While the Slashdot geek still hasn't quite grasped the notion that RAM and other resources are there to be used, not hoarded.
What is the typical slashdotter these days? Are there still starving ex-dotcommers dying of consumption in their garrets?
If you can't afford to be on the cutting edge then don't be. But don't complain that Microsoft has not come out with an update for XP that runs on mid-spec XP machines and makes no use of the features of the current generation.
I'll probably continue using my XP OS for ten as well. I see no reason to "fix" something that isn't broke. If what you have gets the job done, than anything else is just a huge waste of money (like Vista and the $5000 hardware it requires to run decently).
Thats not true, it runs just great on a MacBook Pro which only costs $2K. Not too sure how it will go on my Air under VMWare but thats OK as there is only one program (IE) that I want to run thats Windows only in any case.
I don't see the problem here. By the time slashdoters are ready to run Vista the $2K rig you currently need to make it run really nice is going to be $500 bargain basement.
In order to spend $5000 on a PC today you have to go for an overclocked gamer box with a huge nVidia graphics card. But the reason we do that is to run games like Oblivion which pull vast 3D models in real time on 30" displays. You do not need anything like that power to run vista nicely. I bought a box for the younger kid that runs Vista just fine and cost $800 a year ago. And quite a bit of that was for the monitor.
The most common reason a box is not going to run Vista well is that it does not have enough RAM or someone has been silly enough to put six anti-virus packages on it and suck up all the CPU.
The NSA doesn't require hard drive disposal, they just test and approve the methods of destruction. As an active duty member of the Air Force I used many of their approved methods to destroy classified dives.
The NSA does not have authority over the EOP but most of the IT staff there are ex-NSA or at least give their previous employment as 'a federal agency'. So it amounts to the same thing.
The only thing that overrides the NSA in the EOP is an executive order. There are not many executive orders that apply to IT security, but there is one that dates to the Nixon administration that specifically prohibits Brits from working on the actual premises regardless of the clearance the NSA gives them.
With DOD level (3 pass overwrite) or better disk wiping, the overwritten data cannot be read back or recovered by any current disk drive technology or laboratory technique. Period.
Maybe, but you are not the person I want to be writing the security procedures for the Executive Office of the President.
You have absolutely no idea what the capabilities of the Iranian or Russian labs are. Nor do I. That is why I mandate total and irreversible physical destruction of the drives.
These stories get a little tiresome. What is the ultimate source of authority here? A bunch of nerds who read Slashdot. They think their lives will be easier if they persuade people not to change the configuration of their machines. Only on slashdot would that even be considered news.
IT support staff usually suggest what will make their lives easiest. Vista works just fine on the right hardware. As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.
I think that its time Slashdot retired the 'flamebait' mod. The original poster complained about 'left wing bias', so I think asking if he is simply filtering out all contrary data points is fair comment. It certainly looks that way to me.
The US right wing is responsible for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians by enabling an incompetent and dishonest President to rule by fear. They have smeared and slimed their opponents with attacks on their patriotism. They have lied about WMD, why beleive Condi 'mushroom cloud' Rice on this issue? She has neither credibility nor integrity.
The fact we can't trust the administration is the central problem here. These things do happen by accident. But theis particular administration has long ago used up its stock of trust. They refuse to explain themselves and in fact reject even the idea that we have any right to hold them accountable.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation of this administration is that they are incompetent, dishonest and corrupt.
Last year at RSA, I met the S, Adi Shamir on his way from a booth selling a 'drive destruction' solution that involved drilling a hole into the platter. Neither of us was impressed. The data is spread over the whole surface of the platter. Drilling a hole is not good enough.
The other end of the trade show there was a company showing containers of metal shards. They had a shredder for disk drives. They have security clearances that allow them to shred drives with classified data. I have no direct knowledge of the drive disposal policy at the EOP, but I would expect that the NSA would require this as a matter of course. It is smart IT management.
But the argument over the drives is somewhat irrelevant as we know for a fact that members of the administration were using the RNC mail servers to transact government business, specifically to avoid leaving a paper trail. In the process they directed emails containing the most secret, most confidential government discussions through the machines of a small company that has no security clearance, does not even have a security policy and used the same network resources and mail servers for other customers.
The company concerned received the contract for the 2004 RNC convention. They would therefore have been an espionage target in any case. I would think that it is almost certain that multiple foreign powers have copies of the emails. Why don't we just call up the Iranian embassy and ask them nicely if they will share?
Yeah but it seems that Slashdot, CNet, Wired, and many other "technology" news sites often report on a lot of stories via a political opinion that is very left-wing and very unbalanced and has quite a bit of a spin on it. Even worse are Digg and Reddit websites in which most of the links voted to the first few pages are ultra-liberal in their opinions and anything not ultra-liberal gets dumped or moved to last on the list.
Or maybe they just print the facts as they see them and your brain refuses to acknowledge any data points that conflict with the right wing alternative reality you live in?
One theory is that Bush has dropped to 30% approval ratings because the left wing press have attacked him unfairly, another is that most people now concur with the left wing opinion that the man is a total incompetent abd that he bears a considerable amount of blame for the current economic situation and the fiasco in Iraq.
One theory is that the surge has succeeded and victory is possible. Another is that the insurgents believe that there is no need to fight as only an imbecile would now imagine that the US is going to continue spending a half trillion dollars a year there. If they are proved wrong for whatever reason they can always start fighting again.
One theory is that the sub-prime meltdown tells us that deregulated finance markets are not the cause. Another is that conservative think tanks would spew out any old nonsense if it provided political cover for their paymasters do to the US what the looters in Iraq did to the national museum.
If governments start using OOXML for storing and processing public records, the public will have to use it to view public documents. I see this bogus "you don't have to use it" argument spread around the internet like fertilizer every time someone tries to justify the perversion of the standard setting process.
Don't try to fight that particular fight through the standards process. If you want government documents to be available in a particular format then lobby governments to do so. It is not that difficult to achieve. If a document archive is going to function long term it is going to have to be able to convert from legacy formats to newer ones. Neither OOXML or ODF is likely to be a current editing format in twenty or thirty years time. Hopefully we will have adopted something that is simpler and more powerful than either.
If you have a published standard you can expect provision of input and output filters to be part of such an archive RFP. In other words the ability to store an OOXML or ODF document and the ability to withdraw it in either format (plus pdf, HTML, etc).
The Air has style. It's about style. It's about the young female executive showing off her style, while getting work done. It gets the work an executives need done, done. Nothing else, but whether you like it or not how you look is a big factor in promotions.
I am currently writing this on an Air. As far as I am concerned it is the (almost) perfect traveling laptop. The price is entirely reasonable, it is still cheaper than the MacBook Pro. It is not outrageously more expensive than the MacBook.
The only reasonable objection to the Air in my view is that it is not a desktop replacement. But there is no machine on the market that is an adequate replacement for my deskside computer, nor is that feasible when it draws 1kW and has a 30" monitor. I can't work in the same room that it sits in due to the noise (I like quiet). The idea that something with that power would be sensible as a laptop is ridiculous.
If your computing needs are more modest than mine then maybe you can have one machine stretch to do both functions. I prefer to have travel wear to be confined to a cheaper machine. One really nice feature of the Air is that it is very solid, much more solid than any Lenovo, despite the size. It feels like you are typing on a block of solid metal, there is no hint of plastic.
Its the same value judgment as my car. When I bought it people asked me why I spent so much on a car that would lose virtually all its value. OK so in 9 years I have lost 65% or so of the original purchase price and thats a significant amount of money but it still runs well and people still admire it, I still like it. I am an engineer so some of the toys I buy are engineering toys. If I bought a new car I could easily spend 5h3 $2,500 I spent at the Apple store on the Air plus accessories on some detail package and nobody would question it.
Only things I would change are (in order of increasing difficulty):
I would eliminate the sharp edges there the two halves of the shell come together, replacing them with beveled or 3mm radius curves as has been done with the later iPods. Depending on how you type you can end up with a sharp edge digging into your palm.
Supplemental power pack, $200, plugs into the magsafe connector for use on airplane trips longer than 4 hours. I do not need to be able to replace the internal battery, all I need is to be able to supplement it on a small number of occasions.
Double the built in RAM.
Bigger disk, the only limitation I really feel is the limited disk space and that is only because I would like to run Vista under VmWare and/or keep DVD images.
Bigger screen. The attraction here is thin, not total weight. I would totally buy an Air series machine with a 17" display if they could keep the profile unchanged and did not increase the weight by more than 30%.
Tablet format. The newton was before its time, get over it Apple. The idea was not broken, merely the implementation. At this point the one reason I would buy a Lenovo is to have the tablet capability.
The X300 is not a particularly interesting or remarkable laptop. It is pretty much what you would expect a Lenovo X61 to look like if you stuck a solid state drive and LED displaylight on it. The Air is something totally different, it is the machine every other manufacturer now has to match.
The next iteration of the Air will unquestionably be better than todays. The current model does not use the low power chip that was really intended for it because of supply issues. Coupled with a 160Gb drive those two changes alone will overcome most of the current objections.
The question for me is not 'will I do better by waiting' but 'is there something better I would want to spend my money on now'. When the better machine comes out I will buy it and still be able to sell my current model for $1200 or so if I wanted to.
Its still completely wrong. Standards bodies really do not matter in the way people at slashdot imagine they do. ISO has a complete set of standards for a networking infrastructure, nobody uses it. The Internet was the competition.
During the early 90s many if not most people who were working on the Internet thought it was only a matter of time before the OSI stack replaced it. Didn't turn out that way despite ISO accreditation.
ISO standards do not need to be open or unencumbered. It is not a democratic process.
All the standards process means is that if OOXML is accepted and someone wants to claim their product is OOXML they have to comply with the spec. It does not mean that its open, unencumbered or any good. It does not even mean that it has to work. It does not mean that you have to use the result.
Why are we wasting time on this? Anti Virus is totally useless. You might as well try garlic and a crucifix for all the good it does. The bad guys can spit out an infinite number of different variations of their malwares and very few of them are ever going to be detected by AV.
Macs and Vista have an essentially similar security model, they make it somewhat harder to screw your system by accident. Not running as root is the best protection you can have, if you have that you will do a lot better than with A/V.
I recently came across a system that was running real slow, after taking off the five crapware installations of A.V from different vendors it worked just fine. The only A.V I would run on Windows is Windows Defender which is 1) free and 2) has no real impact on the running system.
Actually this seems a bit disingenuous to me. Intel released Penryn way before they had to. Intel (the hare) was so far ahead of AMD (the tortoise) with the 65nm Core 2 that they could have sat back and relaxed for a while, saving R&D costs while waiting for AMD to catch up at least a little. I mean look at Nvidia for a perfect counterexample. Most people believe that they already have a next gen GPU ready but that they are sitting on it until they have someone to compete with besides themselves.
There are plenty of ultra high end folk who would pay mondo dollars for a faster GPU regardless of whether there was a faster one from the competition. More likely would be that nVidia recognize that they have somewhat pushed the edge as far as power output (heat) goes of late and they could use something of a minimum feature size shrink before they go to the next step.
GPUs are pretty tricky heat wise because you can light up a lot more of your chip real estate with active circuits. Intel are not just putting masses of cache on their chips for speed, they need some less thermally intensive areas on the chip.
No, on both occasions I pointed out that he is an advocate for a cause. He is certainly not giving an impartial legal opinion on this case so whether or not he is capable of doing so is irrelevant.
In other news I hear that the RNC really does not think that Hillary or Obama is ready to be commander in chief while strangely enough they consider McCain to be so. And the directors of Pepsi think that people do prefer the taste to Coke.
Lots of lawyers in the RNC, you know. I am sure that they are all good upstanding examples of the breed (except for the one that allegedly just stole $750K, oh and the ones that were involved in Ambramoff, oh and the ones involved in the email server business.
The one use I can think of for this machine is if you were writing some serious gaming software and needed to have a machine that was somewhat ahead of the curve when you began development.
I have worked on liquid immersion cooled systems. I don't think that you could build it for that price. If you are going to go to the trouble of immersion you might as well start packing in a serious number of processors while you are at it - by which I would mean 32 or more.
The noise factor might be interesting but I solved the noise problem on my Voodoo Omen for less than $150. Its called a great big long DVI cable (50'). Fortunately the DVI spec is way over-speced and it is in fact possible to drive monitors over that length of cable. Getting a USB cable with an amp in it turned out to be a bigger challenge.
Voodoo did use to make a system that was passive cooled, essentially just a great big radiator/heat sink. These days all the really high end machines are egregiously noisy. I might consider a Mac Pro next time round but its going to be a while before I am buying again.
The question is not his competence, its whether he is giving an even handed evaluation of the positions. Clearly he is not since he is principal advocate for a partisan organization in this dispute. Lawyers are not scientists, when they make arguments they are not attempting to arrive at the truth, they are attempting to present the best case for their particular side. In short, lawyers have a tendency to think its ok to lie when they make their case, they lie by omission, by only presenting one side.
You cannot rely on qualifications when you lie by omission. We can rely on this guy only to tell us the best arguments for his side.
There really is no difference between the IBM and Microsoft promises on the points he considers. It is a dishonest argument to make.
There might well be difficulties with the GPL. The objective in the promise was compatibility with the Apache license, not the GPL.
And accusing people who argue against your position as being trolls is just more abuse. I write standards for a living. From the start the ODF faction have been trying to hijack the process so that they can use it to force governments to adopt Open Office over Microsoft Office. It is an utterly transparent motive despite the repeated denials (lawyers tend to tell a lot of lies). Thats not what the process is for.
The ISO people did what they did because they were fed up of this circus. It was like having the scientologists campaigning.
Err, 'lawyers object', what lawyers? Would these be a bunch of academics who have come across the documents and made an independent judgment? Of course not, this is a paper by a bunch of folk who were already opposed and as such its a very partisan analysis.
As for the alleged effect on the ISO process, its actually irrelevant. ISO certainly accepts encumbered standards all the time. They might have a disclosure policy but even that isn't certain because of the role ISO plays. All ISO does is to endorse the output of other standards bodies, usually national standards bodies but also ITU, IEEE, ANSI and in theory IETF (this has never happened but could happen if the IETF was to forward its standards to ISO).
The terms of the open promise are irrelevant because there is no requirement for Microsoft to offer any IPR terms beyond those required by ETSI which are RAND. Microsoft has clearly met this requirement.
Nor is the fact that this is a 20 year old format a disqualification. Standards are what is used, old standards are probably better candidates for standard status than new ones.
There was a little sarcasm and a little criticism in the parent's post, but I fail to see what makes it a troll comment.
Most partisan modders use 'overrated' which for some reason is a mod you cannot disable by giving it a value of 0 despite the fact that it is easily the most abused. It is hard for metamodders to know if a post was overrated or not so it a free swing.
I get modded troll frequently on political issues, or rather did, my position has become rather more mainstream. There was a time when suggesting that the US commander in chief might be less than adequate for the job was considered tantamount to treason by some.
Folk are getting way too exercised over this. The reason the OOXML vote went the way it did is very simple: the aggressive lobbying by the anti-OOXML mob made it inevitable. The ISO process is simply not designed to deal with contentious issues or aggressive lobbying.
The difference between P and O status is not as significant as claimed here, O delegates can achieve P status by attending the requisite number of meetings. But once they achieve P status they add to the quorum for all future decisions until they lose it for non-attendance. That would then delay all the rest of the work.
Most of the 900 objections were interpreted as being made with the intention of delaying the process rather than good faith proposals for improvement. It is likely that 850 or more will disappear after the decision to recognize OOXML as a standard is made.
This result is entirely a result of the over-aggressive lobbying by the anti-OOXML faction. They lost support for their position as a result. Most members of the committee simply wanted the circus to depart as soon as possible.
Another example of over-aggressive lobbying at the moment is the behavior of Obama supporters on the Web now that Obamania is over. They really need to dial back the insults and Limbaugh talk, they are costing Obama support.
Well duuuhhh, I said the RIAA appeared, not that they had a case.
According to Warner the song is in copyright till 2030. I don't think its a claim that could be sustained though. Splitting one note is hardly cause for a 45 year extention of copyright.
I don't think a phone without a camera, 3G, only tri-band and no wifi is going to make as big of a splash as you think.
Actually the lack of a camera is a requirement for many businesses. I can't take a phone with a camera into many of our facilities, it is a very common policy in large companies.
The lack of 3G is a serious problem but it is definitely on the way, it was originally promised for 1Q 2008. This announcement looks to me as if it is either being made in place of the 3G announcement after an unexpected production delay or that they don't want this anouncement to be lost by making it on the same day as announcing a 3G/GPS capable iPhone.
Wow. Your arrogance is breath-taking. I see it now! Nelson Mandela and the rest of the ANC et. al. had nothing to do with it all. Clearly, South Africa's regime change had everything to do with America.
Dude, we worked to get sanctions at the express request of Nelson Mandela and the ANC, it was their campaign from start to finish. It was when it became clear that Thatcher and Reagan's support for Apartheid was running strongly against opinion in both their countries that the Whites realized that South Africa's isolation was going to be permanent so long as Apartheid was in force.
The alternative would have been a civil war like the one that broke out in Rhodesia. As Ghandi observed, revolutions tend to bring certain types of leader to power.
The bill actually names Fidel and Raul Castro, but it isn't actually that significant as it is arguably unconstitutional and there is little that a Democratic Congress is likely to do to complain about lack of enforcement of a bill they tried to filibuster. In addition the President can sign a waiver which Clinton did.
Given the current state of the GOP it is hard to see them managing to pose a serious obstacle. Their main objective in November is going to be to deny the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Take a look at the turnout in the Democratic primaries versus the GOP ones. The Democrats were getting twice the turnout in deep red states when both races were still competitive. It has since increased substantially. It looks like the post-Bush political realignment may be even greater than the post-Nixon realignment. Bush has smashed up the Republican party.
Give one example of an embargo working. You can't - they only end up hurting innocent people and isolating countries so change is slower.
The South African Apartheid regime collapsed due to pressure from sanctions. But the reasons were psychological, not economic. The regime saw itself as an unacknowledged part of the West, the rejection had real and visible effect. Once it became clear that the US was also on the brink of rejecting it, the regime crumbled.
The Cuban situation is exactly the reverse, the only thing keeping Castro in power was the fact that he had successfully stood up to the US when it had acted as a big bully.
The human rights issue is not likely to be very effective when the US is running the best known gulag and torture house on the island.
This is a case where trade can have a positive effect and every policy maker in DC knows it, even the Republicans. The only reason that the embargo is kept in place is to pander to the Cuban vote in Florida.
Thats the way ethnic politics are played in the US. While mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani would attack terrorism over lunch in Brooklyn, then head off for dinner to give a 'humanitarian award' to the leader of the terrorist group that has caused by far the most deaths in Europe. Different constituencies, different positions. I don't think he was pro-Israel or pro-IRA, he just wanted the votes and would do anything it took to get them.
The people the politicians pander to are your usual expatriate irredentists, they can afford to refuse all compromise, they don't live with the consequences.
Actually, they orbit their shared center-of-mass, but I know what you mean.
If you want to be really pedantic it would be the shared center of mass of the sun and Jupiter, Saturn and perhaps some of the other gas giants. The effect of the earth is pretty much insignificant.
Florida board of education on the other hand... in orbit around something else entirely
Slashdot Mirror
What is the typical slashdotter these days? Are there still starving ex-dotcommers dying of consumption in their garrets?
If you can't afford to be on the cutting edge then don't be. But don't complain that Microsoft has not come out with an update for XP that runs on mid-spec XP machines and makes no use of the features of the current generation.
Thats not true, it runs just great on a MacBook Pro which only costs $2K. Not too sure how it will go on my Air under VMWare but thats OK as there is only one program (IE) that I want to run thats Windows only in any case.
I don't see the problem here. By the time slashdoters are ready to run Vista the $2K rig you currently need to make it run really nice is going to be $500 bargain basement.
In order to spend $5000 on a PC today you have to go for an overclocked gamer box with a huge nVidia graphics card. But the reason we do that is to run games like Oblivion which pull vast 3D models in real time on 30" displays. You do not need anything like that power to run vista nicely. I bought a box for the younger kid that runs Vista just fine and cost $800 a year ago. And quite a bit of that was for the monitor.
The most common reason a box is not going to run Vista well is that it does not have enough RAM or someone has been silly enough to put six anti-virus packages on it and suck up all the CPU.
The NSA does not have authority over the EOP but most of the IT staff there are ex-NSA or at least give their previous employment as 'a federal agency'. So it amounts to the same thing.
The only thing that overrides the NSA in the EOP is an executive order. There are not many executive orders that apply to IT security, but there is one that dates to the Nixon administration that specifically prohibits Brits from working on the actual premises regardless of the clearance the NSA gives them.
Maybe, but you are not the person I want to be writing the security procedures for the Executive Office of the President.
You have absolutely no idea what the capabilities of the Iranian or Russian labs are. Nor do I. That is why I mandate total and irreversible physical destruction of the drives.
IT support staff usually suggest what will make their lives easiest. Vista works just fine on the right hardware. As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.
The US right wing is responsible for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians by enabling an incompetent and dishonest President to rule by fear. They have smeared and slimed their opponents with attacks on their patriotism. They have lied about WMD, why beleive Condi 'mushroom cloud' Rice on this issue? She has neither credibility nor integrity.
The fact we can't trust the administration is the central problem here. These things do happen by accident. But theis particular administration has long ago used up its stock of trust. They refuse to explain themselves and in fact reject even the idea that we have any right to hold them accountable.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation of this administration is that they are incompetent, dishonest and corrupt.
The other end of the trade show there was a company showing containers of metal shards. They had a shredder for disk drives. They have security clearances that allow them to shred drives with classified data. I have no direct knowledge of the drive disposal policy at the EOP, but I would expect that the NSA would require this as a matter of course. It is smart IT management.
But the argument over the drives is somewhat irrelevant as we know for a fact that members of the administration were using the RNC mail servers to transact government business, specifically to avoid leaving a paper trail. In the process they directed emails containing the most secret, most confidential government discussions through the machines of a small company that has no security clearance, does not even have a security policy and used the same network resources and mail servers for other customers.
The company concerned received the contract for the 2004 RNC convention. They would therefore have been an espionage target in any case. I would think that it is almost certain that multiple foreign powers have copies of the emails. Why don't we just call up the Iranian embassy and ask them nicely if they will share?
Or maybe they just print the facts as they see them and your brain refuses to acknowledge any data points that conflict with the right wing alternative reality you live in?
One theory is that Bush has dropped to 30% approval ratings because the left wing press have attacked him unfairly, another is that most people now concur with the left wing opinion that the man is a total incompetent abd that he bears a considerable amount of blame for the current economic situation and the fiasco in Iraq.
One theory is that the surge has succeeded and victory is possible. Another is that the insurgents believe that there is no need to fight as only an imbecile would now imagine that the US is going to continue spending a half trillion dollars a year there. If they are proved wrong for whatever reason they can always start fighting again.
One theory is that the sub-prime meltdown tells us that deregulated finance markets are not the cause. Another is that conservative think tanks would spew out any old nonsense if it provided political cover for their paymasters do to the US what the looters in Iraq did to the national museum.
Don't try to fight that particular fight through the standards process. If you want government documents to be available in a particular format then lobby governments to do so. It is not that difficult to achieve. If a document archive is going to function long term it is going to have to be able to convert from legacy formats to newer ones. Neither OOXML or ODF is likely to be a current editing format in twenty or thirty years time. Hopefully we will have adopted something that is simpler and more powerful than either.
If you have a published standard you can expect provision of input and output filters to be part of such an archive RFP. In other words the ability to store an OOXML or ODF document and the ability to withdraw it in either format (plus pdf, HTML, etc).
I am currently writing this on an Air. As far as I am concerned it is the (almost) perfect traveling laptop. The price is entirely reasonable, it is still cheaper than the MacBook Pro. It is not outrageously more expensive than the MacBook.
The only reasonable objection to the Air in my view is that it is not a desktop replacement. But there is no machine on the market that is an adequate replacement for my deskside computer, nor is that feasible when it draws 1kW and has a 30" monitor. I can't work in the same room that it sits in due to the noise (I like quiet). The idea that something with that power would be sensible as a laptop is ridiculous.
If your computing needs are more modest than mine then maybe you can have one machine stretch to do both functions. I prefer to have travel wear to be confined to a cheaper machine. One really nice feature of the Air is that it is very solid, much more solid than any Lenovo, despite the size. It feels like you are typing on a block of solid metal, there is no hint of plastic.
Its the same value judgment as my car. When I bought it people asked me why I spent so much on a car that would lose virtually all its value. OK so in 9 years I have lost 65% or so of the original purchase price and thats a significant amount of money but it still runs well and people still admire it, I still like it. I am an engineer so some of the toys I buy are engineering toys. If I bought a new car I could easily spend 5h3 $2,500 I spent at the Apple store on the Air plus accessories on some detail package and nobody would question it.
Only things I would change are (in order of increasing difficulty):
The X300 is not a particularly interesting or remarkable laptop. It is pretty much what you would expect a Lenovo X61 to look like if you stuck a solid state drive and LED displaylight on it. The Air is something totally different, it is the machine every other manufacturer now has to match.
The next iteration of the Air will unquestionably be better than todays. The current model does not use the low power chip that was really intended for it because of supply issues. Coupled with a 160Gb drive those two changes alone will overcome most of the current objections.
The question for me is not 'will I do better by waiting' but 'is there something better I would want to spend my money on now'. When the better machine comes out I will buy it and still be able to sell my current model for $1200 or so if I wanted to.
During the early 90s many if not most people who were working on the Internet thought it was only a matter of time before the OSI stack replaced it. Didn't turn out that way despite ISO accreditation.
ISO standards do not need to be open or unencumbered. It is not a democratic process.
All the standards process means is that if OOXML is accepted and someone wants to claim their product is OOXML they have to comply with the spec. It does not mean that its open, unencumbered or any good. It does not even mean that it has to work. It does not mean that you have to use the result.
Macs and Vista have an essentially similar security model, they make it somewhat harder to screw your system by accident. Not running as root is the best protection you can have, if you have that you will do a lot better than with A/V.
I recently came across a system that was running real slow, after taking off the five crapware installations of A.V from different vendors it worked just fine. The only A.V I would run on Windows is Windows Defender which is 1) free and 2) has no real impact on the running system.
There are plenty of ultra high end folk who would pay mondo dollars for a faster GPU regardless of whether there was a faster one from the competition. More likely would be that nVidia recognize that they have somewhat pushed the edge as far as power output (heat) goes of late and they could use something of a minimum feature size shrink before they go to the next step.
GPUs are pretty tricky heat wise because you can light up a lot more of your chip real estate with active circuits. Intel are not just putting masses of cache on their chips for speed, they need some less thermally intensive areas on the chip.
In other news I hear that the RNC really does not think that Hillary or Obama is ready to be commander in chief while strangely enough they consider McCain to be so. And the directors of Pepsi think that people do prefer the taste to Coke.
Lots of lawyers in the RNC, you know. I am sure that they are all good upstanding examples of the breed (except for the one that allegedly just stole $750K, oh and the ones that were involved in Ambramoff, oh and the ones involved in the email server business.
I have worked on liquid immersion cooled systems. I don't think that you could build it for that price. If you are going to go to the trouble of immersion you might as well start packing in a serious number of processors while you are at it - by which I would mean 32 or more.
The noise factor might be interesting but I solved the noise problem on my Voodoo Omen for less than $150. Its called a great big long DVI cable (50'). Fortunately the DVI spec is way over-speced and it is in fact possible to drive monitors over that length of cable. Getting a USB cable with an amp in it turned out to be a bigger challenge.
Voodoo did use to make a system that was passive cooled, essentially just a great big radiator/heat sink. These days all the really high end machines are egregiously noisy. I might consider a Mac Pro next time round but its going to be a while before I am buying again.
You cannot rely on qualifications when you lie by omission. We can rely on this guy only to tell us the best arguments for his side.
There really is no difference between the IBM and Microsoft promises on the points he considers. It is a dishonest argument to make.
There might well be difficulties with the GPL. The objective in the promise was compatibility with the Apache license, not the GPL.
And accusing people who argue against your position as being trolls is just more abuse. I write standards for a living. From the start the ODF faction have been trying to hijack the process so that they can use it to force governments to adopt Open Office over Microsoft Office. It is an utterly transparent motive despite the repeated denials (lawyers tend to tell a lot of lies). Thats not what the process is for.
The ISO people did what they did because they were fed up of this circus. It was like having the scientologists campaigning.
As for the alleged effect on the ISO process, its actually irrelevant. ISO certainly accepts encumbered standards all the time. They might have a disclosure policy but even that isn't certain because of the role ISO plays. All ISO does is to endorse the output of other standards bodies, usually national standards bodies but also ITU, IEEE, ANSI and in theory IETF (this has never happened but could happen if the IETF was to forward its standards to ISO).
The terms of the open promise are irrelevant because there is no requirement for Microsoft to offer any IPR terms beyond those required by ETSI which are RAND. Microsoft has clearly met this requirement.
Nor is the fact that this is a 20 year old format a disqualification. Standards are what is used, old standards are probably better candidates for standard status than new ones.
Most partisan modders use 'overrated' which for some reason is a mod you cannot disable by giving it a value of 0 despite the fact that it is easily the most abused. It is hard for metamodders to know if a post was overrated or not so it a free swing.
I get modded troll frequently on political issues, or rather did, my position has become rather more mainstream. There was a time when suggesting that the US commander in chief might be less than adequate for the job was considered tantamount to treason by some.
Folk are getting way too exercised over this. The reason the OOXML vote went the way it did is very simple: the aggressive lobbying by the anti-OOXML mob made it inevitable. The ISO process is simply not designed to deal with contentious issues or aggressive lobbying.
The difference between P and O status is not as significant as claimed here, O delegates can achieve P status by attending the requisite number of meetings. But once they achieve P status they add to the quorum for all future decisions until they lose it for non-attendance. That would then delay all the rest of the work.
Most of the 900 objections were interpreted as being made with the intention of delaying the process rather than good faith proposals for improvement. It is likely that 850 or more will disappear after the decision to recognize OOXML as a standard is made.
This result is entirely a result of the over-aggressive lobbying by the anti-OOXML faction. They lost support for their position as a result. Most members of the committee simply wanted the circus to depart as soon as possible.
Another example of over-aggressive lobbying at the moment is the behavior of Obama supporters on the Web now that Obamania is over. They really need to dial back the insults and Limbaugh talk, they are costing Obama support.
According to Warner the song is in copyright till 2030. I don't think its a claim that could be sustained though. Splitting one note is hardly cause for a 45 year extention of copyright.
Aren't we forgetting something before we start the flamefest?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear universe
Happy
Oh crap the RIAA just appeared at my desk complaining about a copyright infringement.
Actually the lack of a camera is a requirement for many businesses. I can't take a phone with a camera into many of our facilities, it is a very common policy in large companies.
The lack of 3G is a serious problem but it is definitely on the way, it was originally promised for 1Q 2008. This announcement looks to me as if it is either being made in place of the 3G announcement after an unexpected production delay or that they don't want this anouncement to be lost by making it on the same day as announcing a 3G/GPS capable iPhone.
Dude, we worked to get sanctions at the express request of Nelson Mandela and the ANC, it was their campaign from start to finish. It was when it became clear that Thatcher and Reagan's support for Apartheid was running strongly against opinion in both their countries that the Whites realized that South Africa's isolation was going to be permanent so long as Apartheid was in force.
The alternative would have been a civil war like the one that broke out in Rhodesia. As Ghandi observed, revolutions tend to bring certain types of leader to power.
Given the current state of the GOP it is hard to see them managing to pose a serious obstacle. Their main objective in November is going to be to deny the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Take a look at the turnout in the Democratic primaries versus the GOP ones. The Democrats were getting twice the turnout in deep red states when both races were still competitive. It has since increased substantially. It looks like the post-Bush political realignment may be even greater than the post-Nixon realignment. Bush has smashed up the Republican party.
The South African Apartheid regime collapsed due to pressure from sanctions. But the reasons were psychological, not economic. The regime saw itself as an unacknowledged part of the West, the rejection had real and visible effect. Once it became clear that the US was also on the brink of rejecting it, the regime crumbled.
The Cuban situation is exactly the reverse, the only thing keeping Castro in power was the fact that he had successfully stood up to the US when it had acted as a big bully.
The human rights issue is not likely to be very effective when the US is running the best known gulag and torture house on the island.
This is a case where trade can have a positive effect and every policy maker in DC knows it, even the Republicans. The only reason that the embargo is kept in place is to pander to the Cuban vote in Florida.
Thats the way ethnic politics are played in the US. While mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani would attack terrorism over lunch in Brooklyn, then head off for dinner to give a 'humanitarian award' to the leader of the terrorist group that has caused by far the most deaths in Europe. Different constituencies, different positions. I don't think he was pro-Israel or pro-IRA, he just wanted the votes and would do anything it took to get them.
The people the politicians pander to are your usual expatriate irredentists, they can afford to refuse all compromise, they don't live with the consequences.
If you want to be really pedantic it would be the shared center of mass of the sun and Jupiter, Saturn and perhaps some of the other gas giants. The effect of the earth is pretty much insignificant.
Florida board of education on the other hand... in orbit around something else entirely