All the fundamentalists have to realise is that God made them stewards, and isn't going to bail out their ass if they fail -- and that is the only basis needed to engage positively in the AGW debate. However, fundamentalists have allowed politics to inform their faith.
This won't work, for reasons you allude to in your last paragraph. I'll put it more bluntly: most fundamentalist "Christianity" in the USA has nothing to do with traditional Christian belief or ethics, it's just ignorant Red State tribalism. How else do you explain self-professed Christians who love the rich and hate the poor and downtrodden?
What I mean is, we've got a lot of new technologies demanding internet bandwidth (cloud hosted applications, like Microsoft Office 360 for example, or Apple's whole iCloud initiative), and we're just starting to see HD video streaming going mainstream -- BUT, nobody invested in building up the networks first for this.
Nobody in the United States, you mean. Things are far different if you look at South Korea, Japan, or the better-governed countries in western Europe. (Some of the worst-run countries in Europe are as bad as the US or worse in terms of broadband access.) Even some Latin American nations have better broadband access than the US, and at lower prices. The reason why our broadband access sucks isn't technological limitations, it's the incestuous relation between government and big business. Large telecommunications businesses pay off the government and the government ensures that these big businesses don't face any real competition. The result is that prices keep going up and quality of service stagnates. We've been paying taxes and surcharges for years that were supposed to fund high-quality universal service, but these have basically been stolen and diverted into the pockets of executives and shareholders.
Oracle's reference to the Tolkien Elvish language is exceptionally weak. They note that Tolkien's estate claims that Elvish is copyrighted, but they provide no case law to substantiate that claim. Instead, they cite a link to the personal Web site of a lawyer who is also a Tolkien fan. And the page includes the following:
So not only does their own citation say that it is likely Elvish is not copyrightable, it also says that computer languages are not copyrightable – directly undermining Oracle's own specific case! Did the attorney who included this citation assume no one would check it? I expect this kind of practice from desperate college students, not high-priced corporate lawyers.
I'm pretty sure that Intel has a copyright on x86 assembly
No. What Intel does have is a wide variety of patents (not copyrights) on various methods used to implement efficient x86 CPUs and code execution, and these ensure that pretty much no one except Intel, AMD, and VIA can produce a modern x86 CPU. You could probably make a 386 (20+ years old and thus out of patent range) if you wanted to, but who would buy it?
whoever originally spec'd "HDTV" resolution helped kill 4:3 on PC.
The HDTV spec does a good job for movies and TV shows – its intended purpose. It's not the HDTV designers' fault that their creation became a bastardized de facto standard for computer monitors.
Aren't most desktop monitors at least 1280x1024? Isn't 1024x768 something strictly limited to older CRTs? Or are there far more of those out there still being used than I suspect?
There are indeed a lot of old monitors still out therem especially in the hands of non-technical users with aging PCs. Also keep in mind that these resolution surveys are based on what resolution the user has selected, not necessarily the monitor's native resolution. A lot of less experienced users with bad eyesight will get a high-resolution monitor, find that they can't read the text, and instead of increasing the DPI (a setting they probably don't know exists), will lower the resolution via Windows display settings. This is how you wind up with lots of people running at 1024x768.
I've been looking into replacing my current laptop, which has a 1680x1050 resolution. But I see that MOST laptops nowadays have this crappy 1366x768 screen. What gives? Why isn't our screen resolution improving along with out CPU speed, RAM capacity, HD capacity, and virtually everything else???
Because operating systems can't yet do DPI scaling that works 100% perfectly on all applications. Windows 7 is much better at this than XP was, but there are still lots of rogue applications which won't behave themselves properly at anything but the standard DPI setting. Not long ago I filed a bug report on an integrated library system (ILS) application used at my workplace; some of the toolbar icons are solid black if you set 120 dpi, but display fine at the standard setting. Many other programs I've used have text spilling over the edges, overlapping, etc. if anything other than the default DPI setting is used.
My feeling is that Apple is going to solve the deadlock; they're less afraid to break old stuff (in large part because they don't have nearly so many businesses running their software and depending on it supporting legacy apps). And they've already rolled out "Retina displays" in the iPhone and iPad; rumor has it that the MacBook may be next.
You really think that there will be rooms to rent during the Olympics? Yeah maybe.. but for really big $$$.
But in the previous thread you were going on and on about how people should go to any lengths because they should take "pride" in the Olympics. Guess that only applies to the little people, not to corporations that might actually have to shell out some money.
OEM copies of XP were still available in 2009 and it was still being loaded on brand new netbooks in 2010. They'll be cutting off support just 4 years after the last official copy was sold.
These netbooks weren't even designed to last 4 years. You get what you pay for.
Unfortunately IE6/7/8 will live on and I have nightmares that we will be supporting them until 2038...
Support for IE6 ends at the same time as support for XP. The only reason Microsoft has supported it this long is that it's considered to be a "component" of XP, and XP is still under support until 2014. See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewinfaq for details.
if it was Linux based malware a patch would have been out within 24 to 48 hours
And it would have required editing a text configuration file and then running the patch from the command line, and it wouldn't work on a wide variety of common hardware, and whenever someone brought up these issues the response would be "RTFM n00b."
Not stepping into the actual conversation over at-will employment, but the thread moderation is utter shit. Jumping all over the place for no reason. It's obvious that people are rating posts "+1, agree" or "-1, disagree."
Not to defend Best Buy here, but these things are not necessarily compatible with cheap prices in a big-box physical retail environment. For example, all the stores I visit with cheap prices try to upsell the high-margin junk so they can make money.
Not sure how they manage it, but my local Fry's usually has electronics prices competitive with Newegg and other online suppliers, and they don't use the same hard-sell tactics Best Buy does.
What makes you think something like this will happen? Pretty much every other car-safety regulation, ever, applies only to newly manufactured cars. You don't have to get a 1955 Chevy retrofitted with airbags or a pollution-control system in order to keep driving it. And a "classic" car is far, far less safe than anything being sold today (see the 1959 Bel Air crash video for clarification if you doubt this).
Watch it again. The vast majority of the film focuses on the interaction between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Arnold's character has far less screen time (and the crappy stop-motion Terminator endoskeleton appears for about 30 seconds total).
You see, that is the root of the problem. They ("M$") work so that won't happen. We saw recently news about Chrome overtaking IE on Sundays. Can you guess why?
Because Chrome doesn't support Active Directory administration, and in any business organization of any size which is based around Windows, this is an essential feature. It's the #1 reason why alternative browsers haven't gotten a foothold on the corporate desktop.
nope.. when I saw the title 'titanic' I assumed it was an action/disaster flick.. instead it was a shitty love story.. even terminator 1 and 2 do not make up for this trash.
Um... Terminator 1 was also a love story, or didn't you notice?
The longevity of XP was an accident. It was a good time to live in, but they won't make that mistake ever again. Don't expect support to last as long as the XP support for 7 either.
Windows 7 has mainstream support until Jan. 12, 2015 (when new feature development stops) and extended support until Jan. 14, 2020. So you can keep using it for nearly another eight years if you are satisfied with just security patches and no new OS features. Windows 8 is shaping up to be a real dog on the desktop, so I expect the boundaries of support to be used to their fullest. 2020 is plenty of time for Ballmer to be canned and for Windows 9 to get back to fulfilling core business needs and forget about this silly Apple tablet envy.
XP is dying. I agree with MS on this as if they supported more people would still use it. IE 9 requires ASLR, refined DEP, new exception handling security fixes, and something else I do not remember, and of course DRM for their h.264 license which is part of aero.
The H.264 license does not require the use of any DRM. Where do people get this nonsense and why do they keep spreading this misinformation? DRM is only required to play back Blu-rays and other "protected" content – not freely available video from the Web.
Oh, if only there were a third choice. Torn between torment and damnation we might glance about for some saving grace, some true escape from our peril but it is not to be. The choice is either run botnets, or migrate to a newer version of Windows. There is no third course. Alas, we are lost!
In practice, no, there is no third option. Attempting to migrate to Linux or MacOS would not only require extensive retraining of every employee in the company (including the IT staff!), but also rewriting every piece of custom software that relies on Windows (including stuff like Excel spreadsheet macros and VBScripts, many of which are probably undocumented). This would be far, far more expensive than just upgrading to Windows 7, even if that requires new PCs. A migration to another OS is almost impossible to justify by a simple cost-benefit analysis in any large company.
You're misunderstanding what the Supreme court does; the only thing that can "fix" a "bad Supreme Court decision" is another Supreme court decision. A new Constitutional Amendment will change the boundaries of the government, but will not change what court rulings mean; they will still stand as precedent on any related cases that the Amendment did not address.
That's only true when the Supreme Court ruling was made on Constitutional grounds. If the Court rules that something is unconstitutional, then the only way to change that is to put different Justices on the Court or to amend the Constitution. However, many (if not most) Supreme Court cases are actually about statutory interpretation – that is, deciding exactly what Congress meant when passing a law and what it is intended to cover. That is the case here; the Court is being asked to determine whether existing federal patent laws apply to Monsanto's seeds in this instance or not. If Congress disagrees with the Court's interpretation, then Congress is free to pass a bill clarifying (or modifying) patent law to overrule the Court.
An example of Congress overruling the Court was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed early on in the Obama Administration. (In fact, it was the first bill that Obama signed, if I'm not mistaken.) The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the statute of limitations for gender discrimination (women being paid less than men for the same job) started running when the discrimination began, even if it was ongoing, rather than starting over with each unfairly diminished paycheck. This was widely considered unfair because in some cases the workers did not even know about the discrimination until after the statute of limitations had passed. Congress passed a new law adjusting the statute of limitations, and the Supreme Court case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was thus overruled.
this is less helpful when you travel all the time. oh hey look I'm away from home and now my card doesn't work. how convenient. I still have another week of business to do here. thanks visa.
Anecdotal experience: I have a Visa credit card through BB&T. I live in Georgia. A couple months ago, I got a call from the rep (forget whether it was BB&T or Visa) asking if I had made a transaction for a large amount of money (over $600, forget the exact amount) at a Walmart in Virginia. WTF? So someone had made a fraudulent card (still don't know how they got the data) and I had to have it replaced with a different CC#.
Later on I took a vacation to Florida, and these legitimate transactions went through fine. I had thought based on the previous experience that they might call me to verify the usage was legitimate (as they had with the phony Virginia charge) but they didn't. Maybe because it's a neighboring state, or maybe Orlando gets green-flagged because it is such a big tourist destination? I'm sure they have some very complicated heuristics on this stuff. In any case, I can't really complain about the results.
No one with modern hardware should need to pay any additional H.264 licensing fees, because the video hardware already supports decoding the bitstream. This has been the case for all PC video devices except the crappy Atom integrated chipset for about 5 years, and is the case with all current smartphone/tablet chipsets. The license fees were already paid by the hardware vendor. All software has to do is send the bitstream to the driver via the correct API. No use of H.264 patents in the software, no license fees.
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All the fundamentalists have to realise is that God made them stewards, and isn't going to bail out their ass if they fail -- and that is the only basis needed to engage positively in the AGW debate. However, fundamentalists have allowed politics to inform their faith.
This won't work, for reasons you allude to in your last paragraph. I'll put it more bluntly: most fundamentalist "Christianity" in the USA has nothing to do with traditional Christian belief or ethics, it's just ignorant Red State tribalism. How else do you explain self-professed Christians who love the rich and hate the poor and downtrodden?
What I mean is, we've got a lot of new technologies demanding internet bandwidth (cloud hosted applications, like Microsoft Office 360 for example, or Apple's whole iCloud initiative), and we're just starting to see HD video streaming going mainstream -- BUT, nobody invested in building up the networks first for this.
Nobody in the United States, you mean. Things are far different if you look at South Korea, Japan, or the better-governed countries in western Europe. (Some of the worst-run countries in Europe are as bad as the US or worse in terms of broadband access.) Even some Latin American nations have better broadband access than the US, and at lower prices. The reason why our broadband access sucks isn't technological limitations, it's the incestuous relation between government and big business. Large telecommunications businesses pay off the government and the government ensures that these big businesses don't face any real competition. The result is that prices keep going up and quality of service stagnates. We've been paying taxes and surcharges for years that were supposed to fund high-quality universal service, but these have basically been stolen and diverted into the pockets of executives and shareholders.
So not only does their own citation say that it is likely Elvish is not copyrightable, it also says that computer languages are not copyrightable – directly undermining Oracle's own specific case! Did the attorney who included this citation assume no one would check it? I expect this kind of practice from desperate college students, not high-priced corporate lawyers.
I'm pretty sure that Intel has a copyright on x86 assembly
No. What Intel does have is a wide variety of patents (not copyrights) on various methods used to implement efficient x86 CPUs and code execution, and these ensure that pretty much no one except Intel, AMD, and VIA can produce a modern x86 CPU. You could probably make a 386 (20+ years old and thus out of patent range) if you wanted to, but who would buy it?
whoever originally spec'd "HDTV" resolution helped kill 4:3 on PC.
The HDTV spec does a good job for movies and TV shows – its intended purpose. It's not the HDTV designers' fault that their creation became a bastardized de facto standard for computer monitors.
Aren't most desktop monitors at least 1280x1024? Isn't 1024x768 something strictly limited to older CRTs? Or are there far more of those out there still being used than I suspect?
There are indeed a lot of old monitors still out therem especially in the hands of non-technical users with aging PCs. Also keep in mind that these resolution surveys are based on what resolution the user has selected, not necessarily the monitor's native resolution. A lot of less experienced users with bad eyesight will get a high-resolution monitor, find that they can't read the text, and instead of increasing the DPI (a setting they probably don't know exists), will lower the resolution via Windows display settings. This is how you wind up with lots of people running at 1024x768.
I've been looking into replacing my current laptop, which has a 1680x1050 resolution. But I see that MOST laptops nowadays have this crappy 1366x768 screen. What gives? Why isn't our screen resolution improving along with out CPU speed, RAM capacity, HD capacity, and virtually everything else???
Because operating systems can't yet do DPI scaling that works 100% perfectly on all applications. Windows 7 is much better at this than XP was, but there are still lots of rogue applications which won't behave themselves properly at anything but the standard DPI setting. Not long ago I filed a bug report on an integrated library system (ILS) application used at my workplace; some of the toolbar icons are solid black if you set 120 dpi, but display fine at the standard setting. Many other programs I've used have text spilling over the edges, overlapping, etc. if anything other than the default DPI setting is used.
My feeling is that Apple is going to solve the deadlock; they're less afraid to break old stuff (in large part because they don't have nearly so many businesses running their software and depending on it supporting legacy apps). And they've already rolled out "Retina displays" in the iPhone and iPad; rumor has it that the MacBook may be next.
You really think that there will be rooms to rent during the Olympics? Yeah maybe .. but for really big $$$.
But in the previous thread you were going on and on about how people should go to any lengths because they should take "pride" in the Olympics. Guess that only applies to the little people, not to corporations that might actually have to shell out some money.
OEM copies of XP were still available in 2009 and it was still being loaded on brand new netbooks in 2010. They'll be cutting off support just 4 years after the last official copy was sold.
These netbooks weren't even designed to last 4 years. You get what you pay for.
Unfortunately IE6/7/8 will live on and I have nightmares that we will be supporting them until 2038...
Support for IE6 ends at the same time as support for XP. The only reason Microsoft has supported it this long is that it's considered to be a "component" of XP, and XP is still under support until 2014. See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewinfaq for details.
if it was Linux based malware a patch would have been out within 24 to 48 hours
And it would have required editing a text configuration file and then running the patch from the command line, and it wouldn't work on a wide variety of common hardware, and whenever someone brought up these issues the response would be "RTFM n00b."
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bedroom for when I need to look something up real quick."
That's what tablets are for.
Not stepping into the actual conversation over at-will employment, but the thread moderation is utter shit. Jumping all over the place for no reason. It's obvious that people are rating posts "+1, agree" or "-1, disagree."
Not to defend Best Buy here, but these things are not necessarily compatible with cheap prices in a big-box physical retail environment. For example, all the stores I visit with cheap prices try to upsell the high-margin junk so they can make money.
Not sure how they manage it, but my local Fry's usually has electronics prices competitive with Newegg and other online suppliers, and they don't use the same hard-sell tactics Best Buy does.
What makes you think something like this will happen? Pretty much every other car-safety regulation, ever, applies only to newly manufactured cars. You don't have to get a 1955 Chevy retrofitted with airbags or a pollution-control system in order to keep driving it. And a "classic" car is far, far less safe than anything being sold today (see the 1959 Bel Air crash video for clarification if you doubt this).
Watch it again. The vast majority of the film focuses on the interaction between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Arnold's character has far less screen time (and the crappy stop-motion Terminator endoskeleton appears for about 30 seconds total).
You see, that is the root of the problem. They ("M$") work so that won't happen. We saw recently news about Chrome overtaking IE on Sundays. Can you guess why?
Because Chrome doesn't support Active Directory administration, and in any business organization of any size which is based around Windows, this is an essential feature. It's the #1 reason why alternative browsers haven't gotten a foothold on the corporate desktop.
nope.. when I saw the title 'titanic' I assumed it was an action/disaster flick.. instead it was a shitty love story.. even terminator 1 and 2 do not make up for this trash.
Um... Terminator 1 was also a love story, or didn't you notice?
Yep. Expect to see XP on the corporate desktop until 2014, and then Windows 7 until early 2020.
The longevity of XP was an accident. It was a good time to live in, but they won't make that mistake ever again. Don't expect support to last as long as the XP support for 7 either.
Windows 7 has mainstream support until Jan. 12, 2015 (when new feature development stops) and extended support until Jan. 14, 2020. So you can keep using it for nearly another eight years if you are satisfied with just security patches and no new OS features. Windows 8 is shaping up to be a real dog on the desktop, so I expect the boundaries of support to be used to their fullest. 2020 is plenty of time for Ballmer to be canned and for Windows 9 to get back to fulfilling core business needs and forget about this silly Apple tablet envy.
XP is dying. I agree with MS on this as if they supported more people would still use it. IE 9 requires ASLR, refined DEP, new exception handling security fixes, and something else I do not remember, and of course DRM for their h.264 license which is part of aero.
The H.264 license does not require the use of any DRM. Where do people get this nonsense and why do they keep spreading this misinformation? DRM is only required to play back Blu-rays and other "protected" content – not freely available video from the Web.
Oh, if only there were a third choice. Torn between torment and damnation we might glance about for some saving grace, some true escape from our peril but it is not to be. The choice is either run botnets, or migrate to a newer version of Windows. There is no third course. Alas, we are lost!
In practice, no, there is no third option. Attempting to migrate to Linux or MacOS would not only require extensive retraining of every employee in the company (including the IT staff!), but also rewriting every piece of custom software that relies on Windows (including stuff like Excel spreadsheet macros and VBScripts, many of which are probably undocumented). This would be far, far more expensive than just upgrading to Windows 7, even if that requires new PCs. A migration to another OS is almost impossible to justify by a simple cost-benefit analysis in any large company.
You're misunderstanding what the Supreme court does; the only thing that can "fix" a "bad Supreme Court decision" is another Supreme court decision. A new Constitutional Amendment will change the boundaries of the government, but will not change what court rulings mean; they will still stand as precedent on any related cases that the Amendment did not address.
That's only true when the Supreme Court ruling was made on Constitutional grounds. If the Court rules that something is unconstitutional, then the only way to change that is to put different Justices on the Court or to amend the Constitution. However, many (if not most) Supreme Court cases are actually about statutory interpretation – that is, deciding exactly what Congress meant when passing a law and what it is intended to cover. That is the case here; the Court is being asked to determine whether existing federal patent laws apply to Monsanto's seeds in this instance or not. If Congress disagrees with the Court's interpretation, then Congress is free to pass a bill clarifying (or modifying) patent law to overrule the Court.
An example of Congress overruling the Court was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed early on in the Obama Administration. (In fact, it was the first bill that Obama signed, if I'm not mistaken.) The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the statute of limitations for gender discrimination (women being paid less than men for the same job) started running when the discrimination began, even if it was ongoing, rather than starting over with each unfairly diminished paycheck. This was widely considered unfair because in some cases the workers did not even know about the discrimination until after the statute of limitations had passed. Congress passed a new law adjusting the statute of limitations, and the Supreme Court case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was thus overruled.
this is less helpful when you travel all the time. oh hey look I'm away from home and now my card doesn't work. how convenient. I still have another week of business to do here. thanks visa.
Anecdotal experience: I have a Visa credit card through BB&T. I live in Georgia. A couple months ago, I got a call from the rep (forget whether it was BB&T or Visa) asking if I had made a transaction for a large amount of money (over $600, forget the exact amount) at a Walmart in Virginia. WTF? So someone had made a fraudulent card (still don't know how they got the data) and I had to have it replaced with a different CC#.
Later on I took a vacation to Florida, and these legitimate transactions went through fine. I had thought based on the previous experience that they might call me to verify the usage was legitimate (as they had with the phony Virginia charge) but they didn't. Maybe because it's a neighboring state, or maybe Orlando gets green-flagged because it is such a big tourist destination? I'm sure they have some very complicated heuristics on this stuff. In any case, I can't really complain about the results.
No one with modern hardware should need to pay any additional H.264 licensing fees, because the video hardware already supports decoding the bitstream. This has been the case for all PC video devices except the crappy Atom integrated chipset for about 5 years, and is the case with all current smartphone/tablet chipsets. The license fees were already paid by the hardware vendor. All software has to do is send the bitstream to the driver via the correct API. No use of H.264 patents in the software, no license fees.