Google is the real thin client innovator
on
Gates on Google
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· Score: 1
That's why Google is a threat to Microsoft. Sun et al keep on about thin clients and try to sell them to corporates. Google is building up the capability to be the ultimate thick server/thin client system. Of course Google wants to assess the possibilities of making Firefox the basis of their service delivery. They must have one in case Microsoft discovers a way to lock Google services out of IE (not security checked....)
Sodium cooled exhaust valves were common on old fashioned auto engines at one time. In fact, anyone who remembers the Manx Norton will recall the sodium cooled exhaust valve and how you had to warm the thing up carefully to prevent it from sticking.
However, I very much doubt that sodium will be the metal of choice for CPU cooling, no matter how popular it is in submarines. The obvious candidates are mercury and gallium. Mercury is rapidly falling out of favor because it is so toxic and, if you spill it and it gets under the floorboards it is floor removal time. Gallium is a little expensive.
Turbofan engines are really quite efficient. It's only military aircraft and that horrible Concorde thing that use pure jet engines.
In fact I believe that in passenger miles per gallon terms large passenger aircraft do better than most cars, before allowing for the fact that most cars have only one passenger a lot of the time. The only real advantage of trains over planes is that you can power an HST using a nuclear power plant while aircraft need oil. If people and perishable goods are going to continue to move large distances for the next thirty years or so, the A380 is a good bet.
The key thing for the A380 is not just that it's big - it uses 20% less fuel per passenger mile than a 747. Given the predictions that oil production may peak this year or in 2006, that fuel efficiency could be very important. The thing also has huge (for an aircraft) cargo capability.
Boeing still seems to be pinning its hopes on midsize wide bodied aircraft that fly between smaller airports. All I can say is, for Boeing to be right an awful lot of people need to be very wrong about the way the world is going.
Is its pricing model. I just checked again on the site, and they still do not tell you upfront what it will cost.
This for me is an important point. I may be an eccentric, I am certainly a slightly lapsed Quaker, but for me one of the most important things in an ethical business is price transparency. Before any libertarian gets started, this is not an anti-business attitude. The object of stock markets, for instance, is to provide price transparency as well as liquidity. This is one of the things that makes markets trustworthy: things take place in the light of day, not by private agreement.
I do not have a problem with charging for software and support: I do believe that it should be standard business practice for software companies to have a clean and transparent pricing model so that it is possible both to compare products by TCO, and to know that by using XYZ software you are not paying through the nose while XYZ is doing a cheap deal with your competitor.
My beef with MS, for instance, is that I cannot buy Windows alone for the same price as buying it bundled with a PC, plus the belief that the price of the various Microsoft offerings is related to negotiating ability. It is not a level playing field, and this is probably worse than being a monopoly. A monopoly that screws everybody equally at least encourages everybody to look for a way round it, rather than seeking to produce power alignments that keep it in place. By following this "the price is what you negotiate" approach. Bitkeeper cannot avoid the suspicion that people who advocate its use might be in a visible industry position and be getting a special deal. To anyone who says that this is excessive idealism, I would suggest that I do not have a problem with price variation or special offers provided they are freely and openly advertised. I am not in favor of limiting the ability of companies to respond to market conditions. I am opposed to secret deals.
Anybody who questions this might compare the laser printer and copier markets. Historically printers have been engineer-driven and tend to sell to a price. Copiers have been salesman-driven and the vendors have tried to hide the real costs in complex leasing and contract details. It isn't surprising that, as buyers become more aware, power starts to shift to the printer manufacturers. Nobody likes copier vendors. Scott Adams (who is an economist as well as the creator of Dilbert) has summed it up well by using the term "confusopolies" to describe the vendors of mobile phone contracts etc. who seek to conceal the true costs.
So, in summary: Bitkeeper's business practices as regards the cost of their products causes me not to want to buy them.
I've said this before, but when did a dupe post ever stop anyone on Slashdot? If you are worried about support, go with the Sun version. Loads faster, various little tweaks. I have been running the 8 beta for some time and have had no more compatibility problems than exist between Office 97, 2000 and XP.
Common to both free and paid for, the issue of install for multiple users is fixed. It is also possible to configure the (XML) setup files to produce a deployable version that will by default save in MS format with all your other l10n preferences ready set up, just as with MS products.
You can do a number of fun things with OO/StarOffice relatively easily. Using the Java drivers, for instance, you can configure servlets (running under Tomcat, JBoss etc) to create web pages that will run database operations to populate spreadsheets with standard reports, and deploy those pages over your internet or the internet with HTTP over SSL. Without.net, using free tools, you can subtly take over the administrators by giving them access to their most important data in a familar format. (If capacity is a problem, you can use old boxes to run OO as, effectively, a server and so create a cluster of office document generators). You can also export those same reports as downloadable PDFs. In the same way, reports can be created in Word format by replacing embedded fields with data.
Having watched an educational administrator run database query after database query on successive spreadsheets, and then have to package them all up and email them all out (insecure, by the way), the time that could be saved on this sort of thing is enormous. By giving the little dears their data as Excel, they can play with it and convince themselves they are "adding value" by adjusting fonts and line widths and dropping in poisonously bad clip art.
So, don't sell OO as a cheap version. Sell it an an enterprise version that can be programmed to automate tasks just like.net, but with lower TCO and the ability to reformat and distribute documents with excellent security.
I always wondered why, when I needed to, it was so hard to recruit decent chemists. Nothing to do with the pharmaceuticals companies hiring all the best people, everything to do with entering the inorganic chem lab and going into a state of suspended animation.
The amazing thing, given the amount of the stuff you use in basic inorganic analysis, is that any of us got any work done at all.
Corporations were required to switch their allegiance to neutral on ALL bills?
And it would just about fix the entire US budget deficit. The saving on lobbyists, ex-generals recruited to armaments companies, pork barrel projects, interns required to read mail for congressmen - it would add up to a lot of money. And some of these people could be released into the community to do all the jobs we don't want to do and reduce the need for hardworking Mexicans to leave home. Though how good the average lobbyist would be at pool cleaning and auto valeting I do not know.
And it would be even better if the religious right left business alone. Left to themselves to make money, how many businesses would turn down good staff because they had unusual out of work habits?
I think there used to be something called the Constitution that had something to say on the subject before Karl and Donny and Condy told Georgie that all that human rights stuff was just so 20th century.
An in-board memory test is not the same as a proper memory test using a dedicated test set. The in-board approach will not be able to reproduce the range of voltage levels, speeds and timings of a test set. It may provide the equivalent of an infant-mortality test by exercising the DRAM through the descending leg of its bathtub curve, but it cannot tell you what the allowance for degradation with time and temperature is at your chosen settings.
Of course, if this is for your games machine or something you upgrade every few months anyway, doesn't matter. But if you think that memory might stick around for a while and get used in a business critical application...well, I wouldn't, that's all.
And yes, I do buy Crucial memory. Given my dislike of rebuilding things late into the night or being stuck without working hardware, it is extremely cheap insurance.
I was just making the point that if you want a non-Intel processor (and perhaps you have good reason, like the need to evaluate 64 bit apps?) you have plenty of choice. Big as Dell is, it is not a monopoly. I've bought Dells over the years (starting with a 12.5MHz 286 with a VGA screen, which was bleeding edge when it finally arrived) and we have a Dell in our test server rack, along with Proliants, an odd 32-bit AMD, P4s and P3s. Our employee fleet includes notebooks from Dell, HP and Acer. I would be astonished if anyone ever got sacked for buying any of these; they are all good solid machines. Bottom line: whether or not Dell buys AMD cpus doesn't seem to matter very much.
The CIA is making sure it doesn't get caught with its pants down on the 200th anniversary of 1812. They're going to make sure that the Brits, the Canadians and the Indians don't just walk in and burn down the White House a second time. (Yes, I know it was actually in 1814, but the war officially started in 1812.)
If the Toshiba announcement about a better traction battery is correct. Electric motors can have practically an ideal torque/rpm curve, but the current demands for high starting torque are a problem. The holy grail is a battery which has effectively an enormous surface to the electrodes without corresponding fragility, and so can be quickly recharged and discharged. (Traction batteries currently have a long service life but relatively slow charge and discharge. Starter batteries have a fast discharge for starting but are fragile and do not deep discharge well). Such a battery would completely supersede the inefficient compress air/decompress air cycle. So whichever compressed air tools division of this Korean manufacturer came up with this job preservation scheme - forget it and retrain as battery engineers.
I keep saying it, when I feel brave enough to open the mouth hole in my gold-plated mumetal helmet. The recent history of the USA is turning into the history of the Roman Empire. (Hence the obsession with the Persians, now known as the Iranians). Bread and circuses for the proles, and an emperor who arises from an oligarchy which justifies every suppression of civil liberty by claiming that the Empire is threatened from within and without. Among the empires that have used the restriction of travel as a method of social control are the Roman empire, the Soviet Union, and the past and current Chinese empires.
Well, folks, when the guys with funny helmets turn up at the gates on their little horses and the government turns out to have done a runner, don't say you weren't warned.
Oh, actually it just turns out that a government agency was doing what government agencies do all the time. I apologise for the wild exaggeration. So now please put down the Taser and let me get on the goddam airplane.
In pure science, there is a reasonable probability that biased or faked research will get found out. This is because the rules are constant and experiments are reproducible. The great merit of IT as a field for making money out of biased research is that things do not stay the same. In five years time nobody is likely to do a study of penetration of Linux vs Windows systems in 2004 and decide that one system was superior to another. Apart from the commercial secrecy surrounding hacks, there is no way of collating all the logs.
The conclusion has to be that selling IT snake oil is an even better bet than becoming an aromatherapist or an urban shaman. No-one is likely to be able to prove you wrong, and you can continue to be paid by your vendor of choice secure in the knowledge that most publications will not print anything that upsets their biggest advertisers, and that even if a few minority interests notice the connection between your conclusions and your paycheck, the wider world probably won't notice.
The system will only fall apart if academic institutions get together and pass some suitably tough rules on the ethics of product comparisons - and history suggests that that the first one under the new rules will be a study of the aerodynamics of different breeds of pigs.
I once told a DG salesman that I was restoring my house to its original condition. What I needed was a set of medieval style lattice windows. No glass, just wooden lattice to keep large birds out, and shutters. The shutters needed to be in elm and the lattice should be in ash, etc. etc. He was obviously writing all this down. Then I told him I was sorry, I had a call on another line, so I could hang up.
Five minutes later the phone rang. It was the DG salesman calling back to tell me "You are a bastard." This is the first and only time I have managed to get under the skin of one of them, and it was a deeply satisfying experience.
The benchmark is aimed at notebook manufacturers. It tells them, correctly, that an AMD 64 Turion with an onboard integrated graphics chip performs about as well as a P-M with its integrated graphics, and that the power consumption is roughly the same - 27 watts plus memory controller versus 35W with integrated memory controller.
The stuff in the article about battery life is simply rubbish - even if you assume that the P-M combo is only 30W in total, when the screen, hard disk, networking etc. is added in you are probably looking at a difference in average power of only a few percent. The article is clearly an Intel plant, or written by someone who has no idea at all of how laptop computers function.
Up till now, though I use an AMD64 laptop myself as a development tool and am very happy with it, I have been advising other people to buy P-M, based on their need for battery life and the undoubted benefits of the 2Mbyte cache versus the 1Mbyte in the majority of AMD64s. (a 2Mbyte cache allows me to run a demo of our server application on a notebook at quite convincing speed.) But with the coming WinXP64 release, the new AMD processors look like having a bit more future proofing and no obvious downside. I guess this one, outside the corporate We-buy-Dell-because-nobody-ever-got-sacked-for-buy ing-Dell arena, will be decided on price. And I am not alone in this. Have you noticed how cheap P-M notebooks have been getting recently? Doubtless Intel too is preparing an interesting release and wants all the old stock off the shelves.
This is like the McLibel case in the UK. In short, two individuals passed out London Greenpeace leaflets criticising a well known fast food chain. They were sued for libel. After a trial costing millions, in which the defendants were not legally represented because they could not afford it and the UK government refused to assist them, the judge awarded derisory damages. Both the UK Government and the fast food chain spent a lot of money buying lawyers yet another country mansion, yacht etc. The European court has just ruled the trial unfair for this reason, and tghe fast food chain has just had a second huge swathe of adverse publicity as the original case is dragged up again and the sheer unfairness of large corporation versus small individual is rehashed.
In this case an appeal to the European Court on grounds of effective suppression of fair comment sounds as though it might just be possible if funds were somehow made available. It seems on the fac of it obvious that the real reason for the case was a corporation trying to prevent any adverse publicity and using its superior economic power to get the decision it wanted, but it will need expensive experienced judges to point out what seems obvious to the majority of people.
The official IRA is Marxist-Leninist and the Provisional IRA is Trotskyite. I assume that you have never actually been to Ireland or met a few members of Sinn Fein, or you would know this. It is not something they have tended to emphasise while fund raising in the USA. And, btw, all my sympathies in NI are with the respectable Republicans, and I believe that further progress is totally dependent on Sinn Fein getting the criminal side of the IRA under control.
It should be obvious too that the Wahabi sect depends for its power base on people who know little about the world. I define as "obscurantist" any religion which seeks to prevent its followers from acquiring knowledge that might cause them to ask too many questions. Modern communications, which make it possible (for instance) for poor Indians to learn more about the outside world through the WWW and mobile phones, are a threat to this kind of dominance through ignorance.
It's quite significant that these are Wahabis, the dominant sect in Saudi Arabia, and that presumably the "Independent Kashmir" they want would be a Taliban run Afghanistan type of place, not a place that most Kashmiris would want to live in. Because the Wahabis are obscurantists, attacking manifestations of the modern world - like software companies - would fit in fine with the overall strategy. It's inevitable that people here will make jokes about Dell technical support - but it will not be funny if it is your turn next.
It is a pity that words like "Militant" are used for these groups. We really need a word that summarises "Organised criminal gangs that want to steal entire countries". Of course {flamebait} this word would be useful because we could apply it to the Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Rice/Blair/Berlusconi gang as well as the insurgents in Iraq, the part of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process, and the Taliban.{/flamebait} But words like "militant", "terrorist" and "insurgent" conceal rather than illuminate reality.
Yes, SO8 beta runs very nicely, thank you. The beta program runs till roughly the end of March, and it's worth looking at, IMHO. I may be old, mad and past it, but I actually liked SO7 and preferred it enough to the current OO enough to buy it. I suspect I will feel the same about SO8. And no, I do not work for Sun or any of their partners.
The Access database front end works surprisingly well in SO8 beta, though I've only tried it so far with MySQL 4.1 and MSDE.
Interestingly for me, in one application that is important to us where a document is created and formatted remotely by connecting to an Office service, the main portability issue is between different Word generations, not between OO and Word. The latest SO8/OO release looks to me as if it will be more compatible with MS Office 2003/XP than earlier versions.
Although these won't be used in schools (yet...?) I remember an experiment in which a gorilla was using a touchscreen in conjunction with a computer as part of a psychological experiment. The screen was, I think, ultrasonic; in any case, the outer layer was inch thick Makrolon. As the gorilla used to signal frustraton and a desire to stop work for the day by charging the screen full on, it needed to be.
But then, hardened computers need not be that expensive. I remember the original Husky, and I still feel I should have got some sort of sales demonstration award for the reaction from the surrounding soldiers when the one I was using went under the tracks of an armored vehicle, and after removing the mud was completely undamaged.
Will fit the US economic model. They favor centralised power generation, which favors high density cities, trains and trams, rather than suburbs and automobiles. Although solar can produce small amounts of intermittent localised energy, it is no good for equipment which needs large amounts of autonomous short-term power. The problem with both nuclear and solar power is that in the end it does not matter how cheap they are because the US cannot afford the infrastructural and societal cost of transformation needed to use them when the oil runs out.
To put it another way, you can potentially air-condition and service large buildings with solar panels on the walls and heat sinks in the basement, but you will not solve the eventual oil crisis while people are still commuting from suburbs to those buildings. You would need a social transformation that moved the economy back to where people live, so that transport costs are minimised. The real snake oil is the so-called hydrogen economy which depends on making the centralised power available via transported hydrogen gas, supplied by the existing oil companies. It will enable the oil companies to maintain the social structures and the distribution system which enable them to make so much money - and society will have to pay the cost of conversion of the distribution system, vehicles etc. while maintaining their strangehold on the economy and the political system.
Of course, I might prove wrong and society might be prepared to change its ways in the necessary time frame - but if it does, I will be pleasantly amazed.
This seems absolutely correct. If no confirmation is needed below $25, the possibilities for small scale fraud by a large number of vendors would seem to be quite high. Although such fraud should eventually be detected by the unusual transaction patterns, the chance that end users would get reimbursed seems remote. The problem with all "make it easy for the customer to spend money" technologies is the large number of dishonest people who will look to exploit them. Much as retailers would dislike it, what I want is a credit card that makes it hard to spend money, worked by a system that uses one-off transaction details that cannot be reused. The paper bank draft is a reasonably effective way of doing this, but is too hard to use for most people, except for large purchases.
The answer to the inevitable march of progress (sic) seems to be a wholesale adoption of electrically and magnetically screened wallets and handbags. Perhaps this is the next business to invest in.
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That's why Google is a threat to Microsoft. Sun et al keep on about thin clients and try to sell them to corporates. Google is building up the capability to be the ultimate thick server/thin client system. Of course Google wants to assess the possibilities of making Firefox the basis of their service delivery. They must have one in case Microsoft discovers a way to lock Google services out of IE (not security checked....)
However, I very much doubt that sodium will be the metal of choice for CPU cooling, no matter how popular it is in submarines. The obvious candidates are mercury and gallium. Mercury is rapidly falling out of favor because it is so toxic and, if you spill it and it gets under the floorboards it is floor removal time. Gallium is a little expensive.
Turbofan engines are really quite efficient. It's only military aircraft and that horrible Concorde thing that use pure jet engines.
In fact I believe that in passenger miles per gallon terms large passenger aircraft do better than most cars, before allowing for the fact that most cars have only one passenger a lot of the time. The only real advantage of trains over planes is that you can power an HST using a nuclear power plant while aircraft need oil. If people and perishable goods are going to continue to move large distances for the next thirty years or so, the A380 is a good bet.
The thing also has huge (for an aircraft) cargo capability.
Boeing still seems to be pinning its hopes on midsize wide bodied aircraft that fly between smaller airports. All I can say is, for Boeing to be right an awful lot of people need to be very wrong about the way the world is going.
This for me is an important point. I may be an eccentric, I am certainly a slightly lapsed Quaker, but for me one of the most important things in an ethical business is price transparency.
Before any libertarian gets started, this is not an anti-business attitude. The object of stock markets, for instance, is to provide price transparency as well as liquidity. This is one of the things that makes markets trustworthy: things take place in the light of day, not by private agreement.
I do not have a problem with charging for software and support: I do believe that it should be standard business practice for software companies to have a clean and transparent pricing model so that it is possible both to compare products by TCO, and to know that by using XYZ software you are not paying through the nose while XYZ is doing a cheap deal with your competitor.
My beef with MS, for instance, is that I cannot buy Windows alone for the same price as buying it bundled with a PC, plus the belief that the price of the various Microsoft offerings is related to negotiating ability. It is not a level playing field, and this is probably worse than being a monopoly. A monopoly that screws everybody equally at least encourages everybody to look for a way round it, rather than seeking to produce power alignments that keep it in place.
By following this "the price is what you negotiate" approach. Bitkeeper cannot avoid the suspicion that people who advocate its use might be in a visible industry position and be getting a special deal.
To anyone who says that this is excessive idealism, I would suggest that I do not have a problem with price variation or special offers provided they are freely and openly advertised. I am not in favor of limiting the ability of companies to respond to market conditions. I am opposed to secret deals.
Anybody who questions this might compare the laser printer and copier markets. Historically printers have been engineer-driven and tend to sell to a price. Copiers have been salesman-driven and the vendors have tried to hide the real costs in complex leasing and contract details. It isn't surprising that, as buyers become more aware, power starts to shift to the printer manufacturers. Nobody likes copier vendors.
Scott Adams (who is an economist as well as the creator of Dilbert) has summed it up well by using the term "confusopolies" to describe the vendors of mobile phone contracts etc. who seek to conceal the true costs.
So, in summary: Bitkeeper's business practices as regards the cost of their products causes me not to want to buy them.
If you are worried about support, go with the Sun version. Loads faster, various little tweaks. I have been running the 8 beta for some time and have had no more compatibility problems than exist between Office 97, 2000 and XP.
Common to both free and paid for, the issue of install for multiple users is fixed. It is also possible to configure the (XML) setup files to produce a deployable version that will by default save in MS format with all your other l10n preferences ready set up, just as with MS products.
You can do a number of fun things with OO/StarOffice relatively easily. Using the Java drivers, for instance, you can configure servlets (running under Tomcat, JBoss etc) to create web pages that will run database operations to populate spreadsheets with standard reports, and deploy those pages over your internet or the internet with HTTP over SSL. Without .net, using free tools, you can subtly take over the administrators by giving them access to their most important data in a familar format. (If capacity is a problem, you can use old boxes to run OO as, effectively, a server and so create a cluster of office document generators). You can also export those same reports as downloadable PDFs. In the same way, reports can be created in Word format by replacing embedded fields with data.
Having watched an educational administrator run database query after database query on successive spreadsheets, and then have to package them all up and email them all out (insecure, by the way), the time that could be saved on this sort of thing is enormous. By giving the little dears their data as Excel, they can play with it and convince themselves they are "adding value" by adjusting fonts and line widths and dropping in poisonously bad clip art.
So, don't sell OO as a cheap version. Sell it an an enterprise version that can be programmed to automate tasks just like .net, but with lower TCO and the ability to reformat and distribute documents with excellent security.
The amazing thing, given the amount of the stuff you use in basic inorganic analysis, is that any of us got any work done at all.
And it would just about fix the entire US budget deficit. The saving on lobbyists, ex-generals recruited to armaments companies, pork barrel projects, interns required to read mail for congressmen - it would add up to a lot of money. And some of these people could be released into the community to do all the jobs we don't want to do and reduce the need for hardworking Mexicans to leave home. Though how good the average lobbyist would be at pool cleaning and auto valeting I do not know.
And it would be even better if the religious right left business alone. Left to themselves to make money, how many businesses would turn down good staff because they had unusual out of work habits?
I think there used to be something called the Constitution that had something to say on the subject before Karl and Donny and Condy told Georgie that all that human rights stuff was just so 20th century.
Phew, flamed out.
Of course, if this is for your games machine or something you upgrade every few months anyway, doesn't matter. But if you think that memory might stick around for a while and get used in a business critical application...well, I wouldn't, that's all.
And yes, I do buy Crucial memory. Given my dislike of rebuilding things late into the night or being stuck without working hardware, it is extremely cheap insurance.
I was just making the point that if you want a non-Intel processor (and perhaps you have good reason, like the need to evaluate 64 bit apps?) you have plenty of choice. Big as Dell is, it is not a monopoly. I've bought Dells over the years (starting with a 12.5MHz 286 with a VGA screen, which was bleeding edge when it finally arrived) and we have a Dell in our test server rack, along with Proliants, an odd 32-bit AMD, P4s and P3s. Our employee fleet includes notebooks from Dell, HP and Acer. I would be astonished if anyone ever got sacked for buying any of these; they are all good solid machines. Bottom line: whether or not Dell buys AMD cpus doesn't seem to matter very much.
A large number of bears were seen queueing outside a restroom
Personally, though, I'm typing this on an AMD-64 Acer. Behind it is an iMac. What is this Dell and this Intel of which you speak?
The CIA is making sure it doesn't get caught with its pants down on the 200th anniversary of 1812. They're going to make sure that the Brits, the Canadians and the Indians don't just walk in and burn down the White House a second time. (Yes, I know it was actually in 1814, but the war officially started in 1812.)
If the Toshiba announcement about a better traction battery is correct. Electric motors can have practically an ideal torque/rpm curve, but the current demands for high starting torque are a problem. The holy grail is a battery which has effectively an enormous surface to the electrodes without corresponding fragility, and so can be quickly recharged and discharged. (Traction batteries currently have a long service life but relatively slow charge and discharge. Starter batteries have a fast discharge for starting but are fragile and do not deep discharge well). Such a battery would completely supersede the inefficient compress air/decompress air cycle. So whichever compressed air tools division of this Korean manufacturer came up with this job preservation scheme - forget it and retrain as battery engineers.
That, my friends who use "irony" when you mean "paradox" or just "contradictory" - that is not only real irony, it's inverted irony. Full marks.
Well, folks, when the guys with funny helmets turn up at the gates on their little horses and the government turns out to have done a runner, don't say you weren't warned.
Oh, actually it just turns out that a government agency was doing what government agencies do all the time. I apologise for the wild exaggeration. So now please put down the Taser and let me get on the goddam airplane.
The conclusion has to be that selling IT snake oil is an even better bet than becoming an aromatherapist or an urban shaman. No-one is likely to be able to prove you wrong, and you can continue to be paid by your vendor of choice secure in the knowledge that most publications will not print anything that upsets their biggest advertisers, and that even if a few minority interests notice the connection between your conclusions and your paycheck, the wider world probably won't notice.
The system will only fall apart if academic institutions get together and pass some suitably tough rules on the ethics of product comparisons - and history suggests that that the first one under the new rules will be a study of the aerodynamics of different breeds of pigs.
Five minutes later the phone rang. It was the DG salesman calling back to tell me "You are a bastard." This is the first and only time I have managed to get under the skin of one of them, and it was a deeply satisfying experience.
The stuff in the article about battery life is simply rubbish - even if you assume that the P-M combo is only 30W in total, when the screen, hard disk, networking etc. is added in you are probably looking at a difference in average power of only a few percent. The article is clearly an Intel plant, or written by someone who has no idea at all of how laptop computers function.
Up till now, though I use an AMD64 laptop myself as a development tool and am very happy with it, I have been advising other people to buy P-M, based on their need for battery life and the undoubted benefits of the 2Mbyte cache versus the 1Mbyte in the majority of AMD64s. (a 2Mbyte cache allows me to run a demo of our server application on a notebook at quite convincing speed.) But with the coming WinXP64 release, the new AMD processors look like having a bit more future proofing and no obvious downside. I guess this one, outside the corporate We-buy-Dell-because-nobody-ever-got-sacked-for-buy ing-Dell arena, will be decided on price. And I am not alone in this. Have you noticed how cheap P-M notebooks have been getting recently? Doubtless Intel too is preparing an interesting release and wants all the old stock off the shelves.
In this case an appeal to the European Court on grounds of effective suppression of fair comment sounds as though it might just be possible if funds were somehow made available. It seems on the fac of it obvious that the real reason for the case was a corporation trying to prevent any adverse publicity and using its superior economic power to get the decision it wanted, but it will need expensive experienced judges to point out what seems obvious to the majority of people.
It should be obvious too that the Wahabi sect depends for its power base on people who know little about the world. I define as "obscurantist" any religion which seeks to prevent its followers from acquiring knowledge that might cause them to ask too many questions. Modern communications, which make it possible (for instance) for poor Indians to learn more about the outside world through the WWW and mobile phones, are a threat to this kind of dominance through ignorance.
It is a pity that words like "Militant" are used for these groups. We really need a word that summarises "Organised criminal gangs that want to steal entire countries". Of course {flamebait} this word would be useful because we could apply it to the Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Rice/Blair/Berlusconi gang as well as the insurgents in Iraq, the part of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process, and the Taliban.{/flamebait} But words like "militant", "terrorist" and "insurgent" conceal rather than illuminate reality.
The Access database front end works surprisingly well in SO8 beta, though I've only tried it so far with MySQL 4.1 and MSDE.
Interestingly for me, in one application that is important to us where a document is created and formatted remotely by connecting to an Office service, the main portability issue is between different Word generations, not between OO and Word. The latest SO8/OO release looks to me as if it will be more compatible with MS Office 2003/XP than earlier versions.
But then, hardened computers need not be that expensive. I remember the original Husky, and I still feel I should have got some sort of sales demonstration award for the reaction from the surrounding soldiers when the one I was using went under the tracks of an armored vehicle, and after removing the mud was completely undamaged.
To put it another way, you can potentially air-condition and service large buildings with solar panels on the walls and heat sinks in the basement, but you will not solve the eventual oil crisis while people are still commuting from suburbs to those buildings. You would need a social transformation that moved the economy back to where people live, so that transport costs are minimised. The real snake oil is the so-called hydrogen economy which depends on making the centralised power available via transported hydrogen gas, supplied by the existing oil companies. It will enable the oil companies to maintain the social structures and the distribution system which enable them to make so much money - and society will have to pay the cost of conversion of the distribution system, vehicles etc. while maintaining their strangehold on the economy and the political system.
Of course, I might prove wrong and society might be prepared to change its ways in the necessary time frame - but if it does, I will be pleasantly amazed.
The answer to the inevitable march of progress (sic) seems to be a wholesale adoption of electrically and magnetically screened wallets and handbags. Perhaps this is the next business to invest in.