I for one thought the whole Zion/Rasta image was some rastafarian thing:) Come on.. Zion is from Neuromancer.. everyone knows it..
Then you are woefully ignorant of history. Did you go to school in the US perchance? In the Old Testament (reading it as a historical rather than religious text) Zion was the easternmost of two hills on which ancient Jerusalem was built, and also the name of the citadel that later formed the nucleus around which Jerusalem was built around the 10th century BC when King David captured it from the Jebusites.
"Matrix Reloaded" has as much to do with philosophy and religion as my dog's yawns.
It's pretty simple, and it's nothing to do with philosophy or religion per se. In the West when we hear the word "Zion", most people who even know the word associate it with the Rastas. A few may get the Judeo-christian reference. But in the Middle East, it's a loaded word. Whenever anything goes wrong in a Moslem country - usually the fault of their own corrupt, incompetent governments - the state-controlled press blame "Zionist conspiracies" to deflect the blame. A movie where "Zionists" are the heroes would cause an uproar. Changing that one word would have probably avoided the censor's attention altogether.
AES what (how many bits)? And how do they collect entropy? How do they generate the IV? Are there password complexity rules, or at least warnings on insecure passwords?
OK, but remember the target market. People who need strong crypto are savvy enough to use PGP/GPG/whatever. People just looking to secure a few personal files from amateur prying eyes will find 56-bit AES more than adequate. Remember, you don't need infinite security, you only need to make cracking more expensive than the value of the information.
who needs to use there cell phone... IN AN AIRPLANE?? If you need to call someone.. just wait a couple hours until your plane lands then hit the nearest pay phone.. if its an emergency... your on a friggin plane anyway..theres nothing your going to do.
The thing is, the way planes are used is changing. There used to be a "cruise ship" analogy - a plane journey was a big deal, with a lot of procedure and ritual involved. But now there's a "bus" analogy - a plane is just another form of transport that you hop on and off. It's not unusual to jump on a plane to another city for a meeting, then fly back a few hours later. Or skip to another country for a party and fly back the next morning. I'm not even boasting about my jetset lifestyle here, hell, book in advance and you can get from London to Dublin or Amsterdam for a tenner in a couple of hours! But as planes become part of everyday life, people will expect to use them exactly as they use other forms of transport, and that means seamless mobile comms must be available just like on buses and trains.
All electronic devices ? I mean, I have to rip off my digital watch everytime I get within 2 miles of the Airport?
OK, but on the other hand, you cannot expect flight attendents to be expert in every electronic device. Every geek will be arguing, "but this isn't a 1900 Mhz wireless modem it's a 2.4Ghz wifi" or "this is an Airbus so is GSM OK". There's simply no way to verify those claims. Maybe some folk simply won't know what frequencies their gear is emitting. Maybe some geek, emboldened by a comment on/., will simply lie because he wants to continue playing TuxRacer during takeoff, then a real problem does occur.
I don't know how much radiation my palm Vx is emitting, but if it is enough to trouble the plane electronics, I'll reverse to walking/driving...
An ordinary PDA is OK, but a PDA with a GSM card... unless you are a geek, it's not easy to tell, sometimes it may not even be visible from the outside.
There has to be a limit to what is forbidden.
Yeah, but you can always count on some people to abuse "common sense" rules, and those people are the ones who are really responsible for over-zealous bans. For safety's sake, you have to trap them.
I don't know if you've seen this ad, but there is a Apple laptop ad with a very short dude and a very tall dude sitting next to each other on the plane. You hear a chime, and hear a voice saying that it's now OK to remove your seatbelts, as you do on every flight once it's at crusing altitude. Then both dudes reach into their bags and pull out their laptops, open them up, and they come on straight away.
Now, airlines say that it's not enough to just suspend a laptop, it has to actually be shut down, but apparently these rules don't apply to Mac users, since they're so much more "creative" than ordinary people. There needs to be a clear rule, just power off all electronic devices during take off and landing, otherwise you'll get people saying "but it's not a phone it's a Mac with a wireless modem" and that'll just inconvenience everyone. Or get them killed, whatever.
The only format Microsoft offers that does that with MS Office is their proprietary DOC format. Users just don't have a choice.
Funny, I was filling in grad school applications a couple of years back, many of them were editable PDFs. The actual text wasn't editable of course, but you could check boxes, write in textfields, etc, then save it. Acrobat has supported this for ages, maybe even since it was launched. And almost any word processor on any platform can handle RTFs.
The way MS Office works is that a saved document is simply a persisted COM object, the object that represents the document in memory. That's why it keeps changing, because the functionality and hence internal structure of that class changes with every new release. I doubt MS has someone whose job it is to obfuscate things - if there were, why isn't it encrypted as a "feature"? Why are there tools like wv on my SGI machine to read.doc files?
Sorry, but MS aren't the bad guys here. I suggest you take it up with the document authors, because they're the ones causing the problem.
So for about a million US$1 you could get in the top 100 supercomputers in the world.
For $1M you could buy a load of computers, sure. But what is the cost of a building to put them in? A while ago I did some consulting for a major telco/colo provider. Their single biggest expense was electricity to run their air conditioning and dehumidifiers. It cost more than renting the building. They were seriously considering buying a utility company to get a better rate on electricity. Also on the cards was a relocation to Alaska, but the technology just isn't there yet to run truly "lights out" so they would have adopted an oil rig model - flying sysadmins out for 4 weeks on 2 weeks off, like oil companies do for rig workers. (The story ends before they could actually do any of this when the dotcom bubble burst and all their customers stopped paying their bills).
The building, the environmental controls, staff to run the system, staff to run the building (security, janitors, canteen staff and so on) - it all adds up. You would need to spend a lot more than $1M to get into the top 100.
Even if those formats were round trip, trying to get a large organization to use them consistently is like herding kittens: every MS Office installation and every external user just reverts to using the proprietary format
OK, but we're talking publicly available documents here. We don't care what each user has in their "My Documents" directory. It's trivial to add an (automatic) task to workflow that converts.doc to.pdf as part of the publishing process.
An example in programming terms: it does matter if you use gcc or MIPSpro to compile C++, because they use different name manging conventions, so you can't link code produced by one with shared objects produced by the other. But it doesn't matter if you write the C++ source code in vi or emacs originally.
No, I just live in the real world and have actually dealt with these issues with real users.
Me too, and I've addressed them. Just knock up a little "publish to web" macro or wizard for your users, if it's easier for them than FTP'ing.docs directly onto their web server, they'll use it, and you can code whatever processing you want into it.
The only trick then becomes getting four video cards (most likely an AGP and a PCI card, both with dual video out, nVidia style) to cooperate and treat the displays as one giant virtual display in a 2x2 arrangement.
Dual and quad headed workstations are pretty common in financial services. We use 'em all the time in dealing rooms, where traders have got to have lots of charts and data up at once, and obviously the developers working on that software use them too.
I agree that 1280x768 is pretty feeble on a 29" display... I have a 15.1" display on my laptop that is perfectly comfortable at 1400x1050. This display isn't suitable for use on a workstation, maybe as a wall-mounted display for a room or something.
The OICW is a waste. Give any soldier the choice between a set of combat gear or the scorpion suit, and he'll choose the combat gear. Give him a choice between the OICW or an M16, and he'll choose the M16.
To a certain extent this is true, but remember the M16 was able to replace the M14. At the time the M14 was much more reliable, and it fired a round with a lot more stopping power. Next thing you know the US army is in Vietnam - sure you can carry a lot more 5.56 ammo and fire it full auto, but the 7.62 goes through the jungle a lot more accurately, maybe you don't even need to fire as much of it.
This isn't like the computer industry - in the military, you can simply order all your end users to upgrade.
Moving to the latest new fangled gadgets does not make a successful armed force.
I'm sure the old geezers said the same thing when upgrading from muzzle-loaders...
The Glock firearm design is currently the most popular modern design on the market because it is a simple design that works.
A simple design based on decades of experience and the most modern of materials. Remember, the Glock is in most cases replacing a weapon designed in 1911!
The idea that everyone has free choice in signing contracts is foolish. The bottom line is that a disproportionate amount of power is placed in the hands of employers during hard economic times. They should not be able to do anything they chose because of that.
Like most folk, you forget that loyalty is a two way street. In the boom times, employees freely quit whenever they get a better offer - where is the loyalty then? Yet they expect companies to show loyalty to them in the down times. Back in to dotcom days, employees made ludicrous demands, and got them. Some folk demanded, and got, one day a week to work on their personal projects, for example. Now in the aftermath, they wonder why companies are laying people off.
There are companies that were more stable, that didn't pay huge salaries in the boom times. Some of these were the companies that had a good record of keeping employees on in the down times too. What was their reward? Staff quit en masse to go to dotcoms. Is it any wonder those same companies are just a little more cynical now?
The economy as it exists presently is quite cyclical, boom-bust-boom-bust for the last couple of decades or more. Sometimes employers have all the power, sometimes employees have all the power. But, as an employee, you cannot expect to enjoy the good times and be insulated from the bad times any more than a company can.
I don't like MS Office either, and I resent having to pay for it to access information (often public information), when, in my view, it has no other merit and I don't use it for anything else.
I find it interesting that you blame Microsoft for creating a product which they sell to whoever wants it, and not the people who chose to use the product inappropriately. There are plenty of ways to save a complex document in a portable format (RTF, PDF and HTML are a few examples). MS Word supports all of those (I think you need a plugin to save PDFs but MS Word supports plugins so what's the problem?). The creator of the information chose not to use the available tools, yet you blame the creator of the tools, not the user of the tools.
This leads me to suspect that you simply want to bash Microsoft, and don't really care about or understand the underlying issue at all.
He is fighting a losing battle, because his boss believes (whether it's true or not) that outsourcing will be "easy" which translates into "cheap". The counterargument is that doing it in-house will be "super cool". From the manager's point of view, this is a no brainer: the programmer can't come up with a fact-based economic argument (or at least, cannot articulate one) and so probably doesn't have one other than wanting to work on a "cool" project. To the manager, it looks like one of his employees is placing his own enjoyment ahead of the business goals of the organization.
I see this sort of thing all the time. Geeks never present a business case, they always just say something is "cool". A manager wants to know, why is it cool? What is your definition of cool anyway? What makes X cooler than Y, in terms of this specific situation? In what cases would Y be better? What happens to both X and Y when Z happens?
Managers are actually pretty easy to deal with, because all their decisions are ultimately binary "does this make more money than it costs, yes or no?" If you can present a convincing argument for yes, you can do whatever you want. If you can't, you'll be ignored. That's the way it is.
Read claim 1, the patentable feature is dealing with scroll rates and adding/removingfor a number of listings in a VOD environment. This is not a patent for VOD itself there are several hundred existing patents for that.
I'm guessing you're new around here. Slashbots don't bother to read articles; they just see the words "Microsoft" and "patent" on the same page and start frothing at the keyboard.
I've said it a hundred times on here, you can't patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea. Patents are all about what seem like minor details, but are actually things that are important, and they've all got very vague, general names. S'why you have to read 'em before commenting.
You mean... like RPM? DEB? It's nice to know that MS is getting on board for things like centralized dependency checking, but do they have to make everything sound like they're inventing it?
You're right, everyone knows that Linus invented dependency checking, and Red Hat were the first to use it.
Didn't the really great advances in space travel come about because of the intellectual battle between the US and the Soviet Union?
It was not, and never was, an intellectual battle. Both sides sought to intimidate the other, and gain influence amongst the non-aligned states, through demonstrations of superior national will and technology.
If the ESA starts making inroads into space research and NASA wants to keep its top position, it will be forced to become really competitive
Not at all. There's no conflict to win between the US and EU. Neither agency needs to compete, since both are funded by the taxpayers of their respective nations. You will simply see them both swell into even larger and more expensive bureaucratic monsters.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is anymore. A high-end Beowulf compute node these days typically gives you 2 processors and 2-4 Gigabit Ethernet channels, going into a high-end switch.
Once you've factored in the cost of all that Myrinet kit, and the time to do all the systems integration, it's probably cheaper to buy an SGI anyway, especially when you consider that the individual components of the SGI are going to require far less maintenance than commodity off-the-shelf PCs. Don't get me wrong, Beowulfs have their places, but if I wanted a Linux supercomputer, I'd get an Altix with NUMALink instead of a pile of Dells and Myrinets.
they're making the case that clusters should be pursued over supercomputers for the data-intensive number crunching activities like nuclear explosion modeling, etc.
I doubt it. You can only use a "cluster" like a Beowulf if your problem can neatly be divided into small, completely independent work units. If you want to render a movie, then so long as you have all the scene data, each frame can be rendered completely independently of any other, then stitched together at the end.
Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization. You need a traditional supercomputer like an SGI Origin for jobs like that, because of its massive internal bandwidth.
There is absolutely no danger of Beowulfs killing off the supercomputer in the near future. In fact, the supercomputer market is looking pretty healthy.
Any chance IBM's legal team could string together SCO's actions of the last couple of weeks and make a case that SCO was trying to blackmail IBM? Maybe there's a RICO case here.
Any chance? IBM's lawyers are among the most dangerous people on the planet. They have a huge stockpile of Patents of Mass Infringement, and a budget that would make the Special Forces weep. Companies like IBM and Xerox (and others) quietly do huge amounts of research, and patent it all. Most infringements they don't care about, because they simply cross-license IP from their allies. Most of the them exist for one reason: so that if anyone sues IBM for anything, they can respond with total disaster, a big smoking crater where your NASDAQ listing used to be. "Yeah, we infringed one of your patents, sorry about that, oh but you infringed about a hundred of ours, you have 20 seconds to come out with your hands up and your pants down."
The one threat that IBM faces here is setting a precedent by buying SCO outright. They won't want to do that unless backed into a corner because it might encourage others. It's more likely that they'd buy Novell.
I can't justify spending $300 to watch an entire series.
"Hi, I really like your product, but I don't want to give you any money for it. You are going to go on making it, right, so I can just steal it? Hello?"
That's the problem, see. Like all digital media, a DVD is trivial to reproduce once its made. In an industrial scale, it's less than $1/disk. But the content on it is not trivial to produce. Animation requires lots of people and lots of time, and altho' the end product is cool, and the people making the storyboards probably have a blast, the actual cel-by-cel drawing must be incredibly tedious work.
Take open source for an example. There's lots of open source around, because writing software is fun. But the only way to get good documentation is to pay cash money to O'Reilley for it, because writing documentation is dull. O'Reilley sell their documentation in paper form rather than giving away the PDFs for free because if there was no money in it, they couldn't afford to make their product in the first place.
People don't see that every product, no matter how cool it is, is underpinned by lots of dull and painstaking work, that people will only do because it's how they earn their money, which they need in order to buy cool stuff of their own. Those are the people who are really hurt by piracy. Think about it.
Now their phones look like Nokia raided Ideo's discard pile. These phones look great as objects, but each new Nokia suggests "phone" to me less and less.
You think they're bad, check out Xelibri handsets. As for me, I'm very happy with my Nokia 6310, and I was happy with the 6210 before that.
Re:What the CIA needs:
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 1
less technical assets, more people in the field.
There is a very good book about this, "See No Evil" by Robert Baer. A former CIA agent handler, he reports how time and time again, the CIA backed away from good old-fashioned HUMINT (agents on the grounds doing stuff) in favour of SIGINT (intercepting communications). He points out that if you are fighting an enemy who do not use sophisticated technology on a day-to-day basis, who prefer to comunicate face to face, who are patient enough to use bike messengers carrying handwritten notes rather than fax machines and email, then SIGINT is useless.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one thought the whole Zion/Rasta image was some rastafarian thing :) Come on.. Zion is from Neuromancer.. everyone knows it..
Then you are woefully ignorant of history. Did you go to school in the US perchance? In the Old Testament (reading it as a historical rather than religious text) Zion was the easternmost of two hills on which ancient Jerusalem was built, and also the name of the citadel that later formed the nucleus around which Jerusalem was built around the 10th century BC when King David captured it from the Jebusites.
"Matrix Reloaded" has as much to do with philosophy and religion as my dog's yawns.
It's pretty simple, and it's nothing to do with philosophy or religion per se. In the West when we hear the word "Zion", most people who even know the word associate it with the Rastas. A few may get the Judeo-christian reference. But in the Middle East, it's a loaded word. Whenever anything goes wrong in a Moslem country - usually the fault of their own corrupt, incompetent governments - the state-controlled press blame "Zionist conspiracies" to deflect the blame. A movie where "Zionists" are the heroes would cause an uproar. Changing that one word would have probably avoided the censor's attention altogether.
AES what (how many bits)? And how do they collect entropy? How do they generate the IV? Are there password complexity rules, or at least warnings on insecure passwords?
OK, but remember the target market. People who need strong crypto are savvy enough to use PGP/GPG/whatever. People just looking to secure a few personal files from amateur prying eyes will find 56-bit AES more than adequate. Remember, you don't need infinite security, you only need to make cracking more expensive than the value of the information.
who needs to use there cell phone... IN AN AIRPLANE?? If you need to call someone.. just wait a couple hours until your plane lands then hit the nearest pay phone.. if its an emergency... your on a friggin plane anyway..theres nothing your going to do.
The thing is, the way planes are used is changing. There used to be a "cruise ship" analogy - a plane journey was a big deal, with a lot of procedure and ritual involved. But now there's a "bus" analogy - a plane is just another form of transport that you hop on and off. It's not unusual to jump on a plane to another city for a meeting, then fly back a few hours later. Or skip to another country for a party and fly back the next morning. I'm not even boasting about my jetset lifestyle here, hell, book in advance and you can get from London to Dublin or Amsterdam for a tenner in a couple of hours! But as planes become part of everyday life, people will expect to use them exactly as they use other forms of transport, and that means seamless mobile comms must be available just like on buses and trains.
That would be the one which flew into the ground shortly after for as yet unknown reasons, right ?
Yeah, a bunch of untrained civilians fighting it out with a bunch of hardcore fanatic terrorists had nothing to do with it...
All electronic devices ? I mean, I have to rip off my digital watch everytime I get within 2 miles of the Airport?
/., will simply lie because he wants to continue playing TuxRacer during takeoff, then a real problem does occur.
OK, but on the other hand, you cannot expect flight attendents to be expert in every electronic device. Every geek will be arguing, "but this isn't a 1900 Mhz wireless modem it's a 2.4Ghz wifi" or "this is an Airbus so is GSM OK". There's simply no way to verify those claims. Maybe some folk simply won't know what frequencies their gear is emitting. Maybe some geek, emboldened by a comment on
I don't know how much radiation my palm Vx is emitting, but if it is enough to trouble the plane electronics, I'll reverse to walking/driving...
An ordinary PDA is OK, but a PDA with a GSM card... unless you are a geek, it's not easy to tell, sometimes it may not even be visible from the outside.
There has to be a limit to what is forbidden.
Yeah, but you can always count on some people to abuse "common sense" rules, and those people are the ones who are really responsible for over-zealous bans. For safety's sake, you have to trap them.
I don't know if you've seen this ad, but there is a Apple laptop ad with a very short dude and a very tall dude sitting next to each other on the plane. You hear a chime, and hear a voice saying that it's now OK to remove your seatbelts, as you do on every flight once it's at crusing altitude. Then both dudes reach into their bags and pull out their laptops, open them up, and they come on straight away.
Now, airlines say that it's not enough to just suspend a laptop, it has to actually be shut down, but apparently these rules don't apply to Mac users, since they're so much more "creative" than ordinary people. There needs to be a clear rule, just power off all electronic devices during take off and landing, otherwise you'll get people saying "but it's not a phone it's a Mac with a wireless modem" and that'll just inconvenience everyone. Or get them killed, whatever.
The only format Microsoft offers that does that with MS Office is their proprietary DOC format. Users just don't have a choice.
.doc files?
Funny, I was filling in grad school applications a couple of years back, many of them were editable PDFs. The actual text wasn't editable of course, but you could check boxes, write in textfields, etc, then save it. Acrobat has supported this for ages, maybe even since it was launched. And almost any word processor on any platform can handle RTFs.
The way MS Office works is that a saved document is simply a persisted COM object, the object that represents the document in memory. That's why it keeps changing, because the functionality and hence internal structure of that class changes with every new release. I doubt MS has someone whose job it is to obfuscate things - if there were, why isn't it encrypted as a "feature"? Why are there tools like wv on my SGI machine to read
Sorry, but MS aren't the bad guys here. I suggest you take it up with the document authors, because they're the ones causing the problem.
So for about a million US$1 you could get in the top 100 supercomputers in the world.
For $1M you could buy a load of computers, sure. But what is the cost of a building to put them in? A while ago I did some consulting for a major telco/colo provider. Their single biggest expense was electricity to run their air conditioning and dehumidifiers. It cost more than renting the building. They were seriously considering buying a utility company to get a better rate on electricity. Also on the cards was a relocation to Alaska, but the technology just isn't there yet to run truly "lights out" so they would have adopted an oil rig model - flying sysadmins out for 4 weeks on 2 weeks off, like oil companies do for rig workers. (The story ends before they could actually do any of this when the dotcom bubble burst and all their customers stopped paying their bills).
The building, the environmental controls, staff to run the system, staff to run the building (security, janitors, canteen staff and so on) - it all adds up. You would need to spend a lot more than $1M to get into the top 100.
Even if those formats were round trip, trying to get a large organization to use them consistently is like herding kittens: every MS Office installation and every external user just reverts to using the proprietary format
.doc to .pdf as part of the publishing process.
.docs directly onto their web server, they'll use it, and you can code whatever processing you want into it.
OK, but we're talking publicly available documents here. We don't care what each user has in their "My Documents" directory. It's trivial to add an (automatic) task to workflow that converts
An example in programming terms: it does matter if you use gcc or MIPSpro to compile C++, because they use different name manging conventions, so you can't link code produced by one with shared objects produced by the other. But it doesn't matter if you write the C++ source code in vi or emacs originally.
No, I just live in the real world and have actually dealt with these issues with real users.
Me too, and I've addressed them. Just knock up a little "publish to web" macro or wizard for your users, if it's easier for them than FTP'ing
The only trick then becomes getting four video cards (most likely an AGP and a PCI card, both with dual video out, nVidia style) to cooperate and treat the displays as one giant virtual display in a 2x2 arrangement.
Dual and quad headed workstations are pretty common in financial services. We use 'em all the time in dealing rooms, where traders have got to have lots of charts and data up at once, and obviously the developers working on that software use them too.
I agree that 1280x768 is pretty feeble on a 29" display... I have a 15.1" display on my laptop that is perfectly comfortable at 1400x1050. This display isn't suitable for use on a workstation, maybe as a wall-mounted display for a room or something.
The OICW is a waste. Give any soldier the choice between a set of combat gear or the scorpion suit, and he'll choose the combat gear. Give him a choice between the OICW or an M16, and he'll choose the M16.
To a certain extent this is true, but remember the M16 was able to replace the M14. At the time the M14 was much more reliable, and it fired a round with a lot more stopping power. Next thing you know the US army is in Vietnam - sure you can carry a lot more 5.56 ammo and fire it full auto, but the 7.62 goes through the jungle a lot more accurately, maybe you don't even need to fire as much of it.
This isn't like the computer industry - in the military, you can simply order all your end users to upgrade.
Moving to the latest new fangled gadgets does not make a successful armed force.
I'm sure the old geezers said the same thing when upgrading from muzzle-loaders...
The Glock firearm design is currently the most popular modern design on the market because it is a simple design that works.
A simple design based on decades of experience and the most modern of materials. Remember, the Glock is in most cases replacing a weapon designed in 1911!
ESR is married to a fiesty red-headed IP lawyer named Cathy. Maybe you should get a clue before trashing ESR and this strategy.
I dated a lawyer once, so I'm pretty well qualified to tell you that your argument won't hold up in court.
The idea that everyone has free choice in signing contracts is foolish. The bottom line is that a disproportionate amount of power is placed in the hands of employers during hard economic times. They should not be able to do anything they chose because of that.
Like most folk, you forget that loyalty is a two way street. In the boom times, employees freely quit whenever they get a better offer - where is the loyalty then? Yet they expect companies to show loyalty to them in the down times. Back in to dotcom days, employees made ludicrous demands, and got them. Some folk demanded, and got, one day a week to work on their personal projects, for example. Now in the aftermath, they wonder why companies are laying people off.
There are companies that were more stable, that didn't pay huge salaries in the boom times. Some of these were the companies that had a good record of keeping employees on in the down times too. What was their reward? Staff quit en masse to go to dotcoms. Is it any wonder those same companies are just a little more cynical now?
The economy as it exists presently is quite cyclical, boom-bust-boom-bust for the last couple of decades or more. Sometimes employers have all the power, sometimes employees have all the power. But, as an employee, you cannot expect to enjoy the good times and be insulated from the bad times any more than a company can.
I don't like MS Office either, and I resent having to pay for it to access information (often public information), when, in my view, it has no other merit and I don't use it for anything else.
I find it interesting that you blame Microsoft for creating a product which they sell to whoever wants it, and not the people who chose to use the product inappropriately. There are plenty of ways to save a complex document in a portable format (RTF, PDF and HTML are a few examples). MS Word supports all of those (I think you need a plugin to save PDFs but MS Word supports plugins so what's the problem?). The creator of the information chose not to use the available tools, yet you blame the creator of the tools, not the user of the tools.
This leads me to suspect that you simply want to bash Microsoft, and don't really care about or understand the underlying issue at all.
You are fighting a losing battle.
He is fighting a losing battle, because his boss believes (whether it's true or not) that outsourcing will be "easy" which translates into "cheap". The counterargument is that doing it in-house will be "super cool". From the manager's point of view, this is a no brainer: the programmer can't come up with a fact-based economic argument (or at least, cannot articulate one) and so probably doesn't have one other than wanting to work on a "cool" project. To the manager, it looks like one of his employees is placing his own enjoyment ahead of the business goals of the organization.
I see this sort of thing all the time. Geeks never present a business case, they always just say something is "cool". A manager wants to know, why is it cool? What is your definition of cool anyway? What makes X cooler than Y, in terms of this specific situation? In what cases would Y be better? What happens to both X and Y when Z happens?
Managers are actually pretty easy to deal with, because all their decisions are ultimately binary "does this make more money than it costs, yes or no?" If you can present a convincing argument for yes, you can do whatever you want. If you can't, you'll be ignored. That's the way it is.
Read claim 1, the patentable feature is dealing with scroll rates and adding/removingfor a number of listings in a VOD environment. This is not a patent for VOD itself there are several hundred existing patents for that.
I'm guessing you're new around here. Slashbots don't bother to read articles; they just see the words "Microsoft" and "patent" on the same page and start frothing at the keyboard.
I've said it a hundred times on here, you can't patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea. Patents are all about what seem like minor details, but are actually things that are important, and they've all got very vague, general names. S'why you have to read 'em before commenting.
You mean... like RPM? DEB? It's nice to know that MS is getting on board for things like centralized dependency checking, but do they have to make everything sound like they're inventing it?
You're right, everyone knows that Linus invented dependency checking, and Red Hat were the first to use it.
Get over yourself and get a clue.
Didn't the really great advances in space travel come about because of the intellectual battle between the US and the Soviet Union?
It was not, and never was, an intellectual battle. Both sides sought to intimidate the other, and gain influence amongst the non-aligned states, through demonstrations of superior national will and technology.
If the ESA starts making inroads into space research and NASA wants to keep its top position, it will be forced to become really competitive
Not at all. There's no conflict to win between the US and EU. Neither agency needs to compete, since both are funded by the taxpayers of their respective nations. You will simply see them both swell into even larger and more expensive bureaucratic monsters.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is anymore. A high-end Beowulf compute node these days typically gives you 2 processors and 2-4 Gigabit Ethernet channels, going into a high-end switch.
Once you've factored in the cost of all that Myrinet kit, and the time to do all the systems integration, it's probably cheaper to buy an SGI anyway, especially when you consider that the individual components of the SGI are going to require far less maintenance than commodity off-the-shelf PCs. Don't get me wrong, Beowulfs have their places, but if I wanted a Linux supercomputer, I'd get an Altix with NUMALink instead of a pile of Dells and Myrinets.
they're making the case that clusters should be pursued over supercomputers for the data-intensive number crunching activities like nuclear explosion modeling, etc.
I doubt it. You can only use a "cluster" like a Beowulf if your problem can neatly be divided into small, completely independent work units. If you want to render a movie, then so long as you have all the scene data, each frame can be rendered completely independently of any other, then stitched together at the end.
Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization. You need a traditional supercomputer like an SGI Origin for jobs like that, because of its massive internal bandwidth.
There is absolutely no danger of Beowulfs killing off the supercomputer in the near future. In fact, the supercomputer market is looking pretty healthy.
Any chance IBM's legal team could string together SCO's actions of the last couple of weeks and make a case that SCO was trying to blackmail IBM? Maybe there's a RICO case here.
Any chance? IBM's lawyers are among the most dangerous people on the planet. They have a huge stockpile of Patents of Mass Infringement, and a budget that would make the Special Forces weep. Companies like IBM and Xerox (and others) quietly do huge amounts of research, and patent it all. Most infringements they don't care about, because they simply cross-license IP from their allies. Most of the them exist for one reason: so that if anyone sues IBM for anything, they can respond with total disaster, a big smoking crater where your NASDAQ listing used to be. "Yeah, we infringed one of your patents, sorry about that, oh but you infringed about a hundred of ours, you have 20 seconds to come out with your hands up and your pants down."
The one threat that IBM faces here is setting a precedent by buying SCO outright. They won't want to do that unless backed into a corner because it might encourage others. It's more likely that they'd buy Novell.
I can't justify spending $300 to watch an entire series.
"Hi, I really like your product, but I don't want to give you any money for it. You are going to go on making it, right, so I can just steal it? Hello?"
That's the problem, see. Like all digital media, a DVD is trivial to reproduce once its made. In an industrial scale, it's less than $1/disk. But the content on it is not trivial to produce. Animation requires lots of people and lots of time, and altho' the end product is cool, and the people making the storyboards probably have a blast, the actual cel-by-cel drawing must be incredibly tedious work.
Take open source for an example. There's lots of open source around, because writing software is fun. But the only way to get good documentation is to pay cash money to O'Reilley for it, because writing documentation is dull. O'Reilley sell their documentation in paper form rather than giving away the PDFs for free because if there was no money in it, they couldn't afford to make their product in the first place.
People don't see that every product, no matter how cool it is, is underpinned by lots of dull and painstaking work, that people will only do because it's how they earn their money, which they need in order to buy cool stuff of their own. Those are the people who are really hurt by piracy. Think about it.
Now their phones look like Nokia raided Ideo's discard pile. These phones look great as objects, but each new Nokia suggests "phone" to me less and less.
You think they're bad, check out Xelibri handsets. As for me, I'm very happy with my Nokia 6310, and I was happy with the 6210 before that.
less technical assets, more people in the field.
There is a very good book about this, "See No Evil" by Robert Baer. A former CIA agent handler, he reports how time and time again, the CIA backed away from good old-fashioned HUMINT (agents on the grounds doing stuff) in favour of SIGINT (intercepting communications). He points out that if you are fighting an enemy who do not use sophisticated technology on a day-to-day basis, who prefer to comunicate face to face, who are patient enough to use bike messengers carrying handwritten notes rather than fax machines and email, then SIGINT is useless.