This will be how we make the first self-erecting buildings of our Moon base , with no astronauts present until they are ready for occupation.
Also it will be how our explorers on Mars carry their emergency shelters, for when they have to wait to be rescued after digging their rover into a sandpit.
How young are you, friend? The quote does not refer to that piece of Johnny-come-lately unarchitected junk called the PC. The IBMer referred to was Tom Watson Senior, talking in the 50's about the IBM 600. At that point in time, the price of a computer was such that only very few (perhaps 5) customers would both have the dough and see any reason why they should buy one. Back then, no-one had any idea at all about how to justify the purchase by displacing costs, never mind justify by competitive advantage.
What happened next: not 5, but 18 customers bought one. So IBM designed a bigger faster model, the 650. The pricing team begged to set the price on the assumption that 23 customers would buy one. Finance refused to allow any assumption other than that the 18 customers for the 600 would buy a replacement 650. In fact, over 600 were sold of the model 650. This brought in such a huge mountain of money that IBM could bet on the design of a range of compatible models, the System/360. The rest is history - if you look at the horizon, you can still see the peaks of the mountain range of money that the S/360 brought in.
This site IT4Communities puts IT-skilled volunteers together with British charities who need them. Check out the list of current projects, see if there is anything suitable.
A client of mine, for whom I had built a website, was in the middle of conversation with a potential buyer of his specialist services (diamond drilling). The job would be worth several thousand pounds GBP. The conversation was going really well, the buyer was convinced, and asked for his email address to exchange contract documents. My client, forgetting that he now had a new email address that reflected the specialist service, gave his old generalist email address (builder). The buyer immediately chose to disbelieve that he was a certified specialist, and withdrew the offer of work.
It was real, but hyped. None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
However, we knew that all our systems had to interact correctly for the business to deliver correctly. I was working as a contractor for a major airline, and we knew that lots of our most fundamental systems had been written in the 60's and 70's. They HAD to be checked, and HAD to be tested through the full extent of the workflow.
Moreover, it was always journalist bullshit that it was all going to happen at the stroke of midnight. There were plenty of opportunities for problems to occur at other times. A major food and clothing retailer started rejecting shipments of canned food in September 1999 because the dates on the cans said the Sell-By date was 100 years ago. This really happened.
And yet stuff DID happen at the stroke of midnight - and that news got suppressed because it was embarrassing, and anyway most of the incidents were minor - we had successfully fixed everything major.
OK, I'm showing off - I lived in Sweden 18 years, became fluent in Swedish, and I'm guessing (from his name) that Linus is mother tongue Swedish rather than Finnish.
But we're raising a glass and shouting "Skål" and "Gippis" and so on...
The "thin client" meme goes back to well before 1993 (when the phrase was coined), and has never caught on. All the reasons why it did not catch on still apply. Mostly, the saving on hardware cost gets lost in the overall cost of the project, plus, the flexibility of conventional PCs (tuning the client installation to the needs of the specific department, and retuning every time the business need changes) has a value that massively outweighs the saving in hardware cost.
Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past (yes, I know it's a paraphrase).
There are lots of small businesses that will be damaged or made unprofitable. When taking low volumes of payments, where a cheque is much more cost-effective than taking cards, for instance the weekends-only kind of bed & breakfast - getting a card terminal costs £400 and just isn't worth it - that £400 represents our profit for an entire summer.
Don't know - there was one specific location we wanted, it was in the coverage map, but did not work even on 3G, still less HSDPA. No HSDPA was a show-stopper for us, so we returned it and cancelled the contract. [here was nothing wrong with the device or the install - it worked fine in other useless locations].
They are politicians - part of the required skill set is media-savvy. Also, the Internet is not the only medium.
And they do get paid - this is a town council, not a parish council. Quote from a Mail Online story (yes I know) "Local councillors pocketed pay rises of double the level of inflation last year, a study has revealed. Nearly 20,000 picked up an average of £9,300 in 'allowances', the basic pay they get from town halls. In some local authorities, the sum was more than £20,000 a year."
In UK, it IS an offence to do this. Here's the relevant sections of our Data Protection Act 1998
Schedule 1 Part 1 Principle 7
Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
Section 61 Liability of Directors para 1
Where an offence under this Act has been committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of any director, manager, secretary or similar officer of the body corporate or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he as well as the body corporate shall be guilty of that offence and be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly
What emblem is it the Jews are making Palestinians wear? I wasn't aware of this, because it hasn't been mentioned in any of the media I follow (which includes BBC and non-Abglo-Saxon sources).
Could you also please clarify whether your word "Jews" refers to all Jews, or just to "Israelis"?
No, really, I want to understand what you mean by what you say.
>However, it seems to suggest that based on all of this data the ISA will only give a "thumbs-up"or a "thumbs-down"
Currently the organisation requesting a CRB Check can ask either for a plain CRB check, or an "Enhanced" check.
The plain vanilla check just gives thumbs-up or thumbs-down (I understand)
The "Enhanced" check contains everything the police know about you (or whoever you get confused with) including unchecked allegations on which the police took no action (aka malicious gossip).
Famous case recently when an excellent teacher in line for promotion to head not only didn't get the job, but was sacked on the basis of false accusations by a blackmailing pupil at a previous school, which the present school found in an"Enhanced" CRB report, and they believed it.
Dear reader, you'll have noticed that I have put the word "Enhanced" in quotes throughout.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be how we make the first self-erecting buildings of our Moon base , with no astronauts present until they are ready for occupation. Also it will be how our explorers on Mars carry their emergency shelters, for when they have to wait to be rescued after digging their rover into a sandpit.
How young are you, friend? The quote does not refer to that piece of Johnny-come-lately unarchitected junk called the PC. The IBMer referred to was Tom Watson Senior, talking in the 50's about the IBM 600. At that point in time, the price of a computer was such that only very few (perhaps 5) customers would both have the dough and see any reason why they should buy one. Back then, no-one had any idea at all about how to justify the purchase by displacing costs, never mind justify by competitive advantage.
What happened next: not 5, but 18 customers bought one. So IBM designed a bigger faster model, the 650. The pricing team begged to set the price on the assumption that 23 customers would buy one. Finance refused to allow any assumption other than that the 18 customers for the 600 would buy a replacement 650. In fact, over 600 were sold of the model 650. This brought in such a huge mountain of money that IBM could bet on the design of a range of compatible models, the System/360. The rest is history - if you look at the horizon, you can still see the peaks of the mountain range of money that the S/360 brought in.
This site IT4Communities puts IT-skilled volunteers together with British charities who need them. Check out the list of current projects, see if there is anything suitable.
Thames Barrier? Pah. It's already too low. See this article in The Independent
1. Get yourself a current tide table.
2. Do not use the Tube trains around high water.
A client of mine, for whom I had built a website, was in the middle of conversation with a potential buyer of his specialist services (diamond drilling). The job would be worth several thousand pounds GBP. The conversation was going really well, the buyer was convinced, and asked for his email address to exchange contract documents. My client, forgetting that he now had a new email address that reflected the specialist service, gave his old generalist email address (builder). The buyer immediately chose to disbelieve that he was a certified specialist, and withdrew the offer of work.
Their thing "saves you time by making it easy to discover new software, then download and install with a single click".
That's a description of Synaptic and apt-get.
It was real, but hyped. None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
However, we knew that all our systems had to interact correctly for the business to deliver correctly. I was working as a contractor for a major airline, and we knew that lots of our most fundamental systems had been written in the 60's and 70's. They HAD to be checked, and HAD to be tested through the full extent of the workflow.
Moreover, it was always journalist bullshit that it was all going to happen at the stroke of midnight. There were plenty of opportunities for problems to occur at other times. A major food and clothing retailer started rejecting shipments of canned food in September 1999 because the dates on the cans said the Sell-By date was 100 years ago. This really happened.
And yet stuff DID happen at the stroke of midnight - and that news got suppressed because it was embarrassing, and anyway most of the incidents were minor - we had successfully fixed everything major.
Hoho, I cheated of course. Typed them into Notepad, then cut-and-pasted.
Ja må han leva uti hundrade år!
OK, I'm showing off - I lived in Sweden 18 years, became fluent in Swedish, and I'm guessing (from his name) that Linus is mother tongue Swedish rather than Finnish.
But we're raising a glass and shouting "Skål" and "Gippis" and so on...
The "thin client" meme goes back to well before 1993 (when the phrase was coined), and has never caught on. All the reasons why it did not catch on still apply. Mostly, the saving on hardware cost gets lost in the overall cost of the project, plus, the flexibility of conventional PCs (tuning the client installation to the needs of the specific department, and retuning every time the business need changes) has a value that massively outweighs the saving in hardware cost. Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past (yes, I know it's a paraphrase).
I am intrigued. Which UK bank/payments processor offers that capability?
There are lots of small businesses that will be damaged or made unprofitable. When taking low volumes of payments, where a cheque is much more cost-effective than taking cards, for instance the weekends-only kind of bed & breakfast - getting a card terminal costs £400 and just isn't worth it - that £400 represents our profit for an entire summer.
Don't know - there was one specific location we wanted, it was in the coverage map, but did not work even on 3G, still less HSDPA. No HSDPA was a show-stopper for us, so we returned it and cancelled the contract. [here was nothing wrong with the device or the install - it worked fine in other useless locations].
Don't get the one from 3 Mobile Broadband. It's dirt cheap - because the coverage is poor outside central cities.
Mostly X-rays, IIRC. In very large quantities.
I love the taste of fried physicist in the morning...
They are politicians - part of the required skill set is media-savvy. Also, the Internet is not the only medium.
And they do get paid - this is a town council, not a parish council. Quote from a Mail Online story (yes I know) "Local councillors pocketed pay rises of double the level of inflation last year, a study has revealed. Nearly 20,000 picked up an average of £9,300 in 'allowances', the basic pay they get from town halls. In some local authorities, the sum was more than £20,000 a year."
Mod parent up, Insightful
And what prevented those councillors from telling their side of the story?
Clearly they had no real response to this blogger, and so just folded.
Leaves me wondering whether they were guilty or merely incompetent.
In UK, it IS an offence to do this. Here's the relevant sections of our Data Protection Act 1998
Schedule 1 Part 1 Principle 7
Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
Section 61 Liability of Directors para 1
Where an offence under this Act has been committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of any director, manager, secretary or similar officer of the body corporate or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he as well as the body corporate shall be guilty of that offence and be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly
Thanks for enlightening me. I had missed seeing that.
Homo sapiens, huh. Whoever thought that up was ignoring the evidence.
What emblem is it the Jews are making Palestinians wear? I wasn't aware of this, because it hasn't been mentioned in any of the media I follow (which includes BBC and non-Abglo-Saxon sources).
Could you also please clarify whether your word "Jews" refers to all Jews, or just to "Israelis"?
No, really, I want to understand what you mean by what you say.
>However, it seems to suggest that based on all of this data the ISA will only give a "thumbs-up"or a "thumbs-down"
Currently the organisation requesting a CRB Check can ask either for a plain CRB check, or an "Enhanced" check.
The plain vanilla check just gives thumbs-up or thumbs-down (I understand)
The "Enhanced" check contains everything the police know about you (or whoever you get confused with) including unchecked allegations on which the police took no action (aka malicious gossip). Famous case recently when an excellent teacher in line for promotion to head not only didn't get the job, but was sacked on the basis of false accusations by a blackmailing pupil at a previous school, which the present school found in an"Enhanced" CRB report, and they believed it.
Dear reader, you'll have noticed that I have put the word "Enhanced" in quotes throughout.
WHOOSH yourself.
I'm taking about what the Nazis did to the Jews before the concentration camps were created.
Interesting that you refer to camp inmates are "offenders". Where did that come from?
>I propose a system where offenders are clearly marked using clean, unique identifiers, worn in a visible place.
How about a yellow six-pointed star?
Not funny, and not intended to be funny.