The current price of shares is related to supply and demand, like land or oil. Many of the systems used to buy shares - ranging from guesswork through fashion to "buy fortune 100 companies" are not in fact rational. However, they create demand. If not many people want to sell (because they think the price will rise, or because they think their profit will be lower than their future dividends), supply is inelastic and the demand will push the price up.
Market cap is the current share price multiplied by the number of shares in circulation. Now imagine that simultaneously everybody actually decides to sell their shares. What will happen to the price? It will collapse because everybody will assume the shares are junk.
In other words, market cap is only a valuation of a company provided you don't try to realise it by selling a significant number of shares. It is a typical smoke and mirrors number used by crooked gamblers - I'm sorry, I mean investment companies - to try and get suckers - I mean investors - to buy overpriced shares.
The same applies to land. At one time the apparent market valuation of Greater Tokyo was more than the entire United States - because supply was totally inelastic, and yet people thought they must have a presence in Tokyo. As a result, land changed hands for insane prices. The moment the recession hit, prices collapsed.
Warren Buffet has become one of the richest men in the world through not paying attention to mumbo jumbo like market cap, but focussing on the actual core value of companies and their likely income.
There is a shortage of the top level people who can come up with compelling new ideas and get industry to buy into them. There is a shortage of the people who can conceptualise at the level needed to architect systems that actually achieve real benefits. These are the people who create jobs, and they have always been in short supply. There is no shortage of mediocre people or not very good people. This isn't about ticking boxes on resumes, this is about the people who get interviewed at a level where nobody is ticking the boxes, they are talking large systems and strategy. Perhaps the really gifted engineers have already moved on to the next big thing.
Having said that, I suspect the same is true of gifted CEOs and business managers.
As for China, I don't see any difference there. Being cheap and accepting high scrap rates and the occasional scandal is not a long term strategy. The painful issue that we are not addressing is that we (including me, I am one of the guilty parties) are creating a world which is just too difficult and complex for most people to play an meaningful role.
Sorry, there is a huge difference between being "up and running" as in Hello World, and actually being able to do something useful. There are libraries to learn, APIs to understand, the best techniques for debug and data checking...
In fact you are right, and the net result is interesting. In Europe we pay about the same PER MILE for fuel as you do in the US, even though it costs twice as much per gallon. The high tax causes most of us to buy fuel efficient cars, our smaller city streets (built before cars) encourage us to use smaller vehicles. But our road deaths are no worse than the US and often much better.
The problem with CAFE was that it was indeed a boondoggle - the mandated efficiency improvements were actually less than were achieved automatically by European taxation levels, and as you note it was easily evaded with the "light truck" class.
Taxation of fuel is sensible because it is a tax on actual consumption. Most people are able to reduce their consumption by varied means - aggregated journeys, car shares, vacations closer to home, reducing acceleration, using mail order more - without changing their vehicles.
Perhaps a fluent Japanese speaker could confirm or deny, but I have been told that, although it is usually translated as "green", midori does not exactly correlate to the English word. (This is not unusual; the difference between "green" and "blue" is to some extent culturally determined as the two sets of cones in the eye have quite close spectral response peaks and the overlap region is therefore much less well defined than the red-green transition. Even in the British Isles, the word "glas", which is also vaguely cognote to "midori", has different color significance in Irish and Welsh.)
So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be? And is it time for anybody using the word in the US to get in a trademark application, just in case?
I will use a self-signed certificate where the USER needs to authenticate themselves to ME before I will release certain data to them. My box has a valid domain which matches the certificate. The user needs to send me certain data, encrypted, before I will peform certain operations on it, come up with a result, and then present the result to the user. Based on this, the user will make a decision on whether to contact a third party. I'm not going into the application in depth, but you may guess it is to assist a user in a buying decision based on user-selected criteria. It is a paid for application because the decision engine is guaranteed vendor neutral; we have no advertising, no vendor links.
I think it is quite reasonable for Firefox to say something like "the certificate is valid for the domain, but it is not warranted genuine by a third party. If you believe you are accessing a site which is not connected with banking, finance, gambling or on-line purchasing, this is unlikely to be a security risk".
Alternatively, FF3 needs a simple way to import a certificate from a trusted supplier, so I can supply one as part of the new account welcome package.
Orthodox rabbis get to choose who is Jewish. This may not seem odd or eccentric to non-Jews. But the State of Israel is special. Many Jews - especially the most highly educated - are not Orthodox; they are Conservative or Reform. For those who have been following (if anyone) the goings on in the Anglican Church, with the progressive Episcopalians being attacked by the fundies who are attempting to marginalise them, similar things happen in Judaism. In the UK, possibly the three best well known rabbis in recent years are Lionel Blue, Jonathan Magonet and Julia Neuburger. All Reform. Who does the Government regard as being the "leader" of British Jewry? The Orthodox Chief Rabbi, head of a shrinking population of Orthodox who are actually observant. Some people, myself included, would describe him as a not very nice person who exaggerates his own importance. Others might use stronger language.
Many Reform jews are pro-Zionist (think the State of Israel is a good thing) but strongly disapprove of the way it treats Palestinians, the Lebanese and their other neighbours, and object to the hypocrisy of Israel having 200 nuclear warheads and then complaining about regional destabilisation (e.g. the letter from Gerald Kaufman MP in the Guardian this weekend). The result is often quite vicious attacks by Orthodox Jews.
Now look at this in the context of this biometric database. It is a wonderful opportunity for the Orthodox in Israel to identify Jews who they may regard as troublemakers. (They already routinely do things like refuse to recognise marriages of non-Orthodox Jews, or refuse to recognise conversions ratified by Reform rabbis). This database will give the police and the army more power to identify and harass, not only the Palestinians, but people who disagree with the settlers and the ultra-Zionists.
Many of the founders of Israel were secular; a lot of them were socialists. I think they would be horrified by this proposal and would even quote the Torah against it.
"Anti-USA rant" - can you read?
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
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· Score: 2, Informative
I suggested that Brown was wrong about thinking that he has to keep the US on side. I suggested that Barack Obama is better qualified than any of our present candidates to run GB., because, as a professor at Chicago, he made his students think about issues like civil liberties. And I suggested that the US financial crisis is much less severe than that in the UK. Wow, that's anti-US ranting, saying your economy is sounder than ours and some of your politicians are more intelligent. I also suggested that somebody whose entire career has been based around the fortunes and fate of a political party was not a good person to run the country.
Other than that, a number of other posters seem to have pointed out to you that you didn't read the original submission.
the current UK government is run by people who are terrified that US companies will withdraw from the UK if we do not do exactly as they wish. Most of them are purely politicians who have never had jobs in the real economy, so all they know about the world is what they get told by lobbyists. The present Prime Minister is a typical example: PhD in the history of the Labour Party, no less, and then a knowledge of economics derived, basically, from what he gets told by people with lots of money. He is now trying to avoid admitting that our financial crisis is worse than that in the US, because the US actually has a lower proportion of its assets in the housing market and banking (US house prices started from typically half what they were in the UK, so a fall is much less serious.)
Unfortunately the alternative is a PR man, so you can guess how well that is likely to play out.
It would be kind of the US to vote in McCain and let us have Obama, thank you very much. Somebody who has at least spent years discussing civil liberties and civil rights with law students, even Chicago law students, has at least put in the groundwork to be allowed to have opinions on the subject, and politically he's probably on the moderate wing of our Conservative Party.
We do have one politician who has a clue about the subject, Jack Straw, but his current opinion seems to be "I'm far too clever to become Prime Minister and then lose an unwinnable election".
Currently Brown will do anything to try and keep the so-called service economy - entertainment, banking, supermarkets - onside. And the chance that a Government full of middle aged white men who single finger type, and only when they have to, will get a clue about the implications of almost free distribution of all kinds of data is extremely remote. Their idea of data sharing is leaving critical Government databases on unsecured laptops in taxis.
I will probably get modded troll or flamebait - but what conceivable real strategic benefit is there from this thing? It just seems to be a case of USAF/Boeing willy waggling. In case you hadn't noticed, NASA builds stuff that works, and does some real research. Notice how we have gone in a few years from "is there water on Mars?" to "how much water is there on Mars?" - a huge paradigm shift - as a result of work by NASA and the ESA. Meanwhile this project basically does nothing but ask "can we go really really fast with a winged vehicle?". One is R&D which tells us more about the Universe and, ultimately, about our own origins and destiny: the other is NASCAR without wheels.
Blame Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, born into the upper classes, educated at a not very good Public school and the not very good Worcester College Oxford, two years in the Royal Artillery and then a suitable lucrative career as a barrister and then a judge. In other words, a legal mediocrity, not very good at anything except networking within his class, and hoping to keep on getting Government gravy. I believe that, in the US, you have your assholes in the Supreme Court. Here in the UK, the Law Lords in the same way vary from the brilliant to the overpromoted.
For a counterweight, look at Mr. Justice Eady (currently my Judge of the Year favourite) who has dared to find against a tabloid newspaper in a libel case, but now seems determined to stop a British supermarket chain - Tescos - from using the law to silence one of the few remaining independent British newspapers, the Guardian. Eady had better not expect any honors soon - he doesn't mind pissing off the people who think they own politicians.
Finally, as an English person, I'd just like to point out that for some reason our political classes love Scottish Prime Ministers, and they are to a man useless. Balfour,Macmillan, Home,Blair, Brown - ambitious, devoid of ethics, infatuated with the worst aspects of the US and unwilling to implement the best ones, like your robust local democracy. We English need the EU to protect us from the worst excesses of the Scots.
Someone called Zemlin seems to be a complete and utter idiot.
Women over 40 in fact constitute over 1/4 of the developed world adult population. That's not a targeted audience. In fact, I suspect that, as they have had significant life experience so far, it is a much more varied market than women under 40. Which shows that he doesn't understand what is meant by targeted marketing.
As an example, I've just ordered a MSI Wind with XP - why? Because the main reason for it is to work with my 3G HSDPA modem, that's why. Do I want a special Linux version with a built in modem? I do not. To get reliable reception, I need to be able to remote that modem up to 3M from the computer.
So here is an immediate point about the netbook market; I want to be able to remote my antenna so I don't have to sit on the car roof, or on my boat cabin, or on the side of the house which faces the phone mast, just to get a decent signal with a good S/N ratio. I'm a target market: mobile professional users living in rural areas. Currently Windows XP meets my needs and Linux doesn't. I am not interested in eye candy; I want a nice legible screen, and workable keyboard, a responsive operating system that does not need to spend the first 15 minutes of every day downloading anti virus updates and checking them, and the ability to get a 3G or ordinary wireless connection efficiently. Linux meets everything except the last, which unfortunately is the deal breaker. I don't even need long battery life because wherever I go I am normally near either mains or a 12V outlet.
Now, I know that this is not the "fault" of Linux. You will not find me wanting to replace either of my Linux servers with anything else, thank you. But real targeted marketing on the desktop would be to identify some real key user roles, and address their needs to make the result better than Windows, with no actual deal killers.
Mac OS X here is a red herring. Anybody as stupid as my neighbour who bought a Mac because he thought it would be "intuitive", and then found none of his expensive academic PC software would work, or the other one who bought a Mac because it was "easy to use" and still can't work out how to send an attachment, and forgets to label Office files with ".doc", is not going to have their problem fixed by Gnome or KDE any time soon (until there is a wetware upgrade...).
Netbooks are a possible market because their low cpu power makes anti-virus software a pain in the backside, and they will not run Vista. But that means that the focus has to be on communications, and efficient working with a smaller screen. To make that happen will need input from a company like Nokia or Samsung, who are not wedded to overpriced hardware like Apple or Sony.
Most boat owners could really do with a cheap generator that produces not more than around 25-50 watts (which will drive your central heating system in colder climates and your refrigerator in hot ones - you don't really want a big Diesel running for hours a day and big batteries for when it is not running.)
A few years ago I investigated thermoelectric generators and contacted the suppliers. The unit is basically a thermoelectric generator, air-cooled, with a propane heater providing the hot side. Which at first sight looks very simple. The conversation went something like this.
"You don't want this, it's not economic." "Nor is spending $10000 on a new generator just to produce an average 50 watts." "It still isn't economic." "Perhaps I'm an eccentric millionaire?" "Still not worth it."
In fact, they flatly refused even to quote. Which suggests that current thermoelectric technology, with all the peripherals, is hugely expensive. So how is it suddenly going to be easy and cheap to stick this in a car exhaust?
Professional engineers do not get their qualification based on a knowledge of physical laws. They get it based on real world experience which makes them safe out on the streets.
Physical laws do not tell what safety factors are needed in airframe design, or how to specify piling for a building based on a given geology. Computer science does not tell you how to design a business application taking account of the needs of auditability, or how to measure the statistical limits of accuracy of data gathering. My professional qualifications are in the design of software for business needs.
In fact there are important physical and mathematical laws in information theory, which shade off into quantum mechanics, and many of the arguments around black holes have to do with the fate of information. But this is not relevant to whether you would trust me (or another person) to convert your specification for an on line banking website into something that did not lose money or create it from nowhere.
Here in the UK we have at least two post-nominal letter granting institutions, the British Computer Society and the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. You do not have to belong... in the same way you can call yourself an "accountant" without being the equivalent of a CPS, just so long as you do not try to do an audit. We also have National Vocational Qualifications, for which there are programming qualifications that exactly mirror, say, accounting technician levels.
I can assure you that there are circumstances when we tender for jobs when the client wants to see the CVs and the qualifications of the key project personnel, and the letters BCS and IAP count for a lot more than the odd Java or Oracle certification. But then we design systems, and code and databases are only a small part of the whole.
I don't know the answer to your question but I suspect the answer is yes. The core issue is that our Government systems frequently fail owing to poor specification by unqualified civil servants, but investigators (including MPs like Geoffrey Bacon) run into the Civil Service Mafia and make litle progress. Eventually I suspect some politicians will realise that the potential benefits of getting it right are better than the kickbacks from sucking EDS's or Cap Gemini's bottoms. But, alas, it will be long after I retire.
To become a professional you do a theoretical degree to give you a toolkit and learn how to find stuff out, then you do your professional training. Works for physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants. You end up with two or more sets of postnominal letters, one of which is vocational. Why not software designers?
The headline is wrong. A kelvin is a unit of temperature difference, a defined fraction of the temperature of the triple point of water above absolute zero. It is not a scale referenced to Absolute Zero. You are right in that, as an SI unit, it is not capitalised.
But the milli prefix is not capitalised, because capital M implies the Mega prefix - 1E6 rather than 1E-3.
The correct, pedantic version is "10 mk above Absolute Zero", or "10 millikelvins above Absolute Zero".
No chance of having one running off a Honda generator in a cave somewhere in the Pakistan Tribal Territories, or Somalia.
To keep our security agencies happy, quantum computers need to be almost impossible to make. The inventor of a really simple, cheap one is unlikely to have a successful career selling them to Joe Public.
Why is it that XP 64 bit (apart from lack of driver support) isn't at all bad, and Vista, also presumably based on Server 2003, isn't all that good?
I run both XP64 and Ubuntu 8.04 on identical hardware side by side (test lab) with a happy absence of problems on either, and the Server 2003 SP hs worked just fine on XP. Microsoft can build something that is solid and just works. So why don't they? (needs a naivete tag here). I would happily run either OS on my notebook but driver support is the problem in both cases. Why didn't Microsoft make the 64 bit switch when they could have done (I know, because the original Intel dual core couldn't run it...but that was years ago.)
The only thing wrong with MS 64 bit is that stupid name change to "Program Files (X86)" complete with vacuous spaces and brackets which should never appear in file names. Why didn't they leave it alone for back compatibility and just put all the 64 bit code in a folder called "Programs"? Time to stop, Kupfernigk, it's hot and you're rambling.
Apparently research has been done to support this. People do not vote much based on their interests, they vote on how they think the sort of people they aspire to be vote. The poor, who have no aspirations, don't vote.
In the UK, the skilled working class people who were shafted by the Conservatives voted - conservative. Because? They wanted to be seen as middle class, and they thought the middle classes voted Conservative.
As Schiller said, only in German, against stupidity even the Gods struggle in vain.
I agree completely. The slippery slope argument would in fact alternatively suggest that the next stage will be for someone to claim under the 1st Amendment that users must not have the ability to set passwords on their computer accounts, because then their children might not be able to access their -ah- adult aka retarded adolescent content.
This is in effect proposing to mandate a security means, and I for one would be very happy, with my sysadmin hat on, if security means WERE mandated on everything which gives access to any potentially sensitive resources, whether it be internet banking accounts or video games.
The next absurdity would be to demand that the locks be taken off cars, so that parents cannot prevent the kids from taking them.
I meant that bad ads drive out good ads generally as ads, not in terms of Google rankings. Although you are quite right that Google tries to make its directory functions work well, the number of people trying to outgame Google is much greater than the number of people inside Google. This inevitably pushes the equilibrium over towards the gamers. It's like spam; no matter how good filters get, most of the world's emails are still spam.
The value of any new advertising medium declines over time as people find ways to avoid seeing it, or mentally filter it out. The problem is that there are 2 types of advertising:
Directories
Trying to make me buy stuff
People over time get sick of the "Trying to make me buy stuff".
Example: When I was a kid magazines like Amateur Photographer contained piles of ads which were basically directory listings. Item, price, condition. They were in fact useful data for buyers. What's the nearest supplier who has a second hand Leica M3 in excellent condition? Nowadays, the ads in photo magazines are demand-creators; reams of eye candy. More advertising, in color, is needed to pay for the content. What does it tell me? Five guys have half a page of trying to sell me the same digital camera I don't want. Do they have what I do want? Hard to say.
Google's problem is it wants to be a directory, but its advertisers want to distort its market by directing irrelevant traffic in the hope of selling something. Like bad coinage, bad ads drive out good ads. (Just like eBay with the crooks driving out legitimate sellers.) Ultimately the public gets turned off. (Do I ever click on a right hand link on a google page? No. Do I ever click on the top 3 links? Hardly ever. That's experience, not prejudice.)
So, my 2c worth is that this may be nothing to do with the recession and everything to do with the great public having had time to realise what a scam much internet advertising is. Someone will have to come up with a better paradigm. If people will still pay money for print magazines, how much will they pay for a verified Google for instance (I would personally pay a $10/month for a shit-free search engine where abusers were removed from search results, no messing.)
Current solar panels have a cost to watt ratio that makes them unsuitable for domestic use on grid. The output depends on total solar flux and this varies very largely around the world. In fact, the most sensible thing would be to put every single generation panel in the places in the US or Europe which have maximum solar flux. I have been arguing for years that solar panels here in the UK are stupid, because every one generates less than half the lifetime output it would generate in, say, Southern Spain or Arizona. I can't remember which law of economics it is (Ricardo's?) but in business terms it is the expression "sweat the assets" - i.e. make capital plant work as hard as possible for the best return.
The main downside of solar panels at home and EVs, apart from the cost, is that the EV is usually at work in the daytime. So the obvious place to put solar panels is on business sites where they could feed into EV chargers during hours of maximum sunlight.
Slashdot Mirror
Market cap is the current share price multiplied by the number of shares in circulation. Now imagine that simultaneously everybody actually decides to sell their shares. What will happen to the price? It will collapse because everybody will assume the shares are junk.
In other words, market cap is only a valuation of a company provided you don't try to realise it by selling a significant number of shares. It is a typical smoke and mirrors number used by crooked gamblers - I'm sorry, I mean investment companies - to try and get suckers - I mean investors - to buy overpriced shares.
The same applies to land. At one time the apparent market valuation of Greater Tokyo was more than the entire United States - because supply was totally inelastic, and yet people thought they must have a presence in Tokyo. As a result, land changed hands for insane prices. The moment the recession hit, prices collapsed.
Warren Buffet has become one of the richest men in the world through not paying attention to mumbo jumbo like market cap, but focussing on the actual core value of companies and their likely income.
Having said that, I suspect the same is true of gifted CEOs and business managers.
As for China, I don't see any difference there. Being cheap and accepting high scrap rates and the occasional scandal is not a long term strategy. The painful issue that we are not addressing is that we (including me, I am one of the guilty parties) are creating a world which is just too difficult and complex for most people to play an meaningful role.
Sorry, there is a huge difference between being "up and running" as in Hello World, and actually being able to do something useful. There are libraries to learn, APIs to understand, the best techniques for debug and data checking...
The problem with CAFE was that it was indeed a boondoggle - the mandated efficiency improvements were actually less than were achieved automatically by European taxation levels, and as you note it was easily evaded with the "light truck" class.
Taxation of fuel is sensible because it is a tax on actual consumption. Most people are able to reduce their consumption by varied means - aggregated journeys, car shares, vacations closer to home, reducing acceleration, using mail order more - without changing their vehicles.
So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be? And is it time for anybody using the word in the US to get in a trademark application, just in case?
I think it is quite reasonable for Firefox to say something like "the certificate is valid for the domain, but it is not warranted genuine by a third party. If you believe you are accessing a site which is not connected with banking, finance, gambling or on-line purchasing, this is unlikely to be a security risk".
Alternatively, FF3 needs a simple way to import a certificate from a trusted supplier, so I can supply one as part of the new account welcome package.
Many Reform jews are pro-Zionist (think the State of Israel is a good thing) but strongly disapprove of the way it treats Palestinians, the Lebanese and their other neighbours, and object to the hypocrisy of Israel having 200 nuclear warheads and then complaining about regional destabilisation (e.g. the letter from Gerald Kaufman MP in the Guardian this weekend). The result is often quite vicious attacks by Orthodox Jews.
Now look at this in the context of this biometric database. It is a wonderful opportunity for the Orthodox in Israel to identify Jews who they may regard as troublemakers. (They already routinely do things like refuse to recognise marriages of non-Orthodox Jews, or refuse to recognise conversions ratified by Reform rabbis). This database will give the police and the army more power to identify and harass, not only the Palestinians, but people who disagree with the settlers and the ultra-Zionists.
Many of the founders of Israel were secular; a lot of them were socialists. I think they would be horrified by this proposal and would even quote the Torah against it.
Other than that, a number of other posters seem to have pointed out to you that you didn't read the original submission.
Unfortunately the alternative is a PR man, so you can guess how well that is likely to play out.
It would be kind of the US to vote in McCain and let us have Obama, thank you very much. Somebody who has at least spent years discussing civil liberties and civil rights with law students, even Chicago law students, has at least put in the groundwork to be allowed to have opinions on the subject, and politically he's probably on the moderate wing of our Conservative Party.
We do have one politician who has a clue about the subject, Jack Straw, but his current opinion seems to be "I'm far too clever to become Prime Minister and then lose an unwinnable election".
Currently Brown will do anything to try and keep the so-called service economy - entertainment, banking, supermarkets - onside. And the chance that a Government full of middle aged white men who single finger type, and only when they have to, will get a clue about the implications of almost free distribution of all kinds of data is extremely remote. Their idea of data sharing is leaving critical Government databases on unsecured laptops in taxis.
Something that has to be launched from an Atlas missile, has no docking facilities, no cargo space...this will replace the Shuttle how,exactly?
I will probably get modded troll or flamebait - but what conceivable real strategic benefit is there from this thing? It just seems to be a case of USAF/Boeing willy waggling. In case you hadn't noticed, NASA builds stuff that works, and does some real research. Notice how we have gone in a few years from "is there water on Mars?" to "how much water is there on Mars?" - a huge paradigm shift - as a result of work by NASA and the ESA. Meanwhile this project basically does nothing but ask "can we go really really fast with a winged vehicle?". One is R&D which tells us more about the Universe and, ultimately, about our own origins and destiny: the other is NASCAR without wheels.
For a counterweight, look at Mr. Justice Eady (currently my Judge of the Year favourite) who has dared to find against a tabloid newspaper in a libel case, but now seems determined to stop a British supermarket chain - Tescos - from using the law to silence one of the few remaining independent British newspapers, the Guardian. Eady had better not expect any honors soon - he doesn't mind pissing off the people who think they own politicians.
Finally, as an English person, I'd just like to point out that for some reason our political classes love Scottish Prime Ministers, and they are to a man useless. Balfour,Macmillan, Home,Blair, Brown - ambitious, devoid of ethics, infatuated with the worst aspects of the US and unwilling to implement the best ones, like your robust local democracy. We English need the EU to protect us from the worst excesses of the Scots.
Women over 40 in fact constitute over 1/4 of the developed world adult population. That's not a targeted audience. In fact, I suspect that, as they have had significant life experience so far, it is a much more varied market than women under 40. Which shows that he doesn't understand what is meant by targeted marketing.
As an example, I've just ordered a MSI Wind with XP - why? Because the main reason for it is to work with my 3G HSDPA modem, that's why. Do I want a special Linux version with a built in modem? I do not. To get reliable reception, I need to be able to remote that modem up to 3M from the computer.
So here is an immediate point about the netbook market; I want to be able to remote my antenna so I don't have to sit on the car roof, or on my boat cabin, or on the side of the house which faces the phone mast, just to get a decent signal with a good S/N ratio. I'm a target market: mobile professional users living in rural areas. Currently Windows XP meets my needs and Linux doesn't. I am not interested in eye candy; I want a nice legible screen, and workable keyboard, a responsive operating system that does not need to spend the first 15 minutes of every day downloading anti virus updates and checking them, and the ability to get a 3G or ordinary wireless connection efficiently. Linux meets everything except the last, which unfortunately is the deal breaker. I don't even need long battery life because wherever I go I am normally near either mains or a 12V outlet.
Now, I know that this is not the "fault" of Linux. You will not find me wanting to replace either of my Linux servers with anything else, thank you. But real targeted marketing on the desktop would be to identify some real key user roles, and address their needs to make the result better than Windows, with no actual deal killers.
Mac OS X here is a red herring. Anybody as stupid as my neighbour who bought a Mac because he thought it would be "intuitive", and then found none of his expensive academic PC software would work, or the other one who bought a Mac because it was "easy to use" and still can't work out how to send an attachment, and forgets to label Office files with ".doc", is not going to have their problem fixed by Gnome or KDE any time soon (until there is a wetware upgrade...).
Netbooks are a possible market because their low cpu power makes anti-virus software a pain in the backside, and they will not run Vista. But that means that the focus has to be on communications, and efficient working with a smaller screen. To make that happen will need input from a company like Nokia or Samsung, who are not wedded to overpriced hardware like Apple or Sony.
A few years ago I investigated thermoelectric generators and contacted the suppliers. The unit is basically a thermoelectric generator, air-cooled, with a propane heater providing the hot side. Which at first sight looks very simple. The conversation went something like this.
"You don't want this, it's not economic."
"Nor is spending $10000 on a new generator just to produce an average 50 watts."
"It still isn't economic."
"Perhaps I'm an eccentric millionaire?"
"Still not worth it."
In fact, they flatly refused even to quote. Which suggests that current thermoelectric technology, with all the peripherals, is hugely expensive. So how is it suddenly going to be easy and cheap to stick this in a car exhaust?
Physical laws do not tell what safety factors are needed in airframe design, or how to specify piling for a building based on a given geology. Computer science does not tell you how to design a business application taking account of the needs of auditability, or how to measure the statistical limits of accuracy of data gathering. My professional qualifications are in the design of software for business needs.
In fact there are important physical and mathematical laws in information theory, which shade off into quantum mechanics, and many of the arguments around black holes have to do with the fate of information. But this is not relevant to whether you would trust me (or another person) to convert your specification for an on line banking website into something that did not lose money or create it from nowhere.
I can assure you that there are circumstances when we tender for jobs when the client wants to see the CVs and the qualifications of the key project personnel, and the letters BCS and IAP count for a lot more than the odd Java or Oracle certification. But then we design systems, and code and databases are only a small part of the whole.
I don't know the answer to your question but I suspect the answer is yes. The core issue is that our Government systems frequently fail owing to poor specification by unqualified civil servants, but investigators (including MPs like Geoffrey Bacon) run into the Civil Service Mafia and make litle progress. Eventually I suspect some politicians will realise that the potential benefits of getting it right are better than the kickbacks from sucking EDS's or Cap Gemini's bottoms. But, alas, it will be long after I retire.
To become a professional you do a theoretical degree to give you a toolkit and learn how to find stuff out, then you do your professional training. Works for physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants. You end up with two or more sets of postnominal letters, one of which is vocational. Why not software designers?
But the milli prefix is not capitalised, because capital M implies the Mega prefix - 1E6 rather than 1E-3.
The correct, pedantic version is "10 mk above Absolute Zero", or "10 millikelvins above Absolute Zero".
To keep our security agencies happy, quantum computers need to be almost impossible to make. The inventor of a really simple, cheap one is unlikely to have a successful career selling them to Joe Public.
I run both XP64 and Ubuntu 8.04 on identical hardware side by side (test lab) with a happy absence of problems on either, and the Server 2003 SP hs worked just fine on XP. Microsoft can build something that is solid and just works. So why don't they? (needs a naivete tag here). I would happily run either OS on my notebook but driver support is the problem in both cases. Why didn't Microsoft make the 64 bit switch when they could have done (I know, because the original Intel dual core couldn't run it...but that was years ago.)
The only thing wrong with MS 64 bit is that stupid name change to "Program Files (X86)" complete with vacuous spaces and brackets which should never appear in file names. Why didn't they leave it alone for back compatibility and just put all the 64 bit code in a folder called "Programs"? Time to stop, Kupfernigk, it's hot and you're rambling.
In the UK, the skilled working class people who were shafted by the Conservatives voted - conservative. Because? They wanted to be seen as middle class, and they thought the middle classes voted Conservative.
As Schiller said, only in German, against stupidity even the Gods struggle in vain.
This is in effect proposing to mandate a security means, and I for one would be very happy, with my sysadmin hat on, if security means WERE mandated on everything which gives access to any potentially sensitive resources, whether it be internet banking accounts or video games.
The next absurdity would be to demand that the locks be taken off cars, so that parents cannot prevent the kids from taking them.
I meant that bad ads drive out good ads generally as ads, not in terms of Google rankings. Although you are quite right that Google tries to make its directory functions work well, the number of people trying to outgame Google is much greater than the number of people inside Google. This inevitably pushes the equilibrium over towards the gamers. It's like spam; no matter how good filters get, most of the world's emails are still spam.
People over time get sick of the "Trying to make me buy stuff".
Example: When I was a kid magazines like Amateur Photographer contained piles of ads which were basically directory listings. Item, price, condition. They were in fact useful data for buyers. What's the nearest supplier who has a second hand Leica M3 in excellent condition? Nowadays, the ads in photo magazines are demand-creators; reams of eye candy. More advertising, in color, is needed to pay for the content. What does it tell me? Five guys have half a page of trying to sell me the same digital camera I don't want. Do they have what I do want? Hard to say.
Google's problem is it wants to be a directory, but its advertisers want to distort its market by directing irrelevant traffic in the hope of selling something. Like bad coinage, bad ads drive out good ads. (Just like eBay with the crooks driving out legitimate sellers.) Ultimately the public gets turned off. (Do I ever click on a right hand link on a google page? No. Do I ever click on the top 3 links? Hardly ever. That's experience, not prejudice.)
So, my 2c worth is that this may be nothing to do with the recession and everything to do with the great public having had time to realise what a scam much internet advertising is. Someone will have to come up with a better paradigm. If people will still pay money for print magazines, how much will they pay for a verified Google for instance (I would personally pay a $10/month for a shit-free search engine where abusers were removed from search results, no messing.)
The main downside of solar panels at home and EVs, apart from the cost, is that the EV is usually at work in the daytime. So the obvious place to put solar panels is on business sites where they could feed into EV chargers during hours of maximum sunlight.