Posts by Arbee 42 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2011
That TIOBE index is...um....bullshit?
C# is at 4.4% while VB.Net is at 4.2%? Even Microsoft are happy to admit that C# is an order of magnitude more popular than VB (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-net-language-strategy/)
Of course, if you look at their approach, you realise that asking Google how many hits it returns is *maybe* not the most accurate methodology (https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/)
They are obviously not thieves. They have proposed a specific type of contract, and the other parties (the labels and artists) are free to accept or reject that contract. Taylor Swift has rejected it, as is her prerogative, while others will accept it. It is purely an economic and business issue - I don't really see how morality enters into it.
The idea is that you are taxing the profits the multinationals *would* have made if they had not transferred the profits to other countries. Since the tax-rate of profits is only 21% anyway, I think the idea is more to get companies to declare them in the UK at 21%, rather than have an expensive court battle followed by a rate of 25% on those profits.
In practice, the law is likely to be a massive pig to write, but the above is the principle behind it...
Nonsense. It takes a couple of kWh of electricity to charge a phone once a day for a whole year! Let's be pessimistic and say you're half as efficient wireless charging - oh no, you've had to spend another 50p for the year. That's gonna make an impact on my £800 pa electricity bill!
Yes, if you aggregate it over ten million people it starts to sound like a lot, but it's roughly equivalent to everyone making one more cup of tea a month - i.e. irrelevant.
References:
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/09/it-costs-basically-nothing-to-charge-your-phone-for-a-year/
Microsoft is now widely known for their security - they literally wrote the book on developing secure software, from the (painful) lessons they learned from MS.Blaster and all the other attacks on the XP/2003/IIS 5 time of software.
The book: http://www.amazon.com/Security-Development-Lifecycle-Michael-Howard/dp/0735622140.
@Donald Becker
I'm pretty sure there is - the HP/Tandem NonStop system that runs the ATMs for Britain's biggest building society hasn't had any downtime in 20 years, so I suspect that there are plenty of other systems that have been running for 30 years (I just happen to know about that one).
For a good reference of what £450m will buy you, Nationwide recently completed their 5-year Voyager project, which replaced their Unisys mainframes running whatever banking application they did, with SAP Banking Platform. Essentially, this was a complete replacement of the back-end banking platform, a rewrite of most of the middleware, and a rewrite or replacement of most of their front-end applications. We commonly called it "rewriting the bank."
That cost £400m.
(Note they still have the mainframes, but they just have savings and mortgages).
"Small screen"
Small laptops necessitate a small screen. The success of netbooks and the Macbook Air, as well as Intel's massive Ultrabook push demonstrate that this is a compromise lots of people are happy to make.
"lack of resolution"
The resolution is 1080p (i.e. 1920 x 1080). What the hell resolution do you want on a 13" screen!
Happily, as mentioned in the article, there is hope coming in the form of Elite:Dangerous (and surely the success of that Kickstarter campaign should tell the industry there is still a demand out there).
More importantly, what about the massive success of Star Citizen (the new game by Chris "Wing Commander" Roberts) on Kickstarter? From memory he raised 6 million quid (although he also has a number of private backers, so definitely has the money to produce a proper AAA title).
It was very impressive, but still not a patch on Rutger Hauer...
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
This. THIS!
A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS!
I remember one interview (which turned out to be the best job I ever had), we were talking about university, and I mentioned in passing that I got a 2:1. The interviewer was very surprised, as the recruiter had removed the grade from my CV so he had assumed I'd got a 3rd!
The TiVo box is actually much nicer than the V+ box from a UI point-of-view. It's much faster and more responsive, navigation is easier (fewer button presses to get where you want to go, dedicated Home, Guide, and Recorded Shows buttons), and it's got lots of little bits of polish (if you scroll back in the TV guide, you can select programs and it will load them from iPlayer/4OD/etc, is one example of that polish).
Features like watchlists are good too - just add a watchlist to "Record anything directed by David Lean" and it will.
When I got it it was also £3 a month cheaper than V+ (although it cost me £50 upfront).
However, it won't do streaming, DLNA, or anything cool like that.
FTA:
'"I am somebody who if I believe in something, I give it 180 per cent."
That's an impressive 70 per cent improvement on the best efforts of professional footballers'
No - it's a 70 percentage <b>point</b> increase on the effort of a footaballer. It's clearly a ~64% increase.
I trust that the Reg put this in purely to generate vitriolic comments, because otherwise I WEEP FOR HUMANITY.
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