Any gas station you go into now (unless its in podunk la-la land) has a crazy amount of security cameras all over out there monitoring pumps and to catch fuel pumping thieves. I would suppose the reason the high number of pumps that do get hi-jacked are places that aren't open 24-hours or have a douchebag clerk who "pushes the blinky light" to authorize fuel and doesn't notice someone taking apart the pump next to it.
I remember when skimming waiters or waitresses with hand-held swipe devices was "the scam of the year". Someone is always going to 1-up the next I guess. However, it still is very surprising that this type of theft is still happening to begin with, though, and especially to credit card scanning card devices on gas pumps. That's like the bank leaving the door open on an ATM machine.
This is something that I've seriously taken a look into on the personal side of things. I look at all the digital data I've collected (and lost due to a drive failure, virus, corruption, disaster, ect.) over the years and it really makes your head go foggy. I only hit this realization putting together a wedding anniversary party for my parent's together in the last few months. My parents brought over bucket loads of photos and keepsakes that I have to rummage through for an overhead slideshow. On top of them being (thankfully) highly organized with their personal keepsakes, it far superseeds what I have for my own family. My wife and I went back and we literally have a 'digital divide' in the last decade for any tangible photos. Most of our memorable moments were done with a digital camera, which is great, but we have SO many dribblets of photos here and there on this burnt CD or that external storage device, ALL of which can get lost much easier, broken or misplaced FOREVER than a big ass, heavy rubbermade toat of pictures my parents have (negative included, I might add).
So I ask myself, what if my copy of my copy of my copy is corrupt? I'm screwed. What if I have something in an unsupported format that I can't find any support for? I'm screwed. What if I have a photo at 320x240 resolution and I want to make a 8x10 photo of it and put it on my wall? I'm screwed. We've successfully stove-piped ourselves for a high rate of non-reproduction of our valued items along with a staggering rate for failure on the mediums we've chosen for them.
I've come to the conclusion that tangible is becoming an obsolete word when it comes to anything I like anymore: music, movies, photography, books, news, conversations, ect. I don't think there is a way getting around it that I can see.
This is well into the big double-digit count of Google headlining or top subject matter in slashdot news stories in the last 5 days, with ranging topics from broadband internet backbone building to social network privacy with Buzz to energy buy-ins, now iPhone app buy-up monopolization. Unstoppable force, friends.
I know Google has done extremely well diversifying themselves and has their fingers in anything, but no one treats them like monopolizers that Microsoft became.
Hopefully reMail turned a good profit on this... and wasn't squeezed by the big corporation.
At least on the 64-bit comparison, anything (e.g. Windows 7) that has a "minimum" memory requirement of 2GB in terms of an OS, what did you expect? Not that having 2-4GB in any sort of laptop or desktop system these days isn't uncommon, but I don't think I exceed 2GB in anything I currently own, laptop or PC wise. Quite honestly, I don't run Windows 7, and I've been a Linux convert for some time now on the desktop, but I see the very same thing with over-bearing GUI'fied eye-candy Window Managers on Linux, too. I'm constantly blowing away my pagecache on under Gnome and making kernel parameter adjustments to see what little improvements I can make.
Unless I'm running LXDE, icewm, fluxbox, ect. and keeping GUI's down to my browser and the handful of xterm's I've got open, I've found it hard to keep a balance of memory usage as well. The days of lightweight GUI anything are over.
And no, this isn't a lure for a Linux fan boi X-Windows + Window-Manager-of-the-day debate.
FTFA, it's clear that the powers-that-be in charge are incapable with dealing with the scenario properly, what I didn't see covered is anything about "could we handle an attack" from a real infrastructure and mitigation standpoint. IMHO, who gives a flaming rip that some congressional desk monkey can't follow the very policies and procedures they wrote themselves. We all know IT people like me, you and the rest of the InfoSec world are going to have to deal with it and if I noticed it on a national, federal, state or private sector level on my watch, I wouldn't wait for someone to bark an order from up high to try and do something about it.
For all I know, it could be a big U.S. government social propaganda honey-pot to lure attacks to learn from them or see which country "jumps first". I think I just gave my own government WAY too much credit.
Could it be that Futurama is becoming reality? It's only a matter of evolutionary time before that chemical blob morphs into Yivo, and not only becomes a meteor-dwelling overlord, but our planet-sized, tentacled, omnipotent alien overlord that controls us all!
At first glance before watching the video, my first thought is Microsoft breaking into a competition with Google over Google StreetView and that it might be up to a par level against it. I'm actually pretty impressed as well. Bing Maps looks like it deploys pretty similiar feature sets, but they've taken them slightly to the next level and put their own spin on things, but that isn't going to keep them on the wow factor list any longer than it takes to Google to deploy similar functionality, but better.
IMHO, for Bing Maps to stay in the lime-light and not get overrun by Google, they best get on doing the entire lower 48 states, so I can street view more than just Las Vegas or Los Angeles and troll through the streets and sights of some place like Guernsey, Wyoming.
FTFA, I understand the argument of, "Your friends want to cheat, great. Good luck on my uber-weighted final worth, now, 102% of your final grade", and I am personally not a fan of it. I've seen that type of methodology applied at the 101-level and gen-ed classes but I just don't like it at any level as it applies to college. IMHO, I paid for my schooling with the G.I. bill and the rest of it in loans and of course it would piss me off when I'm putting in hard, valid work in a class and not cheating to be punished for what others are doing. If people cheat and don't take the class seriously, the Mr/Mrs Professor should deal with that student accordingly and make sure it qualifies for an automatic failure of the class. I had professors in college that has a very low threshold for that type of behavior and the student would learn (or mom and dad fronting the college bill every semester would learn) that taking classes over and over will only make you either a 7 year senior or a drop out. Furthermore, I don't like how the professor gives up his authority and puts a layer of discipline on the students by punishing them. Is he looking for a militaristic approach? Does he think all the kids in the dorm are going to gang up on "the cheater" and give him/her a blanket party? Absolutely not.
However, when I started working in the real world in the Information Technology field, I never knew that this "group-punish" methodology would apply at most of the jobs I've been at with substantial perks (e.g. Work-from-home a good portion of the week, very flexible and accommodating work schedules with the option to make up time whenever).
To me, it just reminds me of being treated as less as an adult and more like a 2nd grader having to lay their head down on their desk for someone talking in the back of the classroom during teacher instruction time.
My lack of credibility for... posting my opinion on Slashdot at 0600 AM CT about a Wii game and making a grammatical typo in the process? Again, go back to your cave. I have no more credibility than your baseless dong-swinging contest you're pulling now.
Thank you Slashdot grammer troll. Go back to your cave and color.
As sarcastic but as serious as I can be, spellcheck is spellcheck, not grammer check. But hey, you're the Slashdot grammer troll, you must have known that. Since we're pointing out eachother's English grammer mistakes, perhaps you should learn how to capitalize your proper nouns (e.g. 2nd paragraph, "nintendo" is a company, trademark or organization). Remember, you started it, not me.
Nintendo is going to do what any other software mongrel in the free world is going to do when their production is illegally propagated to the masses. However, let's not overshadow the fact that the New Super Mario Bros Wii game did sell over 10 million copies as pointed out a little over 2 weeks ago.
Just for fun, I'd like to see what Nintendo's exterior argument was from 'loosing sales' because, clearly, they capitalized on the sales aspect and in any retail store I've been in recently in my area, even a month or better past the holiday season, has the game completely sold out.
Furthermore, pirating a game like New Super Mario Bros Wii, to me, seems quite contradictory. It's $50 in the store, but it's not like you don't get the gameplay you desire out of it. My wife and I have had this game since late Decemeber 2009 and we've played it daily ever since. With 8 regular levels and 8 unlockable coin levels to conquer, all the easter eggs to discover and the nostaliga of getting to play a killer 2-D game again on a modern-day gaming console, if you don't think that's worth your $50, I pitty you.
I think all the graffiti authors should step forward and claim their share of her enormous royalties
...or claim their guilt in defacing private or state property. I'm sure the college would love to employ free custodial labor with a looming prosectution held over the head of the guilty to scrub bathroom walls and re-paint for them.
I think regardless of where you find it or what type of person are, graffiti is pretty entertaining and intriguing. I think the most amusing graffiti I've seen that encompasses about every walk of life, rank or status and is among the same topic fairing FTFA above was in a Port-a-john during different points in my life, most notably when I was deployed in Iraq. Considering the type of foot traffic that hit these port-a-john's is much more broader than the foot traffic that hits a university library and the fact that, at least when I was in basic training, it was a push-up affair every time you didn't have a black ballpoint pen on your person, the odds were pretty high for someone to carve their opinion in any artistic form into the wall for everyone else to ponder AND respond to.
It's almost a comical affair now to realize I used to go out of my way to keep track of all the "Black Ninja Rule Number n" and actually look for them when I was pouring sweat trying to take a crap or try to unbuckle 50lbs worth of gear and stow it beside me with I pissed in those crackjack boxes.
A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists.
Who would blame India for not having faith and carrying out their out climate study with an in-house panel? Did the IPCC not botch the initial rreport because someone did the School of Office Space decimal point shift in the math dealing with the melting factor of the Himalayan glaciers? I guess some counties feel that if they want something done right, they'll do it themselves. Cant' fault India for that.
I remember playing Doom in the mid-90's on my friend's Gateway 2000 Pentium 100Mhz. I still play it to this day from time to time (openGL port on Linux). It's mindless, self-indulging, gory, non-challenging (now, not then!), and it's becoming one of timeless those FPS games that won't die because it's story line is simple and not drug out, you're thrown right into the mix and you can keep your objective as simple as you want: Make it to the end of the map.
...so potentially $2,000,000,000 - $26,000,000 = $1,974,000,000 = Not bad even when you lost in court IMHO. And certainly *not* counting what ~7 years worth of foreseeable built-up interest on $2B either.
Aside from 'google' 'mobile' 'patents' 'privacy' 'cellphones' and 'story'... there should *always* be a 'not surprised' and 'obvious'. Google is king of data pillaging and border-line inter-personal information mining. This may fail or it could be highly successful for Google; regardless of the outcome, they've got their hands in just about anything as it pertains to identity on the internet now. This shouldn't be any more surprising; and it sounds pretty cool.
Don't you still beat on heads with sticks with digital drums? Yep. Functionality not lost there.
Don't you still press down a tuned key to make a sound with a digital piano? Yep. Functionality not lost there, either.
...so how is my point void since the point of a guitar is to pluck tuned strings and fret to make notes? Functionality lost. Mind as well play go get a Guitar Hero guitar because again, all you're doing is pushing buttons. It may be more than 5, you're not gaining any functional experience that will even help you play a 'real' guitar and succeed. Sure, I can move my fretting hand fast and shred on Guitar Hero, try doing it IRL on a 'real' guitar, many more factors to consider to clarity, tone, definition, pressure, syncing of what you're doing.
...sounds like you have a dedication problem or ADD. Flamebait this post, too. Anyone who actually plays guitar truthfully and skillfully well I'm sure gets the point I'm making.
Overcoming the natural limitations of a traditional guitar, this new instrument eliminates the need to pluck strings while using the right hand to control sound.
This whole movement to become a (fake) virtuoso on a (fake) musical instrument is nauseating the hell out of me (e.g. Guitar Hero and now *this*). Yes, let's teach everyone that hard work and dedication to personal greatness and accomplishment is a joke. What possible "natural limitations" of a traditional guitar are we talking about? So you mean that you can't use both your hands at the same time because it's 'complicated' and 'feels uncomfortable at first'? Well, if that's the case, you shouldn't be walking and breathing either. When you do anything for the first time, those are the two things that usually rear their head first.
Only frustration I ever see out of beginning guitar players that quit in a short amount of time is: 1) They are trying to learn on an absolute garbage guitar that isn't set up and the action is as high as the Empire state building (NO one is going to learn on that and not get frustrated, pro or novice) and 2) They are looking to play like Van Halen, Zakk Wyide, Richie Blackmore, Steve Vai, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, ect. and realize that it takes a bit more than two weeks worth of dedication to do that, they are back to listening to their iPod full of EMO with their Nintendo DS in their hands. Sounds like this Misa is missing the true, life-long value of playing an 'real' instrument and being good at it.
If that's not the voice of Peter Gibbons from Office Space, then slap me silly!
"...Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour and visualized activity by hour and country. I... took a bunch of the IP's from the logs, sent them to a company called Initech; Initech took every... (sent millions of them) Initech took every 40th one and sent them to Lumberg's house."
Unfortunately this is the way our American gov't operates: Bottom-line management style approach to everything with only the lowest budget in mind. It's really no different than people in society who try to live and act like rockstar's on a McDonald's budget. FTFA, IT, in particular, is in shambles because the mass employee attrition related to budget woes. So maybe you get the "diamond-in-the-rough" person who picked up the in's and out's of the infrastructure and singlely-handed administers the whole network themselves, you'd be ignorant to think he's going to stick any long when anything remotely better in the private sector surfaces again. Just like any place, Gov't IT creates their own single point of failure because they 1) Won't purchase what you need to succeed because they are under the esteemed impression that they pay you to come up with enterprise solutions out of thin-air, and 2) charge the gov't 1.5x the salary than they are paying the contractors to do it. You don't build tenure and stability that way, folks.
I've been a RedHat fan-boy since RedHat 4.x days and at my place of employment we have 100+ Redhat subscription/support licenses. However, even their support at the most basic level (~$350/year) isn't really "great"... the support rivals Microsoft anymore. If you have a problem, it's either someone else's or if you are already at the current patch level for package-xyz or kernel-abc, you usually get the shrugged shoulder response unless you throw up a real stink.
I think RedHat really shines because of the variety of enterprise hardware support they have; places like IBM, Dell, HP, etc. all really work out-of-the-box with Redhat installations (pending some pretty new hardware that you have to use the suppliment CD stuff for), so it's not like it was back in the day when SGI and even Sun (since they broke into the x86 market) where you need your in-house hardware to jive with your in-house operating system. There's going to be the opposer's that will argue the stability factor that SGI and SUN have/had in regards to their hardware because it was tailored for it and not made to be as bloat as the Linux kernel has gotten in areas to support the mass hardware platforms. Again, Redhat IMHO should be thanking the enterprise hardware vendors for their posted OS support for RedHat.
This is probably more of a classic case of unrealistic deadlines imposed on Gov't agencies/IT contractors by Gov't security desk jockies and/or congressmen without a clue. I'm sure the infrastructure is convoluted to begin with and I'm sure whatever planning testing was probably rushed. On top of that, I've never know *anything* in the government to 1) rarely meet a deadline on time, 2) accomplish a task on time without an exorbitant amount of hiccups to deal with, or 3) be successful without being strangled by miles of bureaucratic red tape. I'm not making an excuse, just seems pretty plausible considering who we are talking about here.
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What if you lose all those paper pictures and negatives in a fire, a flood, lose the book when moving, get burgled, ... ?
Burgled? Maybe if they had, mixed among their child's 4th birthday party, the photo of who shot Kennedy.
Any gas station you go into now (unless its in podunk la-la land) has a crazy amount of security cameras all over out there monitoring pumps and to catch fuel pumping thieves. I would suppose the reason the high number of pumps that do get hi-jacked are places that aren't open 24-hours or have a douchebag clerk who "pushes the blinky light" to authorize fuel and doesn't notice someone taking apart the pump next to it.
I remember when skimming waiters or waitresses with hand-held swipe devices was "the scam of the year". Someone is always going to 1-up the next I guess. However, it still is very surprising that this type of theft is still happening to begin with, though, and especially to credit card scanning card devices on gas pumps. That's like the bank leaving the door open on an ATM machine.
This is something that I've seriously taken a look into on the personal side of things. I look at all the digital data I've collected (and lost due to a drive failure, virus, corruption, disaster, ect.) over the years and it really makes your head go foggy. I only hit this realization putting together a wedding anniversary party for my parent's together in the last few months. My parents brought over bucket loads of photos and keepsakes that I have to rummage through for an overhead slideshow. On top of them being (thankfully) highly organized with their personal keepsakes, it far superseeds what I have for my own family. My wife and I went back and we literally have a 'digital divide' in the last decade for any tangible photos. Most of our memorable moments were done with a digital camera, which is great, but we have SO many dribblets of photos here and there on this burnt CD or that external storage device, ALL of which can get lost much easier, broken or misplaced FOREVER than a big ass, heavy rubbermade toat of pictures my parents have (negative included, I might add).
So I ask myself, what if my copy of my copy of my copy is corrupt? I'm screwed. What if I have something in an unsupported format that I can't find any support for? I'm screwed. What if I have a photo at 320x240 resolution and I want to make a 8x10 photo of it and put it on my wall? I'm screwed. We've successfully stove-piped ourselves for a high rate of non-reproduction of our valued items along with a staggering rate for failure on the mediums we've chosen for them.
I've come to the conclusion that tangible is becoming an obsolete word when it comes to anything I like anymore: music, movies, photography, books, news, conversations, ect. I don't think there is a way getting around it that I can see.
This is well into the big double-digit count of Google headlining or top subject matter in slashdot news stories in the last 5 days, with ranging topics from broadband internet backbone building to social network privacy with Buzz to energy buy-ins, now iPhone app buy-up monopolization. Unstoppable force, friends.
I know Google has done extremely well diversifying themselves and has their fingers in anything, but no one treats them like monopolizers that Microsoft became.
Hopefully reMail turned a good profit on this... and wasn't squeezed by the big corporation.
At least on the 64-bit comparison, anything (e.g. Windows 7) that has a "minimum" memory requirement of 2GB in terms of an OS, what did you expect? Not that having 2-4GB in any sort of laptop or desktop system these days isn't uncommon, but I don't think I exceed 2GB in anything I currently own, laptop or PC wise. Quite honestly, I don't run Windows 7, and I've been a Linux convert for some time now on the desktop, but I see the very same thing with over-bearing GUI'fied eye-candy Window Managers on Linux, too. I'm constantly blowing away my pagecache on under Gnome and making kernel parameter adjustments to see what little improvements I can make.
Unless I'm running LXDE, icewm, fluxbox, ect. and keeping GUI's down to my browser and the handful of xterm's I've got open, I've found it hard to keep a balance of memory usage as well. The days of lightweight GUI anything are over.
And no, this isn't a lure for a Linux fan boi X-Windows + Window-Manager-of-the-day debate.
FTFA, it's clear that the powers-that-be in charge are incapable with dealing with the scenario properly, what I didn't see covered is anything about "could we handle an attack" from a real infrastructure and mitigation standpoint. IMHO, who gives a flaming rip that some congressional desk monkey can't follow the very policies and procedures they wrote themselves. We all know IT people like me, you and the rest of the InfoSec world are going to have to deal with it and if I noticed it on a national, federal, state or private sector level on my watch, I wouldn't wait for someone to bark an order from up high to try and do something about it.
For all I know, it could be a big U.S. government social propaganda honey-pot to lure attacks to learn from them or see which country "jumps first". I think I just gave my own government WAY too much credit.
Could it be that Futurama is becoming reality? It's only a matter of evolutionary time before that chemical blob morphs into Yivo, and not only becomes a meteor-dwelling overlord, but our planet-sized, tentacled, omnipotent alien overlord that controls us all!
At first glance before watching the video, my first thought is Microsoft breaking into a competition with Google over Google StreetView and that it might be up to a par level against it. I'm actually pretty impressed as well. Bing Maps looks like it deploys pretty similiar feature sets, but they've taken them slightly to the next level and put their own spin on things, but that isn't going to keep them on the wow factor list any longer than it takes to Google to deploy similar functionality, but better.
IMHO, for Bing Maps to stay in the lime-light and not get overrun by Google, they best get on doing the entire lower 48 states, so I can street view more than just Las Vegas or Los Angeles and troll through the streets and sights of some place like Guernsey, Wyoming.
FTFA, I understand the argument of, "Your friends want to cheat, great. Good luck on my uber-weighted final worth, now, 102% of your final grade", and I am personally not a fan of it. I've seen that type of methodology applied at the 101-level and gen-ed classes but I just don't like it at any level as it applies to college. IMHO, I paid for my schooling with the G.I. bill and the rest of it in loans and of course it would piss me off when I'm putting in hard, valid work in a class and not cheating to be punished for what others are doing. If people cheat and don't take the class seriously, the Mr/Mrs Professor should deal with that student accordingly and make sure it qualifies for an automatic failure of the class. I had professors in college that has a very low threshold for that type of behavior and the student would learn (or mom and dad fronting the college bill every semester would learn) that taking classes over and over will only make you either a 7 year senior or a drop out. Furthermore, I don't like how the professor gives up his authority and puts a layer of discipline on the students by punishing them. Is he looking for a militaristic approach? Does he think all the kids in the dorm are going to gang up on "the cheater" and give him/her a blanket party? Absolutely not.
However, when I started working in the real world in the Information Technology field, I never knew that this "group-punish" methodology would apply at most of the jobs I've been at with substantial perks (e.g. Work-from-home a good portion of the week, very flexible and accommodating work schedules with the option to make up time whenever).
To me, it just reminds me of being treated as less as an adult and more like a 2nd grader having to lay their head down on their desk for someone talking in the back of the classroom during teacher instruction time.
My lack of credibility for... posting my opinion on Slashdot at 0600 AM CT about a Wii game and making a grammatical typo in the process? Again, go back to your cave. I have no more credibility than your baseless dong-swinging contest you're pulling now.
Thank you Slashdot grammer troll. Go back to your cave and color.
As sarcastic but as serious as I can be, spellcheck is spellcheck, not grammer check. But hey, you're the Slashdot grammer troll, you must have known that. Since we're pointing out eachother's English grammer mistakes, perhaps you should learn how to capitalize your proper nouns (e.g. 2nd paragraph, "nintendo" is a company, trademark or organization). Remember, you started it, not me.
Nintendo is going to do what any other software mongrel in the free world is going to do when their production is illegally propagated to the masses. However, let's not overshadow the fact that the New Super Mario Bros Wii game did sell over 10 million copies as pointed out a little over 2 weeks ago.
Just for fun, I'd like to see what Nintendo's exterior argument was from 'loosing sales' because, clearly, they capitalized on the sales aspect and in any retail store I've been in recently in my area, even a month or better past the holiday season, has the game completely sold out.
Furthermore, pirating a game like New Super Mario Bros Wii, to me, seems quite contradictory. It's $50 in the store, but it's not like you don't get the gameplay you desire out of it. My wife and I have had this game since late Decemeber 2009 and we've played it daily ever since. With 8 regular levels and 8 unlockable coin levels to conquer, all the easter eggs to discover and the nostaliga of getting to play a killer 2-D game again on a modern-day gaming console, if you don't think that's worth your $50, I pitty you.
I think all the graffiti authors should step forward and claim their share of her enormous royalties
...or claim their guilt in defacing private or state property. I'm sure the college would love to employ free custodial labor with a looming prosectution held over the head of the guilty to scrub bathroom walls and re-paint for them.
I think regardless of where you find it or what type of person are, graffiti is pretty entertaining and intriguing. I think the most amusing graffiti I've seen that encompasses about every walk of life, rank or status and is among the same topic fairing FTFA above was in a Port-a-john during different points in my life, most notably when I was deployed in Iraq. Considering the type of foot traffic that hit these port-a-john's is much more broader than the foot traffic that hits a university library and the fact that, at least when I was in basic training, it was a push-up affair every time you didn't have a black ballpoint pen on your person, the odds were pretty high for someone to carve their opinion in any artistic form into the wall for everyone else to ponder AND respond to.
It's almost a comical affair now to realize I used to go out of my way to keep track of all the "Black Ninja Rule Number n" and actually look for them when I was pouring sweat trying to take a crap or try to unbuckle 50lbs worth of gear and stow it beside me with I pissed in those crackjack boxes.
A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists.
Who would blame India for not having faith and carrying out their out climate study with an in-house panel? Did the IPCC not botch the initial rreport because someone did the School of Office Space decimal point shift in the math dealing with the melting factor of the Himalayan glaciers? I guess some counties feel that if they want something done right, they'll do it themselves. Cant' fault India for that.
I remember playing Doom in the mid-90's on my friend's Gateway 2000 Pentium 100Mhz. I still play it to this day from time to time (openGL port on Linux). It's mindless, self-indulging, gory, non-challenging (now, not then!), and it's becoming one of timeless those FPS games that won't die because it's story line is simple and not drug out, you're thrown right into the mix and you can keep your objective as simple as you want: Make it to the end of the map.
...so potentially $2,000,000,000 - $26,000,000 = $1,974,000,000 = Not bad even when you lost in court IMHO. And certainly *not* counting what ~7 years worth of foreseeable built-up interest on $2B either.
Aside from 'google' 'mobile' 'patents' 'privacy' 'cellphones' and 'story' ... there should *always* be a 'not surprised' and 'obvious'. Google is king of data pillaging and border-line inter-personal information mining. This may fail or it could be highly successful for Google; regardless of the outcome, they've got their hands in just about anything as it pertains to identity on the internet now. This shouldn't be any more surprising; and it sounds pretty cool.
Don't you still beat on heads with sticks with digital drums? Yep. Functionality not lost there.
Don't you still press down a tuned key to make a sound with a digital piano? Yep. Functionality not lost there, either.
...so how is my point void since the point of a guitar is to pluck tuned strings and fret to make notes? Functionality lost. Mind as well play go get a Guitar Hero guitar because again, all you're doing is pushing buttons. It may be more than 5, you're not gaining any functional experience that will even help you play a 'real' guitar and succeed. Sure, I can move my fretting hand fast and shred on Guitar Hero, try doing it IRL on a 'real' guitar, many more factors to consider to clarity, tone, definition, pressure, syncing of what you're doing.
...sounds like you have a dedication problem or ADD. Flamebait this post, too. Anyone who actually plays guitar truthfully and skillfully well I'm sure gets the point I'm making.
Overcoming the natural limitations of a traditional guitar, this new instrument eliminates the need to pluck strings while using the right hand to control sound.
This whole movement to become a (fake) virtuoso on a (fake) musical instrument is nauseating the hell out of me (e.g. Guitar Hero and now *this*). Yes, let's teach everyone that hard work and dedication to personal greatness and accomplishment is a joke. What possible "natural limitations" of a traditional guitar are we talking about? So you mean that you can't use both your hands at the same time because it's 'complicated' and 'feels uncomfortable at first'? Well, if that's the case, you shouldn't be walking and breathing either. When you do anything for the first time, those are the two things that usually rear their head first.
Only frustration I ever see out of beginning guitar players that quit in a short amount of time is: 1) They are trying to learn on an absolute garbage guitar that isn't set up and the action is as high as the Empire state building (NO one is going to learn on that and not get frustrated, pro or novice) and 2) They are looking to play like Van Halen, Zakk Wyide, Richie Blackmore, Steve Vai, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, ect. and realize that it takes a bit more than two weeks worth of dedication to do that, they are back to listening to their iPod full of EMO with their Nintendo DS in their hands. Sounds like this Misa is missing the true, life-long value of playing an 'real' instrument and being good at it.
If that's not the voice of Peter Gibbons from Office Space, then slap me silly!
"...Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour and visualized activity by hour and country. I... took a bunch of the IP's from the logs, sent them to a company called Initech; Initech took every... (sent millions of them) Initech took every 40th one and sent them to Lumberg's house."
Brilliant post. That couldn't be any more right. And I might add:
...hiring another contractor who does the exact same thing because of utter lack of qualification and skill.
Unfortunately this is the way our American gov't operates: Bottom-line management style approach to everything with only the lowest budget in mind. It's really no different than people in society who try to live and act like rockstar's on a McDonald's budget. FTFA, IT, in particular, is in shambles because the mass employee attrition related to budget woes. So maybe you get the "diamond-in-the-rough" person who picked up the in's and out's of the infrastructure and singlely-handed administers the whole network themselves, you'd be ignorant to think he's going to stick any long when anything remotely better in the private sector surfaces again. Just like any place, Gov't IT creates their own single point of failure because they 1) Won't purchase what you need to succeed because they are under the esteemed impression that they pay you to come up with enterprise solutions out of thin-air, and 2) charge the gov't 1.5x the salary than they are paying the contractors to do it. You don't build tenure and stability that way, folks.
I think RedHat really shines because of the variety of enterprise hardware support they have; places like IBM, Dell, HP, etc. all really work out-of-the-box with Redhat installations (pending some pretty new hardware that you have to use the suppliment CD stuff for), so it's not like it was back in the day when SGI and even Sun (since they broke into the x86 market) where you need your in-house hardware to jive with your in-house operating system. There's going to be the opposer's that will argue the stability factor that SGI and SUN have/had in regards to their hardware because it was tailored for it and not made to be as bloat as the Linux kernel has gotten in areas to support the mass hardware platforms. Again, Redhat IMHO should be thanking the enterprise hardware vendors for their posted OS support for RedHat.
This is probably more of a classic case of unrealistic deadlines imposed on Gov't agencies/IT contractors by Gov't security desk jockies and/or congressmen without a clue. I'm sure the infrastructure is convoluted to begin with and I'm sure whatever planning testing was probably rushed. On top of that, I've never know *anything* in the government to 1) rarely meet a deadline on time, 2) accomplish a task on time without an exorbitant amount of hiccups to deal with, or 3) be successful without being strangled by miles of bureaucratic red tape. I'm not making an excuse, just seems pretty plausible considering who we are talking about here.