Which is a bunch of nonsense. Basically it all depends on the cell size. If you are in an urban area, say Western Europe people often won't notice that you are using a cellular phone instead of a analog fixed one. And that phone is operating at probably 0.5 Watt, because any more is a waste of power in microcells anyway.
I really don't know whether GSM is really better than PCS. On the other hand, I have been using a 900 Mhz GSM for almost two years now and rarely get loss of coverage. Works fine in the subway as well and in most parking garages, as long as you are not more than one floor underground. My 1800 Mhz phone has a bit more coverage trouble, but generally speaking it is still far better than the horror story you are telling. Interoperability is never an issue, for a starter. In fact, it is not uncommon to buy a phone in a phone store and get a separate SIM from the mobile operator, although the vast majority of subscribtions are sold in a package deal.
Most of the fibre which is currently underground is laid using tubes. Replacing them is a matter of pulling the fibre out of the tube and blowing new fibre through the pipes. Besides, many new telcos use 'dark fibre' when expanding their networks these days.
Come on, there is lots of readable and understandable stuff in there which doesn't require a degree in CS. My background is in Business Administration and I was able to grasp a fair share of it, though significant portions are beyond me.
It seems to me that this rant is much more about anti-Japanese sentiments than real worries about the American patent system. Otherwise, he would not have kept silent on the fact that this change will bring the American patent system more or less in line with European ones as well. In Europe you have two flavours of systems. The French approach: almost anything is patentable, but your patent won't last very long, about ten years, and it is up to the courts to decide whether a patent can be uphold or not. Which resembles the American system, but the duration of a patent is seriously limited. The German approach: your patent application will be scrutinised very thoroughly for being non-obvious by the patent office, but if you get past this stage you are well protected for quite a long period. The approach on the EU level is a mixture of both: almost anything can be patented for a short period (five years or something in that order) and after a serious investigation it can be extended.
Funnily enough the meaning of Amerikaanse toestanden, is not confined to idiotic behaviour by US authorities, but als includes idiotic behaviour of US citizens in general. This includes tobacco class action suits, the NRA, weird cults, the KKK, people suing the New York underground service for injuries caused in their own bloody suicide attempt, you name it.
Actually, it is a bit early to celebrate the Y2K worldwide computer crash as a non event. Wait until the end of the month when invoices are due to be paid etc. Especially in the field of small and medium enterprises there might be a few nasty surprises lurking in their Foxpro databases dating from the early 90's. If enough of them have their bookkeeping systems going on their knees some funny chain reactions might go on. Or may not, after all. Basically, we don't know yet.
The individual has to ben encouraged by the top. If the top is only paying lip-service to quality control mantra's and methodologies, it just doesn't pay of for the individual to pay attention to quality. Or in your words: the individual won't give a shit. Management endorsement won't result in the opposite, but lack of management endorsement will inevitably result in the bottom of the hierarchy not giving a shit whatsoever.
I couldn't agree less. Quality starts at the top of the hierarchy. Unless management recognises that resources have to be allocated for proper documentation of projects instead of just tinkering along, quality control will never take off. And it pays of in the long run. Temporary systems have a tendency to become permanent solutions. Maintaining and extending functionality on those systems is a real pain if there isn't any proper documentation and you weren't involved with building them in the first place.
Re:This may be a *little* off topic...but anyways.
on
When Does Y2K Begin?
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· Score: 1
This fiscal year thing you mention may apply to your country, but there are a few countries out there which do have fiscal years in sync with the normal calendar.
Actually, the first computers used decimal notation for internal representation. Engineers had to go through terrible headaches to accomplish until someone bright enough figured out that it would be a lot easier to do it binary. Until then representations of numbers than the decimal system had been a quite obscure backwater of mathematics.
The issue of consideration you mention is a typical common law issue and I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is quite unlikely that any consideration will be found in such a case. Under a civil law regime the concept of consideration does not exist at all. However, a court would most likely decide that the liability of the programmers of a GPL'ed program has limits imposed by the amount of money paid for it. Even in a case of gross negligence, the weight of the damages will be put mostly on the shoulders of the user, not the producer.
Which is terribly wrong indeed. The lowlevel formatting functionality provided by debug is intedended to be used for MFM and RLL disks. Those are now completely obsolete. If you try this on a IDE disk, it will end up in killing the disk in such a horrible manner that only the manufacturer can make it usable again, if possible at all.
Economics at high school level may state that a monopoly can only involve one firm, but economics at college level and economic analysis of law usually use the following definition of monopoly: "Monopoly is the power to manipulate price" Which Microsoft clearly has.
Although I am not the original poster who said that he/she got Excel and Word running on Wine, I managed to do the same. I have a Office97 installation disk collecting dust on my bookshelf and decided to give it a try. The installer cocks up, stating that it can't read certain files on the CD-ROM, but if I run Excel straight from the disk it runs. I managed to put a bar-chart in it. Loading and saving documents doesn't work however. The same applies to Word. This was all done on a machine which has never been touched by a Windoze installation.
On the other hand, those expensive consultancy hours are quite well spend if they figure out which 80% of your business can be automated without reinventing the wheel, so your programmers can focus on that 20% which makes your business unique. And that is what makes SAP so succesfull. But you need people with a more general business overview, and programmers tend not to be that kind of people.
Funny enough, while following lectures in competition law, I encountered a lecturer who was very much in favour of abolishing the patent system. His PhD dissertation on intellectual property has been quoted in one or more Supreme Court decisions, so he might have had a clue on the subject. Funnily enough he was as much a capitalist as you can find in Europe and mantra of his work was 'competition is the lifeblood of innovation'. This somehow gives me impression that your opinion on people opposed to certain forms of IP is less valid than you might think.
Wear a jacket lined with an aluminium film or one of those 'space' thermal blankets and the device is useless. Unless it detects the vibrations caused by your heartbeat on radar-reflective objects around you. That would be hard to beat.
Well, in fact, my box at home is a 486DX2-66, with 32 MB RAM and I am running X, E & Netscape on it. Works for me, although I am considering one of the new lightweight WM's with Gnome support instead of E.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a bunch of nonsense. Basically it all depends on the cell size. If you are in an urban area, say Western Europe people often won't notice that you are using a cellular phone instead of a analog fixed one. And that phone is operating at probably 0.5 Watt, because any more is a waste of power in microcells anyway.
I really don't know whether GSM is really better than PCS. On the other hand, I have been using a 900 Mhz GSM for almost two years now and rarely get loss of coverage. Works fine in the subway as well and in most parking garages, as long as you are not more than one floor underground. My 1800 Mhz phone has a bit more coverage trouble, but generally speaking it is still far better than the horror story you are telling. Interoperability is never an issue, for a starter. In fact, it is not uncommon to buy a phone in a phone store and get a separate SIM from the mobile operator, although the vast majority of subscribtions are sold in a package deal.
Most of the fibre which is currently underground is laid using tubes. Replacing them is a matter of pulling the fibre out of the tube and blowing new fibre through the pipes. Besides, many new telcos use 'dark fibre' when expanding their networks these days.
Just to nitpick. It was the Hindenburg instead of Hindenberg. And the bloody thing ran on diesel, not on hydrogen.
Come on, there is lots of readable and understandable stuff in there which doesn't require a degree in CS. My background is in Business Administration and I was able to grasp a fair share of it, though significant portions are beyond me.
Will they ever be allowed to make their changes to Linux available to the general public?
It seems to me that this rant is much more about anti-Japanese sentiments than real worries about the American patent system. Otherwise, he would not have kept silent on the fact that this change will bring the American patent system more or less in line with European ones as well. In Europe you have two flavours of systems. The French approach: almost anything is patentable, but your patent won't last very long, about ten years, and it is up to the courts to decide whether a patent can be uphold or not. Which resembles the American system, but the duration of a patent is seriously limited. The German approach: your patent application will be scrutinised very thoroughly for being non-obvious by the patent office, but if you get past this stage you are well protected for quite a long period. The approach on the EU level is a mixture of both: almost anything can be patented for a short period (five years or something in that order) and after a serious investigation it can be extended.
Funnily enough the meaning of Amerikaanse toestanden, is not confined to idiotic behaviour by US authorities, but als includes idiotic behaviour of US citizens in general. This includes tobacco class action suits, the NRA, weird cults, the KKK, people suing the New York underground service for injuries caused in their own bloody suicide attempt, you name it.
Actually, it is a bit early to celebrate the Y2K worldwide computer crash as a non event. Wait until the end of the month when invoices are due to be paid etc. Especially in the field of small and medium enterprises there might be a few nasty surprises lurking in their Foxpro databases dating from the early 90's. If enough of them have their bookkeeping systems going on their knees some funny chain reactions might go on. Or may not, after all. Basically, we don't know yet.
The individual has to ben encouraged by the top. If the top is only paying lip-service to quality control mantra's and methodologies, it just doesn't pay of for the individual to pay attention to quality. Or in your words: the individual won't give a shit. Management endorsement won't result in the opposite, but lack of management endorsement will inevitably result in the bottom of the hierarchy not giving a shit whatsoever.
I couldn't agree less. Quality starts at the top of the hierarchy. Unless management recognises that resources have to be allocated for proper documentation of projects instead of just tinkering along, quality control will never take off. And it pays of in the long run. Temporary systems have a tendency to become permanent solutions. Maintaining and extending functionality on those systems is a real pain if there isn't any proper documentation and you weren't involved with building them in the first place.
This fiscal year thing you mention may apply to your country, but there are a few countries out there which do have fiscal years in sync with the normal calendar.
Actually, the first computers used decimal notation for internal representation. Engineers had to go through terrible headaches to accomplish until someone bright enough figured out that it would be a lot easier to do it binary. Until then representations of numbers than the decimal system had been a quite obscure backwater of mathematics.
The issue of consideration you mention is a typical common law issue and I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is quite unlikely that any consideration will be found in such a case. Under a civil law regime the concept of consideration does not exist at all. However, a court would most likely decide that the liability of the programmers of a GPL'ed program has limits imposed by the amount of money paid for it. Even in a case of gross negligence, the weight of the damages will be put mostly on the shoulders of the user, not the producer.
Which is terribly wrong indeed. The lowlevel formatting functionality provided by debug is intedended to be used for MFM and RLL disks. Those are now completely obsolete. If you try this on a IDE disk, it will end up in killing the disk in such a horrible manner that only the manufacturer can make it usable again, if possible at all.
Economics at high school level may state that a monopoly can only involve one firm, but economics at college level and economic analysis of law usually use the following definition of monopoly: "Monopoly is the power to manipulate price" Which Microsoft clearly has.
Although I am not the original poster who said that he/she got Excel and Word running on Wine, I managed to do the same. I have a Office97 installation disk collecting dust on my bookshelf and decided to give it a try. The installer cocks up, stating that it can't read certain files on the CD-ROM, but if I run Excel straight from the disk it runs. I managed to put a bar-chart in it. Loading and saving documents doesn't work however. The same applies to Word. This was all done on a machine which has never been touched by a Windoze installation.
I am sorry to spoil your day, but GPS does not really work underwater.
Not In My BackYard
This is not new in Europe. The Netherlands has some quite tough laws on even possessing virii since the early ninety's.
On the other hand, those expensive consultancy hours are quite well spend if they figure out which 80% of your business can be automated without reinventing the wheel, so your programmers can focus on that 20% which makes your business unique. And that is what makes SAP so succesfull. But you need people with a more general business overview, and programmers tend not to be that kind of people.
Funny enough, while following lectures in competition law, I encountered a lecturer who was very much in favour of abolishing the patent system. His PhD dissertation on intellectual property has been quoted in one or more Supreme Court decisions, so he might have had a clue on the subject. Funnily enough he was as much a capitalist as you can find in Europe and mantra of his work was 'competition is the lifeblood of innovation'. This somehow gives me impression that your opinion on people opposed to certain forms of IP is less valid than you might think.
Wear a jacket lined with an aluminium film or one of those 'space' thermal blankets and the device is useless. Unless it detects the vibrations caused by your heartbeat on radar-reflective objects around you. That would be hard to beat.
I wonder who would buy into this kind of nonsense.
Well, in fact, my box at home is a 486DX2-66, with 32 MB RAM and I am running X, E & Netscape on it. Works for me, although I am considering one of the new lightweight WM's with Gnome support instead of E.