The rabbits that were introduced in to Australia have been an environmental nightmare.
In certain conditions they populate so quickly you'll end up with a plague. The munch on all available grass and low level plants. Just leaving sand and soil behind. This valuable topsoil then gets blown away by wind or the occasional storm. Their burrows collapse and cause further run off problems after storms. Much of Australia doesn't have huge trees to bind the soil together. That's just one aspect.
It only took a few rabbits too. Released just near Melbourne. Now they're all over the place.
Mice (at times), Cane toads, Crown of Thorns starfish are all big problems. Foxes are a concern, but not on the same scale, or is that Tassie only? Domestic and stray cats are just as bit a problem in outer suburban/semi-rural areas, going after the native birds and small animals.
All systems will find an equilibrium. Trouble is, that (nearly) isolated systems such as Australia don't have the natrual competitors for introduced species. They would form over time, just not in the short term that we live in and see. Foxes were introduced to try and get the rabbits, Cane Toads to get the Prickly Pear. They just caused thier own problems.
Actually you're dead right. It was started under Hawke/Keating Labour, but was bought to a new level by Howard the Coward.
AFAIR, treaties don't even have to be approved by parliament. (Some one correct me if I'm wrong). The enabling legislation is then a shoo-in as the govt. then just points to the treaty.
Free-trade treaty is an oxymoron anyway. How can something that thick make it EASIER to trade? Just makes it easier for the rich to rip us off and makes it harder for us to do anything about it.
The other big firms picked up most of the refugees from AA. They're even MORE profitable now with the extra regulations and auditing required, post Sarbanes-Oxley.
The division I work for, not even in the US, but for a US company, has two internal audits a year, plus a bigger, external audit. The other three divisions based here, now have two external audits a year. Compliance and regulation costs went up 5 to 10 fold (depending upon department) as a direct result of SOX. In this case the major beneficiary is PWC.
Every "special interest" has a shopping list of things that they want. They just need the right opportunity/cash to get them done. The legislation is already written and just waiting for a "sponsor".
A few short examples: Accounting firms want more regulations: The opportunity: Enron/Worldcom. Result: Sarbanes-Oxley act. Security apparatus want more laws: The opportunity: Drugs (originally), now 911: Result: War on drugs, PATRIOT act. Petroluem interests: The opportunity: Iraq (and in the future, Iran): Result: Gulf War 2.
Don't be surprised that it happens, don't be surprised that it's happening this week. Just follow the money trail.
EU reps don't seem any more less likely to accept bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign contributions than thier US counterparts. Perhaps it's that the news is just a touch more investigative than FOX et al. (That's probably paying journalists too many compliments. Most are press release regurgatating hacks).
I have had zero problems with Big Blue's hardware based RAID cards. Both in servers and SAN.
You never need to reboot to put in a disk, nor remove it.
I think most of you are talking about software (Operating System) solutions. What a waste of resources! Let the damn card do the parity for you.
IBM have both SCSI and SATA based hardware raid. Trust it and them. Or trust Dell, or HP, or whoever. 100 plus people? You have the budget and the means to get a decent solution. We even put those cards in servers where there are only four full-time staff members. Cost outweighs the the risk AND downtime.
SCSI v SATA. Well, at least IBM thinks SATA is worth supporting. SCSI is what is recommended though. Wait and see...
I'm thinking this could go the way of the McLibel case in the UK.
If I was on the end, I think I'd drag up all the little secrets that the record companies didn't want aired. Dodgy accounting practices and the like. It works especially well when you have nothing to lose.
(Nothing to lose is, to me, one definition of perfect freedom.)
Gather a little momentum and publicity, the victims will be coming to you to tell thier stories and point fingers.
Drag the crap on as long as possible.
Sure, you'll lose, but the RIAA et al will lose much, much more. I wish I knew how to spell phyrric victory at this point.
Actually, at least in Australia, Truth is an absolute defence, except in New South Wales. Libel being a state based matter.
NSW was THE state for politicians across the land to sue the various media outlets. Plenty of retirements were funded by suing the news for a long time. IIRC, NSW had to be Truth AND in the public interest.
Many moons ago I used to be a student newspaper editor, so at one time, I had a fairly good working knowledge of the matter. Which ran something like, If in the slightest of doubt, have a lawyer read it first.
Perl might be a better choice if you have multiple playforms to manage (Win32, Unix-like, some big iron).
Script a lot and use centralised management tools. You have got a windows domain, and not just a workgroup? With a Windows or Novell domain you get a directory service and either Group Policy or ZEN works to manage your workstations. Forget even going to those workstations every month, reduce that to every quarter.
Remember that 15 workstations might turn in to 20. Then in 50. You don't want to be going around once a fortnight to each workstation to put on new software and check for security updates and patches.
Please consult the SBB web site http://www.rail.ch/ and you can see that it takes more than 4 hours, let alone 45 minutes through Switzerland. Enter Frieburg as the source and Milan as the destination. (most likely big-ish cities). Make sure it's Frieburg-im-Breisgau (germany) not Fribourg (switzerland)
I'm living on the French-German speaking border in Switzerland, a little north of the Alps, and it takes me 4 hours to get to Milan. Via Bern or via Lausanne.
Of course, the Swiss are taking some pretty big steps to reduce the travel times to Italy too.
OK, give me a cure for the common cold. Or for that matter AIDS, influenza, Herpes/Cold Sores, Malaria, Cot death, British and Irish Lions lack of scoring ability, etc. Plenty more been spent on these that 2 Billion.
Sometimes you've gotta have luck. Sometimes it's just not you, not this day, not this life.
If fact isn't it only Smallpox that has (theoretically) been eradicated?
Noted that you asked about physics, and I gave chem/biol scenarios.
Yes, if you have administrative controls on the client machine.
However, we lock down our machines for end users. What screws this up is that the tight-arse, CIO sleeps with the clue-less lead developer at another company. If the damn thing was digitally signed with could publish the Active-X signature in Active Directory and deployment would be no problem.
With some stock-standard HTML we could (1) have a hell of a lot of time saved deploying upgrades and (2) find a use for all the old PC's that should be used by data entry clerks anyway (eg, Firefox and a locked down linux/xBSD distro).
Win 2k was a great upgrade over NT. Still my favourite MS product (best of a bad bunch). For when it was released it was a lot better than anything else around. Drivers, PNP, USB, AD managability, no endless apply and re-apllu service and fixpacks after any configuration change, etc. Remember that there was NO support for USB in NT?
IIRC, RedHat was a version 6 at that time. Things got better for linux and F/OSS projects at around that time, but MS have stagnated in a lot of areas since then. Windows 2003 Server is not so bad, but is in no way the level of improvement over 2K, as the NT -> 2K jump.
Microsoft's real product development (not innovation) lately has only occurred in areas that it has been kicked in.
Lets have a look at what's hot or not at MS: Exchange Server - incremental development only recently. 5.5 was the last "must have" upgrade. Domino was a major workgroup compeditor, it's still there, but not dominant. Plenty of F/OSS secure and configurable email servers about. SQL Server - Really moving. MySQL and Postgres at the low end, DB2 and Oracle at the high end with competing products. Enterprise authentication - Incremental improvents only recently. Active Directory is dominant, NDS in non-Novell shops is unheard of. Other LDAP based products are just getting a toenail hold. Browsers - IE dominant and stagnant. With Firefox and Opera (et al), MS is finally ramping up development of a new version. Office products - Office95/97 was a big improvement, but most users wouldn't use the new features in XP/2003 versions. Various FOSS office products are fast approaching "drop-in" replacements for most uses and users. Don't know where MS can go with this one. IIS - Apache is market leader by most measures, IIS is too tied to the underlying OS. Not much room to improve. File and print services. Still a lot of offices will have this as one of the most important IT function, along with financials. Samba/CUPS is a more than adequate replacement. MS's file sharing security-model hasn't improved much since the introduction of NTFS and share permissions. No notificable improvements in speed between NT4 and Server 2003 on comparable hardware.
Issues like security and patching have improved vastly, but still have a way to go.
Management of servers is still mainly point and click, but with improvements in 'scriptability'. Still waiting for the simplicity of configuration of an "/etc" folder with a series of.conf files for easy parsing/reading and maintenance.
The big worry for MS is that it is and will continue to lose "mind-share". It's not cool to be working with MS products. It's products are only moving forward where a serious compeditor exists.
The only thing propping MS up is an "out of the box", polished UI. However, it soon pisses off power users and is also too closely tied to the OS. Works fine for Aunt Ethel, and that's fine for Dell (et al)
The lastest generation of net-admins or programmers will be equally experienced on Unix-likes or MS, unless they went to school in a MS-only brainwashing shop.
Actually, the answer lies somewhere between the Dilbert principle and "Yes, Minister".
If you are a manager of a pile of shit, the only thing better is a BIGGER pile of shit. If you can save money, it means that your slice of the pie is reduced next year. Both in relative and absolute terms.
A bigger department with more money is what a manager wants. More money means more kickbacks from those you throw it at.
Saving money is dangerous to personal and professional status. F/OSS doesn't stand a snowflakes chance in hell.
I'm not saying that's not possible, it sound pretty likely even. However, I think that there is a good chance that it would violate some Anti-Trust laws somewhere.
I'd wager a large sum of money that someone was pull a lawsuit at some point. Probably about the same time market share and/or revenue for Adobe from Acrobat type products nose-dives.
Adobe still have some pretty useful products outside of Acrobat. They're not exactly a one-trick pony. (C/f Netscape).
Even IBM survived the non-success of OS/2 against Windows. They have all types of hardware, pretty hand operating systems (AIX, OS/400, etc) and a stack of application and management software for all types of platforms.
I think I can start a list of abuses by Channel NEIN! These come off the top of my head... Married with Children. Channel NEIN! buried it because Channel 10 had the earlier episodes. They didn't want it aired in case Channel 10 capitalised on it's success. Cheers: Irregular programming, often late at night. Friends: Didn't they also very reluctantly show it because Channel 7 also had the ealier episodes? Star Trek TNG/DS9: scheduled around midnight, impossible to set a video for because of an invariable late running Footy Show. For me, of course the unforgivable, last-level-of-Hell-sin is the constant bombardment of Eddie McGuire on the damn screen. (Luckily ATM I'm living in Switzerland). Who the fuck thought he could commentate on the footy?
One school of though on this (The Dilbert School): Your boss has probably been collecting bonuses for keeping wages costs down in your department. Now, the decision comes back to bight him in the arse.
Unless he gave you a share of the cheque: His problem, not yours.
How many CD's do you think they've burnt over the last 10 years (or so)?
UBS Switzerland give you a little calculator with a removable card that hashes a challenge code. You type in the response for a one time password. Seems to work quite well as neither my card not the calculator have my account number on it. It does have a card number, which doesn't have a visual link to my account (which would stop casual theft).
National Australia Bank used to have accounts tied to a specific SSL key in the browser's cache. Too bad if you used multiple PC's to access your account (home PC, work PC, work laptop, etc, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd call that a bonus.
The rabbits that were introduced in to Australia have been an environmental nightmare.
In certain conditions they populate so quickly you'll end up with a plague. The munch on all available grass and low level plants. Just leaving sand and soil behind. This valuable topsoil then gets blown away by wind or the occasional storm. Their burrows collapse and cause further run off problems after storms. Much of Australia doesn't have huge trees to bind the soil together. That's just one aspect.
It only took a few rabbits too. Released just near Melbourne. Now they're all over the place.
Mice (at times), Cane toads, Crown of Thorns starfish are all big problems. Foxes are a concern, but not on the same scale, or is that Tassie only? Domestic and stray cats are just as bit a problem in outer suburban/semi-rural areas, going after the native birds and small animals.
All systems will find an equilibrium. Trouble is, that (nearly) isolated systems such as Australia don't have the natrual competitors for introduced species. They would form over time, just not in the short term that we live in and see. Foxes were introduced to try and get the rabbits, Cane Toads to get the Prickly Pear. They just caused thier own problems.
Actually you're dead right. It was started under Hawke/Keating Labour, but was bought to a new level by Howard the Coward.
AFAIR, treaties don't even have to be approved by parliament. (Some one correct me if I'm wrong). The enabling legislation is then a shoo-in as the govt. then just points to the treaty.
Free-trade treaty is an oxymoron anyway. How can something that thick make it EASIER to trade? Just makes it easier for the rich to rip us off and makes it harder for us to do anything about it.
Accounting firms are not too thin.
The other big firms picked up most of the refugees from AA. They're even MORE profitable now with the extra regulations and auditing required, post Sarbanes-Oxley.
The division I work for, not even in the US, but for a US company, has two internal audits a year, plus a bigger, external audit. The other three divisions based here, now have two external audits a year. Compliance and regulation costs went up 5 to 10 fold (depending upon department) as a direct result of SOX. In this case the major beneficiary is PWC.
Every "special interest" has a shopping list of things that they want. They just need the right opportunity/cash to get them done. The legislation is already written and just waiting for a "sponsor".
A few short examples:
Accounting firms want more regulations: The opportunity: Enron/Worldcom. Result: Sarbanes-Oxley act.
Security apparatus want more laws: The opportunity: Drugs (originally), now 911: Result: War on drugs, PATRIOT act.
Petroluem interests: The opportunity: Iraq (and in the future, Iran): Result: Gulf War 2.
Don't be surprised that it happens, don't be surprised that it's happening this week. Just follow the money trail.
Really?
I though money spoke all languages?
EU reps don't seem any more less likely to accept bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign contributions than thier US counterparts. Perhaps it's that the news is just a touch more investigative than FOX et al. (That's probably paying journalists too many compliments. Most are press release regurgatating hacks).
So when do Google move thier servers out of the US?
Oppressive regimes are all around the world. Abuse of human rights occurs all around the world. Why pick favourites (or "worst ofs")?
I have had zero problems with Big Blue's hardware based RAID cards. Both in servers and SAN.
...
You never need to reboot to put in a disk, nor remove it.
I think most of you are talking about software (Operating System) solutions. What a waste of resources! Let the damn card do the parity for you.
IBM have both SCSI and SATA based hardware raid. Trust it and them. Or trust Dell, or HP, or whoever. 100 plus people? You have the budget and the means to get a decent solution. We even put those cards in servers where there are only four full-time staff members. Cost outweighs the the risk AND downtime.
SCSI v SATA. Well, at least IBM thinks SATA is worth supporting. SCSI is what is recommended though. Wait and see
I'm thinking this could go the way of the McLibel case in the UK.
If I was on the end, I think I'd drag up all the little secrets that the record companies didn't want aired. Dodgy accounting practices and the like. It works especially well when you have nothing to lose.
(Nothing to lose is, to me, one definition of perfect freedom.)
Gather a little momentum and publicity, the victims will be coming to you to tell thier stories and point fingers.
Drag the crap on as long as possible.
Sure, you'll lose, but the RIAA et al will lose much, much more. I wish I knew how to spell phyrric victory at this point.
Actually, at least in Australia, Truth is an absolute defence, except in New South Wales. Libel being a state based matter.
NSW was THE state for politicians across the land to sue the various media outlets. Plenty of retirements were funded by suing the news for a long time. IIRC, NSW had to be Truth AND in the public interest.
Many moons ago I used to be a student newspaper editor, so at one time, I had a fairly good working knowledge of the matter. Which ran something like, If in the slightest of doubt, have a lawyer read it first.
Sure, some people will steal to get cheese.
Others will buy a cow and go back to the source.
HBO is attempting to poison the milk of said cow.
Of course, we know that it's SILICON heaven.
Ob-quote:
There is no such thing as "silicon heaven."
Then where do all the calculators go?
Absolutely, scripting is the way to go.
Perl might be a better choice if you have multiple playforms to manage (Win32, Unix-like, some big iron).
Script a lot and use centralised management tools. You have got a windows domain, and not just a workgroup? With a Windows or Novell domain you get a directory service and either Group Policy or ZEN works to manage your workstations. Forget even going to those workstations every month, reduce that to every quarter.
Remember that 15 workstations might turn in to 20. Then in 50. You don't want to be going around once a fortnight to each workstation to put on new software and check for security updates and patches.
Nice troll.
No one straps a bomb to themselves and sets the timer when they have hope for the future.
Nice response.
.. will be the collective computing power of all the PC's burning nearly-idle cycles just downloading porn.
Anyone that can harness that power, is made.
Could be win-win. Install "clustering software-x", download free porn. Legally.
Please consult the SBB web site http://www.rail.ch/ and you can see that it takes more than 4 hours, let alone 45 minutes through Switzerland. Enter Frieburg as the source and Milan as the destination. (most likely big-ish cities). Make sure it's Frieburg-im-Breisgau (germany) not Fribourg (switzerland)
I'm living on the French-German speaking border in Switzerland, a little north of the Alps, and it takes me 4 hours to get to Milan. Via Bern or via Lausanne.
Of course, the Swiss are taking some pretty big steps to reduce the travel times to Italy too.
OK, give me a cure for the common cold. Or for that matter AIDS, influenza, Herpes/Cold Sores, Malaria, Cot death, British and Irish Lions lack of scoring ability, etc. Plenty more been spent on these that 2 Billion.
Sometimes you've gotta have luck. Sometimes it's just not you, not this day, not this life.
If fact isn't it only Smallpox that has (theoretically) been eradicated?
Noted that you asked about physics, and I gave chem/biol scenarios.
Yes, if you have administrative controls on the client machine.
However, we lock down our machines for end users. What screws this up is that the tight-arse, CIO sleeps with the clue-less lead developer at another company. If the damn thing was digitally signed with could publish the Active-X signature in Active Directory and deployment would be no problem.
With some stock-standard HTML we could (1) have a hell of a lot of time saved deploying upgrades and (2) find a use for all the old PC's that should be used by data entry clerks anyway (eg, Firefox and a locked down linux/xBSD distro).
Win 2k was a great upgrade over NT. Still my favourite MS product (best of a bad bunch). For when it was released it was a lot better than anything else around. Drivers, PNP, USB, AD managability, no endless apply and re-apllu service and fixpacks after any configuration change, etc. Remember that there was NO support for USB in NT?
IIRC, RedHat was a version 6 at that time. Things got better for linux and F/OSS projects at around that time, but MS have stagnated in a lot of areas since then. Windows 2003 Server is not so bad, but is in no way the level of improvement over 2K, as the NT -> 2K jump.
Microsoft's real product development (not innovation) lately has only occurred in areas that it has been kicked in.
.conf files for easy parsing/reading and maintenance.
Lets have a look at what's hot or not at MS:
Exchange Server - incremental development only recently. 5.5 was the last "must have" upgrade. Domino was a major workgroup compeditor, it's still there, but not dominant. Plenty of F/OSS secure and configurable email servers about.
SQL Server - Really moving. MySQL and Postgres at the low end, DB2 and Oracle at the high end with competing products.
Enterprise authentication - Incremental improvents only recently. Active Directory is dominant, NDS in non-Novell shops is unheard of. Other LDAP based products are just getting a toenail hold.
Browsers - IE dominant and stagnant. With Firefox and Opera (et al), MS is finally ramping up development of a new version.
Office products - Office95/97 was a big improvement, but most users wouldn't use the new features in XP/2003 versions. Various FOSS office products are fast approaching "drop-in" replacements for most uses and users. Don't know where MS can go with this one.
IIS - Apache is market leader by most measures, IIS is too tied to the underlying OS. Not much room to improve.
File and print services. Still a lot of offices will have this as one of the most important IT function, along with financials. Samba/CUPS is a more than adequate replacement. MS's file sharing security-model hasn't improved much since the introduction of NTFS and share permissions. No notificable improvements in speed between NT4 and Server 2003 on comparable hardware.
Issues like security and patching have improved vastly, but still have a way to go.
Management of servers is still mainly point and click, but with improvements in 'scriptability'. Still waiting for the simplicity of configuration of an "/etc" folder with a series of
The big worry for MS is that it is and will continue to lose "mind-share". It's not cool to be working with MS products. It's products are only moving forward where a serious compeditor exists.
The only thing propping MS up is an "out of the box", polished UI. However, it soon pisses off power users and is also too closely tied to the OS. Works fine for Aunt Ethel, and that's fine for Dell (et al)
The lastest generation of net-admins or programmers will be equally experienced on Unix-likes or MS, unless they went to school in a MS-only brainwashing shop.
I'd consider MS will under attack.
Actually, the answer lies somewhere between the Dilbert principle and "Yes, Minister".
If you are a manager of a pile of shit, the only thing better is a BIGGER pile of shit. If you can save money, it means that your slice of the pie is reduced next year. Both in relative and absolute terms.
A bigger department with more money is what a manager wants. More money means more kickbacks from those you throw it at.
Saving money is dangerous to personal and professional status. F/OSS doesn't stand a snowflakes chance in hell.
I'm not saying that's not possible, it sound pretty likely even. However, I think that there is a good chance that it would violate some Anti-Trust laws somewhere.
I'd wager a large sum of money that someone was pull a lawsuit at some point. Probably about the same time market share and/or revenue for Adobe from Acrobat type products nose-dives.
Adobe still have some pretty useful products outside of Acrobat. They're not exactly a one-trick pony. (C/f Netscape).
Even IBM survived the non-success of OS/2 against Windows. They have all types of hardware, pretty hand operating systems (AIX, OS/400, etc) and a stack of application and management software for all types of platforms.
I think I can start a list of abuses by Channel NEIN! These come off the top of my head ...
Married with Children. Channel NEIN! buried it because Channel 10 had the earlier episodes. They didn't want it aired in case Channel 10 capitalised on it's success.
Cheers: Irregular programming, often late at night.
Friends: Didn't they also very reluctantly show it because Channel 7 also had the ealier episodes?
Star Trek TNG/DS9: scheduled around midnight, impossible to set a video for because of an invariable late running Footy Show.
For me, of course the unforgivable, last-level-of-Hell-sin is the constant bombardment of Eddie McGuire on the damn screen. (Luckily ATM I'm living in Switzerland). Who the fuck thought he could commentate on the footy?
Bzzzzt: Wrong Answer:
You are in a Government, of the People, by the Corrupt, for the Corporations.
Anyone that tells you their motive isn't profit, is lying.
One school of though on this (The Dilbert School): Your boss has probably been collecting bonuses for keeping wages costs down in your department. Now, the decision comes back to bight him in the arse.
Unless he gave you a share of the cheque: His problem, not yours.
Never stopped AOL.
How many CD's do you think they've burnt over the last 10 years (or so)?
UBS Switzerland give you a little calculator with a removable card that hashes a challenge code. You type in the response for a one time password. Seems to work quite well as neither my card not the calculator have my account number on it. It does have a card number, which doesn't have a visual link to my account (which would stop casual theft).
National Australia Bank used to have accounts tied to a specific SSL key in the browser's cache. Too bad if you used multiple PC's to access your account (home PC, work PC, work laptop, etc, etc).