"I think that's a fair call. Every UK government in my lifetime -- and I'm no spring chicken"
Presumably every UK government in your lifetime has only been either Tory or Labour anyway?
Really, this is why IMO the most fundamental election issue in the UK should be one that's barely spoken about- electoral reform.
Until we move away from this stupid first past the post system where minority governments are still granted 100% of power we're doomed to follow the same pattern over and over precisely because of the fact whoever gets in has absolutely no checks and balances on their power for the most part. Labour only got 33% of popular vote last election, but have had 60% of parliamentary vote- that means they've been able to work to increase their power without any kind of meaningful checks and balances.
At minimum Britain really needs a hung government to ensure the only laws that get passed are the laws that are acceptable to every major party, not just the one with the largest minority. At least this way we'd be left with a much smaller chance of having idiocy like ID cards let through even though no one except Labour with their ~33% supported against the will of the remaining ~67% of the population.
"One would think that if combating terrorism was truly a US priority, the administration would continue to share terrorist intelligence regardless of what the EU does and instead threaten to withhold chicken wings, or iPhones, or Big Macs, or something else NOT security related."
The US under both Bush and Obama have already made this threat before, to Britain, when British courts wanted to release some intelligence documents that proved US and possibly British agents were guilty of torturing a British citizen who was eventually released from Guantanamo. This is particularly offensive when you take into account the fact Britain has been one of only a few countries that stood by the US in it's often largely misguided war on terror. Worse though, Britain has historically had strong ties with countries like India and Pakistan due to our colonial past and largely eventual amicable hand over of power. We have many muslims in our country, and contrary to the tabloid propaganda, many support Britain over terrorism, but still know their communities well. As such Britain is an important intelligence asset for the US because of such connections, and so America would also lose a lot by ceasing intelligence sharing with Britain- effectively to cover up the whole torture debacle, the US is making this threat and putting both European AND US citizens greatly at risk.
It's becoming a bit of a hollow threat, because if the US brings it up each time they don't get to dictate European policy, then the question has to be asked, is US intelligence even worth it? This question is particularly pertinent when you realise that most of the threat to Europe stems from it's support of the US- simply dropping support for US actions would be a good step towards resolving the need for US intelligence in the first place.
Really, the only thing that can come of such threats is harm to the US, it's entirely self-defeating, which is why I presume the US would never carry out the threat, just attempt to use it to get it's own way.
I do agree that it's important to support equal opportunities, but I can understand where his sentiment comes from.
I have for example on multiple occasions seen the situation where a woman has gotten a higher paying role, despite not being the best candidate by far, simply because she played the sex card on the gullable manager doing the interviewing. Whilst it's obviously partly the managers fault, it is also partly the womans fault for taking advantage of the sex appeal advantage women almost nearly always have, but men don't.
In situations like this I can understand the resentment it breeds, and so whilst I agree equal opportunities is good, it's not something that must be put entirely on men to support. Women must also take a stand against this type of behaviour and if they do not then they must realise that they're only hurting their cause in giving some men reason to ensure the status quo is preserved.
Similarly I have witnessed situations where people have been asked to work late and where men oblige, women have dropped out with excuses about having to look after their kids- I'm not saying their kids don't need looking after, but I am saying with equal treatment comes responsibility- if they want to be treated equally come promotion time they need to get their partner to be the one that goes home to look after the kids whilst they work the same hours as their peers. But therein lies the problem, most women would seem to prefer not to be the person in the relationship that works the long hours to boost their career, it is their choice to work the shorter hours and again, in this case, they cannot expect to be treated equally to male colleagues who are willing to work the long hours.
I'm not saying there aren't a lot of women who do work hard and play fairly, I realise there are and am glad there are, but there are also a lot that don't and it is them who I am talking about. It's pointless pretending they don't exist, because as I say, they are just as responsible for creating resentment towards women as the men who are just simply bigots.
As with most things like this, even the oppressed side can do an awful lot more to support their cause and can just as well do harm to it. Improved gender equality still requires a lot of work from women, as well as men. I'm more than happy to see women paid as well as and treated as well as men, on the provision they do just as good a job, and play to the same level of fairness- sure pull the sex card if the other person is playing dirty come interview time, but don't play it against men playing honestly.
That was my feeling on it too- it really depends what type of notes you're taking.
Personally, I can type faster than I can write, so I can get down far more, far better textual information on a netbook, but as in TFA, will struggle with diagrams.
It's really one of those situations where it depends entirely on context, if you're just doing text, stick with the netbook, if you're doing just diagrams, use paper or a tablet, if you're doing a mix, either get a dual function netbook (the ones with the screens that can be rotated and tilted so it doubles as a tablet) or just take a pad of paper to scribble diagrams on and put them in your typed copy later. Unless you're happy with written notes in which case yes, just stick with pen and paper.
I'm not sure why people have to ask these questions on Slashdot though, because the answer really comes down to personal opinion, it's not rocket science to see what the options are and it's as if the person asking wants us to think for them.
The answer to the question is simple- which option is best (for you), is whichever option you personally prefer.
The head of the WHO, Margaret Chan, claimed with regards to Swine flu:
"After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic."
There's hyping it up, then there's sheer idiocy like this. It's clear that swine flu wasn't a threat to the whole of humanity however you cut it, because only a small proportion of people were dying to it even when she said this before we had vaccines etc. It wasn't even the case that the whole of humanity was going to catch it if that's what she meant also.
I'm all for awareness, but come on, this level of scaremongering is horrendous to the point she should've stepped down or been sacked over it. I agree informing is good, I even agree that some degree of hyping up of problems isn't necessarily a bad thing if it isn't abused and makes people pay attention, but this? really?
The reaction by the WHO regarding swine flu wasn't just that of an organisation trying to manage the situation sensibly and with a level head, it was that of a bunch of beuracrats getting hard-ons over the idea that finally it was their department in the spotlight and they just got carried away with it and came out with ludicrous verbal turd like the above quote by Chan.
"In general, the UN is nothing but a scam. It has no accountability"
Er, you mean apart from to every country in the world, bar the only 2 that aren't?
"and due to how it panders to politicians and their whims"
Well yeah, that's generally the idea- an organisation that allows politicians from every country world wide to work together and find solutions that suit everyone, rather than people just going off on conflicting unilateral tangents. Who do you think the UN is supposed to pander to? some grand dictator? or the people? Oh wait, the people are represented by politicians... If your concern is that politicians in your country don't serve the people, then focus on that, because that's a national problem for your country, if your nations population aren't happy with their leadership then they must seek to replace it.
"Frankly, people are fed up with these supranational organizations that do nothing but cause problems."
Yeah, the fucking bastards, damn the International Civil Aviation Organization for ensuring aircraft can communicate in the countries they travel between and don't collide, curse the International Maritime Organization for allowing the same benefits to ships and assisting navigation at sea, screw the Universal Postal Union for ensuring that post can be sent between countries and reach it's destination okay and fuck the International Telecommunication Union for assigning things like country codes so that people in different countries don't have different numbers making international phone systems incompatible.
Wait what's that? You didn't realise it does these things, or simply chose to conveniently ignore them?
I'm first to criticise some UN departments, particularly the likes of the WHO, but tarring the whole of the UN with the same old brush is shows a stunning display of ignorance. The UN has a massive remit, and you don't hear about large parts of it precisely because it does do those things that don't make it into the news so damn well- it runs important global systems and standards transparently enough that people don't even notice it's doing the job just fine. The UN provides a massive benefit to the world despite it's flaws.
I sincerely believe the UN needs major overhauls in some areas- WIPO, WTO, WHO certainly (the head of the WHO, Chan, needs to be sacked ASAP for her incompetence over swine flu), but the idea of getting rid of the UN as a whole including the above departments and the likes of UNESCO is really dumb. Sure you could say disband the UN and continue to run these organisations separately, but that's really just wasteful- why have countries require separate signups to the likes of the postal, aviation, telecomms, maritime and so forth when they need to be part of them all anyway and they work just fine under the UN?
Clearly the UN isn't a scam and is a fundamental organisation for an increasingly connected world, the real solution is to simply fix the UN, rather than shoot it down altogether. Hold up departments that work as examples of how it should be done, and reform those that don't work, sacking he people responsible for such failings.
You'd struggle to claim for your time unfortunately, it's not that easy.
When I was with Demon internet and they dropped me to 128kbps for a month with no notice stating I'd crossed my monthly allowance which was never in my contract and which I'd never agreed to I took them to the small claims court. They didn't turn up to defend, however I was still only granted things that were provable- i.e. XBox live, Dark Age of Camelot were unusuable for the month, also I was allowed to recoup the cost of my subscription with Demon (as they'd broken the contract), as well as setup costs for a new ISP, and the small claims court cost itself. I wasn't however granted the cost of my time in having to deal with the replacement ISP and such.
The issue is, you have to be able to prove the time you spent cost you actual financial harm- if they take it to court for example and you win then yeah you could claim a days lost wages, but if you instead have time to sort it on an evening in your spare time it's really not provable and can't be claimed. It's not enough to say you could've been earning money in that time simply because you weren't. As I understand it it's because you can't simply judge what someone's spare time is worth, it is not necessarily worth as much as their day job- sure you can get paid say £40k a year to work 9 - 5, mon-fri, but could you really get a job paying the same on 5pm - 9am mon-fri and on weekends- i.e. during your spare time? If you dealt with it in work time, you'd have to have your company back you up that you weren't paid for this time and hence there was actual financial loss for you.
Really, the best you could claim is the cost of correspondence, but as much as it sucks, is it even worth spending £30 and even more of your time just to get that £30 plus maybe at most a couple of pounds back if you can even claim for such a small amount?
The real solution I'd argue is to spend the time and money writing letters to MPs, Lords, the media and so forth and pressuring there.
No really, that's not what I said as much as you might have an inability to admit that you perhaps rather oversimplified things and are hence incorrect.
I said a debugger is essential for professional work, amongst other things. A debugger is still essential for "most purposes", else you're basically just going to end up writing crap, buggy code.
It wouldn't be so bad if you could at least expand on what you feel is needlessly over complicated in modern IDEs. A quick flick through Visual Studio's menus and really it all comes down to ensuring help with building modular applications, refactoring, and debugging in an efficient manner. It's a similar story looking at Eclipse and Netbeans, I see nothing there that isn't just there to assist in building good code more efficiently.
I think what you really meant was "I don't know what half the features are for, and can't be arsed to figure it out, so am just going to state they're useless".
Really, learn the features of a proper IDE, you'll soon find they let you build better code, faster.
Simply making such a clearly stupid statement as you did rather than accepting that you know, maybe you don't have as much experience in development as you think to be qualified to really talk about these things with any real authority then and insisting you're right just gives the impression you should step out of development altogether and just stick to fixing home PCs and such. God knows the world doesn't need anymore cowboy coders who don't really know what they're doing, but bodge it the best they can anyway.
The Digital Economy bill has been in the lords of the last few weeks for debate. It's been grossly under-reported even on IT news sites, but to anyone that's been keeping an eye, Lucas has been quite the hero. He's been one of the the main people consistently questioning the logic of the bill's three strikes provision and so forth.
He's a smart guy, he seems to understand how the bill's plans run completely counter to hundreds of years worth of citizens hard earned legal and fundamental rights.
Problem with that one is anyone that has said they're willing to go to court over it has had the case dropped, and there's no recourse, or way to force them to put their money where their mouth is. They just rely on the people who are scared to death at the idea of the court costs and so just settle regardless of innocence or guilty because as Lucas says, the music industry's "evidence" is being treated as proof of guilt when it's anything but.
Judging by the fact Facebook has 350 million users, most of which live in the richest countries in the world, I would say, unfortunately not, as much as I'd like to believe otherwise.
"Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but"
There isn't really a but, because this is the core problem. Those inhibitors include water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen for example.
Even if we do (have?) found water on mars it doesn't cover the entire planet. Simply adding lichen to those areas isn't enough to generate rain clouds that would help it spread across the whole planet. Similarly areas with water will quite possibly not be able to provide enough of the other requirements needed.
This is why the discovery of water is fundamental, because you really have to start work on those areas first, and figure out then how you're going to make those areas spread, or somehow generate more water.
There are indeed plenty of lichen that can survive extreme temperatures as in TFA- I remember when crossing Argentina to Chile via the Andes there were vast areas where there appeared to be no life whatsoever apart from the odd guanaco running around (god knows how they survive- brave bastards!), however a closer inspection of rocks up there showed lichen could at least survive. It's probably also worth noting that even some of Earth's newer species of plant, such as the cactus Opuntia compressa or various members of the genus Escobaria have been found hardy down to -120c in the lab (Mars ranges from -123c to +36c). If these can similarly survive the other pressures, then they might in many ways be better candidates in terms of spread (they can survive years between getting water), or ideally, just part of a mix of a combination of plant/fungus species.
But still, those inhibitors to growth aren't just inhibitors, but complete barriers for the most part. They are problems that really must be solved first.
Yep, that's just it. I've been considering game development for Android, but I find that the lack of proper controls on a lot of these new modern phones kills off a vast amount of game options. Like you say, we've got the hardware now, but we're much more heavily limited in the games we can produce.
No, that's just it, he felt double crossed about Google entering the phone market precisely because he did not want competition from them. Perhaps he didn't expect it either, but clearly the two go hand in hand else he wouldn't have been pissed off about it. It still clearly demonstrates Jobs does not appreciate competition however you cut it.
Well keep in mind that Doom doesn't really require mouse look, it played pretty well- this is a fairly old phone, that had a keypad (again we're going back to 2002) and a small stick controller on it, so really it gave you all the back, forward, turn left, turn right, strafe, shoot, change weapon keys you wanted just fine.
I certainly wouldn't want to play anything that required mouselook on a phone like Quake onwards. In fact, I had Quake on my old iPaq back around 2004 - 2005 and although it ran well, and had the onscreen style mouselook it really wasn't too great.
I'd say Doom is a popular port purely because it doesn't have the complexity of modern FPS controls- effectively it's one of the last FPS games you can really get away with playing like that decently before it started really requiring mouselook. Duke Nukem 3D would probably be the last possible one, but even that's quite a push to play without mouselook.
Interestingly, I think this is actually a disadvantage of newer phones that are touch screen only or near enough, it severely limits gaming- I wouldn't want to try playing Doom on my HTC Magic or an iPhone for example because of lack of decent input options for such a game, touch screen inputs really don't cut it for an FPS IMO.
Even with a hefty chunk off that and costs of running the service removed from it, it's still an amount that's noticably larger than for example, the entirety of Sony's quarter 3 net profit. If just one tiny segment of Microsoft's empire can rake in that much money in a year in relation to Sony's entire empire (remember that includes it's music, movie, TV, Bluray, semiconductor etc. sections) can in a quarter then you can see why Sony would be interested in copying that. There's a lot of money there for them- enough to give at bare minimum a 10% company wide increase in profits if they can mimic Live's success which for a company of their size is quite an impressive increase.
Last stats they released said around 25 million Gold subscribers, at £40 a year, that's £1 billion (around $1.5 billion US) income per year from Live subscriptions.
I'm not sure what rendering API it used, but I had Doom on my Nokia 7650 running just fine around 2002 as well. I think it's been ported most places in many different ways.
Well, that's certainly the view taken by those behind Apple's reality distortion field yes.
But those of us living in the real world recognise one fundamental flaw with it- the idea that Google would see Apple as a threat in search is fucking comical. As such, the idea that Google would need such an agreement is clearly stupid. This is why, at worst, Apple will have to jump into bed with Microsoft for search now that Yahoo search is tied up with Microsoft anyway.
The closest they had was the no poaching agreement for staff.
It's also worth pointing out that the idea that Schmidt was a mole when he was sat on the board, and hence, sat in on board meetings, is quite amusing. Apple were the ones who wanted him there in the first place.
I'm glad to see someone posted this, a lot of people seem to be jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon without having actually bothered to look much into it. They've heard it's some special spec that somehow fix everything that's wrong in the world.
It wont, it's quite a horrible spec in so many ways and as you say, has been developed with a select few interests in mind, whilst outright ignoring others.
In terms of video, I made the point that if we're going to implement a whole new tag specific to video, then we should take the opportunity to improve accessibility, something that's been sorely missing from web video. I suggested that a parameter allowing the element to specify a subtitle file or similar would be an awesome step forward for web accessibility- not just for people who are deaf, but even for people using systems with no sound, or who want to watch a video in silence but still understand what's going on.
Accessibility has been a key foundation in teaching better web development for years, it's been good practice to try and make sure your site adheres to WCAG and so forth for example, and yet the HTML5 team seem to be throwing the whole idea of accessibility out the window.
But it gets worse, with a push back towards HTMLs more sloppy SGML based syntax, and a push away from a stricter XML based syntax, whilst a parser exists to handle both, it does not exist, and will not likely exist in many major frameworks quite like XML does. This leaves us with a web that's much more hassle to parse, much more of a headache to interoperate with, to transform for different display mechanisms and technologies and so forth.
From a development point of view a lot seems to have been thrown in the face of good practice there also- there's countless new tags which are worthless, we have tags like header and footer now, we're told because they're popular div ids anyway based on an older study at Google of the most common tag ids. The problem is, the web isn't static, and specs actually are (or at least should be!!), where is the tag for comments to articles that have become so prominent with the rise of web 2.0 for example? The fact is, you'll end up having to use divs anyway for half your blocks. The argument for these new tags is to make the web more semantic, but this means we're breaking separation of concerns- we realised it was beneficial to separate content with server side scripting languages and databases, dynamic actions with Javascript on the client side, and style information off into separate files where possible. Is it so hard to realise that moving semantics out of HTML like CSS into a semantic definition language would be by far the best option? We'd have the ability to define semantics for old, no longer maintained sites, we'd have the option of separating semantic definition for a site away from programmers to people better suited to it, we'd be given a system that allows the HTML spec to do what it should do- look after document structure, and we wouldn't find ourselves stuck in the situation where we need to pre-define a set of fixed blocks like header and footer, which will rapidly find themselves short as we need new blocks adding or old ones become obsolete. You'd just attach a semantic definition to whichever id or class you wanted to- flexible, dynamic, sensible.
This is not to say HTML5 doesn't bring great new stuff, canvas for example is great, but it's pretty clear as the parent says that HTML5 was developed with a very narrow vision of the web- certainly assisting good practice for web developers and accessibility are two things that were largely ignored. Even with the likes of canvas though I have to question the logic of
HTML5 really takes one step forward and two steps backwards as it brings to the forefront bad ideas and practices, and undoes many useful move sforward that we were finally getting underway with XHTML. I don't pretend XHTML didn't have it's problems either and I agree with XHTML2 a lot of bad decisions were taking, but HTML5 is most definitely
"Just having syntax highlighting and completion is enough."
Not for professional developers it's not
and...
"Most of these IDE's are overkill.""
Not for professional developers they're not.
If you're not using all the features, it doesn't mean that syntax highlighting and completion is enough, or that most IDEs are overkill. It just means that you're not building professional quality applications or are at least working extremely inefficiently. For starters, you at least want a decent debugger.
The problem is, whilst yes, the PS3 is making headway, it's coming at too big a cost to them.
It's not clear that the PS3 is even making a profit on the hardware itself yet, certainly it wasn't even as recently as 6 months back. The PSN costs a lot to run, so they're effectively subsidising that too. This of course becomes more of a big deal when they have to fund additional features to try and keep up with XBox live but do not receive income for it like Microsoft does with Live.
So yeah they certainly have momentum now, but it's costing them too much to be sustainable, so they have a choice of breaking even and pissing people off, or continuing to haemorrhage money in the hope that some day they will indeed be able to make it all back.
Microsoft made the same mistake with the original XBox in that it costs them a fortune, but they learnt from it, sure they still lost money on the hardware for a while, but not so much that they couldn't get it profitable within a few years. They also realised that XBox live is a good way to help fill that gap, in that by charging for it, they're both avoiding losing money there, and making up for some of the money lost on the hardware as well as being able to use the money to fund continued development.
Of course, I agree it's nice to have things for free, but sometimes that just isn't practical, at least in the long run. I'd wager this is why Nintendo didn't really bother with a decent online experience at all- because it would be just an additional cost for them that detracts from their profit.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think that's a fair call. Every UK government in my lifetime -- and I'm no spring chicken"
Presumably every UK government in your lifetime has only been either Tory or Labour anyway?
Really, this is why IMO the most fundamental election issue in the UK should be one that's barely spoken about- electoral reform.
Until we move away from this stupid first past the post system where minority governments are still granted 100% of power we're doomed to follow the same pattern over and over precisely because of the fact whoever gets in has absolutely no checks and balances on their power for the most part. Labour only got 33% of popular vote last election, but have had 60% of parliamentary vote- that means they've been able to work to increase their power without any kind of meaningful checks and balances.
At minimum Britain really needs a hung government to ensure the only laws that get passed are the laws that are acceptable to every major party, not just the one with the largest minority. At least this way we'd be left with a much smaller chance of having idiocy like ID cards let through even though no one except Labour with their ~33% supported against the will of the remaining ~67% of the population.
"One would think that if combating terrorism was truly a US priority, the administration would continue to share terrorist intelligence regardless of what the EU does and instead threaten to withhold chicken wings, or iPhones, or Big Macs, or something else NOT security related."
The US under both Bush and Obama have already made this threat before, to Britain, when British courts wanted to release some intelligence documents that proved US and possibly British agents were guilty of torturing a British citizen who was eventually released from Guantanamo. This is particularly offensive when you take into account the fact Britain has been one of only a few countries that stood by the US in it's often largely misguided war on terror. Worse though, Britain has historically had strong ties with countries like India and Pakistan due to our colonial past and largely eventual amicable hand over of power. We have many muslims in our country, and contrary to the tabloid propaganda, many support Britain over terrorism, but still know their communities well. As such Britain is an important intelligence asset for the US because of such connections, and so America would also lose a lot by ceasing intelligence sharing with Britain- effectively to cover up the whole torture debacle, the US is making this threat and putting both European AND US citizens greatly at risk.
It's becoming a bit of a hollow threat, because if the US brings it up each time they don't get to dictate European policy, then the question has to be asked, is US intelligence even worth it? This question is particularly pertinent when you realise that most of the threat to Europe stems from it's support of the US- simply dropping support for US actions would be a good step towards resolving the need for US intelligence in the first place.
Really, the only thing that can come of such threats is harm to the US, it's entirely self-defeating, which is why I presume the US would never carry out the threat, just attempt to use it to get it's own way.
Safari shouldn't be able to crash because of a plugin either.
However you twist it, either their OS is crap, their browser is crap, or Jobs is simply talking shit.
I do agree that it's important to support equal opportunities, but I can understand where his sentiment comes from.
I have for example on multiple occasions seen the situation where a woman has gotten a higher paying role, despite not being the best candidate by far, simply because she played the sex card on the gullable manager doing the interviewing. Whilst it's obviously partly the managers fault, it is also partly the womans fault for taking advantage of the sex appeal advantage women almost nearly always have, but men don't.
In situations like this I can understand the resentment it breeds, and so whilst I agree equal opportunities is good, it's not something that must be put entirely on men to support. Women must also take a stand against this type of behaviour and if they do not then they must realise that they're only hurting their cause in giving some men reason to ensure the status quo is preserved.
Similarly I have witnessed situations where people have been asked to work late and where men oblige, women have dropped out with excuses about having to look after their kids- I'm not saying their kids don't need looking after, but I am saying with equal treatment comes responsibility- if they want to be treated equally come promotion time they need to get their partner to be the one that goes home to look after the kids whilst they work the same hours as their peers. But therein lies the problem, most women would seem to prefer not to be the person in the relationship that works the long hours to boost their career, it is their choice to work the shorter hours and again, in this case, they cannot expect to be treated equally to male colleagues who are willing to work the long hours.
I'm not saying there aren't a lot of women who do work hard and play fairly, I realise there are and am glad there are, but there are also a lot that don't and it is them who I am talking about. It's pointless pretending they don't exist, because as I say, they are just as responsible for creating resentment towards women as the men who are just simply bigots.
As with most things like this, even the oppressed side can do an awful lot more to support their cause and can just as well do harm to it. Improved gender equality still requires a lot of work from women, as well as men. I'm more than happy to see women paid as well as and treated as well as men, on the provision they do just as good a job, and play to the same level of fairness- sure pull the sex card if the other person is playing dirty come interview time, but don't play it against men playing honestly.
That was my feeling on it too- it really depends what type of notes you're taking.
Personally, I can type faster than I can write, so I can get down far more, far better textual information on a netbook, but as in TFA, will struggle with diagrams.
It's really one of those situations where it depends entirely on context, if you're just doing text, stick with the netbook, if you're doing just diagrams, use paper or a tablet, if you're doing a mix, either get a dual function netbook (the ones with the screens that can be rotated and tilted so it doubles as a tablet) or just take a pad of paper to scribble diagrams on and put them in your typed copy later. Unless you're happy with written notes in which case yes, just stick with pen and paper.
I'm not sure why people have to ask these questions on Slashdot though, because the answer really comes down to personal opinion, it's not rocket science to see what the options are and it's as if the person asking wants us to think for them.
The answer to the question is simple- which option is best (for you), is whichever option you personally prefer.
The head of the WHO, Margaret Chan, claimed with regards to Swine flu:
"After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic."
There's hyping it up, then there's sheer idiocy like this. It's clear that swine flu wasn't a threat to the whole of humanity however you cut it, because only a small proportion of people were dying to it even when she said this before we had vaccines etc. It wasn't even the case that the whole of humanity was going to catch it if that's what she meant also.
I'm all for awareness, but come on, this level of scaremongering is horrendous to the point she should've stepped down or been sacked over it. I agree informing is good, I even agree that some degree of hyping up of problems isn't necessarily a bad thing if it isn't abused and makes people pay attention, but this? really?
The reaction by the WHO regarding swine flu wasn't just that of an organisation trying to manage the situation sensibly and with a level head, it was that of a bunch of beuracrats getting hard-ons over the idea that finally it was their department in the spotlight and they just got carried away with it and came out with ludicrous verbal turd like the above quote by Chan.
"In general, the UN is nothing but a scam. It has no accountability"
Er, you mean apart from to every country in the world, bar the only 2 that aren't?
"and due to how it panders to politicians and their whims"
Well yeah, that's generally the idea- an organisation that allows politicians from every country world wide to work together and find solutions that suit everyone, rather than people just going off on conflicting unilateral tangents. Who do you think the UN is supposed to pander to? some grand dictator? or the people? Oh wait, the people are represented by politicians... If your concern is that politicians in your country don't serve the people, then focus on that, because that's a national problem for your country, if your nations population aren't happy with their leadership then they must seek to replace it.
"Frankly, people are fed up with these supranational organizations that do nothing but cause problems."
Yeah, the fucking bastards, damn the International Civil Aviation Organization for ensuring aircraft can communicate in the countries they travel between and don't collide, curse the International Maritime Organization for allowing the same benefits to ships and assisting navigation at sea, screw the Universal Postal Union for ensuring that post can be sent between countries and reach it's destination okay and fuck the International Telecommunication Union for assigning things like country codes so that people in different countries don't have different numbers making international phone systems incompatible.
Wait what's that? You didn't realise it does these things, or simply chose to conveniently ignore them?
I'm first to criticise some UN departments, particularly the likes of the WHO, but tarring the whole of the UN with the same old brush is shows a stunning display of ignorance. The UN has a massive remit, and you don't hear about large parts of it precisely because it does do those things that don't make it into the news so damn well- it runs important global systems and standards transparently enough that people don't even notice it's doing the job just fine. The UN provides a massive benefit to the world despite it's flaws.
I sincerely believe the UN needs major overhauls in some areas- WIPO, WTO, WHO certainly (the head of the WHO, Chan, needs to be sacked ASAP for her incompetence over swine flu), but the idea of getting rid of the UN as a whole including the above departments and the likes of UNESCO is really dumb. Sure you could say disband the UN and continue to run these organisations separately, but that's really just wasteful- why have countries require separate signups to the likes of the postal, aviation, telecomms, maritime and so forth when they need to be part of them all anyway and they work just fine under the UN?
Clearly the UN isn't a scam and is a fundamental organisation for an increasingly connected world, the real solution is to simply fix the UN, rather than shoot it down altogether. Hold up departments that work as examples of how it should be done, and reform those that don't work, sacking he people responsible for such failings.
You'd struggle to claim for your time unfortunately, it's not that easy.
When I was with Demon internet and they dropped me to 128kbps for a month with no notice stating I'd crossed my monthly allowance which was never in my contract and which I'd never agreed to I took them to the small claims court. They didn't turn up to defend, however I was still only granted things that were provable- i.e. XBox live, Dark Age of Camelot were unusuable for the month, also I was allowed to recoup the cost of my subscription with Demon (as they'd broken the contract), as well as setup costs for a new ISP, and the small claims court cost itself. I wasn't however granted the cost of my time in having to deal with the replacement ISP and such.
The issue is, you have to be able to prove the time you spent cost you actual financial harm- if they take it to court for example and you win then yeah you could claim a days lost wages, but if you instead have time to sort it on an evening in your spare time it's really not provable and can't be claimed. It's not enough to say you could've been earning money in that time simply because you weren't. As I understand it it's because you can't simply judge what someone's spare time is worth, it is not necessarily worth as much as their day job- sure you can get paid say £40k a year to work 9 - 5, mon-fri, but could you really get a job paying the same on 5pm - 9am mon-fri and on weekends- i.e. during your spare time? If you dealt with it in work time, you'd have to have your company back you up that you weren't paid for this time and hence there was actual financial loss for you.
Really, the best you could claim is the cost of correspondence, but as much as it sucks, is it even worth spending £30 and even more of your time just to get that £30 plus maybe at most a couple of pounds back if you can even claim for such a small amount?
The real solution I'd argue is to spend the time and money writing letters to MPs, Lords, the media and so forth and pressuring there.
No really, that's not what I said as much as you might have an inability to admit that you perhaps rather oversimplified things and are hence incorrect.
I said a debugger is essential for professional work, amongst other things. A debugger is still essential for "most purposes", else you're basically just going to end up writing crap, buggy code.
It wouldn't be so bad if you could at least expand on what you feel is needlessly over complicated in modern IDEs. A quick flick through Visual Studio's menus and really it all comes down to ensuring help with building modular applications, refactoring, and debugging in an efficient manner. It's a similar story looking at Eclipse and Netbeans, I see nothing there that isn't just there to assist in building good code more efficiently.
I think what you really meant was "I don't know what half the features are for, and can't be arsed to figure it out, so am just going to state they're useless".
Really, learn the features of a proper IDE, you'll soon find they let you build better code, faster.
Simply making such a clearly stupid statement as you did rather than accepting that you know, maybe you don't have as much experience in development as you think to be qualified to really talk about these things with any real authority then and insisting you're right just gives the impression you should step out of development altogether and just stick to fixing home PCs and such. God knows the world doesn't need anymore cowboy coders who don't really know what they're doing, but bodge it the best they can anyway.
The Digital Economy bill has been in the lords of the last few weeks for debate. It's been grossly under-reported even on IT news sites, but to anyone that's been keeping an eye, Lucas has been quite the hero. He's been one of the the main people consistently questioning the logic of the bill's three strikes provision and so forth.
He's a smart guy, he seems to understand how the bill's plans run completely counter to hundreds of years worth of citizens hard earned legal and fundamental rights.
"If they sue you, go to court."
Problem with that one is anyone that has said they're willing to go to court over it has had the case dropped, and there's no recourse, or way to force them to put their money where their mouth is. They just rely on the people who are scared to death at the idea of the court costs and so just settle regardless of innocence or guilty because as Lucas says, the music industry's "evidence" is being treated as proof of guilt when it's anything but.
Judging by the fact Facebook has 350 million users, most of which live in the richest countries in the world, I would say, unfortunately not, as much as I'd like to believe otherwise.
"Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but"
There isn't really a but, because this is the core problem. Those inhibitors include water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen for example.
Even if we do (have?) found water on mars it doesn't cover the entire planet. Simply adding lichen to those areas isn't enough to generate rain clouds that would help it spread across the whole planet. Similarly areas with water will quite possibly not be able to provide enough of the other requirements needed.
This is why the discovery of water is fundamental, because you really have to start work on those areas first, and figure out then how you're going to make those areas spread, or somehow generate more water.
There are indeed plenty of lichen that can survive extreme temperatures as in TFA- I remember when crossing Argentina to Chile via the Andes there were vast areas where there appeared to be no life whatsoever apart from the odd guanaco running around (god knows how they survive- brave bastards!), however a closer inspection of rocks up there showed lichen could at least survive. It's probably also worth noting that even some of Earth's newer species of plant, such as the cactus Opuntia compressa or various members of the genus Escobaria have been found hardy down to -120c in the lab (Mars ranges from -123c to +36c). If these can similarly survive the other pressures, then they might in many ways be better candidates in terms of spread (they can survive years between getting water), or ideally, just part of a mix of a combination of plant/fungus species.
But still, those inhibitors to growth aren't just inhibitors, but complete barriers for the most part. They are problems that really must be solved first.
Yep, that's just it. I've been considering game development for Android, but I find that the lack of proper controls on a lot of these new modern phones kills off a vast amount of game options. Like you say, we've got the hardware now, but we're much more heavily limited in the games we can produce.
Ah so you accept you were wrong and simple syntax highlighting and completion aren't enough then? Good. Next.
No, that's just it, he felt double crossed about Google entering the phone market precisely because he did not want competition from them. Perhaps he didn't expect it either, but clearly the two go hand in hand else he wouldn't have been pissed off about it. It still clearly demonstrates Jobs does not appreciate competition however you cut it.
Well keep in mind that Doom doesn't really require mouse look, it played pretty well- this is a fairly old phone, that had a keypad (again we're going back to 2002) and a small stick controller on it, so really it gave you all the back, forward, turn left, turn right, strafe, shoot, change weapon keys you wanted just fine.
I certainly wouldn't want to play anything that required mouselook on a phone like Quake onwards. In fact, I had Quake on my old iPaq back around 2004 - 2005 and although it ran well, and had the onscreen style mouselook it really wasn't too great.
I'd say Doom is a popular port purely because it doesn't have the complexity of modern FPS controls- effectively it's one of the last FPS games you can really get away with playing like that decently before it started really requiring mouselook. Duke Nukem 3D would probably be the last possible one, but even that's quite a push to play without mouselook.
Interestingly, I think this is actually a disadvantage of newer phones that are touch screen only or near enough, it severely limits gaming- I wouldn't want to try playing Doom on my HTC Magic or an iPhone for example because of lack of decent input options for such a game, touch screen inputs really don't cut it for an FPS IMO.
Even with a hefty chunk off that and costs of running the service removed from it, it's still an amount that's noticably larger than for example, the entirety of Sony's quarter 3 net profit. If just one tiny segment of Microsoft's empire can rake in that much money in a year in relation to Sony's entire empire (remember that includes it's music, movie, TV, Bluray, semiconductor etc. sections) can in a quarter then you can see why Sony would be interested in copying that. There's a lot of money there for them- enough to give at bare minimum a 10% company wide increase in profits if they can mimic Live's success which for a company of their size is quite an impressive increase.
Last stats they released said around 25 million Gold subscribers, at £40 a year, that's £1 billion (around $1.5 billion US) income per year from Live subscriptions.
I'm not sure what rendering API it used, but I had Doom on my Nokia 7650 running just fine around 2002 as well. I think it's been ported most places in many different ways.
Well, that's certainly the view taken by those behind Apple's reality distortion field yes.
But those of us living in the real world recognise one fundamental flaw with it- the idea that Google would see Apple as a threat in search is fucking comical. As such, the idea that Google would need such an agreement is clearly stupid. This is why, at worst, Apple will have to jump into bed with Microsoft for search now that Yahoo search is tied up with Microsoft anyway.
The closest they had was the no poaching agreement for staff.
It's also worth pointing out that the idea that Schmidt was a mole when he was sat on the board, and hence, sat in on board meetings, is quite amusing. Apple were the ones who wanted him there in the first place.
I'm glad to see someone posted this, a lot of people seem to be jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon without having actually bothered to look much into it. They've heard it's some special spec that somehow fix everything that's wrong in the world.
It wont, it's quite a horrible spec in so many ways and as you say, has been developed with a select few interests in mind, whilst outright ignoring others.
In terms of video, I made the point that if we're going to implement a whole new tag specific to video, then we should take the opportunity to improve accessibility, something that's been sorely missing from web video. I suggested that a parameter allowing the element to specify a subtitle file or similar would be an awesome step forward for web accessibility- not just for people who are deaf, but even for people using systems with no sound, or who want to watch a video in silence but still understand what's going on.
Accessibility has been a key foundation in teaching better web development for years, it's been good practice to try and make sure your site adheres to WCAG and so forth for example, and yet the HTML5 team seem to be throwing the whole idea of accessibility out the window.
But it gets worse, with a push back towards HTMLs more sloppy SGML based syntax, and a push away from a stricter XML based syntax, whilst a parser exists to handle both, it does not exist, and will not likely exist in many major frameworks quite like XML does. This leaves us with a web that's much more hassle to parse, much more of a headache to interoperate with, to transform for different display mechanisms and technologies and so forth.
From a development point of view a lot seems to have been thrown in the face of good practice there also- there's countless new tags which are worthless, we have tags like header and footer now, we're told because they're popular div ids anyway based on an older study at Google of the most common tag ids. The problem is, the web isn't static, and specs actually are (or at least should be!!), where is the tag for comments to articles that have become so prominent with the rise of web 2.0 for example? The fact is, you'll end up having to use divs anyway for half your blocks. The argument for these new tags is to make the web more semantic, but this means we're breaking separation of concerns- we realised it was beneficial to separate content with server side scripting languages and databases, dynamic actions with Javascript on the client side, and style information off into separate files where possible. Is it so hard to realise that moving semantics out of HTML like CSS into a semantic definition language would be by far the best option? We'd have the ability to define semantics for old, no longer maintained sites, we'd have the option of separating semantic definition for a site away from programmers to people better suited to it, we'd be given a system that allows the HTML spec to do what it should do- look after document structure, and we wouldn't find ourselves stuck in the situation where we need to pre-define a set of fixed blocks like header and footer, which will rapidly find themselves short as we need new blocks adding or old ones become obsolete. You'd just attach a semantic definition to whichever id or class you wanted to- flexible, dynamic, sensible.
This is not to say HTML5 doesn't bring great new stuff, canvas for example is great, but it's pretty clear as the parent says that HTML5 was developed with a very narrow vision of the web- certainly assisting good practice for web developers and accessibility are two things that were largely ignored. Even with the likes of canvas though I have to question the logic of
HTML5 really takes one step forward and two steps backwards as it brings to the forefront bad ideas and practices, and undoes many useful move sforward that we were finally getting underway with XHTML. I don't pretend XHTML didn't have it's problems either and I agree with XHTML2 a lot of bad decisions were taking, but HTML5 is most definitely
"Just having syntax highlighting and completion is enough."
Not for professional developers it's not
and...
"Most of these IDE's are overkill.""
Not for professional developers they're not.
If you're not using all the features, it doesn't mean that syntax highlighting and completion is enough, or that most IDEs are overkill. It just means that you're not building professional quality applications or are at least working extremely inefficiently. For starters, you at least want a decent debugger.
Oh my, when did browsing the internet and posting simply because of boredom/procrastination at work go out of fashion?
The problem is, whilst yes, the PS3 is making headway, it's coming at too big a cost to them.
It's not clear that the PS3 is even making a profit on the hardware itself yet, certainly it wasn't even as recently as 6 months back. The PSN costs a lot to run, so they're effectively subsidising that too. This of course becomes more of a big deal when they have to fund additional features to try and keep up with XBox live but do not receive income for it like Microsoft does with Live.
So yeah they certainly have momentum now, but it's costing them too much to be sustainable, so they have a choice of breaking even and pissing people off, or continuing to haemorrhage money in the hope that some day they will indeed be able to make it all back.
Microsoft made the same mistake with the original XBox in that it costs them a fortune, but they learnt from it, sure they still lost money on the hardware for a while, but not so much that they couldn't get it profitable within a few years. They also realised that XBox live is a good way to help fill that gap, in that by charging for it, they're both avoiding losing money there, and making up for some of the money lost on the hardware as well as being able to use the money to fund continued development.
Of course, I agree it's nice to have things for free, but sometimes that just isn't practical, at least in the long run. I'd wager this is why Nintendo didn't really bother with a decent online experience at all- because it would be just an additional cost for them that detracts from their profit.