Its interesting to compare this with the scram jet trials currently scheduled by Qinetic (British Defence Contractor thats just been privatised)
Qinetic are about to test fire a £1 million scramjet directly into the ground. If it works it will fire for 6 seconds before it hits earth at mach 7.
The problem with seeking venture capital is the the investors usually want a return of their investment within a specified (Probably too short) time frame.
Successful space exploration takes man decades not man hours.
2 Internet Techies? Return On Investment? What investment?
Maybe you should advise they give up on having an in house internet presence and outsource the lot. I would recommend you try and find a local specialist web hosting and development company and start asking for a Content Management System customised to your business needs. This will enable someone of a non technological background to change the websites content while still making sure it is constrained to a specified look and feel.
You mention in your post that your company sells products, do they currently sell any online? If so then you should be able to convince higher management of the benefit of an internet presence fairly easily, if not then try and add a form to email facilty to your current site and allow prospective customers to post enquiries. Make sure that you or someone on side with you get the job of filtering these enquiries so management dont get to see the crap.
If you really do work for a business which would benefit from selling online then alot of the emails you recieve through this form will hopefully be requests from potential customers asking why they cannot buy online. These will do the best job of convincing managers of the benefits of an online portal.
Even if the business you work for may not be right for an straight forward ecommerce solution, the value of leads you may be able to generate through such a facilty may help in the long run. Even if this doesnt help, forms to email are cheap so your expenditure was very low.
If your existing site that has been up for 8 years hasn't been changed or looked at internally because it gets no traffic then try and look at why. Maybe you need to advertise that you actually have one to your customers / potential customers.
Even if you company doesn't want the risks associated with online retailing, try having a site which lists all your products in an attractive format and then lets potential customers email the sales dept regarding the product they are interested through a form to email facilty as described above.
Hope this helps but it's hard to provide more help without more info on what your business is.
Why on earth would anyone buy a PC with linux preinstalled only to install windows on it? Most PC's with Linux preinstalled are alot more expensive than those bundled with Windows XP Home.
I know microsoft got into trouble a few year ago for charging PC distributers for a copy of Windows (Or DOS maybe, oh shit I feel old) even when they requested a different OS preinstalled. Several years later they were fined and told to stop but they appear to have just found a more subtle way of achieving the same result - you want to use something other than Windows, you have to pay more for the previledge.
Can any proper sysadmins (ie - people who are responsible for administering computers, preferably remotely) out there recommend a decent tool for snooping / logging my own machines TCP/IP traffic.
On a more general note maybe some nice kind slashdotters out there could actually post their Sysadmin Toolbox Top 10 essential programs.
As a long time linux home user who has just taken on a job where I have to admin a small rack (7, about to become 8) of machines I could do with some suggestions. Most are linux based machines but we have a couple of windows based ones and Remote Desktop sucks.
The main reason for the restrictions on crypto export are nothing to do with security through obscurity. They are about try to restrict other, possibly hostile countries from obtaining technology which could restrict US snooping. (Not neccessarily a bad thing with so many spare nukes in the world / Russia)
I remember hearing a story regarding public key cryptography actually being invented by GCHQ (British Govt Snooping Dept). The maths geek in question however then surpressed his research until somebody else realised how to do it so we could snoop on others more easily. The main difference between this and the US approach is that the american approach tries to get some benefit while denying that benefit to anyone else.
GCHQ like snooping on everyone so this was not in their interest. Maybe now the US govt like snooping on their own population so much they will adopt a similar approach. Maybe they already have, or maybe they just ask GCHQ to do it for them.
Re:Not THAT surprising...
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The surprising thing for us in the UK though is that we may start getting charged a similar price to what you pay in the US.
We have long been known in the UK for our willingness to pay higher prices, maybe this will start to change if more companies adopted a similar attitude. Personally I do wish the MPAA would follow this example and allow music and dvds to be sold at american prices the world over.
"I've seen some pretentious fucks in my day, but you out-pretentious-fuck....."
Why do the people with mod priveledges not just mod this post into oblivion.
Anyone who swears quite as much as this person obviously has nothing helpful or insightful to contribute to a debate. They do however have serious anger management issues by the sounds of it.
If you want to be taken seriously by polite society, try being polite yourself.
And on the subject of banning laptops in class who can blame her, most of her students were probably using them to play solitaire anyway.
Well lets face it, most of us aren't actually fit to choose who governs us anyway as we rely on the british press to decide what is good or bad for the country. This would be the same british press who decided that it wasnt worth covering this bill. With this in mind it's not surprising that the ministers want to cut them out of the loop.
I can see a number of issues arising in the next few years in Britain which there is no alternative to, but that the British people and hence our elected representatives will never allow to pass.
One example of this is going to be the Nuclear power plant building program to provide the electricity to power the desalination plants we need(Southern Britain is currently having a drought would anyone believe?)
Does anybody know a sensible answer as to why the US doesnt just adopt the SI system. Can it really be they dislike the french that much? (SI = Système International)
I know that most of the people in the country will probably still want to use our (British Imperial) system but I am surprised the american scientific comunity hasnt adopted SI at the very least.
When I was studying Physics it would forever puzzle me why they stuck to a system which nobody else used. The result for me was that if I needed to reference background research I would always avoid american reports for fear of the extra maths neccessary (Physics contains more than enough already).
Personally I was educated after this country went metric so I have no idea exactly how the Imperial system works, and I have no great desire to learn now when most of the world has abandoned it.
Correct me if I am wrong but didnt Microsoft Word user to have a cool save feature about 10 years ago. If it was running low on memory and you tried to save you document the save function would fail.
I seem to remember having to deal with a rather frantic support call from someone who was then unable to save about 5 hours typing and the autosave was not switched on by default.
If Open Office ever behaved like this it would be a laughing stock, yet Microsoft actually charged people for their buggy load of crap even 10 years ago.
The other question would be what decent new features have microsoft added in 10 years. From my memory all they seem to have done is bug fixes (also known as undocumented feature removal) and visual overhauls to make it match their latest incarnation of Windows.
There will be a hell of members of congress who know exactly what is going on. They are also however paid huge amounts of money via their campaign funds to stfu and pass the bill anyway.
That is how the american political system works. Members of congress get rich by objecting to stuff initially just to get their price up.
The only way to change this would be make all electoral contributions go through a central fund that was then divided equally amongst all the people running for office.
Unfortunately this would open you political system up and allow small fry to mount similar campaigns to the big dogs so neither Republican nor Democrat will ever go for this.
I do wish america would stop pretending it is a democracy!
This situation suggests to me another possibility. Microsoft always knew that this piece of poor design was an issue but decided not to fix it initially on cost grounds. As soon as it was discovered (by someone else) a patch could be put together quickly because half the work was already done.
The people developing WINE simply missed it so they had to verify the bug exists and look at exactly what it was before they could fix it.
Most people seem to consider all problems with software to be the fault of the coder, In my experience I used to point small security holes out to my employer all the time but sometimes he viewed it as not being cost effective to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
Its interesting to compare this with the scram jet trials currently scheduled by Qinetic (British Defence Contractor thats just been privatised)
Qinetic are about to test fire a £1 million scramjet directly into the ground. If it works it will fire for 6 seconds before it hits earth at mach 7.
The problem with seeking venture capital is the the investors usually want a return of their investment within a specified (Probably too short) time frame.
Successful space exploration takes man decades not man hours.
2 Internet Techies? Return On Investment? What investment?
Maybe you should advise they give up on having an in house internet presence and outsource the lot.
I would recommend you try and find a local specialist web hosting and development company and start asking for a Content Management System customised to your business needs. This will enable someone of a non technological background to change the websites content while still making sure it is constrained to a specified look and feel.
You mention in your post that your company sells products, do they currently sell any online? If so then you should be able to convince higher management of the benefit of an internet presence fairly easily, if not then try and add a form to email facilty to your current site and allow prospective customers to post enquiries. Make sure that you or someone on side with you get the job of filtering these enquiries so management dont get to see the crap.
If you really do work for a business which would benefit from selling online then alot of the emails you recieve through this form will hopefully be requests from potential customers asking why they cannot buy online. These will do the best job of convincing managers of the benefits of an online portal.
Even if the business you work for may not be right for an straight forward ecommerce solution, the value of leads you may be able to generate through such a facilty may help in the long run. Even if this doesnt help, forms to email are cheap so your expenditure was very low.
If your existing site that has been up for 8 years hasn't been changed or looked at internally because it gets no traffic then try and look at why. Maybe you need to advertise that you actually have one to your customers / potential customers.
Even if you company doesn't want the risks associated with online retailing, try having a site which lists all your products in an attractive format and then lets potential customers email the sales dept regarding the product they are interested through a form to email facilty as described above.
Hope this helps but it's hard to provide more help without more info on what your business is.
Why on earth would anyone buy a PC with linux preinstalled only to install windows on it? Most PC's with Linux preinstalled are alot more expensive than those bundled with Windows XP Home.
I know microsoft got into trouble a few year ago for charging PC distributers for a copy of Windows (Or DOS maybe, oh shit I feel old) even when they requested a different OS preinstalled. Several years later they were fined and told to stop but they appear to have just found a more subtle way of achieving the same result - you want to use something other than Windows, you have to pay more for the previledge.
Can any proper sysadmins (ie - people who are responsible for administering computers, preferably remotely) out there recommend a decent tool for snooping / logging my own machines TCP/IP traffic.
On a more general note maybe some nice kind slashdotters out there could actually post their Sysadmin Toolbox Top 10 essential programs.
As a long time linux home user who has just taken on a job where I have to admin a small rack (7, about to become 8) of machines I could do with some suggestions. Most are linux based machines but we have a couple of windows based ones and Remote Desktop sucks.
The main reason for the restrictions on crypto export are nothing to do with security through obscurity. They are about try to restrict other, possibly hostile countries from obtaining technology which could restrict US snooping. (Not neccessarily a bad thing with so many spare nukes in the world / Russia)
I remember hearing a story regarding public key cryptography actually being invented by GCHQ (British Govt Snooping Dept). The maths geek in question however then surpressed his research until somebody else realised how to do it so we could snoop on others more easily. The main difference between this and the US approach is that the american approach tries to get some benefit while denying that benefit to anyone else.
GCHQ like snooping on everyone so this was not in their interest. Maybe now the US govt like snooping on their own population so much they will adopt a similar approach. Maybe they already have, or maybe they just ask GCHQ to do it for them.
The surprising thing for us in the UK though is that we may start getting charged a similar price to what you pay in the US.
We have long been known in the UK for our willingness to pay higher prices, maybe this will start to change if more companies adopted a similar attitude. Personally I do wish the MPAA would follow this example and allow music and dvds to be sold at american prices the world over.
"I've seen some pretentious fucks in my day, but you out-pretentious-fuck....."
Why do the people with mod priveledges not just mod this post into oblivion.
Anyone who swears quite as much as this person obviously has nothing helpful or insightful to contribute to a debate. They do however have serious anger management issues by the sounds of it.
If you want to be taken seriously by polite society, try being polite yourself.
And on the subject of banning laptops in class who can blame her, most of her students were probably using them to play solitaire anyway.
Well lets face it, most of us aren't actually fit to choose who governs us anyway as we rely on the british press to decide what is good or bad for the country. This would be the same british press who decided that it wasnt worth covering this bill. With this in mind it's not surprising that the ministers want to cut them out of the loop.
I can see a number of issues arising in the next few years in Britain which there is no alternative to, but that the British people and hence our elected representatives will never allow to pass.
One example of this is going to be the Nuclear power plant building program to provide the electricity to power the desalination plants we need(Southern Britain is currently having a drought would anyone believe?)
I new the 100Gb hard disk in my new laptop was there for a reason.
Does anybody know a sensible answer as to why the US doesnt just adopt the SI system. Can it really be they dislike the french that much? (SI = Système International)
I know that most of the people in the country will probably still want to use our (British Imperial) system but I am surprised the american scientific comunity hasnt adopted SI at the very least.
When I was studying Physics it would forever puzzle me why they stuck to a system which nobody else used. The result for me was that if I needed to reference background research I would always avoid american reports for fear of the extra maths neccessary (Physics contains more than enough already).
Personally I was educated after this country went metric so I have no idea exactly how the Imperial system works, and I have no great desire to learn now when most of the world has abandoned it.
Surely everybody in here knows that GOD created the world in 7 days and that all this evolution nonsense was just made up by some British heretic.
Correct me if I am wrong but didnt Microsoft Word user to have a cool save feature about 10 years ago. If it was running low on memory and you tried to save you document the save function would fail.
I seem to remember having to deal with a rather frantic support call from someone who was then unable to save about 5 hours typing and the autosave was not switched on by default.
If Open Office ever behaved like this it would be a laughing stock, yet Microsoft actually charged people for their buggy load of crap even 10 years ago.
The other question would be what decent new features have microsoft added in 10 years. From my memory all they seem to have done is bug fixes (also known as undocumented feature removal) and visual overhauls to make it match their latest incarnation of Windows.
What a load of crap.
There will be a hell of members of congress who know exactly what is going on. They are also however paid huge amounts of money via their campaign funds to stfu and pass the bill anyway.
That is how the american political system works. Members of congress get rich by objecting to stuff initially just to get their price up.
The only way to change this would be make all electoral contributions go through a central fund that was then divided equally amongst all the people running for office.
Unfortunately this would open you political system up and allow small fry to mount similar campaigns to the big dogs so neither Republican nor Democrat will ever go for this.
I do wish america would stop pretending it is a democracy!
(small letter 'a' is deliberate)
From the Google Page Linked Above (http://pack.google.com/pack_installer_required.ht ml):
Picasa - Photo organizer
* Find, edit, and share your photos in seconds
* Easily remove red eye and fix photos
Well if they say it can edit photos then I say we can call it an image editor.
This situation suggests to me another possibility. Microsoft always knew that this piece of poor design was an issue but decided not to fix it initially on cost grounds. As soon as it was discovered (by someone else) a patch could be put together quickly because half the work was already done.
The people developing WINE simply missed it so they had to verify the bug exists and look at exactly what it was before they could fix it.
Most people seem to consider all problems with software to be the fault of the coder, In my experience I used to point small security holes out to my employer all the time but sometimes he viewed it as not being cost effective to fix.
Are you British? Or do other countries have the same crap in their tabloid newspapers as well.
anti-piracy compatible = linux incompatible