Thanks to all who suggested to stick with notebooks. I've been doing the same for many years but found it more useful to use the page-a-day diary as it has some relatively intuitive indexing built in. It's possibly because of this advance that I would like to move to something electronic. I can certainly appreciate the benefits to the traditional approach, it has worked well for me and clearly works well for many others. However, I do feel that my notes would become more useful to me, particularly as I want to try and use GTD, if I can use electronic mechanisms to integrate them into a number of different tools.
Although I can't remember specifically which Middle Eastern country it was, one of in Richard Dawkins documentaries he did go and speak to some people. I think it was either Palestine or Israel.
To use windows as an example. You wouldn't expect the usage of windows to change that much during your usage of a particular version. XP, probably my favorite (if such a term can be applied to windows), stuck with basically the same layout in terms of desktop, menus and directory structures. It never evolved substantially throughout its life. Ubuntu on the other hand (and a whole host of other GNU/Linux based distributions), can change it's look and feel substantially between different versions (ie, every 6 months). I don't think that windows would have been a success (in commercial terms) if it changed so much so quickly.
Whilst I accept that there are very good reasons to move forward, the issue I see is that not enough effort is put into keeping existing users happy. We want to keep up-to-date but we don't want our experience of the system to change too much. When Ubuntu was still using Gnome 2, you got a fairly nice progression. Gnome 2 improved but did so quite slowly. You also got a chance to say yes or no to wizzy 3d effects. I, and I suspect many others were happy with a slower improvement and this is probably better than the occasional but much bigger jumps that MS would have done with windows.
You can always tell when a politician is lying, his/her lips move. They would have said anything to get elected. Whilst I accept that the world is not static and that pledges such as these cannot always be honored, you do feel that there was little intention to keep to them. The problem is that they're all at it. No wonder we distrust politicians so much, they really are lying to us about these things all the time.
I think it's simply because this function is built into modern TVs. When the PS3 was launched, there was no such thing as a smart TV so being able to stream on the PS3 was a useful feature. Sony just decided to remove an unnecessary piece of s/w from the system.
Whilst I can't comment on the political issues around the success of betamax, I don't think people manage to compare the situation very accurately. Sony continued innovating with betamax for quite some time and were often first to market with features. All betamax videos had excellent shuttle search function, due to the fact that the tape could remain spooled. Whilst VHS would do this eventually, it took some time. When I first had a VHS video, it seemed like it was constantly spooling and unspooling the tape. Another feature I liked from later models was peep search. This allowed the recorded to start playback of a tape whilst you were doing a ff or rew. I had a VHS that could do the same thing but it took about 5 seconds to spool the tape before it would show a picture. Sony also allowed you to put index points on a tape, very useful when you had 3 or 4 TV episodes on a tape. Betamax was the first to introduce hi-fi (not just stereo) sound. In general, betamax offered features that were ahead of VHS or never available on VHS. I feel I should point out as well that an L-500 tape was a two-hour tape and an L-750 was a three-hour tape, at least that's what I had in the UK. Quality wise, whilst I would generally agree there wasn't a lot of difference between the two, I would still say that at any one time, a new beta was better quality than the equivalent VHS. One last thing, I saw Sanyo and Telefunken betamax players.
Whilst there are many aspects about the film I, Robot that I have problems with, this very issue is covered when the female scientist is scared because Wil Smith decides to take manual control of the car they're in.
There's no doubt that Nintendo have made a few mistakes with the Wii U. For a start, they needed a better selection of games available at launch. The top tier games (such as Pikmin 3 which is brilliant) have only recently started to appear. Whilst I understand that Nintendo would want to launch a range of games over several years, there has been too long a wait to get to games such as Mario Kart and a new Super Mario game.
However, Nintendo have shown with the Wii U that they are still prepared to take risks when it comes to their offerings and try to develop new ways to play games. I can't yet be sure that the Wii U controller is the best way to play a game because I don't think there have been games out yet that really exploit it but at least they're trying.
Sony and MS however could not have come out with more vanilla consoles. Both are basically glorified PCs. Whilst I'm sure there is some business logic behind this, I would like to know where the next generation of cell processor is? Where are the new and clever control mechanisms? Sony would seem to be churning out a slightly modified dual shock (presumably so you can't use your old ones) and MS are basically using Kenect again. So, PCs and the same controllers that were used before.
For me, I've yet to see anything from Sony that will let them loose my credit card details again. From MS, I get the impression they're not interested in attracting new gamers, they want new customers to use all the non-gaming services as all the existing customers are assumed will want to convert.
I think the money saved will be lost elsewhere. Like it or not, a large part of car ownership is aspirational. This move will make your car more like a utility and you'll probably replace it less often as a consequence. After all, what's the point of having a high performance engine if your computer is going to pull away from traffic lights in an economical way. That's not to say I don't think this is a good thing, it will make roads much more safe. However, the concern I have is regarding regulation. If there is an accident, who is liable? You, the guy who serviced the car, the company that built it? And thinking along these lines, who will be authorised to service the car and what controls will exist to prevent people using the car if it's not serviced or not serviced by an approved service company?
There are a number of issues with other religions. Fundamentalism often means that there is more likely to be violence. I'm not sure I've heard of fundamentalist Quakers but I suppose it's possible. The issues that normally come about are because of very strict adherence to your own belief and the in inability to tolerate anyone who does not conform.
With respect to your comment on Communists, this reminds me of something Steven Weinberg said (although I heard it first from Richard Dawkins) - "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion". The point of this is that the communists that killed religious people were not doing so because of a religious belief, they were simply bad people. When a scientologist does something bad, they may or may not be a bad person but its possible that they feel compelled to do something bad as a consequence of their belief.
There's a reason why this sort of belief only dates back so far, It's because of the discoveries of science. You go back more than a hundred years (and definitely before Darwin) and people really didn't know how old the world (or universe) was. As science has revealed that the earth is far older than the bible would have you believe, so Christians (and I presume some others from other religions) have become less comfortable and started to become more vocal.
I thought we were in this period now? The problem is that we come across new sources of fossil fuels and that just puts things off again. I think the discovery of these new sources of gas has caused multiple problems. I can't see mankind changing to sustainable sources of energy until we've burnt all the forms of fossil fuels we can get our hands on.
I don't think this policy will ever see the light of day.
I expect it to be as successful as plan cigarette packs and minimum price alcohol and will be postponed due to the practical issues involved in implementing it (some of which have already been mentioned). If it does come in, it will be as half-hearted and flawed as we're expecting it to be. Parents will still need to supervise their kids and they will still have access to whatever they want to see. The best this filter will achieve is to make it a bit more difficult to find certain material but I don't think it will put anyone off.
Although this seems like a sensible approach, it really isn't. When you choose a database, there are many factors that will affect your decision. One of those will be features. Your approach would basically prevent you from using the features for which you're paying. If you ignore those features, all you're doing is reducing your database to a simple data store.
I was surprised to read some of your comments. When I've dealt with database performance problems, it's often not an inefficient piece of SQL that's the cause but the back and forth of vast quantities of data between the database and the app layer that is the problem. Only a change to the law of physics is going to fix that, or doing the processing in the right place. All modern databases are a lot more than simple data stores, they are also data processing engines.
Sorry, although I can't say I'm a fan of the word either, it is what manufacturers are calling them, at least that's the case with my car. And, again, although it's a horrible word, it's name is fairly appropriate. In my car the system manages the radio, cd changer, ipod, sat nav and various other configuration elements for the car (do the mirrors fold in when the cars locked, how long do the interior lights stay on, etc). What would you call it if not infotainment?
Although I'm sure there is some truth to your comments, it really is not that simple. Firstly, the days of a supplier swaying a decision through sweetners is pretty much over. I can't say it doesn't still happen but it doesn't happen as much as you might thing. If you look at the database engine alone, then there are some valid and reasonable alternatives to Oracle - IBM DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, PostgresSQL. Superficially they provide similar functionality. Large organisations quite often use more than one of them. However, anyone who knows much about databases know how substantially different they are. Oracle for example has it's own flavour of the SQL language as well as PL/SQL. Worth mentioning that you can also execute JAVA inside the database as well should you want to. Each of the DBs will have some alternative and it's not so easy to move that code between engines. Clustering is a good way to see the differences between the products. Oracle has something called RAC which attempts (sometimes pretty well) to make a database simultaneously available on several (potentially many) hosts at the same time. DB2 also supports clustering but does so by partitioning the data between different nodes. MS SQL Server supports basic failover clustering. I can't comment on Postgress or Sybase but it's clear that everyone has their own way of doing things. Another area where Oracle differentiates itself is through a number of other features - ASM for storage management, Oracle Application Server for application development and deployment. After all that, there is also products like Exadata.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that Oracle is superior (although it's the DB I know the best), but there are numerous substantial differences that dictate the decision an organisation makes, beyond cost or golf outings. More importantly, you'll find that the reason why a company will stay with a product is because of their investment in that product. It's not easy to lift and drop an application from Oracle into Postgress if you've taken advantage of the features. Making the move from one product to another could take a large organisation a decade to achieve and still find itself with pockets using the 'old' product.
I don't think you would. In principle, MS want you to have a decent internet connection because they want you to see the Xbox as more than just a games console. At the very least, they want you to take advantage of multi-player gaming but most likely they also want you to take advantage of the non-gaming aspects of the console. To be frank, I think they're pretty much saying that if you don't have a reliable internet service, they don't want you as a customer. Pretty arrogant I agree but I think that's along the right lines.
Is it really though? Whilst there's some similarities between the two, as well as a fairly well publicized legal case, the similarities are with only a few plot elements. There is an awful lot about the two that are different. At best, you might Soldier as the 'short story' on which Terminator was based but it's pretty clear that the writer of the film used the story as a jumping off point. In reality, it's much more likely that Cameron hadn't even considered Soldier when he wrote Terminator. Chances are he was influenced as much by any number of other time travel stories.
I read the book a few weeks before seeing the film. In the book there's no suggestion that Deckard was a replicant and the same goes for the original cut of the film. Not only that, the continuity isn't a problem, despite the origami unicorn being found at the end.
I've enjoyed all the versions of the film though and I don't think that Deckard is a replicant, despite the very subtle implications that he might be. I won't go into it all now but:-
1. His boss had known him for a while, he certainly wasn't new.
2. He apparently had a life
3. He had a home
4. He had a history including the photos etc.
5. Deckard displays no obvious Nexus abilities.
Whilst each of these elements might have been a part of a set-up, could that be said for them all? You're talking about cooperation from a whole load of people, including the LA police. Would they really allow someone who had the potential to do such damage into the force?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to all who suggested to stick with notebooks. I've been doing the same for many years but found it more useful to use the page-a-day diary as it has some relatively intuitive indexing built in. It's possibly because of this advance that I would like to move to something electronic. I can certainly appreciate the benefits to the traditional approach, it has worked well for me and clearly works well for many others. However, I do feel that my notes would become more useful to me, particularly as I want to try and use GTD, if I can use electronic mechanisms to integrate them into a number of different tools.
Although I can't remember specifically which Middle Eastern country it was, one of in Richard Dawkins documentaries he did go and speak to some people. I think it was either Palestine or Israel.
To use windows as an example. You wouldn't expect the usage of windows to change that much during your usage of a particular version. XP, probably my favorite (if such a term can be applied to windows), stuck with basically the same layout in terms of desktop, menus and directory structures. It never evolved substantially throughout its life. Ubuntu on the other hand (and a whole host of other GNU/Linux based distributions), can change it's look and feel substantially between different versions (ie, every 6 months). I don't think that windows would have been a success (in commercial terms) if it changed so much so quickly.
Whilst I accept that there are very good reasons to move forward, the issue I see is that not enough effort is put into keeping existing users happy. We want to keep up-to-date but we don't want our experience of the system to change too much. When Ubuntu was still using Gnome 2, you got a fairly nice progression. Gnome 2 improved but did so quite slowly. You also got a chance to say yes or no to wizzy 3d effects. I, and I suspect many others were happy with a slower improvement and this is probably better than the occasional but much bigger jumps that MS would have done with windows.
Do we have reports of other PCs being released? Where's the latest posting regarding a new Dell laptop?
You can always tell when a politician is lying, his/her lips move. They would have said anything to get elected. Whilst I accept that the world is not static and that pledges such as these cannot always be honored, you do feel that there was little intention to keep to them. The problem is that they're all at it. No wonder we distrust politicians so much, they really are lying to us about these things all the time.
I think it's simply because this function is built into modern TVs. When the PS3 was launched, there was no such thing as a smart TV so being able to stream on the PS3 was a useful feature. Sony just decided to remove an unnecessary piece of s/w from the system.
Whilst I can't comment on the political issues around the success of betamax, I don't think people manage to compare the situation very accurately. Sony continued innovating with betamax for quite some time and were often first to market with features. All betamax videos had excellent shuttle search function, due to the fact that the tape could remain spooled. Whilst VHS would do this eventually, it took some time. When I first had a VHS video, it seemed like it was constantly spooling and unspooling the tape. Another feature I liked from later models was peep search. This allowed the recorded to start playback of a tape whilst you were doing a ff or rew. I had a VHS that could do the same thing but it took about 5 seconds to spool the tape before it would show a picture. Sony also allowed you to put index points on a tape, very useful when you had 3 or 4 TV episodes on a tape. Betamax was the first to introduce hi-fi (not just stereo) sound. In general, betamax offered features that were ahead of VHS or never available on VHS. I feel I should point out as well that an L-500 tape was a two-hour tape and an L-750 was a three-hour tape, at least that's what I had in the UK. Quality wise, whilst I would generally agree there wasn't a lot of difference between the two, I would still say that at any one time, a new beta was better quality than the equivalent VHS. One last thing, I saw Sanyo and Telefunken betamax players.
Whilst there are many aspects about the film I, Robot that I have problems with, this very issue is covered when the female scientist is scared because Wil Smith decides to take manual control of the car they're in.
This is how the world will end. People frightened or otherwise wary that they won't be able to do anything without falling foul of an EULA.
However, Nintendo have shown with the Wii U that they are still prepared to take risks when it comes to their offerings and try to develop new ways to play games. I can't yet be sure that the Wii U controller is the best way to play a game because I don't think there have been games out yet that really exploit it but at least they're trying.
Sony and MS however could not have come out with more vanilla consoles. Both are basically glorified PCs. Whilst I'm sure there is some business logic behind this, I would like to know where the next generation of cell processor is? Where are the new and clever control mechanisms? Sony would seem to be churning out a slightly modified dual shock (presumably so you can't use your old ones) and MS are basically using Kenect again. So, PCs and the same controllers that were used before.
For me, I've yet to see anything from Sony that will let them loose my credit card details again. From MS, I get the impression they're not interested in attracting new gamers, they want new customers to use all the non-gaming services as all the existing customers are assumed will want to convert.
I think the money saved will be lost elsewhere. Like it or not, a large part of car ownership is aspirational. This move will make your car more like a utility and you'll probably replace it less often as a consequence. After all, what's the point of having a high performance engine if your computer is going to pull away from traffic lights in an economical way. That's not to say I don't think this is a good thing, it will make roads much more safe. However, the concern I have is regarding regulation. If there is an accident, who is liable? You, the guy who serviced the car, the company that built it? And thinking along these lines, who will be authorised to service the car and what controls will exist to prevent people using the car if it's not serviced or not serviced by an approved service company?
With respect to your comment on Communists, this reminds me of something Steven Weinberg said (although I heard it first from Richard Dawkins) - "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion". The point of this is that the communists that killed religious people were not doing so because of a religious belief, they were simply bad people. When a scientologist does something bad, they may or may not be a bad person but its possible that they feel compelled to do something bad as a consequence of their belief.
There's a reason why this sort of belief only dates back so far, It's because of the discoveries of science. You go back more than a hundred years (and definitely before Darwin) and people really didn't know how old the world (or universe) was. As science has revealed that the earth is far older than the bible would have you believe, so Christians (and I presume some others from other religions) have become less comfortable and started to become more vocal.
I can remember using an application that consolidated results from several engines so that you got results that were a bit more relevant.
I thought we were in this period now? The problem is that we come across new sources of fossil fuels and that just puts things off again. I think the discovery of these new sources of gas has caused multiple problems. I can't see mankind changing to sustainable sources of energy until we've burnt all the forms of fossil fuels we can get our hands on.
I don't think this policy will ever see the light of day. I expect it to be as successful as plan cigarette packs and minimum price alcohol and will be postponed due to the practical issues involved in implementing it (some of which have already been mentioned). If it does come in, it will be as half-hearted and flawed as we're expecting it to be. Parents will still need to supervise their kids and they will still have access to whatever they want to see. The best this filter will achieve is to make it a bit more difficult to find certain material but I don't think it will put anyone off.
Although this seems like a sensible approach, it really isn't. When you choose a database, there are many factors that will affect your decision. One of those will be features. Your approach would basically prevent you from using the features for which you're paying. If you ignore those features, all you're doing is reducing your database to a simple data store.
I was surprised to read some of your comments. When I've dealt with database performance problems, it's often not an inefficient piece of SQL that's the cause but the back and forth of vast quantities of data between the database and the app layer that is the problem. Only a change to the law of physics is going to fix that, or doing the processing in the right place. All modern databases are a lot more than simple data stores, they are also data processing engines.
Sorry, although I can't say I'm a fan of the word either, it is what manufacturers are calling them, at least that's the case with my car. And, again, although it's a horrible word, it's name is fairly appropriate. In my car the system manages the radio, cd changer, ipod, sat nav and various other configuration elements for the car (do the mirrors fold in when the cars locked, how long do the interior lights stay on, etc). What would you call it if not infotainment?
You may be right for Science Fiction but I suspect the record will go to something written by Shakespeare, Jane Austin or Dickens.
Where can I get such lighting systems?
Although I'm sure there is some truth to your comments, it really is not that simple. Firstly, the days of a supplier swaying a decision through sweetners is pretty much over. I can't say it doesn't still happen but it doesn't happen as much as you might thing. If you look at the database engine alone, then there are some valid and reasonable alternatives to Oracle - IBM DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, PostgresSQL. Superficially they provide similar functionality. Large organisations quite often use more than one of them. However, anyone who knows much about databases know how substantially different they are. Oracle for example has it's own flavour of the SQL language as well as PL/SQL. Worth mentioning that you can also execute JAVA inside the database as well should you want to. Each of the DBs will have some alternative and it's not so easy to move that code between engines. Clustering is a good way to see the differences between the products. Oracle has something called RAC which attempts (sometimes pretty well) to make a database simultaneously available on several (potentially many) hosts at the same time. DB2 also supports clustering but does so by partitioning the data between different nodes. MS SQL Server supports basic failover clustering. I can't comment on Postgress or Sybase but it's clear that everyone has their own way of doing things. Another area where Oracle differentiates itself is through a number of other features - ASM for storage management, Oracle Application Server for application development and deployment. After all that, there is also products like Exadata.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that Oracle is superior (although it's the DB I know the best), but there are numerous substantial differences that dictate the decision an organisation makes, beyond cost or golf outings. More importantly, you'll find that the reason why a company will stay with a product is because of their investment in that product. It's not easy to lift and drop an application from Oracle into Postgress if you've taken advantage of the features. Making the move from one product to another could take a large organisation a decade to achieve and still find itself with pockets using the 'old' product.
I don't think you would. In principle, MS want you to have a decent internet connection because they want you to see the Xbox as more than just a games console. At the very least, they want you to take advantage of multi-player gaming but most likely they also want you to take advantage of the non-gaming aspects of the console. To be frank, I think they're pretty much saying that if you don't have a reliable internet service, they don't want you as a customer. Pretty arrogant I agree but I think that's along the right lines.
Is it really though? Whilst there's some similarities between the two, as well as a fairly well publicized legal case, the similarities are with only a few plot elements. There is an awful lot about the two that are different. At best, you might Soldier as the 'short story' on which Terminator was based but it's pretty clear that the writer of the film used the story as a jumping off point. In reality, it's much more likely that Cameron hadn't even considered Soldier when he wrote Terminator. Chances are he was influenced as much by any number of other time travel stories.
I read the book a few weeks before seeing the film. In the book there's no suggestion that Deckard was a replicant and the same goes for the original cut of the film. Not only that, the continuity isn't a problem, despite the origami unicorn being found at the end. I've enjoyed all the versions of the film though and I don't think that Deckard is a replicant, despite the very subtle implications that he might be. I won't go into it all now but :-
1. His boss had known him for a while, he certainly wasn't new.
2. He apparently had a life
3. He had a home
4. He had a history including the photos etc.
5. Deckard displays no obvious Nexus abilities.
Whilst each of these elements might have been a part of a set-up, could that be said for them all? You're talking about cooperation from a whole load of people, including the LA police. Would they really allow someone who had the potential to do such damage into the force?