Though I am inclined to classify this research as bogus, it's quite funny and intriguing that the USA, Britain, Russia and China are in the same club.
Actually, speaking as someone from the UK, I think it's just sad... and entirely, objectively accurate. Our modern surveillance state/database society in the UK would make any dictator proud.
We are rapidly moving towards a state where the government monitors, inter alia,
more CCTV cameras per capita of the population than any other country on the planet,
ANPR cameras on all our major roads, and
all Internet use.
The government is essentially compiling databases, to be kept near enough forever, of:
several biometric identifiers for everyone in the country,
the movements of everyone in the country, and
the communications and associations of everyone in the country,
in addition to all the usual financial and employment records, of course.
The only difference between the UK and certain more infamous countries is that, at least until recently, the serious damage had been only incidental and affecting a few people, while certain other governments more routinely abuse the information they collect. Then again, see my current sig for how fast the UK government is trying to catch up — and remember that's just the biggest story recently, not the only one.
That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility.
Make that two, please.
And FWIW, I've heard this a lot around these parts.
If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?
Only if the advantages gained by doing so more than paid for themselves. However, while there are a few incremental improvements in Vista, and in time maybe DirectX 10 will be worth something[1], there's nothing really ground-breaking that justifies leaving the entire XP-using community in the lurch unless you need 64-bit[2].
[1] I don't think it will be any time soon, because gaming perhaps more than any other market really needs to work on the systems many people have, and needs good reviews from early adopters in the community, and neither of those things supports a Vista-only policy.
[2] Because the 64-bit version of XP sucks rather badly for many people, even if much of that is because of really poor driver support and not the OS itself.
[College students] just don't believe downloading for personal use to be immoral.
Many of my friends didn't see anything unfair about heavy taxation and redistribution of wealth while they were students (and therefore paying no tax and probably claiming some sort of state funding toward their tuition expenses). In most cases, their views changed rather abruptly when they got their first real pay slip and looked at the deductions column.
The moral of the story is that your personal morals are at least in part a product of your own experience and view of the world. Most college students have a very narrow view of the world, being young and having yet to start the main working phase of their lives, so it's not surprising that their views on ethical issues like copyright infringement come from a one-sided perspective. It is, of course, regrettable how quickly certain people who have come through the education system and started work in knowledge industries forget their first perspective in their haste to advocate their second.
They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
For the record, the current ACPO guidelines are 10% + 2mph over the legal limit.
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public.
If that were true, people wouldn't be (quite) so upset. But the fact is that many of the cameras violate the official guidelines, and are posted in highly revenue-generating but statistically very safe areas. Similarly, if the locations were reported accurately and completely, then that would be one thing, but not all police forces and "safety camera partnerships" respect this.
They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right.
That's one side of it. On the flip side, I believe restricting people's freedom (in this case, their freedom to travel quickly) without a good reason is unethical. If driving at a certain speed is not dangerous or inconsiderate, making it illegal as a means of conveniently taxing the motorist is inappropriate, and if cameras are used as the instrument of that inappropriate behaviour then they are inappropriate too.
Tell me this would not have both geek appeal and joe public appeal! It's just too funny to pass up. (Oh wait...it's also an original idea. Can't have that in Hollywood these days, can we?)
Yep, it's completely original. Sassy, female-AI-controlled vehicles have never been done in sci-fi before, and certainly never played for laughs where they show up the macho, testosterone-driven male characters...
Yep, I know what you mean. There's a kind of credibility about certain sci-fi/fantasy shows, in that they minimise the need to suspend disbelief. If you're setting a show in space, you pretty much need to deal with the whole speed-of-light issue (unless you're Firefly:-)), but the better series tend to leave it at that, and anything else is more along the lines of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic than anything that obviously flies in the face of what current science suggests is possible. Apart from that, every time you pick a magic plot device to solve a problem, you tend to lose a part of the show that you can never get back. There's enough current or credible near-future to use in shows like this without relying on outright fantasy if your show is in a realistic, contemporary setting otherwise.
I don't know, but the new KITT makes me think more of KARR than anything else. If the Cylon style back and fro lights are missing, then this is no KITT.
The new model cylons don't have the back and fro lights either, but that doesn't necessarily mean the originals were cooler. Anyone who can talk calmly about all but annihilating an entire race while wearing that dress has got to be cool, right?
Sorry, but I think your model is rather simplistic.
For one thing, roads never really reach full capacity at a given speed, because other effects such as those you mentioned cause everyone to slow down first. This increases the effective capacity, because less space is necessary between vehicles.
For another thing, you are completely ignoring the effects of the accidents caused by people following too close. I'm doing a fair bit of long distance driving at the moment, in some pretty nasty weather conditions some days. I've been stuck for hours in freezing temperatures on major roads that have been completely closed, all because one idiot couldn't be bothered to leave enough space and then had nowhere to go in an emergency and hit someone else.
Better trained drivers are able to drive fast while packed tightly without making many mistakes.
That's true to an extent, but not that great an extent. A better trained/more experienced driver will generally anticipate potential hazards significantly sooner than a novice, allowing them to make better use of whatever space is available, but when you're driving a ton or two of metal around, it still takes a significant distance to stop or change course when driving at speed, and your visibility in the dark or poor weather is still limited.
The Italians have an interesting alternative: their culture is very much to drive right up close (and I mean close) even at speed, and driving is basically a game where everyone tries to cut in front of everyone else, in between lanes, overtaking anywhere they can get. They're actually surprisingly safe in terms of major accidents, because in the end, it's variations in speed that cause accidents, and everyone there tries to maintain their speed relative to other vehicles no matter what. Italian driver training is pretty heavy and, despite their apparently crazy behaviour to our eyes, objectively their drivers are almost uniformly very attentive and very aware of the size of their vehicle and what's going on around them. They do have a hideous number of minor accidents, though: walk through the streets of any Italian town and you'll find probably half the cars have substantial damage to their bodywork.
It's not hard to follow the rule, instead, it's hard to maintain it without ending up going significantly slower than the traffic around you
Except that this is another popular myth, albeit one with a good psychological basis. It always feels like the guys in another lane are moving faster, but if you actually measure it, usually they're not. Weaving through traffic doesn't really get you somewhere much faster even if no-one else is doing it (though it feels like it does because of biased perception). Moreover, if everyone does it, the whole traffic flow is actually slower.
Yeah.... I tried this for several weeks. Except everyone took the opportunity to sneak in front of me so they could play a game of changing lanes repeatedly to snake their way through traffic faster.
It's funny how often I hear this. I try to hold back a safe distance all the time, and sure, a handful of morons weave through the gaps and I have to drop back a little more. But I never see this horrendous influx of morons people keep telling me about. I manage to maintain a much better distance (and a much smoother drive in terms of both vehicle speed and mental stress) than most people other than for a few moments if someone cuts in, and since those people usually cut out again almost as quickly, I doubt it even slows me down noticeably.
FWIW, this is the UK, and the comment above apply to both high-speed motorway driving and crowded conditions around the city. I've never driven in the US, but I do hear the same sorts of complaints the parent post was making all the time.
I don't think the big advantage of the current generation of hybrids is their power source. After all, as you say, if it's not coming from burning gas, it's coming from somewhere else. Right now, most of our somewhere elses are still too polluting and/or diminishing scarce natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
What I do think hybrids are already good for is straight-up efficiency in typical driving. If I'm driving around town, I spend a significant amount of time stationary or moving very slowly on the approach to junctions, even on otherwise clear roads. A hybrid will be running purely on the electric side of the system, and neither waste power nor emit pollutants under those circumstances, in contrast to a typical petrol or diesel vehicle where the engine is wasting reserves and cranking out all kinds of nastiness even when you're not really going anywhere.
This is far more pronounced when we're talking about town driving, since classic engines tend to be slightly more efficient in most current hybrids at sustained high speeds. Still, even on faster roads, if there's an accident or roadworks causing a queue, why waste expensive gas and chuck **** out into the atmosphere for no good reason? A hybrid doesn't, and for me that is the number one reason to consider buying one today.
(The number two reason is that despite this practical efficiency, some of them also have rocking performance for only a modest increase in weight now. Whether you're towing, live near harsh terrain, or simply enjoy a safe but sporty drive, this is all good.)
Well, I'll grant you that your ideas are "innovative". Personally, I'd use "crazy", but maybe I'm just an aging computer geek who still thinks like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming.:-)
Alternatively, maybe I trust tried and tested approaches a lot more than vapourware research, and therefore I'm far more interested in techniques like nested data parallelism and transaction-based synchronisation that have obvious practical applications for current algorithms once we can find ways to do them reliably and efficiently. Coincidentally, I happen to know that Microsoft Research has several people looking into these areas, Simon Peyton-Jones being perhaps the most well-known in geek circles.
Of course it matters! You've obviously never tried to interface different systems or to find some way of using legacy data that no one makes a reader for any more. When a commercial company goes bust (or deliberately shuts down a division), all of the contracts you have for support are null and void.
No, it really doesn't.
No matter how "standard" some electronic format is today, it's still unlikely that 50 years from now your average home computer (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy file format, or that any standard server (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy physical media on which the original data resides. In the meantime, even if some business with a proprietary electronic file format goes bust, it's not like their software suddenly stops working, and the history of cracks for "activated" software makes it pretty obvious that this presents no realistic obstacle to retrieving the data in a worst case scenario.
In any case, this is not your problem or mine. It is up to the government of the day to make sure any government information that remains relevant is transferred to new media, hardware, file formats or other records in whatever way is necessary to keep it available to the public. National libraries have been doing this since long before Microsoft file formats were a twinkle in Bill Gates's eye. It might be in the government's interests at any given time to adopt an open standard to assist with this, or it might not. It really doesn't matter, as long as any citizen can get access to the information freely and reasonably easily.
I'm wondering which of the possible observations you might have been making got your post modded insightful?
It is important to plan for the future.
It might be unwise to divert scarce development resources to half-fix problems now if the problems might never get fully fixed later and they won't matter at all in practice until they are fully fixed.
I'm afraid my sarcasometer also can't determine reliably which was your intended meaning.
Anyone who's a citizen knows enough about the requirements to make the fundamental point: that the information a government generates belongs to the people, and should not be tied up in a format that is controlled by a single organisation.
The latter does not follow from the former.
A responsible government should make the information it generates available to the people, for as long as it may be useful (which may be indefinitely). Whether they do this by publishing it in some popular electronic format(s), or by providing reference copies and any hardware/software necessary to read them at public libraries, or by posting a printed copy to every citizen, or through some combination of means, doesn't really matter. What counts is that the people can access the information free of charge and without jumping through unreasonable hoops.
In any case, pretty much all effective standards are controlled by a single organisation, or even a single person, even if ultimately that organisation or person makes decisions based on the input of others. Take a look at the most successful, practical tools in the programming world. Does the world refuse to use Perl or Ruby because they're basically controlled by a single person or small group and not formally specified? Heck, the Python crowd even make a joke out of it. Meanwhile, the C++ standard may be an official ISO document, but as anyone who's watched the machinery grinding knows, it's still under the control of a relatively small handful of people, many of whom have a personal interest in driving it in certain directions and most of whom effectively pay a substantial sum of money for the privilege of having their voice heard. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not intended as criticism of anyone who works on any of these languages; I'm merely pointing out that just because something is standard, it doesn't mean it's not still effectively under the control of those prepared to spend a substantial amount of money to have their say.
More than that, it's a hugely stupid format, that no developer in their right (read: unbought) mind could possibly endorse.
Ah, proof by ad hominem attack. Somehow, I doubt you'll convince many developers in their right mind with that.:-)
It may have escaped your attention, but ODF isn't exactly the pinnacle of the software standards world either.
Except for the fact their objecting to the wrong cause. It would be one thing if people weren't pirating at all and we had DRM. But that's not reality. Piracy came first, then DRM. The public didn't see the writing on the wall and continued to pirate. So why should anyone start crying tears for those who can't take a hint?
I've made somewhat similar observations in the past, but the big difference in this case is that the DRM technology in Vista screws those of us who don't pirate material and just want a stable, well-performing platform on which to play our legitimately purchased media.
Hear, hear. I can't comment on what the old iPlayer is like, because having downloaded the installer, I then read the attached Ts&Cs. I'm hardly a picky licensing geek, but some of the conditions were pretty much outrageous, and no sane person with a clue about technology would ever agree to them if they read them.
A TV repeat service like this is a great move by the BBC, but only if it's not a serious threat to anyone who installs their damageware player. This move neatly avoids the latter problem entirely, while still apparently offering the major benefit. Well done the Beeb.
Until they're using open technology, this is a hollow gesture to remove the political and social pressure on them. I just hope that the people who really care don't give up their campaign to make the BBC be open.
Oh, please. Your post is complaining about something imperfect, giving no credit for the fact that it is still very much better than the previous version for most people.
This version will allow many users on probably the second and third most popular platforms to view content they otherwise couldn't view at all. It will allow many people using Windows to access the content much more easily and without having to install dubious P2P software with very dubious conditions attached on their PCs (which is the reason that despite being a Windows user and a licence fee payer, I declined to use the previous incarnation of iPlayer when I missed a recording).
The fact that this is not a huge step forward for absolutely everyone who pays the licence fee does not mean it shouldn't be done just to benefit the 99+% of licence fee payers who would see an improvement. Frankly, there isn't much the BBC does that would be of interest to anything like such a high proportion of licence fee payers, and I'm impressed that they appeared to have listened to the criticism and done something reasonable and constructive about it.
None that I'm aware of. But WoW is hardly the entire games world on its own.
I don't think this is a particularly important example anyway, because personally I think the MMORPG dominance will pass in time, just like many trends in gaming before it. There's no doubt that on-line gaming has changed people's expectations, but I doubt any one MMORPG, even one as successful as WoW, will hold the current huge number of people's interest forever. They've just got a great sales model that makes it hard for people to let go once they've subscribed.
How many years late was Vista? Three? five? In all that time, nobody managed to grab significant market share off Microsoft.
On the contrary. In the business world, Linux as a server has been a significant player for a long time now. In the home world, the latest generation of games consoles now command something like 80% of the market, which removes the one really compelling advantage for many home users that a Windows PC has had over alternatives like Mac and Linux boxes until recently. Even if home users haven't started switching in large numbers yet, they are much more able to if gaming is a major factor for them than they used to be.
Even without all of this, we can see the irony that the biggest competitor to Vista for many users is XP.
In any free market, being several years late and then coming up with the excrement that is Vista would kill your company.
I think Microsoft are already on the way out, they just haven't realised yet. With the momentum they have behind them it will take several years for the life support machine to be turned off, but for all practical purposes the lemon that is Vista marks the end of their time as the uncontested leaders of the modern software world.
It's not clear yet whether the alternatives will come from platform-neutral web services, or from increased take up of alternative platforms like Mac and Linux, or from other technologies like games consoles and more powerful PDA-like devices, or perhaps from some new idea that someone has been developing during the past few years but not yet shown publicly. I suspect the reality will be a balance, and five years from now we will have some genuine diversity (and perhaps a renewed appreciation of the need for compatibility and standards) in the IT market for the first time in years.
The thing is, I'm not running Windows XP SP0 on my near-five-year-old PC as I type this. I'm running a fully patched WinXP based on SP2, as I have been for a long time. My system performs well and has always been very stable (barring some recent blips, but those are due to an identified hardware problem).
Of course XP wasn't as good five years ago, but unless Microsoft is going to go back and release Vista on time, it's what we're all running today with which Vista must compare favourably.
OK, Mr AC, I'm a professional software developer. The code I write ships on just about every flavour of Windows, Linux, MacOS and UNIX in common use today. Please name a few substantial things Vista offers that help me as a developer.
Vista is, clearly, both less reliable and less efficient than XP for a significant proportion of people who have tried it. If it had one bad review, that would be one thing, but the web is full of them and of reports from lab tests confirming it in various contexts, and my personal experience and conversations with friends who have seen it is entirely consistent with those reviews and tests. So I have no problem accepting that Vista is inferior to XP in significant ways.
Now, it may be that it's not really down to the DRM. I find it credible that it is, given the nature of DRM technology, and I guess most people reading this have read the high profile articles with more technical details that claim so. But in any case, it doesn't really matter a whole lot why the performance is worse than XP, just that it is worse. If DRM is getting the blame and MS is suffering bad press because of some FUD here, I'm not exactly full of sympathy: it's not like they have a history of being whiter than white in their objective criticisms of their competitors' offerings, nor like the claims about poor performance/compatibility/reliability aren't essentially all true.
Believe it or not, those people are human beings too.
That is unlikely. The kind of creature who does this, knowing that they will at best be taking advantage of another party's reputation and at worst actively damaging them to make a profit, is probably a lower life form. Even if their actions are technically legal and, at least for now, permitted by the domain registration authorities, those actions are still unethical at best. In other contexts, analogous behaviour would be bordering on criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I am inclined to classify this research as bogus, it's quite funny and intriguing that the USA, Britain, Russia and China are in the same club.
Actually, speaking as someone from the UK, I think it's just sad... and entirely, objectively accurate. Our modern surveillance state/database society in the UK would make any dictator proud.
We are rapidly moving towards a state where the government monitors, inter alia,
The government is essentially compiling databases, to be kept near enough forever, of:
in addition to all the usual financial and employment records, of course.
The only difference between the UK and certain more infamous countries is that, at least until recently, the serious damage had been only incidental and affecting a few people, while certain other governments more routinely abuse the information they collect. Then again, see my current sig for how fast the UK government is trying to catch up — and remember that's just the biggest story recently, not the only one.
That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility.
Make that two, please.
And FWIW, I've heard this a lot around these parts.
If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?
Only if the advantages gained by doing so more than paid for themselves. However, while there are a few incremental improvements in Vista, and in time maybe DirectX 10 will be worth something[1], there's nothing really ground-breaking that justifies leaving the entire XP-using community in the lurch unless you need 64-bit[2].
[1] I don't think it will be any time soon, because gaming perhaps more than any other market really needs to work on the systems many people have, and needs good reviews from early adopters in the community, and neither of those things supports a Vista-only policy.
[2] Because the 64-bit version of XP sucks rather badly for many people, even if much of that is because of really poor driver support and not the OS itself.
Very ironic, since that's accurate!
[College students] just don't believe downloading for personal use to be immoral.
Many of my friends didn't see anything unfair about heavy taxation and redistribution of wealth while they were students (and therefore paying no tax and probably claiming some sort of state funding toward their tuition expenses). In most cases, their views changed rather abruptly when they got their first real pay slip and looked at the deductions column.
The moral of the story is that your personal morals are at least in part a product of your own experience and view of the world. Most college students have a very narrow view of the world, being young and having yet to start the main working phase of their lives, so it's not surprising that their views on ethical issues like copyright infringement come from a one-sided perspective. It is, of course, regrettable how quickly certain people who have come through the education system and started work in knowledge industries forget their first perspective in their haste to advocate their second.
They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
For the record, the current ACPO guidelines are 10% + 2mph over the legal limit.
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public.
If that were true, people wouldn't be (quite) so upset. But the fact is that many of the cameras violate the official guidelines, and are posted in highly revenue-generating but statistically very safe areas. Similarly, if the locations were reported accurately and completely, then that would be one thing, but not all police forces and "safety camera partnerships" respect this.
They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right.
That's one side of it. On the flip side, I believe restricting people's freedom (in this case, their freedom to travel quickly) without a good reason is unethical. If driving at a certain speed is not dangerous or inconsiderate, making it illegal as a means of conveniently taxing the motorist is inappropriate, and if cameras are used as the instrument of that inappropriate behaviour then they are inappropriate too.
Tell me this would not have both geek appeal and joe public appeal! It's just too funny to pass up. (Oh wait...it's also an original idea. Can't have that in Hollywood these days, can we?)
Yep, it's completely original. Sassy, female-AI-controlled vehicles have never been done in sci-fi before, and certainly never played for laughs where they show up the macho, testosterone-driven male characters...
Yep, I know what you mean. There's a kind of credibility about certain sci-fi/fantasy shows, in that they minimise the need to suspend disbelief. If you're setting a show in space, you pretty much need to deal with the whole speed-of-light issue (unless you're Firefly :-)), but the better series tend to leave it at that, and anything else is more along the lines of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic than anything that obviously flies in the face of what current science suggests is possible. Apart from that, every time you pick a magic plot device to solve a problem, you tend to lose a part of the show that you can never get back. There's enough current or credible near-future to use in shows like this without relying on outright fantasy if your show is in a realistic, contemporary setting otherwise.
I don't know, but the new KITT makes me think more of KARR than anything else. If the Cylon style back and fro lights are missing, then this is no KITT.
The new model cylons don't have the back and fro lights either, but that doesn't necessarily mean the originals were cooler. Anyone who can talk calmly about all but annihilating an entire race while wearing that dress has got to be cool, right?
Sorry, but I think your model is rather simplistic.
For one thing, roads never really reach full capacity at a given speed, because other effects such as those you mentioned cause everyone to slow down first. This increases the effective capacity, because less space is necessary between vehicles.
For another thing, you are completely ignoring the effects of the accidents caused by people following too close. I'm doing a fair bit of long distance driving at the moment, in some pretty nasty weather conditions some days. I've been stuck for hours in freezing temperatures on major roads that have been completely closed, all because one idiot couldn't be bothered to leave enough space and then had nowhere to go in an emergency and hit someone else.
Better trained drivers are able to drive fast while packed tightly without making many mistakes.
That's true to an extent, but not that great an extent. A better trained/more experienced driver will generally anticipate potential hazards significantly sooner than a novice, allowing them to make better use of whatever space is available, but when you're driving a ton or two of metal around, it still takes a significant distance to stop or change course when driving at speed, and your visibility in the dark or poor weather is still limited.
The Italians have an interesting alternative: their culture is very much to drive right up close (and I mean close) even at speed, and driving is basically a game where everyone tries to cut in front of everyone else, in between lanes, overtaking anywhere they can get. They're actually surprisingly safe in terms of major accidents, because in the end, it's variations in speed that cause accidents, and everyone there tries to maintain their speed relative to other vehicles no matter what. Italian driver training is pretty heavy and, despite their apparently crazy behaviour to our eyes, objectively their drivers are almost uniformly very attentive and very aware of the size of their vehicle and what's going on around them. They do have a hideous number of minor accidents, though: walk through the streets of any Italian town and you'll find probably half the cars have substantial damage to their bodywork.
It's not hard to follow the rule, instead, it's hard to maintain it without ending up going significantly slower than the traffic around you
Except that this is another popular myth, albeit one with a good psychological basis. It always feels like the guys in another lane are moving faster, but if you actually measure it, usually they're not. Weaving through traffic doesn't really get you somewhere much faster even if no-one else is doing it (though it feels like it does because of biased perception). Moreover, if everyone does it, the whole traffic flow is actually slower.
Yeah.... I tried this for several weeks. Except everyone took the opportunity to sneak in front of me so they could play a game of changing lanes repeatedly to snake their way through traffic faster.
It's funny how often I hear this. I try to hold back a safe distance all the time, and sure, a handful of morons weave through the gaps and I have to drop back a little more. But I never see this horrendous influx of morons people keep telling me about. I manage to maintain a much better distance (and a much smoother drive in terms of both vehicle speed and mental stress) than most people other than for a few moments if someone cuts in, and since those people usually cut out again almost as quickly, I doubt it even slows me down noticeably.
FWIW, this is the UK, and the comment above apply to both high-speed motorway driving and crowded conditions around the city. I've never driven in the US, but I do hear the same sorts of complaints the parent post was making all the time.
I don't think the big advantage of the current generation of hybrids is their power source. After all, as you say, if it's not coming from burning gas, it's coming from somewhere else. Right now, most of our somewhere elses are still too polluting and/or diminishing scarce natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
What I do think hybrids are already good for is straight-up efficiency in typical driving. If I'm driving around town, I spend a significant amount of time stationary or moving very slowly on the approach to junctions, even on otherwise clear roads. A hybrid will be running purely on the electric side of the system, and neither waste power nor emit pollutants under those circumstances, in contrast to a typical petrol or diesel vehicle where the engine is wasting reserves and cranking out all kinds of nastiness even when you're not really going anywhere.
This is far more pronounced when we're talking about town driving, since classic engines tend to be slightly more efficient in most current hybrids at sustained high speeds. Still, even on faster roads, if there's an accident or roadworks causing a queue, why waste expensive gas and chuck **** out into the atmosphere for no good reason? A hybrid doesn't, and for me that is the number one reason to consider buying one today.
(The number two reason is that despite this practical efficiency, some of them also have rocking performance for only a modest increase in weight now. Whether you're towing, live near harsh terrain, or simply enjoy a safe but sporty drive, this is all good.)
Well, I'll grant you that your ideas are "innovative". Personally, I'd use "crazy", but maybe I'm just an aging computer geek who still thinks like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming. :-)
Alternatively, maybe I trust tried and tested approaches a lot more than vapourware research, and therefore I'm far more interested in techniques like nested data parallelism and transaction-based synchronisation that have obvious practical applications for current algorithms once we can find ways to do them reliably and efficiently. Coincidentally, I happen to know that Microsoft Research has several people looking into these areas, Simon Peyton-Jones being perhaps the most well-known in geek circles.
Of course it matters! You've obviously never tried to interface different systems or to find some way of using legacy data that no one makes a reader for any more. When a commercial company goes bust (or deliberately shuts down a division), all of the contracts you have for support are null and void.
No, it really doesn't.
No matter how "standard" some electronic format is today, it's still unlikely that 50 years from now your average home computer (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy file format, or that any standard server (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy physical media on which the original data resides. In the meantime, even if some business with a proprietary electronic file format goes bust, it's not like their software suddenly stops working, and the history of cracks for "activated" software makes it pretty obvious that this presents no realistic obstacle to retrieving the data in a worst case scenario.
In any case, this is not your problem or mine. It is up to the government of the day to make sure any government information that remains relevant is transferred to new media, hardware, file formats or other records in whatever way is necessary to keep it available to the public. National libraries have been doing this since long before Microsoft file formats were a twinkle in Bill Gates's eye. It might be in the government's interests at any given time to adopt an open standard to assist with this, or it might not. It really doesn't matter, as long as any citizen can get access to the information freely and reasonably easily.
I'm wondering which of the possible observations you might have been making got your post modded insightful?
I'm afraid my sarcasometer also can't determine reliably which was your intended meaning.
Anyone who's a citizen knows enough about the requirements to make the fundamental point: that the information a government generates belongs to the people, and should not be tied up in a format that is controlled by a single organisation.
The latter does not follow from the former.
A responsible government should make the information it generates available to the people, for as long as it may be useful (which may be indefinitely). Whether they do this by publishing it in some popular electronic format(s), or by providing reference copies and any hardware/software necessary to read them at public libraries, or by posting a printed copy to every citizen, or through some combination of means, doesn't really matter. What counts is that the people can access the information free of charge and without jumping through unreasonable hoops.
In any case, pretty much all effective standards are controlled by a single organisation, or even a single person, even if ultimately that organisation or person makes decisions based on the input of others. Take a look at the most successful, practical tools in the programming world. Does the world refuse to use Perl or Ruby because they're basically controlled by a single person or small group and not formally specified? Heck, the Python crowd even make a joke out of it. Meanwhile, the C++ standard may be an official ISO document, but as anyone who's watched the machinery grinding knows, it's still under the control of a relatively small handful of people, many of whom have a personal interest in driving it in certain directions and most of whom effectively pay a substantial sum of money for the privilege of having their voice heard. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not intended as criticism of anyone who works on any of these languages; I'm merely pointing out that just because something is standard, it doesn't mean it's not still effectively under the control of those prepared to spend a substantial amount of money to have their say.
More than that, it's a hugely stupid format, that no developer in their right (read: unbought) mind could possibly endorse.
Ah, proof by ad hominem attack. Somehow, I doubt you'll convince many developers in their right mind with that. :-)
It may have escaped your attention, but ODF isn't exactly the pinnacle of the software standards world either.
Except for the fact their objecting to the wrong cause. It would be one thing if people weren't pirating at all and we had DRM. But that's not reality. Piracy came first, then DRM. The public didn't see the writing on the wall and continued to pirate. So why should anyone start crying tears for those who can't take a hint?
I've made somewhat similar observations in the past, but the big difference in this case is that the DRM technology in Vista screws those of us who don't pirate material and just want a stable, well-performing platform on which to play our legitimately purchased media.
Hear, hear. I can't comment on what the old iPlayer is like, because having downloaded the installer, I then read the attached Ts&Cs. I'm hardly a picky licensing geek, but some of the conditions were pretty much outrageous, and no sane person with a clue about technology would ever agree to them if they read them.
A TV repeat service like this is a great move by the BBC, but only if it's not a serious threat to anyone who installs their damageware player. This move neatly avoids the latter problem entirely, while still apparently offering the major benefit. Well done the Beeb.
Until they're using open technology, this is a hollow gesture to remove the political and social pressure on them. I just hope that the people who really care don't give up their campaign to make the BBC be open.
Oh, please. Your post is complaining about something imperfect, giving no credit for the fact that it is still very much better than the previous version for most people.
This version will allow many users on probably the second and third most popular platforms to view content they otherwise couldn't view at all. It will allow many people using Windows to access the content much more easily and without having to install dubious P2P software with very dubious conditions attached on their PCs (which is the reason that despite being a Windows user and a licence fee payer, I declined to use the previous incarnation of iPlayer when I missed a recording).
The fact that this is not a huge step forward for absolutely everyone who pays the licence fee does not mean it shouldn't be done just to benefit the 99+% of licence fee payers who would see an improvement. Frankly, there isn't much the BBC does that would be of interest to anything like such a high proportion of licence fee payers, and I'm impressed that they appeared to have listened to the criticism and done something reasonable and constructive about it.
Which console runs Blizzard's World of Warcraft?
None that I'm aware of. But WoW is hardly the entire games world on its own.
I don't think this is a particularly important example anyway, because personally I think the MMORPG dominance will pass in time, just like many trends in gaming before it. There's no doubt that on-line gaming has changed people's expectations, but I doubt any one MMORPG, even one as successful as WoW, will hold the current huge number of people's interest forever. They've just got a great sales model that makes it hard for people to let go once they've subscribed.
How many years late was Vista? Three? five? In all that time, nobody managed to grab significant market share off Microsoft.
On the contrary. In the business world, Linux as a server has been a significant player for a long time now. In the home world, the latest generation of games consoles now command something like 80% of the market, which removes the one really compelling advantage for many home users that a Windows PC has had over alternatives like Mac and Linux boxes until recently. Even if home users haven't started switching in large numbers yet, they are much more able to if gaming is a major factor for them than they used to be.
Even without all of this, we can see the irony that the biggest competitor to Vista for many users is XP.
In any free market, being several years late and then coming up with the excrement that is Vista would kill your company.
I think Microsoft are already on the way out, they just haven't realised yet. With the momentum they have behind them it will take several years for the life support machine to be turned off, but for all practical purposes the lemon that is Vista marks the end of their time as the uncontested leaders of the modern software world.
It's not clear yet whether the alternatives will come from platform-neutral web services, or from increased take up of alternative platforms like Mac and Linux, or from other technologies like games consoles and more powerful PDA-like devices, or perhaps from some new idea that someone has been developing during the past few years but not yet shown publicly. I suspect the reality will be a balance, and five years from now we will have some genuine diversity (and perhaps a renewed appreciation of the need for compatibility and standards) in the IT market for the first time in years.
The thing is, I'm not running Windows XP SP0 on my near-five-year-old PC as I type this. I'm running a fully patched WinXP based on SP2, as I have been for a long time. My system performs well and has always been very stable (barring some recent blips, but those are due to an identified hardware problem).
Of course XP wasn't as good five years ago, but unless Microsoft is going to go back and release Vista on time, it's what we're all running today with which Vista must compare favourably.
OK, Mr AC, I'm a professional software developer. The code I write ships on just about every flavour of Windows, Linux, MacOS and UNIX in common use today. Please name a few substantial things Vista offers that help me as a developer.
Vista is, clearly, both less reliable and less efficient than XP for a significant proportion of people who have tried it. If it had one bad review, that would be one thing, but the web is full of them and of reports from lab tests confirming it in various contexts, and my personal experience and conversations with friends who have seen it is entirely consistent with those reviews and tests. So I have no problem accepting that Vista is inferior to XP in significant ways.
Now, it may be that it's not really down to the DRM. I find it credible that it is, given the nature of DRM technology, and I guess most people reading this have read the high profile articles with more technical details that claim so. But in any case, it doesn't really matter a whole lot why the performance is worse than XP, just that it is worse. If DRM is getting the blame and MS is suffering bad press because of some FUD here, I'm not exactly full of sympathy: it's not like they have a history of being whiter than white in their objective criticisms of their competitors' offerings, nor like the claims about poor performance/compatibility/reliability aren't essentially all true.
Believe it or not, those people are human beings too.
That is unlikely. The kind of creature who does this, knowing that they will at best be taking advantage of another party's reputation and at worst actively damaging them to make a profit, is probably a lower life form. Even if their actions are technically legal and, at least for now, permitted by the domain registration authorities, those actions are still unethical at best. In other contexts, analogous behaviour would be bordering on criminal.