yes, good point, I did.... (Chrome on Ubuntu) - although in defence I remember using Google Spreadsheets thru Firefox and it being good enough, before iOS was even announced.
I seem to recall that this is the phrasing the late Steve Jobs used during the keynote where he first displayed an iPhone.
While HTML5 has advanced a lot (and Apple certainly did their bit although they werent perhaps quite the driving force they would like to be thought of as) I'm still not entirely convinced. I use a lot of web apps, they improve constantly, but theres a lot to be said for local code running fully independently of connectivity.....
I'm an Accounting student. I bought an Acer Aspire ZG9 (Atom , 9-in, 2gb, 160gb) in 2010 to take to lectures and make notes on easily during my first qualification. I wiped the default Linux install and put Ubuntu 9 netbook edition on it, with Dropbox running at all times. It was the perfect tool for the job as I could lug it around all day and it'd run for 3-4 hours in a nightschool class with no worries, at the end of the class I'd tether briefly to my phone or the college WiFi and sync all my notes up to my desktop via Dropbox so I could do my homework / project work / further notes on a larger screen when I got home.
There's a definite use case for Netbooks - the now 3 year old netbook is still operational and I take it to some places and my Nexus 7 tablet to others. Really depends what I expect to have to do - I'd never have used a tablet at college.
And - it has regrettably to be said - in a culture full of batshit-insane drivers. Even President Medyedev has gone on the record as stating that the Russian Federation has a lot of very poor and excessively reckless drivers.
Someone once told me that in Russian the words for yield/give way and surrender are identical and Russians surrender to nobody. Don't know if that's true. Not sure I want it to be....
When I was about 7 I was first introduced to electronics. I can still remember the anticipation of ripping into a Tandy (Radio Shack in the UK) mixed box of LEDs. So many bright colours and shapes.
Nowadays I buy them in bulk from China to refit my friends homes to save money. In certain cases such the the popular GU-10 50w downlighter bulbs, LEDs have been up to the job for quite some time if you ignore the high-power LED versions and buy units with 60 to 80 individual warm white LEDs. Been doing this for 2 years now and only seen a few failures, and all the recipients report lower fuel bills to an extent that paid for the bulbs in months. Failures are a fact of life with Chinese LEDs but if you make sure you buy 10% more than you need, you;re covered and the savings materialise as expected.
On my bicycle I use a 30 or 40 year old chrome headlight made for use with a dynamo.
I replaced the 6v 2.4watt filament bulb in it with a high power white MES LED module designed to have 100 degree illumination. Powered by a single PP3 radio battery under the saddle, it produces a 15 foot cone of light on the road ahead of me lighting everything up to handlebar height (yes, I'm overvolting a 6v LED module but it doesnt seem to cause any problems, it still runs cool)
Most of the countries that have been brought out of some sort of vaguely self-imposed darkness did a lot themselves to start the process: Soviets & their colonies worked hard to produce the sort of consumer goods that the West had and to maintain a standard of living in their own bizarre way - phone lines, cars, washing machines - they might have been crude, they might have been expensive, but they were available. China's going even further in terms of introducing Western methods and their benefits
Are we in the West resourceful enough to take on stewarding a population for whom (and I invent this example as a guess, not as an insult) stainless steel blades for their scythes might be an undreamed of technical advance? Even South Korea, a population that is ethnically near as dammit identical, is so different that refugees from the North apparently suffer extreme shock and inability to cope. And what would we steward and assist them towards?.
NK is the last feudal agrarian society, in large. I would not also be surprised if it didnt prove to be deeply conservative in the way that agrarian communities often prove to be - afraid of change and unaware of alternatives. I really feel in NK we need to wait for change, or even blackmail or bribe the power structure in a way to bring it around. Simply knocking out the top echelon and leaving the other problems would be unconscionable: taking them on is a responsibility for which we may not be fit.
I wish that before seizing new platforms, some focus would go on laptop compatibility, especially with WiFi - which has taken a major downturn since 10.x. People keep bringing me netbooks to put Linux on and I have to send them away disappointed with a reinstall of Windows because current Ubuntu releases dont work with a lot of WiFi chips that worked beautifully in 10.04. I've wasted far too much of my life configuring sketchy 3rd-party WiFi drivers that crash permanently 2 weeks later...
Has the timeline been changed by better archaeology or dating, or reclassification of remains? when I was at school (only 2 decades ago, in the UK) I was taught that the last Neanderthals died out around the time of the construction of the Pyramids in Egypt, no more than 6000 years ago
I hardly ever watched his show but I feel we're the poorer for him no longer being alive. News reports suggest he knew he only had a few days to live but still chose to present his last show rather than spending the time on preparing. Thats dedication. RIP
Or should I say, my employers - a reasonably large UK-based IBM reseller. We resell them (ha!) into the third world. We have to deal with IBM's outsourced Indian operations, they are appallingly bad. The people speak English well enough but theres no motivation to do anything that doesnt address their Key Performance Indicators - ask for a payable balance, you get it instantly, ask for a copy document, you get it instantly, query an allocation, dispute a delivery, ask for support - blanked. phones get 'cut off', emails go unanswered, proof of dispute gets ignored then requested again in triplicate.
I cant see IBM putting up with this indefinitely - we're important enough a customer to have direct contacts in IBM USA and we've called them in on the problems we're having...
Israel imposed a total closure on all crossings to the Gaza Strip in Jan 2008 following an agreement made 7 months earlier in June 2007. As I was saying...
I should have said that I meant automobile use - and specifically in reciprocating cylinder engines. The use of water injection on both piston and jet engines has proven benefits, however water injection kit is often sold nowadays under dishonest premises such as calling it 'water fuelling' and claiming notable reductions in petrol or diesel consumption. If it was marketed as a protective measure to prevent overheating I'd have fewer objections to the tactic, despite my reservations about retrofitting such kit to engines not designed for it.
Probably more subtly than in the west though. (Perhaps understandably based on geography and regional politics) Israel has a little bit of a siege mentality. In a nation where many holocaust survivors still live among the population, that doesnt make it easy to openly criticise. Nobody likes to be branded a traitor, which most certainly has happened to the more vocal.
... that Slashdot had been finally invaded by the 'run your ICE-powered device on water' fraudsters who are all over the car forums on the web now. Thankful to find its just a bad description of using steam expansion as part of a power stroke (BMW tested the same theory using steam generated or augmented by the engines cooling system a few years back, although it worked for them they couldnt get the costs of it to be viable)
For the record before anyone does start talking about vehicle water injection, it adds no power per se, all it does is increase implied octane ratings by adding better cooling and detonation control, exactly the same way a well-designed intercooler would but with the added risk that it steam-cleans the oil from the cylinder walls and probably shortens the engine life as a result. Not to mention the effect on the cat and tailpipe from the increased moisture in the exhaust
I'm guessing their testing doesn't include the overhead of a virtualised x86 processor to run the apps that for me make Ubuntu an obvious choice of OS: Chrome browser, Dropbox, Jungledisk, VLC - as I don't recall any of them have ARM or even PowerPC ports (yes, thats another platform I tried ubuntu on..)
In an economics class you'd probably find respectful, intelligent debate about the nature of capital markets and the best way to promote growth (you'll find few communists these days in any country who wish to overturn the basic system of capital being ventured to gain revenue and benefit the investor and the society -) that's accepted, the remaining debate is over whether its best to intervene to redistribute and regulate, or best to wait for the trickle-down effect to spread the benefit to all those who are willing to work for their keep.
The offence that risks being taken, lies elsewhere. I spent 2 years sharing a house with 2 gay men. As a result of this (it was a comfy, cheap, welcoming place to live and I dont regret it at all), I never really understood the aversion to gay relationships, to me they were like two girls who I didn't fancy and who did things that didnt in any way appeal to me.... but I had insults shouted at me on the street by neighbours because they assumed because I shared a roof with a known and open gay couple I must share their interests.
Some conservatives (a minority, I admit) say that a person's sexuality doesnt affect their ability to work or venture capital, and earn wages or accrue revenue, and the state shouldnt intervene because intervening is something a state shouldnt do. Other conservatives really do seem to want to make statements about the nature and desirability of gay relationships. Thats where it gets really difficult because you won't find many liberals (outside an extreme lunatic fringe) stating that long term heterosexual monogamous relationships, especially marriages, are a bad thing. A lot of us aspire to that for ourselves. At the same time, if we have friends who don't conform to the family values ideal, those who speak out for it (and they will..) often seem to pose a threat to the lifestyles of our friends, and of us by proxy.
If only the core debate wasnt centred on such personal issues. So, yes, sometimes i hear the message someone is sending on conservative social issues, and i take offence, not because it impacts on me or the way i want to live my life, but out of a protective care for friends who would be affected. Apparently by my own standards I'm a hypocrite for doing so: I can live with that. I'd be as much a hypocrite, by those same standards, if i said nothing.
Tricky. Very tricky. Don't know how we sort this one out...
I assume the debates that are discussed go deep into the modern conflict between rights of individuals and traditional expectations of society: It seems to me thta in one way it could be a real issue..... I assume everyone has views, and people value their views: They don't like to see them denigrated or to see aspersions cast upon them.
I'm trying to see things from a Conservative viewpoint here (its not something that comes naturally to me) - if I had strong views about relationships, about the rights and duties of states and individuals, I'd probably want to talk about them. I'm pretty sure someone would find them offensive (normally it'd probably be me). BUT - if the people on one side are allowed to make a big thing of their views and values, why aren't those on the other side?
what I'm saying is that in certain circumstances we need to either have an open debate, or silence all debate. I'm a liberal. I think conservatives are WRONG at a pretty fundamental level... but if I seek to silence them from talking about things that matter to them we arent having the debate, nobody wins, we just increase divides that already exist. That would make for a peaceful life: I wouldnt have to worry about people who already have a bad time (immigrants, gays) hearing stuff that will offend them.. but it can't.. really.. be good...
Slashdot Mirror
yes, good point, I did.... (Chrome on Ubuntu) - although in defence I remember using Google Spreadsheets thru Firefox and it being good enough, before iOS was even announced.
I seem to recall that this is the phrasing the late Steve Jobs used during the keynote where he first displayed an iPhone.
While HTML5 has advanced a lot (and Apple certainly did their bit although they werent perhaps quite the driving force they would like to be thought of as) I'm still not entirely convinced. I use a lot of web apps, they improve constantly, but theres a lot to be said for local code running fully independently of connectivity.....
I'm an Accounting student. I bought an Acer Aspire ZG9 (Atom , 9-in, 2gb, 160gb) in 2010 to take to lectures and make notes on easily during my first qualification. I wiped the default Linux install and put Ubuntu 9 netbook edition on it, with Dropbox running at all times. It was the perfect tool for the job as I could lug it around all day and it'd run for 3-4 hours in a nightschool class with no worries, at the end of the class I'd tether briefly to my phone or the college WiFi and sync all my notes up to my desktop via Dropbox so I could do my homework / project work / further notes on a larger screen when I got home.
There's a definite use case for Netbooks - the now 3 year old netbook is still operational and I take it to some places and my Nexus 7 tablet to others. Really depends what I expect to have to do - I'd never have used a tablet at college.
Thanks
And - it has regrettably to be said - in a culture full of batshit-insane drivers. Even President Medyedev has gone on the record as stating that the Russian Federation has a lot of very poor and excessively reckless drivers.
Someone once told me that in Russian the words for yield/give way and surrender are identical and Russians surrender to nobody. Don't know if that's true. Not sure I want it to be....
When I was about 7 I was first introduced to electronics. I can still remember the anticipation of ripping into a Tandy (Radio Shack in the UK) mixed box of LEDs. So many bright colours and shapes.
Nowadays I buy them in bulk from China to refit my friends homes to save money. In certain cases such the the popular GU-10 50w downlighter bulbs, LEDs have been up to the job for quite some time if you ignore the high-power LED versions and buy units with 60 to 80 individual warm white LEDs. Been doing this for 2 years now and only seen a few failures, and all the recipients report lower fuel bills to an extent that paid for the bulbs in months. Failures are a fact of life with Chinese LEDs but if you make sure you buy 10% more than you need, you;re covered and the savings materialise as expected.
On my bicycle I use a 30 or 40 year old chrome headlight made for use with a dynamo.
I replaced the 6v 2.4watt filament bulb in it with a high power white MES LED module designed to have 100 degree illumination. Powered by a single PP3 radio battery under the saddle, it produces a 15 foot cone of light on the road ahead of me lighting everything up to handlebar height (yes, I'm overvolting a 6v LED module but it doesnt seem to cause any problems, it still runs cool)
James Bond's theme tune for his next, North Korean, mission: Mr Kiss Kiss Gang Nam
Most of the countries that have been brought out of some sort of vaguely self-imposed darkness did a lot themselves to start the process: Soviets & their colonies worked hard to produce the sort of consumer goods that the West had and to maintain a standard of living in their own bizarre way - phone lines, cars, washing machines - they might have been crude, they might have been expensive, but they were available. China's going even further in terms of introducing Western methods and their benefits
Are we in the West resourceful enough to take on stewarding a population for whom (and I invent this example as a guess, not as an insult) stainless steel blades for their scythes might be an undreamed of technical advance? Even South Korea, a population that is ethnically near as dammit identical, is so different that refugees from the North apparently suffer extreme shock and inability to cope. And what would we steward and assist them towards?.
NK is the last feudal agrarian society, in large. I would not also be surprised if it didnt prove to be deeply conservative in the way that agrarian communities often prove to be - afraid of change and unaware of alternatives. I really feel in NK we need to wait for change, or even blackmail or bribe the power structure in a way to bring it around. Simply knocking out the top echelon and leaving the other problems would be unconscionable: taking them on is a responsibility for which we may not be fit.
"...the Nodong engines..."
The whole insecurity of NK is so freudian it could only be put down to having no dong..
I wish that before seizing new platforms, some focus would go on laptop compatibility, especially with WiFi - which has taken a major downturn since 10.x. People keep bringing me netbooks to put Linux on and I have to send them away disappointed with a reinstall of Windows because current Ubuntu releases dont work with a lot of WiFi chips that worked beautifully in 10.04. I've wasted far too much of my life configuring sketchy 3rd-party WiFi drivers that crash permanently 2 weeks later...
Has the timeline been changed by better archaeology or dating, or reclassification of remains? when I was at school (only 2 decades ago, in the UK) I was taught that the last Neanderthals died out around the time of the construction of the Pyramids in Egypt, no more than 6000 years ago
I hardly ever watched his show but I feel we're the poorer for him no longer being alive. News reports suggest he knew he only had a few days to live but still chose to present his last show rather than spending the time on preparing. Thats dedication. RIP
If you have a pension plan you are already wagering in a market of unknown fairness.
Or should I say, my employers - a reasonably large UK-based IBM reseller. We resell them (ha!) into the third world. We have to deal with IBM's outsourced Indian operations, they are appallingly bad. The people speak English well enough but theres no motivation to do anything that doesnt address their Key Performance Indicators - ask for a payable balance, you get it instantly, ask for a copy document, you get it instantly, query an allocation, dispute a delivery, ask for support - blanked. phones get 'cut off', emails go unanswered, proof of dispute gets ignored then requested again in triplicate.
I cant see IBM putting up with this indefinitely - we're important enough a customer to have direct contacts in IBM USA and we've called them in on the problems we're having...
Israel imposed a total closure on all crossings to the Gaza Strip in Jan 2008 following an agreement made 7 months earlier in June 2007. As I was saying...
I should have said that I meant automobile use - and specifically in reciprocating cylinder engines. The use of water injection on both piston and jet engines has proven benefits, however water injection kit is often sold nowadays under dishonest premises such as calling it 'water fuelling' and claiming notable reductions in petrol or diesel consumption. If it was marketed as a protective measure to prevent overheating I'd have fewer objections to the tactic, despite my reservations about retrofitting such kit to engines not designed for it.
Probably more subtly than in the west though. (Perhaps understandably based on geography and regional politics) Israel has a little bit of a siege mentality. In a nation where many holocaust survivors still live among the population, that doesnt make it easy to openly criticise. Nobody likes to be branded a traitor, which most certainly has happened to the more vocal.
Is that not because Israel in a treaty with Egypt required that that border be closed and all who cross it must do so with Israeli permission?
One could almost make the same point about the IDF's official twitter account
... that Slashdot had been finally invaded by the 'run your ICE-powered device on water' fraudsters who are all over the car forums on the web now. Thankful to find its just a bad description of using steam expansion as part of a power stroke (BMW tested the same theory using steam generated or augmented by the engines cooling system a few years back, although it worked for them they couldnt get the costs of it to be viable)
For the record before anyone does start talking about vehicle water injection, it adds no power per se, all it does is increase implied octane ratings by adding better cooling and detonation control, exactly the same way a well-designed intercooler would but with the added risk that it steam-cleans the oil from the cylinder walls and probably shortens the engine life as a result. Not to mention the effect on the cat and tailpipe from the increased moisture in the exhaust
I just typed this into a Sony-Ericsson Android 3G handset.
The backlight went out and the network branding now says "It is pitch black.You ar". I Think there's a max 24 character limit.
And there's something in the room with me. WTF?
I'm guessing their testing doesn't include the overhead of a virtualised x86 processor to run the apps that for me make Ubuntu an obvious choice of OS: Chrome browser, Dropbox, Jungledisk, VLC - as I don't recall any of them have ARM or even PowerPC ports (yes, thats another platform I tried ubuntu on..)
I don't know how we fix this.
In an economics class you'd probably find respectful, intelligent debate about the nature of capital markets and the best way to promote growth (you'll find few communists these days in any country who wish to overturn the basic system of capital being ventured to gain revenue and benefit the investor and the society -) that's accepted, the remaining debate is over whether its best to intervene to redistribute and regulate, or best to wait for the trickle-down effect to spread the benefit to all those who are willing to work for their keep.
The offence that risks being taken, lies elsewhere. I spent 2 years sharing a house with 2 gay men. As a result of this (it was a comfy, cheap, welcoming place to live and I dont regret it at all), I never really understood the aversion to gay relationships, to me they were like two girls who I didn't fancy and who did things that didnt in any way appeal to me.... but I had insults shouted at me on the street by neighbours because they assumed because I shared a roof with a known and open gay couple I must share their interests.
Some conservatives (a minority, I admit) say that a person's sexuality doesnt affect their ability to work or venture capital, and earn wages or accrue revenue, and the state shouldnt intervene because intervening is something a state shouldnt do. Other conservatives really do seem to want to make statements about the nature and desirability of gay relationships. Thats where it gets really difficult because you won't find many liberals (outside an extreme lunatic fringe) stating that long term heterosexual monogamous relationships, especially marriages, are a bad thing. A lot of us aspire to that for ourselves. At the same time, if we have friends who don't conform to the family values ideal, those who speak out for it (and they will..) often seem to pose a threat to the lifestyles of our friends, and of us by proxy.
If only the core debate wasnt centred on such personal issues. So, yes, sometimes i hear the message someone is sending on conservative social issues, and i take offence, not because it impacts on me or the way i want to live my life, but out of a protective care for friends who would be affected. Apparently by my own standards I'm a hypocrite for doing so: I can live with that. I'd be as much a hypocrite, by those same standards, if i said nothing.
Tricky. Very tricky. Don't know how we sort this one out...
I assume the debates that are discussed go deep into the modern conflict between rights of individuals and traditional expectations of society: It seems to me thta in one way it could be a real issue..... I assume everyone has views, and people value their views: They don't like to see them denigrated or to see aspersions cast upon them.
.. but it can't.. really.. be good...
I'm trying to see things from a Conservative viewpoint here (its not something that comes naturally to me) - if I had strong views about relationships, about the rights and duties of states and individuals, I'd probably want to talk about them. I'm pretty sure someone would find them offensive (normally it'd probably be me). BUT - if the people on one side are allowed to make a big thing of their views and values, why aren't those on the other side?
what I'm saying is that in certain circumstances we need to either have an open debate, or silence all debate. I'm a liberal. I think conservatives are WRONG at a pretty fundamental level... but if I seek to silence them from talking about things that matter to them we arent having the debate, nobody wins, we just increase divides that already exist. That would make for a peaceful life: I wouldnt have to worry about people who already have a bad time (immigrants, gays) hearing stuff that will offend them