I suppose what is meant is that it is possible to close the country border routers to outbound traffic and have a country wide network running on Internet protocols. It would support businesses, communication, gaming etc. but would drop all requests outside of that space into a blackhole.
Countries in Europe or Asia or whevere could link their local networks via the current global infrastructure but it would be segregated. The interesting point is in trying to predict the reaction of the general populous when they realise they can't get cheap trans-atlantic calls, email their Aunt in Australia, but movies from Japan or whatever. Who would we complain to?
On a side note, Go Wales! (I'm sporting my Red Dragon cufflinks today). A reference to Cardiff yesterday and now Sketty! Do you know anyone living on Bernard Street down in the Uplands?
I'm sitting in a building looking over Liverpool Street station at the moment. There's no traffic but loads of people out walking home. Typically, it's raining. The office here has gone into it's planned security routine i.e. away from windows, no one out unless nedessary, checking that everyone is able to get home etc. It's going to be madness once everyone is let out of the offices round here. Everyone commuting in from North and North East is going to have no chance of getting home because Liverpool St. is the primary station for that. Apparently Waterloo is still open for the South and South West services so people going that way are already moving. It's odd to see today's papers full of the joy of winning the Olympic bid and knowing that tomorrow's will be full of the horror of today's attacks.
Aren't most of the jobs going to be axed from the manufacturing side? I know this set of losses is from "bad results" but aren't IBM going to shed some anyway due to the PC business sale to Levono?
Sorry about your Uncle. Through the loss of this manufacturing capability with the closure of Rover and we're [the UK] down another section of the tiny remains of our manufacturing power.
I love these insightful posts. It makes reading Slashdot a pleasure.
Having been taken out for a spin in an Aston Martin DB9 soft top (prototype form only, it's not in the market yet) at the weekend, I can attest to the fact that in the hands of an expert driver, the cars safety systems do allow you to push a car beyond limits that you'd normally come up against. However, the driver still has to make that decision about _what_ to do in an emergency situation that no system will be able to assist with. Avoid, steer round under braking, slam on the anchors etc. You pick it wrong and you'll drive you girlfriends TVR into a fence sideways (my own discovery about picking the wrong method of dealing with a 'situation').
On a similar fiction related theme, how about something more akin to the suit worn by the female star of the William Gibson short story. Blast, memory fails me, but it was about her ability to record dreams and the man who had to edit for her.
Light weight, designed to assist the physically impaired more than to 'hulk up' a normal human.
There was an advert on TV here in the UK which featured a model who had lost her lower legs and which had been replaced by what appeared to be curves of sprung metal. A none powred version of an exosuit which used stored elastic energy to improve user motion by 10-40% or similar. I would love to be able to lope along at 20 kph but using only limited energy.
You know you've read Slashdot to long when you swear you can remember various stories exactly like the one posted...
Who cares? The central root of this argument is the fact that content creators have the 'right' to be paid for their content. That assumes that people WANT TO PAY MONEY FOR IT! At the end of the day, plays, music, film, books etc. are a luxury on top of the things we need to survive. Worried about not earning money from your song writing? Get out of the business or do it part time. Want to be certain of a regular income? Take vocational job training and do a task that people NEED. There are thousands and thousands of wannabe pop stars, authors, play writes etc. Each one is subject to market pressures i.e. if their product is good, people will pay. JUST DON'T EXPECT TO BE THE ONE WHO MAKES IT! I have to stop reading Slashdot because the same freakin' arguments are gone through AGAIN and AGAIN. Ah, forget it.
I wrote to all 72 MEPs in the country. From Labour, the position was very much "Some changes needed but we think it's the right way to go". From the Conservatives, pretty much the same. The Green party were the only ones who said "Evil!", the Lib Dems were on the fence. What was odd was that Labour and Conservative had pre-written letters (I had the same response from a number of each of them). The Greens wrote personal letters (or so it seemed). I even had a Christmas card from a Lib Dem person. In all fairness, I got responses from just about everyone (I lost count after a while), but overall the tone was one of acceptance with a little fiddling rather than an end to the bill, except the Greens.
I have all the email adrreses and post address in CSV format to do a quick mail merge or mass emailing if anyone is interested. Reply here if you want the file.
Actually, it might be time for a follow up letter...
Your point is very valid, but that isn't why they are building WinFS per se. It's for those of us in a corporate environment mainly. It's a way of helping you find that presentation or spreadsheet which a colleague has stored on a shared drive, but which he/she has named something obscure.
This is a driect challenge to other content managment solutions and MS is trying to integrate it with the more standard file server environment thus negating the need to implement something else. (I am aware that something like Documentum provides a whole set of other functionality, but for many organisations, the low level requirements need to be met before you introduce workflow).
MS strategy for the past twelvety years has been about building a better CORPORATE desktop with the overflow benefits going to the home user. MS of course cares passionately about the home user market, but most of the new developments are for corporate users.
Just a thought.
Finally, someone who understands that you can't just say "buy something else". People are VERY BRAND AWARE, regardless of whether that's because they are being force feed B. Spears or because they really like it. You can't discuss the latest outpourings of underground-indie-pub-band with your teeny bopper mates if they have never heard of them.
**cough** IBM, Toshiba, Sony = Cell **cough**.
Possibly destined to be a thoroughly ubiquitous processor in the next couple of years.
Or how about Mainframe resurgence? You won't see an Intel/AMD chip running Big Iron for a while.
Don't right things off just yet.
Oddly enough, I was just looking at The Christian Voice website. I suppose from a UK point of view they could be classed as "fundamentalist". Why was I looking? They have threatend to picket the UK tour of "Jerry Springer the Opera". It seems that in this day and age, you just have to organise a bunch of nutters to stand outside a theatre and you'll get whatever you want pulled from the stage. See the recent play about Islam that was pulled due to threats and pressure.
Madness
Didn't Microsoft apply for a patent in this area not so long ago? I'd search the slashdot repository if I thought it would turn up a link.
Hang on...
Maybe this...
Cheers,
Stokey
I read that the same way as you did, but I think he means (or perhaps should mean if he didn't) the the _producers_ of software know that people will go off looking for alternatives if their software suddenly stops working after 2 years. Regardless of whether a product has an MTBF of 20,000 hours, the version _I_ bought may go on for 40k or 100k hours. Knowing that it's going to dies on the dot of whenever makes it less attractive.
Agreed about the QA thing. I was wondering if a scheme that arranged coloured dots inthe image then asked whether the yellow one was above, below, left or right of the blue one (where the colours would change at random). Maybe not a big enough set of permutations? I'm sure that could be worked out.
Having said that, nothing beats a room full of cheap labour. It still amazes me that SPAM can generate enough income to make that sort of expense worthwhile. Seriously WTF?!
Cue the gags about "Finally, I shall be able to download my pr0n collection".
Cue questions about whether is gigabytes or gigabits.
Cue questions about "How can I get a such gaping-a$$ bandwidth.
One of these days I will write the ultimate FAQ to/. posts including all the possible combinations of arguments started by SCO stories, how politics is treated here and a whole chapter on non-funny memes.
Hmm, I think I am going to suffer the same fate soon. My T-Bird has been around a while. Is there a source of information somewhere that tells you what it is possible to upgrade your current box to given memory types, HDs, cards etc? I don't really want to have to buy a new Mobo, proc and half a gig of RAM.
Ha ha! Wow, that takes me back. A friend of mine had it for the Amiga and we would spend hours trying to get the fastest deck (Ono-Sendai 9000?) or wandering into the Loser.
Time to head off and see if I can find any screen shots. EASTSEABOD!
This is a solid idea.
Who do you get to fund it though? The actual adverts themselves would be hilarious.
"Look Maureen, those manhood enlargement pills I bought from manh00dgr0w3r.com have arrived. Pass me a glass of water, I'm going to get started"
Death occurs. Someone stump up to fund this.
That has embarressed me in front of my colleagues by forcing me to laugh out loud. Thank LBJ that there was no liquids in my mouth or I am certain I would have spurted.
Don't mod this high because other posters in this thread have made this argument more eloquently. Every time there is a story about $organisation considering Linux, one group says "No! It's just a license fee bargaining chip" and another group says "I converted my $relationship to Mozilla and they love it, it must be tiome to use Linux on the desktop. But don't forget about those VBA apps!".
The point is: A company evaluates tools which it thinks are credible. There is no point wasting time and resources unless they really think there is value in it. If Microsoft called everyones bluff, said "Go on then!" and Linux was not ready for the desktop, then MS prices would rise and business would cry.
(The only exception is where a company evaluates tools or software as an internal demonstration of best practice. "You see, we evaluated these three products and no, we really hadn't selected A beforehand").
You know you read too much slashdot when you see the story headline, instandly formulate all of the expected responses in your head (even the trolls and the jokes) THEN READ THE ARTICLE ANYWAY!!
KHAAAN! I don't even know what that is...
Stokey
I find it strange how there seem to be tides with regard to law, particulalry in the States. It seemed that a few months ago, Slashdot was full of stories (so many, I can't be bothered to find and link them all) about this or that abude (PATRIOT, Patent Law, Copyright abuse, Trademark disputes, INDUCE, CAN-SPAM oh gods does it stop?), but now we seem to be seeing the downswing (or up if you prefer), where certain parts of laws or acts are finally being shown to be useless or unlawful or just plain dumb.
I wonder if there is an equilibrium point where things settle down (i.e. laws repealed, corrected etc.) before the next round of political changes bring in a whole hoopla of new ones for people to have a crack at. All historians will probably turn round (correctly) and say "yes, but it takes a serious revolution to rebalance the pendulum, but maybe there's another point of transcendence e.g. saturation of the legal profession.
Just wibbling away, please feel free to add wibble.
If anyone is interested, I recently wrote to, and emaild, all 79 UK MEPs with a letter decrying the software patent. I have all the addresses and contact details in a much more usable format that allows mail merge etc. Reply to this if you want to get hold of the info.
To be fair to them all, I had written responses from everyone, even a couple of hand signed letters. I also had email responses from at least the offices. The general themes were: We're for them except for the grey areas and we all believe they need more work. That is except for the Green party who are admirably anti SPs.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose what is meant is that it is possible to close the country border routers to outbound traffic and have a country wide network running on Internet protocols. It would support businesses, communication, gaming etc. but would drop all requests outside of that space into a blackhole.
Countries in Europe or Asia or whevere could link their local networks via the current global infrastructure but it would be segregated. The interesting point is in trying to predict the reaction of the general populous when they realise they can't get cheap trans-atlantic calls, email their Aunt in Australia, but movies from Japan or whatever. Who would we complain to?
On a side note, Go Wales! (I'm sporting my Red Dragon cufflinks today). A reference to Cardiff yesterday and now Sketty! Do you know anyone living on Bernard Street down in the Uplands?
I'm sitting in a building looking over Liverpool Street station at the moment. There's no traffic but loads of people out walking home.
Typically, it's raining. The office here has gone into it's planned security routine i.e. away from windows, no one out unless nedessary, checking that everyone is able to get home etc.
It's going to be madness once everyone is let out of the offices round here. Everyone commuting in from North and North East is going to have no chance of getting home because Liverpool St. is the primary station for that. Apparently Waterloo is still open for the South and South West services so people going that way are already moving.
It's odd to see today's papers full of the joy of winning the Olympic bid and knowing that tomorrow's will be full of the horror of today's attacks.
Aren't most of the jobs going to be axed from the manufacturing side? I know this set of losses is from "bad results" but aren't IBM going to shed some anyway due to the PC business sale to Levono?
Sorry about your Uncle. Through the loss of this manufacturing capability with the closure of Rover and we're [the UK] down another section of the tiny remains of our manufacturing power.
I love these insightful posts. It makes reading Slashdot a pleasure.
Having been taken out for a spin in an Aston Martin DB9 soft top (prototype form only, it's not in the market yet) at the weekend, I can attest to the fact that in the hands of an expert driver, the cars safety systems do allow you to push a car beyond limits that you'd normally come up against. However, the driver still has to make that decision about _what_ to do in an emergency situation that no system will be able to assist with. Avoid, steer round under braking, slam on the anchors etc. You pick it wrong and you'll drive you girlfriends TVR into a fence sideways (my own discovery about picking the wrong method of dealing with a 'situation').
More informative posts please!
Did anyone else know that Hotblack Desiato is an estate agent in Islington, North London?
Kind of a wierd inspiration, but super odd when you see houses for sale with signs up.
The opening episode got 8 million viewers which was more than the "other" channels popular Saturday Night show with Ant and Dec.
So not bad. Compare to an "Only Fools And Horses" or "Eastenders" Christmas special of 20ish million. Not bad for sci-fi...
On a similar fiction related theme, how about something more akin to the suit worn by the female star of the William Gibson short story. Blast, memory fails me, but it was about her ability to record dreams and the man who had to edit for her. Light weight, designed to assist the physically impaired more than to 'hulk up' a normal human. There was an advert on TV here in the UK which featured a model who had lost her lower legs and which had been replaced by what appeared to be curves of sprung metal. A none powred version of an exosuit which used stored elastic energy to improve user motion by 10-40% or similar. I would love to be able to lope along at 20 kph but using only limited energy. You know you've read Slashdot to long when you swear you can remember various stories exactly like the one posted...
Who cares?
The central root of this argument is the fact that content creators have the 'right' to be paid for their content. That assumes that people WANT TO PAY MONEY FOR IT! At the end of the day, plays, music, film, books etc. are a luxury on top of the things we need to survive.
Worried about not earning money from your song writing? Get out of the business or do it part time.
Want to be certain of a regular income? Take vocational job training and do a task that people NEED.
There are thousands and thousands of wannabe pop stars, authors, play writes etc. Each one is subject to market pressures i.e. if their product is good, people will pay. JUST DON'T EXPECT TO BE THE ONE WHO MAKES IT!
I have to stop reading Slashdot because the same freakin' arguments are gone through AGAIN and AGAIN.
Ah, forget it.
I wrote to all 72 MEPs in the country. From Labour, the position was very much "Some changes needed but we think it's the right way to go". From the Conservatives, pretty much the same. The Green party were the only ones who said "Evil!", the Lib Dems were on the fence.
What was odd was that Labour and Conservative had pre-written letters (I had the same response from a number of each of them). The Greens wrote personal letters (or so it seemed). I even had a Christmas card from a Lib Dem person. In all fairness, I got responses from just about everyone (I lost count after a while), but overall the tone was one of acceptance with a little fiddling rather than an end to the bill, except the Greens.
I have all the email adrreses and post address in CSV format to do a quick mail merge or mass emailing if anyone is interested. Reply here if you want the file.
Actually, it might be time for a follow up letter...
Your point is very valid, but that isn't why they are building WinFS per se. It's for those of us in a corporate environment mainly. It's a way of helping you find that presentation or spreadsheet which a colleague has stored on a shared drive, but which he/she has named something obscure.
This is a driect challenge to other content managment solutions and MS is trying to integrate it with the more standard file server environment thus negating the need to implement something else. (I am aware that something like Documentum provides a whole set of other functionality, but for many organisations, the low level requirements need to be met before you introduce workflow).
MS strategy for the past twelvety years has been about building a better CORPORATE desktop with the overflow benefits going to the home user. MS of course cares passionately about the home user market, but most of the new developments are for corporate users. Just a thought.
Finally, someone who understands that you can't just say "buy something else". People are VERY BRAND AWARE, regardless of whether that's because they are being force feed B. Spears or because they really like it. You can't discuss the latest outpourings of underground-indie-pub-band with your teeny bopper mates if they have never heard of them.
**cough** IBM, Toshiba, Sony = Cell **cough**.
Possibly destined to be a thoroughly ubiquitous processor in the next couple of years.
Or how about Mainframe resurgence? You won't see an Intel/AMD chip running Big Iron for a while.
Don't right things off just yet.
Oddly enough, I was just looking at The Christian Voice website. I suppose from a UK point of view they could be classed as "fundamentalist". Why was I looking? They have threatend to picket the UK tour of "Jerry Springer the Opera". It seems that in this day and age, you just have to organise a bunch of nutters to stand outside a theatre and you'll get whatever you want pulled from the stage. See the recent play about Islam that was pulled due to threats and pressure.
Madness
Didn't Microsoft apply for a patent in this area not so long ago? I'd search the slashdot repository if I thought it would turn up a link.
Hang on...
Maybe this...
Cheers,
Stokey
I read that the same way as you did, but I think he means (or perhaps should mean if he didn't) the the _producers_ of software know that people will go off looking for alternatives if their software suddenly stops working after 2 years.
Regardless of whether a product has an MTBF of 20,000 hours, the version _I_ bought may go on for 40k or 100k hours. Knowing that it's going to dies on the dot of whenever makes it less attractive.
Agreed about the QA thing. I was wondering if a scheme that arranged coloured dots inthe image then asked whether the yellow one was above, below, left or right of the blue one (where the colours would change at random). Maybe not a big enough set of permutations? I'm sure that could be worked out.
Having said that, nothing beats a room full of cheap labour. It still amazes me that SPAM can generate enough income to make that sort of expense worthwhile. Seriously WTF?!
Cue the gags about "Finally, I shall be able to download my pr0n collection".
/. posts including all the possible combinations of arguments started by SCO stories, how politics is treated here and a whole chapter on non-funny memes.
Cue questions about whether is gigabytes or gigabits.
Cue questions about "How can I get a such gaping-a$$ bandwidth.
One of these days I will write the ultimate FAQ to
Go! Pedal faster.
More so than president@whitehouse.gov?
Hmm, I think I am going to suffer the same fate soon. My T-Bird has been around a while. Is there a source of information somewhere that tells you what it is possible to upgrade your current box to given memory types, HDs, cards etc? I don't really want to have to buy a new Mobo, proc and half a gig of RAM.
Stokey
Ha ha! Wow, that takes me back. A friend of mine had it for the Amiga and we would spend hours trying to get the fastest deck (Ono-Sendai 9000?) or wandering into the Loser.
Time to head off and see if I can find any screen shots. EASTSEABOD!
This is a solid idea.
Who do you get to fund it though? The actual adverts themselves would be hilarious.
"Look Maureen, those manhood enlargement pills I bought from manh00dgr0w3r.com have arrived. Pass me a glass of water, I'm going to get started"
Death occurs. Someone stump up to fund this.
That has embarressed me in front of my colleagues by forcing me to laugh out loud. Thank LBJ that there was no liquids in my mouth or I am certain I would have spurted.
Don't mod this high because other posters in this thread have made this argument more eloquently. Every time there is a story about $organisation considering Linux, one group says "No! It's just a license fee bargaining chip" and another group says "I converted my $relationship to Mozilla and they love it, it must be tiome to use Linux on the desktop. But don't forget about those VBA apps!". The point is: A company evaluates tools which it thinks are credible. There is no point wasting time and resources unless they really think there is value in it. If Microsoft called everyones bluff, said "Go on then!" and Linux was not ready for the desktop, then MS prices would rise and business would cry. (The only exception is where a company evaluates tools or software as an internal demonstration of best practice. "You see, we evaluated these three products and no, we really hadn't selected A beforehand"). You know you read too much slashdot when you see the story headline, instandly formulate all of the expected responses in your head (even the trolls and the jokes) THEN READ THE ARTICLE ANYWAY!! KHAAAN! I don't even know what that is... Stokey
I find it strange how there seem to be tides with regard to law, particulalry in the States. It seemed that a few months ago, Slashdot was full of stories (so many, I can't be bothered to find and link them all) about this or that abude (PATRIOT, Patent Law, Copyright abuse, Trademark disputes, INDUCE, CAN-SPAM oh gods does it stop?), but now we seem to be seeing the downswing (or up if you prefer), where certain parts of laws or acts are finally being shown to be useless or unlawful or just plain dumb.
I wonder if there is an equilibrium point where things settle down (i.e. laws repealed, corrected etc.) before the next round of political changes bring in a whole hoopla of new ones for people to have a crack at. All historians will probably turn round (correctly) and say "yes, but it takes a serious revolution to rebalance the pendulum, but maybe there's another point of transcendence e.g. saturation of the legal profession.
Just wibbling away, please feel free to add wibble.
Stokey
If anyone is interested, I recently wrote to, and emaild, all 79 UK MEPs with a letter decrying the software patent. I have all the addresses and contact details in a much more usable format that allows mail merge etc. Reply to this if you want to get hold of the info.
To be fair to them all, I had written responses from everyone, even a couple of hand signed letters. I also had email responses from at least the offices. The general themes were: We're for them except for the grey areas and we all believe they need more work. That is except for the Green party who are admirably anti SPs.
Cheers,
Stokey