Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 1
It's not just TV news, US newspapers "World News" sections are much smaller than most overseas counterparts, and tend to focus on US interests abroad rather than truely international coverage.
When Microsoft released Windows XP, they recommended at least 64Mb of RAM, which IIRC meant that it ran OK with anything over 128Mb. When I visited my mother recently, she was complaining that since her PC had been updated (to SP2 or 3, I'm not sure which one caused the breakage as we live in different hemispheres so I don't visit often), it ran like a dog. I checked, and it was using 100% of her 256Mb RAM at startup with just the OS, anti-virus and firewall running. So I bought her some RAM, and now everything is responsive again.
Eventually Windows XP will become unsupported, and users are going to be faced with a choice - upgrade or get pwned as soon as the next Windows XP vulnerability is publicised. But if they have been avoiding Vista (and its successors) because of compatibility problems, then they are more likely to consider walking away from Windows, since they're going to have to replace their other software with Vista compatible versions anyway.
They don't proactively check ads, they wait for complaints. And compliance is voluntary, though the advertising industry is incestuous enough that any agency or client who insisted on flouting the rules would soon find it hard to get airtime. In extreme cases, ASA could refer the case to Trading Standards, who can take legal action, but Trading Standards more interested in cases where there is real fraud going on, not just a bit of harmless exaggeration.
I never would have guessed it from the user ID, but you must be new here.
It seems you're right though, the Wikipedia page for IBM ViaVoice needs citations, and the page for its Windows 3.1 and OS/2 predecessor VoiceType, which is the one I saw demonstrated, has not even been created yet.
1. Solar power: Noone wants to carry around their mobile devices out in the open oriented to catch the most Sun. Solar panels on houses and cars I can understand, but they will never be anything more than a marketing gimmick on mobile devices.
3. Voice input: My first exposure to this was a demo from IBM in the mid 1990's. PCs have increased in power a lot since then and the quality of voice recognition has hardly changed, so I think it's going to take a major new discovery to make significant advances in the next five years.
4. Robot Shop Assistants: Marketing gimmick, might appear in a few sushi restaurants, but when people go shopping in brick and mortar stores, they want to deal with people not machines, otherwise they'd just do their shopping online.
5. Memory aids: Many people still find an old fashioned paper diary more usable than a PDA, there are a lot more advances needed in UI and AI technology before we will see devices like those described that are actually useful to the common man, as opposed to a tech geek who is willing to put up with the system's quirks, spend many man-months customizing it for their needs, and learn to use it properly.
And the number one reason why none of this is going to see light within the next five years is that R&D funding is already being slashed, and it is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better again.
But I can get 2kbps downstream (yup, that's right) through my 2.5 or 3G connection. Yay. I think I was getting better than that on dialup in about 1995.
You need to get an iPhone. Apparently they are really fast.
Sealand doesn't have land or coastal waters, nor does it have a government that is recognized by any other nation or international organization. It is an oil platform, that in 1968 lay outside the 3 mile territorial waters of UK, but in 2008 lies entirely within the 12 mile territorial waters.
That is beyond what they should do. The MPAA should have made their complaint to the police in the first place, and if the police decide to use their limited resources to follow it up, then and only then should iiNet get involved. Alternatively, if the MPAA starts a civil case and obtains a court order to get information out of iiNet.
Apple also tends to use standards without extending them, whereas Microsoft isn't well-known for that.
In this case, Microsoft has pushed its standard (the unextended version at least) as a standard and encouraged competitors to use it, while Apple tries to keep its proprietary protocol completely locked up through abuse of the DMCA.
They don't need to sit down and devise it, MTP was standardized as a USB device class earlier this year, and is already supported by pretty much all of Apple's competitors, with support built in to all major OSes (stretching the definition of OS to include any libraries that gets pulled in by a GNU/Linux distribution if you install a media player capable of syncing with an MP3 device).
They seldom stop full lines on the London Underground either, except the Circle line, which has to keep going around in the same direction and is covered by other lines along all four sides, and the Waterloo and City, which has only two stations. Your example of the Jubilee line is only a short section between Stratford and North Greenwich, and if other underground rail operators are able to run for 7 years with trains up to every 3 minutes 5am - 1am without major maintenance, then they are asking for headaches in future. The work is carried out at weekends, because the number of people who rely on the system during the week vastly outweighs the number of people using it for leisure at the weekend.
In contrast to your anecdotes about how wonderful other countries rail systems are, I was in Tokyo this weekend, and was unable to get to Shinjuku on Saturday, except by round about route across the other side of town and back through the middle - the equivalent of getting from Victoria to Embankment by taking the Circle line via Earls Court to Paddington and coming back on the Bakerloo, because of engineering works, which I suspected were occurring because of an anomaly I found in the Narita Express timetable, but were otherwise completely unadvertised on the JR East website - at least you can go to the TFL website and see what engineering works are planned in London.
On any random day, particualrly at weekends, you will find whole subnetworks of the UK public transport system closed off due to 'engineering works'. You'll often get stranded in some back of beyond town and need to hire a taxi, hitch-hike, sleep in a hotel (or if you have no money in a station).
Alternatively, you could make use of the Rail Replacement Bus Service which is provided for you by the rail companies during engineering works.
The biggest problem with the UK travel system is the whiners who have only ever used public transport abroad for short holidays when they could travel out of peak and weren't in any hurry to get anywhere, and then come home to complain about the overcrowding during peak time, and the occasional maintenance closures that for most people might affect them one Sunday every six months, unless there are major upgrade works in their area where the trade off is a significant improvement in service when they are complete.
I would like to see women engaged in every kind of work without discrimination, and I would like to believe that women are equally capable in CS, engineering and everything else. But the evidence I've seen goes against it.
In many Asian societies, ones which could quite reasonably be considered more sexist than US and European society, there is a much higher proportion of women in computer science and related fields. Even some European countries have a considerably higher ratio than the Anglo-Saxon countries in my experience. Certainly the few women who I have encountered have been very capable, in contrast to many of the males working in software, and has led me to believe that there is a self-selection process going on, whereby only the top few percent of women are determined enough to make it through whatever it is that keeps women out of computer science in droves.
Consideration does not have to be monetary, nor does it have to be of fair value compared with what you are giving up. But what they are giving you in return would have to be explicitly stated in the contract, probably an education in the case of any contract with a university.
The phone companies themselves don't understand their own economics. I was turned down for a free upgrade a few years ago, because I was "not a good customer, you don't make enough calls". On asking how much I'd need to make to qualify, the level was still less than the number of bundled minutes that I was already paying for, so the phone company would be making no more money out of me, at an extra cost to them.
Nice theory, but when a member of the Yakuza wants to withdraw cash, he doesn't go to an ATM, he goes round the local businesses offering his services to protect them from himself.
they have atm's here that only let you in with a valid keycard
Really? The ones I've seen on ATM doors grant access when any card with a magnetic strip in the standard location is swiped. The electronics to detect a signal from the card reader's head and trigger the door to open is much cheaper than a microcontroller that has to decode the data and send it back to the bank for verification quick enough for the user to be allowed access before they kick the door in in frustration.
I don't know about this particular method, but biometric measurements in general are not perfectly repeatable, so they need to use fuzzy algorithms, which raise the probability of collisions. So they are more like a hashed password than a perfectly unique user ID.
Dogs and other animals do random things that might seem a little odd all the time. Most of the time, you don't give it a second thought, but when something unpredictable happens, like an earthquake, if you believe in the supernatural powers of dogs, then you might connect the random odd acts with the earthquake after the fact, in much the same way that plagues of locusts and floods get connected with the actions of people leading up to their occurrence, and ascribed to "punishment from God" in the bible.
Back in those days, schools didn't care that they were using obscure software like MS Word when the clear market leader was WordPerfect, they were teaching skills not software.
Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Which didn't really help in the case of the printer I bought in 1999, which came with a Windows 98 driver, and has never had a Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista driver available, yet is supported out of the box by CUPS and Ghostscript.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just TV news, US newspapers "World News" sections are much smaller than most overseas counterparts, and tend to focus on US interests abroad rather than truely international coverage.
When Microsoft released Windows XP, they recommended at least 64Mb of RAM, which IIRC meant that it ran OK with anything over 128Mb. When I visited my mother recently, she was complaining that since her PC had been updated (to SP2 or 3, I'm not sure which one caused the breakage as we live in different hemispheres so I don't visit often), it ran like a dog. I checked, and it was using 100% of her 256Mb RAM at startup with just the OS, anti-virus and firewall running. So I bought her some RAM, and now everything is responsive again.
Eventually Windows XP will become unsupported, and users are going to be faced with a choice - upgrade or get pwned as soon as the next Windows XP vulnerability is publicised. But if they have been avoiding Vista (and its successors) because of compatibility problems, then they are more likely to consider walking away from Windows, since they're going to have to replace their other software with Vista compatible versions anyway.
They don't proactively check ads, they wait for complaints. And compliance is voluntary, though the advertising industry is incestuous enough that any agency or client who insisted on flouting the rules would soon find it hard to get airtime. In extreme cases, ASA could refer the case to Trading Standards, who can take legal action, but Trading Standards more interested in cases where there is real fraud going on, not just a bit of harmless exaggeration.
I never would have guessed it from the user ID, but you must be new here.
It seems you're right though, the Wikipedia page for IBM ViaVoice needs citations, and the page for its Windows 3.1 and OS/2 predecessor VoiceType, which is the one I saw demonstrated, has not even been created yet.
1. Solar power: Noone wants to carry around their mobile devices out in the open oriented to catch the most Sun. Solar panels on houses and cars I can understand, but they will never be anything more than a marketing gimmick on mobile devices.
3. Voice input: My first exposure to this was a demo from IBM in the mid 1990's. PCs have increased in power a lot since then and the quality of voice recognition has hardly changed, so I think it's going to take a major new discovery to make significant advances in the next five years.
4. Robot Shop Assistants: Marketing gimmick, might appear in a few sushi restaurants, but when people go shopping in brick and mortar stores, they want to deal with people not machines, otherwise they'd just do their shopping online.
5. Memory aids: Many people still find an old fashioned paper diary more usable than a PDA, there are a lot more advances needed in UI and AI technology before we will see devices like those described that are actually useful to the common man, as opposed to a tech geek who is willing to put up with the system's quirks, spend many man-months customizing it for their needs, and learn to use it properly.
And the number one reason why none of this is going to see light within the next five years is that R&D funding is already being slashed, and it is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better again.
You need to get an iPhone. Apparently they are really fast.
Sealand doesn't have land or coastal waters, nor does it have a government that is recognized by any other nation or international organization. It is an oil platform, that in 1968 lay outside the 3 mile territorial waters of UK, but in 2008 lies entirely within the 12 mile territorial waters.
That is beyond what they should do. The MPAA should have made their complaint to the police in the first place, and if the police decide to use their limited resources to follow it up, then and only then should iiNet get involved. Alternatively, if the MPAA starts a civil case and obtains a court order to get information out of iiNet.
In this case, Microsoft has pushed its standard (the unextended version at least) as a standard and encouraged competitors to use it, while Apple tries to keep its proprietary protocol completely locked up through abuse of the DMCA.
They don't need to sit down and devise it, MTP was standardized as a USB device class earlier this year, and is already supported by pretty much all of Apple's competitors, with support built in to all major OSes (stretching the definition of OS to include any libraries that gets pulled in by a GNU/Linux distribution if you install a media player capable of syncing with an MP3 device).
They seldom stop full lines on the London Underground either, except the Circle line, which has to keep going around in the same direction and is covered by other lines along all four sides, and the Waterloo and City, which has only two stations. Your example of the Jubilee line is only a short section between Stratford and North Greenwich, and if other underground rail operators are able to run for 7 years with trains up to every 3 minutes 5am - 1am without major maintenance, then they are asking for headaches in future. The work is carried out at weekends, because the number of people who rely on the system during the week vastly outweighs the number of people using it for leisure at the weekend.
In contrast to your anecdotes about how wonderful other countries rail systems are, I was in Tokyo this weekend, and was unable to get to Shinjuku on Saturday, except by round about route across the other side of town and back through the middle - the equivalent of getting from Victoria to Embankment by taking the Circle line via Earls Court to Paddington and coming back on the Bakerloo, because of engineering works, which I suspected were occurring because of an anomaly I found in the Narita Express timetable, but were otherwise completely unadvertised on the JR East website - at least you can go to the TFL website and see what engineering works are planned in London.
Alternatively, you could make use of the Rail Replacement Bus Service which is provided for you by the rail companies during engineering works.
The biggest problem with the UK travel system is the whiners who have only ever used public transport abroad for short holidays when they could travel out of peak and weren't in any hurry to get anywhere, and then come home to complain about the overcrowding during peak time, and the occasional maintenance closures that for most people might affect them one Sunday every six months, unless there are major upgrade works in their area where the trade off is a significant improvement in service when they are complete.
In many Asian societies, ones which could quite reasonably be considered more sexist than US and European society, there is a much higher proportion of women in computer science and related fields. Even some European countries have a considerably higher ratio than the Anglo-Saxon countries in my experience. Certainly the few women who I have encountered have been very capable, in contrast to many of the males working in software, and has led me to believe that there is a self-selection process going on, whereby only the top few percent of women are determined enough to make it through whatever it is that keeps women out of computer science in droves.
Sounds like Scientology for operating systems.
Consideration does not have to be monetary, nor does it have to be of fair value compared with what you are giving up. But what they are giving you in return would have to be explicitly stated in the contract, probably an education in the case of any contract with a university.
The phone companies themselves don't understand their own economics. I was turned down for a free upgrade a few years ago, because I was "not a good customer, you don't make enough calls". On asking how much I'd need to make to qualify, the level was still less than the number of bundled minutes that I was already paying for, so the phone company would be making no more money out of me, at an extra cost to them.
Nice theory, but when a member of the Yakuza wants to withdraw cash, he doesn't go to an ATM, he goes round the local businesses offering his services to protect them from himself.
Really? The ones I've seen on ATM doors grant access when any card with a magnetic strip in the standard location is swiped. The electronics to detect a signal from the card reader's head and trigger the door to open is much cheaper than a microcontroller that has to decode the data and send it back to the bank for verification quick enough for the user to be allowed access before they kick the door in in frustration.
I don't know about this particular method, but biometric measurements in general are not perfectly repeatable, so they need to use fuzzy algorithms, which raise the probability of collisions. So they are more like a hashed password than a perfectly unique user ID.
Dogs and other animals do random things that might seem a little odd all the time. Most of the time, you don't give it a second thought, but when something unpredictable happens, like an earthquake, if you believe in the supernatural powers of dogs, then you might connect the random odd acts with the earthquake after the fact, in much the same way that plagues of locusts and floods get connected with the actions of people leading up to their occurrence, and ascribed to "punishment from God" in the bible.
Back in those days, schools didn't care that they were using obscure software like MS Word when the clear market leader was WordPerfect, they were teaching skills not software.
The political alignment of the rest of the world (excluding Georgia) favoured Obama.
Not so much that you COULD find prior art, as you WILL find prior art for some part of your software design for any non trivial implementation.
Which didn't really help in the case of the printer I bought in 1999, which came with a Windows 98 driver, and has never had a Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista driver available, yet is supported out of the box by CUPS and Ghostscript.