Where does this assumption come from that if big companies aren't making money off of it, the net is not being of practical use?
Economies of scale. If corporates are regularly buying lots of of something, then the price of it comes down for everyone else too. You can get a PC for under a thousand dollars today... the price wasn't driven there by hobbyists, it was driven there by massive corporations signing deals for 50,000 units so the manufacturers could take advantage of economies of scale, which they in turn passed on to consumers.
Why do you think the airlines are hurting so much right now? It's because large corporations are cutting back on business travel... it will result in a round of cost cutting, some airlines will go out of business, but if the corporations don't start travelling again, air travel for the consumer will go up. In any commodity market, margins are thing and you make money on volume. If there's no volume, there's no market, apart from at the expensive, bespoke end. Here endeth the lesson.
So, in order to maximise shareholder value, they gamble on these illusory measures. Terrorism is still quite rare, so they take the chance.
I don't think this is the case at all. Planes are expensive, lawsuits from families of passengers are expensive, reputational damage is expensive. Given the choice, the average airline would have excellent security. If they didn't, the auditors employed by their insurers would up the premiums.
More than anything, these are publicity stunts. By harassing the general public, they create the false sense that security is strict.
No, this is just general, federal-grade cluelessness. Like there is a no standing rule on some flights now. Exactly how does that help? How does being asked to empty your pockets more than once help? How does banning metal cutlery from the diner in the waiting area help?
What we are seeing here is officials who have absolutely no idea how to deal with the threat grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to show that they are doing "something". I certainly don't feel any safer; all this has proved is that security is *worse* than anyone suspected, since these people clearly don't know what they're doing.
This stuff scares the hell out of me. We are not teaching our kids to think or research. We are teaching them how to let a computer figure it out instead.
Mod the parent back up, please. For an explanation, read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll (who also wrote Cuckoo's Egg). Summary: computers are pretty much useless un education between the ages of 6 and 16. The money would be better spent on museums visits and field trips than on multimedia CD Roms, and on hiring great teachers rather than on bandwidth.
Even the best search engine can only answer questions, it cannot teach how to ask new questions. A word processor can't help you with what to right. A spreadsheet will work out numbers for you, it can't tell you if what you are modelling even makes sense.
Parents who let their kids be educated by laptop are as guilty as parents who dump their kids in front of the TV their whole time. It's simply abdicating responsibility.
you CANT run a software business like an assembly line. there is no blueprint - every project is unique.
I bet that was true for bridges, roads, cars etc. etc. back in the day too. It's the attitude that software development is something special rather than just another branch of engineering that is holding the industry back.
In my homecountry, Germany, you have to register with the city you live in, tell them where you live and, if you move, unregister with your old city and register in the new one.
Now, the funny thing about Germany (for those of you who haven't been there) is the toilets. They have a shelf on them, which you, uhh, do your business on, and they flush sideways. This is because the Germans eat a lot of raw meat, and need to check themselves for parasites. Parents check for children, this would be one of a childs early memories, which influence personality in adults. It has bred a nation that is obsessed with inspection and approval of everything. We have a term taken from psychology, saying someone is "anally retentive", well that is the standard German mindset.
What I'm trying to say is, Germans like bureacracy, they like officialdom, they like forms and rubber stamps and regulations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it probably even isn't their fault. But it's a mistake to think that just because Germans like this sort of thing that Americans would too.
Reselling software is a first sale right. A EULA that takes this away is misuse of copyright.
If you sold your copy of Windows NT and bought a new full retail copy of Windows XP, I don't think MS would mind. If you sold your NT and only bought a cheaper "upgrade" to XP, then there is a problem, since you no longer have a right to run the upgrade. That's the core of the matter.
If you cut the visceral reactions to various images out of the loop, then there is a problem. Then you end up with dealing with individuals with individual thoughts and ideas and experiences.
Imagine software that could say "he bought nappies last week, and he has a subscription to the racing channel, and he lives near a high crime area, we can take these images and those images and show him a sports car with side impact bars and an immobiliser, priced at what we think he can afford", and do that hundred times a second for a hundred different web site users or even viewers of interactive TV.
It is far easier to market to a million people as a mass market that to market to a million independent thinking individuals.
I question this assertion. Think about it this way, maybe you could spent $1M on an advertising campaign to ten million people via traditional media, it costs $0.10 to communicate with each person. Or, you could spend $10M on fancy technology, and show your message to the million visitors to your web site, costing you $10 per person.
The question is, how many responses (sales) do you need to break even? And how much money are you actually paying for each response?
It may turn out that it is easier (i.e. costs less for the same net result) to spend the money up front on the technology. Fewer people will see it, it will cost more per person, but maybe the net result will be ten thousand actual sales rather than a hundred, if you do it right. It's only difficult because it's new: I bet that selling washing powder and automobiles was poorly understood at one point too.
The issue isn't mass psychology, per se, it's what I will call meta-psychology, a heuristic for tailoring the delivery of a message based on the characteristics of the recipient. If there is a scalable way to analyze clickstream and past buying patterns, running meta-psychology algorithms over that data and build an ad campaign on the fly from relatively generic assets, and you can buy that software off the shelf from Oracle, then the game changes, radically.
The whole point of technology and the push of civilization has been the dissemination of information and ideas. Encryption runs so much against this concept that it's no wonder that people both don't understand its necessity and don't want it.
You have it backwards. Civilization is about privacy. It's about having the freedom to do what you want to do rather than what the tribe wants you to do. It's about being free to disagree, being free to do something your way if you don't like the way everyone else does it.
As Bruce Schneier said, "it's not enough to protect ourselves with laws of men, we must protect ourselves with laws of mathematics". That is going to be true as long as there are people on earth who are willing to kill other people for what they believe.
I'm tired of the outrage. If you get on a plane, I want to know who you are
McNealy, if I get on a plane that you own, then you have a a right to know who I am. If I get on a plane that Delta owns, then they have a right to know who I am. Oh wait, they already do, because they have my Amex details and they checked my passport when I picked up my e-ticket. What value does another form of ID add over that?
And what benefit would it have, even if it were practical, for all passengers to know who the other passengers are?
That's true, but at the time, no-one knew that this wouldn't disappear in the next release of Excel, for example MS had pretty much abandoned J++. So it was judged to be too risky to just use the old tech. Oh well. Maybe next time...:0)
We were using Excel as the data entry client, the using Perl (with the Excel module, very good BTW) and/or VBA to extract the data and send it to Oracle, and ODBC to query from Oracle into Excel. This wasn't a decision we made, it was the clients(i.e. the customer, not the software) legacy way of doing things, and they weren't up for paying us to rebuild it, and retrain all their staff.
You can use Perl to extract the data from Oracle and write SQL INSERT or SQL*Loader scripts, but this is a real pain. Windows is pretty good for Unicode, actually, even Notepad is a Unicode text editor, but the actual encoding is (off the top of my head) fixed width (16 bit) UCS2. The locale of the Oracle client was UTF8 (variable width), and it was verifying that the translating worked that sucked up a lot of resource (we naively first assumed that it would just work). UTF8 is great because if you're only using a subset of it, it doesn't waste storage space. The Oracle server was Windows 2000, the client terminals were a variety of different versions of Windows, running Excel for some bits of the app, MSIE4 for others. On the web side, there was some rather crap ASP/COM based middleware, in the end we dumped it and redid it in Java just for the Unicode-nativeness of it.
Around that time (this was just over 6 months ago) I woulda killed for a Java API to Excel with access to all the objects exposed to VBA, which would have made things a breeze; maybe that exists now.
Oracle 8i, UTF8 character set. Compatibility with both Unicode and ASCII character sets. What're the problems? Well, clients that think that Unicode is UCS2, is one to watch out for, or forgetting that there's more to life than Western European ISO.
Basically, 90% of the problems you will encounter is in converting between character sets to integrate with other things. If you can use Java (Unicode native) and PL/SQL for as much as possible, you'll have fewer problems. If your client is Excel (don't ask) that complicates matters. If you can assume that everything in the database is US7ASCII you're all set, because you won't need to do any data cleansing. If you have to convert stuff that's already there, then you will run into problems, what happened to me is that we had a Western European encoding, but people were entering Cyrillic data. It all came out fine on their desktops, which were configured for that character set, but the actual data in the database was gibberish as far as the queries were concerned. Non-trivial to fix.
Good luck!
Re:Corporate Thinking or Public Service?
on
J#
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I ask the question:- if you were a director/shareholder of a company like Microsoft would you
a) play to your strength and leverage your current market domination and try to eliminate competing standards while creating new "standards", eg.NET that ultimately play back into your desktop Windows (XP) market, or
b)go open source, support Java, employ open standards, go cross platform, etc etc and risk losing any market dominance you have now?
Legally, you would have no choice at all. If a director fails to act in the interest of shareholders, the penalty can be a jail sentence and a ban from ever running a company again, at least under UK law. Yes, that's right, you can go to jail for doing the "right thing". Unless you could prove that it was in the best interest of shareholders - who will tear you apart if you miss your quarterly earnings target - there is no option for you but (a).
The reason corporations put profit before everything else is because the law - created by the governments, who represent the taxpayer - have decreed that they must do so. It would be a little hypocritical to criticize a thing for acting in accordance with its nature.
There is always the fact that Java is being natively excluded from Win XP.
Uhh, hello? Didn't Sun just sue Microsoft? Aren't a bunch of other companies, including AOL and Real arguing with MS right now over bundling of products? It's not as if MS are saying that you can't run Java, they're just saying that it's a piece of third party software, you have to install it yourself, just like you have to install, say, WinAmp if you want it, or Photoshop.
Sorry, but I think Microsoft are doing the right thing here, or at least they are doing the least-worst thing.
Isn't it all supposed to be about choice? A world where Java is the only language (and we all know how responsive Sun have been to the wishes of the community, can you say ECMA standard?) would be a poorer world than one where Java/J2EE and C#/.NET have to compete on features and quality.
There's one way out of this for the Anti-Microsoft camp: get Java to be like C, SQL and FORTRAN, an ANSI standard. Until we see that, this battle isn't one for the engineers, it's marketeer vs marketeer.
cause here in Europe (at least in my country, which is Sweden), you don't have to pay for education. You pay for books (or lend them frome someone), and you pay for your apt and food, but not for your education as such.
No such thing as a "free education", or free healthcare for that matter. It's all paid for through taxation. Which simply means that those who don't study have no option but to subsidize those who do.
It's all about control. Will the Swedish government (taxpayer) pay for your education at a university that isn't an "approved" part of their system? Of course not... but your 4 years of tuition fees in the US will get you the best education money can buy, anywhere in the world.
When you graduate, you pay the taxes, and you lose control over your future. I mean that quite literally, for example the state-run pension systems throughout Europe are heading for bankruptcy.
European governments are living on borrowed time, just as the dotcom firms were during the bubble, spending money freely without thinking of the future. I will make very sure to move my assets out of Europe and into a "free" (as in speech, not as in beer) economy before the EU governments realise that their vote-winning health, education and pension schemes, or should I say scams, are actually built on sand.
At that time, the American system of "pay for what you actually use" will be proved to be the only sustainable model.
I was going to post a well reasoned reply to this, but, hmm, about 1/2 hr ago I couldn't log into/., and all the non-static pages were just taking me back to the front page. Hmm, that couldn't be because MySQL crashed (again) could it?
I can only say that a device that does the work of a nights engineering and a truckload of equipment on a 12V DC source is amazing... AND IT DOES IT LIVE.
I only hope they can get these on Star Trek, so the away team don't have to be always saying, Captain, you'd better get down here...
I remember one episode of TNG where they only way they could visually link the away team with the ship was via Georgie's prosthetic. Ridiculous! These people can travel faster than the speed of light and they can't even transmit video over a few tens of kilometers from the surface up to orbit! Hell, my Nokia 6210 is more powerful than a Star Fleet communicator! Hook it up to my Psion and it's more powerful than a Tricorder too!
Anyway, back on topic. If, and this is a big if, 3G ever takes off, then assuming the infrastructure was there (a portable base station with a satellite uplink, maybe in a truck 10 kms back perhaps) then we can have reporters on the ground send reports back by mobile phone. And if we all have the 3G infrastructure back home, we can watch it like that too...
Jesus, I hope this is bullshit, but I just heard on CNN the Taliban is forcing 13-year olds to fight and is redirecting refugees into combat areas. What the hell is worth all this?
In that part of the world, a 13 year old is counted as a mature adult, capable of making their own decisions. From the locals' perspective, it's no different from the West sending 18 year olds into battle.
They may look like children, but as the Soviet Empire discovered to their cost, a mujehedin "child" is a deadly fighter in the mountains.
I just have to say, I listen to Blair's speech a few minutes ago, and I douub the United States could have any better friend than Britain and Tony Blair himself.
I can't be bothered to search out links to news stories, but Blair and his government have a long history of appeasing terrorists, permitting them to retain their arsenals, letting convicted terrorists out of prison, even paying compensation to terrorists for the actions of the security forces.
Oh, wait, those were white, nominally Christian terrorists, the IRA. Seems there's a whole 'nother rule for Arab, nominally Moslem terrorists.
And Bush, who says that nations who support terrorists are as bad as terrorists themselves. Apart from the fact that NORAID is still operating.
Now don't get me wrong, bin Laden et al are bad people and need to be brought to justice (or have justice brought to them). But Blair's hands aren't clean, either.
The current naming system seems like every other abusive overuse of popular catch words: they sound good but they lack meaning and in the end are generally confusing to the public.
I think the names were chosen long before anyone considered what the public might find confusing, and long before they were catchwords:0)
I always thought it strange that there were three of them
Well, the most basic reason is that there are three different objectives, which aren't easily met in a single operating system:
FreeBSD is about the best possible performance on the x86, cross-platform capability is not very important.
NetBSD is about being able to compile on as many platforms as possible. This is more important than feature set or performance on a single platform.
OpenBSD is about correctness and hence security. I believe they are an offshoot of FreeBSD, but I could be mistaken. They might like cross-platform compatibility and performance, but these aren't the priority.
BSD/OS is a proprietary implementation of BSD by Berkeley Software Design, who's name coincidentally enough has the same initials as Berkeley Standard Distribution. They're a commercial organization, so you get support etc. from them, whereas the others are ad-hoc. This doesn't mean there's no support and no product upgrading of course, just that they tend to proceed according to the developer's wishes rather than contractual obligations.
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Where does this assumption come from that if big companies aren't making money off of it, the net is not being of practical use?
Economies of scale. If corporates are regularly buying lots of of something, then the price of it comes down for everyone else too. You can get a PC for under a thousand dollars today... the price wasn't driven there by hobbyists, it was driven there by massive corporations signing deals for 50,000 units so the manufacturers could take advantage of economies of scale, which they in turn passed on to consumers.
Why do you think the airlines are hurting so much right now? It's because large corporations are cutting back on business travel... it will result in a round of cost cutting, some airlines will go out of business, but if the corporations don't start travelling again, air travel for the consumer will go up. In any commodity market, margins are thing and you make money on volume. If there's no volume, there's no market, apart from at the expensive, bespoke end. Here endeth the lesson.
So, in order to maximise shareholder value, they gamble on these illusory measures. Terrorism is still quite rare, so they take the chance.
I don't think this is the case at all. Planes are expensive, lawsuits from families of passengers are expensive, reputational damage is expensive. Given the choice, the average airline would have excellent security. If they didn't, the auditors employed by their insurers would up the premiums.
More than anything, these are publicity stunts. By harassing the general public, they create the false sense that security is strict.
No, this is just general, federal-grade cluelessness. Like there is a no standing rule on some flights now. Exactly how does that help? How does being asked to empty your pockets more than once help? How does banning metal cutlery from the diner in the waiting area help?
What we are seeing here is officials who have absolutely no idea how to deal with the threat grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to show that they are doing "something". I certainly don't feel any safer; all this has proved is that security is *worse* than anyone suspected, since these people clearly don't know what they're doing.
This stuff scares the hell out of me. We are not teaching our kids to think or research. We are teaching them how to let a computer figure it out instead.
Mod the parent back up, please. For an explanation, read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll (who also wrote Cuckoo's Egg). Summary: computers are pretty much useless un education between the ages of 6 and 16. The money would be better spent on museums visits and field trips than on multimedia CD Roms, and on hiring great teachers rather than on bandwidth.
Even the best search engine can only answer questions, it cannot teach how to ask new questions. A word processor can't help you with what to right. A spreadsheet will work out numbers for you, it can't tell you if what you are modelling even makes sense.
Parents who let their kids be educated by laptop are as guilty as parents who dump their kids in front of the TV their whole time. It's simply abdicating responsibility.
you CANT run a software business like an assembly line. there is no blueprint - every project is unique.
I bet that was true for bridges, roads, cars etc. etc. back in the day too. It's the attitude that software development is something special rather than just another branch of engineering that is holding the industry back.
Because when 4 guys who are at least loosely associated with a known terrorist buy tickets on the same flight, that just might trigger a few bells.
Actually, in the instructions that Mohammed Atta wrote for the other terrorists, he reminded them to bring their ID cards.
In my homecountry, Germany, you have to register with the city you live in, tell them where you live and, if you move, unregister with your old city and register in the new one.
Now, the funny thing about Germany (for those of you who haven't been there) is the toilets. They have a shelf on them, which you, uhh, do your business on, and they flush sideways. This is because the Germans eat a lot of raw meat, and need to check themselves for parasites. Parents check for children, this would be one of a childs early memories, which influence personality in adults. It has bred a nation that is obsessed with inspection and approval of everything. We have a term taken from psychology, saying someone is "anally retentive", well that is the standard German mindset.
What I'm trying to say is, Germans like bureacracy, they like officialdom, they like forms and rubber stamps and regulations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it probably even isn't their fault. But it's a mistake to think that just because Germans like this sort of thing that Americans would too.
SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special
Not too sure about that. Solaris 8 new features are here.
Reselling software is a first sale right. A EULA that takes this away is misuse of copyright.
If you sold your copy of Windows NT and bought a new full retail copy of Windows XP, I don't think MS would mind. If you sold your NT and only bought a cheaper "upgrade" to XP, then there is a problem, since you no longer have a right to run the upgrade. That's the core of the matter.
I couldn't seem to get the ownership changed back
In NT, you take ownership of things, where in Unix you are assigned ownership of things. Just a philosophical difference.
If you cut the visceral reactions to various images out of the loop, then there is a problem. Then you end up with dealing with individuals with individual thoughts and ideas and experiences.
Imagine software that could say "he bought nappies last week, and he has a subscription to the racing channel, and he lives near a high crime area, we can take these images and those images and show him a sports car with side impact bars and an immobiliser, priced at what we think he can afford", and do that hundred times a second for a hundred different web site users or even viewers of interactive TV.
It is far easier to market to a million people as a mass market that to market to a million independent thinking individuals.
I question this assertion. Think about it this way, maybe you could spent $1M on an advertising campaign to ten million people via traditional media, it costs $0.10 to communicate with each person. Or, you could spend $10M on fancy technology, and show your message to the million visitors to your web site, costing you $10 per person.
The question is, how many responses (sales) do you need to break even? And how much money are you actually paying for each response?
It may turn out that it is easier (i.e. costs less for the same net result) to spend the money up front on the technology. Fewer people will see it, it will cost more per person, but maybe the net result will be ten thousand actual sales rather than a hundred, if you do it right. It's only difficult because it's new: I bet that selling washing powder and automobiles was poorly understood at one point too.
The issue isn't mass psychology, per se, it's what I will call meta-psychology, a heuristic for tailoring the delivery of a message based on the characteristics of the recipient. If there is a scalable way to analyze clickstream and past buying patterns, running meta-psychology algorithms over that data and build an ad campaign on the fly from relatively generic assets, and you can buy that software off the shelf from Oracle, then the game changes, radically.
The whole point of technology and the push of civilization has been the dissemination of information and ideas. Encryption runs so much against this concept that it's no wonder that people both don't understand its necessity and don't want it.
You have it backwards. Civilization is about privacy. It's about having the freedom to do what you want to do rather than what the tribe wants you to do. It's about being free to disagree, being free to do something your way if you don't like the way everyone else does it.
As Bruce Schneier said, "it's not enough to protect ourselves with laws of men, we must protect ourselves with laws of mathematics". That is going to be true as long as there are people on earth who are willing to kill other people for what they believe.
I'm tired of the outrage. If you get on a plane, I want to know who you are
McNealy, if I get on a plane that you own, then you have a a right to know who I am. If I get on a plane that Delta owns, then they have a right to know who I am. Oh wait, they already do, because they have my Amex details and they checked my passport when I picked up my e-ticket. What value does another form of ID add over that?
And what benefit would it have, even if it were practical, for all passengers to know who the other passengers are?
That's true, but at the time, no-one knew that this wouldn't disappear in the next release of Excel, for example MS had pretty much abandoned J++. So it was judged to be too risky to just use the old tech. Oh well. Maybe next time... :0)
We were using Excel as the data entry client, the using Perl (with the Excel module, very good BTW) and/or VBA to extract the data and send it to Oracle, and ODBC to query from Oracle into Excel. This wasn't a decision we made, it was the clients(i.e. the customer, not the software) legacy way of doing things, and they weren't up for paying us to rebuild it, and retrain all their staff.
You can use Perl to extract the data from Oracle and write SQL INSERT or SQL*Loader scripts, but this is a real pain. Windows is pretty good for Unicode, actually, even Notepad is a Unicode text editor, but the actual encoding is (off the top of my head) fixed width (16 bit) UCS2. The locale of the Oracle client was UTF8 (variable width), and it was verifying that the translating worked that sucked up a lot of resource (we naively first assumed that it would just work). UTF8 is great because if you're only using a subset of it, it doesn't waste storage space. The Oracle server was Windows 2000, the client terminals were a variety of different versions of Windows, running Excel for some bits of the app, MSIE4 for others. On the web side, there was some rather crap ASP/COM based middleware, in the end we dumped it and redid it in Java just for the Unicode-nativeness of it.
Around that time (this was just over 6 months ago) I woulda killed for a Java API to Excel with access to all the objects exposed to VBA, which would have made things a breeze; maybe that exists now.
Oracle 8i, UTF8 character set. Compatibility with both Unicode and ASCII character sets. What're the problems? Well, clients that think that Unicode is UCS2, is one to watch out for, or forgetting that there's more to life than Western European ISO.
Basically, 90% of the problems you will encounter is in converting between character sets to integrate with other things. If you can use Java (Unicode native) and PL/SQL for as much as possible, you'll have fewer problems. If your client is Excel (don't ask) that complicates matters. If you can assume that everything in the database is US7ASCII you're all set, because you won't need to do any data cleansing. If you have to convert stuff that's already there, then you will run into problems, what happened to me is that we had a Western European encoding, but people were entering Cyrillic data. It all came out fine on their desktops, which were configured for that character set, but the actual data in the database was gibberish as far as the queries were concerned. Non-trivial to fix.
Good luck!
I ask the question :- if you were a director/shareholder of a company like Microsoft would you
.NET that ultimately play back into your desktop Windows (XP) market, or
a) play to your strength and leverage your current market domination and try to eliminate competing standards while creating new "standards", eg
b)go open source, support Java, employ open standards, go cross platform, etc etc and risk losing any market dominance you have now?
Legally, you would have no choice at all. If a director fails to act in the interest of shareholders, the penalty can be a jail sentence and a ban from ever running a company again, at least under UK law. Yes, that's right, you can go to jail for doing the "right thing". Unless you could prove that it was in the best interest of shareholders - who will tear you apart if you miss your quarterly earnings target - there is no option for you but (a).
The reason corporations put profit before everything else is because the law - created by the governments, who represent the taxpayer - have decreed that they must do so. It would be a little hypocritical to criticize a thing for acting in accordance with its nature.
There is always the fact that Java is being natively excluded from Win XP.
Uhh, hello? Didn't Sun just sue Microsoft? Aren't a bunch of other companies, including AOL and Real arguing with MS right now over bundling of products? It's not as if MS are saying that you can't run Java, they're just saying that it's a piece of third party software, you have to install it yourself, just like you have to install, say, WinAmp if you want it, or Photoshop.
Sorry, but I think Microsoft are doing the right thing here, or at least they are doing the least-worst thing.
Isn't it all supposed to be about choice? A world where Java is the only language (and we all know how responsive Sun have been to the wishes of the community, can you say ECMA standard?) would be a poorer world than one where Java/J2EE and C#/.NET have to compete on features and quality.
There's one way out of this for the Anti-Microsoft camp: get Java to be like C, SQL and FORTRAN, an ANSI standard. Until we see that, this battle isn't one for the engineers, it's marketeer vs marketeer.
What the hell do you mean, "troll"? You might not agree with it, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid perspective.
cause here in Europe (at least in my country, which is Sweden), you don't have to pay for education. You pay for books (or lend them frome someone), and you pay for your apt and food, but not for your education as such.
No such thing as a "free education", or free healthcare for that matter. It's all paid for through taxation. Which simply means that those who don't study have no option but to subsidize those who do.
It's all about control. Will the Swedish government (taxpayer) pay for your education at a university that isn't an "approved" part of their system? Of course not... but your 4 years of tuition fees in the US will get you the best education money can buy, anywhere in the world.
When you graduate, you pay the taxes, and you lose control over your future. I mean that quite literally, for example the state-run pension systems throughout Europe are heading for bankruptcy.
European governments are living on borrowed time, just as the dotcom firms were during the bubble, spending money freely without thinking of the future. I will make very sure to move my assets out of Europe and into a "free" (as in speech, not as in beer) economy before the EU governments realise that their vote-winning health, education and pension schemes, or should I say scams, are actually built on sand.
At that time, the American system of "pay for what you actually use" will be proved to be the only sustainable model.
I was going to post a well reasoned reply to this, but, hmm, about 1/2 hr ago I couldn't log into /., and all the non-static pages were just taking me back to the front page. Hmm, that couldn't be because MySQL crashed (again) could it?
I can only say that a device that does the work of a nights engineering and a truckload of equipment on a 12V DC source is amazing... AND IT DOES IT LIVE.
I only hope they can get these on Star Trek, so the away team don't have to be always saying, Captain, you'd better get down here...
I remember one episode of TNG where they only way they could visually link the away team with the ship was via Georgie's prosthetic. Ridiculous! These people can travel faster than the speed of light and they can't even transmit video over a few tens of kilometers from the surface up to orbit! Hell, my Nokia 6210 is more powerful than a Star Fleet communicator! Hook it up to my Psion and it's more powerful than a Tricorder too!
Anyway, back on topic. If, and this is a big if, 3G ever takes off, then assuming the infrastructure was there (a portable base station with a satellite uplink, maybe in a truck 10 kms back perhaps) then we can have reporters on the ground send reports back by mobile phone. And if we all have the 3G infrastructure back home, we can watch it like that too...
Jesus, I hope this is bullshit, but I just heard on CNN the Taliban is forcing 13-year olds to fight and is redirecting refugees into combat areas. What the hell is worth all this?
In that part of the world, a 13 year old is counted as a mature adult, capable of making their own decisions. From the locals' perspective, it's no different from the West sending 18 year olds into battle.
They may look like children, but as the Soviet Empire discovered to their cost, a mujehedin "child" is a deadly fighter in the mountains.
I just have to say, I listen to Blair's speech a few minutes ago, and I douub the United States could have any better friend than Britain and Tony Blair himself.
I can't be bothered to search out links to news stories, but Blair and his government have a long history of appeasing terrorists, permitting them to retain their arsenals, letting convicted terrorists out of prison, even paying compensation to terrorists for the actions of the security forces.
Oh, wait, those were white, nominally Christian terrorists, the IRA. Seems there's a whole 'nother rule for Arab, nominally Moslem terrorists.
And Bush, who says that nations who support terrorists are as bad as terrorists themselves. Apart from the fact that NORAID is still operating.
Now don't get me wrong, bin Laden et al are bad people and need to be brought to justice (or have justice brought to them). But Blair's hands aren't clean, either.
The current naming system seems like every other abusive overuse of popular catch words: they sound good but they lack meaning and in the end are generally confusing to the public.
:0)
I think the names were chosen long before anyone considered what the public might find confusing, and long before they were catchwords
Well, the most basic reason is that there are three different objectives, which aren't easily met in a single operating system:
BSD/OS is a proprietary implementation of BSD by Berkeley Software Design, who's name coincidentally enough has the same initials as Berkeley Standard Distribution. They're a commercial organization, so you get support etc. from them, whereas the others are ad-hoc. This doesn't mean there's no support and no product upgrading of course, just that they tend to proceed according to the developer's wishes rather than contractual obligations.