It was Stalin who said that WW2 was won by Russian blood, American resources, and British brains. Most US innovation was post WW2, though US machine tools in WW2 were excellent and contributed a great deal to eventual victory. Both Germany and the UK during WW2 were centers of innovation, and it was lucky for us that we concentrated on things like the magnetron, digital data processing, nuclear energy and advanced aircraft while the Germans spent so much effort on missiles and efficient ways of killing unwanted people. (the Mosquito stealth bomber was one of the most effective weapons of WW2 and did far more damage to the German war effort than either the V1 or the V2 did to the UK).
As well as its meaning of pulling a sailing ship on its side to expose the bottom for anti-fouling or hull repair purposes, the idea of movement in a curve certainly coexisted. I'm thinking of "Lucifer in starlight" by James Meredith:
"And now upon his western wing he leaned; Now his huge bulk o'er Africa careened Now the strange planet shadowed Arctic snows"
American Conservatives are the useful idiots of the "Libertarians". The Libertarians want, in essence, for people with money and power to be able to do what they like. They want the liberty to run private armies, to profit from the drug trade, and a whole lot of other "freedoms" that would be recognised by the corporate robber barons of the last two centuries.
They have persuaded uneducated fundamentalist Christians and the same poor people who would suffer from their policies to vote for them in the belief that they are somehow aligned to "conservative values". Vote for me and I'll stop abortion. But hey, it won't matter because the rape victim will die for lack of medical treatment.
The Libertarians are the spiritual heirs of Al Capone, and use the same schtick to energise the base.
I think the "army of professional accountants" is part of the problem, not the solution. Financial records are about what happened in the past (though the order book is about what should happen in the future, there is no guarantee that the future will be a continuation of the past).
Paradoxically, crowd sourcing an opinion through something like Slashdot might actually be more accurate - how often have you thought a proposed merger,flotation or acquisition stinks, and so it proved? Geeks often do have inside knowledge on technology trends, but they do not always recognise it and see how it fits the bigger picture. Accountants can tell you what happened, but once they move into futurology, they are at a disadvantage to someone who really knows, say, how a particular technology stacks up against the competition. And they won't know who to ask, because they don't talk to engineers.
I'm pretty sure I could start a flamewar with a suitably crafted post about date handling in Java. And at least start a discussion about the accuracy of dendrochronology when used in conjunction with C14 dating.
Or, and this has just occurred to me and might be a bit way out for Slashdot, are you thinking of the art of persuading another person to drop his or her underpants in an intimate setting?
This doesn't make sense. Aircraft composites cost more because fiber size and length must be tightly controlled, density must be controlled, resins must be mixed in the prescribed manner and layup must be temperature controlled with accurate resin to fiber ratio, vacuum bagging and 24 hour control of the process. Commercial boats are made with a bored Chinese operator spraying cheap fiber mat with polyester resin. That's why one costs 100 times as much as the other. The NDT and destructive sample testing are important, but it is process control that. Is fundamentally different.
Apart from the completely irrelevant dragging in of China, where is the argument? A level of staffing and competence is needed for a project but large companies are full of bureaucracy and private empires that make products worse and more expensive. Government needs to stop being addled by size and cronyism.
This would be nice, but existing tablets don't have the capacity or the speed to index my local work mailboxes. I know it's ridiculous it takes an I7 to run Tbird acceptably fast, but that is how it is.
I think it's Pope who wrote in his 'Essay on Man' "but man, proud man, is all in arms through fear", and I really wouldn't want to live in a society like that.
So if I see your house is on fire I won't go to tell you in case you are one of those nuts who cannot tell legitimate visitors from criminals. Way to go for a cohesive society.
It's usually political unintelligence that is at the root of the problem. The Army has to do the stupid things that keep politicians believing they are in control. It was the military that didn't want to invade Iraq, but chimp and dick overrode them.
Artillery was pulled by horses and loaded on mules until well into the 20th Century. WW1 was a terrible bloodbath of innocent animals as well as people. In WW2, Germany reserved oil for critical military applications (like the ineffective V-weapons) and a lot of horses were still used. We have actually become slightly more civilised.
Like a lot of Kipling's verse, it starts off on a positive note and then the anti-war bit comes in at the end. But see the section for the "screw-gun mules".
Not exactly. They have set up a website with poor security which may be in breach of the Data Protection Act, and their solution to this is to demand that people use it. The European Court is going to love this one.
I estimate that over my career I've been a net contributor to the Exchequer to well into 6 figures, if not 7. If I become unemployed I expect some of that back. It should not be hard to devise a system which takes contribution into account in assessing benefits, but instead this Government chooses to regard all unemployed people as layabouts - forgetting that a significant part of the unemployment is due to the deregulation of the banks and the privatisation of public assets, both of which started when they were last in power.
It was approved of by someone whose nickname in the Army was "Drunken". Given that this was the British Army, where a certain officer was nicknamed "foggy" because he was wet and thick, that tells you a lot of what you need to know.
You didn't kill the Taliban, young, rootless, aggressive men. You are killing a lot of actual civilians - noncombatants. People who are invested in where they live do not stand a chance against a modern army.
No, they exist. They believe that Maemo/Meego was the One True way, and that it would have been successful but for Elop. In my view they don't really understand that ultimately it was under-resourced and too late. The N900, for instance, had a resistive touchscreen and a micro-USB that had a tendency to break off. I recommended them to my company and got the resulting flak, and I won't forget it. The N9 sold reasonably well but I suspect that Nokia could not have supported it alongside ramping up Windows Phone, and by then Android was a bandwagon that everyone was getting on to.
And whenever I post on this subject I get modded to -1 by Nokia fanboys. But I have quite good karma, and I do have this thing about living in the real world. So.
Look at RIM. They are trying to re-invent themselves with a QNX-based platform. In order to deliver that, they have basically abandoned their old platform to existing products and a new low-end phone to try to retain market share in places like Nigeria. Development on existing products has stopped. They know that they can only afford to do one OS and they must do it well.
We've already read about the internal fighting in Nokia around Maemo/Meego. It is fairly obvious that the investment wasn't there to take it forward as a new platform to compete with the iOS/Android bandwagons. It falls into the category of things with good foundations that didn't get a chance and lost momentum, like webOS. (I have an N900, I have a Pre 2 and a Pre 3, I do know what I am writing about).
Elop was right about the burning platform and he was between the Scylla of Android and the Charybdis of Microsoft. Regardless of where he came from, he could see that Taiwan and Korea were already ramping up Android and Nokia would be a me-too. Microsoft offered investment and a different offering. Basically, he knew that he would be screwed by Microsoft but he also knew he would be screwed by Samsung, HTC, LG, and even Asus. So what do you do in the circumstances? You cannot do both because having too many offerings - a long term Nokia failing - leads to excessive support and R&D costs, along with insufficient volume for a given product
Elop isn't a saint, he is a CEO. I am pretty sure that in the same situation anyone who understands the industry, and business in general, would have made a similar decision. It might be of the order of "do I abandon ship in this shark infested water or do I keep pumping and hope I get to Tahiti", but it still looks like a rational decision.
I think you meant "Geology is not the only tool...", we also have ice cores, dendrochronology, carbon dating, isotopic ratios, and other things I personally don't know about and cannot be bothered.
And the climate change denialists have...Christopher Walter Monckton.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Stalin who said that WW2 was won by Russian blood, American resources, and British brains. Most US innovation was post WW2, though US machine tools in WW2 were excellent and contributed a great deal to eventual victory. Both Germany and the UK during WW2 were centers of innovation, and it was lucky for us that we concentrated on things like the magnetron, digital data processing, nuclear energy and advanced aircraft while the Germans spent so much effort on missiles and efficient ways of killing unwanted people. (the Mosquito stealth bomber was one of the most effective weapons of WW2 and did far more damage to the German war effort than either the V1 or the V2 did to the UK).
"And now upon his western wing he leaned;
Now his huge bulk o'er Africa careened
Now the strange planet shadowed Arctic snows"
There was Government violence against the Suffragettes, and shows of force intended to intimidate them.
They have persuaded uneducated fundamentalist Christians and the same poor people who would suffer from their policies to vote for them in the belief that they are somehow aligned to "conservative values". Vote for me and I'll stop abortion. But hey, it won't matter because the rape victim will die for lack of medical treatment.
The Libertarians are the spiritual heirs of Al Capone, and use the same schtick to energise the base.
They want to sue you for trade mark abuse.
Paradoxically, crowd sourcing an opinion through something like Slashdot might actually be more accurate - how often have you thought a proposed merger,flotation or acquisition stinks, and so it proved? Geeks often do have inside knowledge on technology trends, but they do not always recognise it and see how it fits the bigger picture. Accountants can tell you what happened, but once they move into futurology, they are at a disadvantage to someone who really knows, say, how a particular technology stacks up against the competition. And they won't know who to ask, because they don't talk to engineers.
Or, and this has just occurred to me and might be a bit way out for Slashdot, are you thinking of the art of persuading another person to drop his or her underpants in an intimate setting?
This doesn't make sense. Aircraft composites cost more because fiber size and length must be tightly controlled, density must be controlled, resins must be mixed in the prescribed manner and layup must be temperature controlled with accurate resin to fiber ratio, vacuum bagging and 24 hour control of the process. Commercial boats are made with a bored Chinese operator spraying cheap fiber mat with polyester resin. That's why one costs 100 times as much as the other. The NDT and destructive sample testing are important, but it is process control that. Is fundamentally different.
Apart from the completely irrelevant dragging in of China, where is the argument? A level of staffing and competence is needed for a project but large companies are full of bureaucracy and private empires that make products worse and more expensive. Government needs to stop being addled by size and cronyism.
"Ignition!" is available as a PDF somewhere and is one of the most entertaining books about chemistry and chemists ever written. Please read it.
Soon he will be in a maze of twisty little passages.
This would be nice, but existing tablets don't have the capacity or the speed to index my local work mailboxes. I know it's ridiculous it takes an I7 to run Tbird acceptably fast, but that is how it is.
I think it's Pope who wrote in his 'Essay on Man' "but man, proud man, is all in arms through fear", and I really wouldn't want to live in a society like that.
These are all true but outside London and some other cities, crime rates in the UK are rather low.
So if I see your house is on fire I won't go to tell you in case you are one of those nuts who cannot tell legitimate visitors from criminals. Way to go for a cohesive society.
It's usually political unintelligence that is at the root of the problem. The Army has to do the stupid things that keep politicians believing they are in control. It was the military that didn't want to invade Iraq, but chimp and dick overrode them.
Artillery was pulled by horses and loaded on mules until well into the 20th Century. WW1 was a terrible bloodbath of innocent animals as well as people. In WW2, Germany reserved oil for critical military applications (like the ineffective V-weapons) and a lot of horses were still used. We have actually become slightly more civilised.
Like a lot of Kipling's verse, it starts off on a positive note and then the anti-war bit comes in at the end. But see the section for the "screw-gun mules".
I estimate that over my career I've been a net contributor to the Exchequer to well into 6 figures, if not 7. If I become unemployed I expect some of that back. It should not be hard to devise a system which takes contribution into account in assessing benefits, but instead this Government chooses to regard all unemployed people as layabouts - forgetting that a significant part of the unemployment is due to the deregulation of the banks and the privatisation of public assets, both of which started when they were last in power.
It was approved of by someone whose nickname in the Army was "Drunken". Given that this was the British Army, where a certain officer was nicknamed "foggy" because he was wet and thick, that tells you a lot of what you need to know.
You didn't kill the Taliban, young, rootless, aggressive men. You are killing a lot of actual civilians - noncombatants. People who are invested in where they live do not stand a chance against a modern army.
Gen Petraeus gave his mistress access to classified information. I don't care what the rules are, if they can be broken some will be.
No, they exist. They believe that Maemo/Meego was the One True way, and that it would have been successful but for Elop. In my view they don't really understand that ultimately it was under-resourced and too late. The N900, for instance, had a resistive touchscreen and a micro-USB that had a tendency to break off. I recommended them to my company and got the resulting flak, and I won't forget it. The N9 sold reasonably well but I suspect that Nokia could not have supported it alongside ramping up Windows Phone, and by then Android was a bandwagon that everyone was getting on to.
Look at RIM. They are trying to re-invent themselves with a QNX-based platform. In order to deliver that, they have basically abandoned their old platform to existing products and a new low-end phone to try to retain market share in places like Nigeria. Development on existing products has stopped. They know that they can only afford to do one OS and they must do it well.
We've already read about the internal fighting in Nokia around Maemo/Meego. It is fairly obvious that the investment wasn't there to take it forward as a new platform to compete with the iOS/Android bandwagons. It falls into the category of things with good foundations that didn't get a chance and lost momentum, like webOS. (I have an N900, I have a Pre 2 and a Pre 3, I do know what I am writing about).
Elop was right about the burning platform and he was between the Scylla of Android and the Charybdis of Microsoft. Regardless of where he came from, he could see that Taiwan and Korea were already ramping up Android and Nokia would be a me-too. Microsoft offered investment and a different offering. Basically, he knew that he would be screwed by Microsoft but he also knew he would be screwed by Samsung, HTC, LG, and even Asus. So what do you do in the circumstances? You cannot do both because having too many offerings - a long term Nokia failing - leads to excessive support and R&D costs, along with insufficient volume for a given product
Elop isn't a saint, he is a CEO. I am pretty sure that in the same situation anyone who understands the industry, and business in general, would have made a similar decision. It might be of the order of "do I abandon ship in this shark infested water or do I keep pumping and hope I get to Tahiti", but it still looks like a rational decision.
And the climate change denialists have...Christopher Walter Monckton.