I think that working at Microsoft Research is pretty neat, they get to develop all sorts of nifty apps like the interactive table/monitor, this thing, and a lot more. If it were your job, you would accept that it meant having your fancy app depend on windows, even if you would knew how to avoid that.
If some headhunter would come to you, and told you you would get a "carte blanche" to develop anything you want at microsoft research, would you say no? (that is not per se a rhetorical question )
I know several people from countries with known "problematic censorship". Trust me, as long as they are exposed to modern technology, any technological block will be avoided and the word will get out. There are a lot of smart people out there, why do you think that on any US universities you will find a lot of people from China? Not because they are "cheap labor". As long there is a will, there is a way. North Korea is the most problematic here, the poor people are very efficiently blocked from every scientific advancement since the 50s.
For all the other countries, be sure that any citizen will have access to as much technology as he want and is willing to afford. As far as how much you believe they are limited and you aren't, you should do a reality check with this interestingly two-sided movie from the 50's on how to recognize propaganda
.
At least this time he didn't write that it could be a cure for cancer. Or did he? Ok so I checked the original article and they proposed use for "international security". Crazy of course, but to be honest here, as a scientist you'll try to find any funding available, as long as you can make it plausible to the referee of the funding institute, why not try.
I would like to add to this: Sometimes you can already "learn" by making a careful analysis and perform a few preliminary test, find alternative ways and save a lot of money and time. As a scientist I sometimes talk to engineers who want to solve everything by "rolling up their sleeves" and DO: a gazillion of experiments just to avoid having to read the literature and look for causes of their problem. Because they end up thinking the cause is not their problem, their problem is their problem.
Now I understand that sometimes this is the best way to go, e.g. when you want to optimize process parameters of a 100-parameter system and don't have too much time to halt the process. There are luckily theories on how to have a smart way to randomly change these parameters and find the optimum. But if you want to create smart materials, you really need to put your smarts in it before doing anything.
From out of europe, a cheap call-by-call to a mobile phone in the US is about 1 eurocent per minute, whereas a call-by-call to a european mobile phone costs about 13 cents at least. That made me think that the US has a pretty neat cheap mobile phone system, but it appears that for the cheap calls to a mobile phone, the money is earned on texting and other weird systems. I guess being screwed over by your cellphone provider is international.
Oh? What happened to the popular belief that all governmental-driven projects are money wasters, and everything should be left to the safe and efficient hands of the market economy?
Actually, I run XP on a Via Cyrix, and some HP Printer software wouldn't want to install because they apparently check for either AMD or Intel CPUs literally, not for x86 compatibility. Bonus for HP is that the free chat-based support (most likely from an Indian called "Bob") was excellent, and he told me I could press something like shift-ctrl and then click the cancel button to proceed with the install for my system.
I had similar problems with installing silverlight, btw "you are not running a supported OS", I kid you not. But hard to try finding decent support there.
you might be able to get GPRS or EDGE or whatever, that would be an only hope. IT would be a bit higher price, and it's not given that they put towers for that in such remote areas.
Googling a bit gives the option of "hiding" the satellite dish, some exist in the UK at least, not sure how well it looks in reality: sqish
Maybe I am indeed too optimistic and trying to put my own views into my interpretation. Actually this remins me of an excellent play by Max risch: the firebugs. It was actually meant to describe the acceptance of communism and/or nazism by the "normal population", but you will easily see connections to things happening now. A new translation has been made in 2007, says wikipedia, so I'm apparently not the only one thinking this.
It's like a hollywood movie. They start by adding some events that you accept to believe, say due to global warming the gulf stream slows down. Then you start adding ridiculousness, e.g. second-by-second freezing of a skyscraper.
MS does the same. A few days ago they started announcing the fictional event that they will have an OS for lightweight laptops ready soon. Today they announce this device, tomorrow: steve ballmer is actually an alien!
Even if you don't believe in conspiracy theories, your "hard fact" makes no sense at all. If it were an optical mouse, where the laser is needed for its functioning, I would agree, but the camera can work just fine without the LED on, so which power of nature or world-wide law forces it to be on every time the camera is on?
well actually, google is making money on the advertising, and the advertisements are watched because of the content. A bit like a billboard get watched based on how interesting it looks.
Streetview is content shown by google to get viewers for their advertisements, When you are part of that content, why shouldn't you have rights to part of the income? Or at least have the right to be removed.
my view exactly. I think that there are enough muslim individuals who would be capable of this, but the problem is the violent minority that will not approve.
The west has been supporting this violent minority for way too long already, actively (e.g. the Taliban in afghanistan would never has been as powerful without US support) and passively (certain well-known extremist organizations are not forbidden in several european nations, despite their anti-democratic principles).
The Dutch politician Wilders has, like many, shown that just warning for the "muslim" threat, is not a way to fight this problem. It really is too generalizing, and you cannot deal with the muslim problem by generalization, because that would affect the whole democratic principle. Why forbid muslims to
wear their head scarf, but allow jews to wear a wig and catholics to wear a cross.
It doesn't work that way. An evolution to muslim integration can only work by making sure the rotten apples don't get a change to spread. This might be easier than you would think, but there has to be a complete political will to do this. Hint: giving the extremist guns is not a very good idea, politicians: please stop with that first.
Did you consider a lobotomy? I heard it can do wonders!
I have an alternative, more efficient, idea you might like: Let's distribute dog food only via veterinarians, and build little capsules with special inert rfid capsules into the food, whereby the unique rfid idea is put in a central database. That way, every piece of dog shit can be tracked back to the owner with a simple rfid scan. You would then need only a few people on scooters riding along and checking for dog shit, just like you have wardens for falsely parked cars.
Every problem can be fought with by privacy-reducing means. Or it could be prevented by increasing standards of life, so that people themselves don't want shit to happen to their neighbourhood.
The problem with the UK is that having kids on a young (under)age is stimulated, you get a big house, probably diapers paid, etc. This way you create an immense lower class of people who left school to get kids and sit at home watching channel 4, or go outside and break stuff.
You don't stop all this happening with cameras, you stop it with policies that make sense. However, the moment you become a politician, totalitarian ideas start popping up in your brain, sending reason out of it. Really, I don't know why stuff like this keeps happening everywhere in the world, even in places that are supposed to be "democracies".
Actually, German law should allow for you to return a product ordered over the internet within something like two to four weeks, no questions asked. Digital media might be an exception there, though, due to copying. Then again if the company provided the game with copy protection you might be able to show that,due to it not being copyable, it should be treated as any other good ordered over the internet.
What's the use of legacy support anyway. If you have a windows 95 application, it will always have problems running under XP. If it needs to use special PC ports (e.g. access to serial connections) it will be hell to get it working.
I understand the need at some places to keep running the old software, I've seen spectrophotometers that had to be connected to an OS/2 program, just because the software was only written for OS/2, but those cases you should either use virtualization, or treasure your old hardware.
You know what? Go walk around(*) day in day out for a year with a 5 lb, 10"x16" chunk of plastic and we'll see who will go talk to a doctor soon. Also realize that the notebook is not the only thing you have with you. Most likely you're carrying around some books, papers, an extra bag, etc. Or just talk to a college student who has to carry around several books plus a cheap heavy (yes, 5 lb is heavy) notebook. Other trick. Fill bottles with 5 lb water and put them in your bag. Do you feel like walking around with that for a day?
There's a reason subnotebooks were sold, even for the premium price, and it wasn't just the looks. I was at the point of buying a second hand X31 when the EEE came along. The EEE is about the weight of a 1-liter bottle of water and almost light enough not to be noticed. It also fits into a smaller bag so you don't have to carry additional weight from finding the appropriately sized reinforced bag. Even the power adaptor is much lighter.
For people thinking to buy one: It's probably better to take the Xandros 9 inch, because most websites are a bit more difficult to use with the 7 inch one, and the larger multitouch touchpad will be very good for the usability as well. I have the 7 inch and don't regret it because I wanted one fast, I'll buy the 9 inch but it won't be readily available in Germany for a long time yet. Even the EEE which I bought half a year ago is now less available, it's sold for 50 Euro more than I paid, and as far as I heard the battery is smaller on the new models, because they have problems getting enough batteries!
Here comes the biggest problem of these new notebooks: working at minimal profit margins it is logistically very difficult to get enough of the appropriate materials at the lowest price point possible (example: 7 inch screens were getting cheap because of car dvd players, but what about 9 inch? Did anybody make them before?). I'll say that that will be the reason that a lot of the EEE competition won't make it. There will be troubles manufacturing enough of them in time and for the price mentioned in the beginning. When prices go up another 200 euro it becomes a less and less interesting choice.
(*) This means leaving your parents' basement, sorry.
Have to agree with that. As far as I like yahoo standing up for themselves, yahoo's product is hardly viable either with or without MS. I remember yahoo's horrid news group interface with ad-only pages intermitting every 5 messages or so. The only good thing about yahoo is Flickr and the only reason MS needs yahoo is to make Flickr dependent on Silverlight so that they will get a critical mass for the Silverlight userbase. MS needs to do that fast, if the growth of Silverlight is too slow web developers will just spare their time learning to use it.
In "real" money, however, both MS and yahoo are probably higher priced than their actual valuem, and the worth is more likely to go down than up.
Ok, so having a backup from non-EU countries I can imagine, but how will the EU ever reach a state away from "political disagreement"? We have about 20-30 states right now (I lost count), and every one wants to have its say of course.
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If some headhunter would come to you, and told you you would get a "carte blanche" to develop anything you want at microsoft research, would you say no? (that is not per se a rhetorical question )
you mean, like, nuclear waste?
Or does the overexposure you just get numbed down more?
For all the other countries, be sure that any citizen will have access to as much technology as he want and is willing to afford. As far as how much you believe they are limited and you aren't, you should do a reality check with this interestingly two-sided movie from the 50's on how to recognize propaganda .
At least this time he didn't write that it could be a cure for cancer. Or did he? Ok so I checked the original article and they proposed use for "international security". Crazy of course, but to be honest here, as a scientist you'll try to find any funding available, as long as you can make it plausible to the referee of the funding institute, why not try.
Now I understand that sometimes this is the best way to go, e.g. when you want to optimize process parameters of a 100-parameter system and don't have too much time to halt the process. There are luckily theories on how to have a smart way to randomly change these parameters and find the optimum. But if you want to create smart materials, you really need to put your smarts in it before doing anything.
It could get into some serious troubles in 2038, though
From out of europe, a cheap call-by-call to a mobile phone in the US is about 1 eurocent per minute, whereas a call-by-call to a european mobile phone costs about 13 cents at least. That made me think that the US has a pretty neat cheap mobile phone system, but it appears that for the cheap calls to a mobile phone, the money is earned on texting and other weird systems. I guess being screwed over by your cellphone provider is international.
Oh? What happened to the popular belief that all governmental-driven projects are money wasters, and everything should be left to the safe and efficient hands of the market economy?
I had similar problems with installing silverlight, btw "you are not running a supported OS", I kid you not. But hard to try finding decent support there.
I'd probably stay out of SP3 just to be sure.
Googling a bit gives the option of "hiding" the satellite dish, some exist in the UK at least, not sure how well it looks in reality: sqish
Maybe I am indeed too optimistic and trying to put my own views into my interpretation. Actually this remins me of an excellent play by Max risch: the firebugs. It was actually meant to describe the acceptance of communism and/or nazism by the "normal population", but you will easily see connections to things happening now. A new translation has been made in 2007, says wikipedia, so I'm apparently not the only one thinking this.
MS does the same. A few days ago they started announcing the fictional event that they will have an OS for lightweight laptops ready soon. Today they announce this device, tomorrow: steve ballmer is actually an alien!
Even if you don't believe in conspiracy theories, your "hard fact" makes no sense at all. If it were an optical mouse, where the laser is needed for its functioning, I would agree, but the camera can work just fine without the LED on, so which power of nature or world-wide law forces it to be on every time the camera is on?
Streetview is content shown by google to get viewers for their advertisements, When you are part of that content, why shouldn't you have rights to part of the income? Or at least have the right to be removed.
The west has been supporting this violent minority for way too long already, actively (e.g. the Taliban in afghanistan would never has been as powerful without US support) and passively (certain well-known extremist organizations are not forbidden in several european nations, despite their anti-democratic principles).
The Dutch politician Wilders has, like many, shown that just warning for the "muslim" threat, is not a way to fight this problem. It really is too generalizing, and you cannot deal with the muslim problem by generalization, because that would affect the whole democratic principle. Why forbid muslims to wear their head scarf, but allow jews to wear a wig and catholics to wear a cross.
It doesn't work that way. An evolution to muslim integration can only work by making sure the rotten apples don't get a change to spread. This might be easier than you would think, but there has to be a complete political will to do this. Hint: giving the extremist guns is not a very good idea, politicians: please stop with that first.
I have an alternative, more efficient, idea you might like: Let's distribute dog food only via veterinarians, and build little capsules with special inert rfid capsules into the food, whereby the unique rfid idea is put in a central database. That way, every piece of dog shit can be tracked back to the owner with a simple rfid scan. You would then need only a few people on scooters riding along and checking for dog shit, just like you have wardens for falsely parked cars.
Every problem can be fought with by privacy-reducing means. Or it could be prevented by increasing standards of life, so that people themselves don't want shit to happen to their neighbourhood.
You don't stop all this happening with cameras, you stop it with policies that make sense. However, the moment you become a politician, totalitarian ideas start popping up in your brain, sending reason out of it. Really, I don't know why stuff like this keeps happening everywhere in the world, even in places that are supposed to be "democracies".
Actually, German law should allow for you to return a product ordered over the internet within something like two to four weeks, no questions asked. Digital media might be an exception there, though, due to copying. Then again if the company provided the game with copy protection you might be able to show that ,due to it not being copyable, it should be treated as any other good ordered over the internet.
I understand the need at some places to keep running the old software, I've seen spectrophotometers that had to be connected to an OS/2 program, just because the software was only written for OS/2, but those cases you should either use virtualization, or treasure your old hardware.
There's a reason subnotebooks were sold, even for the premium price, and it wasn't just the looks. I was at the point of buying a second hand X31 when the EEE came along. The EEE is about the weight of a 1-liter bottle of water and almost light enough not to be noticed. It also fits into a smaller bag so you don't have to carry additional weight from finding the appropriately sized reinforced bag. Even the power adaptor is much lighter.
For people thinking to buy one: It's probably better to take the Xandros 9 inch, because most websites are a bit more difficult to use with the 7 inch one, and the larger multitouch touchpad will be very good for the usability as well. I have the 7 inch and don't regret it because I wanted one fast, I'll buy the 9 inch but it won't be readily available in Germany for a long time yet. Even the EEE which I bought half a year ago is now less available, it's sold for 50 Euro more than I paid, and as far as I heard the battery is smaller on the new models, because they have problems getting enough batteries!
Here comes the biggest problem of these new notebooks: working at minimal profit margins it is logistically very difficult to get enough of the appropriate materials at the lowest price point possible (example: 7 inch screens were getting cheap because of car dvd players, but what about 9 inch? Did anybody make them before?). I'll say that that will be the reason that a lot of the EEE competition won't make it. There will be troubles manufacturing enough of them in time and for the price mentioned in the beginning. When prices go up another 200 euro it becomes a less and less interesting choice.
(*) This means leaving your parents' basement, sorry.
In "real" money, however, both MS and yahoo are probably higher priced than their actual valuem, and the worth is more likely to go down than up.
Planning a murder and then buying the books afterwards would be a case of severely being behind on schedule. Sounds like a software engineer to me ;)
Ok, so having a backup from non-EU countries I can imagine, but how will the EU ever reach a state away from "political disagreement"? We have about 20-30 states right now (I lost count), and every one wants to have its say of course.
Congratulations! You are just to right type to become a vacuum cleaner salesman. Ever considered changing field?