What Microsoft will almost certainly do, is give away free Windows and Office licenses to these schools. They'd rather lose the money, than lose the users, because free software is "contagious". Get a kid used to Linux, he's likely to continue using it beyond the classroom, maybe even writing interop tools to help migrate his friends and relatives away from expensive commercial apps.
You don't need to look very far... Microsoft wouldn't be a tenth of the size today, were it not for rampant proliferation of its OS during the 80's and 90's. People grew up on Windows, whether or not they paid for it is irrelevant, it's what they know and inertia is what keeps them there.
I just want these guys to write Cobol viruses so the world can migrate away from these dinosaurs once and for all.
Anything Cobol can do, any other language can do as well. The difference is Cobol developers, being a rare and dying breed, cost a lot more than any modern developer.
Many people defend Cobol by virtue of its record definition capabilities, and while it was possibly the first language to implement such functionality natively, most other languages have copied the concept. We just call them structs and objects.
Yep it's a pretty ugly business. Too much competition, no solidarity whatsoever, often pulling insurance stunts or even destroying competitors' property to get an edge. They make the Chinese look like amateurs. Well no, more like peers, but still...
Combine that with a lack of integrity among the companies that hire truckers, and how much bullshit they hear every single day. You end up with a system that is so broke, you have to wonder why these guys don't sell their trucks and go work at Subway or something.
The fact that these Russians picked the trucking industry as their targets just makes them that much more heinous. Why couldn't they defraud the insurance industry like everyone else ?
I don't find that incredible at all. I have relatives in the trucking industry (yeah go figure!).
1. Contractors usually invoice with net-30 terms, meaning they only get paid a month after the job is done.
2. Some jobs are paid upon project completion, which means you could be waiting 3-6 months or more.
2. A lot of trucking/construction businesses are run by imbeciles with poor cashflow that pay late, and some of them are just assholes who pay late on purpose.
3. A lot of companies go bankrupt (or vanish) and never pay.
4. A large number of truckers are independent, so the bookkeeping is handled by either the guy himself or their spouse. Things fall through the cracks all the time.
5. How many trucking companies are there in the US ? Enough that these crooks never had to use the same one twice. These contractors don't exactly communicate fraud information with each other, so you could scam N-2 companies and still find a pair of suckers.
Well you know what ? Some of those people actually do "get it", that it's a little crazy to kill someone because they can tell the difference between a woman and a goat.
Those people often emigrate to Canada, the U.S. or Western Europe, to live with like-minded people. Maybe they realize their homeland is too far gone to be saved.
Regardless of what we think, humanity runs its course. The best thing we can do is support those who seek change, either at home or abroad. In that same stream of consciousness, we must protect our own values, just as religious fanatics protect theirs.
You can't tell others how to life their lives, but you can stop them from ruining yours!
In my opinion, economic crisis might have the reverse effect: it will demonstrate how little "value" there is in money. Your dollar is worth less, but free stuff is still free.
I know it's a pipe dream, but this could be just one more step toward society minus money.
How is Vista more stable than Win2k ? Win2k, even in its early days, was rock-solid. I used it as a desktop for many years, long after XP was released, because 2k was still tighter than XP by a wide margin.
Vista, on the other hand, feels like a perverted patchwork of code bits that can't seem to agree on basic security issues. Some stuff needs to run as administrator, some doesn't. Some stuff refuses to run either way... dare I say, it reminds me of the old Desktop Linux distros of the 90's in terms of usability and stability.
I just specced out a balls-out CX1, and it had 8 blades, each with 2 quad-core Xeons... so it's 64 cores total, 256gb ram (32gb per blade), and a 320gb disk per blade.
Really, it's little more than a fancy enclosure, shared power supply, and a bunch of Xeon boards sandwiched together. There's no Cray magic in these, and it seems like any OEM could deliver the same thing with minimal effort, just mount the ATX power connector at the rear of the board and you're done. I was unimpressed. The only thing you're really buying is Cray's support. The rest you could cobble together in your basement with parts from TigerDirect.
The simplest, and most reliable way to do what you want, is to hold on to old PCs with those devices.
Others have already said it: many of these outdated formats depend on legacy interfaces that have been discontinued, like ISA/VLB ports. Keep an old Pentium machine around, most of them are built to survive armageddon anyway. Dig up some spare parts like AT power supplies, and stash them somewhere safe.
Ultimately, you should just transfer all these old memories to new storage and let go of the obsoleted physical medium. It's a ton of work, but it's better to do the transfer now, than to wait a few years and watch your retro-PC skills fade away. Do you think anyone in 10 years will have the slightest clue how to work with 1.44mb disk images ? Heck, a lot of sysadmins today have never even heard of HD-Copy or FDFormat. Chances are, in 10 years your memory will be rusty too!
Right, WebKit runs Safari, and Chrome: two browsers that have the carpet-bombing vulnerability, as well as being a bit goofy with the rendering in more situations than I'm willing to tolerate.
My issue with WebKit is that it doesn't seem to have a real niche. Competing with IE and Firefox is redundant and hopeless. At least Opera have found themselves a cozy place in the mobile/embedded world, where they can actually do some good. At least if WebKit were slim, stable and hyperfast, that would be a very welcome improvement over the competition, and if it could render 95% of the sites I need, I might actually consider it. Right now, it is none of those things, and thus is gets none of my love.
The liberals accuse Harper of being a Bush groupie on a weekly basis. It's like clockwork.
Weekly ? I live in Ottawa, and not a day goes by that I don't bash the son-of-a-turd. George W. Harper, I call him.
The thing most USians don't seem to understand is that liberal in Canada is not the same as liberal in the US. Liberal here kind of means "back off and let me be", whereas Conservative kind-of translates into "old-school values". Either way, their actions are nowhere near as dramatic and polarized as those of their US siblings, which is why some of us kick up a big fuss when there are talks of a Canadian DMCA. We just don't roll that way.
Meanwhile, with the US struggling to patch the holes in the fantasy banking game... er, I mean system... I'm inclined to think Canada's leaders should whore themselves out a little less to foreign interests, and a little more to local interests. Why enact more US-friendly laws, when their money has the not-so-remote possibility of going south of the peso ? Does Harper sign anti-piracy deals with Malaysian interests ? No ? Then he shouldn't sign them for US interests either.
Nah, more like very few people care who's in charge of this country. A lot of folks used to be indifferent, now we're just all annoyed with the candidates. Harper's a robot, the two before him were stone-faced crooks, and the locals just make it worse.
The way the Canadian electoral system works, we've been voting for the same local inbred candidates for the last 20 years. There's no new blood, which means often times to support your preferred party, you also have to support some idiot that's going to shit all over your home town. Well what do you do when the 4 or 5 different candidates are all from the same two-faced protein-deficient gene pool ? You don't vote. That's right! A staggering number of people this year either didn't bother voting because it was a waste of their time, or participated in so-called "strategic voting" to at least make sure a minority government was established. It makes them all play a tighter game, less extravagance in spending/legislation, etc... At this point, many people believe that's the best option, until Harper gets run over by a moose, or the liberals find a leader that doesn't wet himself on camera.
You don't actually get a tax rebate for volunteer work. You can write off any expenses directly related to the volunteer activities (travel, materials, and meals under strict circumstances).
Submitting code to yet another half-assed IM client on SourceForge does not magically entitle you to not pay income tax for your day job.
That said, there's a whole mess of funky stuff going on with the US tax laws. Some folks argue that there is no law in existence forcing US citizens to pay income tax! I take it with a grain of salt, because there isn't a crooked judge on this planet who would ever decide in your favor, should you come under scrutiny of the IRS.
I'm not a union sheeple, in fact I do think most if not all unions are obsolete, but I also think the same of the financial system, and Wal-Mart is a very big and efficient player of the money game.
It's okay, you think I'm crazy/stupid and I don't expect that to ever change. Not until the system fails to a degree where you livelihood is personally affected by the fallout.
In case you need any more reasons to hate me, I'm a libertarian, and I think that drugs and the sex industry should be de-criminalized. Oh, and I'm also convinced 9/11 was an inside job. And just to be sure you've noticed, I'm CANADIAN! BOOO!
But answer me this: Tell me one way that Wal-Mart has directly improved your quality of life... just one.
And that is why we come from different attitudes... I think heroin addicts can do whatever the hell they want to themselves, as long as they do no harm to others.
The way I see it, if someone's happy with IE6 and they put up with its quirks, they have the same rights as anyone else.
In today's bastardized world, if you don't have something in writing, you have absolutely nothing.
If a small fry were to screw up this bad, they would be afraid of their phone thanks to the many passive-aggressive office drones complaining repeatedly. Not that it helps in any way, but I'm pretty sure Google's techs aren't being harassed with phone calls every 5 seconds. I hate to enable the lusers, but when you've got paying clients breathing down your neck, you tend to take whatever measures necessary to fix the problem asap.
If anything, this should send the message that Google, contrary to popular belief, is not invincible. They mess up just like everyone else, which means maybe they're no better than anyone else.
There's nothing subtle and inoffensive about telling someone to change their browser.
What if everytime you stopped at a gas station, the attendant said "Your Ford sucks, why don't you go visit the Toyota dealership down the road, where my brother Ackbar works"... I would choke that little he-bitch!
People who use IE are often quite happy with it. They don't need to be beaten over the head with Firefox ads.
Standards do help, but the problem is the leading browser doesn't follow the standards too well.
My primary browser is Firefox, so I do 90% of the development in there. The last 10% is spent adjusting little bits and bobs for IE6/7. It doesn't matter that my pages validate, and that I'm pretty damned good at making my spaghetti code spew proper XHTML - IE is still a retard.
Where I work, we guarantee only one browser: IE6. Anything else costs extra, because of the testing involved. If someone wants us to guarantee their site will run perfectly in Opera or any other browser, they have to cover our time spent testing and massaging the markup. Sometimes that can amount to another 2-3 days of billable time on a big site/app.
I don't use Konqueror at all for web browsing. Frankly I wish it would just embed the Gecko engine and be done with it.
Comparing a BMW and a Prius has less to do with "Happy faces" and more to do with the detailed grille that gives the BMW the illusion of luxury. The Prius has a simple, blank profile that is readily associated with cheap little cars.
I suspect the association here is not with happy or angry, but with classy vs cheap. What, you actually like your 1991 Festiva ?
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What Microsoft will almost certainly do, is give away free Windows and Office licenses to these schools. They'd rather lose the money, than lose the users, because free software is "contagious". Get a kid used to Linux, he's likely to continue using it beyond the classroom, maybe even writing interop tools to help migrate his friends and relatives away from expensive commercial apps.
You don't need to look very far... Microsoft wouldn't be a tenth of the size today, were it not for rampant proliferation of its OS during the 80's and 90's. People grew up on Windows, whether or not they paid for it is irrelevant, it's what they know and inertia is what keeps them there.
I just want these guys to write Cobol viruses so the world can migrate away from these dinosaurs once and for all.
Anything Cobol can do, any other language can do as well. The difference is Cobol developers, being a rare and dying breed, cost a lot more than any modern developer.
Many people defend Cobol by virtue of its record definition capabilities, and while it was possibly the first language to implement such functionality natively, most other languages have copied the concept. We just call them structs and objects.
Yep it's a pretty ugly business. Too much competition, no solidarity whatsoever, often pulling insurance stunts or even destroying competitors' property to get an edge. They make the Chinese look like amateurs. Well no, more like peers, but still...
Combine that with a lack of integrity among the companies that hire truckers, and how much bullshit they hear every single day. You end up with a system that is so broke, you have to wonder why these guys don't sell their trucks and go work at Subway or something.
The fact that these Russians picked the trucking industry as their targets just makes them that much more heinous. Why couldn't they defraud the insurance industry like everyone else ?
I don't find that incredible at all. I have relatives in the trucking industry (yeah go figure!).
1. Contractors usually invoice with net-30 terms, meaning they only get paid a month after the job is done.
2. Some jobs are paid upon project completion, which means you could be waiting 3-6 months or more.
2. A lot of trucking/construction businesses are run by imbeciles with poor cashflow that pay late, and some of them are just assholes who pay late on purpose.
3. A lot of companies go bankrupt (or vanish) and never pay.
4. A large number of truckers are independent, so the bookkeeping is handled by either the guy himself or their spouse. Things fall through the cracks all the time.
5. How many trucking companies are there in the US ? Enough that these crooks never had to use the same one twice. These contractors don't exactly communicate fraud information with each other, so you could scam N-2 companies and still find a pair of suckers.
Well you know what ? Some of those people actually do "get it", that it's a little crazy to kill someone because they can tell the difference between a woman and a goat.
Those people often emigrate to Canada, the U.S. or Western Europe, to live with like-minded people. Maybe they realize their homeland is too far gone to be saved.
Regardless of what we think, humanity runs its course. The best thing we can do is support those who seek change, either at home or abroad. In that same stream of consciousness, we must protect our own values, just as religious fanatics protect theirs.
You can't tell others how to life their lives, but you can stop them from ruining yours!
In my opinion, economic crisis might have the reverse effect: it will demonstrate how little "value" there is in money. Your dollar is worth less, but free stuff is still free.
I know it's a pipe dream, but this could be just one more step toward society minus money.
How is Vista more stable than Win2k ? Win2k, even in its early days, was rock-solid. I used it as a desktop for many years, long after XP was released, because 2k was still tighter than XP by a wide margin.
Vista, on the other hand, feels like a perverted patchwork of code bits that can't seem to agree on basic security issues. Some stuff needs to run as administrator, some doesn't. Some stuff refuses to run either way... dare I say, it reminds me of the old Desktop Linux distros of the 90's in terms of usability and stability.
The summary, as always, is misleading.
I just specced out a balls-out CX1, and it had 8 blades, each with 2 quad-core Xeons... so it's 64 cores total, 256gb ram (32gb per blade), and a 320gb disk per blade.
Really, it's little more than a fancy enclosure, shared power supply, and a bunch of Xeon boards sandwiched together. There's no Cray magic in these, and it seems like any OEM could deliver the same thing with minimal effort, just mount the ATX power connector at the rear of the board and you're done. I was unimpressed. The only thing you're really buying is Cray's support. The rest you could cobble together in your basement with parts from TigerDirect.
The simplest, and most reliable way to do what you want, is to hold on to old PCs with those devices.
Others have already said it: many of these outdated formats depend on legacy interfaces that have been discontinued, like ISA/VLB ports. Keep an old Pentium machine around, most of them are built to survive armageddon anyway. Dig up some spare parts like AT power supplies, and stash them somewhere safe.
Ultimately, you should just transfer all these old memories to new storage and let go of the obsoleted physical medium. It's a ton of work, but it's better to do the transfer now, than to wait a few years and watch your retro-PC skills fade away. Do you think anyone in 10 years will have the slightest clue how to work with 1.44mb disk images ? Heck, a lot of sysadmins today have never even heard of HD-Copy or FDFormat. Chances are, in 10 years your memory will be rusty too!
Right, WebKit runs Safari, and Chrome: two browsers that have the carpet-bombing vulnerability, as well as being a bit goofy with the rendering in more situations than I'm willing to tolerate.
My issue with WebKit is that it doesn't seem to have a real niche. Competing with IE and Firefox is redundant and hopeless. At least Opera have found themselves a cozy place in the mobile/embedded world, where they can actually do some good. At least if WebKit were slim, stable and hyperfast, that would be a very welcome improvement over the competition, and if it could render 95% of the sites I need, I might actually consider it. Right now, it is none of those things, and thus is gets none of my love.
Correction: In a minority government, you don't have to go behind your leader's back. You just cross the floor and do it all over his dumb face.
The liberals accuse Harper of being a Bush groupie on a weekly basis. It's like clockwork.
Weekly ? I live in Ottawa, and not a day goes by that I don't bash the son-of-a-turd. George W. Harper, I call him.
The thing most USians don't seem to understand is that liberal in Canada is not the same as liberal in the US. Liberal here kind of means "back off and let me be", whereas Conservative kind-of translates into "old-school values". Either way, their actions are nowhere near as dramatic and polarized as those of their US siblings, which is why some of us kick up a big fuss when there are talks of a Canadian DMCA. We just don't roll that way.
Meanwhile, with the US struggling to patch the holes in the fantasy banking game... er, I mean system... I'm inclined to think Canada's leaders should whore themselves out a little less to foreign interests, and a little more to local interests. Why enact more US-friendly laws, when their money has the not-so-remote possibility of going south of the peso ? Does Harper sign anti-piracy deals with Malaysian interests ? No ? Then he shouldn't sign them for US interests either.
Nah, more like very few people care who's in charge of this country. A lot of folks used to be indifferent, now we're just all annoyed with the candidates. Harper's a robot, the two before him were stone-faced crooks, and the locals just make it worse.
The way the Canadian electoral system works, we've been voting for the same local inbred candidates for the last 20 years. There's no new blood, which means often times to support your preferred party, you also have to support some idiot that's going to shit all over your home town. Well what do you do when the 4 or 5 different candidates are all from the same two-faced protein-deficient gene pool ? You don't vote. That's right! A staggering number of people this year either didn't bother voting because it was a waste of their time, or participated in so-called "strategic voting" to at least make sure a minority government was established. It makes them all play a tighter game, less extravagance in spending/legislation, etc... At this point, many people believe that's the best option, until Harper gets run over by a moose, or the liberals find a leader that doesn't wet himself on camera.
The Bush administration forgot to renew their domain names... tee-hee!
You don't actually get a tax rebate for volunteer work. You can write off any expenses directly related to the volunteer activities (travel, materials, and meals under strict circumstances).
Submitting code to yet another half-assed IM client on SourceForge does not magically entitle you to not pay income tax for your day job.
That said, there's a whole mess of funky stuff going on with the US tax laws. Some folks argue that there is no law in existence forcing US citizens to pay income tax! I take it with a grain of salt, because there isn't a crooked judge on this planet who would ever decide in your favor, should you come under scrutiny of the IRS.
I'm not a union sheeple, in fact I do think most if not all unions are obsolete, but I also think the same of the financial system, and Wal-Mart is a very big and efficient player of the money game.
It's okay, you think I'm crazy/stupid and I don't expect that to ever change. Not until the system fails to a degree where you livelihood is personally affected by the fallout.
In case you need any more reasons to hate me, I'm a libertarian, and I think that drugs and the sex industry should be de-criminalized. Oh, and I'm also convinced 9/11 was an inside job. And just to be sure you've noticed, I'm CANADIAN! BOOO!
But answer me this: Tell me one way that Wal-Mart has directly improved your quality of life... just one.
And that is why we come from different attitudes... I think heroin addicts can do whatever the hell they want to themselves, as long as they do no harm to others.
The way I see it, if someone's happy with IE6 and they put up with its quirks, they have the same rights as anyone else.
That's what they get for not having an SLA.
In today's bastardized world, if you don't have something in writing, you have absolutely nothing.
If a small fry were to screw up this bad, they would be afraid of their phone thanks to the many passive-aggressive office drones complaining repeatedly. Not that it helps in any way, but I'm pretty sure Google's techs aren't being harassed with phone calls every 5 seconds. I hate to enable the lusers, but when you've got paying clients breathing down your neck, you tend to take whatever measures necessary to fix the problem asap.
If anything, this should send the message that Google, contrary to popular belief, is not invincible. They mess up just like everyone else, which means maybe they're no better than anyone else.
There's nothing subtle and inoffensive about telling someone to change their browser.
What if everytime you stopped at a gas station, the attendant said "Your Ford sucks, why don't you go visit the Toyota dealership down the road, where my brother Ackbar works"... I would choke that little he-bitch!
People who use IE are often quite happy with it. They don't need to be beaten over the head with Firefox ads.
Standards do help, but the problem is the leading browser doesn't follow the standards too well.
My primary browser is Firefox, so I do 90% of the development in there. The last 10% is spent adjusting little bits and bobs for IE6/7. It doesn't matter that my pages validate, and that I'm pretty damned good at making my spaghetti code spew proper XHTML - IE is still a retard.
Where I work, we guarantee only one browser: IE6. Anything else costs extra, because of the testing involved. If someone wants us to guarantee their site will run perfectly in Opera or any other browser, they have to cover our time spent testing and massaging the markup. Sometimes that can amount to another 2-3 days of billable time on a big site/app.
I don't use Konqueror at all for web browsing. Frankly I wish it would just embed the Gecko engine and be done with it.
Two weeks before the election... is this something Obama could revoke (assuming he wins) ?
Frankly, I don't think anything should get passed within 3 months of an election. The strategic implications are too great to let fly..
1+15 digits ? That's short-sighted. They should just use a full-resolution display with scalable fonts :)
Comparing a BMW and a Prius has less to do with "Happy faces" and more to do with the detailed grille that gives the BMW the illusion of luxury. The Prius has a simple, blank profile that is readily associated with cheap little cars.
I suspect the association here is not with happy or angry, but with classy vs cheap. What, you actually like your 1991 Festiva ?
Well it's certainly better than DeVry!