Or what would have been corruption is now 'legal' (lobbying, patriot act, nsa etc)
Just the opposite. There have been vastly more controls put on law enforcement. Look into the history of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and tell me how much better times were than with NSA spying today...
When's the last time you heard of a gas powered car catching fire because it ran over something without crashing.
ALL THE DAMN TIME.
I've seen nice new vehicles just driving down the street suddenly start having smoke and flames coming up around the hood. I expect the fuel lines were faulty and simply burst, but the fuel pump dutifully keeps pumping gasoline onto the hot engine, and it ignites.
I've had a rubber gasket fail in a fairly new oil filter, which caused oil to be spurted out all over my engine, and a cloud of smoke rising up. Fortunately this was shortly after it was started-up on a cold winter morning, so things weren't hot enough for ignition.
Conventional cars don't need ANY good reason to burst into flames. The slightest little component getting stressed can cause a disaster.
Even judged by the standards of a brainless action movie, it's still terrible. Lousy plot, stiff acting by brainless models, cartoony weapons, etc. Compare and contrast with Robocop.
Just look at what public officials can get away with these days.
A LOT less than they could in the past. Study your US history, and you'll find that corruption in politics was far more extensive and flagrant than what we've got now. It went as far as the president of the US being decided by political dealings and corrupt electoral college members, rather than the public. It's only observation bias that makes you think things are getting so much worse, while in fact they're slowly improving (same is true of crime rates, gun violence, etc). Corruption in politics has been slowly declining for a long, long time.
Those elements were ALL in there from the start. It hasn't gotten any better or worse with age. It remains ham-fisted, dark, very poorly acted, etc.
I re-watch it from time to time. Not a good movie, but somewhere between campy and popcorn flicks, and doing neither well.
It was about halfway between Verhoeven's triumphant Robocop, and his decent into notorious shame with Showgirls, with many elements of both throughout. Unless the later gets reassessed and becomes an American Classic, Starship Troopers will also remain a just plain bad movie.
If you want to archive and preserve data long term, wouldn't you want a stable location, someplace that doesn't suffer from 9+ magnitude earthquakes every century or so?
Every part of the US has some sort of horrible risk of natural disasters. Flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, land slides, forest fires, ice storms, etc. Nowhere you can pick would be entirely safe.
Besides, this is DIGITAL, not physical archiving, and your "small city" in a "stable location" may not even have decent internet access, which is required resource #1. As long as they have off-site backups, it doesn't matter where their headquarters is located.
Sure enough. That explains why they've opted to spend billions of dollars on patent licenses instead of making "a few improvements to an open source piece of Windows software".
They aren't paying billions of dollars to use FAT32. Microsoft has many patents, and that is but one. Besides, it's the handset manufacturers who have to pay the license fees, and Google wasn't one until recently.
Or maybe you didn't realize that a single person running a piece of software on a single platform isn't exactly a thorough QA process.
I never said they should ship that program, or any specific existing program, never mind unmodified and untested.
From your post here, you are saying it would cost Google "billions of dollars" to improve and QA Ext2Fsd to meet Google's quality standards... Do you have any clue how much a developer's salary is?
But don't let me stop you from setting up all those straw men.
First of all, what mythical Windows Ext2 filesystem driver are we talking about here? Last I checked, there wasn't one.
There are several... You've listed one.
Are you talking about Ext2Fsd? The same one that lists Windows BSODs as a feature? Read the comments on sourceforge and then tell me this is something that Google would want to distribute.
I happen to have used Ext2Fsd on Windows 7 extensively, and it has been completely rock-solid.
Besides, your incredulity is silly. Google wrote the entire Android OS, they can make a few improvements to an open source piece of Windows software sure enough.
Possibly true (it's not a dangerous bit of software)... Until the majority of home users have it installed, and the CEO wants to know why he can't see his digital camera photos on his work computer. Then you'll be deploying it to ALL the systems.
Companies typically have Flash, Java, Acrobat, and other such software installed on all their workstations. There's no way their IT department ever thought those were a good idea, yet they're all standard and expected, now.
Get out in the sticks where your max internet speed is still 56k
More than enough bandwidth to construct a 500 movie Netflix queue, and then log-off and let them keep mailing discs to you. There's no reason to resort to walking into a Blockbuster.
have people really moved on that quickly that everyone today has an IP-connected TV in their living room with which to watch films?
A decade ago, every college student that moved into the dorms had a laptop with a DVD drive and fast internet access, but NO TVs to be seen.
With smart phones and tablets, the trend only expanded. Big, cheap TVs might have slightly reversed the trend for a while, but set-top boxes, and smart TVs added more fuel to the fire. The old retired lady down the street who never watches TV just got a Roku.
With services like Hulu, you can even stream the nightly news, and watch most popular TV shows the day after they aired. So (except for live sports) it's a drop-in replacement for cable, for a fraction the price, which also happens to offer movies.
Viewing habits have definitely shifted. Though there's surely plenty of people just renting DVDs from Netflix and Redbox that really killed Blockbuster.
Blockbuster pushed out many of the independent video rental places. I wonder if some of them will make a come back, to fill what ever niche there will be for renting physical videos.
Have you heard of Netflix and Redbox? Because it's them, not internet streaming, that killed Blockbuster.
If the mom & pop shops can find a niche that the above two don't fill, they might have a chance. But the same was true for them against Blockbuster.
I always find it difficult to understand the mentality of those cheering and saying good riddance that a long time business [even former giants of the industry] has failed.
When it's a company that abused their customers at every turn while they had the chance, we're all glad to see them go.
Since Blockbuster's entire business model depended upon exorbitant late fees, and they were only too happy to reduce rental times for new releases from 2 down to 1-day for the same reason once their competitors were disappearing, I'll be near the front of the line to spit on their grave. Nothing of value has been lost.
Not as long as Microsoft filesystems are the de-facto file systems for SD cards by virtue of their desktop monopoly.
Right, Microsoft is abusing their MONOPOLY, not patent trolling.
And there certainly are workarounds Google could implement. How about if USB-connected Android phones presented a small FAT12 (or ISO9660, or UFS) partition to the OS, which merely contained a (8.3 file-name) installer for the Windows EXT2 file system driver? That would result in widespread desktop support for EXT2 file systems, with Google using their mobile OS monopoly to push against Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly.
A few deals with the most prolific digital camera manufacturers, and Google could get them using EXT2 by default as well, putting Microsoft under-fire for not supporting EXT2. When forced to, Microsoft will adopt EXT2 as its own, just as they did with MP3s despite trying hard to push WMA, or TCP/IP long before that, or hundreds of other examples.
The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.
Copyright doesn't prevent clean-room reverse-engineering, while patents do.
And while "momentum when scrolling" makes a nice silly little example, there are plenty of legitimate examples where patents make sense. Video and audio codecs, for instance, only patent the exact, specific implementation of a technology, and copyright wouldn't work to protect it, or any other open standards, where it's neither trade secret nor obfuscated and copyrighted.
IA64 was a power struggle inside Intel, with the IA64 group trying to wrest control from the x86 group. That's where the "IA64 will replace x86" was coming from--but even inside Intel many people knew that was unlikely. Large companies easily can do two things at once--try something, but have a backup plan in case it doesn't work.
Except Intel DIDN'T have any backup plans! 32-bit memory limitations had been a problem for quite some time, and PAE was getting old. Intel's only path to 64-bit was Itanium.
It's immensely lucky for Intel that AMD had a different plan. AMD's path to 64-bit became Intel's path to 64-bit when Itanium floundered, and Intel has been immensely successful with it. Companies that were paying big bucks for proprietary 64-bit systems up and switched to Intel's x86-64 chips, and the world doubled-down on x86 instead of picking one of the alternative architectures and getting economies of scale going for some other chip maker.
What's happening now with Intel versus ARM could well have happened back in 2005 over the lack of 64-bit memory addressing. MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, or POWER were all viable competitors that could have started eating Intel's server market share. Instead, x86-64 got its foot in the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the opposite. There have been vastly more controls put on law enforcement. Look into the history of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and tell me how much better times were than with NSA spying today...
ALL THE DAMN TIME.
I've seen nice new vehicles just driving down the street suddenly start having smoke and flames coming up around the hood. I expect the fuel lines were faulty and simply burst, but the fuel pump dutifully keeps pumping gasoline onto the hot engine, and it ignites.
I've had a rubber gasket fail in a fairly new oil filter, which caused oil to be spurted out all over my engine, and a cloud of smoke rising up. Fortunately this was shortly after it was started-up on a cold winter morning, so things weren't hot enough for ignition.
Conventional cars don't need ANY good reason to burst into flames. The slightest little component getting stressed can cause a disaster.
Even judged by the standards of a brainless action movie, it's still terrible. Lousy plot, stiff acting by brainless models, cartoony weapons, etc. Compare and contrast with Robocop.
They weren't a threat, until we incited them to attack. IIRC, that was only quietly suggested in the movie, and easy enough to miss, but it was there.
A LOT less than they could in the past. Study your US history, and you'll find that corruption in politics was far more extensive and flagrant than what we've got now. It went as far as the president of the US being decided by political dealings and corrupt electoral college members, rather than the public. It's only observation bias that makes you think things are getting so much worse, while in fact they're slowly improving (same is true of crime rates, gun violence, etc). Corruption in politics has been slowly declining for a long, long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1836
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome
Wake me up when we have another Watergate...
http://www.berlios.de/ - Has been around forever, and is somewhat popular.
Or you could check the list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities
You only need a window manager (like Fluxbox, fvwm, xfwm, sawfish etc) to manage multiple xterms, not a full desktop environment.
And you don't need X11 at all, since tmux will allow you to do all of that from a text console.
eg.: http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux3.png
Those elements were ALL in there from the start. It hasn't gotten any better or worse with age. It remains ham-fisted, dark, very poorly acted, etc.
I re-watch it from time to time. Not a good movie, but somewhere between campy and popcorn flicks, and doing neither well.
It was about halfway between Verhoeven's triumphant Robocop, and his decent into notorious shame with Showgirls, with many elements of both throughout. Unless the later gets reassessed and becomes an American Classic, Starship Troopers will also remain a just plain bad movie.
They already have...
Every part of the US has some sort of horrible risk of natural disasters. Flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, land slides, forest fires, ice storms, etc. Nowhere you can pick would be entirely safe.
Besides, this is DIGITAL, not physical archiving, and your "small city" in a "stable location" may not even have decent internet access, which is required resource #1. As long as they have off-site backups, it doesn't matter where their headquarters is located.
You really enjoy spouting nonsense, don't you?
http://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=centrifugal-sugar&graph=cane-sugar-production
They aren't paying billions of dollars to use FAT32. Microsoft has many patents, and that is but one. Besides, it's the handset manufacturers who have to pay the license fees, and Google wasn't one until recently.
I never said they should ship that program, or any specific existing program, never mind unmodified and untested.
From your post here, you are saying it would cost Google "billions of dollars" to improve and QA Ext2Fsd to meet Google's quality standards... Do you have any clue how much a developer's salary is?
But don't let me stop you from setting up all those straw men.
There are several... You've listed one.
I happen to have used Ext2Fsd on Windows 7 extensively, and it has been completely rock-solid.
Besides, your incredulity is silly. Google wrote the entire Android OS, they can make a few improvements to an open source piece of Windows software sure enough.
Possibly true (it's not a dangerous bit of software)... Until the majority of home users have it installed, and the CEO wants to know why he can't see his digital camera photos on his work computer. Then you'll be deploying it to ALL the systems.
Companies typically have Flash, Java, Acrobat, and other such software installed on all their workstations. There's no way their IT department ever thought those were a good idea, yet they're all standard and expected, now.
More than enough bandwidth to construct a 500 movie Netflix queue, and then log-off and let them keep mailing discs to you. There's no reason to resort to walking into a Blockbuster.
A decade ago, every college student that moved into the dorms had a laptop with a DVD drive and fast internet access, but NO TVs to be seen.
With smart phones and tablets, the trend only expanded. Big, cheap TVs might have slightly reversed the trend for a while, but set-top boxes, and smart TVs added more fuel to the fire. The old retired lady down the street who never watches TV just got a Roku.
With services like Hulu, you can even stream the nightly news, and watch most popular TV shows the day after they aired. So (except for live sports) it's a drop-in replacement for cable, for a fraction the price, which also happens to offer movies.
Viewing habits have definitely shifted. Though there's surely plenty of people just renting DVDs from Netflix and Redbox that really killed Blockbuster.
Have you heard of Netflix and Redbox? Because it's them, not internet streaming, that killed Blockbuster.
If the mom & pop shops can find a niche that the above two don't fill, they might have a chance. But the same was true for them against Blockbuster.
When it's a company that abused their customers at every turn while they had the chance, we're all glad to see them go.
Since Blockbuster's entire business model depended upon exorbitant late fees, and they were only too happy to reduce rental times for new releases from 2 down to 1-day for the same reason once their competitors were disappearing, I'll be near the front of the line to spit on their grave. Nothing of value has been lost.
And yet Netflix is a no-go on any Linux/X11 systems, and it took them forever to cave-in and start supporting Android.
If I'm spending my money on video delivery, I'll give it to Hulu, since they are slightly less customer-rapey than Netflix.
Right, Microsoft is abusing their MONOPOLY, not patent trolling.
And there certainly are workarounds Google could implement. How about if USB-connected Android phones presented a small FAT12 (or ISO9660, or UFS) partition to the OS, which merely contained a (8.3 file-name) installer for the Windows EXT2 file system driver? That would result in widespread desktop support for EXT2 file systems, with Google using their mobile OS monopoly to push against Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly.
A few deals with the most prolific digital camera manufacturers, and Google could get them using EXT2 by default as well, putting Microsoft under-fire for not supporting EXT2. When forced to, Microsoft will adopt EXT2 as its own, just as they did with MP3s despite trying hard to push WMA, or TCP/IP long before that, or hundreds of other examples.
Copyright doesn't prevent clean-room reverse-engineering, while patents do.
And while "momentum when scrolling" makes a nice silly little example, there are plenty of legitimate examples where patents make sense. Video and audio codecs, for instance, only patent the exact, specific implementation of a technology, and copyright wouldn't work to protect it, or any other open standards, where it's neither trade secret nor obfuscated and copyrighted.
Even HP doesn't believe that. Sorry.
That road map ends in a few years, or 1-2 Itanium generations. Maybe you call that "a long time" but I wouldn't.
You've got several years to work out an alternative, and you'd be foolish not to do so.
Except Intel DIDN'T have any backup plans! 32-bit memory limitations had been a problem for quite some time, and PAE was getting old. Intel's only path to 64-bit was Itanium.
It's immensely lucky for Intel that AMD had a different plan. AMD's path to 64-bit became Intel's path to 64-bit when Itanium floundered, and Intel has been immensely successful with it. Companies that were paying big bucks for proprietary 64-bit systems up and switched to Intel's x86-64 chips, and the world doubled-down on x86 instead of picking one of the alternative architectures and getting economies of scale going for some other chip maker.
What's happening now with Intel versus ARM could well have happened back in 2005 over the lack of 64-bit memory addressing. MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, or POWER were all viable competitors that could have started eating Intel's server market share. Instead, x86-64 got its foot in the door.
So just because the first place you found the antenna, is selling it for $600, you assume that's actually the going rate they paid for it?
I wonder how many people bought this $23 million book about flies:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
And even with your blinds fully closed, it's still easy to tell whether the lights are on or off.
Very few people have dark, black-out curtains, but that's want you need to be sure data isn't leaking out of the building.