I recall it had really neat rotating number plates - there were several in variouos nationalities. Sounds like a perfect solution for well prepared criminals.
But what are they going to do about bicycles.. horses... pedestrians... boats?
This happened to my father (age 75) in England. The police called him and asked if he wanted to pick up his car, as they'd found it. He declined, as he could see his car in the garage. They inisited, but eventually agreed there were two cars (both Mercs, though how that's relevant I don't know) with the same numberplate.
Not a theft as such (I'm not sure quite what the conclusion was), but surely an interesting challenge to any such computer system... a vehicle in London at 09:00... and Edinburgh at 09:15 - definitely speeding then!
'I am just going outside and may be some time.'....
No, actually it's not that bad. I am still building novel applications (yeah, AJAX, but I've doing that for some years... I really should have written some articles) and plan to continue doing so.
As previouos commenters have, well, commented, there weren't that many programmers then. I was among the first in the UK to take A-level computing (a pretty tough set of exams you take - or took - in Britain about age 18, I took 4 I think, 3 was usual). My university computing class was about 30 people. So we are a rare breed. Some get bored and move to management. Some get rich (damn, missed it again!). Some plug on.
A friend of mine in Canberra is still writing code - and he worked on systems with mercury delay lines!
Actually I always felt DEC made a catastophic error. At the time PCs were just appearing they had a tough, industry tested 16 bit multi user, multi processing operating system - RSX/11M. It ran on a microprocessor (and bigger machines in a different form, notably on the VAX) and was really pretty good.
I don't think they could bring themselves to sell it at a low price - they charged maybe USD 1000 for it.
And now they are dead. So sad. They made good kit.
I wrote AJAX-style web aps long before xmlhttp existed. (I did it by maintaining a constantly open connection in a frame, with periodic refereshes. Doesn't scale well, but brilliant for intranet apps - you even get dynamic updating for free. Bit annoying bevcause you get an hourglass all the time - but it worked well. Changing to use xmlhttp took an hour or so. Wonderful).
Microsoft DID invent xmlhttp - and it was great idea (not all Microsoft's idea - and this actually WAS one, as opposed to a copy - are bad). It was copied by Mozilla and Opera. That's great too!
"AJAX sucks." A complete lift of "Frames Suck", as anybody who read TFA would know (hint, you have to read right to the end before commenting). This is Jakob Nielson, remember, espouser of a completely static web - no page should ever go away, dynamically generated pages are evil, no web page should need scrolling, etc. Have you READ his stuff?
AJAX is brilliant for web apps. It's hard to write, but very neat. It makes the web site feel like an application. Users like that. Used as an impemtation framework, it reduces the client side install to - enter the URL. And that's it, no updates, no installs, no concern with compatability (not much, anyway - cerainly any modern browser will do the trick nicely - IE, Firefox, Opera, Linux, Windows, Mac, who cares? Wonderful).
It's not good for stuff that needs to be searched - no it's not, but do you really want people searching your - say - bank transactions? That's sily. Horses for course (or as my wife says, sauces for courses).
Enough. I have to get back to writing my evil AJAX systems. (No sign of Microsoft there).
Google appear to put the user first. Indeed, that's where they started, building a search engine to help people. Money came later (and haven't they done well?).
Microsoft and Time Warner started with wanting to make money. That comes - and, more to the point, feels as though it comes - way before the user.
And we don't trust them.
Google ads rely on advertisers (the person with the ad, and the person with the ad space) trusting them to put the right ads in the right place. Google does - and everyone makes money. Trust, trust trust - the foundation stone of trade.
But who would trust Microsoft and Time Warner to do that?
Before the time of pencil and paper, people remembered things. Sagas, history, songs. Funnily enough, people still can. There are lots of folk about who can happily remember complete pages of telephone books. Plenty of people who can sketch what they have seen. (And some who can hum songs they've heard - but that's another story).
In fact let's ban all forms of thought. And art, and music, oh, and teaching any form of science - especially that evilolution stuff.
Let's ban..... bzzt.. sorry this Kansas Educational broadcast has been interrupted by the real world.
Research doesn't always give directly useful results. It might - or it might not. The process of doing research might give useful results - or it might not. In fact doing almost anything might give useful results. Or not.
But backing off from researching the local area - now that's really silly. Volcanoes on Venus - who cares? Well I do, for one. Any better understanding of volcanoes would seem to be a useful thing to me - there are quite a few in the world. It would be nice to learn something about them in a completely different environment.... bzzt, back to the Kansas educational department broadcast...
Yes, and let's ban the Internet, and electricity, and inoculations, and.....
Re:The press release is dated 24/8/2005 ...
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 1
You know I've always though the US system is the daftest - the Japanese get it right with yyyy-mm-dd, the brits, aussies, and most of europe use dd-mm-yyyy which is ok.
But mm-dd-yy - that has to be crazy. Ludicrous ordering.
For the record I'm in Sydney (that's Australia, you know, where it's heading into summer at the moment).... and, not that it's relevant in any way, if you really want a laugh some day, try calling a chap from Texas a Northerner. Tee hee.
"OpenOffice.org uses less CPU, less RAM, and far less Hard Disk space."
Have you ever actually RUN OpenOffice?
I have. It's excellent - but the startup time is really, really long. It takes up heaps of memory (something like three time MS if I recall). There are plenty of reviews elsewhere telling the details. Disc space - OO - 188M, MS Office - 217M (I'm sure there is a lot in shared libraries somewhere, though). Hardly a point heavily in OO's favour. Don't know about document size - one might hope OO is a lot smaller.
Using untruthful arguments to support a rant is silly, and self defeating. Don't do it.
The OpenOffice folk (Google, Sun.. gosh) need to spend a lot of time on getting that memory footprint - or at least the startup time - down.
What's wrong with being anti-religious? Personally I am definitely against anything that encourages folk to believe in things without proof (repeatable proof, at that).
This covers religion (no proof), witchcraft (no proof and definitely not repeatable), astrology, ghosts, even racial hatred (proof? of what).
I am in favour of people making decision on the basis of tested theories. I am in favour of people changing their behaviour when things they have previously believed turn out to be false. I am in favour of people questioning their beliefs.
Morals are a different question. But does being honest and trustworthy, and following an agreed set of rules make for a good and just society? Yes it does - this has been demonstrated repeatedly in history. Take away the rules and the countries/societies fall apart.
Doubt things. Test things. Do experiments. Be sceptical. Ask questions. Listen to other people's questions.
Think!
Isn't this what schools are about... oh, sorry these are RELIGIOUS schools. And that's NOT what they are about, is it?
Actually I think Australia (my country of choice) would be more than happy to be a launching spot. Indeed we have a launching site - Woomera (recently used by the Japanese for some rather cool hypersonic scram jet work).. but I think somewhere further North (that's nearer the equator for the geographically challenged) would be better.
So come on down - the beer's cold, the climate's warm, and the people are friendly - not to mention intelligent, well educated, and speak English (not American, though I admit we are bit weird on the whole football thing).
Yes indeed Blackberries are pretty horrible. (I have a combined phone/Blackberry 7100 and hate it with a passion).
If you have a "Corporate" configuration, you cannot use them (except to answer the phone) until you type in a six digit password... good eh? If you use it as a calendar - what Palms did so wonderfully - it will beep, but you cannot find out why until you type in that damned password (must include numbers AND letters... so you need TWO hands to work the shift key). And then it usually loses the notification.
The interface is pretty horrible, but IS usable, once you learn the shift key does weird things to the roller when you are editing. The keyboard is ok.
They are big. And clunky.
But you CAN program them to turn themselves OFF between certain times - and you get a different choice for weekdays and weekends, so that's something. But you don't have fine grained control. You can't just turn off email, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
... to reduce losses in urban combat.
Losses to which side?
In communist Russia, the walls watch YOU.
He is a keen dancer in his spare time .... no, wait, he does that at work, too!
See http://www.msboycott.com/media/ballmer_monkey.mpg
I recall it had really neat rotating number plates - there were several in variouos nationalities. Sounds like a perfect solution for well prepared criminals.
.. horses ... pedestrians ... boats?
But what are they going to do about bicycles
This happened to my father (age 75) in England. The police called him and asked if he wanted to pick up his car, as they'd found it. He declined, as he could see his car in the garage. They inisited, but eventually agreed there were two cars (both Mercs, though how that's relevant I don't know) with the same numberplate.
... a vehicle in London at 09:00 ... and Edinburgh at 09:15 - definitely speeding then!
Not a theft as such (I'm not sure quite what the conclusion was), but surely an interesting challenge to any such computer system
That'd be a fun court case. Short, but fun.
Actually a 64 bit computer way back then WAS pretty impressive ... no, wait ...
'I am just going outside and may be some time.' ....
... I really should have written some articles) and plan to continue doing so.
No, actually it's not that bad. I am still building novel applications (yeah, AJAX, but I've doing that for some years
As previouos commenters have, well, commented, there weren't that many programmers then. I was among the first in the UK to take A-level computing (a pretty tough set of exams you take - or took - in Britain about age 18, I took 4 I think, 3 was usual). My university computing class was about 30 people. So we are a rare breed. Some get bored and move to management. Some get rich (damn, missed it again!). Some plug on.
A friend of mine in Canberra is still writing code - and he worked on systems with mercury delay lines!
Actually I always felt DEC made a catastophic error. At the time PCs were just appearing they had a tough, industry tested 16 bit multi user, multi processing operating system - RSX/11M. It ran on a microprocessor (and bigger machines in a different form, notably on the VAX) and was really pretty good.
I don't think they could bring themselves to sell it at a low price - they charged maybe USD 1000 for it.
And now they are dead. So sad. They made good kit.
I wrote AJAX-style web aps long before xmlhttp existed. (I did it by maintaining a constantly open connection in a frame, with periodic refereshes. Doesn't scale well, but brilliant for intranet apps - you even get dynamic updating for free. Bit annoying bevcause you get an hourglass all the time - but it worked well. Changing to use xmlhttp took an hour or so. Wonderful).
Microsoft DID invent xmlhttp - and it was great idea (not all Microsoft's idea - and this actually WAS one, as opposed to a copy - are bad). It was copied by Mozilla and Opera. That's great too!
"AJAX sucks." A complete lift of "Frames Suck", as anybody who read TFA would know (hint, you have to read right to the end before commenting). This is Jakob Nielson, remember, espouser of a completely static web - no page should ever go away, dynamically generated pages are evil, no web page should need scrolling, etc. Have you READ his stuff?
AJAX is brilliant for web apps. It's hard to write, but very neat. It makes the web site feel like an application. Users like that. Used as an impemtation framework, it reduces the client side install to - enter the URL. And that's it, no updates, no installs, no concern with compatability (not much, anyway - cerainly any modern browser will do the trick nicely - IE, Firefox, Opera, Linux, Windows, Mac, who cares? Wonderful).
It's not good for stuff that needs to be searched - no it's not, but do you really want people searching your - say - bank transactions? That's sily. Horses for course (or as my wife says, sauces for courses).
Enough. I have to get back to writing my evil AJAX systems. (No sign of Microsoft there).
>> I receive both Comedy Central and SciFi, but I only ever watch Comedy Central.
You are heretofore banned from Slashdot, never to return
Why is Google successful?
Trust.
Google appear to put the user first. Indeed, that's where they started, building a search engine to help people. Money came later (and haven't they done well?).
Microsoft and Time Warner started with wanting to make money. That comes - and, more to the point, feels as though it comes - way before the user.
And we don't trust them.
Google ads rely on advertisers (the person with the ad, and the person with the ad space) trusting them to put the right ads in the right place. Google does - and everyone makes money. Trust, trust trust - the foundation stone of trade.
But who would trust Microsoft and Time Warner to do that?
In some ways this is funny.
Before the time of pencil and paper, people remembered things. Sagas, history, songs.
Funnily enough, people still can. There are lots of folk about who can happily remember complete pages of telephone books.
Plenty of people who can sketch what they have seen.
(And some who can hum songs they've heard - but that's another story).
Are they illegal too?
Albert Swank ... Al Swank ... Als ...
Well he sounds like a Slashdotter - how come we haven't heard from him?
I've heard of a nasal whine, but never a nasal walk!
If I had an X-box - why would I have books? (ducks)
Whenever I see the word "stakeholder", an image of Buffy comes to mind ...
Yes, absolutely. Who cares ....
...
..... bzzt .. sorry this Kansas Educational broadcast has been interrupted by the real world.
... bzzt, back to the Kansas educational department broadcast ...
.....
In fact let's ban all forms of research
In fact let's ban all forms of thought. And art, and music, oh, and teaching any form of science - especially that evilolution stuff.
Let's ban
Research doesn't always give directly useful results. It might - or it might not. The process of doing research might give useful results - or it might not.
In fact doing almost anything might give useful results. Or not.
But backing off from researching the local area - now that's really silly. Volcanoes on Venus - who cares? Well I do, for one. Any better understanding of volcanoes would seem to be a useful thing to me - there are quite a few in the world. It would be nice to learn something about them in a completely different environment.
Yes, and let's ban the Internet, and electricity, and inoculations, and
You know I've always though the US system is the daftest - the Japanese get it right with yyyy-mm-dd, the brits, aussies, and most of europe use dd-mm-yyyy which is ok.
... and, not that it's relevant in any way, if you really want a laugh some day, try calling a chap from Texas a Northerner. Tee hee.
But mm-dd-yy - that has to be crazy. Ludicrous ordering.
For the record I'm in Sydney (that's Australia, you know, where it's heading into summer at the moment).
This works well in - surprise - New York.
You can't drive anywhere, and if you did you definitely couldn't park, so you don't. Few New Yorkers own cars, nearly all use public transport.
Result - NYC is just about the greenest (ecology, not plants) city in the whole of the USA. (Not that that is saying much, but still).
Recycled news is green too, I suppose ....
Spindizzies, the new Chinese technologhy.
Wasn't that James Blish or someone?
Not on my system it doesn't - still way over 20 seconds.
"OpenOffice.org uses less CPU, less RAM, and far less Hard Disk space."
.. gosh) need to spend a lot of time on getting that memory footprint - or at least the startup time - down.
Have you ever actually RUN OpenOffice?
I have. It's excellent - but the startup time is really, really long. It takes up heaps of memory (something like three time MS if I recall). There are plenty of reviews elsewhere telling the details.
Disc space - OO - 188M, MS Office - 217M (I'm sure there is a lot in shared libraries somewhere, though). Hardly a point heavily in OO's favour.
Don't know about document size - one might hope OO is a lot smaller.
Using untruthful arguments to support a rant is silly, and self defeating. Don't do it.
The OpenOffice folk (Google, Sun
What's wrong with being anti-religious? Personally I am definitely against anything that encourages folk to believe in things without proof (repeatable proof, at that).
... oh, sorry these are RELIGIOUS schools. And that's NOT what they are about, is it?
This covers religion (no proof), witchcraft (no proof and definitely not repeatable), astrology, ghosts, even racial hatred (proof? of what).
I am in favour of people making decision on the basis of tested theories. I am in favour of people changing their behaviour when things they have previously believed turn out to be false. I am in favour of people questioning their beliefs.
Morals are a different question. But does being honest and trustworthy, and following an agreed set of rules make for a good and just society? Yes it does - this has been demonstrated repeatedly in history. Take away the rules and the countries/societies fall apart.
Doubt things. Test things. Do experiments. Be sceptical. Ask questions. Listen to other people's questions.
Think!
Isn't this what schools are about
Well really!
.. but I think somewhere further North (that's nearer the equator for the geographically challenged) would be better.
Actually I think Australia (my country of choice) would be more than happy to be a launching spot. Indeed we have a launching site - Woomera (recently used by the Japanese for some rather cool hypersonic scram jet work)
So come on down - the beer's cold, the climate's warm, and the people are friendly - not to mention intelligent, well educated, and speak English (not American, though I admit we are bit weird on the whole football thing).
Yes indeed Blackberries are pretty horrible. (I have a combined phone/Blackberry 7100 and hate it with a passion).
... good eh? If you use it as a calendar - what Palms did so wonderfully - it will beep, but you cannot find out why until you type in that damned password (must include numbers AND letters ... so you need TWO hands to work the shift key). And then it usually loses the notification.
If you have a "Corporate" configuration, you cannot use them (except to answer the phone) until you type in a six digit password
The interface is pretty horrible, but IS usable, once you learn the shift key does weird things to the roller when you are editing. The keyboard is ok.
They are big. And clunky.
But you CAN program them to turn themselves OFF between certain times - and you get a different choice for weekdays and weekends, so that's something. But you don't have fine grained control. You can't just turn off email, for example.
In short, I hate mine.
And the games SUCK. No camera. Nothing nice.