But seriously, this sounds interesting. If they actually manage to pull it off, this might actually make TV on the go a real possibility (compared to strain your neck trying to watch Sex and the City on your phone...).
Now the only question is, how heavy is the battery to allow for such a long lasting device. You can't tell me it actually is this efficient, if it boasts that kind of computational power.
I didn't read TFA, but since heise.de just brought an anouncement that Toshiba is planning to kill Blu-Ray by introducing a normal DVD player with enhanced upscaling... Is this the same thing or are they betting on two horses?
Well, I for one would miss it dearly. I want my food to have been able to howl, grunt, moo, snort or what the hell.
And besides, not eating meat doesn't solve all that much of the problem. Cows don't eat crop. They eat grass. That's the stuff we usually don't eat. That's the stuff that grows even where wheat doesn't. Sheep eat... well, damn, everything! They can produce food digestable by humans through stuff that isn't digestable. Humans call it processing, nature does it since forever and a day.
Meals containing no animal fats just don't sate me and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone. Considering that I can go one day on one good steak with a filling side dish, while I get hungry in mere hours from the side dish alone... I am a carnivore. I know that. My body has made that completely clear.
Well, in case of the EU it was probably more a question of having a backup for when Bush would go completely crazy. A lot of people here actually expected one or more central european countries to be counted among the axis of evil sooner or later.
So let me extend my post: You need your own either when you know you're gonna piss the owner of the system in place off or when you expect them to completely go down the deep end sooner rather than later.
Me being a European, both possibilities scare the living shit out of me.
Why do they want their own if it doesn't do anything the others don't?
The question is simple: If you're using something that is owned and controlled by someone else and you plan on pissing them off, you need your own. And that is what makes this bad news.
Hear the noise change to thunder of epic proportions? That's the world choking on their own set of similar problems because they wasted their time laughing at a bad example instead of learning from it.
Your optimism concerning the rest of the world is very heartening and cute in a naive way.
Actually living in Europe I can tell you it's no better here than it is over there. We're just lagging behind a bit. Give us time, we'll show you guys that we can have ourselves fucked up the arse without lube and rubber just as well as you can.
Indeed, it takes a pure genious to make exciting films out of that kind of base material. How he managed to make people actually stay in the theaters for over thirty minutes when the story actually revolved around something Tolkien has written will forever remain a mystery to me.
Now do proceed marking me Troll, I don't care. I'll stand by my opinion that from a literary point of view, Tolkien's written garbage. While the guy did a fabulous job 'inventing' whole races and languages and so forth, the writing still remains atrocious.
As much as it irks me, dogmas seem to have been introduced into science that, for some people, make it akin to religion.
I've come across enough people who would discard experience and things they have seen or felt personally if only enough studies had been made saying the opposite.
Science works only when people question everything other scientists have found out by thoroughly checking their data and their results to make sure that there has been no mistake and no misinterpretation of statistics or whatever. Enough people seem to be happy to ignore that.
Excuse me? Ready for the masses? Where? I've been working in IT for years and tinkering with computers for about 15 years now so I'd say I've come across my share of problems and I've mostly been able to solve them myself or with the aid of, then, AltaVista and google.
That being said, I tried to install Ubuntu a month or two ago. Well, it appears that the graphical installation is shot. Whatever I did, it wouldn't run on my now at least one year old machine. So I had to download the text install version.
I have two SATA Harddrives in there. One houses XP which I won't get rid of until Cedega actually manages to run ALL my effing games without 'minor problems'. Did you know that I've been partitioning with the likes of fdisk and cfdisk back in those days? Did you know I've been able to do a dual boot as a sixteen year old kid back in those days with an ancient version of SuSE?
Well, don't go believing I was able to partition the disks the way I wanted with Ubuntu because Ubuntu is made for the masses and the masses obviously don't have a need for partitioning more than one drive because the drive I wanted to partition just didn't show up.
What did install eventually was Mandriva. And it worked... mostly. Except I have two monitors with different resolutions... Man, THAT was unpleasant but after days of scouring message boards and trying to get familiar with xorg.conf I managed even that. My scanner isn't supported in linux it seems, so there goes that idea.
Frankly, perhaps it's just me but on every damn try I run into stupid little problems which take me hours or even days to solve. As long as that remains the case, Linux for the masses remains a myth. As long as we don't have doubleclickable install files that guide us through software installation, as long as we have to set up repositories and work with dependancies that go beyond "you need Java!" Linux is definitely NOT ready for average desktop users.
And to those who'd like to mod me a troll, I'm the first person throwing a party the day I can just replace windows with linux. But at the moment I don't have the time to spend hours tinkering with my box. I need that damn piece of equipment to just work.
'Many of us'? What is 'many'? Because it's obviously still only a small percentage of the whole population... if 'many' stood for any sizable portion of the population, you wouldn't be in the mess you're in now.
Let's face it, most people are cowards and that's never going to change.
If there was really that much involved in pop-music we wouldn't turn up our noses at it like we do.
It's a sad fact that this 'consumable fashion item' we call pop-music nowadays mostly consists of remixes of old songs (usually just overlayed with some heavy beats) with some production line peroxide blondie 'singing' either the original lyrics or some new stuff. pop-hiphop isn't any better. Take a classic, throw some base drums in and 'rap' about bitches, money and all the luxury items you own.
And when said blondie doesn't cut it as a singer, use a computer program to make it sound 'good'. Our company had some musicians over at an event. We were all supposed to sing a 'company song' together (you know, motivational crap...). It sounded like someone was torturing a hundred cats and three babies. Then they showed us how they went about it all, a little echo here, a small change of pitch there and voila, it was reduced to merely twenty cats and half a baby.
Seriously, that is not music. That is the china-produced clothing of music. It is cheap, sold at a hefty price.
I am interested to speculate on how the feudal Japanese would have perceived stock brokers and managers. A merchant at least transports goods and makes available several types of goods (usually) at a single location and often in greater quantity than one single producer can provide. But what economical worth does a stock broker have? Those guys make money by moving property around. There is no gain to the activity, yet those guys actually demand to be paid for it. They get money for doing something that gives the community nothing.
If you want to know why your IT department is hated, ask yourself how you treat your customers. Do you treat them as your bosses, or as your enemies?
Neither is a good idea. You should treat your customers as exactly that: Customers. They are not your boss. Your boss is in a situation where he wields power over you and should have at least a little insight in the field you operate in. With customers, that usually isn't the case at all.
Treating them as enemies, of course, is stupid. But the above isn't much better.
Whenever I've come across an obnoxious IT staff, it's usually been like that for two distinctive reasons:
1: For some reason, there's a shortage in IT personel, and these guys are milking it for what it's worth. There's also a possibility that they belong to the most senior of workers and are all chummy with the CEO, thus creating a perceived lack of alternative.
2: They've been treated too badly for too long. They are now fed-up and until they get the boot or find a new job, you're in for payback.
To option number one I'll say it's the CEO's fault. If you go and give some of your staff this much leeway or are not willing to offer interesting condictions to new staff (there's always someone who can do the job you offer... the question is are you ready to pay them?), it's your own damn fault. Live with it.
To option number two I say: Serves you right. I hope they make your life hell for as long as possible you damned slavedriver.
Which address bar feature are we talking about? Because if you're talking about this avalanche of text that really doesn't interest me but does a terrific job of getting in the way of actually finding the URL I'm looking for then I'll have to say I, for one, am not impressed.
So just because you can't get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning means you should get more sunlight in the evening... right. What about those who enjoy a quiet morning stroll in the park before they go to work? What about all of us who take weeks, two times a year, to get their sleeping under control because their internal clock gets all messed up? Do I need to walk around like a zombie for days afterwards (again, twice a year!) just because YOU think nature has to adapt to your schedule?
I still say build some nuclear power plants and drive fully electric cars to begin with. Using H2 from electrolysis is just wasteful as the process itself isn't 100% efficient nor is the engine.
As I understand it, you Americans could use an upgraded powergrid anyway, so why not go all the way, and build it for the future, with enough capacity to recharge your car at home?
With current nuclear technoligy, efficiency and waste are comparably small problems. And there'd be no CO2 or any other harmful gases poured into our atmosphere.
How on earth is a thong for kids a reason for people becoming pedophiles?
Believe it or not, a lot of women wear thongs because they feel comfortable in them, not to look sexy. Now what the hell is wrong with kids feeling comfortable in their underwear? Just because YOUR dirty mind equals thongs to sexuality doesn't mean everyone else is wired the same way.
You do realize that the temperature in the passenger box is usually higher than, say, in the trunk or under the hood (when the engine wasn't running)? Windows, man. It's called a greenhouse effect.
You sign a contract which says you have to work x hours to get y salary. Nobody complains about having to work more, once in a while. Now in your example, you calculate about half an hour a day of overtime. I don't know whether anyone would sue over that but I personally know people who work like an hour or two overtime (not at IBM) every single day. So assuming some of those who sued are working like that then it's 12 to 25% more work than they signed a contract for.
Basically, IBM is saying "You don't want us to take a dump on this contract of ours? No problem, we'll just take a dump on your head instead and cut your salary. There, now remember to not fuck with us again when we want to screw you. Oh, that reminds me, send your wife over this weekend... I'm a little horny."
The times when you had to spread your asscheeks and take it up yours just to even HAVE a job should be over. IBM should be sued to hell, back, and right to hell again for trying to go back to those good ole days. IBM should honor their workforce who is willing to roll up their sleeves for their company and actually get shit done (assuming those overtimers do get shit done... if not it's the bosses job to fire them). What they do is basically expecting everyone to work 10 to 20% more than they get paid for. Anyone who thinks that's fair is hereby invited to send me a monthly 10% of their salary to my Paypal account.
Also even if they knew that files had been traded over a NIC with his MAC... so what? They'd still have to prove that it was him doing it. Technically, he could have attached a WiFi router and registered that MAC adress and then it could have been anyone doing the downloading.
I'd prefer a system where I could generate a credit card number every time I made a purchase online. Naturally, this is not going to work in stores or such, but at least online you could limit the damage one could do because the number works just once. Furthermore by noting where you've used the number you'd know exactly who has been leaking or misusing your number.
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Do we get cool black suits and guns? Lotsa guns?? ;)
But seriously, this sounds interesting. If they actually manage to pull it off, this might actually make TV on the go a real possibility (compared to strain your neck trying to watch Sex and the City on your phone...).
Now the only question is, how heavy is the battery to allow for such a long lasting device. You can't tell me it actually is this efficient, if it boasts that kind of computational power.
I didn't read TFA, but since heise.de just brought an anouncement that Toshiba is planning to kill Blu-Ray by introducing a normal DVD player with enhanced upscaling... Is this the same thing or are they betting on two horses?
The heise article is here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Toshiba-setzt-Kampf-gegen-Blu-ray-Disc-mit-einem-DVD-Player-fort--/meldung/108830
Well, technically, I'm an omnivore, but it is a close call...
Well, I for one would miss it dearly. I want my food to have been able to howl, grunt, moo, snort or what the hell.
And besides, not eating meat doesn't solve all that much of the problem. Cows don't eat crop. They eat grass. That's the stuff we usually don't eat. That's the stuff that grows even where wheat doesn't. Sheep eat... well, damn, everything! They can produce food digestable by humans through stuff that isn't digestable. Humans call it processing, nature does it since forever and a day.
Meals containing no animal fats just don't sate me and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone. Considering that I can go one day on one good steak with a filling side dish, while I get hungry in mere hours from the side dish alone... I am a carnivore. I know that. My body has made that completely clear.
Well, in case of the EU it was probably more a question of having a backup for when Bush would go completely crazy. A lot of people here actually expected one or more central european countries to be counted among the axis of evil sooner or later.
So let me extend my post: You need your own either when you know you're gonna piss the owner of the system in place off or when you expect them to completely go down the deep end sooner rather than later.
Me being a European, both possibilities scare the living shit out of me.
The question that needs to be answered is:
Why do they want their own if it doesn't do anything the others don't?
The question is simple: If you're using something that is owned and controlled by someone else and you plan on pissing them off, you need your own. And that is what makes this bad news.
Hear the noise change to thunder of epic proportions? That's the world choking on their own set of similar problems because they wasted their time laughing at a bad example instead of learning from it.
Your optimism concerning the rest of the world is very heartening and cute in a naive way.
Actually living in Europe I can tell you it's no better here than it is over there. We're just lagging behind a bit. Give us time, we'll show you guys that we can have ourselves fucked up the arse without lube and rubber just as well as you can.
Indeed, it takes a pure genious to make exciting films out of that kind of base material. How he managed to make people actually stay in the theaters for over thirty minutes when the story actually revolved around something Tolkien has written will forever remain a mystery to me.
Now do proceed marking me Troll, I don't care. I'll stand by my opinion that from a literary point of view, Tolkien's written garbage. While the guy did a fabulous job 'inventing' whole races and languages and so forth, the writing still remains atrocious.
You forgot scientists.
As much as it irks me, dogmas seem to have been introduced into science that, for some people, make it akin to religion.
I've come across enough people who would discard experience and things they have seen or felt personally if only enough studies had been made saying the opposite.
Science works only when people question everything other scientists have found out by thoroughly checking their data and their results to make sure that there has been no mistake and no misinterpretation of statistics or whatever. Enough people seem to be happy to ignore that.
Excuse me? Ready for the masses? Where? I've been working in IT for years and tinkering with computers for about 15 years now so I'd say I've come across my share of problems and I've mostly been able to solve them myself or with the aid of, then, AltaVista and google.
That being said, I tried to install Ubuntu a month or two ago. Well, it appears that the graphical installation is shot. Whatever I did, it wouldn't run on my now at least one year old machine. So I had to download the text install version.
I have two SATA Harddrives in there. One houses XP which I won't get rid of until Cedega actually manages to run ALL my effing games without 'minor problems'. Did you know that I've been partitioning with the likes of fdisk and cfdisk back in those days? Did you know I've been able to do a dual boot as a sixteen year old kid back in those days with an ancient version of SuSE?
Well, don't go believing I was able to partition the disks the way I wanted with Ubuntu because Ubuntu is made for the masses and the masses obviously don't have a need for partitioning more than one drive because the drive I wanted to partition just didn't show up.
What did install eventually was Mandriva. And it worked... mostly. Except I have two monitors with different resolutions... Man, THAT was unpleasant but after days of scouring message boards and trying to get familiar with xorg.conf I managed even that. My scanner isn't supported in linux it seems, so there goes that idea.
Frankly, perhaps it's just me but on every damn try I run into stupid little problems which take me hours or even days to solve. As long as that remains the case, Linux for the masses remains a myth. As long as we don't have doubleclickable install files that guide us through software installation, as long as we have to set up repositories and work with dependancies that go beyond "you need Java!" Linux is definitely NOT ready for average desktop users.
And to those who'd like to mod me a troll, I'm the first person throwing a party the day I can just replace windows with linux. But at the moment I don't have the time to spend hours tinkering with my box. I need that damn piece of equipment to just work.
'Many of us'? What is 'many'? Because it's obviously still only a small percentage of the whole population... if 'many' stood for any sizable portion of the population, you wouldn't be in the mess you're in now.
Let's face it, most people are cowards and that's never going to change.
If there was really that much involved in pop-music we wouldn't turn up our noses at it like we do.
It's a sad fact that this 'consumable fashion item' we call pop-music nowadays mostly consists of remixes of old songs (usually just overlayed with some heavy beats) with some production line peroxide blondie 'singing' either the original lyrics or some new stuff. pop-hiphop isn't any better. Take a classic, throw some base drums in and 'rap' about bitches, money and all the luxury items you own.
And when said blondie doesn't cut it as a singer, use a computer program to make it sound 'good'. Our company had some musicians over at an event. We were all supposed to sing a 'company song' together (you know, motivational crap...). It sounded like someone was torturing a hundred cats and three babies. Then they showed us how they went about it all, a little echo here, a small change of pitch there and voila, it was reduced to merely twenty cats and half a baby.
Seriously, that is not music. That is the china-produced clothing of music. It is cheap, sold at a hefty price.
I am interested to speculate on how the feudal Japanese would have perceived stock brokers and managers. A merchant at least transports goods and makes available several types of goods (usually) at a single location and often in greater quantity than one single producer can provide. But what economical worth does a stock broker have? Those guys make money by moving property around. There is no gain to the activity, yet those guys actually demand to be paid for it. They get money for doing something that gives the community nothing.
Neither is a good idea. You should treat your customers as exactly that: Customers. They are not your boss. Your boss is in a situation where he wields power over you and should have at least a little insight in the field you operate in. With customers, that usually isn't the case at all.If you want to know why your IT department is hated, ask yourself how you treat your customers. Do you treat them as your bosses, or as your enemies?
Treating them as enemies, of course, is stupid. But the above isn't much better.
Whenever I've come across an obnoxious IT staff, it's usually been like that for two distinctive reasons:
1: For some reason, there's a shortage in IT personel, and these guys are milking it for what it's worth. There's also a possibility that they belong to the most senior of workers and are all chummy with the CEO, thus creating a perceived lack of alternative.
2: They've been treated too badly for too long. They are now fed-up and until they get the boot or find a new job, you're in for payback.
To option number one I'll say it's the CEO's fault. If you go and give some of your staff this much leeway or are not willing to offer interesting condictions to new staff (there's always someone who can do the job you offer... the question is are you ready to pay them?), it's your own damn fault. Live with it.
To option number two I say: Serves you right. I hope they make your life hell for as long as possible you damned slavedriver.
Which address bar feature are we talking about? Because if you're talking about this avalanche of text that really doesn't interest me but does a terrific job of getting in the way of actually finding the URL I'm looking for then I'll have to say I, for one, am not impressed.
Is there a way to turn that off?
So just because you can't get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning means you should get more sunlight in the evening... right. What about those who enjoy a quiet morning stroll in the park before they go to work? What about all of us who take weeks, two times a year, to get their sleeping under control because their internal clock gets all messed up? Do I need to walk around like a zombie for days afterwards (again, twice a year!) just because YOU think nature has to adapt to your schedule?
I still say build some nuclear power plants and drive fully electric cars to begin with. Using H2 from electrolysis is just wasteful as the process itself isn't 100% efficient nor is the engine.
As I understand it, you Americans could use an upgraded powergrid anyway, so why not go all the way, and build it for the future, with enough capacity to recharge your car at home?
With current nuclear technoligy, efficiency and waste are comparably small problems. And there'd be no CO2 or any other harmful gases poured into our atmosphere.
Hey, I think the Brits will happily take the Euro as soon as the US starts using the metric system ;).
How on earth is a thong for kids a reason for people becoming pedophiles?
Believe it or not, a lot of women wear thongs because they feel comfortable in them, not to look sexy. Now what the hell is wrong with kids feeling comfortable in their underwear? Just because YOUR dirty mind equals thongs to sexuality doesn't mean everyone else is wired the same way.
You do realize that the temperature in the passenger box is usually higher than, say, in the trunk or under the hood (when the engine wasn't running)? Windows, man. It's called a greenhouse effect.
Now that is bullshit.
You sign a contract which says you have to work x hours to get y salary. Nobody complains about having to work more, once in a while. Now in your example, you calculate about half an hour a day of overtime. I don't know whether anyone would sue over that but I personally know people who work like an hour or two overtime (not at IBM) every single day. So assuming some of those who sued are working like that then it's 12 to 25% more work than they signed a contract for.
Basically, IBM is saying "You don't want us to take a dump on this contract of ours? No problem, we'll just take a dump on your head instead and cut your salary. There, now remember to not fuck with us again when we want to screw you. Oh, that reminds me, send your wife over this weekend... I'm a little horny."
The times when you had to spread your asscheeks and take it up yours just to even HAVE a job should be over. IBM should be sued to hell, back, and right to hell again for trying to go back to those good ole days. IBM should honor their workforce who is willing to roll up their sleeves for their company and actually get shit done (assuming those overtimers do get shit done... if not it's the bosses job to fire them). What they do is basically expecting everyone to work 10 to 20% more than they get paid for. Anyone who thinks that's fair is hereby invited to send me a monthly 10% of their salary to my Paypal account.
Also even if they knew that files had been traded over a NIC with his MAC... so what? They'd still have to prove that it was him doing it. Technically, he could have attached a WiFi router and registered that MAC adress and then it could have been anyone doing the downloading.
I'd prefer a system where I could generate a credit card number every time I made a purchase online. Naturally, this is not going to work in stores or such, but at least online you could limit the damage one could do because the number works just once. Furthermore by noting where you've used the number you'd know exactly who has been leaking or misusing your number.