I am never going to defend the Iraq war, but your statement is just beyond the pale uninformed and sad/funny.
1. Bush neither ignored nor used the UN. He tried to appease both camps within US domestic politics. If the end game was inevitable war with Iraq, which seems clear it was, he should have done it immediately, without warning, and without announcement. Telegraphing an impending war for 18 months is not a good strategy for anything.
2. Regarding a "war for oil", it's laughable. First, everyone including the President knew this war would make oil less accessible - as it has - and less cheap. If Iraq was about oil, Bush would have secretly ordered concessions to Iraq, and fasttracked normalization with Iraq - and gained huge international applause for it. This would have release a huge amount of oil into OPEC's markets. However, this also is interesting, since OPEC would have simply reduced production in other countries, thereby stabilizing prices. What is mostly likely is that Bush simpl believed his own line, about Iraq and Hussein and terror. He is an idiot, but probably a sincere one. All evidence that supported his case was The Truth, and everything else trivial.
3. Regarding US standings in the world, the world has hated the US for a long time. During the Clinton years it was a period of outward smilies but behind the scenes plotting and antagonism. Europe has had chilly relations with the US for decades. As has parts of Asia and of course the entire Middle East save Israel. All of the fake good will could not bring peace to the middle-east, an end to North Koreas nuclear ambitions, an end to Irans nuclear ambitions, or any of that. Under Clinton the Sec State went to North Korea to get them to cease any nuclear program. What we got was a big bunch of lies and promises. I am not blaming anything on Clinton, but civil war and ill feelings towards the US are not new, and did not start with Bush.
4. Regarding civil war in Iraq. What you don't realize is that Iraq has been a in lopsided civil war for 20 years. The Kurds have been a break-away province for nearly 15 years, and fighting had raged long before that. Iraq is not good, but the one good difference is that the threats made by the UN and Clinton and the whole of Europe were actually acted upon by Bush. Foreign policy is shambles to be sure, but again, this is not new. Whats important to recognize though is that US had significant and strong opposition to attacking Afganistan, even faced with a videotaped confession from bin Laden.
The UN does not act to promote peace. They treat all nations as equals, even when clearly not all nations should be treated as such. A nation of despots and tryants is treated equally to a nation of democratic traditions and generally liberal attitudes. Faced with obvious evidence of wrongdoing the UN is in capable of good.
That is fine and dandy for scanners, but what about reliable 15k rpm drive in a hardware raid configuration, MS is grouping them under the label of "legacy".
They did no such thing. The e-mail reference clearly is talking about peripherials. So long as you have a controller with decent BIOS and drivers, your SCSI equipment will be just fine.
Second, SATA is a great replacement for SCSI. I loved SCSI, but now its like a religious experience to work with it. SATA drives are typically identical to SCSI counterparts in terms of platter and mechanics but with a different interface attached. They are fast - as fast or faster than SCSI models, use similiarly low CPU power, reasonably priced, and all that.
The onboard parallel port is also still the best way to connect a printer last a checked
Flatly wrong. It's inferior in virtually ever way. First, parallel transfers still to this day generally cause an interupt, which is bad for performance. Print a large document and all of the sudden your new top of the line PC gets stuttery. Plus, you only get one (generally) per PC, and never more than three. That's sucky.
USB printers have a tradeoff in software overhead and support for them is buggy on any platform
Not quite. What you are thinking about is crappy printers that have "management software" attached. Those are cheapo crappy printers. That software usually is bloated, buggy, ugly, etc. There is nothing inherent to USB that makes this required. Many parallel printers (aka HP and EPSON have had this for a long time).
There are tons of decent or excellent USB printers that are "inf" only installs. You are associating USB with one brand of printer, I think. I have an Xerox laser printer on my desk which required precisely this to work: plug in power, plug USB cable into USB port on PC, wait a moment, ready to go. No CDs, no installers, nothing. It Just Works. I can have 10 of these printers installer.
This means no significant overhead and you can perform an inf only install, no worries about installers seeing the printer or concerns about whether the software runs on your platform, or setting up peer2peer sharing, etc.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Peer2Peer sharing?
Works better with an hp jet direct this way too. That becomes important as they start taking parallel connections out of low end laserjets. If this keeps up only corporate users will have network printers since the jetdirect cards sometimes cost an additional $500-$600+
There are tons of print servers that work with USB printers, and most work better than parallel printer servers which tend to get overflowed and congested easily.
For all other periphial devices (keyboards, mice, printers, etc) usb is a downgrade.
No. Absolutely not. Let me tell you why USB is better:
1. High-speed and serial. Good combination. Parallel is difficult to control at high speed and the typical ECP/EPP chips require an IRQ, which is unacceptable in modern computing.
2. No hard limit. 127 devices per controller is a good threshold. If you have only two USB ports you can get a nice little hub until you have all the ports you need.
3. Power over USB. You can get decent power of USB reliably for small devices. Web cams, input devices, joysticks, controllers, label printers, anything of that sort can be easily connected and powered from one small thin cable. ?
4. Best OS support. USB is very well supported, and easily. Implementing good USB support is not hard, which is why all modern OSes have nifty support. The ability for devices to identify themselves is key. If you plug your PS/2 keyboard into your PS/2 mouse slot, what happens? You get no input. On some machines you can damage equipment (*cough* Sun *cough). This is impossible with USB. One connector, one standard.
5. Hot-swappable. Why shouldn't you be able to hot-swap your keyboard if one breaks? Or external CD-ROM? Or thumbdrive?
USB is an upgrade. Between USB and FireWire there is absolutely no realistic modern need for dedicated controllers like UARTs and keyboard interfaces. It's a waste of brainpower and silicon.
Sign up for a regular package you want, and call up and ask for a static ip address and a reverse address.
Most of the black lists out there that block spam based on "dynamic" ranges do so based on what IPs are allocated to dial-up ISPs and home style cable modems. I've not had any problems with speakeasy's being accounts of any type being blacklisted. Your mileage may vary. Even if you don't get a static IP from speakeasy, the lease times are very much staticish. I dont have speakeasy no more, but I had the same IP from them for like 18 months - even though it was "dynamic".
XP is fine and dandy with SCSI and parallel devices. I have a number of data acquisiton devices I hand-built that use a parallel interface that have zero problems with XP or XP SP2.
The post you quoted was in 2003, which was quite some time ago. It is a nearly trivial matter to write a decent device driver for parellel devices - I have written nearly a dozen. It is not any harder to write a SCSI driver for Windows XP than it is for any other operating system.
Finally, it's odd you decided to link to the post you did, since I followed it for a long time. I too, had a similiar model scanner from the big Nikkon in the sky. The MS engineer in question was not commenting on the fact that XP doesn't support SCSI or parellel devices, just that vendors who had previously done much work with parellel and scsi devices had basically done little-to-nothing to support to XP. Vendors are not likely to spend time re-writing drivers for discontinued products for new systems. The core issue is really that many parallel devices sold in the 90's were really internally SCSI devices which had been modified for mass-market appeal. Scanners, for example, previously had been SCSI (or proprietary) devices, but when the mass market consumers started wanting them, it was an "easy" fix to convert them to parallel devices with a pass-through. The problem is that they were poorly done, and used techniques that weren't really intended.
The bottom line I think is that you are being quite disingenious with your little snarky post. Most manufacturers abandoned using the parallel port because it is slow, limited, and clunky. Most manufactuers abandoned SCSI for external devices because it is overly complex and provides few benefits over USB.
I've really looked, and the answer is going to be a big no.
I used to admin a 2000 server network, and I never found what you were looking. I worked on a building an add-on for any old distribution, but there just isn't enough stuff out there to support it.
Well to be fair, to setup a directory on a Win2k or 2k3 server requires running one command, stepping through a 5 point wizard, and maybe rebooting.
To attach a machine to that directory requires one simple action on the client, which can be automated into the Windows install, and a reboot. It takes about 3-5 minutes, with no really manual configuration.
The reasoning is mathematically sound. It is not a supposition. Dying younger from cancer or emphasema is much cheaper than living an additional 30 years and being sickly and poor.
One of the states in the US is going through this debate right now. If you want to penalize people based on them being disproportonately expensive to treat, healthcare wise, then you should tax *non-smokers*. The smokers more than pay for themselves. In fact, they actually subsidize care for non-smoking related cancer patients in most areas.
Eventually the state will have to deal with the loss of revenue but by then they'll actually be seeing benefits from reduced health care, etc.
Uhh, no. That's the claim - don't get me wrong - but if it did actually happen that way then well its purely by co-incidence. What happens is that smokers already pay drastically higher insurance rates. The poor people who smoke and die early from cancer and other smoking related diseases actually *save* the government money in the long-run, since being dead is cheaper than being old and ailing.
Okay, well, you maybe don't think that, but the statistics are there, and they are pretty clear. About the same number of smokers, about 20% fewer cigarattes, from all sources, combined.
The problem is, like tobacco taxes, is that it will cause people to consume less, and then, eventually, lead to lower taxes.
The State of Maine had a problem like this. The State needed more revenue, so they hiked the tobacco tax drastically. By the next year, smoking/tobacco sales had dropped to a level so that revenue would be flat or almost flat, instead of higher. They expected that since people were addicted, they'd keep buying. So they raised the taxes again, which will very likely reduce smoking again.
The bottom line? The same-ish number of people smoke and cause themselves harm, but smoke somewhat less than before, maybe about 20% fewer cigarettes.
Now the State is in a death spiral of taxes. They raise them, people cutback. Eventually the income will stop staying flat, and will actually fall.
And then what? They'll want to *cut* taxes to encourage smoking to *raise* revenues, but it'll be all politically incorrect to do so, and the State will have to solve its funding problem on something other than peoples addiction.
The same thing will happen with gas. People will drive less, buy less gas, car pool more, buy black market gas more, and generally, find ways around the tax. That's it, the bottom line. Then CA will have to address the real issue. How to raise revenue in an even fair way.
The best, if you want a really rich client side UI, is to hope that the mono people can make WinForms work well and reliably through mono on many platforms.
A "NoTouch" deployed.NET application is a very nice, handy thing. The.NET Runtime on the client PC runs the binary in a sandbox. This means you can have access to the entire native.NET API, which is really pretty much huge, and still maintain a safe environment without the silly ActiveX singing bullcrap that was supposed to work before.
So, maybe, if that happens, you'll have some decent web browser-based apps. Google does the best job of anyone, MS a second on some of its stuff (Outlook Web Access, springs to mind), but let's be real here. Javascript + XHTML + CSS is a big, nasty, god forsaken hack that has put us years back in UI design and usability. I'd rather a flat experience than that.
So, if Mono gets done ever and a FireFox extension added, you'd have a really nice chance for rich, responsive, standards compliant web-apps.
Actually, there is no fundamental difference.
Ahh, no. Mafia Violence = people being killed, or physically hurt by big men with weapons. Political pressure = persuassion, corruption and/or undue influence.
This has nothing to do with the abstract. Political pressure is not in any equivalent to physical violence. Period.
When I go to rent a new apartment I need to make sure that the apartment fits my needs. Am I wasting the rental agent's time because the apartment I view is inappropriate and I go on the the next one?
If you use a real-estate agent, and then get them to do all the research, and don't use them for the sale/lease, but instead contact the seller/owner directly, you've acted unethically. A lot of this about intent. Did you intend to rent an apartment from that service person?
That's not being 'ethical', that's being stupid.
There is a line. If you never intend to buy from a certain dealership, then you've acted unethically. It's a false pretense. Let's say there are two Nissan dealerships in your "area" - one close by - like 10 miles near the city, and another, in the boondocks, 120 miles away. It's unethical for you to do all your research the one 10 miles from your house, and then go the dealership 2 hrs away to complete the sale at a lower "out of the city" price. Is it illegal? No. Moral? Probably not. Ethical? No. Is it legally theft? No, not all. Likewise, if you just go to a dealership and test drive a bunch of cars when you know you can't afford it, or can't buy it, or whatever. It's wrong.
Talking to salesperson at a specialty TV store to get information and recommendation and then buying the same TV at Walmart because it's cheaper since they don't employ qualified salespeople, THAT I'll agree is kind of cheap.
It's just a question of ethics. That's all.
The TV example was given to me by a hasidic (sp?) friend who has shown me alot about his faith. Something like the TV example would be a very grave "crime", akin to a fraud. You appealed the TV sales persons sense of need to obtain something of value in return for nothing, all to further your own greed. Very very unethical.
The same goes for music. Is copyright infringement theft in a legal sense? No, not at all. Is it ethically equivalent? To some people, clearly, yes.
Has it occured to you that a percentage of salespeople are also unethical and are ripping people off?
Bad behaviour is not excusable because of other bad behaviour. That's all on that topic. Also, again, I know a lot of people who'd never ever even go some place without a personal recommendation and a check with the chamber of commerce and better business board.
Are you suggesting that the movie someone downloads and watchs on their computer is the same quality experience as attending a movie with a huge screen and nice surround sound? It's not the same, and doesn't have the same value. People that watch movies in theaters still watch movies in theaters. People that buy DVDs still buy DVDs. If this wasn't true, then wouldn't the DVD Market or the box office have suffered? They haven't. Their sales numbers are directly proportional to the quality of the movies they produce. P2P downloads have no more affect on their income than the weather.
The weather isn't controllable. Individual actions are. You can claim all day that P2P downloads don't affect income, and I am sure they dont affect it as much as the various sources claim. However, it stretches credibility to suggest that there aren't at least SOME people who elect to download rather than buy. It may be small, but clearly, there are those people. Regardless, there are people who believe strongly that a person has the right to control their creative works to any degree they see fit, and that abusing that is Wrong, with a capital W. Illegal? Who knows. Unethical? Yes. You are enjoying someone elses bounty. You ought to go by their rules. That's the fundamental underpinning of the argument. Do you do what you want, or what the creator of the work wants?
If the MPAA was really concerned with copyright infringement, they would be after the huge Asian market that is almost exclusively illegal copies.
They clearly are. The WIPO, WTO, etc are all moves designed to pressure Asian piraters who globally reduce the value of DVDs. However, combatting this problem doesn't meant that the MPAA should do nothing else.
Right now the quality is poor from downloaded movies. However, there are people actively trying to change that. There are significant numbers of people trading full quality videos with the intent of producing identical or nearly identical DVD copies. That number of people is going to grow.
This is not the story in the music industry. $18 for a CD? The people, the artists, that put their time, effort, and creative ability into creating that CD are not being properly compensated. So people don't feel as good about buying them, and rightly so. Download your music. Buy a t-shirt and concert ticket instead.
Do whatever you want. However, don't come bitching to the rest of the world when you ISP turns your name over to the owner of the works you who works you are violating. The fact remains that regardless of the RIAA or MPAA, the individual musicans themselves (remember Metalica) are against you copying their works without permission. At the end of the day, you are subverting (for the most part, some artists are more liberal, of course) what the creator(s) of the work want. You can wrap that however you want, but my point is, there are many people who would never do that, despite the circumstances. It is a fundamental issue of freedom and fairness. Do you have a right to appropriate something that you did not create against the will of someone else? It's an actual of intellectual violence.
Terminal Services catches GDI calls, things like "draw a line here" or "select this brush", compresses them to high heaven, and sends them down the wire. It does not grab the rendered bitmap data. This is why TSE is enormously faster and more bandwidth-friendly than VNC, and very similar to X11.
I have to disagree with you. I have examined the protocol, and the source for rdesktop before, and there is no relation to the commands RDP uses and GDI calls.
RDP is better than VNC simply because it "knows" exactly which bits of the screen have been repainted, by hooking into the paint event on all hDc's displayed. The whole process happens in kernel level, with very low latency. In comparsion, VNC and other apps have to come user space and blit a copy of the framebuffer, do some type of compare operation - essentially "poll" the framebuffer - to find what changes. There has been development on a low-level "hooks" interface that will get closer to the actual redraws, but it's still a long way from how low RDP interfaces with Windows. There is also some good work being done on interfacing via the video driver, and mirroring that off into a lower-latency framebuffer for vnc to work with.
On the server, RDP uses its own video driver to render display output by constructing the rendering information into network packets using RDP protocol and sending them over the network to the client. On the client, RDP receives rendering data and interprets the packets into corresponding Microsoft Win32® graphics device interface (GDI) API calls.
Notice: the client constructs GDI calls based on the data sent over. They are not GDI calls natively.
RDP is conceptually very different from X11, and much more similiar to VNC.
Just so you know.. there was a time in this country that the ethical guidelines that people lived by were a bit more stringent. It wasn't all patina tinged 50's vision, but still...
...my grandparents never would imagine talking to a salesperson and getting information from him unless they had already decided to buy a product from that outlet. Today, people go and shop around, and talk to different sales people before making a decision to buy a something. You might go to 3-4 car dealerships and take test drives, kick the tires, and spend an hour or two at each one before you decide.
There are people who really consider that unethical. Those sales people could have lost another sale, or another opportunity by spending time with you, and it causes them have to spend lots of time with a large number of people all for no payoff. Today, it's a fact of business. Salespeople for big products will chase you down, fly to your business, whatnot.
To this day my grandmother would never walk into Best Buy, talk to the sales person about TVs, which are good, which are junky, which are just right and then go buy a similiar TV at Wal-Mart cause it's $20 cheaper. It just won't happen. She considers it theft. Clearly, it's not stealing it from the shelves, but it's costing them opportunity.
Likewise, with copyright infringement. Downloading a movie without authorisation isn't purely theft. No one is deprived of something they didn't have before. Things are net neutral in the physical property department, save maybe bandwidth, but that's not relevant here.
What you have done is deprived the people involved in that movie of a head to add to their headcount. The movie theater owner of $8 plus maybe concessions. The advertisers who paid to get their products on screen, etc. Do they have a right to your money and eyeballs? No, not at all. Just like a TV sales person has no right to sell you a TV. It's all optional.
Regardless, I am just saying, there are people alive who believe that if you examine an action, and ask the question "what would happen if everyone did this activity?", and the answer is negative, you shouldn't do it. They would and do consider that loss of opportunity - the opportunity for a sale, the opportunity for popularity, all that - as a form of theft. Maybe no punishable like theft of a physical object, but certainly no more respectable.
I believe Windows remote desktop does this
You believe entirely, 100% wrong. Windows does no such thing.
Remote desktop actually works very simply, much like VNC does. It's simpler than using a remote X server as well.
Take a look at the source code for rdesktop sometime. It handles mouse and keyboard redirection, audio streaming (two way), and a video protocol.
Remote desktop "feels fast" because of two things. For one, apparently it has some good kernel level hooks so that where other stuff has to "watch" the frame buffer to figure out changes, remote desktop is notified. It's a much more efficent method, and it means that the client is truly dumb. It doesn't have to know anything about fonts, or widgets, or windows, or anything.
X works quite a bit differently. It also doesn't have to know about widgets and all that stuff. Windows RDP goes "after" everything is drawn and takes a look at the end product - the compisited ready to draw images or portions of portions of the screen. X actually brings the primitives over the wire. Which can be sometimes much, much faster and more bandwidth effective. It depends on the application.
The Win2k kernel source isn't particular difficult to get a view at. I've been a contractor on a job that was working on a deeply system related project and the code I reviewed was all professional, well laid out, clean and nicely commentted. Additionally there was a very well maintained design document - which was up to date including hot fixes and patches - as well as a professionally edited style guide and implementation log.
That was all kernel code, or very low level system services. (Stuff that would all be in the kernel in a linux system but ran in userspace on Windows).
The code I saw that was for supporting tools was a little less clean. Applets, shims, drivers, etc were more of a patchwork of style.
I think the difference in my eyes was that projects that were large - developed by a time - were much more "strict" while standalone bits that were "owned" by a single person tended to be more unique.
You assume that Google did not have a clearly state blog policy.
I start by assuming that since he got fired so quickly, without much messing around, that Google had a clear policy, he violated it, and he was terminated.
Slashdot Mirror
I am never going to defend the Iraq war, but your statement is just beyond the pale uninformed and sad/funny.
1. Bush neither ignored nor used the UN. He tried to appease both camps within US domestic politics. If the end game was inevitable war with Iraq, which seems clear it was, he should have done it immediately, without warning, and without announcement. Telegraphing an impending war for 18 months is not a good strategy for anything.
2. Regarding a "war for oil", it's laughable. First, everyone including the President knew this war would make oil less accessible - as it has - and less cheap. If Iraq was about oil, Bush would have secretly ordered concessions to Iraq, and fasttracked normalization with Iraq - and gained huge international applause for it. This would have release a huge amount of oil into OPEC's markets. However, this also is interesting, since OPEC would have simply reduced production in other countries, thereby stabilizing prices. What is mostly likely is that Bush simpl believed his own line, about Iraq and Hussein and terror. He is an idiot, but probably a sincere one. All evidence that supported his case was The Truth, and everything else trivial.
3. Regarding US standings in the world, the world has hated the US for a long time. During the Clinton years it was a period of outward smilies but behind the scenes plotting and antagonism. Europe has had chilly relations with the US for decades. As has parts of Asia and of course the entire Middle East save Israel. All of the fake good will could not bring peace to the middle-east, an end to North Koreas nuclear ambitions, an end to Irans nuclear ambitions, or any of that. Under Clinton the Sec State went to North Korea to get them to cease any nuclear program. What we got was a big bunch of lies and promises. I am not blaming anything on Clinton, but civil war and ill feelings towards the US are not new, and did not start with Bush.
4. Regarding civil war in Iraq. What you don't realize is that Iraq has been a in lopsided civil war for 20 years. The Kurds have been a break-away province for nearly 15 years, and fighting had raged long before that. Iraq is not good, but the one good difference is that the threats made by the UN and Clinton and the whole of Europe were actually acted upon by Bush. Foreign policy is shambles to be sure, but again, this is not new. Whats important to recognize though is that US had significant and strong opposition to attacking Afganistan, even faced with a videotaped confession from bin Laden.
The UN does not act to promote peace. They treat all nations as equals, even when clearly not all nations should be treated as such. A nation of despots and tryants is treated equally to a nation of democratic traditions and generally liberal attitudes. Faced with obvious evidence of wrongdoing the UN is in capable of good.
That is fine and dandy for scanners, but what about reliable 15k rpm drive in a hardware raid configuration, MS is grouping them under the label of "legacy".
They did no such thing. The e-mail reference clearly is talking about peripherials. So long as you have a controller with decent BIOS and drivers, your SCSI equipment will be just fine.
Second, SATA is a great replacement for SCSI. I loved SCSI, but now its like a religious experience to work with it. SATA drives are typically identical to SCSI counterparts in terms of platter and mechanics but with a different interface attached. They are fast - as fast or faster than SCSI models, use similiarly low CPU power, reasonably priced, and all that.
The onboard parallel port is also still the best way to connect a printer last a checked
Flatly wrong. It's inferior in virtually ever way. First, parallel transfers still to this day generally cause an interupt, which is bad for performance. Print a large document and all of the sudden your new top of the line PC gets stuttery. Plus, you only get one (generally) per PC, and never more than three. That's sucky.
USB printers have a tradeoff in software overhead and support for them is buggy on any platform
Not quite. What you are thinking about is crappy printers that have "management software" attached. Those are cheapo crappy printers. That software usually is bloated, buggy, ugly, etc. There is nothing inherent to USB that makes this required. Many parallel printers (aka HP and EPSON have had this for a long time).
There are tons of decent or excellent USB printers that are "inf" only installs. You are associating USB with one brand of printer, I think. I have an Xerox laser printer on my desk which required precisely this to work: plug in power, plug USB cable into USB port on PC, wait a moment, ready to go. No CDs, no installers, nothing. It Just Works. I can have 10 of these printers installer.
This means no significant overhead and you can perform an inf only install, no worries about installers seeing the printer or concerns about whether the software runs on your platform, or setting up peer2peer sharing, etc.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Peer2Peer sharing?
Works better with an hp jet direct this way too. That becomes important as they start taking parallel connections out of low end laserjets. If this keeps up only corporate users will have network printers since the jetdirect cards sometimes cost an additional $500-$600+
There are tons of print servers that work with USB printers, and most work better than parallel printer servers which tend to get overflowed and congested easily.
For all other periphial devices (keyboards, mice, printers, etc) usb is a downgrade.
No. Absolutely not. Let me tell you why USB is better:
1. High-speed and serial. Good combination. Parallel is difficult to control at high speed and the typical ECP/EPP chips require an IRQ, which is unacceptable in modern computing.
2. No hard limit. 127 devices per controller is a good threshold. If you have only two USB ports you can get a nice little hub until you have all the ports you need.
3. Power over USB. You can get decent power of USB reliably for small devices. Web cams, input devices, joysticks, controllers, label printers, anything of that sort can be easily connected and powered from one small thin cable.
?
4. Best OS support. USB is very well supported, and easily. Implementing good USB support is not hard, which is why all modern OSes have nifty support. The ability for devices to identify themselves is key. If you plug your PS/2 keyboard into your PS/2 mouse slot, what happens? You get no input. On some machines you can damage equipment (*cough* Sun *cough). This is impossible with USB. One connector, one standard.
5. Hot-swappable. Why shouldn't you be able to hot-swap your keyboard if one breaks? Or external CD-ROM? Or thumbdrive?
USB is an upgrade. Between USB and FireWire there is absolutely no realistic modern need for dedicated controllers like UARTs and keyboard interfaces. It's a waste of brainpower and silicon.
That's why I love you, Gigs.
Sign up for a regular package you want, and call up and ask for a static ip address and a reverse address.
Most of the black lists out there that block spam based on "dynamic" ranges do so based on what IPs are allocated to dial-up ISPs and home style cable modems. I've not had any problems with speakeasy's being accounts of any type being blacklisted. Your mileage may vary. Even if you don't get a static IP from speakeasy, the lease times are very much staticish. I dont have speakeasy no more, but I had the same IP from them for like 18 months - even though it was "dynamic".
XP is fine and dandy with SCSI and parallel devices. I have a number of data acquisiton devices I hand-built that use a parallel interface that have zero problems with XP or XP SP2.
The post you quoted was in 2003, which was quite some time ago. It is a nearly trivial matter to write a decent device driver for parellel devices - I have written nearly a dozen. It is not any harder to write a SCSI driver for Windows XP than it is for any other operating system.
Finally, it's odd you decided to link to the post you did, since I followed it for a long time. I too, had a similiar model scanner from the big Nikkon in the sky. The MS engineer in question was not commenting on the fact that XP doesn't support SCSI or parellel devices, just that vendors who had previously done much work with parellel and scsi devices had basically done little-to-nothing to support to XP. Vendors are not likely to spend time re-writing drivers for discontinued products for new systems. The core issue is really that many parallel devices sold in the 90's were really internally SCSI devices which had been modified for mass-market appeal. Scanners, for example, previously had been SCSI (or proprietary) devices, but when the mass market consumers started wanting them, it was an "easy" fix to convert them to parallel devices with a pass-through. The problem is that they were poorly done, and used techniques that weren't really intended.
The bottom line I think is that you are being quite disingenious with your little snarky post. Most manufacturers abandoned using the parallel port because it is slow, limited, and clunky. Most manufactuers abandoned SCSI for external devices because it is overly complex and provides few benefits over USB.
Yes, speakeasy gives static ips by request, and they'll even set your reverse dns name however you want.
I've really looked, and the answer is going to be a big no.
I used to admin a 2000 server network, and I never found what you were looking. I worked on a building an add-on for any old distribution, but there just isn't enough stuff out there to support it.
Well to be fair, to setup a directory on a Win2k or 2k3 server requires running one command, stepping through a 5 point wizard, and maybe rebooting.
To attach a machine to that directory requires one simple action on the client, which can be automated into the Windows install, and a reboot. It takes about 3-5 minutes, with no really manual configuration.
The reasoning is mathematically sound. It is not a supposition. Dying younger from cancer or emphasema is much cheaper than living an additional 30 years and being sickly and poor.
One of the states in the US is going through this debate right now. If you want to penalize people based on them being disproportonately expensive to treat, healthcare wise, then you should tax *non-smokers*. The smokers more than pay for themselves. In fact, they actually subsidize care for non-smoking related cancer patients in most areas.
Eventually the state will have to deal with the loss of revenue but by then they'll actually be seeing benefits from reduced health care, etc.
Uhh, no. That's the claim - don't get me wrong - but if it did actually happen that way then well its purely by co-incidence. What happens is that smokers already pay drastically higher insurance rates. The poor people who smoke and die early from cancer and other smoking related diseases actually *save* the government money in the long-run, since being dead is cheaper than being old and ailing.
Yeah, well, why would the CD stop installing if it had been used.
Okay, well, you maybe don't think that, but the statistics are there, and they are pretty clear. About the same number of smokers, about 20% fewer cigarattes, from all sources, combined.
The problem is, like tobacco taxes, is that it will cause people to consume less, and then, eventually, lead to lower taxes.
The State of Maine had a problem like this. The State needed more revenue, so they hiked the tobacco tax drastically. By the next year, smoking/tobacco sales had dropped to a level so that revenue would be flat or almost flat, instead of higher. They expected that since people were addicted, they'd keep buying. So they raised the taxes again, which will very likely reduce smoking again.
The bottom line? The same-ish number of people smoke and cause themselves harm, but smoke somewhat less than before, maybe about 20% fewer cigarettes.
Now the State is in a death spiral of taxes. They raise them, people cutback. Eventually the income will stop staying flat, and will actually fall.
And then what? They'll want to *cut* taxes to encourage smoking to *raise* revenues, but it'll be all politically incorrect to do so, and the State will have to solve its funding problem on something other than peoples addiction.
The same thing will happen with gas. People will drive less, buy less gas, car pool more, buy black market gas more, and generally, find ways around the tax. That's it, the bottom line. Then CA will have to address the real issue. How to raise revenue in an even fair way.
IE5+ already supports what I talked about. FF and Mono/Winforms is all we really need at this point for it to be crossplatform.
The best, if you want a really rich client side UI, is to hope that the mono people can make WinForms work well and reliably through mono on many platforms.
.NET application is a very nice, handy thing. The .NET Runtime on the client PC runs the binary in a sandbox. This means you can have access to the entire native .NET API, which is really pretty much huge, and still maintain a safe environment without the silly ActiveX singing bullcrap that was supposed to work before.
A "NoTouch" deployed
So, maybe, if that happens, you'll have some decent web browser-based apps. Google does the best job of anyone, MS a second on some of its stuff (Outlook Web Access, springs to mind), but let's be real here. Javascript + XHTML + CSS is a big, nasty, god forsaken hack that has put us years back in UI design and usability. I'd rather a flat experience than that.
So, if Mono gets done ever and a FireFox extension added, you'd have a really nice chance for rich, responsive, standards compliant web-apps.
Actually, there is no fundamental difference.
Ahh, no. Mafia Violence = people being killed, or physically hurt by big men with weapons. Political pressure = persuassion, corruption and/or undue influence.
This has nothing to do with the abstract. Political pressure is not in any equivalent to physical violence. Period.
Political pressure and violence are the not same thing.
Really, it's a whole different category of activity, and it shouldn't be joked about.
When I go to rent a new apartment I need to make sure that the apartment fits my needs. Am I wasting the rental agent's time because the apartment I view is inappropriate and I go on the the next one?
If you use a real-estate agent, and then get them to do all the research, and don't use them for the sale/lease, but instead contact the seller/owner directly, you've acted unethically. A lot of this about intent. Did you intend to rent an apartment from that service person?
That's not being 'ethical', that's being stupid.
There is a line. If you never intend to buy from a certain dealership, then you've acted unethically. It's a false pretense. Let's say there are two Nissan dealerships in your "area" - one close by - like 10 miles near the city, and another, in the boondocks, 120 miles away. It's unethical for you to do all your research the one 10 miles from your house, and then go the dealership 2 hrs away to complete the sale at a lower "out of the city" price. Is it illegal? No. Moral? Probably not. Ethical? No. Is it legally theft? No, not all. Likewise, if you just go to a dealership and test drive a bunch of cars when you know you can't afford it, or can't buy it, or whatever. It's wrong.
Talking to salesperson at a specialty TV store to get information and recommendation and then buying the same TV at Walmart because it's cheaper since they don't employ qualified salespeople, THAT I'll agree is kind of cheap.
It's just a question of ethics. That's all.
The TV example was given to me by a hasidic (sp?) friend who has shown me alot about his faith. Something like the TV example would be a very grave "crime", akin to a fraud. You appealed the TV sales persons sense of need to obtain something of value in return for nothing, all to further your own greed. Very very unethical.
The same goes for music. Is copyright infringement theft in a legal sense? No, not at all. Is it ethically equivalent? To some people, clearly, yes.
Has it occured to you that a percentage of salespeople are also unethical and are ripping people off?
Bad behaviour is not excusable because of other bad behaviour. That's all on that topic. Also, again, I know a lot of people who'd never ever even go some place without a personal recommendation and a check with the chamber of commerce and better business board.
Are you suggesting that the movie someone downloads and watchs on their computer is the same quality experience as attending a movie with a huge screen and nice surround sound? It's not the same, and doesn't have the same value. People that watch movies in theaters still watch movies in theaters. People that buy DVDs still buy DVDs. If this wasn't true, then wouldn't the DVD Market or the box office have suffered? They haven't. Their sales numbers are directly proportional to the quality of the movies they produce. P2P downloads have no more affect on their income than the weather.
The weather isn't controllable. Individual actions are. You can claim all day that P2P downloads don't affect income, and I am sure they dont affect it as much as the various sources claim. However, it stretches credibility to suggest that there aren't at least SOME people who elect to download rather than buy. It may be small, but clearly, there are those people. Regardless, there are people who believe strongly that a person has the right to control their creative works to any degree they see fit, and that abusing that is Wrong, with a capital W. Illegal? Who knows. Unethical? Yes. You are enjoying someone elses bounty. You ought to go by their rules. That's the fundamental underpinning of the argument. Do you do what you want, or what the creator of the work wants?
If the MPAA was really concerned with copyright infringement, they would be after the huge Asian market that is almost exclusively illegal copies.
They clearly are. The WIPO, WTO, etc are all moves designed to pressure Asian piraters who globally reduce the value of DVDs. However, combatting this problem doesn't meant that the MPAA should do nothing else.
Right now the quality is poor from downloaded movies. However, there are people actively trying to change that. There are significant numbers of people trading full quality videos with the intent of producing identical or nearly identical DVD copies. That number of people is going to grow.
This is not the story in the music industry. $18 for a CD? The people, the artists, that put their time, effort, and creative ability into creating that CD are not being properly compensated. So people don't feel as good about buying them, and rightly so. Download your music. Buy a t-shirt and concert ticket instead.
Do whatever you want. However, don't come bitching to the rest of the world when you ISP turns your name over to the owner of the works you who works you are violating. The fact remains that regardless of the RIAA or MPAA, the individual musicans themselves (remember Metalica) are against you copying their works without permission. At the end of the day, you are subverting (for the most part, some artists are more liberal, of course) what the creator(s) of the work want. You can wrap that however you want, but my point is, there are many people who would never do that, despite the circumstances. It is a fundamental issue of freedom and fairness. Do you have a right to appropriate something that you did not create against the will of someone else? It's an actual of intellectual violence.
Terminal Services catches GDI calls, things like "draw a line here" or "select this brush", compresses them to high heaven, and sends them down the wire. It does not grab the rendered bitmap data. This is why TSE is enormously faster and more bandwidth-friendly than VNC, and very similar to X11.
= /library/en-us/termserv/termserv/remote_desktop_pr otocol.asp
I have to disagree with you. I have examined the protocol, and the source for rdesktop before, and there is no relation to the commands RDP uses and GDI calls.
RDP is better than VNC simply because it "knows" exactly which bits of the screen have been repainted, by hooking into the paint event on all hDc's displayed. The whole process happens in kernel level, with very low latency. In comparsion, VNC and other apps have to come user space and blit a copy of the framebuffer, do some type of compare operation - essentially "poll" the framebuffer - to find what changes. There has been development on a low-level "hooks" interface that will get closer to the actual redraws, but it's still a long way from how low RDP interfaces with Windows. There is also some good work being done on interfacing via the video driver, and mirroring that off into a lower-latency framebuffer for vnc to work with.
Check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
The relevant portion is:
On the server, RDP uses its own video driver to render display output by constructing the rendering information into network packets using RDP protocol and sending them over the network to the client. On the client, RDP receives rendering data and interprets the packets into corresponding Microsoft Win32® graphics device interface (GDI) API calls.
Notice: the client constructs GDI calls based on the data sent over. They are not GDI calls natively.
RDP is conceptually very different from X11, and much more similiar to VNC.
Just so you know.. there was a time in this country that the ethical guidelines that people lived by were a bit more stringent. It wasn't all patina tinged 50's vision, but still...
...my grandparents never would imagine talking to a salesperson and getting information from him unless they had already decided to buy a product from that outlet. Today, people go and shop around, and talk to different sales people before making a decision to buy a something. You might go to 3-4 car dealerships and take test drives, kick the tires, and spend an hour or two at each one before you decide.
There are people who really consider that unethical. Those sales people could have lost another sale, or another opportunity by spending time with you, and it causes them have to spend lots of time with a large number of people all for no payoff. Today, it's a fact of business. Salespeople for big products will chase you down, fly to your business, whatnot.
To this day my grandmother would never walk into Best Buy, talk to the sales person about TVs, which are good, which are junky, which are just right and then go buy a similiar TV at Wal-Mart cause it's $20 cheaper. It just won't happen. She considers it theft. Clearly, it's not stealing it from the shelves, but it's costing them opportunity.
Likewise, with copyright infringement. Downloading a movie without authorisation isn't purely theft. No one is deprived of something they didn't have before. Things are net neutral in the physical property department, save maybe bandwidth, but that's not relevant here.
What you have done is deprived the people involved in that movie of a head to add to their headcount. The movie theater owner of $8 plus maybe concessions. The advertisers who paid to get their products on screen, etc. Do they have a right to your money and eyeballs? No, not at all. Just like a TV sales person has no right to sell you a TV. It's all optional.
Regardless, I am just saying, there are people alive who believe that if you examine an action, and ask the question "what would happen if everyone did this activity?", and the answer is negative, you shouldn't do it. They would and do consider that loss of opportunity - the opportunity for a sale, the opportunity for popularity, all that - as a form of theft. Maybe no punishable like theft of a physical object, but certainly no more respectable.
I believe Windows remote desktop does this
You believe entirely, 100% wrong. Windows does no such thing.
Remote desktop actually works very simply, much like VNC does. It's simpler than using a remote X server as well.
Take a look at the source code for rdesktop sometime. It handles mouse and keyboard redirection, audio streaming (two way), and a video protocol.
Remote desktop "feels fast" because of two things. For one, apparently it has some good kernel level hooks so that where other stuff has to "watch" the frame buffer to figure out changes, remote desktop is notified. It's a much more efficent method, and it means that the client is truly dumb. It doesn't have to know anything about fonts, or widgets, or windows, or anything.
X works quite a bit differently. It also doesn't have to know about widgets and all that stuff. Windows RDP goes "after" everything is drawn and takes a look at the end product - the compisited ready to draw images or portions of portions of the screen. X actually brings the primitives over the wire. Which can be sometimes much, much faster and more bandwidth effective. It depends on the application.
This is a good short inro on xlib programming.
The Win2k kernel source isn't particular difficult to get a view at. I've been a contractor on a job that was working on a deeply system related project and the code I reviewed was all professional, well laid out, clean and nicely commentted. Additionally there was a very well maintained design document - which was up to date including hot fixes and patches - as well as a professionally edited style guide and implementation log.
That was all kernel code, or very low level system services. (Stuff that would all be in the kernel in a linux system but ran in userspace on Windows).
The code I saw that was for supporting tools was a little less clean. Applets, shims, drivers, etc were more of a patchwork of style.
I think the difference in my eyes was that projects that were large - developed by a time - were much more "strict" while standalone bits that were "owned" by a single person tended to be more unique.
You assume that Google did not have a clearly state blog policy.
I start by assuming that since he got fired so quickly, without much messing around, that Google had a clear policy, he violated it, and he was terminated.
Is SPAM such a nasty problem that we have to suspend the US Constitution in its totality to solve it?