Actually Happy Birthday is another case of copyright out of control. It was originally copyrighted in 1935 and the copyright is now held by our friends at AOL-Time Warner. This why all of the restraunts have made up their own tunes to sing for peoples birthdays.
You obviously have no clue whatsoever about the original Trade Wars. Trade Wars has always been an online game. Cmdr. Taco met Hemos, Nate, et. al online and only later face to face.
Let me address your points one at a time:
1) Have you ever played a MMPORPG? Trust is a major issue, if you can't trust people you can't pool your resources for the greater good. And when someone else does pool their resources you are going to be left in the dust.
2) To me slashdot is a meeting of the minds. People have met with technology for years and years. I've heard stories of married couples who met because the woman packed mail order catalog orders and stuck her name and address in the box.
3) It is not the internet's fault that these businesses can't attract any business. A flawed bussines model is not different offline than online and changing technology can make a perfectly good business model flawed. Take door to door milk delivery as a perfect example. As refrigeration and pasturization became viable technologies people bought their milk at the store and not from the milkman.
I think this game is just a game and that you are reading far to much into what it symbolizes.
The thing about Debian is that in addition to all the hardcore pure Debian users you have other distros that are based on Debian plus some bells and whistles. Corel and Storm did this for a while, and Progeney is still doing it. When you count the people using a superset of Debian its percentages go up. What other distribution can you grab the whole main archive of, and know that everything is licensed in a Free as in speach manner. The only licensing issues you have to work out are with the packages you add yourself.
In the past couple of years Debian has had some rocky times, and made some major changes. There was a period of time when they were not accepting new maintainers and a lot of packages fell by the wayside during that time. There were some problems with coordinating the release of the newest release (potato) between the various architectures. I think what he means by this comment is that his bigest accomplishment is not screwing anything up so bad that Debian died.
The key difference between slashdot and a DDOS is the legitimacy of the access.
When slashdot links to a site all they are doing is advertising the existance of said site. Its not that much different from when a gas station does a roll back the clock sale and marks their prices down to $0.49 for the day and it has similar results. Every person going to a site linked to by slashdot has a legitimate reason to go there. Additionally many of the sites benifit from the added traffic. For many of the small sites if just 1 percent of the slashdotters that visit the site keep coming they will have increased their number of readers by an order of magnitude or more, and by increasing their numbers they have increased their earning from any advertising they may do.
The traffic generated by a DDOS attack on the other hand is not legitimate traffic. Its sole intenet is to bring down the site. It dosen't bring new people to the site, it dosen't generate banner revnue for the site it just brings it down. It'd be the equivalent to somehow brainwashing a bunch of people to all get in their cars at the same time, drive down to the gas station. Once they got there they'd pull up to the pump, take the nozzle out, flip the lever and then hang it back up again without pumping any gas. All you are doing is preventing legitimate access from taking place, and in the gas station example they'd all probably get prosocuted for trespassing.
You can't blame slashdot for a site's inability to keep up with legitimate demand, the same way you can't blame the community for a store's inability to keep a hot item in stock, say a Furby a couple Christmases ago. Who do you blame, the store who can't meet demand, and the site who can't keep up with traffic.
Unanimous Consent does mean what the article implies it means. I've served as the parliamentarian for several local student organzations and have actually read Robert's Rules of Order.
Unanimous consent is typically used for minor matters in which do not need a recorded vote. For example to aprove the minutes of a meeting. The way it typically works is that if a call for unanimous consent is made and no one objects within a few seconds then the motion is considered to have passed.
All the Unanimous Consent statement is doing in this case is allowing the Senate to take the bill up from comitte and consider it. It puts no stipulations on the rest of the procedings for the bill, all it has to do is pass by a simple majority like any other.
Thats fine if all they do is knock is on the door. The white hat cracker however is like a missionary who comes in without an invitation. And not only that but if the front door is locked he'll walk around the house and try the windows, the basement door, and the back door. If it is a particuarly vigorus white hat cracker he'll even climb up a ladder and try the upstairs windows. And once he gets in how do I know he didn't make a copy of the key that was laying on my dresser so he can get back in any time?
In an ideal world this wouldn't be an issue, but this isn't an ideal world. How do we know that a "white hat" isn't a black hat pretending to be a white hat. He'll point out the obvious holes in your box, and leave a way that only he knows about to get in. Then six months latter when you've forgotten about it you find out your network that he has systematically infiltriated is being used for to coordinate a DDOS attack against somebody like the FBI.
I don't have a problem with scans. I don't have a problem with someone saying "I saw that the version of bind that you are runing is out of date, there are security holes in it" But when someone uses that vulnerability to break into my system it becomes a whole new ball game.
First off, if you read the article you'll realize that the supply ship that will be docking on the 26th is a Russian Progress unit that has been up for about a month or so. It went up shortly after they took residence on the station. So when that unit went up they still had two spares for the fan unit.
Secondly even if the third fan were to go, and no one could launch in the 14 day time frame we still wouldn't be runing a risk of losing anyone. There is a Soyez capsule attacked to the station, the same one that they used to get to the station that they can evacuate in at any time.
I too would expect a book entitled "Perl for System Administrators" to assume no knowledge of perl. The problem is that someone botched the title in the review. The actual title of the book is "Perl for System Administration". Those few letters make a huge difference in what the goal of the book most likely is.
By the time anything is aproaching standardization and wide spread use it is obsolete.
Its a catch-22, if a product is wide spread and popular then you have to maintain compatibility or risk upseting the user base. Thats a big part of the reason why the x86 architecture is still in use. There are things chip manufacturers can do to greatly improve chip performance but they break the ever important backwards compatibility. Joe User dosen't care if a chip is a RISC or a CISC chip so long as he can run Windows and type his spreadsheet. But Joe User is comforted by the fact that if he wants to run Wolfenstien on his system that all the hardware changes over the years haven't made that impossible.
The same goes for standardization. There is a Java standard set by Sun, and every browser of note has a Java VM in it. Sun has to be very careful about what they do to Java because while I'm sure there is stuff they could do to make Java better, have more functionality etc, they run the risk of breaking both the VM and angering programmers who have made an investment in learning Java as it exists today.
Any tool or library goes through an early stage where it is very dynamic and flowing, because the number of people affected is minimal. As it gains wider acceptance the development cycle slows down and eventually the tool stagnates. Somewhere along the line someone develops a new tool that surpases the old tool in one way or another. Around the time that the new tools functionality begins to exceed that of the old tools is when the new tool will stagnate. Why? Because at this point more and more people will start to use it because it is better. But the more people that use it the more any changes have to be analyzed for their impact.
Take a look at Motif vs GTK. As I understand it both are windowing toolkits. For the longest time Motif was "it" when it came to graphical toolkits. But it stagnated, part of the stagnation was that it didn't go open source. Along comes gtk, and early on, no one uses it because the early versions stink. But that means that stuff that dosen't work well can be purged out and replaced. Then it gets big, people start switching to it from Motif, more and more people start using it. So now, every change that the developers make to the functionality of the program they have to look and see if it will help more people then it will hurt. As a result it will begin to stagnate, and something else will come down the road a little later.
I don't think you are recalling correctly. I know that in the county in which I live the election board mails out a sample ballot that except for being printed on paper instead of cardboard is identical to the real ballot.
Part of the issue could also be "required" packages. Its been a while since the last time I installed Debian from scratch, but if memory serves, required, and maybe important packages get selected for install the first time you run dselect and if you don't want them installed you have to manually deselect them. This usually isn't a problem since these packages are for the most part packages needed to take your system from a machine that can boot linux but not do much to a useful debian box.
First and foremost every linux distribution caters, or atleast claims to cater to a specific subsection of the linux population. If you want the most recognized linux distribution, with the one of the bigest installed bases out there you run RedHat. If you want a distribution that is as tight as a drum you apply Bastille Linux. If you want productivity suties cleanly integrated into your install process you run Corel Linux (which BTW is based on Debian.) If you feel like supporting User Friendly you run Suse. If you want a distribution that you know all the parts work well together in you run Debian.
The author of this article seems to lack an understanding of the Debian release cycle. Debian was frozen before several of the release he mentions came out. Once Debian has been frozen getting a new package into it becomes substanially more difficult. Now before everyone screams about how now that potato (Debian 2.2) is stable these fixes can't make it in, keep in mind that security fixes are one of the items on the very short list of packages that can be changed once a release goes stable.
Joe Homeuser most likely isn't going to choose Debian as his distribution. Most people who choose Debian do so because the support Open Source ideals to the extreme and as such have problem been around the Open Source block a time or two and atleast have some idea what they are doing.
Are these valid secutiry holes in potato? Yes! Should someone have written an article bringing them to light? Yes! Is this a big enough deal to warrant a Slashdot Story? No! It should be a quickie at best.
For those of you who are too lazy to do the search for yourselves and haven't seen it before, details on how to activiate the flight simulator bug can be found at this site.
One of the big problems with the classic open source argument of "you can examine the source" in the "trusted" market is that it dosen't apply exclusively to open source projects. The bucks for this kind of thing are substantial enough that even M$ will open the source up to the auditors. On top of that the cost difference is not as substantial because the cost of having the suytem audited has to be figured into the TCO.
Also, like many people have pointed out development cycle time is less important because of the large time constant involved in testing. Basicly if closed source can get a release out in x amount of time and open source in x/4 time both will require c amount of time to test. While becomes negligble for sufficently large value of x, sufficently large value of x results in massively obsolete code.
The best way that open source can get a solid foothold on the trusted systems market is with the production of quality systems. If it does the job better then anything else on the market then people will use it. If it dosen't then they won't.
This could be the patent mistake that finally wakes the general public up to just how messed up the Intelectual Property laws have gotten. Most of the screwy patent decisions that have been made so far have only atracted the attention of the "geeks." This one has the potential to attract widespread attention.
Lets face it, how many people have the potential to be affected by Amazon's affiliate program patent or the one-click patent? It dosen't affect Joe Web User. This has the potential to affect us all where we are most sensitive the wallet.
Hopefully this is just a misinterpretation of some statement made by a moronic middle manager, but if it isn't then we could be in for a wild ride. Remember one of the necesities for any form of government is the consent of the governed. Even in the cold war soviet union the people consented, granted at the threat of death, to be governed. If everyone, and I don't mean everyone on slashdot, I mean a majority of the population of a given country, refuse to be governed by a law then there is nothing that the government can do about it.
Sure, Apogee might have enough of brain to realize that it isn't in their best intrests to do this, but they still have the ability. And it won't always be up to the people with a clue to decide. If prosocuting someone under the terms of UCITA would result in a substantial profit for a company it is quite possible that due diligence laws might come into effect, forcing the company to do so, against their better judgement.
And what about the behemoths that don't care if the allienate those of us that support freedom. To a microsoft or an AOL the damage that negative comments could do to their bottom line far outweighs the negative feedback about the software product. And if they were to design a product that atuomates the locating of negative feedback would making coments to the fact that they locate negative feedback also be covered by UCITA?
UCITA is bad. Especially for those of us who live in states like MD where the UCITA, even a weakend version of it, is scheduled to become law in the near future.
Take a closer look at John Woo's other movies, especially his American movies like Face/Off. If you diagram the action it is actually quite similar. You've got the initial capture, and after that there is probably about an hour where the only thing going on is Cage and Travolta trying trying not to get found out.
Then at the very end of the movie we have the massive action sequences, complete with Woo's trademark doves. I think CmdrTaco hits the nail on the head when he says that by being a John Woo movie it is either an automatic plus or a first strike depending on your opinion of Woo. Woo is one of those directors that some people love and some people hate.
The thing you have to keep in mind about this movie is that it is an action flick. Even more then that it is a John Woo action flick. The plot is not going to be impecible, and the action scenes are going to show his style.
You have to keep in mind that the target audience for a movie like this is not 18-35 geek crowd, its the 13-24 testosterone crowd. They don't care if the plot has a few holes in it, so long as 1)The explosions are cool. 2)The fight scenes are cool. 3)They get to see something to titilate them.
Take a look at the Bond films, they follow a very similar formula, and have been wildly succesful. They say imitation is the sincerist form of flatery and I think that it shows true for the Mission Impossible movies.
The only bad thing about this player is that AIWA is giving RIAA more bullets to put into the gun. They mention in their advertisment or press release that the usual way people get mp3s is to download them off the internet. The miss all the users who are making legal copies of mp3s off their own CDs.
The bright side is that if that this is a major car audio vendor selling this thing. If they think there is money to be had from the market then they have the deep corprate pockets to fight RIAA if they try and sue them. The more market penetration mp3 players get beyond the nerds the more the old making a copy of a cd you own to listen to on your tape player becomes a valid argument.
I think you also have to take into account the different climates and cultures that exist throughout the world. I've never heard of any diplomatic posts in Europe being considered a "hazardous duty" posting because of climate, but for much of the 18th and early 19th century Washington D.C. was considered just that, because it had the effective climate of a malarial swamp (and this was before all the beauracrats moved in).
As several other people have pointed out this item did not refer just to air conditioning but also to refrigeration. Without mechanical refregeration we would still be depending on people cutting blocks of ice in the winter and delivering them to our doors. The need for refrigeration in the U.S. is also do to societial issues. Here in the U.S. we do not have a butcher, baker, etc on every street that we visit every day. Instead we have a few large supermarkets that we visit a few times a week.
Lastly without refrigeration we'd be without many of the other products that we don't even associate refrigeation with. There are many manufacturing processes that at some point either in actual production or in the delivery of raw materials make use of liquid CO2 or N2. Aluminum plants are one case of this. I don't know the details, but I know that when aluminum plant workers strike the police will escort some of the deliveries in because the involve super-cooled liquids, which can be highly dangerous.
Suffice it to say that refrigeration has a far reaching impact. I find myself more inclined to agree with the previous poster who felt that refrigeration belonged higher, not lower in the list.
Arg!! I have to wait 8 months for this!
on
New Ender Sequel
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· Score: 1
After being absolutely riveted by the first five chapters what upset me most about this book is that it dosen't come out until January 2, 2001. This book looks like it is going to give me exactly what I want from a sequel, more of the same characters. The same plot can only take you through one book, but character development is what makes me keep coming back for book after book.
What makes you want to see The Empire Strikes Back after watching Star Wars? Its not that the plot of Star Wars needs Empire to be complete, Star Wars was written and produced to stand on its own. The studio expected it to be a flop relative to American Graffiti, and was basically just humoring Lucas. You go see Empire because you want to learn what is going to happen the characters. Will Luke and Leia get together, or will she end up with Han etc.
That is the beautiful thing about Ender's Game. Yes it has a plot hook into the rest of the series, but it stands without them. What makes Card a truly amazing author is the mileage that he has been able to get out Ender's Game. How many people are able to keep going back to the same roots and still produce quality work 20 years later? Some of my favorite authors can't even do it. Piers Anthony did a wonderful job with the early Xanth books, my first, and one of my favorites is Castle Roogna, but the recent books in the series have descended to an infantile level.
This book looks truly interesting, as reunites us with the characters that we got close to back when we first read Ender's Game. At the same time it takes a look at them in fresh situations, giving Card all the more flexibility in continuing their growth. I just wish I didn't have to wait 8 months to read the rest of this book!
If you take a look at the who we are section of their web site you will see that the vast majority of the people involved with the game and the web site are from foreign countries, in particular spain. Their grammer is very consistent with people who are just starting to learn english. English and spanish have substantially different sentance structure.
There have been great coders from many nations, and not just english speaking ones. Granted that the vast majority of compilers work on source code that uses commands in english, but learning what the couple 100 reserved words are, as well as the very consistent structure of a programming language is easier then learning the whole english vocabulary and grammer structure. How many adult native english speakers are still to this day confused by their there and they're.
I'm sure that with the infant nature of this project that the exposure that they will get from slashdot will result in an inflow of the number of people helping them out. Lets see how things look here in a month or so when the help they get from slashdot readers who become interested in the project has had a chance to make some changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Happy Birthday is another case of copyright out of control. It was originally copyrighted in 1935 and the copyright is now held by our friends at AOL-Time Warner. This why all of the restraunts have made up their own tunes to sing for peoples birthdays.
You obviously have no clue whatsoever about the original Trade Wars. Trade Wars has always been an online game. Cmdr. Taco met Hemos, Nate, et. al online and only later face to face.
Let me address your points one at a time:
1) Have you ever played a MMPORPG? Trust is a major issue, if you can't trust people you can't pool your resources for the greater good. And when someone else does pool their resources you are going to be left in the dust.
2) To me slashdot is a meeting of the minds. People have met with technology for years and years. I've heard stories of married couples who met because the woman packed mail order catalog orders and stuck her name and address in the box.
3) It is not the internet's fault that these businesses can't attract any business. A flawed bussines model is not different offline than online and changing technology can make a perfectly good business model flawed. Take door to door milk delivery as a perfect example. As refrigeration and pasturization became viable technologies people bought their milk at the store and not from the milkman.
I think this game is just a game and that you are reading far to much into what it symbolizes.
The thing about Debian is that in addition to all the hardcore pure Debian users you have other distros that are based on Debian plus some bells and whistles. Corel and Storm did this for a while, and Progeney is still doing it. When you count the people using a superset of Debian its percentages go up. What other distribution can you grab the whole main archive of, and know that everything is licensed in a Free as in speach manner. The only licensing issues you have to work out are with the packages you add yourself.
In the past couple of years Debian has had some rocky times, and made some major changes. There was a period of time when they were not accepting new maintainers and a lot of packages fell by the wayside during that time. There were some problems with coordinating the release of the newest release (potato) between the various architectures. I think what he means by this comment is that his bigest accomplishment is not screwing anything up so bad that Debian died.
The key difference between slashdot and a DDOS is the legitimacy of the access.
When slashdot links to a site all they are doing is advertising the existance of said site. Its not that much different from when a gas station does a roll back the clock sale and marks their prices down to $0.49 for the day and it has similar results. Every person going to a site linked to by slashdot has a legitimate reason to go there. Additionally many of the sites benifit from the added traffic. For many of the small sites if just 1 percent of the slashdotters that visit the site keep coming they will have increased their number of readers by an order of magnitude or more, and by increasing their numbers they have increased their earning from any advertising they may do.
The traffic generated by a DDOS attack on the other hand is not legitimate traffic. Its sole intenet is to bring down the site. It dosen't bring new people to the site, it dosen't generate banner revnue for the site it just brings it down. It'd be the equivalent to somehow brainwashing a bunch of people to all get in their cars at the same time, drive down to the gas station. Once they got there they'd pull up to the pump, take the nozzle out, flip the lever and then hang it back up again without pumping any gas. All you are doing is preventing legitimate access from taking place, and in the gas station example they'd all probably get prosocuted for trespassing.
You can't blame slashdot for a site's inability to keep up with legitimate demand, the same way you can't blame the community for a store's inability to keep a hot item in stock, say a Furby a couple Christmases ago. Who do you blame, the store who can't meet demand, and the site who can't keep up with traffic.
Take a look at W3C's WebCGM and SVG recomendations.
Unanimous Consent does mean what the article implies it means. I've served as the parliamentarian for several local student organzations and have actually read Robert's Rules of Order.
Unanimous consent is typically used for minor matters in which do not need a recorded vote. For example to aprove the minutes of a meeting. The way it typically works is that if a call for unanimous consent is made and no one objects within a few seconds then the motion is considered to have passed.
All the Unanimous Consent statement is doing in this case is allowing the Senate to take the bill up from comitte and consider it. It puts no stipulations on the rest of the procedings for the bill, all it has to do is pass by a simple majority like any other.
Thats fine if all they do is knock is on the door. The white hat cracker however is like a missionary who comes in without an invitation. And not only that but if the front door is locked he'll walk around the house and try the windows, the basement door, and the back door. If it is a particuarly vigorus white hat cracker he'll even climb up a ladder and try the upstairs windows. And once he gets in how do I know he didn't make a copy of the key that was laying on my dresser so he can get back in any time?
In an ideal world this wouldn't be an issue, but this isn't an ideal world. How do we know that a "white hat" isn't a black hat pretending to be a white hat. He'll point out the obvious holes in your box, and leave a way that only he knows about to get in. Then six months latter when you've forgotten about it you find out your network that he has systematically infiltriated is being used for to coordinate a DDOS attack against somebody like the FBI.
I don't have a problem with scans. I don't have a problem with someone saying "I saw that the version of bind that you are runing is out of date, there are security holes in it" But when someone uses that vulnerability to break into my system it becomes a whole new ball game.
First off, if you read the article you'll realize that the supply ship that will be docking on the 26th is a Russian Progress unit that has been up for about a month or so. It went up shortly after they took residence on the station. So when that unit went up they still had two spares for the fan unit.
Secondly even if the third fan were to go, and no one could launch in the 14 day time frame we still wouldn't be runing a risk of losing anyone. There is a Soyez capsule attacked to the station, the same one that they used to get to the station that they can evacuate in at any time.
It was the Dodge Neon campaign.
I too would expect a book entitled "Perl for System Administrators" to assume no knowledge of perl. The problem is that someone botched the title in the review. The actual title of the book is "Perl for System Administration". Those few letters make a huge difference in what the goal of the book most likely is.
By the time anything is aproaching standardization and wide spread use it is obsolete.
Its a catch-22, if a product is wide spread and popular then you have to maintain compatibility or risk upseting the user base. Thats a big part of the reason why the x86 architecture is still in use. There are things chip manufacturers can do to greatly improve chip performance but they break the ever important backwards compatibility. Joe User dosen't care if a chip is a RISC or a CISC chip so long as he can run Windows and type his spreadsheet. But Joe User is comforted by the fact that if he wants to run Wolfenstien on his system that all the hardware changes over the years haven't made that impossible.
The same goes for standardization. There is a Java standard set by Sun, and every browser of note has a Java VM in it. Sun has to be very careful about what they do to Java because while I'm sure there is stuff they could do to make Java better, have more functionality etc, they run the risk of breaking both the VM and angering programmers who have made an investment in learning Java as it exists today.
Any tool or library goes through an early stage where it is very dynamic and flowing, because the number of people affected is minimal. As it gains wider acceptance the development cycle slows down and eventually the tool stagnates. Somewhere along the line someone develops a new tool that surpases the old tool in one way or another. Around the time that the new tools functionality begins to exceed that of the old tools is when the new tool will stagnate. Why? Because at this point more and more people will start to use it because it is better. But the more people that use it the more any changes have to be analyzed for their impact.
Take a look at Motif vs GTK. As I understand it both are windowing toolkits. For the longest time Motif was "it" when it came to graphical toolkits. But it stagnated, part of the stagnation was that it didn't go open source. Along comes gtk, and early on, no one uses it because the early versions stink. But that means that stuff that dosen't work well can be purged out and replaced. Then it gets big, people start switching to it from Motif, more and more people start using it. So now, every change that the developers make to the functionality of the program they have to look and see if it will help more people then it will hurt. As a result it will begin to stagnate, and something else will come down the road a little later.
I don't think you are recalling correctly. I know that in the county in which I live the election board mails out a sample ballot that except for being printed on paper instead of cardboard is identical to the real ballot.
Part of the issue could also be "required" packages. Its been a while since the last time I installed Debian from scratch, but if memory serves, required, and maybe important packages get selected for install the first time you run dselect and if you don't want them installed you have to manually deselect them. This usually isn't a problem since these packages are for the most part packages needed to take your system from a machine that can boot linux but not do much to a useful debian box.
First and foremost every linux distribution caters, or atleast claims to cater to a specific subsection of the linux population. If you want the most recognized linux distribution, with the one of the bigest installed bases out there you run RedHat. If you want a distribution that is as tight as a drum you apply Bastille Linux. If you want productivity suties cleanly integrated into your install process you run Corel Linux (which BTW is based on Debian.) If you feel like supporting User Friendly you run Suse. If you want a distribution that you know all the parts work well together in you run Debian.
The author of this article seems to lack an understanding of the Debian release cycle. Debian was frozen before several of the release he mentions came out. Once Debian has been frozen getting a new package into it becomes substanially more difficult. Now before everyone screams about how now that potato (Debian 2.2) is stable these fixes can't make it in, keep in mind that security fixes are one of the items on the very short list of packages that can be changed once a release goes stable.
Joe Homeuser most likely isn't going to choose Debian as his distribution. Most people who choose Debian do so because the support Open Source ideals to the extreme and as such have problem been around the Open Source block a time or two and atleast have some idea what they are doing.
Are these valid secutiry holes in potato? Yes! Should someone have written an article bringing them to light? Yes! Is this a big enough deal to warrant a Slashdot Story? No! It should be a quickie at best.
For those of you who are too lazy to do the search for yourselves and haven't seen it before, details on how to activiate the flight simulator bug can be found at this site.
One of the big problems with the classic open source argument of "you can examine the source" in the "trusted" market is that it dosen't apply exclusively to open source projects. The bucks for this kind of thing are substantial enough that even M$ will open the source up to the auditors. On top of that the cost difference is not as substantial because the cost of having the suytem audited has to be figured into the TCO.
Also, like many people have pointed out development cycle time is less important because of the large time constant involved in testing. Basicly if closed source can get a release out in x amount of time and open source in x/4 time both will require c amount of time to test. While becomes negligble for sufficently large value of x, sufficently large value of x results in massively obsolete code.
The best way that open source can get a solid foothold on the trusted systems market is with the production of quality systems. If it does the job better then anything else on the market then people will use it. If it dosen't then they won't.
This could be the patent mistake that finally wakes the general public up to just how messed up the Intelectual Property laws have gotten. Most of the screwy patent decisions that have been made so far have only atracted the attention of the "geeks." This one has the potential to attract widespread attention.
Lets face it, how many people have the potential to be affected by Amazon's affiliate program patent or the one-click patent? It dosen't affect Joe Web User. This has the potential to affect us all where we are most sensitive the wallet.
Hopefully this is just a misinterpretation of some statement made by a moronic middle manager, but if it isn't then we could be in for a wild ride. Remember one of the necesities for any form of government is the consent of the governed. Even in the cold war soviet union the people consented, granted at the threat of death, to be governed. If everyone, and I don't mean everyone on slashdot, I mean a majority of the population of a given country, refuse to be governed by a law then there is nothing that the government can do about it.
Actually, the select was only if you wanted to two player mode.
Sure, Apogee might have enough of brain to realize that it isn't in their best intrests to do this, but they still have the ability. And it won't always be up to the people with a clue to decide. If prosocuting someone under the terms of UCITA would result in a substantial profit for a company it is quite possible that due diligence laws might come into effect, forcing the company to do so, against their better judgement.
And what about the behemoths that don't care if the allienate those of us that support freedom. To a microsoft or an AOL the damage that negative comments could do to their bottom line far outweighs the negative feedback about the software product. And if they were to design a product that atuomates the locating of negative feedback would making coments to the fact that they locate negative feedback also be covered by UCITA?
UCITA is bad. Especially for those of us who live in states like MD where the UCITA, even a weakend version of it, is scheduled to become law in the near future.
Take a closer look at John Woo's other movies, especially his American movies like Face/Off. If you diagram the action it is actually quite similar. You've got the initial capture, and after that there is probably about an hour where the only thing going on is Cage and Travolta trying trying not to get found out.
Then at the very end of the movie we have the massive action sequences, complete with Woo's trademark doves. I think CmdrTaco hits the nail on the head when he says that by being a John Woo movie it is either an automatic plus or a first strike depending on your opinion of Woo. Woo is one of those directors that some people love and some people hate.
The thing you have to keep in mind about this movie is that it is an action flick. Even more then that it is a John Woo action flick. The plot is not going to be impecible, and the action scenes are going to show his style.
You have to keep in mind that the target audience for a movie like this is not 18-35 geek crowd, its the 13-24 testosterone crowd. They don't care if the plot has a few holes in it, so long as 1)The explosions are cool. 2)The fight scenes are cool. 3)They get to see something to titilate them.
Take a look at the Bond films, they follow a very similar formula, and have been wildly succesful. They say imitation is the sincerist form of flatery and I think that it shows true for the Mission Impossible movies.
The only bad thing about this player is that AIWA is giving RIAA more bullets to put into the gun. They mention in their advertisment or press release that the usual way people get mp3s is to download them off the internet. The miss all the users who are making legal copies of mp3s off their own CDs.
The bright side is that if that this is a major car audio vendor selling this thing. If they think there is money to be had from the market then they have the deep corprate pockets to fight RIAA if they try and sue them. The more market penetration mp3 players get beyond the nerds the more the old making a copy of a cd you own to listen to on your tape player becomes a valid argument.
I think you also have to take into account the different climates and cultures that exist throughout the world. I've never heard of any diplomatic posts in Europe being considered a "hazardous duty" posting because of climate, but for much of the 18th and early 19th century Washington D.C. was considered just that, because it had the effective climate of a malarial swamp (and this was before all the beauracrats moved in).
As several other people have pointed out this item did not refer just to air conditioning but also to refrigeration. Without mechanical refregeration we would still be depending on people cutting blocks of ice in the winter and delivering them to our doors. The need for refrigeration in the U.S. is also do to societial issues. Here in the U.S. we do not have a butcher, baker, etc on every street that we visit every day. Instead we have a few large supermarkets that we visit a few times a week.
Lastly without refrigeration we'd be without many of the other products that we don't even associate refrigeation with. There are many manufacturing processes that at some point either in actual production or in the delivery of raw materials make use of liquid CO2 or N2. Aluminum plants are one case of this. I don't know the details, but I know that when aluminum plant workers strike the police will escort some of the deliveries in because the involve super-cooled liquids, which can be highly dangerous.
Suffice it to say that refrigeration has a far reaching impact. I find myself more inclined to agree with the previous poster who felt that refrigeration belonged higher, not lower in the list.
After being absolutely riveted by the first five chapters what upset me most about this book is that it dosen't come out until January 2, 2001. This book looks like it is going to give me exactly what I want from a sequel, more of the same characters. The same plot can only take you through one book, but character development is what makes me keep coming back for book after book.
What makes you want to see The Empire Strikes Back after watching Star Wars? Its not that the plot of Star Wars needs Empire to be complete, Star Wars was written and produced to stand on its own. The studio expected it to be a flop relative to American Graffiti, and was basically just humoring Lucas. You go see Empire because you want to learn what is going to happen the characters. Will Luke and Leia get together, or will she end up with Han etc.
That is the beautiful thing about Ender's Game. Yes it has a plot hook into the rest of the series, but it stands without them. What makes Card a truly amazing author is the mileage that he has been able to get out Ender's Game. How many people are able to keep going back to the same roots and still produce quality work 20 years later? Some of my favorite authors can't even do it. Piers Anthony did a wonderful job with the early Xanth books, my first, and one of my favorites is Castle Roogna, but the recent books in the series have descended to an infantile level.
This book looks truly interesting, as reunites us with the characters that we got close to back when we first read Ender's Game. At the same time it takes a look at them in fresh situations, giving Card all the more flexibility in continuing their growth. I just wish I didn't have to wait 8 months to read the rest of this book!
If you take a look at the who we are section of their web site you will see that the vast majority of the people involved with the game and the web site are from foreign countries, in particular spain. Their grammer is very consistent with people who are just starting to learn english. English and spanish have substantially different sentance structure.
There have been great coders from many nations, and not just english speaking ones. Granted that the vast majority of compilers work on source code that uses commands in english, but learning what the couple 100 reserved words are, as well as the very consistent structure of a programming language is easier then learning the whole english vocabulary and grammer structure. How many adult native english speakers are still to this day confused by their there and they're.
I'm sure that with the infant nature of this project that the exposure that they will get from slashdot will result in an inflow of the number of people helping them out. Lets see how things look here in a month or so when the help they get from slashdot readers who become interested in the project has had a chance to make some changes.