This is what bothers me most. Free trade is only good when corporations can take advantage of emerging economies. But when it comes to selling their wares in emerging economies for 5% of what they charge in the US or Europe, well that is just people being unfair.
I would be quite happy for a corporation to charge ''UK prices'' if the goods were made in the UK using UK labour paid a fair UK wage. What I cannot accept is paying ''UK prices'' on goods made using cheap labour in other countries, when they sell the same goods as cheaper prices in other countries.
Globalisation should cut both ways. Either: they can transport goods around the world, and so can I; or neither of us can.
Maybe NC ought to patent ''One Click Taxation'' and charge the other 49 states to use it - that would be a nice little earner for them and might solve their budget balancing problems.
How science defines things is not always the same as how the ''common man'' calls things. For instance: botanically a tomato is a fruit, most of my friends think of it as a vegetable; also botanically rhubarb is a vegetable, most of my friends think of it as fruit.
To most people, myself included, pluto will remain a planet - I don't care what the astronomers think!
I recently wanted an 0845 phone number (a non geographic number in the UK). The vendor (uk2numbers.co.uk) wanted to verify my address. The only suitable document (that had my PO box address) was a credit card statement. So I scanned it, blurred out my credit limit and part of the credit card number. Long story short: they refused to deal with me because I refused to give them a copy with these numbers in full. I refused to give it to them because of security concerns.
It seems evident that most who deal with them just hand this stuff over, and then wonder why they end up being owned.
In the end it turned out good for me since I looked elsewhere and got a much better service on phone numbers - but at the time it looked to me as if I was paying a cost (today) for trying to keep secure (future). They do not need my credit limit for their purposes, I am concerned about what is happening with such information that others have given them; I will report them to the UK ICO.
I thought the IT industry was one of the industries that wanted to use established standards the most for interoperability.
Wrong: The IT industry claims that it wants standards but the problem with standards is that they let other people compete on a level playing field, this is why there are many, many different standards; most poorly documented, if at all. Would proprietary s/ware have survived so well if others had been able to use their protocols & file formats ?
If you are going to feel embarrassed when someone exposes things that you have done, the solution is quite simple: don't do bad things.
It is not just the USA - look at how Israel has been caught forging British passports so that it could a Hamas leader. Governments do dirty deeds and then pretend that they did not. The world would be a better place if governments where run by honest, decent people - from top to bottom.
And then when it comes to try to get them to do the things that you need from an ISP - they just won't. A customer of mine has what they call a ''business connection'' with a fixed IP address (although they are known to change that with no warning) - they refuse to set the reverse name for the IP address.
Virgin suck - don't go near them. My customer is stuck with them because the broadband over phone wires is hopelessly slow -- too far from the exchange.
Was it before you committed to the job ? If it was after - then it is a change to your contract, why do you need to accept it ? Unless it is a change in the law in which case you need to bend over and let yourself be shafted.
People seem to assume that things are either one thing or the other; today we run this OS, tomorrow we run something else. That way is horribly expensive and is doomed to failure.
A saner approach is to plan migration over several years:
Ensure that all infrastructure will play nicely with the current proprietary applications and the chosen FLOSS replacements -- this means making sure that they obey the appropriate standards and use well defined document standards
Mandate that all new server s/ware, in house or bought in, has to work to standards, ie is agnostic to desktop operating system
Where desktop s/ware is needed: urge that the next version work through the browser (this makes deployment much cheaper anyway); if something really is OS dependent - make them justify it
Mandate that all new s/ware be fully specified: file formats and wire protocols, so that someone could write something compatible -- publish these specs freely
Put FLOSS applications on the existing desktops: firefox, OoO, thunderbird would make a good start.
When PCs come up for renewal, inspect what the user does with the PC; more 80% you will find that all that they do is managed by the existing FLOSS apps that you put on their desktops already;
for them give them a Linux based box; for the other 20% give them what they need to run whatever apps.
This will, over 5 years, give you 80% of desktops and most servers running FLOSS. The remaining 20% may stay around for a long time - it doesn't matter, you still get the savings from the 80%. Yes the cost of heterogeneous systems is initially a little higher than just staying with MS, but the sysadmins will be come skilled at it and costs will drop.
But a big bang approach is wrong... you will always have applications that run best on platform X. So you pick the low hanging fruit - do the easy stuff first - most applications can run using FLOSS, so move them over - leave the rest running on whatever. What is wrong with heterogeneous systems ?
If you were to use tap water where I live (hard water area), you would quickly end up with a smear of limescale on the surface. So you would need to clean (or at least rinse) with distilled water.
It could be something on the govt agency's computers connecting out at certain times and what we see are the reply packets coming back in. Maybe one of their own cron jobs.
Without a whole bunch of more information we are guessing in the dark:
What agency ?
What sort of packages ? UDP/TCP/ICMP ? What port numbers ?
The remote addresses: are they the same ones all the time, or a much smaller set ?
The local addresses: how many are these packets being sent to ?
Correlate protocol and IP address
Until we know more -- it is not worth spending time on this.
Quite apart from potentially being fun to look at, it would have really helped to see a short clip of this in action. It could have informed things like: how thick the metal, how wide the hole,...
I am no MS fan boy but I think that this action by the patent parasites i4i is completely wrong. We all know that the US patent system needs to be reformed, especially in the area of software patents -- this is just another example of how it is broken.
If they can do 12 hours on a laptop that, presumably, has a fast CPU & stuff - how long could they go on a laptop with a modest CPU ?
These guys always seem to want to show speed and power in a laptop -- but what I need in a laptop is long battery life. How much CPU does it take to do a bit of web browsing, run up emacs & ssh. I have a PC at home or stuff that I ssh to if I need to do fast compiles or run databases & other heavy stuff. These guys just don't get it, I thought they had when they brought out the original eeepc -- but subsequent models have just turned to bloat (OK: I do like the larger screens, but that is all).
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This is what bothers me most. Free trade is only good when corporations can take advantage of emerging economies. But when it comes to selling their wares in emerging economies for 5% of what they charge in the US or Europe, well that is just people being unfair.
I would be quite happy for a corporation to charge ''UK prices'' if the goods were made in the UK using UK labour paid a fair UK wage. What I cannot accept is paying ''UK prices'' on goods made using cheap labour in other countries, when they sell the same goods as cheaper prices in other countries.
Globalisation should cut both ways. Either: they can transport goods around the world, and so can I; or neither of us can.
Maybe NC ought to patent ''One Click Taxation'' and charge the other 49 states to use it - that would be a nice little earner for them and might solve their budget balancing problems.
Or perhaps because of most scientists main interest in it: A fly by any other name would breed as much.
How science defines things is not always the same as how the ''common man'' calls things. For instance: botanically a tomato is a fruit, most of my friends think of it as a vegetable; also botanically rhubarb is a vegetable, most of my friends think of it as fruit.
To most people, myself included, pluto will remain a planet - I don't care what the astronomers think!
It seems evident that most who deal with them just hand this stuff over, and then wonder why they end up being owned.
In the end it turned out good for me since I looked elsewhere and got a much better service on phone numbers - but at the time it looked to me as if I was paying a cost (today) for trying to keep secure (future). They do not need my credit limit for their purposes, I am concerned about what is happening with such information that others have given them; I will report them to the UK ICO.
birthday cards, valentines, ...
I am sorry - I could not get it out of my head that this looked very much like something that would have been made by that intrepid duo!
this will stop others from trying to inflict a copy of this idea on us!
or at least the famous Sun headline on a previous EU strong arm attempt "Up Yours Delors".
I thought the IT industry was one of the industries that wanted to use established standards the most for interoperability.
Wrong: The IT industry claims that it wants standards but the problem with standards is that they let other people compete on a level playing field, this is why there are many, many different standards; most poorly documented, if at all. Would proprietary s/ware have survived so well if others had been able to use their protocols & file formats ?
It is not just the USA - look at how Israel has been caught forging British passports so that it could a Hamas leader. Governments do dirty deeds and then pretend that they did not. The world would be a better place if governments where run by honest, decent people - from top to bottom.
We need to get this installed in the houses of parliament -- get something useful back for our money.
Will he buy the moon next?
He would be a lunatic to do so.
Does this mean that the bars are not going to be able to serve Tequila properly (with salt & lime)?
This patent should be defeated by demonstrating prior art of an upsell - porn sites did this in 1998.
Please can you provide a reference to this — something that we can check with the wayback machine and then point the USPTO at it.
Virgin suck - don't go near them. My customer is stuck with them because the broadband over phone wires is hopelessly slow -- too far from the exchange.
Was it before you committed to the job ? If it was after - then it is a change to your contract, why do you need to accept it ? Unless it is a change in the law in which case you need to bend over and let yourself be shafted.
A saner approach is to plan migration over several years:
This will, over 5 years, give you 80% of desktops and most servers running FLOSS. The remaining 20% may stay around for a long time - it doesn't matter, you still get the savings from the 80%. Yes the cost of heterogeneous systems is initially a little higher than just staying with MS, but the sysadmins will be come skilled at it and costs will drop.
I'm afraid that CAD isn't there yet.
But a big bang approach is wrong ... you will always have applications that run best on platform X. So you pick the low hanging fruit - do the easy stuff first - most applications can run using FLOSS, so move them over - leave the rest running on whatever. What is wrong with heterogeneous systems ?
You may not agree with the comment, but it is a reasonable point of view. Why do I get the feeling that someone wants to suppress bguiz's ideas ?
If you were to use tap water where I live (hard water area), you would quickly end up with a smear of limescale on the surface. So you would need to clean (or at least rinse) with distilled water.
Without a whole bunch of more information we are guessing in the dark:
Until we know more -- it is not worth spending time on this.
Quite apart from potentially being fun to look at, it would have really helped to see a short clip of this in action. It could have informed things like: how thick the metal, how wide the hole, ...
I am no MS fan boy but I think that this action by the patent parasites i4i is completely wrong. We all know that the US patent system needs to be reformed, especially in the area of software patents -- this is just another example of how it is broken.
These guys always seem to want to show speed and power in a laptop -- but what I need in a laptop is long battery life. How much CPU does it take to do a bit of web browsing, run up emacs & ssh. I have a PC at home or stuff that I ssh to if I need to do fast compiles or run databases & other heavy stuff. These guys just don't get it, I thought they had when they brought out the original eeepc -- but subsequent models have just turned to bloat (OK: I do like the larger screens, but that is all).