Here's a story I was told by a classmate and that supposedly happened to a relative of his. It seems that a new neighbor moved into the suburban community this relative lived in. This guy had a big nasty dog he would let loose in the neighborhood. The whole summer the entire neighborhood tried to get this guy to clean up the shit his dog was leaving all over the place but he just ignored them. Finally winter came around and the dog would poop in the snow which was not visible most of the time so people stopped being as annoyed about it. However, come spring, the snow melted and there was dogshit everywhere. So one day the all the neighbors got together with shovels and buckets, gathered up all the dogshit and dumped it on the dog owners doorstep along with a note that very politely promised more of the same. After that the dog was kept on a leish.
A couple of years ago I saw a news report on a German TV station about a bunch of French farmers. These guys decided to display their displeasure about some new regulation or something of that nature. They got them selves a slurry sprayer, filled it up with slurry made from pig manure and then drove the thing around the town hall, spraying away as they went. Apparently they did this on two seperate occasions. A less liquid but no less fragrant variant of this is a common tactic among French fishermen. You get your self a truckload of fish, drive it to a remote location and let it stew in the sun for a couple of days and then dump it on the doorstep of whomevery you happen to dislike.
Wonder how much cache those 80GB and 100GB drives have. Most 5400RPM laptop HDs these days come with 8MB of cache, but there are 16MB versions too which really remedies the problem of slower performance of laptop HDs. I put a 60GB 16MB cache 5400RPM Toshiba drive in an IBM T21 and the performance difference compared to the previous HD (4200RPM, barely any cache) was simply amazing. Although, the only problem was that the drive was too hot for the poor T21 and RAM was located above the HD slot, so things got really unstable after about 10 minutes of operation.
From what I hear putting a 5400rpm drive in a PowerBook G4 really livens it up. A coworker of mine installed one for his father and the performance is noticably better, especially when opening large files in PS etc.... but I haven't had any feedback on heat issues. Has anybody else tried upgrading the PowerBook to 5400rpm? I'd be interested in hearing your experiences.
"nanoceramic material extracted from a natural stone"? How stupid do you have to be to believe this kind of thing?
Quite stupid actually, it is common knowledge among chemists that you get better results when extracting nanoceramic materials for stick on battery enhancers from supernatrural stone.
Hardly #2, but the USA is nevertheless waking up to the fact that China is catching up technologically at a much faster rate than anybody had expected. Soon enough the Chinese will have reached a point where they can threaten the USA militarily using Chinese developed technology based on technological transfer from Russia, W-Europe and the USA it self. Greedy corporations outourced work to China and with they exported the technology China needed to develop better and better military hardware. This sort of a panic reaction is simply a belated reckonition of this development. Expect the Chinese to field Submarines, Tanks and a Stealth aircraft capable of competing with the F-35 within the next 20 years or so and its surface fleet will become a serious challenge to the USN in the Pacific.
.. like griping that M$ does not produce a versions of it's Games, Office suite, Visio toos etc. for Linux? With IBM backing Linux why should they support Solaris? Corporate Wolf bites Corporate Coyote...
What is really bizarre about this is the library is legally required and therefore must legally be able to make copies. So why do they need a license? It's not like these German equivalents of the *AA's should be able to stop them.
That isn't guaranteed to stop them from trying. This is probably an effort by the Libraray to avoid the aggrivation of a totally pointless lawsuit. German banks for example have regularly taken quite mundane lawsuits to the supreme court in the hope that the expense of the process would discourage people from even trying to seek their right in the first place. Frivolous lawsuits are not just a problem in the USA, the Germans are almost as good at it as the Americans.
"The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005."
Actually the Register said:
So claim sources close to Taiwan's contract manufacturers, DigiTimes reports.
Which makes this more of a glorified rumor than anything else. Of course if it is true I'll be first in line to buy a G5 PowerBook come Q2 2005 and judging from what is being written about cooling problems I will also be able to fry bacon and eggs on it.
Just not enough to make me leave behind the utility of Linux for a world of locked down gaudy nonsense and five year old versions of *nix utilities.
That does not compute, most of the *nix utilities are included in OS.X, ok, some of them may not be familiar to the LINUX user being that OS.X descends from BSD. Even so they are not five years old and what is out of date can be replaced with minimal effort since most of the LINUX power user utilities have been ported to OS.X anyway.
While I commend the notion, Iceland has a unique feature not mentioned in the article -- an extremely small population. According to the CIA (spare the check-your-facts comments, thanks), it is currently less than 300,000 people.
Those 300.000 people also operate one of the biggest and most modern fishing fleets on the planet. In view of that fact being oil free by 2050 becomes a bit more challenging. Running cars on alternative fuels is one thing but extending that to deep sea trawlers and bulk cargo carriers is quite another proposition and that is precisely what they are thinking about.
I guess one of the reasons us Canadians support it is this way we can keep those damn Russians and Danes from stealing Santa's mail. (You all knew Santa is Canadian, right?)
And here I thought Santa Claus was Finnish?!?! Not that it matters really, it's the Icelanders who have the last laugh, they have 13 santas.
Right! It is and always will be cheaper and easyer to fork out a few billion dollars/euros in military aid to napalm strips of jungle or rocky hillside (aka, suspected coca/poppy/marihuana/hemp plantation) in country X than it is to deal with the root causes of drug use at home.
Until they get somewhere in the neighboorhood of SpaceShipTwentyEight, its still gonna be too expensive for me!
And with a bit of luck by the time SpaceShipOneThousandTwentyFour leaves the orbital shipyard we will be able to afford a vacation in another solar system.
Same here except it's 240GB of duplicates of the 60 or so Gigabytes of crap on my powerbook. I don't collect crap so much because I am a packrat. I make sequential backups of my crap to pacify my sense of paranoia, I suppose I have seen to many harddisk crashes.
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
I agree with you on the PowerBook & IBM Thinkpad probably being the best on the market. On the other hand Lenovo will have to live up to IBM's excellent design standard. If the next generation of TinkPads turns out to be the same sort of concrete slabs that makes most of the rest of the Inter PC based laptops out there they will become just another run of the mill manufacturer of cheap-n-clunky laptops. The whole reason alot of people buy the ThinkPad is because the latest generation is the only Intel PC based laptop out there that can hold a candle to the PowerBook in terms of design.
Red Hat's Linux clearly in this context means Red Hat's version of Linux. Ok, it's ambigous but let's not get stupid with the nit picking.
Nitpicking? He's still wrong, a very sigificant portion of all Linux installs by businesses and corporations, are in other distros than Red Hat. In my particlular corner of the world Suse is the distro of choice for most businesses. In fact I'd say Suse actually has Red Hat on the run over here. Red Hat may be the distro of coice in the US where a DoD official is reported to have expresed the following opinion of Suse: We don't use that German ****! but then again the Linux using world is alot larger than the USA alone.
Re:Strategic offshoring
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
...offshore has more advantages than disadvantages for huge projects (Texas unemployment office, anyone?).
Things must be tough if even the Texas unemployment office is outsourcing to India?!?! Imagine that, some poor Texan who just lost his job to offshoring calls the Texas Unemployment Office's information hotline:
"Hello, Texas unemployment office, Sanjay in Bangalore speaking. How can I help you ??"
I'd advise against it. I had a Toshiba laptop once and it broke down more often than all my other laptops combined. The powerconnector went, the floppy disk and the display. The one good thing about Toshiba is the exellent global service, they actually don't give you lip when you try to cache in on the international warranty and the techsupport isn't bad either. On the other hand, good as the service was, having the thing in the shop half the time sucked.
So -- using that old razor of Occam's -- either the entire world and every observable natural system is on the brink of an unheard-of disaster, or there is a noticable (and understandable) trend in scientific research to a) follow the herd, and b) doomsay.
True enough, Up here in the arctic the change in temprature is really noticable. Over the last few years all sorts of plants and animals that would hardly ever bee seen in here just 10-15 years ago have become common place. They do concede in this article that the climate is still colder than it was during the middle ages when people were able to grow wheat in quantity as far north as sub arctic Norway, Sweden and in Iceland: "...the temperatures of summer 2003 were almost undoubtedly the highest in Europe for over 500 years." So I'm still not convinced that this isn't just a natural fluctuation in the climate, althought is is probably not completely unaffected by human activity.
Yes but to quote a Pentagon official: "We don't use that German crap!" Ironically enough if you change the word "German" to "proprietary" and you have what is rapidly becoming the German position on using Windows.
Now they're putting together their own, affordable, bomb-disposal robots. I admire the initiative, but deplore the circumstances that make it necessary. Especially since the fact that a soldier/marine and his/her family can invest in the equipment means it is relatively inexpensive. If many soldiers buy it, it's *probably* useful too. So how come the government doesn't provide it?
It's probably because they are trying to figure out which campaign contributor should get the multi billion $ contract. It is really shameful that US troops are going into action packing ancient M-16's, privately bought body armor and communication/GPS kits and vehicles they armored them selves with metal taken from knocked out Iraqi tanks. On the other hand improvisation can be very valuable. And it is usually a quicker way to help your self than waiting for the Pentagon buerocracy to work. Take the whole issue of arming up the Predator drone, it was a semi official project accomplished by a handful of people who rigged the thing up with missiles and tested it. They even solved the problem of the low anti personnel potential of the Hellfire missiles AP warhead by fitting it with a simple metal fragmentation collar costing only a few cents. All this was accomplished in a matter of a few months. I bet a buch of engineers workign for some fat-cat defense contractor presented with the same problem of arming the Predator would have come back with a whole new UAV plus missile system priced in the billions of dollars and on a timescale spanning a decade. If you want quick and cheap, no nonsense solutions, the big US defenese contractors are usually not a good choice I don't think they are capable of thinking in terms of things that cost less than a billion and take less than a year to accomplish.
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Here's a story I was told by a classmate and that supposedly happened to a relative of his. It seems that a new neighbor moved into the suburban community this relative lived in. This guy had a big nasty dog he would let loose in the neighborhood. The whole summer the entire neighborhood tried to get this guy to clean up the shit his dog was leaving all over the place but he just ignored them. Finally winter came around and the dog would poop in the snow which was not visible most of the time so people stopped being as annoyed about it. However, come spring, the snow melted and there was dogshit everywhere. So one day the all the neighbors got together with shovels and buckets, gathered up all the dogshit and dumped it on the dog owners doorstep along with a note that very politely promised more of the same. After that the dog was kept on a leish.
A couple of years ago I saw a news report on a German TV station about a bunch of French farmers. These guys decided to display their displeasure about some new regulation or something of that nature. They got them selves a slurry sprayer, filled it up with slurry made from pig manure and then drove the thing around the town hall, spraying away as they went. Apparently they did this on two seperate occasions. A less liquid but no less fragrant variant of this is a common tactic among French fishermen. You get your self a truckload of fish, drive it to a remote location and let it stew in the sun for a couple of days and then dump it on the doorstep of whomevery you happen to dislike.
Wonder how much cache those 80GB and 100GB drives have. Most 5400RPM laptop HDs these days come with 8MB of cache, but there are 16MB versions too which really remedies the problem of slower performance of laptop HDs. I put a 60GB 16MB cache 5400RPM Toshiba drive in an IBM T21 and the performance difference compared to the previous HD (4200RPM, barely any cache) was simply amazing. Although, the only problem was that the drive was too hot for the poor T21 and RAM was located above the HD slot, so things got really unstable after about 10 minutes of operation.
From what I hear putting a 5400rpm drive in a PowerBook G4 really livens it up. A coworker of mine installed one for his father and the performance is noticably better, especially when opening large files in PS etc.... but I haven't had any feedback on heat issues. Has anybody else tried upgrading the PowerBook to 5400rpm? I'd be interested in hearing your experiences.
"nanoceramic material extracted from a natural stone"? How stupid do you have to be to believe this kind of thing?
Quite stupid actually, it is common knowledge among chemists that you get better results when extracting nanoceramic materials for stick on battery enhancers from supernatrural stone.
Hardly #2, but the USA is nevertheless waking up to the fact that China is catching up technologically at a much faster rate than anybody had expected. Soon enough the Chinese will have reached a point where they can threaten the USA militarily using Chinese developed technology based on technological transfer from Russia, W-Europe and the USA it self. Greedy corporations outourced work to China and with they exported the technology China needed to develop better and better military hardware. This sort of a panic reaction is simply a belated reckonition of this development. Expect the Chinese to field Submarines, Tanks and a Stealth aircraft capable of competing with the F-35 within the next 20 years or so and its surface fleet will become a serious challenge to the USN in the Pacific.
.. like griping that M$ does not produce a versions of it's Games, Office suite, Visio toos etc. for Linux? With IBM backing Linux why should they support Solaris? Corporate Wolf bites Corporate Coyote...
What is really bizarre about this is the library is legally required and therefore must legally be able to make copies. So why do they need a license? It's not like these German equivalents of the *AA's should be able to stop them.
That isn't guaranteed to stop them from trying. This is probably an effort by the Libraray to avoid the aggrivation of a totally pointless lawsuit. German banks for example have regularly taken quite mundane lawsuits to the supreme court in the hope that the expense of the process would discourage people from even trying to seek their right in the first place. Frivolous lawsuits are not just a problem in the USA, the Germans are almost as good at it as the Americans.
Guess that explains the Simpsons. What about the other 290 million?
Ok, Homer turns to drink once in a while, but in which episode(s) did Bart rob a bank, Lisa become a pregnant crack addict and Marge become a whore?
"The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005."
Actually the Register said:
So claim sources close to Taiwan's contract manufacturers, DigiTimes reports.
Which makes this more of a glorified rumor than anything else. Of course if it is true I'll be first in line to buy a G5 PowerBook come Q2 2005 and judging from what is being written about cooling problems I will also be able to fry bacon and eggs on it.
Just not enough to make me leave behind the utility of Linux for a world of locked down gaudy nonsense and five year old versions of *nix utilities.
That does not compute, most of the *nix utilities are included in OS.X, ok, some of them may not be familiar to the LINUX user being that OS.X descends from BSD. Even so they are not five years old and what is out of date can be replaced with minimal effort since most of the LINUX power user utilities have been ported to OS.X anyway.
While I commend the notion, Iceland has a unique feature not mentioned in the article -- an extremely small population. According to the CIA (spare the check-your-facts comments, thanks), it is currently less than 300,000 people.
Those 300.000 people also operate one of the biggest and most modern fishing fleets on the planet. In view of that fact being oil free by 2050 becomes a bit more challenging. Running cars on alternative fuels is one thing but extending that to deep sea trawlers and bulk cargo carriers is quite another proposition and that is precisely what they are thinking about.
I guess one of the reasons us Canadians support it is this way we can keep those damn Russians and Danes from stealing Santa's mail. (You all knew Santa is Canadian, right?)
And here I thought Santa Claus was Finnish?!?! Not that it matters really, it's the Icelanders who have the last laugh, they have 13 santas.
But then the statistics would not look good...
Right! It is and always will be cheaper and easyer to fork out a few billion dollars/euros in military aid to napalm strips of jungle or rocky hillside (aka, suspected coca/poppy/marihuana/hemp plantation) in country X than it is to deal with the root causes of drug use at home.
Until they get somewhere in the neighboorhood of SpaceShipTwentyEight, its still gonna be too expensive for me!
And with a bit of luck by the time SpaceShipOneThousandTwentyFour leaves the orbital shipyard we will be able to afford a vacation in another solar system.
Right now its around 250GB of crap.
Same here except it's 240GB of duplicates of the 60 or so Gigabytes of crap on my powerbook. I don't collect crap so much because I am a packrat. I make sequential backups of my crap to pacify my sense of paranoia, I suppose I have seen to many harddisk crashes.
In Korea only old people use nucelar Fission
Not quite... In Korea the North nukes YOU!
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
I agree with you on the PowerBook & IBM Thinkpad probably being the best on the market. On the other hand Lenovo will have to live up to IBM's excellent design standard. If the next generation of TinkPads turns out to be the same sort of concrete slabs that makes most of the rest of the Inter PC based laptops out there they will become just another run of the mill manufacturer of cheap-n-clunky laptops. The whole reason alot of people buy the ThinkPad is because the latest generation is the only Intel PC based laptop out there that can hold a candle to the PowerBook in terms of design.
Red Hat's Linux clearly in this context means Red Hat's version of Linux. Ok, it's ambigous but let's not get stupid with the nit picking.
Nitpicking? He's still wrong, a very sigificant portion of all Linux installs by businesses and corporations, are in other distros than Red Hat. In my particlular corner of the world Suse is the distro of choice for most businesses. In fact I'd say Suse actually has Red Hat on the run over here. Red Hat may be the distro of coice in the US where a DoD official is reported to have expresed the following opinion of Suse: We don't use that German ****! but then again the Linux using world is alot larger than the USA alone.
...offshore has more advantages than disadvantages for huge projects (Texas unemployment office, anyone?).
Things must be tough if even the Texas unemployment office is outsourcing to India?!?! Imagine that, some poor Texan who just lost his job to offshoring calls the Texas Unemployment Office's information hotline:
"Hello, Texas unemployment office, Sanjay in Bangalore speaking. How can I help you ??"
!!!CRUNCH!!! (Texan crushes telephone handset)
I guess I'll have to buy Toshiba instead.
I'd advise against it. I had a Toshiba laptop once and it broke down more often than all my other laptops combined. The powerconnector went, the floppy disk and the display. The one good thing about Toshiba is the exellent global service, they actually don't give you lip when you try to cache in on the international warranty and the techsupport isn't bad either. On the other hand, good as the service was, having the thing in the shop half the time sucked.
So -- using that old razor of Occam's -- either the entire world and every observable natural system is on the brink of an unheard-of disaster, or there is a noticable (and understandable) trend in scientific research to a) follow the herd, and b) doomsay.
True enough, Up here in the arctic the change in temprature is really noticable. Over the last few years all sorts of plants and animals that would hardly ever bee seen in here just 10-15 years ago have become common place. They do concede in this article that the climate is still colder than it was during the middle ages when people were able to grow wheat in quantity as far north as sub arctic Norway, Sweden and in Iceland: "...the temperatures of summer 2003 were almost undoubtedly the highest in Europe for over 500 years." So I'm still not convinced that this isn't just a natural fluctuation in the climate, althought is is probably not completely unaffected by human activity.
Yeah, and sooner or later the following headline would appear on theregister.com:
Robot wife gets stuck in endless programming loop, owner shagged to death.
Yes, Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8 has
Yes but to quote a Pentagon official: "We don't use that German crap!" Ironically enough if you change the word "German" to "proprietary" and you have what is rapidly becoming the German position on using Windows.
Now they're putting together their own, affordable, bomb-disposal robots. I admire the initiative, but deplore the circumstances that make it necessary. Especially since the fact that a soldier/marine and his/her family can invest in the equipment means it is relatively inexpensive. If many soldiers buy it, it's *probably* useful too. So how come the government doesn't provide it?
It's probably because they are trying to figure out which campaign contributor should get the multi billion $ contract. It is really shameful that US troops are going into action packing ancient M-16's, privately bought body armor and communication/GPS kits and vehicles they armored them selves with metal taken from knocked out Iraqi tanks. On the other hand improvisation can be very valuable. And it is usually a quicker way to help your self than waiting for the Pentagon buerocracy to work. Take the whole issue of arming up the Predator drone, it was a semi official project accomplished by a handful of people who rigged the thing up with missiles and tested it. They even solved the problem of the low anti personnel potential of the Hellfire missiles AP warhead by fitting it with a simple metal fragmentation collar costing only a few cents. All this was accomplished in a matter of a few months. I bet a buch of engineers workign for some fat-cat defense contractor presented with the same problem of arming the Predator would have come back with a whole new UAV plus missile system priced in the billions of dollars and on a timescale spanning a decade. If you want quick and cheap, no nonsense solutions, the big US defenese contractors are usually not a good choice I don't think they are capable of thinking in terms of things that cost less than a billion and take less than a year to accomplish.
Plus the developers thought, wow, sounds like a cool name for a game.
That sounds alot more like a brainstorming session at the marketing department than something you would expect to hear from a developer.