It is difficult for us younger people/ geeks to understand why on earth you would want to drop a big one on a service which is only used by a load of incontinent coffin-dodgers who haven't got the mental energy of a goldfish.
However the grey dollar is important, and my guess is that they are doing this to buy market share. All the business books tell you that this is poor strategy, and it probably is. However most business books do not cover the situation of a desparate competitor who is cash rich, and you want to deny them the only way of building their market share.
It is not so much that they want this market, it is more that they want to deny it to MS.
from someone else with two of the previous generation version.
The present version has got a much better D/A converter, whereas the old one was a bit crap if you had a decent hifi. The good thing is that both versions have digital electrical (SPDIF) and toslink out, so I just run the spdif into a good quality cheap DAC.
As hifi nuts update their kit regularly, you don't have to pay much for some top notch kit which is a few years old, and there is nothing to wear out in a DAC.
You can also use the web interface to manage what is streamed to your computer, and you can co-ordinate multiple players to all play the same thing, which is handy for parties.
Good gadget, but definitely happier in wired mode than wireless, I have found.
It depends what sort of games you are writing, but if not graphics intensive, you could package the game+all essentials on a lightweight linux distro, and put the whole thing out as a virtual machine using VMWare Player.
I have a tablet that I bought when they couldn't sell them (toshiba 3500) and the price went through the floor.
It was great to use in meetings to wind other people up - the gee-wow factor, but even as a medic, I didn't find them useful in a workplace context. It's a nice idea, but there is a reason that Apple hasn't done tablets (yet). It has turned out to be an excellent general notebook though.
OneNote does sound good, but the only real solution to portable computing input is good voice recognition, and I think we are still a way off that for average use.
What I meant was, if your blood pressure is slightly elevated, and you have good genetic predictors, there might be no benefit to treating it, as any drugs have side effects. The risks might outweigh the benefits. "First do no harm" should underpin all medical treatment decisions. Direct to consumer drug advertising is a good way of undermining this principle.
What the insurance companies (both life insurance and health insurance) want to avoid providing insurance to people who are going to get chronic illnesses as these are very very very expensive. If you can exclude these people, you can make much more profit for your shareholders, and make insurance much cheaper for everyone else, and people with expensive chronic diseases can be 'looked after' by the Government.
Aside from the eugenics argument, there are potential problems in that our genetic (and creative) diversity could be harmed by this. Maybe there will be an countries or areas in which only the beautiful and genetically pure could live. The future sounds great doesn't it?
Actually we do make decisions based on that history. (IAAD).
It becomes relevant in deciding the pre-test probability of a disease existing. Most tests for disease are not black and white.
We need to work out the probability of a disease existing, to choose the right test (to minimise false positives and false negatives).
This is a practical application of Bayes Theorem.
If you have a slightly high blood pressure on testing (which is a flawed test with false positives and false negatives), do I advise treatment or not? If you have a strong family history of strokes and heart problems then I probably do, if you don't well maybe we wait and see. A genetic test would mean that I would be looking very actively for signs of disease, and might even treat before there was evidence of disease (althought there is no current evidence to support this).
The problem with genetic tests is that the R&D in developing these tests is huge, and with a limited patent time available (20 years max, usually about 10 after testing) the manufacturer has to make as much money as possible, and the cost of producing the testing kits is usually minimal, therefore every test kit sold is basically pure profit. This is how drugs companies work as well. Hence the massive push to get consumers to buy.
This is a brave stance, but they will end up having to weasel out of it, otherwise they will end up hovering up the shallow end of the gene pool There are some interesting sides to this though, as it might be more cost-effective to hire people who tend to die early, as long as they have no sick leave before hand. It would certainly save on pensions/ superannuation.
Genetic health screening is already done to an extent when doctors ask you about illnesses in the family, what age did your relatives die, have you got any chronic health problems. Genetic screening will come in gradually as an extension to this, and I think companies will find themselves forced to use it by the market.
People with a positive genetic test for something long and expensive like MS, mental health problems, or early Alzheimers would be pretty much unemployable, even before they developed the clinical signs of the disease. As all tests are fallible, some of them would not go on to develop the disease anyway. These sort of problems will need legislation to protect people from the worst excesses of such testing, but I don't see how we are going to stop it.
As the developing world catches us up, and plenty of companies with no compunction about using such tests, I would be surprised if IBM is still saying the same thing in 20 years time.
This is cool becasue Barry Marshall was a junior doctor who saw something he couldn't explain and decided to investigate and test it, in classic geeky fashion. He even tested the theory by drinking H.Pylori and got the mother of all stomach aches afterwards. This proves that it is still possible to do great medical research in the mould (sorry) of Fleming and Penicillin, and you don't need a $100m research budget.
He suffered a lot of problems getting the medical establishment to believe him, and it took at least 20 years, but once it did, the Nobel was bound to happen sooner or later.
Unless someone has managed to to satisfy the Turing test while I wasn't looking, this whole thing is scripted anyway - just an educational ELIZA, and about as much use.
the great thing about having an uncommon name like Ms Strzalkowski quoted in the article, is that a quick Google search for Strzalkowski and Microsoft reveals a certain Tomek Strzalkowski who appears to be friendly with the Beast.
I wonder if they know each other?
I have a ericsson P900 (basically same as P910 without thumb keyboard) and putty is a pita without the flipdown keyboard that is on the 910, although the text is legible (just). The main prob is that the on screen keyboard always overlaps the display.
All the flips on these P series phones are vulnerable (although now much better than P800 ones) The nokia looks to be the better bet as it is more robust and the display would be great, and you will be less likely to leave it somewhere accidentally (no one used to lose their motorola 8500 bricks did they?)
Surely they can be nailed on the accessibility.
There is a nice helpful link on every page saying that they are committed to accessibility.
There is even a email address, to allow people who think that accessibility to this site is sub-optimal, to contact them. If you know anyone who feels this way, maybe they should send an email to
FEMAOPA@dhs.gov
and I'm sure they will be pleased to sort it out.
I think that introducing the beginner to Brainfuck is highly likely to mutilate them (or at least induce them to self-mutilate).
On a more serious note, I think that to most (non geek) people, computer = Interweb so a programming language that has the ability to output html is preferable. This would mean that they can show off their work to friends, which has a powerful re-inforcing effect in itself.
Although I like PHP, it sounds like Python has the edge in that it is more flexible in this regard
Although it sounds like Apple was pissed off about the lack of mobile G5 action, I wonder whether part of the reason for this was to stop Apple being bought by IBM. This was the obvious thing to happen the way things were panning out, and it looked like IBM binned its consumer (PC) hardware to make the switch (tm) easily. With Apple in bed with Intel, that doesn't look so likely, and is effectively a poison pill.
On the positive side, the prospect of a 12" powerbook which can drive dual displays, which can run vmware has got my wallet out already.
If you are using electrical connection, I read somewhere that you need to use 75 ohm cable for these digital connections - at least this is what I use and it seems to be fine.
I use video leads which are 75 ohm and cheaper than the specialist 'digital ' links they sell to hi-fi suckers, and I reckon it doesn't re-arrange too many of those pesky '0's and '1's.
I think that jitter probably is crap. It is a digital signal. Having a good quality stable clock is probably important, buy if my computer can keep all its bits in order 3,000,000,000 times a second, then it can probably do so at 44,000 times a second.
Having said that, some digital outputs definitely sound better than others. It is possible to buy secondhand DACs that the sad hifi tinfoil hats have finished with, which are very cheap and very good. I got a Meridian one for a tenth of the new price, and it is very good, driven by a standard (ASUS onboard) spdif output - ultimate cheap hifi hack.
To come back to the topic, then I have heard elsewhere that either all spdif outputs resample, or that only the expensive ones do, but I am not sure of evidence to back this up.
I don't know whether that will be a whole lot of help, as service and trade marks are limited to being in respect of some specific area of trade/ practice, and I don't see a whole lot of overlap between sports teams and computer software.
If someone were looking for prior art, I think William Blake (1757-1827) got there before a Canadian football team:
The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what the shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Maybe I'm missing something, but the 'honestreporting.com' site does seem to have a single aim of increasing the amount of PR favouring Jewish interests.
If you are after balance, it strikes me as odd that you would refer/. readers to a site which explicitly unilateral.
I am not a particular fan of the BBC, and its 'youth' shows are shockingly bad, especially radio 1, which is for tards. But its news is pretty good, in an up-itself British sort of way.
Destroying their high-street shops
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think this is kind of academic as goods are allowed to be freely distributed for personal use within the EC, and anyone in Holland who wants an ipod will just buy it mail-order from the UK or somewhere without the tax.
Exactly the same thing has happened with the iTrip - it is illegal to sell or use here in the UK but so many have been imported, that they are turning a blind eye to the selling now.
It's a bit like trying to tax the super wealthy - if you try to do it too much, they just move somewhere else, and you end up with no money.
I am sure that the shop sellers of ipods will just arrange to have them delivered from another country, but will lose out big time to the intenet and mail-order sales. If they want to destroy their high-street shops, who are we to stop them?
I have a large old house with more than 5 acres and by putting the WRT54G reasonably high up with a 12dB parabolic reflector made from a dried milk carton (same foil lined cardboard as pringles cans, but bigger) I can easily get a good signal everywhere, and no dicking around with expensive baby coax cables.
The Spice Girls are a good example, as they were a manufactured band, and this chart is designed to give official validation to a 'chart' that will be even easier for the big labels to manipulate.
The BBC's independence doesn't quite extend to DJs and producers being able to resist big bribes by labels wanting to get their songs onto playlists. Ever wonder why Radio One DJs have big houses and lots of cars? Let's face it, it's not because they are talented.
The BBC has the resources to look at doing a far more interesting chart of what people are really wanting to listen to, by sampling p2p networks, but haven't got the imagination or balls to follow through, as for some reason they are beholden to the big labels.
I pay my licence fee for independence from state interference, how about freedom from big business interference?
Actually it might be a blessing if it did happen. If you want to know more about the dubious joys of living on the isle of Sheppey (on which Sheerness is located) then you can find out at the most excellent Isle of Sheppey tourists guide.
This is a good point, but I go further: I am a doctor and we say 'never write something in the notes that you would not want them to see'.
Similarly we only use our 'official' work emails for the most anodyne correspondence. Anything of interest is between our home email accounts, which are much less likely to get subpoened.
(we are not involved in widespread criminal activity, well not yet anyway - we just don't want our admins to read all our mail too easily. I suppose encryption would be good as well).
1. Please don't say 'passed away'. We're not in first grade. he has died. (cue parrot jokes)
2. If Crick et al had been made their discovery today, could they have patented it? or could you only patent the technology used to make the discovery?
Slashdot Mirror
It is difficult for us younger people/ geeks to understand why on earth you would want to drop a big one on a service which is only used by a load of incontinent coffin-dodgers who haven't got the mental energy of a goldfish.
However the grey dollar is important, and my guess is that they are doing this to buy market share. All the business books tell you that this is poor strategy, and it probably is. However most business books do not cover the situation of a desparate competitor who is cash rich, and you want to deny them the only way of building their market share.
It is not so much that they want this market, it is more that they want to deny it to MS.
All their applications phoning home of course. No spyware though, I am sure. If you can't trust Real, who can you trust?
from someone else with two of the previous generation version.
The present version has got a much better D/A converter, whereas the old one was a bit crap if you had a decent hifi. The good thing is that both versions have digital electrical (SPDIF) and toslink out, so I just run the spdif into a good quality cheap DAC.
As hifi nuts update their kit regularly, you don't have to pay much for some top notch kit which is a few years old, and there is nothing to wear out in a DAC.
You can also use the web interface to manage what is streamed to your computer, and you can co-ordinate multiple players to all play the same thing, which is handy for parties.
Good gadget, but definitely happier in wired mode than wireless, I have found.
It depends what sort of games you are writing, but if not graphics intensive, you could package the game+all essentials on a lightweight linux distro, and put the whole thing out as a virtual machine using VMWare Player.
I have a tablet that I bought when they couldn't sell them (toshiba 3500) and the price went through the floor.
It was great to use in meetings to wind other people up - the gee-wow factor, but even as a medic, I didn't find them useful in a workplace context. It's a nice idea, but there is a reason that Apple hasn't done tablets (yet). It has turned out to be an excellent general notebook though.
OneNote does sound good, but the only real solution to portable computing input is good voice recognition, and I think we are still a way off that for average use.
What I meant was, if your blood pressure is slightly elevated, and you have good genetic predictors, there might be no benefit to treating it, as any drugs have side effects. The risks might outweigh the benefits. "First do no harm" should underpin all medical treatment decisions. Direct to consumer drug advertising is a good way of undermining this principle.
What the insurance companies (both life insurance and health insurance) want to avoid providing insurance to people who are going to get chronic illnesses as these are very very very expensive. If you can exclude these people, you can make much more profit for your shareholders, and make insurance much cheaper for everyone else, and people with expensive chronic diseases can be 'looked after' by the Government.
Aside from the eugenics argument, there are potential problems in that our genetic (and creative) diversity could be harmed by this. Maybe there will be an countries or areas in which only the beautiful and genetically pure could live. The future sounds great doesn't it?
Actually we do make decisions based on that history. (IAAD).
It becomes relevant in deciding the pre-test probability of a disease existing. Most tests for disease are not black and white.
We need to work out the probability of a disease existing, to choose the right test (to minimise false positives and false negatives).
This is a practical application of Bayes Theorem.
If you have a slightly high blood pressure on testing (which is a flawed test with false positives and false negatives), do I advise treatment or not? If you have a strong family history of strokes and heart problems then I probably do, if you don't well maybe we wait and see. A genetic test would mean that I would be looking very actively for signs of disease, and might even treat before there was evidence of disease (althought there is no current evidence to support this).
The problem with genetic tests is that the R&D in developing these tests is huge, and with a limited patent time available (20 years max, usually about 10 after testing) the manufacturer has to make as much money as possible, and the cost of producing the testing kits is usually minimal, therefore every test kit sold is basically pure profit. This is how drugs companies work as well. Hence the massive push to get consumers to buy.
This is a brave stance, but they will end up having to weasel out of it, otherwise they will end up hovering up the shallow end of the gene pool
There are some interesting sides to this though, as it might be more cost-effective to hire people who tend to die early, as long as they have no sick leave before hand. It would certainly save on pensions/ superannuation.
Genetic health screening is already done to an extent when doctors ask you about illnesses in the family, what age did your relatives die, have you got any chronic health problems. Genetic screening will come in gradually as an extension to this, and I think companies will find themselves forced to use it by the market.
People with a positive genetic test for something long and expensive like MS, mental health problems, or early Alzheimers would be pretty much unemployable, even before they developed the clinical signs of the disease. As all tests are fallible, some of them would not go on to develop the disease anyway. These sort of problems will need legislation to protect people from the worst excesses of such testing, but I don't see how we are going to stop it.
As the developing world catches us up, and plenty of companies with no compunction about using such tests, I would be surprised if IBM is still saying the same thing in 20 years time.
This is cool becasue Barry Marshall was a junior doctor who saw something he couldn't explain and decided to investigate and test it, in classic geeky fashion. He even tested the theory by drinking H.Pylori and got the mother of all stomach aches afterwards.
This proves that it is still possible to do great medical research in the mould (sorry) of Fleming and Penicillin, and you don't need a $100m research budget.
He suffered a lot of problems getting the medical establishment to believe him, and it took at least 20 years, but once it did, the Nobel was bound to happen sooner or later.
Good on you Bazza
Time to bring excuses up to date as well.
Unless someone has managed to to satisfy the Turing test while I wasn't looking, this whole thing is scripted anyway - just an educational ELIZA, and about as much use.
the great thing about having an uncommon name like Ms Strzalkowski quoted in the article, is that a quick Google search for Strzalkowski and Microsoft reveals a certain Tomek Strzalkowski who appears to be friendly with the Beast. I wonder if they know each other?
I have a ericsson P900 (basically same as P910 without thumb keyboard) and putty is a pita without the flipdown keyboard that is on the 910, although the text is legible (just). The main prob is that the on screen keyboard always overlaps the display.
All the flips on these P series phones are vulnerable (although now much better than P800 ones) The nokia looks to be the better bet as it is more robust and the display would be great, and you will be less likely to leave it somewhere accidentally (no one used to lose their motorola 8500 bricks did they?)
Surely they can be nailed on the accessibility.
There is a nice helpful link on every page saying that they are committed to accessibility.
There is even a email address, to allow people who think that accessibility to this site is sub-optimal, to contact them.
If you know anyone who feels this way, maybe they should send an email to
FEMAOPA@dhs.gov
and I'm sure they will be pleased to sort it out.
I think that introducing the beginner to Brainfuck is highly likely to mutilate them (or at least induce them to self-mutilate).
On a more serious note, I think that to most (non geek) people, computer = Interweb so a programming language that has the ability to output html is preferable. This would mean that they can show off their work to friends, which has a powerful re-inforcing effect in itself.
Although I like PHP, it sounds like Python has the edge in that it is more flexible in this regard
Although it sounds like Apple was pissed off about the lack of mobile G5 action, I wonder whether part of the reason for this was to stop Apple being bought by IBM.
This was the obvious thing to happen the way things were panning out, and it looked like IBM binned its consumer (PC) hardware to make the switch (tm) easily. With Apple in bed with Intel, that doesn't look so likely, and is effectively a poison pill.
On the positive side, the prospect of a 12" powerbook which can drive dual displays, which can run vmware has got my wallet out already.
If you are using electrical connection, I read somewhere that you need to use 75 ohm cable for these digital connections - at least this is what I use and it seems to be fine.
I use video leads which are 75 ohm and cheaper than the specialist 'digital ' links they sell to hi-fi suckers, and I reckon it doesn't re-arrange too many of those pesky '0's and '1's.
I think that jitter probably is crap. It is a digital signal. Having a good quality stable clock is probably important, buy if my computer can keep all its bits in order 3,000,000,000 times a second, then it can probably do so at 44,000 times a second.
Having said that, some digital outputs definitely sound better than others. It is possible to buy secondhand DACs that the sad hifi tinfoil hats have finished with, which are very cheap and very good. I got a Meridian one for a tenth of the new price, and it is very good, driven by a standard (ASUS onboard) spdif output - ultimate cheap hifi hack.
To come back to the topic, then I have heard elsewhere that either all spdif outputs resample, or that only the expensive ones do, but I am not sure of evidence to back this up.
I don't know whether that will be a whole lot of help, as service and trade marks are limited to being in respect of some specific area of trade/ practice, and I don't see a whole lot of overlap between sports teams and computer software.
If someone were looking for prior art, I think William Blake (1757-1827) got there before a Canadian football team:
The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what the shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Ummm.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the 'honestreporting.com' site does seem to have a single aim of increasing the amount of PR favouring Jewish interests.
If you are after balance, it strikes me as odd that you would refer
I am not a particular fan of the BBC, and its 'youth' shows are shockingly bad, especially radio 1, which is for tards. But its news is pretty good, in an up-itself British sort of way.
I think this is kind of academic as goods are allowed to be freely distributed for personal use within the EC, and anyone in Holland who wants an ipod will just buy it mail-order from the UK or somewhere without the tax.
Exactly the same thing has happened with the iTrip - it is illegal to sell or use here in the UK but so many have been imported, that they are turning a blind eye to the selling now.
It's a bit like trying to tax the super wealthy - if you try to do it too much, they just move somewhere else, and you end up with no money.
I am sure that the shop sellers of ipods will just arrange to have them delivered from another country, but will lose out big time to the intenet and mail-order sales. If they want to destroy their high-street shops, who are we to stop them?
At least look at these ideas
wifi-base's cheap antennae
I have a large old house with more than 5 acres and by putting the WRT54G reasonably high up with a 12dB parabolic reflector made from a dried milk carton (same foil lined cardboard as pringles cans, but bigger) I can easily get a good signal everywhere, and no dicking around with expensive baby coax cables.
The Spice Girls are a good example, as they were a manufactured band, and this chart is designed to give official validation to a 'chart' that will be even easier for the big labels to manipulate.
The BBC's independence doesn't quite extend to DJs and producers being able to resist big bribes by labels wanting to get their songs onto playlists. Ever wonder why Radio One DJs have big houses and lots of cars? Let's face it, it's not because they are talented.
The BBC has the resources to look at doing a far more interesting chart of what people are really wanting to listen to, by sampling p2p networks, but haven't got the imagination or balls to follow through, as for some reason they are beholden to the big labels.
I pay my licence fee for independence from state interference, how about freedom from big business interference?
Actually it might be a blessing if it did happen.
If you want to know more about the dubious joys of living on the isle of Sheppey (on which Sheerness is located) then you can find out at the most excellent Isle of Sheppey tourists guide.
And his website seems to think that elevated 1,25-dihdroxycholecalciferol causes chronic fatigue. "scientific proof for chronic fatigue".
The reason CFS patients have more of the active form of Vitamin D is that they sit around on their arses doing nothing while their bones fall to bits.
This is not news. It is basic physiology. Active vitamin D promotes calcium absorption from the gut to replace that lost by inactivity.
If you want a cause, there a pretty plausable one here.
Why don't they get well? They don't get well if it is better to be ill. Simple really.
This is a good point, but I go further: I am a doctor and we say 'never write something in the notes that you would not want them to see'.
Similarly we only use our 'official' work emails for the most anodyne correspondence. Anything of interest is between our home email accounts, which are much less likely to get subpoened.
(we are not involved in widespread criminal activity, well not yet anyway - we just don't want our admins to read all our mail too easily. I suppose encryption would be good as well).
or could you only patent the technology used to make the discovery?