Kinda strange that you conflate offering a free public speech platform with "elaborate spy-type skulduggery."
Not really surprising that the real world doesn't match your expectations.
The real world also doesn't match your perceptions.
The spy-type skulduggery I was talking about is the long history that the US government and notably the CIA have in Cuba and how pathetic and ineffective it has been.
As for the USIA in particular, I'll leave that to others to debate, but that's not who I was referring to,
I don't see how holding patents in itself is intrinsically contrary to a university's purpose as a research and educational institution. The express purpose of the patent system (in the US anyway) is to advance knowledge, and the deal is this: you reveal publicly how your invention works in return for exclusive economic rights to the invention for a limited time.
It's the "for a limited time" throttling that's the problem.
The ideal of a university is that it's for the promotion and advancement of knowledge. Making a profit off the process isn't part of the ideal, and that's why univeristies are often non-profit organizations.
If you retard that by limiting it to paying customers for a time, it's a bit hypocritical.
If you retard that by limiting it when the public provided much of the funding for the discovery, it's a LOT hypocritical.
You don't have to pay patent license fees to use open-source software. A company that wants to mass-produce blue LEDs using a discovery owned by XYZ University may have to develop mass-production technigues and equipment - which they can patent themselves - but they still have to pay XYZ for the basic idea, and if the fee they pay is based on the number of LEDs produced, then you pay for it twice.
Once when your taxes become the research grant that funded XYZ U.
Once when you pay the price of the royalties for each LED you buy.
Cuba is sort of the poster child for how the US is incompetent at elaborate spy-type skulduggery. I understand Castro has an entire museum dedicated to showcasing failed plots. Including the famous "poisoned baseball".
"researchers built horse mannequins, painted them in a variety of patterns, coated them with sticky stuff, and found that horseflies seemed to avoid landing on the fake horses that were painted with black and white stripes."
"The proposed explanation was that the flies preferred to land on dark surfaces. Such surfaces reflect the kind of polarized light that reminds the flies of the water or mud where they breed. Light surfaces aren't as attractive, but dark-and-light patterns are even worse — perhaps because such patterns confuse the flies' navigational sense."
Flies don't like to land on moving surfaces from what I've seen. They prefer stationary targets which won't move while they're trying to land, are less likely to be able to swat them, whatever.
If you can't keep moving all the time (and in tropical regions, you'd really prefer not to), then the alternative is to provide the illusion of movement. As a fly approaches a striped object, those compound eyes are going to register a veritable pyrotechnic display of apparent movement, since the fly is moving relative to the stripes and is going to find it hard to tell how much of the movement is its own and how much is the target. Even humans, who have more precise vision and more brain processor power are routinely deceived by such illusions.
Actually, I do want to see ads that are relevant to me. Although "relevant" doesn't mean that I go to the Times of India website and the page ads are for the automobile dealer down the street. But I get my information in a multitude of ways, and while peers may be what makes for the ultimate buying decision, they may not always be the first place I find out about stuff.
Cookies are already separated across websites. The problem is that the typical web page is often assembled from a multitude of sites, as you can tell if your browser is one of those that keeps flashing messages like "loading from ad.doubleclick.net" as the page is displayed. Some web clients even query for permission before they fetch those particular URLs. But it can get to be a major pain answering all those dialogs.
I don't expect ads to go away. Kids have been ignoring them since long before I was born. All I expect is that the ads not get in the way of the primary purpose of the webpage, and that they pitch something meaningful (or at least entertaining) to me.
But that doesn't mean I expect to see a diminution of loud flashy auto-playing multimedia ads. There's a reason why after all these years you still have to block "Cheap Viagra!" spam and requests to transfer large sums out of Nigeria. Enough idiots respons that despite the fact that they're annoying, a waste of bandwidth, and possibly loaded with malware, it's still profitable for the advertisers. And that's all they care about.
Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design . Good design should fall back to plain html/css with ideally, minimum loss of functionality
Kiss all the AJAX goodby if you do, though. You'll be refreshing entire web pages every time you turn around.
Except people do not buy new computers for the OS; the operating system is just something that comes with the computer. People would still be buying new computers at more or less the same rate if they came with Windows XP.
Technically true, but most companies of any size have a depreciation plan for their systems. So they combine the task of upgrading hardware with the task of upgrading OS's. Especially since Windows isn't very friendly to upgrade-in-place even if the hardware can handle the newer release.
For a long time, there really were compelling reasons to get new versions of Windows. DVD support, USB. Wireless networking. uPnP. More security. These are major things that needed a major change in the OS. I don't know that an SSD is enough different from the general hard drive architecture that it requires that much of a change and I'm even less certain in the case of USB3. Linux formally started USB3 support on a minor release, and even Windows can gain it by installing a third-party driver.
Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.
That's nice. But what about the Desktop? Messaging? Office? All those other kooky little apps, add-ins and plug-ins the world runs on that all run on MS? You know IT is more than just Financials (most of which is Oracle and SAP already (ie not MS)), and there's lot more to a CIO's than a relgious crusade?
Believe it or not, I manage to work an office quite well without using Microsoft products. Although technically, I suppose you could call Skype a Microsoft product, even though I don't run it on Windows. OpenOffice has never been a problem for me, no matter what some people claim.
A CIO doesn't have to go on a "religious crusade" to make a change like that. All it takes is falling into the clutches of a good salesman. This is especially true in larger companies, where less-competent managers have basically allowed their vendors to do their decision-making for them in exchange for the assurance that the vendor would take care of everything. It's where the phrase "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" came from. Back when IBM actually offered support instead of cheap offshore monkey-with-a-script and Bill Gates was still trying to get into Harvard.
Once upon a time, payroll and accounting ran on a mainframe. On punched cards, no less.
OK, so your current system runs on Windows. And you've a captive audience that has no choice but to use IE. A browser whose world-wide usage rate has been dropping for years.
Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.
Nothing is forever in computers. Not even Windows. Although the time spent waiting on virus scans can certainly make it seem like forever.
With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.
I think the braindead reason is simply that when you're selling an OS version, it has to offer something different than the version that it's supposed to replace. Otherwise people won't see the point in throwing away their old computers just to get something even more bloated than the OS they have now.
We currently don't have a whole lot of really new hardware features that desperately need a new OS to use. So the alternative is to change the UI, even if it means that people will complain about it. And hope that eventually, they stop complaining.
Unfortunately, the current trend in desktop UI design seems to be to make desktops be like tablets, whether it makes sense or not, and to remove popular features because it's prettier without them.
Windows isn't the only OS out there that's gone this route recently. But since Windows doesn't do plug-replaceable desktops, and since they charge money for this gobbler, they're getting even more heat that other systems have.
Ignoring security issues isn't something fundamentally different than ignoring technical ones. Chances are, if you're cheap/sloppy in one place, you're cheap and sloppy in others as well.
And when the lid blows off, people are going to run around and scream and you'll be more or less out of business for an extended period of time.
I think we can safely rule out the fault being wholly external. Otherwise more banks than this one would have gone offline and we'd have heard it on the news.
I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.
I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.
Banking and computers go almost all the way back to the beginning. Probably only the military, scientific and insurance industries can claim as much. As a result, there are a multitude of banking software packages and service vendors with long histories to choose from.
But just as there are banks that aren't competent with their investments, there are banks which are incompetent with their IT.
In the USA, a large quantity of peanut butter is now being destroyed because it comes from a plant that had experienced Salmonella contamination, although supposedly not at the time this particular lot was made.
In the mean time, Japan - a country notoriously obsessed with cleanliness and purity - is eating discarded remains of scientific experiments.
The insert gives you a great fit, while using more traditional methods for creating the actual shoe results in a better constructed, longer-lasting product, for less.
Does it? Years ago that might have been the case. But nowadays the modus operandi of industry - not just shoe industry, but all industry - is to make cheap crap that won't last then charge slightly lower price for it and pocket the difference. Why wouldn't cutting out the middleman and printing your own cheap crap be cheaper for you?
I suppose the operative word is "cheap crap".
Once upon a time, you measured someone's prosperity by how well they were served. Bespoke clothing and footwear. Having someone else shine your shoes, deliver your milk, etc.
Post-WWII, a rising middle class made their metric how much stuff you owned. Car, furniture, stereos, TV, appliances.
Then came cheap electronics. Which, since they demanded precision automated production actually became quality electronics as time progressed. Aided and abetted by technological advances: micro-circuits that made precision control functions and advanced signal processing something that fit on your fingertip instead of occupying a large (and very warm) room full of vaccuum tubes.
Eventually we reached a point where people could sneer at the less fortunate because people claimed that they were poor despite having big-screen TVs and cellphones instead, of, say decent housing and food. Because decent living is, in the long run, more expensive than electronic junk and even poor people want to appear "wealthy" as measured by the "how much junk you own" standard.
And thus we have reached the point where people think by owning vast quantities of cheap crap that they are somehow wealthy.
They get lousy service, they donate vast quantities of their own time and labor (self-serve) on things that wealthy people can have done for them, because of all the "savings" they are getting, since they've been taught to value material goods over their own personal convenience.
A 3D printer isn't going to change people's illusions of wealth that they don't really have, but at least you can get items more personally-tailored for you. Providing that you're willing to spend even more time and effory doing the customization.
Or, of course, in paying a middleman to do the customizing. If you're wealthy enough.
At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.
Chances are, it's a steel-frame building. Which is probably the next best thing to a Faraday cage, plus whatever echoes and distortions the interior structure contributes. Then there's the questionable radio transparency of concrete floors and walls at cell frequencies.
It's when you're outside and the coverage is crap that your should be concerned/annoyed.
If interior coverage was that important to the company, I'm sure that they could arrange it.
stupid AC. I'll tell you why: some people have expensive hardware that only works with xp and its NOT practical to rebuy working hardware just to run a more modern os. the os only exists to run apps and if the value of the apps and hardware are high enough, you will stay with the older os.
of course, AC's think that only linux matters. they can't see that in the real world, you need TOOLS to do your job and if those tools are only running on an older os, you keep that older os!
this should not have to be explained. maybe I got trolled, but figured if he was serious, I'll at least explain WHY you need to continue to run older systems.
Oh crap. April 8?
There are exactly 2 apps in my collection that I run under Windows. MS Flight Simulator (the Linux sim is supposed to be good, but I just happen to like what I have). And Turbo Tax. Because Intuit has Microsoft so far up their butts that their idea of "export to Excel" means use OLE to bring up a copy of Excel installed on the machine that the Intuit product is located on and ram the data in that way instead of allowing export to XLS files like everyone else does (just in case Excel might happen to be on some other machine, maybe?)
I like my little XP box - when I have it powered up - but it ain't going to stand moving up to Windows 7 and I wouldn't touch Windows 8 while wearing a hazmat suit even if the chances weren't even worse. So I'd better do my taxes fast. After that, I guess I just found a new Linux box.
I already have enough Linux boxes. Most of them started out as Windows boxes that I recycled when the next big version of Windows wouldn't run on them.
I agree it is highly unlikely, but calendars have been switched before, though there was a lot less time keeping done then. I guess there is an off chance that it could find some niche in scientific or military uses and then bleed into the general population, but yeah, that does not seem likely either.
Still, I imagine the people who came up with it had a lot of fun in the process.
It's obviously time to move to Star Dates. DST is bad enough. Why wait for Einstein error correction factors to become a problem as well?
If you prefer daylight time to standard time, your working hours are screwed up. At least with standard time, the sun and clock are more or less in sync. My working hours are generally flex time, so when they meddle with the clocks, I simply change my "clock times" and keep my "sun time" the same.
In a free market anything that benefits from network effects will tend towards a monopoly or, at best, an oligopoly. And then you'll get all the abuses associated with such. Free markets are wonderful for commodities with low barriers to entry. Not so much for anything else.
"network effects".
I think the more commonly-used term would be Economies of Scale.
Even though it's been diluted to the point where just about every single molecule has been replaced, it can somehow remember all the good stuff it used to contain.
And yet, for some strange reason, it doesn't remember the fact that it used to contain bovine fecal matter and all sorts of other bad stuff.
That's the bit I find curious, although maybe that's where the bovine fecal matter shines through:-)
Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state", but also if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar, we are going to get detained, cavity searched and otherwise.
Trust me. It doesn't matter. I had to work with the OFAC data lists.
Osama bin Ladin's name was only given Fox-News style: "Usama". The Soundex algorithms we had were for English, not Arabic, where the same letter can be "O", "U", or "W", depending on context and other variables. Therefore an "Osama" bin Ladin would have barely registered above average on the scoring process.
On the other hand, people with the name Guadalupe Ortiz were constantly being harassed, including one or 2 cases that made the national news.
Apparently, Guadalupe Ortiz was the name of a Mexican travel agency involved in money laundering and thus had earned a place on the OFAC list. It's also, however, a not uncommon name for ordinary individuals.
Our system wasn't permitted to distinguish between names of persons, companies, or transport vessels. They were concerned that someone would use the alias of "Ford Prefect", or so I was told.
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda strange that you conflate offering a free public speech platform with "elaborate spy-type skulduggery."
Not really surprising that the real world doesn't match your expectations.
The real world also doesn't match your perceptions.
The spy-type skulduggery I was talking about is the long history that the US government and notably the CIA have in Cuba and how pathetic and ineffective it has been.
As for the USIA in particular, I'll leave that to others to debate, but that's not who I was referring to,
I don't see how holding patents in itself is intrinsically contrary to a university's purpose as a research and educational institution. The express purpose of the patent system (in the US anyway) is to advance knowledge, and the deal is this: you reveal publicly how your invention works in return for exclusive economic rights to the invention for a limited time.
It's the "for a limited time" throttling that's the problem.
The ideal of a university is that it's for the promotion and advancement of knowledge. Making a profit off the process isn't part of the ideal, and that's why univeristies are often non-profit organizations.
If you retard that by limiting it to paying customers for a time, it's a bit hypocritical.
If you retard that by limiting it when the public provided much of the funding for the discovery, it's a LOT hypocritical.
It's VERY different from open-source software.
You don't have to pay patent license fees to use open-source software. A company that wants to mass-produce blue LEDs using a discovery owned by XYZ University may have to develop mass-production technigues and equipment - which they can patent themselves - but they still have to pay XYZ for the basic idea, and if the fee they pay is based on the number of LEDs produced, then you pay for it twice.
Once when your taxes become the research grant that funded XYZ U.
Once when you pay the price of the royalties for each LED you buy.
Not CIA? That's what I expected.
Cuba is sort of the poster child for how the US is incompetent at elaborate spy-type skulduggery. I understand Castro has an entire museum dedicated to showcasing failed plots. Including the famous "poisoned baseball".
Relevant quotes missing from summary:
"researchers built horse mannequins, painted them in a variety of patterns, coated them with sticky stuff, and found that horseflies seemed to avoid landing on the fake horses that were painted with black and white stripes."
"The proposed explanation was that the flies preferred to land on dark surfaces. Such surfaces reflect the kind of polarized light that reminds the flies of the water or mud where they breed. Light surfaces aren't as attractive, but dark-and-light patterns are even worse — perhaps because such patterns confuse the flies' navigational sense."
Flies don't like to land on moving surfaces from what I've seen. They prefer stationary targets which won't move while they're trying to land, are less likely to be able to swat them, whatever.
If you can't keep moving all the time (and in tropical regions, you'd really prefer not to), then the alternative is to provide the illusion of movement. As a fly approaches a striped object, those compound eyes are going to register a veritable pyrotechnic display of apparent movement, since the fly is moving relative to the stripes and is going to find it hard to tell how much of the movement is its own and how much is the target. Even humans, who have more precise vision and more brain processor power are routinely deceived by such illusions.
Hey, it's as good a hypothesis as any.
Actually, I do want to see ads that are relevant to me. Although "relevant" doesn't mean that I go to the Times of India website and the page ads are for the automobile dealer down the street. But I get my information in a multitude of ways, and while peers may be what makes for the ultimate buying decision, they may not always be the first place I find out about stuff.
Cookies are already separated across websites. The problem is that the typical web page is often assembled from a multitude of sites, as you can tell if your browser is one of those that keeps flashing messages like "loading from ad.doubleclick.net" as the page is displayed. Some web clients even query for permission before they fetch those particular URLs. But it can get to be a major pain answering all those dialogs.
I don't expect ads to go away. Kids have been ignoring them since long before I was born. All I expect is that the ads not get in the way of the primary purpose of the webpage, and that they pitch something meaningful (or at least entertaining) to me.
But that doesn't mean I expect to see a diminution of loud flashy auto-playing multimedia ads. There's a reason why after all these years you still have to block "Cheap Viagra!" spam and requests to transfer large sums out of Nigeria. Enough idiots respons that despite the fact that they're annoying, a waste of bandwidth, and possibly loaded with malware, it's still profitable for the advertisers. And that's all they care about.
Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design . Good design should fall back to plain html/css with ideally, minimum loss of functionality
Kiss all the AJAX goodby if you do, though. You'll be refreshing entire web pages every time you turn around.
Except people do not buy new computers for the OS; the operating system is just something that comes with the computer. People would still be buying new computers at more or less the same rate if they came with Windows XP.
Technically true, but most companies of any size have a depreciation plan for their systems. So they combine the task of upgrading hardware with the task of upgrading OS's. Especially since Windows isn't very friendly to upgrade-in-place even if the hardware can handle the newer release.
For a long time, there really were compelling reasons to get new versions of Windows. DVD support, USB. Wireless networking. uPnP. More security. These are major things that needed a major change in the OS. I don't know that an SSD is enough different from the general hard drive architecture that it requires that much of a change and I'm even less certain in the case of USB3. Linux formally started USB3 support on a minor release, and even Windows can gain it by installing a third-party driver.
Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.
That's nice. But what about the Desktop? Messaging? Office? All those other kooky little apps, add-ins and plug-ins the world runs on that all run on MS? You know IT is more than just Financials (most of which is Oracle and SAP already (ie not MS)), and there's lot more to a CIO's than a relgious crusade?
Believe it or not, I manage to work an office quite well without using Microsoft products. Although technically, I suppose you could call Skype a Microsoft product, even though I don't run it on Windows. OpenOffice has never been a problem for me, no matter what some people claim.
A CIO doesn't have to go on a "religious crusade" to make a change like that. All it takes is falling into the clutches of a good salesman. This is especially true in larger companies, where less-competent managers have basically allowed their vendors to do their decision-making for them in exchange for the assurance that the vendor would take care of everything. It's where the phrase "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" came from. Back when IBM actually offered support instead of cheap offshore monkey-with-a-script and Bill Gates was still trying to get into Harvard.
Once upon a time, buggy whips had a large market share, too.
Once upon a time, payroll and accounting ran on a mainframe. On punched cards, no less.
OK, so your current system runs on Windows. And you've a captive audience that has no choice but to use IE. A browser whose world-wide usage rate has been dropping for years.
Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.
Nothing is forever in computers. Not even Windows. Although the time spent waiting on virus scans can certainly make it seem like forever.
With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.
I think the braindead reason is simply that when you're selling an OS version, it has to offer something different than the version that it's supposed to replace. Otherwise people won't see the point in throwing away their old computers just to get something even more bloated than the OS they have now.
We currently don't have a whole lot of really new hardware features that desperately need a new OS to use. So the alternative is to change the UI, even if it means that people will complain about it. And hope that eventually, they stop complaining.
Unfortunately, the current trend in desktop UI design seems to be to make desktops be like tablets, whether it makes sense or not, and to remove popular features because it's prettier without them.
Windows isn't the only OS out there that's gone this route recently. But since Windows doesn't do plug-replaceable desktops, and since they charge money for this gobbler, they're getting even more heat that other systems have.
Ignoring security issues isn't something fundamentally different than ignoring technical ones. Chances are, if you're cheap/sloppy in one place, you're cheap and sloppy in others as well.
And when the lid blows off, people are going to run around and scream and you'll be more or less out of business for an extended period of time.
I think we can safely rule out the fault being wholly external. Otherwise more banks than this one would have gone offline and we'd have heard it on the news.
I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.
I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.
Banking and computers go almost all the way back to the beginning. Probably only the military, scientific and insurance industries can claim as much. As a result, there are a multitude of banking software packages and service vendors with long histories to choose from.
But just as there are banks that aren't competent with their investments, there are banks which are incompetent with their IT.
In the USA, a large quantity of peanut butter is now being destroyed because it comes from a plant that had experienced Salmonella contamination, although supposedly not at the time this particular lot was made.
In the mean time, Japan - a country notoriously obsessed with cleanliness and purity - is eating discarded remains of scientific experiments.
Does it? Years ago that might have been the case. But nowadays the modus operandi of industry - not just shoe industry, but all industry - is to make cheap crap that won't last then charge slightly lower price for it and pocket the difference. Why wouldn't cutting out the middleman and printing your own cheap crap be cheaper for you?
I suppose the operative word is "cheap crap".
Once upon a time, you measured someone's prosperity by how well they were served. Bespoke clothing and footwear. Having someone else shine your shoes, deliver your milk, etc.
Post-WWII, a rising middle class made their metric how much stuff you owned. Car, furniture, stereos, TV, appliances.
Then came cheap electronics. Which, since they demanded precision automated production actually became quality electronics as time progressed. Aided and abetted by technological advances: micro-circuits that made precision control functions and advanced signal processing something that fit on your fingertip instead of occupying a large (and very warm) room full of vaccuum tubes.
Eventually we reached a point where people could sneer at the less fortunate because people claimed that they were poor despite having big-screen TVs and cellphones instead, of, say decent housing and food. Because decent living is, in the long run, more expensive than electronic junk and even poor people want to appear "wealthy" as measured by the "how much junk you own" standard.
And thus we have reached the point where people think by owning vast quantities of cheap crap that they are somehow wealthy.
They get lousy service, they donate vast quantities of their own time and labor (self-serve) on things that wealthy people can have done for them, because of all the "savings" they are getting, since they've been taught to value material goods over their own personal convenience.
A 3D printer isn't going to change people's illusions of wealth that they don't really have, but at least you can get items more personally-tailored for you. Providing that you're willing to spend even more time and effory doing the customization.
Or, of course, in paying a middleman to do the customizing. If you're wealthy enough.
At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.
Chances are, it's a steel-frame building. Which is probably the next best thing to a Faraday cage, plus whatever echoes and distortions the interior structure contributes. Then there's the questionable radio transparency of concrete floors and walls at cell frequencies.
It's when you're outside and the coverage is crap that your should be concerned/annoyed.
If interior coverage was that important to the company, I'm sure that they could arrange it.
stupid AC. I'll tell you why: some people have expensive hardware that only works with xp and its NOT practical to rebuy working hardware just to run a more modern os. the os only exists to run apps and if the value of the apps and hardware are high enough, you will stay with the older os.
of course, AC's think that only linux matters. they can't see that in the real world, you need TOOLS to do your job and if those tools are only running on an older os, you keep that older os!
this should not have to be explained. maybe I got trolled, but figured if he was serious, I'll at least explain WHY you need to continue to run older systems.
Oh crap. April 8?
There are exactly 2 apps in my collection that I run under Windows. MS Flight Simulator (the Linux sim is supposed to be good, but I just happen to like what I have). And Turbo Tax. Because Intuit has Microsoft so far up their butts that their idea of "export to Excel" means use OLE to bring up a copy of Excel installed on the machine that the Intuit product is located on and ram the data in that way instead of allowing export to XLS files like everyone else does (just in case Excel might happen to be on some other machine, maybe?)
I like my little XP box - when I have it powered up - but it ain't going to stand moving up to Windows 7 and I wouldn't touch Windows 8 while wearing a hazmat suit even if the chances weren't even worse. So I'd better do my taxes fast. After that, I guess I just found a new Linux box.
I already have enough Linux boxes. Most of them started out as Windows boxes that I recycled when the next big version of Windows wouldn't run on them.
I agree it is highly unlikely, but calendars have been switched before, though there was a lot less time keeping done then. I guess there is an off chance that it could find some niche in scientific or military uses and then bleed into the general population, but yeah, that does not seem likely either.
Still, I imagine the people who came up with it had a lot of fun in the process.
It's obviously time to move to Star Dates. DST is bad enough. Why wait for Einstein error correction factors to become a problem as well?
If you prefer daylight time to standard time, your working hours are screwed up. At least with standard time, the sun and clock are more or less in sync. My working hours are generally flex time, so when they meddle with the clocks, I simply change my "clock times" and keep my "sun time" the same.
In a free market anything that benefits from network effects will tend towards a monopoly or, at best, an oligopoly. And then you'll get all the abuses associated with such. Free markets are wonderful for commodities with low barriers to entry. Not so much for anything else.
"network effects".
I think the more commonly-used term would be Economies of Scale.
Even though it's been diluted to the point where just about every single molecule has been replaced, it can somehow remember all the good stuff it used to contain.
And yet, for some strange reason, it doesn't remember the fact that it used to contain bovine fecal matter and all sorts of other bad stuff.
That's the bit I find curious, although maybe that's where the bovine fecal matter shines through :-)
Fish urine.
Actually, I only use streamed Netflix for TV shows. For movies, I get the discs in the mail, and the selection is better there for movies.
Unfortunately, I've been getting a lot of scratched discs lately.
Never attribute to malice what sufficiently can be explained with stupidity.
This is a clear case of "blinded by data".
Garbage in, Gospel Out.
Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state", but also if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar, we are going to get detained, cavity searched and otherwise.
Trust me. It doesn't matter. I had to work with the OFAC data lists.
Osama bin Ladin's name was only given Fox-News style: "Usama". The Soundex algorithms we had were for English, not Arabic, where the same letter can be "O", "U", or "W", depending on context and other variables. Therefore an "Osama" bin Ladin would have barely registered above average on the scoring process.
On the other hand, people with the name Guadalupe Ortiz were constantly being harassed, including one or 2 cases that made the national news.
Apparently, Guadalupe Ortiz was the name of a Mexican travel agency involved in money laundering and thus had earned a place on the OFAC list. It's also, however, a not uncommon name for ordinary individuals.
Our system wasn't permitted to distinguish between names of persons, companies, or transport vessels. They were concerned that someone would use the alias of "Ford Prefect", or so I was told.