The difference in countries that don't have mandatory helmet laws is that there is already a culture of people sharing the footpath/sidewalk with bicycles. So it is alright for people to ride around at medium speed. If you live in a country that doesn't have this sort of culture then you are screwed! You have to share the road with cars. This makes wearing a helmet mandatory.
You don't know what you're writing about.
Plenty of European cyclists use the road for some or all of their journeys, yet helmets are not mandatory (except for children, in some countries).
Australia has mandatory helmets, and very low levels of cycling to go with it.
Cyclists should wear helmets because it can save their life if hit by a car.
That's exactly the kind of injury that cycle helmets aren't much use at preventing -- the speeds are too high.
Also, some research showed that drivers overtook helmeted cyclists with less room compared to unhelmeted cyclists, i.e. the drivers take a higher risk because they assume the helmet is protecting the cyclist.
not to stop a bruise when they fall over at traffic lights because their fancy shoes didn't unclip
That's the kind of injury the helmet might help with, and people cycling for sport should probably wear helmets. (Just like people driving for sport wear helmets.)
KDE handles my monitor setup OK -- one large widescreen monitor, one rotated-right smaller monitor, and they don't line up.
This is connected to a laptop (VGA and HDMI), and the laptop monitor can't be used at the same time (doesn't work on Windows either). The problem at present is if I disconnect it and plug in to a projector. I actually have two usernames set up with different monitor configurations; since I disconnect it so rarely this was the easiest solution.
My colleagues have the same equipment but use Windows 7, and they had trouble getting everything set up correctly. Oddly, they mostly had different problems to each other.
Linux works 80%, in this case, 100% of the time. Windows works 100%, but only 80% of the time.
I haven't been to France for a long time, but in general in Europe there are appropriate times for talking to a stranger, and then times when people assume the other one wants privacy.
I'd consider someone reading my notebook over my shoulder quite rude (an invasion of my privacy), and someone talking to me in a shop is probably intruding (depending on the country, shop assistants in Europe will often ignore you unless you signal that you want help).
It would be OK to chat while queueing for a cinema ticket, or at a bar.
Talking to strangers on public transport is OK in the late evening, but not when most people are trying to zone out on their way to or from work.
I thought people in the south (well, New Orleans and Atlanta) were friendly. There was less of an awkward start to talking to a stranger than there is in the UK, for example.
A good few people who chatted to me in the street wanted money.
Apparently casual conversation is something to be feared and avoided at all cost in North America
If someone has "time" to talk to you clearly they "want something" I guess:-/
I noticed that when I visited the US last year. I don't have a driving license, and I enjoy walking round cities anyway. Normally, not many people try and talk to me. In the US lots of people did -- and almost every single one of them was begging for money (though many started the conversation with, "I'm not asking you for anything").
One exception was a woman in New Orleans, who saw me photographing the statue of Joan of Arc and said "ain't she beautiful? She founded this city, you know". I didn't know who the statue depicted (I photographed it from a distance, before moving closer to read the plaque) and she thoroughly confused me in the resulting conversation.
I work for a non-departmental public body ("quango"). In 2010, my team were asked what database we wanted to use for an upcoming project. We said we were fine with continuing with MySQL for the moment, were considering moving to Postgresql, but realised this would have a cost (hiring someone who knew Postgres, or training the existing admin).
The government department told us were were getting Oracle. We said we couldn't use Oracle, as we have to use an open source system to allow collaboration with certain external (non-UK) organisations. Oracle was licensed which cost over £250k (according to data.gov.uk, that's probably for the first year?). I understand it was used to power the website CMS.
We continue to use MySQL. The head of IT runs Linux on his PC, but unfortunately the decisions seem to be made somewhere else (a nice island, probably).
It makes me sick to see how much money is wasted. It could have employed several developers (and we could use them!), or employed developers for MySQL/Postgres. Increasing my salary would be a better use, at least most of it would be go back to the UK in tax or be spent here.
I haven't bothered to check recently, but I don't think Slashdot respects the character encoding sent by the web browser, so different browsers (or different configurations of them) give bad results.
(That I hardly ever see this on any other site suggests it's/. that's got the problem.)
Hey these roads are covered in ice, I am on a multi-lane road, and the guy behind me is driving like a moron. I am going to purposely drive slower so the other guy changes lanes and passes me.'?
That sounds like an easy rule to implement.
In general, a following driver going, say, 15% faster than what the car computer considered a safe speed on that road (just a second ago) could be a good catch-all for bad drivers.
Are there not Perl/Python libraries for working with OpenDocument ODS spreadsheets? That would have been a much better choice, rather than relying on a proprietary format.
... but is this really better than good ol' Courier?
I think it looks a bit nicer, but not sufficiently better than DejaVu Sans Mono or whatever the default monospaced font is on most Linux distributions. I probably won't bother to try it out.
For the last six months I've been using a proportional font (DejaVu Sans, I think) in Eclipse. I'm not interested in going back. I lose out on within-line tabs, but it's easier to read. If I really need to see things in a fixed width font I can go into block editing mode (Shift-Alt-A).
People in the UK drive faster and more aggressively than those in the US on similar roads -- bear in mind that many roads in the UK are narrower and bendier (although the surface is often better). It's not so much driving at 80mph in a 70mph limit on the freeway/motorway, it's that the twisty British road has a 60mph limit and people drive that fast.
Also, in the UK "Stop" signs are extremely rare, which means drivers aren't used to stopping at every junction.
for enterprise software the install should be no more complicated than install-package local-config.txt
How can this work if some of the dependencies lack an easy "silent install" feature?
I've been reading "Continuous Delivery" by Jez Humble, which seems to be the bible for this, and the conclusion there is something like 1) Pester the supplier to make a silent install feature 2) Write one yourself 3) Switch to something else (if there's an open source replacement for the software it probably installs silently).
I'm still working out the best way to have a configuration applied to software. I like the idea that the binary should be the same no matter what environment the software is deployed to (which is a change from how we do things at the moment, with ${placeholders} filled in for a particular environment at compile-time.
Apple's problem is primarily with the data, not the actual mapping application.
OpenStreetMap has better data in plenty of regions (there have been many examples of awful data in big European cities, which is where OSM is better than anything the commercial mappers provide), so I think there's more to it than simply data.
Now as for the actual application, I believe Apple's map application is superior to Google's in a number of ways. I've always preferred vector / real-time drawn maps over pre-rendered tiled raster maps (which is what Google's are).
Virgin (UK cable) upgraded me to 60Mbit/s a few months ago. An ISO downloads in less than two minutes at that speed, and they generally did.
However, I've recently moved house, and can't get cable here. but hopefully I'll be able to get the new FTTC service that should be available at the end of the month. The upstream on that is 9Mbits/s, which will be nice. At the moment, I've got normal ADSL (16Mbit/s or so, down, 0.0000001Mbit/s up), and my phone's 3G uploads faster.
French custom is almost certainly different to US custom. As far as I know, the US law that puts everything done by the government in the public domain is unusual -- it's good in some respects, but there are also reasonable arguments about it.
Just copying a bit from Wikipedia:
The Louvre is owned by the French government; however, since the nineties it has become more independent.[34][37][38][39] Since 2003, the museum has been required to generate funds for projects.[38] By 2006, government funds had dipped from 75 percent of the total budget to 62 percent. As the Louvre became a point of interest in the book The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on the book, the museum earned $2.5 million by allowing filming in its galleries.[40][41] In 2008, the French government provided $180 million of the Louvre's yearly $350 million budget; the remainder came from private contributions and ticket sales.[37]
That's also more-or-less how things work here in the UK (except the large museums are free to visit, apart from special exhibitions).
I'm not sure why -- maybe the data format Google use doesn't allow enough detail -- but if I ask to travel across London, Google wants me to change from train to bus for part of the journey. Transport for London advise two trains, which makes more sense -- it's an easier transfer, it's more reliable due to traffic, and it's usually cheaper (depending what ticket one has, it's never more expensive).
Trying another route, there are some bugs with the interface, like "At Oxford Circus, walk to Oxford Circus" (which would be better as "At Oxford Circus [station], change for the northbound Victoria Line". And the distances are in feet, which isn't used in this context in the UK (false accuracy, too: "128 feet", just the train is 133m / 430 ft long). Those could be easily fixed.
TFL advise me if a route is going to be closed for maintenance, or busy due to an event (football match, etc). They also know that for most of the day, many routes aren't timetabled by time, but by frequency (e.g. trains arrive about every 3-5 minutes, or 2-3 minutes at peak times) so it doesn't make sense to give directions like "take the 21:25 Circle Line train". I've had a tourist ask me if they were in the right place while holding some printed Google directions like this -- it was e.g. 12:00, their directions said "12:03", but the display said "Next trains: 2, 4, and 7 minutes".
This is all local stuff, specific to every city, and Apple have a good idea here -- I hope Google implement it too.
Don't most of those places get funding from the government? I.e. From taxes.
Yes, but it reduces the amount of funding needed (or, alternatively, means more work can be done) if they can generate income by licensing photographs for commercial use.
Where I work, most disruptive commercial photography is done outside normal visitor hours (i.e. between 18:00 and 09:00).
However, all images we have are available for license for commercial use, and can be browsed and bought on a website. Prices for a book seem to be between £30 and £200, depending how large you want to print it and the number of books being produced. I expect a non-profit would be charged much less, if anything.
(We do get funding from the government; charging to license images for commercial use reduces the amount of funding we need.)
Slashdot Mirror
It could be, except that the level of cycling dropped massively after the helmet laws were introduced.
(For further references on that, see comments from others elsewhere in this article.)
Here you are: https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=opera&rls=en-GB&q=site:.ltd.uk+OR+site:.plc.uk
It's much less popular than .co.uk.
The difference in countries that don't have mandatory helmet laws is that there is already a culture of people sharing the footpath/sidewalk with bicycles. So it is alright for people to ride around at medium speed. If you live in a country that doesn't have this sort of culture then you are screwed! You have to share the road with cars. This makes wearing a helmet mandatory.
You don't know what you're writing about.
Plenty of European cyclists use the road for some or all of their journeys, yet helmets are not mandatory (except for children, in some countries).
Australia has mandatory helmets, and very low levels of cycling to go with it.
Cyclists should wear helmets because it can save their life if hit by a car.
That's exactly the kind of injury that cycle helmets aren't much use at preventing -- the speeds are too high.
Also, some research showed that drivers overtook helmeted cyclists with less room compared to unhelmeted cyclists, i.e. the drivers take a higher risk because they assume the helmet is protecting the cyclist.
not to stop a bruise when they fall over at traffic lights because their fancy shoes didn't unclip
That's the kind of injury the helmet might help with, and people cycling for sport should probably wear helmets. (Just like people driving for sport wear helmets.)
KDE handles my monitor setup OK -- one large widescreen monitor, one rotated-right smaller monitor, and they don't line up.
This is connected to a laptop (VGA and HDMI), and the laptop monitor can't be used at the same time (doesn't work on Windows either). The problem at present is if I disconnect it and plug in to a projector. I actually have two usernames set up with different monitor configurations; since I disconnect it so rarely this was the easiest solution.
My colleagues have the same equipment but use Windows 7, and they had trouble getting everything set up correctly. Oddly, they mostly had different problems to each other.
Linux works 80%, in this case, 100% of the time.
Windows works 100%, but only 80% of the time.
I haven't been to France for a long time, but in general in Europe there are appropriate times for talking to a stranger, and then times when people assume the other one wants privacy.
I'd consider someone reading my notebook over my shoulder quite rude (an invasion of my privacy), and someone talking to me in a shop is probably intruding (depending on the country, shop assistants in Europe will often ignore you unless you signal that you want help).
It would be OK to chat while queueing for a cinema ticket, or at a bar.
Talking to strangers on public transport is OK in the late evening, but not when most people are trying to zone out on their way to or from work.
I don't agree either.
I thought people in the south (well, New Orleans and Atlanta) were friendly. There was less of an awkward start to talking to a stranger than there is in the UK, for example.
A good few people who chatted to me in the street wanted money.
Apparently casual conversation is something to be feared and avoided at all cost in North America
If someone has "time" to talk to you clearly they "want something" I guess :-/
I noticed that when I visited the US last year. I don't have a driving license, and I enjoy walking round cities anyway. Normally, not many people try and talk to me. In the US lots of people did -- and almost every single one of them was begging for money (though many started the conversation with, "I'm not asking you for anything").
One exception was a woman in New Orleans, who saw me photographing the statue of Joan of Arc and said "ain't she beautiful? She founded this city, you know". I didn't know who the statue depicted (I photographed it from a distance, before moving closer to read the plaque) and she thoroughly confused me in the resulting conversation.
Yes, but AIUI the MS "open" formats are (intentionally) very complicated.
I work for a non-departmental public body ("quango"). In 2010, my team were asked what database we wanted to use for an upcoming project. We said we were fine with continuing with MySQL for the moment, were considering moving to Postgresql, but realised this would have a cost (hiring someone who knew Postgres, or training the existing admin).
The government department told us were were getting Oracle. We said we couldn't use Oracle, as we have to use an open source system to allow collaboration with certain external (non-UK) organisations. Oracle was licensed which cost over £250k (according to data.gov.uk, that's probably for the first year?). I understand it was used to power the website CMS.
We continue to use MySQL. The head of IT runs Linux on his PC, but unfortunately the decisions seem to be made somewhere else (a nice island, probably).
It makes me sick to see how much money is wasted. It could have employed several developers (and we could use them!), or employed developers for MySQL/Postgres. Increasing my salary would be a better use, at least most of it would be go back to the UK in tax or be spent here.
I haven't bothered to check recently, but I don't think Slashdot respects the character encoding sent by the web browser, so different browsers (or different configurations of them) give bad results.
(That I hardly ever see this on any other site suggests it's /. that's got the problem.)
Hey these roads are covered in ice, I am on a multi-lane road, and the guy behind me is driving like a moron. I am going to purposely drive slower so the other guy changes lanes and passes me.'?
That sounds like an easy rule to implement.
In general, a following driver going, say, 15% faster than what the car computer considered a safe speed on that road (just a second ago) could be a good catch-all for bad drivers.
1) says some anonymous person that doesn't know me from Adam. Anyone capable of cogent thought will take your statement with a heaping serving of NaCl
Look at the timeline at the bottom: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=56781
The airbags have deployed and the crash is over before the human notices.
Are there not Perl/Python libraries for working with OpenDocument ODS spreadsheets? That would have been a much better choice, rather than relying on a proprietary format.
How about this: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=250035553
£1 for 4x440mL.
But the usual cheap drink in the UK is cider (in a three-litre bottle): http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=255238708
5.3% isn't very strong, they used to be stronger. £1.25/L though.
(This is 7.5%: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=268773411 . Last time I went to Scotland I met an 11-year-old boy who offered me a sip of his cider in return for helping him stand up...)
You're a dinosaur.
... but is this really better than good ol' Courier?
I think it looks a bit nicer, but not sufficiently better than DejaVu Sans Mono or whatever the default monospaced font is on most Linux distributions. I probably won't bother to try it out.
For the last six months I've been using a proportional font (DejaVu Sans, I think) in Eclipse. I'm not interested in going back. I lose out on within-line tabs, but it's easier to read. If I really need to see things in a fixed width font I can go into block editing mode (Shift-Alt-A).
People in the UK drive faster and more aggressively than those in the US on similar roads -- bear in mind that many roads in the UK are narrower and bendier (although the surface is often better). It's not so much driving at 80mph in a 70mph limit on the freeway/motorway, it's that the twisty British road has a 60mph limit and people drive that fast.
Also, in the UK "Stop" signs are extremely rare, which means drivers aren't used to stopping at every junction.
for enterprise software the install should be no more complicated than install-package local-config.txt
How can this work if some of the dependencies lack an easy "silent install" feature?
I've been reading "Continuous Delivery" by Jez Humble, which seems to be the bible for this, and the conclusion there is something like
1) Pester the supplier to make a silent install feature
2) Write one yourself
3) Switch to something else (if there's an open source replacement for the software it probably installs silently).
I'm still working out the best way to have a configuration applied to software. I like the idea that the binary should be the same no matter what environment the software is deployed to (which is a change from how we do things at the moment, with ${placeholders} filled in for a particular environment at compile-time.
Is this going to free up a bit of IPv4 address space?
No, because the rulers will still want to see both the public and private Internet.
Apple's problem is primarily with the data, not the actual mapping application.
OpenStreetMap has better data in plenty of regions (there have been many examples of awful data in big European cities, which is where OSM is better than anything the commercial mappers provide), so I think there's more to it than simply data.
Now as for the actual application, I believe Apple's map application is superior to Google's in a number of ways. I've always preferred vector / real-time drawn maps over pre-rendered tiled raster maps (which is what Google's are).
Google's maps have been vector-based on Android since, apparently, 2010, and for a while on a WebGL browser too. http://www.techoncept.com/google-maps-android-app-now-has-amazing-vector-graphics-content-available-offline
Virgin (UK cable) upgraded me to 60Mbit/s a few months ago. An ISO downloads in less than two minutes at that speed, and they generally did.
However, I've recently moved house, and can't get cable here. but hopefully I'll be able to get the new FTTC service that should be available at the end of the month. The upstream on that is 9Mbits/s, which will be nice. At the moment, I've got normal ADSL (16Mbit/s or so, down, 0.0000001Mbit/s up), and my phone's 3G uploads faster.
I'd really like this service: https://hyperoptic.com/web/guest/home (100/100 or 1000/1000) but it's not available here.
French custom is almost certainly different to US custom. As far as I know, the US law that puts everything done by the government in the public domain is unusual -- it's good in some respects, but there are also reasonable arguments about it.
Just copying a bit from Wikipedia:
The Louvre is owned by the French government; however, since the nineties it has become more independent.[34][37][38][39] Since 2003, the museum has been required to generate funds for projects.[38] By 2006, government funds had dipped from 75 percent of the total budget to 62 percent. As the Louvre became a point of interest in the book The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on the book, the museum earned $2.5 million by allowing filming in its galleries.[40][41] In 2008, the French government provided $180 million of the Louvre's yearly $350 million budget; the remainder came from private contributions and ticket sales.[37]
That's also more-or-less how things work here in the UK (except the large museums are free to visit, apart from special exhibitions).
That's not quite true.
I'm not sure why -- maybe the data format Google use doesn't allow enough detail -- but if I ask to travel across London, Google wants me to change from train to bus for part of the journey. Transport for London advise two trains, which makes more sense -- it's an easier transfer, it's more reliable due to traffic, and it's usually cheaper (depending what ticket one has, it's never more expensive).
Trying another route, there are some bugs with the interface, like "At Oxford Circus, walk to Oxford Circus" (which would be better as "At Oxford Circus [station], change for the northbound Victoria Line". And the distances are in feet, which isn't used in this context in the UK (false accuracy, too: "128 feet", just the train is 133m / 430 ft long). Those could be easily fixed.
TFL advise me if a route is going to be closed for maintenance, or busy due to an event (football match, etc). They also know that for most of the day, many routes aren't timetabled by time, but by frequency (e.g. trains arrive about every 3-5 minutes, or 2-3 minutes at peak times) so it doesn't make sense to give directions like "take the 21:25 Circle Line train". I've had a tourist ask me if they were in the right place while holding some printed Google directions like this -- it was e.g. 12:00, their directions said "12:03", but the display said "Next trains: 2, 4, and 7 minutes".
This is all local stuff, specific to every city, and Apple have a good idea here -- I hope Google implement it too.
Don't most of those places get funding from the government? I.e. From taxes.
Yes, but it reduces the amount of funding needed (or, alternatively, means more work can be done) if they can generate income by licensing photographs for commercial use.
Where I work, most disruptive commercial photography is done outside normal visitor hours (i.e. between 18:00 and 09:00).
However, all images we have are available for license for commercial use, and can be browsed and bought on a website. Prices for a book seem to be between £30 and £200, depending how large you want to print it and the number of books being produced. I expect a non-profit would be charged much less, if anything.
(We do get funding from the government; charging to license images for commercial use reduces the amount of funding we need.)