Ok, Who modded this down & why? Am I not allowed to criticise the later Hitchhiker books? Please explain. Is there really anyone who can give me a reasonable argument to convince me that "So long and thanks for all the fish" is even half as good as the original book?
Now to the shameless marketing ploy comment. That wasn't entirely what I meant but seing as the dear old Beeb is really short of cash it makes sense.
Doctor Who is being revived... Anyone else see a pattern here? It's something I've been thinking for some time. Dr Who does make more sense to me than Hitchhikers mainly for the reasons given in my original post.
What I was referring to was the fact that the BBC didn't have control of the original Hitchhiker spinoffs. This resulted in the series being re-recorded for the LP records which had script revisions included. (As Geoffrey Perkins put it DNA was one of the few writers who would have less script on the day of recording than he had two days earlier) The BBC were limited to the Original radio series on cassette (and later CD) and the TV show spinoffs which for some reason weren't as lucrative...
DNA got all the royalties for the official towel;)
I listened to the HGTTG in the '70s when I was still at school. It was a revelation.
I bought the books when they came out but was rather disappointed.
The less said about the TV show the better.
I expect the movie to be awful but I hope I'm wrong.
I cannot see how this new radio series; so distant from the original in every respect can be anything other than a sad attempt to cash in - This time the BBC will be selling the records, towels and plush Vogon toys.
Hopefully a sizable abount of money will go to a bunch of deserving people who did so much to bring the series to life in the first place - otherwise I can't see any upside. The later books were shite anyway;)
Agree wholeheartedly with the comment you made about reliability as I have first hand experience of that sort of uptime in a past life.
The thing that let Novell down was the quality of third party software running as part of Netware "NLM" Netware loadable modules.
Interbase 4.0 (or was it 3.0) could reliably ABEND (terminate with extreme prejudice for all you youngsters) just by sending "prepare" twice on the same query using Delphi 1. Took me 4 tries before I realised that was the cause... We did get our development server within a week though;)
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Ok, I;ve read some of the other replies and to be honest it's the same old same old. Don't insult potential customers and don't expect them to switch paradigms.
What we need is for some enterprising soul in the UK to start selling a linux distro professionally, like Red Hat or Suse.
Then (s)he can afford brochures and salesmen to go into large client sites and explain to the government people just how much money they'll be keeping in the UK, employing British programmers, providing custom solutions where they have full access to the source code, for a fraction of the cost of large outsourcing firms like EDS CSC etc.
(S)he will also be able to afford (by selling support contracts) support engineers to help configure and answer queries.
M$ does not make economic sense for any government other than the US government as so much money leaves the country and ends up employing Americans.
Our governments should take the same money and spend it on local programmers improving FOSS (for the benefit of the world).
The reason that browsers mis-report is that some websites don't work properly unless the visiting browser says it's IE. As I've found using other browsers, the webpages do usually work. It's just M$ FUD that the clueless have swallowed.
Now in my company, consistently writing IE only code would be grounds for dismissal. But on the basis of (as I said statistically invalid) surveys people believe that 98%+ of the internet is using IE. Mozilla and Opera need to default to reporting the TRUTH. Then popping up an informative error box if a site does spew on the browser version.
eg. "The site you are visiting 'www.example.com' only accepts traffic from Microsoft Internet Explorer. We suggest you complain to the site owner but in the meantime do you want to retry and report that you are using Internet Explorer?"
Then we could start trusting the stats & sites might be encouraged to write better and more standards compliant pages.
My copy of Mozilla reports itself as IE (the default case) as does my copy of Opera. Haven't checked Firebird or Safari but I can make an educated guess at the former;)
Can we really trust these statistics if browsers default to misrepresenting themselves as IE?
I know quite a few people who moved from IE when they realised it was keeping undeletable hidden logs of the pages they visited (guilty conscience I suppose;) and changing the preferences to make Mozilla or Opera correctly report their version is not way up on most peoples list
Just my 5c
Re:The US has central planning of consumer product
on
The Next Path for Joy
·
· Score: 1
Remember that the next time you shop at Wal-Mart, or Asda in the UK.
Why pick on those two - try Tesco. Back in the '70s they got a terrible reputation with suppliers for the following delightful little trick:-
1) Pick a small-medium sized supplier, place a modest (for you) but huge for them order, say 10-20% of their output on a regular basis and negotiate down on that basis.
2) Gradually increase the order over time so you now represent 60-80% of their output.
3) Call them in & tell them what price you'll be paying in the future, take it or leave it. Your choice: take it up the ass from Tesco or go out of business.
Nice. I'm sure any company in a similar position might consider the same sort of tactic so I'm not picking on them particularly and as far as I know they've stopped.
Now, do any of you brainwashed capitalist running dogs want to argue that this practice is good for the consumer? Don't say that the savings would be passed on to the customer either because they weren't. Instead lower quality "built to a price" rubbish was sold at the same price to the poor unwitting customer. Monopoly or near monopoly is extremely bad for everyone except the monopolist.
that exposure to 3G waves can cause headaches and nausea (conventional cellular service doesn't have these effects)
Does on me. If I use a (GSM) mobile for more than a few minute I get uncomfortable & it can cause headaches if I stick with it. What I've found anecdotally is that the more intelligent the person, the more likely they are to be negatively impacted by prolonged exposure to a Cellphones. Sitting next door to one on a train can set me off. Theory: the more intelligent the person the more highly tuned the brain therefore more sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance. Or should that be arrogant;)
Haven't noticed any improvement in reflexes or thinking - given the number of jabbering morons running around in front of moving vehicles & crashing their cars I'd be inclined to question it...
And in New Zealand the lack of maintenance by a privatised monopoly electricity supplier caused a 3 week outage in Auckland. Everybody can take one isolated example & build an argument around them as you have done. I'm sure there are various other American examples that you have chosen to ignore because they do not support your case.
I cannot think of a single recent example where private business has unequivocally acted in the public interest where their short term profits would be reduced. I am less inclined than you to blindly put my trust in corporations to just "do the right thing" unless there are some forces at work that make them.
Ok, so you reckon that the best way to approach finding a security hole is to put the information in the hands of as many lame script kiddies as possible at the same time as the people who need to fix it.
I'm not a M$ fan but I can understand anyone involved in securing a computer system wanting a chance to fix the problem before the hackers find & exploit it.
Are you really naive enough to imagine that if, say, Linus found a security hole in Linux he'd publicise it in an open forum before closing it?
IINet do an all you can eat that does make sense - go over your (generous) limit & you get throttled back to what they deem "Modem speed" which is more like ISDN:)
I have to go over to them as soon as I'm out of contract with *&^*&* Telstra...
If left unchecked, the top 1% could very well end up being someone who has less than modem usage.
Yeah, right. Assuming their business model involves throwing away more than half of their customers.
It won't go that far. Anyone who downloads more than a few GB per month is doing it by stealing copyrighted material (MP3s, Movies, Software, whatever) and the more excessive abusers quite frankly deserve everything they get. I've never gone above 1.5GB/Month on my ADSL line doing web design, e-mail, surfing,/. etc.
How is it that these Free Software programs are gaining on the software developed by the software giant?
My take would be that M$ have not really added any compelling "must have" features to Word since at least Office 97 & arguably Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1 (except XML and I am NOT buying Office 2003 for that, I bought Office 2000 OEM and cheap when I was building my own box & I didn't see any reason to upgrade to XP either). So with a fixed target the open source versions are bound to catch up with the "key" features RSN.
Now, being fair to the great Satan there are not many more features that could be crammed into Word 6.0 that are actually useful to the majority of users. Unfortunately for them they have to get people to upgrade regularly and "now without that crash-bug that lost you 3 hours of work" ain't cool enough (and IMHO should not be chargable anyway - unless I can charge them for the three hours of my time they wasted...)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, Who modded this down & why? Am I not allowed to criticise the later Hitchhiker books? Please explain. Is there really anyone who can give me a reasonable argument to convince me that "So long and thanks for all the fish" is even half as good as the original book?
;)
Now to the shameless marketing ploy comment. That wasn't entirely what I meant but seing as the dear old Beeb is really short of cash it makes sense.
Doctor Who is being revived... Anyone else see a pattern here? It's something I've been thinking for some time. Dr Who does make more sense to me than Hitchhikers mainly for the reasons given in my original post.
What I was referring to was the fact that the BBC didn't have control of the original Hitchhiker spinoffs. This resulted in the series being re-recorded for the LP records which had script revisions included. (As Geoffrey Perkins put it DNA was one of the few writers who would have less script on the day of recording than he had two days earlier) The BBC were limited to the Original radio series on cassette (and later CD) and the TV show spinoffs which for some reason weren't as lucrative...
DNA got all the royalties for the official towel
I listened to the HGTTG in the '70s when I was still at school. It was a revelation.
;)
I bought the books when they came out but was rather disappointed.
The less said about the TV show the better.
I expect the movie to be awful but I hope I'm wrong.
I cannot see how this new radio series; so distant from the original in every respect can be anything other than a sad attempt to cash in - This time the BBC will be selling the records, towels and plush Vogon toys.
Hopefully a sizable abount of money will go to a bunch of deserving people who did so much to bring the series to life in the first place - otherwise I can't see any upside. The later books were shite anyway
Agree wholeheartedly with the comment you made about reliability as I have first hand experience of that sort of uptime in a past life.
;)
The thing that let Novell down was the quality of third party software running as part of Netware "NLM" Netware loadable modules.
Interbase 4.0 (or was it 3.0) could reliably ABEND (terminate with extreme prejudice for all you youngsters) just by sending "prepare" twice on the same query using Delphi 1. Took me 4 tries before I realised that was the cause... We did get our development server within a week though
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Happy days...
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of...
No, forget I said that...
Ok, I;ve read some of the other replies and to be honest it's the same old same old. Don't insult potential customers and don't expect them to switch paradigms.
;)
What we need is for some enterprising soul in the UK to start selling a linux distro professionally, like Red Hat or Suse.
Then (s)he can afford brochures and salesmen to go into large client sites and explain to the government people just how much money they'll be keeping in the UK, employing British programmers, providing custom solutions where they have full access to the source code, for a fraction of the cost of large outsourcing firms like EDS CSC etc.
(S)he will also be able to afford (by selling support contracts) support engineers to help configure and answer queries.
M$ does not make economic sense for any government other than the US government as so much money leaves the country and ends up employing Americans.
Our governments should take the same money and spend it on local programmers improving FOSS (for the benefit of the world).
Win-Win
Unless you're Bill
The reason that browsers mis-report is that some websites don't work properly unless the visiting browser says it's IE. As I've found using other browsers, the webpages do usually work. It's just M$ FUD that the clueless have swallowed.
Now in my company, consistently writing IE only code would be grounds for dismissal. But on the basis of (as I said statistically invalid) surveys people believe that 98%+ of the internet is using IE. Mozilla and Opera need to default to reporting the TRUTH. Then popping up an informative error box if a site does spew on the browser version.
eg. "The site you are visiting 'www.example.com' only accepts traffic from Microsoft Internet Explorer. We suggest you complain to the site owner but in the meantime do you want to retry and report that you are using Internet Explorer?"
Then we could start trusting the stats & sites might be encouraged to write better and more standards compliant pages.
My copy of Mozilla reports itself as IE (the default case) as does my copy of Opera. Haven't checked Firebird or Safari but I can make an educated guess at the former ;)
;) and changing the preferences to make Mozilla or Opera correctly report their version is not way up on most peoples list
Can we really trust these statistics if browsers default to misrepresenting themselves as IE?
I know quite a few people who moved from IE when they realised it was keeping undeletable hidden logs of the pages they visited (guilty conscience I suppose
Just my 5c
Remember that the next time you shop at Wal-Mart, or Asda in the UK.
Why pick on those two - try Tesco. Back in the '70s they got a terrible reputation with suppliers for the following delightful little trick:-
1) Pick a small-medium sized supplier, place a modest (for you) but huge for them order, say 10-20% of their output on a regular basis and negotiate down on that basis.
2) Gradually increase the order over time so you now represent 60-80% of their output.
3) Call them in & tell them what price you'll be paying in the future, take it or leave it. Your choice: take it up the ass from Tesco or go out of business.
Nice. I'm sure any company in a similar position might consider the same sort of tactic so I'm not picking on them particularly and as far as I know they've stopped.
Now, do any of you brainwashed capitalist running dogs want to argue that this practice is good for the consumer? Don't say that the savings would be passed on to the customer either because they weren't. Instead lower quality "built to a price" rubbish was sold at the same price to the poor unwitting customer. Monopoly or near monopoly is extremely bad for everyone except the monopolist.
that exposure to 3G waves can cause headaches and nausea (conventional cellular service doesn't have these effects)
;)
Does on me. If I use a (GSM) mobile for more than a few minute I get uncomfortable & it can cause headaches if I stick with it. What I've found anecdotally is that the more intelligent the person, the more likely they are to be negatively impacted by prolonged exposure to a Cellphones. Sitting next door to one on a train can set me off. Theory: the more intelligent the person the more highly tuned the brain therefore more sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance. Or should that be arrogant
Haven't noticed any improvement in reflexes or thinking - given the number of jabbering morons running around in front of moving vehicles & crashing their cars I'd be inclined to question it...
And in New Zealand the lack of maintenance by a privatised monopoly electricity supplier caused a 3 week outage in Auckland. Everybody can take one isolated example & build an argument around them as you have done. I'm sure there are various other American examples that you have chosen to ignore because they do not support your case.
I cannot think of a single recent example where private business has unequivocally acted in the public interest where their short term profits would be reduced. I am less inclined than you to blindly put my trust in corporations to just "do the right thing" unless there are some forces at work that make them.
Ok, so you reckon that the best way to approach finding a security hole is to put the information in the hands of as many lame script kiddies as possible at the same time as the people who need to fix it.
I'm not a M$ fan but I can understand anyone involved in securing a computer system wanting a chance to fix the problem before the hackers find & exploit it.
Are you really naive enough to imagine that if, say, Linus found a security hole in Linux he'd publicise it in an open forum before closing it?
I mean, I don't call saying "Yo bubba" addressing me by name...
IINet do an all you can eat that does make sense - go over your (generous) limit & you get throttled back to what they deem "Modem speed" which is more like ISDN :)
I have to go over to them as soon as I'm out of contract with *&^*&* Telstra...
Mike (No affiliation with IINET)
If left unchecked, the top 1% could very well end up being someone who has less than modem usage.
/. etc.
Yeah, right. Assuming their business model involves throwing away more than half of their customers.
It won't go that far. Anyone who downloads more than a few GB per month is doing it by stealing copyrighted material (MP3s, Movies, Software, whatever) and the more excessive abusers quite frankly deserve everything they get. I've never gone above 1.5GB/Month on my ADSL line doing web design, e-mail, surfing,
Graham Chapman will appear in every scene. >> But wasn't he cremated? Er yes, but he will appear in every scene, ashtrays, vacuum cleaners...