POWER TO THE PEOPLE! (For those of you not in the UK, or those of you too young to recognise this, look up "Citizen Smith").

The total production run for the Stanley was 11,000 cars in 25 years. Stanley Steamer

Thats 440 per year, on average.

Don't Ferrari only make something like 1,000 cars (of a particular version, save F50, or whatever) a year?

Thats not such a stretch, its a factor of 2.

I agree that the Stanley was history though, whenever I see a steam car its obvious the tech has been superceded.

This is grossly ignorant. Know anything about aerodynamics? About fluid flow (air is a fluid) and lamina flow vs turbulent flow? Consider that bicycles are reasonably easy to cycle until you hit (average per person) 12 mph (Imperial miles, the ones that count) and above that it gets much harder. Magnify that to the speeds involved with this particular event. I doubt very much that just increasing by 13mph is that easy. Its almost certainly a Velocity^2 relationship or worse (almost certainly due to the problems with drive train and steam, let alone aero which I've alluded to). Given that the US record is probably in US mph and the current record will be in Imperial mph (given that its a UK university that has done it), this is a high speed acheivement, but htne again, if the FIA ratify it, both records will have been recorded in Imperial mph. Oh, and finally, the correct way to spell tyres, is with a 'y'.

Can I just point out that a mobile phone is in itself a mobile computing device (even without the ability to "run" your app of choice or a command shell. Even the "bricks" that people carried around circa 1985 had more CPU power than most computers. This patent is invalid right from the get go.

Oh wow. If this is true, this could have some serious battlefield uses. Not to mention decoy usage defending airstrips etc.

Put a cloak on innocent objects to look like planes and on fighter planes to look like innocent objects.

Pretty useful for covert surveillance as well.

This is one hell of an innovation in technology, if it is for real.

As usual I can't be bothered to login because I'm not a kharma whore.

Why doesn't stallman take this view when it comes to food production? If you don't grow the food you don't control what goes in to the food (nutrients, pesticide residues, fertiliser residues, etc). Even if you go organic, you are still ceding control to the grower over how, when, where the food is grown, harvested and delivered to you.

Sometimes, allowing someone else to do some or all of the work for you is, wait for it, beneficial to both parties. In those cases you can park you ideological bigotry at the door. Sadly, despite his intellect he does not seem to get that.

Let alone the environmental issues. Pooling resources into centralised services can (and should) be beneficial if done correctly. His solution is definitely sub-optimal on this axis by a very large measure.

For these reasons other people provide web hosting for me, and I don't own a nuclear, coal or gas power station, I just use the services of one. Likewise, water, sewerage etc. Its all the same thing. I don't need to have the blueprints and physical access to the premises to use the service.

Which of course if you take Stallman's views on software and extend them to these things, you'd pretty much have to demand access to these. I can see it now, "Here you are Piping Snail, these keys will let you into the main reactor, be sure not to hit any of the controls with your bagpipe..."

Does stallman own a credit card or have a bank account? I hope not, because he'll be implicitly using other people's computers whenever he makes a transaction.

What about when he drives his car, unless its really old, he'll be using software written by people to control the engine, the air con, the windows etc. None of which he will have seen.

What about the roads he drives upon? All the traffic light systems are embedded systems, which he is implicitly using.

Likewise if he ever has need of surgery or emergency medical equipment.

and when he uses telephones, faxes, modems, etc...

...and so on...

Frankly, his whole position is untenable and thus hypocritical.

No ocpyright infringement. This is an original recording of a unique arrangement. Copyright exists in this new recording.

In the UK, the PRS (Performing Rights Society) will what a fee for the performance of this work because it is a derivative arrangement of an existing protected work. In turn the PRS will protect this arrangement and collect fees for that as well, should they accept a request to protect it.

Just to repeat though - Nothing to do with copyright.

The PRS perform useful and harmful work all over the UK. Useful in the for commercial performances they ensure the original composers and musicians get rewarded for their work.

Harmful in that their enforcement is over-zealous and results in them regarding not-for-profit performances (you and your mates playing tunes on folk instruments down the local pub) as a revenue generating exercise. This imposese ridiculous fees on pubs etc and results in music sessions shutting down etc. Resulting in less music for everyone and less space for musicians to hone their skills who some of which become the very people the PRS need to protect. So short sighted. I know many PRS members, and non of them think the PRS treat music sessions correctly.

The PRS are loathed just about everywhere for their heavy handed approach to licensing. They even insist that an employer is responsible for licensing an employees radio if used in that workspace (because everyone can listen to it, in theory, never mind the workspace is a noisy car mechanic workshop - yes, this went to court and sadly, the PRS won).

Many parallels to the RIAA, where what they gain on one hand they lose with the other through insensitive, heavy handed greed.

That implies you must be using a laptop to write code.

How can you produce your best code on laptop? Thats just incredible. Rubbish keyboard on all laptops and compromised mouse support.

I've got an excellent laptop, a Dell M6300 and its not up to the job despite a good large keyboard and 1920x1200 screen. Don't even mention a Macbook with its horrible keyboard and even worse mouse/trackpad etc.

You need a real machine, with good ergonomics etc. So basically that means separate screen (so you are not hunched over it), real keyboard that you situate a decent distance and height from the screen (unlike a laptop), same for mouse, multiple buttons on the mouse (Ouch, out goes the Apple). OS of your choice, Windows or Linux, doesn't matter.

Airplane? You've got to be kidding. Thats about as useful an environment as sitting at a bus-stop or in a cafe. Plain useless. If I'm in a plane, I'm suffering all the other folks because I want to go to the destination. If I'm in a cafe its because I'm hungry and/or I have some interesting company to hang out with.

The last thing I want is some inane conversation about football or a TV soap or some girl nattering about her boyfriend interfering with my software thought processes. Thats the unfortunate things about ears, unlike eyes you can't close them.

Silence. It can be great. As I get older I find I prefer it more. But often I code to music (Zappa through folk, no rap, no hip hop, no drum and bass - what could be worse?). Melody is good (rhythm implied by melody), rhythm without melody (drum and bad, hip hop, rap all fit that) is bad.

I often puncuate my software writing with playing musical instruments (border bagpipe and mandolin if you are interested). A good long walk often helps as well.

And yes, I do get to do all these things. I work for myself these days, but previous employers often let me arrive late for work or leave in the middle of hte day for 3 hours to go horse riding. All about getting the right things. I may be gone for 3 hours but most times those days they got 10 hours out of me those days (yes 10 in the office) and highly productive too (Emacs on various Unix and VMS back then).

Someone mentioned vi. For productivity? You are joking.

In an ideal world, vi, its progeny and derivatives (including Emacs vi-mode), like smallpox before it, would be eradicated. And all software developers would be a lot more productive. Bill Joy has a hell of a lot to answer for inflicting that upon the software world.

That is not insightful, its laughable. Anyone using vi, or any derivative is not productive. vi is the 2nd worst editor in the world, bested only by edlin. Shockingly bad.

You think she cares about the computer you use?

Frankly, if she DOES, you should ignore her, unless her problem is directly related to the computer. Otherwise she is just a shallow waste of space, justs like you.

Yes, *JUST LIKE YOU*.

The computer you use, and the computer she uses (or does not use) have NOTHING, I'll repeat that, NOTHING, to do with whether you'll fall in love, get married, shag a hell of a lot, hopefully create some nice, well adjusted children, etc, etc,

If you think you iMac Pro laptop is important for this task, (like some f**kwits in some previous posts on slashdot), you are going to be very disappointed, and/or you are going to seriously hurt (possibly several years down the line) the woman you are hoping for).

Do yourself (and her) a favaour and forget about the fact the your iMac is more cool than your PC, and think about what *YOU*, as a *PERSON*, offer *HER*/*HIM* as a potential life partner.

I love nice cars, gadgets, hand made, bespoke, musical instruments - but it IS NOT WORTH A DAMN without someone that is with you *FOR THE RIGHT REASON" and that *IS NOT" because I've "GOTTA CEWLA LAPTOP than he has" and *IS NOT* because I am *WEALTHIER" than hs is, AND SO ON.

Finally, If you are so bright. Why do I need to spell the above out to you? I apoligise for the clumsy grammar.

And for those of you that think I'm clueless about OS and must be an MS zealot and therefore closed-minded, you shoud look to yourself first, I've worked on 7 different home computer systems in the 80s, bespoke 8 bit embedded systems, multi-platorm Unix/VMS systems, Windows, Linux etc, etc and I currently work supplyinf software tools for C++/C/Delphi/VB/Fortran/Java/JavaScript/Lua/Python/Ruby/Perl/Php. Its not as if I am not widely experienced.

Have you ever used an Itanium box?

Jeez, what an awful piece of cr*p. Sound of a vaccum cleaner, performance slower than an equivalent x86, Mhz for Mhz (timeframe: 2000/1). Well maybe no in benchmarks, but if you had a box, side by side, both running Whistler, you couldn't tell the difference.

I had an early pre-release Intel box (well, I had several) plus pre-release Visual Studio and compilers. I ported a 2,000,000 line C++ CAD app from 32 bit MFC to 64 bit MFC. We did the port, but the box did not sing. It was horrible.

5 years earlier I'd used Sun's Windows emulation environment running Windows apps on Sparcstation pizza boxes. That was better.

Itanium is much more of a dead platform than x86.

I don't know how expandable SPARC is, in terms of future bandwidth, but if its available its a reasonable legacy bet, given Sun have the emulator software.

Real shame they dropped Alpha. That was a good platform. Ahread of its time. We had one in our office early nineties, running Digital UX. Sometime in 90-94. That thing was fast, compared to the competition.

ARM would be excellent though, I'd love that to happen. Same platform for desktop, mobile, embedded, low power, high performance. All we need is multi-core (sorry, haven't followed it closely enough to know if that is the horizon).

I've only used 2 machines in my life that have sounded like vaccuum cleaners:
1) Motorola Exorciser, 6809 development system with 8" floppies
2) Intel development Itanium box (several of).

Both were [polite]not very good[/polite].

Surely if you comment (in public) or discuss (in public or private, except with other jurors) about a trial for which you are a juror, that is contempt of court? Well, in the UK, not sure if you have the same concept in the US.

Roll on Haiku finally getting an ISO of their OS ready. Then real work on getting an Ubunutu equivalent of Haiku can start. Haiku has been non-ISO for too long, but recent developments (native GCC/G++ 4.0) mean that may end soon.

Ditto for ReactOS.

Then issues like this can go away (I hope).

For the record: I make my living writing software for MS operating systems. MSDN is awesome and makes OSDN look pathetic. But this type of thing by Microsoft only works against them, so I wish for a solution that sidesteps that mentality, hence Haiku and ReactOS.

Software patents should be abolished - compete on the quality of implementation.

Its pretty clear from the job posting on Linked In that this guy has to know about Netbooks and mobile devices. That is explicit. Also further down in the posting it mentions not only x86 but also ARM - which is definitely mobile territory and many think will soon be Netbook territory. I'll only get a Netbook when its got an ARM in it. And of course it'll have Ubuntu on it when that happens - no Windows for ARM at the moment.

OK, what about this for an idea? We already know about "Singularity" - the byte code OS from Microsoft - they could port that to a Netbook very quickly - just port the runtime to ARM and the rest works (ok, slight simplification, but a lot easier than porting Windows 7 to ARM).

OK, that was a wild idea, but you never know.

Anyway, my 2 penneth, they are targetting Netbooks.

With Windows 2000 and XP, search worked, especially once you turned off the smiling dog and configured XP search to work like 2000 search (i.e. it does what you want it to, not what it thinks you want it to).

With Vista, they made search awful. Firstly they simplified it so that for anything that a developer would want to do you had to do a search you knew would fail and then in the resulting dialog (because there is no other way to get that dialog, well not that I've found) you got to interact with possibly one of the worst ever designed search dialogs going. No way a non-techie could use it. Almost as if the Visual Studio 7 search dialog team had been let lose on Vista!

Now we get to Windows 7, and the search experience is worse! You still have to do the stupid search that you know will fail, but when it does fail there is no sensible way to do a better search. There is an abomination called Custom Search that isn't, there is no way to search the whole filesystem, including hidden files and non-indexed locations (if there is, please tell me!). Its awful.

I can see I'm going to have to write my own search dialog for use with Windows 7. Yes, its that bad.

The explorer file navigation pane is still missing the "up" button that was present in all versions of Windows prior to Vista. Yes I know I can click on the appropriate point on the dynamic thingy above but in my usage the new "user friendly" way introduced with Vista is slower to use and requires more accuracy in mouse usage than simply clicking the up button a few times.

On the plus side, I haven't tripped over any god-awful "you can't do that" admin dialogs like in Vista (where the best thing you can do is turn that feature off).

I just don't understand how every time they try to make Windows friendlier to novices they make it harder to use for everyone. And in the process Ubuntu just looks better and better, not withstanding the fact it is getting better and better. Seems like MS are trying to damage themselves. Just hope the Ubuntu guys see these changes in Vista/Windows 7 and don't go there with their UI.

I love the eye candy, but its worth nothing if the useful features are broken. Who wants a sports car fitted with a 1 litre 2 stroke engine?

Stephen