The last PDC was in 2000 and that was when we got the very first public-ish 'Technology Preview' builds of the.net Framework, the CLR and the C# compiler. It was already rather different by the time Beta 1 came out later that year. Beta 2 was 2001 followed by the Release Candidates and the first RTM was VS2002 a year later.
On the one hand, completing Longhorn is a much bigger task, on the other hand a lot of the work's been going on since 2000 at least, and Moft seem to like to dogfood their major releases for a fair while before RTM.
So, we're in late 2003 for the first Technology Preview. From the.net timescale, make a wild assumption of 2 years until the Release Candidates appear, allow 6 months of dogfooding and we're into 2006 as Moft seem to be saying at the moment.
I can't imaging that all the slashdotters on earth are collectively as sick to the back teeth of the swiss cheese that is Windows at present as are the Moft people who have to work in the guts of it every day, or try to justify it in the face of entirely reasonable accusations of flakiness, or deal with the support burden, or just try and get their jobs done with the company's products. If the flakiness of Moft products costs many businesses too much, then surely it costs Moft too much in spades.
The very existence of all the Moft internal blogs looks to me like evidence of a much more open and transparent approach and a willingness, a desire even, for as much feedback as possible *before* things are set in stone. Plus it's fun reading that the likes of Don Box and Dare (formerly Carnage4Life of this manor) Obasanjo have been writing their respective bits of Whidbey in Emacs:-)
Bill Gates has a history of 'betting the company'. And as 'Chief Software Architect', this time round the final responsibility for any misdesigns lies clearly and personally with Bill. So I can see how he'd be well in favour of spending *whatever* it costs to finally build a secure, reliable, patchable, maintainable OS on personal as well as commercial grounds.
Re:Sharing information is a GOOD THING, remember?
on
Longhorn Developers @ MSDN
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· Score: 2, Interesting
FWIW I've seen the very same sentiment on several Moft Program Managers' blogs. If nothing else, the people developing what they feel are great new features, naturally enough, seem keen to get their work out into developers' hands sooner rather than later.
There are a couple of areas in which they have taken this approach already - the SQLXML extensions to SQLserver 2000 have been upversioned a few times while we wait for Yukon, and various Web Services extensions are also available well in advance of the v2.0 (Whidbey) release of System.Web
Thinking on a bit, if WinFX in Longhorn gives Moft a clean, modular API to replace the spaghetti'd mess that is Win32, it might then become a lot easier to do incremental upgrades to specific areas of the OS functionality.
From what I can gather, WinFX refers to the point at which the.net Framework ceases to be a wrapper for the Win32 API and becomes the fully managed-code replacement for it. Essentially, WinFX seems to be the new Framework Class Library as documented (obviously in VERY preliminary form) here in the Reference / Class Library Reference / Namespaces section. I also notice there's some stuff there like Microsoft.Build.UnitTests, which will be long overdue by 2006 but it's good to see it in there.
VS2002 was 'Rainier' and VS2003 was 'Everett' before release. The VS release after 'Whidbey' is 'Orcas', another island, near Whidbey. Sharepoint Portal Server was 'Tahoe', SQL2000 was 'Shiloh'...
And on the same principle, the new products we're working on in the small UK-based company where I work are currently known as 'Grimsby', 'Carshalton' and 'Cleethorpes'.
Re:moving towards bloatware or are these important
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
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· Score: 1
One of the blogs I follow is Brad Abrams, the Lead Program Manager for the Common Language Runtime, and a lot of the posts are about programming interface guidelines and internal reimplementations, and the plusses and minuses thereof.
So the original CLR features, and by implication their implementations in the various.net languages including C#, are certainly mutable already.
Given the code-safety benefits of managed code, I'd imaging that Moft at least aspire to building their future headline products this way, and given the dogfooding tradition they're building, they've got plenty of incentive to make sure that.net rises to the challenge.
The shrinkwrap release won't be here until next year. I'd say the reason this got released now is because today (26th oct) is the first day of the Moft Professional Developers' Conference in LA, and the attendees will be getting early releases of Whidbey, Yukon and Longhorn.
So as of about now Whidbey's out in the wild. At least to an extent where the spec for C# 2.0 will be useful to some people.
Did you see that documentary on the BBC the other day too? The quote there was something along the lines of:
300 million pounds may have been too much, but we got a supersonic airliner for it, while Boeing got some wooden models for 500 million dollars.
Clearly an exaggeration in terms of all the intangibles Boeing got in addition to the wooden models, but still, in terms of physical delverables, it's basically right.
For both individuals I've mentioned, regular medical checkups are another part of the rest-of-your-life menu. The 6-monthly checkups are as immoveable as Christmas, the rest of the calendar falls in around that. Though I suspect if the tolerances on the dosage are fairly tight you might have to go through a week or so on the pills between chips to keep the levels controlled? Not ideal, certainly, but still saves you maybe 120 pill-days.
I think the killer blow came about half way through the first Concorde flight after the Paris crash with news from New York. The date was September 11th, 2001, and the civil aviation economy changed utterly at that moment.
It was an economic disaster, rather than a technological mistake. The trouble was that in the time it took to get Concorde off the ground, Boeing reconstructed the entire market with their also brilliant 747. The 747 is a miracle of economics, Concorde was a miracle of technology. And Pan-Am couldn't wait any longer so they cancelled their order for a fleet of Concordes and bought 747s instead.
If I play with your words enough I can certainly make a case that if Concorde was a technological mistake, then at least it transported several thousand people across the Atlantic, making it a far less glaring failure than the disastrous Apollo-Saturn moon missions which cost far more and only took 15 people to the Moon and back;-)
I benefited from Concorde every time it flew overhead. It's just sublimely beautiful, there's no way I'll get over in these words how staggeringly lovely it is, shooting across the sky over London after take-off from Heathrow, you hear a jet roar, you look up but it isn't just another airplane. It's something altogether more graceful, sleek, it's not a plane it's a dart, pure white against the sky.
And coupled to the grace and elegance of the exterior, grace and elegance which is purely a side-effect of hard mathematics and empirical investigation, were four of the most brutal powerplants in all of civil transportation, at 38,000 lbs of thrust each with afterburners on takeoff.
A constant reminder that I was born in The Space Age, the poetry of engineering set in titanium, a reminder of what humans are capable of, the root of the collaborations that led to Airbus, the measure of how all passenger flights obviously ought to be, or simply the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a daytime sky. I'll miss her, she brought me a little joy every single time I saw her.
Two points - firstly, although you make a good point about the relative costs of the new 'chip' versus standard pills, it's not a comparison between the price of one chip and one pill but rather between the price of 1 chip and 140 pills, which should at least narrow the gap somewhat. Though probably not all the way.
Secondly, the drug used in the tests was Heparin, an anticoagulant. I don't know about Heparin, but I know that Warfarin, another anticoagulant, is something my Mum's had to take twice a day every day since she had a heart attack 5 years ago, and something that my friend who just had a heart valve replaced will have to take every single day for the rest of her life (she's only 30, so that's an awful lot of tablets to remember). For both these people at least, reducing the memory requirement from 2-pills-a-day to one-chip-per-7-months would make a huge difference to the disruption their coronary health needs impose on their lives.
I suspect as usual we'll see the neato technology being used in the 'west' for the treatment of the diseases of affluence, while we continue to make those in the developing world slum it with lowest common denominator medicines for the diseases of poverty. While all the while ignoring Malaria completely, of course.
tV
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
I'm curious, what does the new SQL/XML layer mean for applications developers.
The impression I'm gaining, from keeping up with MSDN and particularly the various Moft bloggers (OPML ) and from reading the article, brings together a few factors:
The 'Yukon' version of SQL Server will have XML as a native data type, along with the usual varchars and ints and datetimes.
'Yukon' will allow the use of XML Schemas to validate the XML data stored is a particular feed.
WinFS will build on NTFS and SQL Server.
The cited article mentioned the use of custom XML Schemas to describe the metadata for particular types of data in the file system.
In 'Yukon' and the 'Whidbey' release of Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime becomes part of SQL Server itself, so that (and I'm really not at all sure how much I like this with my DBA head on but I love it with my developer head on) it becomes possible to write Stored Procedures in any.net language, there's some sort of automagic mashalling between SQL and Common Type System datatypes, as well as to debug them in Visual Studio.
So, and this is all very fuzzy and hazy for me at the moment, I might as a developer be able to supply an XML Schema which would allow the existing filesystem to both display, index and query my choice of metadata to suit my anticipated use cases. If I use a.net language, I might be able to make winFS queries against the file system natively in whatever language I'm using. Or perhaps several O/FS projects developing similar applications could agree on a Schema for a set of core metadata, which each implementation could extend, to provide compatible metadata via winFS. As I say, very hazy as I'm thinking this up on the fly. There should be an awful lot more information after the PDC as that seems to be the point where a lot of the gags come off about Longhorn.
I'd guess it'll be the 2006 equivalent of the MSDE at present. It's limited to, IIRC, 5 concurrent users and, in it's present guise, 2GB of data, and isn't supplied with the client tools like Enterprise Manager and ISQLW, but otherwise it's SQLserver2k, and it's bundled with all sorts of Moft apps nowadays - which was one of the reasons Slammer was so effective, of course: hundreds of thousands of people were running SQL Server without even knowing it.
tV
Re:Developers, developers, developers!
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
And what's more NTFS will also hide his pr0n from his girlfriend, as requested;-) Although wXP does go way too far in trying not to worry the user's pretty little head with that scary Security stuff.
You may not like SUN for all its policies, but they are and always shall be part of the good guys
I have no feelings either way for Sun, but no corporation 'always shall be' anything which it might be today. If the shareholders in a corporation decide they would like to see a change in behaviour, it is illegal for that corporation to avoid that change in behaviour. Hence today's 'good guys' are not necessarily tomorrow's. It's not that long ago that the quote could have read "You may not dislike IBM for all its policies, but they are and always shall be part of the bad guys"
(sorry, couldn't resist, but seriously That Black Mask was one of the icons of the original Star Wars trilogy. And until he got redeemed in RotJ, Lord Vader was IMHO the best, the quintessential villain in the history of melodrama.)
Does anyone know how the other IM networks implement their notifications?
I ask because the Patent text in this case specifies that the notification is sent (or not) regularly at a predetermined time interval, and a similar regime on a separate timer drives flushing of the notifications at the receiving client. If for example A.N. Other Network were to implement its notifications by, say, sending an activity message after every seven keystrokes, regardless of timing, then ISTM such a client would not be affected by this patent, as worded.
So, how do the other IM networks do notifications?
I can think of one key way in which the economics could have very nasty consequences:
If unregulated VoIP proves significantly cheaper then regulated telephone service, then one can expect customers to migrate en-masse away from the regulated providers. At some point, it may then become uneconomic for those providers to continue in business, at which point nobody is required to provide 911 service - the new VoIP firms don't because they're not required to, and the old PST firms don't becasue they no longer operate in the telphone business. At which point it becomes necessary to regulate the VoIP providers, in which case it would have made much more sense to do so in the first place, before the problem manifested.
The solar-powered showers were admittedly fantastic again this year (and there was a lot more water available at Cheddar than used to be the case at Upper Pertwood (the old site for the BGG).
But for serious cleanliness, the various on-site saunas were even better. Big shout out to all at Sam's Magic Hat sauna - built in a converted old caravan capable of holing maybe 20 people if you *really* crammed those sweaty bods together;-), with a woodburning stove, cold showers in the entrance and a full-blown cold plungepool. All funded from optional donations, and founded on the rather fab principle that everyone deserves the opportunity to be clean.
Sure there were healers. And sure they took payment. But there's a big difference between Katrina from Oxford getting in for free because she was offering Shiatsu for whatever amount seemed affordable (or in several cases for free) and fair rather than the 30 an hour she charges me as a regular client outside the festival, and huge Coke, Vodaphone and Carlsberg logos everywhere. There were plenty of small stallholders doing business. There were no major listed companies doing business. I think that's the distinction which was being drawn.
Hahahah....he loves the trees so much he chops up their rotting corpses and sells them for profit. Nice.
Trees have been known to benefit from pruning. trees have been known to drop branches in storms. And knowledge about woodwork can enable people to become more self-sufficient to a greater extent than knowledge about metalwork (also on offer at the BGG) or how plastic factories work.)
What's so evil about making some money? Making money isn't evil, it's essential. Certain approaches to making money are more or less unpleasant than others, that's all.
Bear in mind that the BGG was always had a very strong contingent of the activist community, and a lot of these people have ongoing campaigns to run Commitment doesn't necessarily stop just becasue you're at a festival.
Also, it wasn't just a few hours, it was five full (and very fabulous) days for the punters, and a lot of the workers were there for a week beforehand and a week afterwards.
The rickshaw technology is not demeaning. For that matter, the opportunity it gives to grindingly poor people to feed their families rather than starving is not in itself demeaning either. Now, the culture which allows this to happen, that's another matter. And it's not a matter of history so it's not really a case of resurrection.
Which would be all very well if it weren't for the 'how far back can you go, how many lives have you lived' scene in Brain Of Morbius, which suggests that the Tom Baker version was already number 12 (assuming, reasonably enough, that you can ignore Peter Cushing and Trevor Martin) by showing 8 pre-Hartnell Doctors (actually the faces of various members of the production team, for which they then had to compensate Equity). Except that the 'only 13 lives' bit was introduced rather later.
Doctor Who continuity was never much more sturdy than the sets - or, to put it more positively, Doctor Who never let silly continuity niggles get in the way of telling a good story.
Anyhow, if it came to the crunch, it's not as if the BBC would stop the show becasue they'd run out of permissible regenerations, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
The last PDC was in 2000 and that was when we got the very first public-ish 'Technology Preview' builds of the .net Framework, the CLR and the C# compiler. It was already rather different by the time Beta 1 came out later that year. Beta 2 was 2001 followed by the Release Candidates and the first RTM was VS2002 a year later.
.net timescale, make a wild assumption of 2 years until the Release Candidates appear, allow 6 months of dogfooding and we're into 2006 as Moft seem to be saying at the moment.
:-)
On the one hand, completing Longhorn is a much bigger task, on the other hand a lot of the work's been going on since 2000 at least, and Moft seem to like to dogfood their major releases for a fair while before RTM.
So, we're in late 2003 for the first Technology Preview. From the
I can't imaging that all the slashdotters on earth are collectively as sick to the back teeth of the swiss cheese that is Windows at present as are the Moft people who have to work in the guts of it every day, or try to justify it in the face of entirely reasonable accusations of flakiness, or deal with the support burden, or just try and get their jobs done with the company's products. If the flakiness of Moft products costs many businesses too much, then surely it costs Moft too much in spades.
The very existence of all the Moft internal blogs looks to me like evidence of a much more open and transparent approach and a willingness, a desire even, for as much feedback as possible *before* things are set in stone. Plus it's fun reading that the likes of Don Box and Dare (formerly Carnage4Life of this manor) Obasanjo have been writing their respective bits of Whidbey in Emacs
Bill Gates has a history of 'betting the company'. And as 'Chief Software Architect', this time round the final responsibility for any misdesigns lies clearly and personally with Bill. So I can see how he'd be well in favour of spending *whatever* it costs to finally build a secure, reliable, patchable, maintainable OS on personal as well as commercial grounds.
FWIW I've seen the very same sentiment on several Moft Program Managers' blogs. If nothing else, the people developing what they feel are great new features, naturally enough, seem keen to get their work out into developers' hands sooner rather than later.
There are a couple of areas in which they have taken this approach already - the SQLXML extensions to SQLserver 2000 have been upversioned a few times while we wait for Yukon, and various Web Services extensions are also available well in advance of the v2.0 (Whidbey) release of System.Web
Thinking on a bit, if WinFX in Longhorn gives Moft a clean, modular API to replace the spaghetti'd mess that is Win32, it might then become a lot easier to do incremental upgrades to specific areas of the OS functionality.
From what I can gather, WinFX refers to the point at which the .net Framework ceases to be a wrapper for the Win32 API and becomes the fully managed-code replacement for it. Essentially, WinFX seems to be the new Framework Class Library as documented (obviously in VERY preliminary form) here in the Reference / Class Library Reference / Namespaces section. I also notice there's some stuff there like Microsoft.Build.UnitTests, which will be long overdue by 2006 but it's good to see it in there.
tomV
VS2002 was 'Rainier' and VS2003 was 'Everett' before release. The VS release after 'Whidbey' is 'Orcas', another island, near Whidbey. Sharepoint Portal Server was 'Tahoe', SQL2000 was 'Shiloh'...
And on the same principle, the new products we're working on in the small UK-based company where I work are currently known as 'Grimsby', 'Carshalton' and 'Cleethorpes'.
One of the blogs I follow is Brad Abrams, the Lead Program Manager for the Common Language Runtime, and a lot of the posts are about programming interface guidelines and internal reimplementations, and the plusses and minuses thereof.
.net languages including C#, are certainly mutable already.
.net rises to the challenge.
So the original CLR features, and by implication their implementations in the various
Given the code-safety benefits of managed code, I'd imaging that Moft at least aspire to building their future headline products this way, and given the dogfooding tradition they're building, they've got plenty of incentive to make sure that
tomV
The shrinkwrap release won't be here until next year. I'd say the reason this got released now is because today (26th oct) is the first day of the Moft Professional Developers' Conference in LA, and the attendees will be getting early releases of Whidbey, Yukon and Longhorn.
So as of about now Whidbey's out in the wild. At least to an extent where the spec for C# 2.0 will be useful to some people.
tomV
For both individuals I've mentioned, regular medical checkups are another part of the rest-of-your-life menu. The 6-monthly checkups are as immoveable as Christmas, the rest of the calendar falls in around that. Though I suspect if the tolerances on the dosage are fairly tight you might have to go through a week or so on the pills between chips to keep the levels controlled? Not ideal, certainly, but still saves you maybe 120 pill-days.
I think the killer blow came about half way through the first Concorde flight after the Paris crash with news from New York. The date was September 11th, 2001, and the civil aviation economy changed utterly at that moment.
And of course Boeing's SST project died when Congress finally turned off its subsidy after 8 years, having paid $500M to that point.
As you say, Boeing had a backup plan. But then in a sense Airbus has turned out to be an equivalent backup plan for the Concorde project.
I liked The Space Age...
tomV
It was an economic disaster, rather than a technological mistake. The trouble was that in the time it took to get Concorde off the ground, Boeing reconstructed the entire market with their also brilliant 747. The 747 is a miracle of economics, Concorde was a miracle of technology. And Pan-Am couldn't wait any longer so they cancelled their order for a fleet of Concordes and bought 747s instead.
;-)
If I play with your words enough I can certainly make a case that if Concorde was a technological mistake, then at least it transported several thousand people across the Atlantic, making it a far less glaring failure than the disastrous Apollo-Saturn moon missions which cost far more and only took 15 people to the Moon and back
No, if only that were the case.
I benefited from Concorde every time it flew overhead. It's just sublimely beautiful, there's no way I'll get over in these words how staggeringly lovely it is, shooting across the sky over London after take-off from Heathrow, you hear a jet roar, you look up but it isn't just another airplane. It's something altogether more graceful, sleek, it's not a plane it's a dart, pure white against the sky.
And coupled to the grace and elegance of the exterior, grace and elegance which is purely a side-effect of hard mathematics and empirical investigation, were four of the most brutal powerplants in all of civil transportation, at 38,000 lbs of thrust each with afterburners on takeoff.
A constant reminder that I was born in The Space Age, the poetry of engineering set in titanium, a reminder of what humans are capable of, the root of the collaborations that led to Airbus, the measure of how all passenger flights obviously ought to be, or simply the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a daytime sky. I'll miss her, she brought me a little joy every single time I saw her.
Two points - firstly, although you make a good point about the relative costs of the new 'chip' versus standard pills, it's not a comparison between the price of one chip and one pill but rather between the price of 1 chip and 140 pills, which should at least narrow the gap somewhat. Though probably not all the way.
Secondly, the drug used in the tests was Heparin, an anticoagulant. I don't know about Heparin, but I know that Warfarin, another anticoagulant, is something my Mum's had to take twice a day every day since she had a heart attack 5 years ago, and something that my friend who just had a heart valve replaced will have to take every single day for the rest of her life (she's only 30, so that's an awful lot of tablets to remember). For both these people at least, reducing the memory requirement from 2-pills-a-day to one-chip-per-7-months would make a huge difference to the disruption their coronary health needs impose on their lives.
I suspect as usual we'll see the neato technology being used in the 'west' for the treatment of the diseases of affluence, while we continue to make those in the developing world slum it with lowest common denominator medicines for the diseases of poverty. While all the while ignoring Malaria completely, of course.
tV
The impression I'm gaining, from keeping up with MSDN and particularly the various Moft bloggers (OPML ) and from reading the article, brings together a few factors:
- The 'Yukon' version of SQL Server will have XML as a native data type, along with the usual varchars and ints and datetimes.
- 'Yukon' will allow the use of XML Schemas to validate the XML data stored is a particular feed.
- WinFS will build on NTFS and SQL Server.
- The cited article mentioned the use of custom XML Schemas to describe the metadata for particular types of data in the file system.
- In 'Yukon' and the 'Whidbey' release of Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime becomes part of SQL Server itself, so that (and I'm really not at all sure how much I like this with my DBA head on but I love it with my developer head on) it becomes possible to write Stored Procedures in any
.net language, there's some sort of automagic mashalling between SQL and Common Type System datatypes, as well as to debug them in Visual Studio.
So, and this is all very fuzzy and hazy for me at the moment, I might as a developer be able to supply an XML Schema which would allow the existing filesystem to both display, index and query my choice of metadata to suit my anticipated use cases. If I use atV
I'd guess it'll be the 2006 equivalent of the MSDE at present. It's limited to, IIRC, 5 concurrent users and, in it's present guise, 2GB of data, and isn't supplied with the client tools like Enterprise Manager and ISQLW, but otherwise it's SQLserver2k, and it's bundled with all sorts of Moft apps nowadays - which was one of the reasons Slammer was so effective, of course: hundreds of thousands of people were running SQL Server without even knowing it.
tV
And what's more NTFS will also hide his pr0n from his girlfriend, as requested ;-) Although wXP does go way too far in trying not to worry the user's pretty little head with that scary Security stuff.
The truly careful would PGPdisk it too.
You may not like SUN for all its policies, but they are and always shall be part of the good guys
I have no feelings either way for Sun, but no corporation 'always shall be' anything which it might be today. If the shareholders in a corporation decide they would like to see a change in behaviour, it is illegal for that corporation to avoid that change in behaviour. Hence today's 'good guys' are not necessarily tomorrow's. It's not that long ago that the quote could have read "You may not dislike IBM for all its policies, but they are and always shall be part of the bad guys"
tomV
I find your lack of faith...
Disturbing.
Wheeze, Wheeze.
(sorry, couldn't resist, but seriously That Black Mask was one of the icons of the original Star Wars trilogy. And until he got redeemed in RotJ, Lord Vader was IMHO the best, the quintessential villain in the history of melodrama.)
Does anyone know how the other IM networks implement their notifications?
I ask because the Patent text in this case specifies that the notification is sent (or not) regularly at a predetermined time interval, and a similar regime on a separate timer drives flushing of the notifications at the receiving client. If for example A.N. Other Network were to implement its notifications by, say, sending an activity message after every seven keystrokes, regardless of timing, then ISTM such a client would not be affected by this patent, as worded.
So, how do the other IM networks do notifications?
tomV
I can think of one key way in which the economics could have very nasty consequences:
If unregulated VoIP proves significantly cheaper then regulated telephone service, then one can expect customers to migrate en-masse away from the regulated providers. At some point, it may then become uneconomic for those providers to continue in business, at which point nobody is required to provide 911 service - the new VoIP firms don't because they're not required to, and the old PST firms don't becasue they no longer operate in the telphone business. At which point it becomes necessary to regulate the VoIP providers, in which case it would have made much more sense to do so in the first place, before the problem manifested.
tomV
The solar-powered showers were admittedly fantastic again this year (and there was a lot more water available at Cheddar than used to be the case at Upper Pertwood (the old site for the BGG).
;-), with a woodburning stove, cold showers in the entrance and a full-blown cold plungepool. All funded from optional donations, and founded on the rather fab principle that everyone deserves the opportunity to be clean.
But for serious cleanliness, the various on-site saunas were even better. Big shout out to all at Sam's Magic Hat sauna - built in a converted old caravan capable of holing maybe 20 people if you *really* crammed those sweaty bods together
tV
Sure there were healers. And sure they took payment. But there's a big difference between Katrina from Oxford getting in for free because she was offering Shiatsu for whatever amount seemed affordable (or in several cases for free) and fair rather than the 30 an hour she charges me as a regular client outside the festival, and huge Coke, Vodaphone and Carlsberg logos everywhere. There were plenty of small stallholders doing business. There were no major listed companies doing business. I think that's the distinction which was being drawn.
Hahahah....he loves the trees so much he chops up their rotting corpses and sells them for profit. Nice.
Trees have been known to benefit from pruning. trees have been known to drop branches in storms. And knowledge about woodwork can enable people to become more self-sufficient to a greater extent than knowledge about metalwork (also on offer at the BGG) or how plastic factories work.)
What's so evil about making some money? Making money isn't evil, it's essential. Certain approaches to making money are more or less unpleasant than others, that's all.
tV
In fairness, there was no shortage of 14 year old kids out of their heads on vodka and shrooms. for better or worse.
tV
Bear in mind that the BGG was always had a very strong contingent of the activist community, and a lot of these people have ongoing campaigns to run Commitment doesn't necessarily stop just becasue you're at a festival.
Also, it wasn't just a few hours, it was five full (and very fabulous) days for the punters, and a lot of the workers were there for a week beforehand and a week afterwards.
The rickshaw technology is not demeaning. For that matter, the opportunity it gives to grindingly poor people to feed their families rather than starving is not in itself demeaning either. Now, the culture which allows this to happen, that's another matter. And it's not a matter of history so it's not really a case of resurrection.
tomV
Which would be all very well if it weren't for the 'how far back can you go, how many lives have you lived' scene in Brain Of Morbius, which suggests that the Tom Baker version was already number 12 (assuming, reasonably enough, that you can ignore Peter Cushing and Trevor Martin) by showing 8 pre-Hartnell Doctors (actually the faces of various members of the production team, for which they then had to compensate Equity). Except that the 'only 13 lives' bit was introduced rather later.
Doctor Who continuity was never much more sturdy than the sets - or, to put it more positively, Doctor Who never let silly continuity niggles get in the way of telling a good story.
Anyhow, if it came to the crunch, it's not as if the BBC would stop the show becasue they'd run out of permissible regenerations, is it?
tV