What's really sad though, is that back in 2001, BBC Radio 4 (the BBC's flagship speech-only radio station renowned for quality news anc current affairs) ran with a headline on the national news that the National Health Service (funded to the tune of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money) had reach a groundbreaking deal with Microsoft to save money of Microsoft software. The size of the saving was 50,000 UKP. That's right: 50 thousand pounds (under $100k).
Why this made national news headlines I have no idea.
If this decision did not meet with the approval of the people represented by this unit of government, they could change it. That could be anything from a polite request to reconsider, to burning down City Hall with all the representatives still in it.
The joke's on Newham. Let's hope they do another study in a few years and see how much they really saved.
It would be funny if it weren't sad. The people of Newham have elected a bunch of clueless and possibly corrupt morons to run their council. These very morons have signed a 10-year deal(!). (They say a week is a long time in politics.) So, in a decade, when these head-cases have lost their seats, the inhabitants of Newham will still be suffering, both in terms of poor service and wastage of tax money. Hopefully the deal has a get-out clause so that the people of Newham can remove this millstone from their neck before it's too late.
What a superb idea! Let's make every drunken lovers' tiff aboard an aeroplane a pontentially fatal activity not just for the lovers, but for everyone else on board!:-)
I'm sorry - how does having showed your ID actually help in identifying a specific corpse out of all the corpses surrounding a crash site?
Well, you see, before, they had no way of knowing who was on the aeroplane. Now they have a better idea (although not 100% reliable due to fakes). So if 270 people die in a mangled plane wreck, the investigators' job just became a bit easier.
What I want to know is, can these new-fangled airport security systems detect ceramic knives and guns?
Yes, I hope you Americans depose your dictator:-) Then I hope that cretin Tony Blair gets a clue (and David Blunkett too) and we can depose him next year as well!:-)
This "War on Terror" is nothing but a war on Freedom. It is an instrument of corrupt government to entrench their political and financial interests at our expense.
How showing ID to board a plane prevents mechanical failures is left as an exercise to the reader. How mandatory ID even prevents terrorist attacks is also not clear to me;
I suspect it is for two main reasons: to help identify the corpses and in the case of fake IDs, to provide a starting point for the police to investigate.
I agree though, it does nothing to improve safety.
Synthetic benchmarks like SPEC often give very different results to real world applications. The fact that the Opteron is faster in the SPEC benchmarks and many real-world tests speaks for itself.
Since the Government[the tax payer] already pays for OAP's, why don't we turn the BBC into some kind of national braodcasting company and pay for it out of taxes.
At last! Someone else who thinks like this.:-) This is the obvious and fairest thing to do. Mention it to most people and they call you a loony though...:-(
I just hate having to pay Fucking advertising tax every time I buy a can of Coke.
No one forces you to buy a can of Coke. On the other hand, you are forced to pay a TV license fee if you operate a TV. While I agree that the BBC produces some of the best quality television content in the world, it also produces a heck of a lot of dross (e.g. East Enders, The Weakest Link, Bargain Hunt, Songs of Praise) which comes out of that license fee.
The TV license is an unfair system, and it is enforced heavy-handedly.
The problem with the BBC is that is tries to be all things to all people.
This open codec that they're working on is one shining example of the good that the BBC does, however.
There must be a fairer way of funding the BBC. Perhaps if they kept a license fee for the news, current affairs, science and education, but charged subscriptions or pay-per-view for the "entertainment" content?
No, SGI bought part of Cray a few years back and Sun bought another part (that's where the Sun E10k came from). SGI sold it's part of Cray to a company called Tera which then changed its name to Cray.
There are no 512-way Opteron systems; maybe NASA likes to write shared-memory parallel applications.
Not yet, but Cray is working on it in something called Red Storm.
Itanium's "better" floating point performance than Opteron is confined to some pretty specialised benchmarks. Over all, Opteron is a more efficient design, runs cooler than itanium, has better compilers, better software support, is cheaper and had more room to scale to much higher clock speeds.
Sounds quite insane, I'd love to see the practical reasons for this.
With the heat given off by all those itanics, I'm sure they could do some pretty good real-word research into heat shield materials and rocket engine nozzles.
Besides, you use 2.2.x & 2.4.x Why does it matter to you what happens in the 2.6.x branch?
Because it the 2.6 branch worked better, and if it were less likely to get worse, I'd use it on my main box. I don't really think it will get worse, because I'm sure Linus won't let it. I just think these proposals are silly. By the way, you want more poeple using a new Linux, don't you?
You're the one claiming the kernel will be unstable and unpredictable (at least more than it is right now). Please present actual evidence to backup up those claims, otherwise go troll elsewhere.
How can there be any evidence of something that hasn't happened yet?
I am merely expressing one view point (mine) namely that I think it is a mistake making the main kernel development tree the development kernel tree. Please show me examples of where this has been beneficial before?
Perhaps there are no ulterior motives, perhaps it will not happen.
I think it's a bad idea.
Simple as that.
That's not a troll, that's an opinion. Now, please show your maturity by your willingness to accept that other people have opinions that differ to yours, and retract your accusation of Troll, Mr AC.
...but with all the new, bleeding edge c00l h4x0r cruft in.
I still think it's a recipie for disaster. And they're asking the distributions to do the stability part. We all know this is a coded message for RedHat and SuSE (now Novell). I'm not a Red Hat or SuSE customer.
If I'm going to have to chose an expensive commerical distribution to get my stability, I might as well buy the best desktop UNIX on the market. Just now that's MacOS X. OK, I'll need to buy new hardware, but I'll do it if that's what it comes to. Anything except be forced by Linus and Andrew, of all people, to switch to Red Hat.
Tell me how that's in the spirit of Free Software?
Please tell me that's not what they want to happen, and that they won't let it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Their plan to move everyone to itanic appears to have backfired. Has itanic finally sunk?
Why this made national news headlines I have no idea.
Unfortunately, the Great British Public appears to be quite happy with Microsoft in general.
Ignorance is bliss, so it goes.
It would be funny if it weren't sad. The people of Newham have elected a bunch of clueless and possibly corrupt morons to run their council. These very morons have signed a 10-year deal(!). (They say a week is a long time in politics.) So, in a decade, when these head-cases have lost their seats, the inhabitants of Newham will still be suffering, both in terms of poor service and wastage of tax money. Hopefully the deal has a get-out clause so that the people of Newham can remove this millstone from their neck before it's too late.
What a superb idea! Let's make every drunken lovers' tiff aboard an aeroplane a pontentially fatal activity not just for the lovers, but for everyone else on board! :-)
Funny, that. Student IDs are the easiest of all to fake. In my day, loads of people had them for the express puropose of under-age drinking.
The terrorists all had ID cards, and that didn't stop the hijackings or the deaths.
So please tell me again, how is it supposed to work?
Well, you see, before, they had no way of knowing who was on the aeroplane. Now they have a better idea (although not 100% reliable due to fakes). So if 270 people die in a mangled plane wreck, the investigators' job just became a bit easier.
What I want to know is, can these new-fangled airport security systems detect ceramic knives and guns?
This "War on Terror" is nothing but a war on Freedom. It is an instrument of corrupt government to entrench their political and financial interests at our expense.
I suspect it is for two main reasons: to help identify the corpses and in the case of fake IDs, to provide a starting point for the police to investigate.
I agree though, it does nothing to improve safety.
Not really. It's actually quite an impressive and useful technical innovation.
Synthetic benchmarks like SPEC often give very different results to real world applications. The fact that the Opteron is faster in the SPEC benchmarks and many real-world tests speaks for itself.
At last! Someone else who thinks like this. :-) This is the obvious and fairest thing to do. Mention it to most people and they call you a loony though... :-(
No one forces you to buy a can of Coke. On the other hand, you are forced to pay a TV license fee if you operate a TV. While I agree that the BBC produces some of the best quality television content in the world, it also produces a heck of a lot of dross (e.g. East Enders, The Weakest Link, Bargain Hunt, Songs of Praise) which comes out of that license fee.
The TV license is an unfair system, and it is enforced heavy-handedly.
The problem with the BBC is that is tries to be all things to all people.
This open codec that they're working on is one shining example of the good that the BBC does, however.
There must be a fairer way of funding the BBC. Perhaps if they kept a license fee for the news, current affairs, science and education, but charged subscriptions or pay-per-view for the "entertainment" content?
No, SGI bought part of Cray a few years back and Sun bought another part (that's where the Sun E10k came from). SGI sold it's part of Cray to a company called Tera which then changed its name to Cray.
Not yet, but Cray is working on it in something called Red Storm.
Itanium's "better" floating point performance than Opteron is confined to some pretty specialised benchmarks. Over all, Opteron is a more efficient design, runs cooler than itanium, has better compilers, better software support, is cheaper and had more room to scale to much higher clock speeds.
With the heat given off by all those itanics, I'm sure they could do some pretty good real-word research into heat shield materials and rocket engine nozzles.
This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!
Because it the 2.6 branch worked better, and if it were less likely to get worse, I'd use it on my main box. I don't really think it will get worse, because I'm sure Linus won't let it. I just think these proposals are silly. By the way, you want more poeple using a new Linux, don't you?
Thank you! A sane voice and a plain talker in a world of lunacy. You have put my mind at ease.
How can there be any evidence of something that hasn't happened yet?
I am merely expressing one view point (mine) namely that I think it is a mistake making the main kernel development tree the development kernel tree. Please show me examples of where this has been beneficial before?
Perhaps there are no ulterior motives, perhaps it will not happen.
I think it's a bad idea.
Simple as that.
That's not a troll, that's an opinion. Now, please show your maturity by your willingness to accept that other people have opinions that differ to yours, and retract your accusation of Troll, Mr AC.
It's not me who's slipping the deadlines.
I'm just trying to point out some possibilites here. As usual, it's gone down as flamebait.
I don't speak Welsh. How will I know?
...but with all the new, bleeding edge c00l h4x0r cruft in.
I still think it's a recipie for disaster. And they're asking the distributions to do the stability part. We all know this is a coded message for RedHat and SuSE (now Novell). I'm not a Red Hat or SuSE customer.
If I'm going to have to chose an expensive commerical distribution to get my stability, I might as well buy the best desktop UNIX on the market. Just now that's MacOS X. OK, I'll need to buy new hardware, but I'll do it if that's what it comes to. Anything except be forced by Linus and Andrew, of all people, to switch to Red Hat.
Tell me how that's in the spirit of Free Software?
Please tell me that's not what they want to happen, and that they won't let it happen.
It does become useless to me, if this gung-ho attitude to new features in the main kernel comes at the expense of stability and predictability.