I think its more of what your body is used to, people who never drink coffee may hallucinate at 3 cups but I don't your average joe will.
During my second year of University my load work started to seriously ramp up and over the course of the year I went from a cup or two to 8-12 pints of coffee (I got a very big mug). The only side effect I noticed, was when the year ended and even though I had caught up on the sleep I still had insane cravings for coffee (constantly wanted the stuff) it took 3 weeks for them to go away. I never saw anything interesting, or suffered any ill effects except the weird craving after the year was over.
Its the same with sleep deprevation I've always had trouble sleeping and usually have gotten by on 5-6 hours, during my second year of University I went through 13 days with approximate 1 hour of sleep. I remember handing in my coursework, being woken up at the end of the class I went to and a friend took me home. Even after such a long time I struggled to stay asleep for more than 20 hours and ended up going out the next night only to relate the entire story to a final year psych student who was certain I should be insane and asked if I would be part of her final year study thing (not what I was going for). During that time the only real side effects I noticed was the constant feeling someone was watching my right shoulder (which I was rational enough to know my mind was screwing with me), a slight irrationality which I could recognise (with effort), a tendency to be more irratable than normal (which my friends tell me they didn't notice) and the obvious desire to sleep for ten/twelve hours.
These days with a real job and all the stress's of University behind me (real work is alot less stressfull for me) I rarely drink more than two cups of earl grey a day and have gotten used to being able to sleep 7 hours every night to the point where I only managed six last night and I'm now feeling tired.
The UK does have a constitution but its isn't nicely laid out and harped about like the American one. I remember some BBC documentary on it where a historian got very irrate when it was claimed that Britain doesn't have one. Most people consider the Magna Carta the first part of the Brittish Constitution (as well as Australia's if that Australian Parlimentary exhibit was correct) with the Bill of Human Rights beings the latest part of legislation which is a part of it.
Hazy memory tells me that politicians/historians consider the Brittish COnstitution to span the last 1000 years with around 1200 pages to it.
Personnally I think its a good thing since we don't have people shouting about their "constitutional rights". Hearing about the *abuses of the Bill of Human Rights irratates me. Having an small poorly defined document open for abuse would be horrific.
*Such abuses include mandating a TV, playstation, etc.. for Inmates, people on benifits requiring Satalite TV, mobile phones, etc.. and several crinimals getting off because of it.
I'm not quite sure this is true, I recently spent 6 weeks in Australia (mainly Melbourne) and at first I thought all Australian cars were American. Sure their some european cars around Holden Briana (The European Vauxhall/Opel Corsa), the Ford Mondeo and Focus and a Toyato Corolla's. As for the rest of the "european cars" they had been horribly altered (Honda Civic has been changed beyond recognition) I saw alot of other cars like the Ford Fairlane, Explorer and the *shudder* Falcon, the Toyota Aurion and Camry. These cars simply don't exist in Europe and my American colleages recognised the names on many of them. I will agree that they said the cars were much smaller than their American counter parts, but in my time there I saw hundreds of Aurions and Falcons and very few Mondeo's and Corrolla's.
The Australian market seems gutted with giant, poorly handling, crappy braking, large engined automatics. Which I could understand if the Australian police wern't so anal on Speeding (15kmh over the speed limit is a driving ban??) I could understand if your speed limit wasn't lower than the UK's and considering the hole in the ozone layer you have you'd think I wouldn't have spent just as much money on fuel (for roughly the same distance) in Australia as I do in the UK when Australian fuel prices were 65p a litre compared to (when I left) £1.10 of the UK.
I know a UK (Plymouth) based dockyard (DML Dockyard) that did something similar. When times were lean and the Royal Navy awarded all their refitting contracts to smaller dying dockyards DML first moved into building super yachts, then took up the regionals train servicing contracts and currently produces hundreds of land buggys for the US and UK armies. Now their Frigate and Submariane business has been ensured the new short sighted owners are refocusing back on that.
The point is a dockyard of 4000 workers was able to use its talent and expertise in stripping, repairing and rebuilding various submarianes, aircraft carriers and frigates and use it to create super fast super yachts, maintain the regions trains to a higher standard that dedicated yards could and were able to retrofit buggys for army use. Why can't the "big 3" supposedly "American made" is a sign of high quality surely people capable of this quality can diversify?
My teachers always combined software programming with electronics/robotics (admittedly I was on a electronics course.) I learnt C by writing code that first moved a robot arm, then rewrote parts of the application so you could directly control the arm and finally I got the arm to play tic tac toe against me.
I learnt assembly by programming a microcontroller board to act as a waveform analyser and traffic light co-ordination system.
It was a great incentive, the purely software approach has always seemed a bit dull to me.
The UK already has free health care for everyone from broken arms, heart transplants, fertility treatment and even transexual ops. I would rather see the £12 billion spent on providing free dental service (surprisingly we don't get that unless it involves an operation) or how about improving school food, the idea of hiring police adminstrators instead of requiring police to do all the paper work, how about reducing council tax or giving more money to local councils.
The number you need to call to get your installation revalidated isn't free, from the UK your looking at something like £1/£1.50 a minute to get you perfectly legitimate copy of a game working.
People on slashdot have frequently complained about about Windows activation which ues a free number (no matter where you are) asks you 2-3 simple questions (how many machines is this installed on, why are you reinstalling and where did you get the disc) and can be gotten through in roughly 4 minutes. In short you get flagged but the onus is on you to come out and say your a pirate and your assumed to be a normal customer. Reading the EA forums in can take upto an hour to get through a customer service rep who then seems to go out of there way to accuse you of piracy. EA's spore servers have suffered several technical faults and they don't even have a complete list of all of the valid keys they have distributed.
I agree with you that disc's do wear out and if EA were offering a system similar to Steam I would have probably bought Spore and Red Alert 3. As it stands EA appear to be trying to slip a rental system in through the back door and considering what secuRom does (rootkitting your pc) and the slashdot reaction to the Sony music rootkit fiasco I'm amazed that more people aren't complaining.
I say all this as a person who loves the C&C/Red Alert series, I won't buy a game which has limited re-installs and decides it should be able to root kit my pc to protect itself,
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would have throught the best way to measure performance is in functionality/bug fixing, combined with some sort of rough syntax analsys so you can see how many bugs a person is introducing, how many non best practices their introducing and how many their fixing.
Last week I spent all week re-writing and heavily expanding an interface and it allowed me to remove something like 5000 lines of code from the software. Measuring LOC would have had me seriously in the negitive.
You don't need that crap, it's that same attitude which is causing the music industry so much hassle. I used to help manage a podcast group called The Cavern Today, I'm listening to the latest one right now and it proves my point. Goto http://www.thecaverntoday.org/?go=pod34 have a listen and tell me what you think a professional mixing console and complete sound proof room would do to enhance the audio quality of it (I'll accept the content may not be your thing and the cheap pc microphones can cause problems.)
While your listening I'd like to point out everyone involved (excusing Mowog) is using a £20 or less microphone, the background music has been supplied from a variety of soruces many of which have suggested Goldwave and Audacity. The person known as Jnathus will have mixed and edited the entire podcast in Audacity.
I've used Cool Edit Pro (legitimately I might add) and I've used audacity and I don't know what cool Edit Pro actually adds. I think it's a bit like my sisters music management degree where you had to produce a website in Dreamweaver because everything else was "rubbish" (I taught her to make a decent one in notepad and we ported it into dreamweaver.) Sure studio time is still expensive but if your ignore the big music recordng studio's I believe you can get a decent studio plus sound engineer for a couple hundred quid an hour.
I never said the music industries had lost their ability to advertise and they still know how to shove stuff down our throats. When you couple that with the high noise to signal ratio (good vs suckie indie bands) of course smaller less advertised bands are going to have a hard job starting up. The audio quality of their albums has nothing to do with it, their ability to play live and to have good songs does.
Reading the GP it appears the post wants to be able to give the ability to upload several files to his users (for whatever reason.) The users are uploading files not downloading them.
I think your missing a huge point in their business model. SONY BMG, Universal, etc.. are companies that traditionally trumped up the high recording/production costs in making films/movies. They would spend the required millions to put people on stage they would then contractually and physically have the ability to limit supply and so artificially increase the value of their product.
The problem is that technology has changed where you needed a $1 million dollar recording studio twenty years ago we can now use a $2000 PC and importantly you get the same quality of music out of it. The advent of the internet means it is now relatively cheap to get your message out. I believe Sandi Thom showed just how easy it was to gain a large audience through the internet. On top of this technology has made copying intellectual property very cheap (it costs around 10p to copy a DVD.)
Their business model isnâ(TM)t making things and selling them (such a description covers every single business model I can think of.) Their business model is being a middle man in the access to music. They were able to control the supply of music to the masses and in doing so make money from it. Technology has meant they have lost the ability to control that, rather than update their business model and try adding value to their product they continually attack their customer base and work to devalue their business model (paper cd cases, drm, etc..)
I'd care but can't since Rock Band still isn't availiable in the UK on the PS3 due to exclusivity deals. Because of this crap treatment by Harmonix I won't be purchasing Rock Band I'll wait for Guitar Hero 4, which will probably make it to the PS3 before Rock Band does.
Harmonix are only doing this because when Guitar Hero does get a series of exclusives they can complain about the uncompetitive practices, while at the same time arranging for (rock band 2) anouther xbox360 exclusive pushing the UK PS3 release somewhere in the region of 2010.
Piracy is the norm within UK society, the BPI likes to state that 6 million people regularly pirate in the UK. There are only ~20 million broadband users in the UK, this suggests a good fraction of people see nothing wrong with piracy and are happy to do it. 1/10th of our populaton admit to regularly pirating and don't see anything wrong with it. Piracy is a society norm, there are less iPhones and iPods in the UK both of which are considered "norms".
What needs to be addressed is how do we deal with this problem, Labour government seem hell bent on headlines and so are prosecuting everyone in sight. Your not going to convince people its wrong and just like Speeding no matter what lies, statistic and campaigns you do people are still going to do it (that was a reference to speed camera's whose effectiviness is current being strongly questioned in light of the 100 million pound in fines the government gets.)
its not "opt-in" i got caught by this a few months ago if you choose not to do it then you choose not to buy anything. What has concerned me is HSBC have obviously put me into this scheme and yet have in no way informed me about it. The first time it came up I ended up calling the only existing store for OcUK and confirming it was legitimate.
Do you know what bugs me more than anything? The password must be at most 10 characters, but the password input box allows for more than ten characters, everytime I end up having to reset the password to use it. Then again I'm still dreaming of the day when banks,websites and forums can decided on a standardised password contents and length format.
This is an agreement between two business organisations as such it wouldn't be exempt from existing laws. We have a thing called the Data Protection Act in the UK which protects everyones information. If the BPI gave virgin an IP address and Virgin contacted me then it hasn't been broken but if Virgin start handing my personal information over to the BPI without my permissionn and without a court order then legally they would be in very hot water. Deliberate breaches of the data protection act can lead to jail sentances and massive fines.
If care about roadsafety try looking at its NCAP results, in europe all cars have to go through a standardised set of results. The tests cover things from survival in various head/side on collisions to the survival of any pedestrians you hit. Unfortunatly I can't seem to load the homepage atm, but the site address is http://www.euroncap.com/ and remember bigger isn't always best.
They were a series of books co-written by lecturers, The ones that stuck in memory were the RF Micro-electronics, Microwave Electronics and the Digital Filters booklets. Its true a lecturer can make mistakes but none of the books were written by a single lecturer. These same lecturers taught in class and set (in conjunction with the IET) the tests.
Its true you have the chance that information contained within them could be wrong, however they were heavily math based with alot of examples and of course if you understand the subject you can figure out examples and tests of your own. Bad math never/very rarely works.
I knew several lecturers who co-wrote several large paperbacks and had them placed into the library. They basically assembled information from dozens of text books and were structured to easily explain it (I have a photocopy of the RF Microelectronics book.) The books were for those interested in doing better in class and were designed to accompany the lectures. One lecturer even offered PDF sections of one of the books to help with certain parts of his module.
All course material was free and easily accessable on a modified version of ms exchange, which I can still access 1 year after leaving university. I used to recieve around 1000 pages of module information for every module and while every lecturer had a recommended reading list after the 1st year in University I noticed the free course material often went into greater depth and was better explained than the books I was paying £50 for. I am excluding information gained from classes when I say "course material".
Thats the Univeristy of Plymouth for anyone who's looking to study Electrical/Electronic/Computing/Communications Engineering. The lecturers there teach because they honestly have a passion for the subject and try to imprint it onto their students.
I disagree with this, a few years ago when the Matrix Reloaded was screened it took 5/6 months to be released. My parents boot a boot leg copy of the DVD 3 months after its screening cause they liked the film and wanted to watch it. Sure they went out to buy the DVD when it was released so the companies didn't lose any money but in that particular case I didn't know a single person who didn't own a boot legged copy of the film.
I've always thought that film showed what can happen if you delay the release of something too long. Personnally I prefer to wait, most films released at £12/14 will be between £3-7 3 months after release. But most people won't and with P2P getting access to films has gotten so easy the computer iliterate like my Dad can use it.
Don't get me wrong I agree 10 years inprisonment is insane and would like to see an overhaul of copyright law (worldwide) so non-commerical copyright infringement becomes legal. I do think prelease material can cost companies money but then those same companies need to work out how to add value to their product rather than take value away (DRM, Force you to watch trailers/adverts force you to watch piracy is a crime video, etc....) The only reason I've been buying Blu-ray disks is because at the current moment they don't have that sort of crap on them.
realMyst does't work on WINE (I've tried) and several of the game developers have admitted to skipping certain windows rules. It was designed to work on Windows 98 and has a spotty record at best on XP.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its more of what your body is used to, people who never drink coffee may hallucinate at 3 cups but I don't your average joe will.
During my second year of University my load work started to seriously ramp up and over the course of the year I went from a cup or two to 8-12 pints of coffee (I got a very big mug). The only side effect I noticed, was when the year ended and even though I had caught up on the sleep I still had insane cravings for coffee (constantly wanted the stuff) it took 3 weeks for them to go away. I never saw anything interesting, or suffered any ill effects except the weird craving after the year was over.
Its the same with sleep deprevation I've always had trouble sleeping and usually have gotten by on 5-6 hours, during my second year of University I went through 13 days with approximate 1 hour of sleep. I remember handing in my coursework, being woken up at the end of the class I went to and a friend took me home. Even after such a long time I struggled to stay asleep for more than 20 hours and ended up going out the next night only to relate the entire story to a final year psych student who was certain I should be insane and asked if I would be part of her final year study thing (not what I was going for). During that time the only real side effects I noticed was the constant feeling someone was watching my right shoulder (which I was rational enough to know my mind was screwing with me), a slight irrationality which I could recognise (with effort), a tendency to be more irratable than normal (which my friends tell me they didn't notice) and the obvious desire to sleep for ten/twelve hours.
These days with a real job and all the stress's of University behind me (real work is alot less stressfull for me) I rarely drink more than two cups of earl grey a day and have gotten used to being able to sleep 7 hours every night to the point where I only managed six last night and I'm now feeling tired.
The UK does have a constitution but its isn't nicely laid out and harped about like the American one. I remember some BBC documentary on it where a historian got very irrate when it was claimed that Britain doesn't have one. Most people consider the Magna Carta the first part of the Brittish Constitution (as well as Australia's if that Australian Parlimentary exhibit was correct) with the Bill of Human Rights beings the latest part of legislation which is a part of it.
Hazy memory tells me that politicians/historians consider the Brittish COnstitution to span the last 1000 years with around 1200 pages to it.
Personnally I think its a good thing since we don't have people shouting about their "constitutional rights". Hearing about the *abuses of the Bill of Human Rights irratates me. Having an small poorly defined document open for abuse would be horrific.
*Such abuses include mandating a TV, playstation, etc.. for Inmates, people on benifits requiring Satalite TV, mobile phones, etc.. and several crinimals getting off because of it.
I'm not quite sure this is true, I recently spent 6 weeks in Australia (mainly Melbourne) and at first I thought all Australian cars were American. Sure their some european cars around Holden Briana (The European Vauxhall/Opel Corsa), the Ford Mondeo and Focus and a Toyato Corolla's. As for the rest of the "european cars" they had been horribly altered (Honda Civic has been changed beyond recognition) I saw alot of other cars like the Ford Fairlane, Explorer and the *shudder* Falcon, the Toyota Aurion and Camry. These cars simply don't exist in Europe and my American colleages recognised the names on many of them. I will agree that they said the cars were much smaller than their American counter parts, but in my time there I saw hundreds of Aurions and Falcons and very few Mondeo's and Corrolla's.
The Australian market seems gutted with giant, poorly handling, crappy braking, large engined automatics. Which I could understand if the Australian police wern't so anal on Speeding (15kmh over the speed limit is a driving ban??) I could understand if your speed limit wasn't lower than the UK's and considering the hole in the ozone layer you have you'd think I wouldn't have spent just as much money on fuel (for roughly the same distance) in Australia as I do in the UK when Australian fuel prices were 65p a litre compared to (when I left) £1.10 of the UK.
I know a UK (Plymouth) based dockyard (DML Dockyard) that did something similar. When times were lean and the Royal Navy awarded all their refitting contracts to smaller dying dockyards DML first moved into building super yachts, then took up the regionals train servicing contracts and currently produces hundreds of land buggys for the US and UK armies. Now their Frigate and Submariane business has been ensured the new short sighted owners are refocusing back on that.
The point is a dockyard of 4000 workers was able to use its talent and expertise in stripping, repairing and rebuilding various submarianes, aircraft carriers and frigates and use it to create super fast super yachts, maintain the regions trains to a higher standard that dedicated yards could and were able to retrofit buggys for army use. Why can't the "big 3" supposedly "American made" is a sign of high quality surely people capable of this quality can diversify?
My teachers always combined software programming with electronics/robotics (admittedly I was on a electronics course.) I learnt C by writing code that first moved a robot arm, then rewrote parts of the application so you could directly control the arm and finally I got the arm to play tic tac toe against me.
I learnt assembly by programming a microcontroller board to act as a waveform analyser and traffic light co-ordination system.
It was a great incentive, the purely software approach has always seemed a bit dull to me.
The UK already has free health care for everyone from broken arms, heart transplants, fertility treatment and even transexual ops. I would rather see the £12 billion spent on providing free dental service (surprisingly we don't get that unless it involves an operation) or how about improving school food, the idea of hiring police adminstrators instead of requiring police to do all the paper work, how about reducing council tax or giving more money to local councils.
But then your stuck with Orange, I'd rather pay more with someone else then hve to deal with Orange.
Media histeria says violence and crime have gone up, facts say the opposite. (I agree a 41% drop isn't note worthy.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7421534.stm
The number you need to call to get your installation revalidated isn't free, from the UK your looking at something like £1/£1.50 a minute to get you perfectly legitimate copy of a game working.
People on slashdot have frequently complained about about Windows activation which ues a free number (no matter where you are) asks you 2-3 simple questions (how many machines is this installed on, why are you reinstalling and where did you get the disc) and can be gotten through in roughly 4 minutes. In short you get flagged but the onus is on you to come out and say your a pirate and your assumed to be a normal customer.
Reading the EA forums in can take upto an hour to get through a customer service rep who then seems to go out of there way to accuse you of piracy. EA's spore servers have suffered several technical faults and they don't even have a complete list of all of the valid keys they have distributed.
I agree with you that disc's do wear out and if EA were offering a system similar to Steam I would have probably bought Spore and Red Alert 3. As it stands EA appear to be trying to slip a rental system in through the back door and considering what secuRom does (rootkitting your pc) and the slashdot reaction to the Sony music rootkit fiasco I'm amazed that more people aren't complaining.
I say all this as a person who loves the C&C/Red Alert series, I won't buy a game which has limited re-installs and decides it should be able to root kit my pc to protect itself,
I would have throught the best way to measure performance is in functionality/bug fixing, combined with some sort of rough syntax analsys so you can see how many bugs a person is introducing, how many non best practices their introducing and how many their fixing.
Last week I spent all week re-writing and heavily expanding an interface and it allowed me to remove something like 5000 lines of code from the software. Measuring LOC would have had me seriously in the negitive.
You don't need that crap, it's that same attitude which is causing the music industry so much hassle. I used to help manage a podcast group called The Cavern Today, I'm listening to the latest one right now and it proves my point. Goto http://www.thecaverntoday.org/?go=pod34 have a listen and tell me what you think a professional mixing console and complete sound proof room would do to enhance the audio quality of it (I'll accept the content may not be your thing and the cheap pc microphones can cause problems.)
While your listening I'd like to point out everyone involved (excusing Mowog) is using a £20 or less microphone, the background music has been supplied from a variety of soruces many of which have suggested Goldwave and Audacity. The person known as Jnathus will have mixed and edited the entire podcast in Audacity.
I've used Cool Edit Pro (legitimately I might add) and I've used audacity and I don't know what cool Edit Pro actually adds. I think it's a bit like my sisters music management degree where you had to produce a website in Dreamweaver because everything else was "rubbish" (I taught her to make a decent one in notepad and we ported it into dreamweaver.) Sure studio time is still expensive but if your ignore the big music recordng studio's I believe you can get a decent studio plus sound engineer for a couple hundred quid an hour.
I never said the music industries had lost their ability to advertise and they still know how to shove stuff down our throats. When you couple that with the high noise to signal ratio (good vs suckie indie bands) of course smaller less advertised bands are going to have a hard job starting up. The audio quality of their albums has nothing to do with it, their ability to play live and to have good songs does.
How has this been modded up?
Reading the GP it appears the post wants to be able to give the ability to upload several files to his users (for whatever reason.) The users are uploading files not downloading them.
I think your missing a huge point in their business model. SONY BMG, Universal, etc.. are companies that traditionally trumped up the high recording/production costs in making films/movies. They would spend the required millions to put people on stage they would then contractually and physically have the ability to limit supply and so artificially increase the value of their product.
The problem is that technology has changed where you needed a $1 million dollar recording studio twenty years ago we can now use a $2000 PC and importantly you get the same quality of music out of it. The advent of the internet means it is now relatively cheap to get your message out. I believe Sandi Thom showed just how easy it was to gain a large audience through the internet. On top of this technology has made copying intellectual property very cheap (it costs around 10p to copy a DVD.)
Their business model isnâ(TM)t making things and selling them (such a description covers every single business model I can think of.) Their business model is being a middle man in the access to music. They were able to control the supply of music to the masses and in doing so make money from it. Technology has meant they have lost the ability to control that, rather than update their business model and try adding value to their product they continually attack their customer base and work to devalue their business model (paper cd cases, drm, etc..)
I'd care but can't since Rock Band still isn't availiable in the UK on the PS3 due to exclusivity deals. Because of this crap treatment by Harmonix I won't be purchasing Rock Band I'll wait for Guitar Hero 4, which will probably make it to the PS3 before Rock Band does.
Harmonix are only doing this because when Guitar Hero does get a series of exclusives they can complain about the uncompetitive practices, while at the same time arranging for (rock band 2) anouther xbox360 exclusive pushing the UK PS3 release somewhere in the region of 2010.
Bitter me?
Piracy is the norm within UK society, the BPI likes to state that 6 million people regularly pirate in the UK. There are only ~20 million broadband users in the UK, this suggests a good fraction of people see nothing wrong with piracy and are happy to do it. 1/10th of our populaton admit to regularly pirating and don't see anything wrong with it. Piracy is a society norm, there are less iPhones and iPods in the UK both of which are considered "norms".
What needs to be addressed is how do we deal with this problem, Labour government seem hell bent on headlines and so are prosecuting everyone in sight. Your not going to convince people its wrong and just like Speeding no matter what lies, statistic and campaigns you do people are still going to do it (that was a reference to speed camera's whose effectiviness is current being strongly questioned in light of the 100 million pound in fines the government gets.)
its not "opt-in" i got caught by this a few months ago if you choose not to do it then you choose not to buy anything. What has concerned me is HSBC have obviously put me into this scheme and yet have in no way informed me about it. The first time it came up I ended up calling the only existing store for OcUK and confirming it was legitimate.
Do you know what bugs me more than anything? The password must be at most 10 characters, but the password input box allows for more than ten characters, everytime I end up having to reset the password to use it. Then again I'm still dreaming of the day when banks,websites and forums can decided on a standardised password contents and length format.
This is an agreement between two business organisations as such it wouldn't be exempt from existing laws. We have a thing called the Data Protection Act in the UK which protects everyones information. If the BPI gave virgin an IP address and Virgin contacted me then it hasn't been broken but if Virgin start handing my personal information over to the BPI without my permissionn and without a court order then legally they would be in very hot water. Deliberate breaches of the data protection act can lead to jail sentances and massive fines.
Thats just what I'd expect an economy hurting hippie pirate to say. You stopped Adele from affording a Boeing 747!
I've been doing the same thing for years, every once in a wile I use a version of norton or mcafree, avg and I haven't found any virus's yet.
If care about roadsafety try looking at its NCAP results, in europe all cars have to go through a standardised set of results. The tests cover things from survival in various head/side on collisions to the survival of any pedestrians you hit. Unfortunatly I can't seem to load the homepage atm, but the site address is http://www.euroncap.com/ and remember bigger isn't always best.
They were a series of books co-written by lecturers, The ones that stuck in memory were the RF Micro-electronics, Microwave Electronics and the Digital Filters booklets. Its true a lecturer can make mistakes but none of the books were written by a single lecturer. These same lecturers taught in class and set (in conjunction with the IET) the tests.
Its true you have the chance that information contained within them could be wrong, however they were heavily math based with alot of examples and of course if you understand the subject you can figure out examples and tests of your own. Bad math never/very rarely works.
I knew several lecturers who co-wrote several large paperbacks and had them placed into the library. They basically assembled information from dozens of text books and were structured to easily explain it (I have a photocopy of the RF Microelectronics book.) The books were for those interested in doing better in class and were designed to accompany the lectures. One lecturer even offered PDF sections of one of the books to help with certain parts of his module.
All course material was free and easily accessable on a modified version of ms exchange, which I can still access 1 year after leaving university. I used to recieve around 1000 pages of module information for every module and while every lecturer had a recommended reading list after the 1st year in University I noticed the free course material often went into greater depth and was better explained than the books I was paying £50 for. I am excluding information gained from classes when I say "course material".
Thats the Univeristy of Plymouth for anyone who's looking to study Electrical/Electronic/Computing/Communications Engineering. The lecturers there teach because they honestly have a passion for the subject and try to imprint it onto their students.
Changing oil isn't hard, the hardest part is probably finding a Halfords that stocks a Haynes mannual for your car/bike.
I disagree with this, a few years ago when the Matrix Reloaded was screened it took 5/6 months to be released. My parents boot a boot leg copy of the DVD 3 months after its screening cause they liked the film and wanted to watch it. Sure they went out to buy the DVD when it was released so the companies didn't lose any money but in that particular case I didn't know a single person who didn't own a boot legged copy of the film.
I've always thought that film showed what can happen if you delay the release of something too long. Personnally I prefer to wait, most films released at £12/14 will be between £3-7 3 months after release. But most people won't and with P2P getting access to films has gotten so easy the computer iliterate like my Dad can use it.
Don't get me wrong I agree 10 years inprisonment is insane and would like to see an overhaul of copyright law (worldwide) so non-commerical copyright infringement becomes legal. I do think prelease material can cost companies money but then those same companies need to work out how to add value to their product rather than take value away (DRM, Force you to watch trailers/adverts force you to watch piracy is a crime video, etc....) The only reason I've been buying Blu-ray disks is because at the current moment they don't have that sort of crap on them.
realMyst does't work on WINE (I've tried) and several of the game developers have admitted to skipping certain windows rules. It was designed to work on Windows 98 and has a spotty record at best on XP.