Next it'll be Facebook. Then the Times and the NYT. Then various EU Governmental sites with large databases, Getty, Microsoft's source code repository..
It'll be information anarchy. I'm looking forward to this.
But I'm unhappy at work because the fuckwit company refuses to negotiate with me and instead only discusses things with the unions.
Exactly how would joining a union help me here? Pay £200 a year to fund a political party I hate and support some twat that's negotiating my performance into someone else's pay and bonus? Fuck that.
For those who have seen it: the "Cool Wall" : decisions are sometimes made as to where a car goes simply because Clarkson is taller than Hammond and Hammond can't take one down.
My car was put into 'Sub Zero' in the most recent series.
I'm still mystified about why, but it wont stop me feeling smug about it:)
Where did they claim it had run out of power? I linked the video, tell me which part of it claims the car ran out of power.
There is no technical merit to their reviews at all.
Clearly false.
They are portraying their reviews as factual but misrepresenting the facts to suit their own agenda. They lie. They falsify results.
As I said, libellous.
Out of curiousity, why do you hate them so much? I'm confused. I quite like the BBC and I enjoy Top Gear, and I'm British so I can easily differentiate between humour and objective product reviews, so maybe I'm just missing out on whatever it is that's causing your bile.
I've talked to a few people that are in the market for a two-seat sports car in that price range, but they're not sure the Tesla is ready for prime time since it is so new.
If they're on the fence and see that episode, they're likely to go ahead an buy the Porsche, Lotus, etc..
Hmm. Tesla $109k Lotus Elise (same chassis) $55-65k
If they're buying the Lotus instead it's probably because it's considerably cheaper.
When qualified engineers (and BBC Top Gear do employ them) state that a car as driven around a racetrack by a professional racing driver will not do the 200 miles it can achieve when driven carefully and economically, they are not incompetent.
I'm amazed you've claimed they're lying. Did you note the rate at which they were using power and extrapolate the results?
In race conditions I'd be getting low teens fuel economy from my car at best. Hell, I'm not a professional race driver and I don't want to damage the drive train so I never really thrash it, and I only get 22mpg when I'm driving down country lanes. Yet in careful real-world driving I can get 50mpg.
Can I believe that racetrack performance of a Tesla is substantially lower than 200 miles? Easily. Can I believe 55 miles? It's more realistic than suggesting a 211 mile range in racing conditions.
You cannot extrapolate from a tiny datapoint and try and claim its what people would actually get
Sorry, who has done that and made that claim? Where? Give me links to the quotes on the BBC website, or to the point in a video at which such claims are met?
Top Gear were talking about performance on their track. They weren't talking about performance on the open road. Which part of the sentence a 4m58 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DfHyGD7_pM suggests you can't get 200 miles from it?
They lied and they're incompetent.
That's libellous. Luckily the BBC are unlikely to pursue you for it.
Can a Tesla get me the 110 miles to work on a Monday morning, when I'm accelerating hard through the country lanes for the first ten miles and driving at 'motorway' speeds for the rest of the journey, 8 months after purchase?
Sure, they can drive 200 miles on a single charge when new. I don't want to drive that slowly.
Besides, wouldn't it be great to drive to work, come out to drive home and find you now have a full 'tank' because it recharged by solar? THAT is what the gas companies are afraid of.
So.. I can spend £80k on a car, £847m on enough of Manchester to cover in solar panels to actually charge it enough to use after a day at work, and drive home using electricity, or I can spend £15k on a car and another £10k on the diesel needed to commute for ten years. Sure, the gas companies are really fucking scared.
It's a show for adult boys; sportscars, bantering, destruction, adventure, roadtrips... I love it!
Very popular with ladies too. I think it's so shamelessly and self-deprecatingly laddish that nobody takes that seriously and so nobody feels embarrassed about enjoying it.
It does have very good production value though; camera work, postpro, editing. Other car shows try to mimick the visual style but all fail miserably.
I think they're heavily underrated for the sheer quality of their visuals. The laddish entertainment is fun, but you do get the impression the cameramen/editors could walk into any TV station in the world and get offered a job.
High speed high volume high availability storage isn't cheap.
Sure, 5GB isn't a lot and is cheap these days. Shit, 5 TB isn't expensive.
5TB is 1000 users. What if they have a million users?
Amazon would be insane to turn off the device level de-duplication mechanisms that allow them to hold a million different references to the same underlying file because all one million users happened to upload their identical copy of the Radiohead album they bought in mp3 format.
The file system will report a million albums. The underlying storage use will be one album (and a million references).
Hmm, Steam tells me Amnesia: The Dark Descent is Action, Adventure, Indie.
The Indie bit works for me, Action games can be fun but I've never had the patience for Adventure games. (Action Adventure games are even worse, but to be fair that doesn't look like one to me).
The reviews are exceedingly positive and I doubt for a moment that it's a superb game. I just don't think I'll get on with it. There's a demo available, I'll give that a go, see how it goes..
Arx Fatalis for £2.99 on Steam is downloading as I type this..
I need to retry Mass Effect. Bought it, tried playing it, kind of ran out desire to go back to it.
I loved SW:KOTOR, enjoyed SW:KOTOR2 (despite the negative comparisons everyone made to KOTOR) and I'm currently having a lot of fun with DAO, so the genre/approach clearly works for me. Just Mass Effect didn't..
(I do still consider Baldur's Gate as one of the top RPG games though, having had surprisingly few good RPG experiences prior to that)
I'm already 18 months behind the curve on (most) computer games. I'm buying them at a quarter of the price on Steam instead of paying the 'brand new game' premium.
Some games (online ones and FM2011) need immediate purchase, but a lot don't - last week I put 43 hours in Dragon Age, while on steam my friends are playing Dragon Age II. I'm playing the Ultimate Edition of the original, with all the DLC and expansions, which I paid a lot less for than they've paid for less of a game in the sequel.
If the games became free after 2 years, that would hurt sales. Making them free after 5-10 years would not. Making them free after 5 years and charging me a nominal fee to add them to my Steam account (and keep them running on 'latest' Windows version) would be very worthwhile.
C&Ding a 26yo game does feel rather excessive though, even if it is legally still under copyright.
It's a key step in your engineering process. It should be a repeatable testable process. It should take microseconds through automation. It should be configurable to permit deployment to dev, systest, SIT, UAT, stress, OAT, Prod, DR* environments without needing to change the packaged deployable.
You're entirely correct with "Don't run the server-side of the web application on your development workstation." but mounting production server storage from your dev machine is frankly almost as bad.
At the time Java was up against C, C++, VB and Delphi as the key development languages off mainframe.
I'd say that by v1.1 and definitely by v1.2 it was more usable with better features than all of those as a server-side development language.
J2EE replaced CORBA and led to the dominance of Java app servers as the server-side platform of choice for many companies.
Even app vendors switched to it, unless they were specifically targeting the mainframe or Windows..
Other markets (device drivers, embedded systems, desktop apps, mainframes) had better choices available, and sure v1.0 had a shakey start, but it rapidly turned into a pretty spectacularly successful language in that market.
Wtf? No polymorphism on the basic types perhaps, but it's an OO language enough for polymorphism on the objects you instantiate.
Be more precise!
Oddly the strong typing with 'real rules and structure' is why I like it as a commercial development language. Most programmers lack software engineering skills so a language that constrains them a little saves a massive amount of bug hunting and regression testing down the line.
Me, I don't sweat through my fingers. Maybe the 100+ minutes of exercise I average a day somehow (luckily) doesn't prevent my skin from having a natural level of moisture and protection.
You may find that natural oils from your fingers pass on to your computing equipment and capture small dirt particles that eventually acrrue into visible/noticeable yuckiness that needs to be cleaned up.
Or you may wear gloves, or you may just not use any computing equipment intensely, or you may have someone else come and clean it regularly for you. The rest of us recognise that we need to clean our keyboards and mice from time to time.
18 months of handling before a mouse needs cleaning sounds extremely reasonable to me.
Tax they had to pay, rather than tax they offset against expenses (at a guess).
It also doesn't state that those taxes were paid in the US, and it doesn't state that those taxes were income taxes, rather than the employment, property, etc taxes that they refer to later in their response. Check their financial report, it'll give you that clarity.
Sounds like they accrued tax in prior years, and are using current losses from GE Capital to write off that accrual rather than paying it. That is a tax loophole, but it's a common one for companies.
Tax legislation is bloody complicated, and corporation taxes are merely cream on top. Any corporation profits are either reinvested (which is good for the economy), distributed as dividends (which are taxed anyway - although there are various allowances and loopholes available there) or retained (in which case the company value increases, which is irrelevant until someone sells it. At that point capital gains tax is due, so again, taxation occurs, albeit again with various allowances and loopholes).
So it all gets taxed in the end, to some extent. If you really think the company is making too much money without getting taxed, buy shares in it, get your own cut.
He didn't say that any of his three countries was the US, and there is no indication that he is evading tax (rather than merely avoiding it) in any of the countries in which he works or lives.
In Europe it's possible to pay very little income tax perfectly legally. Just because the US has obnoxious laws on out-of-country earnings doesn't mean everyone does.
It's not that manufacturers think people will only be watching movies, it's that the 1920x1200 ratio used to be the premium alternative to a 1650x1050 (or whatever it was) cheaper version.
So 17" laptops would come with a crap resolution as a mass-market option, and premium upgrades got you a proper screen resolution.
Demand for HD means the mass market screen display is now 1920x1080, where nobody in a 17 or 18" laptop wants smaller than that. The price point for the screen size/resolution has correspondingly dropped (more people manufacturing them) and the number of people willing to pay a premium for 1920x1200 over 1920x1080 is almost certainly a lot less than the number willing to upgrade from 1650x1050 (or whatever it was).
So there's a far smaller market for 1920x1200, fewer manufacturers, correspondingly higher prices and so laptop designers are focussing on the far more affordable and available 1920x1080, without for a moment presuming people will only watch HD movies on it.
Me, I hate it too, and it is delaying my purchase of a new laptop, so the market as a whole is losing out a little - but frankly, only a very little.
Ironically Sony (everyone's favourite hardware manufacturer) now do a 13.1" 1920x1080 laptop. If I needed a smaller form factor I'd be sorely tempted, and cope with the loss of 120 pixels for the sheer portability.
Two options: - hit 'escape' - switch to a different tab while that one loads in the background
The third and fourth options involve other applications and non-computer based activities, but the days of waiting for a single web browser window to load are long long gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man, it'd be fun if MS win.
First it's Youtube.
Next it'll be Facebook. Then the Times and the NYT. Then various EU Governmental sites with large databases, Getty, Microsoft's source code repository..
It'll be information anarchy. I'm looking forward to this.
2) You think he actually has to do any coaxing to get a BJ (except maybe from his wife)?
Well, I'm sure he's a nice bloke an' all, but yeah. I'd take a hell of a lot of coaxing.
But I'm unhappy at work because the fuckwit company refuses to negotiate with me and instead only discusses things with the unions.
Exactly how would joining a union help me here? Pay £200 a year to fund a political party I hate and support some twat that's negotiating my performance into someone else's pay and bonus? Fuck that.
For those who have seen it: the "Cool Wall" : decisions are sometimes made as to where a car goes simply because Clarkson is taller than Hammond and Hammond can't take one down.
My car was put into 'Sub Zero' in the most recent series.
I'm still mystified about why, but it wont stop me feeling smug about it :)
Where did they claim it had run out of power? I linked the video, tell me which part of it claims the car ran out of power.
There is no technical merit to their reviews at all.
Clearly false.
They are portraying their reviews as factual but misrepresenting the facts to suit their own agenda. They lie. They falsify results.
As I said, libellous.
Out of curiousity, why do you hate them so much? I'm confused. I quite like the BBC and I enjoy Top Gear, and I'm British so I can easily differentiate between humour and objective product reviews, so maybe I'm just missing out on whatever it is that's causing your bile.
I've talked to a few people that are in the market for a two-seat sports car in that price range, but they're not sure the Tesla is ready for prime time since it is so new.
If they're on the fence and see that episode, they're likely to go ahead an buy the Porsche, Lotus, etc..
Hmm.
Tesla $109k
Lotus Elise (same chassis) $55-65k
If they're buying the Lotus instead it's probably because it's considerably cheaper.
Top Gear spread very damaging lies about it.
I'm getting fucked off with the name calling on this thread.
Tesla CLAIM that Top Gear lied about it. Lets see what the outcome in court is.
When qualified engineers (and BBC Top Gear do employ them) state that a car as driven around a racetrack by a professional racing driver will not do the 200 miles it can achieve when driven carefully and economically, they are not incompetent.
I'm amazed you've claimed they're lying. Did you note the rate at which they were using power and extrapolate the results?
In race conditions I'd be getting low teens fuel economy from my car at best. Hell, I'm not a professional race driver and I don't want to damage the drive train so I never really thrash it, and I only get 22mpg when I'm driving down country lanes. Yet in careful real-world driving I can get 50mpg.
Can I believe that racetrack performance of a Tesla is substantially lower than 200 miles? Easily. Can I believe 55 miles? It's more realistic than suggesting a 211 mile range in racing conditions.
You cannot extrapolate from a tiny datapoint and try and claim its what people would actually get
Sorry, who has done that and made that claim? Where? Give me links to the quotes on the BBC website, or to the point in a video at which such claims are met?
Top Gear were talking about performance on their track. They weren't talking about performance on the open road. Which part of the sentence a 4m58 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DfHyGD7_pM suggests you can't get 200 miles from it?
They lied and they're incompetent.
That's libellous. Luckily the BBC are unlikely to pursue you for it.
Can a Tesla get me the 110 miles to work on a Monday morning, when I'm accelerating hard through the country lanes for the first ten miles and driving at 'motorway' speeds for the rest of the journey, 8 months after purchase?
Sure, they can drive 200 miles on a single charge when new. I don't want to drive that slowly.
Besides, wouldn't it be great to drive to work, come out to drive home and find you now have a full 'tank' because it recharged by solar? THAT is what the gas companies are afraid of.
So.. I can spend £80k on a car, £847m on enough of Manchester to cover in solar panels to actually charge it enough to use after a day at work, and drive home using electricity, or I can spend £15k on a car and another £10k on the diesel needed to commute for ten years. Sure, the gas companies are really fucking scared.
It's a show for adult boys; sportscars, bantering, destruction, adventure, roadtrips... I love it!
Very popular with ladies too. I think it's so shamelessly and self-deprecatingly laddish that nobody takes that seriously and so nobody feels embarrassed about enjoying it.
It does have very good production value though; camera work, postpro, editing. Other car shows try to mimick the visual style but all fail miserably.
I think they're heavily underrated for the sheer quality of their visuals. The laddish entertainment is fun, but you do get the impression the cameramen/editors could walk into any TV station in the world and get offered a job.
High speed high volume high availability storage isn't cheap.
Sure, 5GB isn't a lot and is cheap these days. Shit, 5 TB isn't expensive.
5TB is 1000 users. What if they have a million users?
Amazon would be insane to turn off the device level de-duplication mechanisms that allow them to hold a million different references to the same underlying file because all one million users happened to upload their identical copy of the Radiohead album they bought in mp3 format.
The file system will report a million albums. The underlying storage use will be one album (and a million references).
Wouldn't the point of a stealth bomber be that the FAA couldn't actually tell where you were flying?
The asset holding company uses some of its assets to clear the liability.
Hmm, Steam tells me Amnesia: The Dark Descent is Action, Adventure, Indie.
The Indie bit works for me, Action games can be fun but I've never had the patience for Adventure games. (Action Adventure games are even worse, but to be fair that doesn't look like one to me).
The reviews are exceedingly positive and I doubt for a moment that it's a superb game. I just don't think I'll get on with it. There's a demo available, I'll give that a go, see how it goes..
Arx Fatalis for £2.99 on Steam is downloading as I type this..
Thanks for the recommendations :)
I need to retry Mass Effect. Bought it, tried playing it, kind of ran out desire to go back to it.
I loved SW:KOTOR, enjoyed SW:KOTOR2 (despite the negative comparisons everyone made to KOTOR) and I'm currently having a lot of fun with DAO, so the genre/approach clearly works for me. Just Mass Effect didn't..
(I do still consider Baldur's Gate as one of the top RPG games though, having had surprisingly few good RPG experiences prior to that)
I don't mind paying for content.
I'm already 18 months behind the curve on (most) computer games. I'm buying them at a quarter of the price on Steam instead of paying the 'brand new game' premium.
Some games (online ones and FM2011) need immediate purchase, but a lot don't - last week I put 43 hours in Dragon Age, while on steam my friends are playing Dragon Age II. I'm playing the Ultimate Edition of the original, with all the DLC and expansions, which I paid a lot less for than they've paid for less of a game in the sequel.
If the games became free after 2 years, that would hurt sales. Making them free after 5-10 years would not. Making them free after 5 years and charging me a nominal fee to add them to my Steam account (and keep them running on 'latest' Windows version) would be very worthwhile.
C&Ding a 26yo game does feel rather excessive though, even if it is legally still under copyright.
No, see Beelsebob's post above.
"Deploy"
It's a key step in your engineering process. It should be a repeatable testable process. It should take microseconds through automation. It should be configurable to permit deployment to dev, systest, SIT, UAT, stress, OAT, Prod, DR* environments without needing to change the packaged deployable.
You're entirely correct with "Don't run the server-side of the web application on your development workstation." but mounting production server storage from your dev machine is frankly almost as bad.
*adjust to fit your SDLC
At the time Java was up against C, C++, VB and Delphi as the key development languages off mainframe.
I'd say that by v1.1 and definitely by v1.2 it was more usable with better features than all of those as a server-side development language.
J2EE replaced CORBA and led to the dominance of Java app servers as the server-side platform of choice for many companies.
Even app vendors switched to it, unless they were specifically targeting the mainframe or Windows..
Other markets (device drivers, embedded systems, desktop apps, mainframes) had better choices available, and sure v1.0 had a shakey start, but it rapidly turned into a pretty spectacularly successful language in that market.
Wtf? No polymorphism on the basic types perhaps, but it's an OO language enough for polymorphism on the objects you instantiate.
Be more precise!
Oddly the strong typing with 'real rules and structure' is why I like it as a commercial development language. Most programmers lack software engineering skills so a language that constrains them a little saves a massive amount of bug hunting and regression testing down the line.
At home I use more interesting languages..
Interesting, your sweat is oily?
Me, I don't sweat through my fingers. Maybe the 100+ minutes of exercise I average a day somehow (luckily) doesn't prevent my skin from having a natural level of moisture and protection.
You may find that natural oils from your fingers pass on to your computing equipment and capture small dirt particles that eventually acrrue into visible/noticeable yuckiness that needs to be cleaned up.
Or you may wear gloves, or you may just not use any computing equipment intensely, or you may have someone else come and clean it regularly for you. The rest of us recognise that we need to clean our keyboards and mice from time to time.
18 months of handling before a mouse needs cleaning sounds extremely reasonable to me.
Tax they had to pay, rather than tax they offset against expenses (at a guess).
It also doesn't state that those taxes were paid in the US, and it doesn't state that those taxes were income taxes, rather than the employment, property, etc taxes that they refer to later in their response. Check their financial report, it'll give you that clarity.
Sounds like they accrued tax in prior years, and are using current losses from GE Capital to write off that accrual rather than paying it. That is a tax loophole, but it's a common one for companies.
Tax legislation is bloody complicated, and corporation taxes are merely cream on top. Any corporation profits are either reinvested (which is good for the economy), distributed as dividends (which are taxed anyway - although there are various allowances and loopholes available there) or retained (in which case the company value increases, which is irrelevant until someone sells it. At that point capital gains tax is due, so again, taxation occurs, albeit again with various allowances and loopholes).
So it all gets taxed in the end, to some extent. If you really think the company is making too much money without getting taxed, buy shares in it, get your own cut.
He didn't say that any of his three countries was the US, and there is no indication that he is evading tax (rather than merely avoiding it) in any of the countries in which he works or lives.
In Europe it's possible to pay very little income tax perfectly legally. Just because the US has obnoxious laws on out-of-country earnings doesn't mean everyone does.
It's not that manufacturers think people will only be watching movies, it's that the 1920x1200 ratio used to be the premium alternative to a 1650x1050 (or whatever it was) cheaper version.
So 17" laptops would come with a crap resolution as a mass-market option, and premium upgrades got you a proper screen resolution.
Demand for HD means the mass market screen display is now 1920x1080, where nobody in a 17 or 18" laptop wants smaller than that. The price point for the screen size/resolution has correspondingly dropped (more people manufacturing them) and the number of people willing to pay a premium for 1920x1200 over 1920x1080 is almost certainly a lot less than the number willing to upgrade from 1650x1050 (or whatever it was).
So there's a far smaller market for 1920x1200, fewer manufacturers, correspondingly higher prices and so laptop designers are focussing on the far more affordable and available 1920x1080, without for a moment presuming people will only watch HD movies on it.
Me, I hate it too, and it is delaying my purchase of a new laptop, so the market as a whole is losing out a little - but frankly, only a very little.
Ironically Sony (everyone's favourite hardware manufacturer) now do a 13.1" 1920x1080 laptop. If I needed a smaller form factor I'd be sorely tempted, and cope with the loss of 120 pixels for the sheer portability.
Two options:
- hit 'escape'
- switch to a different tab while that one loads in the background
The third and fourth options involve other applications and non-computer based activities, but the days of waiting for a single web browser window to load are long long gone.