Microsoft is - by making it very difficult to find any alternative and this is anti-competitive. Lets see what happens when they have to get chosen on merit alone.

Rich people will still be rich either way and will be able to afford the fares whereas the rest of us will be better off travelling otherwise and will have to pay to build it anyhow.

That's a typical IT comment which causes hatred. You can't see anything below the GUI on windows 7 (which indicates a bit of technical illiteracy) and you think that whatever shell you use is going to run bash scripts.

Essentially you think that your problems are the only ones that count. You're not doing development and you don't care what people in dev want. You can't put yourself in their shoes and you have contempt for their requests. Definitely the antithesis of customer service and I am sure you don't see them as customers.

Its easier to explain computing in terms of a machine to people and lambda calculus is not instantly real to most of us. So Turing is one of the people whose work almost any layman can at least conceive.

I think this deserves plenty of credit.

School is about telling you things you don't know and wouldn't learn on your own otherwise we would not have invented it.

If you trust anyone to handle your comms securely then you deserve whatever happens to you.

What are today's costly mistakes?

If you came from Somalia you wouldn't think it was funny - you'd prefer to live in the US any day as I believe some have managed to do.

I have never found that translation helps. Being able to speak directly to people who wanted things was the greatest luxury and saved huge effort as we ended up not doing a lot of things that "translators" had mistakenly thought was necessary and did other things that were *actually* vital.

"Iran's religious leaders are set to test the new "Thanksbetogod" landing system which involves praying for the miraculous saviour of the astronaut. The new landing system is considerably lighter than anything the pathetic decadent homosexual Europeans or the Great Satan can achieve and will give Iran total domination of manned spaceflight within the next 2 weeks.

The event is so auspicious that the supreme leader Aye-a-toilet Car-mini especially asked our own President to test the system. "To refuse would be to disbelieve in the power of the almighty, Mr Ah-my-dinner-jacket, and I assure you that we will all be there to pray at exactly the right moment and I can assure this because we will be using our new great Iranian "IfGodiswilling" wrist watches which are based on such immense faith that there is not even any need for clockwork! Do not fear for your hairy little chin, my dear Mad-mood, for the lord loves all who trust in him - even the fires of the atmosphere and the terminal velocity of the highest fall are as nothing compared of the prayer of myself and all your other good friends of the Majles-e Khobregan (assembly of experts)."

It was touching, as this reporter can testify, to see the tears of what can only be joy, his sudden urge to leave the room to hide his emotion and the kindness with with the guard officers of the Revolutionary protection unit insisted that he should stay...

In the cases that I care about the inability to understand needs has been on the IT side, but the problem is with the very idea that the world is divided into this side and that side. Why do you need to have the business explained to you? Does it mean that you don't understand the business you're working in?

Someone is going to invent the "Marines" of computing - a sea based unit with it's own airforce and ships - a unit where decisions can be made quickly and permission does not have to be sought to obtain the necessary resources below a certain degree. In the computing world this might be a development organisation with it's own IT staff scattered throughout the teams. These people will understand needs because they will be spending their time with the people who have the need.

Testing is now done this way in some places and I think it's so much better than the "Test department" idea that existed at another company. Where there are 2 entities everyone blames the other for delays, bugs problems and an adversarial attitude develops.

Clouds and generic services are a balm - something that can soothe the tensions by making the issue of "why do you want this" go away. In most of the world you can have anything you can pay for as long as it's legal and so it should be inside companies. The IT department can run a cloud of it's own or can bulk buy capacity and leave the "embedded IT people" within the business units to use it as they see fit.

Well, now we have the Holy Open Spirit and the Son so who's the daddy?

How can you say that? It's so cruel to poor little MS - getting shoved around by the big boys! :-( I want to join a "help MS defeat the system" society - do you know if there is one yet?

If this is ok for you then the maps should be ok too:

http://maps.ovi.com/#|47.7023446|-122.2419395|11|0|0|hybrid.day?

It doesn't seem too bad to me. It's not great in Argentina or my part of Africa. It's also quite a lot better than not having a map at all because you've run out of credit or can't get a signal.

Regards,

Tim

The N8's prime advantages on holiday are:

Preloaded maps so you don't need to eat up bandwidth to look up how to get places.
A 12MP camera that justifies the megapixel numbr by being fantastic and better if you get the panorama app.
Longer battery life than most of them and certainly longer than a lot of cameras.
Pentaband Radio - if it's GSM you can connect.
Built like a brick shithouse. Sorry, that saying might be local to where I'm from but basically it's tough.
The HDMI output is very nice for looking at photos you took that day or with the USB on the go feature you can use the phone to show the pictures off a camera which doesn't have a video output.

I have taken it on holiday and it's the one to have IMO. I am very biased, BTW so you should know that and I admit that many things might not seem great about its GUI etc but I just don't think they counted much when I was out there using it.

Here is an example of a Panorama I took with it of Table Mountain:

http://www.panogio.com/south-africa/3751101061399

Regards,

Tim