If they start using some open-source code for their browser, will the architecture of the OS still have IE as such an integral part, or will it become a separate application again?
You misunderstand. Ballmer said that they would look into a new rendering engine. Which means that IE will still be IE, just with a new codebase under the hood. After all, 95% of their customer base won't understand the difference. All they'll know is that IE is still part of Windows yet works better than ever.
...
Which Microsoft will then go on to say is an inexorable part of the Operating System. (insert eye roll here)
I'm glad we at least understand each other now. And I'd like to thank you for taking the time to add insight to the European systems. Your response is possibly the most informed comparison I've seen in the last few days. And for that, I'm grateful. Thank you.:-)
The true power is with the chancellor, who is a chosen member of parliament.
The Chancellor's position uses practically the same process as the German Presidential election. (Just different actors.) How in the world does that make the individual voters vote "count" more than an American voter's vote? You still can't directly vote for a Chancellor!
The EU doesn't have a Presidential election, simply because there's no EU president. There is a President of the Commission, but he's not presiding the EU.
The President of the Commission is who I was referring to. He's the closest analog to the United States President. At least, the closest elected official.
In the EU, the true power is wielded by the council of ministers, members of the (elected) governments of the individual nations.
And yet, (to the best of my understanding) the Council is not actually elected by the people. So their vote doesn't "count" there either, because they don't get a vote.
His name is Barroso, btw.
I never would have guessed. (*ahem* "Bassrao (the current EU President) is famous for stating that the EU Presidency lacks legitimacy" --AKAImBatman)
It's quite important to grasp these differences if you want to make statements about the democratic legitimacy of foreign governments.
I am not making statements about the legitimacy of the German or EU government. They may govern as they wish. I am questioning the legitimacy of the statement that "German votes votes count more than American voters votes". Such a statement is the height of arrogance when the closest analogs of the US President are not electable by the public! The system may work fine for Germany and the EU, but the average German or EU voter's ability to elect a specific individual to an analogous post is far, far, far less than the average American's ability.
If you go to NPR, you can hear their old Money Talk programs as podcasts. The hosts are struggling just as much as us to understand the crisis, so the result is fairly easy for the layman to understand. Also, a peer of your post posted a link to the "Long Johns" gags. Surprisingly, they are very much on the money. Which is probably what makes them so funny!
unless there's some advantage to using find that I'm unaware of
You mean, like the half-dozen posts above yours that point out that '-r' doesn't work on actual Unix systems?;-)
To reiterate, I mostly use Solaris. In result, '-r' and 'rgrep' don't work unless explicitly installed. I don't usually install them for three reasons:
1. I'm often using employer systems which I do not administrate
2. Updating dozens of systems is a PITA and a waste of time
3. It's just easier to depend on what you know will be there.;-)
Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions
The locate command is useless. Worse than useless, in fact. Most systems I've used don't have a proper locate database configured. Even when they do, half the time we're talking about combing through log files. (i.e. recent data) Which makes locate even more useless than useless. (If that's possible!:-P)
Err... the whole point of the "-h" is to output the result in "human readable form". Using "-h" gives you GB, MB, or KB depending on how large the byte count is.
e.g.:
bash-2.05$ df -h Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 7.3G 94M 7.1G 1%/ /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 185G 10.5G 174G 6%/usr
Oh, I almost forgot about one of my favorite tricks. Count the number of items:
wc -l (paste the list into the window and then type CTRL-D)
It even works when the list of items has oddities. e.g. I had a list where every other line was blank. So I needed to count n/2 the value. Except that one of the blank lines wouldn't copy, so I actually needed (n+1)/2.
echo $(($((`wc -l`+1))/2))
Want to make sure your sig is under 120 characters? Type "wc -c" in, paste it into your terminal, then press CTRL-D. Instant character count.
Whoever modded my post Troll does not understand what the term "Troll" means. Worse off, (s)he is responsible for an egregious bout of "Troll Moderating" himself. Thanks for proving why Americans are so upset at Europeans.
The German system has several major differences. For one, the election for President is held every five years. The Federal Assembly actually votes on who will be the President. While they usually vote along party lines (giving it a semblance of similarity to the Canadian system), there is no requirement that the members of the Assembly do so.
While it is certainly true that members of both Canada and Germany can be somewhat confident that the representative they choose will affect the outcome of the President/Prime Minister election in an expected manner, it is the height of arrogance to suggest that American votes count less than German votes. If anything, German votes count for far less because there is no requirement that the representative carry out the party affiliation (or elect the desired member of the party) as the American system allows. Worse yet, it is not possible in the Canadian system nor feasible in the German system to intentionally set the head of state in opposition to the representatives.
In result, Germans don't have a vote for their President. At best they get to play a game of musical chairs in selecting a faceless party to hold all the power.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you have it backwards. Mortgage Backed Securities are securities that are composed of Mortgages. They reduce risk carried by banks because they make the failure of Mortgages someone else's problem in the same way that selling stocks makes the fluctuating value of those stocks someone else's problem. The only difference is that the value of Mortgage Backed Securities fluctuates based on the payment of the mortgages rather than the strength of a company. Obviously a bank makes less money off of MBSes than holding the mortgages directly, but they also are exposed to less risk.
Credit Default Swaps/Options (CDS/CDO) are a financial instrument that act as an insurance policy that is not technically an insurance policy. If my securities fail for whatever reason, the swaps will cover the cost of the "default".
What's messed up about CDS/CDO instruments is that you don't need to own any actual securities to obtain the instrument. I owned nothing from Lehman Brothers, but I could still take out a CDS on that company. (Ostensibly to protect indirect assets like a fail on a lease due to tough financial circumstances.) That made them very dangerous. The fact that they were basically unregulated insurance policies made them even more dangerous. The fact that CDSes were not reevaluated after being sold (thus making them ripe for resale at a higher rate) made them near-deadly. The fact that many sub-prime mortgages were being rated as AAA securities while banks took out CDS instruments to protect against the possible failure of MBSes made CDSes the perfect storm necessary to collapse the financial market.
And that's STILL a simplified view of what happened.:-/
P.S. Guess which three letter insurance company all those CDSes folded up to? If you said "AIG", you win.
The members of the Electoral College are duty-bound to vote for the candidate their constituents told them to vote for. So while there is a layer between the voter and the true election, the people's votes count.
Germany doesn't have a Presidential election. Only their representation (sort of a combination between what we would think of as the House of Representatives and the individual State Senates) gets a vote.
EU has a Presidential election in so much that they choose a party. The actual individual is chosen by the Commission from the winning party. Bassrao (the current EU President) is famous for stating that the EU Presidency lacks legitimacy.
Glass-Steagall (spell it right, people!) is a scapegoat. The situation is far more complex than that. Did weakening that bill have an impact? Absolutely. But it was only part of the problem. The real problem was the excessive greed and risk aversion in the financial market that lead to the creation of new financial instruments to sneakily make risk everyone else's problem. CDSes would have happened regardless of Glass-Steagall, and banks would have found alternative methods of making their financial risks someone else's problem.
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated, but moreover we should kick the greedy bastards out of Wall Street and replace them with the more conservative financial leaders who were slowly pushed out by the instant-gratification morons.
Let me just back this up with an "Amen". I am sick and tired of Europe thinking they can tell America what it should do with its own goddamn country! Just yesterday I had a German telling me that his vote counts more than American votes, and that the American election system is old and outdated. Save for the fact that Germans don't elect their President (their representatives do) and EU residents can't elect that President either (they vote for a party).
Now here I see some know-nothing here on Slashdot telling us that "America is on notice"? The arrogance! Just who the hell do you think you are? This is our country and we will fix it as we see fit. If you don't like it, worry about divorcing your own country from ours. If we drive it into the ground (which I very much doubt), it will be ours to drive into the ground. Not yours.
I hope the American people are smart enough to realize that Bush has buried them deeeep into the sh*t hole and that it will take a while to dig out of it.
I would have hoped that the American people would be smart enough to know that the crisis was a bi-partisan failure. From Credit Default Swaps passing the Senate as a rider 98-0, to the Bush Administration sounding the alarm in 2003 but being ignored, to Barney Frank famously telling the House Republicans that there is nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and getting the backing of House Democrats), to the Republicans blocking the Fannie/Freddie bill once it reached the Senate, there is plenty of blame to spread around.
The truth is that the economic crisis happened because the financial markets found new ways to be greedy that no one understood. When the powers that be looked at the balance sheets, they'd see these odd financial instruments and mortgage-backed securities and just shrug and say, "We trust that you guys are educated and know what you're doing. Besides, it seems to be working." Only now that they're falling apart is it clear to everyone how underhanded and vile these various financial instruments were. It's all crystal clear in 20/20 hindsight.
That being said, McCain didn't help himself any by appointing Grahm and Fiorna as his advisors. Having the guy responsible for CDSes and the most hated CEO in history (at least, that hasn't been prosecuted) didn't exactly endear him to the American public.
Since they're going for patented technology anyway, I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't push the AAC format. While I know geeks tend to associate it with iTunes, it's pretty much a universal standard in newer players. As a bonus, it's smaller, better quality, and a heck of a lot easier to license than the craziness behind the MP3 and MPEG formats.
Yeah, yeah. I know that MP3 has brand recognition. But nothing will ever change if no one pushes things forward. And besides, MP3 100% Compatible? That doesn't even sound cromulent!
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand. Ballmer said that they would look into a new rendering engine. Which means that IE will still be IE, just with a new codebase under the hood. After all, 95% of their customer base won't understand the difference. All they'll know is that IE is still part of Windows yet works better than ever.
Which Microsoft will then go on to say is an inexorable part of the Operating System. (insert eye roll here)
I'm glad we at least understand each other now. And I'd like to thank you for taking the time to add insight to the European systems. Your response is possibly the most informed comparison I've seen in the last few days. And for that, I'm grateful. Thank you. :-)
The Chancellor's position uses practically the same process as the German Presidential election. (Just different actors.) How in the world does that make the individual voters vote "count" more than an American voter's vote? You still can't directly vote for a Chancellor!
The President of the Commission is who I was referring to. He's the closest analog to the United States President. At least, the closest elected official.
And yet, (to the best of my understanding) the Council is not actually elected by the people. So their vote doesn't "count" there either, because they don't get a vote.
I never would have guessed. (*ahem* "Bassrao (the current EU President) is famous for stating that the EU Presidency lacks legitimacy" --AKAImBatman)
I am not making statements about the legitimacy of the German or EU government. They may govern as they wish. I am questioning the legitimacy of the statement that "German votes votes count more than American voters votes". Such a statement is the height of arrogance when the closest analogs of the US President are not electable by the public! The system may work fine for Germany and the EU, but the average German or EU voter's ability to elect a specific individual to an analogous post is far, far, far less than the average American's ability.
Is my understanding correct that all you want for Christmas is a PSP? (A PSP? A PSP?)
Primarily I've been listening to NPR. A lot. :-P
If you go to NPR, you can hear their old Money Talk programs as podcasts. The hosts are struggling just as much as us to understand the crisis, so the result is fairly easy for the layman to understand. Also, a peer of your post posted a link to the "Long Johns" gags. Surprisingly, they are very much on the money. Which is probably what makes them so funny!
You do realize that your command does diddly squat, right? The task was to CONVERT photoshop images into PNG images, not rename them.
Nope. That's a GNU feature. And in any case, who uses .Z files anymore? I'm more concerned about .gz and .bz2 files. :-)
You mean, like the half-dozen posts above yours that point out that '-r' doesn't work on actual Unix systems? ;-)
To reiterate, I mostly use Solaris. In result, '-r' and 'rgrep' don't work unless explicitly installed. I don't usually install them for three reasons:
1. I'm often using employer systems which I do not administrate
2. Updating dozens of systems is a PITA and a waste of time
3. It's just easier to depend on what you know will be there. ;-)
Is that all they're after? Pff. The Internet Archive already lets me do that. And if that's too much work, the candidates have already done the graphical diffs for us!
The locate command is useless. Worse than useless, in fact. Most systems I've used don't have a proper locate database configured. Even when they do, half the time we're talking about combing through log files. (i.e. recent data) Which makes locate even more useless than useless. (If that's possible! :-P)
If you're going to go for a graphical tool, then go from easy to awesome. As long as you have a JVM, just click on the Webstart link and go! :-)
If God intended us to use SI units, he wouldn't have made binary base-2. :-P
Err... the whole point of the "-h" is to output the result in "human readable form". Using "-h" gives you GB, MB, or KB depending on how large the byte count is.
e.g.:
Xargs is much more fun with complex data processing. e.g.
Convert all PSDs to PNGs:
Parse out and sort column 2 from a semicolon delimited file:
Oh, I almost forgot about one of my favorite tricks. Count the number of items:
It even works when the list of items has oddities. e.g. I had a list where every other line was blank. So I needed to count n/2 the value. Except that one of the blank lines wouldn't copy, so I actually needed (n+1)/2.
Want to make sure your sig is under 120 characters? Type "wc -c" in, paste it into your terminal, then press CTRL-D. Instant character count.
Ah, all the fun stuff you can do with Unix tools.
I spend most of my time on Solaris, so I try to forget about GNU extensions. Though untarring without "-z" or "-j" is a real pain in the neck.
Works like a charm for finding a file containing a keyword. Another one I often use is:
Human readable disk space:
Track down where your space is going:
If your primary concern is Russia, then America just bet on the wrong horse. Big time.
America elected Obama because Russia is not our primary concern at the moment.
Whoever modded my post Troll does not understand what the term "Troll" means. Worse off, (s)he is responsible for an egregious bout of "Troll Moderating" himself. Thanks for proving why Americans are so upset at Europeans.
The German system has several major differences. For one, the election for President is held every five years. The Federal Assembly actually votes on who will be the President. While they usually vote along party lines (giving it a semblance of similarity to the Canadian system), there is no requirement that the members of the Assembly do so.
While it is certainly true that members of both Canada and Germany can be somewhat confident that the representative they choose will affect the outcome of the President/Prime Minister election in an expected manner, it is the height of arrogance to suggest that American votes count less than German votes. If anything, German votes count for far less because there is no requirement that the representative carry out the party affiliation (or elect the desired member of the party) as the American system allows. Worse yet, it is not possible in the Canadian system nor feasible in the German system to intentionally set the head of state in opposition to the representatives.
In result, Germans don't have a vote for their President. At best they get to play a game of musical chairs in selecting a faceless party to hold all the power.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you have it backwards. Mortgage Backed Securities are securities that are composed of Mortgages. They reduce risk carried by banks because they make the failure of Mortgages someone else's problem in the same way that selling stocks makes the fluctuating value of those stocks someone else's problem. The only difference is that the value of Mortgage Backed Securities fluctuates based on the payment of the mortgages rather than the strength of a company. Obviously a bank makes less money off of MBSes than holding the mortgages directly, but they also are exposed to less risk.
Credit Default Swaps/Options (CDS/CDO) are a financial instrument that act as an insurance policy that is not technically an insurance policy. If my securities fail for whatever reason, the swaps will cover the cost of the "default".
What's messed up about CDS/CDO instruments is that you don't need to own any actual securities to obtain the instrument. I owned nothing from Lehman Brothers, but I could still take out a CDS on that company. (Ostensibly to protect indirect assets like a fail on a lease due to tough financial circumstances.) That made them very dangerous. The fact that they were basically unregulated insurance policies made them even more dangerous. The fact that CDSes were not reevaluated after being sold (thus making them ripe for resale at a higher rate) made them near-deadly. The fact that many sub-prime mortgages were being rated as AAA securities while banks took out CDS instruments to protect against the possible failure of MBSes made CDSes the perfect storm necessary to collapse the financial market.
And that's STILL a simplified view of what happened. :-/
P.S. Guess which three letter insurance company all those CDSes folded up to? If you said "AIG", you win.
The members of the Electoral College are duty-bound to vote for the candidate their constituents told them to vote for. So while there is a layer between the voter and the true election, the people's votes count.
Germany doesn't have a Presidential election. Only their representation (sort of a combination between what we would think of as the House of Representatives and the individual State Senates) gets a vote.
EU has a Presidential election in so much that they choose a party. The actual individual is chosen by the Commission from the winning party. Bassrao (the current EU President) is famous for stating that the EU Presidency lacks legitimacy.
Glass-Steagall (spell it right, people!) is a scapegoat. The situation is far more complex than that. Did weakening that bill have an impact? Absolutely. But it was only part of the problem. The real problem was the excessive greed and risk aversion in the financial market that lead to the creation of new financial instruments to sneakily make risk everyone else's problem. CDSes would have happened regardless of Glass-Steagall, and banks would have found alternative methods of making their financial risks someone else's problem.
There's a fairly good take on this issue here: http://www.bapcha.com/?p=53
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated, but moreover we should kick the greedy bastards out of Wall Street and replace them with the more conservative financial leaders who were slowly pushed out by the instant-gratification morons.
Let me just back this up with an "Amen". I am sick and tired of Europe thinking they can tell America what it should do with its own goddamn country! Just yesterday I had a German telling me that his vote counts more than American votes, and that the American election system is old and outdated. Save for the fact that Germans don't elect their President (their representatives do) and EU residents can't elect that President either (they vote for a party).
Now here I see some know-nothing here on Slashdot telling us that "America is on notice"? The arrogance! Just who the hell do you think you are? This is our country and we will fix it as we see fit. If you don't like it, worry about divorcing your own country from ours. If we drive it into the ground (which I very much doubt), it will be ours to drive into the ground. Not yours.
So BACK OFF.
I would have hoped that the American people would be smart enough to know that the crisis was a bi-partisan failure. From Credit Default Swaps passing the Senate as a rider 98-0, to the Bush Administration sounding the alarm in 2003 but being ignored, to Barney Frank famously telling the House Republicans that there is nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and getting the backing of House Democrats), to the Republicans blocking the Fannie/Freddie bill once it reached the Senate, there is plenty of blame to spread around.
The truth is that the economic crisis happened because the financial markets found new ways to be greedy that no one understood. When the powers that be looked at the balance sheets, they'd see these odd financial instruments and mortgage-backed securities and just shrug and say, "We trust that you guys are educated and know what you're doing. Besides, it seems to be working." Only now that they're falling apart is it clear to everyone how underhanded and vile these various financial instruments were. It's all crystal clear in 20/20 hindsight.
That being said, McCain didn't help himself any by appointing Grahm and Fiorna as his advisors. Having the guy responsible for CDSes and the most hated CEO in history (at least, that hasn't been prosecuted) didn't exactly endear him to the American public.
Since they're going for patented technology anyway, I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't push the AAC format. While I know geeks tend to associate it with iTunes, it's pretty much a universal standard in newer players. As a bonus, it's smaller, better quality, and a heck of a lot easier to license than the craziness behind the MP3 and MPEG formats.
Yeah, yeah. I know that MP3 has brand recognition. But nothing will ever change if no one pushes things forward. And besides, MP3 100% Compatible? That doesn't even sound cromulent!