"However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure"
The usual thing you'd do with a server with low disk I/O, maybe some webservers that talk to a db server on real hardware? Laptops have low power consumption, built-in 4-6 hour UPS, built-in keyboard and display.
Yeah, I watched Iron Man in the cinema and it was worth it. Not so sure about the recent Indiana Jones and the Tarzan Kid of Doom - some relatives wanted to see it so we went, as per normal movies I set my IQ to low (and suspension of disbelief to medium), and it initially went like an average Indy Jones movie but when Tarzan Boy started swinging from tree to tree, let's just say my default configuration wasn't ready for that).
I'm glad I didn't watch Star Wars Episode 2-3 in the cinema.
LoTR = worth it on large screen (I must say the last one seemed to have like 12 endings and they couldn't decide which ones to cut so they showed them all;) ).
In my country there are plenty of distributors of Unauthorized Copies, but people were queuing up to watch LoTR in the cinemas, even _weeks_ after the first screening, tickets were often sold out.
You make a good movie, people will buy the tickets. People can make coffee at home and many have fancy expensive coffee machines at home, but lots of people still go to Starbucks and pay for coffee.
I don't have any huge loyalty to Google, just like I didn't have any to Altavista or Infoseek or Hotbot or whoever else did search in the old days.
I won't pay Google as long as there's one other that's almost as good and doesn't charge.
Yahoo's search engine is OK ( http://search.yahoo.com/ ). In fact it can be better than Google's at some queries. I just use Google because they are still good enough for me not to bother switching (they're not as good as the old days because of all the spamming and fake sites).
But if they're the only "no charge" one left, I might use them.
I suspect if private corps didn't do search for free, Governments might start to do it. I'm sure the Chinese Government will be very happy if only the Chinese Government was "willing" to provide search services to people living in China.
If I were the equivalent of the NSA in a country and there were no free search engines, I would certainly provide search services via a front company - pay the front company millions for ads that hardly ever get shown etc. Always good to know what people doing, and a good way to keep people from finding stuff you don't want them to find is to provide them other stuff to find instead;).
Does Hotel 81 really have a hotel in Beijing? I thought Hotel 81 was a Singapore-only hotel chain.
As for the Chinese complaining about whites taking away their girls, the last I recall the Chinese in China didn't want baby girls (abortions, artificial selection etc).
"It's a very large place so you'll get different answers to just about any question depending on where they are from"
I bet that's how the "news media" all get their quotes. Get quotes from 100 or so people on the street/web. Broadcast/publish the ones in line with your agenda. Interview enough people and some will say what you want to say.
It's like one of those collages. The little bits are from different sources, but the resulting picture people are supposed to perceive is carefully crafted.
How many cases have there been where email evidence was used out of context or misinterpreted by the courts/jury so that the innocent got hurt?
How many cases have there been where email evidence was used to nail the guilty bastards?
So tell me, is it really a good thing for emails to be deleted?
What does it tell you about the company? It has lots of guilty bastards? Do you want to continue working in such a company? They could blame _YOU_ for something and if you're innocent where's the evidence to protect you? If you're keeping your evidence against company policy have a nice day;).
As for personal emails, I try to keep most personal emails. Hard disk space is cheap, so why bother taking the time to figure out whether an email is important or not?
You might not even want to bother deleting spam - some people keep a store of spam so that they can test/tune antispam systems/filters.
Lastly, I think many people do work with projects that last more than 6 months. Sometimes your memory might fail, sometimes your boss's memory might fail, sometimes your colleagues forget.
And sometimes when people ask the same questions it's convenient to just dig out the reply/explanation and resend it (email programs should have a decent and fast search - kmail is too slow). If it keeps happening maybe you put it in a FAQ somewhere and then you might add a link to it;).
They hack each other to death. And one machete can kill and keep killing for quite a long time.
I'm not sure what really can be done.
The main thing is the rich countries have other priorities.
1) The rich countries with farmers, subsidize their farmers (go confirm it yourself). So guess what happens to farmers in countries too poor to subsidize their farmers - they can't compete. Any farming will be just for growing food for themselves - farming won't drag them out of poverty. Or giving up and getting food from "foreign aid". Think about it - how can a farmer get significant $$$ if almost everyone around them is a subsistence farmer, and if you're not a farmer why buy food from a local farmer who can't sell you food cheaper than "foreign aid" or cheaper food from subsidized farmers in other countries? Yes I know this is a simplification.
2) The hypocritical rich countries keep making the poor countries play by different rules (don't subsidize your farmers, open your markets), or encourage them to do stupid stuff like sell their reserves to pay back loans. Read between the lines here: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/malawi.htm and note this is a PR release by the IMF, go look for a less charitable view on what happened). Yeah maybe the IMF didn't tell them to sell everything, but with "help" like this guess why Africa is having such big problems. It's like telling some farmer you _know_ has had a track record for being _stupid_ and who owes you money: "pay back now!", then when he sells all his grain to pay you back, and his family is starving, you say "Oh it's not my fault, nobody told him to sell all his grain". Right, they're such a great help to Africa aren't they?
Sometimes I wonder if China is really doing such a bad thing by "colonizing" Africa (that's what the Westerners like to call it anyway). The Europeans have had their turn, the Africans themselves have also had their turn (some have done the "kick all the whiteys out" thing and it didn't work that well eh?) and neither have done a good job.
As far as I see the Chinese want the raw materials fast, plentiful and cheap. Wars and riots don't help with that. So maybe they might figure something out. Some parts of Africa may start looking like some parts of China - practically no government involvement - just factories/mines with a few independent entrepreneurs selling phones, snacks etc. There'll probably be a fair bit of killing of people who "aren't good for business" by the military (sponsored by the Chinese). BUT, hopefully not as much random killing, or as many mobs slashing each other with machetes.
It's not good, but is there anyone else willing and able to do something better?
Well then their long term strategy to make themselves look much worse than Intel is working.
"Billy - put our Foxconn brand on all the half working crappy boards, and the Intel brand on the good ones".
Seriously though - Intel boards are likely to use a different BIOS from Foxconn badged ones.
ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte all have fancy stuff in their BIOS that tweakers like.
Such fancy stuff is normally not in the BIOS for Intel, Dell, HP and other big names - potentially too dangerous or they'd get too many calls for support.
To say it's Microsoft's responsibility for ensuring that NAV is easily uninstalled, is similar to saying it's Ubuntu's responsibility for ensuring some random 3rd party software (malware?;) ) is easily uninstalled.
If Norton/Symantec did not state valid system requirements so that their product could be uninstalled the "proper" way, then I'd say it's Norton/Symantec's fault. Especially when other products can and do get uninstalled without such problems.
Of course if someone ignored the system requirements then that's different.
It's like uninstalling some malware/rootkit on Linux. Or some crappy printer driver for Linux made by a vendor that doesn't care about doing things properly.
My _wild_guess_ is that they probably screwed up the reconciliation checks.
I suspect that once in a period (day?) all the transactions are sent to a central site and the "correct" values for all the cards are calculated, and if cards deviate (too much?) from the expected value, they are flagged and put on a blacklist that is distributed everywhere.
Something went wrong somewhere - maybe not all transactions were sent in time (WAN, sneakernet failed), and someone still ran the checks and invalidation thingy _anyway_ when they shouldn't have, thus messing up tons of cards that were valid.
When such a system works, the hacking stuff doesn't matter at all, except for cases where people just use the tampered cards for only one day (or however long it takes for detection). If they require people to be identified before they can buy a card, that may deter tampering even further.
Of course, I could be totally wrong - this is just a wild guess after all:).
Why don't you fire an intense and powerful enough laser to ionize a conducting path to wherever those currents are and see what happens;).
Oh yeah, while you're at it though, try not to massively disrupt the earth's magnetosphere which apparently shields us from a fair bit of the crap the Sun chucks and emits at us.
That means 2.5mW @ 2.4GHz isn't going to get far below the surface of the skin. Which probably makes it safer.
Skin is used to getting damaged all the time. The sun (at peak 1KW per square metre is 100mW per square centimetre, and 1mW per square millimetre), normal wear and tear will probably do a lot more than 2.5mW @ 2.4GHz (assuming the bluetooth antenna is not shoved up the wrong way - most of the 2.5mW should be going elsewhere and not inside your body for stuff to work).
Whereas 1W @ cellphone frequencies (1W is 400X more power) right next to your ear is more likely to go deeper, and do more.
I'm just stating the relative risks based on the facts I know.
I'm not saying that cellphones are dangerous or not - I don't have evidence, one way or the other. I believe there's actually evidence that cellphone radiation does have an effect on cells etc BUT so far I have no evidence on whether it poses a significant health risk or not.
I do know that cellphone radiation (at least from GSM phones) is strong enough to interfere with electronic devices, so it would be a surprise to me if it had _NO_ effect on the brain at all which is what many people seem to be confidently claiming.
It doesn't have to be an obvious health risk for me to consider it a problem, AFAIK nobody's checked to see if cellphone user's brains deteriorated _functionally_ (e.g. IQ, recall, learning) more than non-users than _expected_ (it seems like most people become more stupid and less coordinated once they have a cellphone next to their ear;) ). It would be difficult to conduct such a test. But perhaps they can do it with large numbers of mice - doing the usual mazes, problem solving stuff, learning, memory etc.
It's not so simple to do such a study. You can't just put a phone near the rat's cage - since the intensity drops off rapidly. To do things properly you'd have to test different intensities, durations. And while you're at it you'd probably want to measure stress hormones as well. You'd need tons of rats and lots of time, staff and other resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Most children eventually grow up to be voters.
:).
Why would politicians want to make things harder for themselves by actually fixing the education system?
They probably think the education system doesn't need fixing - it's working just fine - after all they got voted in
Best to just look like you're fixing it. Keep it long enough and the voters won't have the brains to figure out the difference.
Where do most politicians in power send their children to for education?
"However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure"
The usual thing you'd do with a server with low disk I/O, maybe some webservers that talk to a db server on real hardware? Laptops have low power consumption, built-in 4-6 hour UPS, built-in keyboard and display.
I searched for "problems with linq to sql" on google and only got 21 to 23 hits depending on which google site). e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&safe=off
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&safe=off
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&btnG=Search
On search.yahoo.com I got 135 hits ( http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8 )
Microsoft's search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&go=&form=QBLH
I think cuil has a very long way to go.
O RLY?
We present to you the Microsoft iPod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0
http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/25957
There's a difference somewhere... I just can't put my finger on it ;).
Yeah, I watched Iron Man in the cinema and it was worth it. Not so sure about the recent Indiana Jones and the Tarzan Kid of Doom - some relatives wanted to see it so we went, as per normal movies I set my IQ to low (and suspension of disbelief to medium), and it initially went like an average Indy Jones movie but when Tarzan Boy started swinging from tree to tree, let's just say my default configuration wasn't ready for that).
;) ).
I'm glad I didn't watch Star Wars Episode 2-3 in the cinema.
LoTR = worth it on large screen (I must say the last one seemed to have like 12 endings and they couldn't decide which ones to cut so they showed them all
In my country there are plenty of distributors of Unauthorized Copies, but people were queuing up to watch LoTR in the cinemas, even _weeks_ after the first screening, tickets were often sold out.
You make a good movie, people will buy the tickets. People can make coffee at home and many have fancy expensive coffee machines at home, but lots of people still go to Starbucks and pay for coffee.
I don't have any huge loyalty to Google, just like I didn't have any to Altavista or Infoseek or Hotbot or whoever else did search in the old days.
I won't pay Google as long as there's one other that's almost as good and doesn't charge.
Yahoo's search engine is OK ( http://search.yahoo.com/ ). In fact it can be better than Google's at some queries. I just use Google because they are still good enough for me not to bother switching (they're not as good as the old days because of all the spamming and fake sites).
I haven't bothered using Microsoft's search engine much: http://www.live.com/
But if they're the only "no charge" one left, I might use them.
I suspect if private corps didn't do search for free, Governments might start to do it. I'm sure the Chinese Government will be very happy if only the Chinese Government was "willing" to provide search services to people living in China.
If I were the equivalent of the NSA in a country and there were no free search engines, I would certainly provide search services via a front company - pay the front company millions for ads that hardly ever get shown etc. Always good to know what people doing, and a good way to keep people from finding stuff you don't want them to find is to provide them other stuff to find instead ;).
" It is part of the reason why I really want to see us on mars"
:).
I actually would prefer to see some politicians/leaders on mars.
The rest of us can stay here
"it is still ridiculously expensive "
;).
Ah but I doubt the journalists would be the ones actually paying for it.
The question is, will the Companies/Organizations the journalists work for approve the Work Related Expense?
If they do, then the price isn't too high even if it's ridiculously expensive.
Doesn't look like censorship to me
Does Hotel 81 really have a hotel in Beijing? I thought Hotel 81 was a Singapore-only hotel chain.
As for the Chinese complaining about whites taking away their girls, the last I recall the Chinese in China didn't want baby girls (abortions, artificial selection etc).
"It's a very large place so you'll get different answers to just about any question depending on where they are from"
I bet that's how the "news media" all get their quotes. Get quotes from 100 or so people on the street/web. Broadcast/publish the ones in line with your agenda. Interview enough people and some will say what you want to say.
It's like one of those collages. The little bits are from different sources, but the resulting picture people are supposed to perceive is carefully crafted.
Why would it be wrong for me to backup my own SIM?
You also need to make sure the I/O to/fro the GPU is good enough.
No point being able to do calculations really fast but not be able to get the results or keep feeding the GPU with data.
I think not too long ago graphics cards were fast, but after you added the problem of getting calculation results back, it wasn't really worth it.
Of course not.
And what level of encryption/security do these provide?
And what level of encryption/security do these services provide?
How many cases have there been where email evidence was used out of context or misinterpreted by the courts/jury so that the innocent got hurt?
;).
;).
How many cases have there been where email evidence was used to nail the guilty bastards?
So tell me, is it really a good thing for emails to be deleted?
What does it tell you about the company? It has lots of guilty bastards? Do you want to continue working in such a company? They could blame _YOU_ for something and if you're innocent where's the evidence to protect you? If you're keeping your evidence against company policy have a nice day
As for personal emails, I try to keep most personal emails. Hard disk space is cheap, so why bother taking the time to figure out whether an email is important or not?
You might not even want to bother deleting spam - some people keep a store of spam so that they can test/tune antispam systems/filters.
Lastly, I think many people do work with projects that last more than 6 months. Sometimes your memory might fail, sometimes your boss's memory might fail, sometimes your colleagues forget.
And sometimes when people ask the same questions it's convenient to just dig out the reply/explanation and resend it (email programs should have a decent and fast search - kmail is too slow). If it keeps happening maybe you put it in a FAQ somewhere and then you might add a link to it
Ah but maybe the company intends to do things that are worse than what people normally sue them for.
So overall it would be a net gain for such companies.
Alternatively:
Maybe the company has such crappy lawyers that they allow the court to see emails out of context.
Or maybe the courts and juries are so crap that they'd take some email rant like "I'm going to kill and bury X" more literally than the writer meant.
Either way it's not a good sign.
It's never a good sign if people don't want to keep the truth around, or can't handle the truth, or don't bother to determine the truth.
"that is the reason we have judges and juries"
And in some countries the judge could also say: Apple wins, "loser" please pay Apple one dollar, Apple please pay costs of both parties. Next case!
They hack each other to death. And one machete can kill and keep killing for quite a long time.
I'm not sure what really can be done.
The main thing is the rich countries have other priorities.
1) The rich countries with farmers, subsidize their farmers (go confirm it yourself). So guess what happens to farmers in countries too poor to subsidize their farmers - they can't compete. Any farming will be just for growing food for themselves - farming won't drag them out of poverty. Or giving up and getting food from "foreign aid". Think about it - how can a farmer get significant $$$ if almost everyone around them is a subsistence farmer, and if you're not a farmer why buy food from a local farmer who can't sell you food cheaper than "foreign aid" or cheaper food from subsidized farmers in other countries? Yes I know this is a simplification.
2) The hypocritical rich countries keep making the poor countries play by different rules (don't subsidize your farmers, open your markets), or encourage them to do stupid stuff like sell their reserves to pay back loans. Read between the lines here: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/malawi.htm and note this is a PR release by the IMF, go look for a less charitable view on what happened). Yeah maybe the IMF didn't tell them to sell everything, but with "help" like this guess why Africa is having such big problems. It's like telling some farmer you _know_ has had a track record for being _stupid_ and who owes you money: "pay back now!", then when he sells all his grain to pay you back, and his family is starving, you say "Oh it's not my fault, nobody told him to sell all his grain". Right, they're such a great help to Africa aren't they?
Sometimes I wonder if China is really doing such a bad thing by "colonizing" Africa (that's what the Westerners like to call it anyway). The Europeans have had their turn, the Africans themselves have also had their turn (some have done the "kick all the whiteys out" thing and it didn't work that well eh?) and neither have done a good job.
As far as I see the Chinese want the raw materials fast, plentiful and cheap. Wars and riots don't help with that. So maybe they might figure something out. Some parts of Africa may start looking like some parts of China - practically no government involvement - just factories/mines with a few independent entrepreneurs selling phones, snacks etc. There'll probably be a fair bit of killing of people who "aren't good for business" by the military (sponsored by the Chinese). BUT, hopefully not as much random killing, or as many mobs slashing each other with machetes.
It's not good, but is there anyone else willing and able to do something better?
Well then their long term strategy to make themselves look much worse than Intel is working.
"Billy - put our Foxconn brand on all the half working crappy boards, and the Intel brand on the good ones".
Seriously though - Intel boards are likely to use a different BIOS from Foxconn badged ones.
ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte all have fancy stuff in their BIOS that tweakers like.
Such fancy stuff is normally not in the BIOS for Intel, Dell, HP and other big names - potentially too dangerous or they'd get too many calls for support.
I don't think that's fair.
;) ) is easily uninstalled.
To say it's Microsoft's responsibility for ensuring that NAV is easily uninstalled, is similar to saying it's Ubuntu's responsibility for ensuring some random 3rd party software (malware?
If Norton/Symantec did not state valid system requirements so that their product could be uninstalled the "proper" way, then I'd say it's Norton/Symantec's fault. Especially when other products can and do get uninstalled without such problems.
Of course if someone ignored the system requirements then that's different.
But I'd say that's NAV's fault not Windows.
It's like uninstalling some malware/rootkit on Linux. Or some crappy printer driver for Linux made by a vendor that doesn't care about doing things properly.
There would be no "smooth GUI" to uninstall that.
My _wild_guess_ is that they probably screwed up the reconciliation checks.
:).
I suspect that once in a period (day?) all the transactions are sent to a central site and the "correct" values for all the cards are calculated, and if cards deviate (too much?) from the expected value, they are flagged and put on a blacklist that is distributed everywhere.
Something went wrong somewhere - maybe not all transactions were sent in time (WAN, sneakernet failed), and someone still ran the checks and invalidation thingy _anyway_ when they shouldn't have, thus messing up tons of cards that were valid.
When such a system works, the hacking stuff doesn't matter at all, except for cases where people just use the tampered cards for only one day (or however long it takes for detection). If they require people to be identified before they can buy a card, that may deter tampering even further.
Of course, I could be totally wrong - this is just a wild guess after all
Why don't you fire an intense and powerful enough laser to ionize a conducting path to wherever those currents are and see what happens ;).
Oh yeah, while you're at it though, try not to massively disrupt the earth's magnetosphere which apparently shields us from a fair bit of the crap the Sun chucks and emits at us.
That means 2.5mW @ 2.4GHz isn't going to get far below the surface of the skin. Which probably makes it safer.
;) ). It would be difficult to conduct such a test. But perhaps they can do it with large numbers of mice - doing the usual mazes, problem solving stuff, learning, memory etc.
Skin is used to getting damaged all the time. The sun (at peak 1KW per square metre is 100mW per square centimetre, and 1mW per square millimetre), normal wear and tear will probably do a lot more than 2.5mW @ 2.4GHz (assuming the bluetooth antenna is not shoved up the wrong way - most of the 2.5mW should be going elsewhere and not inside your body for stuff to work).
Whereas 1W @ cellphone frequencies (1W is 400X more power) right next to your ear is more likely to go deeper, and do more.
I'm just stating the relative risks based on the facts I know.
I'm not saying that cellphones are dangerous or not - I don't have evidence, one way or the other. I believe there's actually evidence that cellphone radiation does have an effect on cells etc BUT so far I have no evidence on whether it poses a significant health risk or not.
I do know that cellphone radiation (at least from GSM phones) is strong enough to interfere with electronic devices, so it would be a surprise to me if it had _NO_ effect on the brain at all which is what many people seem to be confidently claiming.
It doesn't have to be an obvious health risk for me to consider it a problem, AFAIK nobody's checked to see if cellphone user's brains deteriorated _functionally_ (e.g. IQ, recall, learning) more than non-users than _expected_ (it seems like most people become more stupid and less coordinated once they have a cellphone next to their ear
It's not so simple to do such a study. You can't just put a phone near the rat's cage - since the intensity drops off rapidly. To do things properly you'd have to test different intensities, durations. And while you're at it you'd probably want to measure stress hormones as well. You'd need tons of rats and lots of time, staff and other resources.