laptops definitely do not cost the same amount of money as desktops, in terms of the amount of processing power you get for your money. Especially since laptops cant really be upgraded, etc. If all you're doing is word processing, then sure you can get a little £300/$500 laptop, but if you want to do anything useful, such as play games (hehe), or 3D CAD work, then laptops are nowhere near the same value as a good old desktop.
That depends on how you do your math. The value of picking laptops over destktops is measured in more than money and benchmark results. The company I work for uses hardly anything other than laptops. How sophisticated a laptop you get depends on what you are doing, people who only do word processing and muck around with book-keeping software etc.. get lower end machines (but still high quality brands). If you are doing more demanding work or if you are a PHB you get something better. Performance at the high end is really not an issue 90% of the time since even our engineers and developers are rarely doing heavy-duty 3D CAD work or playing Halflife 2 on their laptop work stations. The latter should be done at home anyway and it is not surprising that the former reqires a very powerful laptop or a specialized desktop system (ie. expensive systems). All in all laptops come out better than desktops in many companies for the exact reason the grandparent mentioned, people take them home which means they can quickly respond to emergency situations via a VPN connection which makes you capable of very flexible responses in a crisis. That would not be possible if you only bought desktops. The size is not an issue since most laptop owners mainly just transport their laptop to and from work by car. Furthermore since people (at least where I work) also often get to use the company laptops for personal stuff you might argue the laptop becomes one of the perks of the job since it saves alot of people having to buy a computer of their own even if the company laptop does not score tops in the benchmarks since, believe it or not, most people are not hardcore computer gamers in their spare time.
...is that the reason for these king sized laptops? I thought it was part of an an international conspiracy to irradiate the reproductive organs of/. readers to keep them from breeding.
It is off limits for more reasons than just evil liberals and environmentalist and their protests. While I agree that for the forseeable future there is no way to get around nuclear technology in large sized space craft for deep space exploration I also share some of the concerns voiced by people arguing against using nuclear power with wild abandon in the design of spacecraft. The problem is how do you build a large sized space craft capable of really worth while deep space journeys? Do you build the components down on earth and lift them into orbit? In that case what if one of the heavy lifters carrying say, a metric ton of nuclear fuel explodes after launch? Even if the effort succeeds how comfortable will you feel having a nuclear powered space ship or even several space ships each the size of a large nuclear submarine and their nuclear powered support facilities in earth orbit? Considering the hysteria caused by 'Cosmos 954' what would the prospect of an interplanetary space ship crashing to earth do to public support for space exploration? And this is actually not such an implausable suggestion either, all it would take to cause a major disaster is a single piece of space debri or a micro metiorite. I for one would feel alot better about large nuclear powered space craft if they were built as far off planet as possible, preferably on a moonbase using locally mined materials.
Early Roman navys were often temporary entities although there were also permanent squadrons even during the later empire. By then it seems their main function was to combat pirates and smugglers since the Romans had by then eliminated all serious naval challengers. A large standing navy only reappeared during the very late imperial and Byzantine period when various barbarian and large moslem naval forces reappered as the Western and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The temporary fleets, built on campaign or to deal with some sudden maratime threat, were often built of unseasoned or low quality wood and intended to last no more than a few of campaigning seasons before they were either scrapped as unseaworthty or had been lost to bad weather. While it is probably possible to torch a Roman war galley at ancor on a calm cloudless day using some sort of mirror array I don't think such a weapon would have scored more than a couple of sucesses at best and it would have been practically useless against a fast moving and maneuvering target. It would have been most useful against relatively immobile targets such as floating siege towers or catapults that would have been mounted on platforms made by lashing several galleys together. If anything the psychological effect of this 'death ray' would have been far greater than the practical destructive effect, sort of like the effect that rockets had the first time Chinese armies deployed them in combat. At first they probably scared the hell out of the barbarians but after a short while barbarians got wise to the fact that unless they were really big and carried exploding warheads Chinese rockets were not terribly destructive and made sure their forces knew it and that the horses were acclimatized to the alien noises the rockets made. I would not expect a force that achieved the very high degree of professionalism the Roman army did to have been impressed by this sort of a weapon for very long even if the weapon worked under ideal conditions.
The point of the robot arm is to get the same range of motion as the actual Dinosaur would have had. They can then give each joint a strength proportional to the size of the muscle that would have been attached to it (some guess work here I would assume). Then they can play around with it and see what different movements and would kind of attacks would have been possible and how much damage they would do. Animals use their claws in different ways, and the appendage the claw is attached to gives you just as much information as the size and shape of the claw itself. The expirement isn't what damage can WE do with a velociraptor claw it's what damage the velociraptor could have done.
And it is a commendable effort. It is amazing how many obviously dumb theories are repeated in both paleontological and archeological literature simply because nobody bothered to go out to the machine shop, set up a test rig and experiment. An example from archeology is the legend that has grown up around the British Longbow stating that these weapons were able to pierce the armor of even the best eqiuipped knights at long ranges. If you go out and test the Longbow it acutally turns out it was not terribly successful at penetrating medieval armor although it was still a valuable weapon. Fire an armor piercing arrow (bodkin arrrow) at somebody wearing a chain mail shirt (although I pesonally prefer to use a test rig to simulate a human and not just because chain mail wearing humans are getting rather rare nowadays) and it will penitrate but if the mail is of reasonably good quality (as in rivited or even double) and worn over padded armor the damage will often be surprisingly small. Repeat the experiment on plate armor and not the usual experiment of suspending a 3x3 foot flat plate of sheet iron in mid air by the corners (Where the bodkin will penetrate at short ranges with a powerful bow) but on an actual breastplate backed by padded armor and some test rig to approximate the wearer and a even an armor piercing Longbow arrow will bounce off due to deflection or fail to penetrate most of the time and especially at longer ranges. Similar stories can be told about a variety of scientific debates like for example, to cite an example from paleontology, whether or not the Marsupial lion was able to actively hunt or whether it was a pure carrion eater. People spend years debating and even mud slinging in some cases when a couple of weeks of experimenting can probably do alot more good.
...Novell/Suse on Intel and AMD powered boxen is making major headway as well. On the other hand there is also plenty of MCSE/MCSA people on their way into management and not just Linux fans. There will be a continuing migration from the old UNIX brands like Sun for example to Linux as Linux matures but I would not expect any migration from Windows to Linux to become an uncontrollable Exodus.
What's hard to understand? There was a ban placed on the use of public funds to do manned space exploration because it was considered a waste of money by the scientific community. When you consider how much money is wasted on the ISS every year you gotta appreciate they may have a point.
No they don't have a point. The ISS it self has had a number of problems but calling the basic idea of an ISS a waste of money because one of the implementations of that idea sucks is plain stupid. Like any other elementary scientific research (be it in physics, genetics, mathematics, computing....the list goes on), studying the problems of manned space exploration requires the vision to see that the knowledge gained from experimental installations we are building today will perhaps only be useful some 50 or even 100 years from now. In fact some of the uses we find for this knowledge will be things we cannot not dream of today. The ISS and manned space flight in general may not serve much of a practical, profit generating purpose today and this will probably be true for decades to come but that is not the point. The point is that the ISS and manned space flight in general is fundamental research that we are going to need the day we have advanced far enought to enable us to economically travel to other parts of our solar system. It is easy to point a finger at projects like this one and call it a waste of money the tough bit is opening your eyes and seeing the benefits farther down the road.
Estonia is the fake country with the bearded people.
No thats Elbonia, and I deeply resent your ignorance we are not a fake country.
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
Well, the thing is those *stan countries were blasted into in orbit around Pluto by the Soviet space agency during the cold war since they proved to be a general nuisance. The only exception is Afghanistan which had to be brought down to earth a few years ago for a major overhaul due to a massive rodent infestation.
I don't care if it's see through or not. Stopping a.50 armour piercing round from a browning pretty damn impressive. I wonder if the compound suffers from the same degradation due to exposure to sunlight as some types of bullet proof glass.
Keep in mind this is not the.50 cal Browning machine gun they are talking about, that would be impressive enough all on it's own, this thing is a super heavy sniper rifle (M107?). The achievement is especially impressive in view of the fact that the AP rounds form these rifles proved capable of piercing the armor of some of the APC's fielded by the Iraqi army during the Bush-wars in the Gulf.
By having many different INI files, the loss of one file isn't going take the whole frigging system out.
I guess convenience is more important than resiliency to some, but since that's been Microsoft's approach to damn near everything for the past 20 years it doesn't surprise me in the least...
I am no fan of Microsoft but I have to defend them on this count. If I remember correctly IBM's AIX (a Unix variant) also stores most of its system configuration in a Object Database and does not appear to suffer for it. Of course IBM, unlike Microsoft, was very selective about who and what gets to run as Root. So I don't think the problem with Windows is so much the fact that Microsoft decided to use a database instead of text files. The problem lies in the fact that this registry database was badly structured and the fact that that since most people using Windows boxen are running everything from Minesweeper through IE 6.0 to Doom3 as Administrator it is very easy for malicious software that slips in to manipulate the Windows Registry. That still does not mean that using databases to store the system configuration informanton of an operating system is the root of all evil.
Holding companies accountable, as suggested in the article, might be a slightly better solution, but again it's somewhat complicated when you start trying to hold an overseas company accountable. (It's more doable than holding an overseas individual accountable, but still not a simple task).
That is especially true in places like India and the PRC where justice is to a large extent dependent on who you know or manage to pay off as opposed to the USA and the older EU member states (the newer EU states still have alot of work to do) where justice may cost alot of money but at least corruption levels are a lot lower. Even Italy gets a higher rating in that survey than India and the PRC.
How about making an O/S that is secure to begin with? Charging people or supplying add-ons to fix one's own problems?
Since when has Microsoft elected to do things the easy and efficient way when they can do things the really complicated and inefficient way? From my point of view it is really kind of funny that they might now get into trouble with the EU because they are trying to muscle into (and probably kill off) an industry that largely owes its existence to Microsoft's incompetence and its long-standing reluctance to fix the gaping security holes and design flaws in it's own operating system.
Any hypothetical Office for Linux would markedly hurt Microsoft OS sales (No, it would not cause them to completely collapse but it would definetly dent them). So I think Microsoft is about as likely to create MS Office for Linux as the USA is likely to sell F-16 fighters to Iran. I have, however, always wondered why they bothered to create the MS Office suite for Mac?
On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful ladies.....even with a whole harem of beutiful ladies that must be uncomfortable. I mean.. they must have paper-cuts in all sorts of unmentionable places?!
Well, they don't have to give anything back, if postgres is BSD-license. But in practice, they probably will. Not everything, but quite a bit. It's in their interests to give back to the community a lot of the changes they've made, so that the work done on the free version doesn't unnecessarily duplicate the proprietary version, and so that the next release of postgres doesn't force Sun to rewrite half their modifications. Basically, if Sun want to take advantage of progress made by the community on postgres, then they'll be giving back some of their own. They don't want to diverge too far.
I agree, even if Sun only contributes to making the Open Source version of Postgres more stable than it is now it will have been worth it. Let's just hope that if this collaboration ever materializes it won't run into the same headaches as Apple/Safari did with the KDE-team/KHTML. Assuming they are even interested in cooperating with a big, evil corporation Postgres developers may find them selves recieving what they consider 'dirty' code from Sun, having to sign non-disclosure agreements and other things that are anathema to many of them. There are many cultural incompatabilities between corportations and Open Source purists and there is no guarantee they can be overcome.
How about buying a few thousand and hiding them at strategic locations in the meeting places of the US Congress and other world parliaments? Of course it is always possible that nobody would notice since most of what comes out of those places is practically unintelligible anyway.....
...lets RTFA and carefully note that Boeing is buying TTTech chips as well as Airbus:
Indeed, Boeing Co. has ordered TTTech's chips for the flight control system for its upcoming mid-size 787 Dreamliner. Boeing executives said they were unaware of any problems with TTTech's chips, but said further questions should be addressed by TTTech.
The boys at Boeing don't sound any more eager to take this seriously than Airbus so he would't get any support from that quarter would he? The US Govt. is another matter of course, being that it is teeming with Neocons just itching to shoot the Airbus consortium down in flames.
It sure sounds like Austria has a screwed up legal system.
Screwed up as it is I don't think the Austrian system is any worse than the US, German, French. British one.... The basic truth is that every body is equal under the law in a Democracy and everybody can get justice. All you have to do is put up the money for a N-year long legal battle and we all know who is more likely to win that one don't we? Ciitizen John Q. Public or Corporation X? My money is on the corporation. The end result in cases like this usually is that however wrong they may be the corporations always win. They do it by dragging things out in court until they have bankrupted you broken up your marrage and genarally ruined yoru life causing you to give up. One is just left hoping that Boeing and Airbus both have the sense to test these chips exhaustively before one of their aircraft makes them regret their lethargy when several hundred people die. Of course it usually never sinks in until to late that the PR damage done by one of their new superliners crashing will cost them more than what they are saving by ignoring the problem but one can always hope for a miracle, like... say... an aerospace industry CEO growing a consience? I know it's a slim chance but I have't quite given up on the human race yet.
... when I need them? That is so true. I expect Windows to catch up in terms of security and stability with Linux/Unix but to lose out in usability/userfriendlyness as Microsoft tightens the bolts on their OS. So while Windows will definitely catch up to Linux/Unix in terms of being a server system that should be taken seriously, expect the bar also to rise dramatically on the demands for knowledge, education and professionalism being made on Windows administrators. Alot Windows Server operators are going to find them selves looking for more highly qualified computer professionals because their old self taught went-to-night-school-and-got-a-certificate Administrators can no longer solve problems thrown up on Win 2003 or Vista Server that weren't there before because Microsoft left all hatches open to make things easyer for these less well educated admins. I already see this happening and the amusing thing is that after installing Windows 2003 many of these Certificate Admins solve the problems created when Microsoft changed default settings in Windows to a more secure configuration by reversing those changes and opening the security holes up again. I suppose you could argue these Admins are just being lazy but I think that a simple inability to adapt to the new more secure way of doing things has just as much to do with it.
Blair is alot of things, most of all he is not a Socialist. The labor party defined it self as a 'Democratic Socialist party' (Yes, there is a big difference between Social Democrats and Socialists, the latter are usually more radical). Today New Labor has flushed most of the original Social Democratic ideals of the Labor party down the toilet. The best descritpion of him that I have yet to hear is that he is: "... a tory infiltrator in the Labor party who by some fantastic chain of events managed to become it's leader". People have even speculated about whether or not he is a Neocon. Labor may have started out as a left wing party but today they have migrated considerably further to the Right of the policial spectrum.
Funny, I was going to say Democrats are. They're the socialist-wannabes, aren't they?
Actually, by European standards most US Democrats are pretty comfortably to the right of the center in politics. Everytime I hear you Neocons accuse liberal or moderate right wing politicians in the US of being Socialists I wonder what would happen if somebody introduced one of you US-American conservatives to a real live 24 carat way-left-of-center Socialist, never mind an acutal honest to goodness die hard Communist like we have them over here in Europe? My pet theory is that you would go red in the face, then steam would shoot out of your ears and your eyes would bulge out followed by a massive bang as your head explodes. Many US-Americans speak very belligerently about Communists, Socialsits and how they are the spawn of Satan etc... but I get the feeling most US-Americans have little or no idea what those words acutally mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they do their taxes on a firewall?
Masochism?
laptops definitely do not cost the same amount of money as desktops, in terms of the amount of processing power you get for your money. Especially since laptops cant really be upgraded, etc. If all you're doing is word processing, then sure you can get a little £300/$500 laptop, but if you want to do anything useful, such as play games (hehe), or 3D CAD work, then laptops are nowhere near the same value as a good old desktop.
That depends on how you do your math. The value of picking laptops over destktops is measured in more than money and benchmark results. The company I work for uses hardly anything other than laptops. How sophisticated a laptop you get depends on what you are doing, people who only do word processing and muck around with book-keeping software etc.. get lower end machines (but still high quality brands). If you are doing more demanding work or if you are a PHB you get something better. Performance at the high end is really not an issue 90% of the time since even our engineers and developers are rarely doing heavy-duty 3D CAD work or playing Halflife 2 on their laptop work stations. The latter should be done at home anyway and it is not surprising that the former reqires a very powerful laptop or a specialized desktop system (ie. expensive systems). All in all laptops come out better than desktops in many companies for the exact reason the grandparent mentioned, people take them home which means they can quickly respond to emergency situations via a VPN connection which makes you capable of very flexible responses in a crisis. That would not be possible if you only bought desktops. The size is not an issue since most laptop owners mainly just transport their laptop to and from work by car. Furthermore since people (at least where I work) also often get to use the company laptops for personal stuff you might argue the laptop becomes one of the perks of the job since it saves alot of people having to buy a computer of their own even if the company laptop does not score tops in the benchmarks since, believe it or not, most people are not hardcore computer gamers in their spare time.
...is that the reason for these king sized laptops? I thought it was part of an an international conspiracy to irradiate the reproductive organs of /. readers to keep them from breeding.
nuclear propulsion is politically off-limits..
It is off limits for more reasons than just evil liberals and environmentalist and their protests. While I agree that for the forseeable future there is no way to get around nuclear technology in large sized space craft for deep space exploration I also share some of the concerns voiced by people arguing against using nuclear power with wild abandon in the design of spacecraft. The problem is how do you build a large sized space craft capable of really worth while deep space journeys? Do you build the components down on earth and lift them into orbit? In that case what if one of the heavy lifters carrying say, a metric ton of nuclear fuel explodes after launch? Even if the effort succeeds how comfortable will you feel having a nuclear powered space ship or even several space ships each the size of a large nuclear submarine and their nuclear powered support facilities in earth orbit? Considering the hysteria caused by 'Cosmos 954' what would the prospect of an interplanetary space ship crashing to earth do to public support for space exploration? And this is actually not such an implausable suggestion either, all it would take to cause a major disaster is a single piece of space debri or a micro metiorite. I for one would feel alot better about large nuclear powered space craft if they were built as far off planet as possible, preferably on a moonbase using locally mined materials.
Early Roman navys were often temporary entities although there were also permanent squadrons even during the later empire. By then it seems their main function was to combat pirates and smugglers since the Romans had by then eliminated all serious naval challengers. A large standing navy only reappeared during the very late imperial and Byzantine period when various barbarian and large moslem naval forces reappered as the Western and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The temporary fleets, built on campaign or to deal with some sudden maratime threat, were often built of unseasoned or low quality wood and intended to last no more than a few of campaigning seasons before they were either scrapped as unseaworthty or had been lost to bad weather. While it is probably possible to torch a Roman war galley at ancor on a calm cloudless day using some sort of mirror array I don't think such a weapon would have scored more than a couple of sucesses at best and it would have been practically useless against a fast moving and maneuvering target. It would have been most useful against relatively immobile targets such as floating siege towers or catapults that would have been mounted on platforms made by lashing several galleys together. If anything the psychological effect of this 'death ray' would have been far greater than the practical destructive effect, sort of like the effect that rockets had the first time Chinese armies deployed them in combat. At first they probably scared the hell out of the barbarians but after a short while barbarians got wise to the fact that unless they were really big and carried exploding warheads Chinese rockets were not terribly destructive and made sure their forces knew it and that the horses were acclimatized to the alien noises the rockets made. I would not expect a force that achieved the very high degree of professionalism the Roman army did to have been impressed by this sort of a weapon for very long even if the weapon worked under ideal conditions.
The point of the robot arm is to get the same range of motion as the actual Dinosaur would have had. They can then give each joint a strength proportional to the size of the muscle that would have been attached to it (some guess work here I would assume). Then they can play around with it and see what different movements and would kind of attacks would have been possible and how much damage they would do. Animals use their claws in different ways, and the appendage the claw is attached to gives you just as much information as the size and shape of the claw itself. The expirement isn't what damage can WE do with a velociraptor claw it's what damage the velociraptor could have done.
And it is a commendable effort. It is amazing how many obviously dumb theories are repeated in both paleontological and archeological literature simply because nobody bothered to go out to the machine shop, set up a test rig and experiment. An example from archeology is the legend that has grown up around the British Longbow stating that these weapons were able to pierce the armor of even the best eqiuipped knights at long ranges. If you go out and test the Longbow it acutally turns out it was not terribly successful at penetrating medieval armor although it was still a valuable weapon. Fire an armor piercing arrow (bodkin arrrow) at somebody wearing a chain mail shirt (although I pesonally prefer to use a test rig to simulate a human and not just because chain mail wearing humans are getting rather rare nowadays) and it will penitrate but if the mail is of reasonably good quality (as in rivited or even double) and worn over padded armor the damage will often be surprisingly small. Repeat the experiment on plate armor and not the usual experiment of suspending a 3x3 foot flat plate of sheet iron in mid air by the corners (Where the bodkin will penetrate at short ranges with a powerful bow) but on an actual breastplate backed by padded armor and some test rig to approximate the wearer and a even an armor piercing Longbow arrow will bounce off due to deflection or fail to penetrate most of the time and especially at longer ranges. Similar stories can be told about a variety of scientific debates like for example, to cite an example from paleontology, whether or not the Marsupial lion was able to actively hunt or whether it was a pure carrion eater. People spend years debating and even mud slinging in some cases when a couple of weeks of experimenting can probably do alot more good.
...Novell/Suse on Intel and AMD powered boxen is making major headway as well. On the other hand there is also plenty of MCSE/MCSA people on their way into management and not just Linux fans. There will be a continuing migration from the old UNIX brands like Sun for example to Linux as Linux matures but I would not expect any migration from Windows to Linux to become an uncontrollable Exodus.
What's hard to understand? There was a ban placed on the use of public funds to do manned space exploration because it was considered a waste of money by the scientific community. When you consider how much money is wasted on the ISS every year you gotta appreciate they may have a point.
No they don't have a point. The ISS it self has had a number of problems but calling the basic idea of an ISS a waste of money because one of the implementations of that idea sucks is plain stupid. Like any other elementary scientific research (be it in physics, genetics, mathematics, computing....the list goes on), studying the problems of manned space exploration requires the vision to see that the knowledge gained from experimental installations we are building today will perhaps only be useful some 50 or even 100 years from now. In fact some of the uses we find for this knowledge will be things we cannot not dream of today. The ISS and manned space flight in general may not serve much of a practical, profit generating purpose today and this will probably be true for decades to come but that is not the point. The point is that the ISS and manned space flight in general is fundamental research that we are going to need the day we have advanced far enought to enable us to economically travel to other parts of our solar system. It is easy to point a finger at projects like this one and call it a waste of money the tough bit is opening your eyes and seeing the benefits farther down the road.
Estonia is the fake country with the bearded people.
No thats Elbonia, and I deeply resent your ignorance we are not a fake country.
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
Well, the thing is those *stan countries were blasted into in orbit around Pluto by the Soviet space agency during the cold war since they proved to be a general nuisance. The only exception is Afghanistan which had to be brought down to earth a few years ago for a major overhaul due to a massive rodent infestation.
I don't care if it's see through or not. Stopping a .50 armour piercing round from a browning pretty damn impressive. I wonder if the compound suffers from the same degradation due to exposure to sunlight as some types of bullet proof glass.
.50 cal Browning machine gun they are talking about, that would be impressive enough all on it's own, this thing is a super heavy sniper rifle (M107?). The achievement is especially impressive in view of the fact that the AP rounds form these rifles proved capable of piercing the armor of some of the APC's fielded by the Iraqi army during the Bush-wars in the Gulf.
Keep in mind this is not the
A classic example of poor design.
By having many different INI files, the loss of one file isn't going take the whole frigging system out.
I guess convenience is more important than resiliency to some, but since that's been Microsoft's approach to damn near everything for the past 20 years it doesn't surprise me in the least...
I am no fan of Microsoft but I have to defend them on this count. If I remember correctly IBM's AIX (a Unix variant) also stores most of its system configuration in a Object Database and does not appear to suffer for it. Of course IBM, unlike Microsoft, was very selective about who and what gets to run as Root. So I don't think the problem with Windows is so much the fact that Microsoft decided to use a database instead of text files. The problem lies in the fact that this registry database was badly structured and the fact that that since most people using Windows boxen are running everything from Minesweeper through IE 6.0 to Doom3 as Administrator it is very easy for malicious software that slips in to manipulate the Windows Registry. That still does not mean that using databases to store the system configuration informanton of an operating system is the root of all evil.
Holding companies accountable, as suggested in the article, might be a slightly better solution, but again it's somewhat complicated when you start trying to hold an overseas company accountable. (It's more doable than holding an overseas individual accountable, but still not a simple task).
That is especially true in places like India and the PRC where justice is to a large extent dependent on who you know or manage to pay off as opposed to the USA and the older EU member states (the newer EU states still have alot of work to do) where justice may cost alot of money but at least corruption levels are a lot lower. Even Italy gets a higher rating in that survey than India and the PRC.
How about making an O/S that is secure to begin with? Charging people or supplying add-ons to fix one's own problems?
Since when has Microsoft elected to do things the easy and efficient way when they can do things the really complicated and inefficient way? From my point of view it is really kind of funny that they might now get into trouble with the EU because they are trying to muscle into (and probably kill off) an industry that largely owes its existence to Microsoft's incompetence and its long-standing reluctance to fix the gaping security holes and design flaws in it's own operating system.
No Office For Linux, MS Patents Rejected
Any hypothetical Office for Linux would markedly hurt Microsoft OS sales (No, it would not cause them to completely collapse but it would definetly dent them). So I think Microsoft is about as likely to create MS Office for Linux as the USA is likely to sell F-16 fighters to Iran. I have, however, always wondered why they bothered to create the MS Office suite for Mac?
Oh yeah, I forgot.
....even with a whole harem of beutiful ladies that must be uncomfortable. I mean.. they must have paper-cuts in all sorts of unmentionable places?!
On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful ladies.
but i am one of those that are sure that animals have "souls" and are consciouss as well as plants....
Sssshhhhhh..... don't tell the vegans...
Well, they don't have to give anything back, if postgres is BSD-license. But in practice, they probably will. Not everything, but quite a bit. It's in their interests to give back to the community a lot of the changes they've made, so that the work done on the free version doesn't unnecessarily duplicate the proprietary version, and so that the next release of postgres doesn't force Sun to rewrite half their modifications. Basically, if Sun want to take advantage of progress made by the community on postgres, then they'll be giving back some of their own. They don't want to diverge too far.
I agree, even if Sun only contributes to making the Open Source version of Postgres more stable than it is now it will have been worth it. Let's just hope that if this collaboration ever materializes it won't run into the same headaches as Apple/Safari did with the KDE-team/KHTML. Assuming they are even interested in cooperating with a big, evil corporation Postgres developers may find them selves recieving what they consider 'dirty' code from Sun, having to sign non-disclosure agreements and other things that are anathema to many of them. There are many cultural incompatabilities between corportations and Open Source purists and there is no guarantee they can be overcome.
Did we get invaded? I hadn't noticed. ... I sure hope you are not posting form Iraq!
How about buying a few thousand and hiding them at strategic locations in the meeting places of the US Congress and other world parliaments? Of course it is always possible that nobody would notice since most of what comes out of those places is practically unintelligible anyway.....
...lets RTFA and carefully note that Boeing is buying TTTech chips as well as Airbus:
Indeed, Boeing Co. has ordered TTTech's chips for the flight control system for its upcoming mid-size 787 Dreamliner. Boeing executives said they were unaware of any problems with TTTech's chips, but said further questions should be addressed by TTTech.
The boys at Boeing don't sound any more eager to take this seriously than Airbus so he would't get any support from that quarter would he? The US Govt. is another matter of course, being that it is teeming with Neocons just itching to shoot the Airbus consortium down in flames.
It sure sounds like Austria has a screwed up legal system.
Screwed up as it is I don't think the Austrian system is any worse than the US, German, French. British one.... The basic truth is that every body is equal under the law in a Democracy and everybody can get justice. All you have to do is put up the money for a N-year long legal battle and we all know who is more likely to win that one don't we? Ciitizen John Q. Public or Corporation X? My money is on the corporation. The end result in cases like this usually is that however wrong they may be the corporations always win. They do it by dragging things out in court until they have bankrupted you broken up your marrage and genarally ruined yoru life causing you to give up. One is just left hoping that Boeing and Airbus both have the sense to test these chips exhaustively before one of their aircraft makes them regret their lethargy when several hundred people die. Of course it usually never sinks in until to late that the PR damage done by one of their new superliners crashing will cost them more than what they are saving by ignoring the problem but one can always hope for a miracle, like... say... an aerospace industry CEO growing a consience? I know it's a slim chance but I have't quite given up on the human race yet.
... when I need them? That is so true. I expect Windows to catch up in terms of security and stability with Linux/Unix but to lose out in usability/userfriendlyness as Microsoft tightens the bolts on their OS. So while Windows will definitely catch up to Linux/Unix in terms of being a server system that should be taken seriously, expect the bar also to rise dramatically on the demands for knowledge, education and professionalism being made on Windows administrators. Alot Windows Server operators are going to find them selves looking for more highly qualified computer professionals because their old self taught went-to-night-school-and-got-a-certificate Administrators can no longer solve problems thrown up on Win 2003 or Vista Server that weren't there before because Microsoft left all hatches open to make things easyer for these less well educated admins. I already see this happening and the amusing thing is that after installing Windows 2003 many of these Certificate Admins solve the problems created when Microsoft changed default settings in Windows to a more secure configuration by reversing those changes and opening the security holes up again. I suppose you could argue these Admins are just being lazy but I think that a simple inability to adapt to the new more secure way of doing things has just as much to do with it.
Blair is alot of things, most of all he is not a Socialist. The labor party defined it self as a 'Democratic Socialist party' (Yes, there is a big difference between Social Democrats and Socialists, the latter are usually more radical). Today New Labor has flushed most of the original Social Democratic ideals of the Labor party down the toilet. The best descritpion of him that I have yet to hear is that he is: "... a tory infiltrator in the Labor party who by some fantastic chain of events managed to become it's leader". People have even speculated about whether or not he is a Neocon. Labor may have started out as a left wing party but today they have migrated considerably further to the Right of the policial spectrum.
Funny, I was going to say Democrats are. They're the socialist-wannabes, aren't they?
Actually, by European standards most US Democrats are pretty comfortably to the right of the center in politics. Everytime I hear you Neocons accuse liberal or moderate right wing politicians in the US of being Socialists I wonder what would happen if somebody introduced one of you US-American conservatives to a real live 24 carat way-left-of-center Socialist, never mind an acutal honest to goodness die hard Communist like we have them over here in Europe? My pet theory is that you would go red in the face, then steam would shoot out of your ears and your eyes would bulge out followed by a massive bang as your head explodes. Many US-Americans speak very belligerently about Communists, Socialsits and how they are the spawn of Satan etc... but I get the feeling most US-Americans have little or no idea what those words acutally mean.
The really interesting question is to whom will they outsource lawenforcement and national defense?