I've read the bible, but there is a core who will use the message for a cause. I'm not saying the bible teaches us those things, but religion has lead to some of the most messy wars in history, because those who acted were 'just' and had god behind them. Your right no one person can ever understand it all, however you will find that people will heavy faith in the bible can also be some of the more intolerant people as well, its not necessary what the articles of faith says just how people wish to excuse their prejudice and hatred. Thats why the Two Towers were attacked and why there is so much hatred by some religious groups against gay people.
Cracking down on murder isn't an effective tool as cracking down on Terrorists. Bush's tactics are quite effective his only real mistake was Iraq. He's created a religious frenzy and has a hard deciviness, by argueing that he needs this and that powers in order to protect the USA from terror he can force people to accept his ideas or suggest that the safety of the country isn't in their interest.
At the same time the war on terror ruse allows him to do all of this and pamper to the hard right wng republicans who seem to thrive on war and are often to stupid to understand much more than the bible and American Idol.
if yo ucrack down on mruder you are just taking a line against those evil people, but murder is a part of life, cracking down on terrorism is cracking down on people who hate you and everything about you and your life, this unites people.
The article its interesting but doesn't really have any facts about how they improved the model. I can see the obvious advantages you'd be able to calculate when a CME is going to be strong enough to effect power systems and when it might be a good idea to move satalities into a temporary lower orbit. But some more details on the how would have been nice.
Its a matter of perception as well as design, years back i used mIRC and all that and it was the 30+ crowd who used ICQ, no one my age used ICQ it was either mIRC or nothing. As time roled on MSN messenger appeared and myself and a few friends used it, because it was really really simple and came with a free email account. Now years have gone by, I've used AOL Messenger (like windows messenger but worse in my opinion) I've looked at the bloated crap called Yahoo Messenger, heck I've even signed upto googletalk. Now all of these apps have pro's and cons, google talk and AIM are just basic chat clients kinda ugly and just function, yahoo messenger is bloated rubbish, and so is msn messenger.
However here is the key thing, I switched to msn all those years ago so when friends started joining me online i suggested they use MSN that way we could chat. Its got to the point that this year with my uni mates two have never had a MSN account have had to get one or miss out on all the revision planning, social planning that goes on. I've stopped using AIM and yahoo because no one I know uses them, I'd have to convert 40+ people over to one of them or live with msn. Which is easier?
As for WMP I have to say I'm a big fan of WMP 11 beta, WMP10 was crap and half of it didn't work. But again lets look at the alternatives, winAMP was great until version 2 then it sucked I used to use it I haven't looked at it since after that app. Anyone who suggests real make media players has not used real player and realised how truely useless memory hogging crap it is.
Momemtum is a hard thing to kill, in order to get me to switch from MSN messenger you would have to supply a good reason to use it, I help produce a podcast and the interviews we do are all recorded through Skype as it supports mutli person calling. No one in the cast team uses skype for anything other than this because Skype is a huge system hog, MSN messenger sits quietly in the corner and works.
As for the idea of an Ipod killa, I thought my PPC with WMP10 and my XP version of WMP11 was that app.
Creating a phone network costs a hell of a lot of money, and in mosts cases it is heavily funded by the government, in 1980 BT wanted to have Fibre optic to every door but couldn't because of lack of funding, they have now started to get said funding. The Telco's have a huge barrier to entry, in order to run your own telco you need a huge investment a multi billion pound investment at the least. This means that in the UK at least only the few telco's who were there from the start stood a chance and as the industry was nationalised any chance for competition went out of the window. So in the UK we have only really one big telco company.
Now I move to France and want to call home, now france is going to have a series of other telco's owning the network there, but they won't necessaily own a network in the UK, so in order to phone my home line on ther BT network they need to connect to the BT network.
Well obviously using someone elses network is going to cost that person money, they are only going to let you use it if you pay them to. However the BT and french Telco agree to allow each other to access each others networks as its expands the possible number of people on the network, which in a communication industry makes the telco more attractive.
Now lets think about this in internet terms, I'm with BT.Yahoo broadband, I pay my £20 a month for a connection to the BT network at a set data rate and data amount(we'll get to this later) There's something on a french server I want, the french server pays for a connection and bandwidth. So i send a request off to France for the information through the BT network which in turn is transmitted onto the french network, the french telco has an agreement with BT and so it reaches the french server. Which then sends the information off back towards me. Again as the french telco and BT have an agreement BT doiesn't charge access to use its network.
Now why do I have to pay for a set data rate and data amount? The more bandwidth I use the greater share of the network i use, so at 56k I'm using the equivlent of one phone line, at 512k i'm using the same as 10 lines. Now I know some people are shouting 'horse shit'. But most networks now run digital systems there are no longer 500 lines going into my local server just a few pieces of fibre with a limited transmission rate. One analgue phone call only needs x amount of bandwidth, so increasing your transmission rate increasing thes bandwidth on a line. I'm not explaining this well but you should get the point.
Now its in the telco's interest to provide me a cheap rate to other countries and networks, because it means I will use their service, Again it was in their interest to provide the line and quality to anouther telco because if they didn't that telco wouldn't do the same for them, they would lose customers.
The internet is different in how it operates, and is why net neutrality is so damm important, it doesn't matter if I'm in the UK,France,USA i might be downloading from the USA,UK,France wherever the server is located. Now companies are still have an agreement to use each others networks but net neutrality means that no company will hurt anouther in sending information by delaying packets accross their network. Its in their interests to get that information around
However the natural monopoly status of many telcos means people have limited choice. So if BT decided that because a German telco paid it then its packets would have priority over french ones, could effectivly ruin a frnech telco, the lack of choice would hurt the customers, its a bad idea. Because I have to use BT (because there aren't any other ISP's) then BT is increasing its cash at the detriment of the consumer, its not priortising german packets for any other reason than money.
So we go back to our world internet, Now its in the telco's interests to pass information faster for telco's which give them more money. So verizon pays BT alot and verizon using servers can no
Apple has had an impressive marketing strategy, they produced something that was easy to use, intuative and more importatnly distinctive. People latched on to it, most MP3 players of the time sucked I know mine did. As such they grew in the geek community and overspilled into the 'mainstream' communtiy. People saw them as small easy to use expensive things which were easily recognisable. I've not seen every Mp3 player out there, but a fair few as friends and family buy Ipod clones and can't figure out the fifteen step guide needed to get music on them. The joke is, I usually put Itunes on for them explain how it works and get them to treat it as a portable drive.
The only company which in my eyes had provided somethign comparable is Microsoft (shock horror saying nice things about M$!) WMP10 and Mobile 2003's WMP10 worked quite nicely together and wern't to hard to get. However seeing WMP11 and Mobiles 2003's WMP10 is something comparable to Itunes and the Ipod. But it will never replace either as it isn't a complete solution a just some smart software for your PC and PDA.
Sandisk products generally suck I've owned alot of Flash/SD/MMC/Reduced SD cards the only ones that have ever broke are the San disk ones, and since their support sucks a treat.... I'm guessing their MP3 player is similar over difficult to use full of unnecessary information and with dire support. If they came up with a clever campaign and had a decent support service, reasonable device and on top of that were able to keep it simple. Then they might stand a chance.
The high cost on Beer and Fags is due to the high social costs of those products, drunks might vandalise a property the extra policemen and women needed at closing time, The increased violence and crime related activities, the cost to the NHS in dealing with all of the cancer and dead livers. All this adds up, much of it is indirect but it still does.
Graphically games have reached a very high standard, however other areas of a game have been forgotten. Things like gameplay, innovation and story are just as important. Because of people like yourself constantly demanding the latest in graphics then developers have spent every minute designing ways of improving graphics. But then forgot what it was that made a game so interesting.
Games like Myst had great graphics of the time, but it was the innovation and story that helped it become such a huge sucess. Half Life was graphically very good yet the story of half life and the versitility of the community and game is what made it one of the best selling games around.
Doom3 had stunning graphics better than Half Lifes in many ways, however it lacked any real story, the game was basically a clone of previous FPS games the game play wasn't bad but it was nothing new. Half Life 2 has very good graphics the charracter models are superior to Doom's, yet that game sold because of the story, there was some inovation to the genre (Grav gun, Mighty impressive Physics) and the game play wise it was comparable to Doom3. I have no idea about the sales of either but if you ask Joe Blogs what game they thought was better then 90% of people will reply HL2, because it was more enjoyable.
The gaming industry needs to catch up in these areas, there are game out there which try to do it UruLive and Black and White 2 both come to mind. Once the industry can create a fantastic game with the grpahics available and keeps tryign to inovate then I want them to work on the graphics a bit more.
But is there a point to playing Doom3 which is really just a 'run around shoot everything' game with incredible graphics. I'd much prefer to look at damm good graphics and love every minute I'm playing.
See this is where your confusing the UK government for the paranoid USA one. I think this is a relativly good idea, the majority of CCTV cameras in my home city are centered in the city centre and in poor areas. Knowing where cameras are and where they are not is a really helpful thing to know, a friend of mine was walking through town when a chav punched him him no reason. The area he was in had no CCTV a slight alteration to his route would have meant that had the occassion occured police would have had a decent photo of the idiot who attacked him. Heck it might have helped prevent the attack in the first place.
Recently the police raided and closed down a night club (Dance Accademy) it was a well known fighting and drugs hotspot. I speacial constable friend of mine told me they were literally walking on drugs when they got in there. Now I suppose many of you think this is a good thing. A bad night club is closed down, now because they don't have dance acadmey the same people are going into the main areas of town. Which was mostly a fighting and drugs free areas. Last night sat down in what was a quiet pub there were three major fights and the police were called in 5 times, its effectivily ruined my nights out.
So what does this have to do with anything? Before you knew if you went to a certain part of the city centre you were looking at the Druggie/ fighting area, it was highly patrolled and you only wern't their armed. Now its defused through the entire city centre, there is no safe place.
Knowing where the cameras are and knowing that someone is watching them is useful, I had a CCTV gamer aimed at my motorcyle in front of my house but there were times when it was interesting to watch it because of the events outside (in one case it proved useful to the police.) A CCTV channel lets people know where it is safe to walk, where people are watching. Sure this sytem can get abused put I think that the knowledge it could provide would be damm useful.
As for freedoms, WTF? I mean there is nothing I would in public that I wouldn't do in public knowing someone might be watching me on camera. People who would have their behavoir altered by having a camera on them are either self conseous or they are doing something they shouldnt. Either way its no loss.
I'm no curtain twitcher, but I do like to know things are safe the police do a bang up job at the moment and I would rather everyone had access to the video footage these people are recording because at least its honest. Or would you rather the NSA way of doing things?
I realise things might be a little different in the USA, but a few years back the Uk considered takning everyones DNA on file. The reason was for crime, and to be honest I'm all for it there are way to many unsolved rape and murder cases for my liking. ALright just because your DNA is at a scene doesn't mean yo udid it, but rather than looking at a needle in a hay stack it gives the governement imediate suspects.
I understand your concerns about abuse of this information, I'm guessing many people have seen the film Gattaca. But right now we don't have the technology to make clones, so the only real fears I can see anyone having is that a company won't hire you because of your DNA. But then I can't see this working in a age without proper genetic engineering.
The one thing i found ammusing about the UK governments attempt a while back, was that the people who seemed vocal against it appeared to be the type of low level crime figures the law was designed to catch.
Ok I've been keeping abreast of the whole new Intel chip, but readin the article does anyone else get a de'javou feeling? I seem to remember AMD bringing out their AMD 1700-2200xp chips with their low clock rates, and telling us performance mattered not clock speed. Intel then got carried away upto 3.7Ghz, telling us we needed faster and faster chips that cost 3 or 4 times the AMD ones.
AMD is finally ahead and while I don't do any network service work or place my PC understrain I've found the AMD64 3700+ does everything I would want, it doesn't slow down it runs everything very quickly and every game I own runs maxed out wiuth a decent frame rate. The one bottle neck in my system now seems to be windows itself (xp64 is an awful OS) and the hard drive access times.
Has Intel got lost in the 'MHz = l33t' attitude again? Or have they come up with something that competes with Hypertransport yet?
Well outside the MAC, Servers and your elite gamer can anyone see this chip selling? Its unlikely your average joe is interested eith the price tag being so high. The elite gamer seems to be a dieing breed, and does anyone know its performance against a AMDFX 62??
As for the 'who will buy a Sony?' comment, I will be, once the top notch one drops to around £200. My PS2 cost that and the years of enjoyment its brought me, coupled with the out of box games like singstar,buzz off etc show sony are thinking about me and my mates. It comes with Blu-ray since the 360 seems to be trying to pass itself off as a entertainment hub its lack of next gen drive is very very poor. Sonys Blu-ray, and general 'hype' seem to sugegst it can be a true entertainment hub that happens to play fantastic games. No i don't have a HDTV nor do I plan to buy one, but I'm pretty certain that the Movie industry is going to force this on us so would rather save the cash now and get it in my console.
Its pun of sorts Uru stands for You Are You, amoungst other things. I think it was done because Ubisoft shoved a offline version down Cyans through and then demanded it have Myst in the title. Cyans attempt at differentiating thier product.
OK let me tell you a story of my last experience with the NHS, last year (July) I had an accident in a lane and came off my motorcycle, and drove into a hedge luckily the soft hedge took most of the 40-60mph impact and so all i ended up with were bruises and a completely and utterly mangled wrist.
After getting help and going to my nearest A&E, I was assessed and sent straight through as an emergency patient (apparently your wrist should not look like a hump backed bridge) after sitting down for ten minutes i was seen given a pain killer x rayed and asked to wait (total time on a Sunday night 2 hours waiting) the sent up to a ward.
Next day seen by a new doctor reassessed and placed on a waiting list, it took two days for my non emergency operation to happen, yes that's right two days but since I had no school or work to do I was happy to wait, probably saying that to the surgeon wasn't the best of ideas.
The surgeon (head surgeon there) decided rather than give me a cheap fix, being a young man he would go to excessive lengths to make sure I could use my hand quickly and would gain maximum mobility out of my hand. The result was a 5 inch flexible bar. Within two weeks I was back at work using my wrist booking in physical therapy sessions if and when I needed them.
My dad was seen, operated and in a ward 3 hours after going in A&E with a swollen appendix.
The NHS does work and it works well but there are two problems to it, firstly waste of time patients, while i was waiting for my Xrays a work colleague turned up with sun burnt legs, she was worried she had skin cancer all she had was sun burn, but that's time hospitals don't need to waste. Secondly the inability to financially organise themselves, a while back when Labour first came to power a very old friend of mine who happened to work at the local hospital told me that since the hospital couldn't work out what to spend the extra money on, they bought laptops for staff to use for work related activities. This is pure and simple waste and happens a lot in the NHS.
The really sad thing is the private hospital opposite now delivers low quality of service when compared to my local NHS go figure.
Streets two small for cars? What? Ok i live in PLymouth in the UK its a city that has grown out of a town that has been here for hundreds if not a thousand years. Most of it got bombed during WW2 but we do have some areas that survived only the occasional ally way is to small for a car to traverse (I can think of one in plymouth) Everyone can drive cars and a lot of people do but it comes down to public transport and a willingness to actually get off my butt. Do you drive to the shops ten minutes up the road or walk? Unless i'm getting £100's worth of shopping guess what i do?
As for having a high population density you are right Plymouth has a quater of a million citizens spread out over ten miles, but then since it has expanded into cornwall and over a river many people living in Saltash have a bridge or ferry to cross and then either have to take a lot of back roads or a main A road to the city center and yet they still walk or catch a bus.
You really are talking out of your ass aren't you? The last figures i saw on europes progress on pollution suggested that yes it won't be making its pollution targets and yes some countries won't be doing that well and are quite far off. I do know the UK expects to get to 10% less than 1990 levels and so will miss it target of 15% less.
So why does europe manage to do it, we'll firstly each country in europe does things differently so I will just talk about the UK. I live two miles away from the city center (and my university) and most days i take the 30 minute walk into university as do most of my university mates. We walk into uni and so pollute on ther rare occassion that I am late and need to be somewhere quickly i ride my motorcycle which does between 90 and 110 miles to the gallon and uses next to no fuel. OK its only a 200cc, but then my dads 600cc still manages 70 miles to the gallon.
Petrol prices in the UK have just topped a £1 a litre, which means when you are looking for a car fuel efficency is top of your list, so most people own cars that do 30+ miles to the gallon (by necessity). When I hear that Americans are being charged $3/4 a gallon i have to ask how can they complain? But does this make fuel ecconomy a high priority? I wouldn't think so I personnaly hope it starts getting to $10 (UK levels we will just reduce tax on fuel) then you guys wil lreap what you soe, and all your giant pointless heavy polluting cars wil be shown for what they are.
The whole idea that America doesn't have the infrastructure to support people walking into work and the like is a lame excuse i used to walk three and a half miles into school everyday since the bus took as long to travel the distance and so i could get up later. I have a uni mate who travel five miles on a bicyle to university it takes him around thirty minutes. If your living further away from your job than that then you might have a reason to drive a car or a motorcycle, but then i have to ask why are you living so far away from your job?
Where I'm studying the professors all give a wide range of possible books, they are for reference only, you can complete the course without them, however most of the good professors will point out two books from their list of ten, for their value (in terms of money), or the fact that they are so incredibly good. I got through my first year only spending £200 on books which i regulary used, they helped me alot, this second year one of the professors had written a book (no big offical publisher) with anouther to help us students, taking that book out reading it and using it helped me achieve a very high grade in that module, he also published certain chapters online for people to read (who missed getting one of the books from the library.)I have a extremly good grasp of that subject and have enjoyed it alot. Anouther module's lecturer's do the same thing each year a lectuer who teaches the course adds their own knowldge to the C/C++ guide for the module, its at 800+ pages and compared to any C/C++ guide its the most useful resource i have ever had for programming in C.
These are professors/lecturers who have a passion for the subject they teach, who want to give students a good resource to use and know that you can't spend £500+ each term on new books, not make a name for themselves and screw the students for extra money.
First they have a go at M$ for daring to bundle Windows Media Player onto their OS, argueing that by bundling the software microsoft were stopping competition taking advantage. That was crap if I ever saw it, it was the EU sueing microsoft so EU companies could gain a better foothold in the media player market, (please understand I'm not suggesting thats a bad thing its just something should increase its share cause its better not because the government says so.)
Now I was a big fan of Itunes but to be honest most other media players generally don't come upto scratch, the Divx player (until recently) wasn't that great, I have hated the 'Real One' player and everything else doesn't seem to scratch in versaility when compared to WMP (for me and what I use it for.) Now the same could be said of Internet Explorer, in fact I would say installing IE as part of the OS is anouther great example of M$ stopping competition, do people use IE or do they use the better programs that exist, well the growing firefox following suggests people go with what they percieve to be best.
Now the EU are complaining that the documentation M$ gave isn't good enough, and that they are trying to control the internet and further more are only looking out for themselves? Well who would have thought it a company trying to look out for its own interests? Anyone stating that you can control the internet doesn't have a clue how its run do they? Yes you can have the monopoly on servers, you could even force your own backwards standards onto people but control it?
Honestly there are time I wish the EU would disappear into a hole along with the CAP.
lol, no i'm not after any particular thing here but these things aren't well designed having to go through with so many companies using them, yes they are a great cost saver, but they don't work.
To give an example:
I have two class mates, one is top of the class or near top of the class in every module, is highly social, hard working and a good laugh to be around. The other is near bottom of the class, after being in the same class as him for two years and many of us extending a hand of freindship trying to get him out more, we have given up the guys just doesn't like people. Now then both are robitics students and applied for a placement at a helicopter firm both were required to do a personnality test before the interview. My hard working top of the class friend was rejected at that phase and the anti social one let on, (as a point of interest later did not get the job because he seemed highly unsuited for the team working and the like.)
Now this just happens to be two people I know and most of my class has come up against the same problem, as for your lie option, well tried that and also tried giving the exact opposite answer to what i normally would. Strangely enough I did have minor sucess with one pharmacutical company when i decided to see if my third application to them would pass if i went for all the evil bastard options I did pass that time, although after completing the next round didn't hear anything more from them.
Over the last few years I've seen companies fire employee's over their blogs, its not exactly a new idea. Ok in this instance the person used a online news site to 'get the information out'. It seems pretty clear whats going to happen. This employee probably broke a confidentiality agreement as well, these aren't things whicvh you can choose to ignore because your excited about your campanies new product. As much as bloggers like to be considered the new form of journalism they aren't, they are just people (often with overinflated ego's) who want to have their say.
But I have to ask if that person had gone to a newspaper where would we be legally?
See you say this but I honestly have to look at all of the tests out there and honestly believe that a twelve year old child devised them.
Recently I took an maths test and a personality test for Corus (for a placement year) the maths test was terrible, it wasn't a test of maths but a test to see if I could work out double convoluted negatives, heck half way through I called a parent up to go through and see if he (since he interviews people as part of his job) could make heads or tales of the questions. The personality test was even worse, it took me two or three minutes to break down each question into what it was actually asking (since those too were ridiculously overcomplicated.)
I have applied to quite a few companies and taken a lot of personality tests and generally fail ever time on these tests.
Recently I looked at a job at QinetiQ, I travelled all the way up there sat down had an interview and was quite successful at it, the Yini person (do not use Yini if looking for a placement) who I spoke to implied that the other applicant had more of the hard skills they wanted (I don't want to be a programmer (the Yini person assured me it wasn't programming) they wanted a programmer, from what I could understand.)
On every employee review, student review I have ever had I am described as a Nice, Generous, Loyal, Hard Working, Inteligent, Team worker, Strong Leadership Abilities, Practical, Social, Upbeat/Happy, and finally a good sense of humour. Yes I know it isn't humble to say that, but heck it's something I hear a lot.
So why do I fail at these personality tests? Could I really be a narcissistic, sadist who hates everyone? Or could it be that many of the tests themselves are poorly thought out and deeply flawed? I do not deny that they can have some value, but if you want to look at a candidate's personality bring him or her up for a open day and interview them, relying on these tests is just another way of dehumanising the system and missing out on great candidates, friends of mine who are far more hard working, intelligent are also falling at the wayside with these things.
Cameras in phones, is just a logical step, people like integration. A few years back I used to carry a Laptop, a 3MP Digital Camera, a Nokia 3310 and a bulky MP3 player. Now I carry my PPC. I'll admit right here and now that the PPC does not work as well as my old laptop when performing laptop things (pocket word isn't great) and the camera isn't as good as my 3MP one. But instead of carrying 3 small devices and a bulky laptop i have something that fits in my top pocket and performs to a staisfactory level all of their functions.
I'm not a photogrpaher I have no aspirations of being one, however there have been times in my life that its been handy to have a camera. Quality isn't important as long as the information i'm recording is legiable, when I go out socialising I would never have taken My digital camera with me, myself or a friend would hav epicked up a cheap disposible camera and used that. Now we don't have to bother there are a few good camera phones and we use those instead.
The qualtiy of the camera in a phone isn't dependant of the megapixels, My nokia 7650's camera was better than the Nokia 7610's. My PPC with its 1.3MP (Highest MP count) has the worst light handling ability out of the three. There are plenty of phones out there without camera's if you don't like them.
As for 2MP being cutting edge 2MP phones have been out for a while now, they are even starting to become mainstream.
I'll admit i haven't used a blackberry but for university work and the like I did look at blackberrys and decided they were out of date. I got a Orange m5000 free with my contract (unlike the blackberry which costs money) this has a keyboard, mega pixel camera and built in wireless facility.Everywhere i go within university I can sit down open it up and start doing coursework in excel/word use a few pocket apps that are relevent, and then log on through the universities wireless and check my (exchange) email. To top it off it came with Msn Messenger installed, I have only handled a Crackberry never used it, but i know my m5000 is slighty smaller and has a keybaord thats much much bigger, it has windows media player 10 so that gig card can act as my MP3 player, It handles text messages video messages wonderfully, Good quality camera (not 5 megapixel proper camera quality but surprisingly good none the less) and works very closely to my pc so It took me a new user to windows mobile all of 2 seconds to understand and customise. Mixed with all the proper phone compatibility and that handy thing GPRS i can use it anywhere, (Skype calls are fun!)
So you have the PPC range of phones which are smaller, do the job better than a blackberry and more importantly cheaper, the fact that they allow you to integrate a whole range of other devices is just something helpful i mean i liked carrying around a specific MP3 player, digital camera and gps device. They also operate with existing company hardware (My university has made no modifications to their exchange server to allow PDA users to access it) and don't really require much in the way of care, what makes a blackberry so much better? They were in the UK competing with the O2 XDA when they first came out, PPC's have come one enormously since the XDA I don't think the blackberry has.
See I Live in the UK and the blackberry has never really appeared over here, but i have to ask myself why it seems every American needs one, or loves one.
Why not use a phone? Lets look at some of the Nokias, a Nokia 6600, will send emails, it will recieve SMS's, it can make phone calls and keep everything in your Outlook calender folder on itself. Thats all a blackberry does isn't it? Now thats an old phone using two, three year old technology. So why is a blackberry twice its size? You might say for the keyboard, but then lets look at PDA phones what about the O2's XDA range or Oranges M range these run windows mobile are dirt cheap do everything above and more, the newer ones are smaller, lighter and more attractive than those butt ugly crackberrys. Please don't say Windows Mobile is hard to use either its based visually on windows and so for john idiot should be very intuative. I'll admit it can be a little unstable requiring to be reset every once and a while but then no datas lost because of that.
Also on the plus side the fact you need to spend two seconds effort in sending your message, through Msn Messenger or the Symbian equivilent, might help the productivity because most people won't be tempted to do frivilous IM's,SMS if it takes more than half a second of thought. Of course don't get me wrong millions of teenagers do, however if a company just pays the monthly contract then an employee is going to be a little more carefull.
Finally, on a phone (PDA or Symbian) if you want to check your messages you have to open the email folder up and hit send and recieve, thus allowing you not to be buzzed every ten seconds, and yet keeping upto date.
Why create a new range of devices when there are already a bunch of existing ones doing a better job and allowing for increased productivness. Please don't say they don't exist in america either as i know they do
TO be fair here Gordon Brown is very old labour and as such is quite left wing, you can see it in his budgets, i think he even managed it this year. I wouldn't worry about him talking to big business look at the current state of the economy, by sacrificing long term growth he has been able to help the country avoid some of the extremes of the boom/bust cycle. He's not avoided it true, but since we are going into a depression period I'm not seeing negative growth figures either.
This law won't get through, it is true that parliament could vote for it, but like many things it has been in parliament for a while and will eventually will go away. Blair doesn't really have that much to gain by putting this law through as most of us expect him to be standing down in a year or so, Brown/Blair wouldn't force this through either with the Parliamentary act. Because of the media publicity it would create, Browns worked very hard on his current public figure as 'a man of the people' and Blair knows his term is finishing now so there would be no advantage for him.
Its an interesting law but it will never pass V for vendetta will help make sure of that, you have to love chavs there good for something's (even if its not voting, the fights can be good to watch.)
In short Brown has done some extremely savvy things like putting interest rate control out of the hands of government and start more than a few social iniatives, talking to big business is a way of solving solutions. Would you believe when he does take power i won't be voting for him. Although i don't vote labour anyway since it was my evil MP who suggested that damm tuition fee thing 'because students in his constituency didn't object' and we didn't send him 5000 signatures last year saying we don't like top up fee's (the git was an architect of that one as well.)
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I've read the bible, but there is a core who will use the message for a cause. I'm not saying the bible teaches us those things, but religion has lead to some of the most messy wars in history, because those who acted were 'just' and had god behind them.
Your right no one person can ever understand it all, however you will find that people will heavy faith in the bible can also be some of the more intolerant people as well, its not necessary what the articles of faith says just how people wish to excuse their prejudice and hatred. Thats why the Two Towers were attacked and why there is so much hatred by some religious groups against gay people.
Cracking down on murder isn't an effective tool as cracking down on Terrorists. Bush's tactics are quite effective his only real mistake was Iraq. He's created a religious frenzy and has a hard deciviness, by argueing that he needs this and that powers in order to protect the USA from terror he can force people to accept his ideas or suggest that the safety of the country isn't in their interest.
At the same time the war on terror ruse allows him to do all of this and pamper to the hard right wng republicans who seem to thrive on war and are often to stupid to understand much more than the bible and American Idol.
if yo ucrack down on mruder you are just taking a line against those evil people, but murder is a part of life, cracking down on terrorism is cracking down on people who hate you and everything about you and your life, this unites people.
The article its interesting but doesn't really have any facts about how they improved the model. I can see the obvious advantages you'd be able to calculate when a CME is going to be strong enough to effect power systems and when it might be a good idea to move satalities into a temporary lower orbit. But some more details on the how would have been nice.
Its a matter of perception as well as design, years back i used mIRC and all that and it was the 30+ crowd who used ICQ, no one my age used ICQ it was either mIRC or nothing. As time roled on MSN messenger appeared and myself and a few friends used it, because it was really really simple and came with a free email account. Now years have gone by, I've used AOL Messenger (like windows messenger but worse in my opinion) I've looked at the bloated crap called Yahoo Messenger, heck I've even signed upto googletalk. Now all of these apps have pro's and cons, google talk and AIM are just basic chat clients kinda ugly and just function, yahoo messenger is bloated rubbish, and so is msn messenger.
However here is the key thing, I switched to msn all those years ago so when friends started joining me online i suggested they use MSN that way we could chat. Its got to the point that this year with my uni mates two have never had a MSN account have had to get one or miss out on all the revision planning, social planning that goes on. I've stopped using AIM and yahoo because no one I know uses them, I'd have to convert 40+ people over to one of them or live with msn. Which is easier?
As for WMP I have to say I'm a big fan of WMP 11 beta, WMP10 was crap and half of it didn't work. But again lets look at the alternatives, winAMP was great until version 2 then it sucked I used to use it I haven't looked at it since after that app. Anyone who suggests real make media players has not used real player and realised how truely useless memory hogging crap it is.
Momemtum is a hard thing to kill, in order to get me to switch from MSN messenger you would have to supply a good reason to use it, I help produce a podcast and the interviews we do are all recorded through Skype as it supports mutli person calling. No one in the cast team uses skype for anything other than this because Skype is a huge system hog, MSN messenger sits quietly in the corner and works.
As for the idea of an Ipod killa, I thought my PPC with WMP10 and my XP version of WMP11 was that app.
Ok I'll break this down for you
Creating a phone network costs a hell of a lot of money, and in mosts cases it is heavily funded by the government, in 1980 BT wanted to have Fibre optic to every door but couldn't because of lack of funding, they have now started to get said funding. The Telco's have a huge barrier to entry, in order to run your own telco you need a huge investment a multi billion pound investment at the least. This means that in the UK at least only the few telco's who were there from the start stood a chance and as the industry was nationalised any chance for competition went out of the window. So in the UK we have only really one big telco company.
Now I move to France and want to call home, now france is going to have a series of other telco's owning the network there, but they won't necessaily own a network in the UK, so in order to phone my home line on ther BT network they need to connect to the BT network.
Well obviously using someone elses network is going to cost that person money, they are only going to let you use it if you pay them to. However the BT and french Telco agree to allow each other to access each others networks as its expands the possible number of people on the network, which in a communication industry makes the telco more attractive.
Now lets think about this in internet terms, I'm with BT.Yahoo broadband, I pay my £20 a month for a connection to the BT network at a set data rate and data amount(we'll get to this later) There's something on a french server I want, the french server pays for a connection and bandwidth. So i send a request off to France for the information through the BT network which in turn is transmitted onto the french network, the french telco has an agreement with BT and so it reaches the french server. Which then sends the information off back towards me. Again as the french telco and BT have an agreement BT doiesn't charge access to use its network.
Now why do I have to pay for a set data rate and data amount? The more bandwidth I use the greater share of the network i use, so at 56k I'm using the equivlent of one phone line, at 512k i'm using the same as 10 lines. Now I know some people are shouting 'horse shit'. But most networks now run digital systems there are no longer 500 lines going into my local server just a few pieces of fibre with a limited transmission rate. One analgue phone call only needs x amount of bandwidth, so increasing your transmission rate increasing thes bandwidth on a line. I'm not explaining this well but you should get the point.
Now its in the telco's interest to provide me a cheap rate to other countries and networks, because it means I will use their service, Again it was in their interest to provide the line and quality to anouther telco because if they didn't that telco wouldn't do the same for them, they would lose customers.
The internet is different in how it operates, and is why net neutrality is so damm important, it doesn't matter if I'm in the UK,France,USA i might be downloading from the USA,UK,France wherever the server is located. Now companies are still have an agreement to use each others networks but net neutrality means that no company will hurt anouther in sending information by delaying packets accross their network. Its in their interests to get that information around
However the natural monopoly status of many telcos means people have limited choice. So if BT decided that because a German telco paid it then its packets would have priority over french ones, could effectivly ruin a frnech telco, the lack of choice would hurt the customers, its a bad idea. Because I have to use BT (because there aren't any other ISP's) then BT is increasing its cash at the detriment of the consumer, its not priortising german packets for any other reason than money.
So we go back to our world internet, Now its in the telco's interests to pass information faster for telco's which give them more money. So verizon pays BT alot and verizon using servers can no
Apple has had an impressive marketing strategy, they produced something that was easy to use, intuative and more importatnly distinctive. People latched on to it, most MP3 players of the time sucked I know mine did. As such they grew in the geek community and overspilled into the 'mainstream' communtiy. People saw them as small easy to use expensive things which were easily recognisable. I've not seen every Mp3 player out there, but a fair few as friends and family buy Ipod clones and can't figure out the fifteen step guide needed to get music on them. The joke is, I usually put Itunes on for them explain how it works and get them to treat it as a portable drive.
The only company which in my eyes had provided somethign comparable is Microsoft (shock horror saying nice things about M$!) WMP10 and Mobile 2003's WMP10 worked quite nicely together and wern't to hard to get. However seeing WMP11 and Mobiles 2003's WMP10 is something comparable to Itunes and the Ipod. But it will never replace either as it isn't a complete solution a just some smart software for your PC and PDA.
Sandisk products generally suck I've owned alot of Flash/SD/MMC/Reduced SD cards the only ones that have ever broke are the San disk ones, and since their support sucks a treat.... I'm guessing their MP3 player is similar over difficult to use full of unnecessary information and with dire support. If they came up with a clever campaign and had a decent support service, reasonable device and on top of that were able to keep it simple. Then they might stand a chance.
The high cost on Beer and Fags is due to the high social costs of those products, drunks might vandalise a property the extra policemen and women needed at closing time, The increased violence and crime related activities, the cost to the NHS in dealing with all of the cancer and dead livers. All this adds up, much of it is indirect but it still does.
Graphically games have reached a very high standard, however other areas of a game have been forgotten. Things like gameplay, innovation and story are just as important. Because of people like yourself constantly demanding the latest in graphics then developers have spent every minute designing ways of improving graphics. But then forgot what it was that made a game so interesting.
Games like Myst had great graphics of the time, but it was the innovation and story that helped it become such a huge sucess. Half Life was graphically very good yet the story of half life and the versitility of the community and game is what made it one of the best selling games around.
Doom3 had stunning graphics better than Half Lifes in many ways, however it lacked any real story, the game was basically a clone of previous FPS games the game play wasn't bad but it was nothing new. Half Life 2 has very good graphics the charracter models are superior to Doom's, yet that game sold because of the story, there was some inovation to the genre (Grav gun, Mighty impressive Physics) and the game play wise it was comparable to Doom3. I have no idea about the sales of either but if you ask Joe Blogs what game they thought was better then 90% of people will reply HL2, because it was more enjoyable.
The gaming industry needs to catch up in these areas, there are game out there which try to do it UruLive and Black and White 2 both come to mind. Once the industry can create a fantastic game with the grpahics available and keeps tryign to inovate then I want them to work on the graphics a bit more.
But is there a point to playing Doom3 which is really just a 'run around shoot everything' game with incredible graphics. I'd much prefer to look at damm good graphics and love every minute I'm playing.
See this is where your confusing the UK government for the paranoid USA one. I think this is a relativly good idea, the majority of CCTV cameras in my home city are centered in the city centre and in poor areas. Knowing where cameras are and where they are not is a really helpful thing to know, a friend of mine was walking through town when a chav punched him him no reason. The area he was in had no CCTV a slight alteration to his route would have meant that had the occassion occured police would have had a decent photo of the idiot who attacked him. Heck it might have helped prevent the attack in the first place.
Recently the police raided and closed down a night club (Dance Accademy) it was a well known fighting and drugs hotspot. I speacial constable friend of mine told me they were literally walking on drugs when they got in there. Now I suppose many of you think this is a good thing. A bad night club is closed down, now because they don't have dance acadmey the same people are going into the main areas of town. Which was mostly a fighting and drugs free areas. Last night sat down in what was a quiet pub there were three major fights and the police were called in 5 times, its effectivily ruined my nights out.
So what does this have to do with anything? Before you knew if you went to a certain part of the city centre you were looking at the Druggie/ fighting area, it was highly patrolled and you only wern't their armed. Now its defused through the entire city centre, there is no safe place.
Knowing where the cameras are and knowing that someone is watching them is useful, I had a CCTV gamer aimed at my motorcyle in front of my house but there were times when it was interesting to watch it because of the events outside (in one case it proved useful to the police.) A CCTV channel lets people know where it is safe to walk, where people are watching. Sure this sytem can get abused put I think that the knowledge it could provide would be damm useful.
As for freedoms, WTF? I mean there is nothing I would in public that I wouldn't do in public knowing someone might be watching me on camera. People who would have their behavoir altered by having a camera on them are either self conseous or they are doing something they shouldnt. Either way its no loss.
I'm no curtain twitcher, but I do like to know things are safe the police do a bang up job at the moment and I would rather everyone had access to the video footage these people are recording because at least its honest. Or would you rather the NSA way of doing things?
I realise things might be a little different in the USA, but a few years back the Uk considered takning everyones DNA on file. The reason was for crime, and to be honest I'm all for it there are way to many unsolved rape and murder cases for my liking. ALright just because your DNA is at a scene doesn't mean yo udid it, but rather than looking at a needle in a hay stack it gives the governement imediate suspects.
I understand your concerns about abuse of this information, I'm guessing many people have seen the film Gattaca. But right now we don't have the technology to make clones, so the only real fears I can see anyone having is that a company won't hire you because of your DNA. But then I can't see this working in a age without proper genetic engineering.
The one thing i found ammusing about the UK governments attempt a while back, was that the people who seemed vocal against it appeared to be the type of low level crime figures the law was designed to catch.
Ok I've been keeping abreast of the whole new Intel chip, but readin the article does anyone else get a de'javou feeling? I seem to remember AMD bringing out their AMD 1700-2200xp chips with their low clock rates, and telling us performance mattered not clock speed. Intel then got carried away upto 3.7Ghz, telling us we needed faster and faster chips that cost 3 or 4 times the AMD ones.
AMD is finally ahead and while I don't do any network service work or place my PC understrain I've found the AMD64 3700+ does everything I would want, it doesn't slow down it runs everything very quickly and every game I own runs maxed out wiuth a decent frame rate. The one bottle neck in my system now seems to be windows itself (xp64 is an awful OS) and the hard drive access times.
Has Intel got lost in the 'MHz = l33t' attitude again? Or have they come up with something that competes with Hypertransport yet?
Well outside the MAC, Servers and your elite gamer can anyone see this chip selling? Its unlikely your average joe is interested eith the price tag being so high. The elite gamer seems to be a dieing breed, and does anyone know its performance against a AMDFX 62??
As for the 'who will buy a Sony?' comment, I will be, once the top notch one drops to around £200. My PS2 cost that and the years of enjoyment its brought me, coupled with the out of box games like singstar,buzz off etc show sony are thinking about me and my mates. It comes with Blu-ray since the 360 seems to be trying to pass itself off as a entertainment hub its lack of next gen drive is very very poor. Sonys Blu-ray, and general 'hype' seem to sugegst it can be a true entertainment hub that happens to play fantastic games. No i don't have a HDTV nor do I plan to buy one, but I'm pretty certain that the Movie industry is going to force this on us so would rather save the cash now and get it in my console.
Its pun of sorts Uru stands for You Are You, amoungst other things. I think it was done because Ubisoft shoved a offline version down Cyans through and then demanded it have Myst in the title. Cyans attempt at differentiating thier product.
OK let me tell you a story of my last experience with the NHS, last year (July) I had an accident in a lane and came off my motorcycle, and drove into a hedge luckily the soft hedge took most of the 40-60mph impact and so all i ended up with were bruises and a completely and utterly mangled wrist. After getting help and going to my nearest A&E, I was assessed and sent straight through as an emergency patient (apparently your wrist should not look like a hump backed bridge) after sitting down for ten minutes i was seen given a pain killer x rayed and asked to wait (total time on a Sunday night 2 hours waiting) the sent up to a ward. Next day seen by a new doctor reassessed and placed on a waiting list, it took two days for my non emergency operation to happen, yes that's right two days but since I had no school or work to do I was happy to wait, probably saying that to the surgeon wasn't the best of ideas. The surgeon (head surgeon there) decided rather than give me a cheap fix, being a young man he would go to excessive lengths to make sure I could use my hand quickly and would gain maximum mobility out of my hand. The result was a 5 inch flexible bar. Within two weeks I was back at work using my wrist booking in physical therapy sessions if and when I needed them. My dad was seen, operated and in a ward 3 hours after going in A&E with a swollen appendix. The NHS does work and it works well but there are two problems to it, firstly waste of time patients, while i was waiting for my Xrays a work colleague turned up with sun burnt legs, she was worried she had skin cancer all she had was sun burn, but that's time hospitals don't need to waste. Secondly the inability to financially organise themselves, a while back when Labour first came to power a very old friend of mine who happened to work at the local hospital told me that since the hospital couldn't work out what to spend the extra money on, they bought laptops for staff to use for work related activities. This is pure and simple waste and happens a lot in the NHS. The really sad thing is the private hospital opposite now delivers low quality of service when compared to my local NHS go figure.
Streets two small for cars? What? Ok i live in PLymouth in the UK its a city that has grown out of a town that has been here for hundreds if not a thousand years. Most of it got bombed during WW2 but we do have some areas that survived only the occasional ally way is to small for a car to traverse (I can think of one in plymouth) Everyone can drive cars and a lot of people do but it comes down to public transport and a willingness to actually get off my butt. Do you drive to the shops ten minutes up the road or walk? Unless i'm getting £100's worth of shopping guess what i do?
As for having a high population density you are right Plymouth has a quater of a million citizens spread out over ten miles, but then since it has expanded into cornwall and over a river many people living in Saltash have a bridge or ferry to cross and then either have to take a lot of back roads or a main A road to the city center and yet they still walk or catch a bus.
You really are talking out of your ass aren't you? The last figures i saw on europes progress on pollution suggested that yes it won't be making its pollution targets and yes some countries won't be doing that well and are quite far off. I do know the UK expects to get to 10% less than 1990 levels and so will miss it target of 15% less.
So why does europe manage to do it, we'll firstly each country in europe does things differently so I will just talk about the UK. I live two miles away from the city center (and my university) and most days i take the 30 minute walk into university as do most of my university mates. We walk into uni and so pollute on ther rare occassion that I am late and need to be somewhere quickly i ride my motorcycle which does between 90 and 110 miles to the gallon and uses next to no fuel. OK its only a 200cc, but then my dads 600cc still manages 70 miles to the gallon.
Petrol prices in the UK have just topped a £1 a litre, which means when you are looking for a car fuel efficency is top of your list, so most people own cars that do 30+ miles to the gallon (by necessity). When I hear that Americans are being charged $3/4 a gallon i have to ask how can they complain? But does this make fuel ecconomy a high priority? I wouldn't think so I personnaly hope it starts getting to $10 (UK levels we will just reduce tax on fuel) then you guys wil lreap what you soe, and all your giant pointless heavy polluting cars wil be shown for what they are.
The whole idea that America doesn't have the infrastructure to support people walking into work and the like is a lame excuse i used to walk three and a half miles into school everyday since the bus took as long to travel the distance and so i could get up later. I have a uni mate who travel five miles on a bicyle to university it takes him around thirty minutes. If your living further away from your job than that then you might have a reason to drive a car or a motorcycle, but then i have to ask why are you living so far away from your job?
Where I'm studying the professors all give a wide range of possible books, they are for reference only, you can complete the course without them, however most of the good professors will point out two books from their list of ten, for their value (in terms of money), or the fact that they are so incredibly good. I got through my first year only spending £200 on books which i regulary used, they helped me alot, this second year one of the professors had written a book (no big offical publisher) with anouther to help us students, taking that book out reading it and using it helped me achieve a very high grade in that module, he also published certain chapters online for people to read (who missed getting one of the books from the library.)I have a extremly good grasp of that subject and have enjoyed it alot.
Anouther module's lecturer's do the same thing each year a lectuer who teaches the course adds their own knowldge to the C/C++ guide for the module, its at 800+ pages and compared to any C/C++ guide its the most useful resource i have ever had for programming in C.
These are professors/lecturers who have a passion for the subject they teach, who want to give students a good resource to use and know that you can't spend £500+ each term on new books, not make a name for themselves and screw the students for extra money.
First they have a go at M$ for daring to bundle Windows Media Player onto their OS, argueing that by bundling the software microsoft were stopping competition taking advantage. That was crap if I ever saw it, it was the EU sueing microsoft so EU companies could gain a better foothold in the media player market, (please understand I'm not suggesting thats a bad thing its just something should increase its share cause its better not because the government says so.) Now I was a big fan of Itunes but to be honest most other media players generally don't come upto scratch, the Divx player (until recently) wasn't that great, I have hated the 'Real One' player and everything else doesn't seem to scratch in versaility when compared to WMP (for me and what I use it for.) Now the same could be said of Internet Explorer, in fact I would say installing IE as part of the OS is anouther great example of M$ stopping competition, do people use IE or do they use the better programs that exist, well the growing firefox following suggests people go with what they percieve to be best. Now the EU are complaining that the documentation M$ gave isn't good enough, and that they are trying to control the internet and further more are only looking out for themselves? Well who would have thought it a company trying to look out for its own interests? Anyone stating that you can control the internet doesn't have a clue how its run do they? Yes you can have the monopoly on servers, you could even force your own backwards standards onto people but control it? Honestly there are time I wish the EU would disappear into a hole along with the CAP.
lol, no i'm not after any particular thing here but these things aren't well designed having to go through with so many companies using them, yes they are a great cost saver, but they don't work. To give an example: I have two class mates, one is top of the class or near top of the class in every module, is highly social, hard working and a good laugh to be around. The other is near bottom of the class, after being in the same class as him for two years and many of us extending a hand of freindship trying to get him out more, we have given up the guys just doesn't like people. Now then both are robitics students and applied for a placement at a helicopter firm both were required to do a personnality test before the interview. My hard working top of the class friend was rejected at that phase and the anti social one let on, (as a point of interest later did not get the job because he seemed highly unsuited for the team working and the like.) Now this just happens to be two people I know and most of my class has come up against the same problem, as for your lie option, well tried that and also tried giving the exact opposite answer to what i normally would. Strangely enough I did have minor sucess with one pharmacutical company when i decided to see if my third application to them would pass if i went for all the evil bastard options I did pass that time, although after completing the next round didn't hear anything more from them.
Over the last few years I've seen companies fire employee's over their blogs, its not exactly a new idea. Ok in this instance the person used a online news site to 'get the information out'. It seems pretty clear whats going to happen. This employee probably broke a confidentiality agreement as well, these aren't things whicvh you can choose to ignore because your excited about your campanies new product. As much as bloggers like to be considered the new form of journalism they aren't, they are just people (often with overinflated ego's) who want to have their say.
But I have to ask if that person had gone to a newspaper where would we be legally?
See you say this but I honestly have to look at all of the tests out there and honestly believe that a twelve year old child devised them.
Recently I took an maths test and a personality test for Corus (for a placement year) the maths test was terrible, it wasn't a test of maths but a test to see if I could work out double convoluted negatives, heck half way through I called a parent up to go through and see if he (since he interviews people as part of his job) could make heads or tales of the questions. The personality test was even worse, it took me two or three minutes to break down each question into what it was actually asking (since those too were ridiculously overcomplicated.)
I have applied to quite a few companies and taken a lot of personality tests and generally fail ever time on these tests.
Recently I looked at a job at QinetiQ, I travelled all the way up there sat down had an interview and was quite successful at it, the Yini person (do not use Yini if looking for a placement) who I spoke to implied that the other applicant had more of the hard skills they wanted (I don't want to be a programmer (the Yini person assured me it wasn't programming) they wanted a programmer, from what I could understand.)
On every employee review, student review I have ever had I am described as a Nice, Generous, Loyal, Hard Working, Inteligent, Team worker, Strong Leadership Abilities, Practical, Social, Upbeat/Happy, and finally a good sense of humour. Yes I know it isn't humble to say that, but heck it's something I hear a lot.
So why do I fail at these personality tests? Could I really be a narcissistic, sadist who hates everyone? Or could it be that many of the tests themselves are poorly thought out and deeply flawed? I do not deny that they can have some value, but if you want to look at a candidate's personality bring him or her up for a open day and interview them, relying on these tests is just another way of dehumanising the system and missing out on great candidates, friends of mine who are far more hard working, intelligent are also falling at the wayside with these things.
Cameras in phones, is just a logical step, people like integration. A few years back I used to carry a Laptop, a 3MP Digital Camera, a Nokia 3310 and a bulky MP3 player. Now I carry my PPC. I'll admit right here and now that the PPC does not work as well as my old laptop when performing laptop things (pocket word isn't great) and the camera isn't as good as my 3MP one. But instead of carrying 3 small devices and a bulky laptop i have something that fits in my top pocket and performs to a staisfactory level all of their functions.
I'm not a photogrpaher I have no aspirations of being one, however there have been times in my life that its been handy to have a camera. Quality isn't important as long as the information i'm recording is legiable, when I go out socialising I would never have taken My digital camera with me, myself or a friend would hav epicked up a cheap disposible camera and used that. Now we don't have to bother there are a few good camera phones and we use those instead.
The qualtiy of the camera in a phone isn't dependant of the megapixels, My nokia 7650's camera was better than the Nokia 7610's. My PPC with its 1.3MP (Highest MP count) has the worst light handling ability out of the three. There are plenty of phones out there without camera's if you don't like them.
As for 2MP being cutting edge 2MP phones have been out for a while now, they are even starting to become mainstream.
I'll admit i haven't used a blackberry but for university work and the like I did look at blackberrys and decided they were out of date. I got a Orange m5000 free with my contract (unlike the blackberry which costs money) this has a keyboard, mega pixel camera and built in wireless facility.Everywhere i go within university I can sit down open it up and start doing coursework in excel/word use a few pocket apps that are relevent, and then log on through the universities wireless and check my (exchange) email. To top it off it came with Msn Messenger installed, I have only handled a Crackberry never used it, but i know my m5000 is slighty smaller and has a keybaord thats much much bigger, it has windows media player 10 so that gig card can act as my MP3 player, It handles text messages video messages wonderfully, Good quality camera (not 5 megapixel proper camera quality but surprisingly good none the less) and works very closely to my pc so It took me a new user to windows mobile all of 2 seconds to understand and customise. Mixed with all the proper phone compatibility and that handy thing GPRS i can use it anywhere, (Skype calls are fun!)
So you have the PPC range of phones which are smaller, do the job better than a blackberry and more importantly cheaper, the fact that they allow you to integrate a whole range of other devices is just something helpful i mean i liked carrying around a specific MP3 player, digital camera and gps device. They also operate with existing company hardware (My university has made no modifications to their exchange server to allow PDA users to access it) and don't really require much in the way of care, what makes a blackberry so much better? They were in the UK competing with the O2 XDA when they first came out, PPC's have come one enormously since the XDA I don't think the blackberry has.
See I Live in the UK and the blackberry has never really appeared over here, but i have to ask myself why it seems every American needs one, or loves one.
Why not use a phone? Lets look at some of the Nokias, a Nokia 6600, will send emails, it will recieve SMS's, it can make phone calls and keep everything in your Outlook calender folder on itself. Thats all a blackberry does isn't it? Now thats an old phone using two, three year old technology. So why is a blackberry twice its size? You might say for the keyboard, but then lets look at PDA phones what about the O2's XDA range or Oranges M range these run windows mobile are dirt cheap do everything above and more, the newer ones are smaller, lighter and more attractive than those butt ugly crackberrys. Please don't say Windows Mobile is hard to use either its based visually on windows and so for john idiot should be very intuative. I'll admit it can be a little unstable requiring to be reset every once and a while but then no datas lost because of that.
Also on the plus side the fact you need to spend two seconds effort in sending your message, through Msn Messenger or the Symbian equivilent, might help the productivity because most people won't be tempted to do frivilous IM's,SMS if it takes more than half a second of thought. Of course don't get me wrong millions of teenagers do, however if a company just pays the monthly contract then an employee is going to be a little more carefull.
Finally, on a phone (PDA or Symbian) if you want to check your messages you have to open the email folder up and hit send and recieve, thus allowing you not to be buzzed every ten seconds, and yet keeping upto date.
Why create a new range of devices when there are already a bunch of existing ones doing a better job and allowing for increased productivness. Please don't say they don't exist in america either as i know they do
TO be fair here Gordon Brown is very old labour and as such is quite left wing, you can see it in his budgets, i think he even managed it this year. I wouldn't worry about him talking to big business look at the current state of the economy, by sacrificing long term growth he has been able to help the country avoid some of the extremes of the boom/bust cycle. He's not avoided it true, but since we are going into a depression period I'm not seeing negative growth figures either.
This law won't get through, it is true that parliament could vote for it, but like many things it has been in parliament for a while and will eventually will go away. Blair doesn't really have that much to gain by putting this law through as most of us expect him to be standing down in a year or so, Brown/Blair wouldn't force this through either with the Parliamentary act. Because of the media publicity it would create, Browns worked very hard on his current public figure as 'a man of the people' and Blair knows his term is finishing now so there would be no advantage for him.
Its an interesting law but it will never pass V for vendetta will help make sure of that, you have to love chavs there good for something's (even if its not voting, the fights can be good to watch.)
In short Brown has done some extremely savvy things like putting interest rate control out of the hands of government and start more than a few social iniatives, talking to big business is a way of solving solutions. Would you believe when he does take power i won't be voting for him. Although i don't vote labour anyway since it was my evil MP who suggested that damm tuition fee thing 'because students in his constituency didn't object' and we didn't send him 5000 signatures last year saying we don't like top up fee's (the git was an architect of that one as well.)