"Existing small helicopters are loud" does not directly imply "all small helicopters must be loud"; that's an unwarrented conclusion. If you dump more money into it I would expect you can nearly eliminate the engine noise.
Simply using a 4 stroke or gas turbine engine would help with the engine noise. Two stroke engines are very noisy, but they are also robust and relativly easy to make in small sizes.
"Low cost" is a relative term
As is "small" a 1.5 metre long aircraft is going to be easily visible a fair distance away.
You've been watching too much Fox news. There are no Saddam loyalists. The freedom fighters are just that - fighting for control of their own country.
A more accurate description would be that these are militiamen reacting to a foreign occupying army. The "Saddam Loyalist" type arguments come from those who's thinking is that anyone anti-US is pro-Saddam. To these people it's inconcievable that Iraqs can be both anti-Saddam and anti-US.
Bing, Bing, Bing, opps, your half right. I was going to say more than 150 years (California), but I thought of the Spanish American War) as a gotcha.
The Spanish-American war is probably one of the most significent in recent history. Since it effectivly resulted in the US becoming an imperial power at the same time Spain ceased to be one.
One of the conquests of that war, the Phillipies could arguably be called a colony. But if you consider colonization to include "importing" population with an eye on keeping the place then Guam or Puerto Rico.
This also happened with Hawaii, was attempted by Germany in WWII, is currently happening in Tibet and Israel. It was even attempted in the Kurdish part of Iraq.
Do you really think bombing, invading and occupying a country is likely to result in people liking you? What do you think would happen if the US were to be invaded and occupied?
Iraq was called the "Fertile Crescent" when it was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Biblical legend had it that the Garden of Eden was at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The people of Southern Iraq are sometimes known as "Marsh Arabs" Because of the flood plains of the rivers. Iraq is similar to Egypt in that rivers have provided sufficent water in an arid part of the world for people to form urban populations since pre-history.
Likely but not definite - Democracy does not equal free-market capitalism.
A genuine "free market" might well not be "corporate friendly" espcially to foreign corporations.
If given totally free elections (yeah, right), the Iraqis might elect a fundamentalist theocracy (oops!) or even a socialist govenment (double oops!).
Even if they were to come up with something "capitalist" it would capitalism according to Arab rules and traditions rather than North American traditions.
We took the Panama Canal Zone from Panama a few seconds after we "liberated" Panama from Colombia. Sure, that was a while ago, but we only just gave it back. There's also the coup staged in Hawaii, which we only recently apologized for (a little late, I would say...).
The "apology" came a century after first occupation. Actually it goes a little further and admits that Hawaii has never been part of the US. But that dosn't stop the US Government pretending it is from day to day. Even though the invasion of Hawaii took place at the time of the Spanish-American war Hawaii was an independent constitution Monarcy.
Of course, these can be written off as "little" issues, since most of our expansion was during the Nineteenth Century. But did we stop because we're now nice guys, or simply because we're big enough? From the beginning of the Twentieth Century to July 4, 1946, from St. Thomas to Luzon the sun did not set in the United States. And even today it's still damn close.
The claiming of Alaska and Hawaii as US states happened after 1946. The plebcite referendums carried out are invalid since a required option was omitted from the ballot. In the case of Hawaii things are also invalid because the rules used were intended for "territories" which had never been self governing.
I do think that Iraq has one of the best chances of any Middle East country of creating a stable representational democratic government, something that is in short supply there. Ironicly enough Iran is closest to that mark now, but (I think) will soon be surpassed.
Iran actually had a democratic government, it was overturned and replaced with a tyrany, because it wasn't friendly to foreign oil companies. A representative democratic Iraqi government is hardly likley to be friendly to the US or its corporations. Do you really think that the US, as occupying force, will allow such a government to come into existance? Historically the US has opposed US unfriendly democratic governments and supported (financially and militarily) US friendly dictatorships and tyranies.
Not saying we (the US) is doing a good job, but do you really think armed rebels would set up a fair democratic election? That would be the day.
Maybe they should try setting up Iraq as a Constitutional Federal Republic instead:) Maybe someone can arrange for some tea to be thrown in the Tigris...
But: remember that we put Halliburton Oil in charge of fueling our vehicles over there. Haliburton imported their own men, licensed their own contractors, and it ended up costing us $2.65 per gallon, while the locals (from Kuwait) were willing to deliver it for $1.06.
If anything fuel from Iraqi oil should have cost less than that from Kuwait. Since Iraq probably had stuff sitting in storage at refinaries they couldn't sell because of the sanctions.
Consider this example. American firms estimated that it would take many months and millions of dollars to rebuild Iraqi cement factories, which are crucial to the rebuilding effort. Intrepid Iraqis did it in a few months for less than $100k. How? They didn't set lofty goals for state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. They cannibalized parts from remaining production lines to get at at least one production facility operating.
But in the process les money wound up going to whichever American firm had be "awarded the contract".
Likewise, why should we as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to import the labor and material into Iraq when there exists local talent to do the same job?
Depends if the idea is to rebuild Iraq in a cost effective and sustainable way or if the idea is to provide "corporate welfare".
If they're not as skilled, fine. TRAIN them to do the job, don't do it for them.
All of the skills required most likely already exist. Plenty of rebuilding was carried out after the first war, when Iraq was under strict sanctions.
You'd end up with 2000 Marines busy churning through hundreds of penis enlargement, bigger boobs, refinancing, debt-free, horny teens, etc ads. I expect they'd resent the penis enlargement ads the most.
Since there are spammers who spam about "anti-spam" tools does this mean arms dealers will be getting in on the act. "To cut down on yore SPAM you can now buy everything from torpedos to nuklear kruise missiles at a *BARGIN* price..."
R1 DVDs only need to carry English audio, subtitles and menus while R2 DVDs theoretically have to have English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and usually other languages.
Thing is that the only region which makes any sense in terms of language is R6. R1 needs English, Spanish and French. It dosn't make sense to lump Western Europe in with Japan and the Middle East. Or to lump most of North Africa with Russia, India and random bits of Asia. If the reasoning were language Arabic speaking North African countries would be in the same region as the Middle East.
Now that the region system is finally failing, it's only a matter of time before all tvs can handle both PAL and NTSC signals.
Most PAL chipsets can handle NTSC. Problem is that North America is a big enough market to make it worthwhile for the manufactures to make NTSC only (quite likely 110v AC only too) kit.
US consumers are least affected by region codes: they watch virtually only US content, and have small risk of wanting to play a non-region-1 DVD.
Depends what they are watching. Region 1 tends to get US produced movies first on DVD. But could quite easily be the last to get US produced TV programmes on DVD. Since the US TV has a system for showing repeats to death, sometimes omitting part of the content to stuff in more commercials. Effectivly TV works differently in the US from the rest of the planet. Even to the point where it's quite easy to recognise a US production, regardless of where it was filmed, which production company (including Canadian ones) was used or even the nationality of the actors. If the total length of an "hour long" show is around 42-43 minutes and the credits are part way through then it was made for the US market orignally. If the credits are the very first thing and there is more than 45 minutes of actual content then it was originally made for commercial television elsewhere in the world. More than 50 minutes of content indicates a production for non-commercial television.
So, if everyone has been using Office for the last 10 years, they aren't going to want to try anything new, irregardless of the benefits of said change.
How many people actually exist who are using a 1993 vintage office suite? Can you buy the 1993 version of MS Office any more?
When this is the case, I find that users will suddenly get stupider. As dumb as they were before, and as clueless as they were before, they are now clueless with a purpose. That purpose? To make you regret making them change their desktop. Suddenly many will be looking for reasons to have things not work. The simplest of these being folks who think something doesn't work at all now, just because it doesn't work exactly like it used to. Others being the type who actively search for weak areas in the software so they can bitch about the lack of some arcane/unused feature that used to be available.
You will get these issues changing from one proprietary office suite to another proprietary office suite. Even when the latter claims to just be an "update".
I happen to tell then that Microsoft probably only has the majority share of users in the US. There are other countries where users dont have money to spend on an OS.
Possibly the most interesting thing happening here is that the country in question is has very strong links with the US, is probably the US's strongest ally on the planet and would probably have little problem getting the US Government to give them whatever money they asked for.
First of all, like has been mentioned numerous times on/., the functionality in Office 97 is sufficient for most users. Very few people use, let alone need, the extra functionality added in the later versions of office.
The "extra functionality" may even get in the way.
Silence remains golden. That more you say, the less attention what you say receives. Humans have limited bandwidth, and conserve it for interesting things. If you program continually spits out verbage, no one will notice the important line in the middle of the verbage.
or better still, have an underlying component object model that exposes the functionality of your system and then have a set of GUI and command-line tools that both use these components. oh, and while you're at it, document and expose these components in such a way as they can easily be used from 3rd-party scripts and programs.
This has the side effect of making any component easily replacable. Since all that matters are the (well documented) interface specifications. With OSS this is at worst neutral, potentially a huge positive. To a proprietary software company like Microsoft it's a huge negative.
Sometimes you need to do something once every three months. Clicking in a gui would get the job done in maybe half a minute, while reading up on the required command line actions would take half an hour. So in this case you need a gui.
Actually the time interval dosn't really matter. Repetative tasks are better done by machines than humans.
At other times you need to do the same repetitive task thousands of times, over dozens of machines, every single day. You'd better be able to automate that, so you need a command line option here.
A just as likely senario is that the same task needs to be done once every few months on several machines all within a certain time period. e.g between 2 and 3 am (either local time or GMT) on the first of every month.
I am observing that the Windows metaphor works great for the first 2-3 years, but then the end user runs into a brick wall where he can't do what he wants, doesn't know why, and has no tools or path at his disposal to move forward. I have seldom seen a person who grew up in the Unix (or VMS, or TOPS-20) metaphor hit that same wall and not be able to figure out a way around it.
IMHO what I suspect is going on is that you can go a fair way with Windows without actually understanding what is actually going on. A learning curve akin to y=x^n. Whereas with other operating you tend to get nowhere unless you know what is going on. A learning curve akin to y=x^(1/n).
It was primarly my Unix and VMS background that allowed me to figure out how to make Microsoft LAN Manager 1.1 actually work, for example, when the Microsoft technicians were clueless (another long story).
My experience is also that people "brought up" with Windows tend only to understand Windows. Whereas those "brought up" with Multics, Unix, VMS, TOPS, etc appear to have more easily transferable skills. Usually the difficulty the latter have with Windows is understanding Microsoft Jargon...
The problem that Mr. Sposky doesn't address is this: 2/3 of the problems addressed with computers today (even so-called personal computers) are data processing problems, and there is absolutely no evidence that a GUI is an efficient way to handle those problems.
In many cases the GUI can be a clumsy way of either doing something or telling the computer what to do. e.g. printing several files under Windows especially if you have to send them to a printer which is not normally the default printer.
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"Existing small helicopters are loud" does not directly imply "all small helicopters must be loud"; that's an unwarrented conclusion. If you dump more money into it I would expect you can nearly eliminate the engine noise.
Simply using a 4 stroke or gas turbine engine would help with the engine noise. Two stroke engines are very noisy, but they are also robust and relativly easy to make in small sizes.
"Low cost" is a relative term
As is "small" a 1.5 metre long aircraft is going to be easily visible a fair distance away.
You've been watching too much Fox news. There are no Saddam loyalists. The freedom fighters are just that - fighting for control of their own country.
A more accurate description would be that these are militiamen reacting to a foreign occupying army.
The "Saddam Loyalist" type arguments come from those who's thinking is that anyone anti-US is pro-Saddam. To these people it's inconcievable that Iraqs can be both anti-Saddam and anti-US.
Bing, Bing, Bing, opps, your half right. I was going to say more than 150 years (California), but I thought of the Spanish American War) as a gotcha.
The Spanish-American war is probably one of the most significent in recent history. Since it effectivly resulted in the US becoming an imperial power at the same time Spain ceased to be one.
One of the conquests of that war, the Phillipies could arguably be called a colony. But if you consider colonization to include "importing" population with an eye on keeping the place then Guam or Puerto Rico.
This also happened with Hawaii, was attempted by Germany in WWII, is currently happening in Tibet and Israel. It was even attempted in the Kurdish part of Iraq.
Their rebels are fighting because they hate us,
Do you really think bombing, invading and occupying a country is likely to result in people liking you? What do you think would happen if the US were to be invaded and occupied?
Iraq was called the "Fertile Crescent" when it was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Biblical legend had it that the Garden of Eden was at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The people of Southern Iraq are sometimes known as "Marsh Arabs" Because of the flood plains of the rivers.
Iraq is similar to Egypt in that rivers have provided sufficent water in an arid part of the world for people to form urban populations since pre-history.
Likely but not definite - Democracy does not equal free-market capitalism.
A genuine "free market" might well not be "corporate friendly" espcially to foreign corporations.
If given totally free elections (yeah, right), the Iraqis might elect a fundamentalist theocracy (oops!) or even a socialist govenment (double oops!).
Even if they were to come up with something "capitalist" it would capitalism according to Arab rules and traditions rather than North American traditions.
We took the Panama Canal Zone from Panama a few seconds after we "liberated" Panama from Colombia. Sure, that was a while ago, but we only just gave it back. There's also the coup staged in Hawaii, which we only recently apologized for (a little late, I would say...).
The "apology" came a century after first occupation. Actually it goes a little further and admits that Hawaii has never been part of the US. But that dosn't stop the US Government pretending it is from day to day. Even though the invasion of Hawaii took place at the time of the Spanish-American war Hawaii was an independent constitution Monarcy.
Of course, these can be written off as "little" issues, since most of our expansion was during the Nineteenth Century. But did we stop because we're now nice guys, or simply because we're big enough? From the beginning of the Twentieth Century to July 4, 1946, from St. Thomas to Luzon the sun did not set in the United States. And even today it's still damn close.
The claiming of Alaska and Hawaii as US states happened after 1946. The plebcite referendums carried out are invalid since a required option was omitted from the ballot. In the case of Hawaii things are also invalid because the rules used were intended for "territories" which had never been self governing.
I do think that Iraq has one of the best chances of any Middle East country of creating a stable representational democratic government, something that is in short supply there. Ironicly enough Iran is closest to that mark now, but (I think) will soon be surpassed.
Iran actually had a democratic government, it was overturned and replaced with a tyrany, because it wasn't friendly to foreign oil companies.
A representative democratic Iraqi government is hardly likley to be friendly to the US or its corporations. Do you really think that the US, as occupying force, will allow such a government to come into existance?
Historically the US has opposed US unfriendly democratic governments and supported (financially and militarily) US friendly dictatorships and tyranies.
Not saying we (the US) is doing a good job, but do you really think armed rebels would set up a fair democratic election? That would be the day.
:) Maybe someone can arrange for some tea to be thrown in the Tigris...
Maybe they should try setting up Iraq as a Constitutional Federal Republic instead
But: remember that we put Halliburton Oil in charge of fueling our vehicles over there. Haliburton imported their own men, licensed their own contractors, and it ended up costing us $2.65 per gallon, while the locals (from Kuwait) were willing to deliver it for $1.06.
If anything fuel from Iraqi oil should have cost less than that from Kuwait. Since Iraq probably had stuff sitting in storage at refinaries they couldn't sell because of the sanctions.
Consider this example. American firms estimated that it would take many months and millions of dollars to rebuild Iraqi cement factories, which are crucial to the rebuilding effort. Intrepid Iraqis did it in a few months for less than $100k. How? They didn't set lofty goals for state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. They cannibalized parts from remaining production lines to get at at least one production facility operating.
But in the process les money wound up going to whichever American firm had be "awarded the contract".
Likewise, why should we as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to import the labor and material into Iraq when there exists local talent to do the same job?
Depends if the idea is to rebuild Iraq in a cost effective and sustainable way or if the idea is to provide "corporate welfare".
If they're not as skilled, fine. TRAIN them to do the job, don't do it for them.
All of the skills required most likely already exist. Plenty of rebuilding was carried out after the first war, when Iraq was under strict sanctions.
You'd end up with 2000 Marines busy churning through hundreds of penis enlargement, bigger boobs, refinancing, debt-free, horny teens, etc ads. I expect they'd resent the penis enlargement ads the most.
Since there are spammers who spam about "anti-spam" tools does this mean arms dealers will be getting in on the act.
"To cut down on yore SPAM you can now buy everything from torpedos to nuklear kruise missiles at a *BARGIN* price..."
R1 DVDs only need to carry English audio, subtitles and menus while R2 DVDs theoretically have to have English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and usually other languages.
Thing is that the only region which makes any sense in terms of language is R6. R1 needs English, Spanish and French.
It dosn't make sense to lump Western Europe in with Japan and the Middle East. Or to lump most of North Africa with Russia, India and random bits of Asia. If the reasoning were language Arabic speaking North African countries would be in the same region as the Middle East.
Actually, it is an offence to sell DVDs in the UK that are not BBFC rated, which effectively makes selling non-Region 2 DVDs illegal.
The region code dosn't matter. This would apply to a region 2 disk which had not been BBFC passed.
Now that the region system is finally failing, it's only a matter of time before all tvs can handle both PAL and NTSC signals.
Most PAL chipsets can handle NTSC. Problem is that North America is a big enough market to make it worthwhile for the manufactures to make NTSC only (quite likely 110v AC only too) kit.
US consumers are least affected by region codes: they watch virtually only US content, and have small risk of wanting to play a non-region-1 DVD.
Depends what they are watching. Region 1 tends to get US produced movies first on DVD. But could quite easily be the last to get US produced TV programmes on DVD. Since the US TV has a system for showing repeats to death, sometimes omitting part of the content to stuff in more commercials. Effectivly TV works differently in the US from the rest of the planet. Even to the point where it's quite easy to recognise a US production, regardless of where it was filmed, which production company (including Canadian ones) was used or even the nationality of the actors. If the total length of an "hour long" show is around 42-43 minutes and the credits are part way through then it was made for the US market orignally. If the credits are the very first thing and there is more than 45 minutes of actual content then it was originally made for commercial television elsewhere in the world. More than 50 minutes of content indicates a production for non-commercial television.
So, if everyone has been using Office for the last 10 years, they aren't going to want to try anything new, irregardless of the benefits of said change.
How many people actually exist who are using a 1993 vintage office suite? Can you buy the 1993 version of MS Office any more?
When this is the case, I find that users will suddenly get stupider. As dumb as they were before, and as clueless as they were before, they are now clueless with a purpose. That purpose? To make you regret making them change their desktop. Suddenly many will be looking for reasons to have things not work. The simplest of these being folks who think something doesn't work at all now, just because it doesn't work exactly like it used to. Others being the type who actively search for weak areas in the software so they can bitch about the lack of some arcane/unused feature that used to be available.
You will get these issues changing from one proprietary office suite to another proprietary office suite. Even when the latter claims to just be an "update".
I happen to tell then that Microsoft probably only has the majority share of users in the US. There are other countries where users dont have money to spend on an OS.
Possibly the most interesting thing happening here is that the country in question is has very strong links with the US, is probably the US's strongest ally on the planet and would probably have little problem getting the US Government to give them whatever money they asked for.
First of all, like has been mentioned numerous times on /., the functionality in Office 97 is sufficient for most users. Very few people use, let alone need, the extra functionality added in the later versions of office.
The "extra functionality" may even get in the way.
This is why we need Judge Judy on the bench in this case.
If she had been the judge SCO would have lost months ago. Since she dosn't suffer procrastination or fools gladly...
Silence remains golden. That more you say, the less attention what you say receives. Humans have limited bandwidth, and conserve it for interesting things. If you program continually spits out verbage, no one will notice the important line in the middle of the verbage.
Best described as "crying wolf"...
or better still, have an underlying component object model that exposes the functionality of your system and then have a set of GUI and command-line tools that both use these components. oh, and while you're at it, document and expose these components in such a way as they can easily be used from 3rd-party scripts and programs.
This has the side effect of making any component easily replacable. Since all that matters are the (well documented) interface specifications.
With OSS this is at worst neutral, potentially a huge positive. To a proprietary software company like Microsoft it's a huge negative.
Sometimes you need to do something once every three months. Clicking in a gui would get the job done in maybe half a minute, while reading up on the required command line actions would take half an hour. So in this case you need a gui.
Actually the time interval dosn't really matter. Repetative tasks are better done by machines than humans.
At other times you need to do the same repetitive task thousands of times, over dozens of machines, every single day. You'd better be able to automate that, so you need a command line option here.
A just as likely senario is that the same task needs to be done once every few months on several machines all within a certain time period. e.g between 2 and 3 am (either local time or GMT) on the first of every month.
I am observing that the Windows metaphor works great for the first 2-3 years, but then the end user runs into a brick wall where he can't do what he wants, doesn't know why, and has no tools or path at his disposal to move forward. I have seldom seen a person who grew up in the Unix (or VMS, or TOPS-20) metaphor hit that same wall and not be able to figure out a way around it.
IMHO what I suspect is going on is that you can go a fair way with Windows without actually understanding what is actually going on. A learning curve akin to y=x^n. Whereas with other operating you tend to get nowhere unless you know what is going on. A learning curve akin to y=x^(1/n).
It was primarly my Unix and VMS background that allowed me to figure out how to make Microsoft LAN Manager 1.1 actually work, for example, when the Microsoft technicians were clueless (another long story).
My experience is also that people "brought up" with Windows tend only to understand Windows. Whereas those "brought up" with Multics, Unix, VMS, TOPS, etc appear to have more easily transferable skills. Usually the difficulty the latter have with Windows is understanding Microsoft Jargon...
The problem that Mr. Sposky doesn't address is this: 2/3 of the problems addressed with computers today (even so-called personal computers) are data processing problems, and there is absolutely no evidence that a GUI is an efficient way to handle those problems.
In many cases the GUI can be a clumsy way of either doing something or telling the computer what to do. e.g. printing several files under Windows especially if you have to send them to a printer which is not normally the default printer.