And if it were anyone but Verisign, I might believe you. Honestly, if I ever design a network protocol, I am going to patent every possible way I can think of to abuse it down the road...
However, since we are talking about Verisign here, I'm sure this is just business as usual. Watch for announcement of a licensing deal with Earthlink in the not to distant future.
Regardless of whether the other guy ever had any intention of buying the lot or just wanted a free ride, "I" still knew the stipulations that were placed on the property when I made the bid, and "I" still felt the property was worth enough to warrant the price even with the restriction. The time for me to air that complaint would have been before the auction, not after I had beaten out several other bidders that had all agreed to the same terms and had chosen their bid amounts based on those conditions.
Ignore the Google-guy for a moment and imagine that you were one of the other bidders on the property in question. Suppose that you had decided the property would ordinarily be worth a million dollars to you, but you decide that because of this stipulation you are only willing to bid 600k. Now some other person comes along and outbids you at 750k, and then decides he is going to ignore the stipulations anyway. Would you be a little pissed? According to you, you didn't pay for it, so you lost your right to complain.
Nobody but me, I suppose. But I must say that I'm quite surprised to learn that they apparently put together the whole windows download just for little old me. Seems like a lot of work for just one user.
And how this is related to the KDE vs Gnome debate, I'm having a really hard time seeing.
(And IMO yes, the new behavior is @#$%-ing annoying. I don't mind the auto-resize as much - in fact I had hardly noticed it until now - but the input area is way too small by default. If there was just some way way to set the starting size, whether by a config option or by resizing manually, I'd be perfectly happy with it.)
Well, the second (and third) most intelligent land animals and many of the great apes are all in trouble primarily due to the relatively recent activities of the most intelligent one. All of them were getting along just fine without us. And even assuming it's true, saying that humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago doesn't mean a whole lot, because 1) humans still weren't all that developed back then, and our intelligence was offset by a number of other factors, and 2) how many even less developed species didn't survive the event? Any species with a limited range, regardless of how advanced they are, is going to be much more susceptible to environmental factors, and the assumption in this study appears to be that modern humans (or at least the direct precursors of modern humans) were at the time still limited to parts of Africa. Plus, if modern humans had died out 70,000 years ago, it should have left room for one of the other intelligent species to displace us, such as the Neanderthals, which at that point should have occupied much of Europe, or one of the great apes.
Where did you find the option for a 1920x1200 15.4" (or even 17") Mac Book Pro? I must have missed it when I looked.
Other reasons why I would choose a ThinkPad over a MacBook regardless of price difference: 1) No eraser mouse. 2) Single mouse button.
I know, I know, I'm not supposed to complain about only having one mouse button since like 2002. Any USB mouse blah, balh, blah... Well, with a desktop, I wouldn't, but on a laptop, you are often stuck with the built in mouse, and the built in mouse only has one button, so IMO it's still a perfectly valid complaint when discussing a MacBook.
I was always a fan of the RFC on methods for ultra low bandwidth means of communication, where the author was trying to find slower ways of transmitting information than the ELF links that the military uses (used?) to communicate with submarines. In particular, I liked the proposal of painting 0's and 1's on the turrets of a number of Abrams main battle tanks, and having a spotter read off the numbers as they drove by. As I recall, they also noted that by having the tanks engage in combat maneuvers could be used as a sort of rudimentary encryption to confuse unwanted observers.
Nonsense. Azerbaijan has a long and glorious tradition of software innovation. Surely you've seen their name come up many times in other XML related work. And don't even get me started on the contributions of Malta to the technology industry.
It will be interesting to see whether this deal will now magically fall through in the coming months.
I wouldn't bet on it. Microsoft is more than well known for dumping large amounts of cash on governments, schools, and anywhere ales that they think will generate a large number of new customers for them. And if they had a reputation for backing out on deals like this, it would be a lot harder for them to make these sorts of promises in the future.
Besides, I'd be curious to see what form of "investment" they are actually talking about. Don't be surprised if half (or more) of it comes in the form of free software licenses... That seems to be their typical way of doing things.
Suppose you have a few grams of uranium suspended in a vacuum, and a few grams of black hole. Which has a stronger gravitational attraction to it's surroundings?
Maybe they do now, but for years (even through SP1) their drivers would blue screen XP regularly if you were using the Windows XP theme. I don't know if this was limited to certain hardware models or not, but at the time I knew a lot of laptop users that were having this problem.
From the initial release of XP through some time in 2003, several of my coworkers, as well as my girlfriend, all complained about their video drivers crashing their computers regularly. None of them could go more than a day without blue screening, and sometimes it happened as quickly as a few minutes after they booted up. These complaints came exclusively from laptop users with Nvidia graphics cards, and persisted through countless driver updates, and even SP1 (which was supposed to fix several major Nvidia related problems). It wasn't until I started convincing them, one at a time, to switch to the windows classic theme that the problem started to go away. I have no idea when (or if) they finally fixed the problem. All of those laptops have since been retired- and continued running the Windows Classic theme until they were- and it wasn't until just this year that I've even tried running Windows XP + XP theme on an Nvidia card again.
Interesting - I always assumed that "choosing" the date of Easter was a simple and fairly straightforward affair - it should always be the Sunday following the Jewish passover feast. How the date for that is determined, I am not really sure off the top of my head, but it doesn't seem like it should have been that hard to figure out for any Christian leader who was particularly interested, since the Christians included most of the Jewish scriptures and proscriptions in their own.
Why can't I have a 200mpg Hummer? This isn't rocket science, and this "prize" isn't going to push the revolution any faster.
No, it isn't rocket science. It's basic thermodynamics. A Hummer weighs about 4 tons. It takes a lot of power to move 4 tons of mass, and there's no magical technology out there that can change that. The only way to get 200MPG out of a Hummer would be to find a fuel source that was 15 times more dense than gasoline. You could make small gains with a more efficient engine, but gasoline engines already operate pretty close to their maximum efficiency. Even if you switched to some new engine technology that miraculously gave you a 100% energy conversion ratio, your Hummer would only get about 5 times the miles per gallon that it gets now, which still puts you 125 MPG short of 200. (and that includes hybrids because 100% of the power in a hybrid still comes from gasoline.)
Fuel efficient cars are small because big cars are heavy. Heavy vehicles require more power to move, therefore cannot possibly be as fuel efficient as a small car.
If GM could build a 200MPG Impala, they wouldn't be in the car market anymore, because there are a lot more lucrative places they could sell the technology required to pull that off. (Not that they would miss it - the market has not been kind to them lately...)
I believe you can use anything you want. The descriptions I've read about this were all written before the formal announcement, but basically you have to be able to go 100 miles while producing as much pollution (or less) as you would generate by burning a gallon of gas. So they have conversion tables for various other possible fuels, or for electrically powered vehicles (e.g. getting x kW-h from your power company is equivalent to y gallons of gasoline.)
From what I've heard about it so far, I'm impressed, because it seems like they are focusing on actual solutions instead of neat tricks, so e.g. the guy who was getting a lot of press for converting Hummers to get 50 MPG couldn't enter because he would have to also account for the compressed hydrogen and other energy sources that go into the 50 MPG figure that all the magazines were so quick to parade around. It also knocks out vehicles like the Tesla roadster, because lets face it, you and I know that it takes just as much energy to move a 3 ton vehicle using electricity as it does with gasoline, even if the rest of the country hasn't figured that out yet.
On the other hand, the four wheels bit is new from the last I heard. That will knock out the company (Aptera) that looked like it was going to be the leading contender.
How much for a three bedroom? I lived in a number of apartments in Chicago from 1999-2003 and when I moved from a 1 bedroom apartment by myself into a 3 bedroom apartment with 2 friends, it cut my rent in half. Granted there was also a location change involved, which accounted for some of that change, but not all of it.
Have you ever tried it? Go right ahead- You can "listen" to 25 free songs a month on Rhapsody and see how it works out for you. I'd pay for a service like this if there was one that worked with my music player, but stream ripping from a subscription service isn't worth my time and trouble, even if it's free. You'll get better results by looking for bands' MySpace pages.
I doubt that it's actually the whole other half. There are some people out there who are fortunate enough to work for companies that understand how stupid it is to be so Draconian about their software policies. At my office, we are free to install whatever we want on our computers, as long as it's legitimate. Free tools are fine. If they cost money, we have to get it approved (usually pretty easy if you have a remotely valid reason). Our parent company is extremely picky about us having all of our ducks in a row regarding licensing, but beyond that, we are given pretty much free reign. I can't imagine working for an employer with a different policy. I don't think it's something that I would ask in an interview, as I've been fortunate enough so far that it's not really on the top of my head when I am looking for a job, but I can't imagine sticking around very long if I did end up in a company like that.
Given that processors with four cores are called "quad-core", shouldn't a six core processor be a "sexa-core" processor? Calling a six core processor "hexa-core" would imply that a processor with four cores should be called "tetra-core."
You (and all the other AC's saying roughly the same thing) missed the part where the shells self destruct in flight to minimize collateral damage. And if you read the links in the Wikipedia article in addition to the article itself, you would have seen that one of the things that is (was? I didn't see the date on the article...) holding up widespread adoption is a study on the potential for collateral damage.
The real question is why didn't Merkey just edit it himself - that's what Wikipedia is for.
He probably can't, because he has been (repeatedly) banned from Wikipedia for making both veiled and overt threats of legal action against people who revert his mods or make mods he disagrees with. It also seems that, due to his... unique... view of reality, he has gathered a something of a "following" of editors who spend the majority of their time on Wikipedia tracking and undoing his changes.
Well, I think we can safely assume that Noah and his family were "grandfathered" in. That said, you don't hear a whole lot of people arguing about the four corners of the earth anymore, do you? It seems that even the most ardent believers have already decided that there are some parts of the bible that aren't meant to be taken literally.
It sounds to me like the only wall they are hitting is hiring. That might be because the platform is outdated and needs to be replaced, but I can think of a number of reasons that are more likely.
The most likely reason is that they just aren't offering enough for the position. I think this is a big problem at my current company. I've been here for years and there's never been a time that we haven't been trying to hire more web developers. I'm only involved in part of the hiring process, but as far as I can tell, they tend to offer a pretty middle of the road salary for web development positions, but the people making the salary offers don't understand that we aren't trying to hire middle of the road developers. In fact the people who review web developer resumes will typically throw out an "average web developer" resume without a second look.
The other very likely reason is that they are being far to specific. If they are looking for "5 years ASP.NET + VSS + AJAX.NET + [some random.NET technology]", they are limiting their search too much. 5 years ago, a hiring manager could get away with that, because there were so many out of work programmers that you couldn't throw a stick without hitting one, but not anymore. Try broadening your search. If you're looking for AJAX (I can still barely use that word without gagging), well, it's about the same no matter what language you use on the backend. Any good PHP programmer will have no problem working in ASP if they are willing to, and vice versa. Same with C# and Java. Instead of trying to find somebody who knows your platform inside and out, look for a solid programmer in any language that is familiar with the type of work that you need done and is willing to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone but Microsoft, apparently...
And if it were anyone but Verisign, I might believe you. Honestly, if I ever design a network protocol, I am going to patent every possible way I can think of to abuse it down the road...
However, since we are talking about Verisign here, I'm sure this is just business as usual. Watch for announcement of a licensing deal with Earthlink in the not to distant future.
Regardless of whether the other guy ever had any intention of buying the lot or just wanted a free ride, "I" still knew the stipulations that were placed on the property when I made the bid, and "I" still felt the property was worth enough to warrant the price even with the restriction. The time for me to air that complaint would have been before the auction, not after I had beaten out several other bidders that had all agreed to the same terms and had chosen their bid amounts based on those conditions.
Ignore the Google-guy for a moment and imagine that you were one of the other bidders on the property in question. Suppose that you had decided the property would ordinarily be worth a million dollars to you, but you decide that because of this stipulation you are only willing to bid 600k. Now some other person comes along and outbids you at 750k, and then decides he is going to ignore the stipulations anyway. Would you be a little pissed? According to you, you didn't pay for it, so you lost your right to complain.
Nobody but me, I suppose. But I must say that I'm quite surprised to learn that they apparently put together the whole windows download just for little old me. Seems like a lot of work for just one user.
And how this is related to the KDE vs Gnome debate, I'm having a really hard time seeing.
(And IMO yes, the new behavior is @#$%-ing annoying. I don't mind the auto-resize as much - in fact I had hardly noticed it until now - but the input area is way too small by default. If there was just some way way to set the starting size, whether by a config option or by resizing manually, I'd be perfectly happy with it.)
Well, the second (and third) most intelligent land animals and many of the great apes are all in trouble primarily due to the relatively recent activities of the most intelligent one. All of them were getting along just fine without us. And even assuming it's true, saying that humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago doesn't mean a whole lot, because 1) humans still weren't all that developed back then, and our intelligence was offset by a number of other factors, and 2) how many even less developed species didn't survive the event? Any species with a limited range, regardless of how advanced they are, is going to be much more susceptible to environmental factors, and the assumption in this study appears to be that modern humans (or at least the direct precursors of modern humans) were at the time still limited to parts of Africa. Plus, if modern humans had died out 70,000 years ago, it should have left room for one of the other intelligent species to displace us, such as the Neanderthals, which at that point should have occupied much of Europe, or one of the great apes.
Where did you find the option for a 1920x1200 15.4" (or even 17") Mac Book Pro? I must have missed it when I looked.
Other reasons why I would choose a ThinkPad over a MacBook regardless of price difference:
1) No eraser mouse.
2) Single mouse button.
I know, I know, I'm not supposed to complain about only having one mouse button since like 2002. Any USB mouse blah, balh, blah... Well, with a desktop, I wouldn't, but on a laptop, you are often stuck with the built in mouse, and the built in mouse only has one button, so IMO it's still a perfectly valid complaint when discussing a MacBook.
You should try to find the one that Linden Labs sent to the guy who made the "Get a First Life" web site.
I was always a fan of the RFC on methods for ultra low bandwidth means of communication, where the author was trying to find slower ways of transmitting information than the ELF links that the military uses (used?) to communicate with submarines. In particular, I liked the proposal of painting 0's and 1's on the turrets of a number of Abrams main battle tanks, and having a spotter read off the numbers as they drove by. As I recall, they also noted that by having the tanks engage in combat maneuvers could be used as a sort of rudimentary encryption to confuse unwanted observers.
Nonsense. Azerbaijan has a long and glorious tradition of software innovation. Surely you've seen their name come up many times in other XML related work. And don't even get me started on the contributions of Malta to the technology industry.
I wouldn't bet on it. Microsoft is more than well known for dumping large amounts of cash on governments, schools, and anywhere ales that they think will generate a large number of new customers for them. And if they had a reputation for backing out on deals like this, it would be a lot harder for them to make these sorts of promises in the future.
Besides, I'd be curious to see what form of "investment" they are actually talking about. Don't be surprised if half (or more) of it comes in the form of free software licenses... That seems to be their typical way of doing things.
Sorry. Bzzt. Not true.
And Republicans vs. Democrats has nothing to do with it either way.
Suppose you have a few grams of uranium suspended in a vacuum, and a few grams of black hole. Which has a stronger gravitational attraction to it's surroundings?
Maybe they do now, but for years (even through SP1) their drivers would blue screen XP regularly if you were using the Windows XP theme. I don't know if this was limited to certain hardware models or not, but at the time I knew a lot of laptop users that were having this problem.
From the initial release of XP through some time in 2003, several of my coworkers, as well as my girlfriend, all complained about their video drivers crashing their computers regularly. None of them could go more than a day without blue screening, and sometimes it happened as quickly as a few minutes after they booted up. These complaints came exclusively from laptop users with Nvidia graphics cards, and persisted through countless driver updates, and even SP1 (which was supposed to fix several major Nvidia related problems). It wasn't until I started convincing them, one at a time, to switch to the windows classic theme that the problem started to go away. I have no idea when (or if) they finally fixed the problem. All of those laptops have since been retired- and continued running the Windows Classic theme until they were- and it wasn't until just this year that I've even tried running Windows XP + XP theme on an Nvidia card again.
Interesting - I always assumed that "choosing" the date of Easter was a simple and fairly straightforward affair - it should always be the Sunday following the Jewish passover feast. How the date for that is determined, I am not really sure off the top of my head, but it doesn't seem like it should have been that hard to figure out for any Christian leader who was particularly interested, since the Christians included most of the Jewish scriptures and proscriptions in their own.
No, it isn't rocket science. It's basic thermodynamics. A Hummer weighs about 4 tons. It takes a lot of power to move 4 tons of mass, and there's no magical technology out there that can change that. The only way to get 200MPG out of a Hummer would be to find a fuel source that was 15 times more dense than gasoline. You could make small gains with a more efficient engine, but gasoline engines already operate pretty close to their maximum efficiency. Even if you switched to some new engine technology that miraculously gave you a 100% energy conversion ratio, your Hummer would only get about 5 times the miles per gallon that it gets now, which still puts you 125 MPG short of 200. (and that includes hybrids because 100% of the power in a hybrid still comes from gasoline.)
Fuel efficient cars are small because big cars are heavy. Heavy vehicles require more power to move, therefore cannot possibly be as fuel efficient as a small car.
If GM could build a 200MPG Impala, they wouldn't be in the car market anymore, because there are a lot more lucrative places they could sell the technology required to pull that off. (Not that they would miss it - the market has not been kind to them lately...)
I believe you can use anything you want. The descriptions I've read about this were all written before the formal announcement, but basically you have to be able to go 100 miles while producing as much pollution (or less) as you would generate by burning a gallon of gas. So they have conversion tables for various other possible fuels, or for electrically powered vehicles (e.g. getting x kW-h from your power company is equivalent to y gallons of gasoline.)
From what I've heard about it so far, I'm impressed, because it seems like they are focusing on actual solutions instead of neat tricks, so e.g. the guy who was getting a lot of press for converting Hummers to get 50 MPG couldn't enter because he would have to also account for the compressed hydrogen and other energy sources that go into the 50 MPG figure that all the magazines were so quick to parade around. It also knocks out vehicles like the Tesla roadster, because lets face it, you and I know that it takes just as much energy to move a 3 ton vehicle using electricity as it does with gasoline, even if the rest of the country hasn't figured that out yet.
On the other hand, the four wheels bit is new from the last I heard. That will knock out the company (Aptera) that looked like it was going to be the leading contender.
How much for a three bedroom? I lived in a number of apartments in Chicago from 1999-2003 and when I moved from a 1 bedroom apartment by myself into a 3 bedroom apartment with 2 friends, it cut my rent in half. Granted there was also a location change involved, which accounted for some of that change, but not all of it.
Have you ever tried it? Go right ahead- You can "listen" to 25 free songs a month on Rhapsody and see how it works out for you. I'd pay for a service like this if there was one that worked with my music player, but stream ripping from a subscription service isn't worth my time and trouble, even if it's free. You'll get better results by looking for bands' MySpace pages.
I doubt that it's actually the whole other half. There are some people out there who are fortunate enough to work for companies that understand how stupid it is to be so Draconian about their software policies. At my office, we are free to install whatever we want on our computers, as long as it's legitimate. Free tools are fine. If they cost money, we have to get it approved (usually pretty easy if you have a remotely valid reason). Our parent company is extremely picky about us having all of our ducks in a row regarding licensing, but beyond that, we are given pretty much free reign. I can't imagine working for an employer with a different policy. I don't think it's something that I would ask in an interview, as I've been fortunate enough so far that it's not really on the top of my head when I am looking for a job, but I can't imagine sticking around very long if I did end up in a company like that.
Given that processors with four cores are called "quad-core", shouldn't a six core processor be a "sexa-core" processor? Calling a six core processor "hexa-core" would imply that a processor with four cores should be called "tetra-core."
</pedantic>
You (and all the other AC's saying roughly the same thing) missed the part where the shells self destruct in flight to minimize collateral damage. And if you read the links in the Wikipedia article in addition to the article itself, you would have seen that one of the things that is (was? I didn't see the date on the article...) holding up widespread adoption is a study on the potential for collateral damage.
He probably can't, because he has been (repeatedly) banned from Wikipedia for making both veiled and overt threats of legal action against people who revert his mods or make mods he disagrees with. It also seems that, due to his... unique... view of reality, he has gathered a something of a "following" of editors who spend the majority of their time on Wikipedia tracking and undoing his changes.
Well, I think we can safely assume that Noah and his family were "grandfathered" in. That said, you don't hear a whole lot of people arguing about the four corners of the earth anymore, do you? It seems that even the most ardent believers have already decided that there are some parts of the bible that aren't meant to be taken literally.
It sounds to me like the only wall they are hitting is hiring. That might be because the platform is outdated and needs to be replaced, but I can think of a number of reasons that are more likely.
.NET technology]", they are limiting their search too much. 5 years ago, a hiring manager could get away with that, because there were so many out of work programmers that you couldn't throw a stick without hitting one, but not anymore. Try broadening your search. If you're looking for AJAX (I can still barely use that word without gagging), well, it's about the same no matter what language you use on the backend. Any good PHP programmer will have no problem working in ASP if they are willing to, and vice versa. Same with C# and Java. Instead of trying to find somebody who knows your platform inside and out, look for a solid programmer in any language that is familiar with the type of work that you need done and is willing to learn.
The most likely reason is that they just aren't offering enough for the position. I think this is a big problem at my current company. I've been here for years and there's never been a time that we haven't been trying to hire more web developers. I'm only involved in part of the hiring process, but as far as I can tell, they tend to offer a pretty middle of the road salary for web development positions, but the people making the salary offers don't understand that we aren't trying to hire middle of the road developers. In fact the people who review web developer resumes will typically throw out an "average web developer" resume without a second look.
The other very likely reason is that they are being far to specific. If they are looking for "5 years ASP.NET + VSS + AJAX.NET + [some random
Oh God, does that bring back some bad memories. But boy, did it pay well...