Even if he didn't provide relicensing rights, companies and assets can change ownership through restructuring, M+A, court settlements, etc. in ways which may not be limitable through commercial license agreements.
The majority of people who contribute on Slashdot are not only tech savvy, but have some understanding of licensing, copyright and the like.
Yes, "some understanding" in the same sense that knowledge of the Jargon File provides some understanding of software engineering, or Call of Duty provides some understanding of assault tactics. See:
I especially enjoy that users are only getting mad when explicitly told by the media to do so in 2009, especially when the substantial point being protested (Facebook can store/reuse your user-generated data) has been in their TOS from the beginning.
Facebook could derive the same rights to reuse user-contributed data from every previous TOS they had, and equally well from the re-revised TOS that users are celebrating now, as easily evidenced by significant user-generated FB content being made searchable on Gooble, being used as part of their internal social advertising, and through any number of internal and external apps with public-facing content and data repositories.
This present round of anger confirms that users neither read, nor substantially care about TOS agreements in general. The outrage at around the new year over the breast-feeding photo censorship, which relied on asserting user rights allegedly in the TOS, should have clued in several thousands of users to the now objectionable changes in the TOS as they read it to understand the allowable photo content clauses they were specifically raging against, but that obviously didn't happen.
I wonder what part of the TOS the sensationalists will trawl next month to keep the ad revenue coming.
Since we don't know the extent that potential cohabitating forms of life would compete with carbon life for a similar commonly assumed set of material and energy resources, as a first step I would settle for detecting unexpected changes in water chemistry after carbon life is removed from the system. We cannot at this point understand what "flourish" or "plentiful" mean in the context of a previously unknown system of life. It may be that mineral life would flourish or fail in the absence of carbon life.
There may be broader symbioses in play between carbon and perhaps a mineral system of life, which would provide insights into how plants came to rely on rare magnesium ions to be able to pull slightly less rare carbon from the environment into our known food webs, and also how macroscopic organisms were able to durably evolve to rely on dietary minerals found in rare to trace quantities on the Earth's surface for essential biological functions.
I experience similar symptoms on my first-gen MBP from time to time.
Check for applications/daemons (particularly scanner and peripheral helpers) launching from the various StartupItems folders. Also, the startup sequence sometimes inserts a hard disk check if you've shut down uncleanly recently, or if the disk is dieing. Also, try installing the next OS X _combo_ update when it becomes available, as the small deltas in sequence are alleged to miss some files on occasion.
Also, some older builds of 10.5 combine the "generate previews of files" thread/functionality into Finder in such a way that every file that is visible must have its preview icon generated before Finder will respond to anything else. A desktop full of previewable items will add many seconds to the time it takes to get to a productive state from the login prompt. Apple has recently reconfigured the preview functionality as a separate process or some such to fix the issue.
Eyeballing the Richards benchmark chart tells me that 64-bit vs 32-bit explains more of the variation in the results than operating system version choice. I've not run the statistics, but I wouldn't expect the differences to be statistically significant at any interesting confidence interval with the very small sample size in the test.
Also, 12% on an operation that takes a total of less than a second is uninteresting for me as a human in the general case. 12% on encoding a video, report generation, pushing frames, or opening a PDF would be far more interesting.
Why is it a flawed test to check the read/write speed from USB to HD using the primary HD? That's where (IMO) a very significant majority of users will be keeping their files, it makes sense to speed-test transfer rates from the most common file location.
It is flawed because the test they conducted is next to irrelevant to the real world situation where it is next to impossible to determine or control where a particular user file will physically be located on a hard disk, due to the hundreds/thousands of free space holes created by OS configuration/install/updates, application installs/updates, temporary file caches, file system options, saved user documents, log files, etc. (ignoring all the other fun things that the disk/controller hardware can do at the physical layer). In other words, there is no "most common file location", just the some user files are on a particular logical volume at some particular time, which change in important ways in a very difficult to predict manner as files accumulate and are deleted, resized, etc. throughout the lifetime of the operating system installation.
Their test represents well what happens on that specific model of hard disk under those specific OS installs on that particular motherboard within the first hours or days of use, but it was not a good indicator of any operating system's general speed or ability to transfer files to/from the hard disk. (In reality, virtually no other system in use will have the same kinds of relevant user-created files at or near the physical hard disk locations the testers did for very long.) Conclusions about the general operating system characteristics, with respect to file transfer speeds, would require data obtained using far more controls than were described in the benchmarks. To start, they would need to at least know or approximate the locations of where their files are being written to or read from on the hard disk, but even then, the real world user experience (time it takes to make/copy files) will change throughout time as the hard disk is filled. (From their particular tests, I wouldn't strongly object to a conclusion such as: "this operating system is smaller or installs more compactly, leaving X GB more of free space at the beginning of the disk than that operating system, so this particular type of file transfer is likely to be faster until you use X GB of space with some type of file." But that kind of limited information is not particularly useful in most cases.)
If either operating system or file system has design or implementation issues with respect to file handling, such flaws will show up unambiguously by keeping consistent as many factors as possible. I proposed a separate disk because it would be easy to implement, but you could, with a bit more work, test while ensuring that the users' local document or desktop folder is physically located in a particular narrow region of the physical disk through partitioning, etc. but that may not be any closer to being a snapshot of real-world conditions.
There may be relevant performance differences between the operating systems and versions, but this benchmark mostly does not test for them in the general use cases.
* How long does each operating system take to install?
Typical home user installs neither, real IT shops use disk images and other automated deployment tools.
* How much disk space was used in the standard install?
This is only a significant concern for SSD Netbooks. Typical home users will use ad hoc unmanaged storage and fill any available space with porn/music/photos. Power users who need lots of storage understand multiple hard disks. Real IT shops do managed non-local storage.
* How long does boot up and shutdown take?
The benchmarks shows no significant differences for boot up times. Both tests require more iterations and controls to distinguish between clean shutdowns, and ones in which software, first run, and other updates also take place during shutdown.
* How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
Methodology is flawed because the installation of each operating system has perturbed the free and occupied space layouts on the hard disk. An unbiased test would be USB to/from other installed hard disk instead of USB to/from the boot disk.
Independent of the operating system in use, data located at the outside of a CAV disk can be read and written faster than data located close to the spindle.
* How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?
Results do not indicate any significant differences in the set. Also, does the Richards benchmark reasonably simulate any particular home or enterprise task set in general, and if so, does the (undisclosed) version of the Richards benchmark employed in this test also reasonably simulate a particular task set?
I also do not care for/your/ strawmen arguments. But please reread the thread because you are more correct than you know.
1) Competent admins cost money regardless of the operating system, application suite or business environment.
2) Colleges (the subject of this thread) do not tend to conduct activities that churn through 6-7 figures on a daily basis. Most colleges pay for 1) and thus try to have well-groomed and partitioned networks that separate well-protected staff networks and PCs from student networks. Student productivity (and other units' productivity) is not generally measured in terms of IT's TCO, nor does it need to be from the colleges' IT department's business perspective.
3) Applications that do amazing things will get exploited on whatever operating system.
Now that you've correctly identified that IT (and bureaucracies in general) is not humanistic in its business SOP, and that they are selfish in their cost calculations, what do you propose to:
1) Reduce the TCO of Linux under the colleges' IT budget and business models? and or 2) Convincingly change the colleges' IT budget models to be more compassionate? (I favour this option).
I thought that it was a problem exclusive for Third World but now I feel somewhat relieved. I've been teaching "Systems Engineers" how a blog works, why the the blue Internet icon is bad for the internets and that there are OTHER operative systems. The problem here is that MS do a lot of lobby in Colleges so theres really an abuse of dominant position. I hope someones do something about it, It's a lot more relevant that the discussion of IExplore WMP and antitrust.
Focusing on my top three issues with your post: 1) Professionals in all industries must continuously learn to at least remain current within their fields. Some professionals choose to learn about developments outside of their niche. They do so through formal and informal education. That some systems engineers (whose niches might not be related to social media) who have learned about blogs from you--and not Google, their own forums, or their peers, etc.--is not exceptional and does not put you in a privileged position. I could probably personally teach Linus at least one of the following things, without diminishing either of our reputations as IT people: a) Effective cognitive information design in electronic document construction (every electronic message written by humans for humans should have this); b) Cultural awareness and sensitivity considerations for UI design elements and workflow precedents (the icon of the animal eating/burning the world can be viewed variously as a talisman, omen, blessing, forbidden, etc.). Even though I've had a decade of senior IT management experience, I could only benefit from some of his perspectives on resourcing and evolving hybrid formal/informal international research, development and support networks. 2) Third world IT is remarkably like IT in the "developed world", in that 80% of the administrators make do with 20% of the resources that would be required to do it "the right way". However, even though we have stricter labour legislation in general, our IT workers are more easily exploited due to the comparative weakness of family and social community pressures and obligations in the developed Western countries. Also, third world IT tends to make more resourceful and resilient use of technology pieces than places where 36-month evergreen/support contracts are popular. 3) Colleges respond to market forces, at least in the HR and procurement domains, but often refuse to admit it. Microsoft remains popular in part because it is supported by students and faculty, in the sense that IT departments don't have to directly foot the cost of students, faculty and front line staff in other departments (e.g. librarians) providing first response tech support to each other for common Microsoft products. $100-400 for an operating system and software is a small part of the TCO. Free software advocates are free to find ways to also reduce the other parts of TCO with non-MS software, or to conduct lobbying efforts with appropriate incentives etc.
It is rational to use means which are proportionate to the problem at hand. Without knowing what personally identifying information/. does, or does not collect, I would expect that/.'s operators would continue to be rational human beings with respect to providing help to law enforcement to deal with legitimate threats to public or personal safety.
As the Milgram experiment demonstrated, you and I could both conceive of and participate in a multitude of circumstances under which any action would be considered to be reasonable for the situation, but which may not appear rational to an unbiased observer.
In times of personal threat, horses become stout.
I believe that both the police and the website operators were behaving within their own reason in this case, even though we may or may not see them as acting in a reasonable or rational manner.
In the act of pulling the post with personally identifying information, operators of the website recognised that one or more users was using the website for improper or illegal purposes. That the operators did so relatively quickly indicates that they had reason to be (directly or through proxies) aware of a potential pattern of use for improper or illegal purposes.
It is reasonable to expect that both the police and the operators are sufficiently knowledgeable about computers to know that enabling logging on the servers would enable police to gather evidence concerning the identities of individuals potentially illegal acts via those servers. It is also reasonable to expect that the operators would continue to follow a standing no-logging policy, despite conversations with police about the need to collect information directly.
In the absence of active cooperation from the operators to investigate actual or potential crimes, it is reasonable to consider alternative methods: a) an operator may have unintentionally left some logging on, in which case the operator would legitimately not be aware of the evidence existing on the server, b) timely physical access to the server may enable evidence to be recovered via methods such as the cold boot attack.
An organization dedicated to the enhancement of the broad human condition would conduct their activities in such a way that non-consenting third-parties are not harmed by the direct actions of the organization or through the reactions of the organization's antagonists. The organization could start by discovering why one of their members can derive and justify--under the organization's perceived mandate--malicious intents to bring bodily harm upon the judge whose personally identifying information was disclosed (alternatively, if the post came from an outsider, the organization needs to evaluate why it's protecting anonymous outsiders whose actions are demonstrably bringing harm to the reputation and operations of the organization).
In any case, the organization has, and recognises, the responsibility not to cause harm to come to innocent third parties; the extent to which the organization are willing to act to meet that responsibility indicates what the organization should do in response to the current and future police requests for evidence about the same.
The failure manifests as swriter: becoming unresponsive in the GUI, discontinuing print output generation (which sometimes confuses CUPS), ceasing to exist as a process, running out of memory (on a 2 GB machine recently), and/or dropping individual records between print runs. In (futile) attempts to get it to just work, switching local/remote data sources did not seem to make a difference, as page counters in the GUI would show the correct number of pages for labels/envelopes/etc. if the process survived that long. It usually works on the first try if the record set is under about 100 rows.
The last OOo build I used was from around Feb. 2008, but the failure has been present and comparable throughout the several builds I've used since early 2005. I look forward to this eventually being fixed because the UI is _slightly_ less cumbersome than the Office 2007 merge wizard.
I would try to fix this, but it's less costly ($ and meeting timely business objectives) to have a copy of Office on hand than for me to reprise my codemonkey skills.
For example do you have Word setup to access a database or something ridiculous like that?
Mail merge is not usually an odd-ball feature for anyone who has more than a handful of friends or clients. As an aside and from experience, attempting to mail merge anything with over 3,000 rows in OOo generally results in pain.
That depends on the relative distributions of TV sets and monitors within the school. At most of the institutions I know, there are more monitors, and they are more widely distributed, than TV sets. In addition, ethernet is also in-wall in more places than coax or rabbit ears.
If you want to argue the effectiveness of a law, then do so in a separate manner.
This entire thread has been about the effectiveness of the current U.S. policy regarding export restrictions. snowgirl argued, in part, that the restrictions are socially ineffective, I've argued that they are logistically ineffective. I've even argued for new or different policies and laws: "Resources applied to enforcing policies which have been demonstrated to be incompletely effective (or, ineffective), can instead be applied to try newer, more effective policies."
the law in still in place and HP is required to obey it. The motives for the laws can be anything from someone not liking the color of someone socks to actually what they mean, the states that HP couldn't do what it was doing and they will get busted for it. If you don't like a law, get it changed, or be prepared to get busted when you violate it... you or I cannot arbitrarily decide to change the laws. The laws are put in place by a government, not you and me. I'm not here saying I support the law, I'm here saying it is in place, people know what it says, people know what's restricted and if they ignore that, they deserve to get busted.
Your position here is unclear, but the underlined sentence highlights where we differ fundamentally. It is my contention that the citizens of an effective democratic government should be able to cause laws to be changed, and that the application and enforcement of laws should not be completely uniform and without judgment. Contemporary practice indicates that the U.S. export control regime agrees with at least the second part of my contention, insofar as they inspect only one percent of eligible goods entering and exiting the U.S., they do next to nothing to practically restrict the export of digital munitions (encryption products) via software, and they do not prevent restricted military surplus from being auctioned and exported abroad from on-line stores legally incorporated in the U.S.
Unless someone specifically complains that some U.S.-based legal entity at HP or any other company is exporting to Iran, I would expect the enforcement agencies to focus on more effective sections of the existing legislation. It is much more useful to prevent new engineering designs and components which would enhance the range and lethality of weapons from reaching Iran, than to stop the flow of consumer electronics which provide next to no enhancement to their existing weapons and capabilities, WHETHER OR NOT such devices are easily obtainable.
Further, laws that are not widely supported or at least tolerated by the public, or which provide no effective benefit, should and become unenforced or rescinded. When was the last time a public good in the U.S. was served by police officers writing tickets respecting the lengths of women's dresses or the hardness of bread or the colour of someone's skin? Some of those laws have been officially stricken, while others have not, and yet no one complains.
I know quite a but about the Middle East security in general. I know quite a bit about the current leadership in Iran and I was actually alive when the Ajax happened so I don't need to read some idiots recounting that skew the facts.... he relied specifically on one sided arguments for his entire worldview on the area. I suggest you are too.
I try to read widely, from different points of view to specifically gain a broad understanding from a variety of different perspectives. That you would suggest that scholars as intellectually and ideologically distant and antagonistic as Ismael and Lewis would provide me with a single, one-sided argument indicates that you place more value in the local perspective than the international, both of which are valid and incomplete without the other. I can presently only argue from the Western perspective, but I would appreciate being enlightened about your argument that Iran acquiring weap
I apologies for overwhelming you with evidence which contradicts your position. To keep it simple (and snowgirl made or implied most of these): 1) Trade embargoes as currently implemented are ineffective in achieving the desired broad policy outcomes of preventing technology proliferation and enhancing physical security. 2) Empirical evidence suggests that the stated motives for adopting trade embargoes do not adequately describe the actual motives for adopting such embargoes, and that such policy measures are applied inconsistently. 3) Resources applied to enforcing policies which have been demonstrated to be incompletely effective (or, ineffective), can instead be applied to try newer, more effective policies. 4) Iran no more requires 21st century computers to make nuclear weapons than the Americans and Soviets and the South Africans and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Chinese (and almost the Germans) did when they each generated international nuclear capabilities over 40 years ago.
Regarding your analogy: Iran and dozens of other nations already have sufficient numbers of weapons and capabilities to considerably harm almost any other state they choose. Their guns are already loaded, they can point their guns at arbitrary targets, and they've already refused to surrender their guns when explicitly asked to do so.
If this was strictly a weapons/capabilities issue, a number of much more effective military policy options exist to remove those weapons/capabilities. The U.S. is, among other reasons, employing non-military policies in this regard, to generate non-military changes in the countries targeted. In this case, as in most, the desired outcome of the non-military policy is to convince Iran not to use those weapons, particularly against the U.S. and its allies.
Please read any of Tariq Ismael's or Bernard Lewis's volumes to gain some contrasting understandings of Middle East security in general, and the significance of peripheral influences such as Iran and India in particular, to U.S. and Western interests in that part of the world.
The printers in question contain processors that are capable of doing more then controling [sic] A [sic] print head with precision and shooting a laser onto a series of drums with accuracy as good as or better then most printing presses.
Ignoring, of course, the thousands of containers of e-waste we ship to Iran's neighbors to the east every month, which contain such useless processors P4s, Alphas, and other embedded/industrial processors and their controllers/chipsets which are much more easily re-purposed for military applications than commercial workgroup printers...
If you would pull your head out of your ass and just look at the entire situation
Yes. Let's. Iran presently has a more sophisticated and technologically advanced military-industrial complex than the U.S. did when it won WWII, despite years of trade sanctions and decades of international ill-repute. Iran has a number of interesting and equally capable allies who all oppose U.S. interests in the area and abroad. Taking more time than required to defeat the entire Axis in WWII, the U.S. has failed to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan against agrarian societies who employ tactics no more sophisticated than those of CDG's French Resistance.
Clearly, control of the proliferation of technology embedded in printer silicon and other IT goods should not be the primary determining factor to the success of whatever designs the U.S. has for the region.
If the Iranians have sufficient computer kit to drive some of the low-end GDI printers HP have introduced of late, where the PS engine is in the driver, they would use those for simulations instead. Many of their good PS/PCL printers run on silicon derived from older GP processors (i960, x86, POWER, etc.), which are more easily obtained for $5 from eBay...
> Considering the complexity of the Internet, I have real and increasing difficulty understanding how the spammers manage to survive.
Complexity begets niches. Niches are difficult to actively manage, hence, spammers thrive.
> If the technical honchos of the Internet scanned the spam to find the largest spam-supporting registrar of the month and the rest of the Web then stopped talking to that registrar, that would seem to be rather harmful to the spammers' so-called business model, eh?
That type of approach was demonstrated to be minimally effective recently. Google mccolo and esthost for examples of how enforcement actions by the community with backing from the "technical honchos of the Internet" had minimal effect on spammers in 2008. As long as there are other spammy registrars, hosting providers, transit providers etc. for spammers to go to, the greatest effect from closing down a provider is to add a line to a black list, without having sustainably altered the situation.
With respect to registrars, it's often not viable for a number of reasons to poke spammy registrars that are also closely linked to ccTLD registrars (or similar) for particular countries (or similar). Individual organizations can implement or subscribe to particular DNS tricks, but there are barriers against large eyeball networks (TW, AOL, VZN, RR, etc.) doing so. (It's interesting that Internet censorship and information lensing of this sort are not well tolerated in general, but are simultaneously explicitly demanded to curtail spammers.)
With respect to structurally breaking spamming methods, having forums/blog software authors universally deploy basic things like robots.txt, nofollow, etc. in conjunction with Google and the other search engines would be much more harmful to the link spammers' business model overall.
Background: One of my sites is a custom job which kills a spam comment every 3 seconds or so, and has done so consistently for the past four years.
OP's suggestions are very good, especially limiting the number of 'http's. We've given up on the keyword lists since they are costly to maintain and aren't as effective as some other methods.
Currently, the most effective kill rules for us are: 1) We write the client's IP address, the ID of the thing being commented on, and random stuff to a cookie from the legitimate page from which the client clicked the "post reply" link. If the IP address doesn't match, or if the ID missing, or if the parameter for the random junk aren't in the cookie, then fail. This rule traps non-browser scripts and limits spam throughput, but does not affect humans.
2) The client's IP address is a hidden form variable. If that IP address does not match the IP from which the POST originates, fail. This rule traps the browser-based scripts, and operators who proxy through botnets for testing.
These two rules catch all but about two spam-like messages a month (spam operator not using proxies to test their scripts), and have mislabeled two legitimate messages (from a local ISP's poorly-configured proxy) in the last three years.
There are other things at play, such as salted hashes of the above, and some other heuristics on hidden and unused fields which sort and categorise the spam for our own research (including point of origin, topic, etc.). One finding is that IP/geographic blacklists are ineffective. I'll post new findings and methods in another two years.
I'm also evil in that the apparent failure modes are non-deterministic, and include such things as random HTTP response codes, random modes of connection failure, and spam messages that apparently go through, but are only visible for the IP that posted them, or for one minute after they are posted.
Why is Psion not suing cnet, etc, for misusing the term?... For a counterexample, see "Blackberry," who sued about the BlackJack phone for being too similarly named.
Asked and answered. There's presently no possibility that someone could buy a small computing device made by cnet thinking it was a product having the characteristics of a Psion netBook.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if he didn't provide relicensing rights, companies and assets can change ownership through restructuring, M+A, court settlements, etc. in ways which may not be limitable through commercial license agreements.
The majority of people who contribute on Slashdot are not only tech savvy, but have some understanding of licensing, copyright and the like.
Yes, "some understanding" in the same sense that knowledge of the Jargon File provides some understanding of software engineering, or Call of Duty provides some understanding of assault tactics. See:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=license+inurl:ask.slashdot.org&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0
I especially enjoy that users are only getting mad when explicitly told by the media to do so in 2009, especially when the substantial point being protested (Facebook can store/reuse your user-generated data) has been in their TOS from the beginning.
Facebook could derive the same rights to reuse user-contributed data from every previous TOS they had, and equally well from the re-revised TOS that users are celebrating now, as easily evidenced by significant user-generated FB content being made searchable on Gooble, being used as part of their internal social advertising, and through any number of internal and external apps with public-facing content and data repositories.
This present round of anger confirms that users neither read, nor substantially care about TOS agreements in general. The outrage at around the new year over the breast-feeding photo censorship, which relied on asserting user rights allegedly in the TOS, should have clued in several thousands of users to the now objectionable changes in the TOS as they read it to understand the allowable photo content clauses they were specifically raging against, but that obviously didn't happen.
I wonder what part of the TOS the sensationalists will trawl next month to keep the ad revenue coming.
Since we don't know the extent that potential cohabitating forms of life would compete with carbon life for a similar commonly assumed set of material and energy resources, as a first step I would settle for detecting unexpected changes in water chemistry after carbon life is removed from the system. We cannot at this point understand what "flourish" or "plentiful" mean in the context of a previously unknown system of life. It may be that mineral life would flourish or fail in the absence of carbon life.
There may be broader symbioses in play between carbon and perhaps a mineral system of life, which would provide insights into how plants came to rely on rare magnesium ions to be able to pull slightly less rare carbon from the environment into our known food webs, and also how macroscopic organisms were able to durably evolve to rely on dietary minerals found in rare to trace quantities on the Earth's surface for essential biological functions.
> Fire is just a chemical reaction.
What do you think cells do?
I experience similar symptoms on my first-gen MBP from time to time.
Check for applications/daemons (particularly scanner and peripheral helpers) launching from the various StartupItems folders. Also, the startup sequence sometimes inserts a hard disk check if you've shut down uncleanly recently, or if the disk is dieing. Also, try installing the next OS X _combo_ update when it becomes available, as the small deltas in sequence are alleged to miss some files on occasion.
Also, some older builds of 10.5 combine the "generate previews of files" thread/functionality into Finder in such a way that every file that is visible must have its preview icon generated before Finder will respond to anything else. A desktop full of previewable items will add many seconds to the time it takes to get to a productive state from the login prompt. Apple has recently reconfigured the preview functionality as a separate process or some such to fix the issue.
Eyeballing the Richards benchmark chart tells me that 64-bit vs 32-bit explains more of the variation in the results than operating system version choice. I've not run the statistics, but I wouldn't expect the differences to be statistically significant at any interesting confidence interval with the very small sample size in the test.
Also, 12% on an operation that takes a total of less than a second is uninteresting for me as a human in the general case. 12% on encoding a video, report generation, pushing frames, or opening a PDF would be far more interesting.
Why is it a flawed test to check the read/write speed from USB to HD using the primary HD? That's where (IMO) a very significant majority of users will be keeping their files, it makes sense to speed-test transfer rates from the most common file location.
It is flawed because the test they conducted is next to irrelevant to the real world situation where it is next to impossible to determine or control where a particular user file will physically be located on a hard disk, due to the hundreds/thousands of free space holes created by OS configuration/install/updates, application installs/updates, temporary file caches, file system options, saved user documents, log files, etc. (ignoring all the other fun things that the disk/controller hardware can do at the physical layer). In other words, there is no "most common file location", just the some user files are on a particular logical volume at some particular time, which change in important ways in a very difficult to predict manner as files accumulate and are deleted, resized, etc. throughout the lifetime of the operating system installation.
Their test represents well what happens on that specific model of hard disk under those specific OS installs on that particular motherboard within the first hours or days of use, but it was not a good indicator of any operating system's general speed or ability to transfer files to/from the hard disk. (In reality, virtually no other system in use will have the same kinds of relevant user-created files at or near the physical hard disk locations the testers did for very long.) Conclusions about the general operating system characteristics, with respect to file transfer speeds, would require data obtained using far more controls than were described in the benchmarks. To start, they would need to at least know or approximate the locations of where their files are being written to or read from on the hard disk, but even then, the real world user experience (time it takes to make/copy files) will change throughout time as the hard disk is filled. (From their particular tests, I wouldn't strongly object to a conclusion such as: "this operating system is smaller or installs more compactly, leaving X GB more of free space at the beginning of the disk than that operating system, so this particular type of file transfer is likely to be faster until you use X GB of space with some type of file." But that kind of limited information is not particularly useful in most cases.)
If either operating system or file system has design or implementation issues with respect to file handling, such flaws will show up unambiguously by keeping consistent as many factors as possible. I proposed a separate disk because it would be easy to implement, but you could, with a bit more work, test while ensuring that the users' local document or desktop folder is physically located in a particular narrow region of the physical disk through partitioning, etc. but that may not be any closer to being a snapshot of real-world conditions.
There may be relevant performance differences between the operating systems and versions, but this benchmark mostly does not test for them in the general use cases.
* How long does each operating system take to install?
Typical home user installs neither, real IT shops use disk images and other automated deployment tools.
* How much disk space was used in the standard install?
This is only a significant concern for SSD Netbooks. Typical home users will use ad hoc unmanaged storage and fill any available space with porn/music/photos. Power users who need lots of storage understand multiple hard disks. Real IT shops do managed non-local storage.
* How long does boot up and shutdown take?
The benchmarks shows no significant differences for boot up times. Both tests require more iterations and controls to distinguish between clean shutdowns, and ones in which software, first run, and other updates also take place during shutdown.
* How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
Methodology is flawed because the installation of each operating system has perturbed the free and occupied space layouts on the hard disk. An unbiased test would be USB to/from other installed hard disk instead of USB to/from the boot disk.
Independent of the operating system in use, data located at the outside of a CAV disk can be read and written faster than data located close to the spindle.
* How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?
Results do not indicate any significant differences in the set. Also, does the Richards benchmark reasonably simulate any particular home or enterprise task set in general, and if so, does the (undisclosed) version of the Richards benchmark employed in this test also reasonably simulate a particular task set?
I also do not care for /your/ strawmen arguments. But please reread the thread because you are more correct than you know.
1) Competent admins cost money regardless of the operating system, application suite or business environment.
2) Colleges (the subject of this thread) do not tend to conduct activities that churn through 6-7 figures on a daily basis. Most colleges pay for 1) and thus try to have well-groomed and partitioned networks that separate well-protected staff networks and PCs from student networks. Student productivity (and other units' productivity) is not generally measured in terms of IT's TCO, nor does it need to be from the colleges' IT department's business perspective.
3) Applications that do amazing things will get exploited on whatever operating system.
Now that you've correctly identified that IT (and bureaucracies in general) is not humanistic in its business SOP, and that they are selfish in their cost calculations, what do you propose to:
1) Reduce the TCO of Linux under the colleges' IT budget and business models? and or
2) Convincingly change the colleges' IT budget models to be more compassionate? (I favour this option).
I thought that it was a problem exclusive for Third World but now I feel somewhat relieved. I've been teaching "Systems Engineers" how a blog works, why the the blue Internet icon is bad for the internets and that there are OTHER operative systems. The problem here is that MS do a lot of lobby in Colleges so theres really an abuse of dominant position. I hope someones do something about it, It's a lot more relevant that the discussion of IExplore WMP and antitrust.
Focusing on my top three issues with your post:
1) Professionals in all industries must continuously learn to at least remain current within their fields. Some professionals choose to learn about developments outside of their niche. They do so through formal and informal education. That some systems engineers (whose niches might not be related to social media) who have learned about blogs from you--and not Google, their own forums, or their peers, etc.--is not exceptional and does not put you in a privileged position. I could probably personally teach Linus at least one of the following things, without diminishing either of our reputations as IT people: a) Effective cognitive information design in electronic document construction (every electronic message written by humans for humans should have this); b) Cultural awareness and sensitivity considerations for UI design elements and workflow precedents (the icon of the animal eating/burning the world can be viewed variously as a talisman, omen, blessing, forbidden, etc.). Even though I've had a decade of senior IT management experience, I could only benefit from some of his perspectives on resourcing and evolving hybrid formal/informal international research, development and support networks.
2) Third world IT is remarkably like IT in the "developed world", in that 80% of the administrators make do with 20% of the resources that would be required to do it "the right way". However, even though we have stricter labour legislation in general, our IT workers are more easily exploited due to the comparative weakness of family and social community pressures and obligations in the developed Western countries. Also, third world IT tends to make more resourceful and resilient use of technology pieces than places where 36-month evergreen/support contracts are popular.
3) Colleges respond to market forces, at least in the HR and procurement domains, but often refuse to admit it. Microsoft remains popular in part because it is supported by students and faculty, in the sense that IT departments don't have to directly foot the cost of students, faculty and front line staff in other departments (e.g. librarians) providing first response tech support to each other for common Microsoft products. $100-400 for an operating system and software is a small part of the TCO. Free software advocates are free to find ways to also reduce the other parts of TCO with non-MS software, or to conduct lobbying efforts with appropriate incentives etc.
It is rational to use means which are proportionate to the problem at hand. Without knowing what personally identifying information /. does, or does not collect, I would expect that /.'s operators would continue to be rational human beings with respect to providing help to law enforcement to deal with legitimate threats to public or personal safety.
As the Milgram experiment demonstrated, you and I could both conceive of and participate in a multitude of circumstances under which any action would be considered to be reasonable for the situation, but which may not appear rational to an unbiased observer.
In times of personal threat, horses become stout.
I believe that both the police and the website operators were behaving within their own reason in this case, even though we may or may not see them as acting in a reasonable or rational manner.
In the act of pulling the post with personally identifying information, operators of the website recognised that one or more users was using the website for improper or illegal purposes. That the operators did so relatively quickly indicates that they had reason to be (directly or through proxies) aware of a potential pattern of use for improper or illegal purposes.
It is reasonable to expect that both the police and the operators are sufficiently knowledgeable about computers to know that enabling logging on the servers would enable police to gather evidence concerning the identities of individuals potentially illegal acts via those servers. It is also reasonable to expect that the operators would continue to follow a standing no-logging policy, despite conversations with police about the need to collect information directly.
In the absence of active cooperation from the operators to investigate actual or potential crimes, it is reasonable to consider alternative methods: a) an operator may have unintentionally left some logging on, in which case the operator would legitimately not be aware of the evidence existing on the server, b) timely physical access to the server may enable evidence to be recovered via methods such as the cold boot attack.
An organization dedicated to the enhancement of the broad human condition would conduct their activities in such a way that non-consenting third-parties are not harmed by the direct actions of the organization or through the reactions of the organization's antagonists. The organization could start by discovering why one of their members can derive and justify--under the organization's perceived mandate--malicious intents to bring bodily harm upon the judge whose personally identifying information was disclosed (alternatively, if the post came from an outsider, the organization needs to evaluate why it's protecting anonymous outsiders whose actions are demonstrably bringing harm to the reputation and operations of the organization).
In any case, the organization has, and recognises, the responsibility not to cause harm to come to innocent third parties; the extent to which the organization are willing to act to meet that responsibility indicates what the organization should do in response to the current and future police requests for evidence about the same.
I recall that "Am I Hot or Not" solved this class of problem in 2000.
The failure manifests as swriter: becoming unresponsive in the GUI, discontinuing print output generation (which sometimes confuses CUPS), ceasing to exist as a process, running out of memory (on a 2 GB machine recently), and/or dropping individual records between print runs. In (futile) attempts to get it to just work, switching local/remote data sources did not seem to make a difference, as page counters in the GUI would show the correct number of pages for labels/envelopes/etc. if the process survived that long. It usually works on the first try if the record set is under about 100 rows.
The last OOo build I used was from around Feb. 2008, but the failure has been present and comparable throughout the several builds I've used since early 2005. I look forward to this eventually being fixed because the UI is _slightly_ less cumbersome than the Office 2007 merge wizard.
I would try to fix this, but it's less costly ($ and meeting timely business objectives) to have a copy of Office on hand than for me to reprise my codemonkey skills.
For example do you have Word setup to access a database or something ridiculous like that?
Mail merge is not usually an odd-ball feature for anyone who has more than a handful of friends or clients. As an aside and from experience, attempting to mail merge anything with over 3,000 rows in OOo generally results in pain.
That depends on the relative distributions of TV sets and monitors within the school. At most of the institutions I know, there are more monitors, and they are more widely distributed, than TV sets. In addition, ethernet is also in-wall in more places than coax or rabbit ears.
But this shouldn't be an either/or proposition.
Right tool might be: TV signal + Hauppage TV tuner card + VLC or other multicast solution on the internal network.
If you want to argue the effectiveness of a law, then do so in a separate manner.
This entire thread has been about the effectiveness of the current U.S. policy regarding export restrictions. snowgirl argued, in part, that the restrictions are socially ineffective, I've argued that they are logistically ineffective. I've even argued for new or different policies and laws: "Resources applied to enforcing policies which have been demonstrated to be incompletely effective (or, ineffective), can instead be applied to try newer, more effective policies."
the law in still in place and HP is required to obey it. The motives for the laws can be anything from someone not liking the color of someone socks to actually what they mean, the states that HP couldn't do what it was doing and they will get busted for it. If you don't like a law, get it changed, or be prepared to get busted when you violate it... you or I cannot arbitrarily decide to change the laws. The laws are put in place by a government, not you and me. I'm not here saying I support the law, I'm here saying it is in place, people know what it says, people know what's restricted and if they ignore that, they deserve to get busted.
Your position here is unclear, but the underlined sentence highlights where we differ fundamentally. It is my contention that the citizens of an effective democratic government should be able to cause laws to be changed, and that the application and enforcement of laws should not be completely uniform and without judgment. Contemporary practice indicates that the U.S. export control regime agrees with at least the second part of my contention, insofar as they inspect only one percent of eligible goods entering and exiting the U.S., they do next to nothing to practically restrict the export of digital munitions (encryption products) via software, and they do not prevent restricted military surplus from being auctioned and exported abroad from on-line stores legally incorporated in the U.S.
Unless someone specifically complains that some U.S.-based legal entity at HP or any other company is exporting to Iran, I would expect the enforcement agencies to focus on more effective sections of the existing legislation. It is much more useful to prevent new engineering designs and components which would enhance the range and lethality of weapons from reaching Iran, than to stop the flow of consumer electronics which provide next to no enhancement to their existing weapons and capabilities, WHETHER OR NOT such devices are easily obtainable.
Further, laws that are not widely supported or at least tolerated by the public, or which provide no effective benefit, should and become unenforced or rescinded. When was the last time a public good in the U.S. was served by police officers writing tickets respecting the lengths of women's dresses or the hardness of bread or the colour of someone's skin? Some of those laws have been officially stricken, while others have not, and yet no one complains.
I know quite a but about the Middle East security in general. I know quite a bit about the current leadership in Iran and I was actually alive when the Ajax happened so I don't need to read some idiots recounting that skew the facts. ... he relied specifically on one sided arguments for his entire worldview on the area. I suggest you are too.
I try to read widely, from different points of view to specifically gain a broad understanding from a variety of different perspectives. That you would suggest that scholars as intellectually and ideologically distant and antagonistic as Ismael and Lewis would provide me with a single, one-sided argument indicates that you place more value in the local perspective than the international, both of which are valid and incomplete without the other. I can presently only argue from the Western perspective, but I would appreciate being enlightened about your argument that Iran acquiring weap
I apologies for overwhelming you with evidence which contradicts your position. To keep it simple (and snowgirl made or implied most of these):
1) Trade embargoes as currently implemented are ineffective in achieving the desired broad policy outcomes of preventing technology proliferation and enhancing physical security.
2) Empirical evidence suggests that the stated motives for adopting trade embargoes do not adequately describe the actual motives for adopting such embargoes, and that such policy measures are applied inconsistently.
3) Resources applied to enforcing policies which have been demonstrated to be incompletely effective (or, ineffective), can instead be applied to try newer, more effective policies.
4) Iran no more requires 21st century computers to make nuclear weapons than the Americans and Soviets and the South Africans and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Chinese (and almost the Germans) did when they each generated international nuclear capabilities over 40 years ago.
Regarding your analogy: Iran and dozens of other nations already have sufficient numbers of weapons and capabilities to considerably harm almost any other state they choose. Their guns are already loaded, they can point their guns at arbitrary targets, and they've already refused to surrender their guns when explicitly asked to do so.
If this was strictly a weapons/capabilities issue, a number of much more effective military policy options exist to remove those weapons/capabilities. The U.S. is, among other reasons, employing non-military policies in this regard, to generate non-military changes in the countries targeted. In this case, as in most, the desired outcome of the non-military policy is to convince Iran not to use those weapons, particularly against the U.S. and its allies.
Please read any of Tariq Ismael's or Bernard Lewis's volumes to gain some contrasting understandings of Middle East security in general, and the significance of peripheral influences such as Iran and India in particular, to U.S. and Western interests in that part of the world.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem_attack
The printers in question contain processors that are capable of doing more then controling [sic] A [sic] print head with precision and shooting a laser onto a series of drums with accuracy as good as or better then most printing presses.
Ignoring, of course, the thousands of containers of e-waste we ship to Iran's neighbors to the east every month, which contain such useless processors P4s, Alphas, and other embedded/industrial processors and their controllers/chipsets which are much more easily re-purposed for military applications than commercial workgroup printers...
If you would pull your head out of your ass and just look at the entire situation
Yes. Let's. Iran presently has a more sophisticated and technologically advanced military-industrial complex than the U.S. did when it won WWII, despite years of trade sanctions and decades of international ill-repute. Iran has a number of interesting and equally capable allies who all oppose U.S. interests in the area and abroad. Taking more time than required to defeat the entire Axis in WWII, the U.S. has failed to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan against agrarian societies who employ tactics no more sophisticated than those of CDG's French Resistance.
Clearly, control of the proliferation of technology embedded in printer silicon and other IT goods should not be the primary determining factor to the success of whatever designs the U.S. has for the region.
If the Iranians have sufficient computer kit to drive some of the low-end GDI printers HP have introduced of late, where the PS engine is in the driver, they would use those for simulations instead. Many of their good PS/PCL printers run on silicon derived from older GP processors (i960, x86, POWER, etc.), which are more easily obtained for $5 from eBay...
> Considering the complexity of the Internet, I have real and increasing difficulty understanding how the spammers manage to survive.
Complexity begets niches. Niches are difficult to actively manage, hence, spammers thrive.
> If the technical honchos of the Internet scanned the spam to find the largest spam-supporting registrar of the month and the rest of the Web then stopped talking to that registrar, that would seem to be rather harmful to the spammers' so-called business model, eh?
That type of approach was demonstrated to be minimally effective recently. Google mccolo and esthost for examples of how enforcement actions by the community with backing from the "technical honchos of the Internet" had minimal effect on spammers in 2008. As long as there are other spammy registrars, hosting providers, transit providers etc. for spammers to go to, the greatest effect from closing down a provider is to add a line to a black list, without having sustainably altered the situation.
With respect to registrars, it's often not viable for a number of reasons to poke spammy registrars that are also closely linked to ccTLD registrars (or similar) for particular countries (or similar). Individual organizations can implement or subscribe to particular DNS tricks, but there are barriers against large eyeball networks (TW, AOL, VZN, RR, etc.) doing so. (It's interesting that Internet censorship and information lensing of this sort are not well tolerated in general, but are simultaneously explicitly demanded to curtail spammers.)
With respect to structurally breaking spamming methods, having forums/blog software authors universally deploy basic things like robots.txt, nofollow, etc. in conjunction with Google and the other search engines would be much more harmful to the link spammers' business model overall.
Background: One of my sites is a custom job which kills a spam comment every 3 seconds or so, and has done so consistently for the past four years.
OP's suggestions are very good, especially limiting the number of 'http's. We've given up on the keyword lists since they are costly to maintain and aren't as effective as some other methods.
Currently, the most effective kill rules for us are:
1) We write the client's IP address, the ID of the thing being commented on, and random stuff to a cookie from the legitimate page from which the client clicked the "post reply" link. If the IP address doesn't match, or if the ID missing, or if the parameter for the random junk aren't in the cookie, then fail. This rule traps non-browser scripts and limits spam throughput, but does not affect humans.
2) The client's IP address is a hidden form variable. If that IP address does not match the IP from which the POST originates, fail. This rule traps the browser-based scripts, and operators who proxy through botnets for testing.
These two rules catch all but about two spam-like messages a month (spam operator not using proxies to test their scripts), and have mislabeled two legitimate messages (from a local ISP's poorly-configured proxy) in the last three years.
There are other things at play, such as salted hashes of the above, and some other heuristics on hidden and unused fields which sort and categorise the spam for our own research (including point of origin, topic, etc.). One finding is that IP/geographic blacklists are ineffective. I'll post new findings and methods in another two years.
I'm also evil in that the apparent failure modes are non-deterministic, and include such things as random HTTP response codes, random modes of connection failure, and spam messages that apparently go through, but are only visible for the IP that posted them, or for one minute after they are posted.
Your move, "RosarioRush".
Why is Psion not suing cnet, etc, for misusing the term? ... For a counterexample, see "Blackberry," who sued about the BlackJack phone for being too similarly named.
Asked and answered. There's presently no possibility that someone could buy a small computing device made by cnet thinking it was a product having the characteristics of a Psion netBook.