Possibly the wost thought out comment I've read today...
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...
Oh but of course, those of us that go out and work hard at making ourselves more employable, get the high value jobs and become successful should pay for those lazy good-for-nothing layabouts that sit on the dole.
I hope you get a horrible illness and have to live on £60 incapacity benefit for the rest of your life.
Perhaps there is a cultural misunderstanding here, or you just didn't read what I wrote.
The dole is slang for unemployment benefit, not incapacity benefit you offensive moron. Both my late father and step mother had to live on incapacity benefit when they got cancer, and I have nothing against paying for those that cannot support themselves. It's people who are perfectly capable but can't be bothered that I have a problem with.
So shove your misplaced moral indignation up your arse.
Since when did frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum become property?
Since the time that the Government though people would pay for it. BTW, feel free to use as much red as you want.
That doesn't make it property. The government licences the use of it. As for using red, that wasn't my point. "I want to own red and no-one else is allowed to use it but me." Get it?
I'm with jw on this one... there are no "natural" rights.
You talk about morals, but that's a personal code of ethics. Any "rights" we have I see as simply a shared moral perspective. I believe very strongly in human rights, at least the western idea of them, as they match my moral beliefs. There are still plenty of countries around the world that don't though. Are these places unnatural? Certain governments formed by people with a common moral code decided that those common morals would be "rights" and put it in the consitution. One country in particular even decided that it was a "right" to own a gun.
"rights" are just higher laws that trump other laws based on what people/governments have decided is a good idea. Slavery wasn't "wrong" in colonial times because people saw the world in a different way.
What about homosexuality? There are plenty of people around that would say it's not natural; but I think a person's sexuality is their own business, and it appears most people agree with me as it's not illegal any more. People now have rights to be gay and not be sacked for it, but it's only because persistant campaigning changed peoples' views.
What about paedophilia? Paedophilies think their sexual preference is something natural, the rest of society strongly disagrees. Who's "rights" are violated when a paedophilie is locked up for creating cartoon kiddie porn? In my country age of consent is 16 years old. Who decided that? Most 14 yearolds are perfectly capable and physically ready to have sex, as demonstrated by the high rate of teen pregnancy in most western countries. People with a shared moral perspective have deicded in this country, it's 16, elsewhere it may be 14-18. So which one is natural?
It angers me when people go on about copyrights as though they are something natural and unimpeachable, just like everything else, we made the laws, we can also unmake the laws. Just because you and alot of others believe something to be natural doesn't make it so. Alot of people think elvis is alive on an alien spaceship, but I really rather doubt it.
Your morals are not everyone's morals; your world is not everyone else's.
The government has the RIP Act (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) which allows them to detain you, with a press gagging order if you refuse to hand over the encryption key they need to decrypt your data. If you refuse or claim you have forgotton and they don't believe you, then it's two years in gaol for you sonny jim.
They only really got this into law because most people don't understand it. Oh and don't forget that since this government came to power the amount of time they can hold you, uncharged, under the terrorism act has gone from 7 to 28 days... and the police want 90! Yes ninety days, 3 months, 2160 hours!
This issue has been covered repeatedly in the UK media over the years. Yes there are detector vans, they can tell when the TV is on, even which channel is being watched. However there are a very small number of vans, they mostly play on the fear of the van, it's much cheaper.
Because the detector vans can't actually 'catch' people watching such broadcasts on their computers
I'd like to see where they got this idea from... if they're using a TV card then the van will be able to detect it just like any other TV. If it's being streamed over the Internet, well it must be coming from a BBC server. If they get it any other way, it's not a live broadcast.
Well because historically not everyone had a TV, it wasn't seen as an "essential" as most people do these days. Okay, so 99% of people have one these days, but the idea isn't that it's state funded, it's supposed to be sort of independant of the state. No political meddling etc. It also gives people a choice. The BBC gets money based on the popularity of using a TV, it's not just a dinosaur that will get money come what may. People can always vote with their feet and stop using TV and the money the BBC gets goes away.
I think this is great as it's forcing the BBC to look to the future and embrace new technologies and deliver their service however they can. The can see the TV is going to bite the dust at some point and they don't want to go down with it.
1)The license is there as a "tax of choice". So, if you don't have a TV, then you don't pay (not even if you do listen to the radio). This made sense in 1960 - but not so much now, when virtually everyone has a television.
Yeah well I don't use a TV at the moment and I'm quite happy not having to pay the BBC for a service I don't use. I think we should all get petrol for free from the government and they can recoup the cost through general taxation, because lets face it, 75% of it is tax and virtually everyone has a car, right?
2)The license collection is extremely inefficient. It involves hassle for the licensor, a draconian TV licensing authority (who make an enormous nuisance of themselves if you don't actually own a TV), and you cannot legally purchase any TV-capable equipment without giving a name and address to the retailer. [Yes, this is outrageous.] Enforcement and collection must cost a significant proportion of the total fee!
You are right there, they do send out loads of stupid letters. I doubt the overall cost is very high though compared to other forms of taxation; there are, for example, a very small number of detector vans.
3)With the exception of pensioners, the TV license is the same for everyone. Yet, some can afford to pay more than others.
Oh but of course, those of us that go out and work hard at making ourselves more employable, get the high value jobs and become successful should pay for those lazy good-for-nothing layabouts that sit on the dole. Pensioners have reached the end of their working lives, the rest of the lazy rabble should stump up or shut up. I'm all for working together to create a better society, I'm not for me working while the rest sit on their collective arses.
4)On principle: As a citizen, I have a natural right to my share of the RF spectrum - and to operate a Radio receiver!
"my share"??! Since when did frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum become property? I DEMAND my share in the ownership of the colour RED! I have a natural right to apply a blunt force instrument to your skull until you die; however most governments have decided to regulate both the RF spectrum and murder as it is a generally held belief it is beneficial to the majority.
Well because historically not everyone had a TV, it wasn't seen as an "essential" as most people do these days. Okay, so 99% of people have one these days, but the idea isn't that it's state funded, it's supposed to be sort of independant of the state. No political meddling etc. It also gives people a choice. The BBC gets money based on the popularity of using a TV, it's not just a dinosaur that will get money come what may. People can always vote with their feet and stop using TV and the money the BBC gets goes away.
I think this is great as it's forcing the BBC to look to the future and embrace new technologies and deliver their service however they can. The can see the TV is going to bite the dust at some point and they don't want to go down with it.
I'm no fan of MS, but the one place I've worked where it was used, it was invaluable.
Put the machine GUID into Active Directory, PXE boot the machine, select the OS image, it formats the drive and puts the image on. You can add whatever updates/drives you want to the image. The rest can be delivered by SMS (Systems Management Service), it can be very slow though.
The other excellent option I've seen is a custom linux partition on each drive that has a modified version of init, boots and checks the windows partition with an image on a remote network drive using rsync. Once done it reboots with the windows partition selected for default boot.
All the admin need do is update the image and reboot the terminals.
Yeah, and it makes people who are gay really uncomfortable to have those words thrown around as insults. It's hard enough to come out in the first place; I can't imagine what it would be like to come out if everyone I knew was clearly hostile to my sexuality because they used those words as insults all the time.
For a few years I ran game servers on a university campus network. As an extention of the SU we had to uphold their anti-homophobia policy and in-game chat was treated like any other SU venue; if we didn't we'd be shut down. This ment logging it all and punishing the offenders. It seemed totally OTT to me, while I didn't use homophobic language myself as it seemed childish, it was just the parlance for insulting people in Internet gaming culture and it never really struck me as wrong.
It made many of the users very angry, and when I started banning persistant offenders they tried to appeal to the SU, to whom I sent the logs and they just threatened the student with a university disciplinary hearing for their conduct; promptly silencing them.
It took about six months for people to really understand and change the way they talked. Initially I wanted to fight it myself as I'm very anti-censorship & pro free speach. However the SU isn't about that, it's a socialist construct and as such one of its roles is to provide a slightly nicer version of the world where young adults can find themselves.
I think everyone benefited. I realised that as harmless as it may seem, using "gay" as a pejorative hurts people. Having to explain to people why they couldn't use it really made me think about it. The offender would always try and explain it away, "it wasn't homophobic", and I knew it wasn't, but it implys being gay is bad and whatever your personal beliefs policy says you can't do that. The gamers hopfully thought about how they used homophobic language and at the very least learned how not to use it if they had to. Plus I'm sure the couple of gamers we had that I knew were gay felt less insulted.
It reminded me that governments often want to restrict freedom of speach for the same reason its freedom needs to be protected. It can be very powerful; which is also the reason we ought to be careful how we use it.
It's all very well saying "they should use debian" or "OMG LFS!!!"
As an IT contractor I've worked inside government, and the culture is very different compared to the commercial world. Government jobs are jobs for life. There is nothing that encourages the learning of new skills, and the only real way to lose your job is through misconduct or negligence. Thus the over-riding concern is about not taking responsibility for anything, and the path known is always better than the unknown. There is no grass-roots techs to push change from the bottom-up, that's risky. Change only comes from the top down, and we all know the top tends to listen to M$.
The only thing that pushes governments towards open source is cost, big IT budgets make bad headlines: "that money could have paid for X number of teachers/doctors/etc"
Due to being public bodies most governments have strict rules on who they buy services from (and usually for good reason) have to be ISO9000 approved, and all that jazz. This usually precludes using anyone but the really big suppilers who can afford such things. This also covers the government, as if it all goes www.titsup.com then they can blame the supplier, and have some tangible "proof" that it was a reasonable choice. Plus there is someone to sue if something really nasty happens.
The fact that it's being chosen at all is a miricle, so be happy, rejoice! These customised Linux provider/support companies are the only way the penguin is going to see high level public service.
I can't recall who offhand, but I remember being told there was a 1 to 5 classification for code quality given out by an internation body, and nasa is the only one in cat 5.
I believe this is mainly due to repetative code reading by hand with paper and pencil.
When I post something relevant it gets rejected, but when someone posts an admittedly funny, but million year old flash animation, it gets front paged?
So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.
What a load of hogwash. In the UK at the start of the 90's the government, at the recommendation of the EU, started the petrol tax escalator. By the end of the 90's the tax rate on fuel is now 320%. 70% of the cost of fuel is tax. There is even VAT (sales tax) of 17.5% on the fuel tax! (tax on tax!) Has this changed anything? Nope, there are still several million more cars on the roads. None of the money has gone into public transport, the cost of which has gone up by 60%. The government tried putting it up further in 2000, causing the nationwide petrol riots.
So called "pricing people out of their cars and onto public transport" doesn't work. We live in a world of out of town shopping centres and long distance commuting (due to the very high price of housing near any major conurbation), and the public transport system is slow and expensive.
The rich/well off still drive their monstrous BMX X5's and perfectly clean 4x4s. All it has achieved is to marginalise the poorer part of society, reducing their denying them full participation in our mobile culture.
That's all very nice, but you don't really understand how the average cinema projection system works...
You keep blathering on about the frame rate of standard projectors being 24fps, and *you're wrong*. Even the old Westar projectors I use that were made in the 1960's are 48fps. Yes the film is 24fps, and that's why they are called "the flicks" because 24fps is noticibly flickery; this problem was solved by the neat trick of showing each frame twice, giving an effective framerate of 48fps.
Modern projectors use all sorts of tricks to help keep the picture flicker free.
As for MaxiVision48, well that failed to get anywhere because as it states in the glossy brousure it gains the better picture "by recapturing the picture space used for the vestigial analog sound stripe". Well calling the analogue sound strip vestigial is getting rather ahead of themselves... There are tones of independant cinemas out there that still use analogue sound and the studios aren't going to cut out part of their market by issuing films in MaxiVision48.
I ran a cinema for 4 years... you wouldn't believe the things people *don't* notice.
Yeah this is going to be lower quality, but the general public won't notice.
Cinema geeks will notice. Projectionists will notice. The public won't.
The cinema geeks will still go, 'cus they've gotta see that movie, the projectionists will still go to work, and the public as ever will put up with being shafted. The studios know this. It's big and it's loud, that's what the public notices.
I never noticed the queue dots, the joined sections the dirt on the film until I became a projectionist.
The only thing that will hold this back is the cinemas themselves. They have a huge capital investment in their current equipment and not much money to invest with (unless it's a studio owned cinema). Technology for _the majority_ of cinemas moves very very very slowly, and the studios for all their power need the cinemas to show their films.
The underlying rendering code might be the same, but the interface (and the features) are completely different.
Firefox is lightweight and quick and I use it on slow/low memory machines, but I prefer mozilla simply because it still looks and behaves like netscape. Firefox is for those people that use IE and switch over.
It might sound silly but there are subtle interface differences and keyboard controls, etc that are missing in Firefox. I went from using netscape to mozilla (when it was stable enough) and I've always disliked IE.
I'm sure Firefox will gain netscape behaviour features at some point, but I guess at that point certain users will start complaining about bloat.
Until there is a compelling feature to move I'm not going to, and I wish people wouldn't make it into some open source guilt trip not to use Firefox! Damnit! I only recently started using mozilla mail over PINE! (and that was for the junk filtering).
Paul Graham's Great Hackers essay has really touched a lot of people's nerves. The wires are choked with people giving their point of view.
Yet again, though, I have had to stop and think - what is it about Java that makes people brand it as the most un-cool language on earth? I have had friends look at me like I was a poor sod for "having to" develop in Java. So, let me list all the reasons I can think why people consider Java un-cool.
Java has considerably fewer surprises and prefers not to add complexity to the language for rarely used features thereby resulting in a language where you cannot really make your friends go ga-ga at amazingly brief programming constructs. You need to write something substantial [like Gosling's Huckster] for them be to impressed with your programming abilities and not your language knowledge. This is probably the biggest reason Java is un-cool. It's too easy (although programming or software development remains as tough as ever). Java was always touted as the language that the "average" IT programmer can use. It's such a language-for-the-masses that yet again, it fails the "geek" test. And if you use Java, so do you.
Java has been considered slow for ages. The earlier allegations (1995) were true. However, with the recent advancements in the JVMs from Sun and IBM, Java runs pretty close to C/C++. Check this benchmark. Contrary to this, there are other benchmarks that prove that Java is slower. All considered, it would be fair to say that Java cannot be considered "slow" anymore, yet its stuck with the label. How cool is to be the jock with the second fastest race-car in the block?
Swing disasters continue to give Java a bad name. Swing is a brilliant, although hard to learn, API. But the vast majority of Swing applications are so bad that they give Swing and therefore Java a bad name.
Java is a strongly typed language therefore you have to tell the compiler exactly what you intend to use. And if you make a mistake in the way you use it, the compiler has the guts to tell you that you were wrong. Too much chaperoning?
Java has a vast library that is available to all Java developers without any ambiguity. Thus, if you wrote yet another Map you would not be considered a data structures guru by Java programmers but a guy who hasn't heard of java.util.*.
Java did not have a good IDE that compared with MS Visual Studio. I think this one was true. I am not so sure it is any more with IntelliJ. The absence of good tools probably pushed away a lot of good programmers.
Java is popular. Anything that is popular has lost its elite status and therefore is not cool.
Java is an application programming platform. You cannot do cool things like device drivers and games, etc (until recently - but Java gaming is coming in a big way).
The tarif I have will my cell phone provider gives me unlimited free SMS messaging, and I've been wondering for a while if there was a way to exploit this as a free transport protocol.
The last time someone asked me to do this for them I got the old drive with the Window2000 system on and the new clean drive and dumped them both in a exisiting window2000 system.
I formatted the new drive and copied the contents of the old drive to the new one, just a select all and a drag and drop.
I then put the new drive in the new machine, booted the windows CD and ran the repair util, rebooted and the system had a fit about the new hardware, updated the drivers and all was happy.
Wow, the USA really is in the dark ages with mobile phones...
No-one pays to recieve calls or text messages in the UK (unless they're internationaly roaming). I've been on tarif (calling plan) with unlimited free text messaging for over 2 years. I got my first mobile over 5 years ago (just after we switched from analogue to digital cell networks) just as I started university. and no.. "daddy" wasn't paying, I was... and I'm a poor student.
You guys in the USA really need to demand a better service.
Txt mania is so bad here 13yearold kids keep making the press for submitting english essays at school in txt spk. I can't find the original article but it is quoted here.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly the wost thought out comment I've read today...
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...
Oh but of course, those of us that go out and work hard at making ourselves more employable, get the high value jobs and become successful should pay for those lazy good-for-nothing layabouts that sit on the dole.
I hope you get a horrible illness and have to live on £60 incapacity benefit for the rest of your life.
Perhaps there is a cultural misunderstanding here, or you just didn't read what I wrote.
The dole is slang for unemployment benefit, not incapacity benefit you offensive moron. Both my late father and step mother had to live on incapacity benefit when they got cancer, and I have nothing against paying for those that cannot support themselves. It's people who are perfectly capable but can't be bothered that I have a problem with. So shove your misplaced moral indignation up your arse.
Since when did frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum become property?
Since the time that the Government though people would pay for it. BTW, feel free to use as much red as you want.
That doesn't make it property. The government licences the use of it. As for using red, that wasn't my point. "I want to own red and no-one else is allowed to use it but me." Get it?
I'm with jw on this one... there are no "natural" rights.
You talk about morals, but that's a personal code of ethics. Any "rights" we have I see as simply a shared moral perspective. I believe very strongly in human rights, at least the western idea of them, as they match my moral beliefs. There are still plenty of countries around the world that don't though. Are these places unnatural? Certain governments formed by people with a common moral code decided that those common morals would be "rights" and put it in the consitution. One country in particular even decided that it was a "right" to own a gun.
"rights" are just higher laws that trump other laws based on what people/governments have decided is a good idea. Slavery wasn't "wrong" in colonial times because people saw the world in a different way.
What about homosexuality? There are plenty of people around that would say it's not natural; but I think a person's sexuality is their own business, and it appears most people agree with me as it's not illegal any more. People now have rights to be gay and not be sacked for it, but it's only because persistant campaigning changed peoples' views.
What about paedophilia? Paedophilies think their sexual preference is something natural, the rest of society strongly disagrees. Who's "rights" are violated when a paedophilie is locked up for creating cartoon kiddie porn? In my country age of consent is 16 years old. Who decided that? Most 14 yearolds are perfectly capable and physically ready to have sex, as demonstrated by the high rate of teen pregnancy in most western countries. People with a shared moral perspective have deicded in this country, it's 16, elsewhere it may be 14-18. So which one is natural?
It angers me when people go on about copyrights as though they are something natural and unimpeachable, just like everything else, we made the laws, we can also unmake the laws. Just because you and alot of others believe something to be natural doesn't make it so. Alot of people think elvis is alive on an alien spaceship, but I really rather doubt it.
Your morals are not everyone's morals; your world is not everyone else's.
I don't really see why the need this anyway.
The government has the RIP Act (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) which allows them to detain you, with a press gagging order if you refuse to hand over the encryption key they need to decrypt your data. If you refuse or claim you have forgotton and they don't believe you, then it's two years in gaol for you sonny jim.
They only really got this into law because most people don't understand it. Oh and don't forget that since this government came to power the amount of time they can hold you, uncharged, under the terrorism act has gone from 7 to 28 days... and the police want 90! Yes ninety days, 3 months, 2160 hours!
I so totally agree, I don't get the point of tabbed browsing. Whatever happened to multiple windows and ALT-TAB?!
This issue has been covered repeatedly in the UK media over the years. Yes there are detector vans, they can tell when the TV is on, even which channel is being watched. However there are a very small number of vans, they mostly play on the fear of the van, it's much cheaper.
Because the detector vans can't actually 'catch' people watching such broadcasts on their computers
I'd like to see where they got this idea from... if they're using a TV card then the van will be able to detect it just like any other TV. If it's being streamed over the Internet, well it must be coming from a BBC server. If they get it any other way, it's not a live broadcast.
Well because historically not everyone had a TV, it wasn't seen as an "essential" as most people do these days. Okay, so 99% of people have one these days, but the idea isn't that it's state funded, it's supposed to be sort of independant of the state. No political meddling etc. It also gives people a choice. The BBC gets money based on the popularity of using a TV, it's not just a dinosaur that will get money come what may. People can always vote with their feet and stop using TV and the money the BBC gets goes away.
I think this is great as it's forcing the BBC to look to the future and embrace new technologies and deliver their service however they can. The can see the TV is going to bite the dust at some point and they don't want to go down with it.
1)The license is there as a "tax of choice". So, if you don't have a TV, then you don't pay (not even if you do listen to the radio). This made sense in 1960 - but not so much now, when virtually everyone has a television.
Yeah well I don't use a TV at the moment and I'm quite happy not having to pay the BBC for a service I don't use. I think we should all get petrol for free from the government and they can recoup the cost through general taxation, because lets face it, 75% of it is tax and virtually everyone has a car, right?
2)The license collection is extremely inefficient. It involves hassle for the licensor, a draconian TV licensing authority (who make an enormous nuisance of themselves if you don't actually own a TV), and you cannot legally purchase any TV-capable equipment without giving a name and address to the retailer. [Yes, this is outrageous.] Enforcement and collection must cost a significant proportion of the total fee!
You are right there, they do send out loads of stupid letters. I doubt the overall cost is very high though compared to other forms of taxation; there are, for example, a very small number of detector vans.
3)With the exception of pensioners, the TV license is the same for everyone. Yet, some can afford to pay more than others.
Oh but of course, those of us that go out and work hard at making ourselves more employable, get the high value jobs and become successful should pay for those lazy good-for-nothing layabouts that sit on the dole. Pensioners have reached the end of their working lives, the rest of the lazy rabble should stump up or shut up. I'm all for working together to create a better society, I'm not for me working while the rest sit on their collective arses.
4)On principle: As a citizen, I have a natural right to my share of the RF spectrum - and to operate a Radio receiver!
"my share"??! Since when did frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum become property? I DEMAND my share in the ownership of the colour RED! I have a natural right to apply a blunt force instrument to your skull until you die; however most governments have decided to regulate both the RF spectrum and murder as it is a generally held belief it is beneficial to the majority.
Well because historically not everyone had a TV, it wasn't seen as an "essential" as most people do these days. Okay, so 99% of people have one these days, but the idea isn't that it's state funded, it's supposed to be sort of independant of the state. No political meddling etc. It also gives people a choice. The BBC gets money based on the popularity of using a TV, it's not just a dinosaur that will get money come what may. People can always vote with their feet and stop using TV and the money the BBC gets goes away.
I think this is great as it's forcing the BBC to look to the future and embrace new technologies and deliver their service however they can. The can see the TV is going to bite the dust at some point and they don't want to go down with it.
It amazes me no-one has mentioned RIS.
I'm no fan of MS, but the one place I've worked where it was used, it was invaluable.
Put the machine GUID into Active Directory, PXE boot the machine, select the OS image, it formats the drive and puts the image on. You can add whatever updates/drives you want to the image. The rest can be delivered by SMS (Systems Management Service), it can be very slow though.
The other excellent option I've seen is a custom linux partition on each drive that has a modified version of init, boots and checks the windows partition with an image on a remote network drive using rsync. Once done it reboots with the windows partition selected for default boot.
All the admin need do is update the image and reboot the terminals.
Yeah, and it makes people who are gay really uncomfortable to have those words thrown around as insults. It's hard enough to come out in the first place; I can't imagine what it would be like to come out if everyone I knew was clearly hostile to my sexuality because they used those words as insults all the time.
For a few years I ran game servers on a university campus network. As an extention of the SU we had to uphold their anti-homophobia policy and in-game chat was treated like any other SU venue; if we didn't we'd be shut down. This ment logging it all and punishing the offenders. It seemed totally OTT to me, while I didn't use homophobic language myself as it seemed childish, it was just the parlance for insulting people in Internet gaming culture and it never really struck me as wrong.
It made many of the users very angry, and when I started banning persistant offenders they tried to appeal to the SU, to whom I sent the logs and they just threatened the student with a university disciplinary hearing for their conduct; promptly silencing them.
It took about six months for people to really understand and change the way they talked. Initially I wanted to fight it myself as I'm very anti-censorship & pro free speach. However the SU isn't about that, it's a socialist construct and as such one of its roles is to provide a slightly nicer version of the world where young adults can find themselves.
I think everyone benefited. I realised that as harmless as it may seem, using "gay" as a pejorative hurts people. Having to explain to people why they couldn't use it really made me think about it. The offender would always try and explain it away, "it wasn't homophobic", and I knew it wasn't, but it implys being gay is bad and whatever your personal beliefs policy says you can't do that. The gamers hopfully thought about how they used homophobic language and at the very least learned how not to use it if they had to. Plus I'm sure the couple of gamers we had that I knew were gay felt less insulted.
It reminded me that governments often want to restrict freedom of speach for the same reason its freedom needs to be protected. It can be very powerful; which is also the reason we ought to be careful how we use it.
It's all very well saying "they should use debian" or "OMG LFS!!!"
As an IT contractor I've worked inside government, and the culture is very different compared to the commercial world. Government jobs are jobs for life. There is nothing that encourages the learning of new skills, and the only real way to lose your job is through misconduct or negligence. Thus the over-riding concern is about not taking responsibility for anything, and the path known is always better than the unknown. There is no grass-roots techs to push change from the bottom-up, that's risky. Change only comes from the top down, and we all know the top tends to listen to M$.
The only thing that pushes governments towards open source is cost, big IT budgets make bad headlines: "that money could have paid for X number of teachers/doctors/etc"
Due to being public bodies most governments have strict rules on who they buy services from (and usually for good reason) have to be ISO9000 approved, and all that jazz. This usually precludes using anyone but the really big suppilers who can afford such things. This also covers the government, as if it all goes www.titsup.com then they can blame the supplier, and have some tangible "proof" that it was a reasonable choice. Plus there is someone to sue if something really nasty happens.
The fact that it's being chosen at all is a miricle, so be happy, rejoice! These customised Linux provider/support companies are the only way the penguin is going to see high level public service.
They roll their own.
I can't recall who offhand, but I remember being told there was a 1 to 5 classification for code quality given out by an internation body, and nasa is the only one in cat 5.
I believe this is mainly due to repetative code reading by hand with paper and pencil.
When I post something relevant it gets rejected, but when someone posts an admittedly funny, but million year old flash animation, it gets front paged?
So called "pricing people out of their cars and onto public transport" doesn't work. We live in a world of out of town shopping centres and long distance commuting (due to the very high price of housing near any major conurbation), and the public transport system is slow and expensive.
The rich/well off still drive their monstrous BMX X5's and perfectly clean 4x4s. All it has achieved is to marginalise the poorer part of society, reducing their denying them full participation in our mobile culture.
That's all very nice, but you don't really understand how the average cinema projection system works...
You keep blathering on about the frame rate of standard projectors being 24fps, and *you're wrong*. Even the old Westar projectors I use that were made in the 1960's are 48fps. Yes the film is 24fps, and that's why they are called "the flicks" because 24fps is noticibly flickery; this problem was solved by the neat trick of showing each frame twice, giving an effective framerate of 48fps.
Modern projectors use all sorts of tricks to help keep the picture flicker free.
As for MaxiVision48, well that failed to get anywhere because as it states in the glossy brousure it gains the better picture "by recapturing the picture space used for the vestigial analog sound
stripe". Well calling the analogue sound strip vestigial is getting rather ahead of themselves... There are tones of independant cinemas out there that still use analogue sound and the studios aren't going to cut out part of their market by issuing films in MaxiVision48.
I ran a cinema for 4 years... you wouldn't believe the things people *don't* notice.
Yeah this is going to be lower quality, but the general public won't notice.
Cinema geeks will notice.
Projectionists will notice.
The public won't.
The cinema geeks will still go, 'cus they've gotta see that movie, the projectionists will still go to work, and the public as ever will put up with being shafted. The studios know this. It's big and it's loud, that's what the public notices.
I never noticed the queue dots, the joined sections the dirt on the film until I became a projectionist.
The only thing that will hold this back is the cinemas themselves. They have a huge capital investment in their current equipment and not much money to invest with (unless it's a studio owned cinema). Technology for _the majority_ of cinemas moves very very very slowly, and the studios for all their power need the cinemas to show their films.
The underlying rendering code might be the same, but the interface (and the features) are completely different.
Firefox is lightweight and quick and I use it on slow/low memory machines, but I prefer mozilla simply because it still looks and behaves like netscape. Firefox is for those people that use IE and switch over.
It might sound silly but there are subtle interface differences and keyboard controls, etc that are missing in Firefox. I went from using netscape to mozilla (when it was stable enough) and I've always disliked IE.
I'm sure Firefox will gain netscape behaviour features at some point, but I guess at that point certain users will start complaining about bloat.
Until there is a compelling feature to move I'm not going to, and I wish people wouldn't make it into some open source guilt trip not to use Firefox! Damnit! I only recently started using mozilla mail over PINE! (and that was for the junk filtering).
Paul Graham's Great Hackers essay has really touched a lot of people's nerves. The wires are choked with people giving their point of view.
Yet again, though, I have had to stop and think - what is it about Java that makes people brand it as the most un-cool language on earth? I have had friends look at me like I was a poor sod for "having to" develop in Java. So, let me list all the reasons I can think why people consider Java un-cool.
Java has considerably fewer surprises and prefers not to add complexity to the language for rarely used features thereby resulting in a language where you cannot really make your friends go ga-ga at amazingly brief programming constructs. You need to write something substantial [like Gosling's Huckster] for them be to impressed with your programming abilities and not your language knowledge. This is probably the biggest reason Java is un-cool. It's too easy (although programming or software development remains as tough as ever). Java was always touted as the language that the "average" IT programmer can use. It's such a language-for-the-masses that yet again, it fails the "geek" test. And if you use Java, so do you.
Java has been considered slow for ages. The earlier allegations (1995) were true. However, with the recent advancements in the JVMs from Sun and IBM, Java runs pretty close to C/C++. Check this benchmark. Contrary to this, there are other benchmarks that prove that Java is slower. All considered, it would be fair to say that Java cannot be considered "slow" anymore, yet its stuck with the label.
How cool is to be the jock with the second fastest race-car in the block?
Swing disasters continue to give Java a bad name. Swing is a brilliant, although hard to learn, API. But the vast majority of Swing applications are so bad that they give Swing and therefore Java a bad name.
Java is a strongly typed language therefore you have to tell the compiler exactly what you intend to use. And if you make a mistake in the way you use it, the compiler has the guts to tell you that you were wrong. Too much chaperoning?
Java has a vast library that is available to all Java developers without any ambiguity. Thus, if you wrote yet another Map you would not be considered a data structures guru by Java programmers but a guy who hasn't heard of java.util.*.
Java did not have a good IDE that compared with MS Visual Studio. I think this one was true. I am not so sure it is any more with IntelliJ. The absence of good tools probably pushed away a lot of good programmers.
Java is popular. Anything that is popular has lost its elite status and therefore is not cool.
Java is an application programming platform. You cannot do cool things like device drivers and games, etc (until recently - but Java gaming is coming in a big way).
Oh the humanity of it!
LOL
The tarif I have will my cell phone provider gives me unlimited free SMS messaging, and I've been wondering for a while if there was a way to exploit this as a free transport protocol.
Please enlighten us on how!
The last time someone asked me to do this for them I got the old drive with the Window2000 system on and the new clean drive and dumped them both in a exisiting window2000 system.
I formatted the new drive and copied the contents of the old drive to the new one, just a select all and a drag and drop.
I then put the new drive in the new machine, booted the windows CD and ran the repair util, rebooted and the system had a fit about the new hardware, updated the drivers and all was happy.
Simple... forget your expensive software.
Wow, the USA really is in the dark ages with mobile phones...
No-one pays to recieve calls or text messages in the UK (unless they're internationaly roaming). I've been on tarif (calling plan) with unlimited free text messaging for over 2 years. I got my first mobile over 5 years ago (just after we switched from analogue to digital cell networks) just as I started university. and no.. "daddy" wasn't paying, I was... and I'm a poor student.
You guys in the USA really need to demand a better service.
Txt mania is so bad here 13yearold kids keep making the press for submitting english essays at school in txt spk. I can't find the original article but it is quoted here.