I keep reading about $600 smart phones in stories on this T-Mobile no-contract scheme. You can have an amazing unlocked no-contract quad-core Nexus 4 for $299-349 here. It's HSPA+ which is all you'll get with T-Mobile in most markets anyhow.

If the best argument against this deal is that unlocked iPhones cost too much then sign me up. Data coverage is the real problem with T-Mobile... but perhaps they're really solving that now.

There is no right to be employed either.

I am for freedom. Including the freedom to fire whatever at-will employed asshole I chose for whatever reason I care to indulge. Stop conflating rights as a citizen with employment. You can stand on a corner and voice as many double entendres as you want. You can even earn a living doing that if you're any good. That doesn't mean I have to employ you.

This is factually incorrect. Coal used for power generation is called `steam coal' and the recent growth of US coal exports is due to steam coal.

You may expect all of this to accelerate rapidly. As the story points out, met coal is going to China from the East coast the hard way; via the Atlantic, Cape of Good Hope, etc. Our pollution outsourcing and de-industrialization needs are so great that the Panama Canal is being expanded to accommodate much larger ships. Simultaneously we're waving environmental regs right and left to dredge up East coast bays for those ships.

This will all be up and running in 2015.

Once "Super-Post-Panamax" shipping can haul coal from the East Coast to China via the Pacific we'll see huge growth in coal exports and more de-industrialization. Coal going that way and finished goods coming back.

I noticed this behavior a few years ago when the Apple+Foxconn stories started to appear. After hunting through the comments of a few of those stories I came up with a comprehensive list of rationalizations.

We are comfortable office people steeped in self-loathing. We can equivocate any evil by dismissing criticism as hypocrisy. The fact that in the case of Chinese industry these arguments happen to align with the desire for low cost products produced well outside "the environment" is purely coincidental...

The summary is a troll. Attributing the 'free market' to nuclear power indicates either ignorance or deceit and we're left to ponder which is worse.

Nuclear reactors represent astonishing amounts of wealth and coordination. It is a hallmark of advanced nations that such things are created. For a reactor to exist in the US it must have the blessing of all levels of government. Financing is often backed by one or more government entities. Federal and state governments must actively regulate it. First responders at each level are prepared for emergencies. Rate payers are involved in voting on proposals prior to construction and regulating on-going rates. The timeline (in contemporary Western nations and certain Asian nations) is at least a decade for construction and licensing is a matter of fractions of a century. People are sourced from rarified cohorts such as military navel reactor operators.

In the end the actual operator is a small and even negligible part of the equation. Invoking the 'free market' mantra when dealing with the troubles of nuclear power is a cop out.

I'm cute and I've probably forgotten more about the HTS and US trade than you'll ever know.

The HTS is a fascinating bit of work. For people that don't know, the Harmonized Tariff Schedule is a US government published document that classifies just about every conceivable good and assigns tariffs, duties, etc. It is huge and is now only published in electronic form.

As the parent wrote, most finished goods in the HTS are 0% tariff. There are many things in the HTS with tariffs, but if it's a finished good it is usually exempt from any cost whatsoever. Some exceptions include small arms and autos; the UAW negotiated a 25% domestic value-add requirement in the '80s if foreign manufacturers wish to avoid tariffs. That one requirement is the sole reason that all auto manufacturing hasn't evacuated the US. Today there are dozens of foreign owned auto plants in the southern US writing paychecks to thousands of US workers because of that law.

No other nation is as import friendly as the US. Unless your nation has imams and muftis actively operating uranium isotope centrifuges in a bunker somewhere then you too can export to the US tariff free. You can wreck the environment to whatever degree you wish, abuse, neglect or contaminate however many people you want and it won't even slow down your goods as they get whisked into the US.

That's what domestic manufacturers and the US working class have to compete with for 80% of all finished goods in the US.

We import many, many foreign guns. There are limits, however. The US doesn't allow Norico (the largest small arms manufacturer on Earth, a Chinese company) to import. Also, foreign small arms must get through the ATF points system which limits what can be imported. Also, there are tariffs. Most other imported finished goods have no tariffs.

The result is that although there are large numbers of imported small arms, the limitations and extra costs to importers allow domestic manufacturing to be viable. Thus, we have companies like Ruger and Smith and Wesson; big, successful manufacturers that build most or all of their products in the US. There are also a plethora of small manufacturers.

Domestic small arms manufacturing is among the best evidence that applying some resistance to imports allows domestic manufacturing to thrive.

It's not about logic. It's about comfort. During a phone call there is a noise most people don't typically notice. It's called sidetone (comfort noise, in some cases) and the effect of it is to convey a feeling that the connection is 'working.' When that noise is absent the operator perceives that the connection is 'dead.' The phone doesn't sound 'live' somehow.

Logic would dictate that such subtleties are unnecessary. That pesky old Real World thinks otherwise, however, and expends extraordinary effort to perpetuate these irrationalities on nearly all audio systems including land lines, cells networks, radio, voip, etc.

Progress bars the are visual analog to comfort noise. When there is no progress bar, accurate or otherwise, the system appears dead and people become anxious. The progress bar limits that anxiety to mere impatience.

So 'logic' 'dictates' nothing here. It's about keeping people from pulling their hair out.

As to the original question, why is it so hard to make accurate progress bars, the answer is simple; the problem is exactly as hard as creating a time machine. The exact length of any non-trivial operation is unknown until after the operation is complete. When predicting the future becomes easy progress bars will become accurate.

Even the most basic understanding of mechanics and computing should make the answer obvious. I am genuinely astonished that anyone involved with operating a computer would wonder about it.

My experience with ASUS has been frustration with low quality third party chips used to provide excessive numbers or SATA and USB ports and other features. These chips are never as good as the integrated Intel circuits. ASUS is the best of the non-Intel lot, but the others do the same thing; solder on whatever is cheapest and makes the specs look better, damn the bugs or driver issues. Intel also uses third party stuff but they're nowhere near as cavalier about it. Intel's work is not flawless, but they fix it when they screw up. If some Silicon Image chip on a Megasustrix motherboard doesn't work right they aren't going to fix it, or even acknowledge the problem.

That hasn't been true for years. On Newegg only ASUS has more (Intel based) motherboard models available than Intel; Intel has been very responsive to the market of people that want good boards. People like me have long since stopped debugging the poorly engineered products of all these little Taiwanese board makers. My last three personal machines were Intel boards and they're all still running perfectly. Two survived transition from XP to Windows 7 with no driver drama; the OS recognized all the important bits out-of-the-box, which is exactly what I expected and intended.

Dear ASUS, this is an opportunity beyond simply gobbling up the market Intel leaves behind. Now is the time to step up your engineering and qualification of components and produce a line of grown-up boards. I don't need or want 35 USB ports provided by 3 phy implementations, all different. I want conservative, well engineered boards that run cool and don't leak capacitor juice all over the place three years after I buy it. Thanks.

Erm. No. Just no.

class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { while (true); } }

(jdk 1.7.0.6 x86_64 linux)

17M resident for that. 0.5G of virtual address space. The only other class referenced is java.lang.String.

The equivalent Perl is 1.7M. Node.js is 9M. Python is 4M. TCL is 1.9M.

EVERYTHING uses less RAM than bleeping Java. A lot less. And this isn't some fail test where Java gets better as applications scale. Go look over here and observe how almost every other language consumes less memory across a wide variety of algorithms. Anecdotal evidence from any app server admin will corroborate this.

Java is a RAM pig and it always has been. The problem, at least regarding initial memory footprint (and start-up time), is excessive class loading. This is not opinion. There has been a project to correct it on the books for almost four years.

Like everything else with Java, it has been neglected. Supposedly the results will appear in JDK 9..... sometime in 2015.

And don't cite Android as some exception. Dalvik isn't JRE.

It's clunky. That's the shortest correct explanation I can provide. The whole user experience is just awful.

The first thing you experience when you encounter a Java applet is a sinking feeling as the browser becomes unresponsive with a large gray void somewhere on the page that will eventually render the applet. Sometimes this is alleviated slightly by a progress indicator in some weird JVM font that looks like it was salvaged from OpenBoot. All this "loading" takes large amounts of RAM so the OS starts paging which creates more anxiety for the user as the drive LED indicates vast amounts of mysterious IO. In any case the process takes too long and by the time the applet has rendered something meaningful most users have lost patience.

At this point the applet has started rendering. Frequently this is a bad thing because many Java applets are tragically ugly. Repulsive, really. So bad they look like hastily made email phishing attempts. It would have been better if the "loading" had never ended leaving the user to seek alternatives. The moment a user sees those fonts they squint, groan a bit inside and consider calling someone for help. The GUI widgets look weird. Things don't work right, like copy and paste or common GUI hot keys. And everything lags; you can feel extra tens of milliseconds of lag with every UI operation; click, scroll, whatever. It all lags.

Finally whatever unfortunate task led our victim here has been accomplished and it's time to leave. You click 'home' or some link or whatever to be on your way and BOOM!, the browser segfaults and closes. Recent browsers mitigate this habit by isolating applets (and other plug-ins) in process sandboxes, but the user still gets that extra little poke in the eye to top off the rest of the 'experience.' The sort of effort required to make the JVM run smoothly inside common browsers has never been applied and to this day it is a fragile and crashy combination.

People that care about the user experience, people with tens or hundreds of millions of users using their site(s), don't tolerate this heinous shit. So Java applets die the death they deserve.

Site operators will block content if ads aren't served. Today, some sites will deliberately not function when ad blocking is detected, but this is not yet wide-spread. That policy is going to become ubiquitous if ISPs start blocking ads for all users.

Right now the arms race between advertisers and ad blockers is low intensity because ad blocking is limited to a small fraction of content consumers. Now that ISPs are monkeying around with ad blocking the race will escalate. The advertisers are going to demand that sites withhold content to ad blockers. They are paying the bills so one guess how that's going to go.

Enjoy your advertising-enforced interwebs.

POSIX signals themselves are a bit of a horror. Like C++ exceptions (as Google correctly points out) they have implications for `other' code, the worst case being code that has not be written to cope with interrupted system calls. Also, signal dispatch has portability problems; signals did not anticipate threads and POSIX was slow and iterative in its promulgation the standard solution, so many subtleties have appeared among implementations.

However, I think you have the right instinct. I personally find myself working in explicitly event driven environments frequently. Node and TCL for example. Here you can not indulge the illusion of absolute control over the fate of the instruction pointer. Any time you `yield' to the runtime you wind up entering your code at some other point as the runtime dispatches events.

Using the event model to cope with errors and exceptions would mean that anything that would traditionally throw an exception or return a error code would instead be a yield point and may generate an error event. You would then provide a handler to receive these events with enough context to cope with the problem.

I've come to the believe the event driven model is a far better model for the actual conditions one assumes when implementing logic. The moment you write main(){...} you are subject to signals that are handled by a collection of default handlers. One day the system becomes non-trivial and you must 'fix' these handlers. Perhaps you have no business writing main(){...} and adopting a naive, linear model in the first place. Instead, you're supposed to implement (the moral equivalent of) a signal handler instead.

Down at the bottom, where CPUs process machine code, hardware interrupts are endemic. The hardware itself imposes the event model. It may be the case that most machine/assembly code still written by humans today are simply event handlers; logic servicing hardware interrupts.

Don't jack up rates to pay those Disney people. We'll just move elsewhere.

— Your customers