Well, technically in the EU there is such a thing like an implied warranty by law.
It's not perfect because only in the first 6 months the company has to prove that the item was not defective, afterwards you have to prove that it was defective (as in hidden defect) at the time of purchase, so it basically turns out that serious companies usually offer a voluntary 2 years warranty, and only ver shaddy companies tend to offer less or only the warranty they are forced to give you by law.
So I'm always really shocked when people talk about 30 days warranties;)
>>>But those two thirds against them were divided among several parties, none of which individually got more. Otherwise, you'd >>>be making the same complaint[1], but against a different party. If there were three other parties with equal shares[2], >>>they'd have over three quarters voting against each of them[3]. That hardly means they have more support than the winner.
Hint: Learn about electoral system in the UK before making a fool out of yourself in public.
The UK has a "small electoral districts" + "winner takes all" system.
So, there are a number of issues:
* not all districts have the same number of voters. * not all districts will have the same level of participation. This gives you the same effect as above even if districts where reallocated all the time to track population to keep them equal sized. * and if there are more then 2 candidates for one district, you get a situation where a relative majority in the district can win the whole district.
While the system has some positive aspects, being a mirror image of popular vote is not one of these.
Yeah, a DVD drive is really a critical part of a computer.
E.g. I've noticed only after 6weeks - 2 months that I've forgot to connect the DVD drive in my desktop box to power.
Clearly a DVD drive in a laptop is critical. It has always been critical for me for installing my OS. Hmmm. Yeah right, ripping DVDs. But for that usually external DVDs are more reliable, shitty internal laptop drives are so hard to change.
Well, technically, yes, some US companies delivered that data management technologies that made the holocaust even possible.
Interestingly, they were not punished in any way. Well, yes, up to the moment where the US entered the war, it was clearly a simple legal business transaction, and afterwards it only complicated slightly the situation, the company that I'm thinking about just setup they're corporate entities up in a different way,...
Well, the $1 app piracy phenomen has still two problems:
-) most of the iPhone apps that I've seen are not worth even the time it takes to install them, and surely not $1 -) itunes is not exactly the best tool to discover which apps might be worth their price or not.
Now we've got a market with incomplete (or potentially totally missing information), now look up in some standard economy literature, why markets without complete information (e.g. private 2nd hand car dealing) favor bad products.
(Basically, without a way to prove how valueable your good is to your customer, the cheapest vendor wins out, because the customer without the quality information about the products has only the price as criteria. It's usually so much cheaper to produce crap than quality,...)
Ridiculous is correct, for years the data access rates have been higher for native Canadian SIM than say an Austrian SIM doing data roaming in Canada (haven't checked for 2 years, but it come up in discussion back then, and I was shocked that my SIM would be cheaper when roaming).
Bullshit, you do it in python, write your own local http server doing it, and then make the game access that one.
"Crack" => make sure that either the URL is changed or that the access is redirected at the OS level. Should they decide to do https, and check certificates, well, then you need to patch the certificate too.
In some ways it makes the "crack" harder because you need to implement and provide services to the game, OTOH, the binary level patching gets easier.
Assuming even that the 359 includes some sales tax (that depends from which country these guys plan to sell it):
http://geizhals.at/eu/a401398.html 339 for an Packard Bell iMedia D4500, Phenom X4 9100e 4x 1.80GHz, 3072MB, 320GB, Windows Vista Home Premium (PB80X37003)
Nothing reasonable priced about this offer, sorry. You can get a multiple of processing power for that money; or more storage and memory even for a DualAtom with a branded product. (And I'd argue that it's still cheaper, because you do get that Win7 license, even if you don't need it.)
And while not all of these PCs are automatically perfectly Linux compatible, some are for sure, e.g. Atom based designs have usually mostly Linux friendly hardware.
Actually, if you think about this, all the movie was rendered. Also the scenes where only humans are running around.
So yes, I realized this already in theatre, it's a quantum leap. The plot was just average, but the rendering was brilliant. The first movie computer rendered movie that is 98% looking like a real-world movie.
The Swiss vendor selling the system never marketed it (even 1992) for security relevant access control, it's just meant as a comfortable access for entertainment parks or similar customers, where comfort and low price are the selling points, not security.
(so basically, it was never ever meant to be used for airport security)
Exactly that one top percent is highly capable of avoiding taxes.
An example that comes to mind is how Microsoft avoids to pay state taxes in Washington, or Federal/European taxes by having a subsidiary in Ireland that handles a good chunk of licensing,...
But that's a big problem. Developer work is effectivly not measurable.
How do you measure code quality? Any "mechanical" method (counting lines, lint scores, whatever) can be very misleading, basically it can be shown by example that it measures the wrong thing.
How do you measure being on time? That strongly depends upon the guestimate that we all do in the start. In most methods, this "educated guess" is done by people who do not have to keep the time limits set.
Add to this that management usually does not understand what the developers are doing (the only thing you might count on is that your immediate superior has a vague idea what you are doing, in most places. The superior of your boss usually has your whole group condensed to one line, and so on), and it gets very hard to be appreciated as a developer. Hence older and more experienced developers often develop a cynic streak, leading to under performing. As long it's hard to prove that you are under performing,...
Furthermore, customers usually do not realize that sprints where vaste amount of functionality gets implemented in very short time (with potentially not much sleep) are something that is not really easily reproducable. Sometimes the subject matter you are working on turns against you (it's way more time consuming to finish off these last half-dozen bugs and edge cases, because it usually involves a good measure of debugging).
Ah, and one last item that makes our job so hard to cast in work days, debugging. There are bugs that you write yourself, against these you can try to protect yourself. Then there are bugs that you inherit from internal modules, 3rd party libraries. Then we've got the whole area of problems associated with the customer not telling everything. Then we've got complete changes of functionality and focus midproject.
Does not happen? I had once a situation where a sister company refused to hand over any documentation beyond what the end customer had. So while we went to reverse engineering stuff that one trip to the sister company could have avoided; Why you wonder? In this case they had a real good reason, the systems they've sold to the customer did not what they were supposed to do. And our effort was to port some applications that would have enabled the customer to check the functionality through his own officers, not relying on the operators from the seller company; so they stonewalled us, while delivering "updates" to the customer,...
Ok, social security systems for pensions work like this:
-) they take the money of new members to pay their obligations to older members.
Hmmm, sounds familiar right?
So what would happen if you tried to do such a thing, without a law legalizing your operation?
And before anyone points out that this is much better than anything bound to stocks, consider that it's fragile too:
-) bad economy means less "new members" contributing to the system as there are less employees, and they get potentially a lower pay, hence the contribution to the social security system shrinks.
-) but beyond being dependant on economy, which any pension fund is dependant too, it's also vunerable on a larger time frame base to changes in population. E.g. if you've got some years with less kids, some decades later on, you'll be missing income in the social security system.
Well, ideally you should do that out of a country, that has a more strict definition of child pornography. Then mail the frames with a believable cover letter,...
And then post the URLs to the news media and the FBI, ideally anonymously:)
Considering that in real life, development is constrained by money & time, you have in practice to compare a crude 1st implementation in C++ to a polished 2nd or 3rd implementation in PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby. And if you haven't got a 2nd implementation (or refactoring) going when using the dynamic bunch, then you wouldn't have a working C++ prototype in the timeframe. Guess in the case of Facebook, not having it would be a big win to privacy on the Internet, but you get the gist of the argument.
And despite the myths, it's quite easy to write C++ code that is not efficient. Especially if you are in a hurry to get your first prototype going. Especially if you have not the best talent. (Which you seldom have).
And the pricepoint of the cheapest is about a 4x 3.0GHz Phenom with 4GB, the prices of the more expensive are slightly more expensive than a Quad Phenom with 8GB RAM.
Just to quote my step mom "But the update is from MS so it must be good" after Windows trashed itself for the 3rd time in a year with an automatic upgrade;)
Guess you don't use games then. Or anything older than a couple of years.
Notice that for many slightly older games (Adventures mostly), there are usually Vista-compatible new releases. Or patches.
Perhaps 50% of these Adventure games work on Vista, and that includes the games that need quite a bit of fiddling around with settings, that are quite often out of the experience of normal users.
Well, while I don't read Finnish, this sounds just like they've included a meager version of broadband into the definition of the general telecommunication service package that some ISPs/Telcos are forced to provide (and they are usually compensated for that by the whole industry sector).
General service requirements are common for telco and postal companies, e.g. the post office is forced to deliver letters to anywhere. Plus, in Europe at least, GSM/UMTS licenses include binding service requirements, e.g. has to provide coverage for 95% of the population by year X, and not fulfilling such requirements can lead to severe consequences (including loosing the license one paid potentially billions euros for).
Slashdot Mirror
lol, the naivity.
Just means that the content mafia has to go to a different shop to buy the 9 democrats?
No, I guess that would be customer-unfriedly (or shall I say lobbyist unfriendly), guess it's a one-stop shopping run.
No, but they did not run on a "we'll protect your constitutional rights" ticket, ...
Well, technically in the EU there is such a thing like an implied warranty by law.
It's not perfect because only in the first 6 months the company has to prove that
the item was not defective, afterwards you have to prove that it was defective (as
in hidden defect) at the time of purchase, so it basically turns out that serious
companies usually offer a voluntary 2 years warranty, and only ver shaddy companies tend
to offer less or only the warranty they are forced to give you by law.
So I'm always really shocked when people talk about 30 days warranties ;)
>>>But those two thirds against them were divided among several parties, none of which individually got more. Otherwise, you'd
>>>be making the same complaint[1], but against a different party. If there were three other parties with equal shares[2],
>>>they'd have over three quarters voting against each of them[3]. That hardly means they have more support than the winner.
Hint: Learn about electoral system in the UK before making a fool out of yourself in public.
The UK has a "small electoral districts" + "winner takes all" system.
So, there are a number of issues:
* not all districts have the same number of voters.
* not all districts will have the same level of participation. This gives you the same effect as above even if districts where reallocated all the time to track population to keep them equal sized.
* and if there are more then 2 candidates for one district, you get a situation where a relative majority in the district can win the whole district.
While the system has some positive aspects, being a mirror image of popular vote is not one of these.
Yeah, a DVD drive is really a critical part of a computer.
E.g. I've noticed only after 6weeks - 2 months that I've forgot to connect the DVD drive in my desktop box to power.
Clearly a DVD drive in a laptop is critical. It has always been critical for me for installing my OS. Hmmm. Yeah right, ripping DVDs. But for that usually external DVDs are more reliable, shitty internal laptop drives are so hard to change.
Well, technically, yes, some US companies delivered that data management technologies that made the holocaust even possible.
Interestingly, they were not punished in any way. Well, yes, up to the moment where the US entered the war, it was clearly a simple legal business transaction, and afterwards it only complicated slightly the situation, the company that I'm thinking about just setup they're corporate entities up in a different way, ...
Well, the $1 app piracy phenomen has still two problems:
-) most of the iPhone apps that I've seen are not worth even the time it takes to install them, and surely not $1
-) itunes is not exactly the best tool to discover which apps might be worth their price or not.
Now we've got a market with incomplete (or potentially totally missing information), now look up in some standard economy literature, why markets without complete information (e.g. private 2nd hand car dealing) favor bad products.
(Basically, without a way to prove how valueable your good is to your customer, the cheapest vendor wins out, because the customer without the quality information about the products has only the price as criteria. It's usually so much cheaper to produce crap than quality, ...)
Ridiculous is correct, for years the data access rates have been higher for native Canadian SIM than say an Austrian SIM doing data roaming in Canada (haven't checked for 2 years, but it come up in discussion back then, and I was shocked that my SIM would be cheaper when roaming).
Bullshit, you do it in python, write your own local http server doing it, and then make the game access that one.
"Crack" => make sure that either the URL is changed or that the access is redirected at the OS level. Should they decide to do https, and check certificates, well, then you need to patch the certificate too.
In some ways it makes the "crack" harder because you need to implement and provide services to the game, OTOH, the binary level patching gets easier.
yacc
Well, nobody has explained if and how much VAT is included in the 359.
This would be a critical price factor.
Because I can find Mac Minis from 444 including 20% VAT, and 359 + 20% VAT would be 430, pretty near, wouldn't you say.
Furthermore, even if the 359 are including VAT, you can get at this price point a name branded PC with more CPU, more RAM and more HDD easily.
E.g.: http://geizhals.at/eu/a401398.html (339, reasonable quad core CPU, 3GB RAM too, 320GB hdd, optical drive and Windows license)
Assuming even that the 359 includes some sales tax (that depends from which country these guys plan to sell it):
http://geizhals.at/eu/a401398.html 339 for an Packard Bell iMedia D4500, Phenom X4 9100e 4x 1.80GHz, 3072MB, 320GB, Windows Vista Home Premium (PB80X37003)
http://geizhals.at/eu/a475774.html 349 for an Acer with 4GB/320GB DualAtom. Funnily even a Win7 license is included.
http://geizhals.at/a468358.html admittingly only 2GB RAM, but a Pentium Dual Core and only 293
http://geizhals.at/?cat=syscpq&bpmax=359&v=e&plz=&dist=&sort=p HP offers at this price point even Quad Opterons (admittingly with 1GB RAM)
http://geizhals.at/eu/?cat=syslenovo&bpmax=359&v=e&plz=&dist=&sort=p&xf=445_2048 Levono does have a number of boxes too
Nothing reasonable priced about this offer, sorry. You can get a multiple of processing power for that money; or more storage and memory even for a DualAtom with a branded product. (And I'd argue that it's still cheaper, because you do get that Win7 license, even if you don't need it.)
And while not all of these PCs are automatically perfectly Linux compatible, some are for sure, e.g. Atom based designs have usually mostly Linux friendly hardware.
Well, and we are always told how bad it is to have a gazillion of Linux distributions ;)
yacc
Actually, if you think about this, all the movie was rendered. Also the scenes where only humans are running around.
So yes, I realized this already in theatre, it's a quantum leap. The plot was just average, but the rendering was brilliant.
The first movie computer rendered movie that is 98% looking like a real-world movie.
I admit that I've found that dual-language fetish in Canada always very charming ;)
url in archive.org?
The Swiss vendor selling the system never marketed it (even 1992) for security relevant access control, it's just meant as a comfortable access for entertainment parks or similar customers, where comfort and low price are the selling points, not security.
(so basically, it was never ever meant to be used for airport security)
You said "control", not "pay taxes".
Exactly that one top percent is highly capable of avoiding taxes.
An example that comes to mind is how Microsoft avoids to pay state taxes in Washington, or Federal/European taxes by having a subsidiary in Ireland that handles a good chunk of licensing, ...
But that's a big problem. Developer work is effectivly not measurable.
How do you measure code quality? Any "mechanical" method (counting lines, lint scores, whatever) can be very misleading, basically it can be shown by example that it measures the wrong thing.
How do you measure being on time? That strongly depends upon the guestimate that we all do in the start. In most methods, this "educated guess" is done by people who do not have to keep the time limits set.
Add to this that management usually does not understand what the developers are doing (the only thing you might count on is that your immediate superior has a vague idea what you are doing, in most places. The superior of your boss usually has your whole group condensed to one line, and so on), and it gets very hard to be appreciated as a developer. Hence older and more experienced developers often develop a cynic streak, leading to under performing. As long it's hard to prove that you are under performing, ...
Furthermore, customers usually do not realize that sprints where vaste amount of functionality gets implemented in very short time (with potentially not much sleep) are something that is not really easily reproducable. Sometimes the subject matter you are working on turns against you (it's way more time consuming to finish off these last half-dozen bugs and edge cases, because it usually involves a good measure of debugging).
Ah, and one last item that makes our job so hard to cast in work days, debugging. There are bugs that you write yourself, against these you can try to protect yourself. Then there are bugs that you inherit from internal modules, 3rd party libraries. Then we've got the whole area of problems associated with the customer not telling everything. Then we've got complete changes of functionality and focus midproject.
Does not happen? I had once a situation where a sister company refused to hand over any documentation beyond what the end customer had. So while we went to reverse engineering stuff that one trip to the sister company could have avoided; Why you wonder? In this case they had a real good reason, the systems they've sold to the customer did not what they were supposed to do. And our effort was to port some applications that would have enabled the customer to check the functionality through his own officers, not relying on the operators from the seller company; so they stonewalled us, while delivering "updates" to the customer, ...
Ok, social security systems for pensions work like this:
-) they take the money of new members to pay their obligations to older members.
Hmmm, sounds familiar right?
So what would happen if you tried to do such a thing, without a law legalizing your operation?
And before anyone points out that this is much better than anything bound to stocks, consider that it's fragile too:
-) bad economy means less "new members" contributing to the system as there are less employees, and they get potentially a lower pay, hence the contribution to the social security system shrinks.
-) but beyond being dependant on economy, which any pension fund is dependant too, it's also vunerable on a larger time frame base to changes in population. E.g. if you've got some years with less kids, some decades later on, you'll be missing income in the social security system.
Well, ideally you should do that out of a country, that has a more strict definition of child pornography. Then mail the frames with a believable cover letter, ...
And then post the URLs to the news media and the FBI, ideally anonymously :)
Actually, in practice that is not even a given.
Considering that in real life, development is constrained by money & time, you have in practice to compare a crude 1st implementation in C++ to a polished 2nd or 3rd implementation in PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby.
And if you haven't got a 2nd implementation (or refactoring) going when using the dynamic bunch, then you wouldn't have a working C++ prototype in the timeframe. Guess in the case of Facebook, not having it would be a big win to privacy on the Internet, but you get the gist of the argument.
And despite the myths, it's quite easy to write C++ code that is not efficient. Especially if you are in a hurry to get your first prototype going. Especially if you have not the best talent. (Which you seldom have).
And the pricepoint of the cheapest is about a 4x 3.0GHz Phenom with 4GB, the prices of the more expensive are slightly more expensive than a Quad Phenom with 8GB RAM.
Just to quote my step mom "But the update is from MS so it must be good" after Windows trashed itself for the 3rd time in a year with an automatic upgrade ;)
Guess you don't use games then. Or anything older than a couple of years.
Notice that for many slightly older games (Adventures mostly), there are usually Vista-compatible new releases. Or patches.
Perhaps 50% of these Adventure games work on Vista, and that includes the games that need quite a bit of fiddling around with settings, that are quite often out of the experience of normal users.
Well, while I don't read Finnish, this sounds just like they've included a meager version of broadband into the definition of the general telecommunication service package that some ISPs/Telcos are forced to provide (and they are usually compensated for that by the whole industry sector).
General service requirements are common for telco and postal companies, e.g. the post office is forced to deliver letters to anywhere. Plus, in Europe at least, GSM/UMTS licenses include binding service requirements, e.g. has to provide coverage for 95% of the population by year X, and not fulfilling such requirements can lead to severe consequences (including loosing the license one paid potentially billions euros for).