Here is a very interesting take on the new line of Sony players, shamelessly stolen from As the Apple Turns:
Okay, so it's been tough, but you've finally managed to stop yourself from taking Dell up on its kind offer to crush your iPod into a thin paste in exchange for $100 off one of its own stellar music players. Good for you. Only now you're finding yourself tempted by those new players that Sony introduced yesterday-- in particular the NW-HD1 Network Walkman. As faithful viewer Mike Scherer pointed out, MacMinute reports that the NW-HD1 (catchy name) has a 20 GB hard drive, but weighs only 4 ounces-- almost thirty percent less than a 20 GB iPod, and only about half an ounce more than a miniPod with a mere 4 GB storage capacity. Trust us, size does matter, as through-the-roof miniPod sales will attest; Dell's player is a clunky slab by comparison, and when we had the misfortune to encounter a 40 GB Nomad Zen last weekend, we mistook the thing for a brick wrapped in tin foil.
Oh, but the temptation doesn't stop at size; whereas the iPod claims 8 hours of use per battery charge, the NW-HD1 boasts 30. What's more, since a 20 GB iPod goes for $399 and Sony's minuscule new player will sell for "less than $400", pricing will likely be a dead heat. So let's recap, here; for the same price as an iPod, Sony offers a smaller and lighter player with gallons more juice per charge, the same size hard disk, and-- did we mention this?-- the ability to store 8,000 more songs. Really! See? Apple claims its 20 GB iPod will put 5,000 songs in your pocket, while Sony's press release insists that the NW-HD1 will hold "up to 13,000 four-minute songs." No wonder you're feeling tempted.
Well, it's cold shower time, kiddies. First of all, any sort of song capacity comparison is a joke, since a 20 GB hard drive is a 20 GB hard drive. Sony's drives aren't enchanted by a dusting of magical pixie dust before leaving the factory or anything. (At least, if they are, you'd expect Sony to play that up as a differentiating factor.) The difference in numbers here is that Apple bases its song count on 128 Kbps AAC files, while Sony's tally assumes "songs recorded at 48 kilobits per second." Yes, 48 Kbps. Considering how many people whine that even 128 Kbps AAC files don't sound good enough, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that 48 Kbps songs in any format are probably going to sound like a portable handheld AM radio playing from the bottom of a well while a few dozen people pop bubble wrap nearby.
And here's the real deal-breaker: about that format? Turns out that Sony's decided to go with its proprietary ATRAC3 format... and nothing else. While Apple pushes AAC pretty heavily (it's the only thing it sells at the iTunes Music Store), at least the iPod can also play AIFF files, WAVs, the new Apple Lossless format, and probably most importantly of all, good ol' MP3s. If you get an NW-HD1, though, you'll have to transcode your entire music library into ATRAC3 before you can carry it around with you, and believe us when we tell you that you're not going to want to do that.
See, aside from the time you'd have to invest, there's the little matter of the fact that, quality-wise, the ATRAC3 format apparently sucks eggs whole through a Crazy Straw. For evidence, we point you towards the results of Roberto Amorim's latest public listening test, conducted just a couple of months ago. The test had dozens of listeners rate the same pieces of music encoded into several digital music formats at or around 128 kbps, and when the results were tabulated, ATRAC3 at 132 kbps came out dead last, having "surprised by its bad performance." So if listeners judge 132 kbps ATRAC3 (incidentally, the format and bitrate of songs sold by Sony's Connect downloadable music store) to sound so much worse than 128 kbps AAC, what do you suppose 48 kbps ATRAC must sound like? (Three hints: radio; well; bubble wrap.)
So while Sony's new player may indeed be, as MacMinute calls it, "the closest
This wasn't quiet at all. The catcalls, when I watched the video tape [Thanks for making it, Greenpeace!], were designed to incite violence (thanks Real TV!)... Which would violate another few principles, "to raise the level and quality of public debate." and "non-violent conflict".
From reading the article, it seems that they attached a platform to the oil rig and sat there protesting. Seems non-violent enough to me. Where is this video that you speak of?
I hope you're being facetious. People don't DIE when windows crashes, thats why.
Yet... In Bill Gates "dream future" where our smart homes all run Windows, which controls everything from HVAC to your electrical system, a worm very well could cause the death of elderly or disabled people by cranking their heat up to 90, or perhaps shorting out their electrical systems and causing fires to start. Sounds far-fetched now, but believe me, in 10-20 years, these problems will be common unless they vastly revamp the structure of Windows.
So, we need to go with option (A). That is that Greenpeace is no longer what Greenpeace stood for.
AFAIK, Greenpeace has always stood for non-violent protest against people, organizations, and things that harm the environment. From their website:
We use research, lobbying, and quiet diplomacy to pursue our goals, as well as high-profile, non-violent conflict to raise the level and quality of public debate.
If you can point me to an instance in time when this has not been true, please do so, and back up your arguments with facts.
I didn't mean to suggest this. I was talking more about the Energy Task Force (you know, those secret meetings that Cheney still won't even release the attendance list for). You have Halliburton, Bechtel, and KBR in Iraq. Then you have Enron and others like them with the failed Energy Bill, and also the pharmaceutical lobby with the recently passed Medicare revisions. Those are just the most egregious examples of big government propping up big corporations through taxpayer subsidies.
As far as Iraq's reconstruction it appears the U.S. has instead been spending or locking in Iraq's current and future oil revenue. Before the U.S. transfered power they'd spent or locked in $19 billion out of $20 billion dollars in Iraq's oil fund.
The CPA argues that they are just slow to spend the U.S. tax dollars, ramp up time, security problems....blah....blah...blah and it will gain momentum but Iraqis have noticed that the CPA has been spending their oil revenue unfettered by these problem.
I imagine American's take this news with mixed emotions. On the plus side I imagine most American's would rather Iraq rebuild itself using its oil wealth instead of American tax dollars.
Then again the Bush administration has had big rhetoric about its commitment to rebuilding Iraq and in critical areas like electricity, security, sanitation and health care its proving to be somewhat empty rhetoric. Lengthy blackouts are still routine more than a year after the invasion. The rhetoric was similar in Afghanistan and was largely not matched by actual money or rebuilding.
Assuming Iraq's oil revenue is largely going in to the pockets of American contractors like Halliburton this suggests, though I'm not saying proves, that the U.S. did in fact steal Iraq's oil revenues which is also something Bush adminstration rhetoric said it would not do.
I agree with you 100%. When I first saw this news on CNN yesterday, they presented it like it was a good thing: "See, our government is being frugal in Iraq." I saw it as just the opposite. Iraqis have been complaining about how the electrical grid and plumbing systems have been deteriorating, not improving, since we took occupation. This just confirms that the US government is doing nothing to repair infrastructure they damaged during all of the bombing. How can you win hearts and minds when you don't even rebuild their country?
Also, the profiteering has gotten way out of hand. No wonder they are kidnapping contractors and beheading them. I don't think murder is justified, but if I was an unemployed Iraqi, and I saw this redneck KBR contractor walking around with loads of cash making six figures just to drive a truck, something an Iraqi would do for about $100 a month, flashing his money around and spouting all of this rhetoric about how the US is #1 that he learned from watching Fox news all day, I'd probably want to kick his ass.
You're talking as if Bush and Cheney sat around with boxes of software on their desks, reading-glasses perched on their noses, passing said boxen backwards and forwards, discussing their pros and cons.
No, I don't think they do that at all. Much more likely is that they hire staffers with like-minded political philosphies, who, when given the choice between Hosting Company A, who uses entirely commercial software written by "Upstanding American Companies(TM), like MS", and Hosting Company B, who uses entirely open source software, written by "Hippie, Commie Bastards(TM), some of them from foreign countries", they choose Hosting Company A. It's a basic political philosophy. You either spend big bucks propping up American companies, even if they produce shoddy products, or you use the best tool for the job, and try to save the taxpayer money.
Me, I would rather elect the candidate that will use the best tool for the job and try to save the taxpayer money. You might argue that basic economics says that money sent to US companies will end up in the hands of US workers, which is true, however, I don't want my government giving any more money to Bill Gates bank account. He doesn't need it, and we have a huge national debt to worry about, so let's be a little more frugal, OK?
A quote from Mr. Paul Watson (as a Greenpeace member, I'm certian you know of him, as he is a principal founder of your organization)
From the article you linked to: He was reportedly ousted from Greenpeace in the late 1970s for violating the organization's principle of "non-violent" action.
Clearly, you can't condemn an organization for the radical actions of one of it's members, who was kicked out of the organization because of those actions. If that was the case the NRA would have been called a terrorist organization decades ago. How many wackos and gun-nuts that went on killing sprees have been members of the NRA? Should we start calling the NRA a terrorist organization now?
this has to be the single most unimportant issue in world politics today. I really struggle to believe that anyone would read anything into, or make any kind of an issue over what webserver hosts a politician's website.
I disagree. The fact that the Republican party would choose to use an inferior commercial software package (IIS) when a superior free version of the same software is available (Apache) goes a long way towards showing what type of party they are. As much as they say they want "small government", when it comes down to it, they want "big government" propping up "big companies" with taxpayer subsidies. Plain and simple. This also shows why as soon as they are in power, they invent a war in order to provide more government money to their big contractor buddies (Halliburton, KBR, Enron, etc.). Sure, the webserver expenditures are only a small part of it, but it shows how completely the GOP has been bought and paid for by large corporations.
I'm not saying the Dems are completely innocent as well, but let's face it, they're much less in the pocket of large defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, and yes, software monopolies.
The principal consideration, Mr. Ellis said, was computer security and protecting the privacy of personal data on the Web site. The programming tools, procedures and the larger pool of workers skilled in using Microsoft software, he said, prompted the Republicans to opt for Microsoft's Web server, called Internet Information Services, running on the Windows 2000 operating system.
This guy obviously has his head so far up Microsoft's ass that hey's bought everything they've said about secure computing. Let's see, there's currently a worm that's infected thousands of IIS servers across the internet (who knows, it could have even infected the GOP's), and it's spreading via Javascript to millions of IE users, for which Microsoft has issued no patch, and yet this is somehow the most secure solution? The mind boggles. Even joe sixpack by now knows that MS is not secure after his Windows box sends him popups when there is no browser loaded and he has to reformat it and start over every three months after being infected with the worm du jour.
I personally find it interesting that the vast majority of the people I talk to consider this to be a "normal" computing experience. When my landlord told me the other day that they'd been infected by Bugbear and had spent a difficult few days trying to clean it off, I said "Well, that's one of the reasons I switched to Mac... No worms or viruses (yet)." He said "Oh, really? You don't have to run Norton's?"
I find it amazing that the majority of computer users out there think that spending $30 a year on subscriptions to AV software and firewalls is a normal expense that you just have to pay for, like the electric utility or water bill, if you want to use a computer. They have no clue that this software is only necessary to make up for a lack of security in the OS to begin with.
The only analogy I would compare it with is if Ford, rather than recalling all of the Explorers that rolled over, simply said, well, you'll have to buy a subscription to our special "tire tread enhancer service", and bring in your car every week to have the treads updated to the latest and greatest treads that won't separate. That way you won't roll over in a crash and explode in a ball of fire. Can you imagine the outcry if that happened? Why isn't MS held to the same standards?
If you have a problem with Internet users from some country, why not help the country fight them?
Easier said than done. Most of these countries have no extradition laws whatsoever, and the police are pretty much worthless/corrupt or are too busy fighting crimes like murder, rape, and armed robbery to even deal with something as petty as fraud.
But on the whole I agree that the blacklists are a bad thing. Fraudsters have no problem finding anonymous proxies in other countries. A far better solution is for the retailer to just simply refuse to ship anything to that country unless the payer sends certified funds like a wire transfer or bank check. It seems like the retailers are just taking an easy out rather than beefing up their own internal fraud prevention teams.
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you haven't needed to sync before reboot for years now on any modern *nix kernel. But it's kind of cool; I can always tell the experienced sysadmins out there that have been using Unix before Linux came along because they do this... I guess old habits really do die hard.
Why? I work for a company that manufacturers portable medical diagnostic equipment.
Pretty much every company in this field offers a mail-in rebate (often times as much as the original purchase price) for our devices if you send in any competitors device.
We regularly box up the devices that are sent to us and ship them back to their original manufacturer so that they know to take those devices out of their support database and to kind of "rub it in their faces" that we've had X number of their customers switch to our product (they do the same to us).
I can say for a fact that this does not happen in the computer industry. Companies like IBM, HP, and Sun realize that if they leave trade-in equipment in circulation, it will just end up on eBay somewhere, where it will be competing against their own salespeople for new revenue. For this reason, any competitive trade ins are always destroyed. There's no point in sending it back to the original manufacturer who will only remanufacture it and resell it. Why would we give money to our competitors.
I suggest your company should strongly consider doing the same. Don't you know that your competitors probably have the ability to refurbish or remanufacture their own equipment and sell it to people again?
In otherwords, sliding windows across the screen, animating some huge mouse cursor (larger than HW mouse accel would allow, for some strange and uncouth reason), or otherwise putting stuff up in front of windows would not cause them to redraw because their pixels would not be damaged by the operation.
For a good example of this effect in action, grab any sufficiently large browser window while running Windows XP, and drag it around on the screen very quickly in a circular motion. You need to have the "show windows contents while dragging" option turned on. Now, notice the windows behind it are constantly being redrawn, a lot slower than you can drag the window around. Also, your CPU usage will spike to pretty much 100%. Now, try this same thing on a Mac that is running OS X with Quartz Extreme enabled... No redrawing. Occlusion is all heandled by the GPU. That's the benefit of pixmaps.
I own a 2001 Acura CL type S, and even though it's got 260 hp and weighs almost 4000 pounds, I'm fairly impressed with the gas mileage. It is EPA rated at 19/29, and I get pretty much exactly that. On long trips with the cruise control set at 70 mph I consistently get about 29.5 mpg. Of course, city driving drops it down pretty significantly, and if you have a lead foot you're going to get much less than 19.
Honda has done a great thing with VTEC. Basically, you've got 4 valves per cylinder, 2 for intake of gas and 2 for exhaust. When the engine is below 4500 rpm, only 2 of those 4 valves are active, giving you great gas mileage. When you need a lot of power for passing or quick acceleration (or just blowing the doors off of the riced out Civic type "R" next to you at a stop light), rev it up higher than 4500 rpms and the second set of valves will open, giving you the quick "burst" power that you need.
It's not that I really need that much power, but it's nice to set the cruise control at 70 mph on long drives and be able to climb steep hills without the car slowing down on you. It's also nice to have the extra power when you need to accelerate really quickly to merge into freeway traffic.
Despite the 260 hp, my car actually qualifies as a LEV (low emissions vehicle), which is quite a feat and demonstrates that Honda engineers really know how to design an efficient engine.
The new Acura TL has 270 hp, a lot more room inside (to me it looks like a boat), and actually qualifies as an ULEV (ultra low emissions vehicle). I don't know how they do it, but those japanese engine designers must really know their stuff.
However, it sounds like the apple thing is doing dual-channel.
Bzzt. Try again. I watched WWDC and actually, they are using two DVI-D (DVI-Dual) connections on the card. The reason: Dual display capability. One DVI-D connection per monitor. There should be no tearing at all because each monitor gets it's own DVI-D connection.
For those of you that are curious about DVI standards: DVI-D and DVI-S look the same, but the DVI-D cables carry more of the pins through to each connection. In short, if you have a display greater than 165 megapixels a second, you need both DVI-D support on your graphics card, and a DVI-D cable or you'll get gobbledygook.
Woohoo! At least CoreVideo will be supported in my 1.25 AlBook I purchased 8 months ago.
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
It will also be supported in anything as lightly powered as a 12" PowerBook rev. B or an iMac 17" or 20". Come on folks, look at the Longhorn requirements and tell me Apple isn't being generous about supporting their old hardware. Tiger won't even be released for another year or so, and for a company to support real-time video processing on two year old hardware is much better than Microsoft is doing. The graphics cards that support Longhorn haven't even been invented yet!
I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.
The whole point of looking glass is that the 3d environment rendering is offloaded onto the GPU, leaving your CPU to handle tasks that it was originally designed for, rather than drawing all the windows and other stuff it was not designed for.
Ok, it might be flamebait. But the quotes are straight from on camera comments by both. I feel the Bush supporters out en force to try to mod down comments like this.
No shit. There are going to be a lot of people RTBLd from moderating after the meta-moderators get through with this thread. Seems a lot of neo-cons got mod points today. Hell, I'll probably be modded off-topic and troll on this post right now, but who really cares... Burn, karma, burn...
My only question is? What happens when neo-cons meta-moderate the bad moderations as fair? Who moderates the meta-moderators?
Michael Moore as quoted on his personal web site in the days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"
I'm not much at home at US politics, but I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans.
I wouldn't go that far. Ann Coulter is basically the equivelant of Howard Stern, but for neo-conservatives rather than frat guys. She tells blatant lies and basically says whatever she can say to get people riled up the most. I mean, she actually named her book "Treason", implying that anyone not supporting the Bush administration or any one of the wars our president starts is a traitor and should be killed. This is way over the top. Michael Moore, on the other hand, while he might have what some consider left-wing views, does not advocate stringing up Republicans and killing them for their viewpoints.
A name is a name (Jack Brown), and gives the officer something to call you besides "Hey You", but as long as we're not required to produce some sort of definitive, unique-identity-signifying number of the beast, I'm not too worried.
Are you aware that giving false information to a police officer is a criminal offense in most states?
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
This is true. But, what probably triggered it was this: A few users received Gmail invites and either didn't know what it was, or didn't recognize the person they received it from, saw it was offering another email service, then clicked the button that says "This is Spam". When Hotmail gets a few reports like that the message text gets added to their filters and everyone else's invites start going to the Spam folder.
That's just standard operating procedure. If they didn't have that procedure in place we'd receive 50-100 spams a day in our Hotmail box.
Of course, none of this would have been a problem if Hotmail hadn't sold all of their account lists to bulk emailers years ago. Hotmail is the only service that when I first created an account, instantly started sending me spam before I had even given my address out to anyone. The only way they could have gotten my address is if Hotmail sold it to bulk senders.
If you put logical chains like that into bash or Perl, using those short-circuit operators, the final term would never even get evaluated.
I'll admit that I didn't read that properly, but there are so many pieces of malware, and even non-malware that installs without your permission that makes this law especially overbroad.
Did you know that Windows Update automatically installs newer versions of itself just by going to the Windows Update site? Well, if you read the law with that loose interpretation, Microsoft would potentially be liable.
IANAL, but IMHO I think you would have to have intent to injure and defraud before a judge would rule against them.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a very interesting take on the new line of Sony players, shamelessly stolen from As the Apple Turns:
Okay, so it's been tough, but you've finally managed to stop yourself from taking Dell up on its kind offer to crush your iPod into a thin paste in exchange for $100 off one of its own stellar music players. Good for you. Only now you're finding yourself tempted by those new players that Sony introduced yesterday-- in particular the NW-HD1 Network Walkman. As faithful viewer Mike Scherer pointed out, MacMinute reports that the NW-HD1 (catchy name) has a 20 GB hard drive, but weighs only 4 ounces-- almost thirty percent less than a 20 GB iPod, and only about half an ounce more than a miniPod with a mere 4 GB storage capacity. Trust us, size does matter, as through-the-roof miniPod sales will attest; Dell's player is a clunky slab by comparison, and when we had the misfortune to encounter a 40 GB Nomad Zen last weekend, we mistook the thing for a brick wrapped in tin foil.
Oh, but the temptation doesn't stop at size; whereas the iPod claims 8 hours of use per battery charge, the NW-HD1 boasts 30. What's more, since a 20 GB iPod goes for $399 and Sony's minuscule new player will sell for "less than $400", pricing will likely be a dead heat. So let's recap, here; for the same price as an iPod, Sony offers a smaller and lighter player with gallons more juice per charge, the same size hard disk, and-- did we mention this?-- the ability to store 8,000 more songs. Really! See? Apple claims its 20 GB iPod will put 5,000 songs in your pocket, while Sony's press release insists that the NW-HD1 will hold "up to 13,000 four-minute songs." No wonder you're feeling tempted.
Well, it's cold shower time, kiddies. First of all, any sort of song capacity comparison is a joke, since a 20 GB hard drive is a 20 GB hard drive. Sony's drives aren't enchanted by a dusting of magical pixie dust before leaving the factory or anything. (At least, if they are, you'd expect Sony to play that up as a differentiating factor.) The difference in numbers here is that Apple bases its song count on 128 Kbps AAC files, while Sony's tally assumes "songs recorded at 48 kilobits per second." Yes, 48 Kbps. Considering how many people whine that even 128 Kbps AAC files don't sound good enough, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that 48 Kbps songs in any format are probably going to sound like a portable handheld AM radio playing from the bottom of a well while a few dozen people pop bubble wrap nearby.
And here's the real deal-breaker: about that format? Turns out that Sony's decided to go with its proprietary ATRAC3 format... and nothing else. While Apple pushes AAC pretty heavily (it's the only thing it sells at the iTunes Music Store), at least the iPod can also play AIFF files, WAVs, the new Apple Lossless format, and probably most importantly of all, good ol' MP3s. If you get an NW-HD1, though, you'll have to transcode your entire music library into ATRAC3 before you can carry it around with you, and believe us when we tell you that you're not going to want to do that.
See, aside from the time you'd have to invest, there's the little matter of the fact that, quality-wise, the ATRAC3 format apparently sucks eggs whole through a Crazy Straw. For evidence, we point you towards the results of Roberto Amorim's latest public listening test, conducted just a couple of months ago. The test had dozens of listeners rate the same pieces of music encoded into several digital music formats at or around 128 kbps, and when the results were tabulated, ATRAC3 at 132 kbps came out dead last, having "surprised by its bad performance." So if listeners judge 132 kbps ATRAC3 (incidentally, the format and bitrate of songs sold by Sony's Connect downloadable music store) to sound so much worse than 128 kbps AAC, what do you suppose 48 kbps ATRAC must sound like? (Three hints: radio; well; bubble wrap.)
So while Sony's new player may indeed be, as MacMinute calls it, "the closest
This wasn't quiet at all. The catcalls, when I watched the video tape [Thanks for making it, Greenpeace!], were designed to incite violence (thanks Real TV!)... Which would violate another few principles, "to raise the level and quality of public debate." and "non-violent conflict".
From reading the article, it seems that they attached a platform to the oil rig and sat there protesting. Seems non-violent enough to me. Where is this video that you speak of?
I hope you're being facetious. People don't DIE when windows crashes, thats why.
Yet... In Bill Gates "dream future" where our smart homes all run Windows, which controls everything from HVAC to your electrical system, a worm very well could cause the death of elderly or disabled people by cranking their heat up to 90, or perhaps shorting out their electrical systems and causing fires to start. Sounds far-fetched now, but believe me, in 10-20 years, these problems will be common unless they vastly revamp the structure of Windows.
So, we need to go with option (A). That is that Greenpeace is no longer what Greenpeace stood for.
AFAIK, Greenpeace has always stood for non-violent protest against people, organizations, and things that harm the environment. From their website:
We use research, lobbying, and quiet diplomacy to pursue our goals, as well as high-profile, non-violent conflict to raise the level and quality of public debate.
If you can point me to an instance in time when this has not been true, please do so, and back up your arguments with facts.
I doubt Enron has been profiteering in Iraq.
....blah....blah...blah and it will gain momentum but Iraqis have noticed that the CPA has been spending their oil revenue unfettered by these problem.
I didn't mean to suggest this. I was talking more about the Energy Task Force (you know, those secret meetings that Cheney still won't even release the attendance list for). You have Halliburton, Bechtel, and KBR in Iraq. Then you have Enron and others like them with the failed Energy Bill, and also the pharmaceutical lobby with the recently passed Medicare revisions. Those are just the most egregious examples of big government propping up big corporations through taxpayer subsidies.
As far as Iraq's reconstruction it appears the U.S. has instead been spending or locking in Iraq's current and future oil revenue. Before the U.S. transfered power they'd spent or locked in $19 billion out of $20 billion dollars in Iraq's oil fund.
The CPA argues that they are just slow to spend the U.S. tax dollars, ramp up time, security problems
I imagine American's take this news with mixed emotions. On the plus side I imagine most American's would rather Iraq rebuild itself using its oil wealth instead of American tax dollars.
Then again the Bush administration has had big rhetoric about its commitment to rebuilding Iraq and in critical areas like electricity, security, sanitation and health care its proving to be somewhat empty rhetoric. Lengthy blackouts are still routine more than a year after the invasion. The rhetoric was similar in Afghanistan and was largely not matched by actual money or rebuilding.
Assuming Iraq's oil revenue is largely going in to the pockets of American contractors like Halliburton this suggests, though I'm not saying proves, that the U.S. did in fact steal Iraq's oil revenues which is also something Bush adminstration rhetoric said it would not do.
I agree with you 100%. When I first saw this news on CNN yesterday, they presented it like it was a good thing: "See, our government is being frugal in Iraq." I saw it as just the opposite. Iraqis have been complaining about how the electrical grid and plumbing systems have been deteriorating, not improving, since we took occupation. This just confirms that the US government is doing nothing to repair infrastructure they damaged during all of the bombing. How can you win hearts and minds when you don't even rebuild their country?
Also, the profiteering has gotten way out of hand. No wonder they are kidnapping contractors and beheading them. I don't think murder is justified, but if I was an unemployed Iraqi, and I saw this redneck KBR contractor walking around with loads of cash making six figures just to drive a truck, something an Iraqi would do for about $100 a month, flashing his money around and spouting all of this rhetoric about how the US is #1 that he learned from watching Fox news all day, I'd probably want to kick his ass.
You're talking as if Bush and Cheney sat around with boxes of software on their desks, reading-glasses perched on their noses, passing said boxen backwards and forwards, discussing their pros and cons.
No, I don't think they do that at all. Much more likely is that they hire staffers with like-minded political philosphies, who, when given the choice between Hosting Company A, who uses entirely commercial software written by "Upstanding American Companies(TM), like MS", and Hosting Company B, who uses entirely open source software, written by "Hippie, Commie Bastards(TM), some of them from foreign countries", they choose Hosting Company A. It's a basic political philosophy. You either spend big bucks propping up American companies, even if they produce shoddy products, or you use the best tool for the job, and try to save the taxpayer money.
Me, I would rather elect the candidate that will use the best tool for the job and try to save the taxpayer money. You might argue that basic economics says that money sent to US companies will end up in the hands of US workers, which is true, however, I don't want my government giving any more money to Bill Gates bank account. He doesn't need it, and we have a huge national debt to worry about, so let's be a little more frugal, OK?
From the article you linked to:
He was reportedly ousted from Greenpeace in the late 1970s for violating the organization's principle of "non-violent" action.
Clearly, you can't condemn an organization for the radical actions of one of it's members, who was kicked out of the organization because of those actions. If that was the case the NRA would have been called a terrorist organization decades ago. How many wackos and gun-nuts that went on killing sprees have been members of the NRA? Should we start calling the NRA a terrorist organization now?
Your logic is flawed. QED
this has to be the single most unimportant issue in world politics today. I really struggle to believe that anyone would read anything into, or make any kind of an issue over what webserver hosts a politician's website.
I disagree. The fact that the Republican party would choose to use an inferior commercial software package (IIS) when a superior free version of the same software is available (Apache) goes a long way towards showing what type of party they are. As much as they say they want "small government", when it comes down to it, they want "big government" propping up "big companies" with taxpayer subsidies. Plain and simple. This also shows why as soon as they are in power, they invent a war in order to provide more government money to their big contractor buddies (Halliburton, KBR, Enron, etc.). Sure, the webserver expenditures are only a small part of it, but it shows how completely the GOP has been bought and paid for by large corporations.
I'm not saying the Dems are completely innocent as well, but let's face it, they're much less in the pocket of large defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, and yes, software monopolies.
The principal consideration, Mr. Ellis said, was computer security and protecting the privacy of personal data on the Web site. The programming tools, procedures and the larger pool of workers skilled in using Microsoft software, he said, prompted the Republicans to opt for Microsoft's Web server, called Internet Information Services, running on the Windows 2000 operating system.
This guy obviously has his head so far up Microsoft's ass that hey's bought everything they've said about secure computing. Let's see, there's currently a worm that's infected thousands of IIS servers across the internet (who knows, it could have even infected the GOP's), and it's spreading via Javascript to millions of IE users, for which Microsoft has issued no patch, and yet this is somehow the most secure solution? The mind boggles. Even joe sixpack by now knows that MS is not secure after his Windows box sends him popups when there is no browser loaded and he has to reformat it and start over every three months after being infected with the worm du jour.
I personally find it interesting that the vast majority of the people I talk to consider this to be a "normal" computing experience. When my landlord told me the other day that they'd been infected by Bugbear and had spent a difficult few days trying to clean it off, I said "Well, that's one of the reasons I switched to Mac... No worms or viruses (yet)." He said "Oh, really? You don't have to run Norton's?"
I find it amazing that the majority of computer users out there think that spending $30 a year on subscriptions to AV software and firewalls is a normal expense that you just have to pay for, like the electric utility or water bill, if you want to use a computer. They have no clue that this software is only necessary to make up for a lack of security in the OS to begin with.
The only analogy I would compare it with is if Ford, rather than recalling all of the Explorers that rolled over, simply said, well, you'll have to buy a subscription to our special "tire tread enhancer service", and bring in your car every week to have the treads updated to the latest and greatest treads that won't separate. That way you won't roll over in a crash and explode in a ball of fire. Can you imagine the outcry if that happened? Why isn't MS held to the same standards?
If you have a problem with Internet users from some country, why not help the country fight them?
Easier said than done. Most of these countries have no extradition laws whatsoever, and the police are pretty much worthless/corrupt or are too busy fighting crimes like murder, rape, and armed robbery to even deal with something as petty as fraud.
But on the whole I agree that the blacklists are a bad thing. Fraudsters have no problem finding anonymous proxies in other countries. A far better solution is for the retailer to just simply refuse to ship anything to that country unless the payer sends certified funds like a wire transfer or bank check. It seems like the retailers are just taking an easy out rather than beefing up their own internal fraud prevention teams.
sync ; sync
reboot -f
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you haven't needed to sync before reboot for years now on any modern *nix kernel. But it's kind of cool; I can always tell the experienced sysadmins out there that have been using Unix before Linux came along because they do this... I guess old habits really do die hard.
Why? I work for a company that manufacturers portable medical diagnostic equipment.
Pretty much every company in this field offers a mail-in rebate (often times as much as the original purchase price) for our devices if you send in any competitors device.
We regularly box up the devices that are sent to us and ship them back to their original manufacturer so that they know to take those devices out of their support database and to kind of "rub it in their faces" that we've had X number of their customers switch to our product (they do the same to us).
I can say for a fact that this does not happen in the computer industry. Companies like IBM, HP, and Sun realize that if they leave trade-in equipment in circulation, it will just end up on eBay somewhere, where it will be competing against their own salespeople for new revenue. For this reason, any competitive trade ins are always destroyed. There's no point in sending it back to the original manufacturer who will only remanufacture it and resell it. Why would we give money to our competitors.
I suggest your company should strongly consider doing the same. Don't you know that your competitors probably have the ability to refurbish or remanufacture their own equipment and sell it to people again?
In otherwords, sliding windows across the screen, animating some huge mouse cursor (larger than HW mouse accel would allow, for some strange and uncouth reason), or otherwise putting stuff up in front of windows would not cause them to redraw because their pixels would not be damaged by the operation.
For a good example of this effect in action, grab any sufficiently large browser window while running Windows XP, and drag it around on the screen very quickly in a circular motion. You need to have the "show windows contents while dragging" option turned on. Now, notice the windows behind it are constantly being redrawn, a lot slower than you can drag the window around. Also, your CPU usage will spike to pretty much 100%. Now, try this same thing on a Mac that is running OS X with Quartz Extreme enabled... No redrawing. Occlusion is all heandled by the GPU. That's the benefit of pixmaps.
Your mileage may vary.
I own a 2001 Acura CL type S, and even though it's got 260 hp and weighs almost 4000 pounds, I'm fairly impressed with the gas mileage. It is EPA rated at 19/29, and I get pretty much exactly that. On long trips with the cruise control set at 70 mph I consistently get about 29.5 mpg. Of course, city driving drops it down pretty significantly, and if you have a lead foot you're going to get much less than 19.
Honda has done a great thing with VTEC. Basically, you've got 4 valves per cylinder, 2 for intake of gas and 2 for exhaust. When the engine is below 4500 rpm, only 2 of those 4 valves are active, giving you great gas mileage. When you need a lot of power for passing or quick acceleration (or just blowing the doors off of the riced out Civic type "R" next to you at a stop light), rev it up higher than 4500 rpms and the second set of valves will open, giving you the quick "burst" power that you need.
It's not that I really need that much power, but it's nice to set the cruise control at 70 mph on long drives and be able to climb steep hills without the car slowing down on you. It's also nice to have the extra power when you need to accelerate really quickly to merge into freeway traffic.
Despite the 260 hp, my car actually qualifies as a LEV (low emissions vehicle), which is quite a feat and demonstrates that Honda engineers really know how to design an efficient engine.
The new Acura TL has 270 hp, a lot more room inside (to me it looks like a boat), and actually qualifies as an ULEV (ultra low emissions vehicle). I don't know how they do it, but those japanese engine designers must really know their stuff.
However, it sounds like the apple thing is doing dual-channel.
Bzzt. Try again. I watched WWDC and actually, they are using two DVI-D (DVI-Dual) connections on the card. The reason: Dual display capability. One DVI-D connection per monitor. There should be no tearing at all because each monitor gets it's own DVI-D connection.
For those of you that are curious about DVI standards: DVI-D and DVI-S look the same, but the DVI-D cables carry more of the pins through to each connection. In short, if you have a display greater than 165 megapixels a second, you need both DVI-D support on your graphics card, and a DVI-D cable or you'll get gobbledygook.
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
Woohoo! At least CoreVideo will be supported in my 1.25 AlBook I purchased 8 months ago.
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
It will also be supported in anything as lightly powered as a 12" PowerBook rev. B or an iMac 17" or 20". Come on folks, look at the Longhorn requirements and tell me Apple isn't being generous about supporting their old hardware. Tiger won't even be released for another year or so, and for a company to support real-time video processing on two year old hardware is much better than Microsoft is doing. The graphics cards that support Longhorn haven't even been invented yet!
I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.
The whole point of looking glass is that the 3d environment rendering is offloaded onto the GPU, leaving your CPU to handle tasks that it was originally designed for, rather than drawing all the windows and other stuff it was not designed for.
Ok, it might be flamebait. But the quotes are straight from on camera comments by both. I feel the Bush supporters out en force to try to mod down comments like this.
No shit. There are going to be a lot of people RTBLd from moderating after the meta-moderators get through with this thread. Seems a lot of neo-cons got mod points today. Hell, I'll probably be modded off-topic and troll on this post right now, but who really cares... Burn, karma, burn...
My only question is? What happens when neo-cons meta-moderate the bad moderations as fair? Who moderates the meta-moderators?
Your reading of the title was quite a stretch. Did you read the book?
No, I did not read the book, but read another comment in this thread regarding her suggestions that liberals should be killed.
Michael Moore as quoted on his personal web site in the days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"
And your point is?
I'm not much at home at US politics, but I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans.
I wouldn't go that far. Ann Coulter is basically the equivelant of Howard Stern, but for neo-conservatives rather than frat guys. She tells blatant lies and basically says whatever she can say to get people riled up the most. I mean, she actually named her book "Treason", implying that anyone not supporting the Bush administration or any one of the wars our president starts is a traitor and should be killed. This is way over the top. Michael Moore, on the other hand, while he might have what some consider left-wing views, does not advocate stringing up Republicans and killing them for their viewpoints.
This Macrovision technology does NOT install spyware or vaporware of any kind on a users PC.
Damn! I was kind of hoping it would install Duke Nukem Forever when I stuck it in my drive...
A name is a name (Jack Brown), and gives the officer something to call you besides "Hey You", but as long as we're not required to produce some sort of definitive, unique-identity-signifying number of the beast, I'm not too worried.
Are you aware that giving false information to a police officer is a criminal offense in most states?
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
This is true. But, what probably triggered it was this: A few users received Gmail invites and either didn't know what it was, or didn't recognize the person they received it from, saw it was offering another email service, then clicked the button that says "This is Spam". When Hotmail gets a few reports like that the message text gets added to their filters and everyone else's invites start going to the Spam folder.
That's just standard operating procedure. If they didn't have that procedure in place we'd receive 50-100 spams a day in our Hotmail box.
Of course, none of this would have been a problem if Hotmail hadn't sold all of their account lists to bulk emailers years ago. Hotmail is the only service that when I first created an account, instantly started sending me spam before I had even given my address out to anyone. The only way they could have gotten my address is if Hotmail sold it to bulk senders.
If you put logical chains like that into bash or Perl, using those short-circuit operators, the final term would never even get evaluated.
I'll admit that I didn't read that properly, but there are so many pieces of malware, and even non-malware that installs without your permission that makes this law especially overbroad.
Did you know that Windows Update automatically installs newer versions of itself just by going to the Windows Update site? Well, if you read the law with that loose interpretation, Microsoft would potentially be liable.
IANAL, but IMHO I think you would have to have intent to injure and defraud before a judge would rule against them.