The Nokia inductive loop fitment (fits 6310s etc, do not believe what it says on the box - Nokia don't know their own product range) works superbly, though if like me you have an in-ear aid you have to put up with strangers thinking you are completely mad - holding a conversation with yourself with no visible equipment at all. There is a Motorola version which for some reason is far more expensive. Sound quality is vastly better than Bluetooth headsets etc. simply because the transducers in phones and headsets are mostly crap. I find it interesting that mobile phones look increasingly exotic while two of the bits that really matter - the input and output transducers - are so inferior compared to those used by Siemens, Widex, Starkey etc.
It's guaranteed that at some point the wrong tags will be delivered to the manufacturer
Bureaucrats are incapable of believing that the system can ever fail
Lower echelons do what they are told without thinking.
When the mines get labeled as missiles, the mechanics will just have to try and make them fit under the wings or get charged with insubordination. I don't care what it looks like, soldier, the tag says it's a missile.....
I think P J O'Rourke commented on this - the sand in Arabia is not the right sort to make sandbags. But then where did you think the sand came from for sandbags in WW2 in Europe? You can't guarantee that your line of fortification will conveniently end in a sandpit.
I'm visiting Italy next week, do you want me to report back? At least Mussolini is supposed to have made the trains run on time, whereas by all reports Berlusconi hasn't managed that.
Actually, I live in a small town that is still a small town. In fact, I live in the "historic center". And we have a community. If I hadn't lived here for 20 years, I would not be able to afford to move here now. But we have just lost the fight to keep out Wal-Mart and I expect ribbon suburbanization to follow quickly.
And counts for little. But it is an interesting argument. In parts of the West a lot of people equate access to personal transport with "standard of living", but the truth is that in many places driving is increasingly unpleasant as a result of the sheer number of other people that want to do it. I am sure that the bulk buying of SUVs is partly a response to the fact that highway driving is rarely enjoyable nowadays. I look back to when I was a kid with a Triumph Bonneville. Roads where you could travel legally and, actually, pretty safely at 100mph. Traffic jams something that only happened in the very center of large cities. When I visit clients it can now easily take 2 hours to travel 70-80 miles. The answer is not necessarily more and better roads because they open up development: just look at the population growth in places like Arizona.
The problem is that we have created urban (and suburban, and exurban) town patterns that are useless for mass transit. But all the "green" power sources - wave, wind, solar, nuclear (yes, I do think nuclear power can be perfectly safe if it is regulated and not used to produce military by-products) are large-scale or spread out so they favor mass transport designs. They will work well in much of Europe, China and, ultimately, India, but not in the US.
The hydrogen economy remains a possibility - alternative power could be used to create hydrogen efficiently by splitting water - and if the storage and distribution problems can be solved, could fix the US transport problem. But it is a huge threat to the Bush family (and the Cheneys, and many party backers) UNLESS hydrogen generation can be linked to the use of oil or coal. It's a truly vicious circle: Oil is good for the Bushes because its price fluctuates, military and business savvy is needed to maintain supplies, and the US consumer thinks he gets cheap oil, not realising he is actually subsidising the same people that gave us Al-Queda. Terrorism or the threat thereof destabilises oil security, so actually benefits the oil industry by helping to keep prices up. A credible hydrogen economy based on alternative energy would actually reduce oil prices, weaken the corporatism of the US, and benefit the end user. So is it going to happen? Not while Exxon has a breath left in its body.
I would much prefer a jacket with an HP keyboard into which a Palm will plug to be the processor and the display. Then I've got Bluetooth, SD card and the rest, good color display and the excellent user interface. Why does no-one make a calculator keyboard for Palms?
And if someone with a plastics factory is reading this, why not build space into it for an auxiliary battery thus avoiding the need for frequent shutoff?
Obviously failed economics 101. A monopoly is something which effectively controls the supply of an economic good. Microsoft is a monopoly as regards desktop operating systems, though not as regards servers. Apple does not control the supply of anything. Orlowski does not appear to realise that vertically integrated business != monopoly.
It's as stupid as calling BMW a monopoly because only BMW makes BMWs.
Or perhaps Orlowski is thinking that Apple is in a monopoly position as regards the suppliers of software. Actually, because their market share is small, the opposite is the case. They have to provide reasons for suppliers to support them. The fact that some applications may be subsumed by Apple is a fact of life: every manufacturer has to make make or buy decisions all the time. Currently conventional wisdom is that everything is better subcontracted out, but eventually if you go far enough the subcontractors own you.
Personally, I suspect that the ITMS may be too small to survive: if revenue is around $30 million and none of that is profit, there is no real budget to promote it. But at least it's a try, and Apple should be given full credit for trying.
Actually lots of people died in the UK too, where it was not nearly as hot for not nearly as long, but the hospital system is so disorganised that it took till October before they noticed.
As for Chirac, I can only offer the explanation of a French taxi driver: "c'est un vieil escroc, mais c'est notre vieil escroc a nous" - he's an old crook, but he's our old crook. Jospin suffered from being seen as too distant, and because the Left either couldn't be bothered to come out to vote or were trying to teach him a lesson by not voting for him in the first round. Which is more or less how Dubya got in, too.
Well, that's an interesting argument in favor of its wider use, especially where some Slashdot readers are concerned. But to convince the PHBs to adopt it, you'll need something a bit more business-oriented. How about "is a big fat smelly vagina with enhanced productivity and lowered TCO?
Everything the parent says is true. The only thing I have ever encountered that was noisier was in service with Aeroflot. And the only thing I have ever flown in that was more cramped was a sailplane, though that had better legroom. The windows are minute. If I want to travel in a cramped, noisy metal tube with no view, there's always the subway. It's like the Pyramids: we don't build things like that nowadays because we are no longer quite so stupid. We have even kind of got the idea that having an atmosphere makes it quite a good idea to fly subsonic safely, reliably, cheaply and reasonably quietly. I find Concord(e) going out of service an occasion for quiet optimism.
In fact, I've seen van der Graafs that work by using a flow of dielectric fluid rather than the rubber belt of the school versions. Admittedly they generate megavolts rather than volts - but isn't the basic method the same? i.e. charge separation.
Also, the electricity isn't generated from the water. It's generated using the kinetic energy of flowing water - just like a turbine or waterwheel, and something needs to produce the kinetic energy in the first place...excuse me while I go and check my cold fusion plant, the room temperature seems a bit low.
It isn't a "microchip" but I wonder if the grooves are fabricated using the same kind of technology.
This could be extremely useful in treating AIDS and tuberculosis in the 3rd world. Apart from the problems of many 3rd world people in ensuring that drugs are taken continuously, there is the risk that they will sell drugs or have them stolen by other sufferers who are not being treated. I do not know how dosage would stack up against feasibility, but the principle looks sound. There's also the possibility of slowly releasing chemotherapy right into tumors.
Obviously any new technology is going to have risks, but if people are going to die of something without treatment, and existing means of delivery are unreliable or worse, surely this has to be worth pursuing.
Actually I think the French may have a point (avis: ma grand-mere etait francaise). One of the most annoying things about Google sponsored links happens when, say, one types in something like "BMW 740" and up comes "Buy BMW 740 from " plus company XYZ. In fact if one is looking for anything remotely unusual, the chances are the link is a waste of time: the advertiser has just set up a load of keywords whether or not they stock the goods in question. In the past I've found that, for instance, "Whirlpool" brings up companies who are not Whirlpool distributors, and so on. Requiring the advertisers to have the permission of the trademark holders before using the trademark as part of the search text could reduce the amount of garbage returned by Google.
I'm sorry not to support the general anti-French paranoia, and I realise that the judgement may not have been precisely about this, but I do think that unscrupulous advertisers are misusing trademarks on the net, and that if it can be stopped it should be.
Sending out invoices in Europe could be fraught with problems. This is because of the way European sales tax works.
If a corporation issues an invoice to another business in the same country, then it is legally obliged to collect the sales tax (TVA, VAT, MWST)and pay it to the government. The tax has to be paid on a due date which may be before the invoice is paid. The other company pays the invoice including sales tax, then claims the sales tax back (yes, I agree, it's hard to think of a more stupid system but it is intended to combat fraud.)
If SCO tries the scam of sending out invoices, it will incur a huge liability for tax. The tax liability is a big inducement not to send out fraudulent invoices. Eventually the invoices will appear as bad debts, and that won't look good on the balance sheet either.
This leaves SCO with the option of sending out cross-border invoices. However, these are far less likely to be paid since even the most nervous accountant is unlikely to want to pay a US invoice for the claimed use of IP in a German product.
And my conclusion? Even more R&D and backoffice business goes to Europe, China and India. It's safer to do business there.
In fact, if I remember rightly, a respectable department store in, I think, London England actually had a vibrator in a street-facing display cabinet. If you didn't know what it was there was precisely nothing to get excited about.
And you are an anonymous coward...as well as being off-topic. Personally I can't stand Blair just as much as I can't stand Bush, but I really want to see what Lord Hutton comes up with before deciding on this one.
Meanwhile it is back to the Unix wars as usual, with a twist.
SuSE: Use our Linux, we're protected because we were part of OpenLinux along with those SCOundrels
HP: Use our Linux, we are protected because we have a secret condom and we promise you won't catch anything.
IBM: So we're being sued. Hell, $3 billion is small change. Excuse us a moment while we thump our chests and then bury these creeps in fecal pellets.
SUN: Linux is crap for the server anyway. But here's this really, really neat corporate desktop which just happens to be SuSE underneath, see above.
All together: "Mind you, don't go buying no Linux from some two cent little organisation that just might get sued to hell and back"
I guess if you got all the marketing people from the organisations mentioned above and asked them to write an essay, "Darl McB: pain in the ass or unexpected business bonus", they'd be typing away for a long time.
Blair is a lawyer (IDS mispronounces it "liar" in his peculiar accent, but that's what he means.) He also left legal practice well before UK lawyers decided that computers were OK, in about 2000. That means that the full extent of his knowledge about IT is:
Lower class people like secretaries and clerks use computers
Some of the people who have something to do with them, like Mr. Gates, apparently have lots of money and should be kept onside.
I imagine if the thinks about it at all, he now thinks that computers are a matter for the civil service. The person who matters is Gordon Brown at the Treasury, a man who famously used to phone journalists up at 10pm because of something interesting he had worked out from a spreadsheet. And his approach could be summarised very briefly as:
Will this work?
Will this save money?
Will this affect UK jobs?
The people to convince about FOSS are in the Treasury, and as they tend to be the smartest people in the UK government, there may be some chance of making it work.
Here in a secret place forgotten, I
Mark the tremendous process of the sky.
So may your inmost soul, forgotten mark
The dawn, the noon, the coming of the dark.
Not only did he graduate from Cambridge, he became the Lucasian Professor, and was eventually called in to help out the Civil Service (run the Mint) partly because of his metallurgical expertise. He was part of the Establishment. And I very much doubt if he was any more eccentric than, say, Poindexter.
The proper title is Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. The only time I ever found Latin useful was when I had to write an essay on Newton and the only copy of the Principia in the library was the Latin version. Stretching a point, you could say, in fact, that Latin was the first scientific programming language.
No. His father died young and although his family technically belonged to the squirearchy, they were very poor. As a teenager he had to do farm work. He had to work his way through Cambridge as the poorest grade of student. It's believed that this explained his attitude to money (grasping) in later life. He was able to "sit around pondering" because the University was closed by the plague and he had to go home for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nokia inductive loop fitment (fits 6310s etc, do not believe what it says on the box - Nokia don't know their own product range) works superbly, though if like me you have an in-ear aid you have to put up with strangers thinking you are completely mad - holding a conversation with yourself with no visible equipment at all. There is a Motorola version which for some reason is far more expensive. Sound quality is vastly better than Bluetooth headsets etc. simply because the transducers in phones and headsets are mostly crap. I find it interesting that mobile phones look increasingly exotic while two of the bits that really matter - the input and output transducers - are so inferior compared to those used by Siemens, Widex, Starkey etc.
- It's guaranteed that at some point the wrong tags will be delivered to the manufacturer
- Bureaucrats are incapable of believing that the system can ever fail
- Lower echelons do what they are told without thinking.
When the mines get labeled as missiles, the mechanics will just have to try and make them fit under the wings or get charged with insubordination. I don't care what it looks like, soldier, the tag says it's a missile.....I think P J O'Rourke commented on this - the sand in Arabia is not the right sort to make sandbags. But then where did you think the sand came from for sandbags in WW2 in Europe? You can't guarantee that your line of fortification will conveniently end in a sandpit.
I'm visiting Italy next week, do you want me to report back? At least Mussolini is supposed to have made the trains run on time, whereas by all reports Berlusconi hasn't managed that.
Actually, I live in a small town that is still a small town. In fact, I live in the "historic center". And we have a community. If I hadn't lived here for 20 years, I would not be able to afford to move here now. But we have just lost the fight to keep out Wal-Mart and I expect ribbon suburbanization to follow quickly.
The problem is that we have created urban (and suburban, and exurban) town patterns that are useless for mass transit. But all the "green" power sources - wave, wind, solar, nuclear (yes, I do think nuclear power can be perfectly safe if it is regulated and not used to produce military by-products) are large-scale or spread out so they favor mass transport designs. They will work well in much of Europe, China and, ultimately, India, but not in the US.
The hydrogen economy remains a possibility - alternative power could be used to create hydrogen efficiently by splitting water - and if the storage and distribution problems can be solved, could fix the US transport problem. But it is a huge threat to the Bush family (and the Cheneys, and many party backers) UNLESS hydrogen generation can be linked to the use of oil or coal. It's a truly vicious circle: Oil is good for the Bushes because its price fluctuates, military and business savvy is needed to maintain supplies, and the US consumer thinks he gets cheap oil, not realising he is actually subsidising the same people that gave us Al-Queda. Terrorism or the threat thereof destabilises oil security, so actually benefits the oil industry by helping to keep prices up. A credible hydrogen economy based on alternative energy would actually reduce oil prices, weaken the corporatism of the US, and benefit the end user. So is it going to happen? Not while Exxon has a breath left in its body.
And if someone with a plastics factory is reading this, why not build space into it for an auxiliary battery thus avoiding the need for frequent shutoff?
It's as stupid as calling BMW a monopoly because only BMW makes BMWs.
Or perhaps Orlowski is thinking that Apple is in a monopoly position as regards the suppliers of software. Actually, because their market share is small, the opposite is the case. They have to provide reasons for suppliers to support them. The fact that some applications may be subsumed by Apple is a fact of life: every manufacturer has to make make or buy decisions all the time. Currently conventional wisdom is that everything is better subcontracted out, but eventually if you go far enough the subcontractors own you.
Personally, I suspect that the ITMS may be too small to survive: if revenue is around $30 million and none of that is profit, there is no real budget to promote it. But at least it's a try, and Apple should be given full credit for trying.
As for Chirac, I can only offer the explanation of a French taxi driver: "c'est un vieil escroc, mais c'est notre vieil escroc a nous" - he's an old crook, but he's our old crook. Jospin suffered from being seen as too distant, and because the Left either couldn't be bothered to come out to vote or were trying to teach him a lesson by not voting for him in the first round. Which is more or less how Dubya got in, too.
Well, that's an interesting argument in favor of its wider use, especially where some Slashdot readers are concerned. But to convince the PHBs to adopt it, you'll need something a bit more business-oriented. How about "is a big fat smelly vagina with enhanced productivity and lowered TCO?
Everything the parent says is true. The only thing I have ever encountered that was noisier was in service with Aeroflot. And the only thing I have ever flown in that was more cramped was a sailplane, though that had better legroom. The windows are minute. If I want to travel in a cramped, noisy metal tube with no view, there's always the subway. It's like the Pyramids: we don't build things like that nowadays because we are no longer quite so stupid. We have even kind of got the idea that having an atmosphere makes it quite a good idea to fly subsonic safely, reliably, cheaply and reasonably quietly. I find Concord(e) going out of service an occasion for quiet optimism.
Also, the electricity isn't generated from the water. It's generated using the kinetic energy of flowing water - just like a turbine or waterwheel, and something needs to produce the kinetic energy in the first place...excuse me while I go and check my cold fusion plant, the room temperature seems a bit low.
This could be extremely useful in treating AIDS and tuberculosis in the 3rd world. Apart from the problems of many 3rd world people in ensuring that drugs are taken continuously, there is the risk that they will sell drugs or have them stolen by other sufferers who are not being treated. I do not know how dosage would stack up against feasibility, but the principle looks sound. There's also the possibility of slowly releasing chemotherapy right into tumors.
Obviously any new technology is going to have risks, but if people are going to die of something without treatment, and existing means of delivery are unreliable or worse, surely this has to be worth pursuing.
I'm sorry not to support the general anti-French paranoia, and I realise that the judgement may not have been precisely about this, but I do think that unscrupulous advertisers are misusing trademarks on the net, and that if it can be stopped it should be.
If a corporation issues an invoice to another business in the same country, then it is legally obliged to collect the sales tax (TVA, VAT, MWST)and pay it to the government. The tax has to be paid on a due date which may be before the invoice is paid. The other company pays the invoice including sales tax, then claims the sales tax back (yes, I agree, it's hard to think of a more stupid system but it is intended to combat fraud.)
If SCO tries the scam of sending out invoices, it will incur a huge liability for tax. The tax liability is a big inducement not to send out fraudulent invoices. Eventually the invoices will appear as bad debts, and that won't look good on the balance sheet either.
This leaves SCO with the option of sending out cross-border invoices. However, these are far less likely to be paid since even the most nervous accountant is unlikely to want to pay a US invoice for the claimed use of IP in a German product.
And my conclusion? Even more R&D and backoffice business goes to Europe, China and India. It's safer to do business there.
In fact, if I remember rightly, a respectable department store in, I think, London England actually had a vibrator in a street-facing display cabinet. If you didn't know what it was there was precisely nothing to get excited about.
How certain are you that the way computing goes in the next few years will favor the Intel approach versus the IBM approach?
And you are an anonymous coward...as well as being off-topic. Personally I can't stand Blair just as much as I can't stand Bush, but I really want to see what Lord Hutton comes up with before deciding on this one.
- SuSE: Use our Linux, we're protected because we were part of OpenLinux along with those SCOundrels
- HP: Use our Linux, we are protected because we have a secret condom and we promise you won't catch anything.
- IBM: So we're being sued. Hell, $3 billion is small change. Excuse us a moment while we thump our chests and then bury these creeps in fecal pellets.
- SUN: Linux is crap for the server anyway. But here's this really, really neat corporate desktop which just happens to be SuSE underneath, see above.
- All together: "Mind you, don't go buying no Linux from some two cent little organisation that just might get sued to hell and back"
I guess if you got all the marketing people from the organisations mentioned above and asked them to write an essay, "Darl McB: pain in the ass or unexpected business bonus", they'd be typing away for a long time.- Lower class people like secretaries and clerks use computers
- Some of the people who have something to do with them, like Mr. Gates, apparently have lots of money and should be kept onside.
I imagine if the thinks about it at all, he now thinks that computers are a matter for the civil service. The person who matters is Gordon Brown at the Treasury, a man who famously used to phone journalists up at 10pm because of something interesting he had worked out from a spreadsheet. And his approach could be summarised very briefly as:- Will this work?
- Will this save money?
- Will this affect UK jobs?
The people to convince about FOSS are in the Treasury, and as they tend to be the smartest people in the UK government, there may be some chance of making it work.Here in a secret place forgotten, I
Mark the tremendous process of the sky.
So may your inmost soul, forgotten mark
The dawn, the noon, the coming of the dark.
We hear about it in October. Do I get the impression this is not being treated witha great deal of seriousness?
Not only did he graduate from Cambridge, he became the Lucasian Professor, and was eventually called in to help out the Civil Service (run the Mint) partly because of his metallurgical expertise. He was part of the Establishment. And I very much doubt if he was any more eccentric than, say, Poindexter.
The proper title is Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. The only time I ever found Latin useful was when I had to write an essay on Newton and the only copy of the Principia in the library was the Latin version. Stretching a point, you could say, in fact, that Latin was the first scientific programming language.
No. His father died young and although his family technically belonged to the squirearchy, they were very poor. As a teenager he had to do farm work. He had to work his way through Cambridge as the poorest grade of student. It's believed that this explained his attitude to money (grasping) in later life. He was able to "sit around pondering" because the University was closed by the plague and he had to go home for a while.