One of the major reasons i'm a 'mac zealot' is in part due to the coolness of getting thinks like free iDisk storage and e-mail access
The problem is that this is commoditized; anyone with any Internet-capable OS can get this from Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, Netscape/AOL, etc. The only differentiator with iTools is the "coolness" factor, not the functionality. As soon as the novelty wears off, functionality is what matters to most users. Maybe the nice integration with the user interface is enough of a differentiator, but I don't think it will be, especially if MSN provide a friendly desktop tool for Macs.
And if you buy the Taliban party line about hospitality, you're pretty gullible. He was practically running the country, by virtue of his using his vast economic resources to fund the cash-poor Taliban regime.
I find that unlikely - for example, al-Queda are reputed to have trafficked heroin to fund their operations, but the Taleban were busily destroying poppy fields as being un-Islamic.
The players in this game are the US government and al-Queda - the Taleban are victims.
The US was not at war with, but considered the Taliban illegitimate rulers of Afghanistan prior to the attacks. When they started helping people kill Americans, the US went to war with them.
The Taleban were no more to do with the Sept 11 attacks than the people of Scotland were to do with Lockerbie. Their only obligation to Osama bin Laden is that he is a brother Moslem and the Qu'ran says if you take in a guest, you are responsible for protecting him.
And the US simply didn't recognise the Taleban as a functioning government. They never tried to depose them before the current invasion.
The Taliban only offered to extradite OBL to another country operating under Sharia (i.e. Muslim religious) law. The only other country that is fully operating under Sharia is Iran.
Or the US client state, Saudi Arabia.
The US government did not help to establish the Taliban. And please do not attempt to say "But they gave them $43 million last year!" because they didn't. That $43 million was grain, medicine, and aid to the people of Afghanistan who were starving due to famine.
Sure they did, the US government funded, trained and equipped the organization that would later become the Taleban during the Soviet occupation.
Being a member of political party in a foreign country is not a crime. Shooting at American soldiers is.
it looks and sounds pretty cool, but until they make one w/ some serious power, 4wd and some serious ground clearance. I'm sticking w/ what I have...
Ah, you Americans. You know, the most patriotic thing you could do right now would be to buy a small Japanese or European car, and drive it only when the journey has to be made by car, for example over a long distance. Everywhere else, walk, take the T, or ride a bike.
Instead, many of your countrymen drive gas-guzzling SUVs, funnelling billions of dollars a year to the middle east where it is siphoned off to fund anti-American activities - yet you stick the Stars and Stripes on your radio antenna or on your bumper, and think they're Patriots. I won't even start on the environment...
I would have thought it reasonable obvious! Policing the content before they agree to sell it potentially gives WalMart an un-acceptable degree of control over what information is available, and how it is presented. Who elected WalMart to the position of official censor? What gives WalMart the right make those decisions?
Censorship is only censorship if the government are doing it. Your right to free speech absolutely does not mean that you have the right to force another private individual to pay attention to you, or to compel them to redistribute your ideas.
Who elected Walmart to this position? Everyone who chooses to buy their magazines there. Last I checked, buying magazines off the rack was a lot more expensive than subscribing directly from the publisher, and you get the magazine through the post, so the content is not censored at all. What gives Walmart the right? The voice of their customers - if those customers made a fuss, Walmart would immediately change its policy, because that's what companies do. But the evidence indicates that the majority of Walmart's customers do wish the organization to take that action on their behalf - because if they didn't, Walmart wouldn't sell many magazines and would not be in a position of influence in the first place.
What if the Waltons decide that they really don't like abortion, and pressure magazines to adjust their content accordingly. Would that be smart business sense?
If the majority of their customers shared this opinion, then it would be good sense to sell them what they want to buy. But if it's not the government - the only organization legitimately backed by force - then it's not censorship.
That's why the ideas in the Constitution were (and perhaps still are) considered dangerous and radical. They require that everyone grants everyone else the right to do things that they themselves might not approve of. You have to accept that other people feel just as strongly as you do, and have considered their position as carefully as you have, even if their conclusions are opposite to your own. This frightens a lot of people into trying to use freedom of speech to actually remove that freedom from others.
Hmmm...isn't this just the kind of thing Gates's charity foundation should be supporting ? Oh, but of course, this thing will run Linux, and we can't be helping people like that, can we.
You're right - perhaps ESR should underwrite this project. When the entire Linux community/industry (call it what you will) has made as many philanthropic donations as the Gates Foundation has, let me know. Here's a hint: I don't think it will be for a long time.
Okay, I'll admit that I'm not the best person to ask about this, but what came to mind (yup, I'm a geek) was the bridge of the Enterprise. Bear with me, I'm serious.
Actually, this is pretty much what an industrial-grade NOC looks like. Large screens on the wall showing a map of the network, and various metrics on performance, probably a TV news feed or two (strewth, traffic just went through the roof! oh wait, CNN just reported...) and a few rows of consoles for the actual operators to sit at. Usually a raised podium at the back where a supervisor can monitor the whole room.
Control rooms for power stations, rail networks, oil refineries, etc, follow similar principles.
As for the problem being Ken's socialist hatred of cars: even many fervent rightwingers acknowledge that there are too many cars for the available roadspace in London. Solutions will have to revolve around supply management (i.e. investing in the tube) and demand management (i.e. discouraging road use).
My point is that this is a tax, plain and simple. He won't force anyone off the road, because they have to make the journey and there's no alternate route. If all the road tax for vehicles registered in the greater London area was hypothecated for those roads plus the rail network, then we would see some progress. Even better if the fuel tax was hypothecated for transport also. Livingstone's latest scheme won't make a difference to traffic, it will just cos people more money.
As long as you do nothing illegal no one is going to give a shit!
What's illegal? Recently, Tony Blair's government investigated the background of a rail crash survivor. 32 people were killed, and she publicly criticized a government minister, Stephen Byers, for his lack of competence in running the railways. The government looked for anything it could use to discredit her, including her political affiliations (IIRC, she had none). It wants to extend the powers to do so to any government department, including local councils.
Unless you are willing to completely abdicate any rights that you have enshrined in law and completely trust all governments that may ever come to power in the future, you should be concerned about plans to track identities and movements.
The idea, apparently, is that traffic is so bad in central London that they want to discourage people from driving in, and encourage them to use public transportation instead -- which kind of makes sense
No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.
Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.
think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island!
In NYC, there is a trend of banks like Goldman's moving to New Jersey, and Warburg's moved up to Stamford, but it's all still within close proximity to Manhattan. Technology has not advanced to the point where location is irrelevant if your business has to interact in any non-trivial way with another business. That's why there's a Silicon Valley, too.
Personally, I'm against any scheme in which a citizen of a nation is charged money by the government to travel to or across particular public lands. They're public lands! Public!)
Really, the problem is that Ken Livingstone hates cars, always has. A classical socialist, he thinks all transport should be public, and that taxation is the solution to every problem. There's only one feasible solution, and that's that the national government must hypothecate road fund tax for transport exclusively, rather than adding it to the general pot of taxation (and while I'm on the subject, do the same for NI).
So why can't you just build 2K without those 2 subprojects, or just stubs inserted for the functions declaired in those projects?
The thing you must understand about Microsoft code is that everything is a component, OLE in the old days, COM now. That's why you can easily call Excel's charting functions from your own code, say. It's also why you can run macros inside Outlook, all Microsoft applications are components and scripting glue (like VBA). Wordpad, for example, is almost no code in and of itself, it's a rich text component, a toolbar component and so forth. If you want to build a custom web browser, you can just reuse the HTML renderer and whatever else you need from IE, they are all components.
But this also means that if the internet components were entirely removed, there would be no OS-level TCP/IP support, the online help viewer which uses the HTML renderer wouldn't work, etc. So that's why MS say they can't remove MSIE - because IExplore.exe on your hard drive is just the glue holding together a bunch of components that are provided by the OS and available to any application.
Re:They might be able to do some damage
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HavenCo Doing Well
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· Score: 2
From what I have heard, they have quite a lot of guns on Sealand, and are clearly willing to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Now, one might argue that they wouldn't last long against the SAS - but putting SAS soldiers lives at risk (given that the British courts have recognised Sealand's right to defend itself) should serve as a significant disincentive for any invasion (as would the risk that the British government could be taken to court for mounting such an invasion afterwards).
No need for anything as melodramatic as an assault by SAS or SBS teams. A frigate could reduce Sealand to rubble less than a minute without ever coming in range of anything Sealand residents might have to shoot back with, unless they've managed to get hold of Exocet missiles. I think in practice Sealand would be treated as a ship for the purposes of law enforcement - I seem to remember there was once a pirate radio station based on a ship in the North Sea, and they were shut down. And I don't think even a British court can give anyone the right to defend themselves from the British government!
I pity the dumb-assed terrorist who tries to hijack one of these convoys. It'll be a quick trip to Allah, is for damn sure.
You think? Remember who trained al-Queda: US special forces and CIA agents. Plus al-Queda are experienced in fighting Soviet Spetsnaz (special forces) troops who, while not as glamorous as the Navy SEALs, are probably comparable in terms of skill.
Thinking of them as half-assed amateurs from the mountains will only breed complacency.
One more thing: they didn't even try to steal the World Trade Center, they got what they wanted by just destroying it. Your friends hopefully have SAMs in their truck!
Yes Insightful, Interesting, Informative, and not to mention totally false. According to the article ALL OEM shipments stop in 9 months. That effects everybody.
Why is this even news? I mean, GNOME doesn't run on Linux kernel 1.0, and it's no big deal. XP includes a backwards-compatibility mode for the very, very few pieces of software that absolutely require Win2K.
My fear is that Microsoft writes something like wine and sells it for Linux.
I don't get why this would be a problem - that's exactly how IBM got Linux running on their mainframes, running Linux within an LPAR. And then the Slashbots are all, like, hooray, IBM supports Linux!
And they still haven't given out any real evidence, except for a badly faked video tape confession.
Well, it wasn't even a real confession. Osama did say that it was the will of Allah, he did say that he was personally rather pleased, he did not claim responsibility for doing it.
But how would that be different than what we just did in Afganistan? There was an organization in that country that caused serious damage to the United States. We ordered the ruling government (the Taliban) to turn over the terrorists or we'd go in there and do it ourselves.
Interestingly, altho' Al-Queda made money from the heroin trade, the Taliban were strongly opposed to it on religious grounds, and were busily shutting down poppy farms all over Afghanistan. Now that there is no functioning government, the poppy growers are back in business.
This may not have been reported in the US, but one of the conditions that the Taliban imposed on Osama Bin Laden was that while he was welcome to stay in their country, he was expressly forbidden from using as a base for terrorist operations. After Sept. 11, the US government accused OBL, and the Taleban said, if it is him he's betrayed us too, but he is our guest so we'll need to see some proof. The US govt. didn't even bother to show the Taleban what they'd got, they just went in shooting to keep the voters back home happy.
So how would it be different for us to demand the Columbian government takes care of the drug cartels. And if they don't, we'd do it ourselves.
Doing that would cost the US any legitimacy it has in foreign policy. Go down that path and there are only two alternatives: an American Empire or withdrawal and isolationism. But I agree with you that half-assed measures waste money and don't accomplish a hell of a lot. The last thing the US govt. needs is a guerilla war on it's doorstep, particularly since the interests of the guerillas and the cartels would be perfectly aligned, and they would be funded by US dollars!
I've always had a bit of that sort of sentimentality about inanimate objects and I've wondered if there was a name for it.
Animism is one way of looking at it, anthropomorphism is another. They are slightly different. Tech people (in Euro-derived cultures) are often anthropomorphic, programmers will say "if got confused when you did that", "it wasn't happy with the data format", "it wants to connect to this" and so forth. They treat technological artifacts as if they have an inherent will and desires and even a personality. Animism is a little more tacit; things have a soul but not necessarily a will (or at least, not one that is easily understandable by their nominal owner). For example, it would be unlikely that an anthropomorphist world-view would include rocks and trees, but an animist would. Animism manifests itself in the West usually as "primitive" or "pagan" religions with elemental gods. Anthropomorphism probably enters our collective cultural subconscious through children's toys, encouraging a child to develop a personal attachment to a stuffed animal, for example. I'm not sure where it's ultimate root is, probably not Judeo-Christian, and I'm not sure it's even rooted in Hellenistic culture.
. The Japanese have a national obsession with gadgets. They just can't get enough of them.
Japanese culture is is heavily influenced by Shinto, and Shinto (as I understand it) is Animist. Basically, this means that things that European-derived (really Greek-derived) cultures consider to be inanimate, Shinto-derived cultures consider to have a "soul" or a "spirit" of their own. That is fundamentally why the Japanese love electronics and especially robots, it touches something deep in their cultural collective subconscious to have otherwise inanimate objects respond and interact. European-derived cultures are much more utilitarian, and regard these things as just tools, with no inherent properties other than fulfilling a task. That's why, as the article says, Americans are more interested in sacrificing features if it means getting a cheaper price.
Japanese companies keep their staff employed for more than six months at a time.
That, unfortunately, is why Japan has been in recession for the last 20 years. The Japanese have very tight relationships between banks, NGOs, government departments and corporations. Americans and Brits are outraged when corporations get to close to governments (and vice versa) but in Japan, the boundaries between the public and private sectors are much less clear. Government will frequently underwrite corporate financing, grant monopoly licences, engage in mercantilist protectionist policies, and government planners will work along side corporate strategists, it would be unthinkable for a Japanese corporation to undertake a large project without a nod from the government.
The basic problem with Japanese industry is that they have a massive, systemic overcapacity. In Britain or the US, there would have been mass layoffs, corporations would go bankrupt, and stock markets would plunge in a similar situation. But in the West, a recession typically lasts 12-18 months and is followed by a period of economic expansion: our boom-bust cycle is like a regular spring cleaning of the economy, on approximately a 10-year cycle. During the expansion, the stock market goes up, and the unemployed from the last bust are re-employed. But in Japan, the government will not permit banks to call in loans or write off bad debt. Corporations cannot raise capital to finance expansion, and investors cannot get a return on their capital. So the Japanese economy is held in limbo, it cannot expand, it cannot collapse, and is stuck in a permanent slow decline.
What Japan really needs is to bite the bullet: let the technically insolvent banks and corporations collapse, suck up the pain of a Western-style recession, then Japan can get back on the track of economic expansion that was once the envy of the world.
What you refer to as stored procedures can be emulated with the greatest of ease in MySQL with a bit of Perl scripting and mod_perl. And as far as I know, stored procedures are currently on the to-do list for MySQL.
Oh, and subqueries can be emulated with the greatest of ease in MySQL with a bit of Perl scripting too, but that's not the point. MySQL can execute very simple queries very quickly, but for complex database tasks - which need things like a proper SQL parser, stored procedures and triggers, check constraints, etc. Does MySQL even do foreign keys yet? Even if it does, they were bolted on as an afterthought, whereas most databases have them from day 1.
Re:X-Box more costly cuz of Windows (RETCH)
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Microsoft Freon
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Ummm Maybe the cost is related to the fact that running Windows requires more memory and a hard drive which runs the costs up more than the competition
I don't think the special version of Windows that comes with the XBox does necessarily, for example it doesn't have virtual memory support. It could probably be run from firmware like CE does. As far as I know, the OS actually comes on the game disk.
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One of the major reasons i'm a 'mac zealot' is in part due to the coolness of getting thinks like free iDisk storage and e-mail access
The problem is that this is commoditized; anyone with any Internet-capable OS can get this from Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, Netscape/AOL, etc. The only differentiator with iTools is the "coolness" factor, not the functionality. As soon as the novelty wears off, functionality is what matters to most users. Maybe the nice integration with the user interface is enough of a differentiator, but I don't think it will be, especially if MSN provide a friendly desktop tool for Macs.
Throwing a fit about a 20 dollar OS upgrade? Were they insane? It sure beats a 199 dollar upgrade to windows XP Pro
He's referring to what Windows users would call a "Service Pack", not a major revision of the OS (Say from MacOS 9.x to OSX or NT4 to Windows 2000).
And if you buy the Taliban party line about hospitality, you're pretty gullible. He was practically running the country, by virtue of his using his vast economic resources to fund the cash-poor Taliban regime.
I find that unlikely - for example, al-Queda are reputed to have trafficked heroin to fund their operations, but the Taleban were busily destroying poppy fields as being un-Islamic.
The players in this game are the US government and al-Queda - the Taleban are victims.
The US was not at war with, but considered the Taliban illegitimate rulers of Afghanistan prior to the attacks. When they started helping people kill Americans, the US went to war with them.
The Taleban were no more to do with the Sept 11 attacks than the people of Scotland were to do with Lockerbie. Their only obligation to Osama bin Laden is that he is a brother Moslem and the Qu'ran says if you take in a guest, you are responsible for protecting him.
And the US simply didn't recognise the Taleban as a functioning government. They never tried to depose them before the current invasion.
The Taliban only offered to extradite OBL to another country operating under Sharia (i.e. Muslim religious) law. The only other country that is fully operating under Sharia is Iran.
Or the US client state, Saudi Arabia.
The US government did not help to establish the Taliban. And please do not attempt to say "But they gave them $43 million last year!" because they didn't. That $43 million was grain, medicine, and aid to the people of Afghanistan who were starving due to famine.
Sure they did, the US government funded, trained and equipped the organization that would later become the Taleban during the Soviet occupation.
Being a member of political party in a foreign country is not a crime. Shooting at American soldiers is.
Hey, they shot at him first.
it looks and sounds pretty cool, but until they make one w/ some serious power, 4wd and some serious ground clearance. I'm sticking w/ what I have...
Ah, you Americans. You know, the most patriotic thing you could do right now would be to buy a small Japanese or European car, and drive it only when the journey has to be made by car, for example over a long distance. Everywhere else, walk, take the T, or ride a bike.
Instead, many of your countrymen drive gas-guzzling SUVs, funnelling billions of dollars a year to the middle east where it is siphoned off to fund anti-American activities - yet you stick the Stars and Stripes on your radio antenna or on your bumper, and think they're Patriots. I won't even start on the environment...
I would have thought it reasonable obvious! Policing the content before they agree to sell it potentially gives WalMart an un-acceptable degree of control over what information is available, and how it is presented. Who elected WalMart to the position of official censor? What gives WalMart the right make those decisions?
Censorship is only censorship if the government are doing it. Your right to free speech absolutely does not mean that you have the right to force another private individual to pay attention to you, or to compel them to redistribute your ideas.
Who elected Walmart to this position? Everyone who chooses to buy their magazines there. Last I checked, buying magazines off the rack was a lot more expensive than subscribing directly from the publisher, and you get the magazine through the post, so the content is not censored at all. What gives Walmart the right? The voice of their customers - if those customers made a fuss, Walmart would immediately change its policy, because that's what companies do. But the evidence indicates that the majority of Walmart's customers do wish the organization to take that action on their behalf - because if they didn't, Walmart wouldn't sell many magazines and would not be in a position of influence in the first place.
What if the Waltons decide that they really don't like abortion, and pressure magazines to adjust their content accordingly. Would that be smart business sense?
If the majority of their customers shared this opinion, then it would be good sense to sell them what they want to buy. But if it's not the government - the only organization legitimately backed by force - then it's not censorship.
That's why the ideas in the Constitution were (and perhaps still are) considered dangerous and radical. They require that everyone grants everyone else the right to do things that they themselves might not approve of. You have to accept that other people feel just as strongly as you do, and have considered their position as carefully as you have, even if their conclusions are opposite to your own. This frightens a lot of people into trying to use freedom of speech to actually remove that freedom from others.
Hmmm...isn't this just the kind of thing Gates's charity foundation should be supporting ?
Oh, but of course, this thing will run Linux, and we can't be helping people like that, can we.
You're right - perhaps ESR should underwrite this project. When the entire Linux community/industry (call it what you will) has made as many philanthropic donations as the Gates Foundation has, let me know. Here's a hint: I don't think it will be for a long time.
Okay, I'll admit that I'm not the best person to ask about this, but what came to mind (yup, I'm a geek) was the bridge of the Enterprise.
Bear with me, I'm serious.
Actually, this is pretty much what an industrial-grade NOC looks like. Large screens on the wall showing a map of the network, and various metrics on performance, probably a TV news feed or two (strewth, traffic just went through the roof! oh wait, CNN just reported...) and a few rows of consoles for the actual operators to sit at. Usually a raised podium at the back where a supervisor can monitor the whole room.
Control rooms for power stations, rail networks, oil refineries, etc, follow similar principles.
As for the problem being Ken's socialist hatred of cars: even many fervent rightwingers acknowledge that there are too many cars for the available roadspace in London. Solutions will have to revolve around supply management (i.e. investing in the tube) and demand management (i.e. discouraging road use).
My point is that this is a tax, plain and simple. He won't force anyone off the road, because they have to make the journey and there's no alternate route. If all the road tax for vehicles registered in the greater London area was hypothecated for those roads plus the rail network, then we would see some progress. Even better if the fuel tax was hypothecated for transport also. Livingstone's latest scheme won't make a difference to traffic, it will just cos people more money.
As long as you do nothing illegal no one is going to give a shit!
What's illegal? Recently, Tony Blair's government investigated the background of a rail crash survivor. 32 people were killed, and she publicly criticized a government minister, Stephen Byers, for his lack of competence in running the railways. The government looked for anything it could use to discredit her, including her political affiliations (IIRC, she had none). It wants to extend the powers to do so to any government department, including local councils.
Unless you are willing to completely abdicate any rights that you have enshrined in law and completely trust all governments that may ever come to power in the future, you should be concerned about plans to track identities and movements.
The idea, apparently, is that traffic is so bad in central London that they want to discourage people from driving in, and encourage them to use public transportation instead -- which kind of makes sense
No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.
Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.
think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island!
In NYC, there is a trend of banks like Goldman's moving to New Jersey, and Warburg's moved up to Stamford, but it's all still within close proximity to Manhattan. Technology has not advanced to the point where location is irrelevant if your business has to interact in any non-trivial way with another business. That's why there's a Silicon Valley, too.
Personally, I'm against any scheme in which a citizen of a nation is charged money by the government to travel to or across particular public lands. They're public lands! Public!)
Really, the problem is that Ken Livingstone hates cars, always has. A classical socialist, he thinks all transport should be public, and that taxation is the solution to every problem. There's only one feasible solution, and that's that the national government must hypothecate road fund tax for transport exclusively, rather than adding it to the general pot of taxation (and while I'm on the subject, do the same for NI).
So why can't you just build 2K without those 2 subprojects, or just stubs inserted for the functions declaired in those projects?
The thing you must understand about Microsoft code is that everything is a component, OLE in the old days, COM now. That's why you can easily call Excel's charting functions from your own code, say. It's also why you can run macros inside Outlook, all Microsoft applications are components and scripting glue (like VBA). Wordpad, for example, is almost no code in and of itself, it's a rich text component, a toolbar component and so forth. If you want to build a custom web browser, you can just reuse the HTML renderer and whatever else you need from IE, they are all components.
But this also means that if the internet components were entirely removed, there would be no OS-level TCP/IP support, the online help viewer which uses the HTML renderer wouldn't work, etc. So that's why MS say they can't remove MSIE - because IExplore.exe on your hard drive is just the glue holding together a bunch of components that are provided by the OS and available to any application.
From what I have heard, they have quite a lot of guns on Sealand, and are clearly willing to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Now, one might argue that they wouldn't last long against the SAS - but putting SAS soldiers lives at risk (given that the British courts have recognised Sealand's right to defend itself) should serve as a significant disincentive for any invasion (as would the risk that the British government could be taken to court for mounting such an invasion afterwards).
No need for anything as melodramatic as an assault by SAS or SBS teams. A frigate could reduce Sealand to rubble less than a minute without ever coming in range of anything Sealand residents might have to shoot back with, unless they've managed to get hold of Exocet missiles. I think in practice Sealand would be treated as a ship for the purposes of law enforcement - I seem to remember there was once a pirate radio station based on a ship in the North Sea, and they were shut down. And I don't think even a British court can give anyone the right to defend themselves from the British government!
I pity the dumb-assed terrorist who tries to hijack one of these convoys. It'll be a quick trip to Allah, is for damn sure.
You think? Remember who trained al-Queda: US special forces and CIA agents. Plus al-Queda are experienced in fighting Soviet Spetsnaz (special forces) troops who, while not as glamorous as the Navy SEALs, are probably comparable in terms of skill.
Thinking of them as half-assed amateurs from the mountains will only breed complacency.
One more thing: they didn't even try to steal the World Trade Center, they got what they wanted by just destroying it. Your friends hopefully have SAMs in their truck!
Every few minutes the battle halts and everyone has to pray towards Mecca. That's gonna suck bigtime.
Sure, every few minutes the terrorists stop and pray, and the US team, who appear in the game as NFL players, stop for a commercial break.
This must be a new meaning of famous I've never come across before. Come on /., sort it out.
/. is making her more famous than her ISP would like ;-)
She says she normally gets 75,000 hits on her website a year. I think
Yes Insightful, Interesting, Informative, and not to mention totally false. According to the article ALL OEM shipments stop in 9 months. That effects everybody.
Why is this even news? I mean, GNOME doesn't run on Linux kernel 1.0, and it's no big deal. XP includes a backwards-compatibility mode for the very, very few pieces of software that absolutely require Win2K.
My fear is that Microsoft writes something like wine and sells it for Linux.
I don't get why this would be a problem - that's exactly how IBM got Linux running on their mainframes, running Linux within an LPAR. And then the Slashbots are all, like, hooray, IBM supports Linux!
And they still haven't given out any real evidence, except for a badly faked video tape confession.
Well, it wasn't even a real confession. Osama did say that it was the will of Allah, he did say that he was personally rather pleased, he did not claim responsibility for doing it.
But how would that be different than what we just did in Afganistan? There was an organization in that country that caused serious damage to the United States. We ordered the ruling government (the Taliban) to turn over the terrorists or we'd go in there and do it ourselves.
Interestingly, altho' Al-Queda made money from the heroin trade, the Taliban were strongly opposed to it on religious grounds, and were busily shutting down poppy farms all over Afghanistan. Now that there is no functioning government, the poppy growers are back in business.
This may not have been reported in the US, but one of the conditions that the Taliban imposed on Osama Bin Laden was that while he was welcome to stay in their country, he was expressly forbidden from using as a base for terrorist operations. After Sept. 11, the US government accused OBL, and the Taleban said, if it is him he's betrayed us too, but he is our guest so we'll need to see some proof. The US govt. didn't even bother to show the Taleban what they'd got, they just went in shooting to keep the voters back home happy.
So how would it be different for us to demand the Columbian government takes care of the drug cartels. And if they don't, we'd do it ourselves.
Doing that would cost the US any legitimacy it has in foreign policy. Go down that path and there are only two alternatives: an American Empire or withdrawal and isolationism. But I agree with you that half-assed measures waste money and don't accomplish a hell of a lot. The last thing the US govt. needs is a guerilla war on it's doorstep, particularly since the interests of the guerillas and the cartels would be perfectly aligned, and they would be funded by US dollars!
I've always had a bit of that sort of sentimentality about inanimate objects and I've wondered if there was a name for it.
Animism is one way of looking at it, anthropomorphism is another. They are slightly different. Tech people (in Euro-derived cultures) are often anthropomorphic, programmers will say "if got confused when you did that", "it wasn't happy with the data format", "it wants to connect to this" and so forth. They treat technological artifacts as if they have an inherent will and desires and even a personality. Animism is a little more tacit; things have a soul but not necessarily a will (or at least, not one that is easily understandable by their nominal owner). For example, it would be unlikely that an anthropomorphist world-view would include rocks and trees, but an animist would. Animism manifests itself in the West usually as "primitive" or "pagan" religions with elemental gods. Anthropomorphism probably enters our collective cultural subconscious through children's toys, encouraging a child to develop a personal attachment to a stuffed animal, for example. I'm not sure where it's ultimate root is, probably not Judeo-Christian, and I'm not sure it's even rooted in Hellenistic culture.
. The Japanese have a national obsession with gadgets. They just can't get enough of them.
Japanese culture is is heavily influenced by Shinto, and Shinto (as I understand it) is Animist. Basically, this means that things that European-derived (really Greek-derived) cultures consider to be inanimate, Shinto-derived cultures consider to have a "soul" or a "spirit" of their own. That is fundamentally why the Japanese love electronics and especially robots, it touches something deep in their cultural collective subconscious to have otherwise inanimate objects respond and interact. European-derived cultures are much more utilitarian, and regard these things as just tools, with no inherent properties other than fulfilling a task. That's why, as the article says, Americans are more interested in sacrificing features if it means getting a cheaper price.
Japanese companies keep their staff employed for more than six months at a time.
That, unfortunately, is why Japan has been in recession for the last 20 years. The Japanese have very tight relationships between banks, NGOs, government departments and corporations. Americans and Brits are outraged when corporations get to close to governments (and vice versa) but in Japan, the boundaries between the public and private sectors are much less clear. Government will frequently underwrite corporate financing, grant monopoly licences, engage in mercantilist protectionist policies, and government planners will work along side corporate strategists, it would be unthinkable for a Japanese corporation to undertake a large project without a nod from the government.
The basic problem with Japanese industry is that they have a massive, systemic overcapacity. In Britain or the US, there would have been mass layoffs, corporations would go bankrupt, and stock markets would plunge in a similar situation. But in the West, a recession typically lasts 12-18 months and is followed by a period of economic expansion: our boom-bust cycle is like a regular spring cleaning of the economy, on approximately a 10-year cycle. During the expansion, the stock market goes up, and the unemployed from the last bust are re-employed. But in Japan, the government will not permit banks to call in loans or write off bad debt. Corporations cannot raise capital to finance expansion, and investors cannot get a return on their capital. So the Japanese economy is held in limbo, it cannot expand, it cannot collapse, and is stuck in a permanent slow decline.
What Japan really needs is to bite the bullet: let the technically insolvent banks and corporations collapse, suck up the pain of a Western-style recession, then Japan can get back on the track of economic expansion that was once the envy of the world.
What you refer to as stored procedures can be emulated with the greatest of ease in MySQL with a bit of Perl scripting and mod_perl. And as far as I know, stored procedures are currently on the to-do list for MySQL.
Oh, and subqueries can be emulated with the greatest of ease in MySQL with a bit of Perl scripting too, but that's not the point. MySQL can execute very simple queries very quickly, but for complex database tasks - which need things like a proper SQL parser, stored procedures and triggers, check constraints, etc. Does MySQL even do foreign keys yet? Even if it does, they were bolted on as an afterthought, whereas most databases have them from day 1.
Ummm Maybe the cost is related to the fact that running Windows requires more memory and a hard drive which runs the costs up more than the competition
I don't think the special version of Windows that comes with the XBox does necessarily, for example it doesn't have virtual memory support. It could probably be run from firmware like CE does. As far as I know, the OS actually comes on the game disk.