Say what you want to about the i7 being "too expensive"... I have a quad-core i7 laptop with 8 GB of RAM, and it's WONDERFUL.
Running Fedora Core 13 Linux as the host, I'm able to run 3 separate VMPlayer instances each with its own copy of Windows CONCURRENTLY on two screens with minimal fuss and a snappy feel, while running Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, VNC, Flash, Acrobat, LogMeIn, a few KDE applets, and GIMP, etc concurrently in all the VMs all at once. And it's smooth!
I know that having gobs of RAM is key to making VMWare play, but even so, this is quite remarkable! But what's even more interesting to me is that this laptop was nearly $1000 cheaper than my previous one - even at the high end, there's been a pronounced drop in price over the past couple years.
If you think that the relatively weak obfuscating technique of reloading an O/S is somehow mitigating the extremely strong obfuscation provided by encryption, then you are really missing the point of encryption.
And if you think that whole-drive encryption is much different than a couple of holes for 'looking like you are hiding something' well, you missed that one too. BOTH make it clear you want to keep your stuff private. However holes do prove lots, since the data on the rest of the drive is quite recoverable.
You might do better with an angle grinder, some glue, and an "art project".
OMG Android is making a play that's designed to let lower cost, highly capable devices subsist in the marketplace? How horrible is that?
I switched from Evil Major Network (TM) to Metro PCS a little over a year ago, and haven't regretted it for a SECOND. It is so nice, getting what you paid for, rather than wondering how much you'll be overcharged for what you aren't even sure you got... it's the ONLY way to survive teen children!
And even Metro PCS, the low price leader, offers a couple of Android phones that are highly capable and useful. For less than $300 I was able to upgrade my wife's shatty phone with a nice, capable Android phone with GPS, navigation, browser, email, games, full-screen youtube, Facebook, Marketplace et al (AKA "the works") and a good, full day of battery life. She LOVES the phone! In case you are wondering, it was the Samsung LG Optimus. And the network cost went from $40/month to (gasp!) $50...
Talk about having your cake and eating it too?
Say what you want, Android's strategy is working, as demonstrated by its continuing skyrocketing market share.
If there's one thing I don't do, it's buy software that isn't written yet.
I've spent the last few weeks enjoying this "not yet written" software with my son. For a combined price of $25, we've enjoyed countless hours together playing this game and comparing notes... it would be worth the $12 or so it cost me without any updates at all!
When CS tells that player "Sorry, the login where the items were sold/transferred came from one of the IP addresses you normally log in from, the problem's on your end." and the player learns that that's because his ISP is NATing their entire network, he's not going to be happy.
Further missing the point: the NAT referenced here isn't the kind of NAT that you are thinking, between an IPV4 public address (EG: 208.39.22.13) and a non-routable IPV4 address. (EG: 192.168.1.19)
The NAT being referenced here is between IPV4 (which doesn't understand IPV6 address space) and IPV6. All connections coming from an IPV4 address to an IPV6 address will have to involve NAT, where the ISP has a NAT gateway so that internally hosted IPV6 addresses initiate connections through NAT to the IPV4 network, and vice-versa. In this scenario, WoW can fix the problem simply by providing an IPV6 host, bypassing the need for the NAT gateway.
It's hard to see anything MS does without some cautious skepticism that they may hold ulterior motives. I personally see two possibilities here:
You're kidding, right?
It's not an "ulterior" motive because an ulterior motive is hidden and/or undisclosed. Their motives here are blindingly clear: to service their customers so that they make money. If you think it's anything else, it's not that they have "ulterior" motives, it's that you have a naive point of view.
And, for what it's worth, it's pretty much OK! Every company has the motivation service their customers so that they make money! And guess what? Mac users are not Microsoft's customer! Neither are PS3 users, Android users, Linux users, or iPhone users!
Microsoft (the company) doesn't do anything at all for altruistic reasons. And for the most part, neither does any other company. Google only seems to because their business model benefits by keeping the web open. (for them to index and serve ads on top of) Even their open-source Android platform serves ads via Google!
Except, of course, for the lack of network congestion when 6000 people are either transfering 2.5MB/s total to watch an episode of Star Trek or 15,000 MB/S to watch one episode of Star Trek, all at the exact same moment.
You are making an assumption that means you really, really don't get it, yet. It lies in the very end of your statement: exact same moment.
Internet TV is *never* done at the "exact same moment". I watch Burn Notice sometime over the weekend. It's campy enough to not take itself seriously, and that makes it fun. It airs on Thursdays-ish, I think. And I don't really care. I watch it when I want. And yes, there will be spikes, such as mid-eve. Right now, I'm watching the Daily Show in the background whilst I type this, and it aired last night.
Point is, it's asynchronous, meaning that spikes are flattened out over time, particularly when people realize that they can log in at any time to see the event - they aren't missing anything by not running straight off to the telly!
If raw bandwidth was an issue, it could be mitigated by running distributed caching similar to what NNTP used, back in the day. This would or could allow shows to be cached locally within an ISP's network, preventing the un-necessary transfer of files repeatedly over the upstream pipe. Strangely, this isn't being done! And it would be so easy to do, too!
1) Netflix could offer caching servers at just over cost to ISPs who wished to reduce their bandwidth bills. It could be a simple Squid proxy cache with some BIG hard drives. (maybe, 20 TB or so?)
2) ISPs are instructed to configure their DNS servers with a pointer to this DNS server.
3) The Netflix software could look for this DNS record and preferentially connect through the proxies. ISPs that didn't use the proxies wouldn't have the DNS record set up, and so would be 100% backwards compatible.
Seriously, a programmer could probably implement this in a few hours. Why aren't they doing this? Considering that Netflix accounts for 20% of Internet traffic (!), this is something that both ISPs AND Netflix should appreciate! ISP reduces as much as 20% of their bandwidth bill, Netflix clients' shows load faster, making both the Internet provider and Netflix look better.
Who loses? Why isn't this already done? Squid's READY MADE for this type of thing!
Yes, the root problem is autoimmune, but we already have a way to correct this, google "Edmunton Protocol" - the participants were effectively cured. The problem was a lack of islet cells (insulin producing cells) to do much good - it takes like 5 donor cadavers to cure 1 diabetic, so there's insufficient supply to handle even 1/100 of the diabetic patients.
But something like this just might provide cures for millions of sufferers, without fear of tissue rejection! As father of a type 1 diabetic son, this is a big, big, BIG deal!
I find the "nature vs nurture" debate annoying. If genetics wasn't a basic part of our behavior, then lizards could be taught to be Islamic.
Ever see an Islamic lizard? No?
Oh, wait! They don't have the genetic predisposition that enables the type of intelligence necessary for belief in Islam! Obviously, there's a genetic component to behavior....
My small company develops document management systems for education. PDF is the standard of choice because it's open and cross platform. The problem is that Adobe sucks so horribly bad that we've actually taken to recommending Foxit as a "better than" solution, even though it has its own set of warts. Sure, Adobe makes its money on Acrobat, and the Adobe reader is a gimme, but why couldn't they make the gimme actually work?!?!?
Rendering a PDF inline works less than 30% of the time among installed base users who have Adobe Reader installed by our own internal survey. Thus, for our needs, Adobe gets this wrong at lesat 70% of the time!
We've actually found it much more useful to render "inline" PDFs as a PNG rendered via ImageMagick (even though it's blurry and adds.2 seconds of rendering time because it actually WORKS in most end user browsers) than to show it as a rendered inline PDF using Adobe among customers with Adobe Reader already installed!
How a multi-billion dollar company can get something so basic (show a vector format as a plugin) so horribly wrong is beyond me, but when they get their asses handed back to them, they will have earned it.
Adobe? Are you listening?!?!? Because I'm telling you: it's easier to find a very second-rate way to display a PDF than it is to use your product because it sucks so badly!
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Pretty simple, really. When you go faster, you dramatically reduce tolerances for routing mechanisms. Also, many items don't travel well doing a 90 degree turn in 10 feet at 600 MPH, but might do just fine at lower speeds. Lastly, it's a relatively short-range system so the benefit from the extra speed is minimal: do you really notice it taking 1 minute instead of 10 to get a package across town?
It's simply amazing how much stupid there is that's been moderated up!
GM isn't a government agency. In case you weren't paying attention, it's being restructured in what really amounts to a form of bankruptcy. It's close to paying back every dime it borrowed, and it's now almost certain that the taxpayers will ultimately pay very little for saving GM. So much for your implied "gubbmint sucks", huh?
Further, not only is GM losing a bit of money on each one sold, this is a good thing! GM is behaving EXACTLY like a start up, delivering an innovative product at a time when it's potentially very useful, and worrying about profits after marketshare and supply channels get streamlined. This is how Amazon became Amazon, how Tesla became Tesla, how Google became Google, how EBay became... you getting the idea yet?
For any virtually ANY truly innovative product, there is always an income gap between initial development and profitability that's usually measured in at least months, and often years. This isn't surprising, it's pretty much a requirement, and if it's not the case, then there's a strong implication that the thing being produced isn't innovative at all!
With the Volt, GM is staking its future on the clean, energy efficient, non-polluting car of the future. Go GM!
It was possible, via myriad methods, to release the same information in a widely distributed, completely anonymous manner, and the world would have received the information but never heard the name "Julian Assange" or ever heard of anything called "Wikileaks".
Information that is truly anonymous is also untrustworthy. Had this information been leaked in a truly anonymous fashion, it would likely have had little impact.
What's notable about this situation isn't that wikileaks leaked a bunch of classified documents. What's notable here is that nobody has questioned the validity of any of the documents. Everybody's talking about the mysterious Julian Assange, and whether or not he's a hero in tights or a traitor in a black hat, but the truth and sanctity of the documents has never, ever been questioned by anybody. We all know the documents are there, and that they are for real.
And that's because wikileaks has never bothered to release documents that weren't carefully reviewed for accuracy, and vetted to ensure that people don't (generally) get killed or maimed, etc. For example, a few posts up there's somebody claiming that people have died in Afghanistan because of Wikileaks documents. If he would have bothered to research even just a little bit, he'd know that this was just a bald-faced lie.
In short, it's the fact that the leaked documents are being backed by a proven, trustworthy source that makes the leak notable, and that's largely due to the leadership of Julian Assange. This is something that the media used to do, and while their recent failures are timed with the rise of the Internet, it's only because they've lost relevance by no longer drilling hard on governments and companies for truth, but rather becoming talking pieces for the PR arms of both.
Strangely, I have a Verizon Droid2 phone with an unlimited data plan costing me $30/month!
1) I bought a WinMo phone a few years back. (It was WinMo 6.1 - don't ask) When I got it, I bought the unlimited "personal data plan" for $30/month. 2) I recently bought a Droid2. When they asked me about my plan, I just said "same as what I already have, mmkay?" and they didn't skip a beat.
I don't know how long lived my reasonably-priced data plan is, but so far, it's working like a dream.
Thing is, that's only when you have control over the NAT device. If ISPs move to multiple levels of NAT, as some people suggest, then you no longer have access to a thing on which you can forward ports. You're stuck being a content consumer.
But, that's not true at all. I've been piercing NAT for years using tools like OpenVPN, and it's not at all difficult to picture a schema similar to DynDNS wherein a standard value can be passed for inbound access to services by proxy.
How I'd see this working:
1) An ISP or network provider would have a "Port Host" server. It would have access to many public IP addresses. They would be available upon demand.
2) The ISP customer's DHCP record would contain, along with DNS servers, a record referencing this Port Host.
3) An ISP customer would, by default, get a NAT address when they log in.
4) If a program running on ISP customer's computer needed a specific inbound port, the application needing it would know to register the need for that via the Port Host, which would request a port number. The Port Host would respond with the logged external IP/port as well as the internal (NAT) ip/port to connect to to listen to this public port number and IP address.
5) The ISP customer's program would then announce the public IP address so that the public connection can begin by whatever means is appropriate.
6) Port hosts only need to keep a unique IP/port combination. A single IP can be used for up to 65,535 inbound ports, so as long as the publicly needed ports are diverse, a relatively small number of IP addresses could server a rather large number of people. And there could be more than one Port Host, ordered by their network proximity to the ISP customer, so that failure conditions could be gracefully handled.
A model like this not only would work for most people, and use a vastly smaller number of IPv4 addresses, but would also allow customers to use whatever Port Host server they wanted if they didn't want to use the ISPs Port Host, much like they can now use whatever DNS servers they wish.
Sadly, the window for IPV6 is pretty much closed. We are not ever going to switch to it. The architects of the IETF had their chance, and they blew it. IPV6 is a wonderful invention, but it failed to take into account the cost of transition, which is now so high that making the existing IPv4 infrastructure continue to work with stupid hacks like I mentioned above is significantly cheaper than switching to IPV6.
How long before "Port Host" (or some similar name) becomes as commonly used as "DNS server" is today?
As a GTK developer, I have to say I don't get your lack of love for it! I've found GTK to be a useful, powerful, cross-platform toolkit with excellent image manipulation capabilities. (And it should, it's what GIMP was written with!)
Other than your silly Yoda reference, you give no reason: why the hate?
I might agree that for many projects, QT would be better, but even it has well-known bugs and documentation limitations on various platforms! The truth is that Win/Mac/Lin are all separate platforms with different primitives, strengths and weaknesses. QT tries to shove all that under the rug and pretend they are all the same and hide all that from the programmer by gluing events to O/S specific primitives, making it easy to get things going but making it harder to get things to work consistently across platforms. GTK, on the other hand, ignores the differences between platforms and implements its own primitives, so it looks "a bit wrong" on every platform except Linux. (where, it could be said, everything looks "a bit wrong")
Personally, I prefer the "it looks the same on all platforms" approach where, although my Macintosh version doesn't look like other Macintosh programs, it does look like the screenshots in our training manual, which were taken on Windows.
Watch that 5 HTP stuff! A little goes a long way, but a little more can kill you. Seriously! Read up on it - if you take even just a little too much, it can quickly turn toxic and you suddenly die.
So please, for the love of God, read up on it, and be careful to never, ever take too much!
And I say this because my wife is blessed with a tendency for anxiety attacks and 5 HTP works wonders for her. Just read the label, OK?
Much as all the discussion is about making nuclear explosions unpossible, I'm reminded of an innovatively simple design for a damned-near foolproof nuclear reactor.
There was a "container" sized power plant that could power a small city. It was pretty straightforward: A rod of nuclear material, and a tube of same nuclear material, attached to gears driven by an electric motor, which slowly turned the gears and pushed the rod into the tube. As the nuclear material slowly made proximity, it heated up (as nuclear materials do) and that heat was used to turn distilled water to steam which was used for production.
The electric motor that turned the gears simply couldn't turn any faster than would be possible to approach critical mass. Monitoring needs are/were minimal. The driving electric motor had a variable range of speeds that determine output with less than 15 minute delay. The nuclear power plant (small enough to fit on the back of a standard diesel truck) could be buried 100 feet down in the ground to foil attempts to disrupt the plant, and it would operate for some 10 years before needing to be unplugged and left, in place.
It seems to me that a design like this might be ideal for a steam ship, as it would be small, light, highly resistant to tampering, requires minimal oversight, uses resources that are widely available (generating distilled water is quite easy when you have lots of both water and power available) and when the power plant is exhausted, it could simply be lifted out and another put in place, perhaps in a single afternoon.
I agree, the time has come. We should be looking into alternatives such as this one!
Old thread is old. But I have some advice for you:
It is far preferable to stay silent and have people wonder about your intelligence than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
It's sad that you'd rather object to my post for pointing out the idiocy than object to the idiot for wasting your time. A classic case of shooting the messenger rather than listening to the message, this is a policy sure to preserve lots of idiocy that you'll get to live with!
I'm probably going to get modded into oblivion for this, because it sounds "right wing" and that's not a popular opinion. (I'm very much a moderate)
The problem is that we're looking at airline security in much the same way that Windows users look at computer security - rather than make the system robust and able to handle the threats (EG: strongly enforced permissions model), we try to eliminate the threats (EG: antivirus). This results in a system that's fragile, and the harder we try to "secure" it, the more fragile it becomes!
That's just dumb.
Rather than try to eliminate all threats, we should be encouraging people who fly to take measures to defend themselves! Rather than disarm everybody (the overwhelming majority of whom are decent, law-abiding citizens with no desire to hurt anybody) we should be encouraging people to carry small arms! I'd be ok with a few restrictions, such as passing a periodic background check and a firearms safety course - this is, in effect, hardening the system so that in the occasion of a filthy hijacker trying to take over the flight, he/she would be facing a fearful, determined audience of ARMED CITIZENS who wouldn't hesitate to take action to preserve their life and liberty.
No amount of government intrusion can eliminate all threats, but by giving everybody the ability to address problems when they occur, they'll find that the overwhelming majority of decent people will quickly subdue the insane minority!
Strangely, this opinion is often very unpopular, even amongst those who are the harshest critics of the TSA. Yet nobody has offered any idea as to why this wouldn't work - this just gets downmodded without comment. As a matter of fact, there are many examples of countries and societies who find that civilization and an armed population in accordance with the rule of law go hand-in-hand.
Apple trades at around 20 times its earnings, similar to Google and Oracle which are both market leaders as well.
Which also makes no sense, and violates the basic idea and utility of stocks!
I own part of a company. The reason that I own this is for the profits - I get a portion of the profits commensurate with my share of the ownership of the company. Originally, that was how stocks worked as well, and technically, that's how it still works. The point of owning stocks was originally about the dividends.
But now, people don't buy stocks based on their real expectations of dividends - they buy in expectation of stock price volatility! It's a giant gambling racket, where the actual economic return of the system (dividends) is dwarfed by the economic costs/losses of the overvalued stock. It's become a giant WTF, and something that's promoting unethical behavior on the part of the companies: The stock holders don't care about the operation and profitability of the company as much as they care about the stock price, so there's reduced incentive for the corporate officers to be ethical.
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Say what you want to about the i7 being "too expensive"... I have a quad-core i7 laptop with 8 GB of RAM, and it's WONDERFUL.
Running Fedora Core 13 Linux as the host, I'm able to run 3 separate VMPlayer instances each with its own copy of Windows CONCURRENTLY on two screens with minimal fuss and a snappy feel, while running Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, VNC, Flash, Acrobat, LogMeIn, a few KDE applets, and GIMP, etc concurrently in all the VMs all at once. And it's smooth!
I know that having gobs of RAM is key to making VMWare play, but even so, this is quite remarkable! But what's even more interesting to me is that this laptop was nearly $1000 cheaper than my previous one - even at the high end, there's been a pronounced drop in price over the past couple years.
If you think that the relatively weak obfuscating technique of reloading an O/S is somehow mitigating the extremely strong obfuscation provided by encryption, then you are really missing the point of encryption.
And if you think that whole-drive encryption is much different than a couple of holes for 'looking like you are hiding something' well, you missed that one too. BOTH make it clear you want to keep your stuff private. However holes do prove lots, since the data on the rest of the drive is quite recoverable.
You might do better with an angle grinder, some glue, and an "art project".
OMG Android is making a play that's designed to let lower cost, highly capable devices subsist in the marketplace? How horrible is that?
I switched from Evil Major Network (TM) to Metro PCS a little over a year ago, and haven't regretted it for a SECOND. It is so nice, getting what you paid for, rather than wondering how much you'll be overcharged for what you aren't even sure you got... it's the ONLY way to survive teen children!
And even Metro PCS, the low price leader, offers a couple of Android phones that are highly capable and useful. For less than $300 I was able to upgrade my wife's shatty phone with a nice, capable Android phone with GPS, navigation, browser, email, games, full-screen youtube, Facebook, Marketplace et al (AKA "the works") and a good, full day of battery life. She LOVES the phone! In case you are wondering, it was the Samsung LG Optimus. And the network cost went from $40/month to (gasp!) $50...
Talk about having your cake and eating it too?
Say what you want, Android's strategy is working, as demonstrated by its continuing skyrocketing market share.
If there's one thing I don't do, it's buy software that isn't written yet.
I've spent the last few weeks enjoying this "not yet written" software with my son. For a combined price of $25, we've enjoyed countless hours together playing this game and comparing notes... it would be worth the $12 or so it cost me without any updates at all!
When CS tells that player "Sorry, the login where the items were sold/transferred came from one of the IP addresses you normally log in from, the problem's on your end." and the player learns that that's because his ISP is NATing their entire network, he's not going to be happy.
Further missing the point: the NAT referenced here isn't the kind of NAT that you are thinking, between an IPV4 public address (EG: 208.39.22.13) and a non-routable IPV4 address. (EG: 192.168.1.19)
The NAT being referenced here is between IPV4 (which doesn't understand IPV6 address space) and IPV6. All connections coming from an IPV4 address to an IPV6 address will have to involve NAT, where the ISP has a NAT gateway so that internally hosted IPV6 addresses initiate connections through NAT to the IPV4 network, and vice-versa. In this scenario, WoW can fix the problem simply by providing an IPV6 host, bypassing the need for the NAT gateway.
It's hard to see anything MS does without some cautious skepticism that they may hold ulterior motives. I personally see two possibilities here:
You're kidding, right?
It's not an "ulterior" motive because an ulterior motive is hidden and/or undisclosed. Their motives here are blindingly clear: to service their customers so that they make money. If you think it's anything else, it's not that they have "ulterior" motives, it's that you have a naive point of view.
And, for what it's worth, it's pretty much OK! Every company has the motivation service their customers so that they make money! And guess what? Mac users are not Microsoft's customer! Neither are PS3 users, Android users, Linux users, or iPhone users!
Microsoft (the company) doesn't do anything at all for altruistic reasons. And for the most part, neither does any other company. Google only seems to because their business model benefits by keeping the web open. (for them to index and serve ads on top of) Even their open-source Android platform serves ads via Google!
Except, of course, for the lack of network congestion when 6000 people are either transfering 2.5MB/s total to watch an episode of Star Trek or 15,000 MB/S to watch one episode of Star Trek, all at the exact same moment.
You are making an assumption that means you really, really don't get it, yet. It lies in the very end of your statement: exact same moment.
Internet TV is *never* done at the "exact same moment". I watch Burn Notice sometime over the weekend. It's campy enough to not take itself seriously, and that makes it fun. It airs on Thursdays-ish, I think. And I don't really care. I watch it when I want. And yes, there will be spikes, such as mid-eve. Right now, I'm watching the Daily Show in the background whilst I type this, and it aired last night.
Point is, it's asynchronous, meaning that spikes are flattened out over time, particularly when people realize that they can log in at any time to see the event - they aren't missing anything by not running straight off to the telly!
If raw bandwidth was an issue, it could be mitigated by running distributed caching similar to what NNTP used, back in the day. This would or could allow shows to be cached locally within an ISP's network, preventing the un-necessary transfer of files repeatedly over the upstream pipe. Strangely, this isn't being done! And it would be so easy to do, too!
1) Netflix could offer caching servers at just over cost to ISPs who wished to reduce their bandwidth bills. It could be a simple Squid proxy cache with some BIG hard drives. (maybe, 20 TB or so?)
2) ISPs are instructed to configure their DNS servers with a pointer to this DNS server.
3) The Netflix software could look for this DNS record and preferentially connect through the proxies. ISPs that didn't use the proxies wouldn't have the DNS record set up, and so would be 100% backwards compatible.
Seriously, a programmer could probably implement this in a few hours. Why aren't they doing this? Considering that Netflix accounts for 20% of Internet traffic (!), this is something that both ISPs AND Netflix should appreciate! ISP reduces as much as 20% of their bandwidth bill, Netflix clients' shows load faster, making both the Internet provider and Netflix look better.
Who loses? Why isn't this already done? Squid's READY MADE for this type of thing!
I've used the 'snap the drive in your hand' trick a few times, and add one more - the 'swap the motherboard with a new drive' trick!
1) dead drive not seen by BIOS but spins up.
2) RMA drive with advance shipping option, where they send new drive and u use the box to ship back dead drive. (With cred card)
3) swap HD mainboard with RMA drive, copy data off now-functioning drive.
4) swap mainboards back, ship dead drive to Mfg.
This has worked several times over the years.
Yes, the root problem is autoimmune, but we already have a way to correct this, google "Edmunton Protocol" - the participants were effectively cured. The problem was a lack of islet cells (insulin producing cells) to do much good - it takes like 5 donor cadavers to cure 1 diabetic, so there's insufficient supply to handle even 1/100 of the diabetic patients.
But something like this just might provide cures for millions of sufferers, without fear of tissue rejection! As father of a type 1 diabetic son, this is a big, big, BIG deal!
Hooray!
Wha...?
Postgres is better. End of statement. The only reason you havent switched is because you don't use MySql.
I find the "nature vs nurture" debate annoying. If genetics wasn't a basic part of our behavior, then lizards could be taught to be Islamic.
Ever see an Islamic lizard? No?
Oh, wait! They don't have the genetic predisposition that enables the type of intelligence necessary for belief in Islam! Obviously, there's a genetic component to behavior....
IT'S ABOUT F!~@#NG TIME!!!
My small company develops document management systems for education. PDF is the standard of choice because it's open and cross platform. The problem is that Adobe sucks so horribly bad that we've actually taken to recommending Foxit as a "better than" solution, even though it has its own set of warts. Sure, Adobe makes its money on Acrobat, and the Adobe reader is a gimme, but why couldn't they make the gimme actually work?!?!?
Rendering a PDF inline works less than 30% of the time among installed base users who have Adobe Reader installed by our own internal survey. Thus, for our needs, Adobe gets this wrong at lesat 70% of the time!
We've actually found it much more useful to render "inline" PDFs as a PNG rendered via ImageMagick (even though it's blurry and adds .2 seconds of rendering time because it actually WORKS in most end user browsers) than to show it as a rendered inline PDF using Adobe among customers with Adobe Reader already installed!
How a multi-billion dollar company can get something so basic (show a vector format as a plugin) so horribly wrong is beyond me, but when they get their asses handed back to them, they will have earned it.
Adobe? Are you listening?!?!? Because I'm telling you: it's easier to find a very second-rate way to display a PDF than it is to use your product because it sucks so badly!
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Pretty simple, really. When you go faster, you dramatically reduce tolerances for routing mechanisms. Also, many items don't travel well doing a 90 degree turn in 10 feet at 600 MPH, but might do just fine at lower speeds. Lastly, it's a relatively short-range system so the benefit from the extra speed is minimal: do you really notice it taking 1 minute instead of 10 to get a package across town?
It's simply amazing how much stupid there is that's been moderated up!
GM isn't a government agency. In case you weren't paying attention, it's being restructured in what really amounts to a form of bankruptcy. It's close to paying back every dime it borrowed, and it's now almost certain that the taxpayers will ultimately pay very little for saving GM. So much for your implied "gubbmint sucks", huh?
Further, not only is GM losing a bit of money on each one sold, this is a good thing! GM is behaving EXACTLY like a start up, delivering an innovative product at a time when it's potentially very useful, and worrying about profits after marketshare and supply channels get streamlined. This is how Amazon became Amazon, how Tesla became Tesla, how Google became Google, how EBay became... you getting the idea yet?
For any virtually ANY truly innovative product, there is always an income gap between initial development and profitability that's usually measured in at least months, and often years. This isn't surprising, it's pretty much a requirement, and if it's not the case, then there's a strong implication that the thing being produced isn't innovative at all!
With the Volt, GM is staking its future on the clean, energy efficient, non-polluting car of the future. Go GM!
It was possible, via myriad methods, to release the same information in a widely distributed, completely anonymous manner, and the world would have received the information but never heard the name "Julian Assange" or ever heard of anything called "Wikileaks".
Information that is truly anonymous is also untrustworthy. Had this information been leaked in a truly anonymous fashion, it would likely have had little impact.
What's notable about this situation isn't that wikileaks leaked a bunch of classified documents. What's notable here is that nobody has questioned the validity of any of the documents. Everybody's talking about the mysterious Julian Assange, and whether or not he's a hero in tights or a traitor in a black hat, but the truth and sanctity of the documents has never, ever been questioned by anybody. We all know the documents are there, and that they are for real.
And that's because wikileaks has never bothered to release documents that weren't carefully reviewed for accuracy, and vetted to ensure that people don't (generally) get killed or maimed, etc. For example, a few posts up there's somebody claiming that people have died in Afghanistan because of Wikileaks documents. If he would have bothered to research even just a little bit, he'd know that this was just a bald-faced lie.
In short, it's the fact that the leaked documents are being backed by a proven, trustworthy source that makes the leak notable, and that's largely due to the leadership of Julian Assange. This is something that the media used to do, and while their recent failures are timed with the rise of the Internet, it's only because they've lost relevance by no longer drilling hard on governments and companies for truth, but rather becoming talking pieces for the PR arms of both.
Strangely, I have a Verizon Droid2 phone with an unlimited data plan costing me $30/month!
1) I bought a WinMo phone a few years back. (It was WinMo 6.1 - don't ask) When I got it, I bought the unlimited "personal data plan" for $30/month.
2) I recently bought a Droid2. When they asked me about my plan, I just said "same as what I already have, mmkay?" and they didn't skip a beat.
I don't know how long lived my reasonably-priced data plan is, but so far, it's working like a dream.
Thing is, that's only when you have control over the NAT device. If ISPs move to multiple levels of NAT, as some people suggest, then you no longer have access to a thing on which you can forward ports. You're stuck being a content consumer.
But, that's not true at all. I've been piercing NAT for years using tools like OpenVPN, and it's not at all difficult to picture a schema similar to DynDNS wherein a standard value can be passed for inbound access to services by proxy.
How I'd see this working:
1) An ISP or network provider would have a "Port Host" server. It would have access to many public IP addresses. They would be available upon demand.
2) The ISP customer's DHCP record would contain, along with DNS servers, a record referencing this Port Host.
3) An ISP customer would, by default, get a NAT address when they log in.
4) If a program running on ISP customer's computer needed a specific inbound port, the application needing it would know to register the need for that via the Port Host, which would request a port number. The Port Host would respond with the logged external IP/port as well as the internal (NAT) ip/port to connect to to listen to this public port number and IP address.
5) The ISP customer's program would then announce the public IP address so that the public connection can begin by whatever means is appropriate.
6) Port hosts only need to keep a unique IP/port combination. A single IP can be used for up to 65,535 inbound ports, so as long as the publicly needed ports are diverse, a relatively small number of IP addresses could server a rather large number of people. And there could be more than one Port Host, ordered by their network proximity to the ISP customer, so that failure conditions could be gracefully handled.
A model like this not only would work for most people, and use a vastly smaller number of IPv4 addresses, but would also allow customers to use whatever Port Host server they wanted if they didn't want to use the ISPs Port Host, much like they can now use whatever DNS servers they wish.
Sadly, the window for IPV6 is pretty much closed. We are not ever going to switch to it. The architects of the IETF had their chance, and they blew it. IPV6 is a wonderful invention, but it failed to take into account the cost of transition, which is now so high that making the existing IPv4 infrastructure continue to work with stupid hacks like I mentioned above is significantly cheaper than switching to IPV6.
How long before "Port Host" (or some similar name) becomes as commonly used as "DNS server" is today?
As a GTK developer, I have to say I don't get your lack of love for it! I've found GTK to be a useful, powerful, cross-platform toolkit with excellent image manipulation capabilities. (And it should, it's what GIMP was written with!)
Other than your silly Yoda reference, you give no reason: why the hate?
I might agree that for many projects, QT would be better, but even it has well-known bugs and documentation limitations on various platforms! The truth is that Win/Mac/Lin are all separate platforms with different primitives, strengths and weaknesses. QT tries to shove all that under the rug and pretend they are all the same and hide all that from the programmer by gluing events to O/S specific primitives, making it easy to get things going but making it harder to get things to work consistently across platforms. GTK, on the other hand, ignores the differences between platforms and implements its own primitives, so it looks "a bit wrong" on every platform except Linux. (where, it could be said, everything looks "a bit wrong")
Personally, I prefer the "it looks the same on all platforms" approach where, although my Macintosh version doesn't look like other Macintosh programs, it does look like the screenshots in our training manual, which were taken on Windows.
Watch that 5 HTP stuff! A little goes a long way, but a little more can kill you. Seriously! Read up on it - if you take even just a little too much, it can quickly turn toxic and you suddenly die.
So please, for the love of God, read up on it, and be careful to never, ever take too much!
And I say this because my wife is blessed with a tendency for anxiety attacks and 5 HTP works wonders for her. Just read the label, OK?
Much as all the discussion is about making nuclear explosions unpossible, I'm reminded of an innovatively simple design for a damned-near foolproof nuclear reactor.
There was a "container" sized power plant that could power a small city. It was pretty straightforward: A rod of nuclear material, and a tube of same nuclear material, attached to gears driven by an electric motor, which slowly turned the gears and pushed the rod into the tube. As the nuclear material slowly made proximity, it heated up (as nuclear materials do) and that heat was used to turn distilled water to steam which was used for production.
The electric motor that turned the gears simply couldn't turn any faster than would be possible to approach critical mass. Monitoring needs are/were minimal. The driving electric motor had a variable range of speeds that determine output with less than 15 minute delay. The nuclear power plant (small enough to fit on the back of a standard diesel truck) could be buried 100 feet down in the ground to foil attempts to disrupt the plant, and it would operate for some 10 years before needing to be unplugged and left, in place.
It seems to me that a design like this might be ideal for a steam ship, as it would be small, light, highly resistant to tampering, requires minimal oversight, uses resources that are widely available (generating distilled water is quite easy when you have lots of both water and power available) and when the power plant is exhausted, it could simply be lifted out and another put in place, perhaps in a single afternoon.
I agree, the time has come. We should be looking into alternatives such as this one!
PS: ROT 26 is roughly equivalent to ROT-0, which is no encryption at all, which is what I think you meant. =)
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
It's pretty clear that you missed the joke somewhere along the way. You probably outta change your sigline just so you aren't announcing to the world how badly you aren't a programmer, cryptographer, or technologically savvy. In the meantime, here's a website that you can use to try to understand just what ROT-13 encryption is.
Old thread is old. But I have some advice for you:
It is far preferable to stay silent and have people wonder about your intelligence than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
It's sad that you'd rather object to my post for pointing out the idiocy than object to the idiot for wasting your time. A classic case of shooting the messenger rather than listening to the message, this is a policy sure to preserve lots of idiocy that you'll get to live with!
I hope you enjoy your choice.
I'm probably going to get modded into oblivion for this, because it sounds "right wing" and that's not a popular opinion. (I'm very much a moderate)
The problem is that we're looking at airline security in much the same way that Windows users look at computer security - rather than make the system robust and able to handle the threats (EG: strongly enforced permissions model), we try to eliminate the threats (EG: antivirus). This results in a system that's fragile, and the harder we try to "secure" it, the more fragile it becomes!
That's just dumb.
Rather than try to eliminate all threats, we should be encouraging people who fly to take measures to defend themselves! Rather than disarm everybody (the overwhelming majority of whom are decent, law-abiding citizens with no desire to hurt anybody) we should be encouraging people to carry small arms! I'd be ok with a few restrictions, such as passing a periodic background check and a firearms safety course - this is, in effect, hardening the system so that in the occasion of a filthy hijacker trying to take over the flight, he/she would be facing a fearful, determined audience of ARMED CITIZENS who wouldn't hesitate to take action to preserve their life and liberty.
No amount of government intrusion can eliminate all threats, but by giving everybody the ability to address problems when they occur, they'll find that the overwhelming majority of decent people will quickly subdue the insane minority!
Strangely, this opinion is often very unpopular, even amongst those who are the harshest critics of the TSA. Yet nobody has offered any idea as to why this wouldn't work - this just gets downmodded without comment. As a matter of fact, there are many examples of countries and societies who find that civilization and an armed population in accordance with the rule of law go hand-in-hand.
Apple trades at around 20 times its earnings, similar to Google and Oracle which are both market leaders as well.
Which also makes no sense, and violates the basic idea and utility of stocks!
I own part of a company. The reason that I own this is for the profits - I get a portion of the profits commensurate with my share of the ownership of the company. Originally, that was how stocks worked as well, and technically, that's how it still works. The point of owning stocks was originally about the dividends.
But now, people don't buy stocks based on their real expectations of dividends - they buy in expectation of stock price volatility! It's a giant gambling racket, where the actual economic return of the system (dividends) is dwarfed by the economic costs/losses of the overvalued stock. It's become a giant WTF, and something that's promoting unethical behavior on the part of the companies: The stock holders don't care about the operation and profitability of the company as much as they care about the stock price, so there's reduced incentive for the corporate officers to be ethical.