I know I'll get flamed to hell, but screw it. If we truly* have such a shortage of computer scientists, then let's recruit the foreigners and bring them in as immigrants. Remember all of those European scientists came to the U.S. before/during WWII? How much of the American technical supremacy of the 20th century can be traced back to their contributions? The best way to develop/maintain technical prowess as a society is to secure the best intellectual capital.
Actually a lot of the current high tech supremacy the US has today is a combination of European knowhow (primarily Nazi German, just compare state-of-the-art Allied and German military projects at the end of WWII) and the USA's commercial muscle, imagination and will to exploit it which is a factor that is often overlooked. A large part was also down to looted technical documentation and research data. There is a famous story of a lead engineer at North American working on the F-86 fighter who went to night school to learn German in order to fully exploit the research data he had been given by the US intelligence services. Apparently he subsequently completely redesigned the aircraft. While that may not be a 100% true story German data and German and other European Scientists certainly had a major effect on the US aerospace industry. It would be hard to repeat this phenomenon today, the influx of sensitive scientific data cannot be replicated since the nations that possess any data of value to the US are neither in ruins nor under occupation by US forces making the wholesale annexation of their entire cutting edge IP impossible. You may, however, expect some success in recruiting some foreign workers who buy into modern variant of the good old 'streets paved with gold' myth.
It comes from Islamism, describing a fundamentalist Islamic revival movement characterized by a literal interpretation of the Qu'ran and application of Islamic ideals to all aspects of life. Islamist, then, is the term for a fundamentalist follower of Islam. Today it is used as an almost derogatory phrase, though, thanks to popularization and use from the current administration.
I agree, I recently saw an interview with a high ranking Turkish politician (a woman and a secular moslem) who objected to the use of the word 'Islamist' by a reporter, firstly since it is silly and secondly because it makes it very easy to draw the false conclusion that Islamism=Islam thus leading many non moslem people, who often are non to familiar with Islam for various reasons, to believe that all moslems are militant fundamentalists which is in no way true. Bin Laden and his ilk are a small minority which, although they enjoy a certain amount of hero worship among a limited community of Islamic fundamentalists and other religio-political extremists, are viewed as a bunch of murdering crackpots by most other muslims. It should be kept in mind that Al Quaeda and friends, seem to make no distinction between what they consider to be 'unworthy'/'heretical' moslems and the hated 'Christian Westerners'/'Crusaders' and kill both with equal relish (I am an agnostic European Westerner from a Christian culture myself). Basically I fail to see why the good old and un-ambivalent term 'militant Islamic fundamentalist' had to be replaced with 'Islamist' which is much more generic and seems designed to give rise to confusion among the uninformed.
I wonder if the Bush Administration realizes what its rhetoric sounds like. Copyright infringement = terrorism? Marijuana = terrorism?
<rant> They are simply sticking with what worked in the hysteric political climate of the recent past when all you needed to do to get a law passed was prefix the words 'anti terrorist' to every occurrence of the word 'legislation' and where you only had to accuse annoying groups of people of having 'links to Al Quaeda' or having 'Islamist sympathies' (Incidentally, what does that make the US based Christian fundamentalists? Christianists!?!) to ensure you could declare open season on them. This is probably just an attempt to see how far you can take this tactic. Fortunately people are getting wise to the ploy, it is only unfortunate it has taken so long. </rant>
Or how about when you see the dentist? Will they make you wear a hat pointing downward saying "This smile brought to you by Dr. Dentafark".
That wouldn't work because you can take the hat off and throw it away... well... unless they staple it to your skull. Another solution would be a temporary tattoo on your forehead. Either way thanks for that post, I needed a laugh... heh... Dr. Dentafark!
It might be next month, or it might be years from now, but the EU will eventually cave and give in to Microsoft.
I don't think so! It is in the interest of the US to maintain the Microsoft monopoly just like it was and still is in their interest to maintain other monopolies or market dominances such as the one Boeing had over the commercial airliner market. It turned out to be in the interest of the European Union to crack the Boeing dominance, Airbus is wiping the floor with Boeing on a number of levels these days, and that example showed alot of people over here that the US corporations can be defeated even if they are supported by the US government. It is in the interest of the European Union to crack Microsoft's stranglehold on the European market since that will only boost their own software industries if they play their cards right. Despite the dismissive attitudes of US neocons toward Europe as a place to do business the European Union is still a market of 460 million people and as such it represents a very significant source of revenue for Microsoft. Threatening this revenue gives the EU considerable leverage against Microsoft and since MS is a US corporation the EU has little motivation to be kind to them.
By your reasoning you could just as easily say an internationally accessible server with web sites about democracy should be subject to Chinese censorship laws even if the server is physically in America and operated by an American company.
I seem to remember having read about this sort of a dilemma before concerning jurisdiction in a libel case. If I remember correctly that case ended up in a debate about how you define the concept of 'publishing' vis-a-vis the Internet. Going by the result in that case the act of uploading the material to the server where it was displayed to the public via a web server constituted an act of 'publishing'. So due to the physical location of this server the material was published in the USA and US law applies. In view of this, if the USA doesn't define fashion designs as IP, then these guys are shit out of luck no matter what French law stipulates. The only thing the French can really can hope for is to achieve some sort of an internet equivalent to recalling or banning the import of a certain issue of a foreign printed paper magazine. They could possibly hope to succeed in compelling this party to deny access to the disputed material on their site from IP numbers located in France and even that would presumably have to be implemented via systems on French soil. That being said what Viewfinder did may be legal but they are really shooting them selves in the foot since this isn't exactly a good way to make friends in the fashion industry any more than if, say, an automobile magazine was to publish unauthorized pictures of a new prototype sports car. The result is that you get universally shut out of the loop and ignored by the industry. Publications like this are considered analogous to those trash papers and magazines who publish paparazzi pictures of celebrities.
Fribble. Sure, the US sells "demilitarized scrap". In the US. To US citizens. Now ask who can buy Russian, Chinese, etc. weapons in the open global weapons market.
The point this guy was making is that anybody can go to a USAF scrap auction and buy several railway flat-car loads of scrap. Unfortunately his experience was that if you rifle through a few carefully selected loads of such 'junk' you are more or less bound to come up with some components of sensetive systems whose intelligence value can be very high to countries like China, Russia and worse still Iran and N-Korea for reasons that are perhaps not immediately obvious. You don't need access to an entire F-16/F-15/F-18 to cause major trouble for the USAF in a future conflict. All you need is access to a few key components from the radar to calibrate your ECM-pods and it seems that such components can occasionally be found in the stuff the USAF sells of as scrap despite the fact that such material should without exception be shipped off for secure disposal. Why do you think the USA sent several helicopter loads of boffins into a minefield in the Kosovo to salvage the radar unit of a shot-down Mig-29? It's not as if a radar that crashed to the ground from several thousand meters altitude can be made to run again but it is still valuabe for research into radar warning recievers and for creating jamming profiles for your ECM-pods and the same goes for any missiles it might have been carrying. Only fools fail to realize the signifigance of this kind of intelligence gathering and it also is the reason why the loss of that F-117 over Serbia probably hurt the US more than the Pentagon is willing to admit. I'd be willing to bet good money that parts of that wreck found it's way into laboratories in Russia and possibly China.
Windows - it's that insecure, you don't even need physical access to a machine to steal it's componants!;-)
Somewhere in California (IIRC) there is a company that specializes in providing military aircraft for the movie industry. At the time he appeared in a documentary which I watched, the owner of this business had apparently assembled more than one Cobra Gunship from parts sold off by the Armed Forces as scrap and was well on his way toward assembling (what was at the time at least) a state-of-the-art Apache assault helecopter using parts draw from similar sources (they showed footage of it being assembled). According to this guy some of the things the US armed forces sell off to civillans as 'scrap' are downright scary both because they are sometimes dangerous (contain live munitions, toxic materials, rocket engines, etc..) and because this 'scrap' includes some pretty sensetive electronic equipment. So stolen PC's are not the only problem, the US armed forces quite freely sells off some pretty amazing stuff as junk. True enough, the information on a stolen PC can cause a significant security breach but an enemy nation getting it's hands on sensetive military electronics at a scrap auction is even worse. I suppose the way the military filters equipment for disposal may have improved over the last few years but somehow I doubt it.
This of course is because people respond to higher MP counts in the same way they like "bling". "Ooooh shiny things!" Come-on people! Put some effort into purchasing quality products that demand a bit more work and are functional for longer periods of time instead of purchasing things that you throw away after only a short time. It shows you are more discriminating, pushes companies to produce better products, is easier on the environment and gives you better quality goods that help to improve your life rather than clutter it up with junk.
From my point of view a good modern GSM phone has the following features:
It offers a simple and functional telephone interface with no frills other than a missed calls list, a call history list and an way to initiate calls directly from onboard address book.
If I wasn't a corporate employee point 1) would be my only demand. Unfortunately, since I am required to be reachable at all hours of the day where ever I am, I also require my GSM phone to have at least a GPRS connection for the two internet related things I plan to do with it which is E-mail and possibly MSN chatting, faster connections are nice but not essential. Power browsing on my GSM phone is not something I am likely to do a lot of
Since I do a lot of connecting to E-mail servers over SSL or VPN it should have broad support for both as well as support for as many push and poll e-mail protocols as possible. As long as I get a secure connection I am not picky about protocols.
It should have broad sync support over multiple operating systems (which is usually not a problem using third party sync apps).
It should be able to sync it's calendar, to-do list and address book against as many group-ware products as possible.
It should be available with and without a camera since I regularly get trouble form Security people if my phone has a built in camera.
A touch-screen and stylus would help but I'll settle for something similar in concept to the Blackberry 71xx series
Microsoft has made their server virtualization software available for free.
Isn't this the opening phase of what Computer Business Review calls 'Netscaping' the competition? I wonder if that word will ever make it's way into the Microsoft system spelling dictionaries?
Why? I don't think anybody immunized AMD against screwing up, they are just as capable of it as Intel.
I wonder if this affects the new Intel Macs?
I'll reserve the right to modify my opinion after familiarizing myself with the details of the nature of this vulnerability. As a first guess I'll hypothesize that this probably depends on how easy the OS running on the affected Intel box makes it for a remote attacker to exploit this hardware flaw.
crewing with those who wish to communicate with your operating system via your protocols is all part of INNOVATION! Abusing your monopoly position is all part of INNOVATION! Poor long suffering Microsoft, the Jesus of Software, so maligned by so many.
I don't think your, Jesus analogy will hold because Jesus' disciples were men of peace and unlike some of the people at Microsoft they would never have thrown chairs at the faithful.
Boot Camp will only help the Mac since it might get fair amount of Gamerz to switch as well as some tech savvy corporate OS.X users who don't use it today because they are afraid to be stuck without a fallback OS in case of the 'missing app' dilemma and other Microsoft compatibility issues. These are people who are usually not afraid of something like changing to a new OS. Another point is that even if rumors of Virtualizaton software being integrated into OS.X 10.5 are wrong there are still products like Parallels that offer high performance Virtualization which will do even more to convince these people to buy OS.X. Even so we are still only talking about 'power-users'. So in a sense this dude is right, neither Boot Camp nor Virtualization will trigger a mass migration from Windows XP/Vista to OS.X but that was bloody obvious from the very beginning so his comments are if anything rather superfluous . I would consider Compatibility Software like Wine to be much more likely to cause a User migration from Windows to OS.X that would be large enough show up as a small blip on Microsoft's look-down-shoot-dow radar. Professional, commercial adaptations of Wine such as CrossOver office if it is ever ported to the Mac will make switching a doable proposition, even for relatively clues-less windows users. But even if we see a dramatic growth for the Mac and OS.X due to these technologies. Apples Hardware/Software package will never grow to enjoy the kind of domination that it threatens Microsoft Windows and the BeigeBox Shufflers like Dell with Extinction.
With China, India, and most other developing countries exempt from Kyoto, (and to a lesser extent, the USA opting out) there's very little incentive for those who have signed on to actually do anything. Plus, the costs of meeting the targets through technology (e.g. hybrids, or new power plants, or home upgrades) are enormous.
And yet it has to happen. There is no way around hybrids, new or upgraded power-plants, energy efficiency measures, alternative fuels for internal combustion engines, home upgrades... (the list goes on) and the longer we put it off the worse the problem gets. That last paragraph of your post is an echo of a very popular conservative argument against pollution and emission control. What that basically says is: 'Doing something to solve this problem (and we are just hypothesizing mind you, not admitting that there actually is a problem) will be to expensive so let's just accept that the only sensible thing we can do is to ignore the problem. After all it is common knowledge that if you ignore problems long enough the forces of the free market will make them go away...' People liked the Kyoto protocol because it seemed like a first step in the right direction nobody ever said it was perfect.
I think the OP's point was : for 2x the power consumption (250 Watt -> 500 Watt), you get 10x the compute performance (300 MHz -> 3 GHz).
So, if your goal is to get the best performance / killowatt-hour, you're better off running fewer, newer, machines.
Actually the OP advocated using '...State-of-the-art computers...'. That's fine if you can afford them, these guys may be using old inefficient hardware but they are getting it for free and if they are running the whole mess on bio diesel the electricity is also practically free since Biodiesel can be made from used vegetable oil which can be had for free at any fast food resturant. I am not going to judge the usefulness of this cluster from a compter science standpoint. However, judging from TFA, with free hardware, free software, free energy other than the purchase and running costs of the generator and the treatment costs for the fuel which into the bargain is environmentally friendly, you'll have a hard time beating this setup for cost efficiency. If we assume the work on the project is done by voulenteers the only other major cost factor would be the cost of housing this setup.
Just so I clear this up I believe in evolution, however, I also firmly believe in God, I see no reason why both theories cannot co-exist, even the vatican support this view.
I know that it is popular to hold the Vatican up as an anti Scientific organization which is unfair because it's attitude to science has radically changed since the 16th century (Just for example: Gregor Mendel the genetics pioneer was an Augustinians monk). The modern Vatican is in no way shape or form a staunch supporter of intelligent design. Pope John Paul II was quoted as saying that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis". As far as I know evolution is taught in the Catholic school system and the Vaticans traditional position has always been either 'no comment' which in later years has given way to the cautious position that evolution and Catholic dogma are not in conflict. You can probably cite a number of examples of people in the Catholic Church making pro Intelligent Design comments but recent and official outspoken statements by people in the Vatican that REALLY matter against Evolution and in support of Intelligent Design as preached by the most vocal US based Christian fundamentalists is something I'd like to see.
Oracle's got PosgreSQL beat in terms of features (which, as someone else already noted, many Oracle users don't need), but I wouldn't try whining that PostgreSQL is "hard to configure" Not compared to Oracle it isn't!
For one thing, these days, Oracle ships with an Java GUI that makes the database creation process alot less painful plus the Enterprise manager also helps to keep an overview. Not that your complaint about the DB instance creation process really makes much sense. You are comparing a Sabertooth tiger with a common house cat which is pretty redundant. OracleDB is a much more complex product than Postgres is, they are in different weight classes. Also keep in mind that it's not just about features. While working for a former employer I watched MySQL get dumped for Postgres as their billing system grew because Postgres had more features. However after about a year Postgres got dumped for Oracle because Postgres kept suffering major faliures every two or three months or so at very high loads. Oracle simply proved to be more stable at high loads, it scaled better, had top notch (though expensive) support and most of all it offered better disaster recovery mechanisms whenever seldom it did experience a catastrophic faliure (once due to a power faliure caused by construction work) and disaster recovery cost us considerably less effort than it did with Postgres. If you run Oracle on top notch hardware on a properly set up, patched and configured OS administered by a good Sysadmin/DBA it is about the most stable setup you can get. For companies that are making millons using Oracle for, say, their billing system like my former employer, the cost of expensive servers, a good sysadmin and the occasional contracted Oracle specialist is really peanuts compared to the damage that downtime can do in terms of Customer confidence and simply lost revenue.
The idea was to keep broadband providers from forming monopolies by keeping other non-partner providers out with high costs or degraded services. However, the Republicans are doing the right thing by their constituents by allowing the maximum freedom to these broadband providers and only seeking legal recourse if there is proof of anti-competitive actions.
Yes, and that has worked so well with Microsoft hasn't it? We all know how MS has been regularly and severely punished by the legal system for its monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive actions over the last 25 years or so. Why, they just got slapped into submission by the legal system every damn time they tried to drive their competitors out of business and set up a monopoly.... or did they? I am all for a free market but like it or not, there are times when Governments, (and by that I mean the Govt. of any country not just the USA), have to grow a spine and legislate with the aim of setting big corporations straight on how far they can go. I'm not so sure the Republicans are doing their constituents any favors with this if it means that all abuses and anti-competetive actions have to be reversed after the fact via the courts. Justice in a Democracy is a very expensive luxury when you are dealing with large corporations.
The only reason for Apple not allowing XP booting would be if Apple were truly scared. If it thought that OS X wasn't up to snuff and the OS X applications (iLife, iWork et al) were lame, then it should shy away from Windows booting. Instead it is trusting its technology and giving its users more options.
Perhaps Dvorak was right and this is really just another step in the process of Apple gradually dumping OS.X for Windows Vista? Think about it, if Dvorak just blabbers on for long enough he has to come up with something that makes sense (as in the monkeys/typewriters/Shakespere-sonnet parable). He was right about the Intel switch so what we have to ask our selves is: What are the odds of Dvorak stumbling onto the truth about Apples plans twice in the same decade??
The place for potential damage, with AGW real or not, is to the economy. We've spend about 100 years building a petroleum based economic engine, and that cannot changed overnight.
Which is better:
Taking the economic hit of energy consumption reform and implementing energy efficiency policies and developing the needed technologies now so as to limit the extent to which the climate and environment is affected.
Slowly and lazily easing out of our petroleum based economic engine over 75-100 years, doing even more to aggravate the climate change in the process and then taking the economic hit of an even more fucked up climate.
From my point of view it's option 1) we better make some painful decisions right now. We have to increase energy efficiency across the board, penalize people financially for being wasteful (Things like for exapmple: gas guzzling SUVs should be a major luxury for any city dweller who doesn't actually need the off road capabilities of a vehicle like that), provide incentives for industry to minimize the pollution footprints and power consumption of their products, radically rethink the way we build and heat our houses and design our cars, build up mass transport, the list goes on...... To judge from what the Scientists are saying we either do something radical within the next 50 years or so or we are potentially in deep trouble. The argument doesn't revolve any more around debating whether or not we are getting our selves into deep shit. It mostly seems to revolve around how deep into the shit will we sink.
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
I agree, E-mail rules because it is works the same way on a PDA, MobilePhone, Windows/OS.X/Linux computer and it is a simple and robust system. If you, using a Microsoft solution want to collaborate with contractor X who uses an Oracle solution and contractor Y who uses Lotus notes or something else you are will be stuck with E-Mail being the lowest common denominator. In essence E-Mail is used because it is thoroughly standardized and will work on any platform, which brings us to (what is IMHO) the achilles heel of all collaboration software, it is only 100% compatible with it self. This is why people revert to email. You can't just expect your partners in a project to dump several thousand dollars worth of software, switch to Windows if they are using OS.X, Linux or some *NIX and (as is commonly done) demand that they standardize on Microsoft groupware products. The only way that collaboration suites are going to gain broad appeal is if different vendors solutions can all communicate with each other over open, industry standard protocols. You have to be able to connect to any workgroup using your favorite collaboration suite or whatever your employer mandates with the same ease that you can browse a website with any browser of your choice because all browsers use the same industry standard protocols and they all use the same basic set of client-side technologies for rendering content (HTML/JavaScript/ etc...). There may be slight variations between browsers but 97% of the time I have no problems browsing web sites no matter which browser/OS combination I am using. Until that kind of interoperability has been achieved by collaboration software vendors people will be 'stuck' with E-mail and in view of the difficulty Software vendors seem to have with agreeing on any kind of standard we will be 'stuck' with E-mail a lot longer.
This is why conservatives don't trust American liberals (leftists).
And its sad that both words have been hijacked. Today's liberal is in reality a socialist, while today's conservative would be either authoritarian or national socialist.
Do you mean US American liberals or liberals in general? A fair portion of US American 'liberals' (the ones the fair and balanced Fox news channel delights in presenting as the worst plague to afflict humantiy since the appearance of smallpox) would be considered as being either moderate conservatives or as occupying the political center most other parts of the world. What the rest of the world calls 'liberals' would be closer to Social democrats with whom US American liberals have some ideals in common. However, 24ct Socialists and Communists are way, way to the left of even the Social Democrats.
Of course, hopefully a good Cedega-for-Mac solution will eliminate the need for dualboot altogether.
OS.X has never been a platform for hardcore gamers, it probably never will be and for those who use it the native game ports usually offer an adequate if not spectacular selection to choose from. But you are probably righ, a Cedega-for-mac solution will probably happen. If it does it will completely kill off the native OS.X ports which will make the people at Cedega happy but for the rest of us that isn't necessarily a good thing. Even if games will be playable with Cedega almost as soon as they are released for Windows the stability will probalby never quite measure up when compared to Windows. Personally I'd rather stick with the native ports and live with the limited selection and dual booting. Another thing is that Cedega's business practices vis-a-vi the OSS community are not exactly to my liking. The OSS crowd doesn't like Cedega alot and they can ruin them by setting up a competing project which is probably why Cedega reacted so venomously and threatened to restrict their proprietary license when Gentoo and Debian included it.
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I know I'll get flamed to hell, but screw it. If we truly* have such a shortage of computer scientists, then let's recruit the foreigners and bring them in as immigrants. Remember all of those European scientists came to the U.S. before/during WWII? How much of the American technical supremacy of the 20th century can be traced back to their contributions? The best way to develop/maintain technical prowess as a society is to secure the best intellectual capital.
Actually a lot of the current high tech supremacy the US has today is a combination of European knowhow (primarily Nazi German, just compare state-of-the-art Allied and German military projects at the end of WWII) and the USA's commercial muscle, imagination and will to exploit it which is a factor that is often overlooked. A large part was also down to looted technical documentation and research data. There is a famous story of a lead engineer at North American working on the F-86 fighter who went to night school to learn German in order to fully exploit the research data he had been given by the US intelligence services. Apparently he subsequently completely redesigned the aircraft. While that may not be a 100% true story German data and German and other European Scientists certainly had a major effect on the US aerospace industry. It would be hard to repeat this phenomenon today, the influx of sensitive scientific data cannot be replicated since the nations that possess any data of value to the US are neither in ruins nor under occupation by US forces making the wholesale annexation of their entire cutting edge IP impossible. You may, however, expect some success in recruiting some foreign workers who buy into modern variant of the good old 'streets paved with gold' myth.
It comes from Islamism, describing a fundamentalist Islamic revival movement characterized by a literal interpretation of the Qu'ran and application of Islamic ideals to all aspects of life. Islamist, then, is the term for a fundamentalist follower of Islam. Today it is used as an almost derogatory phrase, though, thanks to popularization and use from the current administration.
I agree, I recently saw an interview with a high ranking Turkish politician (a woman and a secular moslem) who objected to the use of the word 'Islamist' by a reporter, firstly since it is silly and secondly because it makes it very easy to draw the false conclusion that Islamism=Islam thus leading many non moslem people, who often are non to familiar with Islam for various reasons, to believe that all moslems are militant fundamentalists which is in no way true. Bin Laden and his ilk are a small minority which, although they enjoy a certain amount of hero worship among a limited community of Islamic fundamentalists and other religio-political extremists, are viewed as a bunch of murdering crackpots by most other muslims. It should be kept in mind that Al Quaeda and friends, seem to make no distinction between what they consider to be 'unworthy'/'heretical' moslems and the hated 'Christian Westerners'/'Crusaders' and kill both with equal relish (I am an agnostic European Westerner from a Christian culture myself). Basically I fail to see why the good old and un-ambivalent term 'militant Islamic fundamentalist' had to be replaced with 'Islamist' which is much more generic and seems designed to give rise to confusion among the uninformed.
I wonder if the Bush Administration realizes what its rhetoric sounds like. Copyright infringement = terrorism? Marijuana = terrorism?
<rant>
They are simply sticking with what worked in the hysteric political climate of the recent past when all you needed to do to get a law passed was prefix the words 'anti terrorist' to every occurrence of the word 'legislation' and where you only had to accuse annoying groups of people of having 'links to Al Quaeda' or having 'Islamist sympathies' (Incidentally, what does that make the US based Christian fundamentalists? Christianists!?!) to ensure you could declare open season on them. This is probably just an attempt to see how far you can take this tactic. Fortunately people are getting wise to the ploy, it is only unfortunate it has taken so long.
</rant>
Or how about when you see the dentist? Will they make you wear a hat pointing downward saying "This smile brought to you by Dr. Dentafark".
That wouldn't work because you can take the hat off and throw it away... well... unless they staple it to your skull. Another solution would be a temporary tattoo on your forehead. Either way thanks for that post, I needed a laugh... heh... Dr. Dentafark!
It might be next month, or it might be years from now, but the EU will eventually cave and give in to Microsoft.
I don't think so! It is in the interest of the US to maintain the Microsoft monopoly just like it was and still is in their interest to maintain other monopolies or market dominances such as the one Boeing had over the commercial airliner market. It turned out to be in the interest of the European Union to crack the Boeing dominance, Airbus is wiping the floor with Boeing on a number of levels these days, and that example showed alot of people over here that the US corporations can be defeated even if they are supported by the US government. It is in the interest of the European Union to crack Microsoft's stranglehold on the European market since that will only boost their own software industries if they play their cards right. Despite the dismissive attitudes of US neocons toward Europe as a place to do business the European Union is still a market of 460 million people and as such it represents a very significant source of revenue for Microsoft. Threatening this revenue gives the EU considerable leverage against Microsoft and since MS is a US corporation the EU has little motivation to be kind to them.
...that would be the other job where you get paid for starting flamewars with stupid utterances and writings.
By your reasoning you could just as easily say an internationally accessible server with web sites about democracy should be subject to Chinese censorship laws even if the server is physically in America and operated by an American company.
I seem to remember having read about this sort of a dilemma before concerning jurisdiction in a libel case. If I remember correctly that case ended up in a debate about how you define the concept of 'publishing' vis-a-vis the Internet. Going by the result in that case the act of uploading the material to the server where it was displayed to the public via a web server constituted an act of 'publishing'. So due to the physical location of this server the material was published in the USA and US law applies. In view of this, if the USA doesn't define fashion designs as IP, then these guys are shit out of luck no matter what French law stipulates. The only thing the French can really can hope for is to achieve some sort of an internet equivalent to recalling or banning the import of a certain issue of a foreign printed paper magazine. They could possibly hope to succeed in compelling this party to deny access to the disputed material on their site from IP numbers located in France and even that would presumably have to be implemented via systems on French soil. That being said what Viewfinder did may be legal but they are really shooting them selves in the foot since this isn't exactly a good way to make friends in the fashion industry any more than if, say, an automobile magazine was to publish unauthorized pictures of a new prototype sports car. The result is that you get universally shut out of the loop and ignored by the industry. Publications like this are considered analogous to those trash papers and magazines who publish paparazzi pictures of celebrities.
Fribble. Sure, the US sells "demilitarized scrap". In the US. To US citizens. Now ask who can buy Russian, Chinese, etc. weapons in the open global weapons market.
The point this guy was making is that anybody can go to a USAF scrap auction and buy several railway flat-car loads of scrap. Unfortunately his experience was that if you rifle through a few carefully selected loads of such 'junk' you are more or less bound to come up with some components of sensetive systems whose intelligence value can be very high to countries like China, Russia and worse still Iran and N-Korea for reasons that are perhaps not immediately obvious. You don't need access to an entire F-16/F-15/F-18 to cause major trouble for the USAF in a future conflict. All you need is access to a few key components from the radar to calibrate your ECM-pods and it seems that such components can occasionally be found in the stuff the USAF sells of as scrap despite the fact that such material should without exception be shipped off for secure disposal. Why do you think the USA sent several helicopter loads of boffins into a minefield in the Kosovo to salvage the radar unit of a shot-down Mig-29? It's not as if a radar that crashed to the ground from several thousand meters altitude can be made to run again but it is still valuabe for research into radar warning recievers and for creating jamming profiles for your ECM-pods and the same goes for any missiles it might have been carrying. Only fools fail to realize the signifigance of this kind of intelligence gathering and it also is the reason why the loss of that F-117 over Serbia probably hurt the US more than the Pentagon is willing to admit. I'd be willing to bet good money that parts of that wreck found it's way into laboratories in Russia and possibly China.
Windows - it's that insecure, you don't even need physical access to a machine to steal it's componants! ;-)
Somewhere in California (IIRC) there is a company that specializes in providing military aircraft for the movie industry. At the time he appeared in a documentary which I watched, the owner of this business had apparently assembled more than one Cobra Gunship from parts sold off by the Armed Forces as scrap and was well on his way toward assembling (what was at the time at least) a state-of-the-art Apache assault helecopter using parts draw from similar sources (they showed footage of it being assembled). According to this guy some of the things the US armed forces sell off to civillans as 'scrap' are downright scary both because they are sometimes dangerous (contain live munitions, toxic materials, rocket engines, etc..) and because this 'scrap' includes some pretty sensetive electronic equipment. So stolen PC's are not the only problem, the US armed forces quite freely sells off some pretty amazing stuff as junk. True enough, the information on a stolen PC can cause a significant security breach but an enemy nation getting it's hands on sensetive military electronics at a scrap auction is even worse. I suppose the way the military filters equipment for disposal may have improved over the last few years but somehow I doubt it.
From my point of view a good modern GSM phone has the following features:
Microsoft has made their server virtualization software available for free.
Isn't this the opening phase of what Computer Business Review calls 'Netscaping' the competition? I wonder if that word will ever make it's way into the Microsoft system spelling dictionaries?
Yet another reason AMD is better than Intel!
Why? I don't think anybody immunized AMD against screwing up, they are just as capable of it as Intel.
I wonder if this affects the new Intel Macs?
I'll reserve the right to modify my opinion after familiarizing myself with the details of the nature of this vulnerability. As a first guess I'll hypothesize that this probably depends on how easy the OS running on the affected Intel box makes it for a remote attacker to exploit this hardware flaw.
crewing with those who wish to communicate with your operating system via your protocols is all part of INNOVATION! Abusing your monopoly position is all part of INNOVATION! Poor long suffering Microsoft, the Jesus of Software, so maligned by so many.
I don't think your, Jesus analogy will hold because Jesus' disciples were men of peace and unlike some of the people at Microsoft they would never have thrown chairs at the faithful.
That ubuntu... always stealing the spotlight.
...Red Hat?
Annoying isn't it. You must work for Novell?
Boot Camp will only help the Mac since it might get fair amount of Gamerz to switch as well as some tech savvy corporate OS.X users who don't use it today because they are afraid to be stuck without a fallback OS in case of the 'missing app' dilemma and other Microsoft compatibility issues. These are people who are usually not afraid of something like changing to a new OS. Another point is that even if rumors of Virtualizaton software being integrated into OS.X 10.5 are wrong there are still products like Parallels that offer high performance Virtualization which will do even more to convince these people to buy OS.X. Even so we are still only talking about 'power-users'. So in a sense this dude is right, neither Boot Camp nor Virtualization will trigger a mass migration from Windows XP/Vista to OS.X but that was bloody obvious from the very beginning so his comments are if anything rather superfluous . I would consider Compatibility Software like Wine to be much more likely to cause a User migration from Windows to OS.X that would be large enough show up as a small blip on Microsoft's look-down-shoot-dow radar. Professional, commercial adaptations of Wine such as CrossOver office if it is ever ported to the Mac will make switching a doable proposition, even for relatively clues-less windows users. But even if we see a dramatic growth for the Mac and OS.X due to these technologies. Apples Hardware/Software package will never grow to enjoy the kind of domination that it threatens Microsoft Windows and the BeigeBox Shufflers like Dell with Extinction.
With China, India, and most other developing countries exempt from Kyoto, (and to a lesser extent, the USA opting out) there's very little incentive for those who have signed on to actually do anything. Plus, the costs of meeting the targets through technology (e.g. hybrids, or new power plants, or home upgrades) are enormous.
... (the list goes on) and the longer we put it off the worse the problem gets. That last paragraph of your post is an echo of a very popular conservative argument against pollution and emission control. What that basically says is: 'Doing something to solve this problem (and we are just hypothesizing mind you, not admitting that there actually is a problem) will be to expensive so let's just accept that the only sensible thing we can do is to ignore the problem. After all it is common knowledge that if you ignore problems long enough the forces of the free market will make them go away...' People liked the Kyoto protocol because it seemed like a first step in the right direction nobody ever said it was perfect.
And yet it has to happen. There is no way around hybrids, new or upgraded power-plants, energy efficiency measures, alternative fuels for internal combustion engines, home upgrades
I think the OP's point was : for 2x the power consumption (250 Watt -> 500 Watt), you get 10x the compute performance (300 MHz -> 3 GHz).
So, if your goal is to get the best performance / killowatt-hour, you're better off running fewer, newer, machines.
Actually the OP advocated using '...State-of-the-art computers...'. That's fine if you can afford them, these guys may be using old inefficient hardware but they are getting it for free and if they are running the whole mess on bio diesel the electricity is also practically free since Biodiesel can be made from used vegetable oil which can be had for free at any fast food resturant. I am not going to judge the usefulness of this cluster from a compter science standpoint. However, judging from TFA, with free hardware, free software, free energy other than the purchase and running costs of the generator and the treatment costs for the fuel which into the bargain is environmentally friendly, you'll have a hard time beating this setup for cost efficiency. If we assume the work on the project is done by voulenteers the only other major cost factor would be the cost of housing this setup.
Just so I clear this up I believe in evolution, however, I also firmly believe in God, I see no reason why both theories cannot co-exist, even the vatican support this view.
I know that it is popular to hold the Vatican up as an anti Scientific organization which is unfair because it's attitude to science has radically changed since the 16th century (Just for example: Gregor Mendel the genetics pioneer was an Augustinians monk). The modern Vatican is in no way shape or form a staunch supporter of intelligent design. Pope John Paul II was quoted as saying that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis". As far as I know evolution is taught in the Catholic school system and the Vaticans traditional position has always been either 'no comment' which in later years has given way to the cautious position that evolution and Catholic dogma are not in conflict. You can probably cite a number of examples of people in the Catholic Church making pro Intelligent Design comments but recent and official outspoken statements by people in the Vatican that REALLY matter against Evolution and in support of Intelligent Design as preached by the most vocal US based Christian fundamentalists is something I'd like to see.
Oracle's got PosgreSQL beat in terms of features (which, as someone else already noted, many Oracle users don't need), but I wouldn't try whining that PostgreSQL is "hard to configure" Not compared to Oracle it isn't!
For one thing, these days, Oracle ships with an Java GUI that makes the database creation process alot less painful plus the Enterprise manager also helps to keep an overview. Not that your complaint about the DB instance creation process really makes much sense. You are comparing a Sabertooth tiger with a common house cat which is pretty redundant. OracleDB is a much more complex product than Postgres is, they are in different weight classes. Also keep in mind that it's not just about features. While working for a former employer I watched MySQL get dumped for Postgres as their billing system grew because Postgres had more features. However after about a year Postgres got dumped for Oracle because Postgres kept suffering major faliures every two or three months or so at very high loads. Oracle simply proved to be more stable at high loads, it scaled better, had top notch (though expensive) support and most of all it offered better disaster recovery mechanisms whenever seldom it did experience a catastrophic faliure (once due to a power faliure caused by construction work) and disaster recovery cost us considerably less effort than it did with Postgres. If you run Oracle on top notch hardware on a properly set up, patched and configured OS administered by a good Sysadmin/DBA it is about the most stable setup you can get. For companies that are making millons using Oracle for, say, their billing system like my former employer, the cost of expensive servers, a good sysadmin and the occasional contracted Oracle specialist is really peanuts compared to the damage that downtime can do in terms of Customer confidence and simply lost revenue.
The idea was to keep broadband providers from forming monopolies by keeping other non-partner providers out with high costs or degraded services. However, the Republicans are doing the right thing by their constituents by allowing the maximum freedom to these broadband providers and only seeking legal recourse if there is proof of anti-competitive actions.
Yes, and that has worked so well with Microsoft hasn't it? We all know how MS has been regularly and severely punished by the legal system for its monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive actions over the last 25 years or so. Why, they just got slapped into submission by the legal system every damn time they tried to drive their competitors out of business and set up a monopoly.... or did they? I am all for a free market but like it or not, there are times when Governments, (and by that I mean the Govt. of any country not just the USA), have to grow a spine and legislate with the aim of setting big corporations straight on how far they can go. I'm not so sure the Republicans are doing their constituents any favors with this if it means that all abuses and anti-competetive actions have to be reversed after the fact via the courts. Justice in a Democracy is a very expensive luxury when you are dealing with large corporations.
The only reason for Apple not allowing XP booting would be if Apple were truly scared. If it thought that OS X wasn't up to snuff and the OS X applications (iLife, iWork et al) were lame, then it should shy away from Windows booting. Instead it is trusting its technology and giving its users more options.
Perhaps Dvorak was right and this is really just another step in the process of Apple gradually dumping OS.X for Windows Vista? Think about it, if Dvorak just blabbers on for long enough he has to come up with something that makes sense (as in the monkeys/typewriters/Shakespere-sonnet parable). He was right about the Intel switch so what we have to ask our selves is: What are the odds of Dvorak stumbling onto the truth about Apples plans twice in the same decade??
Which is better:
From my point of view it's option 1) we better make some painful decisions right now. We have to increase energy efficiency across the board, penalize people financially for being wasteful (Things like for exapmple: gas guzzling SUVs should be a major luxury for any city dweller who doesn't actually need the off road capabilities of a vehicle like that), provide incentives for industry to minimize the pollution footprints and power consumption of their products, radically rethink the way we build and heat our houses and design our cars, build up mass transport, the list goes on...... To judge from what the Scientists are saying we either do something radical within the next 50 years or so or we are potentially in deep trouble. The argument doesn't revolve any more around debating whether or not we are getting our selves into deep shit. It mostly seems to revolve around how deep into the shit will we sink.
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
I agree, E-mail rules because it is works the same way on a PDA, MobilePhone, Windows/OS.X/Linux computer and it is a simple and robust system. If you, using a Microsoft solution want to collaborate with contractor X who uses an Oracle solution and contractor Y who uses Lotus notes or something else you are will be stuck with E-Mail being the lowest common denominator. In essence E-Mail is used because it is thoroughly standardized and will work on any platform, which brings us to (what is IMHO) the achilles heel of all collaboration software, it is only 100% compatible with it self. This is why people revert to email. You can't just expect your partners in a project to dump several thousand dollars worth of software, switch to Windows if they are using OS.X, Linux or some *NIX and (as is commonly done) demand that they standardize on Microsoft groupware products. The only way that collaboration suites are going to gain broad appeal is if different vendors solutions can all communicate with each other over open, industry standard protocols. You have to be able to connect to any workgroup using your favorite collaboration suite or whatever your employer mandates with the same ease that you can browse a website with any browser of your choice because all browsers use the same industry standard protocols and they all use the same basic set of client-side technologies for rendering content (HTML/JavaScript/ etc...). There may be slight variations between browsers but 97% of the time I have no problems browsing web sites no matter which browser/OS combination I am using. Until that kind of interoperability has been achieved by collaboration software vendors people will be 'stuck' with E-mail and in view of the difficulty Software vendors seem to have with agreeing on any kind of standard we will be 'stuck' with E-mail a lot longer.
This is why conservatives don't trust American liberals (leftists).
And its sad that both words have been hijacked. Today's liberal is in reality a socialist,
while today's conservative would be either authoritarian or national socialist.
Do you mean US American liberals or liberals in general? A fair portion of US American 'liberals' (the ones the fair and balanced Fox news channel delights in presenting as the worst plague to afflict humantiy since the appearance of smallpox) would be considered as being either moderate conservatives or as occupying the political center most other parts of the world. What the rest of the world calls 'liberals' would be closer to Social democrats with whom US American liberals have some ideals in common. However, 24ct Socialists and Communists are way, way to the left of even the Social Democrats.
Of course, hopefully a good Cedega-for-Mac solution will eliminate the need for dualboot altogether.
OS.X has never been a platform for hardcore gamers, it probably never will be and for those who use it the native game ports usually offer an adequate if not spectacular selection to choose from. But you are probably righ, a Cedega-for-mac solution will probably happen. If it does it will completely kill off the native OS.X ports which will make the people at Cedega happy but for the rest of us that isn't necessarily a good thing. Even if games will be playable with Cedega almost as soon as they are released for Windows the stability will probalby never quite measure up when compared to Windows. Personally I'd rather stick with the native ports and live with the limited selection and dual booting. Another thing is that Cedega's business practices vis-a-vi the OSS community are not exactly to my liking. The OSS crowd doesn't like Cedega alot and they can ruin them by setting up a competing project which is probably why Cedega reacted so venomously and threatened to restrict their proprietary license when Gentoo and Debian included it.