Posts by Adam Williamson 242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007
"Can no-one be trusted these days?"
These days?
Try reading, oh, any newspaper's crime column from the Victorian period - stuffed with (allegedly) larcenous housemaids. Ditto the Edwardian. "Low-paid menial worker nicks from employer" is hardly a *new* headline, mate. it's always happened, in fairly small numbers.
Steve: the death penalty has been abolished in the U.K. for all crimes, including those old chestnuts, for quite a while, now. It's those dastardly Europeans, poking in their interfering noses and telling us who we can and can't kill. Humbug!
I think Asus are trying to dump a big overstock of the 900 caused by everyone wanting the 901 instead. A friend who distributes Eees was offering me the same 900 / 16GB SSD model for a very cheap price yesterday, with the 901 costing a few hundred dollars more. Bit of a miscalculation...
Barry, in Cluedo, Colonel Mustard never dies. He may be the murderer, but he doesn't die. The dead guy is named Mr. Black, but he's not a playable character and doesn't really come up in the course of the game play.
Also, since Hasbro seems to be a giant multinational conglomerate, the obvious question is whether Jack Mustard played soccer or gridiron...
Paris, because I'm as confused as she is by *everything*.
"Maybe it will teach them to do their job properly: you know, check that the signature looks like the one on the card and that the person signs with a single, fluid motion, not all stilted and robotic like somebody trying to copy someone else's signature."
You've clearly never worked retail. I have. There's lots of people out there whose signature is fairly tangentially related to the one on their card, lots of old grannies (or, you know, people with arthritis) who take a long time to do their signature, and lots of rather large blokes who a 16-year old five foot five cashier would not feel particularly comfortable telling to provide another form of payment or re-sign the receipt.
These are just a few of the reasons why the whole signature system is a bit of a problem. As Mike Bell mentioned, in most of North America no-one really bothers with the signature panel at all any more; small purchases are usually just waved through and larger ones often require some kind of photo ID regardless of the signature panel.
This happens periodically in countries where chip + PIN has been around for a while (like here in Canada). Mostly it's best to stick to the kind of reader that's semi-permanently attached to a terminal rather than the ones that are just a little hand unit on the end of a cord. For those ones, some retailers have taken to having the unit's screws covered with a security company's holographic tape, so you can flip it over and check the seals before using it.
I did once consider a system for semi-randomly changing my PIN every day but then decided life was too bloody short...
"The fact that his company has never made a nickel is of course not the reason."
it probably isn't. There's enough firms out there whose stock prices do just fine not on the basis that they're actually making money but that they've promised very solemnly to make *ever* so much money in the future.
Remember Mr. Carroll's "jam tomorrow". Making money is a mug's game - the real trick is convincing everyone that you're definitely going to make money. At some point. When it's done.
"we only put you into secondary when there is a suspicion, when there is a reason to suspect something"
Customs agents' definition of a 'reason':
You're not white.
You're white, but not between the ages of 30 and 55.
You're travelling alone.
You're travelling in a suspiciously large group - say, four or more.
You look nervous.
You look tired.
You look unnaturally relaxed.
You're carrying drug paraphernalia, such as a a credit card.
You're on a terrorist watch list. Or someone with a slightly different surname to your neighbour's ex-cousin is on a terrorist watch list.
They're bored.
They don't like your face.
"I know it's simplistic, and I've no idea where staff salaries factor in."
Or capital costs, equipment maintenance, track maintenance, fuel, security, management, or cleaning.
The transit system doesn't make a profit - that's not what it's meant to do. It's meant to help people get to places. Obviously minimizing costs is good. Is £100m a good cost for a ticketing system for one of the world's largest transit systems? Honestly, I haven't got a clue, and unless you're a specialist I suspect neither have you. But that's the question to ask.
I just had to pay $265 (£135 or so at current exchange rates) for a new U.K. passport here in Canada, earlier this year. And it doesn't look very sodding biometric to me - I didn't have to let the Home Office robots come over and take a tongue swab or anything (I'm sure this is in the planning stages), just send in a photo as per usual. There is a mysterious black square laminated on the "reserved for official comments" page though - is that RFID?
Anyhow, yes, apparently the cost of a bog standard brown-passport-with-a-photo-in-it has somehow gone up 400% in the last few years. Either that or they're milking us poor expiring-passport suckers to pay for their bloody national Who's Been A Naughty Peasant database. If only it hadn't been due to expire until next year I could've done without another U.K. passport ever.
"For a lot of people, off-grid living and microgeneration are religious/moral standpoints, not sets of engineering techniques"
A lot of people? Really, Lewis? Last time I checked a more accurate categorization would be "a small bunch of slightly over-enthusiastic wackos". But then, it's a lot easier to beat up on an opposition that you create yourself, because it can't really fight back.
In the ongoing battle royale to see whether Lewis Page will Borg the Reg with his unhealthy fascination with flying instruments of death, or the Reg will Borg Lewis Page with its heroic embrace of writing entire news articles in the form of double entendres, the Reg just landed a vicious right hook, I'd say. But I'm sure Mr. Page isn't out for the count yet. Ding ding, round 11!
Paris...well, make up your own joke.
"Seems a few people are forgetting that these PAVs would be fully automated, the only flying on the part of the 'driver' would be in case of emergency."
This is a bit like saying "those opposed to nuclear power on safety grounds are forgetting that future nuclear power stations will be 100% safe thanks to future Super Awesome Nuclear Safety Technology". You can make *anything* make sense by, not to put too fine a point on it, making shit up.
We can't build fully automated PAVs and there's not really an obvious roadmap to it which will let us be reasonably confident of being able to build them in the short term future. You can't really argue for the reasonably near-term viability of PAVs (and hence the validity of running a large-scale development effort to build them) if it involves assuming the existence of a technology which we have no clear timescale for the introduction of. Solve the automatic navigation system problem and then get back to us.
"What about when emergency services need to get through?"
Well, *they'd* get to use the flying cars, of course!
I'm surprised no-one pointed out the essential absurdity of this post yet, though: it relies on the idea that NASA gives a flying stuff about the environment. Yes, NASA, the agency whose purpose is to launch gigantic rockets into space at a fuel efficiency of approximately 0.000000000000000000000000001mpg*.
* - estimated by holding down the zero key for half a second. HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC METHOD ALERT.
I don't know why you wrote that @me, because I just made a sarky comment, I really didn't express any opinion on Cuil's approach. :)
If I *were* to, though, it'd go something like this:
as noted by other posters above, Cuil's competition is Google, and Google is famous for the perks it offers its staff. Given that Cuil and Google are competing for the same people and Google has lots of in-built advantages - being the 800lb gorilla - Cuil is not going to get very far in hiring the best people if it tries to run itself like a 1990s 8-6 cubicle prison. So offering generous perks really isn't as nuts or as irresponsible as it sounds, if you think about Cuil's position.
On specific issues - muffins and strawberries really don't cost a lot. Especially if you provide them for a long time. If you put a cubicle jail worker down in a muffins and strawberries environment, maybe for the first week, he'll eat twenty muffins a day and shovel a bushel of strawberries into his briefcase. This is the 'office donut' mentality - they don't show up very often so you grab as many as you can, and hang the slow and the weak. But once they know the muffins and strawberries are going to be there *every day*, most people really aren't going to eat a lot of them. Just a sensible amount - one a day, maybe. As someone above pointed out, if you do the math on a muffin a day for each employee, it really doesn't come out to much money.
As for flexitime - the devil is in the detail, and there's no detail in this article. But it's not inherently a stupid idea. For certain types of staff, it absolutely makes sense to simply give them tasks to do and let them figure out how to do them.
I work from home, and have no fixed hours at all. But I know what I do, and my bosses know what I do. All they care about is that what I do gets done. They don't give a stuff if I do it at 10 a.m. or 11 p.m. So if a friend asks me to go out for lunch, or if I want to get up in the middle of the day and go play a game of tennis or just buy some milk or sod off down the arcade for a couple of hours - I can. I can tell you this definitely makes me a damn sight happier than working fixed hours in an office, and it costs my employer exactly nothing, and all my work still gets done. So in this case, is flexitime a good idea? Bet your ass it is.
I'd say it works well for anyone in a similar situation to me: they're goal driven and the goals are not time-sensitive in terms of exactly when they happen. So one large group for whom flexitime would make a bundle of sense? Software engineers. If I were running a startup, I wouldn't have any coders on the clock at all, nor would I care whether they were working in the office, at home, in a coffee shop on the other side of the city, or in Waikiki. As long as the code I told them to write got written by the time I wanted it written, they've done their job.
Now, I'm betting a lot of Cuil's staff at this point in time are - you guessed it - software engineers. So I would see absolutely no problem in having them on (very) flexitime. In fact I'd say it would be a very smart move.
Obviously this doesn't work for everyone. You would have trouble putting your accounting department on flexitime, for instance, because the banks aren't open at 10 p.m. But as I said, there's no detail in the article, so it's a bit tough to condemn the policy on that kind of grounds. It's entirely possible it's a very sensible policy applied to the right employees, in which case it's a very good point for Cuil's management, not a bad one.
The personal trainer and gym membership thing is frankly a bit OTT, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it fall by the wayside soon. But it makes a neat eye-catcher when you're trying to hire talent away from Google (see above), which I suspect is its purpose.
Paris, cos I've heard she's on flexitime too...
It's an idiotic way of putting it, but they're basically correct.
Again with the carbon monomania, which is unfortunate, but apparently the only way to get any kind of conservation-related story into the mainstream media these days. The fundamental point is that populations are too high to be supported at the quality of life to which they've become accustomed, with our current technological ability. We cannot at present sustainably produce (or get rid of, once we're done playing with it) enough food, power, or - frankly - plastics to support a growing population with expectations of all the same 'stuff' as its parents.
The "it's all fine, scientists will save us all!" brigade have it ass-backwards: *first* come up with the breakthrough technologies in power generation, agriculture, pollution control and waste disposal, and *then* tell everyone it's okay to bonk their hearts out. But on the off-chance that cheap fusion or cheap super-efficient solar are not actually right around the next issue of New Scientist, it's a bit irresponsible to tell everyone that everything's just hunky-dory as it is.
Sure these guys are out of their area of expertise, but then, so are a lot of other people who expect their opinions on this topic to be heard. I just wish they'd quit banging on about carbon.
"...people have short attention spans, and they wander off fairly rapidly if you bang away at the same thing ad nauseam."
Hence the Reg's broadening out from the boring old technology industry into big shiny planes and amateur hour climate change scepticism?
Suddenly it all makes sense!
As Francis says, you've got to at least give them points for trying...
The British newspaper industry (well, local papers are much the same, which is why I don't read those either...) is a bit depressing, really. Living out here in Canada I get the Guardian Weekly, which is a deeply impressive publication; 48 pages or so in tabloid format once a week. No fluff, just several pages of world news, a few pages of U.K. news, a comment section (the best of the comment from the domestic edition, some unique to the Weekly, and Weekly readers' letters), an excellent arts and culture section and a bit of sport. It's covered many important issues long before the rest of the media really picked up on them.
When I occasionally go back to England I pick up a domestic Guardian and am instantly depressed by how much crap it's padded out with. There was an article on the design trends in cotton shopping bags last time, for Pete's sake. This BS is obviously included because it's necessary to sell papers in the domestic market, because it's the kind of drooling idiocy the best-selling domestic papers (Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph) are stuffed with. But damn, does it make the thing depressing to read (and awkward to carry). There's probably enough useful content in the entire mess that is a modern daily British paper (never mind the wasteland of the Saturday and Sunday papers) to fill a single 24 to 32-page tabloid sheet.
As Francis says, it's nice that the Graun is trying *something* new, just a pity they're basically doing the wrong thing. They've clearly recognized the traditional newspaper industry is chasing itself rapidly up its own arsehole, but haven't quite put their finger on what to do instead yet. Hopefully they'll succeed eventually. If not I hope they just dump the domestic publication, jack up the price of the international edition to cover costs, and carry on selling that. I'd happily pay a couple of hundred quid for my annual subscription.
As for the happy-talk about the programs - well, what did you expect? Newspapers employ PR flacks just like everyone else. Do you honestly expect them to say "well, folks, this thing's going down faster than Paris Hilton on a barrel of margaritas and a video camera - we're going to re-shuffle the deckchairs a bit so it looks like we're doing something to make it work better"? Of course they bloody wouldn't.
If anyone wonders what my positive suggestion is, it's this: sod all the airports and build trains. Yes, the airport situation will become increasingly nightmarish. That's the idea. Heathrow's already a hellhole, the more of a hellhole it becomes, the more people will want to avoid it. Re-route all the cash and effort from expanding airports into building a proper European high-speed rail network.
Properly handled, high speed trains are by far the most sensible way to get around Europe from all points of view. They're very energy-efficient, produce very little pollution, are much quieter than airplanes, require far less development room, are much less of a security nightmare, are far nicer to travel on (I honestly prefer spending 24 hours on a decades-old train which never gets past 60mph to get from Vancouver to San Francisco than getting on a plane, so you can imagine how much more preferable Eurostar is to a plane ride...), and with the technology we have available these days, would be only slightly slower, the same speed, or even faster than a plane trip. It's a bit of a bleeding no-brainer, really.
The Eurostar people clearly understand this - anyone who's been to St. Pancras will have noticed that it's about ten times larger than it needs to be to handle the current level of use...
Anyone remember that old game Transport Tycoon? Up the the 1950s or so, before any planes with more than 50 passenger capacity showed up, you built almost all train routes. Then from the 1950s-60s through to the 1990s you built a ton of planes. But when the TGV, Eurostar - and later maglev - trains show up from the 1990s onwards, it suddenly stops making much sense to buy planes, and you start building train routes again. I always thought that was pretty much on the button with how it should be.
So, yes, I propose complete neglect for the air travel industry, much as happened to the trains from the 60s to the 90s. Don't give 'em any public money, don't give 'em preferential planning treatment, don't give 'em sod all. Active sabotage a la Dr. Beeching would be fine also, but not really necessary. If we just stop propping it up and start developing the logical alternatives, it'll do a fine job of going away on its own.
A high-speed rail network across continental Europe could be built within a decade or so, reasonably cheaply, and provide reliable, well-priced, extremely energy-efficient and environmentally sound service from England right across to the eastern E.U. states with a journey time of a few hours and far superior comfort and overall experience to what you get in the travel hell that is the air industry these days. I don't know anyone who actually *enjoys* air travel. Why wouldn't we go for this? Heck, you could rebuild the bloody Orient Express (the real one, not the much-reduced service operating under the name today) and make a profit doing it, I reckon.
If you want to get really advanced, there was a Bruce Sterling (I think) book whose name I forget which was set in a world where there were super high speed trains running intercontinental via vast undersea tunnels. We're not quite at that level of engineering yet, but you could do Europe now. All it needs is the political will to get off the 1960s technology that is the passenger jet.
"And anyway, by most estimates aviation accounts for less than five per cent of global carbon emissions."
....bingo, I knew it was going to be there. I hereby inaugurate the new sport: Register Climate Change Percentage Bingo. Every time one of the unchecked-development-apologists now apparently colonising the Reg uses the "anyway, industry X only accounts for desultory percentage Y of global carbon emissions" argument to suggest that we should let industry X do whatever the hell it likes, take a shot.
In case it's not pathetically obvious, here's the flaw: *no* single operation or industry accounts, all by itself, for a significant percentage of global carbon emissions (or - if we could get off the bloody focus on carbon emissions which one side likes to push because it's simple and the other likes to push because it's not actually that important, hence supporting their argument - consumption of energy, pollution etc etc, much more important than bloody carbon emissions). If it did then it would probably be a damn sight easier to reduce energy consumption, air pollution, damaging impact on biodiversity and - if you really insist - carbon emissions.
Fact is, though, that we do about ten zillion things which cause these problems. Hence, obviously, none of them *on its own* adds up to a significant proportion. The argument that we shouldn't do anything about any given issue because it only represents a small percentage of the problem has an obvious flaw in this case: it applies to every single thing we do that causes the problem, and hence to take the Reg's position to its logical extension, we can never do anything to reduce energy consumption and pollution because we can never address any single cause of it because each single cause, in and of itself, is comparatively insignificant.
If I wasn't so bleeding lazy I'd go back through the archives, note every time the Reg had used this argument, and add up the percentages deployed. But I am lazy, so I won't. Consider it a thought experiment.
As I understand it, this doesn't make any sense.
I'm fairly sure Ubuntu's update notification applet works just like most other distros'. It does all its work client-side. There *is* no update notification server. There's just a lot of Ubuntu mirrors, all around the world, as the article notes. The update notification applet simply checks if there are any updates available in the particular mirrors you have set up locally.
Given this, how can the update notification service itself possibly be described as having uptime or downtime? Unless all Ubuntu mirrors worldwide go up and down at the same time (which..er...they don't), that just doesn't work at all.
If I'm wrong about how Ubuntu's notification applet works do please correct me...but I don't think I am.
AC @Cann is exactly correct. The default attitude of customs officers the world over is that everyone is guilty of everything unless proven otherwise.
The second time I flew into Canada I was pulled out of the customs line and accused of being either a drug smuggling kingpin / mule / just on drugs (it was never quite clear which). After my wallet apparently tested positive for traces of coke (what was that stat about 95% of banknotes testing positive for coke? I've never even SEEN the stuff...) he searched all my bags five times (finding nothing at all), again accused me of being on drugs ("you seem nervous, and your pupils are dilated" - well, gee, I just got pulled off a 13 hour transatlantic flight where I didn't sleep at all and accused of being Don Corleone or something, wouldn't you be nervous?) and eventually let me go with the words "I'm sure you're doing something wrong, I just can't find anything so I have to let you go".
If they were allowed to search the contents of your laptop, anything that looked even *vaguely* dodgy that you couldn't provide a damn watertight paper trail for would lead to your laptop getting confiscated. Bet on it.
Especially if you weren't white, I bet.
Have you ever noticed that the only time you ever actually see anyone in the vicinity of that KFC is when they're protesting something? I've never seen anyone actually *eat* there...they'd be much better off trying to sell fat-slathered saturated fat sticks in Surrey, let's face it.
Ooh, yeah, on topic...er...oh, yes, just to give the rest of the world another good laugh at Canada's expense, Bell and Telus announced today that they would be charging people for incoming text messages. Sigh.
...is that these prices are actually *good* compared to the data plans Rogers and Fido offered before.
K, it's aboot the fact that Canada's cellphone market stinks. When I visit back to the U.K. I notice that cellphones (and plans) are about the *only* thing that are cheaper than here.
The Canadian market is basically a cartel. There's two GSM operators - Fido and Rogers. Only problem is, Rogers now owns Fido, so there's really only one. So if you need a GSM phone because you travel to Europe, you're basically in a monopoly.
There's two CDMA operators - Telus and Bell. They tend to offer amazingly similar products and prices, all substantially higher than in Europe, Asia, or even the States (and often fairly outdated hardware).
Telus has some okay data plans - I think something like $99 for essentially unlimited data (there's an AUP limit at 2GB or 4GB or something, but apparently people who use more than that haven't actually been picked up so far). But EVDO coverage is pretty limited to major metropolitan areas, and rev A coverage is even worse. GSM 3G coverage is frankly a joke, and didn't even exist until earlier this year.
It's easy to tell how much profiteering goes on, because if you call up your provider, threaten to cancel, and get transferred to the 'save' people and give them a hard time, you can get some absurd discounts. I pay around $38 a month (after tax and 'system access fee') for my service, which isn't actually terrible, although it's still more than I'd pay for the same (with a bit of data thrown in) in the U.K. If I was paying the list price, though, it'd be somewhere north of $60.
Okay, by your argument, the French Open is an anomaly too, right? Because you can say the exact same thing: everyone shows up and gets beaten by the guy with the best clay court game.
So out of four major tournaments, by your criteria, half of them are anomalies. That's a fairly odd result, I'd say.
The real travesty is how damn slow they've made the grass. As a serve and volley player, it'd be nice to see at least ONE tournament left where the classic style of playing the game has a vague shot at winning (let's face it, Pat Rafter was the last serve volleyer to likely have a shot at winning Wimbledon). Can't complain about the amazing baseline match Rafa and Roger served up, but come on - they can do that at all the other three majors. Watching Sampras play at Wimbledon was always a joy for me.
Jon: the teams that play for the World Series may now be almost all American (there were two Canadian teams up to a few series ago), but baseball is an international sport, and the World Series is the most prestigious event in the sport. There are also major league players from all over the globe - many from Latin America and Cuba, of course, but there are many major leaguers from Canada, several from Japan, and others from Taiwan, Australia, and many other countries (heck, there've even been a few UK-born players). There's nothing really wrong with the name.
The fundamental problem with central Cambridge is that basically the entire town is listed buildings, and the street 'plan' was laid out somewhere around 1236...it's designed for horses, and you can't change it. So as long as people are trying to drive cars around it, it's basically going to be screwed.
A congestion charge, theoretically, stops people driving. This is fine in London, where transit is excellent. It's more of a problem in Cambridge where - see above - it stinks. I never really took the bus much when I was in Cambridge (I was a student, no immediate time pressures, so I just walked everywhere), but going on what's posted above, it's ludicrous. £20 for a weekly ticket just for buses? Where I live now (Vancouver), a *monthly* pass for buses *and* light rail (all of which are city-run) is £40 - and people complain that it's too expensive.
If you use a congestion charge to try and stop people driving but there's no practical alternative, then this is the result you get: it looks like (and walks like and quacks like) a tax grab, and no-one likes it.
Given the design of Cambridge the only thing I could see working, frankly, is streetcars. Yes, streetcars. Don't laugh, we used to have 'em all over the place (you can still see the tracks in Manchester). There's no space for dedicated light rail (and Cambridge is too small anyway). The street layout, though, would actually work really nicely for a streetcar system. Close all the roads in the city centre to private cars (yep, all of them) and re-purpose them for twin-track streetcars with bike lines down either side. Have the streetcar system run out to the edges of the city centre and run a decent - council-subsidized, if necessary, I know it's against New Labour religion, I don't care, can anyone name a *single* bus service that's got better since it was privatized? - bus system in from the surrounding area to the edge of the city centre.
Yeah, it's far too radical for anyone to ever take it up, I know. But that kind of integrated system is the only thing that's really going to work to get people around Cambridge efficiently. I also suspect it'd get more support from the population than a congestion charging scheme (term 'scheme' used advisedly). At least it would actually improve things for people. I don't think *anyone* actually enjoys driving around Cambridge, it's an exercise in frustration. So if you give them a really well-implemented alternative, instead of a half-assed private profit-gouging bus system run by that twat Souter, they'll probably get behind it.
Good to see the same old nicknames that never comment on anything but global warming stories, but - we have one guy saying that global warming is baloney because Earth's only warmed up as much as Neptune (fine argument, that - they make really comparable experimental subjects!) and some others saying it's baloney because Earth's actually cooling down.
So, er, which is it, guys? Come on, can't you at least all buy the same edition of Dr. Pangloss' Hymns For The Eternal Optimist?
My initial thought on reading that "He also bemoaned the “natural skepticism and debates embedded in the scientific process”" was "I bet that's a journalistic misrepresentation that's going to cause chaos in the comment thread". Right on both counts.
Other commenters - let this be a lesson: *please* always go and read the entire original quotation, in context, before you pile on based on a sketchy misrepresentation in a press report.
Oh, and also note that Dr. Hansen is not advocating imprisoning people based on their beliefs. He is advocating imprisoning people for deliberately and maliciously spreading misinformation (or to put it more bluntly, 'lies') to support the product they happen to be selling. Often in a misleading way - i.e. through front organisations designed to give the impression that there is no connection between themselves and the industry lobby they represent. This is exactly on the model, as other commenters have noted, of the successful prosecutions of tobacco companies for suppressing what they knew to be true - that tobacco is extremely damaging to human health. The vital point is that they did not genuinely believe that tobacco was safe; they knew it wasn't, yet - in order to protect their profits - tried to tell the public that it was. Dr. Hansen believes that the oil lobby knows that they are contributing to pollution and global warming on a massive scale, but are attempting to tell the public that they aren't: this is not about their private beliefs.
As has already been pointed out in a previous comment, the first version of Mandriva Flash came out in December 2006 - two months before that guide, you'll note. And as *also* pointed out in a previous comment, we're perfectly well aware that it's relatively easy (for geeks) to build your own distro-on-a-stick, but that's not the point. This is aimed at people for whom that *would* be difficult, and who just don't want to go through the hassle. Just read my previous comment, "Ian - By Adam Williamson - Posted Saturday 21st June 2008 00:05 GMT".
Flash also has some features you won't get just by installing a regular distro to a USB stick.
The first version of the Flash was launched in December 2006, Ian. This is just the first time the Reg has reviewed it.
But you're missing the point anyway. Sure, people have been putting Linux on flash drives...well...since there *were* Flash drives, more or less. The point of Mandriva Flash is it's all done for you, you get the complete product in a box, you just open the box, plug it into a computer, and that's all. It's aimed at people who appreciate that kind of simplicity versus the more complicated procedure you have to go through to build your own key from another distro. If you're happy creating one yourself, more power to you (and you can do it with Mandriva, without paying anything) - but this isn't aimed at you.
(Disclaimer - In case anyone doesn't know: I work for Mandriva).
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