Am I the only one who thought, "I'd RATHER that malware corrupted a Windows installation than it sat there, harvesting data"?
No, but after reading the article I understand that a use case for this feature is: first harvest data, then win additional time to abuse this data by disabling the computer.
I think these withdrawal symptoms are pretty well known. From personal experience I can tell that going 'cold turkey' from drinking only coffee causes two days of headache and feeling crappy in general. But after that, I had no problems, except that it takes some effort to break with a twenty-year-old habit.
According to TFA it ships with: 'Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-bit' - not 'Ultimate'.
One could argue that an OS that is not ultimately Windows must be an improvement over an OS that is; personally I don't care, since neither one is MacOS.
To summarize the article, hopefully more readable than the Babelfish translation: The Dutch government sees too little added value in using voting machines, and claims that developing new voting machines will be expensive, and won't solve the problem of the possibility of eavesdropping.
But enough of that - maybe I am just getting too old. Is there any good science fiction out there? I basically agree with what you said about how hard it is to find good SF and fantasy. But occasionally I find something new and worthwile in the American Book Center in Amsterdam (already praised by someone else in this discussion). Authors I recently read some books of which I particularly liked are: Iain Banks (everything), Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue) and Jack McDevitt (Seeker, Polaris). Tastes differ, of course. But if you're a programmer and like Terry Pratchett, it's unlikely you won't like Charles Stross' works.
This might seem obvious, but the yearly Hugo awards usually give a good selection of new books. Even the runners up are usually worthwhile. This worked for me the last time. Same goes for the Nebula award.
You are right; when he pleads for kicking second-generation Moroccan criminals out of the Netherlands, he's doing so because they are, generally, Muslims. So yes, you're right, he is not a racist, and it's good trying to be precise when using such harsh words.
There's a million muslims that we know about. In reality, there's probably double that number. Your 'probably double that number' remark suggest that being a Muslim is something scary, shameful or illegal that must be hidden. It isn't.
There are now more mosques than churches in this country Nonsense. The number of mosques is increasing and the number of churces used as such has been decreasing for some time now, but mosques are still largely outnumbered.
two thirds of the kids in school in Amsterdam are non-white Firstly, being a Muslim doesn't do much for your skin color. Secondly, about half (and not two-third) of the kids in Amsterdam have parents that are not 'natives' - Turkish, Moroccan, Surinam and many others. Many of the Turkish and Moroccan people have a Muslim background - and so what? My oldest son (blonde hair, blue eyes, don't worry), went to a school that is something like 70% 'black' three years ago, and is having a good time with the other kids, and learning a lot too.
He's not racist, he just cares about our own society I trust he has the best of intentions, but he is very islamofobic and frustrated, and overly fearful, in my opinion.
as I do, and don't want to see it dragged back to the 17th century By dragging is back into the 12th century (the time of the crusades) instead?
> And this is coming from a fairly right-wing kinda guy.
Of course, right-wing guys in the Netherlands may very well support legalized drugs, gay marriage, euthanasia, universal health care, and so on. Just sayin'.:)
Nah, don't worry. Our right-wing guys can be just as intolerant, short-sighted, materialistic and self-centered as yours:-)
If he would like to make a point about freedom of speech, the best thing he could do now is *not* publish his film, and point at all the fuss already made about a film that nobody has even seen yet.
But, since he is most likely more interested in trolling, I think will just go ahead. Which, indeed, is his right to do - assuming his film stays within the boundaries of the law..
>As this film hasn't been released, I give Network Solutions the benefit of the doubt.
Despite the fact that I think this guy is an islamofobic, racist and generally unpleasant guy, I still have to disagree with you here: before having seen the film, you can't assume it contains legally or otherwise unacceptable material. It will probably do so, but we'll have to wait and see whether this is indeed the case. Until the movie has been published, the benefit of the doubt should be given to Geert Wilders, regardless of his lousy reputation.
I wouldn't like loosing my complete email history every three years. I guess most users would react the same. According to the article,
"Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives"
I cannot imagine a somewhat competent IT department having a hardware upgrade policy that would consistently result in loosing your documents or your email. So that would mean the emails should still be there - on the newer computers.
For people who don't really care about this 'freedom' thing in software, the normal economical arguments still apply. If you can show somebody that he can have a qualitatively good progam that does what he needs, he'll be glad with it. No ideology required.
Some interesting cases where the border between simulation and reality is screwed up can be found in science fiction.
For example, in Forever Peace, soldiers are fighting real wars in a virtual world, by remotely controlling robots doing the actual fighting. In Enders Game, something similar takes place, made even more interesting by the fact that the soldiers doing the fighting initally aren't even aware their virtual fights are actually taking place for real somewhere else.
The succes of iTunes suggests that most people don't really care about DRM if it's implemented in a matter they somehow consider 'fair enough'. As for price, yes, if you do buy all songs on a CD, the iTunes store isn't really cheap, but it does have the advantage that you can buy only the one or two songs of a CD you're really interested in, for a much lower price. But I think the main reason the iTunes store is such a succes is there's really enough content. For example, the majority of books I've bought most recently where by Terry Pratchett. If I would own an eBook player, I might have bought these as eBooks instead, if they were half the price or so that way. But if the Sony eBook store would only have, say, a few thousand titles, it's not very likely that 'The Wee Free Man', the last book I bought, would have been available. And unless I am confident that the eBooks I'd be interested in are available, there's no reason for me to buy the player in the first place.
To me, spending a few hundred dollars/euro's on such a thing is only worth consideration if there is a possibility to buy plenty of content for a price that's much lower that I'd pay for paper versions of the same stuff. I guess theoretically it's possible that Sony will do the the same for books as Apple did for music. However, given the recent experiences with Sony, I seriously doubt they have the vision to make this work. Possible DRM issues aside, they will probably screw this up by having too little content for too high price. This may be a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's not *my* chicken-and-egg problem - I'll stick to books for now.
I usually use Eclipse, for financial reasons, but I've used IntelliJ for a few months at a different company, and I regretted getting back to Eclipse. Eclipe is acceptable, but to me IntelliJ was much more intuitive to use. Of course there's a little bit of a learning curve -IDE's are complex programs. But I remember often being pleased with finding functionality at places where I expected/guessed/hoped it would be. I've rarely used a program this complex that felt so 'natural'. I completely agree with the advice before to give it a try; if my boss would pay for it, I'd switch immediately.
I guess Apple Belgium will have a hard time explaining why, depending on language of choice, a Belgian should either pay an additional 30 or 40 euro's...
Only two relevant things I could find were: - lithium-polymer (not lithium-ion) - 60 Watt-hour capacity
The 15" powerbook has a 50 Watt-hour capacity lithim-ion battery, and apparently Apple's marketing department manages to keep their powerbook runnings for 5 hours on it. Given the slightly higher battery capacity and the fact that the Intel chips were chosen for their good performance/power consumption ratio, the MacBook shouldn't do much worse that a 15" powerbook I guess.
According to the following readworthy review, http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/09/review-of-6-pyt hon-ides.html, Wing should be worth a look - it's not free though.
Disclaimer: I'm basically in the same position as you - looking for a good Python IDE for Mac OS X.
AFAIK the dodos' were eaten to extinction by Dutch sailors; there's even a Dutch synonym for dodo, 'walgvogel', meaning 'disgusting bird', apparently because their taste wasn't even that good - but they were very easy to catch, and after a few months at sea they were a good change of diet.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who thought, "I'd RATHER that malware corrupted a Windows installation than it sat there, harvesting data"?
No, but after reading the article I understand that a use case for this feature is: first harvest data, then win additional time to abuse this data by disabling the computer.
I think these withdrawal symptoms are pretty well known.
From personal experience I can tell that going 'cold turkey' from drinking only coffee causes two days of headache and feeling crappy in general. But after that, I had no problems, except that it takes some effort to break with a twenty-year-old habit.
Well, if that's the problem....
According to TFA it ships with: 'Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-bit' - not 'Ultimate'.
One could argue that an OS that is not ultimately Windows must be an improvement over an OS that is; personally I don't care, since neither one is MacOS.
Honest question: Who buys these things?
My boss, hopefully :-)
To summarize the article, hopefully more readable than the Babelfish translation:
The Dutch government sees too little added value in using voting machines, and claims that developing new voting machines will be expensive, and won't solve the problem of the possibility of eavesdropping.
But occasionally I find something new and worthwile in the American Book Center in Amsterdam (already praised by someone else in this discussion).
Authors I recently read some books of which I particularly liked are:
Iain Banks (everything),
Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue) and
Jack McDevitt (Seeker, Polaris).
Tastes differ, of course. But if you're a programmer and like Terry Pratchett, it's unlikely you won't like Charles Stross' works.
You are right; when he pleads for kicking second-generation Moroccan criminals out of the Netherlands, he's doing so because they are, generally, Muslims. So yes, you're right, he is not a racist, and it's good trying to be precise when using such harsh words.
If he would like to make a point about freedom of speech, the best thing he could do now is *not* publish his film, and point at all the fuss already made about a film that nobody has even seen yet.
But, since he is most likely more interested in trolling, I think will just go ahead. Which, indeed, is his right to do - assuming his film stays within the boundaries of the law..
>As this film hasn't been released, I give Network Solutions the benefit of the doubt.
Despite the fact that I think this guy is an islamofobic, racist and generally unpleasant guy, I still have to disagree with you here: before having seen the film, you can't assume it contains legally or otherwise unacceptable material. It will probably do so, but we'll have to wait and see whether this is indeed the case. Until the movie has been published, the benefit of the doubt should be given to Geert Wilders, regardless of his lousy reputation.
I wouldn't like loosing my complete email history every three years. I guess most users would react the same. According to the article,
"Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives"
I cannot imagine a somewhat competent IT department having a hardware upgrade policy that would consistently result in loosing your documents or your email. So that would mean the emails should still be there - on the newer computers.
For people who don't really care about this 'freedom' thing in software, the normal economical arguments still apply. If you can show somebody that he can have a qualitatively good progam that does what he needs, he'll be glad with it. No ideology required.
You could get a white one for $50 more, so the new black color appears to cost $150, unless there's another difference everyone is overlooking.
Some interesting cases where the border between simulation and reality is screwed up can be found in science fiction. For example, in Forever Peace, soldiers are fighting real wars in a virtual world, by remotely controlling robots doing the actual fighting. In Enders Game, something similar takes place, made even more interesting by the fact that the soldiers doing the fighting initally aren't even aware their virtual fights are actually taking place for real somewhere else.
The succes of iTunes suggests that most people don't really care about DRM if it's implemented in a matter they somehow consider 'fair enough'. As for price, yes, if you do buy all songs on a CD, the iTunes store isn't really cheap, but it does have the advantage that you can buy only the one or two songs of a CD you're really interested in, for a much lower price.
But I think the main reason the iTunes store is such a succes is there's really enough content. For example, the majority of books I've bought most recently where by Terry Pratchett. If I would own an eBook player, I might have bought these as eBooks instead, if they were half the price or so that way. But if the Sony eBook store would only have, say, a few thousand titles, it's not very likely that 'The Wee Free Man', the last book I bought, would have been available. And unless I am confident that the eBooks I'd be interested in are available, there's no reason for me to buy the player in the first place.
To me, spending a few hundred dollars/euro's on such a thing is only worth consideration if there is a possibility to buy plenty of content for a price that's much lower that I'd pay for paper versions of the same stuff. I guess theoretically it's possible that Sony will do the the same for books as Apple did for music.
However, given the recent experiences with Sony, I seriously doubt they have the vision to make this work. Possible DRM issues aside, they will probably screw this up by having too little content for too high price.
This may be a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's not *my* chicken-and-egg problem - I'll stick to books for now.
I usually use Eclipse, for financial reasons, but I've used IntelliJ for a few months at a different company, and I regretted getting back to Eclipse. Eclipe is acceptable, but to me IntelliJ was much more intuitive to use. Of course there's a little bit of a learning curve -IDE's are complex programs. But I remember often being pleased with finding functionality at places where I expected/guessed/hoped it would be. I've rarely used a program this complex that felt so 'natural'. I completely agree with the advice before to give it a try; if my boss would pay for it, I'd switch immediately.
There appears to be no such thing as 'a European price'.
www.apple.de: 2099
www.apple.nl: 2139
www.apple.fr: 2149
www.apple.be: 2179
I guess Apple Belgium will have a hard time explaining why, depending on language of choice, a Belgian should either pay an additional 30 or 40 euro's...
Only two relevant things I could find were:
- lithium-polymer (not lithium-ion)
- 60 Watt-hour capacity
The 15" powerbook has a 50 Watt-hour capacity lithim-ion battery, and apparently Apple's marketing department manages to keep their powerbook runnings for 5 hours on it. Given the slightly higher battery capacity and the fact that the Intel chips were chosen for their good performance/power consumption ratio, the MacBook shouldn't do much worse that a 15" powerbook I guess.
According to the following readworthy review, http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/09/review-of-6-pyt hon-ides.html, Wing should be worth a look - it's not free though.
Disclaimer: I'm basically in the same position as you - looking for a good Python IDE for Mac OS X.
AFAIK the dodos' were eaten to extinction by Dutch sailors; there's even a Dutch synonym for dodo, 'walgvogel', meaning 'disgusting bird', apparently because their taste wasn't even that good - but they were very easy to catch, and after a few months at sea they were a good change of diet.
The scientific reputation of this institute is unknown to me, but the 'buy a cobblestone mat' link right below the article makes me a bit suspicious.
The contest has already been cancelled - see the statement at the original link.