I can't imagine england is morally capable of this kind of thing
You may find it instructive to research how England got its first tea plants from China. That is possibly one of the finest feats of industrial espionage in history.
Also, check out the antics of the East India company, and ponder what happened to all that money and power, think it evaporated away and england is all cuddles and sweetness now?
China is just doing exactly what the US, Russia, England, and every other nation is doing, and has done for hundreds of years, which is stealing each others secrets...
And the recent power outages are due to badly maintained and or out of date hardware thats not very fault tolerant.
That's the simple reality of the dot com boom bust experience.
Those who saw what was coming and ran with the cash did well, and in so doing demonstrated that they had a superior grasp of the nature of the dot com boom/bust event.
The IT industry has been seriously cut throat from the start, only those prepared to bend rules and be occasionally brutal to the competition or their investors have emerged as winners.
Someones bound to bring up googles famous 'do no evil' statement. I ask you though, would that ever have been said if the person who wrote it on the whiteboard wasn't aware that either evil had been done, or was likely to happen?
Personally I can't believe that google got to where it is by being all sweetness and light.
The apparent ease with which Microsoft achieved this does beg the question 'how many times has this happened before?'.
ISO's been around for a while, and I can't see that this is the first standard that stood to make the controlling company rich. There's no doubt Microsoft would have remained in control of the standard, 6000 pages of complex specification that even they haven't yet implemented fully can mean nothing else.
So, are we about to see the dirty secrets of ISO revealed? Will we find that the top bods have been lining their little pockets?
Nonsense,.NET is quite possibly Microsofts one winning strategy in the programming language world.
I'm guessing you haven't used it, since you mention hearing it's dying, but not your own experience with it. You should give it a go, it's actually rather nice in its c# form.
Given that it is compatible with both Linux and Mac versions of.NET, I don't see it going away any time soon.
While your at it, try IronPython, the.NET compatible version of Python. That's bordering on seriously cool.
How can a customs agent possibly determine the MP3s that I have are, or are not purchased with validity
When it comes to checking all iPods, they can't. What is far more likely is that if they have you tagged for some other problem this will mean they can then have your iPod checked over for possible infringing material.
I'm wondering whether they will be thinking that a full iPod means the content is pirated or not.
Also, it's not just music that can be stored on a iPod, or similar music devices. You can store just about anything, so it will also be that they can look for non media content.
Some of us don't hate vista, we just realize that its a pretty poor product from what is supposed to be the worlds primary software company.
I like XP, I liked windows 95, and I even got on well with windows for workgroups. Vista mostly suffers for being installed on sub standard kit.
It's being sold with Aero on by default on laptops that should be running XP with all prettyness off. I know this because I seem to spend far too much time trying to get the damn things working properly for people.
Too much in Vista was unfinished when it was released, that's undeniable. For Microsoft, given their resources, this is absurd.
Once the average pc being sold becomes powerful enough to run all of Vista well, it'll be great. Right now though it's not.
Oh no, this is great. You can remove windows drm with ease, just run drmbg then FairUse4Wm, and the drm is history. Why they would use it when its so trivial to reverse is a puzzler to be sure.
Don't be naive. The problem is simply worse for Windows because windows is the most heavily used OS.
This idea that Linux is immune from viruses is just stupid. It's not the primary target of most malware, but it is a target. A poorly configured Linux server is pure gold to a spammer.
Thinking that you are safe just because you use Linux is, well, dumb.
And as for Apples various OS products? Well they have only a tiny market share. There isn't going to be the same return on investment of time and effort to attack that as much as windows is attacked.
If you're going to make people sit in an office for 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week then don't expect them to magically drop their personal life just because they're at work
What personal life? You mean chatting about what is going on in their personal life, or actively pursuing it with others outside of your workplace whilst on company time? The former is normal, the latter, unacceptable behavior.
You are at work to work. That doesn't mean it should be boring, and yes, sometime you work with your friends, but too much socializing is bad for business.
having seen the amount of crap that gets sent around work email when it's not monitored, I can see the purpose of checking the email of employees. Personal emails should only ever be sent from personal email accounts. That's just common sense.
After all, how dumb is it to put personal information into a system that is likely to see it archived for years in a system you are unlikely to have any control over.
Work email should be just for that, work. Just saying that won't work though, people, especially people who use computers, act with some kind of weird collective stupidity at times that can cause even the most sensible people to do and say things they would never do otherwise.
Better to monitor and make sure everyone follows the rules then have an email from your company showing up on the Internet saying something you would never condone.
Before any 'ooh, I've read 1984 so I am an expert on surveillance societies' morons chip in, I'm talking about the cold hard reality of business here. One wrong word can send stock prices through the floor.
I read a quote somewhere that said 'the Internet has finally disproved the hypothesis of an infinite number of monkeys being able to recreate the complete works of shakespeare.'
What bothers me is that all this is built on top of tcp/ip, and that is inherently insecure. Given that there exists hardware to inspect packets for p2p traffic, how hard would it be to for a person of unpleasant intent to get hold of some of that and start mining 'encrypted' health information.
I can see it now, 'want to get health insurance again? Pay us x dollars or we expose condition y to your health insurance provider.'
Come to think of it, all they'd need to do is pretend they had the info, someone would be bound to be hiding a condition they could hit with random emails.
Most species go extinct because they run out of habitat. Habitat includes lots of things, land, temperature, shelter, food. If one of those is messed up, they die off.
The Mammoths habitat doesn't exist any more. I realise it existed at the time, but it doesn't now. Also man didn't kill them all off, it was the end of the ice age that did for them finally, we just cleared the populations in a lot of regions.
Others (when we're the cause) can be hunting that leaves the habitat intact, but define 'intact'. The dodo likely couldn't survive in its native land now because it had no resistance to rats, and was docile.
The Moa was a huge bird. I'm not so sure the NZ population would be happy to have a mega fauna species introduced, even if it once lived there and the stuff it needs is stil around.
I wouldn't worry too much. Negroponte has pretty much handed over control of his project to Microsoft now, since he's demonstrated that if they want something he'll do it without worrying.
With Microsoft at the helm we can all rest easy in the knowledge that the OLPC experience will soon become so complicated, restricted and slow that no-one will want to use them anyway.
Well, yes, it would be interesting to see them again, but the woolly mammoth had a huge range. You couldn't just keep them in Zoos, that would be cruel.
Might as well do some CGI of them and show movies to people.
Also, that's some disturbing sig you've got there:-)
Reality check here, they aren't trying to create a means to save animals that go extinct. It wouldn't work anyway, because many creatures require habitat that dissapears, That being what makes them go extinct in the first place.
Few animals go extinct in a way that means they could be realistically revived. A shame, but true, so that would be a losing strategy.
Lets look at a recent example, the baiji dolphin. It is now functionally, if not totally, extinct, and a major part of the cause was the fact that their habitat is no longer what it used to be, i.e a vast, silty, *quiet* river. Now it's a vast, crowded, polluted river. Hunting was a problem too, but wouldn't have been had not the environment changed so much (meaning if there were less humans utilizing the river). They've been hunted for thousands of years and only became endangered after the wide scale industrialization of the Yangtze River.
Same for the woolly mammoth. As interesting and challenging as the recreation of that species is (and possible too, there are still frozen mammoths being excavated with intact testicles). The big problem is that they are huge creates whose habitat is long gone. Where would they go if we made them again?
The Tasmanian Tiger is a special case, being rendered extinct fairly recently, and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact.
As for saving the animals in the first place, got a few trillion dollers to pay off the poverty line hugging people that are being paid pennies to actually go out and cut down habitats to make rich people richer? Cos I haven't.
Still, that's nice to know. Personally I think it would be better if they got someone in who actually understood how to properly present such things so as to interest the current generation.
I was particularly annoyed about their state of repair and poor presentation because to be honest they were the only thing I was interested in. When I went there the computer history collection (or whatever it's called) was housed there. That turned out to be the most interesting part of my day. They actually had an Einstein. You don't know how much I wanted one of those...
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I can't imagine england is morally capable of this kind of thing
You may find it instructive to research how England got its first tea plants from China. That is possibly one of the finest feats of industrial espionage in history.
Also, check out the antics of the East India company, and ponder what happened to all that money and power, think it evaporated away and england is all cuddles and sweetness now?
China is just doing exactly what the US, Russia, England, and every other nation is doing, and has done for hundreds of years, which is stealing each others secrets...
And the recent power outages are due to badly maintained and or out of date hardware thats not very fault tolerant.
I might have my cynical head on though.
I'm not sure I agree. The first book was awesome, but they deteriorate after that, becoming progressively less interesting.
Asimov himself admitted that he had no idea how to end the series. Personally I think it should have ended with book one.
That's the simple reality of the dot com boom bust experience.
Those who saw what was coming and ran with the cash did well, and in so doing demonstrated that they had a superior grasp of the nature of the dot com boom/bust event.
The IT industry has been seriously cut throat from the start, only those prepared to bend rules and be occasionally brutal to the competition or their investors have emerged as winners.
Someones bound to bring up googles famous 'do no evil' statement. I ask you though, would that ever have been said if the person who wrote it on the whiteboard wasn't aware that either evil had been done, or was likely to happen?
Personally I can't believe that google got to where it is by being all sweetness and light.
The apparent ease with which Microsoft achieved this does beg the question 'how many times has this happened before?'.
ISO's been around for a while, and I can't see that this is the first standard that stood to make the controlling company rich. There's no doubt Microsoft would have remained in control of the standard, 6000 pages of complex specification that even they haven't yet implemented fully can mean nothing else.
So, are we about to see the dirty secrets of ISO revealed? Will we find that the top bods have been lining their little pockets?
I hope not, but I'm very dubious.
Nonsense, .NET is quite possibly Microsofts one winning strategy in the programming language world.
.NET, I don't see it going away any time soon.
.NET compatible version of Python. That's bordering on seriously cool.
I'm guessing you haven't used it, since you mention hearing it's dying, but not your own experience with it. You should give it a go, it's actually rather nice in its c# form.
Given that it is compatible with both Linux and Mac versions of
While your at it, try IronPython, the
How can a customs agent possibly determine the MP3s that I have are, or are not purchased with validity
When it comes to checking all iPods, they can't. What is far more likely is that if they have you tagged for some other problem this will mean they can then have your iPod checked over for possible infringing material.
I'm wondering whether they will be thinking that a full iPod means the content is pirated or not.
Also, it's not just music that can be stored on a iPod, or similar music devices. You can store just about anything, so it will also be that they can look for non media content.
He wrote an application to measure the volume of a Megapodes nest using it.
I found the source on the web a few years back, it's probably around for those of you who want to have a play.
Some of us don't hate vista, we just realize that its a pretty poor product from what is supposed to be the worlds primary software company.
I like XP, I liked windows 95, and I even got on well with windows for workgroups. Vista mostly suffers for being installed on sub standard kit.
It's being sold with Aero on by default on laptops that should be running XP with all prettyness off. I know this because I seem to spend far too much time trying to get the damn things working properly for people.
Too much in Vista was unfinished when it was released, that's undeniable. For Microsoft, given their resources, this is absurd.
Once the average pc being sold becomes powerful enough to run all of Vista well, it'll be great. Right now though it's not.
Oh no, this is great. You can remove windows drm with ease, just run drmbg then FairUse4Wm, and the drm is history.
Why they would use it when its so trivial to reverse is a puzzler to be sure.
The problem is Windows
Don't be naive. The problem is simply worse for Windows because windows is the most heavily used OS.
This idea that Linux is immune from viruses is just stupid. It's not the primary target of most malware, but it is a target. A poorly configured Linux server is pure gold to a spammer.
Thinking that you are safe just because you use Linux is, well, dumb.
And as for Apples various OS products? Well they have only a tiny market share. There isn't going to be the same return on investment of time and effort to attack that as much as windows is attacked.
If you're going to make people sit in an office for 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week then don't expect them to magically drop their personal life just because they're at work
What personal life? You mean chatting about what is going on in their personal life, or actively pursuing it with others outside of your workplace whilst on company time? The former is normal, the latter, unacceptable behavior.
You are at work to work. That doesn't mean it should be boring, and yes, sometime you work with your friends, but too much socializing is bad for business.
having seen the amount of crap that gets sent around work email when it's not monitored, I can see the purpose of checking the email of employees.
Personal emails should only ever be sent from personal email accounts. That's just common sense.
After all, how dumb is it to put personal information into a system that is likely to see it archived for years in a system you are unlikely to have any control over.
Work email should be just for that, work. Just saying that won't work though, people, especially people who use computers, act with some kind of weird collective stupidity at times that can cause even the most sensible people to do and say things they would never do otherwise.
Better to monitor and make sure everyone follows the rules then have an email from your company showing up on the Internet saying something you would never condone.
Before any 'ooh, I've read 1984 so I am an expert on surveillance societies' morons chip in, I'm talking about the cold hard reality of business here. One wrong word can send stock prices through the floor.
Since nothing that is observed is happening at the time of the observation, real time is as good a term as any.
I thought it read 'Superman Birth Observed..
I'm far too tired for slashdot..
I read a quote somewhere that said 'the Internet has finally disproved the hypothesis of an infinite number of monkeys being able to recreate the complete works of shakespeare.'
Sounds right to me.
What bothers me is that all this is built on top of tcp/ip, and that is inherently insecure.
Given that there exists hardware to inspect packets for p2p traffic, how hard would it be to for a person of unpleasant intent to get hold of some of that and start mining 'encrypted' health information.
I can see it now, 'want to get health insurance again? Pay us x dollars or we expose condition y to your health insurance provider.'
Come to think of it, all they'd need to do is pretend they had the info, someone would be bound to be hiding a condition they could hit with random emails.
Most species go extinct because they run out of habitat. Habitat includes lots of things, land, temperature, shelter, food. If one of those is messed up, they die off.
The Mammoths habitat doesn't exist any more. I realise it existed at the time, but it doesn't now. Also man didn't kill them all off, it was the end of the ice age that did for them finally, we just cleared the populations in a lot of regions.
Others (when we're the cause) can be hunting that leaves the habitat intact, but define 'intact'. The dodo likely couldn't survive in its native land now because it had no resistance to rats, and was docile.
The Moa was a huge bird. I'm not so sure the NZ population would be happy to have a mega fauna species introduced, even if it once lived there and the stuff it needs is stil around.
I wouldn't worry too much. Negroponte has pretty much handed over control of his project to Microsoft now, since he's demonstrated that if they want something he'll do it without worrying.
With Microsoft at the helm we can all rest easy in the knowledge that the OLPC experience will soon become so complicated, restricted and slow that no-one will want to use them anyway.
Quicktime has bowels? That must be the source of its shittiness then...
Well, yes, it would be interesting to see them again, but the woolly mammoth had a huge range. You couldn't just keep them in Zoos, that would be cruel.
:-)
Might as well do some CGI of them and show movies to people.
Also, that's some disturbing sig you've got there
Then there was the Passenger Pigeon which didn't die due to loss of habitat, but rather over hunting as cheap meat.
So, um, they'd be hunted back to extinction as cheap meat again?
In that case the mechanism that drove them to extinction is still present.
Reality check here, they aren't trying to create a means to save animals that go extinct. It wouldn't work anyway, because many creatures require habitat that dissapears, That being what makes them go extinct in the first place.
Few animals go extinct in a way that means they could be realistically revived. A shame, but true, so that would be a losing strategy.
Lets look at a recent example, the baiji dolphin. It is now functionally, if not totally, extinct, and a major part of the cause was the fact that their habitat is no longer what it used to be, i.e a vast, silty, *quiet* river. Now it's a vast, crowded, polluted river.
Hunting was a problem too, but wouldn't have been had not the environment changed so much (meaning if there were less humans utilizing the river). They've been hunted for thousands of years and only became endangered after the wide scale industrialization of the Yangtze River.
Same for the woolly mammoth. As interesting and challenging as the recreation of that species is (and possible too, there are still frozen mammoths being excavated with intact testicles). The big problem is that they are huge creates whose habitat is long gone. Where would they go if we made them again?
The Tasmanian Tiger is a special case, being rendered extinct fairly recently, and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact.
As for saving the animals in the first place, got a few trillion dollers to pay off the poverty line hugging people that are being paid pennies to actually go out and cut down habitats to make rich people richer? Cos I haven't.
Read the article? For shame...
Still, that's nice to know. Personally I think it would be better if they got someone in who actually understood how to properly present such things so as to interest the current generation.
I was particularly annoyed about their state of repair and poor presentation because to be honest they were the only thing I was interested in.
When I went there the computer history collection (or whatever it's called) was housed there. That turned out to be the most interesting part of my day.
They actually had an Einstein. You don't know how much I wanted one of those...
Oh dear, I just showed how old I am.
I pay £15 a month for two book credits, and routinely save £10-£30 pounds on books, sometimes more.