User: Epeeist

Labeling of goods

On: EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks

"I don't endorse it, but to be fair most laissez-faire economists still believe that market participants have to label goods and services accurately. "

So why is the US resisting inclusion of information on GM contents in food on the labels of food?

How do you measure it?

On: Working Hard?

I have done consultancy in the States and in Europe. If you use the overall amount that Americans get done, then they are probably more productive than Europeans.

If however you measure it by how much time spent doing a particular task then Europeans score higher.

There doesn't seem to be the fear of going home before the boss in Europe that I have found in America.

Design for accessibility

On: Tim Brown On Current Design Challenges

He talks a lot about usability, which is fine.

Here in the UK we are presently involved in implementing the Disability Discrimination Act, which is about Accessibility. How do you design for this?

Without a stop bit?

On: Incas Used Binary?

Seven bits hey? They were obviously writing in ASCII and not a Unicode character set.

Content Addressable File Store

On: Tom's Hardware Looks At WinFS

The former British computer firm ICL (now, at best, a subsidiary of Fujitsu) invented a context sensitive file system called CAFS. This was hardware based and could search up to 1MB per second!

Looks like another piece of MS innovation.

Spammers resorting to illegal methods

On: Stronger Anti-Spam Law Proposed

This article in the UK "Guardian" claims that the recent blitz of viruses was done by spammers trying to generate open relays.

A Foolish Consistency

On: Universal Alphanumeric Postal Code Proposed

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
Beloved of little statesmen, philosophers and divines.

Mainframes don't run AIX

On: OSI vs SCO

Not any more they don't. They run Linux under VM.

However, you used to be able to get AIX for S/390. It was hugely expensive and didn't really catch on.

Don't forget the straight cucumbers!

On: UK And EU May Make Unsolicited Email Illegal

After all the EU won't let us have cucumbers with curves in them.

Or was it bananas, totally irrelevant anyway since it turned out to be another fabrication by the media.

Re:UK and the EU?

On: UK And EU May Make Unsolicited Email Illegal

> Yes, but the average Brit, in his heart of hearts, still doesn't really believe that.

Only because that nice Mr. Murdoch tells him so.

For the humour impaired

On: Recent Advances in Cognitive Systems

I realise I missed the smiley off the end.

Here it is :-)

European Science

On: Recent Advances in Cognitive Systems

You know you shouldn't be looking at this. I mean if it comes from Europe it must be:

1. Anti-American
   
2. Socialist
   

Especially if it comes from France

Russia was not, and China isn't

On: Testing Microsoft And The DMCA

> Obviously this wouldn't apply to Russia, being a recent convert from communism.

Russian wasn't communist, and China isn't. Both are totalitarian governments in much the same way as Hitler's Germany or Pinochet's Chile.

Just because they said/say they are communist doesn't make it so.

Correlation and causation

On: BSA IDC FUD

Nice simile, well worth the score.

Absolutely on the button, one could equally well write

"...nations with the largest IT sectors had the lowest piracy rates."

Yet another confusion of correlation with causation.

This is not double jeopardy

On: Jon Johansen To Be Retried On Piracy Charges

Have a look at the way the Norwegian justice system works before you make this kind of comment. The initial trial was in a lower court, both prosecution and defendants may appeal to a higher court.

You may not like it, but this is the way the Norwegian systems works, and has worked for a long time.

Reduced to one book

On: Seven Rules For Spotting Bogus Science

A better set of rules is in Carl Sagan's book "The Demon Haunted World".

Karl Popper has a hard nosed approach

1. Is it testable (at least in principle)?
   
2. Is it falsifiable?
   

If either of these don't apply then it isn't science.

Re:How about versions in the file name

On: Microsoft to End DLL Confusion

You mean like libgdbm.so.2.0.0

That would be innovative :-) [And probably patentable]

So how much of .Net is this?

On: Microsoft Applies For .NET Patent

> Microsoft has already announced that, as part of the ECMA standards process, they are granting EVERYONE the right to implement the .Net Framework, WITHOUT paying any royalties whatsoever.

So how much of the whole .Net is the framework? Can I build web services with the framework alone?

Or will it turn out that I need the run time libraries which are not part of the ECMA standardisation, which are completely under the control of Redmond and are the likely place that implementation of these patents will occur.

Oh no it isn't

On: UK Parliament Domain Without Registrar

The British Parliament is effectively an extension of the US congress.

Or at least Tony Blair is GWB's poodle, or America's foreign secretary according to Jaque Chirac.

.us

On: UK Parliament Domain Without Registrar

I always wondered why I always see .com, and almost never .com.us.

Mobilix/Obelix

On: Asterix and Mobilix Redux

Essentially one character apart (yes, I know there is an E/I difference).

Windows/Lindows, exactly one character apart. Perhaps MS should have taken this case up in Germany.

Re:Microsoft doesn't care

On: Mono - 'Breaking Down the .Net Barriers'

> Personally, I think .NET is a better implemenation of the Java concept. I can use multiple langauges (VB.NET is much nicer for string handling crap, C# is better for syntax, Perl.NET for regexp) and it all works together whereas in Java, there is no reuse at all.

I am suprised this hasn't been moderated funny. Can you imagine a project which mixes half a dozen different languages? You happen to have one guy who is really keen on Haskell (assuming there is a binding for this) and writes a critical part of your suite in this. Of course he leaves immediately after the project finishes, leaving two VB people and a COBOL hacker. What happens when his chunk of code falls in a heap, or you want to upgrade it?

What I want to do is run an end to end application suite over whatever hardware is most appropriate. While .Net may give me elements of this, what happens when I want to use a library that MS has proprietary rights over and hasn't put to ECMA for standardisation?

Re:I'll bite

On: Six Giant Music Retailers Will Try Online Sales Together

Record companies currently produce and distribute the music as well as providing the PR for their artistes.

If someone produces software that allows artistes to run their own Web sites selling music online or to produce customised CDs for people then there would seem to be little requirement for their services except for publicity.

Who bothers to remember phone numbers?

On: 11 Digit Dialing Comes Home to New York

When most phones these days have an address book built in.

In the longer term it would seem sensible to use a telephony equivalent to DNS, so consumers wouldn't have to use a number at all.

And this is surprising because?

On: MPEG 4, Windows Media 9 At War

How many standards based pieces of software has MS tried to extinguish. In most cases because it didn't fit with their assumption that it might just undercut their monopoly.