How true. From my own testing I have found many applications that when uninstalled give significant speed increases. Not to mention apps that run in the background that keep coming up over and over again. HTC Sense and friends, I am looking at you. However I did notice certain games that would do 40+% bettery in an hr on my evo. It was a bit rediculous. Also 4g---forghetabaudit.
I have a bigger issue with BitCoin. It was not mentioned in the response.
Bitcoin is too volatile to use. Because USD is a set amount backed by the government, and because it de-values, I can do things like: Write a contract specifying a rate of pay for a job to the contractor lets say per hour.
With bitcoin this is not possible. I cannot say "I will pay you 5 BTC/hr (50 USD now)" because once I say that, tomorrow that 5 BTS may be worth 100 USD.
Now if the world suddenly and magically switched to BTC by tomorrow night as the only source of coinage, sure this will work. The exchange rate will be stable.
However as Adam points out, this favors the early adopters. Yes mining helps the BTC network, however mining favors early adopters (sorry too late by now) who mined a shit ton of BTC and now have insane amount of money due to exchange rate. They just literally printed their own money and you bought it.
So given the above what really happens is: I need to have a bank of bitcoins, and money must flow not sit for it to be valuable (extremely important, money sitting still is a commodity not currency). I need to be able to spend in BTC and buy in BTC. With that if all my assets are in BTC, me writing a 5 BTC/hr contract is perfectly fine. I don't care there is no conversion, everything is stable and 1 BTC is worth exactly 1 BTC. However that is not how the world for the next foreseeable future will be. There fore lets say I have 0 BTC and would like to buy an iPad. An iPad today is worth roughly 60 BTC give or take. So if I was to write get a contract for 5 BTC/hr I could earn myself an iPad in 12 hrs of work.
To my employer (who also loves ipads) 5 BTC/hr is a scam. To him, today 12 hrs of work ~= 1 iPad. However because BTC is so volatile, tomorrow 6 hrs of work ~= 1 iPad. To him its against his interest to spend BTC because tomorrow it might get more valuable and be worth 3 hrs of work ~= 1 iPad. This will cause BTC to become a commodity not a currency. Fortunately this is a limited commodity, so its essentially becoming a new unregulated global commodity market. And of course those who are early adopters are the real winners.
Also there is a security hole. While some will secure their BTC with insane encryptions and multi-factor authentication... not all do or will. Which means that you lose your bitcoin wallet, you are screwed. You get your computer hacked, you are screwed because your money just moved into someone else's hands. Unlike a bank, you cannot physically walk into a bitcoin office present your government papers (multiple forms of id) and get access to a lost wallet back. Encryption is irrelevant when simple phishing attacks can work just as well and since its a computer password, chances are that if you know one password for a person, you know his wallet's password.
Now a couple of points:
Just like the real market, there will be fraud everywhere. It is money after all. Just different kinds of fraud.
However unlike the real market, the layman will not be able to get the same level of security as current banking. Sure its not 100% secure. Maybe not even 70%. But at least if you put 100k in the bank, you have a fairly good guarantee that your money will not suddenly dissappear. If it does you will have legal measures you can take to get it back. With BTC... you are fuuuucked. See the article about losing 8000 BTC. Sure it was not worth so much at the time, but it is irrelevant. The fact is that it may have been worth 100 dollars at the time and 80,000 today. The person lost his money on a technical glitch.
I still use my Cr-48 as a tool. A useful tool. More of a computer condom if you will. When my friends visit and browse various sites, instead of the occasional virus, my Cr-48 keeps me computer-disease free and worry free. Now everyone can touch my laptop and I won't mind. So ubuntu on it? I think not good sir!
Back on topic. Will It Blend? (http://www.willitblend.com/) > Large Easter Egg Plastic Shell > A cr-48 easter egg. Did I find it?
Haskel is a lambda calculus implementation. Therefore implementing ANYTHING in haskel will mean that it is just a mathematical formula (have a program to transform it so we can put it to court) and therefore as long as anything is implemented in haskel at least once it proves that that something is just a unpatentable mathematical formula.
If the laws won't change to accommodate us, we should pull out the guns (metaphorical).
This is exactly as one math professor mentioned in his lecture: "Everyone secretly write down a number on a piece of paper. I will give the prize of one million dollars to the person with the highest number, but the prize will be divided by the number written."
He wound up paying 1 cent. Which went on to prove that if people cooperate anonymously, everyone wins, yet some people will always chose to not cooperate and screws the whole pot. All the class had to do was collectively write 1 and split the 1 mil evenly between each other.
"a pointer is just data that tells you where something is." Once I had that thought, programming was just so simple in concept.
Second one was when I realized that there are a shitton of libraries for doing things. Until then I just didn't realize it, I don't know why. Once this happened I just understood the beauty of abstraction, toolage, and code reuse.
The final one is when I realized that my code is only awesome if my co-worker can take it over 100% and not hit me with a baseball bat. Funny story, good lesson.
Dude, this is crap for many other reasons. Honestly, Balmer's whining is just like a 5 year old saying "its not fair". Get over it. Solve the problem. Nobody wants to buy your software. Your software costs too much. And exactly as next said, if china could not hack windows, you would have people running linux and that is much worse for MS because then linux desktop innovation would come from somewhere and in higher volumes.
I hope this will be retroactive to older htc devices like the EVO. Would be really nice to just not have to hack anything and just get CM7 working on the phones.
I am an unlucky one with HTC EVO hardware rev 3 which has problems when flashing a kernel, murders battery life until a full restore is done.
Wait, hoops? DRM???? Where have you been for the last month.
However, to not cause flaimbait, there are technologies such as http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/ which look promising potentially making this "# of polygons" issue moot.
Don't forget the overhead that comes with windows and direct x. It is quite known that these things do cause a reduction of power.
ALSO with PS3's fully known hardware, sony optimizes IT and developers optimize FOR IT. They know exactly what limitations exist in which parts of the hardware. Because flaws and advantages in the hardware can be directly exploited certain optimizations are possible ONLY on consoles. Parts are specifically chosen and the OS is designed to do it and get out of the way. They can create a new OS for each console and not worry about legacy, making the best of optimizations not possible in OSes that must support legacy programs. The older PS3 had PS2 hardware to run PS2 games. The new PS3 does not. The point is everything on these consoles is crafted to specifically target that exact console and nothing but.
Copyright is work done such as a single tool A => B. Copyright does not apply to all instances of tools A => B as long as none of those tools copied anything from the original copyrighted tool.
If you take the copyrighted tool and you transform it to something else using something you made or got, the work is not yours since you created a tool A => B completely based on the original copyrighted tool. The law is flimsy here and you would probably have to just go to court to settle it, this is not black and white.
The thing is that we don't want to put MS into a "give us features" release mode, so they will only ship new OS with new features, not with real under-the-hood improvements.
However that is the fundamental flaw in the MS model: User's don't give a shit. Why is it that my Windows 7 is already out-dated when Windows 8 is exactly the same??? Yet this is where MS makes it's money, and this is where it fails. OSX users are used to dropping a few dollars (30?) for their shiny macs to get a nice upgrade, which might not be so major.
A shameless plug but still a good read. I agree with this as most stories about "flat fees" often end up with: Well they gathered requirements. Gave us a flat fee. As time went on they started putting more junior developers on the project and the senior ones moved on. Eventually we just decided it's not worth paying them money anymore as code quality is degrading too much (even a non-developer can tell when the bugs creep in).
Should the government be allowed to stop you in the middle of the street and ask you to strip naked and cavity search you on the spot to ensure you don't have a bomb somewhere on you or in your body so that you don't walk into times square and blow the place up along with you.
Ponder that. I doubt 99% of the pop will agree to this.
Sure its maybe 1 step up from email. However some people would agree with what I just said because of fear. Fear is powerful. We must not let it control us.
You are referring to Entrapment: If the authorities did not entice you to commit the crime, would you have? The point is in some cases the answer is yes, pedophilia is one of those cases. This sort of legal issue has to be dealt with with police-prostitutes picking up johns and then arresting them after payment.
The problem is that most people don't realize that you cannot solve complex problems with oversimplified solutions. The people are presented with "its safer if you give up this liberty because we can catch an extra pedophile" when the implications to the lost liberty is far greater than originally thought.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin
The same quote keeps coming up over and over and over by one of our founding fathers. And for damn good reason. Because people ignore this, and don't realize what they are doing.
Sorry NYT get your facts straight.