Interestingly most torrents you struggle to get people to upload to 1. Doesn't that mean you uploaded 1 copy if your ratio is 1 and your responsible for 1 Copy.
"and cost several of them their jobs as a result." Do you mean the Police officers who were not legally allowed to be members of the BNP?
If anyone loses their jobs and feels they have grounds for claiming unfair dismissal, they are fully entitled to pursue a claim for wrongful dismissal.
I've far more sympathy for the victims of the BNP than the members to be honest, at least BNP members had a choice in the matter.
i'm not thinking of a grid system as such but an improvement to gustavo's encoding of latitude and longitude into a single base 32 number. All my idea is that its a bit silly to have to refine from the planet each time you want to state a latitude and longitude.
As a crude analogy if men are typically between 5 and 6 feet in height and you had to measure each one to be recorded by someone else it wouldnt be long before you went from saying 5 foot 7 inches to 6 inches 8, 5 , 6 foot 2 both the 5 foot and inches become redundant its nearly always 5 foot something although there are exceptions.
I'm not suggesting an alternative to latitude and longitude just a simpler representation. A rule stating if its the usa then we know the limits for the usa and we don't need to say them any more. Obviously The smaller the known given the less you need to calculate and state. A small place such as Monaco might need only a 4 or 5 digit encoding to be at the same accuracy as a 7 digit code for the united states.
All it really is is a simple way to give an address or other location without having to remember a 12 digit or longer sequence of numbers and with it being encoded latitudes and longitudes you don't need any bodys permission to use the code and you also don't need somebody to look it up for you since its pretty easy to locate a latitude and longitude on a mapping system such as google or your own gps.
One big problem faced around the world is actually identifying where something is. Addresses postcodes / zipcodes are not perfect they are quirky and arbitrary and worst of all usually require some form of license to use. Knowing the GPS Latitude and Longitude you can pinpoint anywhere on the planet. but they are hard to remember, if you know them at all.
There are some systems available that can solve this some are patented or otherwise closed to free use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash is an open system which encodes a latitude and longitude to a base 32 number (which is just an alphanumeric string). The longer the String the more precise the location is. An unfortunate drawback is the length of the code is perhaps a little too long to remember easily and be useful.
However a shorter code could be used based on look up tables. kind of similar to http://xkcd.com/426/ you could define an area by the bounding box its contained within. If your within the USA for example you wouldnt need to find the approximate location of the USA since thats already known the bounding area would be defined by a bounding box of the nearest whole degree or a smaller fraction that completely encloses the area of interest. If the USA was still too large an area you could define an area such as california defining the bounding box as the latitudes and longitudes that completely enclose California a Neighboring state would use a similar bounding box which would overlap to a certain extent but it doesnt really matter that a place could be enclosed in two or more bounding boxes since you would use the one defined for your state. probably there is no need to define the bounding box greater than.01 of a degree and generally 0.1 degrees would be close enough.
This would then shorten the code to something most people can remember and keep it free since this concept is derived from the geohash algorithm I would expect it to be free to use by anyone who wishes to use it without payment.
well the initial ppd call gprs didn't work because I didnt have/dev/rfcomm0 automatically configured (usually I'll find it in my bash history if I've been using it) which is why I switched to 2000. The VM was already configured to run the modem in fact the software is supplied with the phone and installs pretty much automatically. configuring consists of pressing the connect button waiting a while and it coming back error 600 and other obscure variants and once in a while registering computer and then connected) In windows the connection doesn't really give any feedback but in the terminal on ubuntu you see the whole transaction and normally its a failure to be assigned a network address. luckily the vodaphone network switch caused an automated sms to be sent saying welcome to vodaphone which then forced me to set the network manually or pay international roaming fee's.
I don't know why but usually the key to success is to browse to any web page that is outside of three on the mobile and then try and initiate the connection and disconnecting the phone from the network and making it re-register seems to help too. Failed connection attempts are the norm from my experience and connections tend to be dropped frequently. Worse still is trying to connect on the move I tried once on a train journey i managed to connect at just about every stop on the journey and lose it as the train pulled out. So much for posing on the train browsing the net.
The reason why yesterday it was just 4 pages loaded was because the connection dropped.
Another problem I've found was at home I had a great 3G signal unfortunately I also had an Excellent G signal so the phone was prone to shifting me on to the slower g network rather than the speedier 3G. You can't configure it not to do that unfortunately.
I like 3 and to be fair it's not just them T-mobile for example is also flakey on connections and closes most ports too if I recall correctly with 3 they are a bit more open.
Three gives me free Skype on my mobile and Skype give me an incoming number, most people who call me via skype get voice mail... Other great mobile phone services such as mobile tv give me half a music video and another go at reconnecting... If I'm sounding jaded it's because I am and I'm a technology nut I love my gadgets but so many are just not quite reliable enough.
I guess I'm an early adopter and used to things not quite working out as they should, if these services were rolled out to a broader audience the customer supports going to be hell, joe in Bangalore is going to have a lot of irate customers with varying hardware screaming at him with both sides having mutually incomprehensible accents.
It kind of puts me in mind of Brazil, i'm sure some technology works flawlessly somewhere... but thats never the stuff that gets remembered.
actually have you tried it? (It's not just Eclipse) It's a fully integrated IDE you can build test get code hints the usual . listofoptions sort of thing debug run in your browser or standalone flash player (debug standalone flash player if you want to debug). If thats marginally netter than notepad you must be using a different notepad.
If you have tried Eclipse before and found it missing a thick manual I can relate to that, I had that experience before trying to code java with it. Being dumped in an IDE with no idea of the workflow is frustrating however the flex plugin environment along with a few tutorials from adobe and elsewhere soon get you in the swing of things. (parden the pun). It's a capable IDE that enables you to get stuck in.
Honestly try it, you may even find a few posts on an ubuntu forum which details how to get it installed, the flex plugin defaults are no good for ubuntu at least. partially since ubuntu ships an older incompatible version of eclipse.
Three you have to love em, I am roaming in ireland but with 'like home' i get the "same" service I get in the UK.
well yesterday i got an obscure message from my bank and decided to go online using my mobile. First problem was my netbook runs ubuntu and I had forgotten how to bind the comm port (since fixed now my netbook knows what device to use and the channel to bind). which left me the Virtualbox option.
So I duly booted my Image of 2000 and passed the usb to the image, tried to connect and failed a few times rebooted the image and the phone. Then found that 3 had passed me over to vodaphone and its 3 a meg rates (rather than the 50p a day £2.50 a week or £5 a month rates). So then had to set the network manually, the 3 3g signal was about 2 bars compared to vodaphones 3bars.
Eventually I managed to connect and join 3's network. I immediately went to the Banks site logged in and eventually got to see my account balances and read one message. Data transfered about 1.8 Meg (5 approximately if I'd have been on Vodaphone and 50 cents on my one day all you can eat plan - if your determined enough. I guess my bank using flash isn't ideal for browsing using a mobile phone.
The speed was a quite reasonable 115k a sec but latency seemed high, I am old enough to have had a 14k400 modem so its better than that and twice the speed of a normal dialup modem with a good connection (actually close to 4 times faster 33k reckoned to be very good from my dialup days. Time taken to retrieve 4 webpages including the messing about approximately 1 hour (more rather than less).
So yeah being in the middle of nowhere and being able to get online and cheaply at a pretty reasonable connection speed is useful, but the downside of being unable to get a network address and a multitude of other failures really means for me the mobile networks either don't want to have me connect on a regular basis or can't have me connect on a regular basis. With enough determination it's possible to get some use from it (I once got a 115meg download although it took about 3 hours to do so and it was a failure it was a 121meg file). I'd need to see a lot more reliability before I'd consider mobile broadband for my main connection for the internet. In fact dialup would probably be better having a slow but generally reliable connection.
I've yet to meet anybody who is entirely satisfied with mobile broadband, do they exist?
Actually that sounds similar to the night vision problem iraqi tanks had in the first iraq war I think it was. The Challenger tank has a system which allows the tank operator to be able to see the heat from the recent tracks left by a tank in a field with no need to illuminate anything. The iraqi's had an infrared system which essentially to the challenger tank crews looked like they were shining searchlights on the battle field. totally giving away the iraqi positions. This meant the night vision systems were useless in the iraqi tanks and left them blind or dead.
you make some interesting points, and maybe I'm not typical but I tend to use google news for old stories usually and the linked pages are usually pretty poorly designed.
My main news site other than Slashdot is the BBC. I'll generally find something interesting and then go through the top 10 most read and the top 5 most emailed. The only time that goes wrong is when a story is actually a sports piece and then the top 10 links are not on the page. now that top 10 although it tends to promote top 10 stories is reflecting popular interest not the publishers agenda. If I'm really bored I may look at the technology pages. Sometimes I'll avoid a story if its something i really have no interest in such as Jade Goody.
I guess the BBC gets a good break by being the default news RSS feed for the UK with Firefox , I'm sure there are others but I haven't looked.
Of the many other news sites I have visited few have kept me for longer than it takes to get through the news article I came for, Sometimes I will click on other stories if they seem to be interesting but mostly I find myself drowning in advertising and looking for the door.
If AP want me to read their stories they could make an RSS Feed, rotating the links to different sites featuring the content, or perhaps the site which posted the story on AP (now that sounds like a winner) I really havent got the time or inclination to put a feed up for each news outlet on my browser.
Oh one more thing the BBC is good at is linking to other sites with related news. They don't seem to mind if I look at other news sources and thats actually added value and an incentive to stick with the BBC.
A nice extension to firefox might be an Rss feed of RSS feeds. so theres one link on the tool bar but a selection of stories from different feeds say expand across 10 feeds dropping 10 menu's or perhaps a number of favourites at the top level and a newspapers sub menu american , uk , australian.. then spliting into individual sites. Bonus points if the extension moves feeds higher up the chain if i use them more often. It could actually present several feeds from a single site if I decide i want technology news. Or web comics or...
now see how google doesn't need to be the first port of call but other sites have to work together or someone just mash up the existing feeds to syndicate on merit rather than just who got lucky in the RSS feed install.
I am not a linguist however it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable hypothesis, one of the problems in translation is finding reasonably equivalent phrases between languages.
Within any individual language there are specialized vocabularies that people outside the profession have very little grasp of, the language of stockbrokers or software engineers or marketing for example.
I believe thats referred to the domain of discourse. Within different languages there are subtle differences between what we would think of as universal concepts. For example the word you in Japanese has maybe 7 roughly equivalent words, the difference is directly related to the relative positions of the two speakers in relation to each other and society. In Polish for example there is a similar difference where there are formal and familiar forms of discourse. If your being respectful then you use the third party form of verbs. As nonnative speakers we are liable to trample all over that difference and may be considered rude or ignorant.
I believe 0 was late to arrive in mathematics but it made a considerable impact on thinking about numbers. Of course there is a tendency of languages to assimilate words from other languages sometimes with a direct relation such as the word bungalow which comes from india or a different meaning such as 'handy' which I believe the Germans use for 'Cell phone' or 'Mobile'. I've not even touched on English idiom which can really baffle non native speakers yet can be extremely vivid concepts for native speakers.
The problem with the hypothesis is that if I were fluent enough to recognize a conceptual difference in one language and were able to convey that concept to you in English or another language then that concept is no longer constrained by its original language.
However the essential idea that language is a framework in which we express our idea's is quite reasonable, the idea that frameworks differ between languages and individuals also seems reasonable, however these frameworks are not fixed and can be expanded on. So given two differing frameworks it is likely that a difference in the concepts as expressed in two different languages may lead to different approaches which may yield different results. Chances are that if it's important enough the language frameworks will be modified to share the concept. Obviously change is ongoing so differences will become more subtle, but it's obvious that if you talked about working with computers for example to someone from the 1900's the concept computer used to be a man who worked with mathematics and windows were glass panels set into walls. I've no doubt you could teach the modern day concepts to someone from the 1900's but then your modifying his frame of reference.
As a final thought I'm reminded of a scifi story where a stricken spacecraft needed instruction from earth to be able to avoid disaster but the delay in sending a communication and receiving the answer meant there wouldnt be enough time to avoid disaster, the problem was solved by the presidents wife who told them to speak at the same time in her field of expertise gossiping nothing would get done if they waited for one party to relay one story before they related their own.
"The International Standards Organisation has rejected appeals from four countries to deny Microsoft's Office Open XML backing as an international standard.
OOXML won approval from the ISO in April, following a controversial fast-track review process which was plagued with claims of voting irregularities, and accusations of technical flaws in the standard itself."
"ISO ratification was achieved at considerable cost. The reputation of the ISO was compromised, as was that of Microsoft. ISO ratification was achieved amid widespread allegations of misbehaviour and undue political influence, which was noted by the likes of the European Commission. Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner, recently said: "If voting in the standard-setting context is influenced less by the technical merits of the technology but rather by side agreements, inducements, package deals, reciprocal agreements, or commercial pressure... then these risk falling foul of the competition rules."
The process has also adversely affected the work of the ISO. Martin Bryan, a senior ISO/IEC Convenor, who reported that the fast-tracking of OOXML "has made it almost impossible to continue with our work within ISO. The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 (OOXML) as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots."
"More than one commentator was reminded of the famous remark by Tom Lehrer, mathematics lecturer and sixties satirist, who said that "satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.""
Eclipse Ganymede the other IDE is free as well, I've got it installed and working on Ubuntu I've not had time to do much with it yet but i've tried a few simple projects. don't think there are too many restrictions its an alpha though and time limited to about 8 months I think. looks like fun anyway.
isn't that about the same as seven degree's of Kevin Bacon, even as someone who has never taken an illegal drug, you probably are associated with someone who uses and just one degree further away than someone who smokes. An end user is unlikely to be directly connected with someone who smuggles for a living. Heck I know people who use windows and they have never even met Bill Gates.
The BBC had Live coverage of the Irish budget today - but unfortunately I wasn't allowed to watch it on line what with being in Ireland. No worries though I just had to turn on my Satellite box and watch the BBC TV broadcast instead.
I've a couple of netbooks the EEE 7inch and the Aspire one 9inch, once in desktop mode the Xandros based EEE is quite nice, and for some reason the networking seems to work better than with ubuntu on it.
I've a Technomate 9101 super Sat Box (also runs Linux) which can send a stream over the LAN you just click on the web interface and you get a Mp3 playlist, which you then run with VLC on the system your using. with the stock xandross its flawless it's like having a digital Tv Card in the EEE unfortunately with ubuntu the results were not satisfactory (breaking up regularly). The one thing I changed from stock was the Ram up from 512k to 2GB, the Keyboards a bit too small and so is the screen but actually its a capable system.
The AspireOne has a good screen size and bigger keyboard and a horrible Linux version, that does run ubuntu again with 1.5gb ram which almost makes up for the very slow SSD. both systems have virtualbox and running a 2000 image performance is more than good enough.
One thing that did impress me was the AspireOnes ability to run OSX my old HP laptop with a Celeron 1.4Ghz CPU used to triple boot XP Home, OSX and Ubuntu but the USB ports died on it, so I salvaged the HDD and put it in an external USB drive case. Of the 3 installs Ubuntu adjusted to the new hardware with very little effort, just needed an edit on menu.lst to find its boot partition, OSX really surprised me it flys very very responsive, but with two issues the WIfI and the Sound the native wireless card isn't supported by OSX however a ralink chipset usb stick (Edimax) has drivers and soon I had working wifi. I did look at the sound issue but didn't solve it though I think it is possible to get the sound working on some if not all versions of OSX. IF Apple made a Netbook based on the AspireOne it would be very nice. XP couldn't make the adjustment to booting from a USB drive although I think it's possible googling round BartPE might lead to a solution with a new install.
With enough ram both systems can run XP well, however I don't have the desire to do so, the ubuntu and xandros operating systems do pretty much all I require and Virtualbox handles any windows stuff for me. Only niggle with 2000 is the lack of a driver for the WebCam on the aspireone.
Not having an optical drive built in isn't a problem my HP donated its DVD writer which went into an External Case from Hongkong (cost about £10) so yes I can burn DVD's with a Netbook. I don't really see a performance issue, compared to my old HP it was fast enough and the Netbooks are fast enough, the AspireOne actually has a faster processor.
For me running a linux operating system means a huge supply of Legal software and no major security issues, with no real malware or virus issues on Linux it means i can get on and do what i want to do, where with Windows I need to do regular virus and malware scans and keep them up to date and I see no advantage in paying for commercial software when Linux gives me what I need.
OSX is quite nice, but its not really got the free software that I use, Ive never got much beyond the proof it works before going back to Linux.
In some cases yes, especially if the follow up revised edition to flyfishing is in print, and Google's practically giving away the earlier book. For current authors the market place has just been opened up from whats currently in print, to that plus a huge chunk of that has gone before and theres almost certain to be more books out of print rather than in print.
The other thing is lets say i'm the son of J R Hartley and Googles now publishing my dads old book, as his only living heir to his estate I should collect my dads book royalties. So I get in touch with Google and ask them for the money, Google quite naturally asks for evidence that I'm rightly due the 67% due to the author and I now have to prove my case. now that will cost me time and money lets say $50 I wouldn't be surprised if it's more but ok Google accept my claim and hand over a check for $2.64 since they have been selling it for $1 and so far 4 people have ordered it. Will they tell me the sales prior to my spending the money?
What's quite interesting is what's going to happen to the authors cut when either the author isn't found or decides google can stick their $2.64 I guess they will have to hang on to it and it's likely the vast majority is likely to go unclaimed. Individual titles may make a very small contribution to Google's income but then haven't they made billions on a few cents a click from adwords. The revenue from this project could be quite sizable. Unless they give the content away for free and then most people will be happy except lawyers publishing companies and the authors or representatives. Maybe Google would play nice but didn't the authors of IE get stitched up thinking they would get a percentage of sales from IE and Microsoft gave it away for free.
I'm talking about getting the best performance out of a given PC, which means ideally loading is close to 100% cpu usage with no paging required.
in the ideal situation the CPU uses every processor cycle and your still using physical ram, in this situation your task is running as fast as physically possible on that particular CPU. You could load your CPU even higher but thats just going to make your tasks take longer. If you haven't got enough ram then your going to use the page file and then the CPU is going to have to sit waiting unable to continue and that page cycle is very very slow. Any excess ram may as well be used as a cache or Ram disk. Simple terms you need enough ram to keep all the tasks in memory and off the HDD.
well theres a few reasons most of which don't matter for about 99% of video files.
The command line gives you a full set of options some of which don't exist or are well hidden in the gui. which is understandable, the Gui simplifies things and if it doesn't then people bitch about it being overly complex.
You can easily pipe the output to another command perhaps to convert the video file to something a bit more useable.
Debugging the playback, a Gui tends to crash and burn without giving you much of a clue of what went wrong. The commandline will output error messages to the console or you can redirect to a file for logging.
Maximum efficiency, the GUI adds overhead to the process which may result in your PC choking on the input file.
The ability to reuse the code within another program, theres a fair number of GUI's which are just front ends to command line programs or bring a number of functions together into a Gui.
An old favourite of mine on the Amiga was Dopus or Directory opus 4 (essentially a file manager) but it's best feature was the ability to set up a button or action to do whatever you wanted it to do using external programs.
Mostly a Gui will be good enough to do what you want to do. But for example I had an australian.ts file that had been recorded to a hdd on a set top box, (It was running Linux although I only knew this because i'd salvaged the HDD) mplayer on the command line was the only thing I could find that could play the HD content flawlessly. Everything else either dropped frames or crashed and burned. Australia's got its own unique DVB broadcast format.
Getting a bit more on topic VLC has some interesting tricks of its own, the ability to transcode and stream media is a good one. You can reduce the bandwidth requirements to something your network can handle.
Chances are your Gui program either uses the command line or embeds an object or calls a library which it then passes the files too. It's done all the time. Did you know firefox can play flash.swf files without HTML,? well actually strictly it doesn't, it passes the.swf files to the flash plugin and it then gets to use the whole of the browser window instead of being constrained to the area normally specified in the html file. But essentially that flash plugin is a command line program but you get a gui to run it, firefox is just used as a container.
might come as a surprise but there tends to be more cellular phone masts in higher density usage area's, Too many callers they split the cell and lower the power. Thats the cell bit in cell phone
yeah that makes perfect sense apart from mobile carriers are selling usb dongles to plug into your laptop and give you a hspda connection. What's the difference between tethering a phone and using the usb dongle?
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Interestingly most torrents you struggle to get people to upload to 1. Doesn't that mean you uploaded 1 copy if your ratio is 1 and your responsible for 1 Copy.
"and cost several of them their jobs as a result." Do you mean the Police officers who were not legally allowed to be members of the BNP?
If anyone loses their jobs and feels they have grounds for claiming unfair dismissal, they are fully entitled to pursue a claim for wrongful dismissal.
I've far more sympathy for the victims of the BNP than the members to be honest, at least BNP members had a choice in the matter.
"Activity could include mapping out routes"
better not tell em about openstreetmap.org then
i'm not thinking of a grid system as such but an improvement to gustavo's encoding of latitude and longitude into a single base 32 number.
All my idea is that its a bit silly to have to refine from the planet each time you want to state a latitude and longitude.
As a crude analogy if men are typically between 5 and 6 feet in height and you had to measure each one to be recorded by someone else it wouldnt be long before you went from saying 5 foot 7 inches to 6 inches 8, 5 , 6 foot 2 both the 5 foot and inches become redundant its nearly always 5 foot something although there are exceptions.
I'm not suggesting an alternative to latitude and longitude just a simpler representation. A rule stating if its the usa then we know the limits for the usa and we don't need to say them any more. Obviously The smaller the known given the less you need to calculate and state. A small place such as Monaco might need only a 4 or 5 digit encoding to be at the same accuracy as a 7 digit code for the united states.
All it really is is a simple way to give an address or other location without having to remember a 12 digit or longer sequence of numbers and with it being encoded latitudes and longitudes you don't need any bodys permission to use the code and you also don't need somebody to look it up for you since its pretty easy to locate a latitude and longitude on a mapping system such as google or your own gps.
doesn't need doing, theres some parts where the police entering an estate is notified to certain interested residents automatically
One big problem faced around the world is actually identifying where something is. Addresses postcodes / zipcodes are not perfect they are quirky and arbitrary and worst of all usually require some form of license to use. Knowing the GPS Latitude and Longitude you can pinpoint anywhere on the planet. but they are hard to remember, if you know them at all.
There are some systems available that can solve this some are patented or otherwise closed to free use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash is an open system which encodes a latitude and longitude to a base 32 number (which is just an alphanumeric string). The longer the String the more precise the location is.
An unfortunate drawback is the length of the code is perhaps a little too long to remember easily and be useful.
However a shorter code could be used based on look up tables. kind of similar to http://xkcd.com/426/ you could define an area by the bounding box its contained within. If your within the USA for example you wouldnt need to find the approximate location of the USA since thats already known the bounding area would be defined by a bounding box of the nearest whole degree or a smaller fraction that completely encloses the area of interest. If the USA was still too large an area you could define an area such as california defining the bounding box as the latitudes and longitudes that completely enclose California a Neighboring state would use a similar bounding box which would overlap to a certain extent but it doesnt really matter that a place could be enclosed in two or more bounding boxes since you would use the one defined for your state. probably there is no need to define the bounding box greater than .01 of a degree and generally 0.1 degrees would be close enough.
This would then shorten the code to something most people can remember and keep it free since this concept is derived from the geohash algorithm I would expect it to be free to use by anyone who wishes to use it without payment.
well the initial ppd call gprs didn't work because I didnt have /dev/rfcomm0 automatically configured (usually I'll find it in my bash history if I've been using it) which is why I switched to 2000. The VM was already configured to run the modem in fact the software is supplied with the phone and installs pretty much automatically. configuring consists of pressing the connect button waiting a while and it coming back error 600 and other obscure variants and once in a while registering computer and then connected) In windows the connection doesn't really give any feedback but in the terminal on ubuntu you see the whole transaction and normally its a failure to be assigned a network address. luckily the vodaphone network switch caused an automated sms to be sent saying welcome to vodaphone which then forced me to set the network manually or pay international roaming fee's.
I don't know why but usually the key to success is to browse to any web page that is outside of three on the mobile and then try and initiate the connection and disconnecting the phone from the network and making it re-register seems to help too. Failed connection attempts are the norm from my experience and connections tend to be dropped frequently. Worse still is trying to connect on the move I tried once on a train journey i managed to connect at just about every stop on the journey and lose it as the train pulled out. So much for posing on the train browsing the net.
The reason why yesterday it was just 4 pages loaded was because the connection dropped.
Another problem I've found was at home I had a great 3G signal unfortunately I also had an Excellent G signal so the phone was prone to shifting me on to the slower g network rather than the speedier 3G. You can't configure it not to do that unfortunately.
I like 3 and to be fair it's not just them T-mobile for example is also flakey on connections and closes most ports too if I recall correctly with 3 they are a bit more open.
Three gives me free Skype on my mobile and Skype give me an incoming number, most people who call me via skype get voice mail... Other great mobile phone services such as mobile tv give me half a music video and another go at reconnecting... If I'm sounding jaded it's because I am and I'm a technology nut I love my gadgets but so many are just not quite reliable enough.
I guess I'm an early adopter and used to things not quite working out as they should, if these services were rolled out to a broader audience the customer supports going to be hell, joe in Bangalore is going to have a lot of irate customers with varying hardware screaming at him with both sides having mutually incomprehensible accents.
It kind of puts me in mind of Brazil, i'm sure some technology works flawlessly somewhere... but thats never the stuff that gets remembered.
actually have you tried it? (It's not just Eclipse) It's a fully integrated IDE you can build test get code hints the usual . listofoptions sort of thing debug run in your browser or standalone flash player (debug standalone flash player if you want to debug). If thats marginally netter than notepad you must be using a different notepad.
If you have tried Eclipse before and found it missing a thick manual I can relate to that, I had that experience before trying to code java with it. Being dumped in an IDE with no idea of the workflow is frustrating however the flex plugin environment along with a few tutorials from adobe and elsewhere soon get you in the swing of things.
(parden the pun). It's a capable IDE that enables you to get stuck in.
Honestly try it, you may even find a few posts on an ubuntu forum which details how to get it installed, the flex plugin defaults are no good for ubuntu at least. partially since ubuntu ships an older incompatible version of eclipse.
Three you have to love em, I am roaming in ireland but with 'like home' i get the "same" service I get in the UK.
well yesterday i got an obscure message from my bank and decided to go online using my mobile. First problem was my netbook runs ubuntu and I had forgotten how to bind the comm port (since fixed now my netbook knows what device to use and the channel to bind). which left me the Virtualbox option.
So I duly booted my Image of 2000 and passed the usb to the image, tried to connect and failed a few times rebooted the image and the phone. Then found that 3 had passed me over to vodaphone and its 3 a meg rates (rather than the 50p a day £2.50 a week or £5 a month rates). So then had to set the network manually, the 3 3g signal was about 2 bars compared to vodaphones 3bars.
Eventually I managed to connect and join 3's network. I immediately went to the Banks site logged in and eventually got to see my account balances and read one message. Data transfered about 1.8 Meg (5 approximately if I'd have been on Vodaphone and 50 cents on my one day all you can eat plan - if your determined enough. I guess my bank using flash isn't ideal for browsing using a mobile phone.
The speed was a quite reasonable 115k a sec but latency seemed high, I am old enough to have had a 14k400 modem so its better than that and twice the speed of a normal dialup modem with a good connection (actually close to 4 times faster 33k reckoned to be very good from my dialup days.
Time taken to retrieve 4 webpages including the messing about approximately 1 hour (more rather than less).
So yeah being in the middle of nowhere and being able to get online and cheaply at a pretty reasonable connection speed is useful, but the downside of being unable to get a network address and a multitude of other failures really means for me the mobile networks either don't want to have me connect on a regular basis or can't have me connect on a regular basis. With enough determination it's possible to get some use from it (I once got a 115meg download although it took about 3 hours to do so and it was a failure it was a 121meg file). I'd need to see a lot more reliability before I'd consider mobile broadband for my main connection for the internet. In fact dialup would probably be better having a slow but generally reliable connection.
I've yet to meet anybody who is entirely satisfied with mobile broadband, do they exist?
Actually that sounds similar to the night vision problem iraqi tanks had in the first iraq war I think it was. The Challenger tank has a system which allows the tank operator to be able to see the heat from the recent tracks left by a tank in a field with no need to illuminate anything. The iraqi's had an infrared system which essentially to the challenger tank crews looked like they were shining searchlights on the battle field. totally giving away the iraqi positions. This meant the night vision systems were useless in the iraqi tanks and left them blind or dead.
you make some interesting points, and maybe I'm not typical but I tend to use google news for old stories usually and the linked pages are usually pretty poorly designed.
My main news site other than Slashdot is the BBC. I'll generally find something interesting and then go through the top 10 most read and the top 5
most emailed. The only time that goes wrong is when a story is actually a sports piece and then the top 10 links are not on the page. now that top 10 although it tends to promote top 10 stories is reflecting popular interest not the publishers agenda. If I'm really bored I may look at the technology pages. Sometimes I'll avoid a story if its something i really have no interest in such as Jade Goody.
I guess the BBC gets a good break by being the default news RSS feed for the UK with Firefox , I'm sure there are others but I haven't looked.
Of the many other news sites I have visited few have kept me for longer than it takes to get through the news article I came for, Sometimes I will click on other stories if they seem to be interesting but mostly I find myself drowning in advertising and looking for the door.
If AP want me to read their stories they could make an RSS Feed, rotating the links to different sites featuring the content, or perhaps the site which posted the story on AP (now that sounds like a winner) I really havent got the time or inclination to put a feed up for each news outlet on my browser.
Oh one more thing the BBC is good at is linking to other sites with related news. They don't seem to mind if I look at other news sources and thats actually added value and an incentive to stick with the BBC.
A nice extension to firefox might be an Rss feed of RSS feeds. so theres one link on the tool bar but a selection of stories from different feeds say expand across 10 feeds dropping 10 menu's or perhaps a number of favourites at the top level and a newspapers sub menu american , uk , australian .. then spliting into individual sites. Bonus points if the extension moves feeds higher up the chain if i use them more often. ...
It could actually present several feeds from a single site if I decide i want technology news. Or web comics or
now see how google doesn't need to be the first port of call but other sites have to work together or someone just mash up the existing feeds to syndicate on merit rather than just who got lucky in the RSS feed install.
I am not a linguist however it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable hypothesis, one of the problems in translation is finding reasonably equivalent phrases between languages.
Within any individual language there are specialized vocabularies that people outside the profession have very little grasp of, the language of stockbrokers or software engineers or marketing for example.
I believe thats referred to the domain of discourse. Within different languages there are subtle differences between what we would think of as universal concepts. For example the word you in Japanese has maybe 7 roughly equivalent words, the difference is directly related to the relative positions of the two speakers in relation to each other and society. In Polish for example there is a similar difference where there are formal and familiar forms of discourse. If your being respectful then you use the third party form of verbs. As nonnative speakers we are liable to trample all over that difference and may be considered rude or ignorant.
I believe 0 was late to arrive in mathematics but it made a considerable impact on thinking about numbers. Of course there is a tendency of languages to assimilate words from other languages sometimes with a direct relation such as the word bungalow which comes from india or a different meaning such as 'handy' which I believe the Germans use for 'Cell phone' or 'Mobile'. I've not even touched on English idiom which can really baffle non native speakers yet can be extremely vivid concepts for native speakers.
The problem with the hypothesis is that if I were fluent enough to recognize a conceptual difference in one language and were able to convey that concept to you in English or another language then that concept is no longer constrained by its original language.
However the essential idea that language is a framework in which we express our idea's is quite reasonable, the idea that frameworks differ between languages and individuals also seems reasonable, however these frameworks are not fixed and can be expanded on. So given two differing frameworks it is likely that a difference in the concepts as expressed in two different languages may lead to different approaches which may yield different results. Chances are that if it's important enough the language frameworks will be modified to share the concept. Obviously change is ongoing so differences will become more subtle, but it's obvious that if you talked about working with computers for example to someone from the 1900's the concept computer used to be a man who worked with mathematics and windows were glass panels set into walls. I've no doubt you could teach the modern day concepts to someone from the 1900's but then your modifying his frame of reference.
As a final thought I'm reminded of a scifi story where a stricken spacecraft needed instruction from earth to be able to avoid disaster but the delay in sending a communication and receiving the answer meant there wouldnt be enough time to avoid disaster, the problem was solved by the presidents wife who told them to speak at the same time in her field of expertise gossiping nothing would get done if they waited for one party to relay one story before they related their own.
you must be new here, or have a short memory
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/0039238.shtml
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/200201.shtml
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/20/2112208.shtml
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/05/02/0049225.shtml
http://www.itpro.co.uk/605142/ms-ooxml-a-format-without-a-future
http://www.itpro.co.uk/605496/iso-rejects-anti-microsoft-office-open-standards-appeal
"The International Standards Organisation has rejected appeals from four countries to deny Microsoft's Office Open XML backing as an international standard.
OOXML won approval from the ISO in April, following a controversial fast-track review process which was plagued with claims of voting irregularities, and accusations of technical flaws in the standard itself."
page 2 of the last link is a hoot as well http://www.itpro.co.uk/605142/ms-ooxml-a-format-without-a-future/2
"ISO ratification was achieved at considerable cost. The reputation of the ISO was compromised, as was that of Microsoft. ISO ratification was achieved amid widespread allegations of misbehaviour and undue political influence, which was noted by the likes of the European Commission. Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner, recently said: "If voting in the standard-setting context is influenced less by the technical merits of the technology but rather by side agreements, inducements, package deals, reciprocal agreements, or commercial pressure ... then these risk falling foul of the competition rules."
The process has also adversely affected the work of the ISO. Martin Bryan, a senior ISO/IEC Convenor, who reported that the fast-tracking of OOXML "has made it almost impossible to continue with our work within ISO. The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 (OOXML) as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots."
"More than one commentator was reminded of the famous remark by Tom Lehrer, mathematics lecturer and sixties satirist, who said that "satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.""
Do I need say any more
Eclipse Ganymede the other IDE is free as well,
I've got it installed and working on Ubuntu I've not had time to do much with it yet but i've tried a few simple projects.
don't think there are too many restrictions its an alpha though and time limited to about 8 months I think.
looks like fun anyway.
If you take a look at the demo theres the lovely statement save your presentation as Powerpoint 2007 an ISO Standard.
sounds really open
isn't that about the same as seven degree's of Kevin Bacon, even as someone who has never taken an illegal drug, you probably are associated with someone who uses and just one degree further away than someone who smokes. An end user is unlikely to be directly connected with someone who smuggles for a living.
Heck I know people who use windows and they have never even met Bill Gates.
The BBC had Live coverage of the Irish budget today - but unfortunately I wasn't allowed to watch it on line what with being in Ireland.
No worries though I just had to turn on my Satellite box and watch the BBC TV broadcast instead.
I've a couple of netbooks the EEE 7inch and the Aspire one 9inch, once in desktop mode the Xandros based EEE is quite nice, and for some reason the networking seems to work better than with ubuntu on it.
I've a Technomate 9101 super Sat Box (also runs Linux) which can send a stream over the LAN you just click on the web interface and you get a Mp3 playlist, which you then run with VLC on the system your using. with the stock xandross its flawless it's like having a digital Tv Card in the EEE unfortunately with ubuntu the results were not satisfactory (breaking up regularly). The one thing I changed from stock was the Ram up from 512k to 2GB, the Keyboards a bit too small and so is the screen but actually its a capable system.
The AspireOne has a good screen size and bigger keyboard and a horrible Linux version, that does run ubuntu again with 1.5gb ram which almost makes up for the very slow SSD.
both systems have virtualbox and running a 2000 image performance is more than good enough.
One thing that did impress me was the AspireOnes ability to run OSX my old HP laptop with a Celeron 1.4Ghz CPU used to triple boot XP Home, OSX and Ubuntu but the USB ports died on it, so I salvaged the HDD and put it in an external USB drive case. Of the 3 installs Ubuntu adjusted to the new hardware with very little effort, just needed an edit on menu.lst to find its boot partition, OSX really surprised me it flys very very responsive, but with two issues the WIfI and the Sound the native wireless card isn't supported by OSX however a ralink chipset usb stick (Edimax) has drivers and soon I had working wifi. I did look at the sound issue but didn't solve it though I think it is possible to get the sound working on some if not all versions of OSX. IF Apple made a Netbook based on the AspireOne it would be very nice. XP couldn't make the adjustment to booting from a USB drive although I think it's possible googling round BartPE might lead to a solution with a new install.
With enough ram both systems can run XP well, however I don't have the desire to do so, the ubuntu and xandros operating systems do pretty much all I require and Virtualbox handles any windows stuff for me. Only niggle with 2000 is the lack of a driver for the WebCam on the aspireone.
Not having an optical drive built in isn't a problem my HP donated its DVD writer which went into an External Case from Hongkong (cost about £10) so yes I can burn DVD's with a Netbook. I don't really see a performance issue, compared to my old HP it was fast enough and the Netbooks are fast enough, the AspireOne actually has a faster processor.
For me running a linux operating system means a huge supply of Legal software and no major security issues, with no real malware or virus issues on Linux it means i can get on and do what i want to do, where with Windows I need to do regular virus and malware scans and keep them up to date and I see no advantage in paying for commercial software when Linux gives me what I need.
OSX is quite nice, but its not really got the free software that I use, Ive never got much beyond the proof it works before going back to Linux.
In some cases yes, especially if the follow up revised edition to flyfishing is in print, and Google's practically giving away the earlier book. For current authors the market place has just been opened up from whats currently in print, to that plus a huge chunk of that has gone before and theres almost certain to be more books out of print rather than in print.
The other thing is lets say i'm the son of J R Hartley and Googles now publishing my dads old book, as his only living heir to his estate I should collect my dads book royalties. So I get in touch with Google and ask them for the money, Google quite naturally asks for evidence that I'm rightly due the 67% due to the author and I now have to prove my case. now that will cost me time and money lets say $50 I wouldn't be surprised if it's more but ok Google accept my claim and hand over a check for $2.64 since they have been selling it for $1 and so far 4 people have ordered it. Will they tell me the sales prior to my spending the money?
What's quite interesting is what's going to happen to the authors cut when either the author isn't found or decides google can stick their $2.64 I guess they will have to hang on to it and it's likely the vast majority is likely to go unclaimed. Individual titles may make a very small contribution to Google's income but then haven't they made billions on a few cents a click from adwords. The revenue from this project could be quite sizable. Unless they give the content away for free and then most people will be happy except lawyers publishing companies and the authors or representatives. Maybe Google would play nice but didn't the authors of IE get stitched up thinking they would get a percentage of sales from IE and Microsoft gave it away for free.
I'm talking about getting the best performance out of a given PC, which means ideally loading is close to 100% cpu usage with no paging required.
in the ideal situation the CPU uses every processor cycle and your still using physical ram, in this situation your task is running as fast as physically possible on that particular CPU. You could load your CPU even higher but thats just going to make your tasks take longer. If you haven't got enough ram then your going to use the page file and then the CPU is going to have to sit waiting unable to continue and that page cycle is very very slow. Any excess ram may as well be used as a cache or Ram disk.
Simple terms you need enough ram to keep all the tasks in memory and off the HDD.
Why use the command line instead of a gui?
well theres a few reasons most of which don't matter for about 99% of video files.
The command line gives you a full set of options some of which don't exist or are well hidden in the gui.
which is understandable, the Gui simplifies things and if it doesn't then people bitch about it being overly complex.
You can easily pipe the output to another command perhaps to convert the video file to something a bit more useable.
Debugging the playback, a Gui tends to crash and burn without giving you much of a clue of what went wrong. The commandline will output error messages to the console or you can redirect to a file for logging.
Maximum efficiency, the GUI adds overhead to the process which may result in your PC choking on the input file.
The ability to reuse the code within another program, theres a fair number of GUI's which are just front ends to command line programs or bring a number of functions together into a Gui.
An old favourite of mine on the Amiga was Dopus or Directory opus 4 (essentially a file manager) but it's best feature was the ability to set up a button or action to do whatever you wanted it to do using external programs.
Mostly a Gui will be good enough to do what you want to do. But for example I had an australian .ts file that had been recorded to a hdd on a set top box, (It was running Linux although I only knew this because i'd salvaged the HDD)
mplayer on the command line was the only thing I could find that could play the HD content flawlessly. Everything else either dropped frames or crashed and burned.
Australia's got its own unique DVB broadcast format.
Getting a bit more on topic VLC has some interesting tricks of its own, the ability to transcode and stream media is a good one. You can reduce the bandwidth requirements to something your network can handle.
Chances are your Gui program either uses the command line or embeds an object or calls a library which it then passes the files too. .swf files without HTML,? well actually strictly it doesn't, it passes the .swf files to the flash plugin and it then gets to use the whole of the browser window instead of being constrained to the area normally specified in the html file. But essentially that flash plugin is a command line program but you get a gui to run it, firefox is just used as a container.
It's done all the time. Did you know firefox can play flash
might come as a surprise but there tends to be more cellular phone masts in higher density usage area's, Too many callers they split the cell and lower the power. Thats the cell bit in cell phone
yeah that makes perfect sense apart from mobile carriers are selling usb dongles to plug into your laptop and give you a hspda connection. What's the difference between tethering a phone and using the usb dongle?
probably wrong but this post might get me 2 achievements 3 if i get modded funny for some reason
Libby Hoeler maybe, as far as I know the video's have been floating round the net for 6-9 years now and chances are will always be around.