How many businesses are going to bring out a product and happily let you use it to slag them off? I don't see anything strange in what MS have done here. This is just mindless anti-Microsoft banality again.
There were only 14 participants in the study. The conclusions drawn are statistically meaningless. And without some kind of measure of the level of skill of the participants in each language prior to the experiment it's not possible to do weight the answers sensibly either.
I think we all seem to agree here that this is a lame product and a lame review.
What gets me is that this claims to be an advancement in technology from the motto they so proudly boast. How does going from 80wpm tying speed to 38wpm typing justify that? So it fits in your pocket, big deal. There are cunning fold-away keyboards that are full-size and still fit in your pocket. And no compromise in typing speed.
About ten years ago on Tomorrow's World (BBC1 - UK) there was a section on a new keyboard that used two handed typing, that is, you used combinations of finger presses to type word parts, not single presses to type letters. The inventor, who claimed to be quite poor at his own keyboard, raced to type the entire show's script against that years winner of secretary of the year (120wpm) and he beat her clocking in a speed of nearly three times that! Now there's a product that should have worked, where is it now?!
That website hosting the puzzle (the RUR-14) is really scary. At first I thought it was real, it took me quite a lot of reading and a clicking around to realise it's probably to do with the film (which I haven't seen). But it raises really big questions.
People really will react this way. I really believe that computers are as much our children as our biological children. Since humans have been so reckless with destructive technologies like plutonium, it won't be long now until some terrorist group or other destroys part of the world. Since, as a race we're so reluctant to get along with each other, I think the sooner we create non-violent kids, the sooner life has a chance to continue, whether artificial or biological.
Re:So big... I want a little one!!
on
Flywheel UPS
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· Score: 1
It's so big because the amount of kinetic energy you can store in a spinning body is proportional to the moment of inertia and the square of the angular velocity. The moment of inertia is proportional to mass, but also greater when mass is distributed farther away from the centre of motion, (varying as r^2), so having a physically large mass is one way of getting away with lower spinning speeds. If you had a small mass (both in size and mass) then you have to have EXTREMELY high angular velocity which tends to be very dangerous and hard to achieve. At lower moment of inertia friction also becomes a significant problem (you may have noticed how bodies with large inertia tend to ignore friction a bit more).
Yes, neon lights are a source of RF. During my PhD we had to remove all of the neon lights in our lab because the electromagnetic contamination was so bad. BUT, we were using SQuID magnetometers which are incredibly sensitive detectors.
RF is only a problem for devices which are sensitive to it (tv's, monitors and radios being three examples)
The simple answer is, if you have anything in your PC which is sensitive to RF (for example a WinTV card for watching TV) then you may experience a degraded signal. Otherwise, no. You won't, it's fine.
I thought this was very funny. Nonetheless, some of the comments posted here afterwards disturbed me. It's very easy to crow with the benefit of hindsight and there are a lot of readers here who are commenting with little or no experience themselves.
Remember that the majority of people involved in the.com boom were highly intelligent people, some of whom had already made a fiscal success of their lives. I don't believe their greed unbalanced their intellect. I believe something else happened that is a sign of our times.
Technology has advanced to a state now where it is rare, if not impossible, to have a complete grasp of more than one subject. Technology in its widest sense simply means a body of knowlegde, so I'm also using this to refer to wider contexts, such as finance, or business too. We rely on the expertise of others. Clearly the marriage of finance/business and internet technology is what failed here. Two groups of people with sound knowledge of their own areas failed to communicate clearly in the confusion and excitement of a new 'goldrush'. Financiers were scared that their speciality was about to be usurped by something new and alien to them, and they jumped on board the e-tech bandwagon for fear of being left behind.
The lessons we must learn from this are profound. I have my own views as to what some of them might be, but it would be facile to attempt to put them down here in such a short message.
I have to comment on this. Maybe it's a regional thing, but Dell's customer service to the UK (run from Eire) has been nothing short of appalling in my recent experience. I've purchased on 3 occassions and each time it has been messed up, and each time the customer care team didn't give a flying crap until I raised merry hell with their managers. Apparently there has even been a report on UK's watchdog (a programme dedicated to exposing things like this) about how poor they are.
I believe Dell's product quality / price is excellent (exploding batteries ignored) which is why I have continued to shop with them. But after my recent experiences I may turn elsewhere. I would advise anyone shopping with Dell not to order over the internet but ring a sales rep and make sure you have their direct line and email in case anything goes wrong.
Google gets relevant and recent additions as everyone knows. But what I didn't know until recently is that the UK and Ireland Yahoo uses Google now. A wise move.
So why doesn't Yahoo.com? Anyone know?
Check out the differences between searches on yahoo.co.uk and yahoo.com.
Erm... I hate to point this out, but the capital gain you get from a $5 stock increasing to $15 is exactly the same as that of a $100 dollar stock increasing to $110. The slope is the same on those two examples. But I'm sure you knew that and it was a simple mistake.
Thank God for your sense. Someone mod this man up please.
Now, that isn't to say that being able to patent things like this isn't wrong, it's just pointless blaming a company for exploiting this when they do so to defend themselves, rather than to attack others.
It's patent law that must be attacked because it is failing to serve it's original intention, which is to encourage creativity and invention by protecting the rights of those who truly invent new things.
No. As someone else has already pointed out, the gas is subterranean and there's no oxygen around to burn the gas. Hence, it doesn't matter what temperature it reaches, it can't burn.
Last Thursday evening on the way home from work one of my colleagues was assualted by a man with an iron bar. He was hit in the face and has had many stitches and possibly suffered damage to one eye. The attack was apparently motiveless.
The man was caught, and thanks to the fact that the whole event was captured on camera the court will be able to prosecuted with the least amount of problem.
We are told by police that the man is suffering from a mental disorder, but the presence cameras on the streets of London is a huge positive as far as most citizens are concerned. Certainly everyone in my company is grateful for their existence. Especially now.
Er... surely the only right you really have is the right not to buy the game. If someone wants to sell a system and specify in the contract how you're allowed to use it, surely that's their right. Isn't it?
If people care so much about having systems that don't do this, then I can only suggest they get together and develop a competing system that doesn't. And if you can screw Sony that way, then well done. But don't moan about "rights".
Yes, but the important thing here is that the patent was already *granted*. The fact that it was overturned is highlighting an ever increasing problem which is that the people granted patents are seemingly no longer adequately qualified to do so and are making a mockery of law.
I'm staring at a patent which is a threat to my business which basically patents a network using IP with some particular use. It's clearly a pile of crap, but the patent office granted it. And as with other points of law, they're assumed to be right unless proven wrong. Who has the money to challenge this?
Something has to change and soon. This victory is a great step forward.
There's a lot of negative advocacy on/. regarding MS. And my opinion is that it gets in the way of a true evaluation of a product.
Ignoring for a moment our opinions of MS the corporation, let's have a look at the capabilities of MS SQL Server. It actually trashes the capabilities of ORACLE on most points with one notable exception reliability. And that fails mostly of the platform it runs on. But, to its advantage, it has excellent failover.
And it's much cheaper to boot.
When you consider Microsoft don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
You can't lump Sybase (or rather Adaptive Server Enterprise as it's now known) into the same bag as MySQL.
Sybase is a high end RDBMS and a major competitor of Oracle. Although Oracle has a larger market share overall, ASE is the leading database in many industries, including the financial sector in the UK (over 70% in fact).
And it costs a similar amount to buy, but you get what you pay for.
I think the important uses of these won't be in the home. Let's face it, enough the cleverest of us don't yet have enough specialist knowledge, nor the design to print our own circuit boards at great expense.
The biggest use of these is likely to be in units that have to travel to places where getting replacement hardware is difficult. Such as extraterrestrial expeditions, or armies at war on earth. Combine this technology with a fabber and you can build whatever replacements you like when things break.
The far ahead possibilities include virally spreading across the universe using fabbers that build more fabbers...
The best use of something like this would be to combine the weapon with a standard ballistic weapon. An armed officer attempting to immobilise a person would then have a much better chance of not killing them, but still have that option should the situation turn really nasty.
Then we could avoid situations as we've had in the past where officers doing their duty have accidentally killed people and then gone to jail themselves for overreacting.
I know I would feel more comfortable upholding the law if the weapon I carried didn't have 'kill' as the only mode.
Yes, it could be programmed not to reproduce, but then how would we get any of it in any decent quantity in the first place? It would have to reproduce.
And even if we did manage it, once we had enough, how would we stop the radioation from knocking that disabled reproductive gene back on and it reproducing again?
This could have interesting consequences. This bacterium is going to mutate at an extraordinary rate if we encourage it to eat radioactive material. We could end up with something we'd rather not have to deal with. Couldn't we?
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How many businesses are going to bring out a product and happily let you use it to slag them off? I don't see anything strange in what MS have done here. This is just mindless anti-Microsoft banality again.
What gets me is that this claims to be an advancement in technology from the motto they so proudly boast. How does going from 80wpm tying speed to 38wpm typing justify that? So it fits in your pocket, big deal. There are cunning fold-away keyboards that are full-size and still fit in your pocket. And no compromise in typing speed.
About ten years ago on Tomorrow's World (BBC1 - UK) there was a section on a new keyboard that used two handed typing, that is, you used combinations of finger presses to type word parts, not single presses to type letters. The inventor, who claimed to be quite poor at his own keyboard, raced to type the entire show's script against that years winner of secretary of the year (120wpm) and he beat her clocking in a speed of nearly three times that! Now there's a product that should have worked, where is it now?!
People really will react this way. I really believe that computers are as much our children as our biological children. Since humans have been so reckless with destructive technologies like plutonium, it won't be long now until some terrorist group or other destroys part of the world. Since, as a race we're so reluctant to get along with each other, I think the sooner we create non-violent kids, the sooner life has a chance to continue, whether artificial or biological.
Hope that helps.
RF is only a problem for devices which are sensitive to it (tv's, monitors and radios being three examples)
The simple answer is, if you have anything in your PC which is sensitive to RF (for example a WinTV card for watching TV) then you may experience a degraded signal. Otherwise, no. You won't, it's fine.
What is it? FriedEgg.com? Done it. Raised $14b and now live on a small island of my own.
Remember that the majority of people involved in the .com boom were highly intelligent people, some of whom had already made a fiscal success of their lives. I don't believe their greed unbalanced their intellect. I believe something else happened that is a sign of our times.
Technology has advanced to a state now where it is rare, if not impossible, to have a complete grasp of more than one subject. Technology in its widest sense simply means a body of knowlegde, so I'm also using this to refer to wider contexts, such as finance, or business too. We rely on the expertise of others. Clearly the marriage of finance/business and internet technology is what failed here. Two groups of people with sound knowledge of their own areas failed to communicate clearly in the confusion and excitement of a new 'goldrush'. Financiers were scared that their speciality was about to be usurped by something new and alien to them, and they jumped on board the e-tech bandwagon for fear of being left behind.
The lessons we must learn from this are profound. I have my own views as to what some of them might be, but it would be facile to attempt to put them down here in such a short message.
I believe Dell's product quality / price is excellent (exploding batteries ignored) which is why I have continued to shop with them. But after my recent experiences I may turn elsewhere. I would advise anyone shopping with Dell not to order over the internet but ring a sales rep and make sure you have their direct line and email in case anything goes wrong.
I'd thoroughly recommend both the book and the methodology it teaches.
Google gets relevant and recent additions as everyone knows. But what I didn't know until recently is that the UK and Ireland Yahoo uses Google now. A wise move. So why doesn't Yahoo.com? Anyone know? Check out the differences between searches on yahoo.co.uk and yahoo.com.
How the hell can you mod this down as off-topic?! It's perfectly on-topic.
Erm... I hate to point this out, but the capital gain you get from a $5 stock increasing to $15 is exactly the same as that of a $100 dollar stock increasing to $110. The slope is the same on those two examples. But I'm sure you knew that and it was a simple mistake.
Now, that isn't to say that being able to patent things like this isn't wrong, it's just pointless blaming a company for exploiting this when they do so to defend themselves, rather than to attack others.
It's patent law that must be attacked because it is failing to serve it's original intention, which is to encourage creativity and invention by protecting the rights of those who truly invent new things.
No. As someone else has already pointed out, the gas is subterranean and there's no oxygen around to burn the gas. Hence, it doesn't matter what temperature it reaches, it can't burn.
Anyway, I'm sure that a better use of Megawatt lasers is in nuclear fusion which promises a much cleaner source of energy than oil.
The man was caught, and thanks to the fact that the whole event was captured on camera the court will be able to prosecuted with the least amount of problem.
We are told by police that the man is suffering from a mental disorder, but the presence cameras on the streets of London is a huge positive as far as most citizens are concerned. Certainly everyone in my company is grateful for their existence. Especially now.
If people care so much about having systems that don't do this, then I can only suggest they get together and develop a competing system that doesn't. And if you can screw Sony that way, then well done. But don't moan about "rights".
I'm staring at a patent which is a threat to my business which basically patents a network using IP with some particular use. It's clearly a pile of crap, but the patent office granted it. And as with other points of law, they're assumed to be right unless proven wrong. Who has the money to challenge this?
Something has to change and soon. This victory is a great step forward.
Ignoring for a moment our opinions of MS the corporation, let's have a look at the capabilities of MS SQL Server. It actually trashes the capabilities of ORACLE on most points with one notable exception reliability. And that fails mostly of the platform it runs on. But, to its advantage, it has excellent failover.
And it's much cheaper to boot.
When you consider Microsoft don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
You can't lump Sybase (or rather Adaptive Server Enterprise as it's now known) into the same bag as MySQL.
Sybase is a high end RDBMS and a major competitor of Oracle. Although Oracle has a larger market share overall, ASE is the leading database in many industries, including the financial sector in the UK (over 70% in fact).
And it costs a similar amount to buy, but you get what you pay for.
The biggest use of these is likely to be in units that have to travel to places where getting replacement hardware is difficult. Such as extraterrestrial expeditions, or armies at war on earth. Combine this technology with a fabber and you can build whatever replacements you like when things break.
The far ahead possibilities include virally spreading across the universe using fabbers that build more fabbers...
The best use of something like this would be to combine the weapon with a standard ballistic weapon. An armed officer attempting to immobilise a person would then have a much better chance of not killing them, but still have that option should the situation turn really nasty. Then we could avoid situations as we've had in the past where officers doing their duty have accidentally killed people and then gone to jail themselves for overreacting. I know I would feel more comfortable upholding the law if the weapon I carried didn't have 'kill' as the only mode.
Yes, it could be programmed not to reproduce, but then how would we get any of it in any decent quantity in the first place? It would have to reproduce. And even if we did manage it, once we had enough, how would we stop the radioation from knocking that disabled reproductive gene back on and it reproducing again?
This could have interesting consequences. This bacterium is going to mutate at an extraordinary rate if we encourage it to eat radioactive material. We could end up with something we'd rather not have to deal with. Couldn't we?