Anybody have any info on the All Pakistan CD, DVD, Audio Casette Traders and Manufacturers Association?
Something tells me that this is an "Industry Association", as the summary suggests, of shopkeepers. I imagine them to be much like the RIAA with less lawyers and more AK47's.
So the headline should really be "Pakistani shop keepers refuse to stock latest crappy COD game".
The British comedian in my says they've chucked them in the curry.
It can be libel and true at the same time if it invades privacy, but I don't think it applies in this case.
True.
But bankruptcy rulings are public info in Australia. The bankruptcy is to protect you from your creditors, you cant do this the ruling is secret.
So,
Is Guy Hingston bankrupt = Yes
Is this public knowledge = Yes
Will this get thrown out of court = Yes
The zune wasn't a failure. Its "failure" was the result of MS-hate from cocky web 2.0 apple bloggers. There is nothing technically wrong with it. It's just that no product, no matter how good it is, can stand the scoffing of turtleneck-wearing "journalists" who laugh at the choice of color. "DURRR WHO WOULD BUY A BROWN ZUNE?".
But it's perfectly ok to get a one-size-fits-all ipod.
This was the problem with the Zune. MS had a chance to make an MP3 player that broke the iMould. Instead all MS did was make a brown Ipod clone. As someone who hated using the Ipod due to it's crappy interface, terrible controls and complete and utter reliance on crappy software to load it I would have liked a device that acted like a USB drive and simply just played music with proper buttons for controls (in fact I did like the Cowon and Archos products I bought for these features).
MS did try to copy Apple, but they didn't have the cock 2.0 webby bloggers that Apple had in their corner in order to make a crappy product cool.
No one likes Tony or Julia, but they vote Labor or LNP because "We have always done it that way." How do you convince people to do something different?
Gord,
A slab of VB for a mod point.
This describes the voting situation in Australia perfectly. You've got large segments of the population that vote Labor or Liberal simply because it's what they've always done.
replace gun with knives. If you were paying attention to australia after they outlawed guns violent crime went up over 30% and home invasions even higher. Just because a criminal does not have a gun does not mean he is no longer a criminal. He is still going to kill you be it with a gun or a knife.
Actually, if you paid attention that didn't happen.
It's an old myth that has been disproven many, many times.
Agreed, I live in the area, and i know the 2 homeowners who have been broken into since this has happened. Nothing but the gun safes were touched, coincidence? I think not
Amazing, This is quite brazen.
I live in a place where guns aren't common and firearm safes have to be up to code and bolted to foundations... Our thieves are complete cowards without quick access to guns.
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I want to know about it.
And I want a pony. The issue is if you have the right to know. He has the constitutional right to those weapons.
So what well regulated militia is he a member of?
Got to love the gun nuts who scream about "constitutional rights" but forget the second amendment talks about a well regulated militia. I'm sure if Jefferson, Washington and the rest saw the way it was being used now they would have written off the second amendment as a terrible idea.
Aeroplanes are actually cleaner than most office buildings due to the fact they have better quality HEPA filters.
The reason most people feel sick from air travel is the extremely low relative humidity on-board (6%) which leads most people to get dehydrated because they dont drink enough water. Add alcohol into the mix and you have people becoming extremely dehydrated. If I dont drink enough water on a flight over 4 hours, I'll usually get off with hangover like symptoms (dizziness, headache, slight nausea), its caused by dehydration, the same as if I'd been on the turps the night before. I'm serious about the dehydration issue on aircraft, most people end up drinking alcohol or diuretic soft drinks which makes the whole thing worse.
What you're more likely to get sick from is using airport facilities, people who dont wash their hands in facilities that get used a lot before they are cleaned.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
As it turns out, generics aren't necessarily equivalent to the original perscription drug.
Since it's late, you get the first article I found on Google
It's a fair representation of the other articles I've read on the subject.
That article is comparing different types of drugs, not the generic variant of the same drug. Completely different thing.
If I were to buy a packet of branded "Nurofen Plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) instead of a generic "Pharmacy Brand Ibuprofen plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) what exactly is the difference? Aside from price, the difference is cosmetic, the box is plain without much branding, generic white pills, pills only embossed with batch numbers.
Now when it comes to patented prescription medication, in Australia there is a box on every prescription that state "Do not allow substitution" that doctors can tick if they want a patient to get a specific drug if the generic has a different effect.
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
Big Pharma are around, I used to work next to the Pfizer factory in Perth but they have three huge hindrances in Australia.
1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
Why do people assume you have to give everyone real info?
We dont assume they have to. We assume they're dumb enough to.
My bank is eliminating the "secret question" method of authentication because its exploited far too much by fraudsters. Things "Mothers maiden name", "Town you were born in" and "name of first pet" is acquired using a half arsed phishing expedition. They are going with One Time Passcodes sent by SMS but there a re a small minority of users complaining to high hell about "having" to use SMS.
Point in short, people are dumb and lazy. They wont even use a password if you dont force them. Assuming they will answer "what is your mothers maiden name" correctly is a good assumption, finding this info is trivial in the age of Facebook and LinkedIn.
"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
Would be more reliable than most of the commercial dash cams and even if you paid someone to build it, cheaper than buying a Blackvue.
I'm just as happy to get on an Airbus as I am to get on a Boeing (although I prefer the seat layout of the A330 (2x4x2) to the B777 layout (2x5x2) but that's just personal preference).
That's up to the airline, not the manufacturer. I've sat in 3-3-3 A330s and 3-3-3 777s.
I should have said typical layout. TheA330's default fit-out is 2x4x2 but this can be changed to any other layout by the airline but most airlines keep the 2x4x2 and 3 class layout, budget airlines typically use 3x3x3 1 class layouts as 3x3x3 requires smaller seats. However the rails the seats are fitted into are fixed in position.
And what country are you from? Name one country that has not engaged in "toppling peaceful regimes, undermining democracies, assassinating legitimate heads of state, waging illegitimate war and generally just fucking things up and killing thousands just for the sake of funnelling money into the right pockets" for thousands of years. If you want to hold us (America) responsible for every action our country has been engaged in, I would wager that our 250 year history is nothing compared to the rampant bloodshed, Feudalism, and barbaric nature of 95% of the planet.
The fucking Swiss.
Aslo the Swedes, except that Ikea is getting pretty damned insidious.
All new aircraft have issues. A380 discovered cracks in the wings and engine problem when it first came out. Just like software, you try and test but some stuff is just not detected until it's deployed into the real world.
This,
Although the Trent 900 issue would be a better example.
People are just blowing it out of proportion due to a perceived rivalry between Airbus and Boeing. Butthurt fanboys on both sides just looking to bash the other. They're as bad as apple/google fanboys (or holden/ford in Australia) and often make just as little sense. I'm surprised I haven't heard "Scarebus" mentioned yet, I've heard Screamliner a few times.
Every single model of aircraft has a list of shit that LAME's (Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers) keep an eye on during regular maintenance. Aircraft see more mechanics in a week than most cars see in their lifetime (and I'm someone who drove a 78 Fairmont in 2010). I'm just as happy to get on an Airbus as I am to get on a Boeing (although I prefer the seat layout of the A330 (2x4x2) to the B777 layout (2x5x2) but that's just personal preference).
Nobody makes jokes about cheap Taiwanese batteries even though Taiwan is largely ethnically Chinese.
That's a kettle of fish you dont want to open.
The Republic of China or ROC (Taiwan) is either an independent state or a province of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) depending on which side of their mouth the politicians are talking about. A lot of harsh words and sometimes even artillery shells get exchanged when someone uses the wrong definition at the wrong time.
Also, ethnic Chinese are just about everywhere in Asia. You've got large ethnic Chinese communities as far away as Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.
Alcatel/Thales is a pretty big company. Much like Sony or GM, so many divisions it's easy to have massive quality differences between them (a GM Daewoo is a shitebox... scratch that, all GM cars are shiteboxes).
I had an Alcatel PCI DSL modem back in the early 00's. Went for years without missing a beat, we only got rid of it because it didn't support ADSL2.
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
I've worked at factory place in Australia, a backup generator that can produce enough power for production to run isn't that uncommon although at the last place I worked, the backup power requirement was for 8 hours, where as in a similar factory in china had a requirement for 21 days of backup power as they couldn't even rely on regular diesel deliveries if things got bad.
Also the power delivered to us from the state power company (state gov owned) was in a very good condition, compared to china where it needed to be filtered. At a local aluminium refinery, they generated all of their own power but they get natural gas delivered to them by pipeline from a feild in the north of the state. About 1/3 of the piped gas goes straight to that refinery so at their size, it's more economical to run your own powerplant. I think the size of the operation we were discussing wouldn't be that large.
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Higher.
China pays about the same per KW as the US but the electricity supply in China and especially India is nowhere near as reliable or clean as western nations. Factories in China have to maintain large transformers to clean the power and large backup generators which increases the cost.
Although, replacing Chinese factory workers wont exactly bring the "jerbs they turk" back to the US.
an employer who treats their staff well will find that staff will do the same for their employer
where is this magical land you speak of? tell me. tell me!
Australian Public Service?
Joking,
Employers like this are typically either mining giants (who can afford all the perks) or specialised SME's in my neck of the woods. When competing for the best talent in any professional service (IT, Engineering, Accounting) your workplace has to be competitive or you'll end up with the people they reject. It depends on company policy rather than the type or location of the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Reliable and speed... ...in the CEO's latest Italian car.
I guess you've never driven a FIAT, neither fast nor reliable.
I guess that's a good analogy for AT&T.
Their conclusion: Men commit more misconduct.
My conclusion: Women are sneakier at committing misconduct.
My question: what percentage of scientists are men?
Something tells me that this is an "Industry Association", as the summary suggests, of shopkeepers. I imagine them to be much like the RIAA with less lawyers and more AK47's.
So the headline should really be "Pakistani shop keepers refuse to stock latest crappy COD game".
The British comedian in my says they've chucked them in the curry.
It can be libel and true at the same time if it invades privacy, but I don't think it applies in this case.
True. But bankruptcy rulings are public info in Australia. The bankruptcy is to protect you from your creditors, you cant do this the ruling is secret.
So,
Is Guy Hingston bankrupt = Yes
Is this public knowledge = Yes
Will this get thrown out of court = Yes
The zune wasn't a failure. Its "failure" was the result of MS-hate from cocky web 2.0 apple bloggers. There is nothing technically wrong with it. It's just that no product, no matter how good it is, can stand the scoffing of turtleneck-wearing "journalists" who laugh at the choice of color. "DURRR WHO WOULD BUY A BROWN ZUNE?".
But it's perfectly ok to get a one-size-fits-all ipod.
This was the problem with the Zune. MS had a chance to make an MP3 player that broke the iMould. Instead all MS did was make a brown Ipod clone. As someone who hated using the Ipod due to it's crappy interface, terrible controls and complete and utter reliance on crappy software to load it I would have liked a device that acted like a USB drive and simply just played music with proper buttons for controls (in fact I did like the Cowon and Archos products I bought for these features).
MS did try to copy Apple, but they didn't have the cock 2.0 webby bloggers that Apple had in their corner in order to make a crappy product cool.
The Zune failed because it _was_ a brown ipod.
Sony is border line bankrupt, where exactly would they find the billions and billions required to spend just to kill off a competitor?
This, trying to buy out MS's games and entertainment division would kill Sony...
Nintendo would have the cash behind the couch. But the Xbox is the antithesis of Nintendo's gaming and business philosophy.
No one likes Tony or Julia, but they vote Labor or LNP because "We have always done it that way." How do you convince people to do something different?
Gord,
A slab of VB for a mod point.
This describes the voting situation in Australia perfectly. You've got large segments of the population that vote Labor or Liberal simply because it's what they've always done.
replace gun with knives. If you were paying attention to australia after they outlawed guns violent crime went up over 30% and home invasions even higher. Just because a criminal does not have a gun does not mean he is no longer a criminal. He is still going to kill you be it with a gun or a knife.
Actually, if you paid attention that didn't happen.
It's an old myth that has been disproven many, many times.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp
Crimes have actually decreased since 1997.
Agreed, I live in the area, and i know the 2 homeowners who have been broken into since this has happened. Nothing but the gun safes were touched, coincidence? I think not
Amazing, This is quite brazen.
I live in a place where guns aren't common and firearm safes have to be up to code and bolted to foundations... Our thieves are complete cowards without quick access to guns.
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I want to know about it.
And I want a pony. The issue is if you have the right to know. He has the constitutional right to those weapons.
So what well regulated militia is he a member of?
Got to love the gun nuts who scream about "constitutional rights" but forget the second amendment talks about a well regulated militia. I'm sure if Jefferson, Washington and the rest saw the way it was being used now they would have written off the second amendment as a terrible idea.
So are airplanes.
Aeroplanes are actually cleaner than most office buildings due to the fact they have better quality HEPA filters.
The reason most people feel sick from air travel is the extremely low relative humidity on-board (6%) which leads most people to get dehydrated because they dont drink enough water. Add alcohol into the mix and you have people becoming extremely dehydrated. If I dont drink enough water on a flight over 4 hours, I'll usually get off with hangover like symptoms (dizziness, headache, slight nausea), its caused by dehydration, the same as if I'd been on the turps the night before. I'm serious about the dehydration issue on aircraft, most people end up drinking alcohol or diuretic soft drinks which makes the whole thing worse.
What you're more likely to get sick from is using airport facilities, people who dont wash their hands in facilities that get used a lot before they are cleaned.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
As it turns out, generics aren't necessarily equivalent to the original perscription drug.
Since it's late, you get the first article I found on Google
It's a fair representation of the other articles I've read on the subject.
That article is comparing different types of drugs, not the generic variant of the same drug. Completely different thing.
If I were to buy a packet of branded "Nurofen Plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) instead of a generic "Pharmacy Brand Ibuprofen plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) what exactly is the difference? Aside from price, the difference is cosmetic, the box is plain without much branding, generic white pills, pills only embossed with batch numbers.
Now when it comes to patented prescription medication, in Australia there is a box on every prescription that state "Do not allow substitution" that doctors can tick if they want a patient to get a specific drug if the generic has a different effect.
They spend 19x more on advertising than they do on R&D, so 95% of what those high prices are amortizing is advertisng, not R&D.
Of course they do.
Why bother doing your own R&D when you can just patent the R&D done by universities and public institutions.
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
Big Pharma are around, I used to work next to the Pfizer factory in Perth but they have three huge hindrances in Australia.
1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
We dont assume they have to. We assume they're dumb enough to.
My bank is eliminating the "secret question" method of authentication because its exploited far too much by fraudsters. Things "Mothers maiden name", "Town you were born in" and "name of first pet" is acquired using a half arsed phishing expedition. They are going with One Time Passcodes sent by SMS but there a re a small minority of users complaining to high hell about "having" to use SMS.
Point in short, people are dumb and lazy. They wont even use a password if you dont force them. Assuming they will answer "what is your mothers maiden name" correctly is a good assumption, finding this info is trivial in the age of Facebook and LinkedIn.
"Or the RaspberryPi in my truck hooked up to a bumper-cam and 1TB hard drive is something my safety conscious family doesn't care about."
yikes, a safety system cobbled together by a hobbyist running on a platform that was designed by people who seemed to learn a EDA during the pi's development all running open source software?
sign me up
Would be more reliable than most of the commercial dash cams and even if you paid someone to build it, cheaper than buying a Blackvue.
I'm just as happy to get on an Airbus as I am to get on a Boeing (although I prefer the seat layout of the A330 (2x4x2) to the B777 layout (2x5x2) but that's just personal preference).
That's up to the airline, not the manufacturer. I've sat in 3-3-3 A330s and 3-3-3 777s.
I should have said typical layout. TheA330's default fit-out is 2x4x2 but this can be changed to any other layout by the airline but most airlines keep the 2x4x2 and 3 class layout, budget airlines typically use 3x3x3 1 class layouts as 3x3x3 requires smaller seats. However the rails the seats are fitted into are fixed in position.
And what country are you from? Name one country that has not engaged in "toppling peaceful regimes, undermining democracies, assassinating legitimate heads of state, waging illegitimate war and generally just fucking things up and killing thousands just for the sake of funnelling money into the right pockets" for thousands of years. If you want to hold us (America) responsible for every action our country has been engaged in, I would wager that our 250 year history is nothing compared to the rampant bloodshed, Feudalism, and barbaric nature of 95% of the planet.
The fucking Swiss. Aslo the Swedes, except that Ikea is getting pretty damned insidious.
All new aircraft have issues. A380 discovered cracks in the wings and engine problem when it first came out. Just like software, you try and test but some stuff is just not detected until it's deployed into the real world.
This,
Although the Trent 900 issue would be a better example.
People are just blowing it out of proportion due to a perceived rivalry between Airbus and Boeing. Butthurt fanboys on both sides just looking to bash the other. They're as bad as apple/google fanboys (or holden/ford in Australia) and often make just as little sense. I'm surprised I haven't heard "Scarebus" mentioned yet, I've heard Screamliner a few times.
Every single model of aircraft has a list of shit that LAME's (Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers) keep an eye on during regular maintenance. Aircraft see more mechanics in a week than most cars see in their lifetime (and I'm someone who drove a 78 Fairmont in 2010). I'm just as happy to get on an Airbus as I am to get on a Boeing (although I prefer the seat layout of the A330 (2x4x2) to the B777 layout (2x5x2) but that's just personal preference).
That's a kettle of fish you dont want to open.
The Republic of China or ROC (Taiwan) is either an independent state or a province of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) depending on which side of their mouth the politicians are talking about. A lot of harsh words and sometimes even artillery shells get exchanged when someone uses the wrong definition at the wrong time.
Also, ethnic Chinese are just about everywhere in Asia. You've got large ethnic Chinese communities as far away as Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.
They also wrote the Tages DRM system.
Alcatel/Thales is a pretty big company. Much like Sony or GM, so many divisions it's easy to have massive quality differences between them (a GM Daewoo is a shitebox... scratch that, all GM cars are shiteboxes).
I had an Alcatel PCI DSL modem back in the early 00's. Went for years without missing a beat, we only got rid of it because it didn't support ADSL2.
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
I've worked at factory place in Australia, a backup generator that can produce enough power for production to run isn't that uncommon although at the last place I worked, the backup power requirement was for 8 hours, where as in a similar factory in china had a requirement for 21 days of backup power as they couldn't even rely on regular diesel deliveries if things got bad.
Also the power delivered to us from the state power company (state gov owned) was in a very good condition, compared to china where it needed to be filtered. At a local aluminium refinery, they generated all of their own power but they get natural gas delivered to them by pipeline from a feild in the north of the state. About 1/3 of the piped gas goes straight to that refinery so at their size, it's more economical to run your own powerplant. I think the size of the operation we were discussing wouldn't be that large.
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Higher.
China pays about the same per KW as the US but the electricity supply in China and especially India is nowhere near as reliable or clean as western nations. Factories in China have to maintain large transformers to clean the power and large backup generators which increases the cost.
Although, replacing Chinese factory workers wont exactly bring the "jerbs they turk" back to the US.
Poor people can succeed, rich people can fail academically - money alone doesn't "fix" anything in education, it just makes it look nicer.
Poor people who fail academically will fail in most other areas of their life.
Rich people who fail academically aren't likely to be working for minimum wage. Money fixes a lot in life.
an employer who treats their staff well will find that staff will do the same for their employer
where is this magical land you speak of? tell me. tell me!
Australian Public Service?
Joking,
Employers like this are typically either mining giants (who can afford all the perks) or specialised SME's in my neck of the woods. When competing for the best talent in any professional service (IT, Engineering, Accounting) your workplace has to be competitive or you'll end up with the people they reject. It depends on company policy rather than the type or location of the company.