Mark Twain (who was a lot more than the author of Tom Sawyer) was of the view that the perfect way to travel was slowly, on a boat, across the Pacific.
Perhaps our CEOs and salesmen would actually work better if they had slower travel and had to organise their lives and companies in a more structured way. Perhaps they'd have to delegate more? Find local representatives they could trust? Learn to use video conferencing properly? Even make better business decisions.
Yes, I do know this is heresy on slashdot. And you know what? I don't care. Not now I know that Linus uses potty words and my last illusion is broken.
Linus is quite right. I will go further and suggest that it is a good idea for small developers to create their own trademarks, and this is especially beneficial in a FOSS world.
Trademarks are not expensive or hard to come by, believe it or not. You may be told you need an agent. Believe me, if you are intelligent enough to be a software developer, it is easy to navigate trademark paperwork. You do not need an agent. You need to behave like a developer using a new technology, i.e. read the documents, follow the rules. (Yes, I practice what I preach. I took out 2 trademarks last year, for a total of about 10 hours of actual work starting from scratch, though admittedly it was not the first time.) My big recommendation: develop a generic trademark that does not depend on appearance. It is a nice stealth weapon.
Why are trademarks nice?
You use them to protect your own name and reputation
You can use them in documentation you produce; if anyone steals your work and is stupid enough to leave in the trademark (yes, they are) you have a nice clear infringement and their lawyers will probably tell them to stop or pay up.
They actually get you taken seriously.
They do not cause complicated copyright and patent issues of themselves.
I have to add a caveat. In the US trademarks are a bit broken. A trademark in one area is allowed to spill into another, so that our favorite software company was allowed to prevent another company, not a software company, calling itself Gentium. In Europe the rules are clearer and enforced, so if I trademark "we make things that don't suck" as a mark of a software company, I cannot then prevent (say) a manufacturer of compressors from using the same descriptive mark. But that doesn't invalidate the idea. Trademarking the name of a software product, or a phrase associated with it, means that someone cannot simply steal your name and reputation even though they can, perfectly legitimately, reuse your GPLed code.
People saying "Hey this means the CPU is being overclocked 33MHz, that's a lot."
Er, no. It scales. It's still only 1% of the reference clock speed,assuming we have a 3GHz or above CPU, and any CPU manufacturer that tried to release CPUs that were exactly marginal on stability at the designated clock frequency would soon be out of business.
My own usual experience, back in hardware days, was that a lot of old boards were badly designed and had out of spec built in delays, but that the tolerances built in to the main components allowed them to keep going regardless. This was as true in the days when EPROM had a claimed access time of 450nS but the board only gave it 400 from address and chip select going stable, to this case where the deviation is quite small.
To be really tedious, I'm going to point out that the defined frequencies are not what really matters. What matters is the access time, the time between the input parameters going stable (i.e. address, chip selects etc. staying below the zero threshold or above the 1 threshold) and the actual point at which data is either read from or latched into a register. This is governed by four main factors - chip to chip variation, clock frequency, supply voltage at the chip, and die temperature, and that is as true for latches and registers as well as for memory and processors.
Therefore, if manufacturer A is confident that all the system delays on his motherboard are consistently within the maximum safe values by a determined amount, he may perfectly well be able to drive the clock speed a little higher than manufacturer B, whose process variations are greater or who has a less well designed board. The actual time available to the bought in components to write or read data may be greater than on manufacturer B's board, despite the higher clock speed.
Personally I do not go in for overclocking- I work for a company that now standardises on AMD64 boxes and, for our work, performance is no longer a real issue - but there is nothing in principle wrong with it. It's just like auto making, where some manufacturers release models using the same engine but slightly different torque curves and outputs, for whatever reason. They don't change the water pump and the gas pump just because one model is rated at 98BHP in one market and, because perhaps of slight variations in fuel quality, 100BHP in another market.
Real wolves, that is, not funny wolves that eat people and howl at the full moon. Looks like you've been reading too many books. Ramblers will be lucky even to catch sight of a real wolf. They are shy, nocturnal creatures.
Good heavens, educated people a hundred years ago knew wolves were no threat to people. And Bergen Evans, writing in the middle of the last century, could not find a single authenticated case of a wolf attacking a human being in the wild.
However, I hope to Hell they don't introduce those wild boards you mentioned. The idea of Halliburton's execs, or Enron's, being allowed loose in the wild is truly frightening. Or did you mean savage roaming packs of 2 by 4s?
Strangely perhaps, I don't necessarily buy into the concept that if you do not know where you are, you need to find out in depth before you move. Yes, I'm biased: I work for a consultancy that advises people on business change, but we are solution neutral. We have spent endless hours of philosophical debate on the measure versus fix issue, and at the moment the fixers are ahead on points.
If you do not know where you are, just consider the cost of finding out. If your solutions have grown all over the place, it can be ridiculously expensive to do the analysis in order to find out how much they are costing. The analysis you need to do, is what solutions do you need? Once you know that, you can do some sums.
Often the analysis needed is a high level overview. If you have lots of users in similar environments all using home crafted spreadsheets - chances are you need to replace it all with some properly organised reporting from a database. Especially if you have reason to suspect that you have only 1 original copy of Office for a hundred users. If you have lots of users endlessly copying documents - chances are you need to document management system, a central repository, perhaps an internal print shop. If you have offices full of inkjet printers, you will save big money in consumables and reports by a proper deployment of laser printers. If you have loads of deskbound light email users all using Exchange server and Outlook - you are wasting an expensive resource because you could put them all on a low overhead server and Thunderbird.
Once you know your needs you can do some planning - which may be to stick with the Windows you know and love and clean up the shit. But it might be that when you expose what people actually need to do, and how they need to cooperate and share data, you would be better off building on a Linux platform.
Summary of that ramble: You do the TCO on where you need to get to, not on where you are today. Because it is practically guaranteed that you are wasting money today; you just need to find out where, in fairly broad brush terms.
I guess that analysis is why I could never have worked for McKinsey and other obsessional bean counters. But ask yourself; if you suspect you are knee deep in shit, is it better to analyse the composition of the shit or to look for a ladder?
Please drop the cultural cringe. You really don't need it. Australia is a first world country and starts to need acting it.
Do not explain Australian jokes on/. The French do not explain French jokes, the English assume that you understand English references. Anybody too stupid to get it has Google. Right?
Drop all references to boomerangs, Fosters, etc. Every country has its cultural obscurities and disgusting alcoholic drinks. Don't go on about it. Ignore people who try to. The English ignore childish US remarks about bad English dentistry. The Americans ignore remarks about rednecks, guns and the chimpanzee in the White House (except for a few dimwits who are themselves probably rednecks.)
Don't knock Germaine Greer. Every country has a female cultural icon that a few low grade pond life hate, e.g. Jane Fonda. Adults are above this nonsense.
Do not make remarks about having electricity etc. People in Third World countries have electricity. It's a very tired joke.
Generally, get rid of any chips on shoulders. You really do not need them. If some of you are the descendants of convicts, remember that the US and the UK are full of the descendants of people who should have been convicts. It's no big deal.
As I at least hold a US patent, perhaps I should try and explain that it is based on date of INVENTION, folks. Microsoft is (apparently) claiming to have invented something before Apple. To prove this, they will need engineer's notes and concepts, drawings etc. which provably originate from an invention date.
Of course, the cost of forgery is immeasurably less than the cost of losing a really big patent fight: as Lord MacAulay noted many years ago, in India there were even companies in Bombay that obligingly kept stacks of paper and ink for different years up to about 40 years back, along with official government seals, so they could do you anything you wanted. This is the major weakness of the US system, i.e. the incentive to fraud is disproportionate to the risk. The weakness of the European system (first to file) is of a thief stealing an invention and filing it first.
The inability or unwillingness of the EC to understand this is at the root of the problem with software patents shows that the last people to leave in charge of technology are civil servants and lawyers.
Because the content is interesting and a lot more quantitative than the submitter indicates. The meat includes:
Of that 73%, 4% expect open source to dominate and be widespread throughout the organization, with the rest expecting the influence of open source software to be limited to core areas, with 41% of those identifying individual business areas as growth opportunities, 17% expecting it to be a fundamental component of core IT systems, and 11% expecting it to be a niche option in non-core IT functions
This is hardly a ringing endorsement. Even more insteresting is the list further down of predicted successful and unsuccessful technologies. As might be expected, the things actually doing well - Apache, MySQL, are visible and expected to continue to be so. Open Office is clearly seen as a failure. Surprisingly, to my mind, so is Thunderbird. And so is JBoss, while Tomcat seems to be better regarded.
There is no ammunition here at all for MS-bashers, and the scenario it paints is a bit gloomy. If in 5 years time everybody is still supporting Office - which, regardless of whether it is the MS version or the OO version is, to my mind, still a truly terrible way to meet the day to day needs of most ordinary office workers - we will surely have learnt nothing and done nothing to meet the real needs of business.
It would be nice to think that this particular survey will go the way of all preductions of the future and be wrong, but actually it seems to point to a growing IT trend - inertia. It makes little difference whether it's computers or SUVs, the answer to all problems is to do more of the same. Perhaps slightly lower fuel consumption immediately offset by dragging around some new feature. 17 inch wheels/monitors? Next year we'll have 19 inch wheels/monitors! And in a nod to the environment, perhaps in 5 years time 5% will be recyclable/OSS. Meanwhile, can anyone explain to me, clearly and convincingly, exactly how the average joe office worker's life benefits from the capabilities of Excel in 2005 versus Lotus 123 in, say, 1990, excluding Y2000 fixes, speed and memory?
Is it just me or is it deeply annoying to have someone call himself something like "Lord British"?
Apart from the sheer obsolescent servile baggage of ridiculous British titles trying to suggest that some chinless dimwit is somehow better that the rest of us, there is the simple idiocy of getting it wrong (lords are named after places because the origins of titles lay in land ownership - actually successful land theft. British is an adjective, not a noun. The person who owns a big chunk of Wiltshire is named Lord Bath, not Lord Bathish). The UK would be a nicer place to visit if the citizenry had followed the sensible French at the end of the 18th Century (though the way their so-called Labor Prime Minister is going, it's probably illegal to say that any more.)
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest, even if it gets modded to hell by Etonians who have discovered/.
The real predictors were surely Pohl and Kornbluth, in their novel The space merchants from the 50s (and yes, the title is a clever pun). I still have a copy. It's wrong about the future - oil and population run out of control much too soon - but (IMFHO) dead right about the unholy alliance of corporations, governments and the advertising industry. It's one of the two books about dysfunctional societies that should be compulsory in the school curriculum, the other one being 1984.
Don't do it. You will get into a hell of a mess. The biggest problem you will face is that basic business accounting consists of two parallel threads: cash in and out, and debtors/creditors. Reconciling them is key to producing management accounts, and you cannot do this with spreadsheets. If you have sales tax to deal with as well, it's much worse. If you didn't understand the above, then you need to (a) learn basic accounting and (b) shell out for a commercial accounts system such as MYOB. If you do understand it, I will offer a comment. The small business system I have developed has about 1 man year in it, spread over about 100 customers. Is it really worth trying to save yourself a few hunded $$ for that?
No way can you blow up 35mm at a push to 6ft. In fact, even 6 by 7 is hard pushed except under studio conditions (heavy tripod, no wind, and a Mamiya 67 is one heavy lump of metal. And even so, the grain will be part of the impact of the picture.) To get 6ft gallery quality you need at least 5 by 4 (inch) and that is serious specialised gear. I have used medium format since 1966, and I sold all my gear (mainly Mamiya and Bronica) four years ago because I was no longer doing studio work, and in the field (where most people work) with hand held conditions, wind, vibration etc. there is simply nothing to be gained over digital.
As for chomatic aberration, it is a lens property and nothing at all to do with interaction between lens and media. It is harder to control as focal length gets shorter, that is all. Cheap short focus long range over compressed lenses will have aberration. Fact of life. Good quality lenses with limited zoom range and sufficient physical volume to give the designer freedom can have good correction. The highest quality Leitz 35mm lenses were all fixed focal length, but when Leitz started producing varifocal lenses it was an admission that lens design had moved on and new options were possible.
It's sad, because like many people I enjoyed the physical process of developing and printing, watching the 20 by 16s come up under the safelight. And for certain art purposes film may be around for a long time, though I guess almost entirely B&W. But let us not pretend that 35mm had huge reserves of quality that digital cannot match. It was, after all, invented as a cheap way of doing photography under difficult conditions. The little waterproof Pentax I now use for snapshots is the heir of the Leitz tradition, not the SLR.
This is actually pretty interesting, but likely to be stamped out by the IP owners. It actually shows pretty clearly what is wrong with present attempts at continued IP extension; it suppresses innovation and originality at the expense of a fossilised business model.
Kids have always played with dolls and toy soldiers and engaged in imaginative play. This is actually a way of actualising that play in a reproducible manner. It's getting back to a core process of the human imagination, and suddenly making it more than just a transient entertainment for a few children.
Up till now animation has been a relatively expensive process which puts it under the control of studios, or results in tiny cartoons produced with great labor by students. This shows that the process is now ready to be democratised - if it is allowed to happen. Potentially Open Source could do this, by creating Open Source animation engines which work with Open Source avatars - meaning that kids (and people a lot older) could create and release those avatars. The result? Well, if it's like music, where the means did NOT result in talented outsiders getting much exposure via the P2P networks, but does result in a lot of piracy, it will be disappointing. But it would be nice if, for once, educators and others got a clue and encouraged kids to use their creative talent on computer generated animation.
On a slightly relatied topic, I do not believe that the real driving force behind the attack on P2P networks is fear of piracy. Piracy just legitimises the existing pyramid structure of content creation and distribution. They are under attack because of the fear that one day they might result in democratisation of content creation and distribution - which would destroy the recording industry and the movie industry as their "blockbuster" lowest common denominator model had to compete within a huge number of niche markets. That's where freedom (the right to create and distribute without being suppressed by the monopolist) meets Marxist socialism - the idea that citizens rather than capitalists should own the means of production and distribution.
No law should ever be based around intention. Proving intention makes lawyers rich, but does little for justice. As an example, consider the difference between murder, manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.
Intention per se is essentially unprovable without documented evidence, and any law based around intention just results in business via conversations in remote places.
The NYT article (yes, I subscribe...) clearly showed booster rockets on the cargo system. Exactly the point I was trying to make. Currently, although oxyhydrogen systems are used some of the time, they are not by any means used all of the time. Without getting too technical (I'm burning up Karma anyway) solid fuel boosters are currently cheap and polluting, just like oxy kerosene is cheap and polluting. Oxy hydrogen puts out a certain amount of nitrogen oxides while in the atmosphere and dumps water in the high atmosphere - where it does not usually occur. Which is better: rush back into space with a technology that will always be limited, or, since there is no real commercial reason to go at the moment, develop a next-gen launch technology that will be efficient and relatively nonpolluting (and, incidentally, probably give a major boost to Earthside energy efficiency, just like bypass jet engines can be installed in efficient gas burning CHP systems.)
If you had bothered to (a) RTFA (b) actually learn a bit about current rocket technology and (c) not try to be a smartass, you might not come over as a dumbass.
In case this ever gets moderated flamebait, the parent called me an idiot. I may possibly be an idiot, but the parent doesn't have any evidence on which to make that call.
Those solid fuel boosters use liquid oxygen and hydrogen, right? However, I suggest before you start being too rude to people who actually (1) have science degrees and (2) have been following the space programs since 1958, you might want to learn to spell. naturally,occurring,occupies,earth's,Because.
We're not going to leave the planet just yet...
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Despite all the people who aren't rocket scientists fantasising about space elevators, perhapsotron drives and the like, it's becoming obvious that we are going to be physically limited to this planet for a long time to come. The amount of shit that has to be poured into the atmosphere to get any really significant payload into orbit means that if any large scale use is found for space, the damage from existing global warming is likely to fade into insignificance. The effects on the climate of the Krakatoa eruption were felt for years afterwards, so it is not like the effects of dumping loads of unexpected gases and particulates into the upper atmosphere are much of a mystery.
Admittedly we have been stupid in the past - commercial interests have been allowed to create huge volumes of truck traffic across the US and Europe that are effectively subsidised by the rest of us - but it is hard to believe that a similarly environmentally damaging new technology could be adopted wholesale by commercial interests nowadays without a great deal of economic analysis and regulation.
Strangely, I'm not trying to be negative about space exploration. I do think there is an important role for NASA. It's in continuing to do clever missions (Mars is a huge scientific success story that is under-promoted to the general public) while investing heavily in basic physics to find out if it is possible to find ways of getting large payloads off the Earth without destroying the environment in the process. What exactly will we learn from building bigger Apollos? It isn't giant SUVs that advance automotive technology, but the constant research into more efficient engines, fuel cells, renewable energy sources etc.
Although the Russian effort was in some ways commendably simple and reliable, it's dependent on cheap energy. It's like the people who keep trying to build new steam railway locomotives because, basically, they like them. They keep promoting the simplicity of the concept while quietly ignoring the fact that they use several times the fuel per passenger mile or tonne mile of the most clapped out Diesel-electric. It's a dead end.
I'm replying to myself before the language Nazis point out that should be "de minimis non curat lex".
Completely off-topic I will now print the little verse that explains this:
There was a young fellow named Rex
With diminutive organ of sex
When charged with exposure he replied with composure
"De minimis non curat lex."
Under English and Welsh law it is assumed that every subject of her gracious Majesty, Defender of the Faith, by the Grace of God Queen Elizabeth the Second (and not in any way the descendant of some dodgy German princes) has a total and accurate knowledge of the law and therefore ignorance is no excuse. The fact that Judges Appellate frequently decide that mere judges get the law wrong, and that the very senior judges appointed to the House of Unelectable Politicians Who Need Some Cash then decide that the Judges Appellate also got it wrong, does not alter the fact that Joe Doe knows the entire legal system from A to Z. (By the way, yes I do know that most judges are considerably more intelligent and sensible than most politicians, and frequently try and interpret silly laws in a sensible way. But that is beside the point.)
However, there is another ancient principle of Common Law: De minimis non curate lex, which means "the law ignores small things". If this is applied, clearly someone occasionally getting their neighbour's wireless network because of signal strength variation is not worth worrying about. Finally, there is the CPS or Crown Prosecution Service. Whether or not they prosecute depends on the current level of terrorism paranoia, what the Daily Mail is screaming about at the moment, and whether the paperwork has been filled in correctly.
The one thing in all this that does not matter is whether or not you were doing this on purpose. And, being completely serious for a moment, that is exactly as it should be because, in reality, it is almost impossible to prove intent.
Without intending a trace of humor or irony, that was a truly informative answer, and has told me something I didn't know. I once knew someone who restored a Triumph Spitfire (mind you he actually drove a Golf) and based on your info I guess someone had switched carbs at an earlier stage. Typical of British industry I guess: too busy on internal feuding to notice the enemies at the gate.
Sticking to the stuff that matters, I thought it was the SU (Skinner Union) carburetor that was found on so many British cars of that era. The SU had a remarkably boob-shaped chamber on top which was indeed capped with a nipple-like object which held the damper rod. There was a chamber inside which contained oil and was connected to a piston which went up and down according to the inlet manifold depression. I am sure the SU was one of the reasons that the VW beetle was so much more successful than small British cars of the same period. (The other reasons were the appalling quality, the underpowered engines, the high cost of spares, the rust, the inaccessibility of mechanical parts, and the whole bad karma of the entire British car industry with the exception of Morgan, which actually made a virtue out of being quirky and English.)
Accordingly I have to point out that what makes this such bad writing is that in reality anybody faced with tuning a pair of SUs would naturally find his thoughts turning to the more attractive subject of boobs, and not vice versa.
You won't see buzzards circling like I can from my office window.
Even when I just had a view of the company generator and a few pigeons, it was better than any diffuse piped light source could ever be. The problem being "solved" here is a fault of US corporate culture that will eventually go away of its own accord when gigantic buildings with dark interiors go out of fashion.
Then you need to understand the mechanism of hearing a bit better.
In effect, nerve transmission is based on a kind of PCM over a number of channels. Nerve cells fire in roughly binary fashion. The bandwidth available from ear to brain is quite finite. Provided the S/N ratio of the digital signal exceeds a certain value over a certain bandwidth, it is indistinguishable from an analog signal. Indeed it must be, because it is converted into an analog signal in the reproduction chain.
Audiophiles with golden ears? I have yet to see a study which shows how their mechanisms of neural transmission have such a huge increase in bandwidth over the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps our CEOs and salesmen would actually work better if they had slower travel and had to organise their lives and companies in a more structured way. Perhaps they'd have to delegate more? Find local representatives they could trust? Learn to use video conferencing properly? Even make better business decisions.
Yes, I do know this is heresy on slashdot. And you know what? I don't care. Not now I know that Linus uses potty words and my last illusion is broken.
Trademarks are not expensive or hard to come by, believe it or not. You may be told you need an agent. Believe me, if you are intelligent enough to be a software developer, it is easy to navigate trademark paperwork. You do not need an agent. You need to behave like a developer using a new technology, i.e. read the documents, follow the rules. (Yes, I practice what I preach. I took out 2 trademarks last year, for a total of about 10 hours of actual work starting from scratch, though admittedly it was not the first time.)
My big recommendation: develop a generic trademark that does not depend on appearance. It is a nice stealth weapon.
Why are trademarks nice?
- You use them to protect your own name and reputation
- You can use them in documentation you produce; if anyone steals your work and is stupid enough to leave in the trademark (yes, they are) you have a nice clear infringement and their lawyers will probably tell them to stop or pay up.
- They actually get you taken seriously.
- They do not cause complicated copyright and patent issues of themselves.
I have to add a caveat. In the US trademarks are a bit broken. A trademark in one area is allowed to spill into another, so that our favorite software company was allowed to prevent another company, not a software company, calling itself Gentium. In Europe the rules are clearer and enforced, so if I trademark "we make things that don't suck" as a mark of a software company, I cannot then prevent (say) a manufacturer of compressors from using the same descriptive mark. But that doesn't invalidate the idea. Trademarking the name of a software product, or a phrase associated with it, means that someone cannot simply steal your name and reputation even though they can, perfectly legitimately, reuse your GPLed code.Er, no. It scales. It's still only 1% of the reference clock speed,assuming we have a 3GHz or above CPU, and any CPU manufacturer that tried to release CPUs that were exactly marginal on stability at the designated clock frequency would soon be out of business.
My own usual experience, back in hardware days, was that a lot of old boards were badly designed and had out of spec built in delays, but that the tolerances built in to the main components allowed them to keep going regardless. This was as true in the days when EPROM had a claimed access time of 450nS but the board only gave it 400 from address and chip select going stable, to this case where the deviation is quite small.
To be really tedious, I'm going to point out that the defined frequencies are not what really matters. What matters is the access time, the time between the input parameters going stable (i.e. address, chip selects etc. staying below the zero threshold or above the 1 threshold) and the actual point at which data is either read from or latched into a register. This is governed by four main factors - chip to chip variation, clock frequency, supply voltage at the chip, and die temperature, and that is as true for latches and registers as well as for memory and processors.
Therefore, if manufacturer A is confident that all the system delays on his motherboard are consistently within the maximum safe values by a determined amount, he may perfectly well be able to drive the clock speed a little higher than manufacturer B, whose process variations are greater or who has a less well designed board. The actual time available to the bought in components to write or read data may be greater than on manufacturer B's board, despite the higher clock speed.
Personally I do not go in for overclocking- I work for a company that now standardises on AMD64 boxes and, for our work, performance is no longer a real issue - but there is nothing in principle wrong with it. It's just like auto making, where some manufacturers release models using the same engine but slightly different torque curves and outputs, for whatever reason. They don't change the water pump and the gas pump just because one model is rated at 98BHP in one market and, because perhaps of slight variations in fuel quality, 100BHP in another market.
Good heavens, educated people a hundred years ago knew wolves were no threat to people. And Bergen Evans, writing in the middle of the last century, could not find a single authenticated case of a wolf attacking a human being in the wild.
However, I hope to Hell they don't introduce those wild boards you mentioned. The idea of Halliburton's execs, or Enron's, being allowed loose in the wild is truly frightening. Or did you mean savage roaming packs of 2 by 4s?
If you do not know where you are, just consider the cost of finding out. If your solutions have grown all over the place, it can be ridiculously expensive to do the analysis in order to find out how much they are costing. The analysis you need to do, is what solutions do you need? Once you know that, you can do some sums.
Often the analysis needed is a high level overview. If you have lots of users in similar environments all using home crafted spreadsheets - chances are you need to replace it all with some properly organised reporting from a database. Especially if you have reason to suspect that you have only 1 original copy of Office for a hundred users. If you have lots of users endlessly copying documents - chances are you need to document management system, a central repository, perhaps an internal print shop. If you have offices full of inkjet printers, you will save big money in consumables and reports by a proper deployment of laser printers. If you have loads of deskbound light email users all using Exchange server and Outlook - you are wasting an expensive resource because you could put them all on a low overhead server and Thunderbird.
Once you know your needs you can do some planning - which may be to stick with the Windows you know and love and clean up the shit. But it might be that when you expose what people actually need to do, and how they need to cooperate and share data, you would be better off building on a Linux platform.
Summary of that ramble: You do the TCO on where you need to get to, not on where you are today. Because it is practically guaranteed that you are wasting money today; you just need to find out where, in fairly broad brush terms.
I guess that analysis is why I could never have worked for McKinsey and other obsessional bean counters. But ask yourself; if you suspect you are knee deep in shit, is it better to analyse the composition of the shit or to look for a ladder?
Please drop the cultural cringe. You really don't need it. Australia is a first world country and starts to need acting it.
Of course, the cost of forgery is immeasurably less than the cost of losing a really big patent fight: as Lord MacAulay noted many years ago, in India there were even companies in Bombay that obligingly kept stacks of paper and ink for different years up to about 40 years back, along with official government seals, so they could do you anything you wanted. This is the major weakness of the US system, i.e. the incentive to fraud is disproportionate to the risk. The weakness of the European system (first to file) is of a thief stealing an invention and filing it first.
The inability or unwillingness of the EC to understand this is at the root of the problem with software patents shows that the last people to leave in charge of technology are civil servants and lawyers.
There is no ammunition here at all for MS-bashers, and the scenario it paints is a bit gloomy. If in 5 years time everybody is still supporting Office - which, regardless of whether it is the MS version or the OO version is, to my mind, still a truly terrible way to meet the day to day needs of most ordinary office workers - we will surely have learnt nothing and done nothing to meet the real needs of business.
It would be nice to think that this particular survey will go the way of all preductions of the future and be wrong, but actually it seems to point to a growing IT trend - inertia. It makes little difference whether it's computers or SUVs, the answer to all problems is to do more of the same. Perhaps slightly lower fuel consumption immediately offset by dragging around some new feature. 17 inch wheels/monitors? Next year we'll have 19 inch wheels/monitors! And in a nod to the environment, perhaps in 5 years time 5% will be recyclable/OSS. Meanwhile, can anyone explain to me, clearly and convincingly, exactly how the average joe office worker's life benefits from the capabilities of Excel in 2005 versus Lotus 123 in, say, 1990, excluding Y2000 fixes, speed and memory?
Apart from the sheer obsolescent servile baggage of ridiculous British titles trying to suggest that some chinless dimwit is somehow better that the rest of us, there is the simple idiocy of getting it wrong (lords are named after places because the origins of titles lay in land ownership - actually successful land theft. British is an adjective, not a noun. The person who owns a big chunk of Wiltshire is named Lord Bath, not Lord Bathish). The UK would be a nicer place to visit if the citizenry had followed the sensible French at the end of the 18th Century (though the way their so-called Labor Prime Minister is going, it's probably illegal to say that any more.)
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest, even if it gets modded to hell by Etonians who have discovered /.
The real predictors were surely Pohl and Kornbluth, in their novel The space merchants from the 50s (and yes, the title is a clever pun). I still have a copy. It's wrong about the future - oil and population run out of control much too soon - but (IMFHO) dead right about the unholy alliance of corporations, governments and the advertising industry. It's one of the two books about dysfunctional societies that should be compulsory in the school curriculum, the other one being 1984.
Don't do it. You will get into a hell of a mess. The biggest problem you will face is that basic business accounting consists of two parallel threads: cash in and out, and debtors/creditors. Reconciling them is key to producing management accounts, and you cannot do this with spreadsheets. If you have sales tax to deal with as well, it's much worse.
If you didn't understand the above, then you need to (a) learn basic accounting and (b) shell out for a commercial accounts system such as MYOB. If you do understand it, I will offer a comment. The small business system I have developed has about 1 man year in it, spread over about 100 customers. Is it really worth trying to save yourself a few hunded $$ for that?
As for chomatic aberration, it is a lens property and nothing at all to do with interaction between lens and media. It is harder to control as focal length gets shorter, that is all. Cheap short focus long range over compressed lenses will have aberration. Fact of life. Good quality lenses with limited zoom range and sufficient physical volume to give the designer freedom can have good correction. The highest quality Leitz 35mm lenses were all fixed focal length, but when Leitz started producing varifocal lenses it was an admission that lens design had moved on and new options were possible.
It's sad, because like many people I enjoyed the physical process of developing and printing, watching the 20 by 16s come up under the safelight. And for certain art purposes film may be around for a long time, though I guess almost entirely B&W. But let us not pretend that 35mm had huge reserves of quality that digital cannot match. It was, after all, invented as a cheap way of doing photography under difficult conditions. The little waterproof Pentax I now use for snapshots is the heir of the Leitz tradition, not the SLR.
But don't worry. The robots watching will be programmed to enjoy it.
It actually shows pretty clearly what is wrong with present attempts at continued IP extension; it suppresses innovation and originality at the expense of a fossilised business model.
Kids have always played with dolls and toy soldiers and engaged in imaginative play. This is actually a way of actualising that play in a reproducible manner. It's getting back to a core process of the human imagination, and suddenly making it more than just a transient entertainment for a few children.
Up till now animation has been a relatively expensive process which puts it under the control of studios, or results in tiny cartoons produced with great labor by students. This shows that the process is now ready to be democratised - if it is allowed to happen. Potentially Open Source could do this, by creating Open Source animation engines which work with Open Source avatars - meaning that kids (and people a lot older) could create and release those avatars. The result? Well, if it's like music, where the means did NOT result in talented outsiders getting much exposure via the P2P networks, but does result in a lot of piracy, it will be disappointing. But it would be nice if, for once, educators and others got a clue and encouraged kids to use their creative talent on computer generated animation.
On a slightly relatied topic, I do not believe that the real driving force behind the attack on P2P networks is fear of piracy. Piracy just legitimises the existing pyramid structure of content creation and distribution. They are under attack because of the fear that one day they might result in democratisation of content creation and distribution - which would destroy the recording industry and the movie industry as their "blockbuster" lowest common denominator model had to compete within a huge number of niche markets. That's where freedom (the right to create and distribute without being suppressed by the monopolist) meets Marxist socialism - the idea that citizens rather than capitalists should own the means of production and distribution.
Intention per se is essentially unprovable without documented evidence, and any law based around intention just results in business via conversations in remote places.
If you had bothered to (a) RTFA (b) actually learn a bit about current rocket technology and (c) not try to be a smartass, you might not come over as a dumbass.
In case this ever gets moderated flamebait, the parent called me an idiot. I may possibly be an idiot, but the parent doesn't have any evidence on which to make that call.
Those solid fuel boosters use liquid oxygen and hydrogen, right? However, I suggest before you start being too rude to people who actually (1) have science degrees and (2) have been following the space programs since 1958, you might want to learn to spell. naturally,occurring,occupies,earth's,Because.
Admittedly we have been stupid in the past - commercial interests have been allowed to create huge volumes of truck traffic across the US and Europe that are effectively subsidised by the rest of us - but it is hard to believe that a similarly environmentally damaging new technology could be adopted wholesale by commercial interests nowadays without a great deal of economic analysis and regulation.
Strangely, I'm not trying to be negative about space exploration. I do think there is an important role for NASA. It's in continuing to do clever missions (Mars is a huge scientific success story that is under-promoted to the general public) while investing heavily in basic physics to find out if it is possible to find ways of getting large payloads off the Earth without destroying the environment in the process. What exactly will we learn from building bigger Apollos? It isn't giant SUVs that advance automotive technology, but the constant research into more efficient engines, fuel cells, renewable energy sources etc.
Although the Russian effort was in some ways commendably simple and reliable, it's dependent on cheap energy. It's like the people who keep trying to build new steam railway locomotives because, basically, they like them. They keep promoting the simplicity of the concept while quietly ignoring the fact that they use several times the fuel per passenger mile or tonne mile of the most clapped out Diesel-electric. It's a dead end.
There was a young fellow named Rex
With diminutive organ of sex
When charged with exposure he replied with composure
"De minimis non curat lex."
However, there is another ancient principle of Common Law: De minimis non curate lex, which means "the law ignores small things". If this is applied, clearly someone occasionally getting their neighbour's wireless network because of signal strength variation is not worth worrying about. Finally, there is the CPS or Crown Prosecution Service. Whether or not they prosecute depends on the current level of terrorism paranoia, what the Daily Mail is screaming about at the moment, and whether the paperwork has been filled in correctly.
The one thing in all this that does not matter is whether or not you were doing this on purpose. And, being completely serious for a moment, that is exactly as it should be because, in reality, it is almost impossible to prove intent.
The newspaper that thinks that, if there is fog in the English Channel, the Continent of Europe is cut off from civilisation.
Without intending a trace of humor or irony, that was a truly informative answer, and has told me something I didn't know. I once knew someone who restored a Triumph Spitfire (mind you he actually drove a Golf) and based on your info I guess someone had switched carbs at an earlier stage. Typical of British industry I guess: too busy on internal feuding to notice the enemies at the gate.
Accordingly I have to point out that what makes this such bad writing is that in reality anybody faced with tuning a pair of SUs would naturally find his thoughts turning to the more attractive subject of boobs, and not vice versa.
Even when I just had a view of the company generator and a few pigeons, it was better than any diffuse piped light source could ever be. The problem being "solved" here is a fault of US corporate culture that will eventually go away of its own accord when gigantic buildings with dark interiors go out of fashion.
In effect, nerve transmission is based on a kind of PCM over a number of channels. Nerve cells fire in roughly binary fashion. The bandwidth available from ear to brain is quite finite. Provided the S/N ratio of the digital signal exceeds a certain value over a certain bandwidth, it is indistinguishable from an analog signal. Indeed it must be, because it is converted into an analog signal in the reproduction chain.
Audiophiles with golden ears? I have yet to see a study which shows how their mechanisms of neural transmission have such a huge increase in bandwidth over the rest of us.