For that the monetry system would have to be a Smart Card system. Given time money as it is may be discontinued due to counterfeit issues. In the future your account will be credited for your work, you can transfer funds to a smart card, and the monetry control body should be able to monitor everything you buy. There might also be limits on what you can use certain funds for, for example if you get a social security payment you might not be able to use it for gambling. Would also make it very hard to avoid taxes. At that point I expect gold to become very popular.
Yeah the grassroots protests against this are probably from political lobyists who get paid to write stuff in their blog. Interesting how well it works.
You should just say that you are Canadian, most bogans round here in Australia can't pick the difference in accent so it would save you from right bashing after the way our farmers have been treated by American interests, not to mention the effects of large bodies of culturally different immigrants fleeing to Australia from areas torn up by US invasions. Australians worry a lot about the welfare of their farmers. Don't target them for lawsuits and boycotts.
This sounds like a reasonable argument. I think people should accept that China has invaded 1 country. The original provocative post was trying to say that the US has invaded more countries in the last 50 years than China has. I don't see how people could argue with that. What might be a better topic to argue about is the intention of the US invasions. In general the US have indicated that their intentions are good, although the outcomes haven't been, so it would seem that the US may not yet be smart enough as a governing body to be given the privilage of having a superior military force. What do you think? Can you point to recent historical evidence to back up your point?
I would say the law isn't harsh enough against people who commit aggrevated sexual assault and other highly violent crimes. Murder is a rubbery area depending on the motive as people are often driven to extremes by other people.
Spammers have just about destroyed the usefulness of e-mail. E-mail could have been more of a revolution for human society than what it has become. You could look at this on a global scale as in what it the total amount of negativity that this this person has inflicted on the world as a whole. Of course it is hard to measure murder of 1 vs annoyance of many but I guess that's what the courts are meant to do, and this is the conclusion they have come to.
Oh right. My bad. I had assumed it had died because I used to read the blog about it http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/ but it stopped being updated in 2005. I thought it would be a cool way to run marginally trusted apps, like shareware, downloaded from the net that required admin access. Run them inside a transaction, then cancel the transaction when you quit the app so that nothing is altered on your machine. I must look into it again.
there are a lot of good smart people here (at IBM)
I've noticed in recent years that there are a lot of smart people moving to Microsoft, and yet I can't help feeling that they seem to have a slight problem harnessing all that talent. I mean while Vista is a step in the right direction, it feels like it needs a little more work, and the new GUI API needs more stuff added to it. With all that talent they should be able to deliver something really astounding. With vista I was expecting a database to be part of the O/S, and have transactional operations so an install can be rolled back on failure by just simply not commiting the transaction. I was hoping that legacy apps would be sandboxed but wrapped so that they thought they were running with admin rights, instead there's this rights escalation dialog that pops up continuously.
What happens in big companies that holds people back? Too much micro-management? Too many meetings? Too much design by committee? Too much political infighting? Too much empire building and idea protecting?
18 months ago I read an article that said Toshiba said they had a triple layer HD-DVD disk which holds 45GB, which pretty much makes the extra expense of Blue-Ray pointless. I read that Here. Move ahead to August 2006 and they are still just talking about it Here and say the spec won't be finalised until mid 2007. They should make sure that HD-DVD players are ready now for this format, and can be firmware upgraded to read them. Of course even if they don't, the next gen HD-DVD players will still be able to play all the HD-DVD movies you already bought, so looking at that it's probably still the better investment.
Where are the signed 64-bit Vista drivers for this? Maybe slightly offtopic, but this made me think about how you can't run unsigned drivers on 64-bit Vista, probably for some DRM reason. Homebrew hardware projects are probably an area which would require the user to be able to run their own drivers. I see a problem.
Did you read the article. Some of the spec is things like "do what MS Word 5.1.4 did with line spaces." How exactly is anyone other than MS supposed to implement that? By reverse engineering a whole slew of old products that are not even available on the market anymore?
I read the article, and I think the author lacked imagination afterall why reinvent the wheel. I assume Microsoft has already done all the hard multi-product reverse engineering work in Word 2007, which you can get a time limited evaluation copy of for free. Additionally Word 2007 has plugins to output in PDF and XPS. So all you need to do is write a script that outputs an OpenXML wordprocessor document with all the things in it you want to test, load it into Word 2007, and then save it out as a PDF file. Then you will have an input file, and an output that has all the typesetting information in it that you require. Given a few iterations and tweaking of that I would think giving one smart person 6 months to come up with a best attempt should yield a reasonably functioning module. Of course how you then port this to a non-typesetting wordprocesssor file format is another issue, which is probably why MS went down the path that they did.
The company boss would say why not just give 8 pages each to 750 developers and by the end of the day we should have a fully working product.
While this is rediculous, I'm sure the spec could be broken up into specs for a few different modules. Afterall if Microsoft wrote the spec, and has implemented the spec, then how difficult could it be?
I once spent 18 months writing a 3000 page spec, and it only took a team of 5 another year to implement it. Of course since then whenever someone asks me if I would like to write a spec everything suddenly goes dark and people find me shaking and sweating in a fetal position in a corner somewhere. Writing a big spec is not fun.
Don't worry, the Tamil's will switch back again once they work out how to pirate Vista. I guess at the moment it looks like Vista's anti piracy measures must be pretty good and thus there are probably a lot of less then wealthy entities that will swap to Linux.
I did look it up. The relevant patent for Tamiflu is here and was filed in December 1996 by Gilead Sciences. According to this page Zanamivir (Relenza) was licensed to GlaxoSmithKline by Biota in 1990 after being discovered in 1989, so it predates Tamiflu by 7 years.
For example Australian company Biota created and patented Relenza for treating bird flu, then Roche modified their product slightly to produce and patent Tamiflu.
Yes! I think I'm going to have to modify all my light fittings so I can install these suckers all throughout my house.....might also have to invest in some sunglasses or glare protection goggles.
I've found that replacing my 100watt bulbs with the equivalent in CFLs was ok, but light coming from them somehow seemed dimmer due to it being a colder temperature light. What I would like to see is really bright CFLs, like 150W equivalent, which would use about 30W. I think this would encourage people to buy them more because as well as only using 30% of the electricity they also get bulbs that produce 50% more light, not to mention the immediate wow factor of having brighter bulbs. Unfortunately things seem to be going the other way, as at my local store I can now only buy 18W CFLs.
Maybe he's thinking about pirates like in "The Scene" http://www.welcometothescene.com/ where one time they were trying to beat other pirates to a "Release" and then suddenly a technical glitch wiped all their files from the server.
People get a lot of their experience these days from watching movies. Software companies test the final version before releasing it, surely movie production companies do the same
Yeah, give an Engineer 12 months to do a 3 month job and they will deliver something completely brilliant, but unrelated to the task that you gave them. Engineers procrastinate the same, except that they do engineering stuff while whittling away the time.
Like the guy who always finds a way to say that he doesn't own a tv http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694. It probably would have been better if the guy stated the time period is terms that more of us can relate to rather than something sensitive like religion.
I don't see what use it would be in a computer game as it's more to do with the mechanics of downshifting at speed. From wikipedia:
Heel-and-toe is a driving technique used in performance driving. It involves operating the throttle and brake pedals simultaneously with the right foot, while facilitating normal activation of the clutch with the left foot. It is used when braking and downshifting simultaneously (like when going around a turn), and allows the driver to "blip" the throttle to raise the engine speed and smoothly engage the lower gear.
Heel-and-toe is used before entry into a turn while a vehicle is under braking, preparing the transmission to be in the optimal gear to accelerate out of the turn. One benefit of downshifting before entering a turn is a jolt to the drivetrain, or any other unwanted dynamics, will not upset the vehicle as badly when going in a straight line; the same jolt while turning may upset the vehicle enough to cause loss of control if it occurs after the turn is begun. Another benefit is "heel-and-toeing" allows you to downshift at the last moment before entering the turn, after you have started braking and the car has slowed, so the engine speed when the lower gear is engaged will not be too high.
Performance vehicles are usually modified (if necessary) so that the heights of the brake and accelerator pedals are closely matched to permit easy use of heel-and-toe, and that the pedals are not too far apart.
The name, stemming from earlier automotive designs where the accelerator pedal was on the left and could be actuated with the heel while the brake pedal was actuated with the toe, is misleading regarding how the technique is carried out in modern cars, i.e., operating the brake with the left edge of the foot, while rocking it down and to the right to operate the throttle. With practice, it becomes possible to smoothly and independently operate both pedals with one foot. The technique is common in all forms of motorsport, especially rallying.
Heel and toe braking has the following steps:
Brake with the ball (left edge) of your right foot while the car is in gear
Disengage (press) the clutch once the car has slowed down significantly (if double clutching, shift to the neutral position and engage the clutch)
Blip the throttle to match the engine rpm to the rpm needed for the selected gear using either the heel or the right edge of your right foot
Shift the gear lever to correct gear (disengage the clutch first if double clutching)
Engage the clutch, release the brake and roll your foot onto the accelerator
Just a thought, but living in a world where we aren't brought up to constantly need mind numbing entertainment spewed at us any time we aren't working might not actually be a bad thing. It seems that people's lives these days are getting dominated by the need to watch fictional lives on tv or at the movies. I think this can lead to people having unrealistic expectations about real life.
I digress though, back to the Chinese. I don't think their economy will be as dependent on Intellectual Property as the US economy is, so the effect you allude to probably won't eventuate so long as the Chinese have such a competitive manufacturing base. Even if it was to be a problem, I don't think that businesses any where in the world care too much past making lots of money in the next year. The Chinese Entertainment industry though is still emerging. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the world over the next 20 years.
I wouldn't feel too bad for him. He's moving to google http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=170/ which I'm sure isn't too bad for his career or his bank account. It's easier to have strong principles when you have a safety net. I've always found a job offer from a competitor to be the perfect opportunity to get things off my chest followed by a resignation.
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For that the monetry system would have to be a Smart Card system. Given time money as it is may be discontinued due to counterfeit issues. In the future your account will be credited for your work, you can transfer funds to a smart card, and the monetry control body should be able to monitor everything you buy. There might also be limits on what you can use certain funds for, for example if you get a social security payment you might not be able to use it for gambling. Would also make it very hard to avoid taxes. At that point I expect gold to become very popular.
Yeah the grassroots protests against this are probably from political lobyists who get paid to write stuff in their blog. Interesting how well it works.
You should just say that you are Canadian, most bogans round here in Australia can't pick the difference in accent so it would save you from right bashing after the way our farmers have been treated by American interests, not to mention the effects of large bodies of culturally different immigrants fleeing to Australia from areas torn up by US invasions. Australians worry a lot about the welfare of their farmers. Don't target them for lawsuits and boycotts.
This sounds like a reasonable argument. I think people should accept that China has invaded 1 country. The original provocative post was trying to say that the US has invaded more countries in the last 50 years than China has. I don't see how people could argue with that. What might be a better topic to argue about is the intention of the US invasions. In general the US have indicated that their intentions are good, although the outcomes haven't been, so it would seem that the US may not yet be smart enough as a governing body to be given the privilage of having a superior military force. What do you think? Can you point to recent historical evidence to back up your point?
I would say the law isn't harsh enough against people who commit aggrevated sexual assault and other highly violent crimes. Murder is a rubbery area depending on the motive as people are often driven to extremes by other people.
Spammers have just about destroyed the usefulness of e-mail. E-mail could have been more of a revolution for human society than what it has become. You could look at this on a global scale as in what it the total amount of negativity that this this person has inflicted on the world as a whole. Of course it is hard to measure murder of 1 vs annoyance of many but I guess that's what the courts are meant to do, and this is the conclusion they have come to.
Oh right. My bad. I had assumed it had died because I used to read the blog about it http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/ but it stopped being updated in 2005. I thought it would be a cool way to run marginally trusted apps, like shareware, downloaded from the net that required admin access. Run them inside a transaction, then cancel the transaction when you quit the app so that nothing is altered on your machine. I must look into it again.
I've noticed in recent years that there are a lot of smart people moving to Microsoft, and yet I can't help feeling that they seem to have a slight problem harnessing all that talent. I mean while Vista is a step in the right direction, it feels like it needs a little more work, and the new GUI API needs more stuff added to it. With all that talent they should be able to deliver something really astounding. With vista I was expecting a database to be part of the O/S, and have transactional operations so an install can be rolled back on failure by just simply not commiting the transaction. I was hoping that legacy apps would be sandboxed but wrapped so that they thought they were running with admin rights, instead there's this rights escalation dialog that pops up continuously.
What happens in big companies that holds people back? Too much micro-management? Too many meetings? Too much design by committee? Too much political infighting? Too much empire building and idea protecting?
What's happening at IBM? What could fix it?
18 months ago I read an article that said Toshiba said they had a triple layer HD-DVD disk which holds 45GB, which pretty much makes the extra expense of Blue-Ray pointless. I read that Here. Move ahead to August 2006 and they are still just talking about it Here and say the spec won't be finalised until mid 2007. They should make sure that HD-DVD players are ready now for this format, and can be firmware upgraded to read them. Of course even if they don't, the next gen HD-DVD players will still be able to play all the HD-DVD movies you already bought, so looking at that it's probably still the better investment.
I wonder if they would do Doom for Wii so that I can really jump around and smash my wiimote into things it's never smashed into before.
Where are the signed 64-bit Vista drivers for this? Maybe slightly offtopic, but this made me think about how you can't run unsigned drivers on 64-bit Vista, probably for some DRM reason. Homebrew hardware projects are probably an area which would require the user to be able to run their own drivers. I see a problem.
Oh no! why did you tell me that? Now I'm not going to get any work done this week.
I read the article, and I think the author lacked imagination afterall why reinvent the wheel. I assume Microsoft has already done all the hard multi-product reverse engineering work in Word 2007, which you can get a time limited evaluation copy of for free. Additionally Word 2007 has plugins to output in PDF and XPS. So all you need to do is write a script that outputs an OpenXML wordprocessor document with all the things in it you want to test, load it into Word 2007, and then save it out as a PDF file. Then you will have an input file, and an output that has all the typesetting information in it that you require. Given a few iterations and tweaking of that I would think giving one smart person 6 months to come up with a best attempt should yield a reasonably functioning module. Of course how you then port this to a non-typesetting wordprocesssor file format is another issue, which is probably why MS went down the path that they did.
The company boss would say why not just give 8 pages each to 750 developers and by the end of the day we should have a fully working product.
While this is rediculous, I'm sure the spec could be broken up into specs for a few different modules. Afterall if Microsoft wrote the spec, and has implemented the spec, then how difficult could it be?
I once spent 18 months writing a 3000 page spec, and it only took a team of 5 another year to implement it. Of course since then whenever someone asks me if I would like to write a spec everything suddenly goes dark and people find me shaking and sweating in a fetal position in a corner somewhere. Writing a big spec is not fun.
Don't worry, the Tamil's will switch back again once they work out how to pirate Vista. I guess at the moment it looks like Vista's anti piracy measures must be pretty good and thus there are probably a lot of less then wealthy entities that will swap to Linux.
I did look it up. The relevant patent for Tamiflu is here and was filed in December 1996 by Gilead Sciences. According to this page Zanamivir (Relenza) was licensed to GlaxoSmithKline by Biota in 1990 after being discovered in 1989, so it predates Tamiflu by 7 years.
I used to be a stock holder in Biota.
For example Australian company Biota created and patented Relenza for treating bird flu, then Roche modified their product slightly to produce and patent Tamiflu.
Yes! I think I'm going to have to modify all my light fittings so I can install these suckers all throughout my house.....might also have to invest in some sunglasses or glare protection goggles.
I've found that replacing my 100watt bulbs with the equivalent in CFLs was ok, but light coming from them somehow seemed dimmer due to it being a colder temperature light. What I would like to see is really bright CFLs, like 150W equivalent, which would use about 30W. I think this would encourage people to buy them more because as well as only using 30% of the electricity they also get bulbs that produce 50% more light, not to mention the immediate wow factor of having brighter bulbs. Unfortunately things seem to be going the other way, as at my local store I can now only buy 18W CFLs.
Maybe he's thinking about pirates like in "The Scene" http://www.welcometothescene.com/ where one time they were trying to beat other pirates to a "Release" and then suddenly a technical glitch wiped all their files from the server.
People get a lot of their experience these days from watching movies. Software companies test the final version before releasing it, surely movie production companies do the same
Yeah, give an Engineer 12 months to do a 3 month job and they will deliver something completely brilliant, but unrelated to the task that you gave them. Engineers procrastinate the same, except that they do engineering stuff while whittling away the time.
Like the guy who always finds a way to say that he doesn't own a tv http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694. It probably would have been better if the guy stated the time period is terms that more of us can relate to rather than something sensitive like religion.
I don't see what use it would be in a computer game as it's more to do with the mechanics of downshifting at speed. From wikipedia:
Heel-and-toe is a driving technique used in performance driving. It involves operating the throttle and brake pedals simultaneously with the right foot, while facilitating normal activation of the clutch with the left foot. It is used when braking and downshifting simultaneously (like when going around a turn), and allows the driver to "blip" the throttle to raise the engine speed and smoothly engage the lower gear.
Heel-and-toe is used before entry into a turn while a vehicle is under braking, preparing the transmission to be in the optimal gear to accelerate out of the turn. One benefit of downshifting before entering a turn is a jolt to the drivetrain, or any other unwanted dynamics, will not upset the vehicle as badly when going in a straight line; the same jolt while turning may upset the vehicle enough to cause loss of control if it occurs after the turn is begun. Another benefit is "heel-and-toeing" allows you to downshift at the last moment before entering the turn, after you have started braking and the car has slowed, so the engine speed when the lower gear is engaged will not be too high.
Performance vehicles are usually modified (if necessary) so that the heights of the brake and accelerator pedals are closely matched to permit easy use of heel-and-toe, and that the pedals are not too far apart.
The name, stemming from earlier automotive designs where the accelerator pedal was on the left and could be actuated with the heel while the brake pedal was actuated with the toe, is misleading regarding how the technique is carried out in modern cars, i.e., operating the brake with the left edge of the foot, while rocking it down and to the right to operate the throttle. With practice, it becomes possible to smoothly and independently operate both pedals with one foot. The technique is common in all forms of motorsport, especially rallying.
Heel and toe braking has the following steps:
Brake with the ball (left edge) of your right foot while the car is in gear
Disengage (press) the clutch once the car has slowed down significantly (if double clutching, shift to the neutral position and engage the clutch)
Blip the throttle to match the engine rpm to the rpm needed for the selected gear using either the heel or the right edge of your right foot
Shift the gear lever to correct gear (disengage the clutch first if double clutching)
Engage the clutch, release the brake and roll your foot onto the accelerator
3 times more powerful. No you got that wrong, it's infinately more powerful, as nothing will ever use the full potential of the PS3. Here's my source http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/1 2/20/1330252.
Just a thought, but living in a world where we aren't brought up to constantly need mind numbing entertainment spewed at us any time we aren't working might not actually be a bad thing. It seems that people's lives these days are getting dominated by the need to watch fictional lives on tv or at the movies. I think this can lead to people having unrealistic expectations about real life.
I digress though, back to the Chinese. I don't think their economy will be as dependent on Intellectual Property as the US economy is, so the effect you allude to probably won't eventuate so long as the Chinese have such a competitive manufacturing base. Even if it was to be a problem, I don't think that businesses any where in the world care too much past making lots of money in the next year. The Chinese Entertainment industry though is still emerging. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the world over the next 20 years.
I wouldn't feel too bad for him. He's moving to google http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=170/ which I'm sure isn't too bad for his career or his bank account. It's easier to have strong principles when you have a safety net. I've always found a job offer from a competitor to be the perfect opportunity to get things off my chest followed by a resignation.