Well I would like MicroSoft's current search to be made a bit more useful by going back to the olden days, i.e. being able to search for a filename on the hard disk without it searching through every byte of every zip file on the machine - taking minutes of time to look through a single directory. A little check-box (do not search inside archives) would be just dandy. As it is I have to go to the command prompt and use DIR/S instead.
Already I use google to search MSDN help online since that is faster than using MSDN itself locally.
Apart from their office being shut down on 12 feb 2004 you mean, and some people getting severance packages. When even EA is shutting down studios like Maxis and Origin, it makes the rest of us nervous.
IIRC my great uncle has a cheap thermometer which says when to turn the heating on (since old people can't tell) that was either from British Gas or SEEBOARD (the electricity company).
Finding the bill was not that easy, because only one copy of it was printed, at midnight the night before the vote, and hidden in a secret location in a hollowed out volcano...
Surely it would be better for bills to be available electronically (with an MD5 checksum) for everyone for some time before the vote...
When Harrods started suing every shop in the world whose owner was called "Harod" or "Herod" etc. the town of Otorohanga in New Zealand renamed itself to Harrodsville...
#2 IIRC it was encouraged by ghanaian teachers in order to improve english language skills, which is a good reason to have a pen-pal! I didn't know it was two-way though.
Like they already have for universities? Students there will be paying for RIAA music whether or not they listen to it... No doubt the aim is to make that more widespread, until everyone has to pay an RIAA tax and they only have to provide the quality of music that they provided the libraries with.
You're thinking of Guyana. Oh dear. School classrooms really should invest in a map of the world that doesn't stop at the borders of their own state... Of course my first map showed it as being "the gold coast" of west africa, but it's changed a bit since then. They (people from Ghana) like advertising for penpals in UK magazines for some reason.
New Zealand doesn't use standard gauge (1435mm - 4 foot eight and a half inches). It uses toytown colonial gauge (1067mm - 3 foot 6 inches) like South Africa. Except for trams etc. While I would love trains to be used more often there (the journeys are very scenic for tourists - well worth going on) I don't think foreign manufacturing companies would support wierd gauges so quickly.
I don't think you will see the wellington to taranaki line getting any sort of decent speed compared to the newly straightened highway 3 (north of paraparaumu) anyway. The track would require a lot of work to get better, and I haven't heard narrow gauge being described as ideal for fast trains anyway.
Re:interesting idea but I doubt it will succede
on
By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 1
Hah! Going on the non-TGV local trains in northern France, the second-class seats were more spacious (3 abreast) and comfortable than British 1st class (4 abreast) or second class (5 abreast) seats.
However, the passenger information system is far more developed in the UK than most other countries. The computerised systems give customised levels of apology depending on how late the trains are... "I am -extremely- sorry for the -severe- delay this has caused to your journey." and there are lots of CRT/plasma/LED screens which give estimates on just how late each train will be.
In Calais on the other hand the station is just shut after 7pm with practically no useful information available. And the machines don't accept notes (yeah, like I want to put in 40 euros in coins).
Here's a novel idea for you: so research and have some patents of your own. That's another neat side-effect of patents: everyone tries to have their own portfolio of nukes. Which means: more incentive to research.
So you are in favour of Iran developing nuclear weapons, to balance the US? That way craziness lies. If they tried using one weapon, on say US troops in the area, they would find the US has considerably more and with better range. Patents are directional weapons. If you have one patent, it is pointed at some random people, unlikely to be the same people as the ones who have patents pointed at you. Unless you are microsoft or ibm, in which case you have so many that they point in all directions.
The reason patents aren't slowing most software down is that most software is not open source. Most commercial software probably does infringe on patents (in the US) but people just ignore that, like they ignore other laws that are rarely enforced. I certainly don't remember at any company I have there being a few months set aside for searching through all the banned techniques that are currrently in force (and at final release to check all the techniques that have subsequently been banned, and afterwards etc.), and we did sell software to the US.
It certainly has slowed down open-source software, as RMS can give you examples (one example: they developed a compression algorithm to replace usage of LSW, and as they were about to publish the software, the patent department announced that someone else had claimed a patent on that technique).
I have independantly created several (fairly poor quality but fast and memory efficient) compression methods, and used them in commercial software. If I had looked into the patent database (spending more time on that than on actually working) no doubt I would have found that several people had already claimed each method several times, and it would not matter that I developed this independantly.
Already more money is spent on marketing a product than on developing it. I don't think that spending more money on patent lawyers than on programmers is an efficient way to run an economy, or will inspire innovation.
And of course cross-licensing agreements don't work with lawyer companies anyway, since they don't actually make anything.
I don't use a car myself but that is fairly unimportant, as I do use other vehicles.
I guess maybe it might reduce the amount of spam email claiming to come from my hotmail address, hence reducing the bounces I get back from clueless mailservers.
Well, he did get the patent. After all, his machine came out in 1969, and the 1967 London Barclays one (possibly the one that is often shown on UK television in nostalgia programs) didn't return the card.
Let them go to the patent office instead. In 99% of the cases they'll just get told that someone patented that idea already, or just got overturned. (Plenty of prior art of flashy web sites that failed.)
If people could not patent obvious ideas that had already been implemented by other people they would be less of a problem. In this world though, the patent office would just give them all those patents, as the USPTO has, and give a horde of lawyers an excuse to sue you at any time. Even with specific compression algorithms they give the patent for the same algorithm to multiple people (e.g. Unisys and IBM for LZW) because they don't check them.
Being a coder I see the threat of being sued for bogus patents (on "ones and zeros", or using RAM to hold the contents of a video screen, or using the internet, etc.) as being worse that the hypothetical payoff for devising something worth patenting.
Anyway, which good ideas from 1984 have you gleaned from US patent applications? And how do they compare with e.g. academic journals?
So you are looking forward to the 30,000 pending software patents in europe being legalised? That means you are looking forward to reading 30,000 patent documents to see which ones your project currently infringes. Why don't you start now? Don't rely on them being titled or indexed sensibly either. You are quite likely to be infringing several of them already. That means you owe money to some random companies. It's not like patents on drugs; most programs have more than one algorithm or function point in them.
There are job ads for mathematicians in financial companies in the City of London. I guess they just don't publish the source code to their stock analysis programs on the internet.
Windows admins can be costly too. For example this happened yesterday: Non-technical user (not our company) rings up the tech-support line for his PC. He has some issues with fonts or something. They advise him to reinstall windows. He does so. Then he says "What happened to the My Documents folder? I had a year's work there and it's empty now". Ouch.
So an admin/support person who doesn't think things through can be expensive (in terms of work lost) for any OS.
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Already I use google to search MSDN help online since that is faster than using MSDN itself locally.
Isn't firefox basically netscape? And hasn't the latest round of viruses pushed huge swathes of users to switch back to something safer?
Apart from their office being shut down on 12 feb 2004 you mean, and some people getting severance packages. When even EA is shutting down studios like Maxis and Origin, it makes the rest of us nervous.
And yes, august was pretty hot.
Well apart from Whale Rider which they gave some money to for having a german character in it. Can you name any other (non-pr0n) german films?
Surely it would be better for bills to be available electronically (with an MD5 checksum) for everyone for some time before the vote...
When Harrods started suing every shop in the world whose owner was called "Harod" or "Herod" etc. the town of Otorohanga in New Zealand renamed itself to Harrodsville...
So should squaresoft relinquish the right to "Moogle" then?
#1 The map was in my grandad's house
#2 IIRC it was encouraged by ghanaian teachers in order to improve english language skills, which is a good reason to have a pen-pal! I didn't know it was two-way though.
Like they already have for universities? Students there will be paying for RIAA music whether or not they listen to it... No doubt the aim is to make that more widespread, until everyone has to pay an RIAA tax and they only have to provide the quality of music that they provided the libraries with.
You're thinking of Guyana. Oh dear. School classrooms really should invest in a map of the world that doesn't stop at the borders of their own state... Of course my first map showed it as being "the gold coast" of west africa, but it's changed a bit since then. They (people from Ghana) like advertising for penpals in UK magazines for some reason.
I don't think you will see the wellington to taranaki line getting any sort of decent speed compared to the newly straightened highway 3 (north of paraparaumu) anyway. The track would require a lot of work to get better, and I haven't heard narrow gauge being described as ideal for fast trains anyway.
However, the passenger information system is far more developed in the UK than most other countries. The computerised systems give customised levels of apology depending on how late the trains are... "I am -extremely- sorry for the -severe- delay this has caused to your journey." and there are lots of CRT/plasma/LED screens which give estimates on just how late each train will be.
In Calais on the other hand the station is just shut after 7pm with practically no useful information available. And the machines don't accept notes (yeah, like I want to put in 40 euros in coins).
So you are in favour of Iran developing nuclear weapons, to balance the US? That way craziness lies. If they tried using one weapon, on say US troops in the area, they would find the US has considerably more and with better range. Patents are directional weapons. If you have one patent, it is pointed at some random people, unlikely to be the same people as the ones who have patents pointed at you. Unless you are microsoft or ibm, in which case you have so many that they point in all directions.
The reason patents aren't slowing most software down is that most software is not open source. Most commercial software probably does infringe on patents (in the US) but people just ignore that, like they ignore other laws that are rarely enforced. I certainly don't remember at any company I have there being a few months set aside for searching through all the banned techniques that are currrently in force (and at final release to check all the techniques that have subsequently been banned, and afterwards etc.), and we did sell software to the US.
It certainly has slowed down open-source software, as RMS can give you examples (one example: they developed a compression algorithm to replace usage of LSW, and as they were about to publish the software, the patent department announced that someone else had claimed a patent on that technique).
I have independantly created several (fairly poor quality but fast and memory efficient) compression methods, and used them in commercial software. If I had looked into the patent database (spending more time on that than on actually working) no doubt I would have found that several people had already claimed each method several times, and it would not matter that I developed this independantly.
Already more money is spent on marketing a product than on developing it. I don't think that spending more money on patent lawyers than on programmers is an efficient way to run an economy, or will inspire innovation.
And of course cross-licensing agreements don't work with lawyer companies anyway, since they don't actually make anything.
I don't use a car myself but that is fairly unimportant, as I do use other vehicles.
I guess maybe it might reduce the amount of spam email claiming to come from my hotmail address, hence reducing the bounces I get back from clueless mailservers.
And there I was thinking that the whole of the Netherlands was within a short cycle ride of Utrecht station...
Well, he did get the patent. After all, his machine came out in 1969, and the 1967 London Barclays one (possibly the one that is often shown on UK television in nostalgia programs) didn't return the card.
Let them go to the patent office instead. In 99% of the cases they'll just get told that someone patented that idea already, or just got overturned. (Plenty of prior art of flashy web sites that failed.)
If people could not patent obvious ideas that had already been implemented by other people they would be less of a problem. In this world though, the patent office would just give them all those patents, as the USPTO has, and give a horde of lawyers an excuse to sue you at any time. Even with specific compression algorithms they give the patent for the same algorithm to multiple people (e.g. Unisys and IBM for LZW) because they don't check them.
Being a coder I see the threat of being sued for bogus patents (on "ones and zeros", or using RAM to hold the contents of a video screen, or using the internet, etc.) as being worse that the hypothetical payoff for devising something worth patenting.
Anyway, which good ideas from 1984 have you gleaned from US patent applications? And how do they compare with e.g. academic journals?
There are job ads for mathematicians in financial companies in the City of London. I guess they just don't publish the source code to their stock analysis programs on the internet.
There was a small flame war about that in Metro (a London newspaper) a few months ago...
IIRC "International Developer" (available in the UK) is a rebadged version of "Australian Developer" (available in NZ).
He took me to meet an old aircraft designer in California in 1980 - C. Gilbert Taylor perhaps? Someone who designed the piper cub anyway...
My brother's plane certainly won't apply - it's a Beaver many years older than he is :-)
More to the point, how can we get linux administrators to use basic hygiene. Like washing their hands. Ewww!
Windows admins can be costly too. For example this happened yesterday: Non-technical user (not our company) rings up the tech-support line for his PC. He has some issues with fonts or something. They advise him to reinstall windows. He does so. Then he says "What happened to the My Documents folder? I had a year's work there and it's empty now". Ouch.
So an admin/support person who doesn't think things through can be expensive (in terms of work lost) for any OS.
I thought "Freedom" was a synonym for "French" these days.