First DoC people will have access to competent advice from State who run the foreign missions.
It depends upon the country. Some are advanced, some are advanced but with little money and some are stone-age.
If the target group is small, expect more surveillance because they have the time available. For example in one of the 'stans, you can assume that your telephone is bugged and if it is known to belong to a foreigner, then you are probably right. Foreigners tend to get better lines to make interception easier.
In the poorer countries, mobiles are still pretty rare. This means that it is easy to classify any users as 'interesting'. Forget any on-air encryption, the interception will take place at the exchange.
Apartment bugs are less likely unless you are a high profile target. In any case, encrypted computer comms are always better than voice for this reason. Van Eck is a possible risk but unlikely unless you are in Russia or China and are very high profile.
The rule is that you always assume that anywhere that isn't cleared by competent staff is bugged. This doesn't mean that you can't talk about things on the phone, you just don't go into specifics.
RedHat doesn't produce much that is GPLed. However you see a *lot* of stuff which was written by people either employed by or are under contract to RedHat. RedHat the company, markets and supports the code, which they pay people to develop.
I agree and will add to what you say, if RedHat develop something, the rest of the community gets it through the GPL (and the fixes too). What they eat their lunch from are the business customers who want enterprise support. RedHat does bundle some third party tools with their high end server packages and these may be non-GPL. But RH seem to be ok though.
Sure, everyone has the source code and can give the support but most businesses prefer to go back to the vendor.
Suse is a German public company limited by shares (AG), but it isn't stock exchange listed so the accounting disclosure rules are negligiable. Unless they decide to list there is unlikely to be more information and the high tech market sector is dead.
German corporate taxes are painful so the tendancy is to minimise profites. When Germany's Neuer Markt was alive, companies could pay taxes according to their books filed under German law (HGB) but publish results according to IAS or US-GAAP. The tax man was held at bay by the agreements that supported disclosure in the Neuer Markt. Now there is no such segment and the tax man is very hungry - so any figures published will understate profits.
However, from the word going around, Suse aren't doing at all badly. They have always gone for a more corporate image which makes them appealing to big business. RH's hacker culture counts against them on this even though they have been very successfully climbing up market.
I agree that the startup groups and dependancies under NT onwards are a nice set of features. Although it isn't always very obvious what is happening or what went wrong. If we did something similar with Linux, we would have the chance to graphically indicate what is waiting for what.
However, it is still annoying that the NT architecture claims that the system is up when it isn't. Login too quickly and you will find that minor things like RPC aren't running yet. With Linux, you get the login when startup is ready.
However, I do like the startup groups and the dependencies under NT onwards, even if the stuff is poorly documented or wrong (bad dependancies). The joke was that in NT4.0 a fast processor and lots of memory sometimes meant that stuff was started out oif sequence - lots of hilarity spent debugging that one!
My premise is that when you have a choice between activities A,B or C and then D comes along then the first three will suffer. Nobody has endless free time. This is economics, the supply is inelastic.
I have given up believing the RIAA numbers since their ridiculous complaints about hurt to their members. However, sales that they have been screaming about are an indicator. They have been dropping.
As for sales via the Internet,well mail order was always competition - yes, one medium can replace the other. But from my point of view (father of two kids), listening to music just isn't so important now.
The big chnge in the last three years is the widespread adoption of flat-rate Internet which doesn't tie up a phone line. There is little parental pressure to stop surfing as it is a utility. Buying music is something that costs even though it can be replayed at leisure. CDs are outrageously priced compared to other media, and ianother rcent factor is that many people have a lower disposable income.
Yes, there is a lot of good music out there. But it is kind of interesting that my son prefers a lot of older stuff which I already have in my collection. He is as likely to watch a video as to listen to music if he has guests over. DVD is easier to use than VHS (playable on all modern computers, no rewind, fast access) and he definitely prefers it.
My daughter is more into obscure music (Eastern European bands, and I don't mean Tatu), but that is hot amongst her friends. What she likes is almost impossible to find on Kazaa (at least in the West).
Of course, I see their friends as well and whilst music isn't dying, the age that kids seem to tire of so-called pop is dropping and their tastes go to other things.
If you have the Muons, it can happen at *much* lower temperatures (even 3K) as the muons shield the nuclei and minimize the usual repulsion so high pressure isn't required. Of course, the main problem is to get muons that survive long enough to be useful - so breakeven isn't exactly a possibility.
If we take a a day, I can do a number of different free time activities. I can do sport, I can watch DVD, I can watch TV and even, listen to music. Add various internet related activities and then there is competition for time. Yes, I can ICQ whilst listening to music but in general I would be doing less music.
My teenage son is just as likely to go to his room to watch a video, play a computer game, ICQ as to listen to music. I understand he isn't the only one.
MP3 sales may be growing, but they are a replacement medium. Overall, audio is less important than it was - another tell-tale is that the audio areas of electronics shops is shrinking. Car audio sales are not down because it is difficult to surf the net or watch a video whilst driving.
Kids have something else to do with their time than listen to music. It isn't just about downloading, it is that their is more competition for something that is limited - people's free time.
Not quite correct, muon catalyzed fusion reactions are known to be real. Take lots of muons and some D2 then you don't need to worry about heat and pressure.
I agree that the Pons-Fleischmann cell is probably electrochemical energy rather than fusion, but don't let it make you discount the phenomenon altogether.
I have heard the FMS needing a restart, but I have never heard of one being based on Windows.
Note that the FMS has to be programed with the route for a flight. Programming these things, at least, used to be fairly painful with lots of horrible little codes and plenty of opportunity for keying errors. If you screw up, it is often easier to reset it.
Both Boeing and Microsoft are based in the same area and we know how Microsoft is pushing CE and how reliable that is proving in the automotive industry.
Last I heard Airbus were using various RTOS systems and if its in a critical area, triplication with three different software solutions implemented on two different processor architectures (Motorola and Intel). I hope that Boeing is doing the same.
Um, during flight test, they have serious hardware onboard up to and including Sun workstations. These aren't known to be particularly quiet, RF wise. The wiring looms for the sensors radiate too. The RF from the measurement technology doesn't give problems during flight test otherwise the plane wouldn't get certification.
I have a horrible impression that the use by passengers of high tech equipment is coincident with higher sophistication in the avionics and that software bugs are being misinterpreted by flight crew.
I've done some of the larger systems like VMS and they would crash leaving at least a minimal dump of the exec event message queues, to a full dump of the system state. The area used for system dumps is pre-allocated and set aside during startup so the exec can locate the file directly by block number without using the file system (or even the regular drivers).
Part of the system startup would scan the dump for the logging buffers, extract the messages and append them to the log file. The file system would have been recovered at this point so a corrupt disk isn't a problem.
I don't know how NT does it, but I would guess something similar given that the architect and some of his team were refugees from Digials central engineering.
Regrettably, the kernel dump project for linux is somewhat 'on-hold' as Linus would rather follow what the big vendors do (those offering enterprise support will need crash dumps for diagnostic purposes).
Look, if a store can make money selling other products at $3, why not the same for DVDs - or at least the same price as a paperback book. A film that is good has a good rep, it doesn't need any more promotion than a book - even less because its reputation precedes it.
As regards the retailer's income - that one is easy, the lower the price the more they will sell. They get their turnover by volume.
They will. Actually VMS Clustering is about 22 years old now.
The problem is that a lot of Linux research comes out of academia where VMS was seen as lumbering and slow. I have worked mostly in commercial environments where VMS meant 5 nines-plus uptime and the security of knowing that if some idiot pulled the plug on your CPU, another would smoothly take over.
Now people are asking for better reliability from Linux maybe someone will start to look at some cool stuff like the Distributed Lock Manager as a first step and then some way of cluster serving locally attached disks like MSCP by building the locking into a file system.
Your point about time zones I absolutey agree with. Even between the EU and India, five hours still means that messages take a good day for a response.
You must micromanage. If your spec isn't perfect, then they will deviate and work may have to be redone. They lack good business analysis capability in many areas, so you have to make sure that they can consult with someone.
I have worked with more Russians than Indians and I would say they are brilliant programmers and mathmaticians but they do need supervision. In our case we *knew* they didn't speak or understand perfect English (and I dumbed down our specs so they could be more easily translated), with India it can be more misleading as some do speak veray good English.
I don't know about India but in Russia their project management and QA sucked. I had to take charge of both processes on my project. However unlike you with your problems team leading, I had been given some hints to use a different style that worked fine in our environment. Note that Russia is somewhere between the Asian and European mentality whereas India is definitely Asian.
So bottom line, you want cheap s/w - send me on an expat package to Bangalore or St. Petersburg and factor that into your costs. I reckon about one expat to between ten and twenty locals. You continue to save money, but it is *nowhere* near the level of the ten cents in the dollar that you have been quoted.
IRTE (I read The Economist and I disagree with you. A dollar like any other currency only has the worth that someone puts on it. This is why, in the Former-Soviet-Union, the dollar could be preferred to the rouble, even for locally produced goods. There is no intention to repatriate the dollars so they just slosh around, never coming near to the Fed.
The issue is that when a country moves away from the dollar, the cash comes back into circulation causing a downward pressure on exchange rates (As has been seen recently). The Fed can't really control this because it has only relatively crude tools and they don't have much control away from the domestic markets.
Actually, I worked on some capital markets reform projects, so you could say that I'm a kind of barefoot economist.
One of the reasons that video-RAM is cheap is because it is being updated by the GPU and read by the DAC asynchronously. Programs are not constrained by the line and frame blanking intervals anymore because there is enough memory that a new frame can be built whilst the old is viewed and switching can occur mid frame. Games don't tend to work at full resolution so the graphics processor has memory to spare.
Really consoles should be discounted because the resolution sucks, even at the PAL 625/312 lines. HDTV should mean that we have a need for better console to explot the resolution. After all most people have bigger TVs than monitors, but the monitor is capable of working at far higher quality levels than the TV.
Actually Holywood goes at 24fps. However modern telecine doesn't give a damn because they stretch the duration of frames using digital processing.
Because tv is interlaced, so you effectively get two very low-resolution frames for every 30 fps "frame". The effective framerate of TVs is 60 fps. (or I suppose 50 for you PAL folks)
Actually, TV is at 25 fps and 30 fps because of interlacing. Each frame is shown twice at half resoloution and then offset.
and that way she can make $2000 faster. It might be illegal but as long as the RIAA can get their money. If she wants to know what to do, just look at some of the recent music videos for lessons.
Your radio anlogy fall down because regrettably many 'local' radio stations are essentially just running centrally generated material from negotiated playlists. You want needle time, you join the queue and pay for it. The end result is that a lot of good music gets left out because smaller companies can't afford the payola.
Having the media yourself reprents choice, you can choose what you want to hear and when.
First, what time does the school close? There is usually a a gap of a couple of hours before even office workers can get home. There are also the summer holidays.
With the best will in the world you can't watch over kids 24x7, at sometime they have to be figuring how to do things themselves.
The kid wasn't selling herself for crack on the streets. As far as the mother was concerned, whe was doing something that she believed was legal at home.
Parents assume reposnibility for the actions of their kids, but there is a reasonable limit to which that responsibility can be taken. The courts do recognise this and I guess all the RIAA will get is bad publicity. Actually there are ISPs that tell me how I can download unlimited music. Some of them may even put in very small lettering something abvout copyright, but many forget.
Oh and I have two teenage kids, and I make a point of knowing where they are. I can not know what they are doing, but I guess that it is legal and I trust them.
You forgot case law. Laws, statutes and ordinances are interpreted in a consistent way. To fully understand the implications, you need a thorough knowledge of the major cases as well.
This is why law students spend so much time cramming. Can anyone else hope to equal this, well yes, but only if you have a lot of time and a good library.
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It depends upon the country. Some are advanced, some are advanced but with little money and some are stone-age.
If the target group is small, expect more surveillance because they have the time available. For example in one of the 'stans, you can assume that your telephone is bugged and if it is known to belong to a foreigner, then you are probably right. Foreigners tend to get better lines to make interception easier.
In the poorer countries, mobiles are still pretty rare. This means that it is easy to classify any users as 'interesting'. Forget any on-air encryption, the interception will take place at the exchange.
Apartment bugs are less likely unless you are a high profile target. In any case, encrypted computer comms are always better than voice for this reason. Van Eck is a possible risk but unlikely unless you are in Russia or China and are very high profile.
The rule is that you always assume that anywhere that isn't cleared by competent staff is bugged. This doesn't mean that you can't talk about things on the phone, you just don't go into specifics.
RedHat doesn't produce much that is GPLed. However you see a *lot* of stuff which was written by people either employed by or are under contract to RedHat. RedHat the company, markets and supports the code, which they pay people to develop.
Sure, everyone has the source code and can give the support but most businesses prefer to go back to the vendor.
German corporate taxes are painful so the tendancy is to minimise profites. When Germany's Neuer Markt was alive, companies could pay taxes according to their books filed under German law (HGB) but publish results according to IAS or US-GAAP. The tax man was held at bay by the agreements that supported disclosure in the Neuer Markt. Now there is no such segment and the tax man is very hungry - so any figures published will understate profits.
However, from the word going around, Suse aren't doing at all badly. They have always gone for a more corporate image which makes them appealing to big business. RH's hacker culture counts against them on this even though they have been very successfully climbing up market.
No, there will be a change. The rate of decline will increase.
However, it is still annoying that the NT architecture claims that the system is up when it isn't. Login too quickly and you will find that minor things like RPC aren't running yet. With Linux, you get the login when startup is ready.
However, I do like the startup groups and the dependencies under NT onwards, even if the stuff is poorly documented or wrong (bad dependancies). The joke was that in NT4.0 a fast processor and lots of memory sometimes meant that stuff was started out oif sequence - lots of hilarity spent debugging that one!
I have given up believing the RIAA numbers since their ridiculous complaints about hurt to their members. However, sales that they have been screaming about are an indicator. They have been dropping.
As for sales via the Internet,well mail order was always competition - yes, one medium can replace the other. But from my point of view (father of two kids), listening to music just isn't so important now.
The big chnge in the last three years is the widespread adoption of flat-rate Internet which doesn't tie up a phone line. There is little parental pressure to stop surfing as it is a utility. Buying music is something that costs even though it can be replayed at leisure. CDs are outrageously priced compared to other media, and ianother rcent factor is that many people have a lower disposable income.
Yes, there is a lot of good music out there. But it is kind of interesting that my son prefers a lot of older stuff which I already have in my collection. He is as likely to watch a video as to listen to music if he has guests over. DVD is easier to use than VHS (playable on all modern computers, no rewind, fast access) and he definitely prefers it.
My daughter is more into obscure music (Eastern European bands, and I don't mean Tatu), but that is hot amongst her friends. What she likes is almost impossible to find on Kazaa (at least in the West).
Of course, I see their friends as well and whilst music isn't dying, the age that kids seem to tire of so-called pop is dropping and their tastes go to other things.
If you have the Muons, it can happen at *much* lower temperatures (even 3K) as the muons shield the nuclei and minimize the usual repulsion so high pressure isn't required. Of course, the main problem is to get muons that survive long enough to be useful - so breakeven isn't exactly a possibility.
My teenage son is just as likely to go to his room to watch a video, play a computer game, ICQ as to listen to music. I understand he isn't the only one.
MP3 sales may be growing, but they are a replacement medium. Overall, audio is less important than it was - another tell-tale is that the audio areas of electronics shops is shrinking. Car audio sales are not down because it is difficult to surf the net or watch a video whilst driving.
Kids have something else to do with their time than listen to music. It isn't just about downloading, it is that their is more competition for something that is limited - people's free time.
I agree that the Pons-Fleischmann cell is probably electrochemical energy rather than fusion, but don't let it make you discount the phenomenon altogether.
Note that the FMS has to be programed with the route for a flight. Programming these things, at least, used to be fairly painful with lots of horrible little codes and plenty of opportunity for keying errors. If you screw up, it is often easier to reset it.
Last I heard Airbus were using various RTOS systems and if its in a critical area, triplication with three different software solutions implemented on two different processor architectures (Motorola and Intel). I hope that Boeing is doing the same.
I have a horrible impression that the use by passengers of high tech equipment is coincident with higher sophistication in the avionics and that software bugs are being misinterpreted by flight crew.
Part of the system startup would scan the dump for the logging buffers, extract the messages and append them to the log file. The file system would have been recovered at this point so a corrupt disk isn't a problem.
I don't know how NT does it, but I would guess something similar given that the architect and some of his team were refugees from Digials central engineering.
Regrettably, the kernel dump project for linux is somewhat 'on-hold' as Linus would rather follow what the big vendors do (those offering enterprise support will need crash dumps for diagnostic purposes).
As regards the retailer's income - that one is easy, the lower the price the more they will sell. They get their turnover by volume.
The problem is that a lot of Linux research comes out of academia where VMS was seen as lumbering and slow. I have worked mostly in commercial environments where VMS meant 5 nines-plus uptime and the security of knowing that if some idiot pulled the plug on your CPU, another would smoothly take over.
Now people are asking for better reliability from Linux maybe someone will start to look at some cool stuff like the Distributed Lock Manager as a first step and then some way of cluster serving locally attached disks like MSCP by building the locking into a file system.
You must micromanage. If your spec isn't perfect, then they will deviate and work may have to be redone. They lack good business analysis capability in many areas, so you have to make sure that they can consult with someone.
I have worked with more Russians than Indians and I would say they are brilliant programmers and mathmaticians but they do need supervision. In our case we *knew* they didn't speak or understand perfect English (and I dumbed down our specs so they could be more easily translated), with India it can be more misleading as some do speak veray good English.
I don't know about India but in Russia their project management and QA sucked. I had to take charge of both processes on my project. However unlike you with your problems team leading, I had been given some hints to use a different style that worked fine in our environment. Note that Russia is somewhere between the Asian and European mentality whereas India is definitely Asian.
So bottom line, you want cheap s/w - send me on an expat package to Bangalore or St. Petersburg and factor that into your costs. I reckon about one expat to between ten and twenty locals. You continue to save money, but it is *nowhere* near the level of the ten cents in the dollar that you have been quoted.
The issue is that when a country moves away from the dollar, the cash comes back into circulation causing a downward pressure on exchange rates (As has been seen recently). The Fed can't really control this because it has only relatively crude tools and they don't have much control away from the domestic markets.
Actually, I worked on some capital markets reform projects, so you could say that I'm a kind of barefoot economist.
Really consoles should be discounted because the resolution sucks, even at the PAL 625/312 lines. HDTV should mean that we have a need for better console to explot the resolution. After all most people have bigger TVs than monitors, but the monitor is capable of working at far higher quality levels than the TV.
Actually Holywood goes at 24fps. However modern telecine doesn't give a damn because they stretch the duration of frames using digital processing.
and that way she can make $2000 faster. It might be illegal but as long as the RIAA can get their money. If she wants to know what to do, just look at some of the recent music videos for lessons.
Having the media yourself reprents choice, you can choose what you want to hear and when.
With the best will in the world you can't watch over kids 24x7, at sometime they have to be figuring how to do things themselves.
The kid wasn't selling herself for crack on the streets. As far as the mother was concerned, whe was doing something that she believed was legal at home.
Parents assume reposnibility for the actions of their kids, but there is a reasonable limit to which that responsibility can be taken. The courts do recognise this and I guess all the RIAA will get is bad publicity. Actually there are ISPs that tell me how I can download unlimited music. Some of them may even put in very small lettering something abvout copyright, but many forget.
Oh and I have two teenage kids, and I make a point of knowing where they are. I can not know what they are doing, but I guess that it is legal and I trust them.
This is why law students spend so much time cramming. Can anyone else hope to equal this, well yes, but only if you have a lot of time and a good library.