We are still working on the outdated idea that government is big and we need to be protected from it, while business is small and needs free access to markets to flourish. This may be true still in a few places in the world, but increasingly the big government we need to be protected from is large companies.
Case in point: in our town, Walmart wanted to build on a green field site. By the time they got around to it zoning rules had changed, but guess what? Our small municipality could not afford the legal fees to take on Walmart. Big corporate crushing small government.
And this is the same thing again. The fact is, if small municipalities can afford to provide broadband at reasonable rates, the private suppliers should easily be able to match them. Because private enterprise is so much more efficient than public enterprise, isn't it?
Well, pardon me while I beg to differ. Why should private enterprise, with its private airplanes, hugely overpaid execs, vast corporate dick-swinging-contest headquarters, and layers of management, be so much more efficient than small community efforts where the management overhead is minimal and the project manager isn't spending most of his or her time trying to do down the internal competition for the coveted corner office job?
Private enterprise is very good at delivering capital goods cheaply, but actually not always terribly good at delivering services cheaply.
It is hard to understand on what basis private companies have the right to prevent citizens banding together to co-operate on projects, whether it be putting up a community hall or a local broadband service. Perhaps a constitutional lawyer could explain it, but an expert on the cash flow of lobby companies might do better.
Is misplaced. I went into science because we had a superb physics teacher in high school (he'd left a job as a research engineer basically because, I think, it was too limiting, and he ended up as the schools science adviser for the council.)
Among the stuff we used to work with were high voltage induction coils, the odd home-made low pressure gas discharge device - a good way of checking your vacuum technique - low power radioactive sources for playing with simple cloud chambers and trying to deflect alpha and beta rays with a watercooled electromagnet - and extracting short half life radionucleides from samples of yellow cake. (I did have enough sense to know that you don't breathe thorium oxide dust and that you handle uranyl nitrate carefully.) That and getting a signal big enough to light up a small bulb across the lab using a klystron. And he would let us get on with this stuff unsupervised - something about kids need trust in order to learn.
Nearly 40 years later I am not only still alive but still building stuff, probably because those early experiences gave me the confidence to try things.
Being quite ruthless, anybody who tries stuff around HV and microwaves and doesn't have the brain to spot when things are going wrong, probably needs to be removed from the gene pool anyway. And anybody who tries and has the brain and initiative to stick at it will learn something. We can't all expect to make our livings for the next twenty years by either recording not very good music and selling it for inflated prices, or suing people who actually have a business. Buying geek toys is no substitute for making them, and things that just go bang or send projectiles a long way are not the only way to have fun with physics.
It is an interesting issue. I remember a pupil of mine who discovered that the prawn flavoring in prawn flavored potato chips was in fact artificial and had no connection with prawns at all. He asked his rabbi if it was OK to eat them, the rabbi asked another rabbi, it went to a disputation of a number of rabbis and in the end they concluded that it was not prohibited but eating them should be avoided for fear of misunderstanding by others.
Having said which, the Jewish tradition is continually evolving and more progressive branches of Judaism seem to think that the prohibition on pork has been obsoleted by better food hygiene and the absence of neighbours who worship pigs. FWIW, there are many ethical and practical worries about genetic modification, but I doubt the production of pigs with closed hooves is high on the agenda.
There was a case in France where a photographer make a postcard of a beach scene and the owner of a boat in the photograph sued because he had painted the boat and its number was visible, i.e. it was his copyrighted artwork. I believe the case proceeded to court, but I do not know the outcome.
Having said that, at a personal level I get annoyed if my house or boat are photographed, especially as I know that there are pictures of them on photoblogs on the net, put there without my permission. If the taxpayer had paid for them, and put them in a public park, I really do not see I would have a case.
If this means that in Norway it will be illegal to hum the opening bars of piano concertos, attempt to play Beethoven with a guitar group, or conversely get the Oslo Philharmonic (if there is one) to play any kind of orchestration of any kind of rock and roll whatsoever....and that guy who used to fart tunes (Le Petomane- slashdot inability to reproduce accents oblige) would be sent down for three years...well, that's where the logic seems to lead and it sounds just fine to me. It's obviously OK to reproduce music in a similar mode but not a different one. Which just seems to have ruled out electronic reproduction of music altogether. Oh dear.
That's the trouble with tiny countries: it's hard enough to find competent legislators in big ones, where there are more people to choose from. But small countries end up being run by the sort of people who were pushed out of the PTA for being too anal about the intepretation of the rules on the cake contest, and are thirsting for revenge.
There's only one way for SCO to go. SCO has to sue the United States government for allowing the creation of a corrupt judicial system that doesn't immediately recognise the validity of their case, denying their access to justice.
Unfortunately the US doesn't recognise the ICC, let alone an international civil court. But there is a simple answer! They can sue in the courts of the sort of country that really appreciates the kind of thing that SCO and co. bring to the table, and has the kind of lawyers and officials that really understand the problems of people like McBride. North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Iran - I'm sure they'd love to host SCO vs United States of America.
Is its adherence to the free market beliefs of Adam Smith. They are at least honest enough to print the occasional letter pointing out that Smith lived in a world of small suppliers and retailers, not huge monolithic companies that own a vast range of brands and have the ability to promote them across global markets. But they will not accept the consequences, which are that huge companies are actually the enemies of free markets, and things like the US and EU competition bodies are increasingly unable to rein them in.
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
When the Wall came down, all the old cars in West Germany started to make their way to the East. Why not sell the Hubble to the Chinese or the Indians so they can get it serviced, and do some work with it, while the US gets a new one?
I suspect the Chinese could get it fixed for a lot less than $1 billion. It's called trickle down economics, I think.
This reminds me of a 70s project to develop a plastic rifle stock for use by Nato forces. It was found that a laser hit on the stock could generate enough toxic gas from chemical decomposition of the surface to kill or incapacitate a sniper in the usual firing position. The composition was hastily rethought...I think the gas produced was a cyanide or isocyanide rather than carbon monoxide, but technology once again shows an ability to return in a different way.
Pity they couldn't have got those rifle stocks in production for Uzis or Kalashnikovs though.
I actually thought myself a few months ago about putting a group of 4 HDs and 4 mobos on a large aluminium plate, placing in a wide, flat enclosure and feeding air in at the center and out via 4 peripheral ducts to build a 4-way unit that could sit under a set of office desks arranged roughly in a square. The benefit is that the hardware takes up zero usable desk space, is well protected from physical damage, and the under-desk air flow results in low noise. For high density offices (e.g. call centers) with all power and network connections feeding in to the center of the desk clusters, this could be a very efficient arrangement. It's nice to know I was beaten to it by a Swiss supercomputer.
I just discovered I have accidentally installed software on my computer that allows me to make copies of document files and send them to other people, allowing the reproduction of copyrighted material.
Among the file extensions of the affected material are:
.pdf
.doc
.xls
.ppt
How much money is there in a tool to identify these files on a computer and warn parents? And how do we stop malicious people from distributing these so-called "Operating systems?". Oh wait a moment...
Good question, but slightly off-topic so I'm replying rather than applying mod points.
Zinc is less harmful than lead, but that's not the whole answer. The real answer is that getting rid of lead has been a rising bandwagon for years, because of the really nasty application of lead - in water pipes and in gasoline. This was directly harmful to large numbers of people. Once a bandwagon is going, it's hard to stop.
Zinc, on the other hand, is by far the most effective way of protecting steel in many environments. There is just no substitute.
FWIW, the greenest metals are probably mild steel and magnesium. Rust is pretty harmless - major constituent of many soils - and magnesium compounds are all over the environment. But they don't make very good electric circuits.
I've said this before and will probably say it again...how to offend both Jewish and Christian communities in one easy title.
For the record, I myself am one of those Godless liberals GWB dislikes so much, but I do recognise that people have a right to their history and have a right not to have the names of their sacred objects abused. And Zion is a name of deep resonance in our culture, whether it is part of the demand for a Jewish homeland or whether it is referred to in Milton or the Requiem Mass. Nowadays, we are just getting to be culturally sensitive enough not to use the word Mecca out of context, and I doubt if the makers of the Matrix would have been stupid enough to do that. Or that they would have called their holdout The Vatican. Or Canterbury Cathedral. Or...I hope you get my drift.
But then, the people who made the film obviously don't even know what Matrix actually means. Goodbye Western culture, it was nice having you.
See above. I do not want the proof of concept to turn into a solution.
FWIW I used quite frequently to do proof of concept in Filemaker before moving to a suitable RDBMS, but nowadays I find it just as easy to prototype in Netbeans, using my own library of standard forms. If I was designing an app - and in this case I am not because no one in their right minds wants to reinvent the MRP wheel - this is what I would do. I would create a framework and some skeleton form classes, create a schema and let the programmer get on with it.
They have asked me to manage the project, and I already know that if their sales growth goes as expected, they will not be able to use the RAD solution. I'm all too aware of the Filemaker to application gulf. But I do believe that this kind of prototyping is often more useful than paper modeling, because at the end of the day _you can import the data_!
When is Hollywood going to make the Tain Bo Cuailnge? (The Cattle Raid of Cooley)?
Has everything. Feisty queen, wet husband, flawed hero with spectacular attributes (Cu Chulainn did an Incredible Hulk transformation 1500 years ago), setpiece personal combats, battles, and a few additional legends to provide subplots. And it's Culture with a capital C, and no charge for an option on the script. Of course in the past Hollywood has struggled with the Irish language, but after Alexander I have a solution: Play Cu Chulainn with a Greek accent.
In the ERP/MRP world, there need to be so many customisations and options that just deciding how to map the software onto existing business processes is a major challenge.
I have just advised a small company to use the small software company next door, not to build them a solution but to build them a model of two core business processes (currently on paper) in either Access or Filemaker (Yes, I know. But the ssc knows Access and Filemaker. OK?) The idea is that when they have defined the process and tested it, they can migrate to an MRP system and import the data they have created - because they will know which fields and reports they actually need, and they can more easily have a discussion about a small and flexible database than try and work their way through the options of an MRP system.
Having said that, the future may be off-the-shelf open source systems with customisation- provided someone solves the documentation problem.
These people should get together with the British politician who had an idea to stop spam - put a postcode (zip code) in everybody's email address. In fact, California is the place for them. Put all the obscurantists, Creationists, and pig-ignorant legislators on the West Coast and fire off a few nukes in the San Andreas fault.
(I got modded Troll for a post in which, while I might have been mistaken, I had no trollish intentions - might as well blow all karma and get modded flamebait as well.)
Large passenger aircraft do not cruise on all their engines, typically. I've been on 747s with the jetstream going the right way that I swear were crossing the Atlantic on one engine. A four engine plane will not usually accumulate engine hours twice as fast as a 2 engine plane.
And, when crossing the Pacific, or the Arctic, how much do you want to rely on only 2 engines?
Back in the day of unreliable British motocycle engines, it was a great comfort to me that all the systems - ignition, carburetor - were duplicated on my Triumph Bonneville, because when the unreliable electrics packed up on one cylinder, or the carb got blocked, I could limp home on the other one. It's called redundancy, and when I'm in an airplane I like to have lots of it.
This is the second most amazing achievement yet of the space program. An immensely long mission, depending on cooperation of multiple groups and agencies, with almost unimaginable complexity has succeeded almost perfectly. (The Mars Rovers are also an amazing achievement, but using more modern technology on a shorter mission to a much nearer object.) Within 24 hours of the transmission the photos can be seen by people all over the world, in a way unimaginable when the first Lunar landings took place.
And all some people can do is bitch about the resolution of the photographs. That's the trouble with science and engineering nowadays: people do utterly amazing stuff and the general public doesn't know it's amazing any more.
Well, I'm going to admit it: when this 54 year old scientist turned systems implementer first read that Huyghens/Cassini had fulfilled its mission, there were tears in my eyes. This is a great human achievement. Don't let the ignorant knock it.
Fingerprint recognition can only be a backup to an alternative login method. After a heavy weekend of DIY or on my boat, I suspect my fingerprints are at least temprarily degraded beyond recognition. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But in any case in my last pda evaluation I once again ran up against an annoyance factor that doesn't go away. I do not like Windows for PDAs, in any shape or form. I like Palm OS much more. But Palm make it hugely difficult to change the battery, even though the basic battery is just an ordinary LiIon. Why? Even the T5, which has flash memory and so can survive battery change, has a battery that requires watch-like dismantling to change. I do not like relying on a device which is only as reliable as a nonexchangeable battery.
HP is surely big enough to make it possible to run their PDAs on either OS. Even if it was a buy-time decision, I would rather have an HP PDA that ran Palm OS than any form of fingerprint recognition.
How long before those urban survivalist fantasists start believing that a hummer has lost it as the ultimate in urban cool, and start looking for a nuclear powered icebreaker to keep on their moorings. Tsunami proof, oil shortage proof, sea level rise and wandering berg proof,probably a good place to be when an asteroid strikes, and almost as economical as the average SUV. I guess the Russians have a few to sell to raise some foreign currency.
...I think it was had a story about a planet with a wall round the middle. (A long time ago now.) If there's any chance this wall has similar properties, we need to get a robot down there to take a look at it.
Cheap projector lenses have barrel distortion, just like the cheap zoom lenses used on digital cameras.
Expensive lenses have as little distortion as you like but are bulky and may be restricted in zoom range. As with everything, you get what you pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point: in our town, Walmart wanted to build on a green field site. By the time they got around to it zoning rules had changed, but guess what? Our small municipality could not afford the legal fees to take on Walmart. Big corporate crushing small government.
And this is the same thing again. The fact is, if small municipalities can afford to provide broadband at reasonable rates, the private suppliers should easily be able to match them. Because private enterprise is so much more efficient than public enterprise, isn't it?
Well, pardon me while I beg to differ. Why should private enterprise, with its private airplanes, hugely overpaid execs, vast corporate dick-swinging-contest headquarters, and layers of management, be so much more efficient than small community efforts where the management overhead is minimal and the project manager isn't spending most of his or her time trying to do down the internal competition for the coveted corner office job?
Private enterprise is very good at delivering capital goods cheaply, but actually not always terribly good at delivering services cheaply.
It is hard to understand on what basis private companies have the right to prevent citizens banding together to co-operate on projects, whether it be putting up a community hall or a local broadband service. Perhaps a constitutional lawyer could explain it, but an expert on the cash flow of lobby companies might do better.
I'll believe in it when I see it in John Lewis.
Among the stuff we used to work with were high voltage induction coils, the odd home-made low pressure gas discharge device - a good way of checking your vacuum technique - low power radioactive sources for playing with simple cloud chambers and trying to deflect alpha and beta rays with a watercooled electromagnet - and extracting short half life radionucleides from samples of yellow cake. (I did have enough sense to know that you don't breathe thorium oxide dust and that you handle uranyl nitrate carefully.) That and getting a signal big enough to light up a small bulb across the lab using a klystron. And he would let us get on with this stuff unsupervised - something about kids need trust in order to learn.
Nearly 40 years later I am not only still alive but still building stuff, probably because those early experiences gave me the confidence to try things.
Being quite ruthless, anybody who tries stuff around HV and microwaves and doesn't have the brain to spot when things are going wrong, probably needs to be removed from the gene pool anyway. And anybody who tries and has the brain and initiative to stick at it will learn something. We can't all expect to make our livings for the next twenty years by either recording not very good music and selling it for inflated prices, or suing people who actually have a business. Buying geek toys is no substitute for making them, and things that just go bang or send projectiles a long way are not the only way to have fun with physics.
Having said which, the Jewish tradition is continually evolving and more progressive branches of Judaism seem to think that the prohibition on pork has been obsoleted by better food hygiene and the absence of neighbours who worship pigs. FWIW, there are many ethical and practical worries about genetic modification, but I doubt the production of pigs with closed hooves is high on the agenda.
Having said that, at a personal level I get annoyed if my house or boat are photographed, especially as I know that there are pictures of them on photoblogs on the net, put there without my permission. If the taxpayer had paid for them, and put them in a public park, I really do not see I would have a case.
That's the trouble with tiny countries: it's hard enough to find competent legislators in big ones, where there are more people to choose from. But small countries end up being run by the sort of people who were pushed out of the PTA for being too anal about the intepretation of the rules on the cake contest, and are thirsting for revenge.
Unfortunately the US doesn't recognise the ICC, let alone an international civil court. But there is a simple answer! They can sue in the courts of the sort of country that really appreciates the kind of thing that SCO and co. bring to the table, and has the kind of lawyers and officials that really understand the problems of people like McBride. North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Iran - I'm sure they'd love to host SCO vs United States of America.
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
I suspect the Chinese could get it fixed for a lot less than $1 billion. It's called trickle down economics, I think.
Pity they couldn't have got those rifle stocks in production for Uzis or Kalashnikovs though.
I actually thought myself a few months ago about putting a group of 4 HDs and 4 mobos on a large aluminium plate, placing in a wide, flat enclosure and feeding air in at the center and out via 4 peripheral ducts to build a 4-way unit that could sit under a set of office desks arranged roughly in a square. The benefit is that the hardware takes up zero usable desk space, is well protected from physical damage, and the under-desk air flow results in low noise. For high density offices (e.g. call centers) with all power and network connections feeding in to the center of the desk clusters, this could be a very efficient arrangement. It's nice to know I was beaten to it by a Swiss supercomputer.
Among the file extensions of the affected material are:
- .pdf
- .doc
- .xls
- .ppt
How much money is there in a tool to identify these files on a computer and warn parents? And how do we stop malicious people from distributing these so-called "Operating systems?". Oh wait a moment...Zinc is less harmful than lead, but that's not the whole answer. The real answer is that getting rid of lead has been a rising bandwagon for years, because of the really nasty application of lead - in water pipes and in gasoline. This was directly harmful to large numbers of people. Once a bandwagon is going, it's hard to stop.
Zinc, on the other hand, is by far the most effective way of protecting steel in many environments. There is just no substitute.
FWIW, the greenest metals are probably mild steel and magnesium. Rust is pretty harmless - major constituent of many soils - and magnesium compounds are all over the environment. But they don't make very good electric circuits.
For the record, I myself am one of those Godless liberals GWB dislikes so much, but I do recognise that people have a right to their history and have a right not to have the names of their sacred objects abused. And Zion is a name of deep resonance in our culture, whether it is part of the demand for a Jewish homeland or whether it is referred to in Milton or the Requiem Mass. Nowadays, we are just getting to be culturally sensitive enough not to use the word Mecca out of context, and I doubt if the makers of the Matrix would have been stupid enough to do that. Or that they would have called their holdout The Vatican. Or Canterbury Cathedral. Or...I hope you get my drift.
But then, the people who made the film obviously don't even know what Matrix actually means. Goodbye Western culture, it was nice having you.
FWIW I used quite frequently to do proof of concept in Filemaker before moving to a suitable RDBMS, but nowadays I find it just as easy to prototype in Netbeans, using my own library of standard forms. If I was designing an app - and in this case I am not because no one in their right minds wants to reinvent the MRP wheel - this is what I would do. I would create a framework and some skeleton form classes, create a schema and let the programmer get on with it.
They have asked me to manage the project, and I already know that if their sales growth goes as expected, they will not be able to use the RAD solution. I'm all too aware of the Filemaker to application gulf. But I do believe that this kind of prototyping is often more useful than paper modeling, because at the end of the day _you can import the data_!
Has everything. Feisty queen, wet husband, flawed hero with spectacular attributes (Cu Chulainn did an Incredible Hulk transformation 1500 years ago), setpiece personal combats, battles, and a few additional legends to provide subplots. And it's Culture with a capital C, and no charge for an option on the script. Of course in the past Hollywood has struggled with the Irish language, but after Alexander I have a solution: Play Cu Chulainn with a Greek accent.
I have just advised a small company to use the small software company next door, not to build them a solution but to build them a model of two core business processes (currently on paper) in either Access or Filemaker (Yes, I know. But the ssc knows Access and Filemaker. OK?) The idea is that when they have defined the process and tested it, they can migrate to an MRP system and import the data they have created - because they will know which fields and reports they actually need, and they can more easily have a discussion about a small and flexible database than try and work their way through the options of an MRP system.
Having said that, the future may be off-the-shelf open source systems with customisation- provided someone solves the documentation problem.
(I got modded Troll for a post in which, while I might have been mistaken, I had no trollish intentions - might as well blow all karma and get modded flamebait as well.)
Large passenger aircraft do not cruise on all their engines, typically. I've been on 747s with the jetstream going the right way that I swear were crossing the Atlantic on one engine. A four engine plane will not usually accumulate engine hours twice as fast as a 2 engine plane.
And, when crossing the Pacific, or the Arctic, how much do you want to rely on only 2 engines?
Back in the day of unreliable British motocycle engines, it was a great comfort to me that all the systems - ignition, carburetor - were duplicated on my Triumph Bonneville, because when the unreliable electrics packed up on one cylinder, or the carb got blocked, I could limp home on the other one. It's called redundancy, and when I'm in an airplane I like to have lots of it.
And all some people can do is bitch about the resolution of the photographs. That's the trouble with science and engineering nowadays: people do utterly amazing stuff and the general public doesn't know it's amazing any more.
Well, I'm going to admit it: when this 54 year old scientist turned systems implementer first read that Huyghens/Cassini had fulfilled its mission, there were tears in my eyes. This is a great human achievement. Don't let the ignorant knock it.
But in any case in my last pda evaluation I once again ran up against an annoyance factor that doesn't go away. I do not like Windows for PDAs, in any shape or form. I like Palm OS much more. But Palm make it hugely difficult to change the battery, even though the basic battery is just an ordinary LiIon. Why? Even the T5, which has flash memory and so can survive battery change, has a battery that requires watch-like dismantling to change. I do not like relying on a device which is only as reliable as a nonexchangeable battery.
HP is surely big enough to make it possible to run their PDAs on either OS. Even if it was a buy-time decision, I would rather have an HP PDA that ran Palm OS than any form of fingerprint recognition.
How long before those urban survivalist fantasists start believing that a hummer has lost it as the ultimate in urban cool, and start looking for a nuclear powered icebreaker to keep on their moorings. Tsunami proof, oil shortage proof, sea level rise and wandering berg proof,probably a good place to be when an asteroid strikes, and almost as economical as the average SUV. I guess the Russians have a few to sell to raise some foreign currency.
...I think it was had a story about a planet with a wall round the middle. (A long time ago now.) If there's any chance this wall has similar properties, we need to get a robot down there to take a look at it.
Expensive lenses have as little distortion as you like but are bulky and may be restricted in zoom range. As with everything, you get what you pay for.