Software IMO has stagnated. I can't think of anything I do at home or at work in a desktop PC that I wasn't doing 10 years ago.
I take issue with this. Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook and AWS were not available 10 years ago, and these days I regularly use all of them from my desktop PC at home or at work, and all of them let me do things that I couldn't do before.
There's a lot of noise being made about the Ellis Act evictions, and how they've "skyrocketed" recently with a 170% increase in evictions. For some perspective, the raw number of Ellis Act evictions last year was 116, in a city with a population of 825,863. It sucks to be evicted, but this isn't a crisis on the scale that some are making it out to be.
I'm also an Australian living in the US and I've also noticed that cities are inside-out. But I don't buy the "different cultures do things differently" reasoning, because after having experienced both first hand, I know that our cultures and values are just not all that different. Most Australians love living in the suburbs and in fact the "Great Australian Dream" is to own a suburban home (it's not just a big part of it, the two are actually synonymous). Because of this the suburbs of cities like Sydney and Melbourne sprawl just like American cities of similar size. And like in the US, younger people (yes, including the hipsters) prefer the urban life too.
The difference is that due to government policies like more comprehensive healthcare, social security and public transport, the downtown areas aren't a cesspool of drugs. And if you remove the drugs, crime and homelessness, and set up some good schools and parks, what exactly is wrong with raising a family in a downtown highrise?
I agree. I'm not a huge fan of either blackberry or patent lawsuits but the typo keyboard is clearly a blatant copy of the blackberry one. For those who haven't seen it, take a look at both keyboards side by side before making up your mind. They've copied a lot more than just the qwerty layout.
https://businessincanada.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screen-Shot-2014-01-03-at-2.26.22-PM.png
"In the abstract"?! In what world do you live in where standalone, server-side Java and Android apps are rare?
In the abstract, Java applets are a problem, sure. But by far most Java code runs on servers and on Android devices and there isn't as much of a problem with poor sandboxing in those environments.
One recent example is how Orbitz puts higher priced hotels at the top of the list for people using macintoshes. The real risk to each and every one of us is their ability to figure out your mental weaknesses and use them against you so that you spend more money than you should. It is the Big Data version of bikini models in beer commercials. Lots of people like to think they are immune to advertising - but nobody is 100% immune to millions of dollars worth of research on manipulation of the human mind.
That still sounds like it's not a big deal compared to what the government could do to you.
I can't find it either. The article in the second link contains a claim that they found the specific defect(s) that caused unintended acceleration, but I can't see anywhere where they actually mention what the defect is. In fact, in the court transcript itself the guy says he wasn't able to reproduce anything:
Q. Now, you have not reproduced in vehicle testing your theory that there's a software bug that opens the throttle and then the task dies, have you?
A. No.
Q. And you have not reproduced in vehicle testing your theory where there's task death and then the throttle is opened farther by a software bug or corruption, correct?
A. Right. So the second corruption that I talked about yesterday has not been demonstrated in a vehicle. We've not attempted to.
It really sounds to me like this "embedded software expert" came up with a whole bunch of possible things that could've gone wrong, but didn't actually find a bug.
In most places, when you buy something from a company in another state, the buyer is responsible for declaring and paying a "use tax". So I think a better question is: do you pay taxes for other people who were supposed to, but didn't?
It's in the article, but you have to click through to page 4.
Google’s team worked faster than Mr. Friedenfelds expected, introducing that algorithm change sometime on Thursday. The effects were immediate: on Friday, two mug shots of Janese Trimaldi, which had appeared prominently in an image search, were no longer on the first page. For owners of these sites, this is very bad news.
The problem with load testing is that it's as much an exercise in testing resources as in the application's efficiency. When it comes time to simulate a million users' load on the server, Amazon or Google could just spin up a few thousand virtual machines on their spare capacity, and simulate a few thousand users on each one. Smaller companies have to make do with what they have - probably a few old servers running a few hundred simulations.
Both Amazon and Google will let anyone use thier spare capacity for a reasonable fee, so big load spikes are no longer a valid excuse for web servers going down.
Now, even if you've got something against putting all that healthcare data on the cloud, they could have at least stored the static content in S3 or some CDN. A quick glance at healthcare.gov shows that the front page HTML is about 60 KB but there is also about 200 KB of static images and another 200 KB of static JavaScript. That's a quick win right there and I'm surprised they didn't even bother to do that.
Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”
Wow, they really need to revisit this idea now. The world has changed since 2007, and Apple now has a lot more money, resources and competition from a range of Android phones, big and small. I personally prefer the "small" 4 inch screens, but I know that most of the market wants gigantic phablets. It made sense back in 2007 to have all the wood behind one arrow, but now they've just got all their eggs in one basket.
Is this going to be like some kind of shoddy Microsoft elevator, which would send him up a few flights before crashing and sending him tumbling down again?
Microsoft used to be all about preserving backwards compatibility, even resorting to crazy hacks in Windows 95 to make sure games like Sim City would run despite bugs in the game. But that Microsoft doesn't exist anymore.
It started with VB.net not being compatible with VB6, and continued with other products too. Microsoft obviously doesn't care about making sure IE10 works with old web apps targeted to IE6, Vista broke the old crappy XP apps that didn't understand non-admin users, and Office often has problems getting the formatting right for documents created in older versions. Those are the obvious examples, but there are many more smaller and more obscure ones.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
Not saying I disagree with all of the decisions - e.g. the old insecure XP apps were broken anyway. But Sim City was also undeniably broken, and yet the old Microsoft took ownership of the issue and fixed it anyway.
And in Apple's defence, they did bring out Rosetta when they started making Intel Macs, and supported it for about 5 or 6 years. Microsoft did no such thing with Windows RT.
What makes you think that it isn't configurable? If you look at the commit diff (linked in the article) you might notice that it is a one line change to disable this functionality. That's because it is a configurable setting; the commit simply changes the default behavior.
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-enable-primary-paste
Isn't it obvious? Because network infrastructure is more economic to build in densely populated areas, and growing food requires more space and forces people to live farther apart. I wouldn't say that high tech and growing your own food are mutually exclusive but it's hard to have both without spending a lot of money.
Going the speed of light is bad for your age.
