On one hand, you've got the makings of a biblical scale disaster with all that water and electricity mixing.
You've never seen the London Unground Network have you? Standing answer as to why they pay £40,000+ for even junior engineers is because it's one of the few places you get to work with high voltage and water at the same time.
Te problem for KDE is that a fair old percentage switched to it because Gnome wasn't customizable enough. From the 10 minutes I had KDE 4.0 installed with Fedora 9 I decided they'd lost the plot in that respect and promptly switched to XFCE. More and more of the guys in my team are moving to XFCE for precisely the same reason. I guess some users might swap to Gnome but either way they lost their main selling point and got all "widgety".
Ironically I think MS suffered from this with Vista as well, swapping existing feaatures and/or functionality for widgets is an original way out of the market.
No, they'll just change the shape of one of the balls, swap the names around and hold "World" series/events that only contain people from their own nation.
In the meantime the Americans will develop enough sense of irony and self-deprication to understand cricket.;^P
...and we have roundabouts as well, which seem to have been completely missed in the US although I believe the favored term is "rotary" instead?
Actually, can you imagine what would happen if some budding terrorist deployed a magic roundabout...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)...in any major metropolis of America?
Regards,
If gyros (or their 2D equivalents, er...) were attached symmetrically about the surface of the balloon with their axis of rotation also being symmetrical would the balloon have any net angular momentum?
My intuitive answer would be no, but what would would be the result on the net angular momentum of the balloon if the following variables were varied...
1) placement of gyros between random and non-random. 2) axis of rotation for identical, random & non-random. 3) Physical properties of the balloon (size, shape & density for instance)...finally, can the derived results of such observations be abstracted to an arbitrary region of space? Answers in a suitable publishing format to my email address, cheers.;^)
Seconded on almost every point but can you imagine what a new generation of OO shell environments would be called?
Ruby Shell : rush?
Python Shell: pysh?
Flex Shell : flesh?...dear lord no! We have enough naming problems as it is with KDE flinging K's everywhere and the GIMP going strong.
1, 1a, 3a and someone else's point about the/etc directory could almost be bundled by a single application and website.
Not sure about 7, shells like bash, csh etc... are either for doing your sys admin work, getting your hands dirty with settings and config or for writting "glue" scripts. In all three of those cases I believe the primary driver should be keeping it simple.
Systems Admin is done on a command line because if all their major changes in syntax or features in one version to the next you can still type man "whatever" and spend two minutes figuring it out, change the syntax in a GUI and you have to spend 10 minutes hunting for the bloody button.
Changing settings on the command line is again something we shouldn't have to inflict upon people, a "pseudo command line" where a single app presents the/etc/ directory in tree structure on one pane and the textual contents of the selected file in another pane but with each config option replaced with a suitable drop down, radio button or whatever (think about a DTD, XSL, XSLT, conig parsing monster) would probably lower the entry barrier enough to start windows "power users" on their way. Final year degree project anyone, Google code project?
My last point, "glue scripts" is where perhaps you were heading. The trouble is you want to be careful that you don't blow the other two functions in the process and then which programming language? It's got to be a universal choice and thats C with csh shirely?
Regards,
Phil
...they run a real risk of becoming extinct. It's not their fault, I think we can all agree that at least a sizable chunk of their output is among the best in the world but if they carry on relying on the "TV License" they'll be the first against the wall when the IPTV revolution finally happens.
They need to adapt somehow as the Internet only has one significant border (the great firewall of China) and even that's of dubious practical implementation (trust me I had a Chinese house mate once).
Why could we not have a referendum on it? Options being...
1) Stay as is and let them defend their corner as a traditional broadcaster as long as they can remain viable. 2) Rename the "TV license" to the "BBC tax" (may as well call a duck a duck) and then...
2.1) Let them give everything away free to all, even those abroad who don't pay (may be delayed?).
2.2) Let them give recorded copies away at minimal price to cover infrastructure costs (servers & bandwidth).
2.3) Let them charge for Internet material but maintain traditional media channels TV, Radio, etc free.
2.4) some other pricing model. 3) some other ideas...
I'd be happy to pay more for higher quality original content whilst they leveraged the Internet to lower distribution costs to nil, perhaps try and put a small amount of effort into keeping it to those who payed the license fee for say 1 month but then, meh, give it away free to mankind.
> well-intentioned, well-informed, and intelligent The Engineers Triangle applied to sociology, three points of the Triangle are nigh-on impossible, two perhaps but one is the most likely case. Pick one you don't need, one you do need and another that you'd like and I'll see what I can do;^)
In, er..., Socialist(?) London we put the politicians offices right next to the Thames, which both smells and is approximately six more shopping trolleys away from breaching it's banks apparently.
The other factor is quality of categorisation, SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT AHEAD, I work for a company that's just finished witting a search engine for the British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/searches.php) and I've had the opportunity of trawling through their reasonably extensive database. It's not just the quantity of data that makes this database interesting it's also the quality, their looking at implementing a feedback system to accept corrections and additions (only a very simple system has been implemented to start with) and they've taken the wise decision to to build researcher review into the plans from the start. The BFI has taken on board the lessons that others have had to learn in the past.
> "No one understands quantum mechanics"
Speaking as an Engineer I spend most of my days making things "I don't understand" work. It's not always necessary you know, I mean I've got a very good idea of how a SI engine works but I'd still be calling out the breakdown service if my Volvo packed up on the way to work.
The other thing to consider is that some of the problems that a quantum computer would work on have an easily checkable answer. The travelling salesman problem might be tricky to verify, but if for instance the NSA had one a QC and some encrypted comms they wanted to break checking whether the private key your quantum computer has just generated from the public key is going to be trivial, it'll either decrypt to a bunch of gibberish or to a communication from the Chinese embassy saying their about to stop buying up you dollar debt mountain (that was joke, breath deeply yeah;^) ).
What have they got up to these days, maybe a dozen qubits did someone say? Say you built one at 24 qubits that only got all the way through it's calculation without collapsing it's wave one in ten times, I'm sure the lads at Langley would still want to "have a chat". I don't whether a 12 qubit QC is particularly feasible or reliable but I'm sure someone somewhere is willing to spend the money to find out and wouldn't be too upset to have something half reliable.
Circumvent? The OED has defined as "to get around or escape from (a requirement) through means that are unusual but defensible", using the decryption keys and hardware that are readily sold to you and are perfectly legal is hardly "getting around", "avoiding", "escaping" or "unusual", if it were the act of merely watching the movie on a computer would also be in breach (where computer may also constitute a DVD player). Your next whinge will be that the encryption is there to stop copying and hence violation of the copyright, copying something does not specifically breach copyright, not in my country anyway. I could take a cheap shot at "effectively", I mean it doesn't appear to be particularly effective does it? What with all these people getting around it.
As part of some final year course thing I wrote a 3D rendering engine in Java based on implicit surface rendering, I did it in two stages. The first was simply an engine that converted the surface equation (f(x) + f(y) + f(z) = whatever) and then plotted it everything into a spacial array then dumpped everything into java's 3d library for scaling and rotation. Then I knocked out the Java 3D API and replaced it with my own so that everything worked all the way back to java 1 with no extra libraries. It was God aweful slow but it did everything, translation, rotation, scaling, specular highlighting, Phong and Gourond(sp?) shading as I remember.
Mr. Peter Jamieson, BPI, Riverside Building, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London, England, SE1 7JA.
Dear Sir,
If you weren't so blinded by your own comical rhetoric you might have actually recognized allofmp3.com as viable business model (which is arguably an independent matter from its legality) rather than someone else to persecute with your myopic naivety. May I take this opportunity to suggest you invest some time in realizing how market based, capitalist democracies operate upon those whose market is shrinking and who still refuse to focus their efforts on innovating and progressing there offerings?
> When that happens, the users will simply buy a new system and then get the latest OS that comes with it. Probably XP or Vista, > depending on time when the old machine dies. They'll make the analysis and indeed decide to buy the latest and greatest but in that process they'll realise that they've now got a brick laying around, if I were a canny Distro I'd produce a "Retro" build speciffically designed and touted to run on old hardware , "like that old Windows box you were going to throw out!", that concentrates on some very specific programs: -
1) Basic email, notepad, calculator, browser. 2) Maybe and I'm streching it here a VERY simple accounting package. 3) Games, old school, NES/Spectrum/Atari emulators, Tetris and bomberman rip-offs, 8 bit grapahics, clunky sound. Proper retro focusing on game play only. 4) Very simple audio player, CD, Radio, MP3/4. No video, maybe a rip function. 5) Bit torrent client, so they can leave it running in the background over night etc... 6) Automagic file backup with idiot proof restore.
You see where I'm going with this? Big, friendly, clean cut, make it either automagically configure everything under the sun or say that "I can't do that, sorry Dave". Don't even offer them any choices, these people ain't going to want to pick from 12 different editors or configure a RAID drive using the 5 1/4 inch 4GB brick that passes for a hard drive (and yes I've got an IDE 5 1/4 drive on my desk they do exist;^)). Don't give them "themes", maybe don't even let them upgrade things. Just put programs on there that are rock solid, basic and user friendly and that require no configuration or more importantly maintainence. Make 90% of the OS read-only so they can't bork it or get a virus, try and make it as fast as possible. Hide the command line away and then the first time they actually make it to the command line show them a message that says "this OS is not designed for anything you're about to do so go and install a proper linux on that big Windows machine you've got over there" and when they type "su -" for the first time show them it again.
I find the phrase "corporate America's intellectual property rights" slightly amusing. I feel maybe the "America's intellectual property" part should always be placed in double quotes or maybe it should be "corporate America's intellectual property wrongs". We've also got the letters i, c, r, a and p in there for the ever so ironic acronym but you can't quite assemble them pleasingly enough for the comedy effect I think we're all after.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no it's EPIC FAIL! Pronounced in the same way the voice over from Mortal Kombat said "FINISH HIM!"
On one hand, you've got the makings of a biblical scale disaster with all that water and electricity mixing.
You've never seen the London Unground Network have you? Standing answer as to why they pay £40,000+ for even junior engineers is because it's one of the few places you get to work with high voltage and water at the same time.
Te problem for KDE is that a fair old percentage switched to it because Gnome wasn't customizable enough. From the 10 minutes I had KDE 4.0 installed with Fedora 9 I decided they'd lost the plot in that respect and promptly switched to XFCE. More and more of the guys in my team are moving to XFCE for precisely the same reason. I guess some users might swap to Gnome but either way they lost their main selling point and got all "widgety". Ironically I think MS suffered from this with Vista as well, swapping existing feaatures and/or functionality for widgets is an original way out of the market.
No, they'll just change the shape of one of the balls, swap the names around and hold "World" series/events that only contain people from their own nation. In the meantime the Americans will develop enough sense of irony and self-deprication to understand cricket. ;^P
...and we have roundabouts as well, which seem to have been completely missed in the US although I believe the favored term is "rotary" instead? Actually, can you imagine what would happen if some budding terrorist deployed a magic roundabout... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon) ...in any major metropolis of America?
Regards,
If gyros (or their 2D equivalents, er...) were attached symmetrically about the surface of the balloon with their axis of rotation also being symmetrical would the balloon have any net angular momentum?
...finally, can the derived results of such observations be abstracted to an arbitrary region of space? Answers in a suitable publishing format to my email address, cheers. ;^)
My intuitive answer would be no, but what would would be the result on the net angular momentum of the balloon if the following variables were varied...
1) placement of gyros between random and non-random.
2) axis of rotation for identical, random & non-random.
3) Physical properties of the balloon (size, shape & density for instance)
Seconded on almost every point but can you imagine what a new generation of OO shell environments would be called? Ruby Shell : rush? Python Shell: pysh? Flex Shell : flesh? ...dear lord no! We have enough naming problems as it is with KDE flinging K's everywhere and the GIMP going strong.
1, 1a, 3a and someone else's point about the /etc directory could almost be bundled by a single application and website.
Not sure about 7, shells like bash, csh etc... are either for doing your sys admin work, getting your hands dirty with settings and config or for writting "glue" scripts. In all three of those cases I believe the primary driver should be keeping it simple.
Systems Admin is done on a command line because if all their major changes in syntax or features in one version to the next you can still type man "whatever" and spend two minutes figuring it out, change the syntax in a GUI and you have to spend 10 minutes hunting for the bloody button.
Changing settings on the command line is again something we shouldn't have to inflict upon people, a "pseudo command line" where a single app presents the /etc/ directory in tree structure on one pane and the textual contents of the selected file in another pane but with each config option replaced with a suitable drop down, radio button or whatever (think about a DTD, XSL, XSLT, conig parsing monster) would probably lower the entry barrier enough to start windows "power users" on their way. Final year degree project anyone, Google code project?
My last point, "glue scripts" is where perhaps you were heading. The trouble is you want to be careful that you don't blow the other two functions in the process and then which programming language? It's got to be a universal choice and thats C with csh shirely?
Regards,
Phil
Their our biatch, ;^) nah, we love em.
...they run a real risk of becoming extinct. It's not their fault, I think we can all agree that at least a sizable chunk of their output is among the best in the world but if they carry on relying on the "TV License" they'll be the first against the wall when the IPTV revolution finally happens.
They need to adapt somehow as the Internet only has one significant border (the great firewall of China) and even that's of dubious practical implementation (trust me I had a Chinese house mate once).
Why could we not have a referendum on it? Options being...
1) Stay as is and let them defend their corner as a traditional broadcaster as long as they can remain viable.
2) Rename the "TV license" to the "BBC tax" (may as well call a duck a duck) and then...
2.1) Let them give everything away free to all, even those abroad who don't pay (may be delayed?).
2.2) Let them give recorded copies away at minimal price to cover infrastructure costs (servers & bandwidth).
2.3) Let them charge for Internet material but maintain traditional media channels TV, Radio, etc free.
2.4) some other pricing model.
3) some other ideas...
I'd be happy to pay more for higher quality original content whilst they leveraged the Internet to lower distribution costs to nil, perhaps try and put a small amount of effort into keeping it to those who payed the license fee for say 1 month but then, meh, give it away free to mankind.
Regards,
Phil (TV license payer)
> well-intentioned, well-informed, and intelligent ;^)
The Engineers Triangle applied to sociology, three points of the Triangle are nigh-on impossible, two perhaps but one is the most likely case. Pick one you don't need, one you do need and another that you'd like and I'll see what I can do
In, er..., Socialist(?) London we put the politicians offices right next to the Thames, which both smells and is approximately six more shopping trolleys away from breaching it's banks apparently.
Regards,
Phil
...throttle users not traffic.
The other factor is quality of categorisation, SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT AHEAD, I work for a company that's just finished witting a search engine for the British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/searches.php) and I've had the opportunity of trawling through their reasonably extensive database. It's not just the quantity of data that makes this database interesting it's also the quality, their looking at implementing a feedback system to accept corrections and additions (only a very simple system has been implemented to start with) and they've taken the wise decision to to build researcher review into the plans from the start. The BFI has taken on board the lessons that others have had to learn in the past.
...welcome our new genetically reconstituted T-Rex overlords!
Sorry I'm trying to quit, I'm down to just 20 obligatory messages a day and no I couldn't be bother to find the correct spelling of Tyrannosaurs.
Regaurds,
Phil
> "No one understands quantum mechanics" Speaking as an Engineer I spend most of my days making things "I don't understand" work. It's not always necessary you know, I mean I've got a very good idea of how a SI engine works but I'd still be calling out the breakdown service if my Volvo packed up on the way to work. The other thing to consider is that some of the problems that a quantum computer would work on have an easily checkable answer. The travelling salesman problem might be tricky to verify, but if for instance the NSA had one a QC and some encrypted comms they wanted to break checking whether the private key your quantum computer has just generated from the public key is going to be trivial, it'll either decrypt to a bunch of gibberish or to a communication from the Chinese embassy saying their about to stop buying up you dollar debt mountain (that was joke, breath deeply yeah ;^) ).
What have they got up to these days, maybe a dozen qubits did someone say? Say you built one at 24 qubits that only got all the way through it's calculation without collapsing it's wave one in ten times, I'm sure the lads at Langley would still want to "have a chat". I don't whether a 12 qubit QC is particularly feasible or reliable but I'm sure someone somewhere is willing to spend the money to find out and wouldn't be too upset to have something half reliable.
WRONG! My PIN is longer than 6 digits. I'm not sure what the max is tho', 6 probably comes from people using either their phone number or their DOB.
Circumvent? The OED has defined as "to get around or escape from (a requirement) through means that are unusual but defensible", using the decryption keys and hardware that are readily sold to you and are perfectly legal is hardly "getting around", "avoiding", "escaping" or "unusual", if it were the act of merely watching the movie on a computer would also be in breach (where computer may also constitute a DVD player).
Your next whinge will be that the encryption is there to stop copying and hence violation of the copyright, copying something does not specifically breach copyright, not in my country anyway.
I could take a cheap shot at "effectively", I mean it doesn't appear to be particularly effective does it? What with all these people getting around it.
As part of some final year course thing I wrote a 3D rendering engine in Java based on implicit surface rendering, I did it in two stages. The first was simply an engine that converted the surface equation (f(x) + f(y) + f(z) = whatever) and then plotted it everything into a spacial array then dumpped everything into java's 3d library for scaling and rotation. Then I knocked out the Java 3D API and replaced it with my own so that everything worked all the way back to java 1 with no extra libraries. It was God aweful slow but it did everything, translation, rotation, scaling, specular highlighting, Phong and Gourond(sp?) shading as I remember.
I could probably dig that out.
Mr. Peter Jamieson,
BPI,
Riverside Building,
County Hall,
Westminster Bridge Road,
London,
England,
SE1 7JA.
Dear Sir,
If you weren't so blinded by your own comical rhetoric you might have actually recognized allofmp3.com as viable business model (which is arguably an independent matter from its legality) rather than someone else to persecute with your myopic naivety. May I take this opportunity to suggest you invest some time in realizing how market based, capitalist democracies operate upon those whose market is shrinking and who still refuse to focus their efforts on innovating and progressing there offerings?
Regards,
Mr. P A. Mather
> When that happens, the users will simply buy a new system and then get the latest OS that comes with it. Probably XP or Vista,
;^)). Don't give them "themes", maybe don't even let them upgrade things. Just put programs on there that are rock solid, basic and user friendly and that require no configuration or more importantly maintainence. Make 90% of the OS read-only so they can't bork it or get a virus, try and make it as fast as possible. Hide the command line away and then the first time they actually make it to the command line show them a message that says "this OS is not designed for anything you're about to do so go and install a proper linux on that big Windows machine you've got over there" and when they type "su -" for the first time show them it again.
> depending on time when the old machine dies.
They'll make the analysis and indeed decide to buy the latest and greatest but in that process they'll realise that they've now got a brick laying around, if I were a canny Distro I'd produce a "Retro" build speciffically designed and touted to run on old hardware , "like that old Windows box you were going to throw out!", that concentrates on some very specific programs: -
1) Basic email, notepad, calculator, browser.
2) Maybe and I'm streching it here a VERY simple accounting package.
3) Games, old school, NES/Spectrum/Atari emulators, Tetris and bomberman rip-offs, 8 bit grapahics, clunky sound. Proper retro focusing on game play only.
4) Very simple audio player, CD, Radio, MP3/4. No video, maybe a rip function.
5) Bit torrent client, so they can leave it running in the background over night etc...
6) Automagic file backup with idiot proof restore.
You see where I'm going with this? Big, friendly, clean cut, make it either automagically configure everything under the sun or say that "I can't do that, sorry Dave". Don't even offer them any choices, these people ain't going to want to pick from 12 different editors or configure a RAID drive using the 5 1/4 inch 4GB brick that passes for a hard drive (and yes I've got an IDE 5 1/4 drive on my desk they do exist
...but all the nodes fell off.
No sorry you're a republic in fact, although you can probably argue the point.
I find the phrase "corporate America's intellectual property rights" slightly amusing. I feel maybe the "America's intellectual property" part should always be placed in double quotes or maybe it should be "corporate America's intellectual property wrongs".
We've also got the letters i, c, r, a and p in there for the ever so ironic acronym but you can't quite assemble them pleasingly enough for the comedy effect I think we're all after.
Marvin isn't Evil, he's just missunderstood.