Amusingly enough, Max Headroom was portrayed by a human actor in heavy makeup and a suit made of fibreglass, the computer technology of the time not being up to the task. Even the geometric backdrop they used was originally a cel animation and didn't become rendered until later episodes.
Just a minor correction ; the UK populace did not elect a leader. We had a hung parliament - we didn't vote for any party enough to supply them with a majority of seats in parliament. The current government is a coalition of our Conservative (right wing) and our Liberal (centrist) parties, with the majority of that made up of the Conservative party.
The Conservative party leader is David Cameron, not Nick Clegg ; he is arguably our leader. Is it the case that Mr Clegg has been more visible to our transatlantic colleagues?
As an aside - the ousted Labour party is also, in my humble opinion, right wing these days. The are supposed to be the socialists, but as you note, they made a great deal of policy in favour of corporate interests just like every other government these days. The Liberals are relatively uncorrupted because they haven't been taken seriously enough to bribe in recent memory.
Because passing a law permitting it tells your whole populace that they are being watched where they previously thought they had privacy.
Secretly watching people is all well and good, but only the paranoid and observant know it's happening. If you come right out and TELL everyone, then they all know that they are being watched - even when they are not - and will regulate their behaviour accordingly. This is much cheaper than hiring real policemen - instead, every citizen becomes his own policeman. Then you can get back to worrying about the real risk - subversives and freethinkers.
Alas, if he went ahead with this idea, the only thing that would be provable was that he engaged in assault (by squirting the kids) and destruction of property (by ruining their clothes with dye). And the culprits likely know this, and being familiar with the justice system, probably know how to pursue a charge.
People in the UK have been afraid to defend themselves and their property for years because they perceive that the law is on the side of the criminal in such matters.
I've had the same experience with cheap bus-powered 2.5" USB controllers ; something in them wears out. They were all the same chipset but you can't tell when you buy them. At first they would start to get unreliable, then they would just die.
The icing on the cake was when I then suffered a mechanical failure in the 500GB drive I was using. I changed to a more expensive caddy, and also switched to a 64GB SSD. The SSD is blisteringly fast, even over a USB 2.0 bus, and despite costing over 8 times as much per GB as a spinning disk, I don't have to worry about the physical abuse it receives to the same degree.
I'm sure the drive controller will have better longevity too because it doesn't draw as much current.
The cost is to Jim's health and sanity - it doesn't show up on any balance sheet. Business love this sort of thing, enough that there is a term for it in economics ; an externality. It belongs in the same category as dumping toxic waste.
The problem being that some people still insist on using voice conference services that have no subscription charges but require the participants to call a premium number. They are very convenient, work even for the technophobic, but ludicrously expensive compared to other methods.
Alas, our network gateway is so terrible that they are actually more reliable for us than any form of VoIP.
I have bought a few albums from Ubuntu One, largely because the music was immediately available. Immediacy has a value, so it's just a question of whether the individual consumer agrees with the value that the service has assigned to it (by sometimes pricing it's music higher than some stores selling physical media).
Since I listen to all my music after it's been lossily compressed these days, the MP3 format only bothers me slightly (in that it's not user-selectable OGG - but given the audience, that's understandable). allofmp3.com did this right by allowing you to select the bitrate and compression scheme or even download FLAC - if only the music industry would take note.
I do agree that for the most part, I am patient enough to order physical media, and that it's often cheaper, and certainly more flexible than a download. But immediacy and convenience have value, and it would seem from the success of the iTunes store amongst others, that these are commodities that have sufficient value to make for a viable business.
Oh my ; the article that you link shows that the most popular Linux distro... has more negative articles online about it than the others. Who'da thunk?
If it showed that the ratio of positive articles to negative articles was different, that might be something, even if that might just reflect the relatively inexperienced user base of Ubuntu (because it's more popular, it's going to cover more of the bell curve of expertise). But it doesn't even try.
It does compare it to Windows. Surprisingly, negative Windows articles are more popular than negative Ubuntu articles. Way to go with that insight.
This comes from the MS Treacherous Computing group, so spoofing the certificate may not be easy.
A certificate would be composed of a hash of all your critical OS components, constructed and signed by the TPM chip on your motherboard.
This would be a form of Remote Attestation. MS, and their real customers in the media cartels, would love to get the thin end of this wedge into Windows, because it would mean that you could e.g. provide streaming media servers while being sure that the client is an official approved client, running an approved software stack that hasn't been tampered with to do naughty things like dump the stream to disk.
Using it to keep virus-infected machines off the internet is just a piece of spin - the real reason for wanting this is the usual - a general purpose computer is a powerful tool, and many powerful interests feel nervous about them being under the full control of their owners.
The main reason no-one bought one was they did the math ; if you are sufficiently organised to set a calendar event to remind you to change your phone plan at the end of your contract, it's cheaper to get the phone on a contract. If you actually use the capacity of the larger plans (as opposed to just going for the more expensive plan to get a phone subsidy), then it's DEFINITELY cheaper to get the phone with a contract.
If they offered an equivalent talk + data plan, cheaper over 2 years than the cost of a smartphone, I'd be all over it. But they don't.
It's not a license giving freedom that's important, it's a license retaining freedom.
Yes, new-BSD, Apache 2.0, public domain - all of these licenses have fewer restrictions than the GPL. But amongst the restrictions they lack is one preventing the addition of further restrictions. So the freedom they give you includes the freedom to take your hard written source, build programs from it, and sell it back to you without giving you those changes.
GPL takes away your freedom to share programs without also sharing the source, so that the people receiving the programs can enjoy the same freedoms that you did.
Definitely not. It used to be that every chip on the board was "naked" - there were no heat sinks on anything. Entire computers use to run on less than the power budget of a modern CPU - the power supply for my Amiga 500 was rated at 35W, that won't even run an early-series Pentium II, let alone the monstrous demands of current processors that need their own 12V line from the PSU.
Modern CPUs are a lot more efficient - but that's a secondary consideration. They don't need more computing power (the old chips obviously worked fast enough), what they do need is absolute reliability, part of which is ensured by avoiding variations in the hardware as much as possible. And older CPUs are probably a lot more reliable versus cosmic radiation, purely because there are thicker layers of material between everything.
So you effectively unionized, right there on the spot.
A movie production is an ephemeral thing, and the willingness of your production company to bend to your terms reflects this. A mine is an ongoing process that will be around for a long time. The ongoing repercussions of raising costs in a mining operation will affect the bottom line for potentially many years to come - it's in the interests of the mining company to resist.
I call BS on the 1-per-day thing for Time Warner - you're seriously telling me that your IP addresses are given out by computers, to routers with unique MAC addresses which you use for billing / service tier purposes, and you can't automate a process that matches a given DHCP lease to a given customer? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
- knock the prices of 2000 things down to a penny less than your competitors
- slap an extra twenty-one pence on 100 products (preferably something incredibly essential and expensive)
Et voila, you just increased your profits and got yourself a soundbite too.
I refuse to use them ; any saving the supermarket makes from their use is going to be ploughed into their margins, not into noticeable savings for the customer. Meanwhile, another low-paid labour job is automated out of existence, meaning someone who may not have the skills or ability to get another job is now living in poverty.
I square my unease with automating work out of existence by working in the healthcare IT market - healthcare will always employ as many people as it can afford ; automating healthcare work hopefully just increases the quantity and quality of care that can be given, rather than pitching people out of a job (at least, in a nationalized healthcare system).
Slashdot Mirror
Amusingly enough, Max Headroom was portrayed by a human actor in heavy makeup and a suit made of fibreglass, the computer technology of the time not being up to the task. Even the geometric backdrop they used was originally a cel animation and didn't become rendered until later episodes.
Just a minor correction ; the UK populace did not elect a leader. We had a hung parliament - we didn't vote for any party enough to supply them with a majority of seats in parliament. The current government is a coalition of our Conservative (right wing) and our Liberal (centrist) parties, with the majority of that made up of the Conservative party.
The Conservative party leader is David Cameron, not Nick Clegg ; he is arguably our leader. Is it the case that Mr Clegg has been more visible to our transatlantic colleagues?
As an aside - the ousted Labour party is also, in my humble opinion, right wing these days. The are supposed to be the socialists, but as you note, they made a great deal of policy in favour of corporate interests just like every other government these days. The Liberals are relatively uncorrupted because they haven't been taken seriously enough to bribe in recent memory.
Because passing a law permitting it tells your whole populace that they are being watched where they previously thought they had privacy.
Secretly watching people is all well and good, but only the paranoid and observant know it's happening. If you come right out and TELL everyone, then they all know that they are being watched - even when they are not - and will regulate their behaviour accordingly. This is much cheaper than hiring real policemen - instead, every citizen becomes his own policeman. Then you can get back to worrying about the real risk - subversives and freethinkers.
Yes, that's been annoying me. I installed Chromium on my shiny new Ubuntu Maverick rather than Chrome, and it seems to work there.
Alas, if he went ahead with this idea, the only thing that would be provable was that he engaged in assault (by squirting the kids) and destruction of property (by ruining their clothes with dye). And the culprits likely know this, and being familiar with the justice system, probably know how to pursue a charge.
People in the UK have been afraid to defend themselves and their property for years because they perceive that the law is on the side of the criminal in such matters.
I've had the same experience with cheap bus-powered 2.5" USB controllers ; something in them wears out. They were all the same chipset but you can't tell when you buy them. At first they would start to get unreliable, then they would just die.
The icing on the cake was when I then suffered a mechanical failure in the 500GB drive I was using. I changed to a more expensive caddy, and also switched to a 64GB SSD. The SSD is blisteringly fast, even over a USB 2.0 bus, and despite costing over 8 times as much per GB as a spinning disk, I don't have to worry about the physical abuse it receives to the same degree.
I'm sure the drive controller will have better longevity too because it doesn't draw as much current.
The cost is to Jim's health and sanity - it doesn't show up on any balance sheet. Business love this sort of thing, enough that there is a term for it in economics ; an externality. It belongs in the same category as dumping toxic waste.
The problem being that some people still insist on using voice conference services that have no subscription charges but require the participants to call a premium number. They are very convenient, work even for the technophobic, but ludicrously expensive compared to other methods.
Alas, our network gateway is so terrible that they are actually more reliable for us than any form of VoIP.
It's actually going to be Natty Narwhal
Well, that's your choice.
I have bought a few albums from Ubuntu One, largely because the music was immediately available. Immediacy has a value, so it's just a question of whether the individual consumer agrees with the value that the service has assigned to it (by sometimes pricing it's music higher than some stores selling physical media).
Since I listen to all my music after it's been lossily compressed these days, the MP3 format only bothers me slightly (in that it's not user-selectable OGG - but given the audience, that's understandable). allofmp3.com did this right by allowing you to select the bitrate and compression scheme or even download FLAC - if only the music industry would take note.
I do agree that for the most part, I am patient enough to order physical media, and that it's often cheaper, and certainly more flexible than a download. But immediacy and convenience have value, and it would seem from the success of the iTunes store amongst others, that these are commodities that have sufficient value to make for a viable business.
Oh my ; the article that you link shows that the most popular Linux distro ... has more negative articles online about it than the others. Who'da thunk?
If it showed that the ratio of positive articles to negative articles was different, that might be something, even if that might just reflect the relatively inexperienced user base of Ubuntu (because it's more popular, it's going to cover more of the bell curve of expertise). But it doesn't even try.
It does compare it to Windows. Surprisingly, negative Windows articles are more popular than negative Ubuntu articles. Way to go with that insight.
TFA says he'll open source it anyway, but this would be a great addition to the line up of code metrics at Ohloh.
This comes from the MS Treacherous Computing group, so spoofing the certificate may not be easy.
A certificate would be composed of a hash of all your critical OS components, constructed and signed by the TPM chip on your motherboard.
This would be a form of Remote Attestation. MS, and their real customers in the media cartels, would love to get the thin end of this wedge into Windows, because it would mean that you could e.g. provide streaming media servers while being sure that the client is an official approved client, running an approved software stack that hasn't been tampered with to do naughty things like dump the stream to disk.
Using it to keep virus-infected machines off the internet is just a piece of spin - the real reason for wanting this is the usual - a general purpose computer is a powerful tool, and many powerful interests feel nervous about them being under the full control of their owners.
The main reason no-one bought one was they did the math ; if you are sufficiently organised to set a calendar event to remind you to change your phone plan at the end of your contract, it's cheaper to get the phone on a contract. If you actually use the capacity of the larger plans (as opposed to just going for the more expensive plan to get a phone subsidy), then it's DEFINITELY cheaper to get the phone with a contract.
If they offered an equivalent talk + data plan, cheaper over 2 years than the cost of a smartphone, I'd be all over it. But they don't.
Your monitor probably doesn't support HDCP. Blu Ray players expect your hardware to participate in the protection of the MPAA cartel content.
Powerballs are supposed to be good for RSI.
It's not a license giving freedom that's important, it's a license retaining freedom.
Yes, new-BSD, Apache 2.0, public domain - all of these licenses have fewer restrictions than the GPL. But amongst the restrictions they lack is one preventing the addition of further restrictions. So the freedom they give you includes the freedom to take your hard written source, build programs from it, and sell it back to you without giving you those changes.
GPL takes away your freedom to share programs without also sharing the source, so that the people receiving the programs can enjoy the same freedoms that you did.
Flamebait or not, Time Warner ISP in the states does just this, claiming they can only process one of these requests PER DAY.
Definitely not. It used to be that every chip on the board was "naked" - there were no heat sinks on anything. Entire computers use to run on less than the power budget of a modern CPU - the power supply for my Amiga 500 was rated at 35W, that won't even run an early-series Pentium II, let alone the monstrous demands of current processors that need their own 12V line from the PSU.
Modern CPUs are a lot more efficient - but that's a secondary consideration. They don't need more computing power (the old chips obviously worked fast enough), what they do need is absolute reliability, part of which is ensured by avoiding variations in the hardware as much as possible. And older CPUs are probably a lot more reliable versus cosmic radiation, purely because there are thicker layers of material between everything.
So you effectively unionized, right there on the spot.
A movie production is an ephemeral thing, and the willingness of your production company to bend to your terms reflects this. A mine is an ongoing process that will be around for a long time. The ongoing repercussions of raising costs in a mining operation will affect the bottom line for potentially many years to come - it's in the interests of the mining company to resist.
I call BS on the 1-per-day thing for Time Warner - you're seriously telling me that your IP addresses are given out by computers, to routers with unique MAC addresses which you use for billing / service tier purposes, and you can't automate a process that matches a given DHCP lease to a given customer? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Magnetic fields do no work.
How to win at these things :
- knock the prices of 2000 things down to a penny less than your competitors
- slap an extra twenty-one pence on 100 products (preferably something incredibly essential and expensive)
Et voila, you just increased your profits and got yourself a soundbite too.
I refuse to use them ; any saving the supermarket makes from their use is going to be ploughed into their margins, not into noticeable savings for the customer. Meanwhile, another low-paid labour job is automated out of existence, meaning someone who may not have the skills or ability to get another job is now living in poverty.
I square my unease with automating work out of existence by working in the healthcare IT market - healthcare will always employ as many people as it can afford ; automating healthcare work hopefully just increases the quantity and quality of care that can be given, rather than pitching people out of a job (at least, in a nationalized healthcare system).
Vendors will hate it. They'll get an increased rate of support calls about it, and none of the benefits, because the fifty bucks goes to Intel.