And because we give them away free to secondary school children.
Been doing it for two years now here in Hartlepool, in NE England, all secondary kids get an Acer Eee-PC
Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds and lots of other places, and enough people like me who make a slice of my residential bandwidth available on unsecured Wi-Fi, mean there's very few places they can't be used.
It still looks strange though, loads of kids silently munching the junk food they've bought at the shops opposite my house to escape the diet-nazi's new school meal regime, each with a burger in one hand and a net book in the other.
And the lack of Windows seems to be only a problem for the school's staff, the kids learn Linux in no time.
It's already mandatory in the EU (and Japan I believe) for auto manufacturers to make all diagnostic code information which affects the "function or efficiency of the vehicle" freely available.
Now, while the EU obviously has no bearing on the US, auto manufacture is a global industry, standard parts abound, and most US manufacturers have one or more European brands in their stables. You'd have to have some kind of Canute complex to think that if you were to try and charge the US drivers for this information, they wouldn't just turn to the net and ask their European associates for it.
Mine's way lower tech than that, and yet is fine to run 4 VM's all day every day
2 x 1 gig Xeon's on a dual processor workstation motherboard bought off ebay, 4Gb RAM because that's the max the motherboard will address, two x 250Gb IDE drives. Cost of all this, under US$250
If you want a rig for "experimentation" then you don't need much more, it's about running and configuring software for me, a bit of functional testing etc, not high volume data throughput. It scales nicely too - I virtually model my server room setup on this rig, and run some data through it - the response is the same as running x1000 as much data through the real thing because each component is effectively strangled slightly by low system resources, as opposed to by sheer workload, but they are analogous from a performance assessment viewpoint.
They do. That's why you see such low quality video feeds in a lot of news reports now - they're being sent by webcam/mobile phone standard transmission methods over the net
20% of my bandwidth is made available to anyone who wants to use it through an open wireless connection. I do this because it doesn't cost me any extra money, and at the time I installed the equipment there were no free access hotspots in our area.
I think I'd be pissed though if some unconnected third party started charging people to access it, which is effectively what Inner Fence has done - found a way to make money from a third party's free service.
I don't regard it as immoral, just making the point that our wealth does affect/impact the poverty of the world's poorer peoples. While I agree with this
To think that keeping the poor poor is in the best interests of the rich is to succumb to extremely short-term thinking
it is unfortunately true that short term thinking is more the norm than we realise. For companies the important thing is year on year dividend to shareholders, while long term plans have to be made to ensure this happens, focus is short term - next year's AGM
I cite DSG because they are just a retailer, so their business model depends on a relatively large gap between the wages of the manufacturing country and that of the end customer
Anyway, as for (im)morality, I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense
Not only that, it's criminal. Or at least the Nuremburg war crime tribunals would have us believe so, since the charges of atrocities against civilians in occupied France cited many instances of the Nazi's destroying whole streets or villages in response to the actions of one "terrorist", apparently this was a "crime against humanity"
But c'mon, be realistic, nothing is going to change over there as long as the US is incapable of levelling any kind of criticism under any circumstance. It's an unfortunate truth that if the Israeli army command got up one morning and decided it was going to put every Arab child under 12 through a garden waste shredder alive and broadcast it on national TV then the US administration would still be silent. We've watched TV pictures of them shooting at an unarmed child on a rooftop, seen them machine gun a BBC cameraman at point blank range live on CNN, watched them bomb the UN, rake hospitals with machine gun fire and said/done nothing.
You are looking for some kind of morality, some universal right/wrong philosophy that governs the actions of the Western military powers, and there just isn't one. Currently the decision has been made for whichever reason you care to believe that whatever they want to do they can get on with it, and until the White House changes its mind nothing will change.
If you want to change the world, begin with something you can realistically impact - Iraq, Afghanistan, 3rd World debt.................
Actually, that a little over-simplistic, and fails to take into account the impact wealth has on those who surround you. In many cases our wealth is the direct cause of their poverty, insomuch as the actions we have taken to secure the continuance of our wealth have removed their opportunity to develop and progress to our level
Poverty outside the Western hemisphere is vital in maintaining our wealth. If everyone on the planet had the same standard of living, and wages, as the average American, the cost of the raw materials we import would cripple us.
How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.
Anything to do with Timothy sharing nationality with Vendor B I wonder? Either way, one mjst ask the question - Timothy, why did you name vendor A but not vendor B?
You plug the entry points the vermin are using. For some reason they dislike the feel of the stuff and shy away from it.
It's effective when you're running cables in closed ducts, but in my experience you'll be plugging entry points forever, and always be a dozen or so holes behind the rats.
Cut off the food supply, spend more on extermination, these are the only long term effective solutions
The key to ANPR success in the UK, and why it would be much more difficult to achieve in the US, is contrast.
The typeface, size, letter spacing, text and background colours are rigidly defined in law. Front only black on white is permitted, rear only black on yellow.
OCR is so much easier when you don't have to read purple text on a blue background, or yellow text on a white one
You can buy blank cards with mag strips on the back for making key cards for mag strip operated door locks.
There's a jig available for the Epson printer CD caddy for doing the credit card sized mini-cd. I use an R200, and the jig hold the CD by its edge, doesn't use the hole in the middle, so doesn't matter of there isn't one
You'd be surprised just how convincing the output from this combination can be.
If you need one with a chip embedded, for visual effect, then there are may suppliers of printable smart cards out there. I got some lovely unprinted Atmega 163's off eBay for playing around with cable TV - they worked a treat for this purpose too.
That would be the America where everyone of every race and origin is treated with love and acceptance, where there has never been any kind of discrimination of any kind, and where migrant workers are loved like long lost brothers and sisters. That would be the America populated by people who know about the world beyond its borders, which doesn't have "World" series' for all kind of sports that exist only within its own borders, that doesn't imprison people without trial, that doesn't torture prisoners of war, that obeys the Geneva conventions, that doesn't have the highest per capita murder rate in the Western world, the highest incidence of narcotic abuse in the Western world, and the highest per capita prison population in the world.
Do please tell me where this America is, me & my Korean and Arab friends would like to visit for a vacation.
The ribbon is such a bug bear to users here that I routinely remove Office 2007 from new PC's bought with it bundled and replace it with 2003. Users hate it, they feel they haven't got the time at work to be learning a new user interface when they could (and should) be just doing the work
Cool, hip and trendiness have no place in business, and especially not in a time of global recession where we need above all to be maximising productivity. What we need is a sensible Microsoft producing evolving series' of software in a predictable and incredibly boring manner. I want each new version of Office to be the same, but better. If it's completely different from the user's perspective, as Office 2007 is, then it's really not Office any more, it's something else, and if I wanted something else, I wouldn't have been using Office all these years.
Isn't this trust issue the core reason why, despite the hype, the cloud concept is unlikely to succeed?
We're a UK company, with big US competitors, much bigger than us, and as the recession bites I can envisage trade and industry departments of all countries wondering what use they could make of anti-terror legislation to gather information which would help their own domestic companies. It's no great leap of the imagination to see a situation where my bids and costings for my primary customers leave Google's servers and end up in the hands of my US competitors.
It's not just a US problem, but primarily the cloud will be controlled by US companies such as Google, and for those of us outside the US that has to be a worry, or at the very least inject a note of caution.
I suppose all good sysadmins have a degree of paranoia, but the cloud is all about trust, and I just can't see why anyone would.
My outsiders perception is that California leads the US in environmental legislation, and certainly it has enacted laws similar to the WEEE directive of the EEC. Our press says that similar laws are being enacted by other states and on a federal level, hence the idea of environmental legislation rooting in California and spreading across the US.
But surely that makes the assumption that people dispose of product at end of life, which is not the case. People most often dispose of working tech product because technological advance makes them obsolete long before they reach end of life.
Cellphones are a great example, they must have quite a few years service life, 10 or more, but I always change mine every year, and I expect most people do the same.
But from the point of view of lead content, plasma screens can be thought of as an array of pixel sized CRT's - the lead content by weight is similar. Disposing of lead containing articles such as CRT's in the UK is a costly nightmare and I was somewhat surprise by the analysis, and then cost of disposal, of our waste plasma screens.
There are lead free plasma screens now commonly available, but the first of these was only developed in late 2006 by Panasonic, and their adoption has by no means been universal.
LCD's are mostly lit by cold cathode fluorescent lamps containing elemental mercury, i.e. not just mercury salts, but some mercury metal too.
The change to LCD/Plasma has not eliminated the toxicity of e-waste, merely changed the nature of the toxins. It's work in the EEC such as the WEEE & ROHS directives, and similar regulations brought in primarily by California then spread through the rest of the US to some degree, that are making areal impact.
So if I toss my garbage in your garden, or pick up my dog's mess and put it in your mailbox then it's your fault for not preventing me from doing so?
Poor people desperate for money will accept extraordinary levels of personal risk in order to earn a living. At the beginning of the last century in the US it was often the case that low paid workers had appalling and dangerous working conditions, suffered crippling industrial disease etc. Then regulators stepped in and said that no man should be subjected to such conditions and enacted health, safety and welfare legislation to make it so. Child labour was common, and the wealthy factory owners ruthlessly exploited their workers whose poverty forced them to accept this exploitation. Society became more civilised and such exploitation is now regarded as morally wrong.
Exploiting the poor of other countries is no less morally reprehensible than exploiting the poverty of US citizens as was done in the Victorian era.
I guess the whole UI regression was lost on people that still think putting tabs 'in' the freaking browser instead of on the taskbar actually makes things easier.
Maybe for some people (like me) it is. Maybe it's just an is2ue of personal preference, not some significant evolutionary stepping stone, so don't get so het up about it.
In the UK it is illegal not to decrypt on demand. There is no burden of proof on the existence of encrypted information either beyond the word of the police. Furthermore, you are by default gagged from discussing the demand for decryption with any third party, including your legal representation.
These necessary provisions keep us all safe and secure from the terrorists who are everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
And because we give them away free to secondary school children.
Been doing it for two years now here in Hartlepool, in NE England, all secondary kids get an Acer Eee-PC
Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds and lots of other places, and enough people like me who make a slice of my residential bandwidth available on unsecured Wi-Fi, mean there's very few places they can't be used.
It still looks strange though, loads of kids silently munching the junk food they've bought at the shops opposite my house to escape the diet-nazi's new school meal regime, each with a burger in one hand and a net book in the other.
And the lack of Windows seems to be only a problem for the school's staff, the kids learn Linux in no time.
It's already mandatory in the EU (and Japan I believe) for auto manufacturers to make all diagnostic code information which affects the "function or efficiency of the vehicle" freely available.
Now, while the EU obviously has no bearing on the US, auto manufacture is a global industry, standard parts abound, and most US manufacturers have one or more European brands in their stables. You'd have to have some kind of Canute complex to think that if you were to try and charge the US drivers for this information, they wouldn't just turn to the net and ask their European associates for it.
Push the gas tax through the roof
Of the roughly $8 a gallon we pay here in the UK for gas, $7 of that is tax
Mine's way lower tech than that, and yet is fine to run 4 VM's all day every day
2 x 1 gig Xeon's on a dual processor workstation motherboard bought off ebay, 4Gb RAM because that's the max the motherboard will address, two x 250Gb IDE drives. Cost of all this, under US$250
If you want a rig for "experimentation" then you don't need much more, it's about running and configuring software for me, a bit of functional testing etc, not high volume data throughput. It scales nicely too - I virtually model my server room setup on this rig, and run some data through it - the response is the same as running x1000 as much data through the real thing because each component is effectively strangled slightly by low system resources, as opposed to by sheer workload, but they are analogous from a performance assessment viewpoint.
They do. That's why you see such low quality video feeds in a lot of news reports now - they're being sent by webcam/mobile phone standard transmission methods over the net
And why to we even allow fisherman to drag crap along the sea bottom? I thought industrial level trawling went out years ago?
And what made you think? Even scallop dredging is still big business (even in the US), and they're even less selective than trawling
20% of my bandwidth is made available to anyone who wants to use it through an open wireless connection. I do this because it doesn't cost me any extra money, and at the time I installed the equipment there were no free access hotspots in our area.
I think I'd be pissed though if some unconnected third party started charging people to access it, which is effectively what Inner Fence has done - found a way to make money from a third party's free service.
I don't regard it as immoral, just making the point that our wealth does affect/impact the poverty of the world's poorer peoples. While I agree with this
To think that keeping the poor poor is in the best interests of the rich is to succumb to extremely short-term thinking
it is unfortunately true that short term thinking is more the norm than we realise. For companies the important thing is year on year dividend to shareholders, while long term plans have to be made to ensure this happens, focus is short term - next year's AGM
I cite DSG because they are just a retailer, so their business model depends on a relatively large gap between the wages of the manufacturing country and that of the end customer
Anyway, as for (im)morality, I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense
It's disproportionate and ineffective.
Not only that, it's criminal. Or at least the Nuremburg war crime tribunals would have us believe so, since the charges of atrocities against civilians in occupied France cited many instances of the Nazi's destroying whole streets or villages in response to the actions of one "terrorist", apparently this was a "crime against humanity"
But c'mon, be realistic, nothing is going to change over there as long as the US is incapable of levelling any kind of criticism under any circumstance. It's an unfortunate truth that if the Israeli army command got up one morning and decided it was going to put every Arab child under 12 through a garden waste shredder alive and broadcast it on national TV then the US administration would still be silent. We've watched TV pictures of them shooting at an unarmed child on a rooftop, seen them machine gun a BBC cameraman at point blank range live on CNN, watched them bomb the UN, rake hospitals with machine gun fire and said/done nothing.
You are looking for some kind of morality, some universal right/wrong philosophy that governs the actions of the Western military powers, and there just isn't one. Currently the decision has been made for whichever reason you care to believe that whatever they want to do they can get on with it, and until the White House changes its mind nothing will change.
If you want to change the world, begin with something you can realistically impact - Iraq, Afghanistan, 3rd World debt.................
Your wealth does not cause my poverty.
Actually, that a little over-simplistic, and fails to take into account the impact wealth has on those who surround you. In many cases our wealth is the direct cause of their poverty, insomuch as the actions we have taken to secure the continuance of our wealth have removed their opportunity to develop and progress to our level
Poverty outside the Western hemisphere is vital in maintaining our wealth. If everyone on the planet had the same standard of living, and wages, as the average American, the cost of the raw materials we import would cripple us.
How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.
Anything to do with Timothy sharing nationality with Vendor B I wonder? Either way, one mjst ask the question - Timothy, why did you name vendor A but not vendor B?
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age
Me 2 please
You plug the entry points the vermin are using. For some reason they dislike the feel of the stuff and shy away from it.
It's effective when you're running cables in closed ducts, but in my experience you'll be plugging entry points forever, and always be a dozen or so holes behind the rats.
Cut off the food supply, spend more on extermination, these are the only long term effective solutions
The key to ANPR success in the UK, and why it would be much more difficult to achieve in the US, is contrast.
The typeface, size, letter spacing, text and background colours are rigidly defined in law. Front only black on white is permitted, rear only black on yellow.
OCR is so much easier when you don't have to read purple text on a blue background, or yellow text on a white one
You can buy blank cards with mag strips on the back for making key cards for mag strip operated door locks.
There's a jig available for the Epson printer CD caddy for doing the credit card sized mini-cd. I use an R200, and the jig hold the CD by its edge, doesn't use the hole in the middle, so doesn't matter of there isn't one
You'd be surprised just how convincing the output from this combination can be.
If you need one with a chip embedded, for visual effect, then there are may suppliers of printable smart cards out there. I got some lovely unprinted Atmega 163's off eBay for playing around with cable TV - they worked a treat for this purpose too.
LMAO
That would be the America where everyone of every race and origin is treated with love and acceptance, where there has never been any kind of discrimination of any kind, and where migrant workers are loved like long lost brothers and sisters. That would be the America populated by people who know about the world beyond its borders, which doesn't have "World" series' for all kind of sports that exist only within its own borders, that doesn't imprison people without trial, that doesn't torture prisoners of war, that obeys the Geneva conventions, that doesn't have the highest per capita murder rate in the Western world, the highest incidence of narcotic abuse in the Western world, and the highest per capita prison population in the world.
Do please tell me where this America is, me & my Korean and Arab friends would like to visit for a vacation.
Haha,
You got to love the moderation on here
Troll = someone who posted other than official US version of an event.
Lol, welcome to the club antique geekmeister
I couldn't agree more
The ribbon is such a bug bear to users here that I routinely remove Office 2007 from new PC's bought with it bundled and replace it with 2003. Users hate it, they feel they haven't got the time at work to be learning a new user interface when they could (and should) be just doing the work
Cool, hip and trendiness have no place in business, and especially not in a time of global recession where we need above all to be maximising productivity. What we need is a sensible Microsoft producing evolving series' of software in a predictable and incredibly boring manner. I want each new version of Office to be the same, but better. If it's completely different from the user's perspective, as Office 2007 is, then it's really not Office any more, it's something else, and if I wanted something else, I wouldn't have been using Office all these years.
Isn't this trust issue the core reason why, despite the hype, the cloud concept is unlikely to succeed?
We're a UK company, with big US competitors, much bigger than us, and as the recession bites I can envisage trade and industry departments of all countries wondering what use they could make of anti-terror legislation to gather information which would help their own domestic companies. It's no great leap of the imagination to see a situation where my bids and costings for my primary customers leave Google's servers and end up in the hands of my US competitors.
It's not just a US problem, but primarily the cloud will be controlled by US companies such as Google, and for those of us outside the US that has to be a worry, or at the very least inject a note of caution.
I suppose all good sysadmins have a degree of paranoia, but the cloud is all about trust, and I just can't see why anyone would.
In most of Europe that would now be illegal
My outsiders perception is that California leads the US in environmental legislation, and certainly it has enacted laws similar to the WEEE directive of the EEC. Our press says that similar laws are being enacted by other states and on a federal level, hence the idea of environmental legislation rooting in California and spreading across the US.
But surely that makes the assumption that people dispose of product at end of life, which is not the case. People most often dispose of working tech product because technological advance makes them obsolete long before they reach end of life.
Cellphones are a great example, they must have quite a few years service life, 10 or more, but I always change mine every year, and I expect most people do the same.
But from the point of view of lead content, plasma screens can be thought of as an array of pixel sized CRT's - the lead content by weight is similar. Disposing of lead containing articles such as CRT's in the UK is a costly nightmare and I was somewhat surprise by the analysis, and then cost of disposal, of our waste plasma screens.
There are lead free plasma screens now commonly available, but the first of these was only developed in late 2006 by Panasonic, and their adoption has by no means been universal.
LCD's are mostly lit by cold cathode fluorescent lamps containing elemental mercury, i.e. not just mercury salts, but some mercury metal too.
The change to LCD/Plasma has not eliminated the toxicity of e-waste, merely changed the nature of the toxins. It's work in the EEC such as the WEEE & ROHS directives, and similar regulations brought in primarily by California then spread through the rest of the US to some degree, that are making areal impact.
So if I toss my garbage in your garden, or pick up my dog's mess and put it in your mailbox then it's your fault for not preventing me from doing so?
Poor people desperate for money will accept extraordinary levels of personal risk in order to earn a living. At the beginning of the last century in the US it was often the case that low paid workers had appalling and dangerous working conditions, suffered crippling industrial disease etc. Then regulators stepped in and said that no man should be subjected to such conditions and enacted health, safety and welfare legislation to make it so. Child labour was common, and the wealthy factory owners ruthlessly exploited their workers whose poverty forced them to accept this exploitation. Society became more civilised and such exploitation is now regarded as morally wrong.
Exploiting the poor of other countries is no less morally reprehensible than exploiting the poverty of US citizens as was done in the Victorian era.
I guess the whole UI regression was lost on people that still think putting tabs 'in' the freaking browser instead of on the taskbar actually makes things easier.
Maybe for some people (like me) it is. Maybe it's just an is2ue of personal preference, not some significant evolutionary stepping stone, so don't get so het up about it.
In the UK it is illegal not to decrypt on demand. There is no burden of proof on the existence of encrypted information either beyond the word of the police. Furthermore, you are by default gagged from discussing the demand for decryption with any third party, including your legal representation.
These necessary provisions keep us all safe and secure from the terrorists who are everywhere.