1) The "hard" but proper way, setup SPF records from all the machines you will be sending mail from or
2) Simply send all your mail out through the box you get it in from. What's so hard about that?
Then you have to setup your mail server to accept and relay mail from all other IP numbers you're using to send mail from. That's just as hard as number 1 (plus, you turn your mailserver into an open relay for anyone on the same/24 if you're on a dynamic IP number -- so number 1 is the better option).
The hierarchy of NASA will be changed so that the Defense Department is now included in the planning and future use of future technology. Expect big stuff from this. Having the military involved is a GOOD thing.
What gives you the impression the DoD is not involved? It was my understanding that quite a few NASA's space shuttle missions were classified, and the unclassified ones also have classified components to them. Probably just launching some spying satellites (optical, radar, signals intelligence (i.e. echelon)), but then again, who knows what else.. Surely there is some technical/research interaction with the DoD.
.. especially for streaming, since a 64kbps stream sounds as good as a 128kbps mp3 stream, which means more people can listen to it, even on their congested at-work LANs, and if you don't attract more people, then at least you cut your bandwidth bill in half. Other codecs that sound sweet at 64kbps exist (windows media, real, quicktime) but they're not free, so you end up paying more than you save in bandwidth.
And if you go legal with your streams, some licensing authorities (for want of a better word) haven't been clued in to how good ogg sounds at half the bitrate, so they'll give you a sucky-quality discount.
If you want to go legal w.r.t. streaming BigFive content in The Netherlands, I don't recommend it btw. BUMA/Stemra seem to have a process in place that's relatively sane (i.e. flat fee for non-commercial use) but you ALSO have to pay SENA (not that it's not spelled SANE..) who are total fucktards in their pricingstructure (BUMA/Stemra are fucktards as well, but at least the pricing schedules seem doable. Anyway, having investigated the options I decided against it (and no, I don't stream unlicensed either).
"We have to lay off more people, because with even educated Americans all working for minimum wage, no one can afford our goods, so we have to lower costs. Incidentally, our Mumbay office has designed machines to replace you all. And themselves. Sure we're not going to be innovating or inventing anything new anymore, but since there is no demand for luxuries like printers anymore, we're moving into manufacturing bread anyhow, so we don't need smart people."
These new MDs coul be a viable replacement for CD-roms, but only if they aren't bogged down with DRM. A physically small, 1GB disc in a protective caddy. It's almost too good to be true.
Talk to you in 3 years time when even your mom has a DVD-R drive and blanks are at most a few bucks. OK, so maybe 5 years considering it's your mom..
People were enthousiastic about data MDs before.. Never mind that ZIP was already a poor man's CD-R, and MD only ever had 1 vendor. Well, today CD-R is a poor man's DVD-R.
I realize that most consumers either tolerate or are unaware of the fidelity loss, hence the continued dominance of the now inferior MP3 format.
There's nothing stopping you from ripping your CDs to 256kbps MP3 format - you determine whether the emphasis is on quantity or quality. Unless you're one of those 1337 audiophile kazaa hounds, in which case you're a walking oxymoron. (Of course, a lot of self-identified audiophiles are not kazaa-hounds as well, in which case the oxy- is dropped;-).
SCO at some price is a reasonable investment. It is akin to an option: you have paid some price for a possible upside, while your downside is limited.
First off, not all options have a limited downside (this is very important to remember if you're trading in them). If you buy an option that gives you the right to buy 100 shares of FooCorp @ $5 a piece in July, the downside is limited, because you can never lose more than the cost of the options (worst case, FooCorp trades at $0 in July and you recoup non of the cost). Now, if you were selling those options, without already owning the stock (and this is more common than you might think) your downside is unlimited; if FooCorp trades at $500 in July, you have to buy them at $500 and sell for $5. Ouch!.
Right, now for the investment/speculation angle. It's a fine line in some cases; buying a basket of DJI stocks is usually regarded as an investment, but you might construe it as gambling on the US economy (especially compared to buying FTSE or XETRA DAX or Nikkei Index, etc..) But at least whatever risk you take is spread among a lot of different companies with non-too-shaky fundamentals ("bad" companies are removed from the index once in a while, which is when institutional investors - who follow the index - dump their stock: bargain time).
One stock isn't a basket of companies, so whenever you're buying just one stock as opposed to a fund you're speculating in a sense. Of course, some instruments are eminently dependable, such as government bonds, the big oilCo's etc. (Well, in the past, if the government or big oil goes titsup, you're rogered.)
Another approach is to take a look at the risk involved. Clearly the risk in government bonds is pretty low; most Western governments haven't gone bankrupt to the extent of not paying off their bonds. But, low risk also means low expected yield, even in the best possible case (bonds have a fixed yield for example).
A company like SCOX is obviously a high-risk investment; they're not turning a profit, they have no products, they're betting the farm on ScoSource. The fenomonal rise of their stock is an indication of this even; they got to this level because they upped the stakes, and not due to organic growth (e.g. marketshare) or realised potential - it's all still in the future.
No one trading in SCOX will be so deluded as to think it's a safe bet, or even as low-risk as simply sticking stuff in big oil for a few years. (Even so, probably less risky than daytrading).
As an aside.. Another way to look at it is to take investment (to put in..) literally and look at what's happening with your money. If you lend money to a startup, or buy stock in IPO, the money goes to the company itself and they try to set it to work to earn more money, and cut you in on the profit (or in the case of a loan, a fixed yield). This is the purest form of investment, though it may be very speculative in nature. If you're a proponent of this definition, than buying stock off the open market is always speculation, because you're given the money to some one who's going to spend it on cheap women and curvy whiskey rather than using it as capital in the company you just bought a part of...
If you want to send your kids to college, just get yourself a nice, cosy, relatively risk-free/low-yield mutual fund, or maybe a basket of diversified industries and competitors within those industries and some bonds... Funds that bundle mortgage debts (like bonds these are relatively risk free[1]) also exist and are a bit of a fad at the moment. (Insurances less so since the Lloyd's of London debacle).
[1] if people default on a mortgage you get their house, but in bad economic times the number of defaults will go up and houses will fetch less money when they're sold, perhaps not enough to cover the debt. So interest rates rise (and mortgages sometimes come with lower interest, but with a defaulting-insurance)..
who will use the IP either to squash competition by not licensing it to anyone (to kill off UNIX and Linux - the Microsoft option)...
I don't know the specifics of Sun's licensing (I understand it's perpetual), but contracts usually are included in the sale. There's no way they could kill off Unix, much less Linux if Microsoft were to buy out SCO. Say what you want about code being placed within Linux. Linux as a whole is still GPL'd and that will never change.
The presumption of the WHAT IF scenario was that SCOX would win. In which case their shares (at least the ones on the open market) are still worth jack (because their eventual owner (or rather unequal-merger-partner, to make destroying minority shareholder value nice ans legal) wouldn't pimp them out for dividends for the minority shareholders.)
In the case that SCOX doesn't win, and the GPL (and Sun) prevail, SCOX stock is also useless.
Let me see if I understand this. If IBM buys SCO, then they... pay money... for the shares. Am I okay so far? And if you own some of those SCO shares, then IBM... pays - whoa, my head is spinning - YOU... for those shares. Which means, you get some, whaddaya call it, money for your shares. So, it wasn't worthless, because you got some money. Could you follow all that?
If YOU own the shares THEY buy, but if SOMEONE ELSE owns the MAJORITY of all stock THEY can sell ALL those shares IN ONE NICE PARCEL.
Buying up stock from the open market to take over a company is almost never done, and most certainly not when there is one single party who holds the controlling interest outright, in these case, The Canopy Group, a privately held corporation.
And get this, once you own over 50% of the stock, you win every vote at the stock-holders meeting! You don't buy 100% of the shares to take over a company.
2 years from now, SCOX will either be worth $100+/share or $0/share.
If SCOX wins, SCOX stock will be worth nothing. Because it will be bought from Canopy by either Microsoft or IBM, who will use the IP either to squash competition by not licensing it to anyone (to kill off UNIX and Linux - the Microsoft option), or defensively by licensing it Royalty Free (to make IBM's GPL offerings retro-actively compliant).
Either way, the controlling share will be bought from Canopy, and not on the open market, and not a penny of royalties will flow into the coffers of minor stockholders (Canopy is privately held, right?)
If SCOX loses, SCOX is worth nothing. Same difference.
Hmm, my post should be modded Funny, in stead of Informative... Though, the point of having armed forces is so you don't have to use them, so there's a kernel of truth in there, I suppose..
What is it exactly that the Swedish use these fighters for? [..] I'm just thinking that I can't recall hearing in recent memory of a Swedish border conflict, or a Swedish peace-keeping force.
That's because there weren't any. They're that good.
Batteries supplied by Nokia itself directly to TestAankoop were found not to explode. Batteries sold by Nokia dealers, who claimed them to be Nokia batteries, with every outward appearance of Nokia batteries DID explode, but Nokia determined these batteries to be forged third party parts..
So far, the only fact that has been determined by independent experts is that some Nokia-branded batteries explode, and others don't. The claims that the ones that do explode are fakes, and the ones that don't are the same as Nokia sells, via its channel, to ordinary customers (rather than only supplying the good stuff to TestAankoop) are only backed up by Nokia itself.
So, the controversy lives on..
Having said that, yes, most third-party batteries for Nokia phones (non-Nokia-branded though, nothing fake about them) do suck. But then again, I've owned a few Nokia phones in my day, and they seem to reliably break down either just outside of their one year warranty, or the repair/refurb/replacement takes so long that it's out of warranty by the time you get it back.. Still, the UI on 'em is great compared to sony ericsson/motorola/siemens..:-(
Im really tired of hearing this. You need to reboot the OS after you apply patches, so get over it. In a few years they will be making no-reboot patches, but for now, thats the way it is. Find another dead horse to beat.... This is true as long as it isnt modifying dll files or other components which need to stay in memory. In that case, it needs to change the files during restart. A little knowledge of the system processes goes a long way. But anyhow, Im a follow the instructions kind of guy. If recipe says bake at 450 degrees for 30 minutes, I bake at 450 for 30. If they say to restart, I restart.
The vast majority of patches do not need to restart the entire OS. Most security patches only affect "windows networking" filesharing (SMB), so you could easily net stop workstation and net stop server, replace the files, and not restart the OS. Same for IIS patches. There are really only a few pieces of code that cannot be stopped without shutting down the OS entirely (that darn COM thingy for one, which contributed significantly to the worm spread of last year).
A DLL only needs to be in memory if it's being used.
Microsoft is already making a lot of no-reboot patches, but people reboot anyway. A lot of the patches for windows 2000 and XP, even those that "must be installed separately", do not require a reboot.
Now, if I were claiming that it's somehow "unfair" to stop the IIS service to patch it, that would be kind of inane. But downing the entire OS to upgrade some services or applications is totally unnecessary. And you simply don't know what your uptime would be like if you didn't reboot as often. Keeping an unpatched stock NT 4.0 system (no service packs!) operating smoothly is easy as long as you reboot every day - as long as it takes less than 14 minutes to restart, hey presto 99% uptime. Never mind that if you didn't reboot it regularly it would crash and burn.
Having to reboot to patch stuff totally unrelated to the real purpose of a server (say, DNS/web/ftp/smtp server) is what keeps me from using windows servers on any servers I really care about. The only thing I need to down my ol' reliable linux server for is for kernel upgrades; up2date/rug takes care of the rest with no steenking reboots.
Now, the patch situation on windows is getting better, but it still seems to me rebooting is just another chore to Microsoft.. Kind of like how sometimes when you blink your eyes you totally miss how explorer.exe (the one that's your start menu) crashes and is restarted automatically..
What are you talking about? A fast food restaurant buys coke syrup by the gallon for something like $4. A large coke contains about $0.09 of syrup. Unless you're going to get 15 "free" refills of your drink they're still going to make money off of you. There's absolutely nothing to discourage anyone from going into a fast food restaurant and buying *just* a coke. Of course they want to entice you to buy more. But they are most definitely not losing money.
No, they are in fact horrendously overcharging you on coke, hoping you might opt for a full meal instead, so they make their $5-a-visitor target.. It's all about the average revenue per user (arpu) - which is a very trendy figure to report if you're a telecomms company these days.
BTW, I have Windows NT servers with over a year of uptime, excluding time spent afterhours applying updates (which you can bitch about all you want, but the fact remains that MS doesnt have no reboot patches), and I have Win2k servers with at least that long. A month uptime is long? No way, only a month of uptime is weak, and there is either a hardware issue, a third-party driver issue, or caused by a non-MS program you are running. So can a Windows box run for over a year without crashing? Hell ya. Easily.
You're kind of cheating there by disregarding the restarts due to necessary patches. Sure, your average linux distribution needs to be patches once in a while as well, but rarely (kernel) to the point of having to reboot everything. Simply rebooting NT will actually solve a lot of problems because every dinky piece of software running on it will be started anew, and memory leaks, stalled/locked/deadlocked software and such disappear..
Still, Microsoft understands very well that as long as it's scheduled downtime, nobody cares about it, as it's after hours.. And, most people don't realize this, but 99% uptime means 14.4 minutes of downtime every 24 hours. If you save that up over a month (an attainable uptime even with NT 4.0) you get over 7 hours to go down at your choosing.. And if High Availability actually matters to you, they'll gladly charge you for it.
BTW a lot of patches that tell you to reboot don't actually need the system to reboot.. Simply stopping and restarting some services will do nicely if that's even needed at all - just like most patches on linux or a BSD. It seems to me that Microsoft views the "forced reboot" as a maintenance chore, much like defragging your hard disk.. Software installs will often prompt you to reboot as well - even though it's totally unnecessary.
You see the problem with hardware is all about margin. Unless you are moving a huge amount of goods you will loose your ass. Software on the other hand is all margin, big profit ratio's. Why do you think so many restarants go out of business? Small margins, same goes for grocery stores.
While it's true that the margin on hardware is virtually nothing, your average restaurant will be worrying more about turn-over than margin; the bulk of costs for a restaurant is in the fixed costs (i.e. renting a place, taxes, employees, fresh ingredients that you have to stock in case people do show up, but that expire quickly whether they do show up or not).
Ever notice how just about every "meal" at a fast food restaurant costs about the same? That's because they're in the business of extracting $5 per visitor rather than being interested in the exact margin on stuff. That's also why fries and a coke are thrown in their meals for a relatively low price, and they cost a lot more separately -- it's all about discouraging sub-par revenue customers. (Grocery stores (or Fast Moving Consumer Goods Retailers as they like to call themselves) have things slightly better than restaurants in that they sell a lot of non-perishables as well - stocking more and more non-food items has been an ongoing trend in supermarkets and grocers' for ages now).
Of course, fixed costs are also a big barrier to entry for any would-be competitors of Dell. Spending a few million here and there to set up a plant and do distribution is peanuts to Dell since they're shipping insanely large volumes, so even relatively large fixed costs translate to a small cost-per-unit. Plus, they can get volume discounts from OEMs. Without a large initial investment it's pretty hard to suddenly gain such a big market share that you can compete with the economies of scale that Dell enjoys. Dell is the Wallmart of PC systems.
Added value is the only way to go for smaller would-be competitors; e.g. better after sales service, warrantees, real life expert human salespeople, full-service-one-stop deployment, etc. Of course, it may well turn out that it's cheaper for you to only offer the added value and buy the systems themselves from Dell!
In ye old days, AV scanners would not only scan for malware that wasn't strictly a virus, but would invariably include an "innoculate" feature which would create checksums for executables and libraries, and the on-access scanner would refuse to run altered or non-checksummed executables. The latter is handy to protect against users installing or running malware. Windows XP includes this, but in a very, very cumbersome manner (Software Restriction Policies) but which at least can check certificates so windows updates will work..
Any one know of any free checksum-checkers-on-execute, preferably with some sort of centralized checksum database, for windows?
Latin doesn't have article (a, the), the verb "to be" (essere) is often just left out, likewise "and".
Of course Latin was written and spoken for centruries, and in many different territories so there is some variation to this; nevertheless in most Classical texts you'll get to read when you start to study Latin, "and", "is", "a" and "the" will hardly make an appearance.
Australia can do it (and actually invented the "secret ballot").
I think Athens beat you to the mark some thousands of years earlier;-) (Which is not to say there were no secret ballots cast in Mesopotamia, I'm just more familiar with the black/white marble-in-a-vase system used in Ancient Greece).
I'm not sure how much difference there is between 'decriminalise' and 'turn a blind eye', because the laws still forbid those decriminalised things.
Pretty big difference. In the first case, you can not be prosecuted no matter what; in the second, it is ultimately up to the mood and whim of the police, prosecutor and court whether you will be punished.
Actually, if the police try to prosecute you for possesion of a small amount of marihuana, they get bitch-slapped by the courts. Selective enforcement is very much frowned upon. Add to that a legal theory of "habitual rights" (basically; if you've been allowed to do something for ages and no-one complained, they can't turn around on you and prohibit it because now it's more convenient for them to do so - squatters often attain legal status because of this) and the a legal theory of expectation ("I wasn't expecting this kind of Spanish Inquisition"), and you're pretty much sorted.
In effect, the policy has been this was for so long, it has in practice eroded the law. It would take a new law to be passed to reinstate zero tolerance enforcement.
You'd be surprised too if any of the laws on dumblaws.com suddenly started to be enforced..;-)
When the developer of both formats publicly states that AAC is a better sounding format than MP3, I'm willing to trust that statement.
Ogg seems to do better than both in most blind listening tests I've seen floating across. AAC does beat the crap out of MP3 at the same bitrate, but 64Kbps AAC doesn't beat 128Kbps MP3 universally.
64Kbps ogg is my sweet point I'd say, especially for web radio (icecast/shoutcast) purposes.
There's always a cap.. Most.nl DSL providers are up front about it; the basic, $25-30/month DSL contracts are not only limited speed, but there's a finite cap and a per-megabyte overage charge. On the higher revenue contracts (typically in the $50-80/month range) they'll tell you they you there's "no cap, but a Fair Use Policy". None of them will indicate what the FUP-cap is.
In the case of FUP what it boils down to is that they don't really care whether you go over a certain threshold, but rather, how much bandwidth there is available in your area. In DSL bandwidth is shared among all the subscribers to one telephone "switch" (CO). For residential use, they typically oversubscribe this to the tune of 1:25 - so a "T1" for every 25 people on a 1024Mbps DSL line.
If they find out that one CO is using vastly more bandwidth than planned, and there aren't that many new (and elderly) users lined up to get connected - so they can't afford to just lay down more fiber, they reserve the right to crack down on people who use more bandwidth than average. Of course they don't want to be dicks about this, so they usually target people using more than ten times the average, or the 10% "top talkers". Going after top talkers first makes a lot of sense, since the number 1 top talker probably uses half of the bandwidth of the entire neigborhood;-)
The actual reason that most plans do NOT come with a cap is that cracking down on top talkers takes a lot of effort. Ever metering the bandwidth can take a lot money and equipment. In one of the earliest incarnations of ADSL service you could check the traffic you used online - they removed this, because all the overhead slowed down connections to the point it was costing them more in terms of bandwidth than just ignoring overages.
In fact, some of the budget plans that pretend to have a cap don't have one. It's a "special offer" for "6 months only", but in reality they don't have the infrastructure and the people to meter all bandwidth all the time and to go after people with nastygrams...
Of course, if your connection really is uncapped in the administrative sense, that doesn't mean they won't bandwidth-limit on your ass without you even knowing...
The most elegant scheme I've seen sofar is used by Bredbandbolaget (IIRC), who sell 10Mbps fiber internet access; if you go over your cap, which is specifically stated to be X GB per month, your speed simply drops to 128Kbps for the rest of the month.. Still usuable for the bare necessities (web, chat, e-mail and some windows updates), just no downloading movies until the next month/billing cycle starts. AND it's fully automated which makes it a lot cheaper than nastygrams. Winners all around.
Slashdot Mirror
Two solutions.
/24 if you're on a dynamic IP number -- so number 1 is the better option).
1) The "hard" but proper way, setup SPF records from all the machines you will be sending mail from or
2) Simply send all your mail out through the box you get it in from. What's so hard about that?
Then you have to setup your mail server to accept and relay mail from all other IP numbers you're using to send mail from. That's just as hard as number 1 (plus, you turn your mailserver into an open relay for anyone on the same
The hierarchy of NASA will be changed so that the Defense Department is now included in the planning and future use of future technology. Expect big stuff from this. Having the military involved is a GOOD thing.
What gives you the impression the DoD is not involved? It was my understanding that quite a few NASA's space shuttle missions were classified, and the unclassified ones also have classified components to them. Probably just launching some spying satellites (optical, radar, signals intelligence (i.e. echelon)), but then again, who knows what else..
Surely there is some technical/research interaction with the DoD.
.. especially for streaming, since a 64kbps stream sounds as good as a 128kbps mp3 stream, which means more people can listen to it, even on their congested at-work LANs, and if you don't attract more people, then at least you cut your bandwidth bill in half. Other codecs that sound sweet at 64kbps exist (windows media, real, quicktime) but they're not free, so you end up paying more than you save in bandwidth.
And if you go legal with your streams, some licensing authorities (for want of a better word) haven't been clued in to how good ogg sounds at half the bitrate, so they'll give you a sucky-quality discount.
If you want to go legal w.r.t. streaming BigFive content in The Netherlands, I don't recommend it btw. BUMA/Stemra seem to have a process in place that's relatively sane (i.e. flat fee for non-commercial use) but you ALSO have to pay SENA (not that it's not spelled SANE..) who are total fucktards in their pricingstructure (BUMA/Stemra are fucktards as well, but at least the pricing schedules seem doable. Anyway, having investigated the options I decided against it (and no, I don't stream unlicensed either).
"We have to lay off more people, because with even educated Americans all working for minimum wage, no one can afford our goods, so we have to lower costs. Incidentally, our Mumbay office has designed machines to replace you all. And themselves. Sure we're not going to be innovating or inventing anything new anymore, but since there is no demand for luxuries like printers anymore, we're moving into manufacturing bread anyhow, so we don't need smart people."
Name off the top of your head one portable battery powered device based on digital storage that is capable of recording a high-fidelity data stream.
DAT recorders, Creative Jukebox (several models)..
These new MDs coul be a viable replacement for CD-roms, but only if they aren't bogged down with DRM. A physically small, 1GB disc in a protective caddy. It's almost too good to be true.
Talk to you in 3 years time when even your mom has a DVD-R drive and blanks are at most a few bucks. OK, so maybe 5 years considering it's your mom..
People were enthousiastic about data MDs before.. Never mind that ZIP was already a poor man's CD-R, and MD only ever had 1 vendor. Well, today CD-R is a poor man's DVD-R.
I realize that most consumers either tolerate or are unaware of the fidelity loss, hence the continued dominance of the now inferior MP3 format.
;-).
There's nothing stopping you from ripping your CDs to 256kbps MP3 format - you determine whether the emphasis is on quantity or quality. Unless you're one of those 1337 audiophile kazaa hounds, in which case you're a walking oxymoron. (Of course, a lot of self-identified audiophiles are not kazaa-hounds as well, in which case the oxy- is dropped
SCO at some price is a reasonable investment. It is akin to an option: you have paid some price for a possible upside, while your downside is limited.
First off, not all options have a limited downside (this is very important to remember if you're trading in them). If you buy an option that gives you the right to buy 100 shares of FooCorp @ $5 a piece in July, the downside is limited, because you can never lose more than the cost of the options (worst case, FooCorp trades at $0 in July and you recoup non of the cost). Now, if you were selling those options, without already owning the stock (and this is more common than you might think) your downside is unlimited; if FooCorp trades at $500 in July, you have to buy them at $500 and sell for $5. Ouch!.
Right, now for the investment/speculation angle. It's a fine line in some cases; buying a basket of DJI stocks is usually regarded as an investment, but you might construe it as gambling on the US economy (especially compared to buying FTSE or XETRA DAX or Nikkei Index, etc..)
But at least whatever risk you take is spread among a lot of different companies with non-too-shaky fundamentals ("bad" companies are removed from the index once in a while, which is when institutional investors - who follow the index - dump their stock: bargain time).
One stock isn't a basket of companies, so whenever you're buying just one stock as opposed to a fund you're speculating in a sense. Of course, some instruments are eminently dependable, such as government bonds, the big oilCo's etc. (Well, in the past, if the government or big oil goes titsup, you're rogered.)
Another approach is to take a look at the risk involved. Clearly the risk in government bonds is pretty low; most Western governments haven't gone bankrupt to the extent of not paying off their bonds. But, low risk also means low expected yield, even in the best possible case (bonds have a fixed yield for example).
A company like SCOX is obviously a high-risk investment; they're not turning a profit, they have no products, they're betting the farm on ScoSource. The fenomonal rise of their stock is an indication of this even; they got to this level because they upped the stakes, and not due to organic growth (e.g. marketshare) or realised potential - it's all still in the future.
No one trading in SCOX will be so deluded as to think it's a safe bet, or even as low-risk as simply sticking stuff in big oil for a few years. (Even so, probably less risky than daytrading).
As an aside.. Another way to look at it is to take investment (to put in..) literally and look at what's happening with your money. If you lend money to a startup, or buy stock in IPO, the money goes to the company itself and they try to set it to work to earn more money, and cut you in on the profit (or in the case of a loan, a fixed yield). This is the purest form of investment, though it may be very speculative in nature. If you're a proponent of this definition, than buying stock off the open market is always speculation, because you're given the money to some one who's going to spend it on cheap women and curvy whiskey rather than using it as capital in the company you just bought a part of...
If you want to send your kids to college, just get yourself a nice, cosy, relatively risk-free/low-yield mutual fund, or maybe a basket of diversified industries and competitors within those industries and some bonds... Funds that bundle mortgage debts (like bonds these are relatively risk free[1]) also exist and are a bit of a fad at the moment. (Insurances less so since the Lloyd's of London debacle).
[1] if people default on a mortgage you get their house, but in bad economic times the number of defaults will go up and houses will fetch less money when they're sold, perhaps not enough to cover the debt. So interest rates rise (and mortgages sometimes come with lower interest, but with a defaulting-insurance)..
Geez, what a rant..
who will use the IP either to squash competition by not licensing it to anyone (to kill off UNIX and Linux - the Microsoft option)...
I don't know the specifics of Sun's licensing (I understand it's perpetual), but contracts usually are included in the sale. There's no way they could kill off Unix, much less Linux if Microsoft were to buy out SCO. Say what you want about code being placed within Linux. Linux as a whole is still GPL'd and that will never change.
The presumption of the WHAT IF scenario was that SCOX would win. In which case their shares (at least the ones on the open market) are still worth jack (because their eventual owner (or rather unequal-merger-partner, to make destroying minority shareholder value nice ans legal) wouldn't pimp them out for dividends for the minority shareholders.)
In the case that SCOX doesn't win, and the GPL (and Sun) prevail, SCOX stock is also useless.
Let me see if I understand this. If IBM buys SCO, then they ... pay money ... for the shares. Am I okay so far? And if you own some of those SCO shares, then IBM ... pays - whoa, my head is spinning - YOU ... for those shares. Which means, you get some, whaddaya call it, money for your shares. So, it wasn't worthless, because you got some money. Could you follow all that?
If YOU own the shares THEY buy, but if SOMEONE ELSE owns the MAJORITY of all stock THEY can sell ALL those shares IN ONE NICE PARCEL.
Buying up stock from the open market to take over a company is almost never done, and most certainly not when there is one single party who holds the controlling interest outright, in these case, The Canopy Group, a privately held corporation.
And get this, once you own over 50% of the stock, you win every vote at the stock-holders meeting! You don't buy 100% of the shares to take over a company.
Here's a shocker; Canopy didn't!
2 years from now, SCOX will either be worth $100+/share or $0/share.
If SCOX wins, SCOX stock will be worth nothing. Because it will be bought from Canopy by either Microsoft or IBM, who will use the IP either to squash competition by not licensing it to anyone (to kill off UNIX and Linux - the Microsoft option), or defensively by licensing it Royalty Free (to make IBM's GPL offerings retro-actively compliant).
Either way, the controlling share will be bought from Canopy, and not on the open market, and not a penny of royalties will flow into the coffers of minor stockholders (Canopy is privately held, right?)
If SCOX loses, SCOX is worth nothing. Same difference.
Hmm, my post should be modded Funny, in stead of Informative... Though, the point of having armed forces is so you don't have to use them, so there's a kernel of truth in there, I suppose..
What is it exactly that the Swedish use these fighters for? [..] I'm just thinking that I can't recall hearing in recent memory of a Swedish border conflict, or a Swedish peace-keeping force.
That's because there weren't any. They're that good.
Batteries supplied by Nokia itself directly to TestAankoop were found not to explode. Batteries sold by Nokia dealers, who claimed them to be Nokia batteries, with every outward appearance of Nokia batteries DID explode, but Nokia determined these batteries to be forged third party parts..
:-(
So far, the only fact that has been determined by independent experts is that some Nokia-branded batteries explode, and others don't. The claims that the ones that do explode are fakes, and the ones that don't are the same as Nokia sells, via its channel, to ordinary customers (rather than only supplying the good stuff to TestAankoop) are only backed up by Nokia itself.
So, the controversy lives on..
Having said that, yes, most third-party batteries for Nokia phones (non-Nokia-branded though, nothing fake about them) do suck. But then again, I've owned a few Nokia phones in my day, and they seem to reliably break down either just outside of their one year warranty, or the repair/refurb/replacement takes so long that it's out of warranty by the time you get it back.. Still, the UI on 'em is great compared to sony ericsson/motorola/siemens..
Im really tired of hearing this. You need to reboot the OS after you apply patches, so get over it. In a few years they will be making no-reboot patches, but for now, thats the way it is. Find another dead horse to beat. ...
This is true as long as it isnt modifying dll files or other components which need to stay in memory. In that case, it needs to change the files during restart. A little knowledge of the system processes goes a long way. But anyhow, Im a follow the instructions kind of guy. If recipe says bake at 450 degrees for 30 minutes, I bake at 450 for 30. If they say to restart, I restart.
The vast majority of patches do not need to restart the entire OS. Most security patches only affect "windows networking" filesharing (SMB), so you could easily net stop workstation and net stop server, replace the files, and not restart the OS. Same for IIS patches. There are really only a few pieces of code that cannot be stopped without shutting down the OS entirely (that darn COM thingy for one, which contributed significantly to the worm spread of last year).
A DLL only needs to be in memory if it's being used.
Microsoft is already making a lot of no-reboot patches, but people reboot anyway. A lot of the patches for windows 2000 and XP, even those that "must be installed separately", do not require a reboot.
Now, if I were claiming that it's somehow "unfair" to stop the IIS service to patch it, that would be kind of inane. But downing the entire OS to upgrade some services or applications is totally unnecessary. And you simply don't know what your uptime would be like if you didn't reboot as often. Keeping an unpatched stock NT 4.0 system (no service packs!) operating smoothly is easy as long as you reboot every day - as long as it takes less than 14 minutes to restart, hey presto 99% uptime. Never mind that if you didn't reboot it regularly it would crash and burn.
Having to reboot to patch stuff totally unrelated to the real purpose of a server (say, DNS/web/ftp/smtp server) is what keeps me from using windows servers on any servers I really care about. The only thing I need to down my ol' reliable linux server for is for kernel upgrades; up2date/rug takes care of the rest with no steenking reboots.
Now, the patch situation on windows is getting better, but it still seems to me rebooting is just another chore to Microsoft.. Kind of like how sometimes when you blink your eyes you totally miss how explorer.exe (the one that's your start menu) crashes and is restarted automatically..
What are you talking about? A fast food restaurant buys coke syrup by the gallon for something like $4. A large coke contains about $0.09 of syrup. Unless you're going to get 15 "free" refills of your drink they're still going to make money off of you. There's absolutely nothing to discourage anyone from going into a fast food restaurant and buying *just* a coke. Of course they want to entice you to buy more. But they are most definitely not losing money.
No, they are in fact horrendously overcharging you on coke, hoping you might opt for a full meal instead, so they make their $5-a-visitor target.. It's all about the average revenue per user (arpu) - which is a very trendy figure to report if you're a telecomms company these days.
BTW, I have Windows NT servers with over a year of uptime, excluding time spent afterhours applying updates (which you can bitch about all you want, but the fact remains that MS doesnt have no reboot patches), and I have Win2k servers with at least that long. A month uptime is long? No way, only a month of uptime is weak, and there is either a hardware issue, a third-party driver issue, or caused by a non-MS program you are running. So can a Windows box run for over a year without crashing? Hell ya. Easily.
You're kind of cheating there by disregarding the restarts due to necessary patches. Sure, your average linux distribution needs to be patches once in a while as well, but rarely (kernel) to the point of having to reboot everything. Simply rebooting NT will actually solve a lot of problems because every dinky piece of software running on it will be started anew, and memory leaks, stalled/locked/deadlocked software and such disappear..
Still, Microsoft understands very well that as long as it's scheduled downtime, nobody cares about it, as it's after hours.. And, most people don't realize this, but 99% uptime means 14.4 minutes of downtime every 24 hours. If you save that up over a month (an attainable uptime even with NT 4.0) you get over 7 hours to go down at your choosing.. And if High Availability actually matters to you, they'll gladly charge you for it.
BTW a lot of patches that tell you to reboot don't actually need the system to reboot.. Simply stopping and restarting some services will do nicely if that's even needed at all - just like most patches on linux or a BSD. It seems to me that Microsoft views the "forced reboot" as a maintenance chore, much like defragging your hard disk.. Software installs will often prompt you to reboot as well - even though it's totally unnecessary.
You see the problem with hardware is all about margin. Unless you are moving a huge amount of goods you will loose your ass. Software on the other hand is all margin, big profit ratio's. Why do you think so many restarants go out of business? Small margins, same goes for grocery stores.
While it's true that the margin on hardware is virtually nothing, your average restaurant will be worrying more about turn-over than margin; the bulk of costs for a restaurant is in the fixed costs (i.e. renting a place, taxes, employees, fresh ingredients that you have to stock in case people do show up, but that expire quickly whether they do show up or not).
Ever notice how just about every "meal" at a fast food restaurant costs about the same? That's because they're in the business of extracting $5 per visitor rather than being interested in the exact margin on stuff. That's also why fries and a coke are thrown in their meals for a relatively low price, and they cost a lot more separately -- it's all about discouraging sub-par revenue customers. (Grocery stores (or Fast Moving Consumer Goods Retailers as they like to call themselves) have things slightly better than restaurants in that they sell a lot of non-perishables as well - stocking more and more non-food items has been an ongoing trend in supermarkets and grocers' for ages now).
Of course, fixed costs are also a big barrier to entry for any would-be competitors of Dell. Spending a few million here and there to set up a plant and do distribution is peanuts to Dell since they're shipping insanely large volumes, so even relatively large fixed costs translate to a small cost-per-unit. Plus, they can get volume discounts from OEMs. Without a large initial investment it's pretty hard to suddenly gain such a big market share that you can compete with the economies of scale that Dell enjoys. Dell is the Wallmart of PC systems.
Added value is the only way to go for smaller would-be competitors; e.g. better after sales service, warrantees, real life expert human salespeople, full-service-one-stop deployment, etc. Of course, it may well turn out that it's cheaper for you to only offer the added value and buy the systems themselves from Dell!
In ye old days, AV scanners would not only scan for malware that wasn't strictly a virus, but would invariably include an "innoculate" feature which would create checksums for executables and libraries, and the on-access scanner would refuse to run altered or non-checksummed executables. The latter is handy to protect against users installing or running malware. Windows XP includes this, but in a very, very cumbersome manner (Software Restriction Policies) but which at least can check certificates so windows updates will work..
Any one know of any free checksum-checkers-on-execute, preferably with some sort of centralized checksum database, for windows?
I predict that next year, Linux will be as dead as BSD and apple.
If that's death, do you want to live?
Latin doesn't have article (a, the), the verb "to be" (essere) is often just left out, likewise "and".
Of course Latin was written and spoken for centruries, and in many different territories so there is some variation to this; nevertheless in most Classical texts you'll get to read when you start to study Latin, "and", "is", "a" and "the" will hardly make an appearance.
Australia can do it (and actually invented the "secret ballot").
;-) (Which is not to say there were no secret ballots cast in Mesopotamia, I'm just more familiar with the black/white marble-in-a-vase system used in Ancient Greece).
I think Athens beat you to the mark some thousands of years earlier
I'm not sure how much difference there is between 'decriminalise' and 'turn a blind eye', because the laws still forbid those decriminalised things.
;-)
Pretty big difference. In the first case, you can not be prosecuted no matter what; in the second, it is ultimately up to the mood and whim of the police, prosecutor and court whether you will be punished.
Actually, if the police try to prosecute you for possesion of a small amount of marihuana, they get bitch-slapped by the courts. Selective enforcement is very much frowned upon. Add to that a legal theory of "habitual rights" (basically; if you've been allowed to do something for ages and no-one complained, they can't turn around on you and prohibit it because now it's more convenient for them to do so - squatters often attain legal status because of this) and the a legal theory of expectation ("I wasn't expecting this kind of Spanish Inquisition"), and you're pretty much sorted.
In effect, the policy has been this was for so long, it has in practice eroded the law. It would take a new law to be passed to reinstate zero tolerance enforcement.
You'd be surprised too if any of the laws on dumblaws.com suddenly started to be enforced..
When the developer of both formats publicly states that AAC is a better sounding format than MP3, I'm willing to trust that statement.
Ogg seems to do better than both in most blind listening tests I've seen floating across. AAC does beat the crap out of MP3 at the same bitrate, but 64Kbps AAC doesn't beat 128Kbps MP3 universally.
64Kbps ogg is my sweet point I'd say, especially for web radio (icecast/shoutcast) purposes.
There's always a cap.. Most .nl DSL providers are up front about it; the basic, $25-30/month DSL contracts are not only limited speed, but there's a finite cap and a per-megabyte overage charge. On the higher revenue contracts (typically in the $50-80/month range) they'll tell you they you there's "no cap, but a Fair Use Policy". None of them will indicate what the FUP-cap is.
;-)
In the case of FUP what it boils down to is that they don't really care whether you go over a certain threshold, but rather, how much bandwidth there is available in your area. In DSL bandwidth is shared among all the subscribers to one telephone "switch" (CO). For residential use, they typically oversubscribe this to the tune of 1:25 - so a "T1" for every 25 people on a 1024Mbps DSL line.
If they find out that one CO is using vastly more bandwidth than planned, and there aren't that many new (and elderly) users lined up to get connected - so they can't afford to just lay down more fiber, they reserve the right to crack down on people who use more bandwidth than average. Of course they don't want to be dicks about this, so they usually target people using more than ten times the average, or the 10% "top talkers". Going after top talkers first makes a lot of sense, since the number 1 top talker probably uses half of the bandwidth of the entire neigborhood
The actual reason that most plans do NOT come with a cap is that cracking down on top talkers takes a lot of effort. Ever metering the bandwidth can take a lot money and equipment. In one of the earliest incarnations of ADSL service you could check the traffic you used online - they removed this, because all the overhead slowed down connections to the point it was costing them more in terms of bandwidth than just ignoring overages.
In fact, some of the budget plans that pretend to have a cap don't have one. It's a "special offer" for "6 months only", but in reality they don't have the infrastructure and the people to meter all bandwidth all the time and to go after people with nastygrams...
Of course, if your connection really is uncapped in the administrative sense, that doesn't mean they won't bandwidth-limit on your ass without you even knowing...
The most elegant scheme I've seen sofar is used by Bredbandbolaget (IIRC), who sell 10Mbps fiber internet access; if you go over your cap, which is specifically stated to be X GB per month, your speed simply drops to 128Kbps for the rest of the month.. Still usuable for the bare necessities (web, chat, e-mail and some windows updates), just no downloading movies until the next month/billing cycle starts. AND it's fully automated which makes it a lot cheaper than nastygrams. Winners all around.