
"A Village Fair with a Church Behind"
What's so ecclesiastic about this uncovered behind?
3465 posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Oracle has a lot of customers in production apps is that they have few other places to go, and migrating is painful. I'd go as far to say that a lot of customers would want to leave, if only they could.
If it comes to developing new solutions in the cloud, however, Oracle has no such user base. And I feel that a lot of their customers are weary to tie themselves again to the big O.
Taking advantage of your monopoly is a dangerous game.
The previous attempt to fix the issue took too long for the antitrust commissioner to see it to end before he had to step down from his job. And that was the fast track.
It's mind-boggling that this can take so long, but I guess each side is allowed months to prepare their retort. Even when the retort amounts to "Your momma".
The news failed to turn heads on Wall Street one way or the other. Google stock was up by a modest 1.43 per cent at the end of the day, trading at $651.79 per share.
Erm. That happened before they released the results. The stock was up 10% after hours to $720, which I believe is an all-time high.
The current YouTube is staying as before, kids are going to keep watching. What is new is a paying ad-free service with a few more features.
Though I read in TechCrunch that Disney has refused the new terms, so there's that. Disney might still leave their videos on YouTube without monetizing them (no ads shown), otherwise they will disappear.
IBM has a long history of hiring intelligent people, and I'm sure some of them are staying until retirement. But in the current job market, what intelligent person would take a job at IBM, when much more friendly work environments are available?
Wasn't Celsius originally based on 0C being the boiling point of water and 100C being the freezing point.
1) No, that's the reverse.
2) The boiling temperature and to a lesser extent the freezing temperature of water depend on the pressure, so that was a little bit imprecise. Celsius are now defined by the triple point of water, which determines both a precise pressure and temperature. The definition is now roughly: "absolute zero is 273.15 °C = 0 K, and at the pressure of the triple point of water, the temperature of the triple point of water is 0.01 °C = 273.16 K". The 0.01 value was chosen because that was the approximate value under the previous definition, and they didn't want to change all existing thermometers.
The unit of a kelvin is based on a degree centigrade which is based on the melting point of a couple of metals (don't remember which) because ice/water/steam is a bit too variable.
Sorry, that's incorrect. The Kelvin is defined as being 0 at absolute zero, and 273.16 at the triple point of water. That's the current official definition, which they are planning to change:
What happens if Sony or Amazon make a phone and load it with Android software that doesn't encrypt the phone by default, or not at all?
Google has the power to kick people out of their Open Handset Alliance if they make incompatible devices, and that's how they stopped Acer from selling a phone with Aliyun OS. Would this work the same?
…What happens to Huawei if China makes it illegal to sell phones that are encrypted by default?
Extending from this, what happens if something is 0.95 euros, and the person purchasing only has 0.90 in 'sliver' and three 2c coins? Who will lose out on 1c?
For the moment, shoppers are allowed to ask for exact change. In this case, if the customer insists, the store has to find a 1c coin to give back the change, and if they can't I imagine that they will just accept the customer only paying 0.94 euros.
However, this change is caused by the fact that nobody cares about such amounts. I remember a study showing that the psychological value most people give to 1c coins is actually negative, meaning that they are more trouble than they are worth.
Switzerland's smallest used coin has been 5 cent of a Franc (more or less equal to 5 Euro cent) for 30 years, and even those feel like a waste of time to keep around in your wallet.
Strangely, Wikipedia claims the 1 cent coin was still struck until 2006, even though item prices have been rounded to 5 cents practically everywhere since the eighties.
Switzerland also seems to have the most valuable coin in circulation: 5 Swiss francs, a bit more than £3.
Almost no phone requires unlocking for taking pictures. The assumption is that people want to take the picture now now now before little Johnny stops making that funny face, and unlocking goes in the way.
QR codes (that's what you mean, right?) are not decoded by the standard camera app; you just end up with a picture of a QR code and the phone does nothing with it. You need to use a different app for taking pictures of QR codes and having the phone follow the link.
The taximeter is the device that measures the charge. From taxi- and -meter, meaning charge and measure. Originally, a "taxi" was an abbreviation of taximeter cab, as in "a cab with a device that measures the charge".
I believe doing this will be far more difficult with driverless cars. To begin with, the driverless car will be far more adept at avoiding the collision than a normal driver. And even if you manage it, the driverless car will have complete records of the accident, including the suicidal behavior which caused it.
As far as I understand, Google already encrypts data from client to server, between servers, and at rest. They started doing this soon after the publication of the NSA slide which noted with a smiley that Google decrypted data as soon as it was on its network.
But that only makes it difficult for the NSA to hack user data. They can still get a secret court order (aka national security letter) and have Google hand it over.
The government has not made it mandatory to submit to examinations by mind-reading machines who will delve into your mind and read your every thought, despite the obvious advantage this would be for national security.
The question is, is the reason they haven't done it that they don't think the government has the right to do it, or is it only that these machines do not exist — yet?
Quite a lot of people would say that this is a feature, not a bug. Would you rather have the workstation salesmen undermine their own unit by pushing an inferior product, just because it is made by the same company?
At best, this would be inefficient; at worst, it can land you in regulatory trouble: See Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
Carriers certainly have a history of putting conditions for selling Android phones. E.g Verizon Galaxy Nexus phones were the only ones not to have the Google Wallet feature, because Verizon was trying to push its own payment solution.
It's hard to believe now, but at some point in the past Android was an underdog, and Google had to convince carriers to sell Android phones.