The issue is that when you are dealing with someone like that - when they have a deep and utter conviction they do not listen to anyone except their inner voices. If it was purely self-interest then it would be possible to perhaps persuade him otherwise.
Tony Blair is exceptionally intelligent man with absolute faith in his beliefs. He believes in the identity card system. He also believed that Afghanistan was now Taliban free and invading Iraq was a good idea to solve terrorism.
He seems to ignore the frequency with which the existing Police National Computer system is abused by both civillians and force members. He also seems to ignore the existing government success rate with major IT projects. Lastly he seems to ignore the problems with biometric ID card systems.
Absolute conviction in your own beliefs is extremely dangerous in a politician. It makes you blind to better counsel.
Its a bit hard to send them to Kiev or Odessa - they are in the Ukraine not the Russian Federation. Lenningrad = St. Petersburg, the best city in Russia. I would recommend somewhere like Kamchatka. That is about as remote as you can get whilst still being in the Russian Federation.
From my brief stint in this area, GPUs have a number of advertised features, some of which may work well and some require a lot of help from the driver. Generally speaking, a GPU is quite cutting edge and it simply can't cope with everything you could throw at it. My feeling is that the silicon goes out to market a lot earlier than the quivalent CPU with the expectation that the driver fixes the problems (usually at the expense of some performance).
It is my belief that an open driver would expose those flaws forcing the vendors to improve their mask quality levels. The problem is that fixing the silicon may increase time to market and unit costs.
Lastly I should emphasise that GPUs have changed a lot since I did drivers. I can only extrapolate from what I saw in the early days. However since the silicon is now much more complicated, I can only imagine the problems have increased accordingly.
Many years ago, I worked for a manufacturer and wrote a graphics driver. This was a long time ago and on ancient hardware, so I won't name names. If I write a disk driver, the thing is fairly basic and the hardware exposes basic functionality, which most people can get right. A graphics processor, particularly with 3D shading support is *exceptionally* complex. To get it running properly, you not only have to know how it works but what doesn' and usually for several different variation of a chip mask. We didn't make the graphics chip but were able to get some documentation on the known issues when signing our corporate life away in NDAs.
The end result is a composite of software, microcode and hardware that sort-of works. Trying to do the same with open source is exceptionally difficult because it means you have to know the problems so that you can workaround them. Manufacturers really don't like people (especially their competitors) finding out about those issues, hence the NDA.
It is down to the star system. There are any number of good actors knocking around and Bruce is one. Hollywood likes to create a shortage as so many people like to live off percentages. There have been plenty of good stars too, but Hollywood prefers a person who has looks but little real talent, so is emminently replaceable.
You want a bit of aggression? What about Formula-1 and Michael Schumacher? As a driver, you really didn't want to be in his way. There may be plenty of greens around but they aren't driving 200km/h down the autobahn. Every so often there is a discussion about restricting the unrestricted parts of the system but that gets shouted down.
Just because the jetstream acts like a weather system divider for the UK doesn't mean to say similar things aren't happening in continental Europe. I ski regularly in the Alps, mostly Austria and Switzerland. I assure you that snow isn't just disappearing from the Cairngorms, because you won't see much of it at the lower resorts in the Alps either.
They finally have reported a reasonable dump of snow in Moscow & St. Petersburg. Both had no snow over the new year. the only place that has had good snow is North America. Unfortunately, you can't find decent Apres there.
That's the lie of the statement that 25% of all Windows installs are illegal. How can that be when almost every computer already comes with the license.
At one stage this was probably due to OS upgrades. People could go from, for example, Win95 to Win98. It won't be true now because the hop to XP required to much of a hardware upgrade. If you bought that new computer then you may as well get a license to go with it.
Double-dipping from Microsoft happens as well. My client is a major bank. They get our PCs with XP Professional (the stickers are still on the cases). However, they deploy with volume licenses. Many large organisations are like this. Sure the client doesn't pay retail but it isn't exactly zero price when every one of their tens of thousands of employees is running XP.
Microsoft's argument is that the PCs get sold on after a few years and this way, they are certain that the PCs remain licensed.
Most explosves are based on nitrates, especially commercial ones because of their stability and energy density. Yes, the bad guys can move to something else, but it makes manufacture more difficult and increases the risk of detonation before deployment or squibs (the chappati bombs used in the UK).
Isn't this more to do with the difficulties in prosecuting format shifting? If I format shift a CD to my MP3 player, who is going to know about it? If I format shift to a shared drive on my home network, again who is going to know about it? If I then share that drive by whatever program with the world then the RIAA is going to have a file name and an IP address to chase.
If I buy a CD in Russia produced by a copyright licensee in Russia then that item is probably fine to take back to the US especially if I don't want to resell it. The chain of rights is clear. Sony US gave rights to Sony Russia, for example and they produced something for the local market that is perhaps differently priced to the US.
If I order a CD by post from Russia that was produced by a valid copyright licensee, I would guess that CD would be legal? Certainly, unless the item was a counterfeit, US Customs would not be interested. Russia does at least in theory subscribe to the Berne Convention
AllofMP3.com claim that they have acquired rights to sell MP3s from their website in Russia, presumably they have acquired the rights from the Russian licensees. The transaction occurred in Russia, so the only fly in the ointment is if the US copyright owner says that the right to sell an MP3 was never granted to the sublicensee.
I was more involved with the currency exchanges (they also trade shares), They tended towards HP-UX with Informix. The same applied, I believe to the DCC (Depository Clearing Company), which served RTS, MICEX and so on. When I stopped working so much with Russia, thre was a big movement towards LinTel on the server side as the HP servers were expensive to run. The joke is that a lot of the Lintel platforms were deployed by stealth.
I know that there is a big project on to reform the depository/clearing system and that some western consultancies are involved. They would almost certainly push Microsoft.
(Had something to do with trading and settlement reform in Russia)
Nah, its probably Informix or something (MICEX used it).
The issue is that the trading may use a sophisticated database, but there is still a lot of stuff going in the background where they use.doc files,.pdfs and.zips. This is all linked to the end of day processing at the exchange and is also vital. Note that the backend is usually *ux but the frontends tend to be Wintel and thus are vulnerable.
The STASI and KGB had a massive problem, they just didn't have the data handling power. In the case of the STASI, the voice intercepts mostly ended up being taped and transcribed using typewriters. As far as data intercepts were concerned, it is doubtful that they even bothered with anything other than high value targets. In any case, they were both much better at humint, i.e. better send an agent to have an affair with the chancellor's secretary than bother with trying to decrypt military communications.
In the early days of NASA (up through the lunar program), it was seen to be where the 'real engineers' went.
Sure, private industry would always pay more, but the space program was where it was at. Engineers/scientists in or contracted to NASA were known for being able to achieve wonders, and they did (for example, look at thie history of the LEM).
Now it is seen to be a bureaucratic mess, more suited for the MBAs.
Interesting point but Google has direct contact with users via its search-engine and so on where HP and Digital never had the opportunity. In their respective hay-days HP and Digital were hideden to most people unless you looked hard. With Google, it is already very visible so it has a good platform to reach out to potential clients with new product ideas.
I worked at DEC as an external contractor a few times. Management was frustrating though and marketing almost non-existant. The catch phrase was "Digital make watches don't they?" after something a temp said during an interview.
However, for a while engineers worked almost in spite of management and certainly weren't led. Remember the story about Cutler getting RSX-11M to work on an 11/70 as a weekend hack, "just for testing". It then meant the demise of IAS and RSX-11D two very much older systems that needed retirement.
There were so many interesting ideas being developed in-house and so few ever getting out to the field. I met a few good sales types at DEC, but many were hopeless and badly informed about products. The joke when working at customer sites was the effort we had to persuade DEC to sell us something.
I have the (mis)fortune to fly via Heathrow T1 a lot of the time so I suddenly saw the Google sign yesterday in the international departures area and had a quick look.
Heathrow T1 is heavily covered by commercial hot-spots. I can't imagine anyone (except the passengers) being happy if Google offered free coverage. There were people there, but they were hardly queueing for seats (there was a couple of spaces free when I had my look). However some ten metres away people were happily using a pay-hotspot organised by T-mobile. They could use their own PCs (big advantage). Hey, if the company is paying, where is the problem?
As a frequent flyer, I have access to a lounge. Although the lounge has only pay-hot-spots, they have a free internet cafe and being an airline lounge, free drinks and munchies. There having been a number of delayed flights earlier, the munchies were limited but at least I could sit there with a free orange juice.
Re:Not the same for the Navigation Box
on
Airbus A380 Under Fire
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For the A320, all critical systems used a minimum of two chip architectures and 3 independent software solutions working from the same closely controlled spec but otherwise not communicating. A friend worked on one of the computers there.
I can't see what would be different for the 380. the only point is whether the pressure control system was considered to be critical enough to be fully backed up.
And many people with mobile phones *do* have a problem with their screens. Is your Samsung a clamshell? In such cases the smaller external screen seems to be a bit better protected.
here are rumors that macromedia is demanding to be paid an undisclosed amount for every machine that has flash player on it here
This is already the case for phones, Yep, phones (particularly 3G) are seen to be one of the big markets for Flash and several manufacturers already licrnse the player. Not so good when that bandwidth costs.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is that when you are dealing with someone like that - when they have a deep and utter conviction they do not listen to anyone except their inner voices. If it was purely self-interest then it would be possible to perhaps persuade him otherwise.
Tony Blair is exceptionally intelligent man with absolute faith in his beliefs. He believes in the identity card system. He also believed that Afghanistan was now Taliban free and invading Iraq was a good idea to solve terrorism.
He seems to ignore the frequency with which the existing Police National Computer system is abused by both civillians and force members. He also seems to ignore the existing government success rate with major IT projects. Lastly he seems to ignore the problems with biometric ID card systems.
Absolute conviction in your own beliefs is extremely dangerous in a politician. It makes you blind to better counsel.
Its a bit hard to send them to Kiev or Odessa - they are in the Ukraine not the Russian Federation. Lenningrad = St. Petersburg, the best city in Russia. I would recommend somewhere like Kamchatka. That is about as remote as you can get whilst still being in the Russian Federation.
From my brief stint in this area, GPUs have a number of advertised features, some of which may work well and some require a lot of help from the driver. Generally speaking, a GPU is quite cutting edge and it simply can't cope with everything you could throw at it. My feeling is that the silicon goes out to market a lot earlier than the quivalent CPU with the expectation that the driver fixes the problems (usually at the expense of some performance).
It is my belief that an open driver would expose those flaws forcing the vendors to improve their mask quality levels. The problem is that fixing the silicon may increase time to market and unit costs.
Lastly I should emphasise that GPUs have changed a lot since I did drivers. I can only extrapolate from what I saw in the early days. However since the silicon is now much more complicated, I can only imagine the problems have increased accordingly.
Many years ago, I worked for a manufacturer and wrote a graphics driver. This was a long time ago and on ancient hardware, so I won't name names. If I write a disk driver, the thing is fairly basic and the hardware exposes basic functionality, which most people can get right. A graphics processor, particularly with 3D shading support is *exceptionally* complex. To get it running properly, you not only have to know how it works but what doesn' and usually for several different variation of a chip mask. We didn't make the graphics chip but were able to get some documentation on the known issues when signing our corporate life away in NDAs.
The end result is a composite of software, microcode and hardware that sort-of works. Trying to do the same with open source is exceptionally difficult because it means you have to know the problems so that you can workaround them. Manufacturers really don't like people (especially their competitors) finding out about those issues, hence the NDA.
It is down to the star system. There are any number of good actors knocking around and Bruce is one. Hollywood likes to create a shortage as so many people like to live off percentages. There have been plenty of good stars too, but Hollywood prefers a person who has looks but little real talent, so is emminently replaceable.
You want a bit of aggression? What about Formula-1 and Michael Schumacher? As a driver, you really didn't want to be in his way. There may be plenty of greens around but they aren't driving 200km/h down the autobahn. Every so often there is a discussion about restricting the unrestricted parts of the system but that gets shouted down.
Just because the jetstream acts like a weather system divider for the UK doesn't mean to say similar things aren't happening in continental Europe. I ski regularly in the Alps, mostly Austria and Switzerland. I assure you that snow isn't just disappearing from the Cairngorms, because you won't see much of it at the lower resorts in the Alps either.
They finally have reported a reasonable dump of snow in Moscow & St. Petersburg. Both had no snow over the new year. the only place that has had good snow is North America. Unfortunately, you can't find decent Apres there.
At one stage this was probably due to OS upgrades. People could go from, for example, Win95 to Win98. It won't be true now because the hop to XP required to much of a hardware upgrade. If you bought that new computer then you may as well get a license to go with it.
Double-dipping from Microsoft happens as well. My client is a major bank. They get our PCs with XP Professional (the stickers are still on the cases). However, they deploy with volume licenses. Many large organisations are like this. Sure the client doesn't pay retail but it isn't exactly zero price when every one of their tens of thousands of employees is running XP.
Microsoft's argument is that the PCs get sold on after a few years and this way, they are certain that the PCs remain licensed.
Most explosves are based on nitrates, especially commercial ones because of their stability and energy density. Yes, the bad guys can move to something else, but it makes manufacture more difficult and increases the risk of detonation before deployment or squibs (the chappati bombs used in the UK).
Isn't this more to do with the difficulties in prosecuting format shifting? If I format shift a CD to my MP3 player, who is going to know about it? If I format shift to a shared drive on my home network, again who is going to know about it? If I then share that drive by whatever program with the world then the RIAA is going to have a file name and an IP address to chase.
If I order a CD by post from Russia that was produced by a valid copyright licensee, I would guess that CD would be legal? Certainly, unless the item was a counterfeit, US Customs would not be interested. Russia does at least in theory subscribe to the Berne Convention
AllofMP3.com claim that they have acquired rights to sell MP3s from their website in Russia, presumably they have acquired the rights from the Russian licensees. The transaction occurred in Russia, so the only fly in the ointment is if the US copyright owner says that the right to sell an MP3 was never granted to the sublicensee.
I know that there is a big project on to reform the depository/clearing system and that some western consultancies are involved. They would almost certainly push Microsoft.
(Had something to do with trading and settlement reform in Russia)
By definition, the paprazzi want to photograph celebs. Any ressemblence between a celeb and a human is purely coincidental.
The issue is that the trading may use a sophisticated database, but there is still a lot of stuff going in the background where they use .doc files, .pdfs and .zips. This is all linked to the end of day processing at the exchange and is also vital. Note that the backend is usually *ux but the frontends tend to be Wintel and thus are vulnerable.
The STASI and KGB had a massive problem, they just didn't have the data handling power. In the case of the STASI, the voice intercepts mostly ended up being taped and transcribed using typewriters. As far as data intercepts were concerned, it is doubtful that they even bothered with anything other than high value targets. In any case, they were both much better at humint, i.e. better send an agent to have an affair with the chancellor's secretary than bother with trying to decrypt military communications.
Sure, private industry would always pay more, but the space program was where it was at. Engineers/scientists in or contracted to NASA were known for being able to achieve wonders, and they did (for example, look at thie history of the LEM).
Now it is seen to be a bureaucratic mess, more suited for the MBAs.
Interesting point but Google has direct contact with users via its search-engine and so on where HP and Digital never had the opportunity. In their respective hay-days HP and Digital were hideden to most people unless you looked hard. With Google, it is already very visible so it has a good platform to reach out to potential clients with new product ideas.
However, for a while engineers worked almost in spite of management and certainly weren't led. Remember the story about Cutler getting RSX-11M to work on an 11/70 as a weekend hack, "just for testing". It then meant the demise of IAS and RSX-11D two very much older systems that needed retirement.
There were so many interesting ideas being developed in-house and so few ever getting out to the field. I met a few good sales types at DEC, but many were hopeless and badly informed about products. The joke when working at customer sites was the effort we had to persuade DEC to sell us something.
When I was there early on Friday evening, she most definitely wasn't. It was just a bunch of Google (male) nerds.
Heathrow T1 is heavily covered by commercial hot-spots. I can't imagine anyone (except the passengers) being happy if Google offered free coverage. There were people there, but they were hardly queueing for seats (there was a couple of spaces free when I had my look). However some ten metres away people were happily using a pay-hotspot organised by T-mobile. They could use their own PCs (big advantage). Hey, if the company is paying, where is the problem?
As a frequent flyer, I have access to a lounge. Although the lounge has only pay-hot-spots, they have a free internet cafe and being an airline lounge, free drinks and munchies. There having been a number of delayed flights earlier, the munchies were limited but at least I could sit there with a free orange juice.
I can't see what would be different for the 380. the only point is whether the pressure control system was considered to be critical enough to be fully backed up.
And many people with mobile phones *do* have a problem with their screens. Is your Samsung a clamshell? In such cases the smaller external screen seems to be a bit better protected.
here are rumors that macromedia is demanding to be paid an undisclosed amount for every machine that has flash player on it here This is already the case for phones, Yep, phones (particularly 3G) are seen to be one of the big markets for Flash and several manufacturers already licrnse the player. Not so good when that bandwidth costs.