yeah - I usually leave the year and month at 1 and set the year to something random - 1920 or so. I don't believe Steam tracks player age, but they could (you need to be 13 there as well, because they collect personal information).
That would be expensive for me - if I couldn't shut the damn thing off with my eyes closed, I'd chuck it across the room. I also don't give a flying f*ck what other people are doing or talking about before I've had my morning cup of joe.
My brother is a morning person. My wife is a morning person. I consider mornings to be evil. Correlation does not imply causation, I'm just sayin'...
For most projects you will never have all the requirements defined up front.
That depends on the development methodology. For Waterfall all requirements are supposed to be defined up front. For Agile they are pulled off a stack and added to while in process based on need. I remember from school the three traditional methodologies are Prototyping, Waterfall, and Spiral, but I've really only used Waterfall until recently.
I'm actually working in a traditionally Waterfall methodology company on a small but growing Agile team. Audits have been a pain for the Agile team because of required pre-coding documentation that doesn't really apply to Agile (like a functional spec). The European audits have been particularly bad (worse than the ISO 9001 audits) because they seem to require Waterfall. We are required to be certified by all of these audit companies by contract and by the US Government, so it isn't by choice (even though they are pretty much worthless, IMO).
I know a few people that can spit out good code fast (one guy even documents well, but most don't), but they are few and far between. I am fairly slow, but I usually get it right the first time.
The problem with Syfy is they say their cheesy monster movies are extremely profitable and keep slamming them out at the expense of better shows. Their (initially) high budget shows like Caprica targeted a niche of Battlestar Galactica fans and in that respect I think it was doomed to failure from the start. The special effects in the last few Capricas was terrible. I never got into the Stargate... or any other show based on a bad movie (Buffy and Highlander to name two, but to be honest I liked the first Highlander until the second one came out...). I failed to get into Eureka, Sanctuary, Warehouse 13, or any of those (to be honest, monster/horror based sci-fi isn't really my thing). OTOH, programming wrestling and such turns me off the channel even more. Sci-fi on network TV has fared poorly with a few exceptions like Battlestar Galactica (which had great ratings despite being essentially a 1 year show - the network canceled it because it cost too much to produce) and Star Trek:TNG. I think the V reboot is doing ok, but the list of short lived failures seems endless (like Bionic Woman reboot, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Moonlight [that one made me wonder why they didn't just re-air Forever Knight], etc).
Hollywood seems stuck in the same rut as the gaming world - no will to try original material, especially if it costs a lot. I was going to cite a 1990s sci-fi show that was a huge flop and I think only aired 3 episodes (marines fighting aliens in space is all I remember), but I can't think of the name for it and failed to find it on a search, so I'll use Firefly. The networks use flops like Firefly to validate not creating more sci-fi, even though the audience for that particular show was probably niche to begin with.
It is possible to create good sci-fi on a budget - Moon, which I saw a couple of weeks ago was actually a quite good movie made with a tiny (for a full length movie) $5 million budget. Pay TV has advantages (like no forced morality rules), but staying on a more basic cable/satellite package does as well by offering a much broader audience. If Sci-fi put in the production values like Starz and HBO have with their shows I would consider paying for it, but I would expect them to put out something more like Forbidden Science, which was a short lived soft-core show on Skinimax (basically, follow a friend of mine's "bad movie rule" which requires boobs every 10-15 minutes to distract you from the bad plot and acting).
PowerShell is great for this type of automation, but for GUI automation you need to do all scripting to do it with PowerShell (at least the last time I checked - I did find some snap-ins for GUI calls, but never anything that records them as PowerShell calls). If that is OK, great, but if you have access to the API a more modern record and playback (+ maybe a hair of customization - like for unique key names - our internally built software adds a number when using these automatically) that relies on events to the widgets rather than mouse clicks may be a better route. Our devs said the record and playback was trivial to add to.NET and Silverlight clients (we support some phone clients and HTML5 was too immature at the time - maybe after it gets ratified in a couple of years... - our other client is java based).
Powershell is great, but not what I would call a great GUI test tool. Sure it can be done, but you're going to need some snapins and there are limitations. Also you may have to write to the lowest common denominator, and if that is XP that may be Powershell 1.0, and that is quite limited IMO (you could download 2.0, which is now available for XP, but it wasn't when I was using powershell). I personally had to abandon my Powershell work, which was more command line than gui because management wanted the upgrade code to be a single script for all platforms and then they added Linux support to the mix (so I kinda moved in the opposite direction of the original poster).
That is done in studios currently, but I think the main downside it requires electricity and someone usually has to push a button to turn it on (in my experience). Not really sure how effective it would be in a studio, though, unless you want a lot of natural reverb. Incidentally, I used to have a room set up with sound absorbing tile for that exact reason, but that all got torn out in a remodel a few years ago (it was in really crappy condition, or in my wife's words, was "fuggly and has to go"). I actually play a lot more acoustic guitar these days, anyway, and the 12 string sounds unbelievable in that small room (my wife also won't let me turn my electric guitars and basses up to 11 [she complains if it's over 1...], either, so they aren't as much fun).
I would go with this: x86 architecture requires a lot more transistors than ARM partially because it is a RISC processor running CISC instructions (and has a much larger high level instruction set), whereas ARM is a RISC processor running RISC instructions. I believe the smallest Atom processor has 5 or 6 times the transistors as the most current ARM processor, and has a die size 3x larger.
In general, the larger the die and transistor count, the higher the power requirements (not always true, but generally).
Minor annoyance - his name is Osama - bin Laden is "from Laden," not really a last name, so it's like if you were George from New York and everyone called you New York all the time.
I would agree - Netflix's closest competitor is Comcast, which also has the pay-as-you-go model. Netflix owns 61% of the market, Comcast 8% (and Comcast is second!). OTOH, YouTube is a close second to Netflix for volume of US internet traffic (20% to 19% to Facebook's 17% - not that Facebook is also trying to get into the market), so the infrastructure is there.
OTOH, it depends on the movies - Netflix only streams a limited catalog, and while that is plenty to keep my nieces and nephews busy when they visit (some of them are just getting old enough to watch Wallace and Gromit - they were too scary before), it still lacks a lot of A-list movies and many TV shows.
Wrong - since this is voluntary, they only know anyone that logs in with their identity, which would be moronic for anyone hacking - good hackers always hide behind NAT and preferably also anonymous open proxy servers. Incidentally, IPv6 has the same dream in the name of "security" - assign each person a unique IP based on their computer, disallow NAT, and you can trace every IP back to the source. It is the FBI's dream... except that IPv6 IPs are generated using the MAC address on the router, which can be spoofed... DOH!
As if that isn't obvious - the Pledge of Allegiance says, to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands...
Then the technical part - the meaning of Republic and Democracy are actually quite ambiguous. Republic essentially means that there is no monarch (or dictator) in charge and to some degree the people rule. A Democracy in the sense used in the United States means that the people chose to rule are elected by the people and everyone gets a vote (which is blurred somewhat because technically people in the US vote for an electoral college and in many states that person is not even bound to vote for the person/party they supposedly represent).
Nobody runs a true Democracy in the sense of the form of government used in ancient Athens - that is an open forum where anyone can show up and all that show up get a vote - the logistics of scale until recently made this entirely impossible (for instance, every person in the US would get a vote on all federal laws), and even now it many be impossible to do it securely.
yeah, and who exactly is the CA (that's certificate authority) in this case? The government? LOL like I'm going to trust my own government to keep my info secret. <sarcasm> I've seen how they do that and I trust them implicitly</sarcasm>.
Any government organization that tracks library book checkouts (cough, FBI, cough) is not going to get any personal info from me.
IE running on Windows is about as exciting as grass growing in dirt - it works, but it is not exactly novel. As you said, Windows NT was designed on architecture independence. In fact, Windows itself is even endian independent, but it still reads and writes files in the native endian-ness (or so I remember from Alpha-NT). With ARM endian-ness is not a problem because ARM is bi-endian, so they can just use little-endian and be happy. If IE only uses the Windows API and the Windows API only uses a kernel built for the hardware, it should compile and run without any changes (because the Windows API is essentially a hardware abstraction layer with the kernel being hardware dependent).
Generally with this sort of design, the API itself is architecture independent (in this case, C++) code and hardware dependent pieces such as graphics, I/O, and devices are part of the kernel. Apple has pretty much the same thing in architecture independent Objective-C code on top of a hacked Mach microkernel (aka monolithic kernel based on mach) which they used to transition from PowerPC to Intel.
Only a week? A girl I dated in high school was out with it for a month.
And more on topic, I'm more interested in moonlight 4 on android, just so I can be the first to run one of my work's products on android (we require 3, but moonlight/mono is skipping 3 and going to 4).
On android I believe it asked for GPS access, which is another reason I didn't install it (and I only made it through the top maybe 10 entries of access rights it wanted before I said no-way, no-how is this going on my phone). Since mobile phones aren't tied to location like land lines, it is more reliable to use GPS location than area code. Anyhow, if you didn't have a GPS or if your GPS was turned off it may have defaulted back to generic ads.
I stopped at the user agreement, which had something like "address book access"... - why the @*%& does a music app need access to my address book? And the conclusion I came to was "so it can steal all of the email addys in there and sell them to spammers." This is hardly the first app I've nixed for wanting way more access than I was willing to give it.
man is deprecated - you should be using info instead, or so I have read.
Personally I can't stand info - it runs in emacs, and while emacs is incredibly powerful and flexible for customization, it is also slow starting, even on modern hardware, HORRIFICALLY un-user friendly unless you run it with a front-end (GUI or pseudo-gui like info), and the gui front-end adds to the horrific slowness. No, I'm not advocating vi, either - that is horrifically un-user friendly also (but OTOH at least I don't have to go play 18 holes while I wait for it to start). There was a time where I used the simple text editor Jot on an SGI IRIX just because it was easy to use and didn't take me 4 1/2 hours to learn how to do something simple, like, say save (note that info was hard to get at that time - the gui browser hadn't even been invented, but http existed). My point is, for 99.999% of purposes I need a text editor to simply edit text, not to, say, make cheeseburgers, and emacs could probably be customized to make cheeseburgers if you really wanted it to do that. I not only don't want one bloated tool that does everything, I don't need one tool for doing everything - I'd rather have a custom tool that does the job in 1/2 the time and is 500x easier to use.
Note that I did learn vi and emacs because I had teachers that required that we learn and use them because they were zealots and put questions in their tests on how to do certain things. For simple edits I still use vi from time to time, but for complex editing like code I vastly prefer modern gui based tools to either of those (tools vary by platform, i.e. notepad++ on Windows).
smartphone?! - in my day we had a rotary dial click tone phone nailed to a wall and wired directly to Ma Bell and we liked it! You kids and your fancy schmancy CLIs...
You think you're creepy... I even announce it in my username;)
OK, that username was actually picked because it was the name of the machine I was using when I registered on Slashdot, but that doesn't mean I don't have creepy tendencies (incidentally, that machine was bought on halloween and the 3 hard disks it had were Creepy, Spooky, and Spectral).
if you have to ask, you definitely don't remember before 1984.
phones were paid per line (and they monitored for multiple line usage) touch tone was extra at one point you had to buy the phone from Bell at a premium cost high base prices every feature cost extra (call waiting, caller ID, etc) long distance charges overseas long distance charge premium
Trash 80 and a 110!? Did you live in a double wide, as well?
Kidding aside, the TRS-80 came out far later than 1964 (1977?), and 300 baud would probably have cost a fortune, so it does sound pretty bourgeoisie. Heck, in 1981 it cost a fortune (~$600 as I recall, for the 300/110 with autodial but without auto answer my mom bought).
Actually, the work on transistors that AT&T did was previously patented I believe (FETs), and they just expanded on that work. A guy that left AT&T for Texas Instruments invented the silicon transistor, and TI was the first company to mass market them, so I'd give TI more credit. IMO Bell Labs did more for the laser than they ever did for the transistor.
The problem isn't that monopolies typically don't invent things that make them more money, it is that they selectively invent them and crush perceived competition in various ways, like buying them and killing their innovations or price fixing below cost to drive them out of the market (like Standard Oil). Bell saw magnetic tape as a threat, ended it and buried the research. Bell saw UNIX as a way to make lots of money by crushing the competing product, multics (I think that was the name) was bloated and slow.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah - I usually leave the year and month at 1 and set the year to something random - 1920 or so. I don't believe Steam tracks player age, but they could (you need to be 13 there as well, because they collect personal information).
That would be expensive for me - if I couldn't shut the damn thing off with my eyes closed, I'd chuck it across the room. I also don't give a flying f*ck what other people are doing or talking about before I've had my morning cup of joe.
My brother is a morning person. My wife is a morning person. I consider mornings to be evil. Correlation does not imply causation, I'm just sayin'...
That depends on the development methodology. For Waterfall all requirements are supposed to be defined up front. For Agile they are pulled off a stack and added to while in process based on need. I remember from school the three traditional methodologies are Prototyping, Waterfall, and Spiral, but I've really only used Waterfall until recently.
I'm actually working in a traditionally Waterfall methodology company on a small but growing Agile team. Audits have been a pain for the Agile team because of required pre-coding documentation that doesn't really apply to Agile (like a functional spec). The European audits have been particularly bad (worse than the ISO 9001 audits) because they seem to require Waterfall. We are required to be certified by all of these audit companies by contract and by the US Government, so it isn't by choice (even though they are pretty much worthless, IMO).
I know a few people that can spit out good code fast (one guy even documents well, but most don't), but they are few and far between. I am fairly slow, but I usually get it right the first time.
The problem with Syfy is they say their cheesy monster movies are extremely profitable and keep slamming them out at the expense of better shows. Their (initially) high budget shows like Caprica targeted a niche of Battlestar Galactica fans and in that respect I think it was doomed to failure from the start. The special effects in the last few Capricas was terrible. I never got into the Stargate... or any other show based on a bad movie (Buffy and Highlander to name two, but to be honest I liked the first Highlander until the second one came out...). I failed to get into Eureka, Sanctuary, Warehouse 13, or any of those (to be honest, monster/horror based sci-fi isn't really my thing). OTOH, programming wrestling and such turns me off the channel even more. Sci-fi on network TV has fared poorly with a few exceptions like Battlestar Galactica (which had great ratings despite being essentially a 1 year show - the network canceled it because it cost too much to produce) and Star Trek:TNG. I think the V reboot is doing ok, but the list of short lived failures seems endless (like Bionic Woman reboot, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Moonlight [that one made me wonder why they didn't just re-air Forever Knight], etc).
Hollywood seems stuck in the same rut as the gaming world - no will to try original material, especially if it costs a lot. I was going to cite a 1990s sci-fi show that was a huge flop and I think only aired 3 episodes (marines fighting aliens in space is all I remember), but I can't think of the name for it and failed to find it on a search, so I'll use Firefly. The networks use flops like Firefly to validate not creating more sci-fi, even though the audience for that particular show was probably niche to begin with.
It is possible to create good sci-fi on a budget - Moon, which I saw a couple of weeks ago was actually a quite good movie made with a tiny (for a full length movie) $5 million budget. Pay TV has advantages (like no forced morality rules), but staying on a more basic cable/satellite package does as well by offering a much broader audience. If Sci-fi put in the production values like Starz and HBO have with their shows I would consider paying for it, but I would expect them to put out something more like Forbidden Science, which was a short lived soft-core show on Skinimax (basically, follow a friend of mine's "bad movie rule" which requires boobs every 10-15 minutes to distract you from the bad plot and acting).
PowerShell is great for this type of automation, but for GUI automation you need to do all scripting to do it with PowerShell (at least the last time I checked - I did find some snap-ins for GUI calls, but never anything that records them as PowerShell calls). If that is OK, great, but if you have access to the API a more modern record and playback (+ maybe a hair of customization - like for unique key names - our internally built software adds a number when using these automatically) that relies on events to the widgets rather than mouse clicks may be a better route. Our devs said the record and playback was trivial to add to .NET and Silverlight clients (we support some phone clients and HTML5 was too immature at the time - maybe after it gets ratified in a couple of years... - our other client is java based).
Powershell is great, but not what I would call a great GUI test tool. Sure it can be done, but you're going to need some snapins and there are limitations. Also you may have to write to the lowest common denominator, and if that is XP that may be Powershell 1.0, and that is quite limited IMO (you could download 2.0, which is now available for XP, but it wasn't when I was using powershell). I personally had to abandon my Powershell work, which was more command line than gui because management wanted the upgrade code to be a single script for all platforms and then they added Linux support to the mix (so I kinda moved in the opposite direction of the original poster).
That is done in studios currently, but I think the main downside it requires electricity and someone usually has to push a button to turn it on (in my experience). Not really sure how effective it would be in a studio, though, unless you want a lot of natural reverb. Incidentally, I used to have a room set up with sound absorbing tile for that exact reason, but that all got torn out in a remodel a few years ago (it was in really crappy condition, or in my wife's words, was "fuggly and has to go"). I actually play a lot more acoustic guitar these days, anyway, and the 12 string sounds unbelievable in that small room (my wife also won't let me turn my electric guitars and basses up to 11 [she complains if it's over 1...], either, so they aren't as much fun).
I would go with this: x86 architecture requires a lot more transistors than ARM partially because it is a RISC processor running CISC instructions (and has a much larger high level instruction set), whereas ARM is a RISC processor running RISC instructions. I believe the smallest Atom processor has 5 or 6 times the transistors as the most current ARM processor, and has a die size 3x larger.
In general, the larger the die and transistor count, the higher the power requirements (not always true, but generally).
Minor annoyance - his name is Osama - bin Laden is "from Laden," not really a last name, so it's like if you were George from New York and everyone called you New York all the time.
oops - typo - "not that facebook" should be 'note that facebook"
I would agree - Netflix's closest competitor is Comcast, which also has the pay-as-you-go model. Netflix owns 61% of the market, Comcast 8% (and Comcast is second!). OTOH, YouTube is a close second to Netflix for volume of US internet traffic (20% to 19% to Facebook's 17% - not that Facebook is also trying to get into the market), so the infrastructure is there.
OTOH, it depends on the movies - Netflix only streams a limited catalog, and while that is plenty to keep my nieces and nephews busy when they visit (some of them are just getting old enough to watch Wallace and Gromit - they were too scary before), it still lacks a lot of A-list movies and many TV shows.
Wrong - since this is voluntary, they only know anyone that logs in with their identity, which would be moronic for anyone hacking - good hackers always hide behind NAT and preferably also anonymous open proxy servers. Incidentally, IPv6 has the same dream in the name of "security" - assign each person a unique IP based on their computer, disallow NAT, and you can trace every IP back to the source. It is the FBI's dream... except that IPv6 IPs are generated using the MAC address on the router, which can be spoofed... DOH!
As if that isn't obvious - the Pledge of Allegiance says, to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands...
Then the technical part - the meaning of Republic and Democracy are actually quite ambiguous. Republic essentially means that there is no monarch (or dictator) in charge and to some degree the people rule. A Democracy in the sense used in the United States means that the people chose to rule are elected by the people and everyone gets a vote (which is blurred somewhat because technically people in the US vote for an electoral college and in many states that person is not even bound to vote for the person/party they supposedly represent).
Nobody runs a true Democracy in the sense of the form of government used in ancient Athens - that is an open forum where anyone can show up and all that show up get a vote - the logistics of scale until recently made this entirely impossible (for instance, every person in the US would get a vote on all federal laws), and even now it many be impossible to do it securely.
yeah, and who exactly is the CA (that's certificate authority) in this case? The government? LOL like I'm going to trust my own government to keep my info secret. <sarcasm> I've seen how they do that and I trust them implicitly</sarcasm>.
Any government organization that tracks library book checkouts (cough, FBI, cough) is not going to get any personal info from me.
IE running on Windows is about as exciting as grass growing in dirt - it works, but it is not exactly novel. As you said, Windows NT was designed on architecture independence. In fact, Windows itself is even endian independent, but it still reads and writes files in the native endian-ness (or so I remember from Alpha-NT). With ARM endian-ness is not a problem because ARM is bi-endian, so they can just use little-endian and be happy. If IE only uses the Windows API and the Windows API only uses a kernel built for the hardware, it should compile and run without any changes (because the Windows API is essentially a hardware abstraction layer with the kernel being hardware dependent).
Generally with this sort of design, the API itself is architecture independent (in this case, C++) code and hardware dependent pieces such as graphics, I/O, and devices are part of the kernel. Apple has pretty much the same thing in architecture independent Objective-C code on top of a hacked Mach microkernel (aka monolithic kernel based on mach) which they used to transition from PowerPC to Intel.
Only a week? A girl I dated in high school was out with it for a month.
And more on topic, I'm more interested in moonlight 4 on android, just so I can be the first to run one of my work's products on android (we require 3, but moonlight/mono is skipping 3 and going to 4).
On android I believe it asked for GPS access, which is another reason I didn't install it (and I only made it through the top maybe 10 entries of access rights it wanted before I said no-way, no-how is this going on my phone). Since mobile phones aren't tied to location like land lines, it is more reliable to use GPS location than area code. Anyhow, if you didn't have a GPS or if your GPS was turned off it may have defaulted back to generic ads.
I stopped at the user agreement, which had something like "address book access"... - why the @*%& does a music app need access to my address book? And the conclusion I came to was "so it can steal all of the email addys in there and sell them to spammers." This is hardly the first app I've nixed for wanting way more access than I was willing to give it.
man is deprecated - you should be using info instead, or so I have read.
Personally I can't stand info - it runs in emacs, and while emacs is incredibly powerful and flexible for customization, it is also slow starting, even on modern hardware, HORRIFICALLY un-user friendly unless you run it with a front-end (GUI or pseudo-gui like info), and the gui front-end adds to the horrific slowness. No, I'm not advocating vi, either - that is horrifically un-user friendly also (but OTOH at least I don't have to go play 18 holes while I wait for it to start). There was a time where I used the simple text editor Jot on an SGI IRIX just because it was easy to use and didn't take me 4 1/2 hours to learn how to do something simple, like, say save (note that info was hard to get at that time - the gui browser hadn't even been invented, but http existed). My point is, for 99.999% of purposes I need a text editor to simply edit text, not to, say, make cheeseburgers, and emacs could probably be customized to make cheeseburgers if you really wanted it to do that. I not only don't want one bloated tool that does everything, I don't need one tool for doing everything - I'd rather have a custom tool that does the job in 1/2 the time and is 500x easier to use.
Note that I did learn vi and emacs because I had teachers that required that we learn and use them because they were zealots and put questions in their tests on how to do certain things. For simple edits I still use vi from time to time, but for complex editing like code I vastly prefer modern gui based tools to either of those (tools vary by platform, i.e. notepad++ on Windows).
smartphone?! - in my day we had a rotary dial click tone phone nailed to a wall and wired directly to Ma Bell and we liked it! You kids and your fancy schmancy CLIs...
yep - MadLibs, great to see slashdot joking on April 1 again.
You think you're creepy... I even announce it in my username ;)
OK, that username was actually picked because it was the name of the machine I was using when I registered on Slashdot, but that doesn't mean I don't have creepy tendencies (incidentally, that machine was bought on halloween and the 3 hard disks it had were Creepy, Spooky, and Spectral).
if you have to ask, you definitely don't remember before 1984.
phones were paid per line (and they monitored for multiple line usage)
touch tone was extra
at one point you had to buy the phone from Bell at a premium cost
high base prices
every feature cost extra (call waiting, caller ID, etc)
long distance charges
overseas long distance charge premium
that scrapes the surface.
Trash 80 and a 110!? Did you live in a double wide, as well?
Kidding aside, the TRS-80 came out far later than 1964 (1977?), and 300 baud would probably have cost a fortune, so it does sound pretty bourgeoisie. Heck, in 1981 it cost a fortune (~$600 as I recall, for the 300/110 with autodial but without auto answer my mom bought).
Actually, the work on transistors that AT&T did was previously patented I believe (FETs), and they just expanded on that work. A guy that left AT&T for Texas Instruments invented the silicon transistor, and TI was the first company to mass market them, so I'd give TI more credit. IMO Bell Labs did more for the laser than they ever did for the transistor.
The problem isn't that monopolies typically don't invent things that make them more money, it is that they selectively invent them and crush perceived competition in various ways, like buying them and killing their innovations or price fixing below cost to drive them out of the market (like Standard Oil). Bell saw magnetic tape as a threat, ended it and buried the research. Bell saw UNIX as a way to make lots of money by crushing the competing product, multics (I think that was the name) was bloated and slow.