Short version: It's open-source, open data (export/import allowed) and has a much cooler zoomable map. Plus it can tell you how much you still need to fly to get to Mars.
Both you and the author are wrong.
Books are processed by individual humans, who are supposed to understand and follow company policy but may or may not do so. The most plausible scenario is simply that the author hit an overly zealous censor who misinterpreted what they're supposed to be looking out for, and that censoring references to Amazon is not official Apple policy.
FWIW, I've had issues much like this with Amazon's book publishing arm CreateSpace: some manuscripts were rejected by processor A for dubious reasons, and then accepted when the resubmission was processed by guy B instead.
What if each wiki article had its own licence decided by the initial contributor?
This would be horribly impractical and seriously impede any work, because every article would essentially become its own little island that can't be merged with any other one.
A simple illustration: I write an article about a company called Foo and license it as GFDL, and you write another about a company called Bar and license it under CC by-sa. Hundreds of others work on the articles over five years and everything is peachy-keen.
Then Foo merges with Bar and renames itself as Foobar. How do you create the Foobar article, when the Foo article can't use anything from Bar (unless they manage to get explicit permission from every user or anon IP who has ever worked on it, which is impossible), and Bar can't use anything from Foo?
The inflight entertainment controller has a control pad for moving the mouse pointer and a miniature QWERTY keypad on the back. Sounds fairly painful for any serious writing, but better than nothing.
Even in the cities stuff was built to last - because until very recently upgrade cycles were measured in years, if not decades. Certainly not the annual or quarterly cycles so common today, even in infrastructure.
And then you get IT vendors muscling into telco and trying to impose IT requirements there. For example, a certain large services company (I'll call 'em "HAL") with a new, fat contract to run a very, very large operator's system recently insisted that, on the giant production cluster that handles all their SMSes, the OS must be upgraded whenever any new patch comes out -- and we're still expected to maintain 99.999% reliability at the risk of draconian penalties. They're about to find out what "don't fix it if it ain't broken" means...
Oh, and in that article it said the "poor" stayed the same. No sign of getting poorer, just most of the "new money" went to the richer.
Hmm? Look at the data -- the percentage of people with no income has increased, and the average income of the poorest families has decreased in absolute terms, which means they did even worse in inflation-adjusted real terms.
Note that 10% of Singaporean households now have no income (at all) and the next decile has seen its average earnings drop 20% in the past 5 years, while the rich get richer.
To enforce this utopian vision, and ensure harmony, freedom of speech has been restricted, in a manner similar to that of Western European states and Canada.
Oh, bullpucky. The level of censorship in Singaporefar exceeds that of any Western European state. Every newspaper, every radio station, every TV channel is controlled by the government. Now that mr brown has been cast out into the cold by the govn't, nobody else will ever publish his writings.
Also, the much-repeated "multicultural in harmony" bit pretty much amounts to propaganda for keeping the Indians, Malays and Others down while ensuring Chinese hegemony.
My relevent dimesions are 32, 36, and 36. Those are waist, inseam, and sleave length measured in inches. It is near impossible to find clothing that fits, even at big and tall shops. Actually, big and tall shops are much more consistant. They never carry anything that fits.
Easy answer: get your clothes custom tailored. It costs less than you might expect (of course, in my case living in South-East Asia helps) and you'll get clothes that fit perfectly.
This is just one of many insanely cool (mostly) Japanese technologies being showcased at Expo 2005 Aichi, which just opened last week. Other highlights include Toyota's robot-laden pavilion, Hitachi's interactive VR safari, the world's first 360-degree fully hemispherical movie projector, driverless buses zipping around the site, etc. See Wikitravel's guide for more.
For more serious photography, check out photo.net, started by Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita fame. Still lots of random pictures to be found, but the quasi-moderation system of ratings does a pretty good job of sorting out the wheat from the chaff; check out the last three day's top-rated pictures for an example. The service is free to use, but people with popular pictures get more disk space -- or you can get it the old-fashioned way by paying.
While this is true of major software releases and service packs, it's certainly not true of critical updates, is it? And besides, software on the scale of Longhorn or Office 2006 is vastly different than a point-and-click problem on a web page.
No, you're missing his point. The MS approach is to deliver a static software package to your desktop, and updating it is a huge hassle because every desktop has its idiosyncracies and MS, despite its best efforts, can't control the desktop. Amazon (plus Salesforce.com and a few others) do away with this by keeping the entire app backend on their side, so the thin client user doesn't have to do anything to have the problem fixes, new features deployed, etc. It's just there the next time he logs in.
Cheers,
-jani
http://map.search.ch/ rocks!
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I thought Google Maps was spiffy, but this is just insanely cool! Took me less than 1 minute to spot the house where I lived near Geneva over 10 years ago, and the satellite map even shows the community swimming pool and the nearby farm sheds full of stinky fertilizer. I can almost hear the cowbells ringing...
Note that you can also check the "Strasseskarte" box to switch between the satellite view and the just-the-facts-ma'am road map view.
but not good for businesses. Skype doesn't offer the "carrier grade" telephony quality/reliability/features businesses are looking for. It's great as a additional line but that's it.
That's highly debatable. Companies usually run up insane phonebills for international conferences and whatnot: not only does my company save a lot of money with Skype, but voice quality is generally a hell of a lot better. Intercontinental analog lines often suffer from all sorts of lag and distortion, but since Skype is digital, it either works pretty much perfectly (minimal packet loss) or not at all (massive packet loss).
Singapore's had this feature for frequent travellers for a few years now.
http://app.ica.gov.sg/serv_pr/oth_serv/iacs.asp
It doesn't cover separate security checks, but does allow one to speed through the immigration lines at entry and exit.
The above cut'n'pasted from the parent AC; I had moderator access, why couldn't I mod it up? The mod button was missing completely for that post alone...
This is newsworthy more from a societal than a technological point of view. 100,000 messages per hour (=27 msg/s) is chicken feed for your typical SMSC, which usually measure traffic in hundreds of SMSes per second. There are even SMS bulk delivery tools that plug directly into SS7 and claim a throughput of 20,000 messages per second. Working in the industry myself (at a competitor, mind you) I'm a little skeptical about this particular claim, but I do know that there are SMSC networks out there capable of handling sustained loads of several thousand msg/s.
But it's neat anyway. Then again, I thought it was pretty nifty to be able to call me university's automated service and get my results via phone 10 years ago... although I'm sure that little wait between "You have..." and "passed" was put there on purpose!.
Can someone more tech-savvy than my mom report on their experience with IE-specific web sites that Singapore citizens are required to use? I'd love to be able to get my mom using some other browser. There are some pop-ups you just don't want your parents seeing...
There aren't too many websites you're "required to use", but yeah, IRAS (the local IRS) isn't too friendly. Surprisingly Mozilla/NS7 for most part work fine, but evidently Opera, Safari and older Netscapes don't.
My biggest hassles have in fact been purely commercial enterprises, like Shaw Cinemas (can buy tix but can't reserve seats online, applet loads but javascript buttons don't work) and even SBS Transit (main menu broken, sitemap works though)... but the occasions when I need to use IE are few and far between.
But this time I am compelled to have a say here,because what has been said above by the guy from Singapore is factually incorrect. Malaysia's Purchasing Power Parity(PPP) GDP per capita is 8000$. And India's PPP GDP per capita is 2950$
Sorry mate, my figures for raw GDP are quite correct. You're right in that PPP is a better way of comparing how rich people are -- but when it comes to outsourcing, it's the dollar salary that companies care about, and here India is much cheaper than Malaysia.
Statistics can be manipulated in all sorts of ways If you're going to talk about per capita figures then yea, Malaysia is 'richer' than India, but does that mean that every malaysian is making that much per year?
No. But this also means that there are Indians who make considerably less than $400 a year.
India's absolute GDP is way HIGHER than Malaysia's, which means that the TOTAL goods & services produced and income earnwed is way beyond anything Malaysia can accomplish.
Duh, because India has 50x more people (but, as it happens, only $650b vs. $80b == 8x more absolute GDP). And your point was...? How does this make people move outsourced jobs from India to Malaysia?
The bottom line is, GDP is a load of bull when it comes to giving an indication about wealth (but the only statistic out there, I'll admit).
Well, there's also the UN Human Development Index. Out of a maximum of 1, Malaysia scores 0.832, while India is a fairly pathetic 0.446. For comparison, the US is 0.937 and even Iraq manages 0.586.
Any country which raises government spending, can boost its GDP Growth rate(i.e. like say hardcore military expenditure).
Malaysia's military expenditure is also puny compared to India, which has to puff itself up to fight off Pakistan and China, whereas Malaysia's big bugaboo is... Singapore (eek!).
So what you are saying is that you should judge how affuent a contries population is by looking at a single city? Should we judge the US, by looking at say New York? Or Los Angeles?
Howzabout looking at the GDP figures? Malaysia's GDP/capita is around $8000, while India's is closer to $400 (yes, one zero less). This means Malaysia is roughly 20 times richer! Having been there some 10 times during the last year I alone, I can assure you this is not all concentrated in the Petronas Towers...
Malaysia isn't stealing Indian jobs. Instead, for most part, it's taking those jobs where the company actually wants, say, niceties like "functional transport infrastructure" and "no power failures". India tends to get customer support, which requires a cheap workforce; Malaysia's forte is more in back office outsourcing, which requires less people but more fancy technology to keep it running.
What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).
Yes, this is exactly what I meant. If a big phone company -- say, Siemens or Samsung -- wants to compete without licensing Symbian or whatever Microsoft's portable OS is called today, pretty much the only option (other that slugging it out alone and dying a painful death) would be to use GPL software like Linux. Sure, it would take a lot of work to make it match the latest Symbian, but that's not the target market: the cheaper price becomes more attractive in the lower segment, where you don't really need all that much in the way of UI software. And then that can grow incrementally the way GPL projects do.
And FWIW, I have a brand-new Nokia 6600 with Symbian... and underneath the pretty chrome, the GUI is painfully slow, maldesigned and crash-prone.
Slashdot Mirror
Short version: It's open-source, open data (export/import allowed) and has a much cooler zoomable map. Plus it can tell you how much you still need to fly to get to Mars.
Long version: http://openflights.org/faq
Both you and the author are wrong. Books are processed by individual humans, who are supposed to understand and follow company policy but may or may not do so. The most plausible scenario is simply that the author hit an overly zealous censor who misinterpreted what they're supposed to be looking out for, and that censoring references to Amazon is not official Apple policy. FWIW, I've had issues much like this with Amazon's book publishing arm CreateSpace: some manuscripts were rejected by processor A for dubious reasons, and then accepted when the resubmission was processed by guy B instead.
Cheers,
-j.
Screenshots
As one of their two demos, they show how you can use the GUI to add an Amazon EC2 instance "in only five minutes" -- as opposed to typing one (1) command or using Amazon's own ElasticFox.
That's because it's a video clip taken from Al Jazeera, the Middle East's top TV news channel. They also have excellent English-language programming.
Cheers,
-j.
This would be horribly impractical and seriously impede any work, because every article would essentially become its own little island that can't be merged with any other one.
A simple illustration: I write an article about a company called Foo and license it as GFDL, and you write another about a company called Bar and license it under CC by-sa. Hundreds of others work on the articles over five years and everything is peachy-keen.
Then Foo merges with Bar and renames itself as Foobar. How do you create the Foobar article, when the Foo article can't use anything from Bar (unless they manage to get explicit permission from every user or anon IP who has ever worked on it, which is impossible), and Bar can't use anything from Foo?
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
And then you get IT vendors muscling into telco and trying to impose IT requirements there. For example, a certain large services company (I'll call 'em "HAL") with a new, fat contract to run a very, very large operator's system recently insisted that, on the giant production cluster that handles all their SMSes, the OS must be upgraded whenever any new patch comes out -- and we're still expected to maintain 99.999% reliability at the risk of draconian penalties. They're about to find out what "don't fix it if it ain't broken" means...
Cheers,
-j.
Hmm? Look at the data -- the percentage of people with no income has increased, and the average income of the poorest families has decreased in absolute terms, which means they did even worse in inflation-adjusted real terms.
Cheers,
-j.
Income inequality widens markedly
Note that 10% of Singaporean households now have no income (at all) and the next decile has seen its average earnings drop 20% in the past 5 years, while the rich get richer.
Cheers,
-j.
Oh, bullpucky. The level of censorship in Singapore far exceeds that of any Western European state. Every newspaper, every radio station, every TV channel is controlled by the government. Now that mr brown has been cast out into the cold by the govn't, nobody else will ever publish his writings.
Also, the much-repeated "multicultural in harmony" bit pretty much amounts to propaganda for keeping the Indians, Malays and Others down while ensuring Chinese hegemony.
Cheers,
-j.
Easy answer: get your clothes custom tailored. It costs less than you might expect (of course, in my case living in South-East Asia helps) and you'll get clothes that fit perfectly.
Cheers,
-j.
And yes, I'm going there next week. :P
Cheers,
-j.
Obligatory own gallery whoring: me! me! me!
And psst: since this is Slashdot, you'll want to know that there's some pretty damn good free pr0... err, I mean kinky photography out there too.
Cheers,
-j.
No, you're missing his point. The MS approach is to deliver a static software package to your desktop, and updating it is a huge hassle because every desktop has its idiosyncracies and MS, despite its best efforts, can't control the desktop. Amazon (plus Salesforce.com and a few others) do away with this by keeping the entire app backend on their side, so the thin client user doesn't have to do anything to have the problem fixes, new features deployed, etc. It's just there the next time he logs in.
Cheers,
-jani
Note that you can also check the "Strasseskarte" box to switch between the satellite view and the just-the-facts-ma'am road map view.
Cheers,
-j.
That's highly debatable. Companies usually run up insane phonebills for international conferences and whatnot: not only does my company save a lot of money with Skype, but voice quality is generally a hell of a lot better. Intercontinental analog lines often suffer from all sorts of lag and distortion, but since Skype is digital, it either works pretty much perfectly (minimal packet loss) or not at all (massive packet loss).
Cheers,
-j.
http://app.ica.gov.sg/serv_pr/oth_serv/iacs.asp
It doesn't cover separate security checks, but does allow one to speed through the immigration lines at entry and exit.
The above cut'n'pasted from the parent AC; I had moderator access, why couldn't I mod it up? The mod button was missing completely for that post alone...
Cheers,
-j.
But it's neat anyway. Then again, I thought it was pretty nifty to be able to call me university's automated service and get my results via phone 10 years ago... although I'm sure that little wait between "You have..." and "passed" was put there on purpose!.
Cheers,
-j.
Does that mean you're female!? :D
No, it means he's a fan of the inimitable Tora-san.
Cheers,
-j.
There aren't too many websites you're "required to use", but yeah, IRAS (the local IRS) isn't too friendly. Surprisingly Mozilla/NS7 for most part work fine, but evidently Opera, Safari and older Netscapes don't.
My biggest hassles have in fact been purely commercial enterprises, like Shaw Cinemas (can buy tix but can't reserve seats online, applet loads but javascript buttons don't work) and even SBS Transit (main menu broken, sitemap works though)... but the occasions when I need to use IE are few and far between.
Cheers,
-j. (in rainy Singapore)
Sorry mate, my figures for raw GDP are quite correct. You're right in that PPP is a better way of comparing how rich people are -- but when it comes to outsourcing, it's the dollar salary that companies care about, and here India is much cheaper than Malaysia.
Cheers,
-j.
No. But this also means that there are Indians who make considerably less than $400 a year.
India's absolute GDP is way HIGHER than Malaysia's, which means that the TOTAL goods & services produced and income earnwed is way beyond anything Malaysia can accomplish.
Duh, because India has 50x more people (but, as it happens, only $650b vs. $80b == 8x more absolute GDP). And your point was...? How does this make people move outsourced jobs from India to Malaysia?
The bottom line is, GDP is a load of bull when it comes to giving an indication about wealth (but the only statistic out there, I'll admit).
Well, there's also the UN Human Development Index. Out of a maximum of 1, Malaysia scores 0.832, while India is a fairly pathetic 0.446. For comparison, the US is 0.937 and even Iraq manages 0.586.
Any country which raises government spending, can boost its GDP Growth rate(i.e. like say hardcore military expenditure).
Malaysia's military expenditure is also puny compared to India, which has to puff itself up to fight off Pakistan and China, whereas Malaysia's big bugaboo is... Singapore (eek!).
So what does that prove?
You tell me.
Cheers,
-j.
Howzabout looking at the GDP figures? Malaysia's GDP/capita is around $8000, while India's is closer to $400 (yes, one zero less). This means Malaysia is roughly 20 times richer! Having been there some 10 times during the last year I alone, I can assure you this is not all concentrated in the Petronas Towers...
Malaysia isn't stealing Indian jobs. Instead, for most part, it's taking those jobs where the company actually wants, say, niceties like "functional transport infrastructure" and "no power failures". India tends to get customer support, which requires a cheap workforce; Malaysia's forte is more in back office outsourcing, which requires less people but more fancy technology to keep it running.
Cheers,
-j. (from sunny Singapore)
What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).
Yes, this is exactly what I meant. If a big phone company -- say, Siemens or Samsung -- wants to compete without licensing Symbian or whatever Microsoft's portable OS is called today, pretty much the only option (other that slugging it out alone and dying a painful death) would be to use GPL software like Linux. Sure, it would take a lot of work to make it match the latest Symbian, but that's not the target market: the cheaper price becomes more attractive in the lower segment, where you don't really need all that much in the way of UI software. And then that can grow incrementally the way GPL projects do.
And FWIW, I have a brand-new Nokia 6600 with Symbian... and underneath the pretty chrome, the GUI is painfully slow, maldesigned and crash-prone.
Cheers,
-j.