A cynical part of me wonders if SP3 contains breaking changes to make life harder for WINE, and possibly other solutions.
I know it crushes the fantasies Linuxites have, but MS could give a shit about W(h)INE.
MS wants XP broken in favor of *Vista*. If SP3 becomes mandatory (ie, remove other hotfixes and make only SP3 available or make SP3 required for some Genuine Advantage "upgrade") and SP3 becomes known for making XP work worse or slower, it has a good chance of making Vista look better and possibly start gaining people willing to upgrade.
Other than new systems purchased at retail by consumers, Vista has been a colossal failure and MS wants/needs new technology uptake to keep the wheel turning. Sabotaging XP is an excellent way to do this.
There is no proof whatsoever that a burglar would "very likely harm" you. None. Period. Go find a study proving otherwise.
I can't provide an URL, but my neighbor IS a 15 year veteran of the local police force. According to him, there are four basic kinds of burglars: opportunists, drug addicts, professionals, and violents.
Drug users in search of a fix are predisposed to violence due to their addiction. Meth addicts stealing for a fix are generally borderline psychotic.
Professionals generally have a rap sheet and/or prison experience and carry weapons; they're prone to avoiding occupants, but are not afraid to use violence to avoid capture or win a conflict. Generally the most dangerous due to their rational commitment to theft and ongoing involvement in the criminal underworld.
Violents are the kind that WANT a conflict and often are really looking for someone they can hurt (often rape), not just steal from. They will deliberately enter occupied homes, beating, killing or raping the occupants along with stealing. This is really an assault with stealing as an afterthought or the assailant's justification. In some ways, the least dangerous due to their general
Opportunists are looking for an easy score -- this means NO occupants, open windows, open doors. They will steal pretty equally from businesses, homes or cars and do not want conflict of any kind. The least threatening, but also less common.
The net is that most of the burglars are capable of violence, and some are quite dangerous and armed.
I can't argue with the logic of not pulling a gun within arm's reach of a martial arts expert. But outside of 10 feet, a martial arts expert really has no advantage. And inside 10 feet, his advantage requires years of training to be useful, and that's IF he isn't already facing a gun that's inside a pocket -- he'd better be able to swing faster than 800 ft/sec.
I've never really understood this point of view. If some kid breaks into your home to steal your TV - are you really going to shoot them, potentially kill them? You would potentially kill someone to keep your $1000 TV?
Why wouldn't I? Because I feel bad about someone who very likely has multiple felony arrests and who would very likely harm me physically if given a chance?
Martial arts expert - Don't carry a gun. Just give them your wallet.
Martial arts "experts" are inherently biased against firearms because they negate very nearly all the martial art skills and allow a person with relatively little training to defend themselves.
No war in the history of mankind has ever come close to that.
But we've never seen modernized China and India slug it out for keeps, either. Both nations are capable of fielding mechanized conventional armies numbering in the tens of millions of soldiers, and both nations have enough technological sophistication to make the battle of Verdun look like a country picnic.
And that's just the battlefield numbers; what happens when they start hitting civilian targets ala Dresden/Tokyo/Hamburg? I'd imagine that a firebombing of Shanghai or Delhi would be particularly effective and might reach nuclear death rates without the nukes.
And that's just playing fair, more or less. What happens when they start playing dirty -- say, hitting the 3 Gorges Dam, or other more nefarious actions that lead to mass famine, disease, etc? Wiping out 3 Gorges could lead to outbeaks of cholera or plague or worse on a scale we haven't seen before.
I've never understood why the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the general de-Baathification process were done with to such a sweeping extent; I'm pretty sure the Wehrmacht was cherry picked for "good" Germans, although I don't think the Nazi party fared too well in postwar Germany, so perhaps de-Baathification "should" have been done the way it was.
Even so, dissolving those institutions wouldn't have contributed to the chaos/tribalism/sectarianism if the US had invested the military manpower in keeping order and some real focus on reconstruction, especially economically. Instead we let chaos settle in, and that destroyed any chance for a physical rebuilding process and the consequent economic revival to take hold, and without an economic revival you have unemployment and dissastisfaction.
I do think Iran is a much larger influence in Iraq. Iran has a great motivation to ensure that it retains a high level of influence over the Shia majority, preventing another war with Iraq, not to mention extending Iranian influence in the middle east, exporting the Islamic revolution, etc. They're also very closely linked with the improvement in roadside bombs from simple fragmentation devices to sophisticated shaped charges. I don't think this leads to an "attack Iran" conclusion at all, its the expected behavior of a self-interested adversary in a war zone (cf the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan).
But this is all water under the bridge at this point; the bigger question is how do we move forward?
When Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were saying we'd be greeted as liberators and that we'd be in and out quickly, and that reconstruction would pay for itself, we didn't buy it. Because it was silly, unrealistic bullshit.
I sure hope that this is the point in the debate where the surety of failure is justified in terms of Islamic radicalism, Iranian interventionism and Iraqi incompetence & corruption, since these are the leading contributors to the clusterfuck that Iraq has become. The opponents prediction of failure certainly wasn't defined ahead of time in military terms.
I will say that the #1 contributor was the Bush administration's attempt to do it on the cheap all while micromanaging it. Had he committed another two divisions up front and been willing to crack down really hard on public disorder that we might be looking at an Iraqi government that doesn't look quite so shaky and a civilian population less given to tribalism/sectarianism.
I'd agree that many conservatives were lulled by the Bush administration; Bush1 managed to wage war against the Iraqis and make it look easy and without any terribly stupid side effects. Nobody knew that Bush2 would try to pull it off with such inadequate resources and then stand around with their dicks in their hands when Iraqi society started to melt down.
But none of this has anything to do with the French; I still don't believe they were motivated at all by anyone's best interest.
The French are as "right" about Iraq as a fortune teller is about the future. In hindsight they appear right, but France's motivation is about as honest as a fortune teller's. The French were far more interested in selling Mirage fighters, Alcatel telecomm equipment and securing beneficial oil deals for TotalFinaElf as they were in preventing the clusterfuck that is/was Iraq.
But somehow by guessing the outcome correctly, the French have somehow been elevated to experts in foreign policy as well as possessing some kind of moral enlightenment. Neither is true.
France has had an ego problem since the 18th century about its "role" in the world. They've never been able to get over playing second fiddle to the British Empire and they've now transferred their "small penis" ego problem to the U.S.
They made a colossal mess of central Africa, in many ways sharing some of the responsibility for the problems in Rwanda, Cote D'Ivoire, and let's not forget Algeria or Viet Nam. The French are STILL involved in interventionism in Africa in Chad, often through the Foreign Legion, a force whose sole mission is foreign interventionism.
And when we fall back on France's moral superiority, lets not forget the DGSE's (French Security) bombing the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" which killed a journalist, all so the French could conduct nuclear tests without interference. In other spheres of French "moral superiority", there's the comfy exile of dictator and general bad guy Duvalier, among others.
Basically it all boils down to France wanting to be taken seriously as a "player" and not playing second fiddle. It has NOTHING to do with the moral or political superiority of French policy.
About the only thing the French got right and we STUPIDLY passed on was DGSE's offer to kill Khomeni when he was in exile there in the 1970s. Had the Khomeni died "tragically in an accident" and the U.S. given the Shah an early retirement in favor of a more moderate government, we may have never seen an Islamic revolution in Iran and consequently had FAR fewer problems in the Middle East today. What would Lebanon be without Iran's proxy force, Hezbollah? What would Israel be without Islamic Jihad and Hamas to deal with? But that was the short-sighted Carter administration for you.
I love French food and champagne though. I just tire of French egos and their completely misguided view of their place in the world.
I have all that installed along with an ABP filterset subscription, but other than me manually blocking Google analytics and syndication as untrusted, how effective is trusting those two solutions to block tracking?
Or do you really have to go nuts and setup manual ABP blocks for tracking vendor(s)?
Its wide enough that 4:3 content generally looks out of proportion when stretched, but its not wide enough to show the most common current 2.35:1 movies without letterboxing.
"Gee, nice wide screen. Why are movies still letterboxed?"
My previous argument was based on what I'd been exposed to with trespass statutes before; I just hadn't bothered to read the text of the law.
The guiding principal is that criminal trespass cannot occur when one enters the unmarked property of another and either heeds or is not told to leave. How do you know you're trespassing if there's no sign and no one tells you to leave?
This is what makes me wonder how anyone with a road, unmarked as to its privacy and not marked "No trespassing", and connected to the public road system, could complain that someone drove on it.
Check again; your neat, precise logic is irrelevant to the law around here which states that in order for criminal trespass to occur, the land has to be posted or the lawful landowner has to request the person leave the property and they must refuse.
Entering unposted land isn't criminal trespass unless you refuse to leave when asked by the landowner, that's not nonsense subjective belief, that's statute 609.605.
No, it's really not trespass except in some highly technical sense that the road may have been private property and they were not specifically given authorization to drive on it.
I don't believe that having a private road, unmarked and with no access control, which is also connected to a public road is any kind of trespass in the legal sense, and certainly very doubtful even in the ethical sense.
The Equalogic we have at work doesn't work like this, or at least it doesn't seem that way to me. LUNs don't seem striped across all disks from what I can tell, but I haven't worked with it in a while.
I've never understood why they don't do this. I went and looked at a Xiotech Magnitude in 2002 at their offices here in the Twin Cities. They gave me the big dog and pony show (my current boss had bought two a year before at a different company) and when they were demoing the unit, I asked if you put new drives in if it restriped the existing data to include the new drives to make adding new LUNs more flexible. They looked sheepish and said no, the new drives had to be created as a new drive group.
The SANs I've seen since then (admittedly all fairly low end, never gotten to use/manage one of the high and systems) all just look like direct-attach SCSI RAID with an integrated controller and a NIC/FC connector.
You would think the idea would be to chuck in drives (with some minimum, like 8 or 12) and have the physical data storage be totally abstracted from the user, with N+2 redundancy and hotspare functionality totally guaranteed, and then allow the user to create LUNs without concern for underlying physical storage.
When you need more space, you add more drives and the system manages the striping, re-striping as necessary for optimum throughput and maximum redundancy, rebuilding failed drives as necessary.
Really.. Are there legions of people living in semirural areas off "private" communal gravel roads (linked to public roads) who are suddenly offended now that they have been "found"?
I just don't get it. Our house has front and back coverage (due to public streets front and back of our property) and I find it more of an amusing curiosity to see them on Google maps than some big brother conspiracy.
Dad lives in Arizona in a community made up of 10+ acre lots abutting BLM land. The BLM land is popular for 4-wheeling but somebody decided that the best access wash was private property (there's some question whether the property lines extend completely down into the wash or not) and fenced it off with 8x8 posts set in concrete, steel bars and wire mesh. If you want to declare private property, that's how you do it.
I also think that there's probably some law involving roadways that declares them open to public thoroughfare if no attempt is made to fence them or otherwise restrict access and if they are connected to an existing public roadways.
...may be the manipulation of the profits/royalties/agreements necessary to make BR hardware now that HD-DVD is more or less officially dead.
Short term they may start pushing the market by selling at a loss, knowing that long-term they're not really competing with anyone and by flooding the market with BR hardware they can create momentum.
Long-term they may switch up who's allowed to make players and cut some of the royalty costs to bring in more of the low-end Chinese manufacturers to keep player prices low, or at least give people ~$100 BR options.
Except that it pays to be super skeptical about their throughput claims.
I have a customer who uses Comcast business (actually they have 3 accounts due to the fact that they are a golf club with outbuildings not tied to the main building, and those buildings use comcast+vpn) and the main building is supposed to have "business class speed" but the 768K cap on upstream renders even the upstream less than fully usable (I'm guessing that sort-of-heavy upstream usage interferes with download ACKs).
Anyway, I'll give up on DSL when Comcast loses this reputation and offers their fat bandwidth with static IPs and no throttling or blocking.
Do you have any reason or evidence that the encryption isn't usable or that Google has some kind of unencrypted access to tabs, history and windows when they are specified to be encrypted? (Cookies and passwords appear encrypted by default and cannot be unencrypted.)
My guess is that they count on people NOT encrypting history/tabs/windows for metrics, but allow encryption of these items to promote the Google brand, etc.
I like browser sync a lot and am not worried too much about the privacy angle in the current implementation.
I would like to see better control/customization of the sync (including naming which browser wins on conflict, a "trash" folder for bookmarks to be deleted, and some force-sync options), but thusfar it's been great, especially the history sync which lets me get to sites I browsed on whole other computer but lack bookmarks for.
One of the concerns everyone raises with hosting on virtual machines is that if a VM instance goes down, you lose everything on it.
That has to be an Amazon limitation.
With, say, VMWare ESX, its almost a functional requirement that your data is stored on hardware other than the host CPU (SAN, usually). I also like critical data stored on a raw SAN LUN (as opposed to a virtual disk on a VMFS) since even if the entire VM execution infrastructure tanks, those same SAN LUNs can be accessed by physical machines with SAN access.
VMDKs have some advantages for smaller datasets and obviously for OS boot volumes, but for most large datasets it can get awkward to manage them and I don't think it does much to enhance performance to add the abstraction layer vs. a raw LUN.
But either way, you never have to lose your data just because a VM crashes even if the host crashes.
It was more of a literal prank than anything else, but at that same agency I worked for above, we would occasionally make Mac or PC desktop screenshots the desktop background on the opposite computer platform.
I'm pretty sure that when it was done when workstations were updated for some of the less savvy executives (which I guess translates as "any executive"), I'm pretty sure the helpdesk took calls about icons that the users couldn't click on. And knowing the helpdesk, they got the users pissed by insisting they weren't clicking right and didn't figure it out themselves until they went and saw the desktop firsthand.
Slashdot Mirror
A cynical part of me wonders if SP3 contains breaking changes to make life harder for WINE, and possibly other solutions.
I know it crushes the fantasies Linuxites have, but MS could give a shit about W(h)INE.
MS wants XP broken in favor of *Vista*. If SP3 becomes mandatory (ie, remove other hotfixes and make only SP3 available or make SP3 required for some Genuine Advantage "upgrade") and SP3 becomes known for making XP work worse or slower, it has a good chance of making Vista look better and possibly start gaining people willing to upgrade.
Other than new systems purchased at retail by consumers, Vista has been a colossal failure and MS wants/needs new technology uptake to keep the wheel turning. Sabotaging XP is an excellent way to do this.
There is no proof whatsoever that a burglar would "very likely harm" you. None. Period. Go find a study proving otherwise.
I can't provide an URL, but my neighbor IS a 15 year veteran of the local police force. According to him, there are four basic kinds of burglars: opportunists, drug addicts, professionals, and violents.
Drug users in search of a fix are predisposed to violence due to their addiction. Meth addicts stealing for a fix are generally borderline psychotic.
Professionals generally have a rap sheet and/or prison experience and carry weapons; they're prone to avoiding occupants, but are not afraid to use violence to avoid capture or win a conflict. Generally the most dangerous due to their rational commitment to theft and ongoing involvement in the criminal underworld.
Violents are the kind that WANT a conflict and often are really looking for someone they can hurt (often rape), not just steal from. They will deliberately enter occupied homes, beating, killing or raping the occupants along with stealing. This is really an assault with stealing as an afterthought or the assailant's justification. In some ways, the least dangerous due to their general
Opportunists are looking for an easy score -- this means NO occupants, open windows, open doors. They will steal pretty equally from businesses, homes or cars and do not want conflict of any kind. The least threatening, but also less common.
The net is that most of the burglars are capable of violence, and some are quite dangerous and armed.
I can't argue with the logic of not pulling a gun within arm's reach of a martial arts expert. But outside of 10 feet, a martial arts expert really has no advantage. And inside 10 feet, his advantage requires years of training to be useful, and that's IF he isn't already facing a gun that's inside a pocket -- he'd better be able to swing faster than 800 ft/sec.
I've never really understood this point of view. If some kid breaks into your home to steal your TV - are you really going to shoot them, potentially kill them? You would potentially kill someone to keep your $1000 TV?
Why wouldn't I? Because I feel bad about someone who very likely has multiple felony arrests and who would very likely harm me physically if given a chance?
Martial arts expert - Don't carry a gun. Just give them your wallet.
Martial arts "experts" are inherently biased against firearms because they negate very nearly all the martial art skills and allow a person with relatively little training to defend themselves.
No war in the history of mankind has ever come close to that.
But we've never seen modernized China and India slug it out for keeps, either. Both nations are capable of fielding mechanized conventional armies numbering in the tens of millions of soldiers, and both nations have enough technological sophistication to make the battle of Verdun look like a country picnic.
And that's just the battlefield numbers; what happens when they start hitting civilian targets ala Dresden/Tokyo/Hamburg? I'd imagine that a firebombing of Shanghai or Delhi would be particularly effective and might reach nuclear death rates without the nukes.
And that's just playing fair, more or less. What happens when they start playing dirty -- say, hitting the 3 Gorges Dam, or other more nefarious actions that lead to mass famine, disease, etc? Wiping out 3 Gorges could lead to outbeaks of cholera or plague or worse on a scale we haven't seen before.
I've never understood why the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the general de-Baathification process were done with to such a sweeping extent; I'm pretty sure the Wehrmacht was cherry picked for "good" Germans, although I don't think the Nazi party fared too well in postwar Germany, so perhaps de-Baathification "should" have been done the way it was.
Even so, dissolving those institutions wouldn't have contributed to the chaos/tribalism/sectarianism if the US had invested the military manpower in keeping order and some real focus on reconstruction, especially economically. Instead we let chaos settle in, and that destroyed any chance for a physical rebuilding process and the consequent economic revival to take hold, and without an economic revival you have unemployment and dissastisfaction.
I do think Iran is a much larger influence in Iraq. Iran has a great motivation to ensure that it retains a high level of influence over the Shia majority, preventing another war with Iraq, not to mention extending Iranian influence in the middle east, exporting the Islamic revolution, etc. They're also very closely linked with the improvement in roadside bombs from simple fragmentation devices to sophisticated shaped charges. I don't think this leads to an "attack Iran" conclusion at all, its the expected behavior of a self-interested adversary in a war zone (cf the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan).
But this is all water under the bridge at this point; the bigger question is how do we move forward?
When Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were saying we'd be greeted as liberators and that we'd be in and out quickly, and that reconstruction would pay for itself, we didn't buy it. Because it was silly, unrealistic bullshit.
I sure hope that this is the point in the debate where the surety of failure is justified in terms of Islamic radicalism, Iranian interventionism and Iraqi incompetence & corruption, since these are the leading contributors to the clusterfuck that Iraq has become. The opponents prediction of failure certainly wasn't defined ahead of time in military terms.
I will say that the #1 contributor was the Bush administration's attempt to do it on the cheap all while micromanaging it. Had he committed another two divisions up front and been willing to crack down really hard on public disorder that we might be looking at an Iraqi government that doesn't look quite so shaky and a civilian population less given to tribalism/sectarianism.
I'd agree that many conservatives were lulled by the Bush administration; Bush1 managed to wage war against the Iraqis and make it look easy and without any terribly stupid side effects. Nobody knew that Bush2 would try to pull it off with such inadequate resources and then stand around with their dicks in their hands when Iraqi society started to melt down.
But none of this has anything to do with the French; I still don't believe they were motivated at all by anyone's best interest.
-Shawn
The French are as "right" about Iraq as a fortune teller is about the future. In hindsight they appear right, but France's motivation is about as honest as a fortune teller's. The French were far more interested in selling Mirage fighters, Alcatel telecomm equipment and securing beneficial oil deals for TotalFinaElf as they were in preventing the clusterfuck that is/was Iraq.
But somehow by guessing the outcome correctly, the French have somehow been elevated to experts in foreign policy as well as possessing some kind of moral enlightenment. Neither is true.
Give me a break.
France has had an ego problem since the 18th century about its "role" in the world. They've never been able to get over playing second fiddle to the British Empire and they've now transferred their "small penis" ego problem to the U.S.
They made a colossal mess of central Africa, in many ways sharing some of the responsibility for the problems in Rwanda, Cote D'Ivoire, and let's not forget Algeria or Viet Nam. The French are STILL involved in interventionism in Africa in Chad, often through the Foreign Legion, a force whose sole mission is foreign interventionism.
And when we fall back on France's moral superiority, lets not forget the DGSE's (French Security) bombing the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" which killed a journalist, all so the French could conduct nuclear tests without interference. In other spheres of French "moral superiority", there's the comfy exile of dictator and general bad guy Duvalier, among others.
Basically it all boils down to France wanting to be taken seriously as a "player" and not playing second fiddle. It has NOTHING to do with the moral or political superiority of French policy.
About the only thing the French got right and we STUPIDLY passed on was DGSE's offer to kill Khomeni when he was in exile there in the 1970s. Had the Khomeni died "tragically in an accident" and the U.S. given the Shah an early retirement in favor of a more moderate government, we may have never seen an Islamic revolution in Iran and consequently had FAR fewer problems in the Middle East today. What would Lebanon be without Iran's proxy force, Hezbollah? What would Israel be without Islamic Jihad and Hamas to deal with? But that was the short-sighted Carter administration for you.
I love French food and champagne though. I just tire of French egos and their completely misguided view of their place in the world.
Falklands II?
Is it a pretty effective solution?
I have all that installed along with an ABP filterset subscription, but other than me manually blocking Google analytics and syndication as untrusted, how effective is trusting those two solutions to block tracking?
Or do you really have to go nuts and setup manual ABP blocks for tracking vendor(s)?
16:9 is such a pooched standard.
Its wide enough that 4:3 content generally looks out of proportion when stretched, but its not wide enough to show the most common current 2.35:1 movies without letterboxing.
"Gee, nice wide screen. Why are movies still letterboxed?"
MN statute 609.605.
My previous argument was based on what I'd been exposed to with trespass statutes before; I just hadn't bothered to read the text of the law.
The guiding principal is that criminal trespass cannot occur when one enters the unmarked property of another and either heeds or is not told to leave. How do you know you're trespassing if there's no sign and no one tells you to leave?
This is what makes me wonder how anyone with a road, unmarked as to its privacy and not marked "No trespassing", and connected to the public road system, could complain that someone drove on it.
Check again; your neat, precise logic is irrelevant to the law around here which states that in order for criminal trespass to occur, the land has to be posted or the lawful landowner has to request the person leave the property and they must refuse.
Entering unposted land isn't criminal trespass unless you refuse to leave when asked by the landowner, that's not nonsense subjective belief, that's statute 609.605.
He had the right answer to "Are you buying?" at least.
No, it's really not trespass except in some highly technical sense that the road may have been private property and they were not specifically given authorization to drive on it.
I don't believe that having a private road, unmarked and with no access control, which is also connected to a public road is any kind of trespass in the legal sense, and certainly very doubtful even in the ethical sense.
Sure, nothing is as good as having a real human make the decision, but that scales really poorly.
The Equalogic we have at work doesn't work like this, or at least it doesn't seem that way to me. LUNs don't seem striped across all disks from what I can tell, but I haven't worked with it in a while.
I've never understood why they don't do this. I went and looked at a Xiotech Magnitude in 2002 at their offices here in the Twin Cities. They gave me the big dog and pony show (my current boss had bought two a year before at a different company) and when they were demoing the unit, I asked if you put new drives in if it restriped the existing data to include the new drives to make adding new LUNs more flexible. They looked sheepish and said no, the new drives had to be created as a new drive group.
The SANs I've seen since then (admittedly all fairly low end, never gotten to use/manage one of the high and systems) all just look like direct-attach SCSI RAID with an integrated controller and a NIC/FC connector.
You would think the idea would be to chuck in drives (with some minimum, like 8 or 12) and have the physical data storage be totally abstracted from the user, with N+2 redundancy and hotspare functionality totally guaranteed, and then allow the user to create LUNs without concern for underlying physical storage.
When you need more space, you add more drives and the system manages the striping, re-striping as necessary for optimum throughput and maximum redundancy, rebuilding failed drives as necessary.
Really.. Are there legions of people living in semirural areas off "private" communal gravel roads (linked to public roads) who are suddenly offended now that they have been "found"?
I just don't get it. Our house has front and back coverage (due to public streets front and back of our property) and I find it more of an amusing curiosity to see them on Google maps than some big brother conspiracy.
Dad lives in Arizona in a community made up of 10+ acre lots abutting BLM land. The BLM land is popular for 4-wheeling but somebody decided that the best access wash was private property (there's some question whether the property lines extend completely down into the wash or not) and fenced it off with 8x8 posts set in concrete, steel bars and wire mesh. If you want to declare private property, that's how you do it.
I also think that there's probably some law involving roadways that declares them open to public thoroughfare if no attempt is made to fence them or otherwise restrict access and if they are connected to an existing public roadways.
...may be the manipulation of the profits/royalties/agreements necessary to make BR hardware now that HD-DVD is more or less officially dead.
Short term they may start pushing the market by selling at a loss, knowing that long-term they're not really competing with anyone and by flooding the market with BR hardware they can create momentum.
Long-term they may switch up who's allowed to make players and cut some of the royalty costs to bring in more of the low-end Chinese manufacturers to keep player prices low, or at least give people ~$100 BR options.
Except that it pays to be super skeptical about their throughput claims.
I have a customer who uses Comcast business (actually they have 3 accounts due to the fact that they are a golf club with outbuildings not tied to the main building, and those buildings use comcast+vpn) and the main building is supposed to have "business class speed" but the 768K cap on upstream renders even the upstream less than fully usable (I'm guessing that sort-of-heavy upstream usage interferes with download ACKs).
Anyway, I'll give up on DSL when Comcast loses this reputation and offers their fat bandwidth with static IPs and no throttling or blocking.
Do you have any reason or evidence that the encryption isn't usable or that Google has some kind of unencrypted access to tabs, history and windows when they are specified to be encrypted? (Cookies and passwords appear encrypted by default and cannot be unencrypted.)
My guess is that they count on people NOT encrypting history/tabs/windows for metrics, but allow encryption of these items to promote the Google brand, etc.
I like browser sync a lot and am not worried too much about the privacy angle in the current implementation.
I would like to see better control/customization of the sync (including naming which browser wins on conflict, a "trash" folder for bookmarks to be deleted, and some force-sync options), but thusfar it's been great, especially the history sync which lets me get to sites I browsed on whole other computer but lack bookmarks for.
Wasn't some kind of laser-based model that could be embedded in a PDA or cell phone coming soon, too?
I seem to remember it being monochrome or possibly even color using multiple lasers or a colorwheel ala DLP.
I agree completely, though, that these seem to be hitting 10 on the BS meter since they never come out.
One of the concerns everyone raises with hosting on virtual machines is that if a VM instance goes down, you lose everything on it.
That has to be an Amazon limitation.
With, say, VMWare ESX, its almost a functional requirement that your data is stored on hardware other than the host CPU (SAN, usually). I also like critical data stored on a raw SAN LUN (as opposed to a virtual disk on a VMFS) since even if the entire VM execution infrastructure tanks, those same SAN LUNs can be accessed by physical machines with SAN access.
VMDKs have some advantages for smaller datasets and obviously for OS boot volumes, but for most large datasets it can get awkward to manage them and I don't think it does much to enhance performance to add the abstraction layer vs. a raw LUN.
But either way, you never have to lose your data just because a VM crashes even if the host crashes.
It was more of a literal prank than anything else, but at that same agency I worked for above, we would occasionally make Mac or PC desktop screenshots the desktop background on the opposite computer platform.
I'm pretty sure that when it was done when workstations were updated for some of the less savvy executives (which I guess translates as "any executive"), I'm pretty sure the helpdesk took calls about icons that the users couldn't click on. And knowing the helpdesk, they got the users pissed by insisting they weren't clicking right and didn't figure it out themselves until they went and saw the desktop firsthand.