... and by that I mean the high street, not certain high streets in US towns and cities, not certain self selecting demographics (/. readership), but actual high streets in other countries in the world...
I live in a city with 2,000+ years of history (Exeter, UK)
I live in a city with 50 mbit cable for approx 50 bucks a month.
I live in a city which is a big university town, and which also is home to the UK Met Office (I mention that because it is basically a tech institution)
You know how many iphones I have seen in the flesh?
NONE
NOT ONE
ZIP
ZERO
Nope, not a single one.
Flipside, I am one of the few people I know who does not own a fully featured smartphone less than 12 months old, I own a very old and very basic samsung phone.
iphone is available here, and competitive price wise, plus we have the ability here to just stick a sim card in and use any carrier you like, and the iphone was marketed harder than any other smartphone, so there really aren't ANY barriers to entry here for users.
except one.
they choose / prefer to buy a different make / model phone.
Apple (iphone) suing HTC over phone tech patents is like Apple (ipod) suing Sony over walkman tech patents.
The analogy is as the ipod is insignificant in the field of hi-fi hardware, the iphone is insignificant in the field of comms hardware.
Apple is a busted flush, suing instead of innovating.
No news here unless you are an Apple shareholder, if you are then this is news, a heads up to sell Apple stock asap and get into something else.
I mean, I get the fact that tidal forces (Earth Moon) have a braking effect on rotation of each body, and I get the fact that the distance between the centres of mass of the two bodies changes as the speed of rotation winds down.
What I do not get is how SHIFTING MASS on the SURFACE of the Earth a few metres, eg an earthquake, changes the speed of rotation???
Model it on a flywheel or gyroscope with a movable mass at the rim, sure, WHILE THE movable mass at the rim of the flywheel IS IN MOTION the flywheel RPM will change, but when the movable mass is at rest again total RPM will be the same.
AFAICR the only way to change RPM with unchanged mass is to move mass towards or away from the axis of rotation, which earthquakes, being crustal events, cannot do...
Geo-physics or celestial mechanics guys help me out, please.
"I take the LACK of such events to be a large indicator that despite the problems there are with intelligence/security, there have been many unreported success stories."
Mmmm, and I have this lump of amethyst that keeps dragons away.
A 500 buck drone, capable of carrying 250g of c4, with a range of 5 km and an endurance of 30 minutes, could bring a country to its knees.
Targets?
Satellite dish LNBs, High Tension cable insulators, refinery pipework, radar dishes on weaponry, etc etc etc.
use two, the first the blow an access into a window, and EVERY important computer is a target, bank computers, traffic control computers, air traffic control, industrial process, etc etc etc.
Use 5, meshed together, and the fifth could be flown inside a rabbit warren, SCRAM control sensors in a reactor plant, you name it.
Praise the spaghetti monster that someone actually gets it.
I have purchased the odd game, ***AFTER*** a good crack game out for it, that allowed me to install it and play it and still be admin of my own computersputnik.
There are no games out there for an "admin" of my mind set to buy, there is only stuff that I cannot differentiate from malware / trojan infested crap.
If I double-click awesomegame.exe I DO NOT either expect or agree to awesomegame.exe launching three other TSR applications, modifying my system start up, filling up my taskbar, or anything else.
The cracked / pirated version is simply superior.
As long as game companies give me ZERO options, at any price bracket, just ZERO options, as though they are administrator of my computers and I am a mere user, then this will continue to be my policy.
.. Haitian man, (they being BBC News 24) and he was very very specific, he said "We need medicines, food and water. We do not need money."
Within 24 hours, the same news channel is talking about nothing but money being needed by these "Aid" organisations, regular appeals every 10 minutes, complete with web addresses and phone numbers to call to donate money.
cut back to reporter on the scene, 60 hours after the quake, located 2 miles from the airport...
"No, no aid of any kind has been seen here"
Cut back to studio, Red Cross guys upset that their food warehouse is being targeted by thieves, and starts citing excuses about needing a plan and infrastructure in place "to ensure that aid gets to the most needy first" as a reason why there are warehouses full of aid ALREADY IN SITU and not being doled out.
Cut back to hospital, no medicine, no aid, no help.
Cut back to reporter on street 2 miles from airport
"No aid of any kind getting through"
Speaks for itself, all these aid agencies are like the cancer research charities of the 80's, not interested in anything except promoting themselves and getting as many donations as possible.
Shit like this is a job for (given the proximity to the USA) US Army mobile hospitals and engineer corps.
It should not be an opportunity for fake charities to exploit to get more donations that never reach those in need.
The only thing that I can remember about EA games is the logo and the girl whispering "EA Games", I can't remember what games had that "loading screen", actually the other thing I can remember about EA Games is most gamers seem to hate them.
While the marketing / advertising / PR types will probably point at my memory of the corporate logo and say "See, branding works!" the fact is that it doesn't, because the memory that I have is not a positive one.
I remember 3dRealms for Duke, I remember Raven for SoF, I remember Cavedog for TA, and those are all positive memories associated with good games.
I can't think of a single game that EA released, I can probably sit here and recite 50+ game titles, many of which may have been released by EA, but that's not the point.
Frankly the ex-exec is as out of touch as the CEO, if you are going to measure anything by my experience, but of course they don't do that do they, they measure stuff by the closed feedback loops of market researchers, also employed by EA, drinking their own kool aid.
The problem with EA is that unlike 3dRealms, Raven, Cavedog et al, they tried to make the "house" bigger than the "game", and I suspect that if you dig down to the level of the actual game workers, you will find that same corporate branding ethos at work, sure, you're all working on "Aliens vs Mario 7", but you're all working for EA first and foremost, you're all able to be switched around within EA, to "Mario vs Jar Jar Binks 3" at the whim of a manager.
Tesla was a very clever man, but his experiments (tesla coil etc) were based on something quite different than "broadcast energy".
Tesla played with "harmonic" or "tuned" energy, eg take two tuning forks tuned to the same frequency, tap one to set it going, and hold it three inches away from the second one, the second one will start to vibrate, you just transferred energy.
The primary and secondary circuits in a tesla coil works the same way, not with sound, but with tuned electromagnetic force, it is a tuned step up transformer.
The SINGLE wireless power experiment that worked recently worked on the same principle, tuned magnetic coupling.
***This*** device is about simple absorbtion, so yes, it *will* absorb power, and yes it will *charge* a battery, technically speaking, so will your old external TV antenna, satellite dish, ham radio antenna, and indeed how the hell do you think the old crystal / cats whisker radios worked without a battery? It works for RFID too.
But *practically* the rate of "charge" you get out of this is going to be less than the rate of self discharge, even for s single AAA size rechargeable battery.
The physical analogy is a steel plate placed in the bottom of an empty swimming pool with indeed grab water condensation from the air overnight and "charge" the swimming pool with water.
It will NEVER fill the pool though, the self discharge (evaporation) is a faster and more robust process.
I though slashdotters were supposed to be educated?
This is nothing more than the industry having settled on a hardware redundancy lifecycle in order to drive periodic sales, gone are the days of buying a radio / record player / reel to reel / television and the damn thing still worked 20 years later.
Even if it works, there will be no media.
Since there is no media, there is no point building it so it will still work.
I have a 49 year old Sony Tapecorder 500 reel to reel that still works, my dad bought it new. Essentially there is no media for it. (yeah, via the internet I can buy blank, try buying content though)
You can't just have PARC and places sitting in isolation, churning out whizz bang science.
Neither can you just build a PARC, and have that attract and create industry around it.
PARC and places like that need to co-exist with a hotbed industrial base, and then you get a positive feedback loop.
If you kill local industry and manufacture, then you also kill science.
If you kill science, then you also kill local industry and manufacture.
Back in the 1960's and before every school in the UK turned out kids who could read, write, and do math.
You cannot do ANY trade without these skills, not plumbing, not carpentry, not bricklaying, not to mention the slightly higher level trades like boilermakers etc.
Sadly, we threw it all away, in our pursuit of crap courses like equine aromatherapy and womyns studies, anything, just to get more people in university, just to get more people with degrees and diplomas and certificates.
Now we have a "service" economy that relies on someone else being able to do the basic math etc.
I am an engineer ( a proper one, eg mechanical and marine) and sadly I am the demographic that went through the trade at a time when an engineer was lower in status and pay than many blue collar jobs, which meant no-one wanted to do apprenticeships, which means I am one of the last of the "old school" of engineers.
The future isn't bright.
Sci-fi series Firefly had one thing right, learn a second language, and make it Chinese.
Even if we turned around and went balls out to fix the problem, money no expense, NOW, it would take a generation, or 20 years, to fix, which is too damn slow to work.
All that is left is importing the talent.
From what I know of the USA, there is a lot of importing engineering talent going on, lots of foreign nationals, green card holders and immigrants working in tech.
A friend of mine summed it up well years ago, when he said that in 2020 the USA will be the place to go to make cheap porn and exploit people who don't have any other options.
I suspect comments in code are like project notes.
Even when I come back to my own projects a year or so later, it is obvious what I was doing with x widget attached just so the y widget.
It is rarely obvious WHY I came around to that solution.
Project notes, and I suspect good comments in code, address the though processes behind doing something this way, rather than explaining in detail WHAT the code does.
10 REM FOR 16 BIT NMS MACHINES 20 FOR X=1 TO 10 30 PRINT "HELLO" 40 NEXT X
(told you I wasn't a coder)
But line 10, the comment may be very useful, aha, that's why this works on X machine but not X machine, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
... and by that I mean the high street, not certain high streets in US towns and cities, not certain self selecting demographics (/. readership), but actual high streets in other countries in the world...
I live in a city with 2,000+ years of history (Exeter, UK)
I live in a city with 50 mbit cable for approx 50 bucks a month.
I live in a city which is a big university town, and which also is home to the UK Met Office (I mention that because it is basically a tech institution)
You know how many iphones I have seen in the flesh?
NONE
NOT ONE
ZIP
ZERO
Nope, not a single one.
Flipside, I am one of the few people I know who does not own a fully featured smartphone less than 12 months old, I own a very old and very basic samsung phone.
iphone is available here, and competitive price wise, plus we have the ability here to just stick a sim card in and use any carrier you like, and the iphone was marketed harder than any other smartphone, so there really aren't ANY barriers to entry here for users.
except one.
they choose / prefer to buy a different make / model phone.
Apple (iphone) suing HTC over phone tech patents is like Apple (ipod) suing Sony over walkman tech patents.
The analogy is as the ipod is insignificant in the field of hi-fi hardware, the iphone is insignificant in the field of comms hardware.
Apple is a busted flush, suing instead of innovating.
No news here unless you are an Apple shareholder, if you are then this is news, a heads up to sell Apple stock asap and get into something else.
Hell, I did this years ago with the power button, you're right, no-one has ever pressed it.
http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/
I mean, I get the fact that tidal forces (Earth Moon) have a braking effect on rotation of each body, and I get the fact that the distance between the centres of mass of the two bodies changes as the speed of rotation winds down.
What I do not get is how SHIFTING MASS on the SURFACE of the Earth a few metres, eg an earthquake, changes the speed of rotation???
Model it on a flywheel or gyroscope with a movable mass at the rim, sure, WHILE THE movable mass at the rim of the flywheel IS IN MOTION the flywheel RPM will change, but when the movable mass is at rest again total RPM will be the same.
AFAICR the only way to change RPM with unchanged mass is to move mass towards or away from the axis of rotation, which earthquakes, being crustal events, cannot do...
Geo-physics or celestial mechanics guys help me out, please.
"I take the LACK of such events to be a large indicator that despite the problems there are with intelligence/security, there have been many unreported success stories."
Mmmm, and I have this lump of amethyst that keeps dragons away.
A 500 buck drone, capable of carrying 250g of c4, with a range of 5 km and an endurance of 30 minutes, could bring a country to its knees.
Targets?
Satellite dish LNBs, High Tension cable insulators, refinery pipework, radar dishes on weaponry, etc etc etc.
use two, the first the blow an access into a window, and EVERY important computer is a target, bank computers, traffic control computers, air traffic control, industrial process, etc etc etc.
Use 5, meshed together, and the fifth could be flown inside a rabbit warren, SCRAM control sensors in a reactor plant, you name it.
as subject, lameness filter, meh
All they ever were was a slick rebranding excercise, with a useful online tool to select the correct memory if you were a dumbass.
If you're going to buy rebranded memory at least do so from someone who puts quality first, eg Mushkin.
As subject.
Cos I can't see any other use for it, unless you're a fanboi...
_____EXACTLY_____
Praise the spaghetti monster that someone actually gets it.
I have purchased the odd game, ***AFTER*** a good crack game out for it, that allowed me to install it and play it and still be admin of my own computersputnik.
There are no games out there for an "admin" of my mind set to buy, there is only stuff that I cannot differentiate from malware / trojan infested crap.
Pirated games are simply superior.
Pirated games treat me like admin of my own computer.
Legitimate game do not.
I really do not need any other reason to refuse to use anything but pirated games.
It is MY hardware, not ubisoft / Ea / etc
Two points.
1/ I fail to see the difference between crapware from the game company and crapware from the kiddies.
2/ Non sequitur, if I am tech savvy enough to not allow one, I am tech savvy enough to not allow either.
If I double-click awesomegame.exe I DO NOT either expect or agree to awesomegame.exe launching three other TSR applications, modifying my system start up, filling up my taskbar, or anything else.
The cracked / pirated version is simply superior.
As long as game companies give me ZERO options, at any price bracket, just ZERO options, as though they are administrator of my computers and I am a mere user, then this will continue to be my policy.
truth
.. Haitian man, (they being BBC News 24) and he was very very specific, he said "We need medicines, food and water. We do not need money."
Within 24 hours, the same news channel is talking about nothing but money being needed by these "Aid" organisations, regular appeals every 10 minutes, complete with web addresses and phone numbers to call to donate money.
cut back to reporter on the scene, 60 hours after the quake, located 2 miles from the airport...
"No, no aid of any kind has been seen here"
Cut back to studio, Red Cross guys upset that their food warehouse is being targeted by thieves, and starts citing excuses about needing a plan and infrastructure in place "to ensure that aid gets to the most needy first" as a reason why there are warehouses full of aid ALREADY IN SITU and not being doled out.
Cut back to hospital, no medicine, no aid, no help.
Cut back to reporter on street 2 miles from airport
"No aid of any kind getting through"
Speaks for itself, all these aid agencies are like the cancer research charities of the 80's, not interested in anything except promoting themselves and getting as many donations as possible.
Shit like this is a job for (given the proximity to the USA) US Army mobile hospitals and engineer corps.
It should not be an opportunity for fake charities to exploit to get more donations that never reach those in need.
I hear you re developers vs publishers.
But....
The fact stands, the BRANDS that I remember are 3dRealms, Raven, Cavedog, mmm, positive feelings, positive associations...
EA... ummm, errrr, dunno, sucks tho.
The only thing that I can remember about EA games is the logo and the girl whispering "EA Games", I can't remember what games had that "loading screen", actually the other thing I can remember about EA Games is most gamers seem to hate them.
While the marketing / advertising / PR types will probably point at my memory of the corporate logo and say "See, branding works!" the fact is that it doesn't, because the memory that I have is not a positive one.
I remember 3dRealms for Duke, I remember Raven for SoF, I remember Cavedog for TA, and those are all positive memories associated with good games.
I can't think of a single game that EA released, I can probably sit here and recite 50+ game titles, many of which may have been released by EA, but that's not the point.
Frankly the ex-exec is as out of touch as the CEO, if you are going to measure anything by my experience, but of course they don't do that do they, they measure stuff by the closed feedback loops of market researchers, also employed by EA, drinking their own kool aid.
The problem with EA is that unlike 3dRealms, Raven, Cavedog et al, they tried to make the "house" bigger than the "game", and I suspect that if you dig down to the level of the actual game workers, you will find that same corporate branding ethos at work, sure, you're all working on "Aliens vs Mario 7", but you're all working for EA first and foremost, you're all able to be switched around within EA, to "Mario vs Jar Jar Binks 3" at the whim of a manager.
Tesla was a very clever man, but his experiments (tesla coil etc) were based on something quite different than "broadcast energy".
Tesla played with "harmonic" or "tuned" energy, eg take two tuning forks tuned to the same frequency, tap one to set it going, and hold it three inches away from the second one, the second one will start to vibrate, you just transferred energy.
The primary and secondary circuits in a tesla coil works the same way, not with sound, but with tuned electromagnetic force, it is a tuned step up transformer.
The SINGLE wireless power experiment that worked recently worked on the same principle, tuned magnetic coupling.
***This*** device is about simple absorbtion, so yes, it *will* absorb power, and yes it will *charge* a battery, technically speaking, so will your old external TV antenna, satellite dish, ham radio antenna, and indeed how the hell do you think the old crystal / cats whisker radios worked without a battery? It works for RFID too.
But *practically* the rate of "charge" you get out of this is going to be less than the rate of self discharge, even for s single AAA size rechargeable battery.
The physical analogy is a steel plate placed in the bottom of an empty swimming pool with indeed grab water condensation from the air overnight and "charge" the swimming pool with water.
It will NEVER fill the pool though, the self discharge (evaporation) is a faster and more robust process.
I though slashdotters were supposed to be educated?
This is nothing more than the industry having settled on a hardware redundancy lifecycle in order to drive periodic sales, gone are the days of buying a radio / record player / reel to reel / television and the damn thing still worked 20 years later.
Even if it works, there will be no media.
Since there is no media, there is no point building it so it will still work.
I have a 49 year old Sony Tapecorder 500 reel to reel that still works, my dad bought it new. Essentially there is no media for it. (yeah, via the internet I can buy blank, try buying content though)
consume, consume, consume.
The following link is ESSENTIAL reading
http://seekingalpha.com/article/178225-on-the-rare-earth-crisis-of-2009
I had to google that...
I meant "Eureka" as in "I have it", not some TV programme.
China will not fall.
I have a story in the submission queue about Neodymium, 97% of which comes from China.
The following link is ESSENTIAL reading to have base data on any future predictions.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/178225-on-the-rare-earth-crisis-of-2009
You can't just have PARC and places sitting in isolation, churning out whizz bang science.
Neither can you just build a PARC, and have that attract and create industry around it.
PARC and places like that need to co-exist with a hotbed industrial base, and then you get a positive feedback loop.
If you kill local industry and manufacture, then you also kill science.
If you kill science, then you also kill local industry and manufacture.
Back in the 1960's and before every school in the UK turned out kids who could read, write, and do math.
You cannot do ANY trade without these skills, not plumbing, not carpentry, not bricklaying, not to mention the slightly higher level trades like boilermakers etc.
Sadly, we threw it all away, in our pursuit of crap courses like equine aromatherapy and womyns studies, anything, just to get more people in university, just to get more people with degrees and diplomas and certificates.
Now we have a "service" economy that relies on someone else being able to do the basic math etc.
I am an engineer ( a proper one, eg mechanical and marine) and sadly I am the demographic that went through the trade at a time when an engineer was lower in status and pay than many blue collar jobs, which meant no-one wanted to do apprenticeships, which means I am one of the last of the "old school" of engineers.
The future isn't bright.
Sci-fi series Firefly had one thing right, learn a second language, and make it Chinese.
Even if we turned around and went balls out to fix the problem, money no expense, NOW, it would take a generation, or 20 years, to fix, which is too damn slow to work.
All that is left is importing the talent.
From what I know of the USA, there is a lot of importing engineering talent going on, lots of foreign nationals, green card holders and immigrants working in tech.
A friend of mine summed it up well years ago, when he said that in 2020 the USA will be the place to go to make cheap porn and exploit people who don't have any other options.
USA, the new Romania.
I suspect comments in code are like project notes.
Even when I come back to my own projects a year or so later, it is obvious what I was doing with x widget attached just so the y widget.
It is rarely obvious WHY I came around to that solution.
Project notes, and I suspect good comments in code, address the though processes behind doing something this way, rather than explaining in detail WHAT the code does.
10 REM FOR 16 BIT NMS MACHINES
20 FOR X=1 TO 10
30 PRINT "HELLO"
40 NEXT X
(told you I wasn't a coder)
But line 10, the comment may be very useful, aha, that's why this works on X machine but not X machine, etc.
some text to satisfy lameness filter