I'm already nervous about visiting the USA, and the recent decision to make compulsory personal information available prior to departure makes me very nervous indeed.
The UK, which has always treated me like crap at customs, has now lost me as a potential tourist finally.
Oh well, I'll spend my tourist money somewhere else, like China, where they'll only deport me if they don't like me, not chuck me in jail for one and a half months not letting anyone know about it.
Orwell, you must be giggling in that grave of yours.
Taking the government to court on this issue might be a good idea, if possible. Arguing on the basis that the federal government is doing almost nothing against spammers and extortionists might be a start. Arguing that the government surely should be concentrating on its other, more serious problems, might be another. Arguing that the fact that, currently, you do not own a permanent license to IP when you pay for it is certainly worth looking at, too.
The RIAA and MPAA have the power to treat you like a criminal whether or not you have actually downloaded unlicensed IP, and, consumers being the lazy bastards that we are, don't generally care until it's our turn on the circumcision block. If enough people actually made their voices heard on this matter, the bill would go away, along with the corrupt bastards who got the wording from the RIAA and MPAA.
I know what the logic behind this bill is: It's that IP is one of the few, if only things, that the USA has left that actually makes any money. The problem is that the senators and congressmen and women behind this bill are almost certainly profiting from the RIAA and MPAA to some extent.
The rest of the world is almost entirely GSM. CDMA might be technically better, but it's simply not an internationally widely used standard.
There's a reason Apple is this year opening dozens of Apple Stores outside of the USA: They know the US economy is tanking and they know that their products are just as popular outside the USA as inside.
Apple is fairly good at recognising what the market outside the US is like, and that market stands to outgrow the US market if current economic factors continue.
Where I work, in a design agency of 45 people in Switzerland, 15 of those people already have iPhones, and they're not even officially sold here yet.
The iPhone will do to the mobile phone market what the iPod did to the mp3 player market, albeit in a smaller fashion, because the market is already so saturated.
The iPhone is definitely not for everyone, and there will still be a market for other phones, especially smaller ones with physical controls as many people still prefer those.
But, in the smartphone segment, I am pretty sure that the iPhone will cream Microsoft, Sony and Nokia.
I really meant blood, but I didn't want to seem overly melodramatic. On the other hand, blood is the cost of the way we do business today - do you have any idea of what percentage of the shit we buy from China is produced in government-owned-and-operated forced labor camps filled predominantly with people whose primary crime is that they were the nails sticking up the farthest and they needed laborers? People are literally put into labor camps for being Christians... where they make the plastic shit that we hang on our christmas trees.
What the fuck is that? Please show me where you got that information on China putting people into labour camps to produce commodity goods?
Excuse me for saying this, but that paragraph makes you look like an ignorant dumbass. China is booming because, surprise, surprise, they embraced capitalism, and Chinese companies work very hard and pay very low wages, and their products sell well because of the resulting low prices. China is not a free country and open your mouth and criticise the government too much and you will get arrested, but they actually have a Chinese branch of the Catholic church (the Vatican and China have resolved a lot of their differences).
The last time China put people into labour camps for being Christian was during the Cultural Revolution, about 40 years ago.
You know, if people like you would actually read the news on occasion, and pay a little attention to what's happening beyond your borders, your economy might profit as a result of that enlightening knowledge.
so you think that modern distributions don't have unstable, untested sections where you can download beta software? If you're a mac user, get a trial of vmware and install a modern ubuntu.
You know, I'm a mac user too (I admin 40 OSX machines at work), and people like make me ashamed. With any modern distro of Linux, such as Ubuntu, installing Firefox is a simple as clicking a button. That's all.
I am almost certain that somewhere along the road to Windows 7, this will get dropped. I might be wrong and Windows 7 might be Vista on steroids (it really needs the extra muscle), but this really just looks like a very desperate attempt by Microsoft to garner some positive media atention after the fuck ups of late.
Vista is so complex that normal users and even sysadmins are suffering. While I'm that navigating through the labyrinth that is Vista's various control panels and settings gets easier with time, it mainly shows an almost total lack of communication between the various development teams at Microsoft.
I also imagine that Microsoft's lack of direction is making them panic. Kicking out various managers, like Allchin, but keeping king size buffoons like Ballmer only make the situation worse. Not knowing how they can improve on the disaster that is Vista, they variously try to copy: a) Google, b)Apple, and when the going gets really rough, even c) Linux.
The touch screen thingamabob they demoed today must have Apple employees laughing so hard they must be crying. If you think that Vista has enormous hardware requirements, and it really does, can you imagine what that touch screen thingy will require, which is in reality, just Microsoft trying to do a vapourware job on Apple.
The problem is that the media have grown up (partly at least). No one is going to fall for MS vapourware until Microsoft produces concrete implementations on commodity hardware. Apple's iPhone can do all that on an embedded CPU...
Nope, you're not the only one. I'm switching from sysadmin to go do multimedia school next year (but in management, not production.)
Vista is so complex that normal users and even sysadmins are suffering. While I'm that navigating through the labyrinth that is Vista's various control panels and settings gets easier with time, it mainly shows an almost total lack of communication between the various development teams at Microsoft.
I also imagine that Microsoft's lack of direction is making them panic. Kicking out various managers, like Allchin, but keeping king size buffoons like Ballmer only make the situation worse. Not knowing how they can improve on the disaster that is Vista, they variously try to copy: a) Google, b)Apple, and when the going gets really rough, even c) Linux.
The touch screen thingamabob they demoed today must have Apple employees laughing so hard they must be crying. If you think that Vista has enormous hardware requirements, and it really does, can you imagine what that touch screen thingy will require, which is in reality, just Microsoft trying to do a vapourware job on Apple.
The problem is that the media have grown up (partly at least). No one is going to fall for MS vapourware until Microsoft produces concrete implementations on commodity hardware. Apple's iPhone can do all that on an embedded CPU...
I'm running on a 2GHz Lenovo Thinkpad (T43p) with 2GB RAM and a CAD certified nVidia Quadra graphics card. If you consider that "older" hardware, or running under specifications then I wonder what you consider the massive numbers of laptops with Intel integrated graphics being sold in various chains with Vista Home Premium?
Vista, out of the box, is slow. It runs just fine on my dual quad core Xeon (2.8GHz) with 4GB RAM and nVidia 8800GT, but this box cost me an absolute fortune and isn't exactly "portable" (unless you're a body builder)
... I do however like Vista, and find that most people who make fun of it, or hate on it, have actually never used it. I've used it, and while I don't hate it, it is far more complex to use, far slower out of the box and far more expensive than XP. Turning off all the crap that slows it down, like shadow copy, indexing and aero, leaves you with a piece of crap that makes you realise you wasted your money.
So speak for yourself. Many people hate it, and almost no companies are upgrading.
Last night I installed Vista for the second time, on the third computer we have running it in our company. My results: 1. Vista is simpler to install than Xp was. It doesn't provide all the drivers it could, but I found drivers for almost everything extra on the Lenovo and HP sites. (A word of warning here: If you're not fairly clued up, you'll have real difficulty understanding which drivers you'll need on either site) 2. Vista, on the default install, is incredibly slow. Turn off Aero, Shadow copy, search indexing, and you're more or less at XP's speed. 3. Vista seems a bit more stable than XP. Crashing appications no longer seem to necessitate a restart as often. 4. The Sidebar is a poor copy of Apple's Dashboard, and could really be more flexible. 5. UAC would be nicer if it were actually as secure as su or sudo. In reality, the security model behind UAC is broken. 6. Standard users can actually work with that level now. 7. The Vista control panel/administrative tools layout is a disaster. It is very hard to find common recurring tasks. It is also far too complex for non technical people. Apple has this right (and even Linux does this better these days)
On the whole, Vista is not bad, but it has some serious performance problems and it seems as if a lot was done simply to attempt to lock users onto the platform.
The nicest thing about Vista: The new set of fonts it uses as standard. Cambria, Concord and co are beautful.
The title of this post is sensationalistic, but it should be obvious to even the biggest luddite that the biggest problem that Dell, Lenovo, HP, sony and even Asus have is Microsoft.
That sounds like the start of another classic Microsoft bashing session, but it's not. The problem that all these companies have is not poor quality hardware, or lack of features, or even ugly hardware (although anyone who has ever opened a Mac tower must realise the extreme amount of thought and work that went into designing the case and the insides). Rather the problem is that all of those companies are dependent on a company that has its own agenda and treats all of its partners as if to only tolerate them, not as if they were valuable in any real way to Microsoft.
If one of the big hardware makers had the wisdom and the courage to buy up a significant stake in a popular Linux distribution, be it Ubuntu or Suse/Novell, they would be, in the long term in a very favourable position.
Firstly, consumers don't really care about the OS. They like OSX because Apple pays such an enormous amount of attention right down to the single pixel corners of windows, but the basically just want to surf, chat, work, email, play games etc.
Apple has been able to leverage its control of both the hardware and the software to deliver a good user experience, and crucually, a stable one with all the tools (and more) that a average consumer needs to use their computer.
If, say Sony, which puts a lot of effort into the design of their machines, were to say, buy Suse, or simply start up their own Kubuntu based distribution (the KDE 4.1 desktop is nothing short of amazing), and most importantly build up a developer team to start making beautiful but simple to use applications, they would a) have the control over what went into the distro nd what not, b) an enormous amount of developer talent worldwide to base their efforts on c) crucially, control of their own destiny.
If Sony were then to preload enough, simple and good apps into the computers, and keep it open enough to encourage others to develop for it,they could very well take Apple on in their own space. And it would grow.
The sad thing is that none of these companies is able to find the courage or has the vision to build up a long term effort like that,that might very well mean losses over the short term, and possibly even a break with Microsoft.
None of them will do that. Hell, even Microsoft could do it, if they started their own computer brand. they would lose all their hardware partners within a year, but their hardware in the form of Keyboards, mice and Xbox has not been too bad.
I think that your idea that China and Europe are dependent on the sale of their products to the US is true to a certain extent, but, both the Chinese and the Europeans are working very hard on building other markets in Asia, South America and Africa.
China especially spends ridiculous sums on infrastructure projects in Africa and Latin America, all with no strings attached, in order to get a foot in the door economically.
The European conservative economic policies have had a bonus to them in that the Euro is well on its way to becoming the world's standard trading currency, due to the Dollar's continual fall and the huge American deficit causing investors to look elsewhere. The Dollar being the international trading currency had major benefits for the US.
Witness the current high risk debt crisis. It affected Europe far less than the US (or the UK, which liberalised its economic laws to allow such practices) due to the conservative lending laws there.
All is not lost, though, I think the US, given a stable and pragmatic government (and no, I don't know who that would be), could recoup its losses within a decade if truly aimed to do so.
Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) wrote a book called The Running Man (totally warped into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie), which ends with the protagonist flying a highjacked plane into a tower block. And, although they don't specifially deal with suicide highjackings, many, many works of fiction, often in Hollywood, such as the Die-Hard series, portray terrorism related plots, often in such detail it's a wonder that terrorists don't study and copy them in even more detail.
The movie The Siege while very fictional and feel good in the end, gives a very good portrayal of the situation after a devastating terrorist attack and the consequences of national paranoia.
In reality, the highjacking of Air France Flight 8969 in 1994, was an attempted suicide highjacking (They wanted to fly into the Eiffel Tower).
The precedents for 9/11/2001 were surely there, all right (no one seemed to remember the WTC bombings in 1993). No one seemed to take much notice up until then, and then, when it finally did happen, everyone went on a patriotic nutcase rave that ended up in 2 bloody and prolonged wars, far more dead than the actual terrorist attacks themselves, and, in a fit of panic, they gave away their constitutional rights to a bunch of people who abused the situation at every possible turn.
Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) wrote a book called [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man]The Running Man[/url] (totally warped into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie), which ends with the protagonist flying a highjacked plane into a tower block. And, although they don't specifially deal with suicide highjackings, many, many works of fiction, often in Hollywood, such as the Die-Hard series, portray terrorism related plots, often in such detail it's a wonder that terrorists don't study and copy them in even more detail.
The movie [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege]The Siege[/url] while very fictional and feel good in the end, gives a very good portrayal of the situation after a devastating terrorist attack and the consequences of national paranoia.
In reality, the highjacking of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969]Air France Flight 8969[/url] in 1994, was an attempted suicide highjacking (They wanted to fly into the Eiffel Tower).
The precedents for 9/11/2001 were surely there, all right (no one seemed to remember the WTC bombings in 1993). No one seemed to take much notice up until then, and then, when it finally did happen, everyone went on a patriotic nutcase rave that ended up in 2 bloody and prolonged wars, far more dead than the actual terrorist attacks themselves, and, in a fit of panic, they gave away their constitutional rights to a bunch of people who abused the situation at every possible turn.
In 1982, I did a semester break job working for the railways in an African country. The switching was all done with circuits that used relays for the logic. The "UPS" was a roomfull of car batteries.
That switching system was made in the early 50's and is still running (on occasion) today. The greatest thing about it that you can actually fix individual relays, which is good a country with no real infrastructure where repairs need to be done by hand, and also because relays are not exactly easy to come by these days.
What Sony needs to do to get a piece of this action is release the PS3 with a builtin Linux distro (not a kit like it is now), with Open Office, Evolution and Firefox, like Ubuntu.
I admin a server room full of Xserves and can only say to your post: ahmen.
The bugs in OSX Server 10.5 are terrible. On the first day of operation the whole system trashed itself and we had to restore the user db from backup. We wanted single sign via OD master slave, but now, due to the extreme unreliability of OSX Server, we'll have to use two ODs and duplicate user entries. Yay.
I personally am kind of sad that Microsoft didn't buy Yahoo. I had a kind of deja vue about the whole thing which I couldn't place, and it only occured to me yesterday: Time-AOL.
When AOL was so bloated with cash they didn't know what to do with it, they bought time. It was a marriage made in hell. Time didn't have anything that AOL needed and AOL couldn't offer Time anything. When the dot bomb crash happened, AOL lost value quickly to eventually become the struggling company today that only exists because of a legacy of users who never switched to better offers.
I had the kind of feeling that that would have happened to Microsoft as well had they bought Yahoo. They would have parted with almost half their operating capital for something that would have given them nothing. Given the fact that Microsoft is not exactly rapidly gaining marketshare at the moment, it could have hurt them badly.
I hate to bait you, but an appropriate comeback to that would be: Whereas as everybody else was running their critical Java6 stuff 2 years ago.
There is a real problem at Apple with Java. Java6 was in beta 2 years ago at Apple, and has only been released in a crippled form for OSX, now. The thing is, Java7 is already on its way for the rest of the world.
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I'm already nervous about visiting the USA, and the recent decision to make compulsory personal information available prior to departure makes me very nervous indeed.
The UK, which has always treated me like crap at customs, has now lost me as a potential tourist finally.
Oh well, I'll spend my tourist money somewhere else, like China, where they'll only deport me if they don't like me, not chuck me in jail for one and a half months not letting anyone know about it.
Orwell, you must be giggling in that grave of yours.
That you, Reg?
Taking the government to court on this issue might be a good idea, if possible. Arguing on the basis that the federal government is doing almost nothing against spammers and extortionists might be a start. Arguing that the government surely should be concentrating on its other, more serious problems, might be another. Arguing that the fact that, currently, you do not own a permanent license to IP when you pay for it is certainly worth looking at, too.
The RIAA and MPAA have the power to treat you like a criminal whether or not you have actually downloaded unlicensed IP, and, consumers being the lazy bastards that we are, don't generally care until it's our turn on the circumcision block. If enough people actually made their voices heard on this matter, the bill would go away, along with the corrupt bastards who got the wording from the RIAA and MPAA.
I know what the logic behind this bill is: It's that IP is one of the few, if only things, that the USA has left that actually makes any money. The problem is that the senators and congressmen and women behind this bill are almost certainly profiting from the RIAA and MPAA to some extent.
The rest of the world is almost entirely GSM. CDMA might be technically better, but it's simply not an internationally widely used standard.
There's a reason Apple is this year opening dozens of Apple Stores outside of the USA: They know the US economy is tanking and they know that their products are just as popular outside the USA as inside.
Apple is fairly good at recognising what the market outside the US is like, and that market stands to outgrow the US market if current economic factors continue.
Where I work, in a design agency of 45 people in Switzerland, 15 of those people already have iPhones, and they're not even officially sold here yet.
The iPhone will do to the mobile phone market what the iPod did to the mp3 player market, albeit in a smaller fashion, because the market is already so saturated.
The iPhone is definitely not for everyone, and there will still be a market for other phones, especially smaller ones with physical controls as many people still prefer those.
But, in the smartphone segment, I am pretty sure that the iPhone will cream Microsoft, Sony and Nokia.
With wisdom and courage like yours, it's a wonder that the USA hasn't yet imploded due to the low density of intellectual acumen.
I really meant blood, but I didn't want to seem overly melodramatic. On the other hand, blood is the cost of the way we do business today - do you have any idea of what percentage of the shit we buy from China is produced in government-owned-and-operated forced labor camps filled predominantly with people whose primary crime is that they were the nails sticking up the farthest and they needed laborers? People are literally put into labor camps for being Christians... where they make the plastic shit that we hang on our christmas trees.
What the fuck is that? Please show me where you got that information on China putting people into labour camps to produce commodity goods?Excuse me for saying this, but that paragraph makes you look like an ignorant dumbass. China is booming because, surprise, surprise, they embraced capitalism, and Chinese companies work very hard and pay very low wages, and their products sell well because of the resulting low prices. China is not a free country and open your mouth and criticise the government too much and you will get arrested, but they actually have a Chinese branch of the Catholic church (the Vatican and China have resolved a lot of their differences).
The last time China put people into labour camps for being Christian was during the Cultural Revolution, about 40 years ago.
You know, if people like you would actually read the news on occasion, and pay a little attention to what's happening beyond your borders, your economy might profit as a result of that enlightening knowledge.
Who the fuck tagged this article with the tag "switzerland"????
Just how dumb can one be if you can't even use google to spot the difference
so you think that modern distributions don't have unstable, untested sections where you can download beta software? If you're a mac user, get a trial of vmware and install a modern ubuntu.
You know, I'm a mac user too (I admin 40 OSX machines at work), and people like make me ashamed. With any modern distro of Linux, such as Ubuntu, installing Firefox is a simple as clicking a button. That's all.
I am almost certain that somewhere along the road to Windows 7, this will get dropped. I might be wrong and Windows 7 might be Vista on steroids (it really needs the extra muscle), but this really just looks like a very desperate attempt by Microsoft to garner some positive media atention after the fuck ups of late.
Vista is so complex that normal users and even sysadmins are suffering. While I'm that navigating through the labyrinth that is Vista's various control panels and settings gets easier with time, it mainly shows an almost total lack of communication between the various development teams at Microsoft.
I also imagine that Microsoft's lack of direction is making them panic. Kicking out various managers, like Allchin, but keeping king size buffoons like Ballmer only make the situation worse. Not knowing how they can improve on the disaster that is Vista, they variously try to copy:
a) Google,
b)Apple,
and when the going gets really rough, even
c) Linux.
The touch screen thingamabob they demoed today must have Apple employees laughing so hard they must be crying. If you think that Vista has enormous hardware requirements, and it really does, can you imagine what that touch screen thingy will require, which is in reality, just Microsoft trying to do a vapourware job on Apple.
The problem is that the media have grown up (partly at least). No one is going to fall for MS vapourware until Microsoft produces concrete implementations on commodity hardware. Apple's iPhone can do all that on an embedded CPU...
Nope, you're not the only one. I'm switching from sysadmin to go do multimedia school next year (but in management, not production.)
Vista is so complex that normal users and even sysadmins are suffering. While I'm that navigating through the labyrinth that is Vista's various control panels and settings gets easier with time, it mainly shows an almost total lack of communication between the various development teams at Microsoft.
I also imagine that Microsoft's lack of direction is making them panic. Kicking out various managers, like Allchin, but keeping king size buffoons like Ballmer only make the situation worse. Not knowing how they can improve on the disaster that is Vista, they variously try to copy:
a) Google,
b)Apple,
and when the going gets really rough, even
c) Linux.
The touch screen thingamabob they demoed today must have Apple employees laughing so hard they must be crying. If you think that Vista has enormous hardware requirements, and it really does, can you imagine what that touch screen thingy will require, which is in reality, just Microsoft trying to do a vapourware job on Apple.
The problem is that the media have grown up (partly at least). No one is going to fall for MS vapourware until Microsoft produces concrete implementations on commodity hardware. Apple's iPhone can do all that on an embedded CPU...
I'm running on a 2GHz Lenovo Thinkpad (T43p) with 2GB RAM and a CAD certified nVidia Quadra graphics card. If you consider that "older" hardware, or running under specifications then I wonder what you consider the massive numbers of laptops with Intel integrated graphics being sold in various chains with Vista Home Premium?
Vista, out of the box, is slow. It runs just fine on my dual quad core Xeon (2.8GHz) with 4GB RAM and nVidia 8800GT, but this box cost me an absolute fortune and isn't exactly "portable" (unless you're a body builder)
... I do however like Vista, and find that most people who make fun of it, or hate on it, have actually never used it. I've used it, and while I don't hate it, it is far more complex to use, far slower out of the box and far more expensive than XP. Turning off all the crap that slows it down, like shadow copy, indexing and aero, leaves you with a piece of crap that makes you realise you wasted your money.So speak for yourself. Many people hate it, and almost no companies are upgrading.
Last night I installed Vista for the second time, on the third computer we have running it in our company. My results:
1. Vista is simpler to install than Xp was. It doesn't provide all the drivers it could, but I found drivers for almost everything extra on the Lenovo and HP sites. (A word of warning here: If you're not fairly clued up, you'll have real difficulty understanding which drivers you'll need on either site)
2. Vista, on the default install, is incredibly slow. Turn off Aero, Shadow copy, search indexing, and you're more or less at XP's speed.
3. Vista seems a bit more stable than XP. Crashing appications no longer seem to necessitate a restart as often.
4. The Sidebar is a poor copy of Apple's Dashboard, and could really be more flexible.
5. UAC would be nicer if it were actually as secure as su or sudo. In reality, the security model behind UAC is broken.
6. Standard users can actually work with that level now.
7. The Vista control panel/administrative tools layout is a disaster. It is very hard to find common recurring tasks. It is also far too complex for non technical people. Apple has this right (and even Linux does this better these days)
On the whole, Vista is not bad, but it has some serious performance problems and it seems as if a lot was done simply to attempt to lock users onto the platform.
The nicest thing about Vista: The new set of fonts it uses as standard. Cambria, Concord and co are beautful.
The title of this post is sensationalistic, but it should be obvious to even the biggest luddite that the biggest problem that Dell, Lenovo, HP, sony and even Asus have is Microsoft.
That sounds like the start of another classic Microsoft bashing session, but it's not. The problem that all these companies have is not poor quality hardware, or lack of features, or even ugly hardware (although anyone who has ever opened a Mac tower must realise the extreme amount of thought and work that went into designing the case and the insides). Rather the problem is that all of those companies are dependent on a company that has its own agenda and treats all of its partners as if to only tolerate them, not as if they were valuable in any real way to Microsoft.
If one of the big hardware makers had the wisdom and the courage to buy up a significant stake in a popular Linux distribution, be it Ubuntu or Suse/Novell, they would be, in the long term in a very favourable position.
Firstly, consumers don't really care about the OS. They like OSX because Apple pays such an enormous amount of attention right down to the single pixel corners of windows, but the basically just want to surf, chat, work, email, play games etc.
Apple has been able to leverage its control of both the hardware and the software to deliver a good user experience, and crucually, a stable one with all the tools (and more) that a average consumer needs to use their computer.
If, say Sony, which puts a lot of effort into the design of their machines, were to say, buy Suse, or simply start up their own Kubuntu based distribution (the KDE 4.1 desktop is nothing short of amazing), and most importantly build up a developer team to start making beautiful but simple to use applications, they would
a) have the control over what went into the distro nd what not, b) an enormous amount of developer talent worldwide to base their efforts on
c) crucially, control of their own destiny.
If Sony were then to preload enough, simple and good apps into the computers, and keep it open enough to encourage others to develop for it,they could very well take Apple on in their own space. And it would grow.
The sad thing is that none of these companies is able to find the courage or has the vision to build up a long term effort like that,that might very well mean losses over the short term, and possibly even a break with Microsoft.
None of them will do that. Hell, even Microsoft could do it, if they started their own computer brand. they would lose all their hardware partners within a year, but their hardware in the form of Keyboards, mice and Xbox has not been too bad.
Ok, back to my beer, now.
I think that your idea that China and Europe are dependent on the sale of their products to the US is true to a certain extent, but, both the Chinese and the Europeans are working very hard on building other markets in Asia, South America and Africa.
China especially spends ridiculous sums on infrastructure projects in Africa and Latin America, all with no strings attached, in order to get a foot in the door economically.
The European conservative economic policies have had a bonus to them in that the Euro is well on its way to becoming the world's standard trading currency, due to the Dollar's continual fall and the huge American deficit causing investors to look elsewhere. The Dollar being the international trading currency had major benefits for the US.
Witness the current high risk debt crisis. It affected Europe far less than the US (or the UK, which liberalised its economic laws to allow such practices) due to the conservative lending laws there.
All is not lost, though, I think the US, given a stable and pragmatic government (and no, I don't know who that would be), could recoup its losses within a decade if truly aimed to do so.
The movie The Siege while very fictional and feel good in the end, gives a very good portrayal of the situation after a devastating terrorist attack and the consequences of national paranoia.
In reality, the highjacking of Air France Flight 8969 in 1994, was an attempted suicide highjacking (They wanted to fly into the Eiffel Tower).
The precedents for 9/11/2001 were surely there, all right (no one seemed to remember the WTC bombings in 1993). No one seemed to take much notice up until then, and then, when it finally did happen, everyone went on a patriotic nutcase rave that ended up in 2 bloody and prolonged wars, far more dead than the actual terrorist attacks themselves, and, in a fit of panic, they gave away their constitutional rights to a bunch of people who abused the situation at every possible turn.
Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) wrote a book called [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man]The Running Man[/url] (totally warped into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie), which ends with the protagonist flying a highjacked plane into a tower block. And, although they don't specifially deal with suicide highjackings, many, many works of fiction, often in Hollywood, such as the Die-Hard series, portray terrorism related plots, often in such detail it's a wonder that terrorists don't study and copy them in even more detail.
The movie [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege]The Siege[/url] while very fictional and feel good in the end, gives a very good portrayal of the situation after a devastating terrorist attack and the consequences of national paranoia.
In reality, the highjacking of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969]Air France Flight 8969[/url] in 1994, was an attempted suicide highjacking (They wanted to fly into the Eiffel Tower).
The precedents for 9/11/2001 were surely there, all right (no one seemed to remember the WTC bombings in 1993). No one seemed to take much notice up until then, and then, when it finally did happen, everyone went on a patriotic nutcase rave that ended up in 2 bloody and prolonged wars, far more dead than the actual terrorist attacks themselves, and, in a fit of panic, they gave away their constitutional rights to a bunch of people who abused the situation at every possible turn.
In 1982, I did a semester break job working for the railways in an African country. The switching was all done with circuits that used relays for the logic. The "UPS" was a roomfull of car batteries.
That switching system was made in the early 50's and is still running (on occasion) today. The greatest thing about it that you can actually fix individual relays, which is good a country with no real infrastructure where repairs need to be done by hand, and also because relays are not exactly easy to come by these days.
I have 150 slashdot freaks!
Who would have thought it?
What Sony needs to do to get a piece of this action is release the PS3 with a builtin Linux distro (not a kit like it is now), with Open Office, Evolution and Firefox, like Ubuntu.
Then I can frag during coffee breaks.
I admin a server room full of Xserves and can only say to your post: ahmen.
The bugs in OSX Server 10.5 are terrible. On the first day of operation the whole system trashed itself and we had to restore the user db from backup. We wanted single sign via OD master slave, but now, due to the extreme unreliability of OSX Server, we'll have to use two ODs and duplicate user entries. Yay.
I personally am kind of sad that Microsoft didn't buy Yahoo. I had a kind of deja vue about the whole thing which I couldn't place, and it only occured to me yesterday: Time-AOL.
When AOL was so bloated with cash they didn't know what to do with it, they bought time. It was a marriage made in hell. Time didn't have anything that AOL needed and AOL couldn't offer Time anything. When the dot bomb crash happened, AOL lost value quickly to eventually become the struggling company today that only exists because of a legacy of users who never switched to better offers.
I had the kind of feeling that that would have happened to Microsoft as well had they bought Yahoo. They would have parted with almost half their operating capital for something that would have given them nothing. Given the fact that Microsoft is not exactly rapidly gaining marketshare at the moment, it could have hurt them badly.
I hate to bait you, but an appropriate comeback to that would be: Whereas as everybody else was running their critical Java6 stuff 2 years ago.
There is a real problem at Apple with Java. Java6 was in beta 2 years ago at Apple, and has only been released in a crippled form for OSX, now. The thing is, Java7 is already on its way for the rest of the world.