The only problem I have with this phone is that it runs Windows Phone OS. The OS actually isn't that bad and the app support is definitely improving, but I just can't stand the home screen. With its pastel colors and overly-animated interface, it looks like they got the inspiration by watching Technicolor cartoons and browsing web pages from 1996. Whenever I see it, I almost expect to see animated GIFS of flames and a dancing Jesus. Other than the home screen, the rest of the OS isn't as bad as I thought it would be.
Just to clarify: it's not that the person with the most dollars gets his guy into office. The system currently allows someone to contribute money to all possible candidates and without those candidates knowing that you paid their opponents as well. Since you have paid all possible parties, your views are guaranteed to be represented regardless of who wins. And then a whole bunch of people will call the voters stupid for electing these guys when the fact of the matter is that all sides were bought because the system is corrupt. I hate to sound cynical, but at this point, it really doesn't matter who you vote for in federal elections.
Because nothing motivates a young boy to learn how to defeat technological filters than the promise of a nearly limitless supply of porn on the other side of those filters.
The original intent of trademarks was to prevent people from releasing products under the same corporate or product name. It was not intended to stifle free speech in order to provide corporations with a cash cow so that they can charge people for sharing information about products. Part of me would recommend standing up for yourself and refusing to take down the content since their claims are somewhat spurious. The other half of me would recommend replacing the content useful to the Everquest community with a notice that a greedy corporation has made overreaching trademark claims and the content is being taken down to prevent any beneficial side effects it might have generated for that company's intellectual property.
We do not hire people based on the number of lines of code they produce. Personally, I hate that metric since not all lines are created equally. Furthermore, the original request was that he explain the magnitude of his contributions to the project in which he was currently working. After he fumbled that, we settled for asking the approximate number of lines of code he contributed. I could not tell if he was genuinely attempting to take credit for writing a million lines of code or if he was providing a sarcastic answer to a question he didn't want to answer. Either way, it is not a smart move when you're being interviewed for a job. In addition to that, he had little experience and an ego I thought existed only in movies. He admitted he had gone off-the-rails on previous projects, which may be perfect in environments that require less structure, but would be a disaster in ours. The project he was interviewing for dwarfed the size of his previous projects and he failed to answer technical questions that would instill a level of confidence in the quality of his code. The request for metrics was a last-ditch effort to determine if he could be hired to do work of a less technical nature at a higher volume than the other candidates. His response was the nail in the coffin and four people unanimously decided he was not fit for the job.
I once interviewed a job candidate and asked him how many lines of code he would estimate he contributed to the project. He responded by saying that he modified one million lines of code on his last project. Somewhat incredulous, I asked him how he managed to do so much work in such little time and he said it was because he wrote a small tool that reformatted all of the code in the system. Needless to say, that candidate didn't hear back from us.
These parents are attempting to find a biological solution to a sociological problem. The reason these kids go on shooting sprees is not because they are inherently violent. They go on shooting sprees because they are unable to cope with being constantly bullied by their classmates, ignored by their parents and teachers, and ultimately feel rejected by society at large. The spree is a final act of desperation and revenge towards the system that did everything it could to break them or marginalize them. I'm not trying to say that there aren't genes that make people more predisposed to committing violent acts, but even when you do find them, I'm fairly certain that some of the perpetrators of school shootings will not contain that gene. If you want to reduce the number of school shootings, do everything you can to make sure your kids are socially adjusted so that they aren't the ones shooting up the school and make sure that your kids are also not the ones bullying someone else's kid to their breaking point.
I imagine the court will say that the government is not stopping anyone from exercising their rights to free speech simply because they are recording their conversations and building graphs of associations. It would seem more effective to claim these rights under the Fourth Amendment since this deals more with privacy than the First Amendment. In any event, this will likely end the way it did the last time the EFF tried to sue the federal government - the court will seek documents from the security agencies, the security agencies will claim that they can not reveal that information for reasons of "national security", and the court will say that the EFF doesn't have a case since they don't have any evidence due to the fact that the defendant refuses to provide the documents the court requested. This is how fascism begins in a democracy.
Apple should have known they could sell more books if they sold them cheaper
Apple's goal is not to sell as many books as possible. Their goal is to make as much money as possible selling books. Selling higher quantities does not mean more profit if you can sell smaller quantities with significantly higher margins. That's Business 101 and there's nothing wrong with that. Their problem was that they drank too much of their own Kool-Aid and thought they could get away with colluding with the publishers to fix prices so that they could sell at high margins and not be undercut by businesses such as Amazon that sell at lower margins.
Since we're using a tool in the first place, it's just as easy to use a tool that understands the binary format.
Let's say that you use a test client to send commands to your custom server interface and there's a bug. Now you have to spend extra time to discover if the bug is in the test client or in your custom server.
Back before open source toolchains had really caught on as a concept, human readable formats were a big plus, because proprietary tools could be hard to come by. Not really a concern these days, as long as the binary format is unencumbered.
You have it backwards. Before open source caught on, binary formats were all the rage. They were proprietary and they were very prone to corruption. Once a document became corrupted, you were at the mercy of the developers to come up with a tool that could reverse the damage. When open source caught on, it pushed hard for using XML as the format for storing and transmitting information. Data corruption is much easier to spot with clear text and can even be easily fixed compared to binary data. In this respect, HTTP 2.0 is a complete step backwards.
You would have to be one of the stupidest people in the world to believe that correlation equals causation. You've done nothing to illustrate how producing your own chips magically makes you profitable.
Yes, but at this point I believe the intelligence and security agencies have more power than the President, or are at least immune to any punitive action. These agencies now have a lot of power and will do anything they can to keep it. I would be very surprised if they weren't colluding to exaggerate the threats against this country in presentations given to the President right after his inauguration just to curb any urge for the President to scale back their power. If they can scare the President into thinking that horrible tragedies will occur if they are forced to relinquish any of their power, then they guarantee their current power for another four years and maybe even gain new powers. Of course I have no proof of this, but I know if I had that much power and there was the potential of losing it, then that would be the best way to maintain it. And if it turns out that they are doing something like that, then of course it doesn't matter who you vote into office, nothing in those agencies will change.
The processor industry is full of players who spend billions of dollars trying to make marginal gains in performance. Spending tons of money on R&D for new processors makes sense if you're selling those processors to lots of other mobile electronics manufacturers, but it doesn't make sense when you're simply hoarding them for your own products. It especially doesn't make sense considering nobody is buying iPhones because of their processor specs, let alone the fact that Apple produces their own chips. Apple would be better off using commodity hardware and spending their money on improving other areas of the user experience. But since I have turned against Apple over the past few years, I'm just fine with watching them make costly mistakes. From what I've been reading, quality control at TSMC has been somewhat questionable and Apple is asking a lot from them to make these new chips with cutting-edge fab processes at a high volume and with minimal defects. I have a feeling this decision will cause trouble for Apple in the future and all of this is a result of Apple trying to punish Samsung in their childish feud.
You mean it was clearly a lie, and you were caught
No, no, no! It was clearly a simple mistake. You can't expect the Director of National Intelligence to know what data national intelligence agencies are collecting! It wasn't perjury, it was incompetence! Sweet, consequence-free incompetence.
I think they were among the first to support USB in an era where PC makers were slavishly doing nothing new because nobody else had done it yet.
Apple fought USB with their own proprietary connector called Firewire. Firewire was significantly faster than USB, especially at sustained transfers, but it was more expensive to implement because of a combination of the technologies involved and Apple's license fees. Apple ended up abandoning that technology for newer versions of USB and eventually Thunderbolt, mostly due to lackluster third-party support for Firewire devices.
Has AMD added support for hardware-accelerated video decoding in their Linux drivers? They claimed they fully supported my video card under Linux, but I was only able to get a couple of frames per second on 720p videos with their latest proprietary drivers. I'm still very bitter about that because that was false advertising in my opinion.
It's interesting to note that it's only a certain replacement battery offered by Best Buy. However, Apple's batteries haven't been much better in the past. I had two bulge out of their case before I decided to go with a third party battery. The third party battery has worked great ever since. However, incidents like these make me very hesitant to buy or recommend a unibody design since the battery is not user-replaceable.
Another form of fragmentation is different hardware, including screen sizes and resolutions. While the variety of iOS devices and hardware is not as big as Android, I'm sure that the differences still cause headaches for their developers. And there's no doubt that Android suffers more from version fragmentation, largely because Android phone manufacturers don't have the balls to stop accepting money from the telcos and other parties for incorporating their shovelware.
With that said, I'm surprised that so many people have upgraded to iOS 6. When I had an iPhone, I got to the point where I stopped upgrading it because the new versions were too demanding for my phone despite the fact that my phone qualified for the update. Maybe Apple has gotten better in that respect.
I have read the patent, but it's been a couple of years and I don't have the time to look it up on the USPTO web site and find that block of text.
discusses the improvements and differences in their own implementation (including an orientation-agnostic plug design and signaling to the power brick).
Orientation-agnostic plugs are becoming very common and have little to do with the fact that it is held in with a magnet. Signaling to the power source is also becoming more common so that the device can negotiate how much power it needs and again has nothing to do with being held in by a magnet. None of these improvements individually seem worthy of a patent nor do they seem related enough to consider this plug significantly different from the plug in the deep fryer, let alone considered a new invention. Slapping a few industry-standard features onto an existing invention does not constitute a novel invention worthy of patent.
Yes - Apple's patent says "on a computer" rather than "on a deep fryer". Actually, the patent more likely says "on a computer, computing device, computer peripheral, display, phone, tablet, or any other portable electronic device".
In other words, since they don't know who you are and can't positively confirm that you are a U.S. citizen, then they claim they are not bound to uphold your Fourth Amendment rights despite the fact that they are likely able to confirm that you are currently located in the U.S. I'm not sure that logic would hold up in court and I hope they are challenged on this.
The PS4 has faster memory, a better GPU, and a more efficient architecture between the CPU and GPU. And your price didn't include the price of the Windows license. And you can not buy and sell used games with the PC. Don't get me wrong, that PC is a very impressive machine for the money, but you can't quite say it's exactly the same.
Best part is you'd have no trouble finding a lawyer to help you sue someone who used the above phrase.
You're right, you wouldn't have trouble finding a lawyer. And that's one of my biggest problems with a lot of lawyers: many of them have no sense of morality or justice. I'm not just talking about lawyers who represent defendants of violent crimes because I realize that they deserve a fair trial. I am referring to all of the lawyers that would argue either side of a case depending on which side offered them more money. These people are not driven by an inner sense of justice and making the world a better place, but simply following their own motivations of greed and rationalizing away any negative effects their greedy actions are causing society. Luckily not all lawyers are like that, but the greedy ones certainly paint a very negative image of lawyers in general and that image is hard to shake.
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The only problem I have with this phone is that it runs Windows Phone OS. The OS actually isn't that bad and the app support is definitely improving, but I just can't stand the home screen. With its pastel colors and overly-animated interface, it looks like they got the inspiration by watching Technicolor cartoons and browsing web pages from 1996. Whenever I see it, I almost expect to see animated GIFS of flames and a dancing Jesus. Other than the home screen, the rest of the OS isn't as bad as I thought it would be.
Just to clarify: it's not that the person with the most dollars gets his guy into office. The system currently allows someone to contribute money to all possible candidates and without those candidates knowing that you paid their opponents as well. Since you have paid all possible parties, your views are guaranteed to be represented regardless of who wins. And then a whole bunch of people will call the voters stupid for electing these guys when the fact of the matter is that all sides were bought because the system is corrupt. I hate to sound cynical, but at this point, it really doesn't matter who you vote for in federal elections.
Because nothing motivates a young boy to learn how to defeat technological filters than the promise of a nearly limitless supply of porn on the other side of those filters.
The original intent of trademarks was to prevent people from releasing products under the same corporate or product name. It was not intended to stifle free speech in order to provide corporations with a cash cow so that they can charge people for sharing information about products. Part of me would recommend standing up for yourself and refusing to take down the content since their claims are somewhat spurious. The other half of me would recommend replacing the content useful to the Everquest community with a notice that a greedy corporation has made overreaching trademark claims and the content is being taken down to prevent any beneficial side effects it might have generated for that company's intellectual property.
We do not hire people based on the number of lines of code they produce. Personally, I hate that metric since not all lines are created equally. Furthermore, the original request was that he explain the magnitude of his contributions to the project in which he was currently working. After he fumbled that, we settled for asking the approximate number of lines of code he contributed. I could not tell if he was genuinely attempting to take credit for writing a million lines of code or if he was providing a sarcastic answer to a question he didn't want to answer. Either way, it is not a smart move when you're being interviewed for a job. In addition to that, he had little experience and an ego I thought existed only in movies. He admitted he had gone off-the-rails on previous projects, which may be perfect in environments that require less structure, but would be a disaster in ours. The project he was interviewing for dwarfed the size of his previous projects and he failed to answer technical questions that would instill a level of confidence in the quality of his code. The request for metrics was a last-ditch effort to determine if he could be hired to do work of a less technical nature at a higher volume than the other candidates. His response was the nail in the coffin and four people unanimously decided he was not fit for the job.
I once interviewed a job candidate and asked him how many lines of code he would estimate he contributed to the project. He responded by saying that he modified one million lines of code on his last project. Somewhat incredulous, I asked him how he managed to do so much work in such little time and he said it was because he wrote a small tool that reformatted all of the code in the system. Needless to say, that candidate didn't hear back from us.
These parents are attempting to find a biological solution to a sociological problem. The reason these kids go on shooting sprees is not because they are inherently violent. They go on shooting sprees because they are unable to cope with being constantly bullied by their classmates, ignored by their parents and teachers, and ultimately feel rejected by society at large. The spree is a final act of desperation and revenge towards the system that did everything it could to break them or marginalize them. I'm not trying to say that there aren't genes that make people more predisposed to committing violent acts, but even when you do find them, I'm fairly certain that some of the perpetrators of school shootings will not contain that gene. If you want to reduce the number of school shootings, do everything you can to make sure your kids are socially adjusted so that they aren't the ones shooting up the school and make sure that your kids are also not the ones bullying someone else's kid to their breaking point.
I imagine the court will say that the government is not stopping anyone from exercising their rights to free speech simply because they are recording their conversations and building graphs of associations. It would seem more effective to claim these rights under the Fourth Amendment since this deals more with privacy than the First Amendment. In any event, this will likely end the way it did the last time the EFF tried to sue the federal government - the court will seek documents from the security agencies, the security agencies will claim that they can not reveal that information for reasons of "national security", and the court will say that the EFF doesn't have a case since they don't have any evidence due to the fact that the defendant refuses to provide the documents the court requested. This is how fascism begins in a democracy.
Apple's goal is not to sell as many books as possible. Their goal is to make as much money as possible selling books. Selling higher quantities does not mean more profit if you can sell smaller quantities with significantly higher margins. That's Business 101 and there's nothing wrong with that. Their problem was that they drank too much of their own Kool-Aid and thought they could get away with colluding with the publishers to fix prices so that they could sell at high margins and not be undercut by businesses such as Amazon that sell at lower margins.
Let's say that you use a test client to send commands to your custom server interface and there's a bug. Now you have to spend extra time to discover if the bug is in the test client or in your custom server.
You have it backwards. Before open source caught on, binary formats were all the rage. They were proprietary and they were very prone to corruption. Once a document became corrupted, you were at the mercy of the developers to come up with a tool that could reverse the damage. When open source caught on, it pushed hard for using XML as the format for storing and transmitting information. Data corruption is much easier to spot with clear text and can even be easily fixed compared to binary data. In this respect, HTTP 2.0 is a complete step backwards.
You would have to be one of the stupidest people in the world to believe that correlation equals causation. You've done nothing to illustrate how producing your own chips magically makes you profitable.
Yes, but at this point I believe the intelligence and security agencies have more power than the President, or are at least immune to any punitive action. These agencies now have a lot of power and will do anything they can to keep it. I would be very surprised if they weren't colluding to exaggerate the threats against this country in presentations given to the President right after his inauguration just to curb any urge for the President to scale back their power. If they can scare the President into thinking that horrible tragedies will occur if they are forced to relinquish any of their power, then they guarantee their current power for another four years and maybe even gain new powers. Of course I have no proof of this, but I know if I had that much power and there was the potential of losing it, then that would be the best way to maintain it. And if it turns out that they are doing something like that, then of course it doesn't matter who you vote into office, nothing in those agencies will change.
The processor industry is full of players who spend billions of dollars trying to make marginal gains in performance. Spending tons of money on R&D for new processors makes sense if you're selling those processors to lots of other mobile electronics manufacturers, but it doesn't make sense when you're simply hoarding them for your own products. It especially doesn't make sense considering nobody is buying iPhones because of their processor specs, let alone the fact that Apple produces their own chips. Apple would be better off using commodity hardware and spending their money on improving other areas of the user experience. But since I have turned against Apple over the past few years, I'm just fine with watching them make costly mistakes. From what I've been reading, quality control at TSMC has been somewhat questionable and Apple is asking a lot from them to make these new chips with cutting-edge fab processes at a high volume and with minimal defects. I have a feeling this decision will cause trouble for Apple in the future and all of this is a result of Apple trying to punish Samsung in their childish feud.
This! My favorite expression in software development is "there are millions of ways this can go wrong and only a few ways it can go right".
No, no, no! It was clearly a simple mistake. You can't expect the Director of National Intelligence to know what data national intelligence agencies are collecting! It wasn't perjury, it was incompetence! Sweet, consequence-free incompetence.
Apple fought USB with their own proprietary connector called Firewire. Firewire was significantly faster than USB, especially at sustained transfers, but it was more expensive to implement because of a combination of the technologies involved and Apple's license fees. Apple ended up abandoning that technology for newer versions of USB and eventually Thunderbolt, mostly due to lackluster third-party support for Firewire devices.
That's just great! Now all of those snooty Opera users will be able to brag about having another feature before all of the other browsers.
Has AMD added support for hardware-accelerated video decoding in their Linux drivers? They claimed they fully supported my video card under Linux, but I was only able to get a couple of frames per second on 720p videos with their latest proprietary drivers. I'm still very bitter about that because that was false advertising in my opinion.
It's interesting to note that it's only a certain replacement battery offered by Best Buy. However, Apple's batteries haven't been much better in the past. I had two bulge out of their case before I decided to go with a third party battery. The third party battery has worked great ever since. However, incidents like these make me very hesitant to buy or recommend a unibody design since the battery is not user-replaceable.
Another form of fragmentation is different hardware, including screen sizes and resolutions. While the variety of iOS devices and hardware is not as big as Android, I'm sure that the differences still cause headaches for their developers. And there's no doubt that Android suffers more from version fragmentation, largely because Android phone manufacturers don't have the balls to stop accepting money from the telcos and other parties for incorporating their shovelware.
With that said, I'm surprised that so many people have upgraded to iOS 6. When I had an iPhone, I got to the point where I stopped upgrading it because the new versions were too demanding for my phone despite the fact that my phone qualified for the update. Maybe Apple has gotten better in that respect.
I have read the patent, but it's been a couple of years and I don't have the time to look it up on the USPTO web site and find that block of text.
Orientation-agnostic plugs are becoming very common and have little to do with the fact that it is held in with a magnet. Signaling to the power source is also becoming more common so that the device can negotiate how much power it needs and again has nothing to do with being held in by a magnet. None of these improvements individually seem worthy of a patent nor do they seem related enough to consider this plug significantly different from the plug in the deep fryer, let alone considered a new invention. Slapping a few industry-standard features onto an existing invention does not constitute a novel invention worthy of patent.
Yes - Apple's patent says "on a computer" rather than "on a deep fryer". Actually, the patent more likely says "on a computer, computing device, computer peripheral, display, phone, tablet, or any other portable electronic device".
In other words, since they don't know who you are and can't positively confirm that you are a U.S. citizen, then they claim they are not bound to uphold your Fourth Amendment rights despite the fact that they are likely able to confirm that you are currently located in the U.S. I'm not sure that logic would hold up in court and I hope they are challenged on this.
The PS4 has faster memory, a better GPU, and a more efficient architecture between the CPU and GPU. And your price didn't include the price of the Windows license. And you can not buy and sell used games with the PC. Don't get me wrong, that PC is a very impressive machine for the money, but you can't quite say it's exactly the same.
You're right, you wouldn't have trouble finding a lawyer. And that's one of my biggest problems with a lot of lawyers: many of them have no sense of morality or justice. I'm not just talking about lawyers who represent defendants of violent crimes because I realize that they deserve a fair trial. I am referring to all of the lawyers that would argue either side of a case depending on which side offered them more money. These people are not driven by an inner sense of justice and making the world a better place, but simply following their own motivations of greed and rationalizing away any negative effects their greedy actions are causing society. Luckily not all lawyers are like that, but the greedy ones certainly paint a very negative image of lawyers in general and that image is hard to shake.