My camera will also work after an EMP - I doubt yours will, and I also doubt your digital pictures will remain intact after such an event.
Ditto my manual-everything lenses.
The photographer on the other hand probably won't survive the nuclear blast that produced it. Yes, there's a few other ways but it's more experimental science than a practical weapon. That goes both if you're going to a war zone or you happen to be a terrorist victim, they prefer the conventional bombs.
And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II.
True, but one can question whether that is because there is less nationalistic and religious feelings or because the world, as a whole, has been in a very stable economical growth ever since WWII. What brought along nazism and fascism was in large part the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Sure, the disputes and the dislikes were always there and decided who were the victims but it's the collapse that fuels the hatred and scapegoating.
Many people have talked of the possibility of a global economic collapse, not just merely a financial crisis like we have seen but entire countries going off on a debt deathspiral with hyperinflation, chaos and collapse dragging others with it. Eventually people may simply refuse to correct their economy and pay their debts, like there has been huge protests in Greece now against the budget cuts. Many other countries are not far behind.
If that comes to pass, I think you will see many old and new hatreds come alive again. I have heard more than enough slurs to know those feelings are far from dead, they're just slumbering because most people are content with the life they have. There's no coincidence that after the financial crisis with rising unemployment all over Europe the extreme right is gaining steam as well. The glossy surface is to shut down the borders and protect the jobs and lives of those already living there but it's quite clear who is wanted and not wanted.
A mere 65 years and counting is short, very short. Remember that for example the Romans had their Pax Romana, a peace that lasted over 200 years before decending into back into wars and chaos again. It's far too early to say that WWII was the "war to end all wars". That was what they said about WWI too, when they just called it "the Great War", before we decided to make a series out of it. The world is currently consuming vast amounts of fixed resources, not just oil but all sorts of deposits built up over millions of years and that'll be gone in decades or at least a century or two. What we see today may not last despite the progress of technology.
You can. It's called cryonics. It's open ended, but it's a better bet than disposing of your body.
From what I understand the freezing process today will generate a ton of ice crystals from water freezing all over your body, causing tons of internal microdamage. If we ever get real cryogenic sleep to work, I imagine you'll be hooked up to some sort of freeze-in fluid to mix with your blood so I doubt the ones being frozen today will ever come alive. They might be somewhat better preserved than the mummies but still really, really damaged.
Well, that highly depends on their timeframe. Hiroshima was bombed 60 years ago, but they rebuilt the city and according to wikipedia there's more than a million living there today. I'm not sure if it's exactly over ground zero but certainly not that far as it's still in the same bay. Spending some hundred years taking out all major forms of life and terraforming it to spec hardly seems impossible or unreasonable for an alien race of sufficient technological capability.
Well go figure when the options are: a) Leave the planes on the ground and lose lots of money b) Fly and get expensive damage that'll ground your planes c) Blame the government and get a bailout
He doesn't want to send his planes up there, he just wants money. There's no doubt that many airlines took an extreme financial hit, here in Norway the entire airspace was closed for days and they were losing millions of dollars each day. And that's only counting the direct costs, not counting all the bad experiences people have had not getting home or not being able to go which might make them not travel by plane or not travel at all in the future. This kind of thing just isn't in their margins, the odd plane or airport having issues sure but not the whole fleet sitting on the ground twiddling thumbs.
That's true, but with the advent of Netbooks and other cheap hardware a number of companies are selling Linux based computers. Walmart sells them on their Web site. I haven't seen many (any?) with Ubuntu though.
Dell has a few options at least. There's some more listed here but no other big names. Trouble is that knowledgeable Linux users will usually check out if a laptop works with Linux and go with some better deal on the hardware rather than the preinstalls. It's a tough crowd to sell to...
So, ARIN will say no. Will the Internet collapse because of that? Hell no. Whoever wants more IP addresses will have to go out on the free market and try purchasing them from someone. As it becomes a valuable asset companies and ISPs will see if they can charge extra for having their own IP address so they can sell the others. How many could live off a NAT'd connection? Or if you got say a machine with 100 incoming ports routed to you, could you configure any servers and whatnot to use that range? Eventually the cost/benefit will tip in the direction of IPv6. But I'm betting it'll be more like 2010 than next year.
For what, serious bug found in beta testing and FIXED? Try again when you have something to bitch about that's in an actual release. Sheesh, I guess sometimes Ubuntu deserves the bashing but I don't think this time. By the way, the same patches were first used by Red Hat then Debian, so if you want to blame QA there's a lot of blame to go around.
Just working hard in itself means very little, I'm sure the Soviet plan economists managed to get people to work but when you take away everything else it doesn't really matter. It's not that I work 40 hours a week (including lunch break) and have 5 weeks vacation that will be our downfall as long as we work smarter and leverage technology. Besides, with enough wealth I think all people will want to do more with life as per Maslow's pyramid.
What creates the huge waves of rising and falling nations is that there's actually a small segment of the population that defines the relative wealth. A retail clerk or waiter or hairdresser makes vastly different wages throughout the world even though they perform essentially the same service, which is again reflected in prices and cost of living through a complex system of passing the money around that we call "the economy". But that part is equal all over the world, everywhere hairdressers and waiters and retail clerks and many more provide services to each other. Who are the differentiators?
I think you saw during the financial crisis, suddenly many export industries and rich stock owners were losing huge amounts of money and stopped pumping it into the US economy. And suddenly none of the retail clerks and waiters and hairdressers had money to pass around and the whole circle unwinded with falling property prices, increasing unemployment and lower wages. Ultimately you can build as many Wal-Marts that you want and everyone there can work as hard as tney'd like, but they'll all be caught in those same waves.
The US is living dangerously off the value of the dollar as an international instrument, because the US is growing dangerously thin on things it provides that are worth something to anyone else. The US wants lots of things from China. China doesn't care what services Americans provide to other Americans. What can China get from the US? Right now it can get a lot for US dollars, but that's because other countries want dollars. If everybody starts questioning the dollar, the US hasn't seen nothing yet...
IT's job is to make sure that everyone is up and running. Its the managers job to make sure that people are doing their work. When people start treating IT like a police force, then something is seriously wrong, and you need to look at the power structure and layout of your company. We can be eyes and ears, we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired.
What if "we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired" are mutually exclusive options? IT shouldn't make itself less than it is either. If the IT department is asked to implement content filtering and detect repeated attempts to circumvent it, then you're acting on instructions not your own initiative. It's not very different from a parent installing a content filter and checking logs on a child's computer, except that in a large company it's delegated to IT people that implement the actual filtering. Many times that's a mandate handed down to the IT department already and doesn't need a board room decision.
Forget that this is IT, imagine if it's just two horizontal departments in different parts of the company. How much would you ignore as "not your department's business"? Ultimately the department manager can't always know the truth of all things, let's say for example you hear a bunch of coders making fun of their boss because their "all night coding crunch" is actually their "all night fps gaming and pizza party night". Or that they're stealing office supplies. Or that they're operating a shadow business on company time. At some point it becomes a responsibility to tell on them even though it'll go up and down the chain of command and someone might get fired. That is equally true for IT.
I think that highly depends on how used you are to working with one large workspace with multiple documents. Personally I find it's a lot of micromanagement to get windows in their place and mostly work fullscreen. Particularly I hate windowed MDI applications, they're usually full of useful solution browsers and toolboxes and stuff that is supposed to be at the left/right/bottom of screen. So I think my ideal development station would have three screens. The center one being the IDE - I might have many source files open in the IDE but the IDE itself is maximized. To the right I'd have my documentation, either if it's specs I write by, language docs, flow diagrams or documentation I write. To the left I'd be running the application, read application logs and whatnot. That sounds like a good mental workspace to me. To the left I have what is happening, to the right I have what should be happening and in the center I'm making it happen.
I was under the impression that you first found an exploit, then installed a rootkit. Even the oldest rootkits I've heard of was a set of modified unix tools so the system administrator couldn't see rouge processes and secretly gave the attacker root access. If the original meaning was just a bunch of exploits, good riddance to such a useless word. At least the current meaning is useful and not easy to express in any other way.
Collecting data for purposes A, then later using them without permission for B, C and D should be illegal. I know that is at least the case here in Norway, the law on use of personal information is quite strict. Consider it a form of fraud if you will, that's the issue here not the research itself.
The biggest problem with rewrites is that the systems you want to rewrite are the ones that you have least clue what do. They're made of ancient code in ancient languages with shoddy documentation, architecture and more tentacles than you realize. To know what exactly you are trying to rewrite, you'd have to tear it apart and figure out what's what, and if you did it wouldn't be such a monster system. Instead you just start off with a new system and hope that eventually it'll be better than the old one, which usually means you make some critical design flaws and end up with a kludge anyway only with less mature code. If I get to pick, I prefer a greenfield project over a rewrite any day of the week. Or at least some narrowly scoped functionality that can be severed from the beast hopefully without too many problems.
I've paid for a computer and renting a cabin with 500 euro bills at least. I had no problems paying with 1000 bath (31$) notes in Thailand, which is huge in a country where the GDP is less than 1/10th of the US - it'd be like a 350$ bill in the US. The visual protections on the euro bills - at least the easily visible ones - are much the same across the notes. If you're used to the feel of the notes, all the things that light up in UV, the metallic strip with the holograms and whatnot makes it really hard to fake. Unlike dollars which as far as I can remember (it's been a while) looked like plain green pieces of paper. Not saying it can't happen, but you have to be in a different league than just having a semi-decent printing press.
Yes absolutely, there goes the last source of porn on the Internet. It's so dry, it's like trying to find sand in Sahara. I even heard they suggested a.xxx TLD, but had to drop it because no providers would come. I guess it's back to the Sport's Illustrated Swimsuit edition for you. Or playing that clip with Janet's tit over and over again. Won't ever be anything like it again, no sir.
You talk as if Canonical could have every team dance after their schedule like Microsoft can with their teams, but they don't. There's always some semi-important package be it the kernel or X or Gnome or KDE or OpenOffice or Firefox or all the server packages and so on that doesn't align well with their schedule and have some versions that are sorta but not really ready for release and if you keep waiting you end up with Debian that has delays longer than Ubuntu has between (non-LTS) releases. Every six months it's the same wailing wall that they released even if it doesn't work for everyone. Since you can't control the community, the best you can do is be predictable.
The kernel is trying very hard to make a release every three months. That essentially means 10.04 LTS has 2.6.32, 10.10 will normally have 2.6.34. KDE releases every six months so this version will have 4.4.x, the next one 4.5.x. Going back and forth with fluid release dates skipping or catching one release here, missing one there is only chaotic. Reality is that you don't get zero bugs by going far enough back because developers simply stop supporting it and stop backporting and the distros don't have time to that on any but the largest packages or if it's a security bug. I used to run Debian, and on more than one occasion the answer was "Won't be fixed in stable, ever. Upgrade to latest version, that one is ancient." Testing would randomly throw you a curve ball when applications upgraded to a new major version without any real notice and had huge stop-go motions around release time.
I guess I could try one of the non-Debian based distros but my experiences with them have all been bad, worse than anything Ubuntu ever managed to do to Debian. Unless there are really bad deal breakers, I'd rather they get it out there and start the people on and the bugs filed while upstream might still bother to fix them. But yeah, backing up and being able to roll back to the last version is very much an advantage...
As I said in another comment, their core market is young, rich, art/media types.
No, they are just the small market of trendsetters - the core market in terms of revenue are all those that want to mimic the young, rich, art/media types. For example, there's quite a huge market of wannabe teenagers/students who is dependent on their parents to get money for their flashy new toy. If android is the pr0n phone and iPhone the clean phone, which is the one you think you'll see under the Christmas tree, as birthday presents and so on? The iPhone. And while I'm sure the art/media types watch pr0n as much as the rest of us, the outward profile is classy and pr0n has never been classy except maybe a few art movies. Not like the older people no, far more relax with regards to sex and nudity and porn and all that but I still most will think pulling up your phone to watch hardcore slapping is more tacky than anything else.
Catholicism != Christianity. Catholicism is based on Christianity, but is far more "Roman Empire" than Christian.
Which makes about as much sense as saying that all variations of Christianity is more "Roman Empire" than Christian, since they all share that background. If you were trying to make a point that it's somehow different in the context of the parent's post you failed. My country is protestant and I think you can pretty much do a search and replace.
Same socket, but can it run all the newer processors? That at least happened to be with a Shuttle I had that I thought about upgrading - for various reasons with the board it couldn't even with a BIOS upgrade. And there always seemed to be some sort of shift like AGP to PCIe, PATA to SATA, DDR2 to DDR3, USB 1.0 to 2.0 or some various other good reasons to upgrade anyway. Expansion cards are just silly expensive compared to motherboards, I'm guessing due to volume.
To take one example, any decent mobo today comes with 6+ SATA-II ports. As expansion cards the cheapest 4-port SATA-II controller is 439,- NOK. I can get a full new P43 motherboard with 6 channels for 499,- NOK. I guess it works nice if the CPU is the one and only thing you would like to upgrade. By the way, Intel really should put their 6-disk controller on an expansion card and kill the competition, don't understand why they don't.
Maybe for once things are finally stable enough to be worth it... but for my part, I've been burned many enough times that I don't even think about future compatibility - I only look at what I want here and now and if that hardware will last.
All it takes is to take a little break, I was on vacation for two weeks, didn't check slashdot once and since I came home I've had two rounds of 15 mod points... pretty much never get mod points otherwise. Not that I mind getting them either, I usually drop to -1 and burn them quite quickly mostly on smacking down trolls then turn it back up. I don't normally metamoderate but if I do then sometimes I get mod points too, it's certainly tied in. But like you I'd rather comment instead.
Seriously though, if a full blown warrior with a bow and axe comes by some random dude "Got any work for me?" it is FAR more likely to be something like "Nice axe you got there, I need someone to chop me some firewood." or "Any good with that bow? I'd pay good money for some pelts" than "I need you to on a sacred quest for the Sword of Doom in the haunted castle of Skul-Ugir". Realism is not very desirable in an RPG.
Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
The thing is that even though click-through rates are bullshit the billboard space is not. If you're a semi-smart consumer you at least check a couple sites and a couple brands before picking one, but WHICH stores and WHICH brands? Oh, the ones you've been fed with the last year and are the first to pop into your mind. There's a diminishing rate of return on checking every store, every model (if such a thing even is possible) as long as you get a good deal on a good model from a reputable seller.
People think they know exactly what you want and isn't affected by ads which is only true for the things that are important to them but ignores everything that's not so important to them. I might know all the high-end CPU models but buy lots of foodstuffs and clothes and furniture and whatnot where it's not like I've gone through any exhaustive search or made a huge in-depth analysis. Nice shirt, best possible shirt purchase? No idea, but I'll buy it anyway. A fashion freak might know every deal on shirts but not have a clue of computers, this is where marketing matters.
Finally, and this is an important point about advertising - ignorance is bliss. Unless they're aware that they overpaid, they don't really care. People just think "Cool, this 600$ computer is amazing, it's so fast and nice and 600$ wasn't much..." even if they could have gotten it for 400$. It's only if they know that they care about the 200$ they "lost", not because it was poor value but because it was a poor deal. If they take the deal then stop looking because they're no longer in the market for any they are happy.
Personally, I hate shopping. If you throw a decent offer in my way I might just to be done shopping. I think these ads are trying to be much the same way, they're not just the window you glance past but the clothes rack in your way. A little obnoxious yes but at the same time something you're not able to dismiss so easily, which might lead you to stop and ahhhhhhh looked at this long enough, I'll buy something now and be done with it. There's definitely business in that in the real world, I don't think the online world is that different.
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My camera will also work after an EMP - I doubt yours will, and I also doubt your digital pictures will remain intact after such an event.
Ditto my manual-everything lenses.
The photographer on the other hand probably won't survive the nuclear blast that produced it. Yes, there's a few other ways but it's more experimental science than a practical weapon. That goes both if you're going to a war zone or you happen to be a terrorist victim, they prefer the conventional bombs.
And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II.
True, but one can question whether that is because there is less nationalistic and religious feelings or because the world, as a whole, has been in a very stable economical growth ever since WWII. What brought along nazism and fascism was in large part the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Sure, the disputes and the dislikes were always there and decided who were the victims but it's the collapse that fuels the hatred and scapegoating.
Many people have talked of the possibility of a global economic collapse, not just merely a financial crisis like we have seen but entire countries going off on a debt deathspiral with hyperinflation, chaos and collapse dragging others with it. Eventually people may simply refuse to correct their economy and pay their debts, like there has been huge protests in Greece now against the budget cuts. Many other countries are not far behind.
If that comes to pass, I think you will see many old and new hatreds come alive again. I have heard more than enough slurs to know those feelings are far from dead, they're just slumbering because most people are content with the life they have. There's no coincidence that after the financial crisis with rising unemployment all over Europe the extreme right is gaining steam as well. The glossy surface is to shut down the borders and protect the jobs and lives of those already living there but it's quite clear who is wanted and not wanted.
A mere 65 years and counting is short, very short. Remember that for example the Romans had their Pax Romana, a peace that lasted over 200 years before decending into back into wars and chaos again. It's far too early to say that WWII was the "war to end all wars". That was what they said about WWI too, when they just called it "the Great War", before we decided to make a series out of it. The world is currently consuming vast amounts of fixed resources, not just oil but all sorts of deposits built up over millions of years and that'll be gone in decades or at least a century or two. What we see today may not last despite the progress of technology.
You can. It's called cryonics. It's open ended, but it's a better bet than disposing of your body.
From what I understand the freezing process today will generate a ton of ice crystals from water freezing all over your body, causing tons of internal microdamage. If we ever get real cryogenic sleep to work, I imagine you'll be hooked up to some sort of freeze-in fluid to mix with your blood so I doubt the ones being frozen today will ever come alive. They might be somewhat better preserved than the mummies but still really, really damaged.
Don't worry, there'll be this man in a blue box calling them up to tell them we're protected under the Shadow Proclamation.
Well, that highly depends on their timeframe. Hiroshima was bombed 60 years ago, but they rebuilt the city and according to wikipedia there's more than a million living there today. I'm not sure if it's exactly over ground zero but certainly not that far as it's still in the same bay. Spending some hundred years taking out all major forms of life and terraforming it to spec hardly seems impossible or unreasonable for an alien race of sufficient technological capability.
My vote's on cash grab.
Well go figure when the options are:
a) Leave the planes on the ground and lose lots of money
b) Fly and get expensive damage that'll ground your planes
c) Blame the government and get a bailout
He doesn't want to send his planes up there, he just wants money. There's no doubt that many airlines took an extreme financial hit, here in Norway the entire airspace was closed for days and they were losing millions of dollars each day. And that's only counting the direct costs, not counting all the bad experiences people have had not getting home or not being able to go which might make them not travel by plane or not travel at all in the future. This kind of thing just isn't in their margins, the odd plane or airport having issues sure but not the whole fleet sitting on the ground twiddling thumbs.
That's true, but with the advent of Netbooks and other cheap hardware a number of companies are selling Linux based computers. Walmart sells them on their Web site. I haven't seen many (any?) with Ubuntu though.
Dell has a few options at least. There's some more listed here but no other big names. Trouble is that knowledgeable Linux users will usually check out if a laptop works with Linux and go with some better deal on the hardware rather than the preinstalls. It's a tough crowd to sell to...
So, ARIN will say no. Will the Internet collapse because of that? Hell no. Whoever wants more IP addresses will have to go out on the free market and try purchasing them from someone. As it becomes a valuable asset companies and ISPs will see if they can charge extra for having their own IP address so they can sell the others. How many could live off a NAT'd connection? Or if you got say a machine with 100 incoming ports routed to you, could you configure any servers and whatnot to use that range? Eventually the cost/benefit will tip in the direction of IPv6. But I'm betting it'll be more like 2010 than next year.
For what, serious bug found in beta testing and FIXED? Try again when you have something to bitch about that's in an actual release. Sheesh, I guess sometimes Ubuntu deserves the bashing but I don't think this time. By the way, the same patches were first used by Red Hat then Debian, so if you want to blame QA there's a lot of blame to go around.
Just working hard in itself means very little, I'm sure the Soviet plan economists managed to get people to work but when you take away everything else it doesn't really matter. It's not that I work 40 hours a week (including lunch break) and have 5 weeks vacation that will be our downfall as long as we work smarter and leverage technology. Besides, with enough wealth I think all people will want to do more with life as per Maslow's pyramid.
What creates the huge waves of rising and falling nations is that there's actually a small segment of the population that defines the relative wealth. A retail clerk or waiter or hairdresser makes vastly different wages throughout the world even though they perform essentially the same service, which is again reflected in prices and cost of living through a complex system of passing the money around that we call "the economy". But that part is equal all over the world, everywhere hairdressers and waiters and retail clerks and many more provide services to each other. Who are the differentiators?
I think you saw during the financial crisis, suddenly many export industries and rich stock owners were losing huge amounts of money and stopped pumping it into the US economy. And suddenly none of the retail clerks and waiters and hairdressers had money to pass around and the whole circle unwinded with falling property prices, increasing unemployment and lower wages. Ultimately you can build as many Wal-Marts that you want and everyone there can work as hard as tney'd like, but they'll all be caught in those same waves.
The US is living dangerously off the value of the dollar as an international instrument, because the US is growing dangerously thin on things it provides that are worth something to anyone else. The US wants lots of things from China. China doesn't care what services Americans provide to other Americans. What can China get from the US? Right now it can get a lot for US dollars, but that's because other countries want dollars. If everybody starts questioning the dollar, the US hasn't seen nothing yet...
IT's job is to make sure that everyone is up and running. Its the managers job to make sure that people are doing their work. When people start treating IT like a police force, then something is seriously wrong, and you need to look at the power structure and layout of your company. We can be eyes and ears, we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired.
What if "we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired" are mutually exclusive options? IT shouldn't make itself less than it is either. If the IT department is asked to implement content filtering and detect repeated attempts to circumvent it, then you're acting on instructions not your own initiative. It's not very different from a parent installing a content filter and checking logs on a child's computer, except that in a large company it's delegated to IT people that implement the actual filtering. Many times that's a mandate handed down to the IT department already and doesn't need a board room decision.
Forget that this is IT, imagine if it's just two horizontal departments in different parts of the company. How much would you ignore as "not your department's business"? Ultimately the department manager can't always know the truth of all things, let's say for example you hear a bunch of coders making fun of their boss because their "all night coding crunch" is actually their "all night fps gaming and pizza party night". Or that they're stealing office supplies. Or that they're operating a shadow business on company time. At some point it becomes a responsibility to tell on them even though it'll go up and down the chain of command and someone might get fired. That is equally true for IT.
If this is that big a deal, I hope nobody finds out I've actually been having sex while the economy tanks. Especially my wife.
Well, that might explain why your economy tanks...
I think that highly depends on how used you are to working with one large workspace with multiple documents. Personally I find it's a lot of micromanagement to get windows in their place and mostly work fullscreen. Particularly I hate windowed MDI applications, they're usually full of useful solution browsers and toolboxes and stuff that is supposed to be at the left/right/bottom of screen. So I think my ideal development station would have three screens. The center one being the IDE - I might have many source files open in the IDE but the IDE itself is maximized. To the right I'd have my documentation, either if it's specs I write by, language docs, flow diagrams or documentation I write. To the left I'd be running the application, read application logs and whatnot. That sounds like a good mental workspace to me. To the left I have what is happening, to the right I have what should be happening and in the center I'm making it happen.
I was under the impression that you first found an exploit, then installed a rootkit. Even the oldest rootkits I've heard of was a set of modified unix tools so the system administrator couldn't see rouge processes and secretly gave the attacker root access. If the original meaning was just a bunch of exploits, good riddance to such a useless word. At least the current meaning is useful and not easy to express in any other way.
Collecting data for purposes A, then later using them without permission for B, C and D should be illegal. I know that is at least the case here in Norway, the law on use of personal information is quite strict. Consider it a form of fraud if you will, that's the issue here not the research itself.
The biggest problem with rewrites is that the systems you want to rewrite are the ones that you have least clue what do. They're made of ancient code in ancient languages with shoddy documentation, architecture and more tentacles than you realize. To know what exactly you are trying to rewrite, you'd have to tear it apart and figure out what's what, and if you did it wouldn't be such a monster system. Instead you just start off with a new system and hope that eventually it'll be better than the old one, which usually means you make some critical design flaws and end up with a kludge anyway only with less mature code. If I get to pick, I prefer a greenfield project over a rewrite any day of the week. Or at least some narrowly scoped functionality that can be severed from the beast hopefully without too many problems.
I've paid for a computer and renting a cabin with 500 euro bills at least. I had no problems paying with 1000 bath (31$) notes in Thailand, which is huge in a country where the GDP is less than 1/10th of the US - it'd be like a 350$ bill in the US. The visual protections on the euro bills - at least the easily visible ones - are much the same across the notes. If you're used to the feel of the notes, all the things that light up in UV, the metallic strip with the holograms and whatnot makes it really hard to fake. Unlike dollars which as far as I can remember (it's been a while) looked like plain green pieces of paper. Not saying it can't happen, but you have to be in a different league than just having a semi-decent printing press.
Yes absolutely, there goes the last source of porn on the Internet. It's so dry, it's like trying to find sand in Sahara. I even heard they suggested a .xxx TLD, but had to drop it because no providers would come. I guess it's back to the Sport's Illustrated Swimsuit edition for you. Or playing that clip with Janet's tit over and over again. Won't ever be anything like it again, no sir.
You talk as if Canonical could have every team dance after their schedule like Microsoft can with their teams, but they don't. There's always some semi-important package be it the kernel or X or Gnome or KDE or OpenOffice or Firefox or all the server packages and so on that doesn't align well with their schedule and have some versions that are sorta but not really ready for release and if you keep waiting you end up with Debian that has delays longer than Ubuntu has between (non-LTS) releases. Every six months it's the same wailing wall that they released even if it doesn't work for everyone. Since you can't control the community, the best you can do is be predictable.
The kernel is trying very hard to make a release every three months. That essentially means 10.04 LTS has 2.6.32, 10.10 will normally have 2.6.34. KDE releases every six months so this version will have 4.4.x, the next one 4.5.x. Going back and forth with fluid release dates skipping or catching one release here, missing one there is only chaotic. Reality is that you don't get zero bugs by going far enough back because developers simply stop supporting it and stop backporting and the distros don't have time to that on any but the largest packages or if it's a security bug. I used to run Debian, and on more than one occasion the answer was "Won't be fixed in stable, ever. Upgrade to latest version, that one is ancient." Testing would randomly throw you a curve ball when applications upgraded to a new major version without any real notice and had huge stop-go motions around release time.
I guess I could try one of the non-Debian based distros but my experiences with them have all been bad, worse than anything Ubuntu ever managed to do to Debian. Unless there are really bad deal breakers, I'd rather they get it out there and start the people on and the bugs filed while upstream might still bother to fix them. But yeah, backing up and being able to roll back to the last version is very much an advantage...
As I said in another comment, their core market is young, rich, art/media types.
No, they are just the small market of trendsetters - the core market in terms of revenue are all those that want to mimic the young, rich, art/media types. For example, there's quite a huge market of wannabe teenagers/students who is dependent on their parents to get money for their flashy new toy. If android is the pr0n phone and iPhone the clean phone, which is the one you think you'll see under the Christmas tree, as birthday presents and so on? The iPhone. And while I'm sure the art/media types watch pr0n as much as the rest of us, the outward profile is classy and pr0n has never been classy except maybe a few art movies. Not like the older people no, far more relax with regards to sex and nudity and porn and all that but I still most will think pulling up your phone to watch hardcore slapping is more tacky than anything else.
Catholicism != Christianity. Catholicism is based on Christianity, but is far more "Roman Empire" than Christian.
Which makes about as much sense as saying that all variations of Christianity is more "Roman Empire" than Christian, since they all share that background. If you were trying to make a point that it's somehow different in the context of the parent's post you failed. My country is protestant and I think you can pretty much do a search and replace.
Same socket, but can it run all the newer processors? That at least happened to be with a Shuttle I had that I thought about upgrading - for various reasons with the board it couldn't even with a BIOS upgrade. And there always seemed to be some sort of shift like AGP to PCIe, PATA to SATA, DDR2 to DDR3, USB 1.0 to 2.0 or some various other good reasons to upgrade anyway. Expansion cards are just silly expensive compared to motherboards, I'm guessing due to volume.
To take one example, any decent mobo today comes with 6+ SATA-II ports. As expansion cards the cheapest 4-port SATA-II controller is 439,- NOK. I can get a full new P43 motherboard with 6 channels for 499,- NOK. I guess it works nice if the CPU is the one and only thing you would like to upgrade. By the way, Intel really should put their 6-disk controller on an expansion card and kill the competition, don't understand why they don't.
Maybe for once things are finally stable enough to be worth it... but for my part, I've been burned many enough times that I don't even think about future compatibility - I only look at what I want here and now and if that hardware will last.
All it takes is to take a little break, I was on vacation for two weeks, didn't check slashdot once and since I came home I've had two rounds of 15 mod points... pretty much never get mod points otherwise. Not that I mind getting them either, I usually drop to -1 and burn them quite quickly mostly on smacking down trolls then turn it back up. I don't normally metamoderate but if I do then sometimes I get mod points too, it's certainly tied in. But like you I'd rather comment instead.
Seriously though, if a full blown warrior with a bow and axe comes by some random dude "Got any work for me?" it is FAR more likely to be something like "Nice axe you got there, I need someone to chop me some firewood." or "Any good with that bow? I'd pay good money for some pelts" than "I need you to on a sacred quest for the Sword of Doom in the haunted castle of Skul-Ugir". Realism is not very desirable in an RPG.
Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
The thing is that even though click-through rates are bullshit the billboard space is not. If you're a semi-smart consumer you at least check a couple sites and a couple brands before picking one, but WHICH stores and WHICH brands? Oh, the ones you've been fed with the last year and are the first to pop into your mind. There's a diminishing rate of return on checking every store, every model (if such a thing even is possible) as long as you get a good deal on a good model from a reputable seller.
People think they know exactly what you want and isn't affected by ads which is only true for the things that are important to them but ignores everything that's not so important to them. I might know all the high-end CPU models but buy lots of foodstuffs and clothes and furniture and whatnot where it's not like I've gone through any exhaustive search or made a huge in-depth analysis. Nice shirt, best possible shirt purchase? No idea, but I'll buy it anyway. A fashion freak might know every deal on shirts but not have a clue of computers, this is where marketing matters.
Finally, and this is an important point about advertising - ignorance is bliss. Unless they're aware that they overpaid, they don't really care. People just think "Cool, this 600$ computer is amazing, it's so fast and nice and 600$ wasn't much..." even if they could have gotten it for 400$. It's only if they know that they care about the 200$ they "lost", not because it was poor value but because it was a poor deal. If they take the deal then stop looking because they're no longer in the market for any they are happy.
Personally, I hate shopping. If you throw a decent offer in my way I might just to be done shopping. I think these ads are trying to be much the same way, they're not just the window you glance past but the clothes rack in your way. A little obnoxious yes but at the same time something you're not able to dismiss so easily, which might lead you to stop and ahhhhhhh looked at this long enough, I'll buy something now and be done with it. There's definitely business in that in the real world, I don't think the online world is that different.