Thanks, mods. So Steve spend the last five minutes of his keynote looking emotional and inwardly scared?
I do not generally go out of my way to see Apple stuff, so I hadn't seen it. I watched the last five minutes and that was certainly not the impression I got.
Perhaps others will disagree but I find you response skewed.
Well, at least I had the experience of watching part of the quicktime. So, thanks!
In wintertime, up in the cold wastelands of US we used this plastic sheet stuff. A sticky strip goes around the window and the plastic is attached. Then the plastic is heated with a hair drier so it pulls tight. This creates an air tight seal around the window that you can still see through with very minimal distortion. In effect, you are creating your own double paned window, cheaply.
It really, *really*, cut down on the heating costs, and kept places much much warmer - especially old buildings with older window casings that have some cracks.
I'm guessing that you can find the stuff online, though I don't know what it's called anymore... I moved to warmer climes.:)
We have fielded an enterprise solution (3 sites - Primary, Failover, DDR) with the requisite goodies(fibrechannel SANS, Oracle RAC, Sun Clusters,Windows and SUN servers, Windows clients.
We deploy new code releases, schema changes, etc., to the fielded system. We have sets of test servers in similar configurations to the fielded systems.
We have a deployment team that creates all the necessary patch and unpatch scripts and test them on the test systems to ensure that all paths work.
These scripts are created off of the deployment notes in the Clearquest item number for updating the system that the developer created when they made the change. So, it is the developer's responsibility to know what types of changes will be required on the live system to make the their change.
Now, the change developer may well work with a deployment developer in creating the required scripts. The modular package of those scripts, with dependencies cross checked - is deployed on a test system, probably multiple times. The developers are often called down to such tests to determine if th eissue is known or if a bug report should be filed. Systems engineers are responsible for checking the requirements that are supposed to be fufilled by what they negotiated with the customer.
We run full systems tests in the lab with real world feeds on a mostly continuous basis. Reconfiguring the clusters to different configurations for tests of different baselines.
Then, when the window is finalized with the customer we deploy the patch in that window. If after everything comes back up something is not right - depending on the severity the problem will either debugged on the spot for a period, logged for debugging or the patch will be removed.
IT's job is outside of all of this, including software deployment, except in such cases where the SW drop requires new IT support - a VPN stetup, more bandwidth, end-to-end ecryption (although could be done is sw), hell one of those new Quantum cryptography setups...
The sw engineering team also contains the infrastructure group, which works with IT on many details but deals with the deployment interface to IT.
If there are going to be IT infrastructure changes, the sw infrastructure team should know about any that could affect the sw functioning on that level (this rarely seems to happen for us), just as Operations should be notified if there is going to be a scheduled outage to operations.
The closest this gets generally are things like OS upgrades (major),java (now that took a little work!), DB upgrades (suprisingly mostly trouble free these days, for us), WebSphere, BMC, , etc. But many of these bigger ones are joint exercises. You know, everyone working together to solve a problem. We also test the hell out of it before ever fielding anything. Even then, there are conditions in the field that take your sw down old dusty rarely used paths every day, so it's not to say everything is perfect.
So, there's how we handle some of those interfaces.
So, we should expect no problem with ODF reading and writing all microsoft documents to be able to seamlessly save across formats, then? After all, that is what specifications are for, right? Hmm, I'll believe that when I see it...
I think that Microsoft should be the first ones to adop this as a corporate standard across the board.
Not only will they gather valuable experience dubugging the problems first hand, with the actual user in front them, but they are costing everyonen else money every bug that stops some piece of business fulidity from happening costs the company that loses the advantage money. They have the joy of live data. What fun!
Microsoft is hoping to pawn off the cost of being the early corporate adopter because it would hurt their business to do so.
Now, who's business, then, wouldn't be inancially disadvantaged compared to a competitor who just... waited?
I personally couldn't recommend a comporation going to vista any time soon.
Apple has had some good competition already - the Archos players, the Creative stuff and the Sandisk. Each of those has brought something interesting to the table and made Apple keep advancing.
What has the Zune brought that's new? WiFi sharing that is so limited...
Yes. Exactly. Very soon now I expect other makers to understand that people actually want this feature. And some of them will get it more right, giving more ability to the users. For example, if the song has no DRM, to be able to share it with another user in range with no DRM. The ability to wirelessly sync, etc.
It's great that MS introduced this feature. Now someone else can make it useful.:)
Just what is "literary" or "artistic" value, beyond simply being a piece of media that someone finds interesting and worth experiencing?
Well, there is transient literary and artistic value - what i experience in the moment when viewing a work of art. This neither has to be plesant or enlightening. The stable artistic value would be what we as a collective experienced in the moment and then internalized and/or shared. Yin and yang.
Then, lasting literary value would be capturing in essence the Divine in a moment, here, for others to see, or in a tale to be journeyed, or in a paradox. Able to be felt, if preserved, generation after generation.
Of course, when the human race dies out or is so transformed not to be able to resonate with the pieces, the patterns will be lost. Unless we happen to transcend.
Of course, money is not, despite what you may have heard, really the most important thing in life. It's nice to have, but it will not make you happy, nor will the lack of it _keep_ you from being happy. (Messed-up family relationships, on the other hand, _can_ keep you from being happy. Never screw up your family relationships over a career.)
No, it will not make you happy. However, lack of money can be a HUGE set of stressors in your life and can certainly make you quite unhappy. Lack of a reasonable level of income can ruin your relationships, your self-esteem (no matter how many times you tell yourself "Money is not important"), your health, etc...
That's pure FUD (do you work for Microsoft?). Open source has been around for several decades, and I'm not aware of any serious consequences for end users from patent infringement by FOSS. First of all, for the very reasons you mention--people know they are being scrutinized--patent infringement by FOSS is rare, and when it does, people simply remove the offending code.
I agree that end users will probably not be sued for using infringing software - initially. I don't agree that people can "simply remove the offending code" in all cases. This is not copyright we're talking about - it's patents. If you are infringing on a patent and get called for it you need to find an alternate method that produces the same result but misses one or more of the planks in the patent. So, what if there are no other ways of doing something because the patent has been wisely written not to stray too far into implementation? It could preclude even the existence of your FOSS program. Period.
So, then, after this has been settled anyone who still uses the FOSS program at that point could and probably would be sued.
Passwords are ordinary to the point of being obnoxious. Normal users don't associate them with security, but something that just happens all the time on computers. Even today, its fairly trivial to social engineer a password over the telephone, but even the blondest of secretaries would not give keys to basically anything.
And why not? If your security mechanism (whatever it is) is adopted worldwide how is it not going to be as ubiquitous as a password. Why wouldn't people start treating it exactly the same way? Why wouldn't the secretary hand her RFID chip to someone if they would tell them the password (or perhaps have her authorize on some page or other to slurp the contents)?
I don't see anything in another mechanism that would contravene the natural tendency of the importance of the authentication factor to be minimized. Face it, anything that must be used all the time is pretty much going to become rote.
Oh right. The Sony Handycam I bought is USB, but the Mac won't read the video. It finds the stills no problem but I can't get it to see the video, no matter what I try. So, no, the Mac is not all plug and play either.
99.5% availability to me means that all the services are available for use 99.5% of the
So 99.5% availability isn't really hard. Not really. Try 5 or 6 9's. That is ambitious, especially if you have to preserve real world state in the meantime. But it can be done with HA redundant clusters, redundant sans, dbs, Sun Clusters (I would chose Linux over sun for the excellent hardware and hot-swap capabilities, and I am not certain the state of Linux in these type of situations - sure Openmosix or a custom builder shop for clusters, but... ), Oracle Clusters, replication, glue and more redundancy and monitoring systems. A DR site in case both the primary and backup sites go off line...
99.5% availability shoud be no problem for $100M not to say some portion of $24B
so I don't really see what Solaris would gain. I think Sun made a very clever choice with the CDDL for Solaris. It's Free, and the Linux guys can't just take the best bits and surpass them.
You don't want Linux to get any better because...? You don't want Linux to be better that Solaris because...??? I would think that as a user you would want the absoultely best OS and system you could have, no matter if it was Linux, Solaris, or even (gasp!) MS.
Under the current model, YouTube does not have control over what gets uploaded to the site. This means they either have to police the site to be sure copyrighted content stays off -- which is difficult if not impossible, and not what the viewers want in any event -- or they have to slog through the myriad possible copyright owners who could end up on YouTube.
I don't believe that this is a correct reading of the current state of copyright. The only thing they have to do, it seems, it remove infringing content when served with the proper paperwork. It appears they don't even have to make sure that no one else uploads another exact copy, much less one that is not bitwise identical, though I may be off on that one.
Also, I don't see why we need to create another set of leeches and middlemen who take a cut of everything when it doesn't seem required. (The ASCAP certainly doesn't work for free does it?)
You are both supporting and countering his argument. What about all those missing TV programs from the 60's? There are still a lot missing, as I recall. The recovered stuff wasn't 'live' in the sense that everyone was still sharing it - it was gasping for breath at the bottom of a dustbin.
So, in 50 years everyone has thrown away their Brittany Spears CD's, or even kept them. Most did not bother to back up their TB's of crapo music (or whatever) on magnetic platters(ugh!) to holostorage. Most "Modern" people of the time don't even particularly care about Brittany - if they even know who she is. There is a filtering mechanism working here. Sure, you might be able to go find a dusty old NAS box in some forgotten basement that has a goldmine of interesting stuff on it, but you might not, either.
It is relatively unsupportable to say that we will have this great nice archive of data 'live' and floating around when most people won't want to access it - if they even know about it.
Because if the reps get into the linux accounts they can "upsell" them to MS windows. Not very hard to figure that out. It's been a long-standing tactic for a lot of companies (IBM I *am* looking at you!) and can be used to push their server products.
Not only that, they get to see first hand what issues Linux has in enterprise applications and FUD the hell out of them.
Not only that, they can get real world understanding of what is missing from their own offerings that caused these clients to choose Linux.
The US doesn't control the Internet and hasn't since it became global. Or, going back a bit further, since multi-nationals picked up the medium.
Now, the US can exert direct control over the physical and data layer of that part of the net they can get their hands on, mostly on soverign ground and any country they invade. They could institute a filter policy similar to China's, or rip everyone's lines out. That's control, I tell ya.
They can also put pressure on other countries (and I include multinationals here) to try and extend the scope of power. Treaties and 'alignment' of laws across jurisdictions and laws multi's that desire to do business in the country go a long way here. But in the end, whoever is willing to exert the most force to secure the physical layer has control and largely that control resides in the governments of every individual country on the net.
Not quite. Society, at least a large portion of it, does not seem to consider it wrong to download copyrighted material illegally. Nor do we seem to consider it wrong to share copyrighted material with others. So therefore, they cannot consider it a good compromise to allow a limited monopoly. If We did, people wouldn't infringe, right?
When the laws and Society have a parting of ways, it can be particularly painful, especially for those on the leading edge of change.
But seriously, fingerprinting an adult before they consume an intoxicant proven to lead to violence (or rather increase the likelyhood thereof) is one thing. Even watching us via CCTV, is not an entirely bad thing. It has reduced violent crime.
Why don't they just lock everyone in their house? That would reduce violence too, except domestic violence, I suppose. Ah, I see a solution - lock everyone in separate rooms. Hmm, that works, except for self-inflicted violence... I know - 4-point restraints should stop much of that.
After all, this solution is not as bad as killing everyone outright so It must be ok, no?
Marked funny but in the day many of the "slick" installers (wise, install anywhere) could not create empty directories(!). Yes, that's right, you had to have at least one file in any directory created by the installer.
So, for example, if you have a program that requires a temp or config directory that is utilized and populated at runtime one could either do the "right" thing and put the checks in to create/recreate the directory as needed or ensure the directory was there on install by adding a dummy file to the directory in the installer.
None of which explains why Google thinks YouTube is worth $1.65 Billion. There are a lot of big profitable high-tech companies that aren't worth that much. Selling text ads? They don't need to buy the company to do that. Selling video ads? They have their own video technology.
Google doesn't think YouTube is worth $1.65B. It also doesn't think it's stock is worth ~$400 a share. However, the two overblown figures tend to cancel each other out.
Why is this bad? Because you have a lot of money, resources, and talent being used to subsidize what amounts to high-tech masturbation. Google gets bigger and bigger, and yet they release very few new products. And the products they do release stay in beta mode forever.
So, another way of putting it is they are experimenting with entirely new fields of endeavour where *no one* knows exactly what will work in the long term and what won't. Some people would call this empirical research.
Financially, Google is big success. But when it comes to pushing technological progress, they're a ship without a rudder. A very fancy ship, mind you, with free gourmet meals for the crew, and lots of conveniences and gadgets. But where is ship going. Nobody seems to know.
That is correct. The strategy seems sound. No one does know where all these "toy projects" will lead. Instead of charging off in a direction behind someone who is "Leading" them forward, all those bright minds get to try and find their own directions. Things that work keep having more energy poured into them, things that don't, don't. How much better is that?
So perhaps you would care to give a working definition of weapons of mass destruction that includes the chemical weapons that Saddam had in the 80's but does not include our own technologies such as cluster bombs and napalm?
I think a good working definition of a weapon of mass destrution is, well, a weapon that causes large amounts of damage over a large area.
What is your definition of the term that precludes it being applied to some of the technologies we used in the conflict?
Sorry, this type of categorization can only happen after a good working definition is in place. It is intellectually dishonest to categorize the sets of technologies without it and then create a definition that gerrymanders the topology based on your preconceived categorizations.
Its just not possible for them to release their internal source.
Why not? I mean, I haven't heard a reason why they could not release a modified version of the kernel. Do you have any links on this?
Or, could you speculate on the reason(s) why this is the case instead of blandly stating it as fact?
Ah!
Thanks, mods. So Steve spend the last five minutes of his keynote looking emotional and inwardly scared ?
I do not generally go out of my way to see Apple stuff, so I hadn't seen it. I watched the last five minutes and that was certainly not the impression I got.
Perhaps others will disagree but I find you response skewed.
Well, at least I had the experience of watching part of the quicktime. So, thanks!
In wintertime, up in the cold wastelands of US we used this plastic sheet stuff. A sticky strip goes around the window and the plastic is attached. Then the plastic is heated with a hair drier so it pulls tight. This creates an air tight seal around the window that you can still see through with very minimal distortion. In effect, you are creating your own double paned window, cheaply.
:)
It really, *really*, cut down on the heating costs, and kept places much much warmer - especially old buildings with older window casings that have some cracks.
I'm guessing that you can find the stuff online, though I don't know what it's called anymore... I moved to warmer climes.
We have fielded an enterprise solution (3 sites - Primary, Failover, DDR) with the requisite goodies(fibrechannel SANS, Oracle RAC, Sun Clusters,Windows and SUN servers, Windows clients.
We deploy new code releases, schema changes, etc., to the fielded system. We have sets of test servers in similar configurations to the fielded systems.
We have a deployment team that creates all the necessary patch and unpatch scripts and test them on the test systems to ensure that all paths work.
These scripts are created off of the deployment notes in the Clearquest item number for updating the system that the developer created when they made the change. So, it is the developer's responsibility to know what types of changes will be required on the live system to make the their change.
Now, the change developer may well work with a deployment developer in creating the required scripts. The modular package of those scripts, with dependencies cross checked - is deployed on a test system, probably multiple times. The developers are often called down to such tests to determine if th eissue is known or if a bug report should be filed. Systems engineers are responsible for checking the requirements that are supposed to be fufilled by what they negotiated with the customer.
We run full systems tests in the lab with real world feeds on a mostly continuous basis. Reconfiguring the clusters to different configurations for tests of different baselines.
Then, when the window is finalized with the customer we deploy the patch in that window. If after everything comes back up something is not right - depending on the severity the problem will either debugged on the spot for a period, logged for debugging or the patch will be removed.
IT's job is outside of all of this, including software deployment, except in such cases where the SW drop requires new IT support - a VPN stetup, more bandwidth, end-to-end ecryption (although could be done is sw), hell one of those new Quantum cryptography setups...
The sw engineering team also contains the infrastructure group, which works with IT on many details but deals with the deployment interface to IT.
If there are going to be IT infrastructure changes, the sw infrastructure team should know about any that could affect the sw functioning on that level (this rarely seems to happen for us), just as Operations should be notified if there is going to be a scheduled outage to operations.
The closest this gets generally are things like OS upgrades (major),java (now that took a little work!), DB upgrades (suprisingly mostly trouble free these days, for us), WebSphere, BMC, , etc. But many of these bigger ones are joint exercises. You know, everyone working together to solve a problem. We also test the hell out of it before ever fielding anything. Even then, there are conditions in the field that take your sw down old dusty rarely used paths every day, so it's not to say everything is perfect.
So, there's how we handle some of those interfaces.
Great!
So, we should expect no problem with ODF reading and writing all microsoft documents to be able to seamlessly save across formats, then? After all, that is what specifications are for, right? Hmm, I'll believe that when I see it...
Oh, and who owns the IP present in each standard?
I think that Microsoft should be the first ones to adop this as a corporate standard across the board.
Not only will they gather valuable experience dubugging the problems first hand, with the actual user in front them, but they are costing everyonen else money every bug that stops some piece of business fulidity from happening costs the company that loses the advantage money. They have the joy of live data. What fun!
Microsoft is hoping to pawn off the cost of being the early corporate adopter because it would hurt their business to do so.
Now, who's business, then, wouldn't be inancially disadvantaged compared to a competitor who just... waited?
I personally couldn't recommend a comporation going to vista any time soon.
This isn't funny - this is insightful.
I think that if Microsoft thinks Vista is so good they should be the FIRST to adopt it as a coprprate standard.
m
Apple has had some good competition already - the Archos players, the Creative stuff and the Sandisk. Each of those has brought something interesting to the table and made Apple keep advancing.
:)
What has the Zune brought that's new? WiFi sharing that is so limited...
Yes. Exactly. Very soon now I expect other makers to understand that people actually want this feature. And some of them will get it more right, giving more ability to the users. For example, if the song has no DRM, to be able to share it with another user in range with no DRM. The ability to wirelessly sync, etc.
It's great that MS introduced this feature. Now someone else can make it useful.
Just what is "literary" or "artistic" value, beyond simply being a piece of media that someone finds interesting and worth experiencing?
Well, there is transient literary and artistic value - what i experience in the moment when viewing a work of art. This neither has to be plesant or enlightening. The stable artistic value would be what we as a collective experienced in the moment and then internalized and/or shared. Yin and yang.
Then, lasting literary value would be capturing in essence the Divine in a moment, here, for others to see, or in a tale to be journeyed, or in a paradox. Able to be felt, if preserved, generation after generation.
Of course, when the human race dies out or is so transformed not to be able to resonate with the pieces, the patterns will be lost. Unless we happen to transcend.
j
Of course, money is not, despite what you may have heard, really the most important thing in life. It's nice to have, but it will not make you happy, nor will the lack of it _keep_ you from being happy. (Messed-up family relationships, on the other hand, _can_ keep you from being happy. Never screw up your family relationships over a career.)
No, it will not make you happy. However, lack of money can be a HUGE set of stressors in your life and can certainly make you quite unhappy. Lack of a reasonable level of income can ruin your relationships, your self-esteem (no matter how many times you tell yourself "Money is not important"), your health, etc...
That's pure FUD (do you work for Microsoft?). Open source has been around for several decades, and I'm not aware of any serious consequences for end users from patent infringement by FOSS. First of all, for the very reasons you mention--people know they are being scrutinized--patent infringement by FOSS is rare, and when it does, people simply remove the offending code.
I agree that end users will probably not be sued for using infringing software - initially. I don't agree that people can "simply remove the offending code" in all cases. This is not copyright we're talking about - it's patents. If you are infringing on a patent and get called for it you need to find an alternate method that produces the same result but misses one or more of the planks in the patent. So, what if there are no other ways of doing something because the patent has been wisely written not to stray too far into implementation? It could preclude even the existence of your FOSS program. Period.
So, then, after this has been settled anyone who still uses the FOSS program at that point could and probably would be sued.
Passwords are ordinary to the point of being obnoxious. Normal users don't associate them with security, but something that just happens all the time on computers. Even today, its fairly trivial to social engineer a password over the telephone, but even the blondest of secretaries would not give keys to basically anything.
And why not? If your security mechanism (whatever it is) is adopted worldwide how is it not going to be as ubiquitous as a password. Why wouldn't people start treating it exactly the same way? Why wouldn't the secretary hand her RFID chip to someone if they would tell them the password (or perhaps have her authorize on some page or other to slurp the contents)?
I don't see anything in another mechanism that would contravene the natural tendency of the importance of the authentication factor to be minimized. Face it, anything that must be used all the time is pretty much going to become rote.
Oh right. The Sony Handycam I bought is USB, but the Mac won't read the video. It finds the stills no problem but I can't get it to see the video, no matter what I try. So, no, the Mac is not all plug and play either.
99.5% availability to me means that all the services are available for use 99.5% of the
So 99.5% availability isn't really hard. Not really. Try 5 or 6 9's. That is ambitious, especially if you have to preserve real world state in the meantime. But it can be done with HA redundant clusters, redundant sans, dbs, Sun Clusters (I would chose Linux over sun for the excellent hardware and hot-swap capabilities, and I am not certain the state of Linux in these type of situations - sure Openmosix or a custom builder shop for clusters, but... ), Oracle Clusters, replication, glue and more redundancy and monitoring systems. A DR site in case both the primary and backup sites go off line...
99.5% availability shoud be no problem for $100M not to say some portion of $24B
so I don't really see what Solaris would gain. I think Sun made a very clever choice with the CDDL for Solaris. It's Free, and the Linux guys can't just take the best bits and surpass them.
You don't want Linux to get any better because...? You don't want Linux to be better that Solaris because...??? I would think that as a user you would want the absoultely best OS and system you could have, no matter if it was Linux, Solaris, or even (gasp!) MS.
This attitude is incomprehensible to me.
Under the current model, YouTube does not have control over what gets uploaded to the site. This means they either have to police the site to be sure copyrighted content stays off -- which is difficult if not impossible, and not what the viewers want in any event -- or they have to slog through the myriad possible copyright owners who could end up on YouTube.
I don't believe that this is a correct reading of the current state of copyright. The only thing they have to do, it seems, it remove infringing content when served with the proper paperwork. It appears they don't even have to make sure that no one else uploads another exact copy, much less one that is not bitwise identical, though I may be off on that one.
Also, I don't see why we need to create another set of leeches and middlemen who take a cut of everything when it doesn't seem required. (The ASCAP certainly doesn't work for free does it?)
You are both supporting and countering his argument. What about all those missing TV programs from the 60's? There are still a lot missing, as I recall. The recovered stuff wasn't 'live' in the sense that everyone was still sharing it - it was gasping for breath at the bottom of a dustbin.
So, in 50 years everyone has thrown away their Brittany Spears CD's, or even kept them. Most did not bother to back up their TB's of crapo music (or whatever) on magnetic platters(ugh!) to holostorage. Most "Modern" people of the time don't even particularly care about Brittany - if they even know who she is. There is a filtering mechanism working here. Sure, you might be able to go find a dusty old NAS box in some forgotten basement that has a goldmine of interesting stuff on it, but you might not, either.
It is relatively unsupportable to say that we will have this great nice archive of data 'live' and floating around when most people won't want to access it - if they even know about it.
Because if the reps get into the linux accounts they can "upsell" them to MS windows. Not very hard to figure that out. It's been a long-standing tactic for a lot of companies (IBM I *am* looking at you!) and can be used to push their server products.
Not only that, they get to see first hand what issues Linux has in enterprise applications and FUD the hell out of them.
Not only that, they can get real world understanding of what is missing from their own offerings that caused these clients to choose Linux.
The US doesn't control the Internet and hasn't since it became global. Or, going back a bit further, since multi-nationals picked up the medium.
Now, the US can exert direct control over the physical and data layer of that part of the net they can get their hands on, mostly on soverign ground and any country they invade. They could institute a filter policy similar to China's, or rip everyone's lines out. That's control, I tell ya.
They can also put pressure on other countries (and I include multinationals here) to try and extend the scope of power. Treaties and 'alignment' of laws across jurisdictions and laws multi's that desire to do business in the country go a long way here. But in the end, whoever is willing to exert the most force to secure the physical layer has control and largely that control resides in the governments of every individual country on the net.
Not quite. Society, at least a large portion of it, does not seem to consider it wrong to download copyrighted material illegally. Nor do we seem to consider it wrong to share copyrighted material with others. So therefore, they cannot consider it a good compromise to allow a limited monopoly. If We did, people wouldn't infringe, right?
When the laws and Society have a parting of ways, it can be particularly painful, especially for those on the leading edge of change.
But seriously, fingerprinting an adult before they consume an intoxicant proven to lead to violence (or rather increase the likelyhood thereof) is one thing. Even watching us via CCTV, is not an entirely bad thing. It has reduced violent crime.
Why don't they just lock everyone in their house? That would reduce violence too, except domestic violence, I suppose. Ah, I see a solution - lock everyone in separate rooms. Hmm, that works, except for self-inflicted violence... I know - 4-point restraints should stop much of that.
After all, this solution is not as bad as killing everyone outright so It must be ok, no?
Marked funny but in the day many of the "slick" installers (wise, install anywhere) could not create empty directories(!). Yes, that's right, you had to have at least one file in any directory created by the installer.
So, for example, if you have a program that requires a temp or config directory that is utilized and populated at runtime one could either do the "right" thing and put the checks in to create/recreate the directory as needed or ensure the directory was there on install by adding a dummy file to the directory in the installer.
Ah, a variant of a good original:
"Do what thou Will is the whole of the Law."
the original AC...
I wonder if that would be a valid license as well under this interpretation?
None of which explains why Google thinks YouTube is worth $1.65 Billion. There are a lot of big profitable high-tech companies that aren't worth that much. Selling text ads? They don't need to buy the company to do that. Selling video ads? They have their own video technology.
Google doesn't think YouTube is worth $1.65B. It also doesn't think it's stock is worth ~$400 a share. However, the two overblown figures tend to cancel each other out.
Why is this bad? Because you have a lot of money, resources, and talent being used to subsidize what amounts to high-tech masturbation. Google gets bigger and bigger, and yet they release very few new products. And the products they do release stay in beta mode forever.
So, another way of putting it is they are experimenting with entirely new fields of endeavour where *no one* knows exactly what will work in the long term and what won't. Some people would call this empirical research.
Financially, Google is big success. But when it comes to pushing technological progress, they're a ship without a rudder. A very fancy ship, mind you, with free gourmet meals for the crew, and lots of conveniences and gadgets. But where is ship going. Nobody seems to know.
That is correct. The strategy seems sound. No one does know where all these "toy projects" will lead. Instead of charging off in a direction behind someone who is "Leading" them forward, all those bright minds get to try and find their own directions. Things that work keep having more energy poured into them, things that don't, don't. How much better is that?
So perhaps you would care to give a working definition of weapons of mass destruction that includes the chemical weapons that Saddam had in the 80's but does not include our own technologies such as cluster bombs and napalm?
I think a good working definition of a weapon of mass destrution is, well, a weapon that causes large amounts of damage over a large area.
What is your definition of the term that precludes it being applied to some of the technologies we used in the conflict?
Sorry, this type of categorization can only happen after a good working definition is in place. It is intellectually dishonest to categorize the sets of technologies without it and then create a definition that gerrymanders the topology based on your preconceived categorizations.