I'm sorry - are you high? You claim that iPhone has "1%" of the smart phone market, and that Android has more? Utter crap. The most recent data I could find from the end of last year gives Apple 18%, behind Symbian and RIM. Android is showing a whopping 3.5%. Now I'm sure Android did much better in Q4 and will continue to rise, but I would bet my house they won't even reach iPhone by the end of 2010, never mind pass them.
But comparing switching from Win2K to 7 to a simple Linux upgrade isn't fair. We're talking about 10 year old software here - as an example Ubuntu don't support simple in-place upgrades for anything more than a couple of years old (and while I'm no expert Debian seems to have similar multi-step upgrades for older versions). If you're running an OS from 2000 (of any type) and want to upgrade to the latest, you're basically looking at a wipe & reinstall regardless.
XNA? Microsoft will give you a pretty complete 360 dev environment for free, and let you write games (or other apps) and run them on your console. Sure you have to pay a subscription fee ($100 a year I believe) to be able to distribute what you build, but if you're seriously into homebrew or whatever that doesn't seem like a terrible burden.
The fiction sections keeping getting larger and larger and the inclusion of DVDs, CDs, and other media have all come at the expense of the non-fiction section. I would guess that at my current library, only about 20-25% of the selections are non-fiction
My wife is a librarian, so I know a little about this. The reason that the proportion of non-fiction is lower is two-fold. Firstly, the demand is dropping. Libraries are paid for by the taxpayer and it's hard to justify not stocking the kinds of items they are actually interested in. Secondly, non-fiction is simply not being published as much because of the explosion of access to non-fiction information online. One of the very important functions that modern libraries provide which you totally overlook is free access to the internet, along with training and instruction on how to use it. This is replacing (and improving on, in many respects) traditional reference books.
Additionally, I'm not sure I agree with your definition of the purpose of a library. I think they are many fold, and one is the promotion of general literacy. Most librarians are just happy to get kids (and adults to be honest) to read _anything_, the argument over whether they're reading the _right_ thing can come later.
Meh. I'm a huge music fan, and spend a lot of money on CDs etc. I have no interest in T-shirts and rarely go to concerts (largely because most of the artists I listen to don't really play concerts). So if that model were adopted and the recordings were made free, their income from me would drop to basically zero. Of course I'm sure the income from other people would go up from zero, so maybe it'd balance out.
I really have no issue with the current model other than (a) the lawsuits are clearly over the top and (b) I wish I could buy lossless downloads at a comparable price to the physical CD so I could save the waste of manufacturing and shipping the plastic disc I'll rip exactly once. When WAV or FLAC downloads are available they're usually considerably more than the CD on Amazon, which is frankly absurd.
Correct. Which leads to the conclusion that the application itself must spin off event processing onto threads to avoid locking up the main GUI thread.
Example:
GUI thread registers a mouse click, propagates event to app, which wants to load & process a file. If it does this on the GUI thread the whole app (and possibly the whole desktop!) grinds to a halt for a few seconds. A good app will push that task to a new thread so the GUI can remain responsive. It's not a million miles away from the situation with co-operative multitasking back in the day.
This is why (for example) the.NET CLR has a built in threadpool designed for simple use by apps which need to do "stuff" async.
1. Drive down random street. 2. Stop outside random house. 3. Check inside mailbox - you now have name & address. 4. Hang around a bit on a weekend, you now have an actual family in front of you!
I'm all about protecting privacy, but the ability to get the name and address of a random person is hardly new. What's more dangerous (and I don't think is really possible here) is the ability to get the name and address of a _specific_ person. The security concern in this situation (AFAIC) is the ability for people to randomly snarf photos you thought were at least reasonably private, and the ability to insert stuff into your frame.
Who the hell shuts down their computer? More to the point, who does so and sits there watching it? I hit the hibernate button, stand up and walk away. I hear the PSU flip off before I get out of the room - quite quick enough for me.
So given that I carry both an iPhone (personal) and a BB (work) - what does that make me? I don't wear a suit, or talk loudly, or drive an American car. I also don't live in Brooklyn, don't drink latte, am not a vegetarian and don't listen to "world"
music. Any other awesome stereotypes you'd like to throw around?
You can try, I don't know of many games which will refuse to run if you're below min specs, but I guess the devs are saying they won't support it if you have problems. It's a CYA move.
Another thing worth considering is swap - a console game has MUCH more control over memory management (and knows exactly what else is running on the box) - very much unlike a game running on Windows. Given that people typically will have an AV, maybe a browser and even things like iTunes running at the same time as the game, you need to give yourself some wiggle room so you're not grinding the pagefile. Users won't care that they're being stupid trying to run too much on a crappy PC - they'll just point to the min specs and complain.
PC based games often run at higher resolutions and higher texture quality, meaning you're throwing more data around and need more buffer space to keep it all smooth.
Whilst the UK has some serious problems with internet monitoring and privacy (_not_ censorship, at least not by the government at the moment) they're pretty hands off w.r.t. games, and are generally the same as the US. Games are rated, that rating is legally binding, but very, very few games are "banned" or otherwise restricted from sale. Other countries in Europe (e.g. Germany) are much more restrictive, typically around violence and Nazi imagery.
Well it is my experience. I just put Win 7 on all my machines at home, including the couple which were running Ubuntu Desktop. The UI is better (no really, it is), the install was easier (again, really) and laptop battery life was better in at least one case. I still have Ubuntu on my server because the very idea of a Windows server makes me feel a little ill, but for the desktop Win 7 does everything I need easily and cleanly. Of course I'm not everyone, and I'm glad there are options.
Out of interest, which version of Windows were you trying to install, and how old is the laptop? The only problems I had with 7 were on an older laptop which Intel mysteriously refuse to release drivers for. I got it working reasonably easily with a generic driver but Aero doesn't work.
It's also worth mentioning that Xbox as an overall business is profitable and has been for some time, and that even the hardware is making them good money. My memory is that I heard that in the last quarter the E&D div made a loss but Xbox within that div made a profit.
Again, why not just lock the ports down? Then people couldn't break the rule even if they wanted to. Asking people not to do something isn't security, preventing them from doing it is.
If you don't trust the managers of whatever fund your money's in - move it. If you're totally risk averse put it in fixed income. Or hell - if you're so much better at stock picking that the professionals start your own fund. From what you say it should be easy and you'll be rich off all our money:)
Using strings to store numbers internally is wrong, it just is. It's slow, wasteful, and unnessecary. I don't think I've ever (in 20 years of coding) needed to store something bigger than 2^64, but if I did, there are plenty of options (e.g. BigDecimal in Java, bigint in Perl, etc) which are essentially unlimited in size. Doing math with strings is just such a horrible concept:) As for precision floats (i.e. fixed point) there are real solutions for that issue in most languages too. String isn't one of them.
Exchanging your data with other systems (e.g. generating a web page, or XML, or whatever) is of course an entirely different story, you do what makes sense for the requirements. XML Schema, for example, mandates that a parser has to accept up to an 18-digit value for the digit type, but doesn't set an upper bound. So you need knowledge of the parser to know how to transfer very large values.
Your wifi will work fine, you won't need to change anything. The charger for your laptop is almost certainly multi-voltage (check the label) so all you need is a $2 plug adapter, buy it at the airport.
People travel between the US and UK every day, it's not a big deal:) Stop worrying, make sure your credit card has plenty of room, and have fun!
Well I lived in England for 30 years and I have no idea what you mean by "boiled meat"...I don't think I've ever had such a thing (possibly outside of a NYC hotdog, although calling that meat is a stretch). Traditional British food is much maligned but really good when done well, but modern British cooking has borrowed heavily from other parts of the world - just like some other places you might be more familiar with. Or did you think Pizza was invented in the US?
Agreed, my watch broke a while ago and I decided to try living without it and just using my phone. Drove me up the wall...2 months later gave in and bought a new watch.
The data on the HDD is now tainted, as a lot of what modders do is around cheating achivements by trading hacked save games, this seems reasonable to me.
And gamerscore has nothing to do with the data on the drive - I could wipe out all my saves tonight and I'd still have all my earned achievements and gamerscore - they're stored on the XBL servers.
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I'm sorry - are you high? You claim that iPhone has "1%" of the smart phone market, and that Android has more? Utter crap. The most recent data I could find from the end of last year gives Apple 18%, behind Symbian and RIM. Android is showing a whopping 3.5%. Now I'm sure Android did much better in Q4 and will continue to rise, but I would bet my house they won't even reach iPhone by the end of 2010, never mind pass them.
Agreed on time to patch.
But comparing switching from Win2K to 7 to a simple Linux upgrade isn't fair. We're talking about 10 year old software here - as an example Ubuntu don't support simple in-place upgrades for anything more than a couple of years old (and while I'm no expert Debian seems to have similar multi-step upgrades for older versions). If you're running an OS from 2000 (of any type) and want to upgrade to the latest, you're basically looking at a wipe & reinstall regardless.
XNA? Microsoft will give you a pretty complete 360 dev environment for free, and let you write games (or other apps) and run them on your console. Sure you have to pay a subscription fee ($100 a year I believe) to be able to distribute what you build, but if you're seriously into homebrew or whatever that doesn't seem like a terrible burden.
Except the whole international roaming thing. And that's a pretty significant "way".
My wife is a librarian, so I know a little about this. The reason that the proportion of non-fiction is lower is two-fold. Firstly, the demand is dropping. Libraries are paid for by the taxpayer and it's hard to justify not stocking the kinds of items they are actually interested in. Secondly, non-fiction is simply not being published as much because of the explosion of access to non-fiction information online. One of the very important functions that modern libraries provide which you totally overlook is free access to the internet, along with training and instruction on how to use it. This is replacing (and improving on, in many respects) traditional reference books.
Additionally, I'm not sure I agree with your definition of the purpose of a library. I think they are many fold, and one is the promotion of general literacy. Most librarians are just happy to get kids (and adults to be honest) to read _anything_, the argument over whether they're reading the _right_ thing can come later.
Meh. I'm a huge music fan, and spend a lot of money on CDs etc. I have no interest in T-shirts and rarely go to concerts (largely because most of the artists I listen to don't really play concerts). So if that model were adopted and the recordings were made free, their income from me would drop to basically zero. Of course I'm sure the income from other people would go up from zero, so maybe it'd balance out.
I really have no issue with the current model other than (a) the lawsuits are clearly over the top and (b) I wish I could buy lossless downloads at a comparable price to the physical CD so I could save the waste of manufacturing and shipping the plastic disc I'll rip exactly once. When WAV or FLAC downloads are available they're usually considerably more than the CD on Amazon, which is frankly absurd.
...and that's exactly why I'm looking forward to it :)
You can disable the auto-join for unknown networks, then it will only switch to Wifi if it sees a network you already have configured.
Correct. Which leads to the conclusion that the application itself must spin off event processing onto threads to avoid locking up the main GUI thread.
Example:
GUI thread registers a mouse click, propagates event to app, which wants to load & process a file. If it does this on the GUI thread the whole app (and possibly the whole desktop!) grinds to a halt for a few seconds. A good app will push that task to a new thread so the GUI can remain responsive. It's not a million miles away from the situation with co-operative multitasking back in the day.
This is why (for example) the .NET CLR has a built in threadpool designed for simple use by apps which need to do "stuff" async.
1. Drive down random street.
2. Stop outside random house.
3. Check inside mailbox - you now have name & address.
4. Hang around a bit on a weekend, you now have an actual family in front of you!
I'm all about protecting privacy, but the ability to get the name and address of a random person is hardly new. What's more dangerous (and I don't think is really possible here) is the ability to get the name and address of a _specific_ person. The security concern in this situation (AFAIC) is the ability for people to randomly snarf photos you thought were at least reasonably private, and the ability to insert stuff into your frame.
Who the hell shuts down their computer? More to the point, who does so and sits there watching it? I hit the hibernate button, stand up and walk away. I hear the PSU flip off before I get out of the room - quite quick enough for me.
So given that I carry both an iPhone (personal) and a BB (work) - what does that make me? I don't wear a suit, or talk loudly, or drive an American car. I also don't live in Brooklyn, don't drink latte, am not a vegetarian and don't listen to "world"
music. Any other awesome stereotypes you'd like to throw around?
You can try, I don't know of many games which will refuse to run if you're below min specs, but I guess the devs are saying they won't support it if you have problems. It's a CYA move.
Another thing worth considering is swap - a console game has MUCH more control over memory management (and knows exactly what else is running on the box) - very much unlike a game running on Windows. Given that people typically will have an AV, maybe a browser and even things like iTunes running at the same time as the game, you need to give yourself some wiggle room so you're not grinding the pagefile. Users won't care that they're being stupid trying to run too much on a crappy PC - they'll just point to the min specs and complain.
PC based games often run at higher resolutions and higher texture quality, meaning you're throwing more data around and need more buffer space to keep it all smooth.
Whilst the UK has some serious problems with internet monitoring and privacy (_not_ censorship, at least not by the government at the moment) they're pretty hands off w.r.t. games, and are generally the same as the US. Games are rated, that rating is legally binding, but very, very few games are "banned" or otherwise restricted from sale. Other countries in Europe (e.g. Germany) are much more restrictive, typically around violence and Nazi imagery.
See this page for a summary.
Well it is my experience. I just put Win 7 on all my machines at home, including the couple which were running Ubuntu Desktop. The UI is better (no really, it is), the install was easier (again, really) and laptop battery life was better in at least one case. I still have Ubuntu on my server because the very idea of a Windows server makes me feel a little ill, but for the desktop Win 7 does everything I need easily and cleanly. Of course I'm not everyone, and I'm glad there are options.
Out of interest, which version of Windows were you trying to install, and how old is the laptop? The only problems I had with 7 were on an older laptop which Intel mysteriously refuse to release drivers for. I got it working reasonably easily with a generic driver but Aero doesn't work.
It's also worth mentioning that Xbox as an overall business is profitable and has been for some time, and that even the hardware is making them good money. My memory is that I heard that in the last quarter the E&D div made a loss but Xbox within that div made a profit.
Again, why not just lock the ports down? Then people couldn't break the rule even if they wanted to. Asking people not to do something isn't security, preventing them from doing it is.
You wouldn't call it boring if you were the guy who had to wear the red shirt!
If you don't trust the managers of whatever fund your money's in - move it. If you're totally risk averse put it in fixed income. Or hell - if you're so much better at stock picking that the professionals start your own fund. From what you say it should be easy and you'll be rich off all our money :)
Using strings to store numbers internally is wrong, it just is. It's slow, wasteful, and unnessecary. I don't think I've ever (in 20 years of coding) needed to store something bigger than 2^64, but if I did, there are plenty of options (e.g. BigDecimal in Java, bigint in Perl, etc) which are essentially unlimited in size. Doing math with strings is just such a horrible concept :) As for precision floats (i.e. fixed point) there are real solutions for that issue in most languages too. String isn't one of them.
Exchanging your data with other systems (e.g. generating a web page, or XML, or whatever) is of course an entirely different story, you do what makes sense for the requirements. XML Schema, for example, mandates that a parser has to accept up to an 18-digit value for the digit type, but doesn't set an upper bound. So you need knowledge of the parser to know how to transfer very large values.
Your wifi will work fine, you won't need to change anything. The charger for your laptop is almost certainly multi-voltage (check the label) so all you need is a $2 plug adapter, buy it at the airport.
People travel between the US and UK every day, it's not a big deal :) Stop worrying, make sure your credit card has plenty of room, and have fun!
Well I lived in England for 30 years and I have no idea what you mean by "boiled meat"...I don't think I've ever had such a thing (possibly outside of a NYC hotdog, although calling that meat is a stretch). Traditional British food is much maligned but really good when done well, but modern British cooking has borrowed heavily from other parts of the world - just like some other places you might be more familiar with. Or did you think Pizza was invented in the US?
Agreed, my watch broke a while ago and I decided to try living without it and just using my phone. Drove me up the wall...2 months later gave in and bought a new watch.
The data on the HDD is now tainted, as a lot of what modders do is around cheating achivements by trading hacked save games, this seems reasonable to me.
And gamerscore has nothing to do with the data on the drive - I could wipe out all my saves tonight and I'd still have all my earned achievements and gamerscore - they're stored on the XBL servers.