And will break even faster. I have three of four of PCMCIA ethernet card with broken "dongles":-( Which you can't buy separately, and which you can not swap from one card to another, it seems.
Ask anyone in Iraq whether it's safer over there right now or before the war (and yes, anyone includes the americans over there).
For one, I'm sure, you did not ask. Noone did. Such poll would be rather biased too, you know, because who really disliked Saddam's rule were routinely killed.
Imagine a driver loosing control of her/his car. The car spins and hits the guardrail, which badly injures everyone inside, but prevents it from going
onto the other side of the road, which would not only
have killed everyone inside, but also injured/killed others in head-on collision(s).
Will the occupants of the unfortunate car -- and some other witnesses -- blame the guardrail? You bet some will! They will also be quick to point out, that the car's suspension was made by a subsidiary of the same company, which made the railing. And yet despite all the compassion I may have for their sufferings, I can not blame the railing -- it did the right thing, prevening more injuries and destruction.
As Economist put it recently, after 12 years of wrangling it was right to call Saddam's bluff, even if bluff is all it turned out to be.
The US publicly states it is forming two separate expeditionary forces capable of fighting (and winning) a war on their own. Expeditionary forces aren't exactly defensive, you know.
Maybe this gives you an impression of how the rest of the world is starting to think about the US.
Then "the world" is stupid and/or ignorant. The US has maintained this policy since the WWII. As long as "the world" was scared of the Soviets, nobody minded (except for the Warsaw Pact). Now, that the US is, actually, considering a reduction of its military capabilities to winning one while merely sustaining another major campaign (as opposite from winning both, as you describe) you come out and claim we are agressive... If it was not for our "agression" you'd likely be speaking Russian by now and had to get in line in the dairy store at 6 in the morning to get milk.
I wish, China was really so weak militarily. And you may well be right -- I just don't know.
But your response has only limited relevance -- the size of their army (and the amount of weaponry pointed at Taiwan in particular) is the sign of how threatening they are -- even if, come actual shooting, the threat turns out to be hollow.
It could be unfair because such state sponsorships of the new software could amount to subsidies, which could be
argued illegal under WTO rules and, possibly, othre treaties.
China has long been a serious threat to world security...
I'm sorry, but that's a rather funny statement, coming from an American these days...
Mmm, what makes you say this? Oh, I know. A war
in Iraq, right? Saddams and miloshevitches of the world are the only people to feel less secure because of it. Not much less secure, unfortunately -- thanks to you and your kind.
China is actually quite pacifist -- just look into Confucionism
Confucionism or not, China maintains huge army and is known to have used it for highly illegal purposes. Your heart, I'm sure, bleeds, because of the questionable legal grounds for attacking Iraq, but you don't seem to care for China's annexation of Tibet and parts of India's northeast -- for which there are no legal grounds at all.
Criticizing US' and praising China's foreign (and domestic) policies in one breath is sheer stupidity.
Implementing special purpose scripting languages with XML is a great idea
I totally disagree. The resulting "scripts" are just as unreadable as plain code, while taking millions times longer to execute.
If you need a scripting language -- pick an existing one. TCL is _the_ scripting language. Python is close, but
has a messy C API. Perl? Well, may be, although I tend to think of it as a "write-only" language (you can't read it)...
But -- for the sake of us all -- don't invent a new wheel, and certainly don't wrap it into XML -- it is a _data_ description language, not _code_ description.
It's crazy that it came to this. If they had said *anything* reasonable, we would have been happy to just install Linux on the thing and be done with it. But they were saying that anyone who uses a Dell laptop (with this startup screen) *has* to just lie about having read the licenses, and just blindly agree to them.
Faced with this screen I turned the computer off, and
booted it from CD. FreeBSD installation CD that is.
The article says, they tried that, but that Windows
started to boot. I guess, they did not try hard enough, or
that the Dell's BIOS has changed over last year...
The goal of SPEWS is not to list individual spammers, it is to list those who support spammers.
No problems with the goal, it is the execution. There are too many "horror stories" about people being blacklisted without warning nor explanations. SPEWS is notorious for being unreachable. You will be tried in a secret court and sentenced without knowing it, and without a possibility for appeal.
The ISPs should not subscribe to SPEWS, but many do. This gives SPEWS enourmous power, which they don't always wield wisely. They are overly agressive in their blacklisting, which undermines the good idea they use.
If someone want's to stand in a park and hand out ads for a penis enlargment device to anyone who is interested i don't care.
I would care, actually. I don't want this sort of material in the park, sorry. Fortunately, I can "censor" it out, because it is considered "commercial speech" and as such enjoys very little 1st Ammendment protection.
(I'd be especially offended if it were a nudist park...)
It's when someone backs a dump truck up to the park and fills the park with the same ads that I take exception as it infringes on my right to use the park.
So, you'd also like to "censor" certain people/behaviours out, even if your threshold is higher:-)
In my opinion, the "censorship" complaints -- especially from the Internet veterans -- are mostly due to the fact, they are becoming a minority very quickly. They used to set the rules (Internet Death Penalty was known long ago), but they are more and more marginalized.
It is a pity, we have to deal with morons, AOLers, and WebTVers on the Internet, but it is the reality, and, mind you, they foot most of the bill... You don't need a police department in a town of 200 people -- a sheriff will do, but with 20000 you need one...
I agree. However, there are simply too many
decisions to make in today's life, so some/most of them are delegated to a specialist. Be that your friendly sysadmin deciding on which blacklist to use or your
friendly FCC comissioners deciding, what radio jockeys must "beep out" as obscene...
Note, that although the two sample specialists above are
appointed in a totally different manner, they both act as censors (an honorable and coveted position in ancient Rome, BTW).
The discussion in this forum is somewhat distorted, because most of the participants are their own sysadmins, while FCC is a remote entity. But the point is, censorship can be good -- as long as you control the censors...
I feel that the Internet is our last source of un-censored and un-biased information.
Are you sure, you want it un-censored? Before answering with the enthusiastic: "Yes, I am!" however, consider that anti-spamming is censorship,
for example. Also, I would not want Jerry Falwell to be able to reach my children any more, than Jerry would not want his children to be reachable by pornographers (or so he says).
In other words, beware of what you wish for.
Internet used to be the hangout of the few, who did not need many rules and understood each other. It is now the place for everyone -- like a nice park frequented by picnickers. At some point you have to start fining people for leaving garbage on the grass and for playing their stereos too loud -- something, that, of course, violates
their freedom.
Once you accept the need to control people's behaviour, you have to accept the need for some authority to do that. ICANN or SPEWS or anything in between:-)
The java/jdk13 port was added to FreeBSD on Aug 27, 2001 -- according to CVS.
Now, _two_ years later, there is an _officially licensed_ binary package available. All "serious developers" could, and many did consider FreeBSD quite
suitable for years... But it takes a lot of effort to get an official license to distribute the binaries. And not just the
coding effort, which would be the FreeBSD people's idea of fun. It is mostly the legalese and paperwork kind of effort, which most sane people hate...
At the same time, I have a hard time recalling any incident even remotely similar in Holland, Italy, France or the United Kingdom.
Not that I watch those countries closely, but
did not some gang "rescue" their leader from prison in France -- using grenades and other fairly heavy weaponry?
Anyway, the thing to compare is not the bizarre shooting sprees, that get reported all over the world, but the dry everyday statistics and crime-rates...
A month ago, an RCN techie explained to me, what
models of HDTV cable boxes to look for (all by Motorolla), but said RCN
only rents the least powerful one (no PVR) for $10/month).
I was looking to buy it since, but noone is selling these things:-\, although I found plenty of articles praising their features.
Looks like they are marketed to the cable operators only. Anyone knows, where a consumer can buy an HTDV-capable cable box? With or without the
PVR features...
Whoever I ask about the definition of a bit (as in 1/8th of a byte) gets confused and starts
mumbling... Here, can you follow up with a good definition? Don't use a book...
I wonder, if there will be follow-ups and how will they be rated:-)
gcc produces inferior code on both platforms. Intel's C compiler kicks the shit out of gcc
Was not my experience, actually... With gcc-3.2.x (the 3.3 is, supposedly, even better for SSE2/MMX2) on Windows (under Cygwin) I produced an executable, that
worked slightly better than that produced by Intel's compiler (a lot of double-precision math).
Both of them were about 4 times faster, than the binary produced by the Visual C compiler -- from Microsoft.
Their hardware may be reliable and OS stable, but the CPUs -- Sparcs -- are just way too slow, even with their gobs of on-chip cache.
Now, that Intel and AMD have decent operating systems to run on them, there is no reason to pay premium for the Sun's systems. Actually, the operating systems have been available for a long time, but it finally began to sink into the minds of the decision makers (or, some of the FreeBSD/Linux fans finally grew up to become decision makers:-)...
Sun-branded x86 systems may be their salvation -- competing with Dell... Which is, probably, rather sad, because, from what I know,
x86 is an inferior architecture on the technical merits alone.
That's what it seems like to me. All of the features that, supposedly, distinguish this from Usenet can be had on Usenet without too much trouble. Instead of joining this new network, one can just set up a news-server that will
have carefully picked -- possibly private -- news-groups; can't be harder than picking "channels".
obey moderations and cancelations from reliable sources.
The first will limit the bandwidth requirements. The second will take care of spam and authorizations...
Don't invent the new wheel...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sold. Almost -- can the buttons be labeled in Cyrillic? My grandmother's English is not that good...
KDE's Quanta promises a lot... It comes with the modern KDE, or you can get the souped up Quanta Gold from theKompany.
A minor nit -- Volvo now belongs to Ford. Most probably, Gates knows this -- the "suits" around him certainly do.
Luckily for him and for you, there were no migration limitations in US then, for there surely were people already selling fruits off wagons in Iowa...
For one, I'm sure, you did not ask. Noone did. Such poll would be rather biased too, you know, because who really disliked Saddam's rule were routinely killed.
Imagine a driver loosing control of her/his car. The car spins and hits the guardrail, which badly injures everyone inside, but prevents it from going onto the other side of the road, which would not only have killed everyone inside, but also injured/killed others in head-on collision(s).
Will the occupants of the unfortunate car -- and some other witnesses -- blame the guardrail? You bet some will! They will also be quick to point out, that the car's suspension was made by a subsidiary of the same company, which made the railing. And yet despite all the compassion I may have for their sufferings, I can not blame the railing -- it did the right thing, prevening more injuries and destruction.
As Economist put it recently, after 12 years of wrangling it was right to call Saddam's bluff, even if bluff is all it turned out to be.
Then "the world" is stupid and/or ignorant. The US has maintained this policy since the WWII. As long as "the world" was scared of the Soviets, nobody minded (except for the Warsaw Pact). Now, that the US is, actually, considering a reduction of its military capabilities to winning one while merely sustaining another major campaign (as opposite from winning both, as you describe) you come out and claim we are agressive... If it was not for our "agression" you'd likely be speaking Russian by now and had to get in line in the dairy store at 6 in the morning to get milk.
I wish, China was really so weak militarily. And you may well be right -- I just don't know.
But your response has only limited relevance -- the size of their army (and the amount of weaponry pointed at Taiwan in particular) is the sign of how threatening they are -- even if, come actual shooting, the threat turns out to be hollow.
-1 Offtopic :-)
It could be unfair because such state sponsorships of the new software could amount to subsidies, which could be argued illegal under WTO rules and, possibly, othre treaties.
Mmm, what makes you say this? Oh, I know. A war in Iraq, right? Saddams and miloshevitches of the world are the only people to feel less secure because of it. Not much less secure, unfortunately -- thanks to you and your kind.
Confucionism or not, China maintains huge army and is known to have used it for highly illegal purposes. Your heart, I'm sure, bleeds, because of the questionable legal grounds for attacking Iraq, but you don't seem to care for China's annexation of Tibet and parts of India's northeast -- for which there are no legal grounds at all.
Criticizing US' and praising China's foreign (and domestic) policies in one breath is sheer stupidity.
I totally disagree. The resulting "scripts" are just as unreadable as plain code, while taking millions times longer to execute.
If you need a scripting language -- pick an existing one. TCL is _the_ scripting language. Python is close, but has a messy C API. Perl? Well, may be, although I tend to think of it as a "write-only" language (you can't read it)...
But -- for the sake of us all -- don't invent a new wheel, and certainly don't wrap it into XML -- it is a _data_ description language, not _code_ description.
Faced with this screen I turned the computer off, and booted it from CD. FreeBSD installation CD that is.
The article says, they tried that, but that Windows started to boot. I guess, they did not try hard enough, or that the Dell's BIOS has changed over last year...
Of course. And being accused, means being guilty. Otherwise, why would you be accused?
No problems with the goal, it is the execution. There are too many "horror stories" about people being blacklisted without warning nor explanations. SPEWS is notorious for being unreachable. You will be tried in a secret court and sentenced without knowing it, and without a possibility for appeal.
The ISPs should not subscribe to SPEWS, but many do. This gives SPEWS enourmous power, which they don't always wield wisely. They are overly agressive in their blacklisting, which undermines the good idea they use.
I would care, actually. I don't want this sort of material in the park, sorry. Fortunately, I can "censor" it out, because it is considered "commercial speech" and as such enjoys very little 1st Ammendment protection.
(I'd be especially offended if it were a nudist park...)
So, you'd also like to "censor" certain people/behaviours out, even if your threshold is higher :-)
In my opinion, the "censorship" complaints -- especially from the Internet veterans -- are mostly due to the fact, they are becoming a minority very quickly. They used to set the rules (Internet Death Penalty was known long ago), but they are more and more marginalized.
It is a pity, we have to deal with morons, AOLers, and WebTVers on the Internet, but it is the reality, and, mind you, they foot most of the bill... You don't need a police department in a town of 200 people -- a sheriff will do, but with 20000 you need one...
Note, that although the two sample specialists above are appointed in a totally different manner, they both act as censors (an honorable and coveted position in ancient Rome, BTW).
The discussion in this forum is somewhat distorted, because most of the participants are their own sysadmins, while FCC is a remote entity. But the point is, censorship can be good -- as long as you control the censors...
Are you sure, you want it un-censored? Before answering with the enthusiastic: "Yes, I am!" however, consider that anti-spamming is censorship, for example. Also, I would not want Jerry Falwell to be able to reach my children any more, than Jerry would not want his children to be reachable by pornographers (or so he says).
In other words, beware of what you wish for. Internet used to be the hangout of the few, who did not need many rules and understood each other. It is now the place for everyone -- like a nice park frequented by picnickers. At some point you have to start fining people for leaving garbage on the grass and for playing their stereos too loud -- something, that, of course, violates their freedom.
Once you accept the need to control people's behaviour, you have to accept the need for some authority to do that. ICANN or SPEWS or anything in between :-)
The java/jdk13 port was added to FreeBSD on Aug 27, 2001 -- according to CVS.
Now, _two_ years later, there is an _officially licensed_ binary package available. All "serious developers" could, and many did consider FreeBSD quite suitable for years... But it takes a lot of effort to get an official license to distribute the binaries. And not just the coding effort, which would be the FreeBSD people's idea of fun. It is mostly the legalese and paperwork kind of effort, which most sane people hate...
Not that I watch those countries closely, but did not some gang "rescue" their leader from prison in France -- using grenades and other fairly heavy weaponry?
Anyway, the thing to compare is not the bizarre shooting sprees, that get reported all over the world, but the dry everyday statistics and crime-rates...
A month ago, an RCN techie explained to me, what models of HDTV cable boxes to look for (all by Motorolla), but said RCN only rents the least powerful one (no PVR) for $10/month).
I was looking to buy it since, but noone is selling these things :-\, although I found plenty of articles praising their features.
Looks like they are marketed to the cable operators only. Anyone knows, where a consumer can buy an HTDV-capable cable box? With or without the PVR features...
Whoever I ask about the definition of a bit (as in 1/8th of a byte) gets confused and starts mumbling... Here, can you follow up with a good definition? Don't use a book...
I wonder, if there will be follow-ups and how will they be rated :-)
Was not my experience, actually... With gcc-3.2.x (the 3.3 is, supposedly, even better for SSE2/MMX2) on Windows (under Cygwin) I produced an executable, that worked slightly better than that produced by Intel's compiler (a lot of double-precision math).
Both of them were about 4 times faster, than the binary produced by the Visual C compiler -- from Microsoft.
YMMV, of course...
Their hardware may be reliable and OS stable, but the CPUs -- Sparcs -- are just way too slow, even with their gobs of on-chip cache.
Now, that Intel and AMD have decent operating systems to run on them, there is no reason to pay premium for the Sun's systems. Actually, the operating systems have been available for a long time, but it finally began to sink into the minds of the decision makers (or, some of the FreeBSD/Linux fans finally grew up to become decision makers :-)...
Sun-branded x86 systems may be their salvation -- competing with Dell... Which is, probably, rather sad, because, from what I know, x86 is an inferior architecture on the technical merits alone.
- have carefully picked -- possibly private -- news-groups; can't be harder than picking "channels".
- obey moderations and cancelations from reliable sources.
The first will limit the bandwidth requirements. The second will take care of spam and authorizations... Don't invent the new wheel...Because I only have one OS and don't reboot it, you, insensitive clod!