I do hope you're joking. I think I've wasted more time fixing problems with Windows and DOS than any other system I've ever used. In general, all I learned was how badly put together MS products are. Put another way, I don't think Yugo make better cars than Mercedes-Benz because they force you to pull over and futz with the engine every so often.
'Windows' *is* a trade mark of Microsoft: see here (at the bottom), for an example of where they claim this. I believe it's even a registered trade mark (although I don't have something to hand to confirm this).
Note that this does not prevent anyone from using the term, except in relation to the business of computer systems, since there are over forty categories of trade mark, and items can exist in more than one without (legal) conflict. That's why there can be a car and a computer called the 'Vectra', a computer and a household detergent called 'HP9000', and a phone chat service, a cellular phone service and a shampoo/conditioner called 'One-2-One'. There's even an outdoor clothing material called 'Microsoft'. Window companies have no reason to mention that "'Windows' is a trade mark of Microsoft" unless they're selling a competing product.
The Sunday Times also broke the 'Hitler Diaries' as a news story. We definitely need independent corroboration, plus an explanation of how this particular piece of kit might do its job in 12us.
The problem with the anglosaxon system measuring stuff is that you always have these strange formulas to remember when you have to convert to the metric system.
Put another way: "the problem with the metric system is that you always have these strange formulas to remember when you have to convert to regular numbers."
The advantage some of the pre-metric systems have is that they're better for mental arithmetic with common quantities. For example, there were twelve pennies in the English shilling rather than ten because twelve has more divisors than 10, and a shilling was a lot of money when it was invented, so dividing it up was common. Calculators and decimal places have changed the environment somewhat. The other benefits of metric (compatibility between weight and volume for some substances, for example) have relatively limited practical merit outside the technical disciplines.
The reason that America and the UK never switched to the metric system was that it was invented by the french...
The UK has been switching for a generation, and is nearly done, despite the continental origin of the system.
Here in the UK, for example, I buy my petrol and milk in litres, my sugar in kilogrammes, my wine in centilitres and my paper weighed in grammes per square centimetre. Everything in the supermarket has a metric size, although people often still ask for pounds and pints. Only really hard-to-change things (like road signs and bar maids) still routinely use Imperial units, and there are plans to change those too.
I think the european [digital TV] standard only exists on paper.
The UK has had digital TV via cable, satellite dish and ordinary, boring antenna for a year. All five broadcast networks offer digital versions of their programming, and many programmes are also shown in widescreen format. There is an unreasonable quantity of channels already, mostly via set-top boxes (given away free), but some TVs have built-in decoders for major players, such as Sky. Of course, this may well be Yet Another Incompatible System, but I hope not -- I'd like to play with one of these Nokia gadgets myself (he said, veering in a topic-heavy direction).
But surely the commonest data traffic will be to local servers (at least for the home, and for vertical applications)? While I have ISDN for work and home use, >>99% of the network traffic to my computers never leaves the local network.
I'm already accustomed to 100Mb/s for such traffic, and so dropping back to 2 will be very noticeable.
Not as bad as the second series, when she let a bunch of fools with ludicrous hair and pop-guns steal the ship, stranding the entire crew. Oh, except for madman hiding in the vents, ready to save the day.
A pity Suter's character showed too much promise to live.
It says a lot about the vision of the producers that the best actor on the show seems to have been hired for her body. Funnily enough, like Troi before her on TNG, 7of9 looks better in a regulation uniform than spray-on spandex. Maybe she'll go the way of Suter, if she gets too interesting, or interferes with Janeway's erratically-written character once too often.
God knows, the writers wouldn't be smart enough to eliminate Janeway and Chakotay, and make Tuvok the captain and 7of9 first officer -- the ship might actually get home!
The OED has citations for both back to the 14th century, which kind of pre-dates any American English usage. It states that 'fall' was short for 'the fall of the leaf', which probably explains why people still say 'in the fall' rather than 'in fall', while 'in autumn' is fine.
I saw the BBC News item too, and the demonstrator basically stood there and had a dialogue with this thing, calling out how much money he wanted, etc.. It looked completely dopey, and I couldn't imagine it working in Piccadilly or Times Square.
How does it work in a noisy environment? (One of the planned deployments is in nightclubs!) Does it work in the rain? Can people behind you call out answers just to piss you off? Will the system accept bird calls, music and road works as valid, unpredictable input? (Answer: of course.) Will it understand you when you're drunk, and you need the money for a taxi home?
More seriously, how does it cope when you have multiple bank cards with different institutions? How does it cope when you are using an ATM of a bank you're not a customer of, perhaps in a foreign country?
A real example: I have multiple accounts with a Scottish bank but I live in England, so I'm always using ATMs of other banks. In addition , I travel abroad, and rely on my Visa or Amex cards to draw cash. If plastic cards are done away with, how does my single, non-transferable iris pattern work without every bank in the world having details of every account I could draw money on, so that they can offer me the choice of account to use? At least bank/credit card account numbers are structured to allow institutions to contact the issuer for approval; iris patterns have no such predictable structure. The card I choose to insert into the ATM picks my account to be debited, so I still want to be able to have that choice, but I can't see (sic) how this could be done without massive, world-wide propagation of customer information to every participating institution.
Now, if they were to keep ATMs the way they are now, but just allow iris scanning as an option in place of a PIN, I think it might be more workable.
And what are 'cellular autonoma' anyway? Are they like cellular automata, but loners?
And do you get the impression that they only have (at most) one working system?
The whole things just seems like some CS-naive EE has managed to get carried away with himself.
It reminds me of other naive projects, like 'The Last One' (UK, circa 1982, which was to be the last program ever written, because it would take a natural language description of the problem and write the solution for it), or the miracle data compression algorithm reported in Byte magazine a few years back that could repeatedly compress its own output without data loss. Both failed, because both were quite stunningly naive about the nature of the problems they were trying to solve. This super-specific hypercomputer sounds just the same.
Slashdot Mirror
vertux (vert == French for green)
odex (short for odexut, which is tuxedo backwards)
amber (between red (planet) and green (penguin))
anorak, khaki, burberry (types of green jacket)
magenta (what you add to green to get white)
beryl, emerald, holly, jade, olive, kildare, lincoln (types of green)
Do we know what the gender of the green penguin is, by the way?
I do hope you're joking. I think I've wasted more time fixing problems with Windows and DOS than any other system I've ever used. In general, all I learned was how badly put together MS products are. Put another way, I don't think Yugo make better cars than Mercedes-Benz because they force you to pull over and futz with the engine every so often.
'Windows' *is* a trade mark of Microsoft: see here (at the bottom), for an example of where they claim this. I believe it's even a registered trade mark (although I don't have something to hand to confirm this).
Note that this does not prevent anyone from using the term, except in relation to the business of computer systems, since there are over forty categories of trade mark, and items can exist in more than one without (legal) conflict. That's why there can be a car and a computer called the 'Vectra', a computer and a household detergent called 'HP9000', and a phone chat service, a cellular phone service and a shampoo/conditioner called 'One-2-One'. There's even an outdoor clothing material called 'Microsoft'. Window companies have no reason to mention that "'Windows' is a trade mark of Microsoft" unless they're selling a competing product.
The Sunday Times also broke the 'Hitler Diaries' as a news story. We definitely need independent corroboration, plus an explanation of how this particular piece of kit might do its job in 12us.
...or Klingon swearing.
Put another way: "the problem with the metric system is that you always have these strange formulas to remember when you have to convert to regular numbers."
The advantage some of the pre-metric systems have is that they're better for mental arithmetic with common quantities. For example, there were twelve pennies in the English shilling rather than ten because twelve has more divisors than 10, and a shilling was a lot of money when it was invented, so dividing it up was common. Calculators and decimal places have changed the environment somewhat. The other benefits of metric (compatibility between weight and volume for some substances, for example) have relatively limited practical merit outside the technical disciplines.
The reason that America and the UK never switched to the metric system was that it was invented by the french ...
The UK has been switching for a generation, and is nearly done, despite the continental origin of the system.
Here in the UK, for example, I buy my petrol and milk in litres, my sugar in kilogrammes, my wine in centilitres and my paper weighed in grammes per square centimetre. Everything in the supermarket has a metric size, although people often still ask for pounds and pints. Only really hard-to-change things (like road signs and bar maids) still routinely use Imperial units, and there are plans to change those too.
I think the european [digital TV] standard only exists on paper.
The UK has had digital TV via cable, satellite dish and ordinary, boring antenna for a year. All five broadcast networks offer digital versions of their programming, and many programmes are also shown in widescreen format. There is an unreasonable quantity of channels already, mostly via set-top boxes (given away free), but some TVs have built-in decoders for major players, such as Sky. Of course, this may well be Yet Another Incompatible System, but I hope not -- I'd like to play with one of these Nokia gadgets myself (he said, veering in a topic-heavy direction).
But surely the commonest data traffic will be to local servers (at least for the home, and for vertical applications)? While I have ISDN for work and home use, >>99% of the network traffic to my computers never leaves the local network.
I'm already accustomed to 100Mb/s for such traffic, and so dropping back to 2 will be very noticeable.
The story said that the Excellent would be by itself for six months -- then what? The USS Pretty Good relieves it?
Not that this sounds like a thinly-veiled remake of DS9, oh no. But it is convenient that the writers of that show are, er, available.
Not as bad as the second series, when she let a bunch of fools with ludicrous hair and pop-guns steal the ship, stranding the entire crew. Oh, except for madman hiding in the vents, ready to save the day.
A pity Suter's character showed too much promise to live.
It says a lot about the vision of the producers that the best actor on the show seems to have been hired for her body. Funnily enough, like Troi before her on TNG, 7of9 looks better in a regulation uniform than spray-on spandex. Maybe she'll go the way of Suter, if she gets too interesting, or interferes with Janeway's erratically-written character once too often.
God knows, the writers wouldn't be smart enough to eliminate Janeway and Chakotay, and make Tuvok the captain and 7of9 first officer -- the ship might actually get home!
The OED has citations for both back to the 14th century, which kind of pre-dates any American English usage. It states that 'fall' was short for 'the fall of the leaf', which probably explains why people still say 'in the fall' rather than 'in fall', while 'in autumn' is fine.
How do you back up an 11TB system?
:-)
Simple; to another one.
I saw the BBC News item too, and the demonstrator basically stood there and had a dialogue with this thing, calling out how much money he wanted, etc.. It looked completely dopey, and I couldn't imagine it working in Piccadilly or Times Square.
How does it work in a noisy environment? (One of the planned deployments is in nightclubs!) Does it work in the rain? Can people behind you call out answers just to piss you off? Will the system accept bird calls, music and road works as valid, unpredictable input? (Answer: of course.) Will it understand you when you're drunk, and you need the money for a taxi home?
More seriously, how does it cope when you have multiple bank cards with different institutions? How does it cope when you are using an ATM
of a bank you're not a customer of, perhaps in a foreign country?
A real example: I have multiple accounts with a Scottish bank but I live in England, so I'm always using ATMs of other banks. In addition , I travel abroad, and rely on my Visa or Amex cards to draw cash. If plastic cards are done away with, how does my single, non-transferable iris pattern work without every bank in the world having details of every account I could draw money on, so that they can offer me the choice of account to use? At least bank/credit card account numbers are structured to allow institutions to contact the issuer for approval; iris patterns have no such predictable structure. The card I choose to insert into the ATM picks my account to be debited, so I still want to be able to have that choice, but I can't see (sic) how this could be done without massive, world-wide propagation of customer information to every participating institution.
Now, if they were to keep ATMs the way they are now, but just allow iris scanning as an option in place of a PIN, I think it might be more workable.
And what are 'cellular autonoma' anyway?
Are they like cellular automata, but loners?
And do you get the impression that they only
have (at most) one working system?
The whole things just seems like some CS-naive
EE has managed to get carried away with himself.
It reminds me of other naive projects, like
'The Last One' (UK, circa 1982, which was to
be the last program ever written, because it
would take a natural language description of
the problem and write the solution for it), or the
miracle data compression algorithm reported
in Byte magazine a few years back that could repeatedly compress its own output without
data loss. Both failed, because both were
quite stunningly naive about the nature of
the problems they were trying to solve. This
super-specific hypercomputer sounds just the same.