Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf.
Uhh, yes there is. Just correlate requests going into and out from the node, if you're snooping all the traffic anyway. You can probably even do this by looking at the timings, if it's encrypted. If you see an outbound request with no inbound request in the n preceding milliseconds (established empirically) then it's pretty obvious that it was a request originating at that node. Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.
Freenet might work if you only look at one-way traffic from one node at a time, but the people that it was built to circumvent - governments - have the resources to take a wider view.
Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.
Indeed. And since you don't have to "pay" for what you use, a la Mojo Nation, the Tragedy of the Commons applies and the FreeNet system will rapidly go the way of every other P2P system, in which the balance between contributors and consumers is destroyed.
suits are uncomfortable, infact in a sit on you ass all day job, there too fucking hot!!!!! Ok if I worked outside, i might consider waring somthing designed to keep the heat in like a tie, but in an office there highly un-practical, spread pungent smells of sweety armpits
Sounds like you're wearing polyester. Try lightweight 110s wool. It's breathable and not too insulating. And a proper cotton shirt. Generally, the fewer manmade fibres in your clothes, the better (the only manmade I'm wearing now is my shoelaces!). Spend as much as you can afford on your clothes, you're going to spend most of your time in them!
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
How would he know? MIT Media Lab, under Nicholas Negroponte, don't do anything that any academic or industry practitioner would consider to be "research". You see, in the words of Negroponte, they live in a world not of "atoms" but of "bits". In the world of atoms, researchers have to produce such things as peer-reviewed papers and working prototypes. In the world of "bits", researchers are measured by the number of column inches they get in Wired magazine. MIT Media lab churns out books and articles by the tonne, but it's little better than scifi, most of it, and very little of it is even original.
You would think that the hard-headed engineers at MIT would have seen that the Emperor has no clothes and would have cut off their funding by now, but mysterious the Media Lab clings to life. They are an embarassment to real futurists everywhere. Contrast them with the work done at IBM's labs, or BT's, or even Nokia, where stuff is made that actually makes an impact on the real world a decade or two later.
Re:suit up or ship out (my email to the editors)
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 2
3) Profit!
Well,
1) Wear whatever the hell you want 2) ??? 3) Profit!
didn't seem to work, did it?
Re:Its not just the dress code..
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Traditionally, your average IT guy, lived and breathed computers, he was not master of one, he was jack of all trades and (normally) master of one particular area. YOu couldn't just go into uni and be taught everything you needed to know to go out and do computing, you had to live and breath it at a young age.
It's a result of the technology maturing. For example, in the old days if fsck failed, you might have to go in there with fsdb and fix it yourself. And back in the day, SunOS 1.x admins thought fsdb was newfangled nonsense. Nowadays, on a modern journalled filesystem you never have to do that, and on a modern storage array if a disk goes bad you don't have to recover what you can from it, you just hotswap it and throw it away.
The times have changed, now every man and his dog does IT degrees and the market is being flooded with well presented, sociable creatures who dont actually understand what they are doing, they don't understand what teh computer is doing, they have not LEARNT the computer, they have LEARNT the program.
It's the same in every industry. How many people know how their TVs work, or their cars, or their cellphones? Back in the day, the only people who had these things were engineers, now everyone has them. Eventually, the pure-IT people will be like garage mechanics.
The traditional IT workers who can't dress to save there lives and have little social skills are finding it alot harder to compete with these socially adept creatures, and thus the attitude of the workers and the employees has changed
In a mature technology, the problem is not "how to do it", but rather "what should we do". IT always used to be about the former, but now it is about the latter. It is so easy with modern tools to build bread-and-butter applications that it is more important to work out what applications should be built - the complexity is no longer in the technology, but in the application of the technology, how it represents and manipulates data in the "real world". To answer those questions, you need to have good communication and social skills so you can find out what the people paying your salary actually want do, then you need to work out how to use computers to do that.
That's not a bad thing; you can't outsource it to India, it relies on the IT people being right there in the thick of things. People who can't adapt to the new way are going to find themselves in an increasingly precarious position in the job market.
Someone who understands corporate culture far better than I do care to explain how casual dress costs the company more money?
If everyone wears a suit, it's simple. You put on your suit, your shirt, your tie, your shoes and go to work. Easy.
But if you can wear what you want, suddenly there's a bit more thinking involved. The question about what to wear today rears its head. And when you get to work, you can spend hours bitching about/admiring your colleague's clothes. It's the same reason that some employers aren't too keen on excessive decoration of work areas, or bringing your pets to work, or having music playing out loud, or watching DVDs on your PC. The office is a place to work, it's not a social event.
Personally, I think that a compromise between the two extremes should be struck. Productivity is important, but it can be taken to the point where it's all activity and no useful work - and it's rare (in my experience) that anyone does work a solid 8 or 10 hours, there are always gaps when you are waiting for something. In those times, why not do something fun? So long as the balance is kept. In the dotcom days, it became all fun and no work, which is even more damaging that all work and no fun.
I am notoriously incompatible with ties. Also notoriously incompatible with people wearing them.
Well, that's your problem, not theirs. You are making just as much a clothing-based judgement about them as you think they are making about you.
I don't see why people are so down on ties. A tie is really the anti-uniform, the majority of suits you will see are a variation on the two classic colors of navy blue and charcoal grey, but your tie can be almost any color and pattern you want, even in the most conservative of surroundings. Self-proclaimed creative people should be the tie's biggest fans, not the opposite.
I have been working in the City for over 2 years now and have not been required to wear a suit since my interview (apart from at a couple of recruitment things). A lot of the other major banks have switched back recently but here (CitiGroup) and Goldmans have stuck with "business casual".
I'm also in the City, and what I'm seeing is that people are now gradually dressing back up, perfectly voluntarily. I suppose some of it might be due to fears about looking casual when jobs are being cut, but I suspect there's more to it than that. Personally, I like dressing for work, and changing into jeans and a t-shirt when I get home, it draws a nice line between work and the rest of my time. Like many people for a while my job was my life, but now even tho' I do enjoy my job, I do it to pay for my life.
An observation: most people who claim that suits are "uncomfortable" formed their opinion at a time when they could only afford cheap suits. A good suit is far more comfortable even than very casual clothes, it's made of high quality material and it can easily be modified to fit you exactly, rather than a generic "Size X" that casual clothes come on. People look good in suits; tailors have literally centuries of experience starting with military uniforms at making clothes that people look good in. Suits have plenty of pockets for stuff. Suits are versatile, you can go fully formal or in shirt sleeves.
Another possible reason is that humans are very status-oriented. If you've been to grad school and earn $$$, do you really want to dress like a mail room clerk? It sounds terribly snobbish, but I think it's a good explanation.
One final thing they learn in the 24th century. Don't supply a race technology. Or in 20th century speak, don't sell other countries weapons.
Well, Archer hates the Vulcans because they withheld technology from his father. Not because they applied diplomatic pressure to prevent humans from going into space (altho' they did), not because they threatened Earth if they were disobeyed (which they didn't) but because they didn't hand everything to Earth on a silver platter. And in the series he blunders through the universe wondering why every alien he meets isn't overjoyed to meet him, and eager to give him everything he wants. He's whiny and spoilt, basically he's an American tourist overseas, completely unable to understand that the rest of the world isn't like his hometown, and that they couldn't care less about him either way. And he's the best they could find?
i remember someone insightfully stating from the firefly poll that firefly is science-fantasy, not science fiction, in science fantasy the technology is there, its a given, with no explanation and no technobabble, the exact oposite fo star trek
But on Star Trek, there is no functional difference between "technobabble" and "magic spell". You could move the whole thing into a Dungeons & Dragons world, and it would work exactly the same. In real sci fi, there are laws of physics that don't change from episode to episode, and in good drama, there isn't a magical solution to every problem, and things can't be neatly wrapped up in time for the credits.
The avoid techobabble by having jack O'Niell tell scientists to shut up.
There is a great scene in the first episode in which O'Neill isn't taking Carter seriously, and she gives him an earful about how wearing her genitals on the inside didn't stop her flying 100 hrs of combat missions in the Gulf War, and he replies that he has no problem with female Air Force officers, there problem is that she's a scientist too, and he doesn't trust scientists.
One of the great things about the show is that you can see over time how he comes to respect Carter and Jackson, even though Jackson isn't even Air Force, he's a civilian. That sort of character development is far beyond Star Trek's writers.
I have never watched this show but am curious how it compares to the Star Trek and Babylon 5 series in that does it have a story arc and continuity between each episode?
The show has great continuity and the technology is almost completely internally consistent. By that I mean, if a given piece of technology worked one way in one episode, then that's how it works. Unlike Star Trek where the technology is a crutch for weak script writers. You know the way in Star Trek the transporters or sensors will simply stop working for an arbitrary reason to prod the plot along? Doesn't happen on Stargate at all, and without that crutch, the writers are forced to be much more creative.
Another example: Enterprise is set years before Kirk, so deflector shields haven't been invented yet. But the writers are too lazy to do away with the "shields are failing" plot device, so they simply substitute in the technobabble "hull polarization" and write exactly as before. Star Fleet doesn't exist yet, but Earth's single, primitive starship can interfere with established, advanced spacegoing races with impunity, just like Kirk or Picard... how? Umm, because that's the only plot they know how to write.
Another thing that annoyed me about Star Trek and Babylon 5 was their Earth-centricness, Earth being the capital planet of the Federation and humans being the "chosen race" in Babylon 5. In Stargate, humans are in a complex universe in which often they are only bit players in the ongoing feuds of the Goa'uld amongst themselves, the Asgard have problems of their own in their home galaxy and often cannot be bothered with Earth's problems, etc. All the other races have been getting on with their histories without Earth even being relevant for large periods of time (i.e. Earth was ignored by the Goa'uld since the Egyptian period). This ongoing activity by NPCs means that the storylines continue between episodes.
Finally, the characters on Stargate are more believable. They are fairly ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, not like Star Trek (particularly TNG) in which each character is "special", the boy genius, the telepath, the noble warrior, etc. Star Trek characters in every series apart from the original are cliches.
Not quite. I don't think even Outlook was ever set to just run code automatically.
I'm pretty sure it was. Outlook + Exchange was never just an email client-server combo, it was intended as a platform for the development of document routing and workflow systems as well as messaging (i.e. it competes with Lotus Notes, not with pine + sendmail). The scripting capability is there so you can send logic and interactive GUIs around, not just email and attachments, and integrate it via COM with all the other Office applications.
Basically, what's interesting about this is that it's a generalized architecture for any datatype. So, while it's true that there are many MP3 players out there, there's few which are able to handle multiple streams, mixing them with other audio sources, adding in multiple video sources, and hey, throw in some JPEGs, GIFs and Flash while you're at it.
Blah blah blah, another media player. With a name like that I was expecting an Open Source-based Folding@Home or something like that - which would be great, because I have machines with spare CPU cycles that there aren't Stanford binaries for.
So you can handle multiple codecs. So can a dozen other players. Move along people, nothing to see here.
It also means that a Linux-based blade can work in *any* manufacturers chassis. This removes a big barrier of entry for the Linux in the telecom market.
Power Appliance is already available, running Oracle 9i on Linux on up to 48 dual-processor (PIII, 800-1200 Mhz) blades in a single chassis, and the software to manage them.
Due to the lack of details given about the fund being 'robbed', I'm going to guess that the password was compromised, as opposed to some sort of hack on paypal's servers. So... isn't it this guy's fault (at least as opposed to paypal's)? Paypal didn't do anything wrong.. sure maybe they could be a bit more helpful in trying to track down who did it, but they certainly aren't obligated to do so.
If you pay at a restaurant with your Visa card, and the waiter keeps a copy of the carbons and later spends money on your card, Visa will take care of that for you - you aren't liable unless you have been woefully careless.
If AbiWord left their password and account details written down on a postit note then maybe it's their fault, but if their account was brute-forced, then PayPal should be responsible.
PayPal isn't a bank. They don't claim to be a bank. They are not insured like a bank. So why should they have to act like one? They are a payment clearinghouse.
I have to protest about your "bit of fun" comment. Assuming a large enough stake, ESOPs fundamentally change the power structure of a company. While that's fun on some level, it's not trivial.
Point taken - the stake in my example was too small to be meaningful.
In a nutshell: The employees buy shares of the company from the founders. The founders are then able to get equity out of the company w/out selling out to a bunch of outsiders who don't care about long term health of the place, and the employees get to become "stakeholders" in the place that they work. Everybody wins. You might want to consider it.
I once worked for a company that did something like this. I won't bore you with the details, so let me summarize it thusly: pretty much everyone who participated got shafted.
Stuff like ESOP and ESPP can be a bit of fun, but it's no substitute for cold, hard cash. What would you say if the company proposed paying you in lottery tickets?
The funny thing is, managers bitch about techies just as much as techies bitch about managers. Mostly managers wonder why techies, particularly those who seem to rate themselves quite highly, seem utterly unable to deliver the product when they say they will, and are also unable to release code that isn't full of bugs.
Companies exist to generate economic value. If you can do that by writing code, so much the better. Last I checked, for all their high ideals about GPLs and free-as-in-beer, techies do like getting paid. If you want that happy state of affairs to continue, drop the juvenile "them and us" attitude.
I remember when/. used to publish the browser statistics - IIRC, 80-90% of/. readers use Windows. Perhaps the Linux users are simply more vocal, or perhaps they just have more time on their hands.
Of course, to Wall Street, that doesn't matter one iota. They make money, lots of it, world be dammed, and that's all the stock market cares about.
I always smirk when I read things like this. Of course Wall Street is about making money - that's what they're paid to do. And plenty of 401(k) holders are glad that they do it.
What you're saying is akin to your doctor telling you don't worry, there's more to life than good health, you know, or your mechanic saying there are more important things in life than working brakes.
The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence.
Ha ha ha. You're very funny. Banks and consulting firms are laying off MBAs left right and center. I don't know whether NYC or London has more unemployed MBA/sq km, but they're both pretty high. Lots of people are even leaving the MBA off their CVs now, leading to embarassing silences when you interview them and ask about the gap in their employment history.
This sort of nonsense might go over well with people who've already decided that they hate corporations and everything about the capitalist system, but it's not backed by a shred of truth. You might as well say that an MS in CS makes someone one of the tech nobility and these people make all the tech decisions - it simply isn't true.
Stalin, for the most part, kept his "cleansings" to his own country, not becoming the worldwide "playground bully" and making other countries cry for help.
The countries of Eastern Europe (for example, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Armenia, Ukraine etc) would disagree with you. These countries were annexed by the Soviet Empire and subjected to the same regime as the Russians. Not only that, but a significant part of the current trouble in Afghanistan can be traced to Soviet invasion (altho' that obviously happened well after Stalin himself died).
Also, it is correct to compare Fascism with Communism and Nazism with Stalinism - you have to compare like with like, and the former are abstract, the latter practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf.
Uhh, yes there is. Just correlate requests going into and out from the node, if you're snooping all the traffic anyway. You can probably even do this by looking at the timings, if it's encrypted. If you see an outbound request with no inbound request in the n preceding milliseconds (established empirically) then it's pretty obvious that it was a request originating at that node. Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.
Freenet might work if you only look at one-way traffic from one node at a time, but the people that it was built to circumvent - governments - have the resources to take a wider view.
Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.
Indeed. And since you don't have to "pay" for what you use, a la Mojo Nation, the Tragedy of the Commons applies and the FreeNet system will rapidly go the way of every other P2P system, in which the balance between contributors and consumers is destroyed.
suits are uncomfortable, infact in a sit on you ass all day job, there too fucking hot!!!!! Ok if I worked outside, i might consider waring somthing designed to keep the heat in like a tie, but in an office there highly un-practical, spread pungent smells of sweety armpits
Sounds like you're wearing polyester. Try lightweight 110s wool. It's breathable and not too insulating. And a proper cotton shirt. Generally, the fewer manmade fibres in your clothes, the better (the only manmade I'm wearing now is my shoelaces!). Spend as much as you can afford on your clothes, you're going to spend most of your time in them!
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
How would he know? MIT Media Lab, under Nicholas Negroponte, don't do anything that any academic or industry practitioner would consider to be "research". You see, in the words of Negroponte, they live in a world not of "atoms" but of "bits". In the world of atoms, researchers have to produce such things as peer-reviewed papers and working prototypes. In the world of "bits", researchers are measured by the number of column inches they get in Wired magazine. MIT Media lab churns out books and articles by the tonne, but it's little better than scifi, most of it, and very little of it is even original.
You would think that the hard-headed engineers at MIT would have seen that the Emperor has no clothes and would have cut off their funding by now, but mysterious the Media Lab clings to life. They are an embarassment to real futurists everywhere. Contrast them with the work done at IBM's labs, or BT's, or even Nokia, where stuff is made that actually makes an impact on the real world a decade or two later.
3) Profit!
Well,
1) Wear whatever the hell you want
2) ???
3) Profit!
didn't seem to work, did it?
Traditionally, your average IT guy, lived and breathed computers, he was not master of one, he was jack of all trades and (normally) master of one particular area. YOu couldn't just go into uni and be taught everything you needed to know to go out and do computing, you had to live and breath it at a young age.
It's a result of the technology maturing. For example, in the old days if fsck failed, you might have to go in there with fsdb and fix it yourself. And back in the day, SunOS 1.x admins thought fsdb was newfangled nonsense. Nowadays, on a modern journalled filesystem you never have to do that, and on a modern storage array if a disk goes bad you don't have to recover what you can from it, you just hotswap it and throw it away.
The times have changed, now every man and his dog does IT degrees and the market is being flooded with well presented, sociable creatures who dont actually understand what they are doing, they don't understand what teh computer is doing, they have not LEARNT the computer, they have LEARNT the program.
It's the same in every industry. How many people know how their TVs work, or their cars, or their cellphones? Back in the day, the only people who had these things were engineers, now everyone has them. Eventually, the pure-IT people will be like garage mechanics.
The traditional IT workers who can't dress to save there lives and have little social skills are finding it alot harder to compete with these socially adept creatures, and thus the attitude of the workers and the employees has changed
In a mature technology, the problem is not "how to do it", but rather "what should we do". IT always used to be about the former, but now it is about the latter. It is so easy with modern tools to build bread-and-butter applications that it is more important to work out what applications should be built - the complexity is no longer in the technology, but in the application of the technology, how it represents and manipulates data in the "real world". To answer those questions, you need to have good communication and social skills so you can find out what the people paying your salary actually want do, then you need to work out how to use computers to do that.
That's not a bad thing; you can't outsource it to India, it relies on the IT people being right there in the thick of things. People who can't adapt to the new way are going to find themselves in an increasingly precarious position in the job market.
Someone who understands corporate culture far better than I do care to explain how casual dress costs the company more money?
If everyone wears a suit, it's simple. You put on your suit, your shirt, your tie, your shoes and go to work. Easy.
But if you can wear what you want, suddenly there's a bit more thinking involved. The question about what to wear today rears its head. And when you get to work, you can spend hours bitching about/admiring your colleague's clothes. It's the same reason that some employers aren't too keen on excessive decoration of work areas, or bringing your pets to work, or having music playing out loud, or watching DVDs on your PC. The office is a place to work, it's not a social event.
Personally, I think that a compromise between the two extremes should be struck. Productivity is important, but it can be taken to the point where it's all activity and no useful work - and it's rare (in my experience) that anyone does work a solid 8 or 10 hours, there are always gaps when you are waiting for something. In those times, why not do something fun? So long as the balance is kept. In the dotcom days, it became all fun and no work, which is even more damaging that all work and no fun.
I am notoriously incompatible with ties. Also notoriously incompatible with people wearing them.
Well, that's your problem, not theirs. You are making just as much a clothing-based judgement about them as you think they are making about you.
I don't see why people are so down on ties. A tie is really the anti-uniform, the majority of suits you will see are a variation on the two classic colors of navy blue and charcoal grey, but your tie can be almost any color and pattern you want, even in the most conservative of surroundings. Self-proclaimed creative people should be the tie's biggest fans, not the opposite.
I have been working in the City for over 2 years now and have not been required to wear a suit since my interview (apart from at a couple of recruitment things). A lot of the other major banks have switched back recently but here (CitiGroup) and Goldmans have stuck with "business casual".
I'm also in the City, and what I'm seeing is that people are now gradually dressing back up, perfectly voluntarily. I suppose some of it might be due to fears about looking casual when jobs are being cut, but I suspect there's more to it than that. Personally, I like dressing for work, and changing into jeans and a t-shirt when I get home, it draws a nice line between work and the rest of my time. Like many people for a while my job was my life, but now even tho' I do enjoy my job, I do it to pay for my life.
An observation: most people who claim that suits are "uncomfortable" formed their opinion at a time when they could only afford cheap suits. A good suit is far more comfortable even than very casual clothes, it's made of high quality material and it can easily be modified to fit you exactly, rather than a generic "Size X" that casual clothes come on. People look good in suits; tailors have literally centuries of experience starting with military uniforms at making clothes that people look good in. Suits have plenty of pockets for stuff. Suits are versatile, you can go fully formal or in shirt sleeves.
Another possible reason is that humans are very status-oriented. If you've been to grad school and earn $$$, do you really want to dress like a mail room clerk? It sounds terribly snobbish, but I think it's a good explanation.
One final thing they learn in the 24th century. Don't supply a race technology. Or in 20th century speak, don't sell other countries weapons.
Well, Archer hates the Vulcans because they withheld technology from his father. Not because they applied diplomatic pressure to prevent humans from going into space (altho' they did), not because they threatened Earth if they were disobeyed (which they didn't) but because they didn't hand everything to Earth on a silver platter. And in the series he blunders through the universe wondering why every alien he meets isn't overjoyed to meet him, and eager to give him everything he wants. He's whiny and spoilt, basically he's an American tourist overseas, completely unable to understand that the rest of the world isn't like his hometown, and that they couldn't care less about him either way. And he's the best they could find?
i remember someone insightfully stating from the firefly poll that firefly is science-fantasy, not science fiction, in science fantasy the technology is there, its a given, with no explanation and no technobabble, the exact oposite fo star trek
But on Star Trek, there is no functional difference between "technobabble" and "magic spell". You could move the whole thing into a Dungeons & Dragons world, and it would work exactly the same. In real sci fi, there are laws of physics that don't change from episode to episode, and in good drama, there isn't a magical solution to every problem, and things can't be neatly wrapped up in time for the credits.
The avoid techobabble by having jack O'Niell tell scientists to shut up.
There is a great scene in the first episode in which O'Neill isn't taking Carter seriously, and she gives him an earful about how wearing her genitals on the inside didn't stop her flying 100 hrs of combat missions in the Gulf War, and he replies that he has no problem with female Air Force officers, there problem is that she's a scientist too, and he doesn't trust scientists.
One of the great things about the show is that you can see over time how he comes to respect Carter and Jackson, even though Jackson isn't even Air Force, he's a civilian. That sort of character development is far beyond Star Trek's writers.
I have never watched this show but am curious how it compares to the Star Trek and Babylon 5 series in that does it have a story arc and continuity between each episode?
The show has great continuity and the technology is almost completely internally consistent. By that I mean, if a given piece of technology worked one way in one episode, then that's how it works. Unlike Star Trek where the technology is a crutch for weak script writers. You know the way in Star Trek the transporters or sensors will simply stop working for an arbitrary reason to prod the plot along? Doesn't happen on Stargate at all, and without that crutch, the writers are forced to be much more creative.
Another example: Enterprise is set years before Kirk, so deflector shields haven't been invented yet. But the writers are too lazy to do away with the "shields are failing" plot device, so they simply substitute in the technobabble "hull polarization" and write exactly as before. Star Fleet doesn't exist yet, but Earth's single, primitive starship can interfere with established, advanced spacegoing races with impunity, just like Kirk or Picard... how? Umm, because that's the only plot they know how to write.
Another thing that annoyed me about Star Trek and Babylon 5 was their Earth-centricness, Earth being the capital planet of the Federation and humans being the "chosen race" in Babylon 5. In Stargate, humans are in a complex universe in which often they are only bit players in the ongoing feuds of the Goa'uld amongst themselves, the Asgard have problems of their own in their home galaxy and often cannot be bothered with Earth's problems, etc. All the other races have been getting on with their histories without Earth even being relevant for large periods of time (i.e. Earth was ignored by the Goa'uld since the Egyptian period). This ongoing activity by NPCs means that the storylines continue between episodes.
Finally, the characters on Stargate are more believable. They are fairly ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, not like Star Trek (particularly TNG) in which each character is "special", the boy genius, the telepath, the noble warrior, etc. Star Trek characters in every series apart from the original are cliches.
Not quite. I don't think even Outlook was ever set to just run code automatically.
I'm pretty sure it was. Outlook + Exchange was never just an email client-server combo, it was intended as a platform for the development of document routing and workflow systems as well as messaging (i.e. it competes with Lotus Notes, not with pine + sendmail). The scripting capability is there so you can send logic and interactive GUIs around, not just email and attachments, and integrate it via COM with all the other Office applications.
Basically, what's interesting about this is that it's a generalized architecture for any datatype. So, while it's true that there are many MP3 players out there, there's few which are able to handle multiple streams, mixing them with other audio sources, adding in multiple video sources, and hey, throw in some JPEGs, GIFs and Flash while you're at it.
Blah blah blah, another media player. With a name like that I was expecting an Open Source-based Folding@Home or something like that - which would be great, because I have machines with spare CPU cycles that there aren't Stanford binaries for.
So you can handle multiple codecs. So can a dozen other players. Move along people, nothing to see here.
It also means that a Linux-based blade can work in *any* manufacturers chassis. This removes a big barrier of entry for the Linux in the telecom market.
Power Appliance is already available, running Oracle 9i on Linux on up to 48 dual-processor (PIII, 800-1200 Mhz) blades in a single chassis, and the software to manage them.
Due to the lack of details given about the fund being 'robbed', I'm going to guess that the password was compromised, as opposed to some sort of hack on paypal's servers. So... isn't it this guy's fault (at least as opposed to paypal's)? Paypal didn't do anything wrong.. sure maybe they could be a bit more helpful in trying to track down who did it, but they certainly aren't obligated to do so.
If you pay at a restaurant with your Visa card, and the waiter keeps a copy of the carbons and later spends money on your card, Visa will take care of that for you - you aren't liable unless you have been woefully careless.
If AbiWord left their password and account details written down on a postit note then maybe it's their fault, but if their account was brute-forced, then PayPal should be responsible.
PayPal isn't a bank. They don't claim to be a bank. They are not insured like a bank. So why should they have to act like one? They are a payment clearinghouse.
They take deposits and pay interest, and are covered by FDIC. That legally makes them a bank, whatever they may claim.
I have to protest about your "bit of fun" comment. Assuming a large enough stake, ESOPs fundamentally change the power structure of a company. While that's fun on some level, it's not trivial.
Point taken - the stake in my example was too small to be meaningful.
In a nutshell: The employees buy shares of the company from the founders. The founders are then able to get equity out of the company w/out selling out to a bunch of outsiders who don't care about long term health of the place, and the employees get to become "stakeholders" in the place that they work. Everybody wins. You might want to consider it.
I once worked for a company that did something like this. I won't bore you with the details, so let me summarize it thusly: pretty much everyone who participated got shafted.
Stuff like ESOP and ESPP can be a bit of fun, but it's no substitute for cold, hard cash. What would you say if the company proposed paying you in lottery tickets?
Then how come you guys suck at it so much?
The funny thing is, managers bitch about techies just as much as techies bitch about managers. Mostly managers wonder why techies, particularly those who seem to rate themselves quite highly, seem utterly unable to deliver the product when they say they will, and are also unable to release code that isn't full of bugs.
Companies exist to generate economic value. If you can do that by writing code, so much the better. Last I checked, for all their high ideals about GPLs and free-as-in-beer, techies do like getting paid. If you want that happy state of affairs to continue, drop the juvenile "them and us" attitude.
You're new to Slashdot, aren't you?
/. used to publish the browser statistics - IIRC, 80-90% of /. readers use Windows. Perhaps the Linux users are simply more vocal, or perhaps they just have more time on their hands.
I remember when
Of course, to Wall Street, that doesn't matter one iota. They make money, lots of it, world be dammed, and that's all the stock market cares about.
I always smirk when I read things like this. Of course Wall Street is about making money - that's what they're paid to do. And plenty of 401(k) holders are glad that they do it.
What you're saying is akin to your doctor telling you don't worry, there's more to life than good health, you know, or your mechanic saying there are more important things in life than working brakes.
The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence.
Ha ha ha. You're very funny. Banks and consulting firms are laying off MBAs left right and center. I don't know whether NYC or London has more unemployed MBA/sq km, but they're both pretty high. Lots of people are even leaving the MBA off their CVs now, leading to embarassing silences when you interview them and ask about the gap in their employment history.
This sort of nonsense might go over well with people who've already decided that they hate corporations and everything about the capitalist system, but it's not backed by a shred of truth. You might as well say that an MS in CS makes someone one of the tech nobility and these people make all the tech decisions - it simply isn't true.
Stalin, for the most part, kept his "cleansings" to his own country, not becoming the worldwide "playground bully" and making other countries cry for help.
The countries of Eastern Europe (for example, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Armenia, Ukraine etc) would disagree with you. These countries were annexed by the Soviet Empire and subjected to the same regime as the Russians. Not only that, but a significant part of the current trouble in Afghanistan can be traced to Soviet invasion (altho' that obviously happened well after Stalin himself died).
Also, it is correct to compare Fascism with Communism and Nazism with Stalinism - you have to compare like with like, and the former are abstract, the latter practical.