app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort.
i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.
as to openess i still have an iphone 3g. i had the cash saved up for a prepay iphone 3gs and was to go and pick one up the following weekend when apple banned google voice. it was an indicator of control so i spent the cash instead on android. the iphone 3g will be my last purchase from apple thank you very much.
app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort.
i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.
Symbian Signed is what you're talking about. And it didn't just dry-up app development - it killed free software on Symbian.
But that's a completely different situation than Apple's GateKeeper - with Symbian Signed, Nokia decided that they didn't want to take on the hassle of being a CA the way Apple is with GateKeeper, so the Nokia program required applications to be signed with a $800 SSL certificate. How is anyone making a Symbian app in their basement going to shell out for that? Some free software developers had to post convoluted instructions to their users on how to use the Nokia developer website to self-sign their programs. Others looked to commercial software developers to sponsor them to buy certificates. It was a disaster.
i'd rather a platform were i have to be careful to avoid malware rather than a platform were there is a single 'gateway' to what apps can be installed. how can that gateway ever be considered impartial in a for profit system?
If that's what you prefer, it's your choice: don't use OS X Mountain Lion (or use it, with Gatekeeper turned off). You (and I) can understand FlashBlock.app is a malware and wouldn't install it, but ordinary computer users don't, and that's the market Apple is after.
i'm not saying your wrong. and i definitely agree this is aimed at average users. but it will put off a percentage of non average users. and those are often the users who recommend to average users what to use. i know i've stopped recommending apple hardware after a decade of doing so.
whether this affects apple negatively overall is the big question.
I once got a virus on Windows that was attached to an Installshield installer for a legitimate program (WarFTP) that had been posted to download.com.
How could I have avoided that? Something like GateKeeper would have been nice - at least I would have known that the installer had been meddled with. Otherwise?
i'm beginning to think that the biggest problem may now be legal.
with a driver there is someone to get a signature/payment/paperwork whilest a driverless vehicle would need something else.
who's responsible for damage inside the back of a truck when it made 3-4 deleiveries?
how easy would it be to stop and steal the contents of one of these vehicles if it can be stopped on a quiet road with a rolling roadblock?
my brother has done 90% of his work on the road in many service/delivery jobs. he reckons at least here in ireland there will always need to be somebody on board to load/unload/handle paperwork/report problems . or if not need to be it might for a long time be cheaper to be.
The cost of a driver vs someone who sleeps in a truck and gets people to sign papers might still be a substantial cost savings. Who knows? If there needs to be a human, maybe 'truckers' end up riding along in an autonomous vehicle for low wages. Some may watch tv while others may work another job online between stops.
Truckers aren't exactly making huge sums of money now. Their has been downward pressure for years. That is why so many do the fake log thing and work so many hours.
Arranging to have someone at the destination to unload the truck is easy. Everything else could be handled by someone at the central office using Skype video or similar. Having a human along for the ride is a huge waste of time and money.
True, but automating the driving part goes a long way to making the driver irrelevant. Instead of having someone from the shipping company spend 60 hours a week with a truck, they trucking company now just needs someone in each destination to meet with the truck for a few hours a couple times a week. And even that will only be necessary until that is automated as well.
The driving is the skilled labor. Handling the load/unload/handle and paperwork/report issues costs a lot less labor-wise
if it was just a grudge match between tesla and edison i could respect edison a little more. it is possible to get so obsessed that he would have a blind spot and go out of his way to engage a competitor. think steve jobs promising to go nuclear on android. but edison went out of his way to profit from the work of Georges Méliès.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Distributio...
the telegraph service western union turned down a chance to buy the patent for telephones as they thought it was merely a toy. it's still a custom in ireland to send telegrams for weddings, other than that...
facebook is merely a service that will exist till some better service comes along.
Sure, but that doesn't make telegraphs a "fad." Nothing lasts forever--particularly not when it comes to technology. But I don't think you've refuted the parent's statement that facebook won't "be easily displaced." It took a vastly superior technology to supplant telegraphs. If the same is true of Facebook, it could have good staying power.
The inevitable comparison when this comes up is to Friendster or MySpace, but it's really a poor one. Neither had anywhere the reach of Facebook even at their height, nor a large percentage of the world's internet users. Earlier social networks had significant competitors. Isn't it remarkable that in the ~4 years that Facebook has been dominant, _nobody_ has successfully challenged it?
Facebook will likely diminish in importance at some point, but it's not going to happen any time soon.
Perhaps it is hard to come up with a comparison in this space (social media) because it hasn't had a tremendous run time with very many rises and falls. But perhaps looking at something like "browsers" can offer another comparison with more history. We've seen several shifts in the dominant players there. Some have gone away. Some have been slow and steady. Some have risen and fallen... but never died.
I don't think Facebook is a "fad" but I do think that it has a shelf life. It annoys me. I do get to keep up with the lives of people I once knew... but it annoys me. And honestly I'm not sure what annoys me more, Facebook or the people that treat Facebook like the Golden Calf. I would rather be on G+ but their lack of a full feature API is a barrier.
i wonder if the dust created by the bandsaw wouldn't make it difficult to replace it with a more modern system. we used to use standard office pcs to run a pos system for video shops around ireland. as the systems moved from been shipped with win 3.1 to win xp the processors got faster and the dust in the shops used to clog up the fans. machines pre pentium iii with passive cooling worked fine but anything with a cpu fan could be easily clogged with average dust levels in a pos location.
we also had a few pcs in engineering locations and even the power supply fans on 386s had problems with the dust in those locations. you have to wonder what the dust was doing to staffs lungs. after one particular location killed 1 pc a week for a month we ended up putting the pc in a pair of tights as this filtered out the dust. looked weird but far cheaper than a industrial pc.
but opera 3.62 seems to have support for css and works on win 3.1
haven't touched a win 3.1 system since around 2004 or so.
One of our clients is an electric motor shop. They're a pretty great little shop, they do work for elevator companies and PG&E and the like.
Anyway, they have a dust problem -- a carbon / metallic dust compound that permeates and settles on everything in the shop. It's pretty ugly.
There are pretty much two strategies for that kind of an environment, computer-wise: construct a cheap acrylic enclosure with a HEPA filter and maybe a fan or two; or, buy a cheap computer and expect to replace it every 1 to 2 years.
Fanless would have been better, but the case will still have some kind of vents for air cooling, and the dust tends to have a static charge -- so eventually it'll still kill the system.
It's not a great environment for people, no. I'd be wearing a dust mask for sure if I worked there. But, a lot of shop guys aren't like that, especially the older ones. They just do their job and don't mind the dust.
FitPC is what you want—sealed, passively cooled enclosure. We use their second-generation Atom machine for robots and it works great. http://www.fit-pc.com/
With a sufficiently low-power system, purely conductive/convective cooling should be sufficient. You'd be looking at a finned enclosure, possibly with a directed airflow over that.
The real problem is providing for ports (power, networking, comms) without penetrating the enclosure. The recent Marianas Trench submersible showed a number of connectors designed for very high pressure environments, something along those lines should be sufficient.
the office our pc was in was in an office built above the work floor and had very good ventelation but fine dust still made it up and on to every surface. once enough dust settled inside the pc it died.
it cannot be good for the humans there but still not the unhealtiest place i saw. that was a cabbies cubby were 20-30 taxi drivers sat waiting for jobs to come in and they seemed to all be chain smokers. the office was a converted shipping container with benches inside. a pc used for booking calls was brought in dead. when i opened it up there was a tarry goo on the motherboard and the fan was seized solid. after replacing the fan and sponging up as much of the goo as i could i went to clean the case. my boss asked if it was necessary so i took a sheet of a4 paper placed it on the metal case cover and smoothed it down. then i grabbed 2 corners of the paper and lifted the metal lid clear of the desk. the stickiness was pure tar. goodness knows how long the new fan lasted.
Oil cool the computers. I don't have the link but a google search will show you a lot of interesting builds. You don't have to worry about dust or filters because te entire pc is submerged in oil.
Well then you get other problems such as dirty oil (unless you have a good seal). The biggest problem I see is that it lasts as long as the shortest lifespan of all the components then you get to go through buying a new one or the mess of replacing that part.
i always regret that i didn't take my parents valve radio when the house was cleared and sold over a decade ago. it was bulky, inefficient but worked perfectly. had a lot of fond memories of that radio as a kid. they got it as a wedding present in the early sixties. the valves would eventually need replacing but there are still places selling the parts if you know where to go.
but my favourite bike as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s was a bsa bike that had been built in the early forties. that thing was a tank. it's probably still out there in use every day. completely indestrucible with a little light maintenance.
now however things are not built to last. ignoring electronics or computers which date fast. casettes, vcrs. analog mobiles 8bit, 16bit and now even 32bit computers are edging towards obsolescence for desktop use. a crappy tin opener still needed for those tins still sold without a prestressed ring pull will die in less than a decade. the bullhead tin opener in my parents kitchen seems to have been one of the first types sold in the late 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BullOpener.png
i like to think that growing up with ancient hardware gave me an appreciation for well designed and easy to maintain items. i try to avoid flashy insubstantial items.
i hate unity. it's nothing but distracting eye candy. a non standard waste of resources. but i like ubuntu overall so at the mo i use xubuntu. suits all my needs without unity.
but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.
I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.
My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.
i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.
as to openess i still have an iphone 3g. i had the cash saved up for a prepay iphone 3gs and was to go and pick one up the following weekend when apple banned google voice. it was an indicator of control so i spent the cash instead on android. the iphone 3g will be my last purchase from apple thank you very much.