Bunsen & Beaker are scientists first, muppets second.
Reminds me of a scene from Veterinarian's Surgery, featuring Ralph as Doctor Bob and Miss Piggy as, err, Nurse Piggy.
Doctor Bob: Nurse Piggy, you cannot let your feelings interfere with your duty. You are a nurse. Nurse Piggy: I may be a nurse, but I'm a woman first! Doctor Bob: Wrong. You're a pig first. Nurse second. I don't think woman made the top ten...
After this the cameras are simply pointing out the facts of the situation, and are we really that afraid of facts and consequences of our actions (if those actions are illegal or suspicious)?
Facts as seen by who? Suspicious according to what criteria? Into which context will our activities be placed?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
Honestly, you trust the government at the moment (I'm also from the UK)? I certainly do not, and by the dramatic plunge in confidence ratings for Labour I'm not alone (not advocating an alternative party, merely pointing out the failings of the one in power).
And yes, let's look at the London congestion scheme. Brought in ostensibly to cure central traffic problems, when revenue undershot expectations they decided to extend the scheme to the suburbs against the wishes of 76% of the inhabitants, and today it's announced they're also raising the price. Trffic problems? Revenue raising.
Also, where do you think the people who used to drive have gone? What's happened to them, what's happened to their quality of life? Or do you feel it is co-incidence that there have been so many Tube failures lately after a surge in passenger numbers and drastic overcrowding on certain lines?
Pah, I don't know. I could sit here trying to explain my jokes for hours and hours until the cows come home and sometimes I'd still be wasting my breath.
OK, that's it. I've milked this for all it's worth now.
Or more to the point, it would be good if it could be downloaded rather than being purely online. I replay old text adventures on my laptop sometimes whilst on the train - this would be a nice addition.
And I'm a UK taxpayer, so I've definitely paid for the game already.
Cheers,
Ian
(Bonus points to anyone who remembers what I'm talking about with the "just stroll off with it" quote. And I'm talking the original radio, not the books).
OO.o and Abiword both have "experimental" Mac OS X native versions. While you can run OO.o through X11, it doesn't support things like copy-paste from non-X11 applications, something everyone uses.
True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J, frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.
That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.
Are the data transmissions are encrypted in any way?
Yes, they are. Not certain of the standard though, so I don't know how difficult it is to brute force.
How do you select which device you are exchanging data with?
Interface depends on device, but normally you browse for them - a list is presented, and each device is named. Of course, you have to rely on the user having set the name to something more useful than "Nokia 3650" so you can identify which Nokia 3650...
Can you limit which devices can and cannot communicate with each other to prevent the nosy neighbors from listening in?
Yes, you can specify that devices need to a passkey to pair with each other. The neighbours don't get the key.
Can you limit which devices can and cannot communicate with each other to prevent the nosy neighbors from listening in?
Yes - you put your device in non-discoverable mode (similar to not broadcasting the SSID of a wireless network)
How do you enter a secret access password into a headset?
Or, indeed, a mouse as I had to set up for this machine. The answer is that the passkey is fixed on such devices, but they're also tied in with a hardware id (analogous to a MAC address). Thus another, similar headset with the same passkey still wouldn't successfully pair with your device - different hardware id
yeah thats right. PC's set the trends. thats why we use TCP/IP instead of appletalk.
You are joking, right? PCs didn't have TCP/IP for absolutely ages, and Microsoft initially snubbed it. But people coming out of University who were used to their academic networks wanted it. Only when Trumpet Winsock started making its presence felt did Microsoft finally follow the UNIX world (by using the BSD code) and get its net access together.
When was the last time you used a Bluetooth-enabled device to do anything useful?
Well, admittedly typing this reply on a bluetooth keyboard might not count as useful, so I'll have to go for an hour ago when I used it transfer photos. Before that I'd have to stretch a whole two hours ago when I used the built-in bluetooth on this Powerbook to communicate with a bluetooth mobile in order to send an SMS. And before that, it would be about five hours ago when I synchronised my address books. Without taking the phone out of my pocket.
Enough yet? Or shall I cast my memory as far back as this morning to dig out some more usage?
Oracle and PostgreSQL are SQL servers, so Bill grabs the name "SQL Server" and acts like the market for databases is supposed to belong to him.
Err...no. The name "SQL Server" comes from Sybase, the company who they originally licensed from. It's also why both Sybase and MS SQL Server have quite a bit in common with Transact SQL, though they vary significantly in dialect.
...but mp3 playing and players were well entrenched before iPod showed up
Not so. They existed, certainly, but well-entrenched? Not really. And only one had anything like enough storage to hold more than a single album (the Nomad, which I seem to remember was first). And even then, the ones that had capacity had nowhere near the correct form factor.
I know all of this, because I'd been trying to justify getting an MP3 player for month, but couldn't bring myself to do it because I knew that whilst technologically pretty, they were functionaly useless. Then the iPod came out and I knew immediately I wanted one. Could easily fit in a pocket, and could hold a ton of music? Yep - the first of the players to be truley functional. I only had a Windows PC at the time and there was no way for them to talk. I bought an original 5Gig iPod the same day XPlay hit beta.
Oh, and I've since gone to OS X too, returning to Apple after a gap of about seven years. It's up for debate how much of the iPod's quality acted as a trojan horse there.
I back up onto cheap CD-R for use in the car, and straight to hard disk for use at home. Very rarely touch the original CD.
About a year and three quarters' ago, I was involved in an accident in which my car was written off. The CDs were scratched to hell, and a couple had actually snapped in half. No problem though - all handled nicely by the fact that not a single one was an original. Just reburned new copies and stuck them in our other car.
Well, no problem as far as CDs are concerned anyway. Miss the car though - a nice Jaguar XJR.
By the way, I have kids, my wife's family also has many kids. So far, we haven't had anyone get a scratched DVD...not saying that we won't, but I guess we show the kids how to handle DVD's...not that it takes a genius to grasp the concept.
How old? It certainly takes a genuis ten-month old to grasp the concept. My two and a half-year old mostly remembers now, but still can't actually stretch her hand wide enough to hold a DVD without putting fingermarks all over the back of it. We've had scratches too.
Whilst we're at it, does anyone have a compiled binary for OS X of mplayer with Tivo support?
I've hacked the Tivo to do streaming, but can't currently watch the streams on an OS X box. Which is a shame, because that's exactly where I'd like to watch them from.
All help or comments appreciated. Well, within Slashdot norms obviously...
...they shipped the return box to an old address. This was after THEY confirmed my address was correct... I corrected them, and they shipped another box. Where'd it go? You guessed, to the wrong address AGAIN...All in all, I probably spent between 3 and 4 hours on the phone, and had a laptop I couldn't fully use for about a month
Yep, snap for Apple UK. I had one warranty and one paid-for repair to be done. They shipped the box to not just an old address, but an old home address when I'd specified them to ship to my work. They then wanted me to go and find where they'd sent the box to - nope, won't do that. Another box sent to the right address please.
Second box came, and after a few days my machine was returned to me. Not bad? Well, no. Only the warranty repair had been done. My paid-for repair had been ignored. More phone calls - apparently, my credit card details were tied in with the original lost box number, and hadn't been transferred to the second box. Hence the people actually doing the repairs had no knowledge they were supposed to carry out a paid-for repair.
Machine goes back again (this is a 12" Powerbook, by the way). Promised return in ten days. Nothing. Rang - it had been shipped that day, and I should expect a delivery. Of course, nothing turned up. A further week of calls took place before I found out that they'd still been trying to deliver the thing to my old home address, despite me ensuring on the phone that they were going to deliver it to a work address. It was eventually escalatedto the Dispatch Manager before the problem was sorted.
Total time: about five weeks. Actual repairs required? A snapped-off key and a new base to replace a dented one following a fall.
From the article: "One customer service call can easily take the profit out of a product," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif."
Lord - is there no newspaper column he's not around to bung a quote in for?
So are you gonna call the cops if I call you gullible to your face?
If you're doing it for commercial gain, yes. If it's your genuine opinion about me - nothing I can do except try to refute it.
That's the difference. This was commercial speech, not personal. It is not an advert's place to put a blanket insult pointing at a random person using a public space.
weren't they also the ones that slammed Apple for claiming the g5 was the fastest personal computer on earth?
Yes, they were.
I've also had good experiences with the ASA on a non-computing related matter (well, only tangentially related anyway). There were adverts for an online gambling site's poker service put up in Tube trains, with titles like "Sucker", "Gullible" and "Greedy", each one having an arrow pointing straight down at whoever was unfortunate enough to be sat on the seat beneath.
Which included me.
Unwilling to be called gullible purely for the sake of some slimy gambling joint grabbing more cash, I went via the ASA website and complained. Apparently I wasn't the only one, and it took just three weeks for the adverts to be withdrawn. A good result I think.
Oh, and yes - you'll have heard of these cretins should you be unlucky enough to see pop-up ads still. I'm certainly not giving them any free publicity by mentioning their name here though.
From the article: Perhaps the best known...was a colour-coded world map showing time zones, which showed the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region as not being in India...The mistake led to the whole of the Windows 95 operating system being banned in the country, losing large sales. For its replacement, Microsoft, Office 97, Microsoft removed the colour coding and sold 100,000 copies in India.
It's just that Linux is based on a *server-centric* OS (Unix), and all the attempts to reconstruct it as a desktop workstation OS with user-friendly GUI are less than fully realized.
Strange. The Powerbook I'm posting this from seems to be based on Unix, and copes fine as a desktop workstation OS with a user-friendly GUI. In fact, it copes rather better than Windows in this respect.
Solution? 'Hollywood', or whatever conglomoration of companies that will really refer to (is Sony in Hollywood?), should write their own format and get their own software out there to play it. No licensing fees for use of the codec, wrapped in whatever DRM they fancy.
That's precisely the thinking behind the BBC Dirac idea, and it's the same sort of thinking that needs to be adopted here. And yes, I know the idea of the DRM is unpalatable - I'm trying to imagine things from the studio's viewpoint not the end user's.
The first one says Forgent made $50 million on jpeg patents so far. The last claims the lawyers get half, and that is also $50 million.
No contradiction. Total amount: $100m. Forgent's cut? 50%, ie. $50m. Lawyer's cut? 50% ie. $50m.
It just says Forgent has reaped nearly $50m, not that the gross licensing fees were $50m. For their statement to be correct, you can extrapolate the gross to be $100m.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back....In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form. Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
I would like to agree, and certainly agree with the spriti of what you're saying, but there is a practical problem too.
Suppose I succesfully work out all the problems and design the perfect cold fusion-based reactor. There is no possible way for me to implement it - I have to go to an energy company to get a power plant built (at the very least, a bank who will loan me the utter fortune I require to construct it).
At this point, under the changes you suggest the device is not patentable since it has not yet been implemented. What is to stop an unscrupulous energy company, or bank, or indeed anyone who gets wind of it from taking my design and implementing it themselves with no further input from me? Worse still, once they have the implementation it is they who will profit from obtaining a patent, not me.
So the "no patent without implementation" idea is flawed. It's a shame, because it sounds like a good way out. But it wouldn't work as described.
Incidently, I refused to have my name listed as the co-inventer on a patent my company wanted to file because I considered it so trivial as to be silly. I don't want my name associated with patent abuse, and if more people took that approach this problem simply wouldn't occur. That's a pipe-dream though.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me. If I ever, at any stage, start feeling like an Ewok I will not be describing my life as good.
Cheers,
Ian
Reminds me of a scene from Veterinarian's Surgery, featuring Ralph as Doctor Bob and Miss Piggy as, err, Nurse Piggy.
Doctor Bob: Nurse Piggy, you cannot let your feelings interfere with your duty. You are a nurse.
Nurse Piggy: I may be a nurse, but I'm a woman first!
Doctor Bob: Wrong. You're a pig first. Nurse second. I don't think woman made the top ten...
Cheers,
Ian
Facts as seen by who? Suspicious according to what criteria? Into which context will our activities be placed?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
Honestly, you trust the government at the moment (I'm also from the UK)? I certainly do not, and by the dramatic plunge in confidence ratings for Labour I'm not alone (not advocating an alternative party, merely pointing out the failings of the one in power).
And yes, let's look at the London congestion scheme. Brought in ostensibly to cure central traffic problems, when revenue undershot expectations they decided to extend the scheme to the suburbs against the wishes of 76% of the inhabitants, and today it's announced they're also raising the price. Trffic problems? Revenue raising.
Also, where do you think the people who used to drive have gone? What's happened to them, what's happened to their quality of life? Or do you feel it is co-incidence that there have been so many Tube failures lately after a surge in passenger numbers and drastic overcrowding on certain lines?
Cheers,
Ian
Hmm.
Cow, Moo, Moo, Cow? Ring a cowbell anywhere?
Pah, I don't know. I could sit here trying to explain my jokes for hours and hours until the cows come home and sometimes I'd still be wasting my breath.
OK, that's it. I've milked this for all it's worth now.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes. The cow was given a proper funeral, with all appropriate honours. It was very mooving.
Cheers,
Ian
Or more to the point, it would be good if it could be downloaded rather than being purely online. I replay old text adventures on my laptop sometimes whilst on the train - this would be a nice addition.
And I'm a UK taxpayer, so I've definitely paid for the game already.
Cheers,
Ian
(Bonus points to anyone who remembers what I'm talking about with the "just stroll off with it" quote. And I'm talking the original radio, not the books).
True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J, frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.
That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes, they are. Not certain of the standard though, so I don't know how difficult it is to brute force.
Interface depends on device, but normally you browse for them - a list is presented, and each device is named. Of course, you have to rely on the user having set the name to something more useful than "Nokia 3650" so you can identify which Nokia 3650...
Yes, you can specify that devices need to a passkey to pair with each other. The neighbours don't get the key.
Yes - you put your device in non-discoverable mode (similar to not broadcasting the SSID of a wireless network)
Or, indeed, a mouse as I had to set up for this machine. The answer is that the passkey is fixed on such devices, but they're also tied in with a hardware id (analogous to a MAC address). Thus another, similar headset with the same passkey still wouldn't successfully pair with your device - different hardware id
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Ian
You are joking, right? PCs didn't have TCP/IP for absolutely ages, and Microsoft initially snubbed it. But people coming out of University who were used to their academic networks wanted it. Only when Trumpet Winsock started making its presence felt did Microsoft finally follow the UNIX world (by using the BSD code) and get its net access together.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, admittedly typing this reply on a bluetooth keyboard might not count as useful, so I'll have to go for an hour ago when I used it transfer photos. Before that I'd have to stretch a whole two hours ago when I used the built-in bluetooth on this Powerbook to communicate with a bluetooth mobile in order to send an SMS. And before that, it would be about five hours ago when I synchronised my address books. Without taking the phone out of my pocket.
Enough yet? Or shall I cast my memory as far back as this morning to dig out some more usage?
Cheers,
Ian
Err...no. The name "SQL Server" comes from Sybase, the company who they originally licensed from. It's also why both Sybase and MS SQL Server have quite a bit in common with Transact SQL, though they vary significantly in dialect.
Cheers,
Ian
Not so. They existed, certainly, but well-entrenched? Not really. And only one had anything like enough storage to hold more than a single album (the Nomad, which I seem to remember was first). And even then, the ones that had capacity had nowhere near the correct form factor.
I know all of this, because I'd been trying to justify getting an MP3 player for month, but couldn't bring myself to do it because I knew that whilst technologically pretty, they were functionaly useless. Then the iPod came out and I knew immediately I wanted one. Could easily fit in a pocket, and could hold a ton of music? Yep - the first of the players to be truley functional. I only had a Windows PC at the time and there was no way for them to talk. I bought an original 5Gig iPod the same day XPlay hit beta.
Oh, and I've since gone to OS X too, returning to Apple after a gap of about seven years. It's up for debate how much of the iPod's quality acted as a trojan horse there.
Cheers,
Ian
About a year and three quarters' ago, I was involved in an accident in which my car was written off. The CDs were scratched to hell, and a couple had actually snapped in half. No problem though - all handled nicely by the fact that not a single one was an original. Just reburned new copies and stuck them in our other car.
Well, no problem as far as CDs are concerned anyway. Miss the car though - a nice Jaguar XJR.
By the way, I have kids, my wife's family also has many kids. So far, we haven't had anyone get a scratched DVD...not saying that we won't, but I guess we show the kids how to handle DVD's...not that it takes a genius to grasp the concept.
How old? It certainly takes a genuis ten-month old to grasp the concept. My two and a half-year old mostly remembers now, but still can't actually stretch her hand wide enough to hold a DVD without putting fingermarks all over the back of it. We've had scratches too.
Cheers,
Ian
I've hacked the Tivo to do streaming, but can't currently watch the streams on an OS X box. Which is a shame, because that's exactly where I'd like to watch them from.
All help or comments appreciated. Well, within Slashdot norms obviously...
Cheers,
Ian
Yep, snap for Apple UK. I had one warranty and one paid-for repair to be done. They shipped the box to not just an old address, but an old home address when I'd specified them to ship to my work. They then wanted me to go and find where they'd sent the box to - nope, won't do that. Another box sent to the right address please.
Second box came, and after a few days my machine was returned to me. Not bad? Well, no. Only the warranty repair had been done. My paid-for repair had been ignored. More phone calls - apparently, my credit card details were tied in with the original lost box number, and hadn't been transferred to the second box. Hence the people actually doing the repairs had no knowledge they were supposed to carry out a paid-for repair.
Machine goes back again (this is a 12" Powerbook, by the way). Promised return in ten days. Nothing. Rang - it had been shipped that day, and I should expect a delivery. Of course, nothing turned up. A further week of calls took place before I found out that they'd still been trying to deliver the thing to my old home address, despite me ensuring on the phone that they were going to deliver it to a work address. It was eventually escalatedto the Dispatch Manager before the problem was sorted.
Total time: about five weeks. Actual repairs required? A snapped-off key and a new base to replace a dented one following a fall.
Not impressed.
Cheers,
Ian
"One customer service call can easily take the profit out of a product," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif."
Lord - is there no newspaper column he's not around to bung a quote in for?
Cheers,
Ian
Slang derived from cricket. Broke our duck means to break zero. In cricket, to be out for zero is called "scoring a duck" or just "out for a duck".
Be very careful how you pronounce those phrases. Remember - the letter is 'd'. Definitely 'd'. Not any other letter. Oh no.
Cheers,
Ian
If you're doing it for commercial gain, yes. If it's your genuine opinion about me - nothing I can do except try to refute it.
That's the difference. This was commercial speech, not personal. It is not an advert's place to put a blanket insult pointing at a random person using a public space.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes, they were.
I've also had good experiences with the ASA on a non-computing related matter (well, only tangentially related anyway). There were adverts for an online gambling site's poker service put up in Tube trains, with titles like "Sucker", "Gullible" and "Greedy", each one having an arrow pointing straight down at whoever was unfortunate enough to be sat on the seat beneath.
Which included me.
Unwilling to be called gullible purely for the sake of some slimy gambling joint grabbing more cash, I went via the ASA website and complained. Apparently I wasn't the only one, and it took just three weeks for the adverts to be withdrawn. A good result I think.
Oh, and yes - you'll have heard of these cretins should you be unlucky enough to see pop-up ads still. I'm certainly not giving them any free publicity by mentioning their name here though.
Cheers,
Ian
-Djava.ext.dirs=/your/dir/here
Done.
Cheers,
Ian
Perhaps the best known...was a colour-coded world map showing time zones, which showed the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region as not being in India...The mistake led to the whole of the Windows 95 operating system being banned in the country, losing large sales. For its replacement, Microsoft, Office 97, Microsoft removed the colour coding and sold 100,000 copies in India.
Office 97 replaced Windows 95? Yikes.
Cheers,
Ian
Strange. The Powerbook I'm posting this from seems to be based on Unix, and copes fine as a desktop workstation OS with a user-friendly GUI. In fact, it copes rather better than Windows in this respect.
Cheers,
Ian
That's precisely the thinking behind the BBC Dirac idea, and it's the same sort of thinking that needs to be adopted here. And yes, I know the idea of the DRM is unpalatable - I'm trying to imagine things from the studio's viewpoint not the end user's.
Cheers,
Ian
No contradiction. Total amount: $100m. Forgent's cut? 50%, ie. $50m. Lawyer's cut? 50% ie. $50m.
It just says Forgent has reaped nearly $50m, not that the gross licensing fees were $50m. For their statement to be correct, you can extrapolate the gross to be $100m.
Cheers,
Ian
I would like to agree, and certainly agree with the spriti of what you're saying, but there is a practical problem too.
Suppose I succesfully work out all the problems and design the perfect cold fusion-based reactor. There is no possible way for me to implement it - I have to go to an energy company to get a power plant built (at the very least, a bank who will loan me the utter fortune I require to construct it).
At this point, under the changes you suggest the device is not patentable since it has not yet been implemented. What is to stop an unscrupulous energy company, or bank, or indeed anyone who gets wind of it from taking my design and implementing it themselves with no further input from me? Worse still, once they have the implementation it is they who will profit from obtaining a patent, not me.
So the "no patent without implementation" idea is flawed. It's a shame, because it sounds like a good way out. But it wouldn't work as described.
Incidently, I refused to have my name listed as the co-inventer on a patent my company wanted to file because I considered it so trivial as to be silly. I don't want my name associated with patent abuse, and if more people took that approach this problem simply wouldn't occur. That's a pipe-dream though.
Cheers,
Ian