Whilst I think there is some truth in what you say, I also think that a certain amount of pointing and shouting - whining, even - might be necessary to get the Wiki devotees to acknowledge more publicly the undoubted problems with the Wikipaedia and start to address them.
I find myself bemused at the outraged responses. Maybe I was deluding myself but I thought that there was a marginally more insightful audience round here.
I've been told that the reflux action on coffee sitting on a hot-plate changes the coffee so that not only does it taste vile but it increases cholesterol, as the article suggests for de-caf.
I have also heard that the affect on cholesterol of de-caf depends on the particular de-cafination process used. More modern, (and expensive!) methods of de-cafination lead to a better flavour and less harmful effects. Older ones have a similar effect to stewing the brew which in part accounts for their poor flavour.
(I'm not an expert, but I used to work for a coffee company - and they're still one of my customers - so I used to pay attention to reports on the subject.)
One doesn't even need them to be that frequent. One set of monitors between - or at - each exit is perfectly sufficient for tracking movement and checking tax and insurance. You could even still do speed monitoring as an average between junctions, (not that I want that).
I'm outraged that such intrusive monitoring appears to be being slipped through without parliamentary scrutiny.
If your home is being searched (legally!), would you not be obliged to give up the combination to your safe, even though it contained incriminating evidence?
Being forced to surrender encryption keys is much the same and I don't find it to be particularly oppresive. There are plenty of other things to be upset about in RIP, though.
I suspect that Adobe are more interested in it for Flash, now that they look set to buy Macromedia. In particular, for mobile computing. There was a piece in The Register about them buying Mobile Innovation, a mobile phone design company. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/macromedia _mobile_innnovation/
Mobile Innovation seem to be a Symbian operation, primarily, but also do Linux work and there's quite a lot of opportunity for Linux in high-end mobile devices.
Could they not just TEST the deteter to show it is accurate?
I think that's the best way. Even if source code was made available, and I had an expert look it over I wouldn't be confident that he/she had found all of the bugs in the code. Better to reply on rigorous testing: it doesn't really matter how the device works, provided that it does actually work.
Manufacturers should provide detailed test reports. Tests should be repeated after any significant change to the device. If software is a componenet of the device then changes to that software should require re-certifiction of the device.
This is really more important than access to the code. There's been some interest in the UK recently in laser speed-guns. It seems that one particular model was not adequately tested on motorcycles and that it can give significantly innacurate results under fairly normal conditions. This problem is nothing to do with the code inside the gun.
If manufacturers know that they're going to have to produce test reports then they might well take more care to ensure that their products are tested properly. Otherwise they run the risk that police forces (in this case) won't buy their equipment.
Does anyone actually have a use for all these Windows "Tablet PCs"?
I bought a Sony Vaio U71 earlier this year. Previously, I was using an old Psion Series 3. That did good service for many years, but I was finding it was no longer good enough for what I wanted.
I could have bought a new PDA of some sort but they don't seem to do what I want, either. My cell 'phone can handle my contacts and schedule, so if I'm going to carry around another device it needs to be able to do significantly more than that, which IMO PDAs just don't.
The biggest thing for me is that I can read documents and manuals on the Vaio: a full page of A4 text is quite legible. I've also got everything a PC has to offer, but in a package more portable than a laptop. (And it's actually more powerful than my personal laptop!)
I've found the WiFi to be handy: there are plenty of fairly cheap WiFi access points around. (Lausanne, one of the places I visit most often on business is particularly good as they have several free public access points provided by the city.)
Its handwriting recognition works well enough for taking notes - in theory that could be used for business meetings, but mostly I use it for gaming. It's also a decent music repository and player.
Like most portable devices it's a compromise between function and portability but for me, it's a better compromise than a PDA or a regular laptop.
I haven't been to Bend, but in a recent touring holiday in the USA I visited Crater Lake and I'd have to say it was the highlight of my holiday. It's one of the most amazing and beautiful sights I've ever seen.
The other National Parks I visited were also pretty impressive: you're lucky to have such wonderful places and should be congratulated on doing a splendid job of preserving them whilst also making them accessible for people to enjoy.
We seem to have a real problem building infrastructure in this country when it's not needed on an everyday basis.
I don't think it's just your country: it's people in general. For these rare events it's very difficult for people to accept that it might happen to them and that it really is necessary to inconvenience themselves by spending vast sums of money and possibly changing the way they live. People still build on the slopes of active volcanoes, after all: what's a bit of water to worry about?
If you're lucky, you get a small disaster to drive the point home. If you're unlucky you get something rather more cataclysmic, as in this case.
All of my bosses have been ex-technical people, but not always in the same field. They need enough technical knowledge to understand the issues but the detail stuff is up to us. And that's how it should be.
(My previous boss was an ex IBM mainframe sys-prog, managing a UNIX and Windows support team. She didn't know a great deal about either operating system but she did have a fine understanding of computing in general and the issues which are relevant to any platform.)
There are a few intermediate people where I work, managing a small team whilst still being involved in the day-to-day work. Whilst it's true that much of their time will be taken up with meetings and admin stuff, which might tend to make their skills a bit stale, they have the advantage that they can cherry-pick the most interesting work.
Whilst I agree in principal about not needing to reboot, sometimes it's just simpler.
(N.B. I'm talking here about a change to the timezone definition, not simply the move from normal to DST.)
Stopping and re-starting cron will take care of scheduling done by cron, but what about all of the other processes that are running? Like cron, they picked up the appropriate timezone environment when they first started and will continue to use it, even if you've since changed that environment. ($TZ in my case.) Some of these may be doing their own scheduling - e.g. a specialist scheduling package, or a major application such as SAP - for others it may be a matter of log messages being produced with the "wrong" time. (That's quite a pain if you're trying to tie up events on different servers.)
Re-starting the affected process will take care of it but there could be loads - not to mention any system processes which are logging with the wrong time.
Having gone to the trouble of arranging an outage to, say, an SAP system you might just as well take the extra 15 minutes and reboot.
Not so. If the set is capable of receiving BBC broadcasts - which are of course available via satellite - you have to pay, even if you don't watch them.
If, however, you are not able to view them, you don't have to pay. I'll admit that doesn't leave you much to watch. However, you could still watch pre-recorded material.
I've not done this myself - I'm happy to pay the licence fee - but a close friend of mine did, fairly recently. His set even still had a tuner but no aerial and the signal was weak enough that it was not possible to tune into any broadcast stations without one.
He had a few problems initially, being pestered to buy a licence but he did eventually get that sorted out.
I have heard that in Germany the widespread insurance led to problems at one time with neighbour suing neighbour over trivial matters, rather than seeking a negotiated solution. Don't know if that's still the case.
In England, for some things it can be quite easy to sue. We have a thing called the "Small Claims Court", for which lawyers are not necessary. It's ideally suited for things like faulty goods where the retailer tries to ignore you. The fees are very small but there's an upper limit on the amount you can claim of a few thousand pounds, (I can't remember what it is exactly). I think there's a seperate limit on the expenses you can claim.
Cases are usually tried by a Magistrate and generally they don't react well to companies turning up in court with a horde of lawyers.
First off, I'm not an American I'm English, so that's the legal system I'm (not especially) familiar with.
Insurance is available for businesses I guess but not many private individuals would have that sort of cover here, I wouldn't have thought. I understand it's commonplace in Germany and some other countries in Europe, and is starting to appear in the UK. Some specific types of case may be covered by normal English household insurance. e.g. Injuries caused by falling roof tiles.
Changes in the last few years have allowed (English) lawyers to take on cases as no win/no fee, and again there are insurance policies available to cover this. For something which is obviously ridiculous, that's OK. However, some cases may not be quite as clear cut and going to court is always going to be a bit of a gamble which could be quite worrying for someone with little experience of the legal system - which applies to most people.
I must disagree. When buying classical music I most certainly do care about who plays it! Given the relatively small market I suspect that most people buying it do. Not, perhaps, by knowing that such-and-such a conductor or performer(s) are particularly good, but by being guided by reviews and ratings.
The shop in which I buy most of my classical CDs ("Sounds Good", in Cheltenham: highly recommended) includes ratings on a lot of their price lables. The casual purchaser can go for a five-star CD, or may choose a three-star CD because it's half the price. The serious afficionado can make up their own mind.
There may be some people treating it as a commodity, but they'll be buying right at the bottom end of the market: the complete works of Ravel for a tenner.
That's not always true. It may cost a substantial amount to actually defend the case. If a defendant can't find the funds for that - or a sympathetic solicitor - they may have no option but to cave.
Just to add a voice for poor old Neville, Britain at that time was in no shape to fight a war. The agreement may not have stopped Nazi Germany but it did buy some time for Britain to start tooling up. It may also have contributed to Hitler's reluctance to attack us: he would have preferred us as allies, or at least neutral. Chamberlain's actions may have contributed to Hitler's view that we had no stomach for a fight.
Not all that clever. The tube network is so complex that there are loads of places which will affect multiple lines. If they'd planned it on that basis they'd have gone for Waterloo or maybe Embankment, and Earl's Court. Paddington, too, as that's where the express line to Heathrow runs from, plus being a major railway station serving the whole of the Thames valley and points West.
But really, any incident is going to impact the whole Tube network.
From the first reports I saw it looks like all of the bombs were on the Hammersmith and City line, which would suggest a team moving through from one end to the other.
If they'd been really smart they'd have done it a few days ago, before the IOC met.
Internet advertising is a relatively immature industry. There has been a tendancy to use various Web features - pop-ups etc - simply because they're there. This is obviously counter-productive.
The comparison with a newspaper is absurd, and probably disingenuous. Adverts in my newspaper don't interfere with my reading of the paper so I'm quite happy to put up with them and may even read them.
Pissing off potential customers is simply not a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Give them lots of unpleasant tasks to do, and see which one's the first to try to walk out in disgust.
Whilst I think there is some truth in what you say, I also think that a certain amount of pointing and shouting - whining, even - might be necessary to get the Wiki devotees to acknowledge more publicly the undoubted problems with the Wikipaedia and start to address them.
I find myself bemused at the outraged responses. Maybe I was deluding myself but I thought that there was a marginally more insightful audience round here.
Oh well; another Merkin stereotype confirmed.
An exception is an exception. It only proves the rule when you discover that it wasn't an exception after all.
I've been told that the reflux action on coffee sitting on a hot-plate changes the coffee so that not only does it taste vile but it increases cholesterol, as the article suggests for de-caf.
I have also heard that the affect on cholesterol of de-caf depends on the particular de-cafination process used. More modern, (and expensive!) methods of de-cafination lead to a better flavour and less harmful effects. Older ones have a similar effect to stewing the brew which in part accounts for their poor flavour.
(I'm not an expert, but I used to work for a coffee company - and they're still one of my customers - so I used to pay attention to reports on the subject.)
One doesn't even need them to be that frequent. One set of monitors between - or at - each exit is perfectly sufficient for tracking movement and checking tax and insurance. You could even still do speed monitoring as an average between junctions, (not that I want that).
I'm outraged that such intrusive monitoring appears to be being slipped through without parliamentary scrutiny.
If your home is being searched (legally!), would you not be obliged to give up the combination to your safe, even though it contained incriminating evidence?
Being forced to surrender encryption keys is much the same and I don't find it to be particularly oppresive. There are plenty of other things to be upset about in RIP, though.
I suspect that Adobe are more interested in it for Flash, now that they look set to buy Macromedia. In particular, for mobile computing. There was a piece in The Register about them buying Mobile Innovation, a mobile phone design company.a _mobile_innnovation/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/macromedi
Mobile Innovation seem to be a Symbian operation, primarily, but also do Linux work and there's quite a lot of opportunity for Linux in high-end mobile devices.
Could they not just TEST the deteter to show it is accurate?
I think that's the best way. Even if source code was made available, and I had an expert look it over I wouldn't be confident that he/she had found all of the bugs in the code. Better to reply on rigorous testing: it doesn't really matter how the device works, provided that it does actually work.
Manufacturers should provide detailed test reports. Tests should be repeated after any significant change to the device. If software is a componenet of the device then changes to that software should require re-certifiction of the device.
This is really more important than access to the code. There's been some interest in the UK recently in laser speed-guns. It seems that one particular model was not adequately tested on motorcycles and that it can give significantly innacurate results under fairly normal conditions. This problem is nothing to do with the code inside the gun.
If manufacturers know that they're going to have to produce test reports then they might well take more care to ensure that their products are tested properly. Otherwise they run the risk that police forces (in this case) won't buy their equipment.
Does anyone actually have a use for all these Windows "Tablet PCs"?
I bought a Sony Vaio U71 earlier this year. Previously, I was using an old Psion Series 3. That did good service for many years, but I was finding it was no longer good enough for what I wanted.
I could have bought a new PDA of some sort but they don't seem to do what I want, either. My cell 'phone can handle my contacts and schedule, so if I'm going to carry around another device it needs to be able to do significantly more than that, which IMO PDAs just don't.
The biggest thing for me is that I can read documents and manuals on the Vaio: a full page of A4 text is quite legible. I've also got everything a PC has to offer, but in a package more portable than a laptop. (And it's actually more powerful than my personal laptop!)
I've found the WiFi to be handy: there are plenty of fairly cheap WiFi access points around. (Lausanne, one of the places I visit most often on business is particularly good as they have several free public access points provided by the city.)
Its handwriting recognition works well enough for taking notes - in theory that could be used for business meetings, but mostly I use it for gaming. It's also a decent music repository and player.
Like most portable devices it's a compromise between function and portability but for me, it's a better compromise than a PDA or a regular laptop.
I haven't been to Bend, but in a recent touring holiday in the USA I visited Crater Lake and I'd have to say it was the highlight of my holiday. It's one of the most amazing and beautiful sights I've ever seen.
The other National Parks I visited were also pretty impressive: you're lucky to have such wonderful places and should be congratulated on doing a splendid job of preserving them whilst also making them accessible for people to enjoy.
We seem to have a real problem building infrastructure in this country when it's not needed on an everyday basis.
I don't think it's just your country: it's people in general. For these rare events it's very difficult for people to accept that it might happen to them and that it really is necessary to inconvenience themselves by spending vast sums of money and possibly changing the way they live. People still build on the slopes of active volcanoes, after all: what's a bit of water to worry about?
If you're lucky, you get a small disaster to drive the point home. If you're unlucky you get something rather more cataclysmic, as in this case.
I think I prefer the corrolary: Sufficiently retarded reality is indistinguishable from satire.
That seems to apply to a lot of stuff these days.
All of my bosses have been ex-technical people, but not always in the same field. They need enough technical knowledge to understand the issues but the detail stuff is up to us. And that's how it should be.
(My previous boss was an ex IBM mainframe sys-prog, managing a UNIX and Windows support team. She didn't know a great deal about either operating system but she did have a fine understanding of computing in general and the issues which are relevant to any platform.)
There are a few intermediate people where I work, managing a small team whilst still being involved in the day-to-day work. Whilst it's true that much of their time will be taken up with meetings and admin stuff, which might tend to make their skills a bit stale, they have the advantage that they can cherry-pick the most interesting work.
Whilst I agree in principal about not needing to reboot, sometimes it's just simpler.
(N.B. I'm talking here about a change to the timezone definition, not simply the move from normal to DST.)
Stopping and re-starting cron will take care of scheduling done by cron, but what about all of the other processes that are running? Like cron, they picked up the appropriate timezone environment when they first started and will continue to use it, even if you've since changed that environment. ($TZ in my case.) Some of these may be doing their own scheduling - e.g. a specialist scheduling package, or a major application such as SAP - for others it may be a matter of log messages being produced with the "wrong" time. (That's quite a pain if you're trying to tie up events on different servers.)
Re-starting the affected process will take care of it but there could be loads - not to mention any system processes which are logging with the wrong time.
Having gone to the trouble of arranging an outage to, say, an SAP system you might just as well take the extra 15 minutes and reboot.
Not so. If the set is capable of receiving BBC broadcasts - which are of course available via satellite - you have to pay, even if you don't watch them.
If, however, you are not able to view them, you don't have to pay. I'll admit that doesn't leave you much to watch. However, you could still watch pre-recorded material.
I've not done this myself - I'm happy to pay the licence fee - but a close friend of mine did, fairly recently. His set even still had a tuner but no aerial and the signal was weak enough that it was not possible to tune into any broadcast stations without one.
He had a few problems initially, being pestered to buy a licence but he did eventually get that sorted out.
I have heard that in Germany the widespread insurance led to problems at one time with neighbour suing neighbour over trivial matters, rather than seeking a negotiated solution. Don't know if that's still the case.
In England, for some things it can be quite easy to sue. We have a thing called the "Small Claims Court", for which lawyers are not necessary. It's ideally suited for things like faulty goods where the retailer tries to ignore you. The fees are very small but there's an upper limit on the amount you can claim of a few thousand pounds, (I can't remember what it is exactly). I think there's a seperate limit on the expenses you can claim.
Cases are usually tried by a Magistrate and generally they don't react well to companies turning up in court with a horde of lawyers.
First off, I'm not an American I'm English, so that's the legal system I'm (not especially) familiar with.
Insurance is available for businesses I guess but not many private individuals would have that sort of cover here, I wouldn't have thought. I understand it's commonplace in Germany and some other countries in Europe, and is starting to appear in the UK. Some specific types of case may be covered by normal English household insurance. e.g. Injuries caused by falling roof tiles.
Changes in the last few years have allowed (English) lawyers to take on cases as no win/no fee, and again there are insurance policies available to cover this. For something which is obviously ridiculous, that's OK. However, some cases may not be quite as clear cut and going to court is always going to be a bit of a gamble which could be quite worrying for someone with little experience of the legal system - which applies to most people.
The Licence Fee is optional. Nobody is compelled to pay it. You can even own a TV and not pay it, provided you can't receive the broadcasts it funds.
I must disagree. When buying classical music I most certainly do care about who plays it! Given the relatively small market I suspect that most people buying it do. Not, perhaps, by knowing that such-and-such a conductor or performer(s) are particularly good, but by being guided by reviews and ratings.
The shop in which I buy most of my classical CDs ("Sounds Good", in Cheltenham: highly recommended) includes ratings on a lot of their price lables. The casual purchaser can go for a five-star CD, or may choose a three-star CD because it's half the price. The serious afficionado can make up their own mind.
There may be some people treating it as a commodity, but they'll be buying right at the bottom end of the market: the complete works of Ravel for a tenner.
That's not always true. It may cost a substantial amount to actually defend the case. If a defendant can't find the funds for that - or a sympathetic solicitor - they may have no option but to cave.
Just to add a voice for poor old Neville, Britain at that time was in no shape to fight a war. The agreement may not have stopped Nazi Germany but it did buy some time for Britain to start tooling up. It may also have contributed to Hitler's reluctance to attack us: he would have preferred us as allies, or at least neutral. Chamberlain's actions may have contributed to Hitler's view that we had no stomach for a fight.
Not all that clever. The tube network is so complex that there are loads of places which will affect multiple lines. If they'd planned it on that basis they'd have gone for Waterloo or maybe Embankment, and Earl's Court. Paddington, too, as that's where the express line to Heathrow runs from, plus being a major railway station serving the whole of the Thames valley and points West.
But really, any incident is going to impact the whole Tube network.
From the first reports I saw it looks like all of the bombs were on the Hammersmith and City line, which would suggest a team moving through from one end to the other.
If they'd been really smart they'd have done it a few days ago, before the IOC met.
Internet advertising is a relatively immature industry. There has been a tendancy to use various Web features - pop-ups etc - simply because they're there. This is obviously counter-productive.
The comparison with a newspaper is absurd, and probably disingenuous. Adverts in my newspaper don't interfere with my reading of the paper so I'm quite happy to put up with them and may even read them.
Pissing off potential customers is simply not a good idea.
Oh, it's no particular insight of mine; just what I was told by a friend who's a serious Dr Who fan. (I'm just an amateur.)