Said "Former Director of State IT services" in an ad that claimed he wouldn't convert Illinois to Linux because it was insufficiently reliable. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Having said which, this is not really bad news for either side. For Microsoft, this is actually good news. It's counter evidence for the next time they get called in over monopolistic practices, and reduces the chances of more fines from the EU.
Microsoft has to really grow up and become the kind of company that realises that competition from the same kind of product grows the pool. For Linux, the less niche it becomes, the more there is pressure to support, innovate and drive down cost of ownership (not cost of acquisition.) Therefore, as it generates a business ecosystem, its future is more assured.
I'm sorry we have our wires crossed in this way. You said you used Excel for investing. Now you say you use it for trading. They are two completely different things. They are as different as sales and marketing, or as research and development, or as poker and Go.
I've been on enough trading floors to know what traders use, thank you very much. Trading is what it sounds like. It's trying to make money out of the market, treating it as a casino. As a result it is all about acquiring short term asymmetric information, for which spreadsheets are an ideal tool because they can be used quickly to analyse small data sets. I can't see a trader ever using OOo because in that business time is crucial and OOo would only be used if it could analyse faster and more effectively than Excel. Which it can't. No argument. I know one or two people who develop special tools for traders which can do certain things much faster than Excel, and on larger data sets, but they are not the norm.
Investment on the other hand is very different. Investment is the process of seeking to make gains by identifying companies which have a strategic advantage in their market or which are under priced for some reason. This means a lot of serious number crunching. At the banking level, of course, investment becomes about very large deals indeed and the financial tools are very sophisticated. This is where you get physics graduates developing economic models using tools like FEA. And this is what I was thinking of. The people I know of in this area are currently charging out at in excess of $900 per hour, hence my comment about Office costing less than hourly rate. Of course ideas are POCed on spreadsheets, I do it myself (though increasingly I find myself using Transact-SQL directly, reverting to pre-Excel days as my brain cells fall out.)
So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary). I spend time trying to understand macro economics and the effects of things like global warming and try and put my long term assets where they are likely to increment in value faster than bank deposits. That's investment.
If you are investing at the level that OO Calc is too limited, then all or some of the following are true:
A copy of Office Pro costs less than your hourly billing rate, and you have no interest in this debate, so why are you posting?
You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.
Either you employ somebody else to do this stuff anyway, or you have to adhere to corporate policies, and so your desktop is locked down by IT and you don't have a choice of tools.
Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.
I have a car with truck size mirrors, front and rear parking sensors. Then it had to have a problem fixed under warranty and for a week I was driving a hire car. No fun at all. Since I got it, I had become used to being able to park in spaces only a couple of feet longer than the car. Now I needed at least 4 feet and found myself driving round looking for easier places to park. I imagine with this system you would rapidly become almost helpless when parking without it.
In fact, that's at the root of the reason why I refuse to fit a bow thruster on my boat. Helming skills are used sufficiently infrequently by most people (including me) that they need frequent reinforcement. If you get used to not having to compensate for wind and water while mooring, what is the betting that just when you run into problems you flatten the batteries that power the thrusters?
It's only polite to use the units of the country in which you are working, or for which you are writing.
I know it's a troll, but even so. I will make only two small points:
The SI system is as arbitrary as the Imperial system.
I use the SI system all the time, but it has one weakness. There is no convenient unit that results in small numbers for everyday use. It is convenient to say that, say, a table is 6ft by 3ft, the approximation involved being obvious. To say the same in SI, it has to be described as either 1800 by 900 mm or 1.8 by 0.9 metres. This involves either inconveniently large numbers that give a spurious precision, or the need to be familiar with decimals - which a lot of people are not. For scientific and engineering purposes, SI is the only sane way to go. For everyday use it is not ideal. This is because Imperial units are based on human scale, not geographic.
And, btw, your "cm" is not an approved SI unit. SI goes by thousands not tens.
That in fact the description is intended to be sensationalist? That it plays to the religious fundamentalists who want to stop biological research? That it is NOT an accurate description of what is being done? And that some of us actually are of have been working scientists or heads of research departments, and care about accuracy of reporting because we don't like having our work, or that of others, misrepresented?
Recently we had the case of journos talking up Craig Venter's research as producing "artificial life". I had to read his own original comments to see that he never made that claim, and in fact his own comments agreed with my own Slashdot posting on the subject.
Science is not common speech, and attempts to make it so result in misunderstanding and sensationalism. I don't know who modded this "informative" (presumably the same people who moderated me "overrated" because that doesn't get metamoderated, but whoever you are, you clearly know diddly squit about biology.
What is a "human-animal hybrid"? Scientists haven't believed that human beings aren't animals since before Harvey. That's like putting a VW engine into a Ford and calling it a "Ford-car hybrid".
The standard of science reporting is now so low that journalists should be deprived of access to modern medicine and technology until they do better, though given the usual standard of their education they would just end up banging rocks together and trying to brew cider from windfalls till the end of time.
Rant over, this is about hybrids between human beings and _other_ species. Nothing new. Visit any UK city centre on a Friday or Saturday night (don't forget flak jacket and bodyguards) and you will believe this kind of thing has been going on for years.
It isn't the six foot fall, it is the sudden stop. Just like going from 0 to 60 in a car in a mile or so is unnoticeable acceleration, but going from 60 to 0 in two feet, by hitting a brick wall and having the front crumple, is a bit noticeable (though for a short time only.)
Of course the deceleration depends on many factors, including the surface. In the days of metal case germanium transistors, it was well known that dropping a transistor three feet onto concrete could break an internal wire bond, while falling onto carpet would have no effect whatsoever. Interestingly, the 10lb object dropped on concrete will most likely experience less deceleration than the 1lb one - because it will deflect or crush the concrete to a greater extent. However, you are not advised to try this using a large SCSI drive and a 1.8 inch drive, because owing to the effects of scaling, the SCSI drive will be less rigid.
Recent HP printers work well with Linux and are properly supported. And any decent modern laser printer will work in LaserJet 4050 mode for mono and Color Laserjet 4500 mode for color. (This is basically the default drivers used by Bonjour.) I have good results with Kyocera, Oki, Xerox and, of course, HP.
Just do not buy a crappy inkjet printer or all-in-one laser. If you need to scan, buy a small scanner. If you want to use a professional operating system, use professional kit with it.
It's worse than that. At what point do Japan, Taiwan and South Korea decide that the US bankrolling of an increasingly aggressive China means that they can no longer rely in any way on US defence capability? If I were the Japanese government, I would already have a secret date for when the last US armed forces leave Japan. In the meantime, as with Russia and Germany at the end of the 1930s, keep talking and swearing undying friendship.
In fact Russia and its sphere of influence could get big benefits from cooperation with Japan. Russia has the resources, natural and human. Japan has the technology. As the US tries to hold on to more of the oil in the Middle East and South America, at what point can Russia make Japan an offer it will be hard to refuse? Look at a map of the Arctic, look at the sea ice pattern in August/September and see how far Russian resources are from the Japanese islands by, say, 2030. An awful lot of US interests could be affected in quite unexpected ways by global warming, especially when those nuclear subs have far fewer places to hide and have to travel much further under open water to get to them.
Basically he is trying to demonstrate that you can write biological code onto a delivery vehicle and insert it into a functioning cell. It's the equivalent of writing the "Hello world" program from scratch and having it compile and run. It is intended to confirm what we already believe - i.e. that if you arrange DNA bases in the correct sequence, no additional magic is needed for a cell to decode it. So why do I find this annoying?
I don't know if Venter made the overhyped claim but it will surely come back to bite science. Creationists and other voodoo merchants will surely seize on this as an example of scientists claiming far too much, and use it as ammunition to discredit science in the eyes of their followers (I started by typing "foolowers" but how many people nowadays know what it means when you write [stet] after a happy mistype?).
Nobody can claim to create artificial life until there is a complete self-reproducing unit built from inorganic chemicals from the ground up. I don't know how long it will be before that happens, (diminishing resources may mean it never happens - we may have much more urgent tasks for scientists over the next 50 years or so.) but this isn't it. It looks like it is an important technical advance, but it is on a level with, say, the development of the CNC machine, and the claims in the media are about as accurate as if someone had written "With the development of the CNC workstation, we have created self-reproducing robots in the laboratory.
"Better" in what respect? At the end of the cable what do you find? A copper coil in a magnetic field. The design of the loudspeaker normally dominates everything, including the amplifier response curve. (OK, there are electrostatic loudspeakers, but the same is true.) For minimum interference with the signal you want low self-capacitance, low series resistance, and low inductance. You also want the cable to have the smallest magnetic induction cross section or you WILL pick up external signals. You do not need high fairy dust or high bake male bovine excrement.
The best loudspeaker cable you will ever need to make can be provided quite simply. Use auto wiring cable of about 6mm sq cross section. Twist two colours together so that each 360 degree twist occupies 50mm or so. This minimises the magnetic cross-section.Make good quality screw connections at each end. That's it. Too much shielding, capacitance will affect high frequencies. But, at the resistance levels you are playing with, it's almost immaterial. 6mm cross section has a very low resistance, but if you want a very long cable just go up to 8 or 10. You are still paying well under "audiophile" prices.
An audiophile is someone who can hear the difference between copper, OFHC copper, and silver, but can't hear the salesman sniggering as he leaves the shop.
Anybody who has ever been involved in standards, whether ISO, IEC, or their national standards body, knows that this happens all the time. Chairing the meeting is not incompatible with holding strong views. What less ethical chairmen would have done is simply talk to people before the meeting, find people who agreed with their objections, and then make sure they got a chance to express them. If the opposition try and say too much, have a useful retired consultant who can be relied on to stand up and waffle the meeting out.
ISO and IEC are often very political and feelings often run very high in working groups, though this rarely makes it way to the plenary sessions. People shout. Observers try to intervene and have to be shut up. This guy behaved perfectly properly. Your comment about "decisions as chairman" show a bottomless ignorance of procedure. I can only assume that either you have no experience whatsoever of standards work, or your employer is based in Redmond.
Pity I wasted mod points on something else, this is the best summary I've seen in a long time. And it applies to the current near-split in the Anglican church.
Ah well, doing sociology of religion was the reason I never went into the Ministry and ended up a systems designer.
The downside of the horse is that it is unsuited to high density urban environments. Not without reason is the horseman a symbol of the aristocracy. If New York or London had the same horse population as they currently have cars, nothing would move because of the height of the horse dung (and no technical solution to removing it without powered transport.) Even in 18th century England, there was a profitable occupation in large cities of "crossing-sweeper", i.e. somebody who cleaned the dung off a section across roads and charged pedestrians for the right to cross.
That's without considering that the entire planet would be given over to growing grass. Unlike cars, horses consume a lot of fuel even when going nowhere. You have to be quite well off to be an Amish.
This is absolutely true provided that oil is not needed to fuel the processing. Currently, for instance, ethanol production in the US requires a very significant input of oil. Therefore, while demand for energy is increasing, satisfying some of that demand with ethanol will only at best reduce the slope of the release curve.
This ceases to be true when biofuels become totally self sufficient. This means that fertiliser plants, the plants that manufacture everything used in the biofuel production cycle, storage etc., are all being entirely fuelled by their own product.
For this reason, for many years to come, biodiesel has to be the preferred route. This is because the huge installed base of plant can mostly run on it; you can do process heating with biodiesel as well as run generators, trucks and ships. You can, as it were, bootstrap the biodiesel economy, whereas you cannot bootstrap the ethanol or hydrogen economies. Steel plants and machine shops cannot run on either.
Hydrogen is attractive to the vehicle industry not because it is efficient but because it requires replacement of the entire vehicle fleet and would provide a boost to the industry. Biodiesel allows the existing fleet to be replaced much more slowly, with the same emissions benefits.
One of the simplest ways to reduce anthropogenic global warming is just to use less energy. One of the best ways to do that is to make consumer durables last longer, and make them out of readily recyclable materials. But that threatens the entire basis of the US-Chinese industrial complex, whereas hydrogen offers it greatly increased opportunities to expand.
Years ago I read a German press release about the then-new Intel 486. There was a completely confused reference to it having an attached buoy for a small boat (I am not joking). It took me about ten minutes to realise that the author had no idea at all of how to translate "integrated floating point unit", and presumably had come somewhere across the word "boot".
A big, stupid question. And one that Microsoft has forgotten about, unfortunately. An operating system is there to get stuff done, and get out of the way. It is not there to be intrusive or annoying, to try and limit my rights in ways that may not even be legal, or to give third parties unwanted access to my computer. As a developer, I'll be honest, I just want a box that runs a standards compatible browser or three, can handle large projects in an IDE without falling over, and on the side can deal with email, spreadsheets, screen grabbers, icon editors and stuff like that. I am one of a few percent of people who really need a computer for work, and I am totally operating system agnostic: Windows 2000, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, I can live with any of them.
The last thing I want is commercial and social wars being fought out on my desktop operating system, yet that is precisely what Vista appears to be. It's an extension of the US business and legal system into computers. If it applied to cars, every time my car went low on fuel it would try and drive itself to an Exxon garage. It would come without locks and I would have to go to a third party supplier, and every year I would need new locks. Every new model would need an engine twice as large as the previous one but would not seem to go any faster. What's more, the steering wheel and the gearshift would get steadily more expensive.
That's Vista. Microsoft's problem is simple. It makes something that once was a craft product but now is commoditised, and the commodity price is trending to zero. So it wants to create added value, but it hasn't realised that it cannot do that by extending the commodity product. And it has no really good ideas any more. In the real world, you can buy a cheap watch or an expensive watch. Most watches are cheap, the fancy ones are expensive. You can buy a cheap car or an expensive car. Most cars are cheap, a few are expensive. In the software world, most operating system installations are expensive, only a few percent are cheap. It's a population inversion, like the excited atoms in a laser. At some point, that distortion will start to right itself, one way or another.
It's truly amazing how many posters on this thread do not understand the issue. BTW US competition law is basically very similar to the EU, it's just that it gets enforced less often.
Nobody is suggesting you should not be able to buy a computer with a preinstalled OS and ready to go. The suggestion is that you should be made aware at the point of sale of how much of the purchase price is the OS, and that it should be illegal for an OS supplier to make agreements based on exclusivity. If Dell wanted to sell nothing but Vista they would be allowed to, but they would also have to sell the same computer with no OS at all, and Microsoft would be barred from any agreement which penalised them in any way at all for doing so.
There are so many posts on this thread that are simply incorrect that I suspect that MS' lobby firms are astroturfing like crazy - they've had a bad week, even that bastion of respectability Scientific American called them "Micro$oft" on their website this week, in a rather hostile article. Obviously people are starting tog et the drift at last.
As an aside, in a world of "free markets", the internal management of many company sales departments is actually profoundly anti free competition. I suspect that one reason so many North Americans (and more traditional Europeans) have difficulty with the concepts of competition law, despite its great age, is that "business as usual" is profoundly opposed to it.
I grew up in a village in Hertfordshire (north of London) where we had a village policeman who lived in the police house. If he was on patrol you could usually find Mrs. Policeman there, and she would know what to do. He didn't have loads of sophisticated equipment, but he was one of the community leaders (along with the Rector, the head of the local school and the people on the village council) who people knew to go to in an emergency. It wasn't perfect but it worked well.
Forward to 2000 or thereabouts, and the police are remote figures in flak jackets, almost always inside cars. They are not part of the community, and most teenagers don't identify with them at all. The Government wants to reintroduce the village policeman, under the name of "Community support officers". And who opposes it? The police. The truth is, too much exposure to US TV programs (yes, a study in Manchester showed that some police there were consciously emulating "police" in cop shows) has poisoned their own perception of their role, and many of them are afraid that community police will be too successful.
Where I live, which is effectively a village on the edge of a small town, we now have these PCSOs. Many evenings I see them out talking to the kids on the street, just talking to them, like our village policemnan used to talk to us in the 1960s. The wheel is coming a bit full circle, and it's about time it did. Cameras are useless without the desire of the community to support its rule enforcers.
However, one big factor has changed. Our village policeman did not have to deal with large numbers of drunks about from 11p.m. to 4a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. He occasionally had to put a drunk in the cell, but that was about it. Community policing does not work in the UK's disgusting and horrible drunk culture because reasonable people cannot deal with aggressive, knife wielding drunks.(I'm allowed to say this; it's the most shameful thing about this country.) This is the root cause of the cameras. If we fixed the drunk problem, there would be no need for security cameras. This is one case where the US has mostly got it right and we have got it wrong, and I would vote unthinkingly for the first politician who was willing to bring in the laws that apply in Utah, or even Manhattan.
Assuming for the moment that the whole thing wasn't simply a Microsoft sock puppet, Darl McBride would seem to have failed very basic economics. SCO's competition was not Sun, HP, Red Hat etc. It was Microsoft. If he had actually wanted to grow the business, he would have known that when a type of product has relatively low market share, increasing the number of suppliers tends to increase that market share. If it's perceived that "everybody is doing Linux these days", cio and ceo are more likely to buy Linux.
So, reverting to the original argument, I suspect that McBride is not stupid, and that the whole thing is indeed a sock puppet. However, as a scam it is probably too arcane to be explained in a fraud trial. Expect McBride to turn up in a Microsoft advert before too long, explaining that it is the fate of all Linux companies to go bankrupt, so best stick with Windows.
A very smart accountant I knew once deliberately left a good job in a successful company to go and work for a company that was in the UK equivalent of Chapter 11 (voluntary arrangement with creditors.) He reckoned that the experience would accelerate his career. How many companies do you think get into trouble every year? How much of a premium do you think they are prepared to pay to accountants who know how to deal with that stuff? When the shit is really deep, that's when you are prepared to pay a lot of money to the guy with big rubber boots and a large pump.
A Google search for me under my real name comes up with one link to an obsolete website, from the 90s. The corporate site on which my details appear is not indexed by any reputable search engine. It is a mistake of people who rely a lot on the Internet for information to think that a majority of people think the same way. My employers have been able to rely on my evidence of professional qualifications and documented actual achievements, which can be referenced by direct contact with publicly identifiable organisations. Many people, including a lot of senior management in large companies, will rely on such real world data. (And if one of your roles happens to be system security, your absence from search engines is a validation that you know what you are about.)
One of my children has, in my view, far too large a footprint on the Internet, largely due to poor security practices by an employer. Fortunately they have moved house, changed telephone numbers and taken down a personal website. Anybody with a high income who reveals personal data on the Internet is, nowadays, increasing their risk of serious crime. This is probably more of a problem in Europe than the US because gated communities and security guards are rare here.
Ones who go for men who probably have very short career prospects and the likelihood of spending their weekends in traction? I would imagine groin strain and hernia are pretty much occupational diseases. "My boyfriend can jump over 10 trucks on a motorcycle. Unfortunately, last week he was supposed to be doing 11."
Write a letter to the PC World legal department stating the case. Say that the machine exhibits a mechanical fault to a hinge, and that nobody who has an ordinary understanding of computers would confuse this with the software running on them. Tell them that you require a fix or replacement under warranty and that you require in addition compensation for the cost of the second visit. Cost your time at your fully loaded hourly rate, plus transport.
Say that you require complete satisfaction within 3 weeks, and that if the matter is not dealt with in 1 week you will need to hire a replacement laptop. State the likely cost.
Then add that unless the matter is resolved as above you will proceed immediately after the three weeks to the Small Claims Court, and that you will seek compensation for all the expenses as outlined, plus the cost of hire until the case is heard or a replacement laptop, whichever is less.
Finally, add that the matter has already had exposure on a website used by many people with equipment specifying and buying power, and that you will be reporting back on the outcome of your complaint.
PC World's corporate lawyers at £400/hour plus sending someone to the SCC plus bad publicity?
Slashdot Mirror
Having said which, this is not really bad news for either side. For Microsoft, this is actually good news. It's counter evidence for the next time they get called in over monopolistic practices, and reduces the chances of more fines from the EU.
Microsoft has to really grow up and become the kind of company that realises that competition from the same kind of product grows the pool. For Linux, the less niche it becomes, the more there is pressure to support, innovate and drive down cost of ownership (not cost of acquisition.) Therefore, as it generates a business ecosystem, its future is more assured.
I've been on enough trading floors to know what traders use, thank you very much. Trading is what it sounds like. It's trying to make money out of the market, treating it as a casino. As a result it is all about acquiring short term asymmetric information, for which spreadsheets are an ideal tool because they can be used quickly to analyse small data sets. I can't see a trader ever using OOo because in that business time is crucial and OOo would only be used if it could analyse faster and more effectively than Excel. Which it can't. No argument. I know one or two people who develop special tools for traders which can do certain things much faster than Excel, and on larger data sets, but they are not the norm.
Investment on the other hand is very different. Investment is the process of seeking to make gains by identifying companies which have a strategic advantage in their market or which are under priced for some reason. This means a lot of serious number crunching. At the banking level, of course, investment becomes about very large deals indeed and the financial tools are very sophisticated. This is where you get physics graduates developing economic models using tools like FEA. And this is what I was thinking of. The people I know of in this area are currently charging out at in excess of $900 per hour, hence my comment about Office costing less than hourly rate. Of course ideas are POCed on spreadsheets, I do it myself (though increasingly I find myself using Transact-SQL directly, reverting to pre-Excel days as my brain cells fall out.)
So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary). I spend time trying to understand macro economics and the effects of things like global warming and try and put my long term assets where they are likely to increment in value faster than bank deposits. That's investment.
- A copy of Office Pro costs less than your hourly billing rate, and you have no interest in this debate, so why are you posting?
- You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.
- Either you employ somebody else to do this stuff anyway, or you have to adhere to corporate policies, and so your desktop is locked down by IT and you don't have a choice of tools.
Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.In fact, that's at the root of the reason why I refuse to fit a bow thruster on my boat. Helming skills are used sufficiently infrequently by most people (including me) that they need frequent reinforcement. If you get used to not having to compensate for wind and water while mooring, what is the betting that just when you run into problems you flatten the batteries that power the thrusters?
I know it's a troll, but even so. I will make only two small points:
The SI system is as arbitrary as the Imperial system.
I use the SI system all the time, but it has one weakness. There is no convenient unit that results in small numbers for everyday use. It is convenient to say that, say, a table is 6ft by 3ft, the approximation involved being obvious. To say the same in SI, it has to be described as either 1800 by 900 mm or 1.8 by 0.9 metres. This involves either inconveniently large numbers that give a spurious precision, or the need to be familiar with decimals - which a lot of people are not. For scientific and engineering purposes, SI is the only sane way to go. For everyday use it is not ideal. This is because Imperial units are based on human scale, not geographic.
And, btw, your "cm" is not an approved SI unit. SI goes by thousands not tens.
Recently we had the case of journos talking up Craig Venter's research as producing "artificial life". I had to read his own original comments to see that he never made that claim, and in fact his own comments agreed with my own Slashdot posting on the subject.
Science is not common speech, and attempts to make it so result in misunderstanding and sensationalism. I don't know who modded this "informative" (presumably the same people who moderated me "overrated" because that doesn't get metamoderated, but whoever you are, you clearly know diddly squit about biology.
The standard of science reporting is now so low that journalists should be deprived of access to modern medicine and technology until they do better, though given the usual standard of their education they would just end up banging rocks together and trying to brew cider from windfalls till the end of time.
Rant over, this is about hybrids between human beings and _other_ species. Nothing new. Visit any UK city centre on a Friday or Saturday night (don't forget flak jacket and bodyguards) and you will believe this kind of thing has been going on for years.
Of course the deceleration depends on many factors, including the surface. In the days of metal case germanium transistors, it was well known that dropping a transistor three feet onto concrete could break an internal wire bond, while falling onto carpet would have no effect whatsoever. Interestingly, the 10lb object dropped on concrete will most likely experience less deceleration than the 1lb one - because it will deflect or crush the concrete to a greater extent. However, you are not advised to try this using a large SCSI drive and a 1.8 inch drive, because owing to the effects of scaling, the SCSI drive will be less rigid.
Just do not buy a crappy inkjet printer or all-in-one laser. If you need to scan, buy a small scanner. If you want to use a professional operating system, use professional kit with it.
In fact Russia and its sphere of influence could get big benefits from cooperation with Japan. Russia has the resources, natural and human. Japan has the technology. As the US tries to hold on to more of the oil in the Middle East and South America, at what point can Russia make Japan an offer it will be hard to refuse? Look at a map of the Arctic, look at the sea ice pattern in August/September and see how far Russian resources are from the Japanese islands by, say, 2030. An awful lot of US interests could be affected in quite unexpected ways by global warming, especially when those nuclear subs have far fewer places to hide and have to travel much further under open water to get to them.
I don't know if Venter made the overhyped claim but it will surely come back to bite science. Creationists and other voodoo merchants will surely seize on this as an example of scientists claiming far too much, and use it as ammunition to discredit science in the eyes of their followers (I started by typing "foolowers" but how many people nowadays know what it means when you write [stet] after a happy mistype?).
Nobody can claim to create artificial life until there is a complete self-reproducing unit built from inorganic chemicals from the ground up. I don't know how long it will be before that happens, (diminishing resources may mean it never happens - we may have much more urgent tasks for scientists over the next 50 years or so.) but this isn't it. It looks like it is an important technical advance, but it is on a level with, say, the development of the CNC machine, and the claims in the media are about as accurate as if someone had written "With the development of the CNC workstation, we have created self-reproducing robots in the laboratory.
The best loudspeaker cable you will ever need to make can be provided quite simply. Use auto wiring cable of about 6mm sq cross section. Twist two colours together so that each 360 degree twist occupies 50mm or so. This minimises the magnetic cross-section.Make good quality screw connections at each end. That's it. Too much shielding, capacitance will affect high frequencies. But, at the resistance levels you are playing with, it's almost immaterial. 6mm cross section has a very low resistance, but if you want a very long cable just go up to 8 or 10. You are still paying well under "audiophile" prices.
An audiophile is someone who can hear the difference between copper, OFHC copper, and silver, but can't hear the salesman sniggering as he leaves the shop.
ISO and IEC are often very political and feelings often run very high in working groups, though this rarely makes it way to the plenary sessions. People shout. Observers try to intervene and have to be shut up. This guy behaved perfectly properly. Your comment about "decisions as chairman" show a bottomless ignorance of procedure. I can only assume that either you have no experience whatsoever of standards work, or your employer is based in Redmond.
Ah well, doing sociology of religion was the reason I never went into the Ministry and ended up a systems designer.
That's without considering that the entire planet would be given over to growing grass. Unlike cars, horses consume a lot of fuel even when going nowhere. You have to be quite well off to be an Amish.
This ceases to be true when biofuels become totally self sufficient. This means that fertiliser plants, the plants that manufacture everything used in the biofuel production cycle, storage etc., are all being entirely fuelled by their own product.
For this reason, for many years to come, biodiesel has to be the preferred route. This is because the huge installed base of plant can mostly run on it; you can do process heating with biodiesel as well as run generators, trucks and ships. You can, as it were, bootstrap the biodiesel economy, whereas you cannot bootstrap the ethanol or hydrogen economies. Steel plants and machine shops cannot run on either.
Hydrogen is attractive to the vehicle industry not because it is efficient but because it requires replacement of the entire vehicle fleet and would provide a boost to the industry. Biodiesel allows the existing fleet to be replaced much more slowly, with the same emissions benefits.
One of the simplest ways to reduce anthropogenic global warming is just to use less energy. One of the best ways to do that is to make consumer durables last longer, and make them out of readily recyclable materials. But that threatens the entire basis of the US-Chinese industrial complex, whereas hydrogen offers it greatly increased opportunities to expand.
Obviously the translator was all at sea.
The last thing I want is commercial and social wars being fought out on my desktop operating system, yet that is precisely what Vista appears to be. It's an extension of the US business and legal system into computers. If it applied to cars, every time my car went low on fuel it would try and drive itself to an Exxon garage. It would come without locks and I would have to go to a third party supplier, and every year I would need new locks. Every new model would need an engine twice as large as the previous one but would not seem to go any faster. What's more, the steering wheel and the gearshift would get steadily more expensive.
That's Vista. Microsoft's problem is simple. It makes something that once was a craft product but now is commoditised, and the commodity price is trending to zero. So it wants to create added value, but it hasn't realised that it cannot do that by extending the commodity product. And it has no really good ideas any more. In the real world, you can buy a cheap watch or an expensive watch. Most watches are cheap, the fancy ones are expensive. You can buy a cheap car or an expensive car. Most cars are cheap, a few are expensive. In the software world, most operating system installations are expensive, only a few percent are cheap. It's a population inversion, like the excited atoms in a laser. At some point, that distortion will start to right itself, one way or another.
Nobody is suggesting you should not be able to buy a computer with a preinstalled OS and ready to go. The suggestion is that you should be made aware at the point of sale of how much of the purchase price is the OS, and that it should be illegal for an OS supplier to make agreements based on exclusivity. If Dell wanted to sell nothing but Vista they would be allowed to, but they would also have to sell the same computer with no OS at all, and Microsoft would be barred from any agreement which penalised them in any way at all for doing so.
There are so many posts on this thread that are simply incorrect that I suspect that MS' lobby firms are astroturfing like crazy - they've had a bad week, even that bastion of respectability Scientific American called them "Micro$oft" on their website this week, in a rather hostile article. Obviously people are starting tog et the drift at last.
As an aside, in a world of "free markets", the internal management of many company sales departments is actually profoundly anti free competition. I suspect that one reason so many North Americans (and more traditional Europeans) have difficulty with the concepts of competition law, despite its great age, is that "business as usual" is profoundly opposed to it.
Forward to 2000 or thereabouts, and the police are remote figures in flak jackets, almost always inside cars. They are not part of the community, and most teenagers don't identify with them at all. The Government wants to reintroduce the village policeman, under the name of "Community support officers". And who opposes it? The police. The truth is, too much exposure to US TV programs (yes, a study in Manchester showed that some police there were consciously emulating "police" in cop shows) has poisoned their own perception of their role, and many of them are afraid that community police will be too successful.
Where I live, which is effectively a village on the edge of a small town, we now have these PCSOs. Many evenings I see them out talking to the kids on the street, just talking to them, like our village policemnan used to talk to us in the 1960s. The wheel is coming a bit full circle, and it's about time it did. Cameras are useless without the desire of the community to support its rule enforcers.
However, one big factor has changed. Our village policeman did not have to deal with large numbers of drunks about from 11p.m. to 4a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. He occasionally had to put a drunk in the cell, but that was about it. Community policing does not work in the UK's disgusting and horrible drunk culture because reasonable people cannot deal with aggressive, knife wielding drunks.(I'm allowed to say this; it's the most shameful thing about this country.) This is the root cause of the cameras. If we fixed the drunk problem, there would be no need for security cameras. This is one case where the US has mostly got it right and we have got it wrong, and I would vote unthinkingly for the first politician who was willing to bring in the laws that apply in Utah, or even Manhattan.
So, reverting to the original argument, I suspect that McBride is not stupid, and that the whole thing is indeed a sock puppet. However, as a scam it is probably too arcane to be explained in a fraud trial. Expect McBride to turn up in a Microsoft advert before too long, explaining that it is the fate of all Linux companies to go bankrupt, so best stick with Windows.
A very smart accountant I knew once deliberately left a good job in a successful company to go and work for a company that was in the UK equivalent of Chapter 11 (voluntary arrangement with creditors.) He reckoned that the experience would accelerate his career. How many companies do you think get into trouble every year? How much of a premium do you think they are prepared to pay to accountants who know how to deal with that stuff? When the shit is really deep, that's when you are prepared to pay a lot of money to the guy with big rubber boots and a large pump.
One of my children has, in my view, far too large a footprint on the Internet, largely due to poor security practices by an employer. Fortunately they have moved house, changed telephone numbers and taken down a personal website. Anybody with a high income who reveals personal data on the Internet is, nowadays, increasing their risk of serious crime. This is probably more of a problem in Europe than the US because gated communities and security guards are rare here.
Ones who go for men who probably have very short career prospects and the likelihood of spending their weekends in traction? I would imagine groin strain and hernia are pretty much occupational diseases. "My boyfriend can jump over 10 trucks on a motorcycle. Unfortunately, last week he was supposed to be doing 11."
Say that you require complete satisfaction within 3 weeks, and that if the matter is not dealt with in 1 week you will need to hire a replacement laptop. State the likely cost.
Then add that unless the matter is resolved as above you will proceed immediately after the three weeks to the Small Claims Court, and that you will seek compensation for all the expenses as outlined, plus the cost of hire until the case is heard or a replacement laptop, whichever is less.
Finally, add that the matter has already had exposure on a website used by many people with equipment specifying and buying power, and that you will be reporting back on the outcome of your complaint.
PC World's corporate lawyers at £400/hour plus sending someone to the SCC plus bad publicity?