6 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

So? If Google closes their London Headquarters, it'll make literally zero impact to the UK government, because they don't pay any taxes here.

Agreed, except that I wasn't talking about subsidiaries (if you could move a subsidiary elsewhere, there wouldn't be a reason to have a subsidiary in the first place).

The argument that "Oh, we'll just leave then" completely doesn't hold water if you're not actually putting anything back into the economy.

The main contribution of a large corporation to the community is in terms of employment (and employees pay income taxes). It's not just the direct headcount of the corporation itself: there are legions of smaller businesses that work almost exclusively for that corporation and its employees. These can employ at least as many people as the corporation they cater for, and often a lot more.

The employees that work at Google aren't going to suddenly find themselves unemployed just because Google close their office there either. We're not talking about employees living on the breadline.

Similarly if Microsoft said "Come on, boys, we're off to Switzerland", then most of their employees would quit and join Amazon or Google or other companies in Redmond, and Microsoft will be left a withered husk of its previous self.

The US would lose some of its political clout, perhaps, for being the place where Microsoft is registered, but it'll lose bugger all in terms of taxation (since Microsoft pays so little tax), the employees will by-and-large find other companies to work for, or will start new small companies, and literally none of the developers who currently works at Microsoft will be queuing up outside the homeless shelters asking for soup when there's such a high demand for their skillset in the USA.

I seriously doubt that Amazon and Google combined could absorb more than a small percentage of Microsoft's workforce, let alone "most of it". Just look at what happened with the first few rounds of layoffs.

There are other things I strongly disagree with in your post, but it would be pointless to discuss them: neither Microsoft nor Google nor Apple are going anywhere, simply because the US government will bend over backwards to make sure they don't.

This is all corporate FUD. Society doesn't need multinationals half as much as they need us. And if you're not going to pay tax or you'll move to Switzerland, then get out and stay out. And we'll tax your products when you try and sell your products to our citizens at the border via customs like we do with other foreign goods.

It's not a matter of how valuable individuals are to society, it's a matter of contractual power. Rich as you may be, your income tax is probably little more than a rounding error in the fiscal budget of your country, which means that your government is not particularly interested in cutting you a better deal.

As for import duties, good luck with that (hint: they don't work).

To sum it up: I am not happy that large corporations - who benefit from all sorts of services rendered by their respective governments - don't think it's right to contribute back. But that's the way things are and there's very little governments can do. They'll apply some pressure, of course, and be content when they get some results (such as Apple announcing they are bringing back some of their manufacturing, for instance). Rinse and repeat. But don't expect an indictment or a drastic change in legislation.

If a corporation the size of Microsoft, Apple or Google ever decided to jump ship and move the whole campus to - say - Switzerland, they would cause a collapse in the local economies of the area where they currently operate. Try to imagine how much money it would cost to clean up that mess and you'll see why the US government is willing to bark, but not to bite.

5 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

@cheong:Very true. I have other examples, starting with C (with the bad hack of mapping \n to \r\n), ...

That wasn't a hack, nor was it bad: it was a perfectly compliant implementation of the C standard.

If Acer got the same sweet spot in terms of size, this might be a good device.

39 minutes ago, cheong wrote

Maybe some day we'll see "No Google Glass allowed" sign on door of restrooms.

In case you missed it, someone already did and not just on restroom doors.

Might seem premature, but the problem is real. Aside of the obvious places, like restrooms and changing rooms, I can't think of public places where people would feel comfortable having someone pointing a camera at them.

2 hours ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

Gotta wonder how the folks in Oslo are taking this news?

I would think this was good news for Microsoft as an opportunity for those concerned to move away from the newly forming unknown.

According to the FAQ, Opera is also moving to the new rendering engine, so I guess they are pretty happy.

Mitigation is all we can hope for at the moment; for instance, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good thing to allow SMTP servers to reject messages unless they originate directly from one of the IP addresses of the sender's domain (something that is specifically forbidden in the current RFC). That alone would make the whole header spoofing business irrelevant and it would improve the effectiveness of blacklisting.

4 hours ago, elmer wrote

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-blue-leaks

I'm guessing this won't be available for Win7

With a rumored release date just a few months away, limiting IE11 to Windows 8+ would mean confining it to a pretty small niche. I don't think that's going to happen.

8 minutes ago, GoddersUK wrote

@Blue Ink: Pah... the ISO can't tell me what to do!

@Sven Groot: You can't have little pictures in a date, silly!

Can it at least tell you to live in the right year?

26 minutes ago, GoddersUK wrote

@Ian2: The date today is 14.3.2012. No ifs. No buts.

No, it isn't.

10 hours ago, Craig_​Matthews wrote

*snip*

I think putting quotes around 'tablets' was really the way to go, actually. I think at this point, what we call these things is slightly a bit off anyway. We're trying to call something which does more than make phone calls a phone by throwing the word 'smart' in front of it to make 'smartphone' -- and calling anything bigger a tablet, but now we have the form factors meeting up somewhere in the middle around 5-7". It's really all the same thing now except for one little thing -- the one thing that's left, other than size (which IMO is meaningless now), that really distinguishes a "phone" from a "tablet" --- the appearance of a line item on your bill that says "voice." 

What happens when we're all using Skype/Facetime/VoIP for all of our calls? Moving toward that trend, at some point, when we're all using VoIP to make a regular calls, the one remaining vestige of "voice service" will probably be the ability to make a reliable and instantly traceable 911 call. It won't be called voice service anymore since we'll all be using VoIP for our calls, we'd only be using their "voice" service for emergency services. So it'll end up being called "emergency services" on our bill.

So at that point, will we distinguish between a "phone" and a "tablet" based on whether you can call 911 on it?

I think we should just call them all PDAs with different sizes for different purposes, small, medium, large, grande, venti, whatever.

Personally, I don't care about the items on my bill: I draw the line between devices I can use like a handset and devices that are too large for that. Devices in the first category are "phones" everything else isn't.

The reason why I think the distinction makes sense is that there are too many use cases where a "phone" is the best solution, either because of privacy, convenience or social acceptance. Just to make an example, video calling has been around for a long time now, and yet I don't think I've ever seen it used in the wild. Things may change in a generation or two, but for the time being there's still a place for devices that are mainly phones and can occasionally make do for other stuff.

Aside of this, I concur with DCMonkey: a website is just a few pounds these days, and Orchard is your friend...

10 hours ago, cheong wrote

*snip*

I don't have problem for people getting it wrong, but have problem where the teachers teach it without explaining the fundamential reason of doing so.

Once you know the reason, even if you forgot the order, you can deduce it correctly yourself. It's all related to converting goods to their monetary value. "M"oney is the basis of ancient "M"athematics.

The problem is that operator precedence is largely a convention; there's no real reason why 3 + 3 * 4 = 15 and not 24; it's just that we decided it has to be that way.

That's what makes it hard to teach: you can paraphrase it all you want, but the answer is essentially "just because" and that never flies too well with kids.

3 hours ago, cbae wrote

@Blue Ink: Kind people come over for good spaghetti. Anybody remember that one?

I like xkcd's new proposal better.

I stopped relying on mnemonics since I almost flunked a test for misremembering one.

Just curious, though: why should roots be computed after division?

is not the same as

if (CoinResult == true)

Classic pitfall; some compilers warn you about this kind of things.

Two ways to avoid this altogether:

1) Reverse all your comparisons, so that the constant appears first. For instance,

if (true = CoinResult)

would produce a compile time error.

2) At least for Boolean expressions, use implied conversion to bool:

if (CoinResult)

HTH

Of course there's a lot of technology in there that we may never see (apparently they don't need cables or batteries, for instance, signs appear in thin air and screens are so cheap you can slap one on a coffee mug), but we are getting there.

On a side note: there's a lot of "Metro done right" in the video, which seems to validate where Microsoft is heading. On the other hand, it proves that Metro looks just gorgeous on glass (hint hint).

2 hours ago, gcorcoran wrote

For all the businesses using and developing java based applications, it just seems shocking to block it without any warning. Just think about how much time it would take to drop everything and develop in a different language in a business world full of already tight schedules... it's just insane.

Hardly without warning: the way I read it, Apple just reverted a previous decision to re-enable Java after finding out that Oracle's patch was only partially effective.

I'm not an apologist of Apple's tactics, but this time they are kind of justified by Oracle's incompetence.

3 hours ago, davewill wrote

@elmer: Not "all?". When finding a USB/Serial adapter it is important to see what chipset it uses and if it handles both hardware and software handshaking.  Once you find one that meets those criteria then you have found a rock solid adapter.  USBG-232 has been rock solid for years.  http://www.usbgear.com/usbg-232.html

The support and development folks have been at odds for several years now over this.  Support still encourages users to install the converter instead of using USB/(Activesync/WMDM) because it is an instant usable connection and simplifies user life.

Even with perfectly good USB/Serial adapters, there's still the chance that the thing may fail spectacularly. I've seen some devices (no names here, to protect the guilty) that draw small amounts of current off the control signals; no big deal with a real serial port, but enough to make the chip in the adapter go bananas. For extra fun, make sure that the device doesn't draw current continuously and that the peak is borderline.

This said, I'm kind of worried about how well this would work for the general public, looks like there's going to be a "palm rejection" problem on steroids here. Either users get used to move their hands off the sensing area, or the UI needs to be very picky (or very smart) about intentional and valid gestures. Either way I expect it will need some training.

With a little luck, the coolness of "casting spells" to your PC will be a big enough incentive.

As for the audio commands and feedback, the technology never worked too well for PCs; one thing is to bark commands to an xbox in your living room, another is to have to say what you are doing in public. I doubt that's ever going to change, until they nail subvocalization.

Once that happens, we'll have proven Clarke's third law again: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

1 hour ago, ManipUni wrote

* snip *

I'd prefer to pay £89 for the physical boxed copy of Office 2010. I only buy Office once every eight years anyway, plus there is no assurance that Office 365 even gives you the newer versions of Office when they come out in the future (i.e. there might be an "upgrade fee").  

Looking at the Microsoft Store, it says "Ongoing access to updates", which seems to suggest that you just keep getting the latest and greatest.

The pricing looks rather different when you compare current versions: the cheapest I can find on the MS Store is Office Home and Student 2013, which installs on just 1 PC, lacks quite a few features and goes for GBP 109.99. Hmm...

15 minutes ago, Dan276 wrote

Also what are the penalties if you're caught cheating on Visual Studio Achievements?

You get to program in COBOL.