There's now an entire generation of IS/IT managers, directors, and CIOs who not only prefer Microsoft technology but have an active dislike of anything related to Unix(tm) - including but not limited to Linux(tm). And along with dislike comes distrust and contempt. They firmly believe that Microsoft provides superior technology, tools, and usability, and that to choose other technology is not only to make a mistake but to expose themselves to professional risk.

You can disagree with them if you prefer (I tend to, myself). But people holding this set of technical preferences now makes up a substantial fraction - possibly a substantial majority - of technical decisionmakers in the US at least.

sPh

Presuming Jamie Lentz is talking about Portland, OR, he is wrong about the "sharing program like what you see in Portland with bicycles." Portland doesn't have a bike share program. The City Council approved one about two years ago, but no sponsors have stepped up to fund it.

It's funny that Portland gets all this credit for bike stuff that far exceeds what it has actually accomplished. Several other cities, including Seattle, have approved and launched bike share programs in the time since Portland approved its non-existent program, yet Lentz defaults to "Portland" when talking about bike share. I guess perception is 90% of the battle, never mind reality.

Watts is in units of energy divided by time.

Now.... what are the units of "calories per day"? Take your time.

True, but how is that any different to the normal situation where the maximum amount is £20?

Arguably it could make the attack more worthwhile. The effort and hit rate involved might not make it worthwhile at low ticket amount (might as well have a real job) but could be worthwhile as the money starts going up.

Realistically though it sounds like the attacker needs a merchant account to benefit (and presumably enough legitimate volume to hide the fraudulent transactions in without raising suspicions). From the sounds of it the biggest problem would occur if you were actually overseas and you were using your card in cafes and the like. Then perhaps an unscrupulous vendor might be able to get close enough to charge your card without you noticing and you might not notice it as fraudulent when you got your statement.

Yeah, that's the scenario that affected every design choice on the Space Shuttle and led to the building of the Vandenburg shuttle pad. Many problems with it, including the one where it invites a strike by the grab-ee on the landing site leading directly to a Dr. Strangelove situation.

sPh

I'm not sure why Ars Technica took their well-written article about the Soviet decision to build the Buran off-line, but IIRC that was essentially the logic the Soviets were following at the time. All their calculations told them the Space Shuttle was a loser, but the Americans were building one so surely they must know something we don't.... 20 billion rubles down the drain.

sPh

What was the point of Firefox? IE was free and was a proven and already well-established browser. By your logic, we never should have built Firefox and the Web should have stalled with IE6 in 2002.

The world needs a truly open mobile OS as much as it needed a truly open browser a decade ago. Android is open in name only and Google is hurriedly moving its most lucrative components into closed proprietary services and apps that aren't a part of open source Android. iOS is as closed as everything Apple does. Windows is getting some nice HTML5 support for apps, but not nearly enough. There's clearly an opportunity for HTML5 apps to compete on mobile if someone can build a solid alternative platform to the monopolies and silos we're all stuck with today.

Kinda weird how from 1942-1980 or thereabouts it was women who were considered better at programming "systems", and all of a sudden that natural attribute reversed.

sPh

Don't look now, but Moto just released one of the best Android phones ever, is about to release the Droid Turbo, and is the manufacturer of the Nexus 6.

This does sound like the perfect use-case for the cloud (of the 'rent a VM' type of cloud, such as AWS or Azure) - both for short term access to vastly more CPU, RAM or storage than you would reasonably want to be sharing a room with and also for the huge network bandwidth to the rest of the internet typically available from a cloud datacentre (AWS as an example capping out at 224GB RAM or 42TB or local storage).

However this is E.S.R. we are talking about so, aside from the possible issues with whether any of the cloud providers are compatible with his larger philsophical aims, who knows what other interesting ideas he might come up with given access to much more powerful personal computer hardware rather than having his creativity shackled by the limitations of his current systems.

As noted, Jane Jacob's famous _Death and Life of Great American Cities_ addressed the affect of Bauhaus and other modernist schools of architecture and urban planning on everyday human beings. William Whyte's _City_ touches on many of the same issues. Wolfe's _From Bauhaus to Our House_ was written for more of a general audience and shows clear signs of the Wolfe-ian obnoxiousness to follow but is nonetheless a biting critique of those design schools.

But there's a large amount of Bauhaus (and/or Chicago School) criticism out there; you may need to look a bit harder.

sPh

I'm referring more to the general perception that sans serif fonts are "cleaner" and therefore easier to comprehend and read. If you track down the FAA study (ironically published from a manuscript typed on a typewriter IIRC) this is not the case. That matches my personal perception - sans serifs are fine for titling but serif fonts are almost always easier to comprehend - but goes against the conventional wisdom. As evidenced by the "cleaner" trope.

sPh

Highly accomplished designers tend to fall in love with and become obsessed by Bauhaus style in its various cyclical incarnations. The remaining 99.999% of the human race finds Bauhaus objects and systems very pretty to look and impossible to use for more than a few days, as documented by Jane Jacobs, William White, Tom Wolf, and many others. The designers believe the rest of the critics are blind and the human race is just using their wonderful Bauhaus stuff wrong.

sPh

- - - - - It's general knowledge in typography that Helvetica is the most legible typeface. - - - - -

That is very much convention wisdom, yes. There are surprisingly few scientifically designed studies on typeface legibility, but the ones I have been able to find (particularly the FAA-sponsored study in the early days of CRTs in the cockpit) have indicated that serif - NOT sans serif - fonts are easier to read, even at low resolution.

sPh

They also weren't putting IVs in him and taking care of him while he was bleeding out the ass and vomiting during his final few days on earth.