I would be quite surprised if direct fees to government were the bulk of a plant's costs. On the contrary, the US government subsidizes nuclear power in a number of ways, and there are current proposals to expand subsidies.
You can't reproduce with pixels what was created with pigments, it just doesn't work.
So true. I am no art expert, but I've been privileged to see a few incredible and memorable works in museums, including Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" and Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party". What you see on a monitor does not compare.
Gold and other hard assets have some value as a hedge against a decline in paper currency. I think the odds of that happening in a catastrophic fashion in the US are fairly small. Even should it occur, there are plenty of examples of currencies collapsing without the government vanishing and having everyone have to go survivalist. So IMO that is even less likely.
Red Hat would probably be the one everyone wants to buy, but between being the market leader and being fairly profitable (not Microsoft or Apple levels of profitable, but plenty of money to keep everyone in kibble for sure), that's not much of an option.
Red Hat has a market cap of around $7 billion. It's possible they will be acquired, if not by VMware, but the stock has always been high-priced relative to earnings, so that makes it unattractive. But buying SUSE is not a great alternative, IMO. Why would you want to own a company that is not profitable? Also, SUSE has no equivalent of the JBoss assets Red Hat has.
Re:Goal: boost need for per clock cycle performanc
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Intel Buys McAfee
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Most of us know them as a consumer-oriented AV software company, but they have a lot of products targeted at corporate users, too, and not just AV. So it may sort of make sense. They may even have some decent products buried in their rather large portfolio.
The problem I see, even with good products, Intel as a parent company may lack the ability to effectively market and sell them. That was Sun's problem, pre-Oracle - they were always a hardware company first, and their software division, except a few products, barely got traction. They also bought quite a few companies that subsequently went south.
It's not a complete waste. Very short passwords are certainly more crackable than longer ones, for example. But yes, sites can go overboard. http://software.intel.com/ is probably the worst one I've used recently.
> Sounds like a sudden outbreak of common sense. Ticket those red-light runners.
Nice to hear somebody has that opinion. You know, just not running the light *is* an option. I don't buy the whole "I was entrapped.. it was somebody else maybe - go prove it.. I knew it was safe so no big deal" set of attitudes that other posters seem to have. There's a reason none of that flies in traffic court. Most of the time - you were there, you had a chance to do something different, and you didn't. Heck, I've seen people stop, look, then drive through the red. So they had time to consider their options.
It's actually quite sucky to be a credit-card taking merchant, because all the risk of a transaction going bad is pretty much on your shoulders. The card issuer assumes no risk or liability themselves. Which is why some outfits don't take credit cards.
A consumer can always dispute a charge. They can say the merchandise was defective, which it surely was here. Usually the merchant either works it out with the consumer or if they're a scammer they never respond and they're out the money, plus, as a merchant, if you get too many chargebacks, your card company may decide you are more trouble than you are worth and drop you.
I guess you can abuse the system as a consumer, too. Still the merchants bear the greater risk of having things go wrong, because they process more transactions.
Larry has said as much, publicly. Why spend a lot of money and have no IP? And in fact Oracle has almost never bought an open source project, except InnoDB and BerkeleyDB, which were very small deals in $ terms (they got MySQL as a side effect of buying Sun - they would never have paid for it what Sun paid).
Java in the browser has a lot of strong competitors now. Many modern apps are Javascript or Flash on the front end. Or HTML 5 if you want to live on the bleeding edge.
But Java is still an excellent language for large server-side apps and is well supported by tools and a huge variety of open source apps and libraries. Leveraging this existing source base can cut a lot of time and effort out of app development.
And, yes, it is still being used for new development. Oracle just for example were big internal users of Java before the acquisition and are still relying on Java for the bulk of their app development.
It is not secure if you can't verify the host you are connecting to. Having a valid certificate that matches the host helps ensure that you haven't connected to some rogue site that is masquerading as or acting as a proxy to the site you think you are connecting to. That is not as unlikely to happen as you might think.
But it not only end users who decide not to care about this. As other posters have noted, it costs money to be compliant. It also costs some time and trouble to generate and set up a proper certificate chain. And the perceived cost of not doing this is small - it still works, just click on through the warnings. But there's still a cost - maybe a big cost if an successful attack is launched against the site.
Non-browser apps that are SSL clients also frequently fail to verify host certificates, because their developers are too lazy to implement it and/or not security conscious enough to consider it important.
Oracle's very first customer was a government agency (CIA). Many of these government customers have extremely large databases and take advantage of many features that competing databases lack or that are vendor proprietary and thus hard to replace (PL/SQL, data analytics, Oracle Text, XML support, etc). Not all Oracle applications are like this. But many are.
Security functions in particular should not be developed by amateurs. There are few parts of a software product where not knowing the right things to do and how to do them has worse consequences.
It's not really a gutsy move. It would be one if they could follow up with a great plan to win in smart device hardware and/or make a killing licensing Palm software. But the odds they can do that? Slim, I think. The device market, and especially the smartphone market, is viciously competitive and throwing money at the problem does not necessarily get you a better position in that market. Nokia is hurting and they have a lot of resources and experience. That market is going to be mostly owned by a few players and you can guess now which those are. And because of this HP won't get rich off licensing the software and other IP either, IMO.
Some of us don't care. Emacs is my main UI and it doesn't need graphics. If I had a good GPU, I'd probably be just abusing it to get more compute cycles.
There is no way to pull open source Solaris back into closed source. It's out in the wild. And as far as I know, Novell doesn't want to undo the license agreement Sun had (legitimate or not). But they do want the revenue SCO got from it - that's part of their claims against SCO.
IBM almost certainly doesn't care about the cost, which isn't even a day's worth of revenue for them. They have filed counter-claims against SCO, and in theory could win damages, but since SCO has few assets and many creditors, they won't get paid. In a fairer world, SCO would have had to answer for its baseless campaign against Linux users much earlier. But they didn't - they got to put the victims of this campaign on the defensive, first.
I think TFA has a point. I have observed that the more something looks like a freeway, the more people drive on it like it was one. We have expressways in the SF Bay Area. These look pretty much like a freeway: have nice wide multiple lanes, with a barrier in between the two directions. But there's a big difference: they have stop lights. So people drive on these just like a freeway, but it's not as safe to do that on the expressway. The limit is 50 but it is widely ignored. Same thing with a wide street near my home that leads up to and turns into a freeway. It not only has stop lights, but it's curvy and has limited visibility ahead. But it's a nice wide divided road so people drive on it like bats out of hell, despite the 35mph limit.
So, one theory is that the drivers are smarter than the traffic engineers and it really is safe to drive over the limit. But I don't buy it. If you drove unsafely and it increased your chances of an accident 3x, you still have a low probability of anything bad happening. So people see no consequence (most of the time), they're inherently prone to over-confidence anyway (everyone is a good driver - right?) and besides, it's fun to drive fast (personally I don't get much of a kick from it but it appears many do). So - all good, no bad. Until the bad happens.
SSL (more exactly TLS) is an established, mature, well-designed secure protocol. It's not the problem. The "remaining problem" you mention though has always existed with PKI: how do you manage certificates, distribute them to all the sites that need them, handle revocation, etc. That's a big issue and there is no drop in easy solution.
The W3C might have democratic mechanisms, but it is neither a populist nor a grassroots organisation.
It's better than some. For one thing they are very committed to having debate and discussion take place in open forums, with email discussion and F2F meeting notes available to the public. This is the polar opposite of the closed door process Microsoft has lately preferred.
And once your stuff is in S3, you can recycle the same disks to mail them more data.
I think you probably can't realistically ship them stuff every time you need to backup. A more realistic strategy would be to upload a bunch then do incremental backups as needed. How feasible that is to do depends on your data size and the bandwidth of your Net connection. It could be painfully slow if you do not have a very high bandwidth link.
Sun was going to get acquired. The only alternative to Oracle was probably a deal with IBM. You can speculate if IBM would have been a better owner, but IMHO they'd have had many of the same corporate priorities: making money and cutting losses on things they couldn't make money on. If Sun had focused on these things earlier, rather than doing crazy stuff like spending $1B on mySQL, they might have had a chance surviving on their own.
One way to get group insurance (and other benefits) as a consultant is to run your consulting income through Solo W-2 (http://www.solow2.com/). They take a cut (a fairly modest one). Downsides: their plan is expensive and they only want as employees people with substantial consulting income ($60K up).
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I would be quite surprised if direct fees to government were the bulk of a plant's costs. On the contrary, the US government subsidizes nuclear power in a number of ways, and there are current proposals to expand subsidies.
You can't reproduce with pixels what was created with pigments, it just doesn't work.
So true. I am no art expert, but I've been privileged to see a few incredible and memorable works in museums, including Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" and Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party". What you see on a monitor does not compare.
Gold and other hard assets have some value as a hedge against a decline in paper currency. I think the odds of that happening in a catastrophic fashion in the US are fairly small. Even should it occur, there are plenty of examples of currencies collapsing without the government vanishing and having everyone have to go survivalist. So IMO that is even less likely.
Red Hat would probably be the one everyone wants to buy, but between being the market leader and being fairly profitable (not Microsoft or Apple levels of profitable, but plenty of money to keep everyone in kibble for sure), that's not much of an option.
Red Hat has a market cap of around $7 billion. It's possible they will be acquired, if not by VMware, but the stock has always been high-priced relative to earnings, so that makes it unattractive. But buying SUSE is not a great alternative, IMO. Why would you want to own a company that is not profitable? Also, SUSE has no equivalent of the JBoss assets Red Hat has.
Most of us know them as a consumer-oriented AV software company, but they have a lot of products targeted at corporate users, too, and not just AV. So it may sort of make sense. They may even have some decent products buried in their rather large portfolio.
The problem I see, even with good products, Intel as a parent company may lack the ability to effectively market and sell them. That was Sun's problem, pre-Oracle - they were always a hardware company first, and their software division, except a few products, barely got traction. They also bought quite a few companies that subsequently went south.
It's not a complete waste. Very short passwords are certainly more crackable than longer ones, for example. But yes, sites can go overboard. http://software.intel.com/ is probably the worst one I've used recently.
> Sounds like a sudden outbreak of common sense. Ticket those red-light runners.
Nice to hear somebody has that opinion. You know, just not running the light *is* an option. I don't buy the whole "I was entrapped .. it was somebody else maybe - go prove it .. I knew it was safe so no big deal" set of attitudes that other posters seem to have. There's a reason none of that flies in traffic court. Most of the time - you were there, you had a chance to do something different, and you didn't. Heck, I've seen people stop, look, then drive through the red. So they had time to consider their options.
It's actually quite sucky to be a credit-card taking merchant, because all the risk of a transaction going bad is pretty much on your shoulders. The card issuer assumes no risk or liability themselves. Which is why some outfits don't take credit cards.
A consumer can always dispute a charge. They can say the merchandise was defective, which it surely was here. Usually the merchant either works it out with the consumer or if they're a scammer they never respond and they're out the money, plus, as a merchant, if you get too many chargebacks, your card company may decide you are more trouble than you are worth and drop you.
I guess you can abuse the system as a consumer, too. Still the merchants bear the greater risk of having things go wrong, because they process more transactions.
Larry has said as much, publicly. Why spend a lot of money and have no IP? And in fact Oracle has almost never bought an open source project, except InnoDB and BerkeleyDB, which were very small deals in $ terms (they got MySQL as a side effect of buying Sun - they would never have paid for it what Sun paid).
Java in the browser has a lot of strong competitors now. Many modern apps are Javascript or Flash on the front end. Or HTML 5 if you want to live on the bleeding edge.
But Java is still an excellent language for large server-side apps and is well supported by tools and a huge variety of open source apps and libraries. Leveraging this existing source base can cut a lot of time and effort out of app development.
And, yes, it is still being used for new development. Oracle just for example were big internal users of Java before the acquisition and are still relying on Java for the bulk of their app development.
It is not secure if you can't verify the host you are connecting to. Having a valid certificate that matches the host helps ensure that you haven't connected to some rogue site that is masquerading as or acting as a proxy to the site you think you are connecting to. That is not as unlikely to happen as you might think.
But it not only end users who decide not to care about this. As other posters have noted, it costs money to be compliant. It also costs some time and trouble to generate and set up a proper certificate chain. And the perceived cost of not doing this is small - it still works, just click on through the warnings. But there's still a cost - maybe a big cost if an successful attack is launched against the site.
Non-browser apps that are SSL clients also frequently fail to verify host certificates, because their developers are too lazy to implement it and/or not security conscious enough to consider it important.
Oracle's very first customer was a government agency (CIA). Many of these government customers have extremely large databases and take advantage of many features that competing databases lack or that are vendor proprietary and thus hard to replace (PL/SQL, data analytics, Oracle Text, XML support, etc). Not all Oracle applications are like this. But many are.
Security functions in particular should not be developed by amateurs. There are few parts of a software product where not knowing the right things to do and how to do them has worse consequences.
It's not really a gutsy move. It would be one if they could follow up with a great plan to win in smart device hardware and/or make a killing licensing Palm software. But the odds they can do that? Slim, I think. The device market, and especially the smartphone market, is viciously competitive and throwing money at the problem does not necessarily get you a better position in that market. Nokia is hurting and they have a lot of resources and experience. That market is going to be mostly owned by a few players and you can guess now which those are. And because of this HP won't get rich off licensing the software and other IP either, IMO.
>I don't know which one anymore I dislike more, McAfee or Symantec.
I'm with you there. They are both practically malware themselves: intrusive, take excessive system resources, hard to remove ..
Some of us don't care. Emacs is my main UI and it doesn't need graphics. If I had a good GPU, I'd probably be just abusing it to get more compute cycles.
There is no way to pull open source Solaris back into closed source. It's out in the wild. And as far as I know, Novell doesn't want to undo the license agreement Sun had (legitimate or not). But they do want the revenue SCO got from it - that's part of their claims against SCO.
IBM almost certainly doesn't care about the cost, which isn't even a day's worth of revenue for them. They have filed counter-claims against SCO, and in theory could win damages, but since SCO has few assets and many creditors, they won't get paid. In a fairer world, SCO would have had to answer for its baseless campaign against Linux users much earlier. But they didn't - they got to put the victims of this campaign on the defensive, first.
I think TFA has a point. I have observed that the more something looks like a freeway, the more people drive on it like it was one. We have expressways in the SF Bay Area. These look pretty much like a freeway: have nice wide multiple lanes, with a barrier in between the two directions. But there's a big difference: they have stop lights. So people drive on these just like a freeway, but it's not as safe to do that on the expressway. The limit is 50 but it is widely ignored. Same thing with a wide street near my home that leads up to and turns into a freeway. It not only has stop lights, but it's curvy and has limited visibility ahead. But it's a nice wide divided road so people drive on it like bats out of hell, despite the 35mph limit.
So, one theory is that the drivers are smarter than the traffic engineers and it really is safe to drive over the limit. But I don't buy it. If you drove unsafely and it increased your chances of an accident 3x, you still have a low probability of anything bad happening. So people see no consequence (most of the time), they're inherently prone to over-confidence anyway (everyone is a good driver - right?) and besides, it's fun to drive fast (personally I don't get much of a kick from it but it appears many do). So - all good, no bad. Until the bad happens.
SSL (more exactly TLS) is an established, mature, well-designed secure protocol. It's not the problem. The "remaining problem" you mention though has always existed with PKI: how do you manage certificates, distribute them to all the sites that need them, handle revocation, etc. That's a big issue and there is no drop in easy solution.
Sure makes sense to me.
The W3C might have democratic mechanisms, but it is neither a populist nor a grassroots organisation.
It's better than some. For one thing they are very committed to having debate and discussion take place in open forums, with email discussion and F2F meeting notes available to the public. This is the polar opposite of the closed door process Microsoft has lately preferred.
And once your stuff is in S3, you can recycle the same disks to mail them more data.
I think you probably can't realistically ship them stuff every time you need to backup. A more realistic strategy would be to upload a bunch then do incremental backups as needed. How feasible that is to do depends on your data size and the bandwidth of your Net connection. It could be painfully slow if you do not have a very high bandwidth link.
Sun was going to get acquired. The only alternative to Oracle was probably a deal with IBM. You can speculate if IBM would have been a better owner, but IMHO they'd have had many of the same corporate priorities: making money and cutting losses on things they couldn't make money on. If Sun had focused on these things earlier, rather than doing crazy stuff like spending $1B on mySQL, they might have had a chance surviving on their own.
One way to get group insurance (and other benefits) as a consultant is to run your consulting income through Solo W-2 (http://www.solow2.com/). They take a cut (a fairly modest one). Downsides: their plan is expensive and they only want as employees people with substantial consulting income ($60K up).