It's not bad in Apple's case because you have no pressure to buy Apple's products. You don't like Apple's hardware, don't run it. While you don't get to enjoy the OS which they have tied to the hardware, you don't miss out on anything major. It's their right to sell their software on the platforms they want (and if you do want to run it on another PPC system, MacOnLinux will run OSX quite nicely).
With Microsoft, you're locked in in more than just the software. They want to lock you into their DRM, their security concepts, their productivity environments and they even want to lock in hardware which they don't manufacture (consider how TCP/Palladium can be used to stop the installation of OSS operating systems on Palladium-equipped hardware.
I'm not saying it is as bad as all that, but you see the difference...
I'm not surprised that PVRs are so popular in the US, with the amount of ads there are on US channels. Maybe it is not such a problem when you get used to it, but to Europeans visiting the US, the intrusiveness of the ads is overwhelming.
We're used to privately held channels which show a lot fewer ads, and still produce good programming. Take a look at Britain's ITV or Sky and the Dutch, German and Scandinavian channels to see fairly high-quality programming with at most 2 commercial breaks in a 30 minute programme, versus the four or more seen on some US channels.
Leaving aside the state/taxpayer-funded channels such as the BBC (which has no ads), the European model shows that reduced advertising still brings in enough revenue for good programming, while being a lot less annoying for the viewer.
Comparing this to the P900 is like comparing next year's BMW to this year's Merc... By the time that the 7700 is on the market, the P900 (which is little more than a restyling and update of the P800) will likely have been replaced by the real next-generation P-series phone.
Rumour has it that this will also be in a new form-factor, will have WiFi built in alongside the Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS/EDGE/whatever and will also include a much better 1 Mpixel camera (the one which the P800 fanatics wanted to see on the P900).
Of course, this is all unsubstantiated techno rumours, which we know are 90% wrong, but it serves to illustrate that this phone will not go up against the P900 but whatever comes next.
I'm not much of a fan of legislation, but it seems to me that in this case, a smart bit of government legislation that all junk CDs must use these disks would make a lot of sense.
It apalls me when I think of how many thousands of tonnes of AOL CDs alone there are littering our landfill sites (and other junk yards, such as the average computer geek's desk drawer!)
Making unsolicited CDs more expensive would also help us to be more sensible about how we send these things out... After all, how many AOL CDs do I actually need to get a year, considering that I will never, ever sign up with them!
If you're in Europe, check out ViaMichelin. The nice people who do the restaurant guides which are so good at leading us astray from our diets have a great mapping service.
Naturally, at each point on the itenerary, you can get information about restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. Of course, the only way to plan a trip properly is from restaurant to restaurant, so I find this very useful!
Due to the outstandingly positive response to recent media events, the American Teleworking Association has taken steps to protect its constitutional right to protection from unsolicited calls by registering with the National Do Not Call List.
"We were shocked by the intrusiveness of these unsolicited calls", commented Tim Searcy, ATA Executive Director. "None of us could get any work done! Our heartfelt thanks to the Federal Government for their foresight in creating such a resource to protect people like us!"
Returning to work today, ATA employees are looking forward to a day of uninterrupted work now that they are protected from such intrusive unsolicated calls.
Not having the necessary means to get the G5, I acquired a beige G3 recently as a way to have a desktop which complements my TiBook. At first, I planned to run Linux + MOL but thought I would give Jaguar a try first.
Surprisingly, once I had added enough RAM (512MB - those 66MHz SIMMs cost nothing nowadays) and a faster HDD, Jaguar was sufficiently snappy, certainly more so than WindowsXP would be on an x86 box from 1999! The built-in graphics is an issue, but once I added a PCI Radeon 7000, I really felt the difference. You can pick these up on eBay for a pittance (if you get the PC version, make sure that you have a Windows box so you can flash the card's firmware with the Mac firmware - this can't be done from the Mac itself).
Now, I have a great little MacOS X box which is sufficiently fast for me to use on a daily basis. The next thing to do is to see how well it handles Panther!
To be nice, I got in the habit of saying courrier electronique, but now that the Academie has got into their heads to prescribe more artificial changes to the French language I will switch to e-mail. Courriel... What a load of rubbish!
E-mail, e-mail, e-mail, e-mail....
I feel like the guy in Life of Brian who got stoned for shouting "Jehova, Jehova, Jehova". Wonder when they're going to start stoning me!
What this system seems to lack is the relationship to nearby houses.
For example, many post code systems are created so that every house on the same street has the same post code. This is useful in itself since it provides information about the region (with a purely location-based postcode, the adjacent post code could be a house on a street parallel!)
In addition, in many countries you don't actually have to enter the full address. The country code, post code and house number is all that is actually necessary (for example, 10 Downing Street in London could be addressed simply with GB SW1A 2AA 10). All the rest provides an excellent error check for when you mess up!
How many times have you heard a song but have no idea of who the artist is?
If you're as hopeless with names and/or often listen to one of those radio stations who insist on telling you the artist before the song, these sorts of sites are often the only way to find out the artist of a song to buy the CD!
Whilst I agree with the general feeling of distaste (pun intended!) regarding the use of this in making cheaper, lower quality foods better, there are a few areas where this could be very useful.
Consider, for example, children's medicines. Assuming this proves to be 100% safe (who knows nowadays), it would now be possible to make medicines which taste pleasant, isntead of using vast amounts of sugar to ineffectively mask the bitter flavour of the active ingredients.
Better both in flavour and in stopping our children's teeth rotting! (And, in case you didn't guess... I was always one of those kids who complained about the horrible taste of kids medicines!)
I could also see it being useful in taking basically tasteless or unpleasant soy or rice-based staple foods and making them more pleasant. This would allow the creation of pleasant tasting food which is both cheap and highly nutritional. I could see this being very useful in bringing better nutrition to poorer people.
Suppose it comes down to hoping that people will use this for good instead of lining their wallets... Unlikely, I guess!
Sadly, it pretty much is with GSM/GPRS-based phones
I don't know which GSM phone you've been using, but if I were you, I'd take it straight back! Seriously, I would be very unhappy if my mobile phone took more than a few seconds to connect. I've used pretty much the whole range of Ericsson and Nokia phones, all the time with European contracts, but roaming across Europe, Asia and the US, and have never seen this!
DS
Re:Consumer Marketing
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In my opinion a consumer will never notice the kernel version number.
Yeah, but you wouldn't believe the amount of IT managers who would. 3.0 could seriously help divorce Linux from some of the FUD that's been spread about 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4.
As a European, I am shocked by the amount of advertisement on US TV. It makes me wonder whether the broadcasters are killing their own business model by saturating your TV experience with commercials.
I guess the European reaction to adverts is more muted becuase we have so much less advertising - most commercial TV stations here show at most two to three blocks of adverts per 90 minute film or one to two blocks per 30 minute show, (in addition to the blocks in-between the shows themselves).
Now, maybe this is subjective, but I've also found that a lot of European adverts seem to be higher quality (specifically in the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia), possibly as a result of the competition for the smaller amount of advertising space available.
With that combination - a reasonable amount of higher quality adverts - I would pick advertising-based commercial TV over most of the other formats (even the BBC's licence-based funding model, which reduces the power of the viewer to vote economically when TV quality goes down, as the BBC's has recently).
I've done this a couple of times in the Netherlands where companies often buy up old mansions which are too expensive to live in due to the hideous property taxes there. What we normally do is design custom antennas which fit with existing building features.
For example, many older buildings have heavily painted metal rain gutters around the roof (I can't remember if Woolsthorpe Manor has this). What we did in one such building was to build two antennas from plastic sheeting made into a tube the same diameter as the gutter and disguised it with the same paint. Properly mounted with the cables running inside the gutters, it was nigh impossible to see that the antennas weren't part of the drainage system.
If the building you're working on doesn't offer this sort of feature, there are plenty of other options. For example, with the sorts of ranges you're talking about, it would actually be quite easy to do things like hide wire antennas in the putty of the windows, or run them across things like curtain rails or under the roof overhang. Over 100m a well positioned wire antenna could quite easily give you at least 2Mbps between these buildings.
You have plenty of options with disguising - it just pays to ignore the off-the-shelf stuff and make your own.
Designing a font is nigh-on an artform. For it to work properly, first of all, you need to create between 70 and 130 characters (as a minimum) which are all consistent, work together properly (i.e. fit properly next to and above/below each other) and, most importantly, look good.
That's which someone can "'own' a fucking font" (in your words)... It takes a lot of work (sometimes years to do a whole Unicode font) and costs a lot of money to do. Take a look at the majority of free fonts on the market - if they were developed for free, chances are they have a lot of characters missing (especially accented characters needed across the world outside the US) and a lot of bugs.
I have always had a simple rule: Never change jobs unless the new job brings a significant additional benefit. The reason for this is the additional trauma a job change creates (rupture in career steps visible in CV, changing to a new team, relearning new tasks/new company, etc) need to be outweighed by the job'benefits.
In the case of a counteroffer, as long as one is sufficiently appreciated from a professional standpoint (this is more to do with integrity than cash - they rarely are linked!), I believe it is often better to stay.
It all comes down to judging the integrity of the team and the management - are they the sort to look at this as a "betrayal" (which is naïve, to say the least, but common enough)? If that's the case, you're probably better of somewhere else. Otherwise, the old adage "better the devil you knw than the devil you don't" is a good way to think.
Think how much impact this will have on our daily lives. In the coming years, GPS will become part not only of our cars but also of our mobile phones, PDAs and watches. It will become a key part of our interaction with commerce, transport and health services and will be a secure way to get location-based services (it is passive, unlike GSM location info).
With all that in mind, can you blame the Europeans if they don't trust the US government that this will always remain free and open?
Well, what about an x86 Mac? Why should Apple remain with PowerPC? All the rest is already standard (PCI, USB, IEEE1394, IDE).
While I am a huge Mac fan, I can't afford to throw away the investment I've made in x86 s/w. However, I would pay the same price for an x86 Cube-type machine as I would have had to to get the sadly defunct PowerPC one.
The USA Today article actually misquotes Carly's statement regarding the merger. When asked for possible strategies should the merger fail, Carly's response was along the lines of "leaving the PC business is an option, but not a viable option" (can't remember the exact quote)...
I guess the journalist was in need of a good story to keep his editors happy.
Do you know why: Because we all need to choose an OS to run for our day-to-day apps as well.
I run Windows mostly because I work for a computer manufacturer which is very MS focused (even though they have their own OSs too). However, having used MacOS and BeOS I would be very tempted to get a MacOS X machine for day-to-day work just because I like its mix of stability, attractiveness and access for the power user (WindowsXP's DOS prompt cannot compete with a bash shell!)
Now if only it would run on x86 systems which I can get cheaply!!
Slashdot Mirror
It gets worse... I have 8Mbps DSL in France for 14.95 per month (basic idea is that everyone pays the same, whether they get 1Mbps or the max 8Mbps).
Thats less than £10 per month and with no download cap! Come on UK... Getting beaten by the US is bad enough, but by France? That's terrible!
(BTW: I'm a Brit in France, so I have mixed feelings on this one!)
Heh... You'd have no future in HP... They already charge us $75 for three colours... Try $1000 for 70!
It's not bad in Apple's case because you have no pressure to buy Apple's products. You don't like Apple's hardware, don't run it. While you don't get to enjoy the OS which they have tied to the hardware, you don't miss out on anything major. It's their right to sell their software on the platforms they want (and if you do want to run it on another PPC system, MacOnLinux will run OSX quite nicely).
With Microsoft, you're locked in in more than just the software. They want to lock you into their DRM, their security concepts, their productivity environments and they even want to lock in hardware which they don't manufacture (consider how TCP/Palladium can be used to stop the installation of OSS operating systems on Palladium-equipped hardware.
I'm not saying it is as bad as all that, but you see the difference...
WARNING: Eurocentric reply
I'm not surprised that PVRs are so popular in the US, with the amount of ads there are on US channels. Maybe it is not such a problem when you get used to it, but to Europeans visiting the US, the intrusiveness of the ads is overwhelming.
We're used to privately held channels which show a lot fewer ads, and still produce good programming. Take a look at Britain's ITV or Sky and the Dutch, German and Scandinavian channels to see fairly high-quality programming with at most 2 commercial breaks in a 30 minute programme, versus the four or more seen on some US channels.
Leaving aside the state/taxpayer-funded channels such as the BBC (which has no ads), the European model shows that reduced advertising still brings in enough revenue for good programming, while being a lot less annoying for the viewer.
Comparing this to the P900 is like comparing next year's BMW to this year's Merc... By the time that the 7700 is on the market, the P900 (which is little more than a restyling and update of the P800) will likely have been replaced by the real next-generation P-series phone.
Rumour has it that this will also be in a new form-factor, will have WiFi built in alongside the Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS/EDGE/whatever and will also include a much better 1 Mpixel camera (the one which the P800 fanatics wanted to see on the P900).
Of course, this is all unsubstantiated techno rumours, which we know are 90% wrong, but it serves to illustrate that this phone will not go up against the P900 but whatever comes next.
It apalls me when I think of how many thousands of tonnes of AOL CDs alone there are littering our landfill sites (and other junk yards, such as the average computer geek's desk drawer!)
Making unsolicited CDs more expensive would also help us to be more sensible about how we send these things out... After all, how many AOL CDs do I actually need to get a year, considering that I will never, ever sign up with them!
Naturally, at each point on the itenerary, you can get information about restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. Of course, the only way to plan a trip properly is from restaurant to restaurant, so I find this very useful!
Wow... 3.3s from 0 to 60mph. That's about the same as the average Windows boot to bluescreen time!
PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
Due to the outstandingly positive response to recent media events, the American Teleworking Association has taken steps to protect its constitutional right to protection from unsolicited calls by registering with the National Do Not Call List.
"We were shocked by the intrusiveness of these unsolicited calls", commented Tim Searcy, ATA Executive Director. "None of us could get any work done! Our heartfelt thanks to the Federal Government for their foresight in creating such a resource to protect people like us!"
Returning to work today, ATA employees are looking forward to a day of uninterrupted work now that they are protected from such intrusive unsolicated calls.
Not having the necessary means to get the G5, I acquired a beige G3 recently as a way to have a desktop which complements my TiBook. At first, I planned to run Linux + MOL but thought I would give Jaguar a try first.
Surprisingly, once I had added enough RAM (512MB - those 66MHz SIMMs cost nothing nowadays) and a faster HDD, Jaguar was sufficiently snappy, certainly more so than WindowsXP would be on an x86 box from 1999! The built-in graphics is an issue, but once I added a PCI Radeon 7000, I really felt the difference. You can pick these up on eBay for a pittance (if you get the PC version, make sure that you have a Windows box so you can flash the card's firmware with the Mac firmware - this can't be done from the Mac itself).
Now, I have a great little MacOS X box which is sufficiently fast for me to use on a daily basis. The next thing to do is to see how well it handles Panther!
To be nice, I got in the habit of saying courrier electronique, but now that the Academie has got into their heads to prescribe more artificial changes to the French language I will switch to e-mail. Courriel... What a load of rubbish!
E-mail, e-mail, e-mail, e-mail....
I feel like the guy in Life of Brian who got stoned for shouting "Jehova, Jehova, Jehova". Wonder when they're going to start stoning me!
What this system seems to lack is the relationship to nearby houses.
For example, many post code systems are created so that every house on the same street has the same post code. This is useful in itself since it provides information about the region (with a purely location-based postcode, the adjacent post code could be a house on a street parallel!)
In addition, in many countries you don't actually have to enter the full address. The country code, post code and house number is all that is actually necessary (for example, 10 Downing Street in London could be addressed simply with GB SW1A 2AA 10). All the rest provides an excellent error check for when you mess up!
DS
If you're as hopeless with names and/or often listen to one of those radio stations who insist on telling you the artist before the song, these sorts of sites are often the only way to find out the artist of a song to buy the CD!
Shooting themselves and us in the foot, as usual.
Whilst I agree with the general feeling of distaste (pun intended!) regarding the use of this in making cheaper, lower quality foods better, there are a few areas where this could be very useful.
Consider, for example, children's medicines. Assuming this proves to be 100% safe (who knows nowadays), it would now be possible to make medicines which taste pleasant, isntead of using vast amounts of sugar to ineffectively mask the bitter flavour of the active ingredients.
Better both in flavour and in stopping our children's teeth rotting! (And, in case you didn't guess... I was always one of those kids who complained about the horrible taste of kids medicines!)
I could also see it being useful in taking basically tasteless or unpleasant soy or rice-based staple foods and making them more pleasant. This would allow the creation of pleasant tasting food which is both cheap and highly nutritional. I could see this being very useful in bringing better nutrition to poorer people.
Suppose it comes down to hoping that people will use this for good instead of lining their wallets... Unlikely, I guess!
I don't know which GSM phone you've been using, but if I were you, I'd take it straight back! Seriously, I would be very unhappy if my mobile phone took more than a few seconds to connect. I've used pretty much the whole range of Ericsson and Nokia phones, all the time with European contracts, but roaming across Europe, Asia and the US, and have never seen this!
DS
In my opinion a consumer will never notice the kernel version number.
Yeah, but you wouldn't believe the amount of IT managers who would. 3.0 could seriously help divorce Linux from some of the FUD that's been spread about 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4.
DS
As a European, I am shocked by the amount of advertisement on US TV. It makes me wonder whether the broadcasters are killing their own business model by saturating your TV experience with commercials.
I guess the European reaction to adverts is more muted becuase we have so much less advertising - most commercial TV stations here show at most two to three blocks of adverts per 90 minute film or one to two blocks per 30 minute show, (in addition to the blocks in-between the shows themselves).
Now, maybe this is subjective, but I've also found that a lot of European adverts seem to be higher quality (specifically in the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia), possibly as a result of the competition for the smaller amount of advertising space available.
With that combination - a reasonable amount of higher quality adverts - I would pick advertising-based commercial TV over most of the other formats (even the BBC's licence-based funding model, which reduces the power of the viewer to vote economically when TV quality goes down, as the BBC's has recently).
DS
I've done this a couple of times in the Netherlands where companies often buy up old mansions which are too expensive to live in due to the hideous property taxes there. What we normally do is design custom antennas which fit with existing building features.
For example, many older buildings have heavily painted metal rain gutters around the roof (I can't remember if Woolsthorpe Manor has this). What we did in one such building was to build two antennas from plastic sheeting made into a tube the same diameter as the gutter and disguised it with the same paint. Properly mounted with the cables running inside the gutters, it was nigh impossible to see that the antennas weren't part of the drainage system.
If the building you're working on doesn't offer this sort of feature, there are plenty of other options. For example, with the sorts of ranges you're talking about, it would actually be quite easy to do things like hide wire antennas in the putty of the windows, or run them across things like curtain rails or under the roof overhang. Over 100m a well positioned wire antenna could quite easily give you at least 2Mbps between these buildings.
You have plenty of options with disguising - it just pays to ignore the off-the-shelf stuff and make your own.
David Shirley
Designing a font is nigh-on an artform. For it to work properly, first of all, you need to create between 70 and 130 characters (as a minimum) which are all consistent, work together properly (i.e. fit properly next to and above/below each other) and, most importantly, look good.
That's which someone can "'own' a fucking font" (in your words)... It takes a lot of work (sometimes years to do a whole Unicode font) and costs a lot of money to do. Take a look at the majority of free fonts on the market - if they were developed for free, chances are they have a lot of characters missing (especially accented characters needed across the world outside the US) and a lot of bugs.
I have always had a simple rule: Never change jobs unless the new job brings a significant additional benefit. The reason for this is the additional trauma a job change creates (rupture in career steps visible in CV, changing to a new team, relearning new tasks/new company, etc) need to be outweighed by the job'benefits.
In the case of a counteroffer, as long as one is sufficiently appreciated from a professional standpoint (this is more to do with integrity than cash - they rarely are linked!), I believe it is often better to stay.
It all comes down to judging the integrity of the team and the management - are they the sort to look at this as a "betrayal" (which is naïve, to say the least, but common enough)? If that's the case, you're probably better of somewhere else. Otherwise, the old adage "better the devil you knw than the devil you don't" is a good way to think.
>I> ???
...and they tell us to do a preview?? ;)
Think how much impact this will have on our daily lives. In the coming years, GPS will become part not only of our cars but also of our mobile phones, PDAs and watches. It will become a key part of our interaction with commerce, transport and health services and will be a secure way to get location-based services (it is passive, unlike GSM location info).
With all that in mind, can you blame the Europeans if they don't trust the US government that this will always remain free and open?
Well, what about an x86 Mac? Why should Apple remain with PowerPC? All the rest is already standard (PCI, USB, IEEE1394, IDE).
While I am a huge Mac fan, I can't afford to throw away the investment I've made in x86 s/w. However, I would pay the same price for an x86 Cube-type machine as I would have had to to get the sadly defunct PowerPC one.
I guess the journalist was in need of a good story to keep his editors happy.
Do you know why: Because we all need to choose an OS to run for our day-to-day apps as well.
I run Windows mostly because I work for a computer manufacturer which is very MS focused (even though they have their own OSs too). However, having used MacOS and BeOS I would be very tempted to get a MacOS X machine for day-to-day work just because I like its mix of stability, attractiveness and access for the power user (WindowsXP's DOS prompt cannot compete with a bash shell!)
Now if only it would run on x86 systems which I can get cheaply!!