Saying 97 percent of the significant figures in sciences come from the west is like saying 90 percent of shark bite victims happen within 100 meters of the shoreline
Consider, for example, gunpowder. Invented in China, but they only ever used it for fireworks to amuse the aristocrats. In the West, sure it was used as a weapon, but it was also used in mining. Western lateral thinking meant that Western mines were more efficient, which accelerated all forms of technological development.
Or mathematics is another example. Large amounts of it were invented by Arabs, but their religion doesn't permit advanced forms of banking, but when mathematics reached the West it was used for advanced finance, which permitted investment and insurance, which acclerated all forms of technological development.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries. Or it was; in the last century the West has spent less of its resources on developing technology and more on supporting those who aren't able to support themselves. Simple natural selection now means that our populations are becoming geared towards those who consume handouts but produce no new discoveries.
The Anarchist logo os also held within a circle, but is an upper-case A with the horizontal bar extended on both sides to reach the circle. The ends of each diagonal leg, and the angle at the top of the A also reach the circle.
I know nothing about Newham specifically, but the perception in many parts of the UK are that many local councils are not well run.
You know, back in the day, the council (i.e. the people who have the political authority and are elected, as opposed to the people employed by the council to empty bins, etc) were all unpaid volunteers, doing their bit for the good of the community (and their own prestige, of course, but there's nothing wrong with that). They tended to be "pillars of the community" for example local small businessmen, like the town butcher, the baker etc, and before joining the council they'd run their family business for at least couple of decades so they knew the ins and outs of getting stuff done.
These days, being a councillor is a job, complete with salary and benefits. The kind of person who does it is very different: now most councillors are career politicians without any experience whatsoever of the "real world". The old-style councillors saw local government as a means to an end, and their job as to provide a stable, pleasant environment for people to go about their lives and their business. The present kind see local government as an end in and of itself, and the local residents as a mere source of tax to fund the grand ambitions of the councillors - and if it goes wrong, just jack the taxes up.
The quickest way to get local government back on track would be a wholesale cull of everyone on a salary.
Also, and I mean no disrepect to anyone in local government IT in the UK, but it's not well paid compared to the private sector - there are plenty of PHBs I guess
You can't look at salary in isolation, you have to look at the complete package. Government workers enjoy near-absolute job security and lavish taxpayer-funded pensions on retirement. Private sector workers are better paid, sure, but are far more likely to be laid off, and their retirement funds are invested in the market increasing their risk.
Not a computer, but didn't Garth in Wayne's World (can't remember if it was 1 or 2) have a book titled Unix Administrator's something-or-other?
If I remember correctly, it was the ubiquitous "Unix Network Programming" by the equally ubiquitous W. Richard Stevens (RIP). "Look it up in Stevens" is usually the correct answer whenever asked a question about TCP/IP or socket programming in general - if the person asking is smart enough to even understand the answer, it's almost certain they'll already own this book.
but, all the journalling filesystems are new and untested. New your saying? They're a few years old.. and yes, thats true but they're new in comparision to all the other filesystems.
I don't know where you got that from - filesystems like XFS have been proven on multi-terabyte arrays supporting mission-critical applications. I'd take XFS over an old-fashioned non-journalled filesystem like UFS (or ext2) any day.
Cost. Most review sites, especially in the PC industry, don't have much cash to purchase the products themselves. Instead they rely on vendors sending their hardware to them for free.
But the vendor doesn't have to do that. They could say "just go buy one and send us the invoice" or "here's a token redeemable at Best Buy for one of them" or whatever. The idea that a manufacturer actually has to supply it themselves directly in order for a reviewer to get it isn't based on any hard rules, that's just been the tradition.
I figure a lot of people are going to say something along the lines of "to hell with this, we don't ALL need a logo",
No, I say I don't particularly want to be associated with ESR's ideas of being a hacker which, as that page shows, amount largely to taking credit for other's work.
Basicly, any time a program wants to do something like put something in startup or modify winsock settings or stick files in windows system folder or modify the hosts file or dns settings or things like that, windows should come up with a nicely worded warning about why clicking "yes" is a bad idea.
Windows already does block attempts to fiddle with it... unless you're running as Administrator, of course. Surprising how many "geeks" wouldn't dream of running as root constantly on Unix will just add themselves to the administrators group on Windows because it's convenient. And there's no need for it either, now that Windows has "Run As" functionality.
Exactly. I know that at least around here, the ambulance company policy REQUIRES that all ambulances come to a complete stop at all red lights.
In Britain, we have discovered that if you allow the police to indulge in high-speed car chases they are actually far more likely to kill pedestrians than to catch any criminals! Perhaps there is a case for emergency vehicles being allowed to follow a different set of protocols for dealing with other vehicles than private vehicles, but there is no grounds for allowing them to ignore any rules whatsoever...
The sole reason that Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and Mr. Shriram are represented on the board is that they invested millions in Google.
The career of Dr Schmidt is interesting too - for a couple of decades he's essentially been the bagman for KPCB, the VC firm that employs Mr Doerr. They dispatch him to take charge of anything they're particularly interested in until they cash out, then he moves on. Not that that is a bad thing or any criticism of either of them - but it is worth pointing out that the VCs have a clear majority on Google's board.
I mean, there is no reason for google to go public other than greed.
You know nothing about business. One of the most useful things about being a public company is the ability to use your own stock as a currency for making acquisitions. Far, far more efficient that paying cash for another company. An IPO could be simply so Google can use its capital more efficiently.
But the point is that even if it is a target, it is much harder to write a virus for OS X at this point in time
Well, maybe. No-one actually knows, because OSX hasn't attracted much attention from virus writers. It might be harder solely because OSX is newer and virus writers have less experience of it, I suppose, but as of yet, that's the only reason that can be known with any degree of certainty.
Unless they plan on using Warez, the obviously cheapest solution for an organization that probably won't have a lot of money lying around is to use Linux. Seems like common sence to me.
Mmm, yes, and thereby restrict their pool of volunteers to the Unix-savvy? Out in the real world, we have a thing called a cost-benefit analysis. This means that cheap isn't always better if cheap can't do what you want it to. You think a non-profit has the time and resources to retrain people who in all likelihood already know Windows and MS Office in Linux?
Sure, it's possible to produce great-looking documents with TeX or troff. But it's possible to produce documents 90% as good with 10% of the effort in Word. Open office is all well and good, but it lacks key features of MS Office and StarOffice, such as Windows metrically-equivalent fonts.
Someone who wants the best of both worlds is probably best off with Sun's Mad Hatter package. Yes it costs money, but it just goes to show, if you want a professionally-integrated system, you need to pay professionals for it.
Wow, imagine if Microsoft hired engineers smart enough to design a file format that could last through 5-6 versions!
Microsoft don't have people to design file formats, never did to my knowledge. A Word document is a persisted COM object, the in-memory representation of the document. When the code of that object changes, for example as features are added, the "format" of the file on the disk changes too, entirely as a side-effect. Saying MS changes the format purely to thwart compatability is paranoid delusion.
I don't know about you, but where i work, we don't move the computer room every x months, even so, i don't see why you could not move a disk cabinet around.
We've been in two buildings this year and we're about to move again:-)
On the positive note, we have a really nice overhead wire rack, that's looking good and all of our wiring is really tight looking; all the colors match, all the cables are labeled, they are all the right length, etc.
That's great, kid. No offense but you are way out of your depth. Call IBM and get them to build it for you, or at least send over a consultant to advise.
Although magnetic tape's cost per megabyte will give it a role in keeping archival records for years to come, better technologies and techniques are eroding tape's dominance for day-to-day backup and recovery tasks.
Heh. Let me tell you why tapes are good. Tapes are very, very simple and well understood. You can repair a broken tape with a Stanley knife and Sellotape if you have to. Sure you might lose a few blocks, but with decent archiving tools (like cpio and bzip2) losing a file won't cost you the entire archive. If a tape drive fails, just replace it, easy.
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do? Repair the platter? Transplant it to another hard drive? Just not feasible. And how're you going to store archives? Tapes are cheap and high density. Maybe you've moved buildings a couple of times and they've been kicked around, how certain are you HDs can be plugged back in and run? And they take more physical space too, and still cost more.
This is a surprisingly good article for OSNews. Usually their reviews are limited to utterly trivial things like what the reviewer thought of the default colour scheme, or how easy it was to change the desktop wallpaper. But this one actually has some useful quantitative data in, and refers to things that workstation users actually care about, such as compile times. Whoever this chap is he should take over doing all the reviews from the girl (can't remember her name offhand) who usually does them, because she is pretty much clueless.
On a warm September day at Manhattan's upscale St. Regis hotel, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates stepped onto a makeshift stage with IBM senior VP Steve Mills to demonstrate what Mills would describe as a "breakthrough" in software engineering. With the Windows operating system and Microsoft's SQL Server database running on one computer and a Linux operating system and IBM's DB2 database on another, the competitors showed how Web services could be used to conduct secure transactions across their disparate systems.
I don't see what the big deal is - heterogenous distributed transactions have been available for decades using something like Tuxedo or anything that supports XA. It has been possible to freely mix Oracle and DB2 for far longer than the 8 or so years I've been working with industrial-grade databases for a living, and I'm pretty sure Sybase too. This so-called "breakthrough" is trivial with any self-respecting middleware. Not only that, but databases like DB2 and Oracle and Sybase (on which MSSQL is based) completely abstract the underlying OS - the client or the middleware don't need to know, they just need to use the protocol. MSSQL, like Sybase, uses a protocol called TDS, Tabular Data Stream, which is well documented (there's even a free software version) which again completely abstracts the underlying OS. So what is the big deal here?
With RedHat wouldn't you just have to buy one copy of their standard edition software and be able to install it on multiple servers? Would this be a breach of their license?
If I remember correctly, if you install one "unlicensed" copy of Red Hat Enterprise, you invalidate the support for all your installed systems. Buy 50, install 51, you're now completely unsupported (if they find out, of course). I don't know if this also applies to "standard".
See here for a list. The Russell Group are the elite universities of the UK, altho' the group is lower profile than the Ivy League at present, rumours continually persist that it will declare its independance from the State-funded system and actively pursue the endowment- and fee-funded Ivy League model.
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Saying 97 percent of the significant figures in sciences come from the west is like saying 90 percent of shark bite victims happen within 100 meters of the shoreline
Consider, for example, gunpowder. Invented in China, but they only ever used it for fireworks to amuse the aristocrats. In the West, sure it was used as a weapon, but it was also used in mining. Western lateral thinking meant that Western mines were more efficient, which accelerated all forms of technological development.
Or mathematics is another example. Large amounts of it were invented by Arabs, but their religion doesn't permit advanced forms of banking, but when mathematics reached the West it was used for advanced finance, which permitted investment and insurance, which acclerated all forms of technological development.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries. Or it was; in the last century the West has spent less of its resources on developing technology and more on supporting those who aren't able to support themselves. Simple natural selection now means that our populations are becoming geared towards those who consume handouts but produce no new discoveries.
The Anarchist logo os also held within a circle, but is an upper-case A with the horizontal bar extended on both sides to reach the circle. The ends of each diagonal leg, and the angle at the top of the A also reach the circle.
I thought that was "A" for "Avril Lavigne"...
I know nothing about Newham specifically, but the perception in many parts of the UK are that many local councils are not well run.
You know, back in the day, the council (i.e. the people who have the political authority and are elected, as opposed to the people employed by the council to empty bins, etc) were all unpaid volunteers, doing their bit for the good of the community (and their own prestige, of course, but there's nothing wrong with that). They tended to be "pillars of the community" for example local small businessmen, like the town butcher, the baker etc, and before joining the council they'd run their family business for at least couple of decades so they knew the ins and outs of getting stuff done.
These days, being a councillor is a job, complete with salary and benefits. The kind of person who does it is very different: now most councillors are career politicians without any experience whatsoever of the "real world". The old-style councillors saw local government as a means to an end, and their job as to provide a stable, pleasant environment for people to go about their lives and their business. The present kind see local government as an end in and of itself, and the local residents as a mere source of tax to fund the grand ambitions of the councillors - and if it goes wrong, just jack the taxes up.
The quickest way to get local government back on track would be a wholesale cull of everyone on a salary.
Also, and I mean no disrepect to anyone in local government IT in the UK, but it's not well paid compared to the private sector - there are plenty of PHBs I guess
You can't look at salary in isolation, you have to look at the complete package. Government workers enjoy near-absolute job security and lavish taxpayer-funded pensions on retirement. Private sector workers are better paid, sure, but are far more likely to be laid off, and their retirement funds are invested in the market increasing their risk.
Not a computer, but didn't Garth in Wayne's World (can't remember if it was 1 or 2) have a book titled Unix Administrator's something-or-other?
If I remember correctly, it was the ubiquitous "Unix Network Programming" by the equally ubiquitous W. Richard Stevens (RIP). "Look it up in Stevens" is usually the correct answer whenever asked a question about TCP/IP or socket programming in general - if the person asking is smart enough to even understand the answer, it's almost certain they'll already own this book.
but, all the journalling filesystems are new and untested. New your saying? They're a few years old.. and yes, thats true but they're new in comparision to all the other filesystems.
I don't know where you got that from - filesystems like XFS have been proven on multi-terabyte arrays supporting mission-critical applications. I'd take XFS over an old-fashioned non-journalled filesystem like UFS (or ext2) any day.
Cost. Most review sites, especially in the PC industry, don't have much cash to purchase the products themselves. Instead they rely on vendors sending their hardware to them for free.
But the vendor doesn't have to do that. They could say "just go buy one and send us the invoice" or "here's a token redeemable at Best Buy for one of them" or whatever. The idea that a manufacturer actually has to supply it themselves directly in order for a reviewer to get it isn't based on any hard rules, that's just been the tradition.
I figure a lot of people are going to say something along the lines of "to hell with this, we don't ALL need a logo",
No, I say I don't particularly want to be associated with ESR's ideas of being a hacker which, as that page shows, amount largely to taking credit for other's work.
Basicly, any time a program wants to do something like put something in startup or modify winsock settings or stick files in windows system folder or modify the hosts file or dns settings or things like that, windows should come up with a nicely worded warning about why clicking "yes" is a bad idea.
Windows already does block attempts to fiddle with it... unless you're running as Administrator, of course. Surprising how many "geeks" wouldn't dream of running as root constantly on Unix will just add themselves to the administrators group on Windows because it's convenient. And there's no need for it either, now that Windows has "Run As" functionality.
If you answered Tide detergent, congradulations, you may have been "primed" into answering that.
Hmm, actually, I thought "Surf" - gotta be careful there that you don't find yourself subliminally advertising a rival brand!
Exactly. I know that at least around here, the ambulance company policy REQUIRES that all ambulances come to a complete stop at all red lights.
In Britain, we have discovered that if you allow the police to indulge in high-speed car chases they are actually far more likely to kill pedestrians than to catch any criminals! Perhaps there is a case for emergency vehicles being allowed to follow a different set of protocols for dealing with other vehicles than private vehicles, but there is no grounds for allowing them to ignore any rules whatsoever...
I'm going to or a certain pie I want to bake, why buy the whole book?
;-)
I buy cookbooks just for the photos of Nigella
Being a public company means that google will be working for the investors rather than doing what google does best.
Umm, who do you think Google is working for now, if not its investors?
The sole reason that Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and Mr. Shriram are represented on the board is that they invested millions in Google.
The career of Dr Schmidt is interesting too - for a couple of decades he's essentially been the bagman for KPCB, the VC firm that employs Mr Doerr. They dispatch him to take charge of anything they're particularly interested in until they cash out, then he moves on. Not that that is a bad thing or any criticism of either of them - but it is worth pointing out that the VCs have a clear majority on Google's board.
I mean, there is no reason for google to go public other than greed.
You know nothing about business. One of the most useful things about being a public company is the ability to use your own stock as a currency for making acquisitions. Far, far more efficient that paying cash for another company. An IPO could be simply so Google can use its capital more efficiently.
But the point is that even if it is a target, it is much harder to write a virus for OS X at this point in time
Well, maybe. No-one actually knows, because OSX hasn't attracted much attention from virus writers. It might be harder solely because OSX is newer and virus writers have less experience of it, I suppose, but as of yet, that's the only reason that can be known with any degree of certainty.
Unless they plan on using Warez, the obviously cheapest solution for an organization that probably won't have a lot of money lying around is to use Linux. Seems like common sence to me.
Mmm, yes, and thereby restrict their pool of volunteers to the Unix-savvy? Out in the real world, we have a thing called a cost-benefit analysis. This means that cheap isn't always better if cheap can't do what you want it to. You think a non-profit has the time and resources to retrain people who in all likelihood already know Windows and MS Office in Linux?
Sure, it's possible to produce great-looking documents with TeX or troff. But it's possible to produce documents 90% as good with 10% of the effort in Word. Open office is all well and good, but it lacks key features of MS Office and StarOffice, such as Windows metrically-equivalent fonts.
Someone who wants the best of both worlds is probably best off with Sun's Mad Hatter package. Yes it costs money, but it just goes to show, if you want a professionally-integrated system, you need to pay professionals for it.
Indeed, exactly as internet traffic would bypass a firewall set in place by the French government to keep Google out.
Wow, imagine if Microsoft hired engineers smart enough to design a file format that could last through 5-6 versions!
Microsoft don't have people to design file formats, never did to my knowledge. A Word document is a persisted COM object, the in-memory representation of the document. When the code of that object changes, for example as features are added, the "format" of the file on the disk changes too, entirely as a side-effect. Saying MS changes the format purely to thwart compatability is paranoid delusion.
I don't know about you, but where i work, we don't move the computer room every x months, even so, i don't see why you could not move a disk cabinet around.
:-)
We've been in two buildings this year and we're about to move again
On the positive note, we have a really nice overhead wire rack, that's looking good and all of our wiring is really tight looking; all the colors match, all the cables are labeled, they are all the right length, etc.
That's great, kid. No offense but you are way out of your depth. Call IBM and get them to build it for you, or at least send over a consultant to advise.
Although magnetic tape's cost per megabyte will give it a role in keeping archival records for years to come, better technologies and techniques are eroding tape's dominance for day-to-day backup and recovery tasks.
Heh. Let me tell you why tapes are good. Tapes are very, very simple and well understood. You can repair a broken tape with a Stanley knife and Sellotape if you have to. Sure you might lose a few blocks, but with decent archiving tools (like cpio and bzip2) losing a file won't cost you the entire archive. If a tape drive fails, just replace it, easy.
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do? Repair the platter? Transplant it to another hard drive? Just not feasible. And how're you going to store archives? Tapes are cheap and high density. Maybe you've moved buildings a couple of times and they've been kicked around, how certain are you HDs can be plugged back in and run? And they take more physical space too, and still cost more.
Tapes aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
This is a surprisingly good article for OSNews. Usually their reviews are limited to utterly trivial things like what the reviewer thought of the default colour scheme, or how easy it was to change the desktop wallpaper. But this one actually has some useful quantitative data in, and refers to things that workstation users actually care about, such as compile times. Whoever this chap is he should take over doing all the reviews from the girl (can't remember her name offhand) who usually does them, because she is pretty much clueless.
On a warm September day at Manhattan's upscale St. Regis hotel, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates stepped onto a makeshift stage with IBM senior VP Steve Mills to demonstrate what Mills would describe as a "breakthrough" in software engineering. With the Windows operating system and Microsoft's SQL Server database running on one computer and a Linux operating system and IBM's DB2 database on another, the competitors showed how Web services could be used to conduct secure transactions across their disparate systems.
I don't see what the big deal is - heterogenous distributed transactions have been available for decades using something like Tuxedo or anything that supports XA. It has been possible to freely mix Oracle and DB2 for far longer than the 8 or so years I've been working with industrial-grade databases for a living, and I'm pretty sure Sybase too. This so-called "breakthrough" is trivial with any self-respecting middleware. Not only that, but databases like DB2 and Oracle and Sybase (on which MSSQL is based) completely abstract the underlying OS - the client or the middleware don't need to know, they just need to use the protocol. MSSQL, like Sybase, uses a protocol called TDS, Tabular Data Stream, which is well documented (there's even a free software version) which again completely abstracts the underlying OS. So what is the big deal here?
With RedHat wouldn't you just have to buy one copy of their standard edition software and be able to install it on multiple servers? Would this be a breach of their license?
If I remember correctly, if you install one "unlicensed" copy of Red Hat Enterprise, you invalidate the support for all your installed systems. Buy 50, install 51, you're now completely unsupported (if they find out, of course). I don't know if this also applies to "standard".
The who? Never 'eard of 'em.
See here for a list. The Russell Group are the elite universities of the UK, altho' the group is lower profile than the Ivy League at present, rumours continually persist that it will declare its independance from the State-funded system and actively pursue the endowment- and fee-funded Ivy League model.