"Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture"
Please tell me I'm not the only one that cringed at this example of newspeak? The word is *use*. "Apple are bringing out computers that **use** Intel's new Nehalem architecture".
The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).
Besides all that the topic is pointless since everyone knows we won't need more than 640K.;)
The situation is even worse in the UK where our executive branch is embedded in our legislature.
By definition here, the party in government enjoys a majority within parliament and for the last 11 years that majority has been very large.
In essence it means that unless the government wants to do something which is so appalling that even their own party can't bear it then they can do whatever they want.
Like the U.S. we operate a first past the post system with huge majorities being returned for nothing like an absolute majority of the vote and this tends to lead to see-saw politics as the country has to be so disgusted with the ruling party that they choose to exercise the nuclear option of clearing they and all their works from power.
The truth more often than not though is that many people who vote for a party are reasonably happy with some of what they've done and would have, at an earlier moment, exercised a vote showing their displeasure at a particular direction or measure had they thought that it could make a difference. With proportional representation that is an option. With first past the post, no such subtlety exists.
Many detractors of PR point out that it can lead to weak government which is really only yet another euphemism designed to imply that there's something awful about a government which actually has to compromise with competing interests in society to arrive at a result which is inherently more democratic.
For a country that was forced into a war it didn't want to take part in, has been forced to fund the development of an ID card system it doesn't need and has seen many traditional freedoms curtailed, I for one can't wait for 'weak' government.
Of course this makes me wonder- if it's this easy, wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?
Oh, I think that in the event of such a war I'd probably be dwelling more on the hoards of ICBMs that are passing by one another in space. Or at least I'd think about it for the next, and final, few minutes of my life.
I found it hard to continue reading your post after point 1 began with "Microsoft says". As you rightly point out in point 2, MS-says with respect to what we-got in Vista didn't quite match up. MS promised a lot and users got an OS that felt to many like a regression.
MS has a habit of "promising" features that it doesn't know how to deliver; its useful if you want to discourage investment in potential competitors. After all, why go and develop a new fs technology if the company with a 90%+ monopoly in the OS sector is going to integrate it into their product?
"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4?
I think the main reason that no one is interested is that its content is mostly nonsense and speculation.
Take for example the assertion that:
What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive.
Aside from this being bizarre, you only need to look at the statistics to see that communication (in the form of texts) is not "muffled". Approximately 1.2 billion texts were sent each week in the month of September in the UK.
There are lots of other assertions without supporting evidence - i.e. that there are no unlimited data plans in Europe - well I know T-Mobile offers one in the UK alone and I'm sure that there are others.
In general: a poor article with little or no structure and no references for its assertions.
Alas, as much as I'd like to take credit for giving the world such exquisite examples of shrill, hysterical partisanship, I'm afraid I'd have to lay the blame on Rupert Murdoch and the Australians. Who, I recall, still nominally acknowledge the Queen as their sovereign. Without News Corp, there probably wouldn't be a relatively mainstream platform for these people.
Well you could blame Rupert Murdoch - and goodness knows he has a lot to answer for but I'm afraid that the Daily Mail is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust through Associated Newspapers.
This would seem to indicate that an entirely different strand of rabid bile exists within British society that emerged entirely independently of the Dirty Digger.
The Mail is notorious for supporting fascism in the 30s for instance which clearly predates any poison which Murdoch might have brought to our shores.
I would caution everyone to note first of all that the FA is from the Daily Mail and so most of the facts contained therein are subject to question.
As some have noted this incident took place approximately a year ago and in fact it's not even the first time that the Chinese have stalked the Kitty Hawk - albeit from a greater distance that time.
Essentially what the Mail have done here is to raise an issue that ticks all their usual buttons.
It takes a dig at the Americans - note the use of "dumbstruck", "embarrassment" and "red-faced".
It is a cheap article to do - dig up old news, stick some cheap stock pics in and you're done.
It's about the Chinese - who are scary and foreign.
Consequently, on behalf of all Brits, I apologise for the existence of the Daily Mail - plainly we should do more to end it. On the other hand, however you have given the world Fox News and Ann Coulter - although they do hold a certain amusement value.
As an exercise use google news to see how many other 'articles' have now sprung up which in places basically copy the DM article word for word..:)
Unfortunately Games Workshop has had a generally retrograde attitude to copyright/IP for a long time. They take all the fun out of the game/environment due to their obsession with protecting their "IP".
This spreads and if you check out the interviews with Warhammer Online peeps, they consistently talk about a feature "coming from the IP" when I think the correct term they were reaching for would be "it comes from the backstory" or the warhammer world. This transformation of all ideas, plot lines, concepts into mere chattels is a sloppy way of thinking of the world and ultimately chokes all creativity beneath a web of artificial scarcity wherein nothing new is born and all that remains is to be jealously guarded and traded under fiendishly odious terms.
I recall going to the GW web site years ago and downloading a pdf of rules for a particular, I think Tyrannid, unit. I was astonished to have to agree to a license just to download the pdf and that the license effectively prohibited me from even giving the file or the physical copy to another person. This would make gaming with the information quite difficult I suppose. I would have to shield their eyes from the offending document until I had either established whether they had the appropriate license for the photons to reach their retinas or direct them to download their own entirely identical stream of bits.
Yes, sorry, you're quite right though I meant that more as a figurative example of the strangeness of their request for a retrospective change to the duration of the copyright term on the grounds of incentive.
I would be quite happy also to see the duration for songs/fiction to be reduced downwards to life or less. We have sadly seen a "harmonisation" of copyright terms in Europe with the longest duration (I believe Germany's) trumping those countries with a shorter one. The argument seems to be that it's easier to extend than to reduce but I think it is worth taking the harder course in order to derive the greater benefit for society.
What is increasingly at risk here is the very important connection between a "right" to protection in law and the reason for the existance of that right.
The protection of copyright (and other IP forms for that matter) is intended to provide a reward to those who would contribute to the public good; to culture, society, the fine arts and our understanding of the human condition.
To this extent there is a good basis for creating a social contract whereby we protect in our courts of law the creative work of an individual from being passed off as the work of another, or modified in a way that misrepresents a work or distributed for free where that is not what the creator wants.
What they are arguing for now in the UK is the difference not between no protection and protection but between one degree of protection (its duration) and another. Importantly, though, they are using the arguments for and against protection in the debate about the degree of protection. That is a mis-use of the reasons for protection which provide no clear guidance in their favour here.
Given a 95 year term over a 50 year term are we motivated to be 90% more creative? Are great works of fiction or music not written on the grounds that they will *only* be protected for 50 years and not the all important 90 years? Fifty years represents a term in which the creator gets to benefit from their work but also then that society, in a meaningful time frame, gets to benefit culturally from the full propagation (not based on economic means) of a work throughout that society.
It's important also to note that a longer, stricter term of protection fails to acknowledge that all creation is based on the work of those that have gone before us. The true "originality" of a work is of course mollifed by the influences that it has taken. It is only right that creators accept their place in that great progression and let their work eventually also pass into the public domain to be recognised as the influence for more works that help society's culture to flourish.
A shorter copyright protection term could surely only encourage investment in new songs, new books, new acts rather than taking the easy route of holding on to back catalogues that are continuously re-released. Back catalogues are of course another source of irritation since the availability of most music that has been made and of most books ever written in the stores is extremely limited.
The creators of tomorrow would live in a poorer world if proprietary protection for what is, after all, our shared culture was extended arbitrarily to suit the present generation.
As far as a feature goes, it's really a complete non-story. Aside from the inefficiency of shaping traffic on every client computer as opposed to the router, it's also the sort of thing that you can do with ease on linux.
For a home router I recommend taking a look at the Fairnat script http://www.metamorpher.de/fairnat/ although it doesn't include rules for firewalling - you have to do that yourself.
To take full advantage of traffic shaping a connection on linux for users who use p2p it's a good idea to get a version of iptables (or compile your own) with the ipp2p module. It can match against pretty much all p2p protocols that people use (bittorrent, edonkey, soulseek etc).
That'll allow you to prioritise your interactive traffic (ssh, IRC, instant messengers), let your mid-priority traffic (HTTP, IMAP, POP) come in and then put your bulk transfers and p2p lower down in terms of priority.
If you've just got the one machine connected to a broadband modem then take a look at the wondershaper http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ script which will shape traffic on your machine.
The comic makes a good point - of course the really more mature (in terms of discussion) source for the idea of a city planet is Trantor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor.
Asimov makes the exact point, in fact a whole lot of the plot in some books is about, the problems of supplying the population.
I guess the idea of many sci-fi writers is that a dyson sphere or segment of such would make for a much more likely galactic capital. Certainly a more impressive use of resources than covering a grotty planet with metal and so much more efficient.:)
"Because 90% of people watching are going to be from the south"
Firstly, please don't go and add support to the statistic that 68% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Secondly, what do you mean by the south? The new map actually emphasises specifically the south-east. Never mind even Scotland - if you're in the north of *England* which has a very substantial population then you have trouble reading useful information from the map.
It's also worth pointing out that the amount of commercial activity in Scotland that depends on the weather is greater than that in the South. It's a bit inconvenient if my walk in the park is rained on, but if you're a fisherman then having a good idea of the weather is critical.
Most importantly, there's no reason why the model used to represent the weather data needs to make such a tradeoff at all. Your statement about the relative population size implies that it is some sort of anticipated/necessary compromise. Any good system of visualisation should not have to make such a choice. It is more than possible to show the weather accurately over the entire UK. We're not that big an island after all.
Come to think of it, I recall a 2D map the BBC used to have...it seemed to be alright at doing that....
"People preferred the old format because it [...] didn't swoop around"
This is a crtical point that I think sheds some light on the whole fiasco. Far be it from/. to burst the ego of the BBC weather presenting team but I feel that an awful lot of people got their weather information without actually listening all that much to the presenter.
In the old system people would focus on the informative map in the background and pick up on the weather in their area. They'd tune in and out of what the presenter was saying as they talked about the UK weather, maybe picking up on something if they mentioned a place name near them or they said something of general importance. For the most part though, people would study the wind speed, temperature, front position and cloud cover for their area.
With the new style system, they've basically forced everyone to pay attention to them as they take the map on a stomach churning ride around the UK at a speed that doesn't allow most people to get any appreciation of the weather in their area. If you tune in too late to the report you'll have missed your chance to hear about the weather in your area at all.
Most disconcertingly, the camera only seems to stay still for a couple of seconds. For those that haven't seen it yet, imagine that the camera was on a piece of elastic. As it reaches its maximum extension near, say, Cornwall it slows...comes to a stop...then accelerates away.
That's pretty much the way they've set it up so far.
The astonishingly London-centric decision to set the camera angle such that viewers have to strain to even read the temperature in the north of the UK was just profoundly stupid. I think what was most disturbing was the way that they didn't seem to even understand what people were complaining about. I used to feel sorry for the BBC being shipped up in some numbers to Manchester (and I still think it'll all end in tears/yet more wasted license payers money) but now I'm not so sure that it isn't the right thing to do.
That's just a small overview of a few of the problems with the approach. Makes you worry about where the Beeb is really heading....
"has become the norm with the organisation, have decided to ignore public opinion and carry on as they please"
Exactly, only in order to do that they'll need to have another useless "consultation" where they spend lots of license payers money in order to come to the conclusion that they wanted to come to in the first place.
What's most frustrating about their reaction to criticism is that they effectively accused anyone who pointed out the many inadequacies of the new style report of being a neo-luddite.
This issue is not about being "polite and well behaved" which from your post appears to mean "not remind me that they exist". This issue is about people's freedom to work without a threat, explicit or implied that they could be fired on account of their sexuality.
People's sexuality is not some disposable, distinct part of their lives. If your sexual orientation is that of heterosexuality do you really regard your wife to be some distant part of your life? Do you never talk about your wife, what you did at the weekend or what you're doing after work with your co-workers?
In the workplace, people simply do not function with one another without at some point asking about their non-work lives. If a gay/lesbian person mentions their boyfriend or girlfriend and therefore implicitly lets their co-worker know about their sexual orientation, they should not be in fear of their job.
I find it bizzare that you seize upon the notion of someone being "rude" by using the example of a cliched gay slogan (that I'm yet to hear a single gay person use naturally). So to reiterate, this issue is not about "throw[ing] it in peoples' faces" (whatever that means) it's about people trying to get on with their lives, have normal conversations and not get fired as a result.
Re:Ugh, that looks horrible.
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 1
If you recall the first article, this is 30 years old!
Furthermore, we do have interactive TV on the Digital broadcasts - e.g. Sky Digital, NTL (cable), Telewest (cable) and FreeView (a free terrestrial digital broadcast that has all of the BBC channels etc).
The number of times I've watched my Dad flick from the digital broadcast of a channel to the analogue one just to use teletext/ceefax is remarkable. The digital is much more flashy with its multiscreen/in-screen news feeds etc but he just prefers the simpler analogue ceefax/teletext.
Many people prefer the simple but fun quizes on ceefax etc than playing a graphical game over digital - especially since there is often a cost fo those games.
A triumph of a simple system that does its job well over a more complex one it seems...
It's possibly the most vapid article I've read in a long time.
Don't bother posting the text, let me save you the trouble and summarise for you:
a) If you annoy people at work...you might not be promoted. (*gasp*)
b) If you are an annoying person generally, e.g. you annoy the customers, it's possible you're annoying other people too. (*gasp*)
c) In order to not annoy people, try and be less annoying. (*shock*, *horror*)
d) If you're worried about annoying people you need to buy the books and hire the services of the consultants who seem to have been interviewed for the article. (*raised eyebrows*)
That's it. That really is it.
Oh, e) Actually it's alright to annoy everyone so long as you're right and the company benefits. (*errrr?*)
char buf[8];
printf ( "Hey, what's the scoop, newsboy? " );
gets ( buf );
printf ( "Good one my boy, now off to the presses to publish %s!!\n", buf ); "
Ah that was the programming error, he used gets()!
"If we start changing copyright law all around, especially anything that reduces copyright terms, or anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work, it's a sign of instability. The change itself can have negative effects on investment in new works."
The thing is this. The only changes being 'proposed' are those being lobbied for by the special interest groups, e.g. the music industry. There is no change being made to "give less protection" to older works.
The older works are getting the same protection that they had when they were new works; the understanding was always that they would expire in 50 years.
I don't understand your notion of "anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work." By *definition* if it's an older work it's already enjoyed many more years of protection under the terms of its copyright than a newly copyrighted work.
What right do corporations have to buy dead artists work and sell it back to us? By the time of the 49th year of a work's copyright, how many times are we expected to have bought it?
There comes a time when a work has been around for long enough to form part of the cultural background of society. If a work was extremely popular it may even be an important part of our modern cultural heritage. It's only right that, at that point, the use of the work by all and for all becomes possible.
The gates of hell are indeed open! I think the creator of the midi-tune-playing-in-the-background site escaped from the bowels of hell to create that monstrosity.
Never mind the minimum-spec for the game, what the hell is the mininum spec for displaying that site?:)
PS: It doesn't render correctly with mozilla-firefox and version 7 of the flash for linux player.
Slashdot Mirror
"Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture"
Please tell me I'm not the only one that cringed at this example of newspeak? The word is *use*. "Apple are bringing out computers that **use** Intel's new Nehalem architecture".
The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).
Besides all that the topic is pointless since everyone knows we won't need more than 640K. ;)
The situation is even worse in the UK where our executive branch is embedded in our legislature.
By definition here, the party in government enjoys a majority within parliament and for the last 11 years that majority has been very large.
In essence it means that unless the government wants to do something which is so appalling that even their own party can't bear it then they can do whatever they want.
Like the U.S. we operate a first past the post system with huge majorities being returned for nothing like an absolute majority of the vote and this tends to lead to see-saw politics as the country has to be so disgusted with the ruling party that they choose to exercise the nuclear option of clearing they and all their works from power.
The truth more often than not though is that many people who vote for a party are reasonably happy with some of what they've done and would have, at an earlier moment, exercised a vote showing their displeasure at a particular direction or measure had they thought that it could make a difference. With proportional representation that is an option. With first past the post, no such subtlety exists.
Many detractors of PR point out that it can lead to weak government which is really only yet another euphemism designed to imply that there's something awful about a government which actually has to compromise with competing interests in society to arrive at a result which is inherently more democratic.
For a country that was forced into a war it didn't want to take part in, has been forced to fund the development of an ID card system it doesn't need and has seen many traditional freedoms curtailed, I for one can't wait for 'weak' government.
Oh, I think that in the event of such a war I'd probably be dwelling more on the hoards of ICBMs that are passing by one another in space. Or at least I'd think about it for the next, and final, few minutes of my life.
You don't need a "crystal ball" to apply reasoning and form opinions or do you just hold off on forming one until you've been fed the press release?
I disagreed with the parent's post on the grounds that he was taking MS's word as a given rather than that he was making a call on what they would do.
I found it hard to continue reading your post after point 1 began with "Microsoft says". As you rightly point out in point 2, MS-says with respect to what we-got in Vista didn't quite match up. MS promised a lot and users got an OS that felt to many like a regression.
MS has a habit of "promising" features that it doesn't know how to deliver; its useful if you want to discourage investment in potential competitors. After all, why go and develop a new fs technology if the company with a 90%+ monopoly in the OS sector is going to integrate it into their product?
"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4?
I think the main reason that no one is interested is that its content is mostly nonsense and speculation.
Take for example the assertion that:
What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive.Aside from this being bizarre, you only need to look at the statistics to see that communication (in the form of texts) is not "muffled". Approximately 1.2 billion texts were sent each week in the month of September in the UK.
There are lots of other assertions without supporting evidence - i.e. that there are no unlimited data plans in Europe - well I know T-Mobile offers one in the UK alone and I'm sure that there are others.
In general: a poor article with little or no structure and no references for its assertions.
Well you could blame Rupert Murdoch - and goodness knows he has a lot to answer for but I'm afraid that the Daily Mail is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust through Associated Newspapers.
This would seem to indicate that an entirely different strand of rabid bile exists within British society that emerged entirely independently of the Dirty Digger.
The Mail is notorious for supporting fascism in the 30s for instance which clearly predates any poison which Murdoch might have brought to our shores.
I would caution everyone to note first of all that the FA is from the Daily Mail and so most of the facts contained therein are subject to question.
As some have noted this incident took place approximately a year ago and in fact it's not even the first time that the Chinese have stalked the Kitty Hawk - albeit from a greater distance that time.
Essentially what the Mail have done here is to raise an issue that ticks all their usual buttons.
Consequently, on behalf of all Brits, I apologise for the existence of the Daily Mail - plainly we should do more to end it. On the other hand, however you have given the world Fox News and Ann Coulter - although they do hold a certain amusement value.
As an exercise use google news to see how many other 'articles' have now sprung up which in places basically copy the DM article word for word.. :)
Unfortunately Games Workshop has had a generally retrograde attitude to copyright/IP for a long time. They take all the fun out of the game/environment due to their obsession with protecting their "IP".
This spreads and if you check out the interviews with Warhammer Online peeps, they consistently talk about a feature "coming from the IP" when I think the correct term they were reaching for would be "it comes from the backstory" or the warhammer world. This transformation of all ideas, plot lines, concepts into mere chattels is a sloppy way of thinking of the world and ultimately chokes all creativity beneath a web of artificial scarcity wherein nothing new is born and all that remains is to be jealously guarded and traded under fiendishly odious terms.
I recall going to the GW web site years ago and downloading a pdf of rules for a particular, I think Tyrannid, unit. I was astonished to have to agree to a license just to download the pdf and that the license effectively prohibited me from even giving the file or the physical copy to another person. This would make gaming with the information quite difficult I suppose. I would have to shield their eyes from the offending document until I had either established whether they had the appropriate license for the photons to reach their retinas or direct them to download their own entirely identical stream of bits.
And so the world turns I suppose...
So apparently a court thinks that the FCC can not arbitrarily define indecency, but /. submitters are self-censoring f@ckers ;)
The Dark Side of HDCP? I wasn't aware there was a bright one...
I suppose there's a certain irony to the fact that the talk is available only in proprietary formats from those links.
Yes, sorry, you're quite right though I meant that more as a figurative example of the strangeness of their request for a retrospective change to the duration of the copyright term on the grounds of incentive.
I would be quite happy also to see the duration for songs/fiction to be reduced downwards to life or less. We have sadly seen a "harmonisation" of copyright terms in Europe with the longest duration (I believe Germany's) trumping those countries with a shorter one. The argument seems to be that it's easier to extend than to reduce but I think it is worth taking the harder course in order to derive the greater benefit for society.
What is increasingly at risk here is the very important connection between a "right" to protection in law and the reason for the existance of that right.
The protection of copyright (and other IP forms for that matter) is intended to provide a reward to those who would contribute to the public good; to culture, society, the fine arts and our understanding of the human condition.
To this extent there is a good basis for creating a social contract whereby we protect in our courts of law the creative work of an individual from being passed off as the work of another, or modified in a way that misrepresents a work or distributed for free where that is not what the creator wants.
What they are arguing for now in the UK is the difference not between no protection and protection but between one degree of protection (its duration) and another. Importantly, though, they are using the arguments for and against protection in the debate about the degree of protection. That is a mis-use of the reasons for protection which provide no clear guidance in their favour here.
Given a 95 year term over a 50 year term are we motivated to be 90% more creative? Are great works of fiction or music not written on the grounds that they will *only* be protected for 50 years and not the all important 90 years? Fifty years represents a term in which the creator gets to benefit from their work but also then that society, in a meaningful time frame, gets to benefit culturally from the full propagation (not based on economic means) of a work throughout that society.
It's important also to note that a longer, stricter term of protection fails to acknowledge that all creation is based on the work of those that have gone before us. The true "originality" of a work is of course mollifed by the influences that it has taken. It is only right that creators accept their place in that great progression and let their work eventually also pass into the public domain to be recognised as the influence for more works that help society's culture to flourish.
A shorter copyright protection term could surely only encourage investment in new songs, new books, new acts rather than taking the easy route of holding on to back catalogues that are continuously re-released. Back catalogues are of course another source of irritation since the availability of most music that has been made and of most books ever written in the stores is extremely limited.
The creators of tomorrow would live in a poorer world if proprietary protection for what is, after all, our shared culture was extended arbitrarily to suit the present generation.
As far as a feature goes, it's really a complete non-story. Aside from the inefficiency of shaping traffic on every client computer as opposed to the router, it's also the sort of thing that you can do with ease on linux.
For a home router I recommend taking a look at the Fairnat script http://www.metamorpher.de/fairnat/ although it doesn't include rules for firewalling - you have to do that yourself.
To take full advantage of traffic shaping a connection on linux for users who use p2p it's a good idea to get a version of iptables (or compile your own) with the ipp2p module. It can match against pretty much all p2p protocols that people use (bittorrent, edonkey, soulseek etc).
That'll allow you to prioritise your interactive traffic (ssh, IRC, instant messengers), let your mid-priority traffic (HTTP, IMAP, POP) come in and then put your bulk transfers and p2p lower down in terms of priority.
If you've just got the one machine connected to a broadband modem then take a look at the wondershaper http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ script which will shape traffic on your machine.
The comic makes a good point - of course the really more mature (in terms of discussion) source for the idea of a city planet is Trantor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor .
:)
Asimov makes the exact point, in fact a whole lot of the plot in some books is about, the problems of supplying the population.
I guess the idea of many sci-fi writers is that a dyson sphere or segment of such would make for a much more likely galactic capital. Certainly a more impressive use of resources than covering a grotty planet with metal and so much more efficient.
Still give London enough time....
"Because 90% of people watching are going to be from the south"
Firstly, please don't go and add support to the statistic that 68% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Secondly, what do you mean by the south? The new map actually emphasises specifically the south-east. Never mind even Scotland - if you're in the north of *England* which has a very substantial population then you have trouble reading useful information from the map.
It's also worth pointing out that the amount of commercial activity in Scotland that depends on the weather is greater than that in the South. It's a bit inconvenient if my walk in the park is rained on, but if you're a fisherman then having a good idea of the weather is critical.
Most importantly, there's no reason why the model used to represent the weather data needs to make such a tradeoff at all. Your statement about the relative population size implies that it is some sort of anticipated/necessary compromise. Any good system of visualisation should not have to make such a choice. It is more than possible to show the weather accurately over the entire UK. We're not that big an island after all.
Come to think of it, I recall a 2D map the BBC used to have...it seemed to be alright at doing that....
"People preferred the old format because it [...] didn't swoop around"
/. to burst the ego of the BBC weather presenting team but I feel that an awful lot of people got their weather information without actually listening all that much to the presenter.
This is a crtical point that I think sheds some light on the whole fiasco. Far be it from
In the old system people would focus on the informative map in the background and pick up on the weather in their area. They'd tune in and out of what the presenter was saying as they talked about the UK weather, maybe picking up on something if they mentioned a place name near them or they said something of general importance. For the most part though, people would study the wind speed, temperature, front position and cloud cover for their area.
With the new style system, they've basically forced everyone to pay attention to them as they take the map on a stomach churning ride around the UK at a speed that doesn't allow most people to get any appreciation of the weather in their area. If you tune in too late to the report you'll have missed your chance to hear about the weather in your area at all.
Most disconcertingly, the camera only seems to stay still for a couple of seconds. For those that haven't seen it yet, imagine that the camera was on a piece of elastic. As it reaches its maximum extension near, say, Cornwall it slows...comes to a stop...then accelerates away.
That's pretty much the way they've set it up so far.
The astonishingly London-centric decision to set the camera angle such that viewers have to strain to even read the temperature in the north of the UK was just profoundly stupid. I think what was most disturbing was the way that they didn't seem to even understand what people were complaining about. I used to feel sorry for the BBC being shipped up in some numbers to Manchester (and I still think it'll all end in tears/yet more wasted license payers money) but now I'm not so sure that it isn't the right thing to do.
That's just a small overview of a few of the problems with the approach. Makes you worry about where the Beeb is really heading....
"has become the norm with the organisation, have decided to ignore public opinion and carry on as they please"
Exactly, only in order to do that they'll need to have another useless "consultation" where they spend lots of license payers money in order to come to the conclusion that they wanted to come to in the first place.
What's most frustrating about their reaction to criticism is that they effectively accused anyone who pointed out the many inadequacies of the new style report of being a neo-luddite.
Sigh, ok, I'll bite.
s hit-courtsey-of-the-aclu/ which is something of a pejorative term to say the least.
It's pretty obvious that you have a problem with gay people - I mean you call them "sexual deviants" on your web site http://www.blindmindseye.com/2005/04/23/more-bull
This issue is not about being "polite and well behaved" which from your post appears to mean "not remind me that they exist". This issue is about people's freedom to work without a threat, explicit or implied that they could be fired on account of their sexuality.
People's sexuality is not some disposable, distinct part of their lives. If your sexual orientation is that of heterosexuality do you really regard your wife to be some distant part of your life? Do you never talk about your wife, what you did at the weekend or what you're doing after work with your co-workers?
In the workplace, people simply do not function with one another without at some point asking about their non-work lives. If a gay/lesbian person mentions their boyfriend or girlfriend and therefore implicitly lets their co-worker know about their sexual orientation, they should not be in fear of their job.
I find it bizzare that you seize upon the notion of someone being "rude" by using the example of a cliched gay slogan (that I'm yet to hear a single gay person use naturally). So to reiterate, this issue is not about "throw[ing] it in peoples' faces" (whatever that means) it's about people trying to get on with their lives, have normal conversations and not get fired as a result.
If you recall the first article, this is 30 years old!
Furthermore, we do have interactive TV on the Digital broadcasts - e.g. Sky Digital, NTL (cable), Telewest (cable) and FreeView (a free terrestrial digital broadcast that has all of the BBC channels etc).
The number of times I've watched my Dad flick from the digital broadcast of a channel to the analogue one just to use teletext/ceefax is remarkable. The digital is much more flashy with its multiscreen/in-screen news feeds etc but he just prefers the simpler analogue ceefax/teletext.
Many people prefer the simple but fun quizes on ceefax etc than playing a graphical game over digital - especially since there is often a cost fo those games.
A triumph of a simple system that does its job well over a more complex one it seems...
It's possibly the most vapid article I've read in a long time.
Don't bother posting the text, let me save you the trouble and summarise for you:
a) If you annoy people at work...you might not be promoted. (*gasp*)
b) If you are an annoying person generally, e.g. you annoy the customers, it's possible you're annoying other people too. (*gasp*)
c) In order to not annoy people, try and be less annoying. (*shock*, *horror*)
d) If you're worried about annoying people you need to buy the books and hire the services of the consultants who seem to have been interviewed for the article. (*raised eyebrows*)
That's it. That really is it.
Oh, e) Actually it's alright to annoy everyone so long as you're right and the company benefits. (*errrr?*)
"Yeah... you shouldn't have written:
char buf[8];
printf ( "Hey, what's the scoop, newsboy? " );
gets ( buf );
printf ( "Good one my boy, now off to the presses to publish %s!!\n", buf ); "
Ah that was the programming error, he used gets()!
"If we start changing copyright law all around, especially anything that reduces copyright terms, or anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work, it's a sign of instability. The change itself can have negative effects on investment in new works."
The thing is this. The only changes being 'proposed' are those being lobbied for by the special interest groups, e.g. the music industry. There is no change being made to "give less protection" to older works.
The older works are getting the same protection that they had when they were new works; the understanding was always that they would expire in 50 years.
I don't understand your notion of "anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work." By *definition* if it's an older work it's already enjoyed many more years of protection under the terms of its copyright than a newly copyrighted work.
What right do corporations have to buy dead artists work and sell it back to us? By the time of the 49th year of a work's copyright, how many times are we expected to have bought it?
There comes a time when a work has been around for long enough to form part of the cultural background of society. If a work was extremely popular it may even be an important part of our modern cultural heritage. It's only right that, at that point, the use of the work by all and for all becomes possible.
The gates of hell are indeed open! I think the creator of the midi-tune-playing-in-the-background site escaped from the bowels of hell to create that monstrosity.
:)
Never mind the minimum-spec for the game, what the hell is the mininum spec for displaying that site?
PS: It doesn't render correctly with mozilla-firefox and version 7 of the flash for linux player.