aggregated over millions of bulbs it might become somewhat iffy, environmentally, but last time I worked in theatrical lighting, we used to change the emitted colour of our (in many cases very blue/UV-rich) lamps using coloured filters;-)
Of course, the absorbed energy reduces the efficiency gains of the LED somewhat as the gel heats up, but I tend to use gels to modify the basic colour of my lighting at home anyway. I like the energy efficiency side of compact fluorescents but I don't like the high colour temp, so the bulb lives in a shroud of (i kid not about the name) 'Light Bastard Amber' Rosco Supergel, which takes the blue edge off and pinks it up just a smidge. Once you start doing this you then tend to start switching for effects, of course, and Kelly Blue and Deep Moss Green are nice a while if you don't need too much brightness.
When you have companies like that that were it not for their trucks and SUV's why do you think they will spend lots of money on hydrogen fuel research?
My best guess would be: in the hope that commercial salvation might lie that way if they get their skates on and take it seriously NOW, before the oil that powers those SUV's becomes for whatever reason unacceptable as an energy source. A company that's utterly dependent on trucks and SUVs is toast if the price of oil triples and stays there for a while, or if a new fundamentalist regime in Saudi simply refuses to sell oil to the Great Satan, or if someone with impeccable credentials comes up with undeniable proof of dangerous global warming. None of which is entirely beyond the realm of possibility. They owe it to their shareholders to hedge these risks.
Ah, if we're going to go down the route of farcical pedantry, it should be pointed out that the system resources weren't used to determine how to make a tea. In the irritatingly cheerful words of Eddie, the Shipboard Computer:
Hi there, this is Eddie, your shipboard computer, just alerting you to the fact that the Nutrimatic machine has now tapped into my logic circuits to ask me why the human prefers boiled leaves to everything we have to offer him, and wow - it's a biggie. Gonna take a little time to work out.
From Fit The Ninth (Radio series 2), in which our heroes have the chance to chew the fat with some old enemies and Arthur Dent has an unpleasant cup of tea.
The court ruling of the highest German court was very clear in stating that the original owner of the rights also had future rights for redistribution... I'd be surprised if British law were any different.
I'd be surprised too. But Record Company contracts are famously rapacious (see Courtney Love's views on the real 'piracy' in the record industry), while TV contracts are governed very strictly by, for example, Union rules (Equity in the UK).
Most recording artists own no rights to their recordings at all. But credited actors are entitled to repeat fees, and at least under the old Doctor Who contracts, scriptwriters retained copyright on their creations. Because the BBC1 Controller, Lorraine Heggessey, recently commented that she'd love to bring back Doctor Who but the rights were a problem, this was for a while as hot a potato in Who fandom as the SCO stuff is around here, and the ins and outs of who owns what have been done to death, and eventually the BBC published this statement.
The BBC was once a terribly prim and proper establishment organisation, and prided itself on doing everything in the manner of a gentleman, hence perhaps the rather nice way it treated its creatives and the bind this puts it in now.
Thanks for the pointer Mr AC. Here's a link to the semi-official BBC Restoration Team who do all the cleanup work for the Doctor Who DVD and recent VHS releases.
As is clear from this article* on the site, in the 1960s film was used for location and model inserts, but not, generally, for studio recordings, which went straight to 2" VT. The VT was generally 'telerecorded' onto 25fps film for overseas sale by BBC Enterprises, but only after the first sale had been agreed, so for example since noone bought 'The Daleks' Masterplan', no telerecording was made.
Meanwhile, tapes remained the property of the Engineering Department and were routinely wiped a few years after broadcast, until 1978 when the BBC's Film and Videotape Library was founded. By then, Ian Levine's initial audit showed that 47 1960's episodes were still held as telerecordings, but only one complete story, the first, 'An Unearthly Child' (4 eps). And after 1972 BBC Enterprises, once orders for B&W stuff had dried up, had started clearing shelf space, not helped by the fact that Film Recording Clerk Pamela Nash believed that the rights had in any case expired.
Over the same period, a lot of the VT stock was also recycled, and due to the BBC's splendidly bureaucratic records, we know for example that the 2" tape that once held 'Enemy of the World' ep 3 is still in the archive, and exactly where it's shelved. Unfortunately it now contains a 1970's edition of Blue Peter.
So basically, almost the entire output of 1960's Doctor Who existed at the BBC on both tape and film, and by 1978, many episodes had been lost on both tape and film. Most of the 1960's Who that we have now comes from the surviving 25fps film copies from BBCE, and looks jerky. Hence the RT's rather wonderful VidFire process to put back the missing 50% of the timeslices.
I know far far more about Doctor Who than is good for my mental health...
TomV
*the domain's different because it's a deep link into a frameset - can be navigated from the RT homepage via 'Articles and Information', then 'BBC Archive Holdings' in the left frame
They decided a while back that the archives had no value and started destroying it
It's more accurate to say that in the 1970's, in a nasty funding squeeze and an incipient recession, and with no market yet existing for repeats, no domestic videotape yet, only three domestic TV channels, the BBC couldn't afford enough videotape to keep operating and to continue operating except by recycling the tapes they already had. And with Colour being new and wonderful, the archives of old B&W stuff that they wouldn't ever use again, I mean who would watch it anyway, was a good place to start the recycling.
There's a lot of stuff come back from overseas broadcasters, but there are still several complete episodes missing, such as Tenth Planet ep4, all but eps 5 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan, and complete stories including Power Of The Daleks, Evil Of The Daleks, Marco Polo, Galaxy 4, Fury From the Deep, The Highlanders.
Will this just be news/education/documentaries? Or will it really include every episode of Doctor Who and Eastenders?....
Unfortunately, you may be right in worrying about this, and not through any ill-will on the BBC's part.
The news stuff I'm sure they have full rights on and can use as they please. Drama's a bit more difficult.
My specialist subject's Doctor Who. The difficulties here would be twofold. Firstly, and expensively, there's the issue of actor's repeat fees - since Internet fees weren't negotiated until recently, streaming a lot of old material would involve a staggringly huge job tracking down every single actor named in credits, and coming to a satisfactory deal with each and every one of them before the item they were on could be made available. This might not be too tough for a ten year old episode of Eastenders, but can you imaging trying to track down the full cast of a show first broadcast forty years ago? Now, for Doctor Who, they will have had to go through much the same process for the VHS, and they're currently having to negotiate again for the DVD releases. But that's just one show, and a proven moneyspinner which has probably repaid the effort comfortably.
Secondly, for Doctor Who again, the rights on the scripts can be devilish. For Doctor Who, the BBC owns the Doctor, the TARDIS, the other regular characters and very little else. So for example they can't show any Dalek stuff in this anniversary year because the BBC doesn't have any rights to the Daleks, they're owned by the estate of their creator, the late scriptwriter Terry Nation, and Mrs Nation's not selling at a price the BBC are willing to pay at present. So, again, the process of discovery and renegotiation would be potentially nightmarish.
So I suspect this announcement (which is utterly, utterly, utterly thrilling nonetheless) in all likelihood refers only to those items to which the BBC has absolute and clear ownership.
John Arlott lyricising Gary Sobers. I V A Richards in full explosive flow. Lillee and Thompson turning up the heat. Truman coming in like a hurricane. Botham at Headingley. The collected Cake Reviews of Brian Johnson;-)
The first live TV cricket coverage was on June 17 1938. I'm sure the first recordings were much later but the wealth of archive must be staggering, even given the economic need to recycle tapes that robbed us of so much Who, amongst other shows.
Warney's early matches doesn't touch the edge of what must be in those archives. I'm only 34 and I remember watching his first Test delivery in England to Gatting and simply not believing my own eyes. That's one of the problems with archive, of course. Billions of people know now that Warne's one of the most talented sportsmen to ever draw breath, but that Thursday morning, well, it had been decades since anyone made a ball turn like that, and I had no idea such a thing was even possible. That impact you don't get with archive, but still...
TomV
p.s. What about Merv? His 'tache was a whole league up on Boonie's;-)
Exactly. If I were crazed enough to use this mythical spreadsheet for multi-million dollar bond calculations, here's how I'd do it. I'd hire a seriously good C++ guy to build the calculation engine to sufficient precision and wrap it in COM (remember, we're using this thing to do multi-million dollar bond deals, stop smirking at the back: we've got a multimillion-dollar budget for this project, we can afford a VERY good C++ guy and a LOT of time), then write a dozen line of VBA in a macro, to instantiate it, set a few properties and call some methods to get my answers. If I was sufficiently thick, I might even think it was Excel doing it, not expensiveCustomComponent.bondCalculator
That's the COM philosophy - lots of small, very dedicated programs glued together with a bit of script;-)
I'm hoping the mono's vb support will be viable as a fall back
Mono would give you VB.net, not VBA. But that might be a boon not a bad thing. You might get more than just a Fallback from Mono. First impression, without knowing the ins and outs in depth, just a brainstorm-grade idea: it seems to me that as.net becomes more widespread, and especially with the 'Visual Studio for Office' or whatever it's called this week, we're likely to see third-party tools to 'upgrade your existing office VBA macros to.net, today!'.
If the current activity on GotDotNet is anything to go by I'd not be surprised to see a fairly broad range of free, open-sourced.net tools to do this, and if this pans out, then using the Mono CLR, *if* you could host VB.net code, *then* you'd, because this is the *Common* language runtime, be able to host macros written in C#, JScript.net (yeah, get to the point...) and J#, and if you could host J# then it follows that you'd suddenly be in a position to host macros in carefully written Java. And heavy numbercrunching macros written in Haskell.net, or whatever seems the most powerful tool for the job. Which surely wouldn't hurt as a Gnumeric feature regardless of how Excel macros work today.
That's a revolting atitude. I don't think of all the hapless PHBs and MSCSE CIOs, i think of all the millions of ordinary hard-working people who put in the hours at work, sacrificed buying something else so they could spend a grand on a home PC and software (which frequently drives them nuts and makes them feel like idiots because it's STILL not ready for the public, incidentally), to keep in touch with their friends, their families, their loved ones, and found themselves unable to do so, and worried about their ability to do so in future, because of the stupid, childish, expoitative, vandalistic, selfish behaviour of some pus-ridden shitheaded twat who may or may not have felt they had a political point to prove.
I think the point that you're missing is that people died
It seems to me that the next 22 characters, completing the sentence you part-quoted: " (no sex, no story...)" suggests rather strongly that Lshmael, far from missing the point, hit a very clean bullseye.
Here in the UK, we regularly get news along the lines of "something trivial happened in Lancashire, something fairly dull happened in Kent, some minor stuff went down in Dyfed, and in other news, 12,000 people died in a disaster on another continent; no Britons are thought to be involved". I'm sure whichever country you call home exhibits the same tendency.
calling Europe a country is really just extrapolating based upon current trends ... I expect the EU to essentially be a single country within my lifetime
Which is all well and good, but by that argument, we've already run out of oil, China is the world's only superpower, I can expect to live to 150, 250 if I buy a few off-the-shelf gene-mods and I'm posting from Moonbase 3:-)
As i see it the key difference is that UW is an educational institution, funded for the purpose of doing educational activities, and a large spend to support NetGear's router products sounds distinctly ultra vires, and in most Universities I've worked in ultra vires is not a phrase you want to get associated with if you'd like to stay employed.
Microsoft is a commercial organisation selling an operating system which polls microsoft's own NTP servers. For Microsoft to decide to spend an extra million dollars on NTP infrastructure at time.windows.com to supports Microsoft OS products is a perfectly reasonable line of business decision. If supporting their OS products requires them to throw 1000 load-balanced PowerEdges at the problem, they're entitled (morally obliged even?) to do so. And financially very much capable of doing so, of course.
Hardcode your OWN IPs to your hearts content. It may be cretinous design, but it's perfectly fair and equitable cretinous design;-). But if you hardcode MY IP, we have an issue.
(1) is clearly entirely reasonable, clearly the moral thing to do once we've sorted out the water supply and the electricity supply and the telephone networks across most of the developing world;-), (2) the Java client had better be very small. You cannot believe the fury when you're in an Indian internet shop and you realise some cretinous tosser has sent you an email with a 75kB attachment - if you're lucky with the power and the phone line and the ISP you MIGHT get it downloaded within an hour... (this is not speculation this is painful experience), (3) is the practical option of those offered. In fact, (3) is a 800dy good idea. Does anyone run one of these with public access atm, 'cos if they don't, I might have to set one up and become rather popular quite fast! Nice one mate!
Not an RFID thing because, if you read today's Guardian report (page 10, col 6), you'll find that the RFID tags in the Cambridge trial were placed on the packs by Tesco as part of a six-month test, NOT by Gillette. This trial has now ended and Tesco are currently testing RFID on DVDs at their Sandhurst branch. Gillette don't RFID-tag their individual packs, they tag only at Pallet level at present. So whatever you found was something else. I'd be astonished if there wasn't SOME surveillance, given that in the UK at least, small, high-value packs of razorblades are one of the most shoplifted items (which is why in many supermarkets they're no longer on the shelf, you have to ask for them at a kiosk).
unless South Korea has some kind of weird nationwide ban on using anything besides MSN, I don't see what the big deal is.
When I was last travelling in south Asia, internet access was strictly on the 'cybercafe' model. While it's entirely reasonable to say that I can continue to IM using, say, GAIM or Trillian on my OWN pc, while travelling it was a choice between Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger, as these were the clients you could pretty much rely on being available. Installing anything else on a machine not my own would be seriously rude, even if downloading an alternative client over a glitchy 28k modem on a glitchy phone line every time I wanted to use IM was practical. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a real majority of IM users (global scope here) are NOT in control of the platform or client.
My personal choice is Jabber, every time, gatewayed to other services as needed, but in a backstreet Indian internet shop with a bunch of old pc's running Win98, it's not my choice of client, its MSN or Yahoo. So to communicate with family back home, it's the Yahoo or MSN protocol for them too. And therein lies the lockin, of course.
And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example
You know, I'd have had no problem with the war being about Oil if they'd come straight out and said "this war is about Oil". That would have been honest, credible and IMHO even justified.
The Saddam regime was selling its oil priced in Euros not USD. The regime was also encouraging other oil producers to price in Euros not USD. The US national debt is only sustainable because it is denominated in the international reserve currency, the petrodollar. If it was denominated in any currency other than the domestic one, the US couldn't possibly afford to buy enough, e.g. Euros to sustain its debt and the US economy would melt down utterly. That's 'utterly' as in lots of hungry people.
Therefore, to invade a country at the vanguard of a move away from Dollar-pricing of Oil would be a simple straightforward case of protecting National Security from a Clear and Present Danger, and that is, after all, the paramount job of a Government. And thus very hard to gainsay.
I might not have liked the outcome but I'd have had a hard time critiquing the motive. As it is we were told a crock of lies about imminent WMD threats (the Hutton Inquiry is at this moment tearing those claims to shreds), and while protecting National Security is the first responsibility of a government, lying to the electors is probably the primary sin of a government. One punishable, in my book, by Electoral Annihilation.
although technically speaking, if they spotted a female with offspring and it IS a gorilla-chimp hybrid then neither gorillas, chimps, nor this creature would constitute separate species from eachother.
Might I recommend room-darkening vinyl blinds, available on the cheap at wal-mart
Sticking-plaster. OK, so the personal is political and 'act locally', sure, But this approach means that rather than a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down, disrupted ecosystem and sleepless nights, you now have a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down, disrupted ecosystem and 8 hours of Z's.
But you still have the a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down and the disrupted ecosystem. Your approach cost you money, made a nice profit for WalMart, but didn't even start to deal with the actual problem here.
Getting some pressure onto the local authorities to use lower-wattage lighting, tighter frequency ranges, more directional luminaires (all of these ought to bring your taxes down as the power bills fall), better planning regulations on domestic floodlighting, these approaches would actually target the underlying problem here.
Or at least, limited-frequency lights for everyone. As the article pointed out, one of the unfortunate effects of the move away from low-pressure sodium lighting is the wider frequency range of the replacements. While it does make colour perception very hard, at a fixed frequency range (95% at 589nm and 5% at 586nm) a key advantage is that most organisms do not perceive it as an equivalent to sunlight, and so are far less disrupted.
Including me when I want to sleep at night. All yellow sodium here, but at Uni, I was in a room which backed onto a sports field around a mile away, and frequently they would leave the floods on all night (did these people not have to pay power bills or what?) and at a mile away, I'd say they were probably about a tenth as bright as a 100W incandescent in my room. Certainly nothing you'd reasonably describe as 'dark'. In the winter season it basically didn't get dark in that part of town until well after 11pm, if they bothered to switch off at all.
And, having spent many a night (including much of last week on a camping trip so this is pretty fresh) gazing in awe at the sky as one of the most delicate, intricate, bejewelled, brilliant, subtle beauties on all this world, beauty which was there for every person on the planet until gaslight came on, I tend to wonder whether maybe there should be a basic human right of Access To Beauty, something entirely attainable by looking upwards, at night, in a dark environment.
In his most creative flights of fancy, ignoring entirely the limitations imposed by skill, technology and materials, Carl Faberge can never have conceived a piece of jewellery to hold a candle to the Milky Way.
Why not pass a law "the states must use open software (and hardware!) systems in their election machines"?
Because you then run into the whole States Rights quagmire and if you're lucky you might get an answer out of the Supreme Court within 20 years.
So long as you make OSS a pre-condition of Federal funding you bypass that whole issue. Any State that prefers to run Closed-source can do so. At the expense of its taxpayers. Probably not a very popular move. No problem.
Slashdot Mirror
aggregated over millions of bulbs it might become somewhat iffy, environmentally, but last time I worked in theatrical lighting, we used to change the emitted colour of our (in many cases very blue/UV-rich) lamps using coloured filters ;-)
Of course, the absorbed energy reduces the efficiency gains of the LED somewhat as the gel heats up, but I tend to use gels to modify the basic colour of my lighting at home anyway. I like the energy efficiency side of compact fluorescents but I don't like the high colour temp, so the bulb lives in a shroud of (i kid not about the name) 'Light Bastard Amber' Rosco Supergel, which takes the blue edge off and pinks it up just a smidge. Once you start doing this you then tend to start switching for effects, of course, and Kelly Blue and Deep Moss Green are nice a while if you don't need too much brightness.
TomV
When you have companies like that that were it not for their trucks and SUV's why do you think they will spend lots of money on hydrogen fuel research?
My best guess would be: in the hope that commercial salvation might lie that way if they get their skates on and take it seriously NOW, before the oil that powers those SUV's becomes for whatever reason unacceptable as an energy source. A company that's utterly dependent on trucks and SUVs is toast if the price of oil triples and stays there for a while, or if a new fundamentalist regime in Saudi simply refuses to sell oil to the Great Satan, or if someone with impeccable credentials comes up with undeniable proof of dangerous global warming. None of which is entirely beyond the realm of possibility. They owe it to their shareholders to hedge these risks.
TomV
Remember that "if we should ever figure out what everything means, it will instantly be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable"
;-)
Can we PLEASE have just one thread here that doesn't reference that damned SCO suit?
TomV
From Fit The Ninth (Radio series 2), in which our heroes have the chance to chew the fat with some old enemies and Arthur Dent has an unpleasant cup of tea.
Share and enjoy
TomV
The court ruling of the highest German court was very clear in stating that the original owner of the rights also had future rights for redistribution ... I'd be surprised if British law were any different.
I'd be surprised too. But Record Company contracts are famously rapacious (see Courtney Love's views on the real 'piracy' in the record industry), while TV contracts are governed very strictly by, for example, Union rules (Equity in the UK).
Most recording artists own no rights to their recordings at all. But credited actors are entitled to repeat fees, and at least under the old Doctor Who contracts, scriptwriters retained copyright on their creations. Because the BBC1 Controller, Lorraine Heggessey, recently commented that she'd love to bring back Doctor Who but the rights were a problem, this was for a while as hot a potato in Who fandom as the SCO stuff is around here, and the ins and outs of who owns what have been done to death, and eventually the BBC published this statement.
The BBC was once a terribly prim and proper establishment organisation, and prided itself on doing everything in the manner of a gentleman, hence perhaps the rather nice way it treated its creatives and the bind this puts it in now.
TomV
Thanks for the pointer Mr AC. Here's a link to the semi-official BBC Restoration Team who do all the cleanup work for the Doctor Who DVD and recent VHS releases.
As is clear from this article* on the site, in the 1960s film was used for location and model inserts, but not, generally, for studio recordings, which went straight to 2" VT. The VT was generally 'telerecorded' onto 25fps film for overseas sale by BBC Enterprises, but only after the first sale had been agreed, so for example since noone bought 'The Daleks' Masterplan', no telerecording was made.
Meanwhile, tapes remained the property of the Engineering Department and were routinely wiped a few years after broadcast, until 1978 when the BBC's Film and Videotape Library was founded. By then, Ian Levine's initial audit showed that 47 1960's episodes were still held as telerecordings, but only one complete story, the first, 'An Unearthly Child' (4 eps). And after 1972 BBC Enterprises, once orders for B&W stuff had dried up, had started clearing shelf space, not helped by the fact that Film Recording Clerk Pamela Nash believed that the rights had in any case expired.
Over the same period, a lot of the VT stock was also recycled, and due to the BBC's splendidly bureaucratic records, we know for example that the 2" tape that once held 'Enemy of the World' ep 3 is still in the archive, and exactly where it's shelved. Unfortunately it now contains a 1970's edition of Blue Peter.
So basically, almost the entire output of 1960's Doctor Who existed at the BBC on both tape and film, and by 1978, many episodes had been lost on both tape and film. Most of the 1960's Who that we have now comes from the surviving 25fps film copies from BBCE, and looks jerky. Hence the RT's rather wonderful VidFire process to put back the missing 50% of the timeslices.
I know far far more about Doctor Who than is good for my mental health...
TomV
*the domain's different because it's a deep link into a frameset - can be navigated from the RT homepage via 'Articles and Information', then 'BBC Archive Holdings' in the left frame
They decided a while back that the archives had no value and started destroying it
It's more accurate to say that in the 1970's, in a nasty funding squeeze and an incipient recession, and with no market yet existing for repeats, no domestic videotape yet, only three domestic TV channels, the BBC couldn't afford enough videotape to keep operating and to continue operating except by recycling the tapes they already had. And with Colour being new and wonderful, the archives of old B&W stuff that they wouldn't ever use again, I mean who would watch it anyway, was a good place to start the recycling.
There's a lot of stuff come back from overseas broadcasters, but there are still several complete episodes missing, such as Tenth Planet ep4, all but eps 5 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan, and complete stories including Power Of The Daleks, Evil Of The Daleks, Marco Polo, Galaxy 4, Fury From the Deep, The Highlanders.
TomV
Will this just be news/education/documentaries? Or will it really include every episode of Doctor Who and Eastenders?....
Unfortunately, you may be right in worrying about this, and not through any ill-will on the BBC's part.
The news stuff I'm sure they have full rights on and can use as they please. Drama's a bit more difficult.
My specialist subject's Doctor Who. The difficulties here would be twofold. Firstly, and expensively, there's the issue of actor's repeat fees - since Internet fees weren't negotiated until recently, streaming a lot of old material would involve a staggringly huge job tracking down every single actor named in credits, and coming to a satisfactory deal with each and every one of them before the item they were on could be made available. This might not be too tough for a ten year old episode of Eastenders, but can you imaging trying to track down the full cast of a show first broadcast forty years ago? Now, for Doctor Who, they will have had to go through much the same process for the VHS, and they're currently having to negotiate again for the DVD releases. But that's just one show, and a proven moneyspinner which has probably repaid the effort comfortably.
Secondly, for Doctor Who again, the rights on the scripts can be devilish. For Doctor Who, the BBC owns the Doctor, the TARDIS, the other regular characters and very little else. So for example they can't show any Dalek stuff in this anniversary year because the BBC doesn't have any rights to the Daleks, they're owned by the estate of their creator, the late scriptwriter Terry Nation, and Mrs Nation's not selling at a price the BBC are willing to pay at present. So, again, the process of discovery and renegotiation would be potentially nightmarish.
So I suspect this announcement (which is utterly, utterly, utterly thrilling nonetheless) in all likelihood refers only to those items to which the BBC has absolute and clear ownership.
TomV
John Arlott lyricising Gary Sobers. I V A Richards in full explosive flow. Lillee and Thompson turning up the heat. Truman coming in like a hurricane. Botham at Headingley. The collected Cake Reviews of Brian Johnson ;-)
;-)
The first live TV cricket coverage was on June 17 1938. I'm sure the first recordings were much later but the wealth of archive must be staggering, even given the economic need to recycle tapes that robbed us of so much Who, amongst other shows.
Warney's early matches doesn't touch the edge of what must be in those archives. I'm only 34 and I remember watching his first Test delivery in England to Gatting and simply not believing my own eyes. That's one of the problems with archive, of course. Billions of people know now that Warne's one of the most talented sportsmen to ever draw breath, but that Thursday morning, well, it had been decades since anyone made a ball turn like that, and I had no idea such a thing was even possible. That impact you don't get with archive, but still...
TomV
p.s. What about Merv? His 'tache was a whole league up on Boonie's
Exactly. If I were crazed enough to use this mythical spreadsheet for multi-million dollar bond calculations, here's how I'd do it. I'd hire a seriously good C++ guy to build the calculation engine to sufficient precision and wrap it in COM (remember, we're using this thing to do multi-million dollar bond deals, stop smirking at the back: we've got a multimillion-dollar budget for this project, we can afford a VERY good C++ guy and a LOT of time), then write a dozen line of VBA in a macro, to instantiate it, set a few properties and call some methods to get my answers. If I was sufficiently thick, I might even think it was Excel doing it, not expensiveCustomComponent.bondCalculator
;-)
That's the COM philosophy - lots of small, very dedicated programs glued together with a bit of script
I'm hoping the mono's vb support will be viable as a fall back
.net becomes more widespread, and especially with the 'Visual Studio for Office' or whatever it's called this week, we're likely to see third-party tools to 'upgrade your existing office VBA macros to .net, today!'.
.net tools to do this, and if this pans out, then using the Mono CLR, *if* you could host VB.net code, *then* you'd, because this is the *Common* language runtime, be able to host macros written in C#, JScript.net (yeah, get to the point...) and J#, and if you could host J# then it follows that you'd suddenly be in a position to host macros in carefully written Java. And heavy numbercrunching macros written in Haskell.net, or whatever seems the most powerful tool for the job. Which surely wouldn't hurt as a Gnumeric feature regardless of how Excel macros work today.
Mono would give you VB.net, not VBA. But that might be a boon not a bad thing. You might get more than just a Fallback from Mono. First impression, without knowing the ins and outs in depth, just a brainstorm-grade idea: it seems to me that as
If the current activity on GotDotNet is anything to go by I'd not be surprised to see a fairly broad range of free, open-sourced
TomV
That's a revolting atitude. I don't think of all the hapless PHBs and MSCSE CIOs, i think of all the millions of ordinary hard-working people who put in the hours at work, sacrificed buying something else so they could spend a grand on a home PC and software (which frequently drives them nuts and makes them feel like idiots because it's STILL not ready for the public, incidentally), to keep in touch with their friends, their families, their loved ones, and found themselves unable to do so, and worried about their ability to do so in future, because of the stupid, childish, expoitative, vandalistic, selfish behaviour of some pus-ridden shitheaded twat who may or may not have felt they had a political point to prove.
TomV
I think the point that you're missing is that people died
It seems to me that the next 22 characters, completing the sentence you part-quoted: " (no sex, no story...)" suggests rather strongly that Lshmael, far from missing the point, hit a very clean bullseye.
Here in the UK, we regularly get news along the lines of "something trivial happened in Lancashire, something fairly dull happened in Kent, some minor stuff went down in Dyfed, and in other news, 12,000 people died in a disaster on another continent; no Britons are thought to be involved". I'm sure whichever country you call home exhibits the same tendency.
TomV
calling Europe a country is really just extrapolating based upon current trends
:-)
...
I expect the EU to essentially be a single country within my lifetime
Which is all well and good, but by that argument, we've already run out of oil, China is the world's only superpower, I can expect to live to 150, 250 if I buy a few off-the-shelf gene-mods and I'm posting from Moonbase 3
TomV
As i see it the key difference is that UW is an educational institution, funded for the purpose of doing educational activities, and a large spend to support NetGear's router products sounds distinctly ultra vires, and in most Universities I've worked in ultra vires is not a phrase you want to get associated with if you'd like to stay employed.
;-). But if you hardcode MY IP, we have an issue.
Microsoft is a commercial organisation selling an operating system which polls microsoft's own NTP servers. For Microsoft to decide to spend an extra million dollars on NTP infrastructure at time.windows.com to supports Microsoft OS products is a perfectly reasonable line of business decision. If supporting their OS products requires them to throw 1000 load-balanced PowerEdges at the problem, they're entitled (morally obliged even?) to do so. And financially very much capable of doing so, of course.
Hardcode your OWN IPs to your hearts content. It may be cretinous design, but it's perfectly fair and equitable cretinous design
TomV
(1) is clearly entirely reasonable, clearly the moral thing to do once we've sorted out the water supply and the electricity supply and the telephone networks across most of the developing world ;-),
(2) the Java client had better be very small. You cannot believe the fury when you're in an Indian internet shop and you realise some cretinous tosser has sent you an email with a 75kB attachment - if you're lucky with the power and the phone line and the ISP you MIGHT get it downloaded within an hour... (this is not speculation this is painful experience),
(3) is the practical option of those offered. In fact, (3) is a 800dy good idea. Does anyone run one of these with public access atm, 'cos if they don't, I might have to set one up and become rather popular quite fast! Nice one mate!
TomV
Not an RFID thing because, if you read today's Guardian report (page 10, col 6), you'll find that the RFID tags in the Cambridge trial were placed on the packs by Tesco as part of a six-month test, NOT by Gillette. This trial has now ended and Tesco are currently testing RFID on DVDs at their Sandhurst branch. Gillette don't RFID-tag their individual packs, they tag only at Pallet level at present. So whatever you found was something else. I'd be astonished if there wasn't SOME surveillance, given that in the UK at least, small, high-value packs of razorblades are one of the most shoplifted items (which is why in many supermarkets they're no longer on the shelf, you have to ask for them at a kiosk).
TomV
unless South Korea has some kind of weird nationwide ban on using anything besides MSN, I don't see what the big deal is.
When I was last travelling in south Asia, internet access was strictly on the 'cybercafe' model. While it's entirely reasonable to say that I can continue to IM using, say, GAIM or Trillian on my OWN pc, while travelling it was a choice between Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger, as these were the clients you could pretty much rely on being available. Installing anything else on a machine not my own would be seriously rude, even if downloading an alternative client over a glitchy 28k modem on a glitchy phone line every time I wanted to use IM was practical. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a real majority of IM users (global scope here) are NOT in control of the platform or client.
My personal choice is Jabber, every time, gatewayed to other services as needed, but in a backstreet Indian internet shop with a bunch of old pc's running Win98, it's not my choice of client, its MSN or Yahoo. So to communicate with family back home, it's the Yahoo or MSN protocol for them too. And therein lies the lockin, of course.
TomV
And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example
You know, I'd have had no problem with the war being about Oil if they'd come straight out and said "this war is about Oil". That would have been honest, credible and IMHO even justified.
The Saddam regime was selling its oil priced in Euros not USD. The regime was also encouraging other oil producers to price in Euros not USD. The US national debt is only sustainable because it is denominated in the international reserve currency, the petrodollar. If it was denominated in any currency other than the domestic one, the US couldn't possibly afford to buy enough, e.g. Euros to sustain its debt and the US economy would melt down utterly. That's 'utterly' as in lots of hungry people.
Therefore, to invade a country at the vanguard of a move away from Dollar-pricing of Oil would be a simple straightforward case of protecting National Security from a Clear and Present Danger, and that is, after all, the paramount job of a Government. And thus very hard to gainsay.
I might not have liked the outcome but I'd have had a hard time critiquing the motive. As it is we were told a crock of lies about imminent WMD threats (the Hutton Inquiry is at this moment tearing those claims to shreds), and while protecting National Security is the first responsibility of a government, lying to the electors is probably the primary sin of a government. One punishable, in my book, by Electoral Annihilation.
TomV
Presumably something about how it's GNU/Norway, and don't you forget it ;-)
TomV
although technically speaking, if they spotted a female with offspring and it IS a gorilla-chimp hybrid then neither gorillas, chimps, nor this creature would constitute separate species from eachother.
TomV
Might I recommend room-darkening vinyl blinds, available on the cheap at wal-mart
Sticking-plaster. OK, so the personal is political and 'act locally', sure, But this approach means that rather than a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down, disrupted ecosystem and sleepless nights, you now have a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down, disrupted ecosystem and 8 hours of Z's.
But you still have the a kilowatt of full-spectrum light beaming down and the disrupted ecosystem. Your approach cost you money, made a nice profit for WalMart, but didn't even start to deal with the actual problem here.
Getting some pressure onto the local authorities to use lower-wattage lighting, tighter frequency ranges, more directional luminaires (all of these ought to bring your taxes down as the power bills fall), better planning regulations on domestic floodlighting, these approaches would actually target the underlying problem here.
TomV
Asimov once summed it up with fantastic terseness in one of his magazine columns:
Q: Dr Asimov, can you specify any way in which science has actually improved the quality of or allotted three score years and ten?
A: About two score.
TomV
Or at least, limited-frequency lights for everyone. As the article pointed out, one of the unfortunate effects of the move away from low-pressure sodium lighting is the wider frequency range of the replacements. While it does make colour perception very hard, at a fixed frequency range (95% at 589nm and 5% at 586nm) a key advantage is that most organisms do not perceive it as an equivalent to sunlight, and so are far less disrupted.
Including me when I want to sleep at night. All yellow sodium here, but at Uni, I was in a room which backed onto a sports field around a mile away, and frequently they would leave the floods on all night (did these people not have to pay power bills or what?) and at a mile away, I'd say they were probably about a tenth as bright as a 100W incandescent in my room. Certainly nothing you'd reasonably describe as 'dark'. In the winter season it basically didn't get dark in that part of town until well after 11pm, if they bothered to switch off at all.
And, having spent many a night (including much of last week on a camping trip so this is pretty fresh) gazing in awe at the sky as one of the most delicate, intricate, bejewelled, brilliant, subtle beauties on all this world, beauty which was there for every person on the planet until gaslight came on, I tend to wonder whether maybe there should be a basic human right of Access To Beauty, something entirely attainable by looking upwards, at night, in a dark environment.
In his most creative flights of fancy, ignoring entirely the limitations imposed by skill, technology and materials, Carl Faberge can never have conceived a piece of jewellery to hold a candle to the Milky Way.
TomV
Why not pass a law "the states must use open software (and hardware!) systems in their election machines"?
Because you then run into the whole States Rights quagmire and if you're lucky you might get an answer out of the Supreme Court within 20 years.
So long as you make OSS a pre-condition of Federal funding you bypass that whole issue. Any State that prefers to run Closed-source can do so. At the expense of its taxpayers. Probably not a very popular move. No problem.
TomV