The Enterprise licensing operates differently. Apparently you install a licensing server at your business and point the clients to that rather than pointing at Microsoft's servers.
Many small and medium sized companies don't use Enterprise licenses. In my experience they typically buy Dell/HP/IBM or just some noname PC boxen from the local computer store that offers the best price and use whatever version of Windows is pre-installed. This type of customer makes up a significant part of the Windows user base. I know for a fact that these types of companies are already getting pretty annoyed with WGA false positives. I have had to deal with two of those myself, at the same company (as a favor to a friend), on Dell PCs running a perfectly legitimate Windows instance. It will be interesting to see how these companies react when they replace a batch of, say... 10-12 worn out WinXP PCs out of their pool of say... 40 PCs with Windows Vista boxen and discover that the familiar "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting... blah... blah..." nag-screens have been replaced by Microsoft crippling the machine forcing them to make a call to Microsoft to get a new license key where some pimple faced Microsoft support worker will make them jump through hoops to prove they are not thieves. With any kind of luck this will cause Microsoft to finally hit the limits of how blatantly they can abuse their monopoly.
You can't: Connect to the internet, Download songs directly from the Zune store via WiFi, Sync to your computer via WiFi.
I'll say it again, Microsoft killed this product before they even launched it. Those are exactly the features people expected from a WIFI enabled MP3 player. An iPod that is at least syncable with a PC via some high speed wireless link (not to mention one that has iTunes built in) is something I'd buy in a heartbeat. Of course MS could always issue an update and fix these points but knowing Microsoft that will take forever and a day.
Apple will snarl and bite yet another hand. Anyone that thinks Apple is consumer friendly is an idiot.
They'll do more than snarl and bite. I just saw a bunch of sinister looking stealth UAV's loaded to capacity with Norvegian-nerd-seeking lawyer-missiles and Apple logos painted on their wings jetting off from our local Air Force base. They were heading in the direction of San Francisco.
"Two words: iPod and iTunes..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited" Actually those are really bad examples. the Ipod wasn't close to the first music player. ITunes wasn't the first online music store. Apple just really did a great job of taking two existing ideas and implementing them well. What the guy missed was. "Great ideas will not make you rich. Great implementation of great ideas will make you rich."
That is pretty much what I was trying to point out although I should have used the term 'under exploited' in the same breath as iPod and iTunes in stead of 'unexploited'. There is relatively little difference between finding an unexploited market niche and finding an under exploited one. Both offer more or less the same chances of success if you just do some market research to find the right combination of features that will sell. There had been plenty of people setting up online music stores and building MP3 players before Apple went into that business. Yet nobody took notice of the point which the author of TFA rightly pointed out: The first priority of any business is to 'do market research and then give the customer what he/she wants' which in the case of Apple and the iPod/iTunes offering was a simple, stylish, easy-to-use MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage and a tightly integrated online music store all wrapped in a nice little affordable package. I think Apple succeeded so brilliantly precisely because they were new to the online musicstore and MP3 player businesses and saw a way to combine those two things into a winning product that the 'old hands' already established in those businesses couldn't see.
Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there's no money to be made...
He should take a look at a company called Microsoft. Creating a no-competition environment seems to have worked out well for them.
...There are six billion people on this planet, and it's very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.
Two words: iPod and iTunes..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited and the funny part is that most of them are so bloody obvious that most people manage to overlook them.
5. Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
6. I could be wrong on any or all of the above.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every so often to follow the jobs since I am not married and have no kids. I'd even move to India if I had to even if I hate the climate (as in: weather) down there. Unfortunately not everybody is as willing or as able as we are to uproot their wife and kids every 2-3 years pack their belongings into a 20ft container and travel around the world with a big smile on their face in a cheerful quest to adapt to the latest fashion trend in the fabulous outsourcing biz. Unfortunately it looks as if this lifestyle will become a necessity for a lot of people unless they are willing to settle for a relatively menial job back home.
I think you just hit the nail right on the head. CEOs and marketing types want the latest, "greatest", buzzword-compliant software. Old standbys are no longer will probably work just as well, maybe better, but they aren't cool. Actually, geeks aren't immune to this problem either. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason.
<sarcasm> So what you are saying is that after C, C++ and a number of other golden-oldie technologies have gone through the process, Java has now also become mature enough to be declared to be 'dying' by the buzzword junkies? </sarcasm>
But on a more serious note this dude coachwei has a point, best practices is a concept that is pretty much non existent in a lot of places and that is not just true of AJAX. There are times I wish that more Java webapp developers knew why it is important to write thread safe code and what polymorphism and inheritance are useful for.
I won't buy an iPod because I really want the FM radio built in. I won't buy a Zune because of the way it looks.
Whichever one improves first will most likely be the one I'll get.
Why wait? Just buy one of each and encourage them to breed. With any kind of luck you will end up with one or more Zunes that look like iPods and have a cool red/green/blue/yellow colored apple logo printed on the back. You could call them: iZunes.
If it really came down to it, with all out war between the USA and a closely matched opponent, the USA has a ton more sticks to use than anyone else. Big flying ones that make the ground glow.
Nukes? Even Israel and Pakistan have nukes and it seems that soon Iran will have those as well. Don't you think the US might hesitate to be the one to start a full blown nuclear exchange? I'd be really surprised to see the US use nukes unless it was in response to a nuclear first strike by somebody else. The mere suggestion, not that long ago, by US officials that they were considering the implications of use micro-nukes as bunker-busters in tactical engagements stirred up a hornets nest.
The blurb says that they did blind the US satellite, whereas the article says they merely attempted to and that "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful." Good old hype.
A lot of modern western military tactical thinking revolves around spy satellites, communication satellites, navigation satellites, UAVs (most of them remote controlled or semi autonomous at best) as well as battlefield information exchange and coordination networks (basically tanks, planes and ships connected by a kind of WIFI-on-steroids). Since the Americans gutted their network of human intelligence assets in favor of satellites and ELINT in general over the last few decades they must be pretty worried by this even if this Chinese effort only targets one segment of their information gathering and command apparatus. Keep in mind that US satellites have previously been more or less unassailable to anything except perhaps hacker attacks on their command and control links. People keep citing conflicts like the Iraq war as an example of how a modern war is fought but in reality the US forces (and NATO forces in general for that matter) have never gone up against an equally strong, technologically advanced, worthy enemy. The most resourceful and tech savvy enemy they have come across so far in a real honest to goodness shooting war were the Serbs who performed an improvised re-organization of their mostly obsolescent air defenses and communications system thus creating a a new distributed system. The various system elements were highly mobile, often interconnected over the telephone infrastructure which precluded jamming and also made locating the system elements by their radio traffic harder and the Serbs also used a massive amount of decoys. All of this combined to cause US and Nato forces major problems when it came to locating and taking out military assets or suppressing the Serb air defenses. One is tempted to theorize that if western forces ever come up against an enemy that fields top of the line air, naval and ground assets and into the bargain engages in electronic warfare in a big way i.e. jams battlefield networks, UAV remote control links, GPS, Communications, Radar etc in a big way in addition to blinding their spy satellites and even shooting them down the US/NATO military will be in trouble.
ude, I'm not trying to say that California is a "real life socialist republic" or anything of the sort. Lighten up.;)
I didn't think you were. It's simply that American Neocons and right wingers in general tend to liberally apply the words 'communist' and 'socialst' to all sorts of people without having even the slightest idea of what those words mean. These days the American right winger's definition of a socialist/communist seems to be that the term covers anybody to the left of George W Bush which covers a lot of moderate right wing politicians who have nothing in common with socialsits or communists at all.
"Members" are anyone who'se ever signed on for an account and not deleted it....
That is just plain wrong. Members (Latin name: Phallus Maximus) are sentient symbiont life-forms that human males carry between their legs. The member is connected to the brain of the human male and takes over control of the brain and thus the entire body whenever a human female is present manipulating the human male into to doing and saying idiotic things he would otherwise never dream of. Members, and the effect they have upon the behavior, utterances and personality of the human male can be quite annoying but unfortunately they can also not be eradicated since they are essential to the procreation of the species. Research into alternative technologies such as cloning is ongoing.
One of these days, I'm gonna finally move myself out of the Socialist Republic of California...
Next time you go trolling do your self a favor and choose a less simplistic political slur. As somebody who spent time in East Germany (a real life Socialist Republic) I can state with great confidence that California has next to nothing in common with a Socialist Republic.
Re:Toilet seats are a terrible comparison
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
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· Score: 1
Just about the opposite of all the points above can be said about your keyboard and mouse. It should come as absolutely no surprise that these things are riddled with bacteria...
As is your skin. All of it. You are fucking covered in the little guys, and it's rarely a problem. If you're the sort of person who's likely to get sick from a mouse that hasn't been disinfected, your life is too sterile for you to survive easily in the wild. Self-cleaning mice and mobility-scooters for the morbidly obese - they amount to the same thing: people's poor lifestyles causing them to be unfit to survive normally. I understand why people need these things, but if they'd exercised moderation in all things from the start, they wouldn't be in this situation.
Very true, exercise will do more for your health than disinfecting your self, your internal organs and your entire surroundings. In fact a lot of the bacteria on our skin are actually helpful in keeping it healthy and many of the bacteria in our stomach and intestines are vital to their proper function. I will never understand why so many people, and Americans in particular, seem to have an obsessive fear of bacteria in general as if they don't realise that most bacteria are completely harmless. Every so often one of those American talks shows (of the silly variety) like 'Oprah' has this big exposé about bacteria in your surroundings and how to get rid of them with disinfecting soap so perhaps it is just an impression generated by paranoid American TV? Personally I can't use disinfecting soap without it having a detrimental effect on my skin.
Look, I love and worship NASA as much as the next American but I must point out that (from another Slashdot article) the ESA's Mars Express has used a High Resolution Stereo Camera on selected areas at a super resolution of 2 metres/pixel.
Now, 1 meter resolution might be twice as good as 2 meter resolution but my dumbass isn't going to know the difference. My point is that those are two very high resolutions so I think the Mars Express gets the credit of being the first to get super close-up pictures. Don't worry, American's will not be out done by Europeans -- there will not be a super resolution images of mars gap! Every American will now be proud to say that their screensaver takes up roughly twice the amount of room as their European counterpart.:-)
In all seriousness though, these images would be very useful for selecting landing sites for more missions and possibly manned missions in the very far future. The MRO and Mars Express seem to have very similar objectives -- studying the composition of Mars, it's weather, atmosphere & geology -- I wonder if they couldn't have been a combined effort for an even greater return. Then again, I'm just glad both of them are fulfilling their goals instead of both burning up on entry due to a conversion of units error.
As a European, I'm kind of ambivalent about this. On the one hand there will probably be more human traffic on Mars for the forseeable future than on all the other planets of our solar system combined so with two of these cameras in orbit around Mars vital survey work will be done a lot faster, which is important. On the other hand running many duplicate missions in parallel or gunning for the bragging rights of having the piece of some type of equipment on Mars seems pretty futile since it does nothing to advance science. With expeditions to Mars being as difficult, expensive and few in number as they are I'd say that as a general rule it would be better for ESA and NASA to quitely agree to diversify the nature of their missions as much as possible to cover the maximum possible amount of scientific ground and then to share the results than to duplcate each others projects to often. In this case, of course, I'll once again concede that survey work is an exception due to it's fundamental importance. Let's just hope this does not degenerate into a ESA vs. NASA propaganda contest similar to the one between the USA and USSR where science took second place to the quest for PR points.
Because it's the only thing the application will run on? Unfortunatley it's not always possible to use an alternative.
While I appreciate that there are some cases where it is impossible to move from Windows this is hardly the case 80% of the time. My example was aimed at a case where migration to Linux would be possible. I walk into businesses every damn day that that have several NT4/Win2K/WinXP boxes standing around giving people access to either a web app or some GUI client which these days is quite often implemented using some cross platform solution like Java Swing or using something like Lotus Notes where a client is available for Linux and from what I hear even Lotus is being ported to Java. So the question is once again what obligates anybody to pay for a Windows license when they can easily switch to a bare bones Linux box or a thin-client? Even if a dumb Windows terminal is serving up a webapp implemented using.NET on the server side to a bunch of sales people or office drones drones it is usually perfectly possible to access that.NET webapp using a Linux terminal and thus save the cost of a Windows license so long as the webapp's developer didn't tie the app to IE with some satanic technology like 'activex' which most of them, thankfully, do not do. In fact all of the major webapps I use are certified for Firefox as well as IE.
that site has general information about the Linux-Project and a link to this site:
Firstly, thanks for a very German answer:D
Secondly, while that is a nice a site and I say that because this project interests me and I did take a look at that Wiki, I was hoping for a more detailed business and financial oriented explanation than "They will be deploying not SuSE but Debian GNU/Linux, the freest of the Linux distributions." The word 'Debian' is mentioned only once on the pace you linked to.
They're taking a big one-time hit although. Once they've rewritten/replaced all their software and migrated their data the cost to add new units will be significantly lower.
I agree with you and I don't understand why so many people assume that a migration from a Windows infrastructure to an OSS one will cost €0.00? If Munich is going ahead and doing this in the first place they might want to make some fundamental changes to their IT infrastructure since they will be ripping the guts out it anyway. Take for example the proposition of replacing dumb Windows PCs that just stand around all day giving users access to a single application (Why pay a Windows XP license for every one of those PCs?) with Linux based thin clients. In this case they might be factoring the replacement of some quantities of computer equipment and infrastructure changes into that figure of €30 million. Then of course there are the costs of testing the whole system, the costs of writing custom software to aid in the migration of entire data bases, websites and other applications previously hosted on Windows 2003+MSSQL+IIS to open source platforms, porting custom made GUI applications/clients to Linux or replacing them with new webapps. I can see why the costs would go up but in the long run I agree with you that their costs should go down as a result of this measure if they handle the project properly which, admittedly, is asking a lot of a German bureaucracy. I would really like to see a financial breakdown and progress report of this project when they are done, this project is really interesting due to it's scale.
It should be noted that Mayor Christian Ude's PC is slated to be among the first batch of systems to run the Debian-based Linux-desktop Munich will be using.
Why Debian? Not that I'm implying that Debian is a bad distribution but isn't SuSE HQ practically in their back yard (Nürnberg) ?? Or has Novell uprooted SuSE development and moved the entire outfit to the USA ??
And, oh yeah, I predict lots of attendant unpleasantness - first-world cities emptied as birth-rates decline, then re-filled with unassimilated, superstitious immigrants (or, in the case of societies largely closed to immigration like Japan, just plain emptied). Noone to care for the elderly in once-wealthy societies. And lots, lots more fanatical religion and superstition. A new dark ages.
Apart from the 'caring for the elderly' bit (family structures were different back then) that sounds a bit like a description of the last century or so of Roman rule in the Western Empire. The Romans (my ancestors) were essentially out-bred and then overrun by the 'barbarians' (also my ancestors:D ) after the imperial economy declined to a point where the state could no longer adequately fund the military to keep the borders half way secure and ensure Rome always had a a tactical and weapons-technological overmatch on the battlefield and thus ensure imperial domination of barbarian populations. The weird thing is that after the barbarians raped, looted and burned the their way through the Western Empire and left it in ruins they and their descendants have ever since been busy trying to recreate some of what they had so thoughtlessly destroyed. Western history is full of people trying to emulate and recreate bits and pieces of Rome. It is interesting to reflect upon the fact has only taken us a mere 1500 years to finally get close to achieving what the Romans did with the Denarius.
Answer: 4 jets and 1 helicopter [aerospaceweb.org].
Apparently the Iranians added substantially to that score during the first Gulf war. Ironically enough, and if your information on Tomact air victories in US service is reliable, that means that the majority of F-14 Tomcat victories were achieved by the air force of the Islamic Republic of Iranian. It took Iran a while to recover their capability to operate the Tomcat after the revolution but when they did the Tomcat had an easy time especially vs. Iraqi MiG-21s, MiG-23s and assorted helicopters since the Iraqis only got pretty low grade export variants from the Soviets and had nothing capable of matching the Tomcat on any level until they got MiG-25 and Mirage fighters with good radar warning receivers, modern intercept radars and the all important long range missiles. Of course all this happened while Saddam was still America's friend and <sarcasm> before he joined the axis-of-evil </sarcasm>. What is really amazing is that Iran still manages to operate the Tomcat today 27 years after the revolution without manufacturer support.
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Many small and medium sized companies don't use Enterprise licenses. In my experience they typically buy Dell/HP/IBM or just some noname PC boxen from the local computer store that offers the best price and use whatever version of Windows is pre-installed. This type of customer makes up a significant part of the Windows user base. I know for a fact that these types of companies are already getting pretty annoyed with WGA false positives. I have had to deal with two of those myself, at the same company (as a favor to a friend), on Dell PCs running a perfectly legitimate Windows instance. It will be interesting to see how these companies react when they replace a batch of, say... 10-12 worn out WinXP PCs out of their pool of say... 40 PCs with Windows Vista boxen and discover that the familiar "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting... blah... blah..." nag-screens have been replaced by Microsoft crippling the machine forcing them to make a call to Microsoft to get a new license key where some pimple faced Microsoft support worker will make them jump through hoops to prove they are not thieves. With any kind of luck this will cause Microsoft to finally hit the limits of how blatantly they can abuse their monopoly.
I don't know why people bother ...... when Parallels just works.
...Half Life 2?
I'll say it again, Microsoft killed this product before they even launched it. Those are exactly the features people expected from a WIFI enabled MP3 player. An iPod that is at least syncable with a PC via some high speed wireless link (not to mention one that has iTunes built in) is something I'd buy in a heartbeat. Of course MS could always issue an update and fix these points but knowing Microsoft that will take forever and a day.
Dang.... that's exactly how my parents sounded when I was a kid.
Apple will snarl and bite yet another hand. Anyone that thinks Apple is consumer friendly is an idiot.
They'll do more than snarl and bite. I just saw a bunch of sinister looking stealth UAV's loaded to capacity with Norvegian-nerd-seeking lawyer-missiles and Apple logos painted on their wings jetting off from our local Air Force base. They were heading in the direction of San Francisco.
That is pretty much what I was trying to point out although I should have used the term 'under exploited' in the same breath as iPod and iTunes in stead of 'unexploited'. There is relatively little difference between finding an unexploited market niche and finding an under exploited one. Both offer more or less the same chances of success if you just do some market research to find the right combination of features that will sell. There had been plenty of people setting up online music stores and building MP3 players before Apple went into that business. Yet nobody took notice of the point which the author of TFA rightly pointed out: The first priority of any business is to 'do market research and then give the customer what he/she wants' which in the case of Apple and the iPod/iTunes offering was a simple, stylish, easy-to-use MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage and a tightly integrated online music store all wrapped in a nice little affordable package. I think Apple succeeded so brilliantly precisely because they were new to the online musicstore and MP3 player businesses and saw a way to combine those two things into a winning product that the 'old hands' already established in those businesses couldn't see.
He should take a look at a company called Microsoft. Creating a no-competition environment seems to have worked out well for them.
Two words: iPod and iTunes
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every so often to follow the jobs since I am not married and have no kids. I'd even move to India if I had to even if I hate the climate (as in: weather) down there. Unfortunately not everybody is as willing or as able as we are to uproot their wife and kids every 2-3 years pack their belongings into a 20ft container and travel around the world with a big smile on their face in a cheerful quest to adapt to the latest fashion trend in the fabulous outsourcing biz. Unfortunately it looks as if this lifestyle will become a necessity for a lot of people unless they are willing to settle for a relatively menial job back home.
I think you just hit the nail right on the head. CEOs and marketing types want the latest, "greatest", buzzword-compliant software. Old standbys are no longer will probably work just as well, maybe better, but they aren't cool. Actually, geeks aren't immune to this problem either. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason.
<sarcasm>
So what you are saying is that after C, C++ and a number of other golden-oldie technologies have gone through the process, Java has now also become mature enough to be declared to be 'dying' by the buzzword junkies?
</sarcasm>
But on a more serious note this dude coachwei has a point, best practices is a concept that is pretty much non existent in a lot of places and that is not just true of AJAX. There are times I wish that more Java webapp developers knew why it is important to write thread safe code and what polymorphism and inheritance are useful for.
Why wait? Just buy one of each and encourage them to breed. With any kind of luck you will end up with one or more Zunes that look like iPods and have a cool red/green/blue/yellow colored apple logo printed on the back. You could call them: iZunes.
If it really came down to it, with all out war between the USA and a closely matched opponent, the USA has a ton more sticks to use than anyone else. Big flying ones that make the ground glow.
Nukes? Even Israel and Pakistan have nukes and it seems that soon Iran will have those as well. Don't you think the US might hesitate to be the one to start a full blown nuclear exchange? I'd be really surprised to see the US use nukes unless it was in response to a nuclear first strike by somebody else. The mere suggestion, not that long ago, by US officials that they were considering the implications of use micro-nukes as bunker-busters in tactical engagements stirred up a hornets nest.
The blurb says that they did blind the US satellite, whereas the article says they merely attempted to and that "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful." Good old hype.
A lot of modern western military tactical thinking revolves around spy satellites, communication satellites, navigation satellites, UAVs (most of them remote controlled or semi autonomous at best) as well as battlefield information exchange and coordination networks (basically tanks, planes and ships connected by a kind of WIFI-on-steroids). Since the Americans gutted their network of human intelligence assets in favor of satellites and ELINT in general over the last few decades they must be pretty worried by this even if this Chinese effort only targets one segment of their information gathering and command apparatus. Keep in mind that US satellites have previously been more or less unassailable to anything except perhaps hacker attacks on their command and control links. People keep citing conflicts like the Iraq war as an example of how a modern war is fought but in reality the US forces (and NATO forces in general for that matter) have never gone up against an equally strong, technologically advanced, worthy enemy. The most resourceful and tech savvy enemy they have come across so far in a real honest to goodness shooting war were the Serbs who performed an improvised re-organization of their mostly obsolescent air defenses and communications system thus creating a a new distributed system. The various system elements were highly mobile, often interconnected over the telephone infrastructure which precluded jamming and also made locating the system elements by their radio traffic harder and the Serbs also used a massive amount of decoys. All of this combined to cause US and Nato forces major problems when it came to locating and taking out military assets or suppressing the Serb air defenses. One is tempted to theorize that if western forces ever come up against an enemy that fields top of the line air, naval and ground assets and into the bargain engages in electronic warfare in a big way i.e. jams battlefield networks, UAV remote control links, GPS, Communications, Radar etc in a big way in addition to blinding their spy satellites and even shooting them down the US/NATO military will be in trouble.
ude, I'm not trying to say that California is a "real life socialist republic" or anything of the sort. Lighten up. ;)
I didn't think you were. It's simply that American Neocons and right wingers in general tend to liberally apply the words 'communist' and 'socialst' to all sorts of people without having even the slightest idea of what those words mean. These days the American right winger's definition of a socialist/communist seems to be that the term covers anybody to the left of George W Bush which covers a lot of moderate right wing politicians who have nothing in common with socialsits or communists at all.
That is just plain wrong. Members (Latin name: Phallus Maximus) are sentient symbiont life-forms that human males carry between their legs. The member is connected to the brain of the human male and takes over control of the brain and thus the entire body whenever a human female is present manipulating the human male into to doing and saying idiotic things he would otherwise never dream of. Members, and the effect they have upon the behavior, utterances and personality of the human male can be quite annoying but unfortunately they can also not be eradicated since they are essential to the procreation of the species. Research into alternative technologies such as cloning is ongoing.
One of these days, I'm gonna finally move myself out of the Socialist Republic of California...
Next time you go trolling do your self a favor and choose a less simplistic political slur. As somebody who spent time in East Germany (a real life Socialist Republic) I can state with great confidence that California has next to nothing in common with a Socialist Republic.
Very true, exercise will do more for your health than disinfecting your self, your internal organs and your entire surroundings. In fact a lot of the bacteria on our skin are actually helpful in keeping it healthy and many of the bacteria in our stomach and intestines are vital to their proper function. I will never understand why so many people, and Americans in particular, seem to have an obsessive fear of bacteria in general as if they don't realise that most bacteria are completely harmless. Every so often one of those American talks shows (of the silly variety) like 'Oprah' has this big exposé about bacteria in your surroundings and how to get rid of them with disinfecting soap so perhaps it is just an impression generated by paranoid American TV? Personally I can't use disinfecting soap without it having a detrimental effect on my skin.
As a European, I'm kind of ambivalent about this. On the one hand there will probably be more human traffic on Mars for the forseeable future than on all the other planets of our solar system combined so with two of these cameras in orbit around Mars vital survey work will be done a lot faster, which is important. On the other hand running many duplicate missions in parallel or gunning for the bragging rights of having the piece of some type of equipment on Mars seems pretty futile since it does nothing to advance science. With expeditions to Mars being as difficult, expensive and few in number as they are I'd say that as a general rule it would be better for ESA and NASA to quitely agree to diversify the nature of their missions as much as possible to cover the maximum possible amount of scientific ground and then to share the results than to duplcate each others projects to often. In this case, of course, I'll once again concede that survey work is an exception due to it's fundamental importance. Let's just hope this does not degenerate into a ESA vs. NASA propaganda contest similar to the one between the USA and USSR where science took second place to the quest for PR points.
SCOX shares took a loss of 18.75%, or $0.39, to close at $1.69.
Morons....
Because it's the only thing the application will run on? Unfortunatley it's not always possible to use an alternative.
.NET on the server side to a bunch of sales people or office drones drones it is usually perfectly possible to access that .NET webapp using a Linux terminal and thus save the cost of a Windows license so long as the webapp's developer didn't tie the app to IE with some satanic technology like 'activex' which most of them, thankfully, do not do. In fact all of the major webapps I use are certified for Firefox as well as IE.
While I appreciate that there are some cases where it is impossible to move from Windows this is hardly the case 80% of the time. My example was aimed at a case where migration to Linux would be possible. I walk into businesses every damn day that that have several NT4/Win2K/WinXP boxes standing around giving people access to either a web app or some GUI client which these days is quite often implemented using some cross platform solution like Java Swing or using something like Lotus Notes where a client is available for Linux and from what I hear even Lotus is being ported to Java. So the question is once again what obligates anybody to pay for a Windows license when they can easily switch to a bare bones Linux box or a thin-client? Even if a dumb Windows terminal is serving up a webapp implemented using
Firstly, thanks for a very German answer
Secondly, while that is a nice a site and I say that because this project interests me and I did take a look at that Wiki, I was hoping for a more detailed business and financial oriented explanation than "They will be deploying not SuSE but Debian GNU/Linux, the freest of the Linux distributions." The word 'Debian' is mentioned only once on the pace you linked to.
They're taking a big one-time hit although. Once they've rewritten/replaced all their software and migrated their data the cost to add new units will be significantly lower.
I agree with you and I don't understand why so many people assume that a migration from a Windows infrastructure to an OSS one will cost €0.00? If Munich is going ahead and doing this in the first place they might want to make some fundamental changes to their IT infrastructure since they will be ripping the guts out it anyway. Take for example the proposition of replacing dumb Windows PCs that just stand around all day giving users access to a single application (Why pay a Windows XP license for every one of those PCs?) with Linux based thin clients. In this case they might be factoring the replacement of some quantities of computer equipment and infrastructure changes into that figure of €30 million. Then of course there are the costs of testing the whole system, the costs of writing custom software to aid in the migration of entire data bases, websites and other applications previously hosted on Windows 2003+MSSQL+IIS to open source platforms, porting custom made GUI applications/clients to Linux or replacing them with new webapps. I can see why the costs would go up but in the long run I agree with you that their costs should go down as a result of this measure if they handle the project properly which, admittedly, is asking a lot of a German bureaucracy. I would really like to see a financial breakdown and progress report of this project when they are done, this project is really interesting due to it's scale.
Why Debian? Not that I'm implying that Debian is a bad distribution but isn't SuSE HQ practically in their back yard (Nürnberg) ?? Or has Novell uprooted SuSE development and moved the entire outfit to the USA ??
Well, one thing is for certain. If the future is anything like Star Trek there is a bright future in plastic surgery with a specialty in nose jobs.
Apart from the 'caring for the elderly' bit (family structures were different back then) that sounds a bit like a description of the last century or so of Roman rule in the Western Empire. The Romans (my ancestors) were essentially out-bred and then overrun by the 'barbarians' (also my ancestors
Answer: 4 jets and 1 helicopter [aerospaceweb.org].
Apparently the Iranians added substantially to that score during the first Gulf war. Ironically enough, and if your information on Tomact air victories in US service is reliable, that means that the majority of F-14 Tomcat victories were achieved by the air force of the Islamic Republic of Iranian. It took Iran a while to recover their capability to operate the Tomcat after the revolution but when they did the Tomcat had an easy time especially vs. Iraqi MiG-21s, MiG-23s and assorted helicopters since the Iraqis only got pretty low grade export variants from the Soviets and had nothing capable of matching the Tomcat on any level until they got MiG-25 and Mirage fighters with good radar warning receivers, modern intercept radars and the all important long range missiles. Of course all this happened while Saddam was still America's friend and <sarcasm> before he joined the axis-of-evil </sarcasm>. What is really amazing is that Iran still manages to operate the Tomcat today 27 years after the revolution without manufacturer support.