It doesn't matter where Paul Allen got the money from - it still doesn't make it Microsoft sponsorship. It makes it Paul Allen sponsorship because it was his money, not Microsoft's. It doesn't make Space Ship One Microsoft-sponsored any more than me flying light aircraft make the aircraft sponsored by my employer.
Curious question - if you play 3D games (such as Doom, UT or maybe a flight sim etc.) - do you get a very strong 3D effect? I find these games seem to have "real" 3D depth if I close one eye - sort of the 'poor man's 3D goggles'. The effect occurs not if looking at a still image, but as soon as movement occurs (it's like magic - a flat picture suddenly goes 3D when it moves, I suspect from the parallax effect)
The same comment goes for the british, too, and is exemplified with theyr half-hearted all brakes-on adhesion to the European Union.
Not at all. It's just the European Union bureaucracy is about as undemocratic as they get. I'm involved in general aviation - the European Single Sky although in principle a fabulous idea, is being implemented such that it only listens to the moneyed (airlines) and shuts out all general aviation (light aircraft, gliders etc.) - and the consultation period was set so short that it's obvious it's a done deal and Eurocontrol are just going through the motions.
This happens time and time again with the European bureaucracy. The problem is the French and Germans generally don't actually bother adhering fully to these European directives - but Britain does, and so feels the full forces of the consequences of undemacratic, poorly thought out legislation. Witness how.fr/.de can simply ride roughshod over the stability pact.
In principle I'm very pro-European and so are most I know - the free momement of goods and labour in Europe is fantastic. To realise this, some harmonization is necessary. But the way it's done is lousy - the whole system is rife with corruption and non-democratic processes. That's what most people in Britain don't like - not the free market, but silly bureaucratic rules being imposed on British people for which they've had absolutely no involvement in a democratic process - because there isn't one.
Macs are ALREADY pretty much on a parity with name-brand PCs. The eMac is about the same cost as the Hewlett-Packard machine with similar capabilities - except the eMac comes with a display (and no untidy trails of cabling), but the HP machine doesn't.
I saw PCWorld advertising on TV (they are a 'box-shifter' style of retail outlet), and the entry level Dell laptops they were selling were going for roughly the same price as an Apple iBook with similar capibilities.
It's only if you compare a G5 tower with a generic no-brand PC tower you see a price difference - but comparing the £400 PC tower with a dual G5 PowerMac tower is hardly comparing like with like.
MS quietly dropped Palladium months ago, with a low-key marketspeak press release. The press release basically said "We're dropping it because we don't think there will be any customer demand - after all, who's going to buy a new computer which is less functional than the one they've already got?"
Kino's only any good if all you want to do is very basic video editing. It still doesn't have many features for mixing in external music/sound etc.
The only free (as in beer) software I've found to be any good at all for video editing is iMovie which comes pre-installed on a new Mac. The stuff that comes with Windows is shite - I've never seen decent low-cost video editing software for Windows, and Firewire support/DV editing is still a pretty user-hostile experience when compared to the Mac.
My computer DVD drive is supposedly not region free (well, it's not region free under Windows). However, using Xine and the DVD plugins under Linux, it's region free (having lived in the US for 7, that's where I bought the DVD-ROM drive, and now I also have region 2 discs so it's important to me to be able to play both regions).
You might be able to set up a custom Knoppix boot disk or USB drive to act as a region-free DVD player on your laptop if you don't want to dual boot or delete Windows.
There's nothing wrong with being known as the source of good beer.
If Germans think they aren't known for their engineering, it must be some sense of self-loathing. I drive a German car. It is a very good car. My next car will be a German car. I'm impressed with the degree of thoughtfulness and not flashyness about my car. At work, our major piece of industrial machinery is made by Siemens in Germany.
At least here, Germany has a reputation for being a world leader in engineering.
Since you were modded 'Interesting' and not 'Funny', obviously some mods were suckered into what I hope was your sarcasm. (Sarchasm - the gulf between the writer of sarcastic wit and the one who doesn't get it).
Microsoft can patent stuff - but this particular 'invention' was rejected because it was obvious. Something that's patentable must not only be novel, it must be non-obvious.
Well, although that might be true in principle, no skydiving operation in the US has successfully been sued (and skydiving operations always have long, scary disclaimers). This is possibly partly because any jury however dumb will know that skydiving is inherently dangerous - which is where it'll differ from a LAN party. You expect some people to get killed or injured skydiving - you don't expect anyone to get killed or injured at a LAN party.
There's been concern about that too from people who live in proximity to National Grid 400kV transmission lines. There's still no real scientific evidence that it causes a health hazard (although when we lived around 1/2 a mile from one our garage flourescent lights would always dimly glow when not turned on, and on a damp evening you could hear the 50hz buzz).
I bought my Dad an entry level Mac (an eMac) for his birthday, as his old machine was desperately slow.
I'm very impressed with the eMac. It not only offers ease of use and an interface that makes Windows XP look amateurish, but a powerful *BSD OS underneath (when I recently stayed at my Dad's I could continue my development project as if I was using my home Linux system).
For home office use, you'll probably find AppleWorks (supplied with a new Mac) is sufficient. It can read (and write) MS Office files just fine. I've not had the urge to run a PC emulator on the Mac - it's just not proven necessary. A new Mac comes with virtually everything a home user would need pre-installed. The only thing I found a bit lacking was QuickTime - it doesn't play all the video formats that I needed, but that was easily fixed by downloading VLC for OS X. There's a lot of good open source software available for OS X.
Actually, colour-blind and colour-deficient pilots can get medicals quite easily. By default they are limited to daytime VFR only, but if the pilot passes a lantern test (and therefore are probably colour deficient rather than colour blind) the restriction is removed (it's called a SODA - Statement Of Demonstrated Ability: you go to a tower-controlled airport with the FAA, and tower shines their light at you and you call out the colours).
I call bullshit too. I remember 1999 very well, and I remember remarking to my office mate (who was very much into buying and selling stocks, and had been for years) - "Why are these companies valued so high? They don't seem to have a business plan short of selling ad space, they don't have revenues - this can't go on for much longer. I wouldn't touch those stocks with a six-foot barge pole".
I'm hardly a business visionary, in fact my business sense probably matches that of a concussed bumble bee. What I think suckered the smart people is the 'sheeple' (or bandwagon effect if you like) - where people left their analytical skills at the door in the mad rush to follow the rest of the herd as it cantered off across the fields. I watched my friend invest in these stocks I said I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, and he's a decent programmer with normally very good analytical and problem solving skills. But he was caught up in the herd, like so many others. The urge to follow the herd is an extremely powerful part of human nature that shouldn't be underestimated (and indeed, good marketing people know exactly how to exploit it).
It's quite possible the transplants are in California because California suited them and their attitude. Therefore, the 'Californian way' as such gets stronger because the transplants aren't just random people - they are by-and-large a group who consciously selected the state just because of the 'feel' of the state.
I've only been to CA once (around Monterrey/SF) but if I was looking again for somewhere in the US to live, California would be very high on my list precisely because it *does* feel "like home" if you see what I mean - it matches my attitude. Although I wouldn't live in LA. I've seen the smog there and I don't think I'd like that bit very much:-)
It's not as if India is sending a piece of metal worth $80MM to the Moon. The actual cost of the hardware is a minute part of that. In the meantime, building that hardware is:
1. providing local employment that otherwise might not have been provided, thus reducing poverty. 2. providing demand for local business and engineering 3. gaining engineering skill and experience, something that will be very useful for gaining inward investment from other nations
There's no point having universities if the people educated there just bugger off to the United States because there's no future for educated people at home. Projects such as this provide employment in the short term and in the long term they provide technical expertise that can be used to further business. It is arguable the long term effects of performing this mission in terms of what Indian engineers and scientists will learn is better than spending the money on a new university whose graduates will just leave India to work abroad because of a lack of opportunities like this one.
*This* is why my new laptop that I've only just ordered is a Mac, not a PC-based laptop. I got my Dad a low-end eMac for his birthday. No more expensive than the HP desktops we got at work (same amount of memory as the HP machines, same amount of disk space - but it has a display built in unlike the HP machines where you need to pay extra for a display), but it FEELS a lot faster. That and a suspend/resume mode that takes less than 3 seconds to resume. Plus a user-interface that makes Windows look amateurish, with a real (BSD) operating system underneath.
I've not had to recompile a kernel for my desktop Linux systems in a long time - the one that comes with the distro is fine, and gets updated by the distro's tools just fine too.
The only kernel I have to recompile is the rather specialist one for one of my servers which runs a heap of virtual machines. That is expected on an experimental system. If you couldn't recompile the kernel it wouldn't be much good as an experimental system.
I've not had to compile a kernel for a 'production' system in years.
Nobody? I sent out mine at least a dozen times in PDF format and only one person had a problem (a pimp^W recruitment agency) whose IT system was so bad I ended up handing them a printed copy.
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It doesn't matter where Paul Allen got the money from - it still doesn't make it Microsoft sponsorship. It makes it Paul Allen sponsorship because it was his money, not Microsoft's. It doesn't make Space Ship One Microsoft-sponsored any more than me flying light aircraft make the aircraft sponsored by my employer.
I don't think it was Microsoft sponsoring it - I think it was Paul Allen personally putting some of his own money into the project.
Curious question - if you play 3D games (such as Doom, UT or maybe a flight sim etc.) - do you get a very strong 3D effect? I find these games seem to have "real" 3D depth if I close one eye - sort of the 'poor man's 3D goggles'. The effect occurs not if looking at a still image, but as soon as movement occurs (it's like magic - a flat picture suddenly goes 3D when it moves, I suspect from the parallax effect)
...there are already dozens of comments saying "Why don't you peddle your bike to work you lazy bastard".
It's PEDAL, not peddle! Peddling is marketing. Pedaling is using your feet on the pedals of a bicycle.
Not at all. It's just the European Union bureaucracy is about as undemocratic as they get. I'm involved in general aviation - the European Single Sky although in principle a fabulous idea, is being implemented such that it only listens to the moneyed (airlines) and shuts out all general aviation (light aircraft, gliders etc.) - and the consultation period was set so short that it's obvious it's a done deal and Eurocontrol are just going through the motions.
This happens time and time again with the European bureaucracy. The problem is the French and Germans generally don't actually bother adhering fully to these European directives - but Britain does, and so feels the full forces of the consequences of undemacratic, poorly thought out legislation. Witness how
In principle I'm very pro-European and so are most I know - the free momement of goods and labour in Europe is fantastic. To realise this, some harmonization is necessary. But the way it's done is lousy - the whole system is rife with corruption and non-democratic processes. That's what most people in Britain don't like - not the free market, but silly bureaucratic rules being imposed on British people for which they've had absolutely no involvement in a democratic process - because there isn't one.
Macs are ALREADY pretty much on a parity with name-brand PCs. The eMac is about the same cost as the Hewlett-Packard machine with similar capabilities - except the eMac comes with a display (and no untidy trails of cabling), but the HP machine doesn't.
I saw PCWorld advertising on TV (they are a 'box-shifter' style of retail outlet), and the entry level Dell laptops they were selling were going for roughly the same price as an Apple iBook with similar capibilities.
It's only if you compare a G5 tower with a generic no-brand PC tower you see a price difference - but comparing the £400 PC tower with a dual G5 PowerMac tower is hardly comparing like with like.
MS quietly dropped Palladium months ago, with a low-key marketspeak press release. The press release basically said "We're dropping it because we don't think there will be any customer demand - after all, who's going to buy a new computer which is less functional than the one they've already got?"
Kino's only any good if all you want to do is very basic video editing. It still doesn't have many features for mixing in external music/sound etc.
The only free (as in beer) software I've found to be any good at all for video editing is iMovie which comes pre-installed on a new Mac. The stuff that comes with Windows is shite - I've never seen decent low-cost video editing software for Windows, and Firewire support/DV editing is still a pretty user-hostile experience when compared to the Mac.
The observant will also notice that Ferris Bueller was wrong when he was getting ready for his day off - he stated that John Lennon was the walrus.
My computer DVD drive is supposedly not region free (well, it's not region free under Windows). However, using Xine and the DVD plugins under Linux, it's region free (having lived in the US for 7, that's where I bought the DVD-ROM drive, and now I also have region 2 discs so it's important to me to be able to play both regions).
You might be able to set up a custom Knoppix boot disk or USB drive to act as a region-free DVD player on your laptop if you don't want to dual boot or delete Windows.
Most people don't choose Windows - they just get it by default. Most people aren't aware that Windows isn't some intrinsic part of the hardware.
There's nothing wrong with being known as the source of good beer.
If Germans think they aren't known for their engineering, it must be some sense of self-loathing. I drive a German car. It is a very good car. My next car will be a German car. I'm impressed with the degree of thoughtfulness and not flashyness about my car. At work, our major piece of industrial machinery is made by Siemens in Germany.
At least here, Germany has a reputation for being a world leader in engineering.
Since you were modded 'Interesting' and not 'Funny', obviously some mods were suckered into what I hope was your sarcasm. (Sarchasm - the gulf between the writer of sarcastic wit and the one who doesn't get it).
Microsoft can patent stuff - but this particular 'invention' was rejected because it was obvious. Something that's patentable must not only be novel, it must be non-obvious.
Well, although that might be true in principle, no skydiving operation in the US has successfully been sued (and skydiving operations always have long, scary disclaimers). This is possibly partly because any jury however dumb will know that skydiving is inherently dangerous - which is where it'll differ from a LAN party. You expect some people to get killed or injured skydiving - you don't expect anyone to get killed or injured at a LAN party.
There's been concern about that too from people who live in proximity to National Grid 400kV transmission lines. There's still no real scientific evidence that it causes a health hazard (although when we lived around 1/2 a mile from one our garage flourescent lights would always dimly glow when not turned on, and on a damp evening you could hear the 50hz buzz).
404 - File not found.
I bought my Dad an entry level Mac (an eMac) for his birthday, as his old machine was desperately slow.
I'm very impressed with the eMac. It not only offers ease of use and an interface that makes Windows XP look amateurish, but a powerful *BSD OS underneath (when I recently stayed at my Dad's I could continue my development project as if I was using my home Linux system).
For home office use, you'll probably find AppleWorks (supplied with a new Mac) is sufficient. It can read (and write) MS Office files just fine. I've not had the urge to run a PC emulator on the Mac - it's just not proven necessary. A new Mac comes with virtually everything a home user would need pre-installed. The only thing I found a bit lacking was QuickTime - it doesn't play all the video formats that I needed, but that was easily fixed by downloading VLC for OS X. There's a lot of good open source software available for OS X.
Actually, colour-blind and colour-deficient pilots can get medicals quite easily. By default they are limited to daytime VFR only, but if the pilot passes a lantern test (and therefore are probably colour deficient rather than colour blind) the restriction is removed (it's called a SODA - Statement Of Demonstrated Ability: you go to a tower-controlled airport with the FAA, and tower shines their light at you and you call out the colours).
I call bullshit too. I remember 1999 very well, and I remember remarking to my office mate (who was very much into buying and selling stocks, and had been for years) - "Why are these companies valued so high? They don't seem to have a business plan short of selling ad space, they don't have revenues - this can't go on for much longer. I wouldn't touch those stocks with a six-foot barge pole".
I'm hardly a business visionary, in fact my business sense probably matches that of a concussed bumble bee. What I think suckered the smart people is the 'sheeple' (or bandwagon effect if you like) - where people left their analytical skills at the door in the mad rush to follow the rest of the herd as it cantered off across the fields. I watched my friend invest in these stocks I said I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, and he's a decent programmer with normally very good analytical and problem solving skills. But he was caught up in the herd, like so many others. The urge to follow the herd is an extremely powerful part of human nature that shouldn't be underestimated (and indeed, good marketing people know exactly how to exploit it).
It's quite possible the transplants are in California because California suited them and their attitude. Therefore, the 'Californian way' as such gets stronger because the transplants aren't just random people - they are by-and-large a group who consciously selected the state just because of the 'feel' of the state.
:-)
I've only been to CA once (around Monterrey/SF) but if I was looking again for somewhere in the US to live, California would be very high on my list precisely because it *does* feel "like home" if you see what I mean - it matches my attitude. Although I wouldn't live in LA. I've seen the smog there and I don't think I'd like that bit very much
All these whiny messages miss an important point.
It's not as if India is sending a piece of metal worth $80MM to the Moon. The actual cost of the hardware is a minute part of that. In the meantime, building that hardware is:
1. providing local employment that otherwise might not have been provided, thus reducing poverty.
2. providing demand for local business and engineering
3. gaining engineering skill and experience, something that will be very useful for gaining inward investment from other nations
There's no point having universities if the people educated there just bugger off to the United States because there's no future for educated people at home. Projects such as this provide employment in the short term and in the long term they provide technical expertise that can be used to further business. It is arguable the long term effects of performing this mission in terms of what Indian engineers and scientists will learn is better than spending the money on a new university whose graduates will just leave India to work abroad because of a lack of opportunities like this one.
*This* is why my new laptop that I've only just ordered is a Mac, not a PC-based laptop. I got my Dad a low-end eMac for his birthday. No more expensive than the HP desktops we got at work (same amount of memory as the HP machines, same amount of disk space - but it has a display built in unlike the HP machines where you need to pay extra for a display), but it FEELS a lot faster. That and a suspend/resume mode that takes less than 3 seconds to resume. Plus a user-interface that makes Windows look amateurish, with a real (BSD) operating system underneath.
Ummm... $36 is not 20% of your monthly income - it's just under 5% of your monthly income if your monthly income is $741. (36/741)*100.
I've not had to recompile a kernel for my desktop Linux systems in a long time - the one that comes with the distro is fine, and gets updated by the distro's tools just fine too.
The only kernel I have to recompile is the rather specialist one for one of my servers which runs a heap of virtual machines. That is expected on an experimental system. If you couldn't recompile the kernel it wouldn't be much good as an experimental system.
I've not had to compile a kernel for a 'production' system in years.
Nobody? I sent out mine at least a dozen times in PDF format and only one person had a problem (a pimp^W recruitment agency) whose IT system was so bad I ended up handing them a printed copy.