Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26107 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Because most businesses don't use it to call customers - they use it to talk to other bits of the business.
Your programmers in London wanting to talk to your programmers in Seattle - could request a PO to buy a video conference system and then book the room and the call in advance and get a budget to bill it to. Or they could just have regular SKYPE meetings without even bothering to tell you.
We mostly use it for checking if someone else is in the office before calling them - but we have a global VOIP system that is also free and has worse call quality than skype.
Can't exactly see the educational point of this
If the idea is one computer/kid to learn programming - they are still going to need monitors/storage etc. Not sure this saves much on just using simple old PCs with linux.
If the idea is how do computers work, then something like Arduino/Stamp and reading key presses, making LEDs flash seems better.
Remember armies are always prepared to fight the previous war.
America had seen Zeppelins bombing London in WWI and didn't want the same thing happening again - the invention of the fighter aeroplane having apparently escaped them.
For the same reason the British are blocking the export of longbows to France - just in case
Security, usability, cheap - pick one. The problem is you have to balance security against usability.
I've worked in places where computers were only allowed inside locked metal rooms - you opened the door to the room and all the monitors turned off. Great for security but not much good if the ambulance driver needs your address.
Most of these cases were people taking data home to work on, or forwarding emails to external addresses, Not best practice - but would you rather wait another month for your results because the consultant had to visit some data bunker to see your x-rays?
There is going to be a lot of bandwagon jumping about security - which will involve a few minions being fired for taking work home - while the entire confidential data will still be transferred on-mass to the US company's data processing center in India anyway.
And you will have to wait for an extra 12 hours in casualty because they don't have access to your records.
The admins at the police dept probably had nothing to do with this. The systems were bought by some official and installed in the cars - probably by the vehicle maintenance dept.
Think about how much computer kit there is in your building that the sysadmins aren't in charge of. Do you security audit the phone system, CCTV, fire alarm, photocopiers, HVAC?
What about your CEO's cell phone, or the hands free kit in his company car?
Can somebody explain to me how we are better off without Thalidomide - some goody-goody reporters try and make a name for themselves by reporting a few problems with a drug and we suddenly have to run around finding a replacement.
I mean does everybody really need arms anyway?
Ironically the medical are fighting to allow Thalidomide to be used again - it's a very useful drug.
Doctors have now discovered a large part of the population who are unlikely to suffer any pregnancy related side effects..
Yes the police are unlikely to get a speeding conviction on the basis of this.
Of course they might add a little note to your file about you being in London on the same day as protest, or your car regularly going slowly around King's Cross late at night - just in case they ever want to 'have a word with you'
And when Tom Tom sell it to your insurance company your rates might go up a bit.
That's their advantage - why would Samsung bother to develop their own 32bit CPU when they can buy an Arm licence for a few cents?
ARM have the advantage that selling an extra CPU costs them precisely nothing - if you want to buy a billion licenses they can offer you a very good rate!
Yes, note from our legal dept this morning - we aren't allowed to store anything financial/legal/patentable on Dropbox anymore
According to them the stock exchange could regard anything on Dropbox as published and so had to be told to investors first.
You can already allow anybody to download a file from your public folder - you just send them the dropbox generated link, what this software did was work out the secret link that dropbox uses to refer to any file on the system. So no big deal really
What is interesting/important is:
1, Dropbox sent a DMCA take down notice to scare the user with the threat of a major fine/federal crime. If he was using a university computer this was probably already enough to get him kicked out - whether it was true or not. Sending a threat-o-gram is easy, claiming you own the copyright on something that you shared (as he did) involves lawyers and official processes.
2, Dropbox checked inside the contents of the compressed tar file he was hosting to find his code. So dropbox routinely checks the contents of files you upload looking for things that damage their business model. You don't know what their business model is, who their shareholders are, or who they partner with. Out of general paranoia you should assume in business that all your cloud content is delivered directly to your worst enemy - but in this case it seems to be valid.
3, Anything you upload to Dropbox that is to do with business should be encrypted - this will cost dropbox money since they rely on being able to identify identical files from different users and use hashing to only store a single copy (they use Amazon S3 for their backend)
There is already a better system for NTFS - it hides data in the partially unused blocks at the end of files. So if you have a 17k file the disk uses 4 full 4K blocks and a final block with 1K used and 3K free. NTFS can be set to preserve/copy/etc the unused parts of blocks so your 'secret' data gets kept safe.
NTFS has a lot of out-of-band functionality so it can do lots of clever filesystem stuff that nobody ever implemented (cos like NT it was written by someone clever)
The downward spiral is more common - you price your copy at 1c less than the cheapest and it appears as the lowest price. Some sellers were using this to drive down competitors prices on textbooks to 1c - then buying those copies and reselling them at the $ real price.
Basically what Wall St does with stocks but without the 000,000,000 on the end.
Need to address an envelope
1, Put in type writer
2, Type address
Alternative
1, Buy sheet of sticky labels that are supported in Word's list (which seems to only do US sizes even in the UK)
2, Type address
3, Print
4, Print again with labels correct way up in tray
5, Print again because somebody sent another job to the printer and their first page got printed on your labels
6, Discover that you had the margins set wrong and the address starts off the label
7, Manually put a few spaces at the start of the address
8 goto 3
catch: Write the address by hand
Then you have the 99% of forms that aren't fillable PDFs
> Iron Mountain becoming a Real Estate Investment Trust... lowering its tax burden.
So Iron Mountain is a secure document storage/shredding/etc company?
Who I'm supposed trust to securely store/shred/etc my documents
And their strategy is to pretend to be real estate vendors as a tax dodge - that sounds very trustworthy!
You need a pen.
Current system - you go down to Staples and put in an expenses claim.
New system -
1, You apply to your local purchasing laison committee
2, They inform you when the next meeting of the department pen procurement committee is
3, Your request for a pen is rolled up with all other pen requests until it's forwarded to the department's purchasing department
4, This then waits until all the agency's pen requests are forwarded to number 10 for approval
5, The people's central pen purchasing committee isn't buying any pens this year because:
a, The budget wasn't approved
b, The pens are imported from country X and we are waiting until the next state visit of the president of X to announce an order
c, We are currently expecting a visit from president of Y who is at war with X so can't announce an order
d, We want somebody to open a pen factory in a marginal constituency
e, Politician needs to be seen to be tough on pens this week
6, Bids then go out for pens to BAe, CapGemini and whatever Anderson is called this week
7, Before pens are delivered the department is merged, renamed, re-elected and the order is cancelled
8, You go to staples and pay for the pen yourself
9, Savings!!!!
I once worked in a university where all the computer purchases for every department in this subject across the country were all brought together at a single annual purchase by a central body - to get bulk discounts. You can imagine how well this worked!
So instead of standing around doing nothing because they couldn't get on the computer they fought the fire.
Wait till the NHS computer system finally gets running - you wont be able to stop somebody bleeding to death without first filling in your key objective target achievement status
So your own experts decided an invention was novel, so did your patent agent and the experts at the USPTO. But now when you try and stop a huge US company stealing your idea it's all decided by a jury in East Texas.
I'm not familiar with the jury selection process in East Texas, perhaps it does select a jury where they all have a masters in engineering and no inclination to rule in favour of American jobs. But personally I would prefer a tribunal in a German court where the judge is also an engineer.
They know they are going sell bugger-all (=3 in reg units) to a few french companies/celebs who want to look green and don't have a prius
So if you aren't going to sell any there's no need to price it to sell.
The first smart car clone with batteries and a 50mi in town range would sell - but the safety regs introduced to suit 3tons SUVs doing 100mph mean it would be impossible.
Remember the last time there was a credible security threat ( AKA politician anted to be on the today program) a bunch of tanks were parked at Heathrow.
But these were only tiny little baby tanks - no match for T72s.
The euro-fighter and the new carriers must be scrapped and the money used to pay for a battalion of new heavy battle tanks to handle millions of potential terrorists coming through Heathrow armed with T72s
Total cost of ownership - it's a matter of lifetime and replacement costs
A monarch can do you 60-70 years if they are painted regularly whereas a president you might have to upgrade every 4-5 years.
Then a presidential election can costs $Bn whereas to get a new monarch all you need is a rugby player and a bottle of Lambrusco.
Well we could educate our children in science and technology, send them to university and move up the value chain so we are designing the ARM cores that go in the iPads.
We could invest in high tech manufacturing so that we can make things with automated assembly lines instead of needing millions of cheap workers.
Or we could just open another branch of "scented-candles-R-us" and make reality TV shows about shopping there.
Just on the news here - the air and space museum in Seattle (AKA Boeing's gift shop) didn't get one.
They are trying to put a brave face on it. They did get the plywood mockup that the astronauts trained on. But it's not just a mockup it's THE mockup "the only one of its kind in the world" according to their press release.
Most wars today are "asymetric conflicts in human resource rich countries" = us with guns, them with lots of non-white people
So simply round up 1000 of them, put them on a treadmill, @150W each you have 150KW for as long as you want. Optional power boost available with well known whip technology.
In conflicts closer to home where either the locals are too fat and lardy to be of any use, simply exchange for squaddies. With the correct inducement you could probably get more than 150W out of them and at worst they would get fit
