TrueCrypt on a memory stick with an encrypted volume file with a good passphrase and your data will be secure from pretty much anything. I have not heard of TrueCrypt being cracked yet. I use an encrypted image generated by the Apple Disk utility which is capable of creating AES-128 encrypted DMG's. I don't know if aes-128 has been cracked yet but even if it has I rather doubt any thief will go to the trouble of trying to access my data. Of course I might be unlucky enough that my memory stick is stolen by a super Hacker who will go to the trouble of cracking my little DMG crypto image but that seems highly unlikely.
Leopard's delay isn't that big a deal for most of Apple's regular users. Tiger works well enough. There isn't all that much in Leopard that I'm really looking forward to having.
I can wait comfortably for another quarter if it means that Leopard will be released as a better operating system than was Tiger when it was released initially. They managed to break a whole range of features with Tiger including Windows networking interoperability which kept me from getting on with my work until I found out what they had done to screw up Samba and how to work around it. Mind you, they did fix a lot of these bugs pretty quickly. I can't say I'm not looking forward to Leopard, the Spaces feature looks interesting and the backup engine may be a mundane feature but it will be very useful. As for Spotlight, it is the one feature of Tiger I thought I would never use but now find myself using all the time. The addition of boolean operators may not seem like a big deal but it will make Spotlight much more usable since it will enable me to drastically narrow down searches. It also appears they've made some changes to the Finder. Any improvements in that department are welcome although one hopes that one of those 'secret features' will be scrapping the damn thing altogether and replacing it with a new one. Another feature in OS.X I'd like to see replaced or at least drastically overhauled is the Preview app. For some reason whenever I have two monitors connected to my MBP and start Preview, half the app window is placed on the upper monitor. Oh... and finally... here's hoping they have managed to have Dashboard kickstart in the background right after login and not on first launch, I have a few widgets I use a lot and waiting for Dashboard to load is annoying to say the least. I shouldn't have to download a hack to do this.
"By the way, rather than insulting me, have you been able to come up with a single environmental doomsday prediction that has come true?" The fact that I never claimed I could is probably as meaningless to you as any other fact that does not fit your dogma. I'm not saying that logic has anything to do with your rant, but it would seem a tad nonsensical to ask someone to point to a doomsday prediction that has already come to pass. Some doomsday highlights of the last 500 million years, courtesy of Wikipedia:
None of these environmental doomsday events were predicted for obvious reasons but at least they go to show that environmental doomsday events are survivable if you are fit enough. As for future prospects for prediction, so far we haven't done well have we? We were already in the several thousand years into the ongoing Holocene extinction event before we even figured out it was happening but at least we have managed to figure out since then that this time around we are a major contributing factor to the extinctions.
Just another Boeing-vs-Airbus dispute, except Microsoft has no European analogue. And that pisses the EU off far, far more than anything Microsoft itself could ever do. It worked pretty well didn't it? Boeing's near monopoly of the airliner market was eroded to a point where there is now real competition. You can still piss and moan about state subsidies and easy loans being handed to Airbus and you can also piss and moan about the way Boeing is being handed access to materials and technologies developed on behalf of the US Govt. for military purposes practically free of charge for use in it's airliner business and the way Military contracts with Boeing are being used as a covert way of subsidizing them but in the end the fact remains that there is now competition and all the aforementioned pissing and moaning means is that the US Govt. is being a bit more subtle about subsidizing it's champion than the Airbus partner nations. You can't fault the EU for trying to recycle a successful tactic. Keep in mind that the European analog to Microsoft Windows and Co. which the EU is trying to shore up is a distributed industry of thousands of software companies, some of whom are Linux centric while others are, believe it or not, Microsoft centric. Collectively they makeup a sort-of analog to Microsoft. The European Software industry may not be as large as that of the USA but the curious myth that seems to be circulating in the USA that the European Software industry doesn't exist at all is very wrong.
Interoperability with what? I had to explain to a coworker just last week (after she made a v8-specific PDF that no one could open)... If you just tell Acrobat to always save in v4 compatible mode, everyone in the world can read it. Same goes for MS Office. Just save it Word/Excel 98 mode, and plenty of other programs can open it. So why doesn't Word/Excel 98 allow users to open the latest Word/Excel formats? Why do Word/Excel users have to go through the "Could you re-send me that file in Office 98 format please..." routine? Could it be that this is because Microsoft doesn't make them because they want to force customers into an expensive upgrade? Could it be that Microsoft is deliberately keeping these formats secret to prevent third party developers from creating plugins or utilities that do this because it would cut into their sales? My friend has a 40 year old car for which he can still get parts and even upgrades that are made by third party specialist companies because the original manufacturer doesn't support this model anymore. Everybody considers this to be perfectly normal and yet it isn't normal for third party Software outfits to create third part add-ons for Word/Excel 98 giving their users the ability to open or convert Office 2007 files. Perhaps we should allow car manufacturers to sue third party parts makers who make parts for discontinued car models into the ground so that sales of new cars will be boosted? If the EU succeeds in forcing MS to be a bit mor open when it comes to others being able to implement their file formats and protocols I'm all for it. Perhaps you actually like having to upgrade an obscenely expensive office suite every 4-5 years because Microsoft needs to add a new layer of your money to it's already overflowing coffers... I certainly don't.
Someone else already said it, but I'll repeat: EU policies send a very, very clear message - Don't set up shop in the EU. To me it sounds more like they are saying: If you want to do business with the 494 million+ potential customers in the 27 EU member countries be prepared to compete fairly or receive a swift kick in the fundament.
Dear Microsoft, Why did your "security gnomes" not speak up in the first place about such a stupid feature? Why are these things always sneaking in through cursors and screensavers? Are you keeping them busy implementing crap like this in the first place, instead of having security gnomes look at your existing code? People will continue to leave Windows in droves because it's getting loaded with troublesome features like this that backfire even for people who aren't using them or aren't aware of them. Nobody is interested in this junk aside from malware writers and teeny boppers, but everyone is exposed to the vulnerabilities in these features anyway nonetheless because they're bundled into the OS. The vast majority of users are not interested in having their stupid mouse cursors animate. And this chronic habit of running code that arrives over the Internet from unknown sources is getting really old. Dear Customer, Unfortunately a hoard of deranged Mac users has invaded the Microsoft Development Center. They seized the security gnome's cave and their slashdot troll is currently blocking the entrance. Unfortunately, at the time this happened, we had just successfully repelled a massive frontal assault on our development center by a hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins and as a result we were to low on throwing chairs to repel the second assault. We are sorry if this causes you any inconvenience but until the next consignment of hand made throwing chairs arrives from Italy allowing Mr Ballmer to lead us in a fresh asssault to retake the security gnome's cave we will be unable to help you with your problem. Please accept this conciliatory bucket of Microsoft® Fried Penguin drumsticks and a bottle of Microsoft Windows Vista® Kool-Aid free of charge as compensation for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
A far off alien culture sees a third-rate planet called EARTH inhabitied by primitive beings. After a few open atmosphere concerts (Earthling Aid) and a telethon (Dough for Doh!), they raise enough money to send an engineering fleet to ask the earthlings what they want built. Due to some translation errors, and an over active project manager's ego, a simple request for a small pond to keep water for a herd of goats gets "innovated" into a series of pyramids that can be seen from far away. The rest is history. The amazing thing is that there are really people who passionately believe the Pyramids were built by aliens. The Pyramids generate quite a lot of theories about their origins from 'Pyramidologists' around the world. Some are quite serious most of them are ridiculous to the point of being funny. The chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, who regularly gets swamped in these proposals coined a word for 'Pyramidologists', he calls them 'Pyramidiots'.
Less sucky in what way? Anyone who knows how uses the classic start menu and control panel. The only thing that really leaves is the theme and anyone who is at all concerned about performance uses the windows classic theme. My gripes with the Windows 2000/XP interface...
To say it was ugly is going to far it was more like mind numbingly dull. XP helped a little.
I never much liked the start menu:
Move the mouse pointer to the 'Start' button in the lower left corner,
click,
find the 'Programs' item,
click,
find the program you want,
click.
The quick-launch bar was a major improvement but I still like the OS.X dock better because of the magnification feature which makes it easier to hit the icon you want and the fact that the dock is simply easier and quicker to use. The new Windows start menu was, if anything worse than the old one. It had some nice features but it was badly organized. My first action on an XP system is always to set it back to 'classic' look.
The Windows UI behaves in a way that I find infuriating, especially the way that applications steal the focus. This didn't change much with XP. It can be tweaked though.
Endless reboots. XP was an improvement because it decreased their frequency.
The endless OK and Apply buttons are annoying. Somehow OS.X and some Linux desktops and even Windows Mobile seem to manage without them.
The ceaseless stupid questions about whether or not I am sure I want to do this that or the other thing are annoying. I'm not saying they are alwasy unwanted but it would be nice if Microsoft were to reduce their number.
Having to click one's way through endless configuration app windows to perform simple reconfigurations is annoying. I can modify system preferences in OS.X with far fewer mouse clicks than I can in Windows 2000 or XP.
When you have a large number of windows open in 2000 and XP finding a particular one is not easy. They tried to solve this in XP by grouping buttons for a particular app. It helped but it wasn't a good solution. I haven't used Vista, but judging from demonstrations of the 'Rolodex' feature they added in to trump 'Exposé' it looks like a huge improvement.
I'm sure that all these things can either be changed by setting some radio button in a not so easy to find configuration window, tweaked with a third party utility or if all fails modified by changing registry settings but I chose to switch to something that works the way I want it to out of the box and it's into the bargain more secure but that's a matter for a whole other flame-war.
"About 2 billion people will live, in only 18 years, in countries and regions where water will be a distant memory. Two thirds of the world population may live in places where this scarcity will create social and economic unrest in such magnitude that could lead those people to wars on this precious 'blue gold'".
"From the last 100 years, the use of water has increased in a rate two times superior to the population growth rate.
"According with the World Water Council (WWC), it is estimated that in the year 2015 the number of people affected by this serious situation will increase to 3 500 billion people I'm probably going to get flamed for saying this but Castro is right and he isn't the only one who has come up with predictions like this although one can argue endlessly about what the scale of this problem will be. To be fair, people on the right wing of politics world wide, even some in the USA, also admit that this will be a problem. One factor that aggravates these water problems is that in many developing countries (Not all of them by any means) water consumption per capita tends to be rather high and this is often not due direct personal consumption by people but rather 'hidden' consumption due to various factors. Most of this has to do with dilapidated infrastructures that are not renewed or improperly maintained, government regulations that are not enforced, lack of inspection of industry and last but not least... corruption. I have heard (UN) figures of wastage in industrial processes being up to 30 times greater in some third world countries than it is in comparable industries in developed countries and other third world countries who have effective government policies on infrastructure renewal and management. Sooner or later we will see a war break out over water rights. The Israelis for example have been extremely aggressive when it comes to securing their access to water resources and are not likely to be very happy when they lose some of them to a Palestinian state since a lot of the water Israel uses, and which Israelis have greater access to, comes from areas occupied in the 1967 war and so would revert to Palestinian control. Other flash-points concern the damming of the Euphrates and the Nile. Egypt for example got pretty worked up a few years ago when a country up stream (Sudan IIRC) started investigating the possibility of damming the Nile.
Namely nine out of every ten Apple devotees who love their Macs and have loved them for years.
Oh, and probably 3 out of ten iPod owners who think it would be cool to have their iPod and phone all in one.
And then there are the people who just have to have latest gadget. I'm an Apple computer user. I'd consider buying the iPhone despite the price-tag which I know put's a lot of other people off (I'm convinced we'll se an 'iPhone Nano' sooner or later). I use Apple's computers but I'm not one of the mythical 'faithful' who fall to their knees and worship every time they walk past an Apple logo. The way I see it, having an iPod and phone combined in one device would be kind of convenient but it doesn't make the iPhone a must-have device. From an Apple user's point of view, apart from the iPod-in-your-phone factor and the well designed and user friendly UI the chief selling points of the iPhone to Apple users is the seamless OS.X integration because most mobile phone manufacturers don't bother to make a PC connectivity suite for other OS'es than Windows. You will for example be able to update the iPhone, back it up and sync it perfectly with your Mac apps... all directly from OS.X. I have a Nokia phone at the moment and apart from syncing which mostly works (after I adapted a sync profile for another Nokia phone in a text editor and renamed it) I cannot update the firmware in my phone or back up the phone's OS and my data without running Nokia PC suite from Parallels which kind of sucks if you ask me. The iPhone probably won't be perfect though. I dislike the idea of non removable batteries and their life-span is supposedly going to be rather low. Additionally the fact that there will be no third party software available for the iPhone really puts me off.
Dell: Hello, can we help you? Me: Hi, I am having some problems installing Linux on my new Dell laptop. I need some information about the video card so I can set up X. Dell: Ok, umm... sure... you said Lyn-ucks? Me: Yes? Dell: Ok, umm... can you spell that please? Dell:... using Nato Phonetics mind you... Me: Uh... Phonetics?? Dell: Yes Phonetics... you know Lima, Indigo, November... Me: Mmm... Ok... I don't know phonetics but I'll try... Lima, Indigo, November..... wait... let me seee.... http://www.google.com/..... phonetics.... Ah here it is: Uniform, Xray. Dell: Excellent Sir! Now please spell out your full name and address, the model name of your Dell computer, it's serial code, the Linux operating system version and your corporate credentials... Using phonetics of course. Me: All of it? Dell: Yes, all of it. Me: Is that necessary? Dell: Yes Sir. In order to avoid any confusion about the origin of support calls Dell management has decided that all identifying information has to be spelled out by the customer using phonetics. Me: Arrrghh... Very well then... Juliet, October, Hotel, Ummm..... let me see.... November, Delta, October, Echo.... Ummm.... Oh, fuck this..... **Hangs up** Dell: Ahhhh... Yet another Linux support call successfully handled. Me: Hmmmm.... let me see: http://groups.google.com/ comp->linux....
I actually had a conversation like this with a support guy (from Network solutions IIRC, it was a couple of years ago).
Yes, and it was an IBM design decision anyway and had nothing to do with MS. Let me see..... If one considers a severe case Windows system instability to be the Windows equivalent of a Campylobacter infection, then CTRL-ALT-DELTE would be the key combination for triggering the Windows equivalent of death by severe diarrhea.... This raises an interesting question: Doesn't that make the CTRL-ALT-DEL key combo IBM's variant of Montezuma's Revenge? We could call it "IBM's revenge". Thankfully the good folks at Microsoft have seen to it that Windows usually reincarnates after an onset of a case IBM's revenge.
So, did dinosaurs have to endure those irritating "Duck and Cover" films in school, too? No, it was 'Run and Burrow'... if your had read TFA you would know that.
I can picture that scene from Star Wars, where Obi Wan feels a disturbance in the force, except instead of thousands of voices being silenced, it's the sound of thousands of dyed-in-the-wool Linux geeks having an aneurysm. .... So that's what it was? And here I was thinking it was millions of MCSEs having a spontaneous orgasm simultaneously. The only other thing it could have been is thousands of Mac users Oooohing... over a demo of the iPhone......
"But, boss, you really have to admit that MY desk is much more messier than everyone else in this company! I demand more money! See here? We are talking about a freaking 3 DAYS OLD PIZZA, buried under papers and backup tapes for chrissake!!" That seems to be a sound strategy.... Just be careful not to lift up the pile of papers and the shitload of folders you hid the Counter-Strike box under!
And America is losing power to influence the world. Most of this is because on the horizon is the vision that they won't be THE dominant player anymore that can strongarm anybody they please, like they were for most of the 20th Century, because of a variety of factors (EU gaining power, China, US own economy and debt). <rant> Who got the ball rollling on what eventually became the WTO? Wasn't it the USA with the original ITO proposal? Now the USA is finding out that it's not just others who have to play by WTO rules they also have to do so. In a sense the US Govt. shot it self in the foot when it comes to it's freedom to establish mechanisms for strong arming others over trade issues. Not that the EU is any better in this regard, it isn't. The USA likes to keep it's options open on doing things like the Byrd Amendment so one gets the feeling the whole WTO thing wasn't properly thought through in the USA because WTO has significant power to enforce its decisions through the authorization of trade sanctions. It's almost like somebody forgot to turn the WTO into a toothless tiger like the UN. The US Govt. probably can't help MS by trying to strong-arm the EU, at least not under WTO rules, and even if the US tries to strong-arm the EU over MS anyway it wouldn't be worth it since the result could easily be a nasty trade war which would hurt a whole lot more US companies that just MS. </rant>
The primary benefits the piece uses to argue in favor of OSS include no licensing fees, and no license keys. The thing I like the most about OSS is that I have everything at my fingertips with OSS, they only delay is the time it takes to download stuff and install it. When you are workign with proprietary tools it's the same, you do have everything at your fingertips, except you also have to wait for the license costs to be approved by the bean-counters. Somehow I feel that I get things done quicker with OSS because I can bypass a whole layer of corporate bureaucracy. On the other hand quality of OSS software can be low, documentation often sucks and user friendliness is also an issue although with some proprietary stuff such as certain Oracle products for example user friendliness is nothing to cheer about either and I have seen proprietary software that made me wonder where people get the nerve to demand money for such crap.
When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?
Monkeys on typewriters? Traditionally Microsoft hasn't asked anybody when their products weren't doing well. They simply set about either making life so difficult for any competitor and users of his products that the competitor's market share dwindled down to almost nothing or they simply eliminated the competition altogether which forced the consumers to buy Microsoft products. Whenever they couldn't do either of those two things their products often fail. Microsoft products comparatively rarely seem to enjoy huge success on their own merits. I'll admit that despite all the hullablaloo about the demise of Netscape IE was a better browser than Netscape 4.x. Not that IE was anything to cheer over, somewhere between versions 3 and 4 it simply began to suck less than Netscape did. Of course nowadays IE is pretty much beaten by Firefox and Safari (at least IMHO). The MS Office pack is also a fairly good product, after c.a. Office 97 or so it actually became usable for something more than writing letters and short essays!! Their OS and Server products, however, have generally either sucked or been uninspiring at best and their databases are nothing special. It remains to be seen how they do on the Mobile Phone market with their Windows Mobile where they compete against Mobile Phone OS products like Symbian and Linux, and the digital Music/Media market where they are up against the iPod. MS seems to be doing fairly well on the game console market although they haven't exactly succeeded in assimilating it completely into their collective.
How many of us/.ers are going to find out we are so uninteresting that we dont have anything on file? Hah.. even if that turns out to be the case, all it proves is that my tinfoil hat is working.
The argument for pre-installations is really about novice users who can't be bothered to install an OS onto a fresh machine, and just want something that's going to work with minimal fuss. They need a distribution that's as idiot-proof and "polished" as possible, and that's what the criteria for choosing it should be. If Dell also open sources their Linux drivers, those drivers should make their way into most other mainstream distributions anyway which will hopefully satisfy the people whose sense of taste is offended by Dell's choice of preloaded Linux distro. The real advangate of, say.... a Dell Linux laptop for example is, as you pointed out, not having an idiot proof distribution pre-installed. It's being able to pop down to your local Dell dealer and testing the trackpad, punching the keyboard, checking the form factor, weight, display quality etc. of Dell's Linux laptops (or their closely related Windows equivalents) in person. If I could buy a high end, reasonably elegant, big brand laptop where the computer's manufacturer guarantees Linux will work out of the box with the same ease as OS.X does on Apple's MacBook line I'd not be picky about the distribution even if the only distribution that worked completely flawlessly out of the box was Lindows and the computer maker was the Dull^H^H^H^H Dell brickworks.
...Having gone through this, I would feel comfortable starting with Postgres with an eye towards eventually migrating to Oracle when/if the situation warranted - it shouldn't be the huge IT migration nightmare some might fear. Although going back might be a little harder, depending on what Oracle features are used.
The biggest part of the project was translating PL/pgSQL to PL/SQL, and I wrote some throwaway scripts to translate the subset that we used... I'd have to agree, that's pretty much the worst part of it all. Complex DB enabled applications tend to have a lot of PL/pgSQL or PL/SQL code which often makes use of custom features unique to the database. Another thing that often causes problems is when developers of code external to the DB, i.e. webapps, servlets, webservices writen in.NET/Java/Python/etc. fail to abstract the database code from their program code. If a Postgres specific library is hardwired into these applications, migrating is more difficult than just reconfiguring or performing minor rewrites of a database abstraction layer. You have to rewrite these apps. It's not the world's most complex job but pretty tedious and it costs money. A properly designed well abstracted application is easy to port. Unfortunately many applications are neither, especially in eager and inexperienced startup companies who tend to rush in and implement features as rapidly as possible sakrificing maintainability and design for speed and low cost of development.
Slashdot Mirror
I can wait comfortably for another quarter if it means that Leopard will be released as a better operating system than was Tiger when it was released initially. They managed to break a whole range of features with Tiger including Windows networking interoperability which kept me from getting on with my work until I found out what they had done to screw up Samba and how to work around it. Mind you, they did fix a lot of these bugs pretty quickly. I can't say I'm not looking forward to Leopard, the Spaces feature looks interesting and the backup engine may be a mundane feature but it will be very useful. As for Spotlight, it is the one feature of Tiger I thought I would never use but now find myself using all the time. The addition of boolean operators may not seem like a big deal but it will make Spotlight much more usable since it will enable me to drastically narrow down searches. It also appears they've made some changes to the Finder. Any improvements in that department are welcome although one hopes that one of those 'secret features' will be scrapping the damn thing altogether and replacing it with a new one. Another feature in OS.X I'd like to see replaced or at least drastically overhauled is the Preview app. For some reason whenever I have two monitors connected to my MBP and start Preview, half the app window is placed on the upper monitor. Oh... and finally... here's hoping they have managed to have Dashboard kickstart in the background right after login and not on first launch, I have a few widgets I use a lot and waiting for Dashboard to load is annoying to say the least. I shouldn't have to download a hack to do this.
Yup, you're a democrat. No he's a Perl developer....
None of these environmental doomsday events were predicted for obvious reasons but at least they go to show that environmental doomsday events are survivable if you are fit enough. As for future prospects for prediction, so far we haven't done well have we? We were already in the several thousand years into the ongoing Holocene extinction event before we even figured out it was happening but at least we have managed to figure out since then that this time around we are a major contributing factor to the extinctions.
Why did your "security gnomes" not speak up in the first place about such a stupid feature? Why are these things always sneaking in through cursors and screensavers? Are you keeping them busy implementing crap like this in the first place, instead of having security gnomes look at your existing code?
People will continue to leave Windows in droves because it's getting loaded with troublesome features like this that backfire even for people who aren't using them or aren't aware of them. Nobody is interested in this junk aside from malware writers and teeny boppers, but everyone is exposed to the vulnerabilities in these features anyway nonetheless because they're bundled into the OS. The vast majority of users are not interested in having their stupid mouse cursors animate. And this chronic habit of running code that arrives over the Internet from unknown sources is getting really old. Dear Customer,
Unfortunately a hoard of deranged Mac users has invaded the Microsoft Development Center. They seized the security gnome's cave and their slashdot troll is currently blocking the entrance. Unfortunately, at the time this happened, we had just successfully repelled a massive frontal assault on our development center by a hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins and as a result we were to low on throwing chairs to repel the second assault. We are sorry if this causes you any inconvenience but until the next consignment of hand made throwing chairs arrives from Italy allowing Mr Ballmer to lead us in a fresh asssault to retake the security gnome's cave we will be unable to help you with your problem. Please accept this conciliatory bucket of Microsoft® Fried Penguin drumsticks and a bottle of Microsoft Windows Vista® Kool-Aid free of charge as compensation for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Regards
The Microsoft Support Team.
Due to some translation errors, and an over active project manager's ego, a simple request for a small pond to keep water for a herd of goats gets "innovated" into a series of pyramids that can be seen from far away. The rest is history. The amazing thing is that there are really people who passionately believe the Pyramids were built by aliens. The Pyramids generate quite a lot of theories about their origins from 'Pyramidologists' around the world. Some are quite serious most of them are ridiculous to the point of being funny. The chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, who regularly gets swamped in these proposals coined a word for 'Pyramidologists', he calls them 'Pyramidiots'.
- Move the mouse pointer to the 'Start' button in the lower left corner,
- click,
- find the 'Programs' item,
- click,
- find the program you want,
- click.
The quick-launch bar was a major improvement but I still like the OS.X dock better because of the magnification feature which makes it easier to hit the icon you want and the fact that the dock is simply easier and quicker to use. The new Windows start menu was, if anything worse than the old one. It had some nice features but it was badly organized. My first action on an XP system is always to set it back to 'classic' lookI'm sure that all these things can either be changed by setting some radio button in a not so easy to find configuration window, tweaked with a third party utility or if all fails modified by changing registry settings but I chose to switch to something that works the way I want it to out of the box and it's into the bargain more secure but that's a matter for a whole other flame-war.
"From the last 100 years, the use of water has increased in a rate two times superior to the population growth rate.
"According with the World Water Council (WWC), it is estimated that in the year 2015 the number of people affected by this serious situation will increase to 3 500 billion people I'm probably going to get flamed for saying this but Castro is right and he isn't the only one who has come up with predictions like this although one can argue endlessly about what the scale of this problem will be. To be fair, people on the right wing of politics world wide, even some in the USA, also admit that this will be a problem. One factor that aggravates these water problems is that in many developing countries (Not all of them by any means) water consumption per capita tends to be rather high and this is often not due direct personal consumption by people but rather 'hidden' consumption due to various factors. Most of this has to do with dilapidated infrastructures that are not renewed or improperly maintained, government regulations that are not enforced, lack of inspection of industry and last but not least... corruption. I have heard (UN) figures of wastage in industrial processes being up to 30 times greater in some third world countries than it is in comparable industries in developed countries and other third world countries who have effective government policies on infrastructure renewal and management. Sooner or later we will see a war break out over water rights. The Israelis for example have been extremely aggressive when it comes to securing their access to water resources and are not likely to be very happy when they lose some of them to a Palestinian state since a lot of the water Israel uses, and which Israelis have greater access to, comes from areas occupied in the 1967 war and so would revert to Palestinian control. Other flash-points concern the damming of the Euphrates and the Nile. Egypt for example got pretty worked up a few years ago when a country up stream (Sudan IIRC) started investigating the possibility of damming the Nile.
Oh, and probably 3 out of ten iPod owners who think it would be cool to have their iPod and phone all in one.
And then there are the people who just have to have latest gadget. I'm an Apple computer user. I'd consider buying the iPhone despite the price-tag which I know put's a lot of other people off (I'm convinced we'll se an 'iPhone Nano' sooner or later). I use Apple's computers but I'm not one of the mythical 'faithful' who fall to their knees and worship every time they walk past an Apple logo. The way I see it, having an iPod and phone combined in one device would be kind of convenient but it doesn't make the iPhone a must-have device. From an Apple user's point of view, apart from the iPod-in-your-phone factor and the well designed and user friendly UI the chief selling points of the iPhone to Apple users is the seamless OS.X integration because most mobile phone manufacturers don't bother to make a PC connectivity suite for other OS'es than Windows. You will for example be able to update the iPhone, back it up and sync it perfectly with your Mac apps... all directly from OS.X. I have a Nokia phone at the moment and apart from syncing which mostly works (after I adapted a sync profile for another Nokia phone in a text editor and renamed it) I cannot update the firmware in my phone or back up the phone's OS and my data without running Nokia PC suite from Parallels which kind of sucks if you ask me. The iPhone probably won't be perfect though. I dislike the idea of non removable batteries and their life-span is supposedly going to be rather low. Additionally the fact that there will be no third party software available for the iPhone really puts me off.
Dell: Hello, can we help you?
Me: Hi, I am having some problems installing Linux on my new Dell laptop. I need some information about the video card so I can set up X.
Dell: Ok, umm
Me: Yes?
Dell: Ok, umm
Me: Uh... Phonetics??
Dell: Yes Phonetics... you know Lima, Indigo, November...
Me: Mmm... Ok... I don't know phonetics but I'll try... Lima, Indigo, November..... wait... let me seee.... http://www.google.com/
Dell: Excellent Sir! Now please spell out your full name and address, the model name of your Dell computer, it's serial code, the Linux operating system version and your corporate credentials... Using phonetics of course.
Me: All of it?
Dell: Yes, all of it.
Me: Is that necessary?
Dell: Yes Sir. In order to avoid any confusion about the origin of support calls Dell management has decided that all identifying information has to be spelled out by the customer using phonetics.
Me: Arrrghh... Very well then... Juliet, October, Hotel, Ummm..... let me see.... November, Delta, October, Echo.... Ummm.... Oh, fuck this..... **Hangs up**
Dell: Ahhhh... Yet another Linux support call successfully handled.
Me: Hmmmm.... let me see: http://groups.google.com/ comp->linux....
I actually had a conversation like this with a support guy (from Network solutions IIRC, it was a couple of years ago).
Who got the ball rollling on what eventually became the WTO? Wasn't it the USA with the original ITO proposal? Now the USA is finding out that it's not just others who have to play by WTO rules they also have to do so. In a sense the US Govt. shot it self in the foot when it comes to it's freedom to establish mechanisms for strong arming others over trade issues. Not that the EU is any better in this regard, it isn't. The USA likes to keep it's options open on doing things like the Byrd Amendment so one gets the feeling the whole WTO thing wasn't properly thought through in the USA because WTO has significant power to enforce its decisions through the authorization of trade sanctions. It's almost like somebody forgot to turn the WTO into a toothless tiger like the UN. The US Govt. probably can't help MS by trying to strong-arm the EU, at least not under WTO rules, and even if the US tries to strong-arm the EU over MS anyway it wouldn't be worth it since the result could easily be a nasty trade war which would hurt a whole lot more US companies that just MS.
</rant>
Monkeys on typewriters? Traditionally Microsoft hasn't asked anybody when their products weren't doing well. They simply set about either making life so difficult for any competitor and users of his products that the competitor's market share dwindled down to almost nothing or they simply eliminated the competition altogether which forced the consumers to buy Microsoft products. Whenever they couldn't do either of those two things their products often fail. Microsoft products comparatively rarely seem to enjoy huge success on their own merits. I'll admit that despite all the hullablaloo about the demise of Netscape IE was a better browser than Netscape 4.x. Not that IE was anything to cheer over, somewhere between versions 3 and 4 it simply began to suck less than Netscape did. Of course nowadays IE is pretty much beaten by Firefox and Safari (at least IMHO). The MS Office pack is also a fairly good product, after c.a. Office 97 or so it actually became usable for something more than writing letters and short essays!! Their OS and Server products, however, have generally either sucked or been uninspiring at best and their databases are nothing special. It remains to be seen how they do on the Mobile Phone market with their Windows Mobile where they compete against Mobile Phone OS products like Symbian and Linux, and the digital Music/Media market where they are up against the iPod. MS seems to be doing fairly well on the game console market although they haven't exactly succeeded in assimilating it completely into their collective.
...Having gone through this, I would feel comfortable starting with Postgres with an eye towards eventually migrating to Oracle when/if the situation warranted - it shouldn't be the huge IT migration nightmare some might fear. Although going back might be a little harder, depending on what Oracle features are used.The biggest part of the project was translating PL/pgSQL to PL/SQL, and I wrote some throwaway scripts to translate the subset that we used... I'd have to agree, that's pretty much the worst part of it all. Complex DB enabled applications tend to have a lot of PL/pgSQL or PL/SQL code which often makes use of custom features unique to the database. Another thing that often causes problems is when developers of code external to the DB, i.e. webapps, servlets, webservices writen in
Just my two (Euro) Cents.