The fact is, we cannot produce north america's energy needs (or anywhere near it) in this manner
In other words, US power consumption is a symptom of koyaanisqatsi (for the link-challenged, it's a Hopi word meaning, amongst other things, 'a state of life that calls for another way of living').
It's all very well getting defeatist, but don't get defeatist just because you can't fix the symptoms. Look at the causes first
But I don't think MY cost comparison is of any interest to the people in the article. The first few hundred watts are probably the most productive anyway.
And what's more, in 'developed' countries, we've already made a huge investment in power stations to supply our mains electricity, plus systems to distribute that power.
So one important comparison has to be that between spending, say $10,000 for a solar facility for a village (still a lot of money in most places on the planet), and $several_million to build gas/coal/nuclear/whatever powered centralised power stations and distribution networks. Which might end up more economical when calculated across an entire country, but has to be done in one fell swoop rather than being achievable piecemeal, village by village, region by region.
And then there's the ongoing cost of fuel, the carbon release or nuclear waste disposal, the moving parts, the high operating costs...
It will cost us a lot of money to convert to solar in the short term, but, as Keynes so nicely put it, in the long term, we're all dead. and it's in the long term that our grandchildren will thank us for having the foresight and wisdom to take a hit today and set the change in motion.
I wonder how well the bacteria would stand up to washing.
As you saw when you read the article, but seem to have forgotten in the intervening time, you don't wash them. they live off the dirt in your clothes. and if you leave your clothes clean for long enough for them to become dormant, you feed them by wearing the clothes.
Or maybe they'll come up with bacteria that feeds on common clothing stains, too. That way, you'd never have to wash them
Again, when you looked at the title of this story, you noted the words "Sweat-Eating Bacteria to Live in Your Clothes", and when you read the article, you noted that you wouldn't have to wash clothes anymore due to the bacteria keeping them clean. And then the amnesia hit again.
A question: any chance those E. coli bacteria could mutate into a harmful strain?
Clearly, the answer is yes. although there are thousands of strains without which we'd all starve due to our inadequate guts, and a very limited number of strains which are harmful. But as long as you can resist eating Bart's shorts.....
I'd imagine s/he's talking about these three CD's I'm looking at. The ones I used to install Visual Studio.net and the.net framework on my test PC so that I can use it to develop.net applications.
The ones that I got a few days ago as an MSDN Universal subscriber and which are available from M'oft for subscriber download or by mail order for P&P only (about £15 to the UK, which is kind of steep but whatever...).
Oh, and as an aside, the ones which I received mail about from M'oft this morning apologising for the fact that they sent out a 30-day expiring copy, but a non-expiring one's already been despatched to replace it. Idiots!
...and be forced into using microsoft servers, protocols, and latest tie-in schemes.
One thing I learned a long time ago. Do the research first, then make the statement.
I'll provide only one example to refute the claim above. If you go to the XMLBUS site run by Iona Technologies, you'll find a rather nice set of tutorials about IONA's Web Services implementation on UNIX, and their toolsets for generating a SOAP gateway into Java classes or EJBs.
Not to put to fine a point on it, you can consume, and produce SOAP on any platform capable of communicating HTTP and parsing a bit of text.
It's only Moft FUD that suggests otherwise. So they can get a head start. So don't be defeatist.
The real reason is that these companies were taking away too much business from their European counterparts
... which is, after all, the purpose of anti-monopoly legislation.
This is the first time the Commission has made this sort of judgment against two non-EU companies. Put another way, every previous judgment has blocked a merger or cartel which would have enabled some European business or other to become big enough to compete in a globalised economy. a few examples are probably in order here:
Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz - pharmaceuticals
Shell and Montedizon - polypropylene
production
Guinness and Grand Metropolitan - alcoholic beverages
Roche AG and Bayer - sale of vitamin supplements
Blokker and the Dutch subsidiary of Toys-R-Us - toy retailing
Bertelsmann and Vivendi - media and telecomms
that's quite enough.
So basically the Commission's been doing its job for a decade or more. Stopping mergers or anticompetitive arrangements which took too much business away from European companies. This is simply the first case in which both parties to the proposed merger were non-European.
They've been shafting our businesses over here for years. Just because they've finally started shafting yours, don't whine about it.
And I'll restate the point about this being the law here, as decided by our elected representatives in the European Parliament, and by a Commission appointed by our elected national governments.
Democracy at work. What's that repulsive americanism that seems to be so much in vogue at the moment? Oh yes, though it chokes me to even use it...
It's amusing that Kodak actually referred to this as taxation
It's particularly funny as one of the things I said to myself when I got my first digicam was
'... and that's the last time I ever pay Kodak's photo tax'
It's remarkably rich of Kodak, a firm that sold you film and then charged you more than the film cost to actually turn it into useful photos to start accusing others of imposing a 'tax' in the field of photography.
sorry. As far as the software side's concerned, there seems to be an issue here, but as far as Kodak's concerned... no sympathy, let 'em burn.
Excuse me? Why the [XD] should the EU be able to say what two non-European companies should and should not be able to do? Just because the companies do business in the EU?
No-one said they couldn't merge. The commission simply said that if they did merge, then the merged company couldn't trade in various sectors (particularly avionics) within the EU.
Thing is, it's been said a million or so times here in respect of M'oft that "having a monopoly isn't illegal, it's abusing it that's not allowed", but that's the US legal position.
In the EU, having a monopoly is illegal, so once the Commission established that the merged company's market share would be above the defined threshold for a monopoly, they were hardly in a position to act any differently.
What you have here is a governmental body implementing a law put in place by a set of elected representatives. 'Democracy', I believe it's known as. Often posited as a credible alternative to imperialism.
Since the word "Illustrator" was in the Dictionary before Adobe was a company, they do not have the right to trademark it [...] just my 2 Cents.
As a general principle, i'd tend to agree. But as a real-world proposition it's a total nonstarter. After all, "adobe" was in the dictionary before Adobe was a company, similarly Ford (river crossing), Sun (big, bright thing out in the Big Room), Penguin (weird flappy thing, smells of fish), Mars (turn right at Sun and carry on for a while)...
If we were just inventing corporate capitalism now, yours would be a very sensible rule. There's plenty of companies out there who invented names (Xerox, Compaq, Pepsi...)
But I can't really see anyone authorising a 150-year rollback on the whole of capitalism. Which is a shame, in many ways
The 604 "Electronic Calculating Punch" was developed from the 603 Electronic Multiplier, itself a derivative of 1933's 601 Electronic Multiplying Punch.
Enhancements included an increased clock speed (from 35kHz to a screaming 50 kHz, wahey!!), use of miniature tubes, capacity of 20 plugboard steps per card instruction, 32 digit capacity, new flip-flops, and use of standardised control circuitry to make maintenance easier.
It wasn't the first IBM capable of division, that was the 602, and it wasn't a stored-program computer, as it executed straight off the card.
It's sort of questionable if the 604 was a 'computer' in any modern sense, but it was a lot more versatile and reliable than previous electronic calculators, and IBM managed to ship 5600 or so. Also, the demand for 604 parts basically kicked off the 'computer grade vacuum tube' market.
TomV
Re:GSM/USA - I thought it actually worked
on
SMS vs. E-mail?
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· Score: 1
Just buy a tri-band phone [...]
Last time I've been there I picked up an Ericsson thingy for about $400,
And here, I suspect we've hit upon yet another glaring difference between US and European mobile phone culture...
No way am I prepared to actually pay for a mobile phone, unless it's a fashion accessory type model. The usual approach here is that the phone comes either free or massively subsidised as part of the inital sign up package (which is why contracts tend to run for a munimum 12 months, to defray the cost of the phone).
Now, i'm on a prepay (which means I bought a voucher for £50 of outgoing calls in mid 2000 and I'm still running on that, taking incoming calls (cost me nothing), sending lots and lots of SMS and making very very occasional outgoing calls).
Because I had a Motorola startac and the UI is wretched (basically, can't do phonebook lookups at any of the points you'd want to), I actually went out and paid money for a replacement handset to house my SIM. Got a nokia 3210 for £50. Wouldn't dream of paying any more than that. And that was a phone-only deal. For a phone-with-service detail, I'll take a massively subsidised or free phone every single time.
TomV
Re:International Compatibility...
on
SMS vs. E-mail?
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· Score: 1
Until they [the service providers] decide to come up with some standard messaging protocals, you are pretty much screwed.
One of my principal channels of communication with my cousins in New Zealand (I'm in England) is SMS. 5 pence a message, don't need to be at a computer, tested it using a landline at the same time and the messages can be pretty much instantaneous (or take several days depending on network load, that's the biggest downside of SMS), and that's from a nokia Orange Phone (UK) to a panasonic Vodaphone (NZ) and vice-versa.
Same method also works between UK, NZ and South Africa.
There is a standard - it's the control channel on GSM, and it works across most of the world already.
I work at a major publisher of scientific literature. In IT Development, which is all I know about (ops, sys eng, support etc may be different) we each have a £5000 p.a. training budget which is spent either on training our manager chooses, or training we persuade him to let us do, usually a mix. and if there's any of that budget left at the end of the year, we have to justify it to our boss, who has to justify it to our director.
Plus we're expected to spend half a day per week on self-education, be it CBT, playing with technologies, wandering around the MS, IBM or Sun websites, reading appropriate books, whatever. Obviously this takes a back seat when projects get hectic, but it's certainly expected that if there's time, we do this stuff. I think it's partly management realism aboutthe true nature of friday afternoons, actually.
Professors usually have a tenure and are paid to do research work as well as lecturing.
For clarification, in the UK at least, these people are Lecturers, Senior Lecturers or Pricipal Lecturers. Next step up is Reader, whose contract is usually research first, plus some teaching as an extra. Then come the Professors (holder of a Chair, either Personal (for personal extraordinary research achievements) or Named (long-standing post such as Newton's and Hawking's Lucasian chair at Cambridge), again for extraordinary research achievements), plus Emeritus or Regius Professors, often a post-retirement thing that lets them keep their ties to their old departments.
Ever wonder why Windows doesn't come with Microsoft Office included?
No competition! Microsoft ONLY bundles items to kill off competitive products.
Ah, so THAT explains why Office used to be bundled free with every copy of Win 3.x until Word Perfect and Lotus office suites finally collapsed under the unbearable pressure of competing with this free product.
And to think I used to think it was because WP missed the target badly with WP6 (WP5.1 was almost as fab as WP4.2, but 6 was a total dog. On Mogadon) and because Lotus turned Ami-Pro into a horrendous bloated monster rather than a fabulously small lightweight and fast tool and tried to claim Approach was a usable database tool.
My mistake, sorry... I just had this weird hallucination that Office 4 had cost me a months wages, but clearly that must be the drugs talking.
(yes, I read the article, its just that this is the first time I've seen CLI amongst the gajillion references to CLR).
CLI: Common Language Infrastructure - defines how a.net language works, specifies standard data types and so forth
CLR: Common Language Runtime - converts code written in a CLI-compliant language to MSIL (MS Intermediate Language, sort of bytecode thingy), JITs it and runs it.
So the CLI has been handed to ECMA, to allow anyone to implement a language in such a way that the CLR will be able to run it, while the CLR for Windows remains MS-proprietary.
Would be lovely to see the source of the Windows CLR, but it's the CLI that you need to write a CLR for A N Other platform.
You do realise that gigawatt is pronounced jigawat, right?
What I realise is that the 'giga' prefix is of Greek derivation, from the word for Giant, and that the classical Greek alphabet (the one with alpha and beta at the start) didn't have a 'J'. That's why, for example, the New Testament is full of references to a chap called Iesus who lived in the province of Iudea.
OTOH, if I choose to pronounce 'giga' so it sounds like 'cheese', then it's fair to say that gigawatt is pronounced 'cheesewatt'. It's just not terribly useful as a means of communication. And in any case, that would presumably make it 'jijawatt'.
Oh, the perils of having a classics prof for a dad. sigh...
TomV
Re:The Solstice is a little too New Agey for me
on
Total Solar Eclipse
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· Score: 2
Repeat after me, there is no more scientific justification for a Solstice than there is for the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or Atlantis.
What, apart from the bit about the time between sunrise and sunset being longer than any other day of the year?
There's no justification for Wednesdays, Thanksgiving or Christmas, but solstices and equinoxes are a physics thang.
As a species, going by the evidence of the early genome sequences to date, we appear to be a remarkable monoculture. The phrase used in the popular press goes along the lines of 'there is more genetic difference between two chimpanzee siblings than between any pair of humans.'
This, in itself represents a risky position - diversity within a species allows the species (not individuals) to survive as the environment changes.
Consider the Sickle-Cell anaemia example cited in the article. The gene survives at least partly because although it's a killer in a lot of places, in places where malaria is a major cause of death, the AS phenotype of the sickle-cell variation allows enough individuals to reach breeding age without dying from malaria to preserve the variation, and the species (they still get the disease, they're just more likely to survive it).
So what's worrying about diving into GE the moment we know it's even possible is that we could merrily, and with entirely well-meant motives, eliminate something which could be the salvation of our species when faced with some at-present unanticipated risk when it faces us at some unspecified point in the future. It's easy to eliminate a known gene, but a lot harder to design and implement a brand new one to meet a new hazard.
And with the particularly low diversity in our species, our differences are especially precious.
In the last four months, I've had all kinds of thoughts about how insurance companies would charge higher rates for people with certain genes, etc.
I'm pretty much certain that this will happen. here in the UK the government has already changed the relevant laws to make it possible
On the other hand, i suspect that it's actually a short-term problem caused by the paucity of knowledge in the field. Basically, at the moment, we know about a number of genetic characteristics which seem to manifest as risk-associated characteristics in the phenotype, and insurance companies and the like are able to pick up these characteristics and treat them as risky,and thus expensive to cover.
But as time goes by and we discover a borader range of these characteristics, it seems to me that we could well reach a situation where everyone has some sort of 'risky' characteristic, or, as the research goes further, some particularly 'risky' combination of characteristics. At which point it would cease to be worth the insurers' effort to factor these issues into the price, as most people's 'risks' would tend to balance out.
None of which makes it particularly moral in the short term, of course. But I wonder whether a lot of the problem at the moment is naive opportunism, in which case the opportunity will pass.
...left it locked in a drawer unused for about a month. [...] the battery was dead, and it had lost its configuration
I don't know if it's "expected" behaviour, but I certainly recognise it. I've got an iPaq (3630 model, bought about 12 months ago) plus a Palm V bought with my Y2K overtime money.
I have three issues with the iPaq, all of which annoy, but none of which stops me using it:
Battery life - the palm survives quite happily on one night's docking per month, the iPaq's good for 3 weeks tops (remember, mine was a promo deal just beforethey hit the market, so this may have been fixed a bit since) - Clearly the colour screen doesn't help, but even if it just sits switched off, the batteries eventually die.
Bulk - the iPaq is a very gorgeous and deeply sexy geek-toy, everyone who sees it oohs, aahs and gets jealous, but the Palm V actually fits in a pocket and weighs a good deal less, making it a more useful tool
Software - there's a lot of 3rd-party stuff out there for the Palm, and I used it to play stuff like real Spacies and Galaxians on the bus. But then, it's my choice to leave the iPaq on WinCE,....
weight and software, so be it. But the battery life thing is a royal pain.
The flipside of this for commercial vendors though is that Ogg Vorbis is horribly GPL encumbered
Actually, it's only slightly encumbered, rather than horribly so. To quote the xiph.org website:
The encoders, decoders, plugins, and tools at vorbis.com are under the GPL (GNU Public License) and the libraries are under the business-friendly BSD license.
I agree that under pure GPL, ogg would be a commercial non-starter, and therefore would probably never build up sufficient volume of encoded material to make an impact. But it looks like the Xiph team are way ahead of us here...
Heh, You got me on the offensive thing though. I confess, I berated you:) hahahha, sorry ol' chum ol' pal. Maybe we can make up and drink a few pints at the pub? On me
No problem, mate. Mine's a pint of Pedigree. Can you make it to Oxford for lasties?
OK, now that's a little bit personal, and just a pinch of offensive, to boot. Maybe just a tad insecure, but YMMV.
Who cares that the end user can change the redirects?!
Well, I care. Or I imagine I wouldn't have bothered with the post in the first place.
And if the nub of the argument against smart-tags is that Microsoft has total control over them, then I would think that the fact that it just ain't so might be of some interest to a few readers
The end user has NO USE DOING THAT. It provides NOTHING for the end user, to change them himself. HE HAS BOOKMARKS for that purpose.(sorry for the anger, but this schmuck is obviously clueless and/or deceitful).
Sorry again, but that really is needlessly offensive. Believe the 'clueless' part if you want, that's up to you. But 'schmuck' doesn't advance the discussion, and 'deceitful' is downright aggressive.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, US power consumption is a symptom of koyaanisqatsi (for the link-challenged, it's a Hopi word meaning, amongst other things, 'a state of life that calls for another way of living').
It's all very well getting defeatist, but don't get defeatist just because you can't fix the symptoms. Look at the causes first
TomV
And what's more, in 'developed' countries, we've already made a huge investment in power stations to supply our mains electricity, plus systems to distribute that power.
So one important comparison has to be that between spending, say $10,000 for a solar facility for a village (still a lot of money in most places on the planet), and $several_million to build gas/coal/nuclear/whatever powered centralised power stations and distribution networks. Which might end up more economical when calculated across an entire country, but has to be done in one fell swoop rather than being achievable piecemeal, village by village, region by region.
And then there's the ongoing cost of fuel, the carbon release or nuclear waste disposal, the moving parts, the high operating costs...
It will cost us a lot of money to convert to solar in the short term, but, as Keynes so nicely put it, in the long term, we're all dead. and it's in the long term that our grandchildren will thank us for having the foresight and wisdom to take a hit today and set the change in motion.
TomV
As you saw when you read the article, but seem to have forgotten in the intervening time, you don't wash them. they live off the dirt in your clothes. and if you leave your clothes clean for long enough for them to become dormant, you feed them by wearing the clothes.
Or maybe they'll come up with bacteria that feeds on common clothing stains, too. That way, you'd never have to wash them
Again, when you looked at the title of this story, you noted the words "Sweat-Eating Bacteria to Live in Your Clothes", and when you read the article, you noted that you wouldn't have to wash clothes anymore due to the bacteria keeping them clean. And then the amnesia hit again.
A question: any chance those E. coli bacteria could mutate into a harmful strain?
Clearly, the answer is yes. although there are thousands of strains without which we'd all starve due to our inadequate guts, and a very limited number of strains which are harmful. But as long as you can resist eating Bart's shorts.....
TomV
I'd imagine s/he's talking about these three CD's I'm looking at. The ones I used to install Visual Studio.net and the .net framework on my test PC so that I can use it to develop .net applications.
The ones that I got a few days ago as an MSDN Universal subscriber and which are available from M'oft for subscriber download or by mail order for P&P only (about £15 to the UK, which is kind of steep but whatever...).
Oh, and as an aside, the ones which I received mail about from M'oft this morning apologising for the fact that they sent out a 30-day expiring copy, but a non-expiring one's already been despatched to replace it. Idiots!
TomV
One thing I learned a long time ago. Do the research first, then make the statement.
I'll provide only one example to refute the claim above. If you go to the XMLBUS site run by Iona Technologies, you'll find a rather nice set of tutorials about IONA's Web Services implementation on UNIX, and their toolsets for generating a SOAP gateway into Java classes or EJBs.
Not to put to fine a point on it, you can consume, and produce SOAP on any platform capable of communicating HTTP and parsing a bit of text.
It's only Moft FUD that suggests otherwise. So they can get a head start. So don't be defeatist.
TomV
This is the first time the Commission has made this sort of judgment against two non-EU companies. Put another way, every previous judgment has blocked a merger or cartel which would have enabled some European business or other to become big enough to compete in a globalised economy. a few examples are probably in order here:
- Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz - pharmaceuticals
- Shell and Montedizon - polypropylene
production
- Guinness and Grand Metropolitan - alcoholic beverages
- Roche AG and Bayer - sale of vitamin supplements
- Blokker and the Dutch subsidiary of Toys-R-Us - toy retailing
- Bertelsmann and Vivendi - media and telecomms
- that's quite enough.
So basically the Commission's been doing its job for a decade or more. Stopping mergers or anticompetitive arrangements which took too much business away from European companies. This is simply the first case in which both parties to the proposed merger were non-European.They've been shafting our businesses over here for years. Just because they've finally started shafting yours, don't whine about it.
And I'll restate the point about this being the law here, as decided by our elected representatives in the European Parliament, and by a Commission appointed by our elected national governments.
Democracy at work. What's that repulsive americanism that seems to be so much in vogue at the moment? Oh yes, though it chokes me to even use it...
get over it.
TomV
It's particularly funny as one of the things I said to myself when I got my first digicam was
'... and that's the last time I ever pay Kodak's photo tax'
It's remarkably rich of Kodak, a firm that sold you film and then charged you more than the film cost to actually turn it into useful photos to start accusing others of imposing a 'tax' in the field of photography.
sorry. As far as the software side's concerned, there seems to be an issue here, but as far as Kodak's concerned... no sympathy, let 'em burn.
TomV
No-one said they couldn't merge. The commission simply said that if they did merge, then the merged company couldn't trade in various sectors (particularly avionics) within the EU.
Thing is, it's been said a million or so times here in respect of M'oft that "having a monopoly isn't illegal, it's abusing it that's not allowed", but that's the US legal position.
In the EU, having a monopoly is illegal, so once the Commission established that the merged company's market share would be above the defined threshold for a monopoly, they were hardly in a position to act any differently.
What you have here is a governmental body implementing a law put in place by a set of elected representatives. 'Democracy', I believe it's known as. Often posited as a credible alternative to imperialism.
TomV
As a general principle, i'd tend to agree. But as a real-world proposition it's a total nonstarter. After all, "adobe" was in the dictionary before Adobe was a company, similarly Ford (river crossing), Sun (big, bright thing out in the Big Room), Penguin (weird flappy thing, smells of fish), Mars (turn right at Sun and carry on for a while)...
If we were just inventing corporate capitalism now, yours would be a very sensible rule. There's plenty of companies out there who invented names (Xerox, Compaq, Pepsi...)
But I can't really see anyone authorising a 150-year rollback on the whole of capitalism. Which is a shame, in many ways
TomV
Enhancements included an increased clock speed (from 35kHz to a screaming 50 kHz, wahey!!), use of miniature tubes, capacity of 20 plugboard steps per card instruction, 32 digit capacity, new flip-flops, and use of standardised control circuitry to make maintenance easier.
It wasn't the first IBM capable of division, that was the 602, and it wasn't a stored-program computer, as it executed straight off the card.
It's sort of questionable if the 604 was a 'computer' in any modern sense, but it was a lot more versatile and reliable than previous electronic calculators, and IBM managed to ship 5600 or so. Also, the demand for 604 parts basically kicked off the 'computer grade vacuum tube' market.
TomV
Last time I've been there I picked up an Ericsson thingy for about $400,
And here, I suspect we've hit upon yet another glaring difference between US and European mobile phone culture...
No way am I prepared to actually pay for a mobile phone, unless it's a fashion accessory type model. The usual approach here is that the phone comes either free or massively subsidised as part of the inital sign up package (which is why contracts tend to run for a munimum 12 months, to defray the cost of the phone).
Now, i'm on a prepay (which means I bought a voucher for £50 of outgoing calls in mid 2000 and I'm still running on that, taking incoming calls (cost me nothing), sending lots and lots of SMS and making very very occasional outgoing calls).
Because I had a Motorola startac and the UI is wretched (basically, can't do phonebook lookups at any of the points you'd want to), I actually went out and paid money for a replacement handset to house my SIM. Got a nokia 3210 for £50. Wouldn't dream of paying any more than that. And that was a phone-only deal. For a phone-with-service detail, I'll take a massively subsidised or free phone every single time.
TomV
One of my principal channels of communication with my cousins in New Zealand (I'm in England) is SMS. 5 pence a message, don't need to be at a computer, tested it using a landline at the same time and the messages can be pretty much instantaneous (or take several days depending on network load, that's the biggest downside of SMS), and that's from a nokia Orange Phone (UK) to a panasonic Vodaphone (NZ) and vice-versa.
Same method also works between UK, NZ and South Africa.
There is a standard - it's the control channel on GSM, and it works across most of the world already.
TomV
Hmm, which one's worse? Violation of Pauli Exclusion, or illegal possession of a non-quantum spin?
sorry
TomV
Plus we're expected to spend half a day per week on self-education, be it CBT, playing with technologies, wandering around the MS, IBM or Sun websites, reading appropriate books, whatever. Obviously this takes a back seat when projects get hectic, but it's certainly expected that if there's time, we do this stuff. I think it's partly management realism aboutthe true nature of friday afternoons, actually.
TomV
For clarification, in the UK at least, these people are Lecturers, Senior Lecturers or Pricipal Lecturers. Next step up is Reader, whose contract is usually research first, plus some teaching as an extra. Then come the Professors (holder of a Chair, either Personal (for personal extraordinary research achievements) or Named (long-standing post such as Newton's and Hawking's Lucasian chair at Cambridge), again for extraordinary research achievements), plus Emeritus or Regius Professors, often a post-retirement thing that lets them keep their ties to their old departments.
TomV
No competition! Microsoft ONLY bundles items to kill off competitive products.
Ah, so THAT explains why Office used to be bundled free with every copy of Win 3.x until Word Perfect and Lotus office suites finally collapsed under the unbearable pressure of competing with this free product.
And to think I used to think it was because WP missed the target badly with WP6 (WP5.1 was almost as fab as WP4.2, but 6 was a total dog. On Mogadon) and because Lotus turned Ami-Pro into a horrendous bloated monster rather than a fabulously small lightweight and fast tool and tried to claim Approach was a usable database tool.
My mistake, sorry... I just had this weird hallucination that Office 4 had cost me a months wages, but clearly that must be the drugs talking.
TomV
-
CLI: Common Language Infrastructure - defines how a
.net language works, specifies standard data types and so forth
- CLR: Common Language Runtime - converts code written in a CLI-compliant language to MSIL (MS Intermediate Language, sort of bytecode thingy), JITs it and runs it.
So the CLI has been handed to ECMA, to allow anyone to implement a language in such a way that the CLR will be able to run it, while the CLR for Windows remains MS-proprietary.Would be lovely to see the source of the Windows CLR, but it's the CLI that you need to write a CLR for A N Other platform.
TomV
What I realise is that the 'giga' prefix is of Greek derivation, from the word for Giant, and that the classical Greek alphabet (the one with alpha and beta at the start) didn't have a 'J'. That's why, for example, the New Testament is full of references to a chap called Iesus who lived in the province of Iudea.
OTOH, if I choose to pronounce 'giga' so it sounds like 'cheese', then it's fair to say that gigawatt is pronounced 'cheesewatt'. It's just not terribly useful as a means of communication. And in any case, that would presumably make it 'jijawatt'.
Oh, the perils of having a classics prof for a dad. sigh...
TomV
What, apart from the bit about the time between sunrise and sunset being longer than any other day of the year?
There's no justification for Wednesdays, Thanksgiving or Christmas, but solstices and equinoxes are a physics thang.
TomV
It can be a bad thing by reducing diversity.
As a species, going by the evidence of the early genome sequences to date, we appear to be a remarkable monoculture. The phrase used in the popular press goes along the lines of 'there is more genetic difference between two chimpanzee siblings than between any pair of humans.'
This, in itself represents a risky position - diversity within a species allows the species (not individuals) to survive as the environment changes.
Consider the Sickle-Cell anaemia example cited in the article. The gene survives at least partly because although it's a killer in a lot of places, in places where malaria is a major cause of death, the AS phenotype of the sickle-cell variation allows enough individuals to reach breeding age without dying from malaria to preserve the variation, and the species (they still get the disease, they're just more likely to survive it).
So what's worrying about diving into GE the moment we know it's even possible is that we could merrily, and with entirely well-meant motives, eliminate something which could be the salvation of our species when faced with some at-present unanticipated risk when it faces us at some unspecified point in the future. It's easy to eliminate a known gene, but a lot harder to design and implement a brand new one to meet a new hazard.
And with the particularly low diversity in our species, our differences are especially precious.
TomV
I'm pretty much certain that this will happen. here in the UK the government has already changed the relevant laws to make it possible
On the other hand, i suspect that it's actually a short-term problem caused by the paucity of knowledge in the field. Basically, at the moment, we know about a number of genetic characteristics which seem to manifest as risk-associated characteristics in the phenotype, and insurance companies and the like are able to pick up these characteristics and treat them as risky,and thus expensive to cover.
But as time goes by and we discover a borader range of these characteristics, it seems to me that we could well reach a situation where everyone has some sort of 'risky' characteristic, or, as the research goes further, some particularly 'risky' combination of characteristics. At which point it would cease to be worth the insurers' effort to factor these issues into the price, as most people's 'risks' would tend to balance out.
None of which makes it particularly moral in the short term, of course. But I wonder whether a lot of the problem at the moment is naive opportunism, in which case the opportunity will pass.
TomV
I don't know if it's "expected" behaviour, but I certainly recognise it. I've got an iPaq (3630 model, bought about 12 months ago) plus a Palm V bought with my Y2K overtime money.
I have three issues with the iPaq, all of which annoy, but none of which stops me using it:
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Battery life - the palm survives quite happily on one night's docking per month, the iPaq's good for 3 weeks tops (remember, mine was a promo deal just beforethey hit the market, so this may have been fixed a bit since) - Clearly the colour screen doesn't help, but even if it just sits switched off, the batteries eventually die.
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Bulk - the iPaq is a very gorgeous and deeply sexy geek-toy, everyone who sees it oohs, aahs and gets jealous, but the Palm V actually fits in a pocket and weighs a good deal less, making it a more useful tool
- Software - there's a lot of 3rd-party stuff out there for the Palm, and I used it to play stuff like real Spacies and Galaxians on the bus. But then, it's my choice to leave the iPaq on WinCE,
....
weight and software, so be it. But the battery life thing is a royal pain.TomV
Actually, it's only slightly encumbered, rather than horribly so. To quote the xiph.org website:
I agree that under pure GPL, ogg would be a commercial non-starter, and therefore would probably never build up sufficient volume of encoded material to make an impact. But it looks like the Xiph team are way ahead of us here...
TomV
No problem, mate. Mine's a pint of Pedigree. Can you make it to Oxford for lasties?
TomV
OK, now that's a little bit personal, and just a pinch of offensive, to boot. Maybe just a tad insecure, but YMMV.
Who cares that the end user can change the redirects?!
Well, I care. Or I imagine I wouldn't have bothered with the post in the first place.
And if the nub of the argument against smart-tags is that Microsoft has total control over them, then I would think that the fact that it just ain't so might be of some interest to a few readers
The end user has NO USE DOING THAT. It provides NOTHING for the end user, to change them himself. HE HAS BOOKMARKS for that purpose. (sorry for the anger, but this schmuck is obviously clueless and/or deceitful).
Sorry again, but that really is needlessly offensive. Believe the 'clueless' part if you want, that's up to you. But 'schmuck' doesn't advance the discussion, and 'deceitful' is downright aggressive.
TomV