There have been some problems in the NHS hospital wards relating to antibiotic resistant bacteria (MRSA, clostridium difficile).
There was also problems with retirees having DNR written in their medical records by staff (Do Not Resuscitate) without ever being consulted, which meant that if someone had a heart or asthma attack, medical staff would not intervene.
And there is also a problem with asylum seekers and foreign workers being given priority over locals in areas of high demand.
There are small companies all over the country. The larger studios managed to start up back in the 1980's because there were no other industries to compete against (coal mining, ship build and steel working collapsed), so lack of any competing industries meant that the cost of renting/house buying was not an obstacle to recruiting staff.
Very few companies could afford to relocate to that nicer office blocks in the town or business parks. The first problem is that whenever they get media attention about how much new business they are getting, the first thing that the landlords do is to increase the lease, about the annual increase rate, forcing the company to move out and disrupt everyone's commute.
There has always been an official government policy of getting companies to relocate in the poor parts of the country. The main reason is that they can claim to have created jobs and turned an area around. Then there is a belief that staff will want to live locally, and that it will encourage the locals to apply for those jobs.
Unfortunately, it usually means that everyone has to commute from one side of the town/city to the other.
But it is in Greater Nottingham "family areas" such as Lenton, Radford, Dunkirk and Beeston where buy-to-let blight has struck the worst. Estate agents turn what would elsewhere be a three-bedroom semi into a "five to six letting room property", and a four-bedroom house is marketed as "seven to eight letting rooms".
"Nothing is sold in the normal way," says Ms Fletcher. "With each student paying around £3,500 a year, landlords can earn about 8.5% on their investments. Even before tax relief, that's substantially more than the cost of borrowing, so they can outbid families. Estate agents have no interest in selling to parents with children. Investors pay more so there is more commission."
All areas are expensive now. The UK is currently experiencing a housing shortage in the South of England and Scotland due to immigration and growth. They need to build at least 120,000 homes/year just to match growth. One solution has been "garden grabbing" where devlopers buy up a house with a large garden, and convert it into a block of flats which are sold to the "Buy-to-Let" market for minimum wage foreign workers.
Another problem is that of (some say overpaid) city workers who earn 100K+ pounds/year + bonuses who are buying everything up. They will buy a house in the outer suburbs of London for work (Home Counties), a house in the countryside for the weekends, and a flat or two for their children in the cities, when they become students. Needless to say, this does have a effect of pricing the locals out - the UK is currently experiencing a migration of 700K nationals/year due to this as well as the increasing Islamic population in the inner city suburbs. Banks were encouraged to allow first-time buyers to borrow up to 5x their salary, using 100% mortgages.
With interest rates going up and the cost of food going up by 20%/years, this might just change.
You don't need to cancel your entire service to make a protest, you just need to switch to a lower tier service. In the case of broadband, that would mean dropping down from XL (20Mb) to L(10Mb), or down to M (2Mb), although the savings are not that much.
Yes, I did - that's what I did when I first installed FC8. That didn't work because there was a kernel update from:
kernel-2.6.24.3-50.fc8 to kernel-2.6.24.4-64.fc8
which confused the nvidia driver (it went for the 3-50.fc8 kernel) but updated the current X server anyway. So I'm stuck with a half working system - I get the nvidia flash screen, but the X-server won't fire up.
I tried uninstalling the kmod-nvidia driver, but 'yum' then wants to erase a whole bunch of applications.
I resolved this by removing all nvidia drivers, removing the old kernel and reinstalling the nvidia drivers.
* better support for managing multiple desktops and multiple screens -- never got this to my liking, maybe I've too lazy to enter into a long term relationship with my window manager; each time I get it to barely tolerable, encounter some limitations, and then quickly lose interest
A couple of extra buttons on each window would help:
o Expand across another window o Expand down another window o Expand over all windows
It's not that hard. Just make sure the fonts and schemes don't change from release to release, and make sure that the media players and codecs are easily installed across the Internet, if they can be supplied on the install CD/DVD.
I find that Web browsers and E-mail work as good as they can be. The only problem with OpenOffice that I found was the problem with lots of equations in a file, but that is going to be fixed.
After upgrading to Fedora Core 8, apt-get and yum install hasn't been too bad recently, although I did encounter some bad mojo with my Nvidia drivers which turned out to be that the GL library file is now in/usr/lib/nvidia and not/usr/lib, and is not longer called libGL.so, but libGL.so.1 - I ended up just deleting everything nvidia and starting again, then got error permission with/dev/nvidiactl.
Codecs work perfectly, but the installed fonts and desktop schemes seem to change according to the preferences of the current maintainer. A workaround to this is to make a manifest of all the rpm's installed prior to upgrading to a new release, then making a manifest of the new rpm's, then doing a diff and installing the missing rpm's.
Those are minor compared to having the installed anti-virus tools on Windows slow everything down because they are are doing their full volume scans in the evening or at night. Even worse is seeing how much disk space they use up with their virus definition files - this seems to run into hundreds of megabytes now.
And with any pre-installed ISP software, you can never be quite sure what information they are sending out (CPU ID's, local username, local current user directory). Remember the reaction when Real networks was sending back the filenames of the files that users were viewing.
At least with Linux, when you set up your own connection scripts, you know exactly what information is going where.
I would second that - if I'm going to buy a new laptop I expect the display to fill the entire frame of the laptop, not have a bit "cut off" at the bottom which is replaced with the casing. That seems to be a retrograde step similar to the early laptops which only filled the center quarter of the display.
Using a basic 8x16 font with an 80x60 character grid, standard window frames for the desktop GUI, the minimum resolution is around 1280x960.
I blame certain graphics chips manufacturers for using the phrase "cinematic computing" which then led the display manufacturers to switch to cinema ratio display formats.
There was a podcast some time ago, by an university admissions tutor who stated that the "Bachelors degree had become the high-school diploma of the 21st century".
Particularly so when there are 25 graduates competing for every vacancy.
And Virgin could simply have passed the price onto their customers as subscription channels. How can it be a win for Virgin when their cable TV division has made a loss for two quarters?
According to this article, Sky have effectively lost 3.3m customers from their advertising reach, and would have to regain 200,000 subscribers to balance the books.
No doubt, there will be some proxy web sites which allow users to connect to a search engine using a shttp proxy server. And there is always the option of having a random search engine keyword submitter which runs in the background.
Already have done - After Virgin Media decided to unlaterally drop Sky One and Sky News from their channel selections, 44,000 subscribers switched to Sky. Others like myself decided to cancel their premium rate channel subscription, and pay only for broadband service. The first sign of trouble was when Virgin decided that they wouldn't "bamboozle their customers with technical details", but instead to refer to all service options using S, M, L, and XL.
Not surprisingly, Virgin are in the process of increasing their service fees (a +1 pound/month surcharge for paper bills), and an increase for daytime telephone calls, (from 3.25 pence/minute to 4.00 pence/minute) for anyone doesn't have an XL service.
Trying to extract some revenue from their content producers seems to be the next moneymaking scheme.
One is if the future of an organization is uncertain and it looks likely that it will fold.
The best term I have heard to describe that is the The Death Spiral
I have seen this happen to one company. They get money from investors, do an international job search to get good experienced programmers. But instead of putting together one good team, they try and get each experienced programmer to train up a whole load of entry-level programmers. A year later, the expected profits don't come in, so staff are fired and equipment is sold off. The experienced programmers have left out of principle because they were misled. By the time the company is left with two projects, there is nothing left of value for anyone to invest in and the company folds.
Population Dynamics and Reaction-Diffusion equations.
Good management attracts good programmers, up until all the programming jobs are filled. Some good programmers become good managers (Reaction part), while others set up their own companies (Diffusion part).
Bad management repels good programmers with their kooky rules ("You can attend one trade conference every year, but just not in the field you work in", "We always move our brightest engineers into project management"). Bad reputation reduces the number of applicants or growth. (Reaction part). Many good programmers will leave for other companies or setup their own companies. (Diffusion part).
And ISP customers may just react by cancelling their premmium rate services. A good 44,000 people cancelled their cable TV service after Virgin Media (Richard Branson) got into spat with Sky (Rupert Murdoch) over the distribution rights of Sky One and Sky News. Virgin Media are now in the situation where they are now increasing telephone and service charges on a monthly basis.
They are doing away with analog broadcasts. That leaves digital TV by terrestial broadcast, satellite dish, or cable. If anything, the BBC should be able to switch to a subscription based service.
One level deep ray-tracing is no different from triangle rasterisation, even with supersampling. The problem is when you try and do reflections with an entire scene. A single character will consist of over 10,000 triangles, and the scene itself might consist of 1 million triangles. Then you would have to find the space to store all these coordinates, textures and tangent space information (Octrees?) There were experimental systems (PixelPlanes and PixelFlow) which investigated this problem.
Intel always seemed to have bounced in and out of the graphics chip market. They jumped in just when the first graphics chips that fully supported OpenGL came out. Couldn't keep up, so jumped out, then jumped back in again once the market has consolidated. It should be easier for them now that there are only a handful of players, but then again the remaining players are much larger.
You will increase the velocity, so it will be running in a slightly slower time-frame, so you will actually get less performance.
Remember the experiment where two atomic are synchronised at ground level, then one is sent into a circular orbit around the planet. It will run at a slightly slower than the clock that remained on the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been some problems in the NHS hospital wards relating to antibiotic resistant bacteria (MRSA, clostridium difficile).
There was also problems with retirees having DNR written in their medical records by staff (Do Not Resuscitate) without ever being consulted, which meant that if someone had a heart or asthma attack, medical staff would not intervene.
And there is also a problem with asylum seekers and foreign workers being given priority over locals in areas of high demand.
There are small companies all over the country. The larger studios managed to start up back in the 1980's because there were no other industries to compete against (coal mining, ship build and steel working collapsed), so lack of any competing industries meant that the cost of renting/house buying was not an obstacle to recruiting staff.
Very few companies could afford to relocate to that nicer office blocks in the town or business parks. The first problem is that whenever they get media attention about how much new business they are getting, the first thing that the landlords do is to increase the lease, about the annual increase rate, forcing the company to move out and disrupt everyone's commute.
There has always been an official government policy of getting companies to relocate in the poor parts of the country. The main reason is that they can claim to have created jobs and turned an area around. Then there is a belief that staff will want to live locally, and that it will encourage the locals to apply for those jobs.
Unfortunately, it usually means that everyone has to commute from one side of the town/city to the other.
Anyway, city workers compete mostly with each other for the same kinds of property.
Once they have moved into an area I would agree, but it's when a particular area changes character or price, it is obvious:
School lotteries in Brighton
240,000 Second-home owners targeted in bid to save rural areas from turning into ghost towns
Nottingham's forest of housing despair
But it is in Greater Nottingham "family areas" such as Lenton, Radford, Dunkirk and Beeston where buy-to-let blight has struck the worst. Estate agents turn what would elsewhere be a three-bedroom semi into a "five to six letting room property", and a four-bedroom house is marketed as "seven to eight letting rooms".
"Nothing is sold in the normal way," says Ms Fletcher. "With each student paying around £3,500 a year, landlords can earn about 8.5% on their investments. Even before tax relief, that's substantially more than the cost of borrowing, so they can outbid families. Estate agents have no interest in selling to parents with children. Investors pay more so there is more commission."
City chiefs crack down on buy-to-let
Even if people try and move to the other end of the country, houses in good area of the city are still expensive:
Highland House Prices
For Highland as a whole the median price for a previously owned house by 2006 was £136,000 - an increase of £33,000.
The Scottish figure was £114,000, a £24,000 increase.
Two of the most expensive areas for houses are Inverness Ness-side and Inverness South where median prices are about £140,000 and £160,000.
their anti-terrorism laws were mostly used for cases of minor frauds
Especially so in the case of parents falsely claiming the location of their home address in order to get their children to a good school:
Parents stalked for three weeks by city council spies
All areas are expensive now. The UK is currently experiencing a housing shortage in the South of England and Scotland due to immigration and growth. They need to build at least 120,000 homes/year just to match growth. One solution has been "garden grabbing" where devlopers buy up a house with a large garden, and convert it into a block of flats which are sold to the "Buy-to-Let" market for minimum wage foreign workers.
Another problem is that of (some say overpaid) city workers who earn 100K+ pounds/year + bonuses who are buying everything up. They will buy a house in the outer suburbs of London for work (Home Counties), a house in the countryside for the weekends, and a flat or two for their children in the cities, when they become students. Needless to say, this does have a effect of pricing the locals out - the UK is currently experiencing a migration of 700K nationals/year due to this as well as the increasing Islamic population in the inner city suburbs.
Banks were encouraged to allow first-time buyers to borrow up to 5x their salary, using 100% mortgages.
With interest rates going up and the cost of food going up by 20%/years, this might just change.
Like this? Scientists make Darkest material ever made
Send in the bailliffs :)
Customer sends bailiffs in to seize bank's computers
You don't need to cancel your entire service to make a protest, you just need to switch to a lower tier service. In the case of broadband, that would mean dropping down from XL (20Mb) to L(10Mb), or down to M (2Mb), although the savings are not that much.
Virgin Media Deals
Yes, but you wouldn't believe how many punched cards it takes to store the kernel image.
Yes, I did - that's what I did when I first installed FC8. That didn't work because there was a kernel update from:
kernel-2.6.24.3-50.fc8 to kernel-2.6.24.4-64.fc8
which confused the nvidia driver (it went for the 3-50.fc8 kernel) but updated the current X server anyway. So I'm stuck with a half working system - I get the nvidia flash screen, but the X-server won't fire up.
I tried uninstalling the kmod-nvidia driver, but 'yum' then wants to erase a whole bunch of applications.
I resolved this by removing all nvidia drivers, removing the old kernel and reinstalling the nvidia drivers.
* better support for managing multiple desktops and multiple screens -- never got this to my liking, maybe I've too lazy to enter into a long term relationship with my window manager; each time I get it to barely tolerable, encounter some limitations, and then quickly lose interest
A couple of extra buttons on each window would help:
o Expand across another window
o Expand down another window
o Expand over all windows
Rather that just minimize and maximize/restore.
It's not that hard. Just make sure the fonts and schemes don't change from release to release, and make sure that the media players and codecs are easily installed across the Internet, if they can be supplied on the install CD/DVD.
I find that Web browsers and E-mail work as good as they can be. The only problem with OpenOffice that I found was the problem with lots of equations in a file, but that is going to be fixed.
After upgrading to Fedora Core 8, apt-get and yum install hasn't been too bad recently, although I did encounter some bad mojo with my Nvidia drivers which turned out to be that the GL library file is now in /usr/lib/nvidia and not /usr/lib, and is not longer called libGL.so, but libGL.so.1 - I ended up just deleting everything nvidia and starting again, then got error permission with /dev/nvidiactl.
Codecs work perfectly, but the installed fonts and desktop schemes seem to change according to the preferences of the current maintainer. A workaround to this is to make a manifest of all the rpm's installed prior to upgrading to a new release, then making a manifest of the new rpm's, then doing a diff and installing the missing rpm's.
Those are minor compared to having the installed anti-virus tools on Windows slow everything down because they are are doing their full volume scans in the evening or at night. Even worse is seeing how much disk space they use up with their virus definition files - this seems to run into hundreds of megabytes now.
And with any pre-installed ISP software, you can never be quite sure what information they are sending out (CPU ID's, local username, local current user directory). Remember the reaction when Real networks was sending back the filenames of the files that users were viewing.
At least with Linux, when you set up your own connection scripts, you know exactly what information is going where.
I would second that - if I'm going to buy a new laptop I expect the display to fill the entire frame of the laptop, not have a bit "cut off" at the bottom which is replaced with the casing. That seems to be a retrograde step similar to the early laptops which only filled the center quarter of the display.
Using a basic 8x16 font with an 80x60 character grid, standard window frames for the desktop GUI, the minimum resolution is around 1280x960.
I blame certain graphics chips manufacturers for using the phrase "cinematic computing" which then led the display manufacturers to switch to cinema ratio display formats.
There was a podcast some time ago, by an university admissions tutor who stated that the "Bachelors degree had become the high-school diploma of the 21st century".
Particularly so when there are 25 graduates competing for every vacancy.
And Virgin could simply have passed the price onto their customers as subscription channels. How can it be a win for Virgin when their cable TV division has made a loss for two quarters?
According to this article, Sky have effectively lost 3.3m customers from their advertising reach, and would have to regain 200,000 subscribers to balance the books.
The name calling continues Burch calls Sky behaving like school bully.
No doubt, there will be some proxy web sites which allow users to connect to a search engine using a shttp proxy server. And there is always the option of having a random search engine keyword submitter which runs in the background.
Already have done - After Virgin Media decided to unlaterally drop Sky One and Sky News from their channel selections, 44,000 subscribers switched to Sky. Others like myself decided to cancel their premium rate channel subscription, and pay only for broadband service. The first sign of trouble was when Virgin decided that they wouldn't "bamboozle their customers with technical details", but instead to refer to all service options using S, M, L, and XL.
Digital Spy forums have in-depth discussions about Virgins financial status. In particular "Virgin Media TV channels have posted a loss for the past two quarters."
Not surprisingly, Virgin are in the process of increasing their service fees (a +1 pound/month surcharge for paper bills), and an increase for daytime telephone calls, (from 3.25 pence/minute to 4.00 pence/minute) for anyone doesn't have an XL service.
Trying to extract some revenue from their content producers seems to be the next moneymaking scheme.
One is if the future of an organization is uncertain and it looks likely that it will fold.
The best term I have heard to describe that is the The Death Spiral
I have seen this happen to one company. They get money from investors, do an international job search to get good experienced programmers. But instead of putting together one good team, they try and get each experienced programmer to train up a whole load of entry-level programmers. A year later, the expected profits don't come in, so staff are fired and equipment is sold off. The experienced programmers have left out of principle because they were misled. By the time the company is left with two projects, there is nothing left of value for anyone to invest in and the company folds.
Population Dynamics and Reaction-Diffusion equations.
Good management attracts good programmers, up until all the programming jobs are filled. Some good programmers become good managers (Reaction part), while others set up their own companies (Diffusion part).
Bad management repels good programmers with their kooky rules ("You can attend one trade conference every year, but just not in the field you work in", "We always move our brightest engineers into project management"). Bad reputation reduces the number of applicants or growth. (Reaction part). Many good programmers will leave for other companies or setup their own companies. (Diffusion part).
And ISP customers may just react by cancelling their premmium rate services. A good 44,000 people cancelled their cable TV service after Virgin Media (Richard Branson) got into spat with Sky (Rupert Murdoch) over the distribution rights of Sky One and Sky News. Virgin Media are now in the situation where they are now increasing telephone and service charges on a monthly basis.
They are doing away with analog broadcasts. That leaves digital TV by terrestial broadcast, satellite dish, or cable. If anything, the BBC should be able to switch to a subscription based service.
One level deep ray-tracing is no different from triangle rasterisation, even with supersampling. The problem is when you try and do reflections with an entire scene. A single character will consist of over 10,000 triangles, and the scene itself might consist of 1 million triangles. Then you would have to find the space to store all these coordinates, textures and tangent space information (Octrees?)
There were experimental systems (PixelPlanes and PixelFlow) which investigated this problem.
Intel always seemed to have bounced in and out of the graphics chip market. They jumped in just when the first graphics chips that fully supported OpenGL came out. Couldn't keep up, so jumped out, then jumped back in again once the market has consolidated. It should be easier for them now that there are only a handful of players, but then again the remaining players are much larger.
You will increase the velocity, so it will be running in a slightly slower time-frame, so you will actually get less performance.
Remember the experiment where two atomic are synchronised at ground level, then one is sent into a circular orbit around the planet. It will run at a slightly slower than the clock that remained on the surface.