Its also the time you realise why there are some societies which are taking a rather firm stand against the extension of the American way in any shape or form.
Software patents are quite clearly a method of granting a monopoly to multinational corporations and excluding SME's. This is a direct result of American "democracy" which is a method of granting political power to the business lobby. Its pretty good for business but isnt necessarily very good for society.
I have ordered a RAZER because it has a large keypad for texting - but thats because I cant find a phone with a long battery life.
All I want is a mobile that does text messages and the occasional call - and most importantly lasts for as long as possible between recharges. I am sick of carrying different chargers around with me for all my gadgets, so now I buy things that take standard rechargeable cells - and you cant get a phone with standard rechargable cells.
You can get mobiles with just the phone and texting with longer battery life - but they are only widely available in the third world and have terrible cheap keyboards.
The mobile market reminds me of the pc business about five years ago, there was one choice on offer, it had to have the fastest processor, most expensive graphics card, biggest hard disk, most memmory available - whereas it is quite acceptable now to buy something like the Mac Mini which is built to perform a function and not to cram in the latest list of expensive and irrelevant specifications. Mobile phones are the same, you have to have a camera and a large multicolour display and a rubbish keyboard and a mp3 player and a bluetooth module and and and and - loads of stuff I dont want.
It looks like HP is in trouble as a business so it may have to take these measures in order to survive. But it has to be noted that in the long run sucessfull busineses which consider part of their brand offering to be sustainable development and environmental impact should be looking at telecommuting. If we accept that commuting adds to global warming or that flexible working contributes to the sucessful integration of work and home life for parents then telecommuting can be used as a marketing win over rival businesses. Young people are interested in environmental kudos and can be influenced in their purchasing decisions by the environmental profile of the products they buy.
It is sad to hear that this option does not appear to be available to HP at the momment and it suggests that the business is in big trouble. Our present worries about the availability of oil and our leaders actions in securing a supply by the less than sucessful conversion of Iraq into a democracy as part of a longer term plan to stableise the Middle East (- where most of the oil is) will bring efficiency and "sustainable" issues into the mainstream.
Telecommuting has a bright future - but not with HP now
Sport is good for physical health and socialising team work. However a culture which raises sport above everything else will fail as evidenced by the Romans. (and they were pretty sucessfull for a long time). America also seems to be suffering from an unhealthy obsession with dumb male machismo. Rap music eulogises violence as a way of gaining respect, football jocks and cheerleaders are being put up as role models by the schools. Advertising constantly signals to you that your self worth is only measured by your posessions and not by what you can do. Its a lot easier to get drink and drugs these days and we dont have the moral objections to enjoying them that our society used to have. We may have made a mistake in treating children under the age of ten as young adults instead of the animals which they are - its difficult to instill self disciplin in youngsters who are so undiciplined that you cant teach them.
Its hardly suprising that only the cleverest pupils learn anything academic at school. Until the environment makes it cool to be clever at science then more and more Americans will end up ignorant. To suceed at science you need to do some work and to do work you have to be motivated.
But hey you have a president who gets his ideas straight from god and believes in action before planning. So thats allright, even the president is a moron. In any case you wont even need to know science when China does the worlds science anyway.
We dont have all of these problems in the uk, there is still a reasonable respect for academic achievement. What we probably lack is more vocational education as in Germany for the bottom 10% who disrupt the rest of the school.
most of the pirated software would not be bought if it were only available if paid for. I hope the people who publish this stuff and have a disproportionate influence on law makers die of cancer, preferably a very unpleasant cancer. Those organisations which note the unpaid for usage of software in different markets and find ways of selling cheaper copies in those markets deserve to make lots of money and take over their brain dead rivals.
Not to mention all the GHz experimental work, digital modes experimentation, Earth Moon Earth transmission and you can still do new fundamental research into ELF natural phenomenon, build your own radio telescope - all done with gear developed by and for radio amateurs.
Of course the mainstream is more like stamp collecting by cb radio - a competition to work two way communications with as many different countries as possible.
But make no mistake theres lots of cutting edge geekery still to be found in radio.
I expect you are right about the date, I am more familiar with the sell off on my side of the pond in the UK. The market is only now begining to recover and sell some services on the 3g network - like the upcomming world cup soccer vidos possibly to be seen on a cell phone near you soon. The new services have been grossly overpriced because of the need to pay off the licences and the cell phone market has collectively stalled. Just compare with the activity in the wired world with skype and google.
If my in depth skills are lacking, its because I enjoy working in the war zone of start up or high tech manufacturing. You dont need much multi user capability for an application being used by three people. When I get to thirty users then I can afford to hire an expert on contract to implement the business logic in something more robust. Three weeks ago the RMA application was a spreadsheet, today it is a six status nine transaction management system with automated emailing. I also get to do manufacturing capacity modeling, product engineering, six sigma yield improvement, test database analysis tools (MySQL PHP R ) and run gauge R&R experiments at the manufacturing contractors in another country. Taguchi comes next.
I agree, I bet I'm having more fun than the guy who gets to recode my crappy access application in a more technically correct object oriented multiuser fashion. But at least they will have a decent flowchart of the business process to start from.
Failing that the whole thing could be replaced by an outsourced call center on another continent. I imagine they have their own configurable RMA management software and we will just have to chuck my application away and redesign the whole process to fit what they have.
In the real world it is possible to do the impossible by finding a way to do it fast enough to make a difference. I dont have time or the money to implement anything in Oracle so its a local access front end with the tables in MySQL and I can write a PHP web interface for the customers and sales people for the bits they interact with. Except that isnt going to happen now because of the megacorporation buyout and their VPN firewall. My bet is the whole process will be outsourced in six months. At least the early data has been moved out of a spreadsheet into a sensibly normalised database.
I do have a problem it is true with the idea that end users are restricted to using the product of the IT department. Software is just a tool and it should be available for users to use just like writing paper. Thats why I resent the idea that the computer on my desk at work should just be a dumb terminal for running ERP and email on. Its getting to the point where we need two machines, one on the corporate network and another one to do our work on. I am still waiting to hear whether the new corporate IT will allow us to run any open source software at all. I have no objection to running commercial software and just configuring it, some of it is very good with the benefit of thousands of man hours of development work. The question is can my business afford to buy it ?
Oh and you are wrong about the tech college programming course - but it was in the time of Algol-W and I have even used a punch card deck to submit my programs and I still think VAXes were pretty cool pc's.
VB6, LAMP, Python and the RAD mentality also put the power to get the job done in the hands of computer literate end users. All this dot net obsufcation is designed to take power away from the end user and give it to the new exclusive professions of overpaid thirteen year olds. All this talk of properly written programs certified by Microsoft is horseshit to prevent me from stringing together applications so that I can build a capacity model of my business before it doubles in size. Unfortunately we just got bought by a mega corporation with outsourced IT and the imaged pc's are mere weeks away. I assume that if this does come to pass I shall be moving on somewhere with a future. Because this business will die.
My favorite fantasy movie is one where Christianity and Islam unite against the evil of IT management and burn every last one of them.
Theres plenty of non traditional suppliers lining up for the auction with similar aspirations to unwire the States. This particular idea has probably arrived too late to be considered by the Government, which will have already lined up some very agressive bidders with very deep pockets for the spectrum sale.
Its an appealing business model though, because it matches the price of the spectrum against the revenue that can be earned from it rather than the crazy bids for 3G mobile which IMHO was partly to blame for the tech crash in 2001.
Jason wins out for me because the slightly larger font in the story intros reads better on my 10" laptop screen - and as mobile content is where we are all going next it has a degree of future proofing. I also like the boxes around the stories as the eye jumps from one to another and settles on the content quickly. They all look good though stylewise.
Dont worry, another disruptive technology is comming up for prime time real soon now. WiMax should work out cheaper than cable or cellular networks. The standards are just about in place and the technology is ready. Look out for its impact in the market this summer.
I rather like the fact that the smiley is actualy the property of thousands of drug crazed dance music fans in the UK who undoubtedly find the whole wal-mart thing astonishingly rib-cage-explodingly funny
I 'carried the experiment out' and then layed it to rest.
I am not a brilliant advertisement for my tutors at college twenty five years ago. But I was impressed by the common sense approach in the "Writing for engineers" course we had to take in the first year of our University degrees. I seem to recall that they warned against using past tense, passive voice and obscuring jargon. Clarity and immmediacy was their philosophy and I find this advice is still useful today. These days the advice is probably to avoid the temptation to use street slang in your writing, because we now tend to write in the way that we speak. Writing as you speak is probably a good thing because it is more lively. The only downside is that there are lots of wonderfull words that you can write, which are hardly ever used in real life.
I agree that the media overhyped the other diseases. However if you read up on H5N1 I think you will find that it has a far more serious potential to do harm. We had a flu pandemic in the last centuary that killed more people than the first world war. Its only recently that the science has identified where that pandemic came from - and H5N1 is a good candidate to cause a similar pandemic.
It aint happened yet and that is probably the best indication that we might get away with this one. On the other hand the fact that it has only started appearing recently in most countries shows that the probability game still has some time to run.
In my mind a threat assesment of my likelyhood of being killed by various things in the next year comes out in an order like this
bird flu road traffic accident cancer heart attack drowning
Things that I would be willing to bet $10,000 that will not seriously harm me in the next year include Any chemical in food or the environment Nuclear power terrorism Chlorestorol smoking drinking alcohol illegal drugs snowboarding violent crime Aids asbestos suicide air crash rail crash any rare disease
The question for me then becomes why are all the things that I evaluate as low risk the ones that the media is deeply preocupied with. The answer I come up with is that the media publishes stories to sell and make money out of. Its function is only indirectly to inform us. You have to evaluate things for yourself by doing background research. I gave up watching tv 20 years ago because it already and obviously had an information content sufficiently close to zero to be replaced by a three minute radio news slot. Thankfully I can now research most things through the internet and can read a variety of good quality newspapers to check out the zeitgeist of political opinion and get a reasonable catalogue of current events to research off the bbc world service radio.
I love ripping dvd movies, I can give a copy to my unemployed friends children with the knowledge that no one has lost out and in fact the total sum of human happiness has increased.
These phantom losses that the greedy content owners expect to realise by stopping personal piracy are just that - phantom.
I dont have a problem stopping industrialised piracy where the pirate burns off 200 copies and sells them on the street - but there is no profit for anybody in stopping personal piracy - or "fair use" as it used to be called before the modern notion that you could patent and copyright and own just about anything came about.
This bollocks has to stop - my genome does not belong to corporation X, the wheel does not belong to corporation Y and plants grown in third world peasants back yards for 5000 years deffinitely do not belong to corporation Z.
Its about time some common sense was applied in this field because the Chineese do not take any notice of this system and they are going to take everything you have unless you can persuade them that it is in their best interests to have some intellectual property laws that are obeyed - and you can bet your bottom dollar they arnt going to be following the current shitty system that American lawyers have dreamed up. - At least not until their economy is twice the size of the USA (only 40 years folks).
but which site would that be that isnt blocked - if you want to learn how to do something better then there are tons of resources on the web. Smith charts today, gaussian distribution tomorrow followed by an XP powertoy that does a calculator with a scrolling history.
I actualy believe that the web makes me more effective as a worker than the cost in company time that surfing uses. Also instead of wandering off to have a random chat in between writing the report and the conclusion, the necessary mental reset can now be filled with checking my bank balance or scanning slashdot headlines. Its a fine balance, but I know I would have made some avoidable mistakes if I had not had access to the thoughts and experiences of others on the web. Todays example was Motorola six sigma manufacturing - brilliant idea, but dont forget that it only works for a process subject to normal variation - so perfect products with 3 parts per billion fail rates are never going to happen when Joe on night shift loaded the wrong surface mount tape reel in slot five because nobody ever thought that mistake was possible. Special cause variation will keep on burying you in scrap if you think statistics can solve all your problems. So thanks to a couple of sceptical sentances on Wikipedia I have a more rounded picture of how to go about my job.
Surfing is an addictive entertainment but it adds value if you can use the same skills you use to follow your favourite football team online to your work. Whatever the legal reason for allowing reasonable surfing at work it would be a competitive mistake to deny surfing to employees. Far better to teach people how to surf productively. - an example: I am not at work at the momment otherwise this post would deserve no more than three lines of my companies time might be a good rule to aim for:-) (Its probably a good rule anyway, who has time to read all those rambling posts that go on and on and on...)
I would like to see the study that showed that drinking and smoking pot make you more inclined to play moronic violent games - because surely being pissed and stoned is not a state to be in if you want to be able to play very well. And where is the study that says watching ultra violent films is good for your mental health. Dodgy entertainment has always been bad for your outlook, thats why throwing christians to the lions isnt on the tv anymore, or bear baiting or any number of unsavory visceral entertainments. No one is going to ban any of this stuff anyway,it makes too much money.
People are buying the wrong laptops, mine weighs 1.6Kg and does a fine job of recording audio.
having said that I would still prefer paper notes because its quicker to scribble and sketch, though this may not always be the case with tablet pc's improving all the time.
Actually all this talk of Democracy is horseshit, no democracy is perfect, people who claim that it is are as barking mad as Osma Bin Ladin.
Oppression of the minority by the majority is an inevitable result of single parties being elected democratically.
A great deal of effort has to come from institutions surrounding Parliament in order to reign in the tendency of the majority will to crush minorities.
Sadly the current Labour party is one of the worst examples of this in British history and will leave a legacy hated even more than the cruelty of Margaret Thatchers administration.
This labour party wants to grant itself the exclusive right to rule unconstrained by the law or by the slight brake of legislative review by the House of Lords.
The blatant class discrimination and disregard for individual responsibility and rights are vile outcomes of this parties belief that they can do no wrong.
It is for occasions such as this that we do have institutions like the house of lords that can at least call out the arbitary injustices that the evil labour party are spitefully inflicting on various minorities.
its time to get rid of the dead socialist hand of Labour, they may not have destroyed the economy this time around but they are doing their best to destroy our culture. This party is directly responsible for compensation culture, for institutionalising poverty, for disrespectfull yob culture, for criminalising large portions of the population in revenue raising exercises, for banning anything vaguely risky - such as schoolchildren playing conkers, for banning anything they dont personally like - such as smoking in public - though the bast**ds didnt ban it outright because they would lose the tax revenues to the black market.
Its almost certain now that they will not win the next election, dam good thing too because its odds on that the next bunch of terroists to try and kill politicians will be some-one from an opressed British minority that this labour government has shat on - farmers for example.
I hate what this country is becoming under these manipulative scum bags, I cant even figure out quite why they are interfering and restricting what individuals are allowed to do, or what life they intend to force us all to live. Maybe its all about making pliable worker drones? which would make sense except for the explosion of yob culture. Who knows, I dont know why they are doing it. I just know that the tipping point is here and they are not going to get re-elected.
If.wav files are not available on CD or online then you can count on me never buying music content again. I'm not paying for content encoded in lossey compression and not on semi archival quality storage.
If the only choice is lossy content downloadable to the marketers DRM riddled appliance then I will have no incentive to pay for any of my content.
Slashdot Mirror
Its also the time you realise why there are some societies which are taking a rather firm stand against the extension of the American way in any shape or form.
Software patents are quite clearly a method of granting a monopoly to multinational corporations and excluding SME's. This is a direct result of American "democracy" which is a method of granting political power to the business lobby. Its pretty good for business but isnt necessarily very good for society.
I have ordered a RAZER because it has a large keypad for texting - but thats because I cant find a phone with a long battery life.
All I want is a mobile that does text messages and the occasional call - and most importantly lasts for as long as possible between recharges. I am sick of carrying different chargers around with me for all my gadgets, so now I buy things that take standard rechargeable cells - and you cant get a phone with standard rechargable cells.
You can get mobiles with just the phone and texting with longer battery life - but they are only widely available in the third world and have terrible cheap keyboards.
The mobile market reminds me of the pc business about five years ago, there was one choice on offer, it had to have the fastest processor, most expensive graphics card, biggest hard disk, most memmory available - whereas it is quite acceptable now to buy something like the Mac Mini which is built to perform a function and not to cram in the latest list of expensive and irrelevant specifications. Mobile phones are the same, you have to have a camera and a large multicolour display and a rubbish keyboard and a mp3 player and a bluetooth module and and and and - loads of stuff I dont want.
http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail.js p?globalObjectId=6906_6860_23
Looks like these chaps are keen on Linux suceeding and working with the Open Source community
It looks like HP is in trouble as a business so it may have to take these measures in order to survive. But it has to be noted that in the long run sucessfull busineses which consider part of their brand offering to be sustainable development and environmental impact should be looking at telecommuting. If we accept that commuting adds to global warming or that flexible working contributes to the sucessful integration of work and home life for parents then telecommuting can be used as a marketing win over rival businesses. Young people are interested in environmental kudos and can be influenced in their purchasing decisions by the environmental profile of the products they buy.
It is sad to hear that this option does not appear to be available to HP at the momment and it suggests that the business is in big trouble. Our present worries about the availability of oil and our leaders actions in securing a supply by the less than sucessful conversion of Iraq into a democracy as part of a longer term plan to stableise the Middle East (- where most of the oil is) will bring efficiency and "sustainable" issues into the mainstream.
Telecommuting has a bright future - but not with HP now
Sport is good for physical health and socialising team work. However a culture which raises sport above everything else will fail as evidenced by the Romans. (and they were pretty sucessfull for a long time). America also seems to be suffering from an unhealthy obsession with dumb male machismo. Rap music eulogises violence as a way of gaining respect, football jocks and cheerleaders are being put up as role models by the schools. Advertising constantly signals to you that your self worth is only measured by your posessions and not by what you can do. Its a lot easier to get drink and drugs these days and we dont have the moral objections to enjoying them that our society used to have. We may have made a mistake in treating children under the age of ten as young adults instead of the animals which they are - its difficult to instill self disciplin in youngsters who are so undiciplined that you cant teach them.
Its hardly suprising that only the cleverest pupils learn anything academic at school. Until the environment makes it cool to be clever at science then more and more Americans will end up ignorant. To suceed at science you need to do some work and to do work you have to be motivated.
But hey you have a president who gets his ideas straight from god and believes in action before planning. So thats allright, even the president is a moron. In any case you wont even need to know science when China does the worlds science anyway.
We dont have all of these problems in the uk, there is still a reasonable respect for academic achievement. What we probably lack is more vocational education as in Germany for the bottom 10% who disrupt the rest of the school.
most of the pirated software would not be bought if it were only available if paid for. I hope the people who publish this stuff and have a disproportionate influence on law makers die of cancer, preferably a very unpleasant cancer. Those organisations which note the unpaid for usage of software in different markets and find ways of selling cheaper copies in those markets deserve to make lots of money and take over their brain dead rivals.
Theres plenty of deep geekery going on still in Ham radio. Software defined radio for a start
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
Not to mention all the GHz experimental work, digital modes experimentation, Earth Moon Earth transmission and you can still do new fundamental research into ELF natural phenomenon, build your own radio telescope - all done with gear developed by and for radio amateurs.
Of course the mainstream is more like stamp collecting by cb radio - a competition to work two way communications with as many different countries as possible.
But make no mistake theres lots of cutting edge geekery still to be found in radio.
I expect you are right about the date, I am more familiar with the sell off on my side of the pond in the UK. The market is only now begining to recover and sell some services on the 3g network - like the upcomming world cup soccer vidos possibly to be seen on a cell phone near you soon. The new services have been grossly overpriced because of the need to pay off the licences and the cell phone market has collectively stalled. Just compare with the activity in the wired world with skype and google.
If my in depth skills are lacking, its because I enjoy working in the war zone of start up or high tech manufacturing. You dont need much multi user capability for an application being used by three people. When I get to thirty users then I can afford to hire an expert on contract to implement the business logic in something more robust. Three weeks ago the RMA application was a spreadsheet, today it is a six status nine transaction management system with automated emailing. I also get to do manufacturing capacity modeling, product engineering, six sigma yield improvement, test database analysis tools (MySQL PHP R ) and run gauge R&R experiments at the manufacturing contractors in another country. Taguchi comes next.
I agree, I bet I'm having more fun than the guy who gets to recode my crappy access application in a more technically correct object oriented multiuser fashion. But at least they will have a decent flowchart of the business process to start from.
Failing that the whole thing could be replaced by an outsourced call center on another continent. I imagine they have their own configurable RMA management software and we will just have to chuck my application away and redesign the whole process to fit what they have.
In the real world it is possible to do the impossible by finding a way to do it fast enough to make a difference. I dont have time or the money to implement anything in Oracle so its a local access front end with the tables in MySQL and I can write a PHP web interface for the customers and sales people for the bits they interact with. Except that isnt going to happen now because of the megacorporation buyout and their VPN firewall. My bet is the whole process will be outsourced in six months. At least the early data has been moved out of a spreadsheet into a sensibly normalised database.
I do have a problem it is true with the idea that end users are restricted to using the product of the IT department. Software is just a tool and it should be available for users to use just like writing paper. Thats why I resent the idea that the computer on my desk at work should just be a dumb terminal for running ERP and email on. Its getting to the point where we need two machines, one on the corporate network and another one to do our work on. I am still waiting to hear whether the new corporate IT will allow us to run any open source software at all. I have no objection to running commercial software and just configuring it, some of it is very good with the benefit of thousands of man hours of development work. The question is can my business afford to buy it ?
Oh and you are wrong about the tech college programming course - but it was in the time of Algol-W and I have even used a punch card deck to submit my programs and I still think VAXes were pretty cool pc's.
VB6, LAMP, Python and the RAD mentality also put the power to get the job done in the hands of computer literate end users. All this dot net obsufcation is designed to take power away from the end user and give it to the new exclusive professions of overpaid thirteen year olds. All this talk of properly written programs certified by Microsoft is horseshit to prevent me from stringing together applications so that I can build a capacity model of my business before it doubles in size. Unfortunately we just got bought by a mega corporation with outsourced IT and the imaged pc's are mere weeks away. I assume that if this does come to pass I shall be moving on somewhere with a future. Because this business will die.
My favorite fantasy movie is one where Christianity and Islam unite against the evil of IT management and burn every last one of them.
Theres plenty of non traditional suppliers lining up for the auction with similar aspirations to unwire the States. This particular idea has probably arrived too late to be considered by the Government, which will have already lined up some very agressive bidders with very deep pockets for the spectrum sale.
Its an appealing business model though, because it matches the price of the spectrum against the revenue that can be earned from it rather than the crazy bids for 3G mobile which IMHO was partly to blame for the tech crash in 2001.
Jason wins out for me because the slightly larger font in the story intros reads better on my 10" laptop screen - and as mobile content is where we are all going next it has a degree of future proofing. I also like the boxes around the stories as the eye jumps from one to another and settles on the content quickly.
They all look good though stylewise.
Dont worry, another disruptive technology is comming up for prime time real soon now. WiMax should work out cheaper than cable or cellular networks. The standards are just about in place and the technology is ready. Look out for its impact in the market this summer.
I rather like the fact that the smiley is actualy the property of thousands of drug crazed dance music fans in the UK who undoubtedly find the whole wal-mart thing astonishingly rib-cage-explodingly funny
Accieed !!! (copyright D-Mob 1987)
I 'carried the experiment out' and then layed it to rest.
I am not a brilliant advertisement for my tutors at college twenty five years ago. But I was impressed by the common sense approach in the "Writing for engineers" course we had to take in the first year of our University degrees. I seem to recall that they warned against using past tense, passive voice and obscuring jargon. Clarity and immmediacy was their philosophy and I find this advice is still useful today. These days the advice is probably to avoid the temptation to use street slang in your writing, because we now tend to write in the way that we speak. Writing as you speak is probably a good thing because it is more lively. The only downside is that there are lots of wonderfull words that you can write, which are hardly ever used in real life.
I agree that the media overhyped the other diseases. However if you read up on H5N1 I think you will find that it has a far more serious potential to do harm.
We had a flu pandemic in the last centuary that killed more people than the first world war. Its only recently that the science has identified where that pandemic came from - and H5N1 is a good candidate to cause a similar pandemic.
It aint happened yet and that is probably the best indication that we might get away with this one. On the other hand the fact that it has only started appearing recently in most countries shows that the probability game still has some time to run.
In my mind a threat assesment of my likelyhood of being killed by various things in the next year comes out in an order like this
bird flu
road traffic accident
cancer
heart attack
drowning
Things that I would be willing to bet $10,000 that will not seriously harm me in the next year include
Any chemical in food or the environment
Nuclear power
terrorism
Chlorestorol
smoking
drinking alcohol
illegal drugs
snowboarding
violent crime
Aids
asbestos
suicide
air crash
rail crash
any rare disease
The question for me then becomes why are all the things that I evaluate as low risk the ones that the media is deeply preocupied with. The answer I come up with is that the media publishes stories to sell and make money out of. Its function is only indirectly to inform us. You have to evaluate things for yourself by doing background research. I gave up watching tv 20 years ago because it already and obviously had an information content sufficiently close to zero to be replaced by a three minute radio news slot. Thankfully I can now research most things through the internet and can read a variety of good quality newspapers to check out the zeitgeist of political opinion and get a reasonable catalogue of current events to research off the bbc world service radio.
I love ripping dvd movies, I can give a copy to my unemployed friends children with the knowledge that no one has lost out and in fact the total sum of human happiness has increased.
These phantom losses that the greedy content owners expect to realise by stopping personal piracy are just that - phantom.
I dont have a problem stopping industrialised piracy where the pirate burns off 200 copies and sells them on the street - but there is no profit for anybody in stopping personal piracy - or "fair use" as it used to be called before the modern notion that you could patent and copyright and own just about anything came about.
This bollocks has to stop - my genome does not belong to corporation X, the wheel does not belong to corporation Y and plants grown in third world peasants back yards for 5000 years deffinitely do not belong to corporation Z.
Its about time some common sense was applied in this field because the Chineese do not take any notice of this system and they are going to take everything you have unless you can persuade them that it is in their best interests to have some intellectual property laws that are obeyed - and you can bet your bottom dollar they arnt going to be following the current shitty system that American lawyers have dreamed up. - At least not until their economy is twice the size of the USA (only 40 years folks).
but which site would that be that isnt blocked - if you want to learn how to do something better then there are tons of resources on the web. Smith charts today, gaussian distribution tomorrow followed by an XP powertoy that does a calculator with a scrolling history.
:-)
I actualy believe that the web makes me more effective as a worker than the cost in company time that surfing uses. Also instead of wandering off to have a random chat in between writing the report and the conclusion, the necessary mental reset can now be filled with checking my bank balance or scanning slashdot headlines. Its a fine balance, but I know I would have made some avoidable mistakes if I had not had access to the thoughts and experiences of others on the web. Todays example was Motorola six sigma manufacturing - brilliant idea, but dont forget that it only works for a process subject to normal variation - so perfect products with 3 parts per billion fail rates are never going to happen when Joe on night shift loaded the wrong surface mount tape reel in slot five because nobody ever thought that mistake was possible. Special cause variation will keep on burying you in scrap if you think statistics can solve all your problems. So thanks to a couple of sceptical sentances on Wikipedia I have a more rounded picture of how to go about my job.
Surfing is an addictive entertainment but it adds value if you can use the same skills you use to follow your favourite football team online to your work. Whatever the legal reason for allowing reasonable surfing at work it would be a competitive mistake to deny surfing to employees. Far better to teach people how to surf productively. - an example: I am not at work at the momment otherwise this post would deserve no more than three lines of my companies time might be a good rule to aim for
(Its probably a good rule anyway, who has time to read all those rambling posts that go on and on and on...)
These people are not Miro, they are just living off his back.
vermin like this deserve to be laughed into history
Its a pity as Miro's work is groovy and deserves the publicity.
For similar see also Kandinsky at the Tate gallery london 22 June - 1 October 2006. Plenty of images online last time I looked.
I would like to see the study that showed that drinking and smoking pot make you more inclined to play moronic violent games - because surely being pissed and stoned is not a state to be in if you want to be able to play very well.
And where is the study that says watching ultra violent films is good for your mental health. Dodgy entertainment has always been bad for your outlook, thats why throwing christians to the lions isnt on the tv anymore, or bear baiting or any number of unsavory visceral entertainments.
No one is going to ban any of this stuff anyway,it makes too much money.
People are buying the wrong laptops, mine weighs 1.6Kg and does a fine job of recording audio.
having said that I would still prefer paper notes because its quicker to scribble and sketch, though this may not always be the case with tablet pc's improving all the time.
Actually all this talk of Democracy is horseshit, no democracy is perfect, people who claim that it is are as barking mad as Osma Bin Ladin.
Oppression of the minority by the majority is an inevitable result of single parties being elected democratically.
A great deal of effort has to come from institutions surrounding Parliament in order to reign in the tendency of the majority will to crush minorities.
Sadly the current Labour party is one of the worst examples of this in British history and will leave a legacy hated even more than the cruelty of Margaret Thatchers administration.
This labour party wants to grant itself the exclusive right to rule unconstrained by the law or by the slight brake of legislative review by the House of Lords.
The blatant class discrimination and disregard for individual responsibility and rights are vile outcomes of this parties belief that they can do no wrong.
It is for occasions such as this that we do have institutions like the house of lords that can at least call out the arbitary injustices that the evil labour party are spitefully inflicting on various minorities.
its time to get rid of the dead socialist hand of Labour, they may not have destroyed the economy this time around but they are doing their best to destroy our culture. This party is directly responsible for compensation culture, for institutionalising poverty, for disrespectfull yob culture, for criminalising large portions of the population in revenue raising exercises, for banning anything vaguely risky - such as schoolchildren playing conkers, for banning anything they dont personally like - such as smoking in public - though the bast**ds didnt ban it outright because they would lose the tax revenues to the black market.
Its almost certain now that they will not win the next election, dam good thing too because its odds on that the next bunch of terroists to try and kill politicians will be some-one from an opressed British minority that this labour government has shat on - farmers for example.
I hate what this country is becoming under these manipulative scum bags, I cant even figure out quite why they are interfering and restricting what individuals are allowed to do, or what life they intend to force us all to live. Maybe its all about making pliable worker drones? which would make sense except for the explosion of yob culture. Who knows, I dont know why they are doing it. I just know that the tipping point is here and they are not going to get re-elected.
Submarine warefare on the Atari ST circa 1986, brilliant
pay as you go is cheaper.
I spend £2 or £3 a month on a Vodaphone pay as you go here in the UK, mostly on text messages.
Any kind of contract would be total overkill for usage at this level.
If .wav files are not available on CD or online then you can count on me never buying music content again. I'm not paying for content encoded in lossey compression and not on semi archival quality storage.
If the only choice is lossy content downloadable to the marketers DRM riddled appliance then I will have no incentive to pay for any of my content.