True I would say places in the U.S. like NYC, SF, and Miami have especially bad cab drivers.

But I did not have good experiences in Rome, Belgum (also Brussels), and in fact in Germany also (Berlin).

I will agree the black cabs in London are very good, and actually I did have a great cab driver also in Turkey now that I think about it so I do feel a bit sorry for maligning them all in a blanket statement.

But I still stand by the statement that on average the Uber drivers have been much nicer, the cars in much better repair (even the taxi drivers that were friendly in Turkey still had pretty beat up cars).

What have cheques got to do with mobile banking apps?

The markets are different. Google Play doesn't have the same stranglehold on app distribution in China as it does in the EU, so it's far easier to launch a successful phone in China without the Play store than in the EU.

The Uber drivers I have used have all been great. Complaints I've seen have all been about Uber the company, not the drivers... the drivers are just normal people trying to earn a living by making use of what they have.

Most taxi drivers I have encountered on the other hand, have ranged from standoffish to incredibly rude and sometimes hostile, frequently lying about fares to get more money. Taxi drivers can be that way in most places because they have no competition, no reason to provide anything like good service at all - and it doesn't hurt that in a number of areas they are tied to organized crime.

Your use of microbes in your argument is ironic since farmers are also a huge part of the problem of driving bacterial evolution for resistance through misuse of antibiotics.

Antivirals, antibiotics and pesticides should be used in the minimal amounts exactly where most needed. They should not be routinely used everywhere indiscriminately. That's the mode that these GMO crops are encouraging.

The GMO plants I was referring to were designed specifically accommodate increased usage of chemicals. Look up "Roundup ready".

Herbicide use in this country has skyrocketed due to the widespread adoption of GMO crops.

Making a plant manufacture its own insecticide is one thing. Modifying it so that it can withstand being soaked with ever-increasing quantities and varieties of synthetic pesticides is another.

Weeds are gradually evolving to resist this chemical onslaught. Most people would rather not have themselves subjected to such evolutionary pressure within their lifetimes.

The weeds are destined to eventually win this arms race anyway, so this huge experiment in chemical exposure to the US population is eventually going to be for naught.

uhm, actually plist files are xml

ACTUALLY plist files can be either textual or binary, which is very much not XML

I should have said not necessarily though, instead of just "not"... but it was kind of irrelevant to the main point.

They certainly aren't very compact as far as formats go, even on the watch.

Sigh, didn't read much of that original message, did you?

They don't NEED TO BE EXTREMELY COMPACT because they are sent over only once, when the app is loaded on the watch - that said, it is in the binary format which is much more compact than the textual format.

In use the watch pulls files from that bundle at runtime. And if you were any kind of programmer you'd know there is a tradeoff between compression and computation (which the watch has little of) in terms of file formats, so a fairly but not maximally compact file format is better for performance than whatever you are thinking of.

If they are anything like their previous product, very limited, and not useable.

We tried to use the goggle setup they have sold for years. They sucked, the Dev kit was horrid, and the goggle device was buggy as hell.

Maybe by the 5th generation they will get them right and not so small use but open so that anything can be installed.

The UI definition is held in a Plist format (like, but not, XML) but that's not what the device gets. It gets a very compact binary form of your UI, that is loaded onto the watch before the user even opens your application.

The Apple Watch API is actually EXTREMELY conservative with what gets sent over to the watch, to the extent that even attempting to set the same label value twice in a row is rejected with a warning. and UI elements on the screen are wits-only (you cannot query the watch see what currently displayed values are).

They patented things that other people in the community designed and claimed them as their own. Makerbot may have been one of the first, but they ended up as scumbags.

Now there are a ton of other companies out there doing it better, Good luck to the new CEO, he's captain of a sinking ship.

do we call assholes "researchers"? This guy is nothing but a grandstanding asshole. You dont make comments like that and you dont do the FUD slinging that he does after getting denied.

Researchers do real work and publish their findings for peer review, not act like a street cred seeking HAx0r trolling for Lulz.

That sounds like "Cosmos" is cancelled then.

Too bad, as it was the best thing on TV.

Xeons aren't really the competitors for those, they're replacements for Cavium's existing MIPS64 offerings that end up in filer and network appliances. Apparently (according to a somewhat biased source at Cavium) they're competitive with current Xeons in aggregate performance per Watt, doing better on parallel workloads but less well on single-threaded ones. They really shine on anything I/O-intensive though, due to the integration of the ethernet and SATA controllers on the die (and the design of the DMA engines). They're not likely to be in general-purpose servers, but companies in the same markets as NetApp and Juniper are very interested in them (hence Cavium's investment in getting FreeBSD supported on them).

A bit more than hinting: Cavium is selling 24-48 core ThunderX (ARMv8) chips. I think the first one shipped a month or two ago.