Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
Agricultural land "has potential", but the rewards only happen if the farmer plants seed and tends the crop. If the farmer does nothing except drink beer or throw chairs around the land produces nothing.
Same deal here: Skype *had* potential but MS did nothing to realise that potential.
So what you are saying is that the safety gear is there, and safety is possible, but it is inconvenient to use so climbers take chances and employers probably turn a blind eye because doing things by the book reduces productivity.
Pretty much what I was saying.
While I have not climbed towers per se, I have climbed other structures. I used safety kit. Yes, it was a drag having to clip and unclip every step. Yes it took forever, but I was safe.
These climbers have safety harnesses etc available to them. If they use these there should be no way to plummet to a sticky end.
Rock climbing is generally only unsafe when people screw around or the rock breaks. Since the steel fittings of the tower are unlikely to break, tower climbing really only provides opportunity for death through screwing around.
I agree with this article. People might not like what he says, and the implications thereof, but he is correct.
And blaming is pointless. It's not MY fault. Waah, waah, waah! What is important is what you do about it to correct the action. If you are not prepared to accept that this is your problem, then how are you going to fix it?
There are basically two ways to be viewed: cost or value. Companies want value, but they don't want cost.
If you just present yourself as a skill set, then you're going to end up being treated as a cost. ie. "What is the least we can pay to get skillset x?". Just like shopping for any commodity, the companies are drawn to the lowest cost programmers etc.
If you present yourself as a value generator, then the thinking is completely different. Wow, we pay $x and we will get $y, where y is much greater than x. If you can clearly articulate how you generated $5M in savings last year, or increased revenue by $7M, then your $150k (or whatever) remuneration sounds paltry.
Sales people and business unit managers can easily tie their performance to numbers by looking at their revenue or profits. It is way harder for people down the line doing work, but there are ways. For example, if you single handedly improved a part of the system that caused the most grief and reduced tech support calls by 10%, then you can look up the cost of tech support and show how much you saved the company.
Yesterday evening I spent 5 minutes chasing a fly around the room trying to splat it with a fly-swatter. Any time I got within striking distance the bastard took off and flew somewhere else. Eventually it was neutralised by a lucky in-flight swat.
Impressive.
I then opened the door and a moth (well really a caddis) flew in the door - straight into a halogen light and fried itself to death.
Sub-impressive.
I doubt very much the boffins will find anything substantially different between fly brains and caddis brains, so it will likely be a challenge to make sure we get the benefits without getting the stupid stuff.
Rule #6: Don't invest based on emotion. Look at the numbers.
Far too many of the small player investors were just FB members wanting to feel even more part of FB and impress their FB friends. They'd be buying based on emotion and were prepared to pay a premium. Heck, they would have bought at $50 . Once they each had their small pile of shares they would stop influencing the stock price and it would have to find its true value which would be a lot lower.
The rule applies all over the place. I know a bloke who lost a pile of money on a start-up touting some bio-tech that "might lead to a cure for cancer". This bloke's father was dying of cancer and he held onto the stocks even though he should have sold. If he had been less emotional and traded when advised he would have made a few hundred k$. However he felt that he had to keep the faith because of his father.
"I doubt that Windows could legitimately refuse to function just because it detected that it had emigrated from its place of origin."
Of course MS is entitled to do that. It is a licensed product and you have to agree with the terms.
If MS choose to add regionalisation to the terms they can.
IfMS choose to add terms forcing you to eat granola for breakfast they can.
Of course MS are very unlikely to do this. They are already on the back foot and more restrictive licensing is not really in their best interests.
Many corps are already sitting on the fence about switching to Linux and MS is still seem to be a slightly safer bet. Onerous licensing terms that could restrict international businesses from functioning might just be enough to nudge them off the fence amongst the penguins.
Anyone remember the reports of Zunes outselling ipods a few years back? It could be just the same press release run through sed.
It is not at all surprising that a new product sells well for a bit, even if it isn't channel stuffing. There will be a few people wanting these devices and who have been waiting for a while. If they all buy at the same time, there is going to be an amazing once-off sales blip.
What counts though is sustained sales over 6 months to a year. There I expect the Zune sory too.
Everyone knew that the IPO would be skewed by FaceBitches wanting to buy a bit of history. These people buy based on emotion and wanting to score Likes for telling their friends about the purchase.
Then there were a bunch of speculators hoping to cash in on the irrational actions of FaceBitches.
What now? Likely the emotions will dissipate. People will find a wierd looking bit of paper in their hands and start wondering what it might really be worth. That is likely going to take them south.
Anyone can easily make an Arduino-like system with a soldering iron and basic hand tools. All you need are an AVR chip, veroboard and a few other easy to source components. This means many hobbiests make their own Arduinos, or variants, and many companies sell clones.
The RPi, OTOH, can only be assembled in a factory with professional tools/equipment and is way beyond amateur assemblers.
To be fair, most Western companies don't care much about Human Rights either... so long as they don't get caught.
Giving Africans pittancy jobs can be easily rationalised in the same way that Westerners rationalise using cheap Chinese labour: it gives the people a better deal than not being there at all.
Perhaps more than anything this is just sour grapes. The predominant Western attituded is that Westerners should be doing the colonisation and exploitation. Who are these upstart Chinese to do this? Don't they know their place?
They'll have to be pretty clear about what function means.
If look and feel are part of the function and a knock off exactly copies the function is that OK?
What about sound/video? If a program was to completely reproduce the sounds/pixels of some music/video then is that Ok? If so, I can see a huge loop-hole for music/video piracy.
Sure house prices have rocketed, but just look at those houses.
Average house sizes in Oz have gone from approx 150sqm (1500sq ft or so) to over 240sqm (2400 sqft) and the ponciness has increased too. Flashy expensive kitchens, bathrooms etc . Air conditioning was once sneered at as being upper class snobbery and is now considered a basic necessity.
Hardly and apples-to-apples comparison.
MS has only made pittance from sales of WinCE or MoPho or whatever it is called. It might have even lost them money.
They have made much, much, more money out of Android.
However to get really good settlements out of Android they need to be able to show damages. Therefore they need to stay in the business. Therefore they need to keep making phone software just to make the game work.
This does not attempt to patent all of GPS, just a new way of processing GNSS signals.
You cannot patent the wheel per se, because wheels have been around for ages. However if you found a new way to manufacture a wheel or such then you could patent that. For example, Dunlop got a patent for wheel with pneumatic tyre and likely some other person has since been awarded a patent for tyre with non-aquaplaning tread pattern or puncture proof side walls.
Those GPS receivers that use pre-2003 processing methods will not be impacted.
Extracting energy and friction etc will cause localised warming around the turbines, but that is going to make the air move slower. It now has less kinetic energy.
Kinetic energy is released (mainly as heat) when the wind gets to where ever it is going and along the way (heating caused by fricton against the landscape etc).
That means less heat is being transported to where ever and where ever stays cooler.
Let's just down-vote the laws of physics and spend more money and all things become possible.
As per my previous post... Changing from Obama to a Republican won't make any difference to the biggest problem facing USA: out of control debt and spending.
As the old saying goes: "Sell the sizzle, not the steak".
While Obama and the Republicans might have sold different "sizzle", the steak (ie. the substantive part of their actions) are hard to tell apart. There might be some fiddling with the side dishes and trimmings, but nobody is addressing the real issue: winding in the debt.
It is pointless blaming the politicians though. Politics in a democracy is market driven. People get offered what they buy. No wonder the offerings tend to be so similar. The people want to keep on spending and increasing their consumption. They don't want to tighten their belts and face reality.
If anyone think that the choice between Obama and ${Republican} matters they are severely deluded. While they might say different things, they don't act significantly differently. Significantly different options are required so make any meaningful difference.
May as well argue Coke vs Pepsi when you know you should really be drinking water of fruit juice.
Like most other countries, Sweden already has a law against driving while distracted. These laws can be used where needed and there is no need for a cellphone specific law.
Here in NZ we have a cellphone specific law that forbids even fiddling with the phone while driving. If I fiddle with the music function on an iphone I can get pinged. But if I do exactly the same on an ipod touch (with identical form factor, function and software) then the law does not apply. Stupid!
Specific laws are just political pandering.
In days of yore, bees were kept in one location, bred naturally and slowly acclimatised to their conditions.
These days, bees are highly managed, in many ways.
In USA, bees are routinely bred up in the south, then are trucked north to pollinate crops. When they get to the end of the road the hives are killed off and the whole game starts over again the next year.
Queens are routinely killed and the hive re-queened. This helps to control varroa but also keeps the queen vigorous.
As a result of these activities, bees just never get a chance to adapt to their environment. This makes them highly prone to other factors such as chemicals and loss of habitat.
How does handing the kid everything on a plate enhance their creativity? No wonder the tykes are frustrated - they have never learned to do anything for themselves.
I never had Lego, but my kids did. They made many of their own parts by modifying standard Lego bricks with drills, heatguns, hot glue, bolts, pop-riveters etc.
Sure they occasionally got cut, burned and bruised but that is all part of education.
Hey that's my line. And, btw, it is spelled yawho?
They talk of recovery, but all I see are the last gasping steps of a once-great organisation stumbling into the road in front of oncoming traffic.
This move will save them about 375M per year. In other words it will save them about 200M. Can't see y! making a whole year.
Reg hacks need a bit of Stats 101.
Rankings mean nothing when there is such a small difference between the players. Just look at the numbers and consider statistical significance. When you do that then there is no real difference between the top 5 who are all within 95% +- 2%.
Of course the step down to Starbucks and even further down to Microsoft is very significant.
Heat and temperature are not the same thing.
Start with large lump of ice floating in a bucket of cold water. Temperature approx 0 degrees.
Heat the bastard with a propane torch until 50% of the ice has melted (ie you've added a shitload of heat (aka warmed it)): temperature still approx 0 degrees.
Temperature means nothing.
Go look in the FOIA leak and you won't find mention of heat in the models - just temperature. Any model that is based on temperature, and not heat, is just broken bollocks - tweaked to fit an agenda.
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