It would be hard to get myself out of the US more often.... I live outside of the US and my definition of liberal is of the economic and personal kid.
They regularly describe themselves as liberal in the editorials and articles, particularly around individual's freedom and economic policy. Basic tennets of liberalism match pretty well to what the economist stands for IMO. This isn't woolly liberalism of a wet blanket kind, its the direct "torture is wrong, restriction of liberty is wrong, government interference with economies almost always goes pear shaped" kind.
Maybe you might need to read the Economist a bit more:)
This is an advertorial for the folks at the Economist, I'm a subscriber and its easily been the most useful journal I've ever subscribed to, it gives a clear business view of what is going on, so even when they get technology wrong you can see how the business will get it wrong too.
Put it this way, if you are arguing with the business and can say "The economist said" its going to be a million times better that wired/slashdot/any computing mag you can think of.
Politically its "liberal" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. slightly right wing and think the government should keep out of our lives)
Reading this made me think about my time doing safety critical systems (it fails, someone dies) and its really stunning to think that something like voting in a democracy isn't considered mission critical to the country.
There really is no excuse for voting to not be done on a comparative basis e.g. every vote to be checked via 3 different software lines (this isn't rocket science) and a voting system to then confirm that the vote is being applied correctly. This vote should then be written to two (at least) data sources to enable reconciliation at the end.
This is a freaking implementation of a check-box system where is the sodding complexity that means its expensive to be professional.
Voting in a democracy is mission critical, to not consider it that way is to say that voting doesn't matter.
2009... lets see so India is a bigger country than the US, has less resources than the US and has more people than the US most of whom are much poorer than the US.
Of course a government can succeed where private enterprise failed. There will of course be no problem getting 2Mbps to 1 billion people, oh no, and of course the fact that most don't have a computer and that the level of literacy outside of the major cities isn't great won't be any sort of barrier.
Nice political statement, but I'd say there is more chance of the Indian government admitting that project Tiger has issues than rolling out broadband.
So what MS is basically saying is that the iPhone is just going to be wanted by the guy on the right, and the chap in the suit on the left will want to do the "serious" stuff.
Its really scary when MS look at the Apple ads and think "you know what, they are completely right, fun is frivolous and has no part in our strategy"
Some how I think its fairly unlikely that this is a vanilla PC platform running a standard set of hardware for which Ubuntu has all of the device drivers available. The finger interface for instance is liable to be fairly specific.
This truly is the proof however that the Slashdot crowd will never be truly happy. No more is it "I'll just rip OSX/Windows/etc and replace it with Linux"... no the Slashdot folks aren't even happy when it is ALREADY RUNNING LINUX, they want their own favourite distro. I can almost imagine if they'd said Ubuntu that people would have been arguing about the version number.
Of COURSE all files are "basically" the same, after all its just a set of 1s and 0s, and given that you already have lots of 1s and 0s on your machine this means that you already have the file even before you download it.
It reminds me of Eric Morcambe and Andre Previn
Previn: You were playing all the wrong notes
Morcambe: No I was playing all the right notes just not necessarily in the right order
Someone at the DoD needs to hire slightly less movies and think more about how old fashioned "hearts and minds" would be a better thing to pour money into. Fancy stuff like decent hospitals wouldn't go amiss either. I know its only a white-paper request but wouldn't it be great to see more of these blue-sky research things focused on the non-killing or spying part of "Defence"
I also like the timescales from the request Posted Date: Mar 23, 2007 Original Response Date: Feb 14, 2008 Current Response Date: Jul 02, 2007
So first off they expected it to take a year, now its just a 4 month thing.
1. light = unsafe unless made of expensive materials
And why is it unsafe... is it because of the other larger SUVs with more inertia or because small = unsafe. So unsafe really means that there are cars on the road that are dangerous and this won't be protection against it.
2. fuel efficient = excessively low acceleration and/or low top speed I'm assuming you are in the US. Pretty much ALL american cars have poor acceleration and a low top speed, for a test try and find the performance stats for a non-perfomance car on a US website, the try the same on a European website, have a look at the Ford Focus as an example. This really isn't an issue given that US Petrol is slower than European petrol anyway (95 Ron is "standard").
3. aerodynamic = low to the ground = drives don't see you It doesn't mean that (100 MPG isn't that much) what you mean (again) is that fat-assed SUV drivers won't be able to see you. Europe copes fine with decent sporty and fuel efficent cars and if this was a real issue then no-one would buy a decent sports car.
Ummmm you do know that the UK was actually at that time (as it is now) a democracy? That was why people in America got so upset about "taxation without representation" because there actually was representation for people in the UK.
The Magna Carta is a good place to start to understand about how people understood about the requirement for oversight of the monarch a long way before 1776.
Okay so while its nice to have some basic stuff on a website I'm really not sure how this makes sense given the rise and rise of multi-core CPUs (which are fantastic at image processing). Models like Picassa and others which have a download to the machine make more sense as they don't require you to buy a massive amount of server hardware to support your business model.
Sorry I've just realised... its Web 2.0 bubble isn't it, it has to be in the browser because otherwise its not cool.
And out of interest why can't they do that by just writing a Java midlet that uses the Location API to connect from any phone and provide exactly the same functionality but without the cost and risk of building their own hardware. That way they would have a larger addressable market (anyone with a compatible Java phone) and thus much greater potential revenue.
Its stunning how people can't separate applications and software from hardware platforms.
Okay so they are getting into mobile hardware, but why stop there lets add other things to "consider" that will generate more buzz
1) Google are getting into the MP3 player market, it will have a 1TB disk hence Google's search dominance will be critical 2) Google are going to buy Garmin and merge GPS with Google Earth over WiFi and 3G connections 3) Google are going to develop snowboards with integrated messaging and mapping to help you get the best tracks
There must be a load more wild speculations that we can add in, something around them buying Sony & Viacom & lots of other media companies to make sure they don't get sued.
Google truly are the new apple, they can generate news on what people think they might do, not just what they say they will do (Microsoft) or have done (IBM).
Because it wasn't too long ago that they had to hand over around a billion dollars to Sun alone due to the patents and IP that Microsoft was infringing.
Microsoft clearly take IP abuse very seriously, like giving credit when they use open source software, or when stealing other commercial companies IP, they are clearly very serious about abusing other people's IP.... they've been doing that so long they just seem to assume that everyone else must be doing it too.
My experience in reinstalling several completely fried windows boxes (virus or trojans) is that the biggest issue is that the OEM CD has been lost and then the key that they have, for a perfectly valid version of Windows, doesn't work for the "full" Windows CD that I (legally) have. So what is the solution? Phone MS Support? Hell they say its an OEM problem. Phone the OEM and they want to charge to ship a new replacement CD, or just don't care.
So I'd say that a decent proportion of those "invalid" windows installs are actually perfectly valid but just suffering because a reinstall had to be done due to the MS security issues and couldn't be done from a CD that matched the key. You can actually get MS support (nice high cost phone number) to sort this out but it really isn't worth the pain, no doubt these days they'll be pushing a "Vista upgrade" as the solution.
So WGA failure doesn't mean it isn't legal, just that the key you have doesn't match the CD that had to do the re-install.
Its just that climate is changing, and there are loads.... okay one... decent scientist who says it isn't Man made or true or nothing. So I can still drive my SUV, I can still have gas at $2 and I can do what the hell I want. Hey those reduction things don't apply to China or India so they are just costing us jobs, sure people say we are worse, but we won't be forever and being only in the top 3 worse isn't so bad they just want to cripple our jobs, its a conspiracy from pinko liberals trying to bring down America.
The above was a transcribe of the standard "educated" response to climate change on Slashdot. One data point does not make a series... but we already have a series which has yet one more data point.
Climate Change is real, it is man made and only people who think New Earth Creationism is a good idea could be so dumb as to ignore it.
No shit Sherlock... Wow, it amazes me on Slashdot, here are people who have used targeted nano technology to bind to and then starve cancers and your input into the debate is "oh yeah but what happens to the nano particles". Well the answer is that now that the doctors have read your response they've added a new piece of programming which means after the cancer is cured then then bind together with nano particles from other bodies creating a killing machine that is programmed with your DNA and the orders to destroy you.
IANAD, like IANAL but with an even bigger gap between the writer and the qualification.
Yes it is doing that, which means that in the car you have 802.11, and that connects to the internet via 3G. This means there is ONE device that is 3G based (expensive hardware) and lots which are 802.11 (cheap hardware).
Firstly Wifi != Laptop, this could enable things like Google Earth sat images to be downloaded in real time to your Sat/Nav system, it could be used to switch your mobile to VOIP rather than using a cell, it could be used by the cars Radio/CD/iPod player to offer you new tracks.
Secondly the person driving doesn't have to be the person working. Last year myself and a friend drove from San Francisco to Las Vegas, with a bunch of work to do we split the driving and use a car-charger adapter for the laptop, we got a good 10 hours of work done and an internet connection would have made that a lot better.
Thirdly this also means that Avis can start flogging you added extras that work on Wifi, which is cheaper than 3G connected devices.
My big question though is do all those cars have different SSIDs and will they be WPA and greater protected? If I'm connecting up to a network then I'd prefer people not being able to hijack my devices, some SatNavs can already be bluejacked and this could make it miles worse.
With your argument is that the teachers of today are exactly those kids of yesteryear that you are talking about. So say that there was no Gang issues in the 50s/60s is laughable (Krays?), and issues with teenage crime in inner city London in the 50s/60s... I wouldn't bet to heavily on that if I were you. Complaints about clothes, attitude, language of kids has been going on since the beginning of time. I'm not sure about the world you now live in (which I'm assuming is the US as you use the word "fanny paddle") but actually most of the kids are pretty much the same as when I went to school in the 80s, they are just more aware of the world, yet less political.
Blaming the problems of kids today on the kids is insane, the problem is all those idealised muppets from their "idyllic" childhoods failing to recognise and adapt as world has moved on.
Which is actually fine as most people in the US can afford to pay for the drug or have the insurance anyway. I don't think that people in Africa are going to care too much that something doesn't have FDA approval if it is actually proven safe and proven effective by people such as WHO or the Red Cross.
This isn't aimed at helping the USA, its aimed at helping the rest of the world.
So why don't baseball bats have straps? Or Tennis racquets? Or golf clubs? Or drumsticks?
You'd almost think that people managed to hang onto these things because letting go is stupid. IMO the problem is that Nintendo put straps on to stop accidental dropping they tried to be helpful and its backfired. The should have just removed the straps so people didn't think "hey this strap must be able to with stand me throwing it really hard, I mean I do that with my digital camera all the time don't I?"
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to branch out into legit enterprises but you know that push come to shove your kneecaps are in trouble.
It would be hard to get myself out of the US more often.... I live outside of the US and my definition of liberal is of the economic and personal kid.
:)
They regularly describe themselves as liberal in the editorials and articles, particularly around individual's freedom and economic policy. Basic tennets of liberalism match pretty well to what the economist stands for IMO. This isn't woolly liberalism of a wet blanket kind, its the direct "torture is wrong, restriction of liberty is wrong, government interference with economies almost always goes pear shaped" kind.
Maybe you might need to read the Economist a bit more
This is an advertorial for the folks at the Economist, I'm a subscriber and its easily been the most useful journal I've ever subscribed to, it gives a clear business view of what is going on, so even when they get technology wrong you can see how the business will get it wrong too.
Put it this way, if you are arguing with the business and can say "The economist said" its going to be a million times better that wired/slashdot/any computing mag you can think of.
Politically its "liberal" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. slightly right wing and think the government should keep out of our lives)
Mark me up, mark me down, its a class magazine.
Reading this made me think about my time doing safety critical systems (it fails, someone dies) and its really stunning to think that something like voting in a democracy isn't considered mission critical to the country.
There really is no excuse for voting to not be done on a comparative basis e.g. every vote to be checked via 3 different software lines (this isn't rocket science) and a voting system to then confirm that the vote is being applied correctly. This vote should then be written to two (at least) data sources to enable reconciliation at the end.
This is a freaking implementation of a check-box system where is the sodding complexity that means its expensive to be professional.
Voting in a democracy is mission critical, to not consider it that way is to say that voting doesn't matter.
2009... lets see so India is a bigger country than the US, has less resources than the US and has more people than the US most of whom are much poorer than the US.
Of course a government can succeed where private enterprise failed. There will of course be no problem getting 2Mbps to 1 billion people, oh no, and of course the fact that most don't have a computer and that the level of literacy outside of the major cities isn't great won't be any sort of barrier.
Nice political statement, but I'd say there is more chance of the Indian government admitting that project Tiger has issues than rolling out broadband.
Steve
So what MS is basically saying is that the iPhone is just going to be wanted by the guy on the right, and the chap in the suit on the left will want to do the "serious" stuff.
Its really scary when MS look at the Apple ads and think "you know what, they are completely right, fun is frivolous and has no part in our strategy"
Some how I think its fairly unlikely that this is a vanilla PC platform running a standard set of hardware for which Ubuntu has all of the device drivers available. The finger interface for instance is liable to be fairly specific.
This truly is the proof however that the Slashdot crowd will never be truly happy. No more is it "I'll just rip OSX/Windows/etc and replace it with Linux"... no the Slashdot folks aren't even happy when it is ALREADY RUNNING LINUX, they want their own favourite distro. I can almost imagine if they'd said Ubuntu that people would have been arguing about the version number.
Of COURSE all files are "basically" the same, after all its just a set of 1s and 0s, and given that you already have lots of 1s and 0s on your machine this means that you already have the file even before you download it. It reminds me of Eric Morcambe and Andre Previn Previn: You were playing all the wrong notes Morcambe: No I was playing all the right notes just not necessarily in the right order
Geeks get to pretend we have a Social network, without all the hassle of actually physically meeting people
Someone at the DoD needs to hire slightly less movies and think more about how old fashioned "hearts and minds" would be a better thing to pour money into. Fancy stuff like decent hospitals wouldn't go amiss either. I know its only a white-paper request but wouldn't it be great to see more of these blue-sky research things focused on the non-killing or spying part of "Defence"
I also like the timescales from the request
Posted Date: Mar 23, 2007
Original Response Date: Feb 14, 2008
Current Response Date: Jul 02, 2007
So first off they expected it to take a year, now its just a 4 month thing.
Help me out here, is it 99.99% or 99.999% of all the developers on the planet?
1. light = unsafe unless made of expensive materials
And why is it unsafe... is it because of the other larger SUVs with more inertia or because small = unsafe. So unsafe really means that there are cars on the road that are dangerous and this won't be protection against it.
2. fuel efficient = excessively low acceleration and/or low top speed
I'm assuming you are in the US. Pretty much ALL american cars have poor acceleration and a low top speed, for a test try and find the performance stats for a non-perfomance car on a US website, the try the same on a European website, have a look at the Ford Focus as an example. This really isn't an issue given that US Petrol is slower than European petrol anyway (95 Ron is "standard").
3. aerodynamic = low to the ground = drives don't see you
It doesn't mean that (100 MPG isn't that much) what you mean (again) is that fat-assed SUV drivers won't be able to see you. Europe copes fine with decent sporty and fuel efficent cars and if this was a real issue then no-one would buy a decent sports car.
3 non-issues from an SUV driver.
Ummmm you do know that the UK was actually at that time (as it is now) a democracy? That was why people in America got so upset about "taxation without representation" because there actually was representation for people in the UK.
The Magna Carta is a good place to start to understand about how people understood about the requirement for oversight of the monarch a long way before 1776.
Okay so while its nice to have some basic stuff on a website I'm really not sure how this makes sense given the rise and rise of multi-core CPUs (which are fantastic at image processing). Models like Picassa and others which have a download to the machine make more sense as they don't require you to buy a massive amount of server hardware to support your business model.
Sorry I've just realised... its Web 2.0 bubble isn't it, it has to be in the browser because otherwise its not cool.
And out of interest why can't they do that by just writing a Java midlet that uses the Location API to connect from any phone and provide exactly the same functionality but without the cost and risk of building their own hardware. That way they would have a larger addressable market (anyone with a compatible Java phone) and thus much greater potential revenue. Its stunning how people can't separate applications and software from hardware platforms.
Okay so they are getting into mobile hardware, but why stop there lets add other things to "consider" that will generate more buzz
1) Google are getting into the MP3 player market, it will have a 1TB disk hence Google's search dominance will be critical
2) Google are going to buy Garmin and merge GPS with Google Earth over WiFi and 3G connections
3) Google are going to develop snowboards with integrated messaging and mapping to help you get the best tracks
There must be a load more wild speculations that we can add in, something around them buying Sony & Viacom & lots of other media companies to make sure they don't get sued.
Google truly are the new apple, they can generate news on what people think they might do, not just what they say they will do (Microsoft) or have done (IBM).
Because it wasn't too long ago that they had to hand over around a billion dollars to Sun alone due to the patents and IP that Microsoft was infringing.
Microsoft clearly take IP abuse very seriously, like giving credit when they use open source software, or when stealing other commercial companies IP, they are clearly very serious about abusing other people's IP.... they've been doing that so long they just seem to assume that everyone else must be doing it too.
My experience in reinstalling several completely fried windows boxes (virus or trojans) is that the biggest issue is that the OEM CD has been lost and then the key that they have, for a perfectly valid version of Windows, doesn't work for the "full" Windows CD that I (legally) have. So what is the solution? Phone MS Support? Hell they say its an OEM problem. Phone the OEM and they want to charge to ship a new replacement CD, or just don't care.
So I'd say that a decent proportion of those "invalid" windows installs are actually perfectly valid but just suffering because a reinstall had to be done due to the MS security issues and couldn't be done from a CD that matched the key. You can actually get MS support (nice high cost phone number) to sort this out but it really isn't worth the pain, no doubt these days they'll be pushing a "Vista upgrade" as the solution.
So WGA failure doesn't mean it isn't legal, just that the key you have doesn't match the CD that had to do the re-install.
Its just that climate is changing, and there are loads.... okay one... decent scientist who says it isn't Man made or true or nothing. So I can still drive my SUV, I can still have gas at $2 and I can do what the hell I want. Hey those reduction things don't apply to China or India so they are just costing us jobs, sure people say we are worse, but we won't be forever and being only in the top 3 worse isn't so bad they just want to cripple our jobs, its a conspiracy from pinko liberals trying to bring down America.
The above was a transcribe of the standard "educated" response to climate change on Slashdot. One data point does not make a series... but we already have a series which has yet one more data point.
Climate Change is real, it is man made and only people who think New Earth Creationism is a good idea could be so dumb as to ignore it.
I'm not a doctor
No shit Sherlock... Wow, it amazes me on Slashdot, here are people who have used targeted nano technology to bind to and then starve cancers and your input into the debate is "oh yeah but what happens to the nano particles". Well the answer is that now that the doctors have read your response they've added a new piece of programming which means after the cancer is cured then then bind together with nano particles from other bodies creating a killing machine that is programmed with your DNA and the orders to destroy you.
IANAD, like IANAL but with an even bigger gap between the writer and the qualification.
Yes it is doing that, which means that in the car you have 802.11, and that connects to the internet via 3G. This means there is ONE device that is 3G based (expensive hardware) and lots which are 802.11 (cheap hardware).
I'm sure you have a point, but I'm missing it.
There are several things here to consider.
Firstly Wifi != Laptop, this could enable things like Google Earth sat images to be downloaded in real time to your Sat/Nav system, it could be used to switch your mobile to VOIP rather than using a cell, it could be used by the cars Radio/CD/iPod player to offer you new tracks.
Secondly the person driving doesn't have to be the person working. Last year myself and a friend drove from San Francisco to Las Vegas, with a bunch of work to do we split the driving and use a car-charger adapter for the laptop, we got a good 10 hours of work done and an internet connection would have made that a lot better.
Thirdly this also means that Avis can start flogging you added extras that work on Wifi, which is cheaper than 3G connected devices.
My big question though is do all those cars have different SSIDs and will they be WPA and greater protected? If I'm connecting up to a network then I'd prefer people not being able to hijack my devices, some SatNavs can already be bluejacked and this could make it miles worse.
With your argument is that the teachers of today are exactly those kids of yesteryear that you are talking about. So say that there was no Gang issues in the 50s/60s is laughable (Krays?), and issues with teenage crime in inner city London in the 50s/60s... I wouldn't bet to heavily on that if I were you. Complaints about clothes, attitude, language of kids has been going on since the beginning of time. I'm not sure about the world you now live in (which I'm assuming is the US as you use the word "fanny paddle") but actually most of the kids are pretty much the same as when I went to school in the 80s, they are just more aware of the world, yet less political.
Blaming the problems of kids today on the kids is insane, the problem is all those idealised muppets from their "idyllic" childhoods failing to recognise and adapt as world has moved on.
Which is actually fine as most people in the US can afford to pay for the drug or have the insurance anyway. I don't think that people in Africa are going to care too much that something doesn't have FDA approval if it is actually proven safe and proven effective by people such as WHO or the Red Cross.
This isn't aimed at helping the USA, its aimed at helping the rest of the world.
So why don't baseball bats have straps? Or Tennis racquets? Or golf clubs? Or drumsticks?
You'd almost think that people managed to hang onto these things because letting go is stupid. IMO the problem is that Nintendo put straps on to stop accidental dropping they tried to be helpful and its backfired. The should have just removed the straps so people didn't think "hey this strap must be able to with stand me throwing it really hard, I mean I do that with my digital camera all the time don't I?"
These people are muppets, probably Gonzo.