I'm noticing, and not just in the public service, that hardware like tablets, don't appear to be solving anything or improving productivity, it mostly appears like as if they're shoehorning them in because people want them or they want to appear like they're keeping up with the times.
Reminds me of when PCs were first being introduced in Government offices back in the early 1990s.
Back then, they "didn't appear to be solving anything, or improving productivity" for many offices. For some, though, there was someone who either could see the potential, or could make something out of it all.
So, it was a long term goal that (ultimately) paid off
Seems like a pretty drastic way to break the budget deadlock.
Since paying DoD civilian employees was given a big thumbs up, it shows that there can be some agreement. Provided it is in a few, well defined, areas.
The next thing looming is the debt ceiling on the 17th. What better way to get it raised than "we urgently need to spend some $ on a quick military action". Bingo. Support given wholeheartedly "to retain the US military superiority" or somesuch, the debt ceiling is also raised. Job done.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for.
Google already did but it was an April Fool's joke in 2011.
And Douglas Adams did it before Google even existed:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program. Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.
The Surface touchscreen works very nicely, and the Pro's addition of a pressure-sensitive stylus opens it up to the art community in a way that is largely under-addressed (in my opinion, they should be advertising this feature a LOT more).... The high-end market are all in love with their hipsterish Apple devices and hate MS on principle that they're 'the man'. MS has to cut out their own groove, and it's not easy. It's a bad situation for MS.
The art community went for the "hipsterish" Apple years ago.
As IBM worked out, "IBM" is a "Business" brand, and non-business purchasers don't want that stigma. Lenovo was (IIRC) initially IBM owned, before it was sold off, and was beginning to attract the non-business users.
What MS need to do is juggle the "Microsoft" name for the Surface Pro (the "business" one) with a new name (in the same way that enough people forget that X-Box is a Microsoft brand) that will attract the "non-business". Of course, to do serious graphic work means the Surface Pro, so somehow there needs to be a "Microsoft Surface Pro" and a "Wizzygraphic tablet" (which is a Surface Pro in all but name) - which doesn't just confuse the market even more than the current Surface / Surface Pro - WinRT / Win mish-mash does.
And yes, the dozens of "official" interpretations of any Bible passage means that, as the GP pointed out, the uber-creationist view stems from "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. They are attempting to invalidate my whole belief system", rather than "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. Interesting. While they maybe aren't right, maybe my view has been a bit too rigid."
That sums it up pretty well. And doesn't even touch upon the inherent contradictions in different parts of the Bible (particularly in different chapters of Genesis), which anyone could spot if they had actually read it, rather than going on the "edited highlights" of a preacher from one particular part of the established church.
The point is that tablets can come out with full Windows 8, which would be a game changer. You'd have full PC functionality in a laptop. Buh-Bye both Android and Apple.
In theory, yes. However, the Microsoft marketing department could still drop the ball in a big way, if they overprice it, or force people to use the MS Store, or leave out key features that business wants or...
Given the recent hoo-ha with the NSA listening in, and then also admitting that (along with GCHQ) they have "broken" most commonly used encryption, it looks as though the "don't use anything that we can't either backdoor or crack" is, if not NSA itself, certainly from one of their supporters.
[ I actually agree with you you, careless use of language is the careless use of one of humanity's most powerful tools. But I could not resist the opportunity for such irony.]
So, with "I could care less", are you being "ironic" or "careless"?
(If you could care less, then why don't you? On the other hand, if you couldn't care less, then the amount of care has reached a pretty low limit)
As the article says, not very many. It's $200 (USD), and the average income of a North Korean is $100/month.
Traditionally (at least in the west), a wedding ring was meant to cost one month's wages.
A car typically costs around 6 month's wages (or more)
A house used to be 3 years' salary (though with mortgage bubbles, it's common for a mortgage to be anything up to 10x salary)
So, 2 months for the average DPRK citizen to be able to afford one of these? Makes it a pretty desirable object. Therefore, there will be many in NK who will want one of these, based purely on the price. So, in answer to "how many of them", clearly it's "as many as will want to save up"
Who would have thought we'd be rooting for Big Media! (and since Murdoch has beaten Ballmer with SkyDrive, then it looks as though Big Media has more clout than Big Software)
Now, can Big Media trump Government? Time will tell
Trusting a giant corp. to generate your keys for you and presuming that is THE ONLY WAY encryption can work is such fantastically F.U.D I don't even know where to begin.
The reason that PGP (or GPG or whatever) encryption isn't standard, despite being suggested for the best part of the last 20 years, is because it is Too Much Effort (tm)
If an easy to use system is implemented ("check here to encrypt all your emails" type easy), then most people won't bother confirming whether the "encryption" uses proper random keys, or conveniently "provided by the software vendor" (read - 'one of those not really random') keys.
And, with propriety software, how (other than sending many thousand test emails) would most people test whether the keys used were properly generated, or generated using a pre-defined dictionary?
Back when it was "beleagured Apple", $150m from Microsoft in AAPL non-voting stock, and the string was "Microsoft will continue to develop Office:Mac."
Now, $2bn to take Dell private, and the string is "don't do anything non Microsoft"
So, it's "Here's a token amount, and our commitment to support you", or "Here's a large amount, and we pwn you"
Michael Dell, I'd re-negotiate, and go for the small amount...
Archeologists find one of these pieces of quartz, and then (through a lifetime's study) work out that they are not just pretty baubles, but are actually data storage devices. The excitement builds. Whole teams of researchers devote their life to the task of decoding the message - after all, the Rosetta Stone gave a lot of incite into the ancients - and then finally, the day comes when someone has worked it all out:
99 crystals contain cat pictures
1 of them contains the instructions on how to build the reader
And, tucked into one small segment of one of the crystals, almost as an afterthought, the digitised Bodlean Library, and the Library of Congress. Pity that bit was a bit chipped...
Then you just "don't get it" and therefore shouldn't voice your opinion on the matter/trollface
its the same argument people had against the iPad when Steve Jobs first announced it. It was "unnecessary", "expensive" and "people might as well get a laptop." Hell, go look at people were saying when the iPad Mini came out.
It reminds so much of what people said when Windows 3.0 came out (since they had already dismissed the Mac as "a toy"):
"A GUI is unnecessary and expensive. People might as well stick with the command line"
(And I'm sure the same was said a few years before, when the PC came out: "A PC is unnecessary and expensive. People might as well stick with their terminal hooked up to the minicomputer")
What if it is being done by rival emergency services?
The automated telephone exchange was invented by someone who ran a fire brigade, and reckoned (rightly, as it turned out), that the switchboard operators were favouring his rival.
With increasing fragmentation, then the "best performing" one will be the one that can answer calls; by blocking a rival, they can't answer as many calls, and hence will appear to be performing less well (and hence will be shut down)
People in countries outside the jurisdiction of the United States should immediately start issuing as many DMCA notices for *AA works and sites as possible. Flood the system. Let them lost access to their own work using the legal framework they've created. The tail may be long, but the bite still hurts.
And when we're done, copy that site, and then issue takedown notices for the site that bulk copied all the stuff from the *AA.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm noticing, and not just in the public service, that hardware like tablets, don't appear to be solving anything or improving productivity, it mostly appears like as if they're shoehorning them in because people want them or they want to appear like they're keeping up with the times.
Reminds me of when PCs were first being introduced in Government offices back in the early 1990s.
Back then, they "didn't appear to be solving anything, or improving productivity" for many offices. For some, though, there was someone who either could see the potential, or could make something out of it all.
So, it was a long term goal that (ultimately) paid off
Cracking tales there!
I never thought of guising as being "tradition" - it was just something you did. And getting sparklers for Bonfire Night too!
When the sun rises about 8am, and sets around 4pm, then I suppose that makes for a lot of winter festivals to pass the time...
...but not "trick or treat"
(Hey, you gotta earn your treats!)
Seems like a pretty drastic way to break the budget deadlock.
Since paying DoD civilian employees was given a big thumbs up, it shows that there can be some agreement. Provided it is in a few, well defined, areas.
The next thing looming is the debt ceiling on the 17th. What better way to get it raised than "we urgently need to spend some $ on a quick military action". Bingo. Support given wholeheartedly "to retain the US military superiority" or somesuch, the debt ceiling is also raised. Job done.
I think Douglas Adams worked this one out a while back:
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Bistromathics
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for.
You'd have thought that Google, of all people, would have checked to see whether there was an app for that already...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=restaurant+bill+app
Google already did but it was an April Fool's joke in 2011.
And Douglas Adams did it before Google even existed:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.
(grabbed from http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329)
The Surface touchscreen works very nicely, and the Pro's addition of a pressure-sensitive stylus opens it up to the art community in a way that is largely under-addressed (in my opinion, they should be advertising this feature a LOT more). ...
The high-end market are all in love with their hipsterish Apple devices and hate MS on principle that they're 'the man'. MS has to cut out their own groove, and it's not easy. It's a bad situation for MS.
The art community went for the "hipsterish" Apple years ago.
As IBM worked out, "IBM" is a "Business" brand, and non-business purchasers don't want that stigma. Lenovo was (IIRC) initially IBM owned, before it was sold off, and was beginning to attract the non-business users.
What MS need to do is juggle the "Microsoft" name for the Surface Pro (the "business" one) with a new name (in the same way that enough people forget that X-Box is a Microsoft brand) that will attract the "non-business". Of course, to do serious graphic work means the Surface Pro, so somehow there needs to be a "Microsoft Surface Pro" and a "Wizzygraphic tablet" (which is a Surface Pro in all but name) - which doesn't just confuse the market even more than the current Surface / Surface Pro - WinRT / Win mish-mash does.
I probably did mean "their" church.
And yes, the dozens of "official" interpretations of any Bible passage means that, as the GP pointed out, the uber-creationist view stems from "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. They are attempting to invalidate my whole belief system", rather than "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. Interesting. While they maybe aren't right, maybe my view has been a bit too rigid."
That sums it up pretty well. And doesn't even touch upon the inherent contradictions in different parts of the Bible (particularly in different chapters of Genesis), which anyone could spot if they had actually read it, rather than going on the "edited highlights" of a preacher from one particular part of the established church.
The point is that tablets can come out with full Windows 8, which would be a game changer. You'd have full PC functionality in a laptop. Buh-Bye both Android and Apple.
In theory, yes. However, the Microsoft marketing department could still drop the ball in a big way, if they overprice it, or force people to use the MS Store, or leave out key features that business wants or...
Given the recent hoo-ha with the NSA listening in, and then also admitting that (along with GCHQ) they have "broken" most commonly used encryption, it looks as though the "don't use anything that we can't either backdoor or crack" is, if not NSA itself, certainly from one of their supporters.
Tim Berners-Lee created the web specifically so that you could link back to the original document/image/whatever
By your reasoning, outright stealing of images is somehow "better" than linking to them.
I could care less.
[ I actually agree with you you, careless use of language is the careless use of one of humanity's most powerful tools. But I could not resist the opportunity for such irony.]
So, with "I could care less", are you being "ironic" or "careless"?
(If you could care less, then why don't you? On the other hand, if you couldn't care less, then the amount of care has reached a pretty low limit)
A 55 year old actor get my benefit of the doubt
Strangely enough, Capaldi is about the same age as William Hartnell was when he was the first Doctor. But Hartnell looked a lot older.
As the article says, not very many. It's $200 (USD), and the average income of a North Korean is $100/month.
Traditionally (at least in the west), a wedding ring was meant to cost one month's wages.
A car typically costs around 6 month's wages (or more)
A house used to be 3 years' salary (though with mortgage bubbles, it's common for a mortgage to be anything up to 10x salary)
So, 2 months for the average DPRK citizen to be able to afford one of these? Makes it a pretty desirable object. Therefore, there will be many in NK who will want one of these, based purely on the price. So, in answer to "how many of them", clearly it's "as many as will want to save up"
Wow!
Who would have thought we'd be rooting for Big Media! (and since Murdoch has beaten Ballmer with SkyDrive, then it looks as though Big Media has more clout than Big Software)
Now, can Big Media trump Government? Time will tell
Trusting a giant corp. to generate your keys for you and presuming that is THE ONLY WAY encryption can work is such fantastically F.U.D I don't even know where to begin.
The reason that PGP (or GPG or whatever) encryption isn't standard, despite being suggested for the best part of the last 20 years, is because it is Too Much Effort (tm)
If an easy to use system is implemented ("check here to encrypt all your emails" type easy), then most people won't bother confirming whether the "encryption" uses proper random keys, or conveniently "provided by the software vendor" (read - 'one of those not really random') keys.
And, with propriety software, how (other than sending many thousand test emails) would most people test whether the keys used were properly generated, or generated using a pre-defined dictionary?
That god isn't real, and Muhammed wasn't all that special. It's to bad that all those stupid people have all that money
Mmm. (and this applies to other religious zealots who love branding people with the "apostasy / blasphemy" tag)
"I believe in an all powerful being who is so fragile that you must be condemned if you say something bad about him"
What part of "all powerful" do they not get? Anyone that strong can stand up for themselves.
Back when it was "beleagured Apple", $150m from Microsoft in AAPL non-voting stock, and the string was "Microsoft will continue to develop Office:Mac."
Now, $2bn to take Dell private, and the string is "don't do anything non Microsoft"
So, it's "Here's a token amount, and our commitment to support you", or "Here's a large amount, and we pwn you"
Michael Dell, I'd re-negotiate, and go for the small amount...
Archeologists find one of these pieces of quartz, and then (through a lifetime's study) work out that they are not just pretty baubles, but are actually data storage devices. The excitement builds. Whole teams of researchers devote their life to the task of decoding the message - after all, the Rosetta Stone gave a lot of incite into the ancients - and then finally, the day comes when someone has worked it all out:
99 crystals contain cat pictures
1 of them contains the instructions on how to build the reader
And, tucked into one small segment of one of the crystals, almost as an afterthought, the digitised Bodlean Library, and the Library of Congress. Pity that bit was a bit chipped...
Then you just "don't get it" and therefore shouldn't voice your opinion on the matter /trollface
its the same argument people had against the iPad when Steve Jobs first announced it. It was "unnecessary", "expensive" and "people might as well get a laptop." Hell, go look at people were saying when the iPad Mini came out.
It reminds so much of what people said when Windows 3.0 came out (since they had already dismissed the Mac as "a toy"):
"A GUI is unnecessary and expensive. People might as well stick with the command line"
(And I'm sure the same was said a few years before, when the PC came out: "A PC is unnecessary and expensive. People might as well stick with their terminal hooked up to the minicomputer")
What if it is being done by rival emergency services?
The automated telephone exchange was invented by someone who ran a fire brigade, and reckoned (rightly, as it turned out), that the switchboard operators were favouring his rival.
With increasing fragmentation, then the "best performing" one will be the one that can answer calls; by blocking a rival, they can't answer as many calls, and hence will appear to be performing less well (and hence will be shut down)
It's a sad case of nice video, shame about the song.
Not seen a Not the Nine O'Clock News reference for a while. Nice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQamw4xxxHY
People in countries outside the jurisdiction of the United States should immediately start issuing as many DMCA notices for *AA works and sites as possible. Flood the system. Let them lost access to their own work using the legal framework they've created. The tail may be long, but the bite still hurts.
And when we're done, copy that site, and then issue takedown notices for the site that bulk copied all the stuff from the *AA.
Repeat until we run out of bandwidth
Absolutely tragic. Now what was the IP of your home automation again...
Of course, I wouldn't dream of using that information in the wrong way, so there'd be no possible harm in posting the info.
For everyone else. You mean they can see this? Ooops. :-)