True, but there are huge classes of applications which are tremendously useful, for which a failure is tolerable, and which are relatively easy to write. So I strongly favor the existence of languages which allow people to write code with only a few months training. And as a professional software developer/computer scientist, I don't feel threatened by it - I wouldn't want to write those applications. When they need something more complex or more robust, they'll come to me.
Severe ranting ahead, you have been waned...
That's just the problem, a lot of companies don't come to professionals when they need something more complex or robust. They usually start off hiring a bunch of amateurs who have no firm grasp of professional software design because they are cheap to employ and let them loose without proper supervision. These people cobble together some system that works, it doesn't work very stably, but by and large it works if you constantly monitor it and as long as it the system is still relatively small. This system gets maintained for a while and added to. These additions are usually badly designed or even worse, quick fixes intended to patch up problems that could have been avoided if the system had been properly designed in the first place. As I said before, while the system is still relatively small the bad design does not matter so much but as the system's complexity, the load the system is subjected to and it's importance to the company grow the instability and constant hiccups due to bad design begin to become a liability. This is usually the point the company finally decides to call in the professionals who are then confronted with a system that badly needs a complete rewrite and an employer who expects the necessary rewrite to be done in a couple of weeks and on a shoestring budget. My experience is that a lot of the time (not to be read as: **always**, there are companies out there who proper design work) the professionals are called in to clean up messes created by people who learned to write code with only a few months training. Way to many of the jobs I get involve cleaning up problems created by people who committed basic errors such as duplicating code all over the place instead of building it into class libraries and who didn't seem to be aware of the existence of nifty utilities like 'javadoc'/'doxygen' and 'subversion' or even revolutionary concepts like 'multi-line code comments'. Not that I am complaining mind you; the clumsiness of these badly trained developers and the frugality of the managers who hire them keeps me, a professional university educated software developer, employed but it's still a frustrating way to make a living because a lot of the crap I have to deal with could have been so easily avoided.
They throw Beowulf clusters of naked and petrified statues of Natalie Portman as hot grits run down their pants expect in Russia where they throw you when you're not welcoming your new overlords or when old people aren't using the Internet in Korea.
Dude.... I wanted a quiet gathering of a few friendly clichés not a whole cliché convention!
I built a reality simulator. You're living in it right now. Neat, huh?!
Your self are living in one of my own collection of home built reality simulators. I'll give you credit for being the only one of my simulated worlds to develop a reality simulator inside your simulation.
Greetings, Your Lord and Creator.
P.S. If you think that's strange you should see the 4D Holo-presentation I got the other day attatched to a subspace mail message. It's from a giant lizard like creature who claims that I am living on a planet in a miniature universe he carries in a little marble on his keychain....
More over, a house in suburbia is seen by enough people as sort of a birthright and enough people are just generally hostile to the idea of living in higher urban density areas even though it's really the only way to really reduce dependency on cars. People talk about transit which doesn't work well in suburbia because the spread out population means lots of buses that are mostly empty or else living too far from the bus routes for the bus to be useful. Metros and street cars are even less viable in spread out suburbs. Home delivery solves the problem to some degree, but you really can't organize cities around the idea of home delivery.
The following isn't an attempt to flame you, it's simply my own point of view. I don't regard a house in suburbia as a birth right, more as a necessity. Much as I would like to live relatively close to where I work, I would have to pay extortionate housing prices if I realized that ambition. I therefore bought an apartment that isn't even in the city suburbs but in a nearby township and I bought it because it had a low price-tag due to the distance it is from the city center and from the nearest mass transit access node. I ride an old mountain bike (which I fixed up and is in good nick but looks so ugly nobody has bothered to steal it so far) to the nearest station and ride a train to work. I do this as much to get a good dayly workout as I do it to save myself the not incosiderably costs of owning a car. I do agree with you that a family in Europe or N-America, living in the suburbs, needs at least one car. However, from my point of view, if I have to buy a car, the choice will be governed by fuel economy and low operating costs as much as anything else. If I ever get married I will buy some sort of fuel efficient 5 door hatchback for the wife and kids but I'll be damned if I buy a gas guzzling Mini-van and an SUV for myself to commute to work I'll stick with my bike. If I absolutely have to buy a second car for myself to commute to work I will buy some small fuel efficient car or a hybrid when they become affordable. I simply have a score of other things I'd like to spend my money on rather than automobile fuel bills.
Well, have you ever used an M16, notorious for it's tendency to jam, or an AK-47, famous for it's reliability? While the 5.56mm ammo of the M16 offers several advantages over the 7.62mm ammo of the AK-47, when it comes to reliability, the AK-47 wins hands down.
In my opinion the AK-47 wins hands down in just about any category except weight and accuracy. It's 7.62mm round has it's disadvantages. It is an old fashioned projectile derived form a pre WWI rifle round, it is big which increases magazine size which is a disadvantage when you are firing from a prone position. Complaints about inaccuracy are more down to the AK-47 it self than the 7.62 mm round it fires. You can also fit a lot more 5.56mm rounds into a mag the size of the one used by the AK-47 than you can fit 7.62 mm round in there. But the AK-47 and it's 7.62 mm round also has some advantages in urban fighting that the accurate M-16 and it's 5.56mm round does not have such as the ability to punch through slender trees, brick walls (up to a point) and other solid obstacles that would deflect, break up or stop a 5.56mm round. This was actually a problem for the British in N-Ireland with their FAL rifle which also fired a 7.62mm round because those rounds would routinely punch clean through brick walls and kill innocent civilians. In N-Ireland it was a defect but a full blown war this would be an advantage of course. Basically, in full blown urban fighting or if you are fighting in mountainous or wooded terrain where ranges are short and cover is plentiful the reliability and raw punch of the AK-47 is more valuable than the lightness and accuracy of the M-16. The M-16 is better if you are fighting in a place where there is lot's of civilians in the war zone mixed in with the insurgents and you want to avoid collateral casualties but it also is less effective as a pure combat rifle much of the rest of the time.
I note that they said: 'risks'... plural. Now, I won't pretend I know all of the risks Microsoft sees but the paranoid tin-foil-hat part of me would say that one of those risks is that they don't want OS.X and Linux users running Vista in a VM thus circumventing some of Microsoft's barriers, carefully crafted to prevent OS migration. My less paranoid side tells me they are simply trying to weasel out of having to provide tech support for (how many?) millions of users running Vista Home in a VM. If one calls the help center all they have to do is fall back on the old ' Well you see sir it's like this. If you read the EULA that came with your copy of Windows Vista Home edition you will see that....." routine. It will certainly be interesting to see if Vista Home will actually refuse to boot in a VM or whether this is only a cost limiting exercise.
Honestly I find the prevalence of cameras mounted to buildings for policing (such as those found across London) to be more disturbing. It seems more okay when you're using cameras to document the course of a police officer's work.
Don't you think that in the end all those trips to the donut shop would get boring? The endless conversations about hemorrhoids would definetly be disturbing....
1. I use BlueTooth on daily basis to sync my phone with Mac. One day the BT just stopped working with dialog "It does not work". Easy, intuitive.
Never happened to me. I'll freely admit that OS.X does spit out non in formative error messages but then again so does eh... Windows.
2. My Mac can't connect to WPA2 protected wifi network. Windows machines (my friend's mind you) and Linux (my ThinkPad laptop) have no problems with my Linksys router. Mac will just say "Cannot connect to {foo} network" just this. Easy, intuitive, simple.
Eh???? Even my old G4 Powerbook handled WPA2 in a large variety of localities. As for Windows machines being superior in this regard a large number of budget Windows laptops could only handle WEP until fairly recently.
3. I find it annoying that once in a time some update causes other things to stop work. Especially when you run more complicated setup than just ussing crappy iLife and iChat. And then comming after the stupid flaw and banging my head against keyboard thinking about what stupid decission Apple made this time is time saving really. And easy too!
And this never happens in Windows?
4. Finder is full of annoying bugs. F.e. once in a time (I recall I encounter it at least few times a week) some window just can't be minimized or maximised. The buttons for minimise/maximise don't work till Finder restart.
5. Another annoyung Finder bug is that when I copy a folder from other computer (via NFS or when you unpack archive) to my Mac often it is marked as empty dir (but It is not empty!) and I cannot access it contents (it displays empty in Finder). When I open Terminal.app and do ls on that folder magically it is then not empty for Finder. Intuitive, easy, time saving.
Finder, much like the Windows Explorer is a steaming pile of annoyances.... end of discussion!
6. There is no way to have NFS or SMB share mounted on system startup (nor login) in a way that is visible from Finder. You can do manual mount with mount command or/etc/fstab but then it is not visible via Finder (in sidebar, on desktop). So each time I login I need to mount my shares MANUALLY. Time saving, compared to Linux autofs feature.:)
Never needed the feature so I can't really comment. SMB does stink on non MS operating systems and it only somewhat stinks less on Window. Whether that the fault of Apple or the OSS community in the case of Linux is another matter... personally I blame the fact that SMB sucks squarely on MS.
7. Oh and mounting NFS share with Finder is retarded since it mounts NFS share with the most retarded options you can imagine. So when netwok goes down (oh did I mention that this Mac sometimes looses wifi connection with no explanation?) all programs (including the Finder) freeze. Easy.
One more time... Finder, much like the Windows Explorer is a steaming pile of annoyances.... end of discussion!
Nokia has some nice features, but as the article correctly posits, the interfaces are simply hideous.
I own a Nokia E series phone which I use among other things as an organizer. In my opinion the design of the E-series is pretty nice from a hardware standpoint. The phone is ergonomically well designed and compact. What most irritates me about this phone is not so much the complicated interface but rather the other thing the article pointed out which is **core features** that are either lacking or badly designed. And by **core features** I mean telephony, E-mail and SMS communications software and organizer software. My Nokia GSM phone now does indeed try to do too many things poorly. I would like to be able to postpone events with a couple of key presses not five or six, organize to-do notes into categories depending on which project they belong to, I would like not to have to jump through hoops to get a VPN connection to work and most of all I would like easy synchronization ability with all major E-mail systems to ship with the phone for free and a cross platform computer client software wouldn't hurt either since not everybody runs Windows. I had to download sync software for Exchange separately, it wasn't preloaded. Come to think of it the Exchange sync client wasn't even available until a couple of weeks after I bought the phone. My employer has now switched to Lotus and as is I can't easily sync my phone against the company Lotus severs, especially the all important calendar, and even if I could I still need the ability to easily set up a VPN connection where Nokia scores a big fat zero. Say what you will about Windows Mobile, my experience was that it was constantly crashing and usually whiped my phone clean in doing so but it didn't have half of the flaws in it's core features my Nokia phone has. Nokia is losing sight of the fact that people buy GSM phones firstly for Telephony, secondly for E-mail and SMS communications and thirdly for use as organizers. Everything else is a bonus.
My favorite is still the intern who accidentally typed 'rm -rf / home/user' as root. The machine wasn't very important and the data was restorable from tape but it was still pretty funny to see the look on his face when he realized what he had done.
That's quite a sum. To put it into perspective, the CAP budget for 2005 (CAP=Common Agricultural Policy, think of it as a big black hole that eats money) was €43 billion.
With Free/Open Source Software, you are free to upgrade the applications with the OS, and it's the distros' business to make it work.
In an enterprise Environment isn't always as simple as upgrading to the latest bleeding edge Linux, downloading the newest software versions, compiling, installing, uploading your configs and scripts and everything works flawlessly. That's the point TFA was making. Unless your distro is 100% backwards compatible (ok, 90% compatible, there are always problems) back to, say... the 2.2 kernel many corporations won't take Linux seriously as a solution because the cost of debugging the problems that accompany each upgrade because of broken compatibility issues would be prohibitive. Today some Enterprise grade Linux distro's offer this kind of a guarantee, at least up to a point. So if you have ever wondered why people shell out all that money for RedHat SuSE and Co and their Enterprise quality distributions when they can download Slackware for free, that's **one** of the reasons why. While they may not be on the bleeding edge technologically or perform as well some other distributions, the stability and continuity these Enterprise distros offer reduces costs appreciably.
Do they realize that they are implicitly suggesting that Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Even if this is true (and I will not comment one way or another), I think they can kiss your careers goodbye.
What you seem to be implicitly suggesting is that those scientists are implicitly suggesting that Africans are less intelligent that Europeans because they have smaller brains which means that you would be equating brain size with intelligence. However, in science it is well known that brain-size != intelligence if it did whales would be the most intelligent animal on the planet. Intelligence in Humans appears to be governed more by the structure and 'wiring' of the brain than it is governed by size. So I think we can conclude that there are probably no racial undertones in this discovery although I don't doubt that ignorant extremists of all denominations will jump all over this data in an attempt to prove their racist theories. The question is: should we keep a lid on scientific discoveries because they might be used by morons to re-enforce their idiotic theories about the superiority of their own race over others?
To quote TFA:
"The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function," Lahn said.
That sounds to me as if the discovering scientist is saying that this gene gives marginal benefits at best. What is mostly interesting about this discovery is that it is yet another hard-to-ignore hint that Neanderthals and Modern Humans may have interbred. This is something that many scientists have vehemently denied could possibly have happened despite the complete absence of evidence to prove the validity of that denial and despite the fact that species with greater degrees of evolutionary separation than Modern Humans and Neanderthals are known to be able to interbreed.
... this is probably more about kick-starting the Asian airliner industry...
China is already making good headway in the market for small to medium sized turboprop airliners and transports so quite frankly my money is on the Chinese in that particular race. Their aviation industry is more mature than that of India and has proven it self to be able to tackle more sophisticated projects. The same goes for the Russians. Strangely enough, while they took large chunks of the automobile and shipping markets by storm, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans seem especially interested in competing on the medium to top end of the jet airliner market.
My fellow Americans, our only option is clear: We need to preemptively invade the sun.
We regret to inform you Mr. President that the invasion plans will have to be put on hold as we are experiencing extreme development problems with the fleet of coal powered inter planetary invasion shuttles Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insisted we develop to carry the invasion force. We would furthermore like to reiterate our previous advice that persuade Mr. Rumsfeld to consider the use of a more conventional power source.
Even going by the price difference, the situation is different. The salesman cannot sell the stolen bottle of liquor; but the record store can still sell a CD to someone willing (and able) to pay the retail price, because nobody was deprived of a physical item. You just can't use normal "theft" logic when dealing with copyright infringement.
That is true, you can't download unlicensed copies of expensive bottles of luxury liquor off the internet, so theft!=piracy. However, the following logic: 'Baloney! The only reason for piracy is to get something you're not willing to pay for. If they were willing to pay for it then they would have paid for it, BUT THEY DIDN'T because THEY WERENT!', doesn't hold water either. Many people who pirate software, music, movies etc. are quite often people who can afford to buy this material. The reason they pirate this material is because they have plenty of opportunity to do so, there is little chance of getting caught and punished and they save some money to spend on other things. If somebody created a completely fool-proof anti piracy technology and all software/multi-media-content were to use it starting tomorrow a certain percentage of pirate consumers would start to reluctantly pay for the kind material they previously pirated. I simply don't buy the logic that 100% of the people who pirate are also people who can neither afford the pirated material and wouldn't buy it if they couldn't resort to piracy. This may apply to a certain percentage of the software and multi media content pirating public but by no means 100% of them. Basically, however hard you try to rationalize and justify software and multi media content piracy as a practice that doesn't hurt anybody, there is and always will be somebody who loses revenue. You can argue about how large that loss of revenue is but the fact that it happens is indisputable. Of course the assumption that 100% of pirates are people that would otherwise buy *all* the software/multi-media-content they pirate and that *every instance* of piracy represents a lost sale doesn't hold water either. Neither one of these extremes holds water, the truth is somewhere in-between them.
I'm more interested in how hot these things run.. my old Core Duo MBP runs so hot I can't even use it on my lap, and the fan emits a really annoying loud, high-pitched whine. This computer is actually physically painful to use.
Take it back to the shop and have the motherboard replaced. Since I had this done to my MBP it runs noticably cooler.
Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.
Take this with a grain of salt since I'm no sysadmin but from what my friends in that line of business who operate big Win2k and Win2k3 servers tell me, PHP and IIS & Co. don't get along all that well at high loads on Windows server systems or at least not as well as you would expect in an enterprise environment where zero downtime is a must. I suppose this is, at least partly, an effort to increase the reliability/stability of the PHP+IIS combination and not just about adding features for programmers. Security enhancements and integration with Vista Server may also be part of this effort.
I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!
They certify that Oracle products will install trouble free on Red Hat and SUSE Linux Enterprise level distributions (Fedora and OpenSUSE not included) and all the installations I have done one these Linux distributions have indeed gone without a hitch. I have also tried to install Oracle on Fedora and it usually goes trouble free but not by any means always. If you really desperately don't want to pay for an Enterprise quality SUSE or Red Hat license you can achieve most of the benefits of an Oracle certified enterprise Linux distro but without paying for the privilege by using something like Centos which is binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise distros but if you do decide to run Oracle software on an uncertified Linux distro then you are on your own. There is a reason Oracle doesn't certify Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server or other Oracle products for Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and the entire remainder of the Legion of Linux distributions out there and I can easily understand why since if Oracle certified their entire product range for every single Linux distro the growth in support requests would be enormous. The moral of the story is that if you want to build a Production system and run someting like an Oracle DB or AS stably and achieve high uptimes and long MBTF rates you had better run your Oracle DB or AS on a certified distribution, not your un-certified pet distribution. Of course now that Larry is at war with Red Hat perhaps the certification list will change a little... Ubuntu perhaps???
You've addressed none of the substantive criticisms from the grandparent. What he's arguing and what you're arguing are not necessarily incompatible.
I take it you mean this?
I thought about moving to Italy once. Actually, I lived there for several years while working for an American company. When I looked at my Italian counterparts, I thought about having a go at it.
Then I found out they pay almost 50% income tax. On top of that, there is a 20% VAT on most items. On top of that, gasoline was almost $5 per gallon (a few years ago...almost certainly more now).
The high taxes were there to support their social services. Free medical. Free dental. Good unemployment and retirement. Almost no chance of getting fired. 6-hour work days and 30-days of vacation. Virtually no concept of sexual harassment or workplace misconduct.
Then you realize that the social services suck. Want a painkiller for your broken leg? Tough. Want an annual dental checkup? Tough. Want a cop to investigate repeated break-ins? Tough.
Europe is great if you are young or unemployed. Europe sucks if you actually want to make something of yourself through hard work.
Personally, I couldn't live if I worked 6 days a week knowing I'd only get 3-days pay after taxes just so some 22-yo punk could sit in the park all day and smoke pot. -- I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The Italians have their own culture that works for them and I respect that but Italy is not exactly the country that sets the standard for the rest of Europe. Another thing to consider is that most European countries do not have an income tax percentage of 50%, it's usually between 30-45%, at least in those European countries with a sane government but there are exceptions such as Sweden where they tend to take taxing to extremes. The sales tax varies according to the type of product you are buying, it is usually higher for luxury goods and it is not always 20% plus. I have lived in 5 European countries and nowhere was a working day of 6 hours the national norm. Myself I usually work 9 and occasionally 10 hours per day and sometimes on weekends as well. As for there being no concept of sexual harassment that is also not true, most European countries have legislation for this but once again Italy is not the best country to take as an example if you are the type of person who takes the slightest hint of sexual harassment as deadly seriously as I know many Americans do. As for there being fewer cops per crime committed than is needed in European countries, it seems to me this is not only a European problem since my American friends manage to complain about the apathy of their own American police forces with just as much vigor as my European friends. There is a core of truth to what the OP says, taxes in Europe are usually higher than in the US and gasoline taxes are levied for environmental reasons which is a concept that doesn't seem to exist in the USA these days but that post is is also wildly exaggerated in some places. Basically, if you want to live abroad you had better get used to the fact that the entire rest of the world is not like the USA. If you can't get over the fact that foreign cultures are not 100% carbon copies of the USA and that not everybody speaks and writes flawless American English you should stay at home and wrap your self in an American flag.
Why nost just have two mouse-buttons instead of having workarounds like "put two fingers on the trackpad and click" or "push Ctrl and then click"? Why resort on awkward workarounds?
I don't regard it as a workaround but rather as an innovative alternative to the two button layout. In fact Apple's solution is in this case IMHO a pretty practical way of getting the secondary mouse button functionality and in my experience it works 100% reliably and is just as convenient as a secondary mouse button. I do realize it's not to everybody's taste to depart from the norm but then again I am not the kind of person who prefers one and only one exact style of keyboard/pointing-device. I know people who are so militant these things that they refuse to buy certain brands of laptop-computers because they don't like the pointing device or the keyboard layout. Personally I don't give a sh*t, I find it pretty easy to migrate from a regular keyboard to an ergonomic one (as long as the layout is a QWERTY variant) and from a Logitech mouse to an Apple Mighty Mouse, an IBM style Track-point, a regular Track-pad or even a Trackball. It never takes me more than an hour to get used to a new device although it would probably take me a few days to get used to a radically different keyboard layout like Dvorak but even that wouldn't bother me a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Severe ranting ahead, you have been waned...
That's just the problem, a lot of companies don't come to professionals when they need something more complex or robust. They usually start off hiring a bunch of amateurs who have no firm grasp of professional software design because they are cheap to employ and let them loose without proper supervision. These people cobble together some system that works, it doesn't work very stably, but by and large it works if you constantly monitor it and as long as it the system is still relatively small. This system gets maintained for a while and added to. These additions are usually badly designed or even worse, quick fixes intended to patch up problems that could have been avoided if the system had been properly designed in the first place. As I said before, while the system is still relatively small the bad design does not matter so much but as the system's complexity, the load the system is subjected to and it's importance to the company grow the instability and constant hiccups due to bad design begin to become a liability. This is usually the point the company finally decides to call in the professionals who are then confronted with a system that badly needs a complete rewrite and an employer who expects the necessary rewrite to be done in a couple of weeks and on a shoestring budget. My experience is that a lot of the time (not to be read as: **always**, there are companies out there who proper design work) the professionals are called in to clean up messes created by people who learned to write code with only a few months training. Way to many of the jobs I get involve cleaning up problems created by people who committed basic errors such as duplicating code all over the place instead of building it into class libraries and who didn't seem to be aware of the existence of nifty utilities like 'javadoc'/'doxygen' and 'subversion' or even revolutionary concepts like 'multi-line code comments'. Not that I am complaining mind you; the clumsiness of these badly trained developers and the frugality of the managers who hire them keeps me, a professional university educated software developer, employed but it's still a frustrating way to make a living because a lot of the crap I have to deal with could have been so easily avoided.
Dude.... I wanted a quiet gathering of a few friendly clichés not a whole cliché convention!
Gee.. that's a surprise! I always thought Microsoft fended off attackers by throwing chairs at them...
There... now your cliché isn't lonely any more...
That depends.... Was it wearing an astronaut's suit?
Your self are living in one of my own collection of home built reality simulators. I'll give you credit for being the only one of my simulated worlds to develop a reality simulator inside your simulation.
Greetings,
Your Lord and Creator.
P.S. If you think that's strange you should see the 4D Holo-presentation I got the other day attatched to a subspace mail message. It's from a giant lizard like creature who claims that I am living on a planet in a miniature universe he carries in a little marble on his keychain....
The following isn't an attempt to flame you, it's simply my own point of view. I don't regard a house in suburbia as a birth right, more as a necessity. Much as I would like to live relatively close to where I work, I would have to pay extortionate housing prices if I realized that ambition. I therefore bought an apartment that isn't even in the city suburbs but in a nearby township and I bought it because it had a low price-tag due to the distance it is from the city center and from the nearest mass transit access node. I ride an old mountain bike (which I fixed up and is in good nick but looks so ugly nobody has bothered to steal it so far) to the nearest station and ride a train to work. I do this as much to get a good dayly workout as I do it to save myself the not incosiderably costs of owning a car. I do agree with you that a family in Europe or N-America, living in the suburbs, needs at least one car. However, from my point of view, if I have to buy a car, the choice will be governed by fuel economy and low operating costs as much as anything else. If I ever get married I will buy some sort of fuel efficient 5 door hatchback for the wife and kids but I'll be damned if I buy a gas guzzling Mini-van and an SUV for myself to commute to work I'll stick with my bike. If I absolutely have to buy a second car for myself to commute to work I will buy some small fuel efficient car or a hybrid when they become affordable. I simply have a score of other things I'd like to spend my money on rather than automobile fuel bills.
In my opinion the AK-47 wins hands down in just about any category except weight and accuracy. It's 7.62mm round has it's disadvantages. It is an old fashioned projectile derived form a pre WWI rifle round, it is big which increases magazine size which is a disadvantage when you are firing from a prone position. Complaints about inaccuracy are more down to the AK-47 it self than the 7.62 mm round it fires. You can also fit a lot more 5.56mm rounds into a mag the size of the one used by the AK-47 than you can fit 7.62 mm round in there. But the AK-47 and it's 7.62 mm round also has some advantages in urban fighting that the accurate M-16 and it's 5.56mm round does not have such as the ability to punch through slender trees, brick walls (up to a point) and other solid obstacles that would deflect, break up or stop a 5.56mm round. This was actually a problem for the British in N-Ireland with their FAL rifle which also fired a 7.62mm round because those rounds would routinely punch clean through brick walls and kill innocent civilians. In N-Ireland it was a defect but a full blown war this would be an advantage of course. Basically, in full blown urban fighting or if you are fighting in mountainous or wooded terrain where ranges are short and cover is plentiful the reliability and raw punch of the AK-47 is more valuable than the lightness and accuracy of the M-16. The M-16 is better if you are fighting in a place where there is lot's of civilians in the war zone mixed in with the insurgents and you want to avoid collateral casualties but it also is less effective as a pure combat rifle much of the rest of the time.
I note that they said: 'risks'... plural. Now, I won't pretend I know all of the risks Microsoft sees but the paranoid tin-foil-hat part of me would say that one of those risks is that they don't want OS.X and Linux users running Vista in a VM thus circumventing some of Microsoft's barriers, carefully crafted to prevent OS migration. My less paranoid side tells me they are simply trying to weasel out of having to provide tech support for (how many?) millions of users running Vista Home in a VM. If one calls the help center all they have to do is fall back on the old ' Well you see sir it's like this. If you read the EULA that came with your copy of Windows Vista Home edition you will see that....." routine. It will certainly be interesting to see if Vista Home will actually refuse to boot in a VM or whether this is only a cost limiting exercise.
Won't those project either bog down in a Democrat controlled congress or get axed completely if the Dems get a President in next time?
Don't you think that in the end all those trips to the donut shop would get boring? The endless conversations about hemorrhoids would definetly be disturbing....
Never happened to me. I'll freely admit that OS.X does spit out non in formative error messages but then again so does eh... Windows.
Eh???? Even my old G4 Powerbook handled WPA2 in a large variety of localities. As for Windows machines being superior in this regard a large number of budget Windows laptops could only handle WEP until fairly recently.
And this never happens in Windows?
Finder, much like the Windows Explorer is a steaming pile of annoyances.... end of discussion!
Never needed the feature so I can't really comment. SMB does stink on non MS operating systems and it only somewhat stinks less on Window. Whether that the fault of Apple or the OSS community in the case of Linux is another matter... personally I blame the fact that SMB sucks squarely on MS.
One more time... Finder, much like the Windows Explorer is a steaming pile of annoyances.... end of discussion!
Nokia has some nice features, but as the article correctly posits, the interfaces are simply hideous.
I own a Nokia E series phone which I use among other things as an organizer. In my opinion the design of the E-series is pretty nice from a hardware standpoint. The phone is ergonomically well designed and compact. What most irritates me about this phone is not so much the complicated interface but rather the other thing the article pointed out which is **core features** that are either lacking or badly designed. And by **core features** I mean telephony, E-mail and SMS communications software and organizer software. My Nokia GSM phone now does indeed try to do too many things poorly. I would like to be able to postpone events with a couple of key presses not five or six, organize to-do notes into categories depending on which project they belong to, I would like not to have to jump through hoops to get a VPN connection to work and most of all I would like easy synchronization ability with all major E-mail systems to ship with the phone for free and a cross platform computer client software wouldn't hurt either since not everybody runs Windows. I had to download sync software for Exchange separately, it wasn't preloaded. Come to think of it the Exchange sync client wasn't even available until a couple of weeks after I bought the phone. My employer has now switched to Lotus and as is I can't easily sync my phone against the company Lotus severs, especially the all important calendar, and even if I could I still need the ability to easily set up a VPN connection where Nokia scores a big fat zero. Say what you will about Windows Mobile, my experience was that it was constantly crashing and usually whiped my phone clean in doing so but it didn't have half of the flaws in it's core features my Nokia phone has. Nokia is losing sight of the fact that people buy GSM phones firstly for Telephony, secondly for E-mail and SMS communications and thirdly for use as organizers. Everything else is a bonus.
My favorite is still the intern who accidentally typed 'rm -rf / home/user' as root. The machine wasn't very important and the data was restorable from tape but it was still pretty funny to see the look on his face when he realized what he had done.
That's quite a sum. To put it into perspective, the CAP budget for 2005 (CAP=Common Agricultural Policy, think of it as a big black hole that eats money) was €43 billion.
With Free/Open Source Software, you are free to upgrade the applications with the OS, and it's the distros' business to make it work.
In an enterprise Environment isn't always as simple as upgrading to the latest bleeding edge Linux, downloading the newest software versions, compiling, installing, uploading your configs and scripts and everything works flawlessly. That's the point TFA was making. Unless your distro is 100% backwards compatible (ok, 90% compatible, there are always problems) back to, say... the 2.2 kernel many corporations won't take Linux seriously as a solution because the cost of debugging the problems that accompany each upgrade because of broken compatibility issues would be prohibitive. Today some Enterprise grade Linux distro's offer this kind of a guarantee, at least up to a point. So if you have ever wondered why people shell out all that money for RedHat SuSE and Co and their Enterprise quality distributions when they can download Slackware for free, that's **one** of the reasons why. While they may not be on the bleeding edge technologically or perform as well some other distributions, the stability and continuity these Enterprise distros offer reduces costs appreciably.
What you seem to be implicitly suggesting is that those scientists are implicitly suggesting that Africans are less intelligent that Europeans because they have smaller brains which means that you would be equating brain size with intelligence. However, in science it is well known that brain-size != intelligence if it did whales would be the most intelligent animal on the planet. Intelligence in Humans appears to be governed more by the structure and 'wiring' of the brain than it is governed by size. So I think we can conclude that there are probably no racial undertones in this discovery although I don't doubt that ignorant extremists of all denominations will jump all over this data in an attempt to prove their racist theories. The question is: should we keep a lid on scientific discoveries because they might be used by morons to re-enforce their idiotic theories about the superiority of their own race over others?
To quote TFA:
"The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function," Lahn said.
That sounds to me as if the discovering scientist is saying that this gene gives marginal benefits at best. What is mostly interesting about this discovery is that it is yet another hard-to-ignore hint that Neanderthals and Modern Humans may have interbred. This is something that many scientists have vehemently denied could possibly have happened despite the complete absence of evidence to prove the validity of that denial and despite the fact that species with greater degrees of evolutionary separation than Modern Humans and Neanderthals are known to be able to interbreed.
China is already making good headway in the market for small to medium sized turboprop airliners and transports so quite frankly my money is on the Chinese in that particular race. Their aviation industry is more mature than that of India and has proven it self to be able to tackle more sophisticated projects. The same goes for the Russians. Strangely enough, while they took large chunks of the automobile and shipping markets by storm, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans seem especially interested in competing on the medium to top end of the jet airliner market.
We regret to inform you Mr. President that the invasion plans will have to be put on hold as we are experiencing extreme development problems with the fleet of coal powered inter planetary invasion shuttles Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insisted we develop to carry the invasion force. We would furthermore like to reiterate our previous advice that persuade Mr. Rumsfeld to consider the use of a more conventional power source.
Respectfully
NASA
That is true, you can't download unlicensed copies of expensive bottles of luxury liquor off the internet, so theft!=piracy. However, the following logic: 'Baloney! The only reason for piracy is to get something you're not willing to pay for. If they were willing to pay for it then they would have paid for it, BUT THEY DIDN'T because THEY WERENT!', doesn't hold water either. Many people who pirate software, music, movies etc. are quite often people who can afford to buy this material. The reason they pirate this material is because they have plenty of opportunity to do so, there is little chance of getting caught and punished and they save some money to spend on other things. If somebody created a completely fool-proof anti piracy technology and all software/multi-media-content were to use it starting tomorrow a certain percentage of pirate consumers would start to reluctantly pay for the kind material they previously pirated. I simply don't buy the logic that 100% of the people who pirate are also people who can neither afford the pirated material and wouldn't buy it if they couldn't resort to piracy. This may apply to a certain percentage of the software and multi media content pirating public but by no means 100% of them. Basically, however hard you try to rationalize and justify software and multi media content piracy as a practice that doesn't hurt anybody, there is and always will be somebody who loses revenue. You can argue about how large that loss of revenue is but the fact that it happens is indisputable. Of course the assumption that 100% of pirates are people that would otherwise buy *all* the software/multi-media-content they pirate and that *every instance* of piracy represents a lost sale doesn't hold water either. Neither one of these extremes holds water, the truth is somewhere in-between them.
I'm more interested in how hot these things run.. my old Core Duo MBP runs so hot I can't even use it on my lap, and the fan emits a really annoying loud, high-pitched whine. This computer is actually physically painful to use.
Take it back to the shop and have the motherboard replaced. Since I had this done to my MBP it runs noticably cooler.
Jes... änd we were böth näked.... *wink* *wink*
Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.
Take this with a grain of salt since I'm no sysadmin but from what my friends in that line of business who operate big Win2k and Win2k3 servers tell me, PHP and IIS & Co. don't get along all that well at high loads on Windows server systems or at least not as well as you would expect in an enterprise environment where zero downtime is a must. I suppose this is, at least partly, an effort to increase the reliability/stability of the PHP+IIS combination and not just about adding features for programmers. Security enhancements and integration with Vista Server may also be part of this effort.
I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!
They certify that Oracle products will install trouble free on Red Hat and SUSE Linux Enterprise level distributions (Fedora and OpenSUSE not included) and all the installations I have done one these Linux distributions have indeed gone without a hitch. I have also tried to install Oracle on Fedora and it usually goes trouble free but not by any means always. If you really desperately don't want to pay for an Enterprise quality SUSE or Red Hat license you can achieve most of the benefits of an Oracle certified enterprise Linux distro but without paying for the privilege by using something like Centos which is binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise distros but if you do decide to run Oracle software on an uncertified Linux distro then you are on your own. There is a reason Oracle doesn't certify Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server or other Oracle products for Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and the entire remainder of the Legion of Linux distributions out there and I can easily understand why since if Oracle certified their entire product range for every single Linux distro the growth in support requests would be enormous. The moral of the story is that if you want to build a Production system and run someting like an Oracle DB or AS stably and achieve high uptimes and long MBTF rates you had better run your Oracle DB or AS on a certified distribution, not your un-certified pet distribution. Of course now that Larry is at war with Red Hat perhaps the certification list will change a little... Ubuntu perhaps???
Gentlemen! Flame away...........
I take it you mean this?
The Italians have their own culture that works for them and I respect that but Italy is not exactly the country that sets the standard for the rest of Europe. Another thing to consider is that most European countries do not have an income tax percentage of 50%, it's usually between 30-45%, at least in those European countries with a sane government but there are exceptions such as Sweden where they tend to take taxing to extremes. The sales tax varies according to the type of product you are buying, it is usually higher for luxury goods and it is not always 20% plus. I have lived in 5 European countries and nowhere was a working day of 6 hours the national norm. Myself I usually work 9 and occasionally 10 hours per day and sometimes on weekends as well. As for there being no concept of sexual harassment that is also not true, most European countries have legislation for this but once again Italy is not the best country to take as an example if you are the type of person who takes the slightest hint of sexual harassment as deadly seriously as I know many Americans do. As for there being fewer cops per crime committed than is needed in European countries, it seems to me this is not only a European problem since my American friends manage to complain about the apathy of their own American police forces with just as much vigor as my European friends. There is a core of truth to what the OP says, taxes in Europe are usually higher than in the US and gasoline taxes are levied for environmental reasons which is a concept that doesn't seem to exist in the USA these days but that post is is also wildly exaggerated in some places. Basically, if you want to live abroad you had better get used to the fact that the entire rest of the world is not like the USA. If you can't get over the fact that foreign cultures are not 100% carbon copies of the USA and that not everybody speaks and writes flawless American English you should stay at home and wrap your self in an American flag.
Why nost just have two mouse-buttons instead of having workarounds like "put two fingers on the trackpad and click" or "push Ctrl and then click"? Why resort on awkward workarounds?
I don't regard it as a workaround but rather as an innovative alternative to the two button layout. In fact Apple's solution is in this case IMHO a pretty practical way of getting the secondary mouse button functionality and in my experience it works 100% reliably and is just as convenient as a secondary mouse button. I do realize it's not to everybody's taste to depart from the norm but then again I am not the kind of person who prefers one and only one exact style of keyboard/pointing-device. I know people who are so militant these things that they refuse to buy certain brands of laptop-computers because they don't like the pointing device or the keyboard layout. Personally I don't give a sh*t, I find it pretty easy to migrate from a regular keyboard to an ergonomic one (as long as the layout is a QWERTY variant) and from a Logitech mouse to an Apple Mighty Mouse, an IBM style Track-point, a regular Track-pad or even a Trackball. It never takes me more than an hour to get used to a new device although it would probably take me a few days to get used to a radically different keyboard layout like Dvorak but even that wouldn't bother me a bit.