No, I'm paying Eircom because I have an active phone line. I do not have any phone service running on that line. The only service that will be provided is Magnet Broadband. I have looked at Vodaphones home broadband products and they're inclusive of the line rental charge to Eircom. It just happens that Vodaphone/Magnet are the ones transferring the payment to Eircom.
It's Ireland, so I don't know how much competition there is in that country,...
Eircom is a monopoly here, in that it has control over the exchanges (it's control over exchanges is being taken away, but its still relied upon for networking engineering works). I'm currently waiting on Eircom to hand over control of my phone line to another broadband provider, so that I can have decent access to the interent. However, even with my new operator, I'm still paying Eircom line rental charges of €25.36 per month. This represents the biggest failure of our communications regulator in that they failed to properly remove control of the network from Eircom. What the regulator should have done is taken a look at our Electricity market, the incumbent ESB has been split into ESB Networks and ESB Customer Care. This allows us to choose any Electricity provider while retaining a neutral network operator. Eircom should have been split up the same way. Instead we're left with a pseudo deregulated telecoms market and network infrastructure that has no incentive to be upgraded.
What are you talking about? Seriously? What crumbling infrastructure? For a country of 5million, we have a very good infrastructure. Are you aware of our new road networks? (yes i'm aware a lot of new motorways wont be finished until 2010), but our current roads are MUCH better than the 80s or 90s. CIE is undergoing radical transformations, same for bus-eireann. We've built many new and upgraded countless other hospitals, transport stations, public areas, town-centers and other facilities.
Oh and dont forget that we've done all this during a time of war (northern ireland), which has costed the state a lot of taxpayers money. Sure low corporate tax has helped us draw in foreign investment. We needed this because there was no employment before the 90s. Nowadays anybody can find work (probably not in finance atm, but that's their fault for overextending themselves.), including the many immigrants. The real underlying cause to our recent success has been the quality of our education system during the 90s.
Your backwards religious theocracy statement is complete rubbish too. Religious organisations have had minimal input into recent governmental decisions these days.
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.
I'm more interested in when Google starts returning relevant results to my queries.
I can't believe that I'm the only one that finds Google's quality of service somewhat below par. I guess they're better than randomly stabbing in the dark, and there certainly isn't any alternative that's obviously better, but Google sure isn't everything they think they are.
I find this larger index rather unsettling as I feel my search results are becomming more unrelevant. Mostly due to the following reasoning.
Finding 1 page in a billion page index is relatively easier than finding 1 page in a trillion page index.
Has the relevance of the results kept up with the growing index size? or does the growing index cause more unrelevant pages to appear higher in the search results?
In my opinion the next big advancement that is needed on the web is better auto-catagorisation of content, so your search queries can better be matched to the content in the index. Simply relying on pagerank and text matching can't 'cut it' alone anymore IMO.
You know, I like python and all which is a recent shift from previous years... But I still don't like the implementation, syntactically important whitespace is one thing, but the lack of a visible limitator makes python code a little confusing when seeing only portions of it, I am never sure if an if/while/for/def block has ended.
if condition:
a=b
c=d
h=i (End of Page). oops?
If you're reaching the end of the visible page inside your if block, then perhaps you should consider refactoring your code so that it fits on the page. Therefore allowing the function(s) name tell you what the code is doing. There's nothing wrong with it's implementation, just the programmer.
I agree fully with the parent and GP here, I'm Irish and like the idea of the EU, but lately the only thing the EU has been pushing for is more security for the rich and themselves.
34 billion euro to fix up our transport network. Of course this is allready over priced and late. It cost them 500million or so to build a tunnel under dublin, and it closes frequently because the computers crash..
Can ye come over here and help us out? I seriously think that kid on the homepage is building the network.
Ok, I get your point. make ads unintrusive and relevant and they will sell. Now what I don't understand is that Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to tap into that market, but I can't help thinking they're "really", like "really really" missing the mark, simply by looking at their homepages and comparing them to google. They're still pushing flash and animated everything ads to people.
Another point of note is the geographic areas they seem to target. I live in Ireland and find absolutely nothing of interest on msn.ie and yahoo.co.uk, it's all incredibly americanized something Irish people arn't interested in (apart from US tv shows)
I was just thinking the same thing when reading the article.
People use microsoft products because of the monopoly, not because they are good products. What microsoft need to do online is to stop being d***s to their consumers and realise that online consumers dont want to be bombared with adverts for other microsoft products, they just want a product that aids the user to complete what they want to do, like what google does with search.
They seem to be stuck in the idea that their monopoly on Windows is going to be able to push their online service. They need to change that to their public image being able to push their online services. Yahoo had a good public image, until then they started getting envious of their new competitor Google, who were all cheery and happy.
Exactly, Operas point is that their browser is being stiffled out of existence for doing things (more?) correctly than Microsofts browser. Mozilla seems to be working because it acts more like IE, but without the annoyances. Why should Opera be forced to follow this route because of monopolistic practices? It has nothing to do with peoples willingness to download other browsers, it has to do with whether that product does everything the previous product could do.
You can't force people to pick your favorite alternative OS by bankrupting the company selling the market leader.
Last check on how much Bill Gates is worth, is 59Billion US$. The last fine the EU imposed was only 500Million. I don't think Microsoft is going away anytime soon.
People have two strong alternatives to Windows (Mac OS and Linux)
Indeed they do. Both of which arn't offered/sold in stores or online as much as Windows is.
People, by and large, still choose Windows. That's not a monopoly, it's a consumer choice. Deal with it.
This is due to the factor above, if Windows, OSX, Linux and "Other OS Here" were all available as a *choice* for a consumer when purchasing a pc (or just purchasing a new OS), and companies produced their software for each OS, I'm sure we would not have Windows with a 95% market share. Therefore Microsoft is a monopoly, and there is minimal consumer choice. We are dealing with it, via anti-trust lawsuits.
The amount of people in my computer applications (software engineering) course that have no interest in computing is hillarious. I honestly feel that if students have a genuine interest in their course, then it doesn't matter what the course is teaching them as they will be able to teach themselves fairly well.
Lots of the people without any interest are doing the course because "There's loads of money to be made", "It's the thing everybody is doing", "I didn't qualify for any other degree course".
On the content of the course side, I can't really say, as I'm new to the field in comparison to people who did it 20 years ago. It's very interesting to be reading this discussion though!
Most dvd players have an audio track and subtitle button that does it while the movie is playing. Lots of dvd players can upscale too. You bought a hd-dvd addon for your xbox, so thats more than $400 on a tech that hasn't really panned out yet.
TBH, I think that hd-dvd and blu-ray will be completely out of date before they're popular, mainly due to the increasing demand for media centers and dvrs.
This is Ridiculous, There is no way this could work. I'm writing this from a school of geophysics and can tell you that equipment needed to detect earthquakes is sensitive even to people walking nearby, not to mention the moving parts in the computer itself. What about laptops, etc? they are all going to be moving constantly. It's a nice thought, but seriously, let the pros do it and avoid mass hysteria.
Not sure about a palm ebook readers, but on a pc I don't like reading because.. 1) The screen is bad for my eyes. 2) I like the feel of paper and lack of distractions, (other programs, etc..) 3) The fact they cripple them with DRM. 4) The lack of titles. 5) I spend enough time with computers each week and it's bad enough having to read about them in books for college, than to do so on a computer! 6) It's nice to flick through a book. As opposed to clicking next lots of times. 7) They look nice on the shelf. They don't look nice as an icon. 8) Palm Readers make you look like a geek/nerd atm.
I would also probably say that, there's not enough reason to have your entire library of books with you all the time. If your going to want to look up some strange chapter or get an urge to read some book, you can easily wait untill you get home and lie down with a book.
Not likely to happen, but, I'd doubt they would "shit their pants". If they pulled all the licenses from people who paid for them, microsoft would be breaking the law by stealing from people who paid for the licenses. The EU would not let them get away with that, nor would any other government in the world because of the deep integration between the different economies which rely on Microsoft products.
On another viewpoint, if the EU ruled for Microsoft to leave the EU market, the EU would be denying the citizens choice and it wouldn't go down too well for getting votes.
Perhaps another viewpoint would be (my prefered viewpoint), if Microsoft dragged out the case too long, businesses and customers would become cautious of buying Microsoft products and it would hurt their business in the EU.
Of course, I could be wrong and suffering from fatigue...
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No, I'm paying Eircom because I have an active phone line. I do not have any phone service running on that line. The only service that will be provided is Magnet Broadband. I have looked at Vodaphones home broadband products and they're inclusive of the line rental charge to Eircom. It just happens that Vodaphone/Magnet are the ones transferring the payment to Eircom.
It's Ireland, so I don't know how much competition there is in that country, ...
Eircom is a monopoly here, in that it has control over the exchanges (it's control over exchanges is being taken away, but its still relied upon for networking engineering works). I'm currently waiting on Eircom to hand over control of my phone line to another broadband provider, so that I can have decent access to the interent. However, even with my new operator, I'm still paying Eircom line rental charges of €25.36 per month. This represents the biggest failure of our communications regulator in that they failed to properly remove control of the network from Eircom. What the regulator should have done is taken a look at our Electricity market, the incumbent ESB has been split into ESB Networks and ESB Customer Care. This allows us to choose any Electricity provider while retaining a neutral network operator. Eircom should have been split up the same way. Instead we're left with a pseudo deregulated telecoms market and network infrastructure that has no incentive to be upgraded.
You mean a "PC"?
What are you talking about? Seriously? What crumbling infrastructure? For a country of 5million, we have a very good infrastructure. Are you aware of our new road networks? (yes i'm aware a lot of new motorways wont be finished until 2010), but our current roads are MUCH better than the 80s or 90s. CIE is undergoing radical transformations, same for bus-eireann. We've built many new and upgraded countless other hospitals, transport stations, public areas, town-centers and other facilities.
Oh and dont forget that we've done all this during a time of war (northern ireland), which has costed the state a lot of taxpayers money. Sure low corporate tax has helped us draw in foreign investment. We needed this because there was no employment before the 90s. Nowadays anybody can find work (probably not in finance atm, but that's their fault for overextending themselves.), including the many immigrants. The real underlying cause to our recent success has been the quality of our education system during the 90s.
Your backwards religious theocracy statement is complete rubbish too. Religious organisations have had minimal input into recent governmental decisions these days.
I get this on Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.
I'm more interested in when Google starts returning relevant results to my queries.
I can't believe that I'm the only one that finds Google's quality of service somewhat below par. I guess they're better than randomly stabbing in the dark, and there certainly isn't any alternative that's obviously better, but Google sure isn't everything they think they are.
I find this larger index rather unsettling as I feel my search results are becomming more unrelevant. Mostly due to the following reasoning.
Finding 1 page in a billion page index is relatively easier than finding 1 page in a trillion page index.
Has the relevance of the results kept up with the growing index size? or does the growing index cause more unrelevant pages to appear higher in the search results?
In my opinion the next big advancement that is needed on the web is better auto-catagorisation of content, so your search queries can better be matched to the content in the index. Simply relying on pagerank and text matching can't 'cut it' alone anymore IMO.
You know, I like python and all which is a recent shift from previous years... But I still don't like the implementation, syntactically important whitespace is one thing, but the lack of a visible limitator makes python code a little confusing when seeing only portions of it, I am never sure if an if/while/for/def block has ended.
if condition:
a=b
c=d
h=i
(End of Page).
oops?
If you're reaching the end of the visible page inside your if block, then perhaps you should consider refactoring your code so that it fits on the page. Therefore allowing the function(s) name tell you what the code is doing. There's nothing wrong with it's implementation, just the programmer.
I agree fully with the parent and GP here, I'm Irish and like the idea of the EU, but lately the only thing the EU has been pushing for is more security for the rich and themselves.
Ah screw the whole thing!
The "law" is increasingly siding with "rights owners."
So?
So the law should be neutral, it should not side with either party. Thats how you are supposed to get fair rulings.
mod parent up. The law should always be neutral.
Actually, this is somewhat true. With Opera speeddial, my 9 most viewed websites,are loaded before I request them.
Look at what our government is doing...
http://www.transport21.ie/
34 billion euro to fix up our transport network. Of course this is allready over priced and late.
It cost them 500million or so to build a tunnel under dublin, and it closes frequently because the computers crash..
Can ye come over here and help us out? I seriously think that kid on the homepage is building the network.
Ok, I get your point. make ads unintrusive and relevant and they will sell. Now what I don't understand is that Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to tap into that market, but I can't help thinking they're "really", like "really really" missing the mark, simply by looking at their homepages and comparing them to google. They're still pushing flash and animated everything ads to people.
Another point of note is the geographic areas they seem to target. I live in Ireland and find absolutely nothing of interest on msn.ie and yahoo.co.uk, it's all incredibly americanized something Irish people arn't interested in (apart from US tv shows)
Aye, there is allways the exception to the rule.
I was just thinking the same thing when reading the article.
People use microsoft products because of the monopoly, not because they are good products. What microsoft need to do online is to stop being d***s to their consumers and realise that online consumers dont want to be bombared with adverts for other microsoft products, they just want a product that aids the user to complete what they want to do, like what google does with search.
They seem to be stuck in the idea that their monopoly on Windows is going to be able to push their online service. They need to change that to their public image being able to push their online services. Yahoo had a good public image, until then they started getting envious of their new competitor Google, who were all cheery and happy.
Exactly, Operas point is that their browser is being stiffled out of existence for doing things (more?) correctly than Microsofts browser. Mozilla seems to be working because it acts more like IE, but without the annoyances. Why should Opera be forced to follow this route because of monopolistic practices? It has nothing to do with peoples willingness to download other browsers, it has to do with whether that product does everything the previous product could do.
Last check on how much Bill Gates is worth, is 59Billion US$. The last fine the EU imposed was only 500Million. I don't think Microsoft is going away anytime soon.
Indeed they do. Both of which arn't offered/sold in stores or online as much as Windows is.
This is due to the factor above, if Windows, OSX, Linux and "Other OS Here" were all available as a *choice* for a consumer when purchasing a pc (or just purchasing a new OS), and companies produced their software for each OS, I'm sure we would not have Windows with a 95% market share. Therefore Microsoft is a monopoly, and there is minimal consumer choice. We are dealing with it, via anti-trust lawsuits.
The amount of people in my computer applications (software engineering) course that have no interest in computing is hillarious. I honestly feel that if students have a genuine interest in their course, then it doesn't matter what the course is teaching them as they will be able to teach themselves fairly well.
Lots of the people without any interest are doing the course because "There's loads of money to be made", "It's the thing everybody is doing", "I didn't qualify for any other degree course".
On the content of the course side, I can't really say, as I'm new to the field in comparison to people who did it 20 years ago. It's very interesting to be reading this discussion though!
Most dvd players have an audio track and subtitle button that does it while the movie is playing. Lots of dvd players can upscale too. You bought a hd-dvd addon for your xbox, so thats more than $400 on a tech that hasn't really panned out yet.
TBH, I think that hd-dvd and blu-ray will be completely out of date before they're popular, mainly due to the increasing demand for media centers and dvrs.
I can't believe you replied to a person with a 7digit UID who is clearly a troll. Don't feed them :)
This is Ridiculous, There is no way this could work. I'm writing this from a school of geophysics and can tell you that equipment needed to detect earthquakes is sensitive even to people walking nearby, not to mention the moving parts in the computer itself. What about laptops, etc? they are all going to be moving constantly. It's a nice thought, but seriously, let the pros do it and avoid mass hysteria.
Don't worry,
FTA: "including new releases from the Madden NFL, Need for Speed, Harry Potter, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR, SSX and The Godfather franchises".
They're all rehashes, but then so is nSMB and zelda, etc.
It's funny but true. There's probably something else that would be wrong about it but, I don't know what it is.
Not sure about a palm ebook readers, but on a pc I don't like reading because..
1) The screen is bad for my eyes.
2) I like the feel of paper and lack of distractions, (other programs, etc..)
3) The fact they cripple them with DRM.
4) The lack of titles.
5) I spend enough time with computers each week and it's bad enough having to read about them in books for college, than to do so on a computer!
6) It's nice to flick through a book. As opposed to clicking next lots of times.
7) They look nice on the shelf. They don't look nice as an icon.
8) Palm Readers make you look like a geek/nerd atm.
I would also probably say that, there's not enough reason to have your entire library of books with you all the time. If your going to want to look up some strange chapter or get an urge to read some book, you can easily wait untill you get home and lie down with a book.
Not likely to happen, but, I'd doubt they would "shit their pants". If they pulled all the licenses from people who paid for them, microsoft would be breaking the law by stealing from people who paid for the licenses. The EU would not let them get away with that, nor would any other government in the world because of the deep integration between the different economies which rely on Microsoft products.
On another viewpoint, if the EU ruled for Microsoft to leave the EU market, the EU would be denying the citizens choice and it wouldn't go down too well for getting votes.
Perhaps another viewpoint would be (my prefered viewpoint), if Microsoft dragged out the case too long, businesses and customers would become cautious of buying Microsoft products and it would hurt their business in the EU.
Of course, I could be wrong and suffering from fatigue...