Once again: only in America (and according to Wikipedia also the UK and Israel).
I don't live in a country with privatized prisons, or any private law enforcement for that matter. Sure, taxes are probably higher than in the US, but at least my taxes actually go to public services instead of private companies.
Optotraffic installed the Elmwood Place cameras and administered their use, in return for 40 percent of ticket revenue
So 40% of all fines aren't actually fines, but revenue for the camera company. Holy shit, that's flawed.
This sort of setup doesn't exactly persuade the camera company to ensure the correct margins to adjust for measurement errors are used either. Who checks if the camera's comply with the spec? The company who receives 40% of the revenue or the government who receive 60%?
I think the real question is: does Office really require any form of serious development at all? One of the main reasons so many users have stayed behind and stuck with old versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint is because the features introduced in later versions were increasingly trivial. People stick with Office 2003 not because they can't afford newer versions, but because the old version basically is just fine. So if 10 years of development couldn't really add something useful enough for people to upgrade, why continue development at all?
They most certainly did not. Xerox' UI didn't even have draggable icons. On a Xerox Alto/Star everything had to be manipulated through the menu bar at the top, where the menu-item you clicked was applied to the icon you currently had selected. There was no desktop metaphor at all until Apple introduced that with the first Mac.
I didn't even had a clue this guy was sort of a celebrity before you pointed out people could actually know the man.
Now that I've read the Wikipedia entry on him, I can't say I've actually used his software or even heard about it. His contributions to XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS are pretty cool I suppose. But then again, I'm happy we've replaced silly old XML with JSON nowadays.
Google bets their entire company on the web becoming a competent and competitive application platform and they're heavily invested in WebKit. There's no way Google is going to allow WebKit to slow down, whether there are competing rendering engines or not.
But... if $195B worth of metals would be added to the market, wouldn't the value of metals drop because of supply & demand, resulting in a much less profitable asteroid?
It's a healthy state of mind to take anything which is presented as the truth with a grain of salt. But the fact something is thought by the marketing department doesn't automatically mean it is nonsense, even though it may be a popular thing to say amongst engineers.
It makes no sense to cut off the remaining memory just to fit exactly into the 10^x-sizes
Nobody is suggesting the implementation should change. It's fine to use base 2 for storing and transferring data, just change the number that is eventually shown to a user. I think when you buy a 1 TB hard drive consisting of a trillion bytes, your file manager should say "1 TB remaining" instead of ~931 GB. And when you download a file that is a million bytes long, your browser should say its 1 MB. That's the way it is understood by most people now anyway, so what's wrong with changing user interfaces accordingly?
It has nothing to do with science, it has to do with people understanding kilo-, mega- and giga- to be powers of 10. Computers should work in ways people understand, not the other way around. The fact memory is internally stored in base 2 is of no relevance at all to a user of the computer, only developers should have to care about that.
I'm not saying the storage industry adopted the SI-standards because of correctness. Of course it's just a quick way for them to sell less product for more money.
But even though their move is driven by greed, it is still the correct thing to do.
You're exactly right. It's crazy that so many people these days think a byte has to be defined as 8 bits, nor does it matter how many bits make up a byte in this discussion at all.
A byte doesn't have to contain a multiple of 10 bits, it's just a base-unit, like a meter, a gram or a watt. The number of bits inside a byte is also something only developers care about, for a user the smallest unit he ever has to deal with is a byte.
Actually, when it comes to correctness: the International System of Units defines kilo-, mega- and giga- as powers of 10 instead, not powers of 2. I think it is much clearer for a user to define a megabyte as a million bytes. How memory is handled inside a computer is something developers care about, no user should be bothered with it. So all in all I agree with the marketing-people, albeit for different reasons.
I *need* Windows, the apps I run can only run on Windows.
I suppose you mean "the apps I want to run are only available on Windows", because obviously there is no such thing as software that is only able to run on Windows. A computer running Windows is just a turing machine, like any other computer and thus cannot execute code another computer can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again: only in America (and according to Wikipedia also the UK and Israel).
I don't live in a country with privatized prisons, or any private law enforcement for that matter. Sure, taxes are probably higher than in the US, but at least my taxes actually go to public services instead of private companies.
Optotraffic installed the Elmwood Place cameras and administered their use, in return for 40 percent of ticket revenue
So 40% of all fines aren't actually fines, but revenue for the camera company. Holy shit, that's flawed.
This sort of setup doesn't exactly persuade the camera company to ensure the correct margins to adjust for measurement errors are used either. Who checks if the camera's comply with the spec? The company who receives 40% of the revenue or the government who receive 60%?
Seriously? Anti-enterprise is a bad thing now?
I think the real question is: does Office really require any form of serious development at all? One of the main reasons so many users have stayed behind and stuck with old versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint is because the features introduced in later versions were increasingly trivial. People stick with Office 2003 not because they can't afford newer versions, but because the old version basically is just fine. So if 10 years of development couldn't really add something useful enough for people to upgrade, why continue development at all?
They most certainly did not. Xerox' UI didn't even have draggable icons. On a Xerox Alto/Star everything had to be manipulated through the menu bar at the top, where the menu-item you clicked was applied to the icon you currently had selected. There was no desktop metaphor at all until Apple introduced that with the first Mac.
http://microsoft/ does
I didn't even had a clue this guy was sort of a celebrity before you pointed out people could actually know the man.
Now that I've read the Wikipedia entry on him, I can't say I've actually used his software or even heard about it. His contributions to XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS are pretty cool I suppose. But then again, I'm happy we've replaced silly old XML with JSON nowadays.
Ok, this is going to burn karma like crazy... but an article about a guy named Dave Winer who is complaining? Seriously?
I code everything by hand, if it doesn't work in some browser, then that browser's implementation is broken.
You say this like that somehow is a solution.
Google bets their entire company on the web becoming a competent and competitive application platform and they're heavily invested in WebKit. There's no way Google is going to allow WebKit to slow down, whether there are competing rendering engines or not.
No. Apple forked KDE's KHTML into WebKit.
But... if $195B worth of metals would be added to the market, wouldn't the value of metals drop because of supply & demand, resulting in a much less profitable asteroid?
It's a healthy state of mind to take anything which is presented as the truth with a grain of salt. But the fact something is thought by the marketing department doesn't automatically mean it is nonsense, even though it may be a popular thing to say amongst engineers.
When your computer boots, you'll just see the manufacture's logo. This isn't the 90s anymore.
It is not deceit to call a million bytes a megabyte. It is exactly what everyone expects.
It makes no sense to cut off the remaining memory just to fit exactly into the 10^x-sizes
Nobody is suggesting the implementation should change. It's fine to use base 2 for storing and transferring data, just change the number that is eventually shown to a user. I think when you buy a 1 TB hard drive consisting of a trillion bytes, your file manager should say "1 TB remaining" instead of ~931 GB. And when you download a file that is a million bytes long, your browser should say its 1 MB. That's the way it is understood by most people now anyway, so what's wrong with changing user interfaces accordingly?
It has nothing to do with science, it has to do with people understanding kilo-, mega- and giga- to be powers of 10. Computers should work in ways people understand, not the other way around. The fact memory is internally stored in base 2 is of no relevance at all to a user of the computer, only developers should have to care about that.
I'm not saying the storage industry adopted the SI-standards because of correctness. Of course it's just a quick way for them to sell less product for more money.
But even though their move is driven by greed, it is still the correct thing to do.
You're exactly right. It's crazy that so many people these days think a byte has to be defined as 8 bits, nor does it matter how many bits make up a byte in this discussion at all.
A byte doesn't have to contain a multiple of 10 bits, it's just a base-unit, like a meter, a gram or a watt. The number of bits inside a byte is also something only developers care about, for a user the smallest unit he ever has to deal with is a byte.
Actually, when it comes to correctness: the International System of Units defines kilo-, mega- and giga- as powers of 10 instead, not powers of 2. I think it is much clearer for a user to define a megabyte as a million bytes. How memory is handled inside a computer is something developers care about, no user should be bothered with it. So all in all I agree with the marketing-people, albeit for different reasons.
After all, nothing beats a monopoly!
Good thing I can get away from corporate office environments then!
I *need* Windows, the apps I run can only run on Windows.
I suppose you mean "the apps I want to run are only available on Windows", because obviously there is no such thing as software that is only able to run on Windows. A computer running Windows is just a turing machine, like any other computer and thus cannot execute code another computer can't.
Luckily one could write an entire operating system in 99 lines of Perl!