Africa is not some dust bowl or rain forests full of poisonous monkeys.
It is a rich continent and although technology ("progress?") hasn't reached every corner that does not mean the images of doe eyed children starving to death in the middle of nowhere are emblematic of the entire continent.
Something the computer _CAN_ provide is information. What I mean is you can take all the supplies you like but unless you have a hand book or instruction manual those supplies (unless it is just food aid) are all but useless. Imagine having the biggest reference book ever openly available for you and your tutors. Want to build a damn for hydroelectricity in your village? Search for it. Want to build a wind turbine? Search for it then search for companies that can supply and ship components you can't make.
When you talk of providing modern medicine - yes, great. Now look at who rapes who. The "west" (with its extraordinarily tight grip of patents, trademarks, copyrights on most modern drugs) is implicit in the denial of medicine to these countries. Why? Because the corporations of the west will not sell drugs in those countries at the low prices required.
Libya is certainly not as ravaged as your post would indicate. It's a rich(ish) country with food, oil, medicine etc etc. Although maybe their dictator is a bit loco. Then again, he certainly seems to have grown up a lot over the last 20 years.
Other problems in Africa (Darfur, Ethiopea, Eritrea, Congo Basin etc) are cause by _WAR_. If it wasn't for the gutless inaction of the UN then maybe, just maybe those problems would have been sorted out (or at least the long road to recovery) long ago.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm ranting but.. well.. I guess I am.
HP's "reputation" was damage by leaking "the truth", more specifically I think Intel (not the general consumer) were pretty annoyed with that leak.
It seems it has further been damaged by "the truth".
They didn't learn last time. Theses boardroom idlers think they are very cosy where they are e.g. out of the eye of public scrutiny with their nice fat paycheques. Large corporations now have more (or at least as much) power and influence over the general population as governments do yet are unaccountable and unelected. Frankly, if it takes the press spanking these people daily to get them in line then the more the merrier.
Dunn should be fired immediately and, preferably, the police should determine if criminal charges can be brought against her.
I barely tolerate this sort of intrusive spying by government security agents. When private enterprise gets into spying on all and sundry I think maybe modern society should sit down, talk openly, figure out where we are going instead of fighting each other for every last dollar in a climate of escalating paranoia.
Whatever... I've just worked for 11 of the last 12 days - I'm fried.
We actually had a chip shipped to us as it was a preproduction mobo (early LGA board IIRC).
The box was about 2 feet by 2 feet and about 10 inches deep. Inside that was shaped polystyrene. Inside that were poly peanuts, inside _THAT_ was a small black plastic box (abnout 2 inches square), inside that was some more antistat foam inside which was a miniscule BIOS flash chip (about 2 cm square and 3 mill deep).
From the act of birth, the sports of youth, the food you eat, the predator, the prey, the bacteria that attacks the body.
The lion that eats the zebra, the man that eats the sheep, the eating of plants causes their death.
Unless you want to lie around and photosynthesise then get over it (and even then trees will try to outgrow each over, smoothering each other in a struggle for sunlight).
PLUS... this isn't even _REAL_ violence! It's make believe. Real violence (war, murder, rape) is a far bigger problem. Does one cause the other? Not really. "Violence" is so much a part of life that they are innextricably bound.
But, as I've brought up with them before, the site is full of wasted space. I even wrote them a tool to remove all that guff but was told (about 6 months ago) that they were working on the problem.
I only noticed it when I was parsing the thing for an new aggregator and found a big input file to output file sise diff. The XML parser was set to discard pointless whitespace.
Soundblaster == Adlib with 8 bit audio playback. They just ripped the Adlib design and HWQ interface (which used off the shelf Yamaha OPL FM synth chips, thus no legal issues) and added 8 bit sample playback chip. That was all.
Of course it may just be other companies jumping on the bandwagon but I'm afraid to say that some Sony's latest Vaio laptops offerings are far "sexier" and/or "cuter" (I feel ill just typing that) than the Intel/Mac MacBook Pro's.
It's the SW that sets them apart. Even I'll agree that XP is still pretty ugly nad not very clean. Having said that I can't get my head round the Mac interface either... Now, where's BASH gone;-D
Not much! Well, nothing useful. I was obsessed with helicopters at the time but no rotors I ever built out of LEGO were ever going to fly! I seem to remember getting it to stir a cup of tea and made a primitive "elevator"
It was fun enough to just watch the thing spin round then get on and write another prog. I got a ZX81 shortly afterwards and wasted a lot of time pokeing mcode into REM statements. Dear god, what a geeky child I must've been!
So you couldn't display all the characters of the alphabet and one did have to hand assemble code but when I figured out I could connect LEGO motors straight to the back plane and control them from the keypad (via a _tiny_ piece of software) I was very happy!
The "Pentium" now bares NO resemblance to the old 120Mhz thing I have at home! The PPro, PII, PII share some heritage (barely). The original Pentium stands alone (still a good design IMHO). P4 shares no heritage with the earlier chips and has had major changes over the last few years (the pipeline and trace cache have changed a lot).
I didn't realise Intel were still selling the old Pentium core at all... Hmmm... Something smells like BS.
It's time the BBC got some decent, technically competent journos on board. Sheesh. I read more tech crap on there than just about anywhere.
Yours Narked,
Major Frigme Poppleheat Fresharse the Third (Mrs)
A real shame. It was meant to explore the asteroid belt. I near neighbour area of space for which we have little high quality data, surprising as it could prove very useful for further exploration of the Solar System.
The probe was going to visit the major asteroids then end up in orbit around Ceres or Vesta. Now... it is nothing.
Whilst I understand it may be difficult for the public to comprehend why these sorts of missions are scientifically useful and whilst I also understand that these missions don't capture the public in the same way as man moon missions (hell, they "the great unwashed masses" even got bored of those eventually) they are scientifically useful.
We can not allow space exploration to be guided by TV ratings et al. The public had no interest in fibre optics until cable TV turned up at their front door!
Many of the worlds problems can be solved when those affected posess the following 3 properties...
Firstly the physical hardware required to build their required system. Secondly the fortitude to fight through the problems and build a solution. Lastly, and most importantly, information on how and why to utilise the first 2 requirements to best effect.
A pile of clay and a dozen strong people is all well and good but those people, given information, can build a pipeline to ship fresh water and solve many realted health problems.
Without information you would not know this. People all around the world have come up with good ideas but without dispersal of information such ideas will slowly fade away.
How were the Gardens of Babylon watered? This question still arises... To know the answer to that question may help many people water their gardens now.
Memory built into the cart for storing user preferences. If (when) I dig out old SNES or N64 carts I still have all my old stats... and I know where they are (till I loose the cart). I can take that cart, place it in another computer and have my "environment" back.
This could however introduce a few problems when upgrading versions of a package. You'd have to export and import the data. Something along the lines of
Insert Version 1.00
Hit Export (app "hangs" waiting for V2 cart
Remove Version 1.00 and Insert 2.00
The only other issue that springs to mind is the number of software dongles I'm going to need. My laptop has at least a dozen "apps" that are frequently in simultaneous use.
Seems pretty simple to me... 99 cents a song... 6 songs...
$5.94
and that's _WORST_ case. It is possible to calculate directly the cost of this "crime". Where the hell does the 3000->4000 bucks come from?
Trouble is the average RIAA lawyer would charge more than that to lick the stamp for the envelope for the complaint... stapling the complaint costs 1/2 an arm and putting in the letter box at least a leg, maybe even your favourite testicle or ovary...
kinda... whilst venerean/venereal should (probably) be the proper words for describing venus and it's hypothetical inhabitants those words have fallen out of favour due to their connotations. "Venusian" seems to be be the commonly adopted replacement.
Re:Understand the motivation, not the implementati
on
RSSOwl 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
I thought about that but the problem was that by the time I had got a book, found some source, done some reading I would have had the job done in PHP already!
Funny old game this computer malarky.
Understand the motivation, not the implementation
on
RSSOwl 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
I personally produced a RSS->HTML feed. Instead of implementing the solution as an application I wrote a PHP script using the XML parser to convert RSS feeds to HTML. Customisation of the output is often as simple as a CSS file, more "complex" arrangements can be made by modifying the PHP code.
There really isn't very much more to it than that, the page auto-updates every 30minutes. The only feature missing are the user configurable persistent storage of your favourite rss lists, but for the environment it was needed this was no major problem.
Maybe I'm wrong. It's just that I didn't see the point in creating a seperate app + GUI when all the portability I needed was already present on the host machines. I doubt there are many places where there is access to RSS but not to an HTML browser.
then hit "feed". Yes, it's not very pretty and the one major disadvantage is being able to get a user click on an RSS feed to auto open in the webpage. This I have never discovered how to do and this sort of feature could be considered a security flaw IMNSHO. I wanted to implement user storage with the ability to maintain a global list of all RSS feeds, typed and rated.
I'll admit I'm stumped. I read TFA several times and I still have this question... What if the video does not belong to them? e.g. it is not under their "protection" e.g. what if it's _MY_ video stored on _MY_ video camera, VCR whatever?
I don't see how this legislation would work.
If the video is _mine_ why should "hollywood" have any say in what I do with it? Even "copyright" bits don't work. If I record something myself then it is copyright to _me_ and thus any digitiser should allow me to copy it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Africa is not some dust bowl or rain forests full of poisonous monkeys.
It is a rich continent and although technology ("progress?") hasn't reached every corner that does not mean the images of doe eyed children starving to death in the middle of nowhere are emblematic of the entire continent.
Something the computer _CAN_ provide is information. What I mean is you can take all the supplies you like but unless you have a hand book or instruction manual those supplies (unless it is just food aid) are all but useless. Imagine having the biggest reference book ever openly available for you and your tutors. Want to build a damn for hydroelectricity in your village? Search for it. Want to build a wind turbine? Search for it then search for companies that can supply and ship components you can't make.
When you talk of providing modern medicine - yes, great. Now look at who rapes who. The "west" (with its extraordinarily tight grip of patents, trademarks, copyrights on most modern drugs) is implicit in the denial of medicine to these countries. Why? Because the corporations of the west will not sell drugs in those countries at the low prices required.
Libya is certainly not as ravaged as your post would indicate. It's a rich(ish) country with food, oil, medicine etc etc. Although maybe their dictator is a bit loco. Then again, he certainly seems to have grown up a lot over the last 20 years.
Other problems in Africa (Darfur, Ethiopea, Eritrea, Congo Basin etc) are cause by _WAR_. If it wasn't for the gutless inaction of the UN then maybe, just maybe those problems would have been sorted out (or at least the long road to recovery) long ago.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm ranting but.. well.. I guess I am.
What can I say. It works, it works well and most drivers (I've yet to find a broken one) work well thanks to WDM.
I shove a decent firewall on the thing, ditch IE and install my apps of choice and I'm away.
The only thing missing is Cleartype fonts.
Best version of Windows ever.
"Pay peanuts, get monkeys"
They're _theoretically_ accountable... ;-)
Now... Somehow you need to get a rocket up the electorate to get them to think AND get out there and do something.
*sigh*...
HP's "reputation" was damage by leaking "the truth", more specifically I think Intel (not the general consumer) were pretty annoyed with that leak.
It seems it has further been damaged by "the truth".
They didn't learn last time. Theses boardroom idlers think they are very cosy where they are e.g. out of the eye of public scrutiny with their nice fat paycheques. Large corporations now have more (or at least as much) power and influence over the general population as governments do yet are unaccountable and unelected. Frankly, if it takes the press spanking these people daily to get them in line then the more the merrier.
Dunn should be fired immediately and, preferably, the police should determine if criminal charges can be brought against her.
I barely tolerate this sort of intrusive spying by government security agents. When private enterprise gets into spying on all and sundry I think maybe modern society should sit down, talk openly, figure out where we are going instead of fighting each other for every last dollar in a climate of escalating paranoia.
Whatever... I've just worked for 11 of the last 12 days - I'm fried.
We actually had a chip shipped to us as it was a preproduction mobo (early LGA board IIRC).
The box was about 2 feet by 2 feet and about 10 inches deep. Inside that was shaped polystyrene. Inside that were poly peanuts, inside _THAT_ was a small black plastic box (abnout 2 inches square), inside that was some more antistat foam inside which was a miniscule BIOS flash chip (about 2 cm square and 3 mill deep).
BLIMEY!
From the act of birth, the sports of youth, the food you eat, the predator, the prey, the bacteria that attacks the body.
The lion that eats the zebra, the man that eats the sheep, the eating of plants causes their death.
Unless you want to lie around and photosynthesise then get over it (and even then trees will try to outgrow each over, smoothering each other in a struggle for sunlight).
PLUS... this isn't even _REAL_ violence! It's make believe. Real violence (war, murder, rape) is a far bigger problem. Does one cause the other? Not really. "Violence" is so much a part of life that they are innextricably bound.
But, as I've brought up with them before, the site is full of wasted space. I even wrote them a tool to remove all that guff but was told (about 6 months ago) that they were working on the problem.
w s.bbc.co.uk%2F
I only noticed it when I was parsing the thing for an new aggregator and found a big input file to output file sise diff. The XML parser was set to discard pointless whitespace.
Validator... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fne
---
Sometimes I feel like I'm repeating myself. Sometimes I feel like I'm repeating myself.
In 1814 in in London town,
g ht=&
a flood of beer came to drown.
http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=121&highli
Soundblaster == Adlib with 8 bit audio playback. They just ripped the Adlib design and HWQ interface (which used off the shelf Yamaha OPL FM synth chips, thus no legal issues) and added 8 bit sample playback chip. That was all.
Of course it may just be other companies jumping on the bandwagon but I'm afraid to say that some Sony's latest Vaio laptops offerings are far "sexier" and/or "cuter" (I feel ill just typing that) than the Intel/Mac MacBook Pro's.
;-D
e .jpgN otebooks/FJSeries/img_features_screen.jpg
It's the SW that sets them apart. Even I'll agree that XP is still pretty ugly nad not very clean. Having said that I can't get my head round the Mac interface either... Now, where's BASH gone
I mean... this
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/images/6469_larg
vs this
http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/images/article/
Do people (real people that is not hackers & geeks) even care about CPU's these days?
Ahem... or out of the country. Keeping tabs on one of the worlds largest nuclear stockpiles is a major, fulltime job and not one to be taken lightly.
Not much! Well, nothing useful. I was obsessed with helicopters at the time but no rotors I ever built out of LEGO were ever going to fly! I seem to remember getting it to stir a cup of tea and made a primitive "elevator"
It was fun enough to just watch the thing spin round then get on and write another prog. I got a ZX81 shortly afterwards and wasted a lot of time pokeing mcode into REM statements. Dear god, what a geeky child I must've been!
Yeah!
So you couldn't display all the characters of the alphabet and one did have to hand assemble code but when I figured out I could connect LEGO motors straight to the back plane and control them from the keypad (via a _tiny_ piece of software) I was very happy!
The "Current Pentium Core"... WTF!?
The "Pentium" now bares NO resemblance to the old 120Mhz thing I have at home! The PPro, PII, PII share some heritage (barely). The original Pentium stands alone (still a good design IMHO). P4 shares no heritage with the earlier chips and has had major changes over the last few years (the pipeline and trace cache have changed a lot).
I didn't realise Intel were still selling the old Pentium core at all... Hmmm... Something smells like BS.
It's time the BBC got some decent, technically competent journos on board. Sheesh. I read more tech crap on there than just about anywhere.
Yours Narked,
Major Frigme Poppleheat Fresharse the Third (Mrs)
This has been "postponed indefinitely".
A real shame. It was meant to explore the asteroid belt. I near neighbour area of space for which we have little high quality data, surprising as it could prove very useful for further exploration of the Solar System.
The probe was going to visit the major asteroids then end up in orbit around Ceres or Vesta. Now... it is nothing.
Whilst I understand it may be difficult for the public to comprehend why these sorts of missions are scientifically useful and whilst I also understand that these missions don't capture the public in the same way as man moon missions (hell, they "the great unwashed masses" even got bored of those eventually) they are scientifically useful.
We can not allow space exploration to be guided by TV ratings et al. The public had no interest in fibre optics until cable TV turned up at their front door!
Many of the worlds problems can be solved when those affected posess the following 3 properties...
Firstly the physical hardware required to build their required system.
Secondly the fortitude to fight through the problems and build a solution.
Lastly, and most importantly, information on how and why to utilise the first 2 requirements to best effect.
A pile of clay and a dozen strong people is all well and good but those people, given information, can build a pipeline to ship fresh water and solve many realted health problems.
Without information you would not know this. People all around the world have come up with good ideas but without dispersal of information such ideas will slowly fade away.
How were the Gardens of Babylon watered? This question still arises... To know the answer to that question may help many people water their gardens now.
Memory built into the cart for storing user preferences. If (when) I dig out old SNES or N64 carts I still have all my old stats... and I know where they are (till I loose the cart). I can take that cart, place it in another computer and have my "environment" back.
This could however introduce a few problems when upgrading versions of a package. You'd have to export and import the data. Something along the lines of
Insert Version 1.00
Hit Export (app "hangs" waiting for V2 cart
Remove Version 1.00 and Insert 2.00
The only other issue that springs to mind is the number of software dongles I'm going to need. My laptop has at least a dozen "apps" that are frequently in simultaneous use.
Seems pretty simple to me... 99 cents a song... 6 songs...
$5.94
and that's _WORST_ case. It is possible to calculate directly the cost of this "crime". Where the hell does the 3000->4000 bucks come from?
Trouble is the average RIAA lawyer would charge more than that to lick the stamp for the envelope for the complaint... stapling the complaint costs 1/2 an arm and putting in the letter box at least a leg, maybe even your favourite testicle or ovary...
kinda... whilst venerean/venereal should (probably) be the proper words for describing venus and it's hypothetical inhabitants those words have fallen out of favour due to their connotations. "Venusian" seems to be be the commonly adopted replacement.
I thought about that but the problem was that by the time I had got a book, found some source, done some reading I would have had the job done in PHP already!
Funny old game this computer malarky.
I personally produced a RSS->HTML feed. Instead of implementing the solution as an application I wrote a PHP script using the XML parser to convert RSS feeds to HTML. Customisation of the output is often as simple as a CSS file, more "complex" arrangements can be made by modifying the PHP code.
n /front_page/rss.xml
There really isn't very much more to it than that, the page auto-updates every 30minutes. The only feature missing are the user configurable persistent storage of your favourite rss lists, but for the environment it was needed this was no major problem.
Maybe I'm wrong. It's just that I didn't see the point in creating a seperate app + GUI when all the portability I needed was already present on the host machines. I doubt there are many places where there is access to RSS but not to an HTML browser.
For an example go to... http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/rss.html and cut n' paste this into the box.
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_editio
http://www.juno.co.uk/all/feeds/rss
http://www.spacedaily.com/spacedaily.xml
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer.rss
then hit "feed". Yes, it's not very pretty and the one major disadvantage is being able to get a user click on an RSS feed to auto open in the webpage. This I have never discovered how to do and this sort of feature could be considered a security flaw IMNSHO. I wanted to implement user storage with the ability to maintain a global list of all RSS feeds, typed and rated.
wake me up when they've made it 300 times FASTER!
sleeeeeppyyyy...
Good, good. So I'm doing the right thing then! hint... http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/
I'll admit I'm stumped. I read TFA several times and I still have this question... What if the video does not belong to them? e.g. it is not under their "protection" e.g. what if it's _MY_ video stored on _MY_ video camera, VCR whatever?
I don't see how this legislation would work.
If the video is _mine_ why should "hollywood" have any say in what I do with it? Even "copyright" bits don't work. If I record something myself then it is copyright to _me_ and thus any digitiser should allow me to copy it anyway.
Errr... seriously. I'm confused...