And the foreign and Chinese companies who provide the equipment that runs the Firewall find it acceptable enough to sell to the people who run it.
Incorrect. They find it acceptable to profit from the government's ambitions. In a corporation, ethics are not part of the bidding process. Ethics is PR's problem.
In both cases, it is up to the reader to weigh the facts and make up their own mind. TorrentFreak is an openly pro-piracy site, or more accurately anti-copyright abuse.
Do you expect TorrentFreak to say "Oh, we're all wrong and stupid. Call Blair and Sarkozy so they can violate our tight pirate asses".
Most PCs have had working standby/hibernation since the late 90's. Combine that with Wake-on-LAN and you can have a machine that's always available (within a few seconds), yet goes to sleep when not in use.
It almost certainly uses less power to wake from hibernation, than it does to boot the OS from a power-off state.
The Chinese and Russians are every bit as barbaric as Americans. If anything, their scarcity of resources might encourage them think a little harder before going to war.
The main difference between terrorists and the U.S. military is terrorists fight smart (and dirty). A thousand uniformed men with M4 rifles are nothing compared to a dozen plain-looking civilians with a big holy chip on their shoulder.
Everyone's going SSD-crazy, but I'm not yet convinced. They're not _that_ much faster than spinning platters of death, at least not yet, and I'd much rather throw a ton of Ram at the disk cache for the same amount of money.
If you're really worried about performance, invest in a true Ramdisk - the kind that has DDR memory slots on one side and a SATA connector on the other. You can write a 2-line script to mount and format it on boot, and even backup its contents upon shutdown (if needed). That's the ultimate/tmp drive, and it will not wear out no matter how hard you pound it.
This argument has been beaten to death, and still the publishers refuse to listen.
When a game costs $60, and 8 times out of 10 it turns out to be absolute garbage, that is astoundingly poor value for money. So statistically, I have to blow $300 to find one game I actually like, and it might last me a few weeks, at best a month or two before I'm completely sick of it. If I could break that down into some sort of "fun-hours per dollar" metric, it would make cocaine and alcohol seem cheap by comparison.
it provides sufficent 'pluses' to make up for loss
Show me how Steam makes up for my inability to sell, lend or give away old unloved games ? I'm pretty sure I won't be playing Half Life again anytime soon, but I know a certain kid who played the everloving crap out of it after I gave him the box and disc.
The problem with the Steam model is they make too many assumptions:
1. You're going to love the game, and love it until the world dies
2. You're rich, and so is everyone you know, so nobody ever lends, trades or gives anything away second-hand.
Wehell that's a very romanticized outlook of the gaming scene, but very far removed from reality.
I grew up using Windows and never once needed something like that.
Well, kiddo, most of us geeks grew up using DOS and TOS and those Basic cartridges. Windows was a cutesy little app that ran on top of DOS. I spent pretty much all of the 80's and 90's working from a command shell, and even today on my Windows XP desktop, I have a couple hundred batch files and Perl scripts that follow me wherever I go. There is a wealth of tasks that are done more concisely and efficiently with a few text commands than any GUI could ever encompass.
Just look at the very handy things you can do by chaining the holy trinity of Grep/Awk/Sed together with pipes. I recently migrated a mail server from qmail to postfix, and I pulled all the needed info with those tools. There was no "Dump all users, passwords, aliases and domains" command, so I built my own out of basic command-line building blocks, and it took maybe 10 minutes (mostly because I had never worked with qmail). Just try doing something in Exchange Server that's not explicitly offered in one of the menus... you wouldn't even imagine.
And you've just underlined one of the many reasons why the ISPs want in on this thing. They get to double-dip, as not only will they charge you a monthly fee for the receiver, but they will bill you for the bandwidth too!
Just wait 'til you find out what they will be charging for this thing... They may very well offer it as an add-on to existing cable subscribers, because nothing makes a content provider happier than tacking an extra $70 to your monthly bill for multiple copies of the exact same content.
Why wouldn't you just spend the money on a small ESX farm with a couple of nodes and a NFS or iSCSI SAN?
Because then you'd only be paying a tenth of the cost of a mainframe, resulting in your department's budget being reduced next year. People buy mainframes for two reasons:
1. They actually have a valid use for a natively clustered processing architecture with a 100% uptime cash-backed guarantee.
2. They're spending other people's money (either taxpayers' or venture capital).
Chances are if you paid for a zS, you've got better things to put your processor capabilities towards rather then emulating Windows.
Chances are if you own a zS, you can throw a stone at the nearest developer to compile Bochs for free, which just might be what Mantissa did (and added some kind of management UI). The good thing is: anyone buying into this product is a gullible fool who deserves to be robbed blind. The bad news is: there's a 50% chance they're spending your tax money.
Why a personal mainframe if one machine can serve the needs of hundreds ? A household that barely needs a PC today will not require a 128-processor mainframe tomorrow. Give them a cheap terminal to the shared neighborhood bit-banger and they will be happy as a retarded luddite clam.
I'd tell them to keep on snooping, right up until they've eliminated every single potential hire on the planet.
The way I see it is simple: a career is not a one-way relationship. There's a lot more to it than a steady paycheque. For one, I value respect much higher than pay. If someone makes big-money hiring decisions based on drunken Facebook pics, they clearly don't respect my right to have a real life outside of their cubicle reality. Even if they did hire me, they would hate me and I would hate them... fire and water, cat and dog, rebel and piece-of-shit-conformist-swine. I don't want to work in that kind of hostile environment.
I do believe in hiring people with not only the right skills, but the right personality for your company. Contrary to media belief, there are quite a few successful businesses out there that don't have "casual fridays" or "opportunity-targeted coaching, because they're not run by deranged abusive control-freaks. Does my choice of t-shirt slogan have any impact on my ability to mash letters on a keyboard ? Does the fact that I drink tequila instead of boxed wine demonstrate a complete lack of critical thought and judgement ?
If someone can google me and immediately conclude we have irreconcilable differences, that makes me happy because they didn't waste any of my time. I'd rather people know I'm a libertarian asshole, than have them find out the hard way after they've pissed me off once too many.
Heart surgery, auto repair, cooking... once you learn how it works, it's easy.
What these things are not is OBVIOUS. An untrained goon will have a hard time figuring out heart surgery without some kind of training. That same goon will also not have the slightest clue how to fix an ailing piece of shit car. Why would we somehow magically believe the goon is capable of writing secure PHP code ?
None of these jobs are unnecessarily complicated, once you learn what the hell you're supposed to be doing. The problem is, it's a heck of a lot easier for the goon to pretend he's a PHP coder, because people have this funny habit of posting code snippets online for the cretins to copy and paste verbatim. "Look Ma, I'm a porgamror. What's a float?"
I'm pretty sure if you demonstrate heart surgery on Youtube, some dinkus in the retarded states will try to duplicate the procedure. That's just human stupidity at work.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that these nature lovers are hypocrites. There are two things that are certain in life: nature has a way of balancing itself out, and humans have a way to destroy everything they touch. If 8 out of 10 frogs are being killed by this fungus, that's the millenia-old rule of the survival of the fittest. We try to interfere with this impenetrable law, and we end up fucking with something else indirectly.
At best, it will save a few frogs whose existence has been deemed obsolete by the natural chemical evolution of their own habitat. At worst, it will lead to the birth of a stronger, human-borne disease that will wreak far greater havoc in our lives. The only fact is that we don't know all the variables at play, and meddling with them is, by definition, a foolish act in itself.
It's cute that they're doing this the open-source way, but realistically they'd be better off hiring a few designers and letting them fight it out. Maybe I'm jaded from years of Linux adminning, but I have absolutely no faith in the graphic abilities of network geeks, myself included.
Except most municipalities offer a reduced fine if you pay it quickly. In my city, it is roughly half, so there is zero incentive to enlist Parkingticket.com for me. If they beat the fine, I still owe them as much as if I had simply paid the fine without contest. If they lose, sure they give me $10, but the "court fees" get tacked on to the fine, which are usually something like $25 or more (depending on the fine!?).
Parkingtickets.com is useless to me. Wake me when they accept bids to hunt down and beat parking nazis with a stolen coin meter.
The problem is that the parking nazi should not be allowed to be a witness as they cannot be expected to deliver an impartial testimony. The employees are coerced into delivering as many fines as possible, otherwise they wouldn't be handing out a single ticket. Their employer directly profits from parking fines, it is the first reason why there are parking fines. It's not about managing spaces or congestion, it's just about money.
What, you think a normal human being has a desire to stick random strangers with ridiculous fines ? No, that is called a sociopath. Since I'd like to assume most parking employees aren't sociopaths, then they must be under pressure from their employer.
Sure they're happy, if you pay for the tow yourself. Everywhere I've ever lived, the only way to get a car towed at the driver's expense is to go through the police, which is cumbersome and mostly pointless, unless you somehow live in a magic fantasy land where cops aren't lazy pricks.
That sums it up quite nicely. They used to be great, but in the last 3-4 years they've been rather consistently shitting all over their customer base. I jumped ship when they decided the Extreme plan was no longer unlimited.
Like every other ISP, they will become a boring, frustrating, penny-pinching joke/scam. It's only a matter of time before they start pissing off the people they thought un-pissable.
I don't understand people who rely on Gmail, or any other free webmail, as their primary and business-critical point of contact. There is no SLA, no contractual obligation, no guarantee of anything. Anything can happen to your email and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
The logic is quite simple: if you can't live without something, then get a guarantee in writing, and pay the premium for that extra service. In Gmail's case, there is no premium service, so you'd better start looking elsewhere.
It's cute that the Google folks are apologetic, but what they should have said is "Shut the fuck up, we don't owe you a damn thing. Do you know how much of a pain it is to run a public mail service ? Be grateful we give you free email at all, you whiny little attention whores.". I wish!
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And the foreign and Chinese companies who provide the equipment that runs the Firewall find it acceptable enough to sell to the people who run it.
Incorrect. They find it acceptable to profit from the government's ambitions. In a corporation, ethics are not part of the bidding process. Ethics is PR's problem.
You're absolutely correct.
In both cases, it is up to the reader to weigh the facts and make up their own mind. TorrentFreak is an openly pro-piracy site, or more accurately anti-copyright abuse.
Do you expect TorrentFreak to say "Oh, we're all wrong and stupid. Call Blair and Sarkozy so they can violate our tight pirate asses".
Most PCs have had working standby/hibernation since the late 90's. Combine that with Wake-on-LAN and you can have a machine that's always available (within a few seconds), yet goes to sleep when not in use.
It almost certainly uses less power to wake from hibernation, than it does to boot the OS from a power-off state.
Governments are made of people. And people are stupid.
Best t-shirt slogan ever!
The Chinese and Russians are every bit as barbaric as Americans. If anything, their scarcity of resources might encourage them think a little harder before going to war.
The main difference between terrorists and the U.S. military is terrorists fight smart (and dirty). A thousand uniformed men with M4 rifles are nothing compared to a dozen plain-looking civilians with a big holy chip on their shoulder.
What's wrong with him ? Absolutely nothing.
Around some parts, the word "patriot" is synonymous with "racist". Some countries are actually proud of other things than just owning the most guns.
Everyone's going SSD-crazy, but I'm not yet convinced. They're not _that_ much faster than spinning platters of death, at least not yet, and I'd much rather throw a ton of Ram at the disk cache for the same amount of money.
If you're really worried about performance, invest in a true Ramdisk - the kind that has DDR memory slots on one side and a SATA connector on the other. You can write a 2-line script to mount and format it on boot, and even backup its contents upon shutdown (if needed). That's the ultimate /tmp drive, and it will not wear out no matter how hard you pound it.
This argument has been beaten to death, and still the publishers refuse to listen.
When a game costs $60, and 8 times out of 10 it turns out to be absolute garbage, that is astoundingly poor value for money. So statistically, I have to blow $300 to find one game I actually like, and it might last me a few weeks, at best a month or two before I'm completely sick of it. If I could break that down into some sort of "fun-hours per dollar" metric, it would make cocaine and alcohol seem cheap by comparison.
it provides sufficent 'pluses' to make up for loss
Show me how Steam makes up for my inability to sell, lend or give away old unloved games ? I'm pretty sure I won't be playing Half Life again anytime soon, but I know a certain kid who played the everloving crap out of it after I gave him the box and disc.
The problem with the Steam model is they make too many assumptions:
1. You're going to love the game, and love it until the world dies
2. You're rich, and so is everyone you know, so nobody ever lends, trades or gives anything away second-hand.
Wehell that's a very romanticized outlook of the gaming scene, but very far removed from reality.
Time to stop buying DRM-encumbered products. Thank goodness for common sense.
I grew up using Windows and never once needed something like that.
Well, kiddo, most of us geeks grew up using DOS and TOS and those Basic cartridges. Windows was a cutesy little app that ran on top of DOS. I spent pretty much all of the 80's and 90's working from a command shell, and even today on my Windows XP desktop, I have a couple hundred batch files and Perl scripts that follow me wherever I go. There is a wealth of tasks that are done more concisely and efficiently with a few text commands than any GUI could ever encompass.
Just look at the very handy things you can do by chaining the holy trinity of Grep/Awk/Sed together with pipes. I recently migrated a mail server from qmail to postfix, and I pulled all the needed info with those tools. There was no "Dump all users, passwords, aliases and domains" command, so I built my own out of basic command-line building blocks, and it took maybe 10 minutes (mostly because I had never worked with qmail). Just try doing something in Exchange Server that's not explicitly offered in one of the menus... you wouldn't even imagine.
And you've just underlined one of the many reasons why the ISPs want in on this thing. They get to double-dip, as not only will they charge you a monthly fee for the receiver, but they will bill you for the bandwidth too!
Just wait 'til you find out what they will be charging for this thing... They may very well offer it as an add-on to existing cable subscribers, because nothing makes a content provider happier than tacking an extra $70 to your monthly bill for multiple copies of the exact same content.
I believe two seconds of googling would have found a solid answer:
Metallica's label (for Death Magnetic) is UMG. Pretty sure Lars Ulrich doesn't own Universal Group, not even the tiniest part of it.
Why wouldn't you just spend the money on a small ESX farm with a couple of nodes and a NFS or iSCSI SAN?
Because then you'd only be paying a tenth of the cost of a mainframe, resulting in your department's budget being reduced next year. People buy mainframes for two reasons:
1. They actually have a valid use for a natively clustered processing architecture with a 100% uptime cash-backed guarantee.
2. They're spending other people's money (either taxpayers' or venture capital).
Chances are if you paid for a zS, you've got better things to put your processor capabilities towards rather then emulating Windows.
Chances are if you own a zS, you can throw a stone at the nearest developer to compile Bochs for free, which just might be what Mantissa did (and added some kind of management UI). The good thing is: anyone buying into this product is a gullible fool who deserves to be robbed blind. The bad news is: there's a 50% chance they're spending your tax money.
Why a personal mainframe if one machine can serve the needs of hundreds ? A household that barely needs a PC today will not require a 128-processor mainframe tomorrow. Give them a cheap terminal to the shared neighborhood bit-banger and they will be happy as a retarded luddite clam.
I'd tell them to keep on snooping, right up until they've eliminated every single potential hire on the planet.
The way I see it is simple: a career is not a one-way relationship. There's a lot more to it than a steady paycheque. For one, I value respect much higher than pay. If someone makes big-money hiring decisions based on drunken Facebook pics, they clearly don't respect my right to have a real life outside of their cubicle reality. Even if they did hire me, they would hate me and I would hate them... fire and water, cat and dog, rebel and piece-of-shit-conformist-swine. I don't want to work in that kind of hostile environment.
I do believe in hiring people with not only the right skills, but the right personality for your company. Contrary to media belief, there are quite a few successful businesses out there that don't have "casual fridays" or "opportunity-targeted coaching, because they're not run by deranged abusive control-freaks. Does my choice of t-shirt slogan have any impact on my ability to mash letters on a keyboard ? Does the fact that I drink tequila instead of boxed wine demonstrate a complete lack of critical thought and judgement ?
If someone can google me and immediately conclude we have irreconcilable differences, that makes me happy because they didn't waste any of my time. I'd rather people know I'm a libertarian asshole, than have them find out the hard way after they've pissed me off once too many.
Heart surgery, auto repair, cooking... once you learn how it works, it's easy.
What these things are not is OBVIOUS. An untrained goon will have a hard time figuring out heart surgery without some kind of training. That same goon will also not have the slightest clue how to fix an ailing piece of shit car. Why would we somehow magically believe the goon is capable of writing secure PHP code ?
None of these jobs are unnecessarily complicated, once you learn what the hell you're supposed to be doing. The problem is, it's a heck of a lot easier for the goon to pretend he's a PHP coder, because people have this funny habit of posting code snippets online for the cretins to copy and paste verbatim. "Look Ma, I'm a porgamror. What's a float?"
I'm pretty sure if you demonstrate heart surgery on Youtube, some dinkus in the retarded states will try to duplicate the procedure. That's just human stupidity at work.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that these nature lovers are hypocrites. There are two things that are certain in life: nature has a way of balancing itself out, and humans have a way to destroy everything they touch. If 8 out of 10 frogs are being killed by this fungus, that's the millenia-old rule of the survival of the fittest. We try to interfere with this impenetrable law, and we end up fucking with something else indirectly.
At best, it will save a few frogs whose existence has been deemed obsolete by the natural chemical evolution of their own habitat. At worst, it will lead to the birth of a stronger, human-borne disease that will wreak far greater havoc in our lives. The only fact is that we don't know all the variables at play, and meddling with them is, by definition, a foolish act in itself.
It's cute that they're doing this the open-source way, but realistically they'd be better off hiring a few designers and letting them fight it out. Maybe I'm jaded from years of Linux adminning, but I have absolutely no faith in the graphic abilities of network geeks, myself included.
Except most municipalities offer a reduced fine if you pay it quickly. In my city, it is roughly half, so there is zero incentive to enlist Parkingticket.com for me. If they beat the fine, I still owe them as much as if I had simply paid the fine without contest. If they lose, sure they give me $10, but the "court fees" get tacked on to the fine, which are usually something like $25 or more (depending on the fine!?).
Parkingtickets.com is useless to me. Wake me when they accept bids to hunt down and beat parking nazis with a stolen coin meter.
The problem is that the parking nazi should not be allowed to be a witness as they cannot be expected to deliver an impartial testimony. The employees are coerced into delivering as many fines as possible, otherwise they wouldn't be handing out a single ticket. Their employer directly profits from parking fines, it is the first reason why there are parking fines. It's not about managing spaces or congestion, it's just about money.
What, you think a normal human being has a desire to stick random strangers with ridiculous fines ? No, that is called a sociopath. Since I'd like to assume most parking employees aren't sociopaths, then they must be under pressure from their employer.
Sure they're happy, if you pay for the tow yourself. Everywhere I've ever lived, the only way to get a car towed at the driver's expense is to go through the police, which is cumbersome and mostly pointless, unless you somehow live in a magic fantasy land where cops aren't lazy pricks.
That sums it up quite nicely. They used to be great, but in the last 3-4 years they've been rather consistently shitting all over their customer base. I jumped ship when they decided the Extreme plan was no longer unlimited.
Like every other ISP, they will become a boring, frustrating, penny-pinching joke/scam. It's only a matter of time before they start pissing off the people they thought un-pissable.
I don't understand people who rely on Gmail, or any other free webmail, as their primary and business-critical point of contact. There is no SLA, no contractual obligation, no guarantee of anything. Anything can happen to your email and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
The logic is quite simple: if you can't live without something, then get a guarantee in writing, and pay the premium for that extra service. In Gmail's case, there is no premium service, so you'd better start looking elsewhere.
It's cute that the Google folks are apologetic, but what they should have said is "Shut the fuck up, we don't owe you a damn thing. Do you know how much of a pain it is to run a public mail service ? Be grateful we give you free email at all, you whiny little attention whores.". I wish!