Thus far, China's countermeasures do not permanently damage the satelites but only prevent them from taking pictures while over China. You'd probably have a point if China were trying to shoot US satelites out of the sky, but they're not. They're just adding enough visual noise to make pictures taken over their airspace worthless.
One analyst they interviewed said that if you keep looking over your neighbor's fence, sooner or later you're going to get poked in the eye. Other analysts in the article seemed quite nonplussed about China's response. The is a general understanding that if one country is spying on another that the victim of the spying has the right to protect themselves through the use of counter-measures.
If Microsoft had always been this forthcoming, I'd never have grown to be anti-Microsoft.
Honestly.
The single biggest thing that turned me off of Microsoft was the refusal to admit their mistakes. When I worked as a tech support rep for business clients, I can't even begin to count the number of times that I'd research a bug to find a MS knowledgebase article claiming ``this behavior is by design'' meaning it was a defect that they never intended to fix.
If they had openly admitted their defects, strove to correct them and offerend replacement/refunds consistently, there wouldn't be so many people in the anti-MS camp.
The main reason I moved to cable was signal strength. Sure, I could pull in all seven (now down to six) national over the air networks available in the US but reception for half of those was the pants. I suppose I could have went old school and put a fugly antenna up on my house but that would have been no small expense and actually lowered the property value. And even with the antenna, I'm pretty certain that my problem with reception on some of the local VHF channels was due to interference in their bandwidth rather than being unable to bring their signal in.
The article states that in some cases he just studied and took the AP tests without actually taking an AP class. I hadn't realized that you could do that prior to reading the article.
Also, this kid must have mad social engineering skills. Most schools won't let you take above 18 credits at a time. 23 is a reasonable load, but 37? I struggled to carry 18 credits per semester.
The one about perfect competition assuming perfect demand elasticity. I'd be willing to wager that there are X number of people willing to buy a Wii when it comes out and that the subset of those willing to buy the Wii at $150 is not significantly larger than the subset of that number of people willing to buy the Wii at $250.
It's a simple calculation, really. Is good measured more by changing things in China or by keeping oneself unstained with contact with a despotic regime. If good is measured by changing China, then the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo approach is morally superior because the more contact with the west that China has, the more China will change to be like the west. But if moral good is measured by keeping oneself `pure' of contact with evil, then the Wikipedia approach is superior.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do away with the cd player, dvd player, and vcr (used mostly as a poor man's TiVO) sitting in my entertainment center and just have one box that connects to my primary workstation?
Throwing in a game console would probably be a stretch, but Apple doesn't seem to have any designs on entering into the game console market. Consolidation of everything A/V outside of that makes quite a bit sense provided that the hardware support is there. And in the past couple of years inexpensive CPU cores and hard drives have finally gotten to the point where they can do that.
I attended a marketing class this past spring taught by an entrepeneur. He was just back from a trip to Bulgaria and said that the vast majority of businesses in Bulgaria use only Linux and OpenOffice.org. They can't afford Microsoft licenses and can't afford the fines if the Bulgarian version of the BSA comes in to ask to see license documentation. Most just run Linux and forget about the headaches of licensing.
On the other hand, the Bulgarians I've spoke to in person say that almost everyone in Bulgaria uses Windows and Office at home as it's freely available from about a bzillion warez sites.
With the features they're packing in, it doesn't sound like the battery will last all that long. Not only that, but it's going to end up competing with cell phones as well as iPods.
And just how would most sane people keep from getting infected again while updating Windows to a reasonably secure level? The average time it takes for a plain vanilla Windows install to get broken by malware is less than the amount of time it takes to navigate to Windows update.
I think that perhaps you disqualified yourself from the conversation with the admission that you've never had large problems with malware. There is a very large of people that have precisely that problem and, for those people, a decent firewall can be part of the solution.
Of course, they aren't perfect. But I've a got a friend who was having a recurring problems with varioius malware. I set her up with Zone Alarm, Anti-Vir, Ad Aware and advised her to download Firefox to browse with rather than using IE. Without Zone Alarm to block the malware traffic while Anti-Vir downloaded updates to its signature files, her internet connection was saturated with so much malware traffic that she couldn't connect to anything else. Further, she gets to see what programs try to access the internet.
I can't recall the last employer I had that didn't indiscriminately block long distance calls without the keying in of a personal code that would tie the person making the call to the call.
Sun Tzu and Machiavelli offer the opposite view
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As the length of a war increases, the length of tours of duty increase and the likelihood that the war can be won decreases. The most effective fighting force is one of fresh troops who know that they will not be staying long. These troops have relatively high moral. The longer they stay in the theatre, the more demoralized they become and the less they care about the end of the war.
A 64 bit CPU and operating system in the early nineties was a huge deal and it's hard to understate just how innovative it was at a time when mainstream computers were just making the transition to 32 bit CPUs and the operating system that ran on them was DOS/Windows 3.1.
That aside, I'm mostly in agreement with your post. Back in the late ninties, IBM and Microsoft both took turns hiring some of the design geniuses behind the Apple UI. Windows 95 copied quite a bit from the Work Place Shell of OS/2 v2. OS/2 v.4, in turn, copied quite a few ideas from the Chicago shell of Win95 and NT 4. Apple's OS 8 and 9 copied from both. That's how progress works. Somebody comes up with a really good idea that might be brand new (or might be just a variation on a previous idea) and other people do variations on that idea.
But I do think that sometimes the steps taken in this process of evolutionary development are hugely innovative and do need quite a bit of credit. The invention of the mouse, for example, was a big deal. The idea of power throttling inside the CPU, as another, is huge.
Unless I'm mistaken Digital renamed OSF/1 to Digital Unix about the same time they rebranded themselves to Digital from DEC. When they did they came out with a pretty funny series of ads in the trade mags over Digital Kickbutt Unix. So, yeah, OSF/1 was probably the first 64 bit Unix, but the only difference between OSF/1 and Digital Unix was the name.
I took an e-commerce marketing class last spring. According to my professor, most internet advertising has a conversion rate of about a quarter of one percent. If your search conversion is over three percent, it shouldn't surprise you that your ad conversion is less than 1/6 of that rate. If three percent of people searching for something like your site end up converting, it should come as no surprise that only a significant fraction of that number is converting from ads which are less specificially targetted.
Additionally, what many people forget is that clicks aren't the only measure of benefit from an ad. A good deal of the value of ads is in branding. Another portion of the value is in credibility. For example, if you search on something in google and a corporate web site comes up close to the top of the hits/and/ a text ad displays for that firm, most web users will think that web site is more trustworthy. Even if they follow the search hit to get to the site, the ad is part of what caused that action.
As far as I can tell, none of the ``drunk'' drivers were given a sobriety test. Assuming that everyone with a given BAC is drunk to the point of impairment is a serious methodological flaw.
A far more interesting study, IMO, would be to have people with various BAC levels perform the old fashioned sobriety tests and compare the results to people on cell phones taking the same tests.
You're basically arguing that Microsoft should subsidize the discover of security flaws. In an academic setting, this would probably be a good thing with the end result being a better understanding of the information technology industry. But if Microsoft is buying from black hats, then rather than subsidizing research that makes everyone more secure, Microsoft is essentially subsidizing 0 day exploits.
It took four years to break the three wheel enigma and that was with access to the Enigma manual that had the plain text of an encoded message. Breaking the form of enigma used by the German navy took longer and the allies spent thousands of man hours building machines that could perform the calculations fast enough. Also, it took additional thousands upon thousands of man hours to create and operate a machine that could decode the four wheel enigma machine when it was introduced in 1942.
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Thus far, China's countermeasures do not permanently damage the satelites but only prevent them from taking pictures while over China. You'd probably have a point if China were trying to shoot US satelites out of the sky, but they're not. They're just adding enough visual noise to make pictures taken over their airspace worthless.
One analyst they interviewed said that if you keep looking over your neighbor's fence, sooner or later you're going to get poked in the eye. Other analysts in the article seemed quite nonplussed about China's response. The is a general understanding that if one country is spying on another that the victim of the spying has the right to protect themselves through the use of counter-measures.
Honestly.
The single biggest thing that turned me off of Microsoft was the refusal to admit their mistakes. When I worked as a tech support rep for business clients, I can't even begin to count the number of times that I'd research a bug to find a MS knowledgebase article claiming ``this behavior is by design'' meaning it was a defect that they never intended to fix.
If they had openly admitted their defects, strove to correct them and offerend replacement/refunds consistently, there wouldn't be so many people in the anti-MS camp.
The main reason I moved to cable was signal strength. Sure, I could pull in all seven (now down to six) national over the air networks available in the US but reception for half of those was the pants. I suppose I could have went old school and put a fugly antenna up on my house but that would have been no small expense and actually lowered the property value. And even with the antenna, I'm pretty certain that my problem with reception on some of the local VHF channels was due to interference in their bandwidth rather than being unable to bring their signal in.
Too bad you didn't mention them together. They have a model that simply records the raw data feed that most digital cable companies provide.
The article states that in some cases he just studied and took the AP tests without actually taking an AP class. I hadn't realized that you could do that prior to reading the article.
Also, this kid must have mad social engineering skills. Most schools won't let you take above 18 credits at a time. 23 is a reasonable load, but 37? I struggled to carry 18 credits per semester.
The one about perfect competition assuming perfect demand elasticity. I'd be willing to wager that there are X number of people willing to buy a Wii when it comes out and that the subset of those willing to buy the Wii at $150 is not significantly larger than the subset of that number of people willing to buy the Wii at $250.
It's a simple calculation, really. Is good measured more by changing things in China or by keeping oneself unstained with contact with a despotic regime. If good is measured by changing China, then the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo approach is morally superior because the more contact with the west that China has, the more China will change to be like the west. But if moral good is measured by keeping oneself `pure' of contact with evil, then the Wikipedia approach is superior.
Throwing in a game console would probably be a stretch, but Apple doesn't seem to have any designs on entering into the game console market. Consolidation of everything A/V outside of that makes quite a bit sense provided that the hardware support is there. And in the past couple of years inexpensive CPU cores and hard drives have finally gotten to the point where they can do that.
No one buys an iMac for performance.
No more states' rights than the US Constitution, but it does enshrine slavery.
I attended a marketing class this past spring taught by an entrepeneur. He was just back from a trip to Bulgaria and said that the vast majority of businesses in Bulgaria use only Linux and OpenOffice.org. They can't afford Microsoft licenses and can't afford the fines if the Bulgarian version of the BSA comes in to ask to see license documentation. Most just run Linux and forget about the headaches of licensing.
On the other hand, the Bulgarians I've spoke to in person say that almost everyone in Bulgaria uses Windows and Office at home as it's freely available from about a bzillion warez sites.
With the features they're packing in, it doesn't sound like the battery will last all that long. Not only that, but it's going to end up competing with cell phones as well as iPods.
And just how would most sane people keep from getting infected again while updating Windows to a reasonably secure level? The average time it takes for a plain vanilla Windows install to get broken by malware is less than the amount of time it takes to navigate to Windows update.
I think that perhaps you disqualified yourself from the conversation with the admission that you've never had large problems with malware. There is a very large of people that have precisely that problem and, for those people, a decent firewall can be part of the solution.
Of course, they aren't perfect. But I've a got a friend who was having a recurring problems with varioius malware. I set her up with Zone Alarm, Anti-Vir, Ad Aware and advised her to download Firefox to browse with rather than using IE. Without Zone Alarm to block the malware traffic while Anti-Vir downloaded updates to its signature files, her internet connection was saturated with so much malware traffic that she couldn't connect to anything else. Further, she gets to see what programs try to access the internet.
I can't recall the last employer I had that didn't indiscriminately block long distance calls without the keying in of a personal code that would tie the person making the call to the call.
As the length of a war increases, the length of tours of duty increase and the likelihood that the war can be won decreases. The most effective fighting force is one of fresh troops who know that they will not be staying long. These troops have relatively high moral. The longer they stay in the theatre, the more demoralized they become and the less they care about the end of the war.
That aside, I'm mostly in agreement with your post. Back in the late ninties, IBM and Microsoft both took turns hiring some of the design geniuses behind the Apple UI. Windows 95 copied quite a bit from the Work Place Shell of OS/2 v2. OS/2 v.4, in turn, copied quite a few ideas from the Chicago shell of Win95 and NT 4. Apple's OS 8 and 9 copied from both. That's how progress works. Somebody comes up with a really good idea that might be brand new (or might be just a variation on a previous idea) and other people do variations on that idea.
But I do think that sometimes the steps taken in this process of evolutionary development are hugely innovative and do need quite a bit of credit. The invention of the mouse, for example, was a big deal. The idea of power throttling inside the CPU, as another, is huge.
Unless I'm mistaken Digital renamed OSF/1 to Digital Unix about the same time they rebranded themselves to Digital from DEC. When they did they came out with a pretty funny series of ads in the trade mags over Digital Kickbutt Unix. So, yeah, OSF/1 was probably the first 64 bit Unix, but the only difference between OSF/1 and Digital Unix was the name.
Digital Unix on Alpha in the early nineties.
Additionally, what many people forget is that clicks aren't the only measure of benefit from an ad. A good deal of the value of ads is in branding. Another portion of the value is in credibility. For example, if you search on something in google and a corporate web site comes up close to the top of the hits /and/ a text ad displays for that firm, most web users will think that web site is more trustworthy. Even if they follow the search hit to get to the site, the ad is part of what caused that action.
As far as I can tell, none of the ``drunk'' drivers were given a sobriety test. Assuming that everyone with a given BAC is drunk to the point of impairment is a serious methodological flaw. A far more interesting study, IMO, would be to have people with various BAC levels perform the old fashioned sobriety tests and compare the results to people on cell phones taking the same tests.
You're basically arguing that Microsoft should subsidize the discover of security flaws. In an academic setting, this would probably be a good thing with the end result being a better understanding of the information technology industry. But if Microsoft is buying from black hats, then rather than subsidizing research that makes everyone more secure, Microsoft is essentially subsidizing 0 day exploits.
When the API is stable, then it is time to talk about a proper release.
It took four years to break the three wheel enigma and that was with access to the Enigma manual that had the plain text of an encoded message. Breaking the form of enigma used by the German navy took longer and the allies spent thousands of man hours building machines that could perform the calculations fast enough. Also, it took additional thousands upon thousands of man hours to create and operate a machine that could decode the four wheel enigma machine when it was introduced in 1942.