For the same reason that someone who signs a contract without reading it and/or insisting on changes, deserves to be screwed. It's called a manual, it comes with the device, and you are allowed to read it. There is no "deception", only ignorance on the part of the user. This won't hold up in court, and for good reason. The customer had a reasonable expectation that turning the device "off" would prevent it from performing any transactions that would cost money. There was, at no point, a warning displayed (because the device was "off") that charges were being accumulated. There's simply no interaction here that would suggest to a typical user "read the manual before operating the off button, or get charged extra money."
To make it clearer, re-cast your argument in terms of someone being charged nearly $5000 because the "enter" key on their new computer's keyboard was specially interpreted by the pre-installed operating system as a signal to accept a customer service fee for requesting email-based help on the current application. There's simply no way that would fly in court, no matter what the manual said.
That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16. UTF-16 more multi-lingual friendly than UTF-8? Er... it has many disadvantages and not a single benefit over UTF-8. The touted benefit of UTF-16 is that for those who make almost no use of the 7-bit ascii set (the only characters that are represented by a single byte in UTF-8), it can improve the speed of reading/scanning and ultimate size of many files.
In practice, this isn't really going to happen in most Web-based text, but for electronic versions of non-Web text, it can be a win. Overall, however, I agree with you that there's more benefit in using UTF-8 universally.
Right on their front page: "It started as an open source Desktop Sharing and Remote PC access project..."
And then what happened?
And if what they claim (that they use, but haven't modified vnc/openssh) then there's no problem here, and no, as per their Web site, it isn't open source.
Slashdot really is scraping the "slow news day barrel" this week.
Absolutely not a good move. I don't want to see Then - now, try to stay with me, here - you are not the correct target audience for said ads. Oh well. Advertisers will quickly find that sites which are frequented most often be people who share your tastes aren't the right place for video ads, and they will use the text ads that I use (see links in my sig) on my own site because I know my target audience.
>>Now look back at Europe in the middle ages, just handfulls of generations ago when humans were about 80% of our current average height.
Uh? It seems as if you're suggesting that these guys were different from us, only the living conditions (and the lack of medical knowledge) made them smaller for example, otherwise they were 100% identical to us. This is a very fine line to cut. Height is not a well understood factor in human genetic drift over the last millennium. Certainly some groups of humans have varied in height dramatically over the past thousand years, both becoming taller and shorter. See Men From Early Middle Ages Were Nearly As Tall As Modern People. Each generation applies unique pressures to its populations, and it would take many generations of a consistent pressure (or a species-threatening event) to permanently alter the genetic makeup of a species, but drift happens every generation. One generation might be taller (say, because food supplies needed for larger people are plentiful). The next shorter (perhaps due to famine, where the tallest will die first, needing more food). If these forcers were permanent (at least when measured on the scale of a millennium or so), then you might see the genetic markers for the less successful types of human completely disappear from the species. This is how evolution happens. It's not a straight-line between fish and man, but a slow, halting process of minor changes, most of which are reversed. It's one step forward, two steps back, with thousands of branch-points that lead to dead-ends or other species.
Well, most of the matter that makes up human beings has no awareness whatsoever. Only those portions that take part in the higher-order neurological functions are part of that process. My neurons are not self-aware. They supposedly play a role in creating my self-awareness, but the same goes for my hands, my vocal cords, and arguably every other body part that I am aware of. Awareness is a process, not a thing that you can point at. It's the process of re-interpreting the prior interpretation of stimulus. Self-evaluation if you will. The hands and vocal cords have no part in this. They merely provide stimulus and receive directives. Now, in a general sense they are part of the process, but the actual process of awareness happens in the nervous system alone. It's not even a terribly complex process, as evidenced by the fact that brains which have been almost entirely destroyed by gradual buildups in cerebral fluid are still capable of the process.
Of course, no neuron is self-aware, just as no neuron is capable of making you walk, and no individual employee of a company makes the company function. your neurons, taken as a whole, however, are quite self-aware, and will remain so even when isolated from your hands, your feet, your vocal cords, or any other part of your body that isn't required in order to bring them oxygen.
The concept of matter ending up as human beings, and then being aware of its own existence, is mind blowing! Well, most of the matter that makes up human beings has no awareness whatsoever. Only those portions that take part in the higher-order neurological functions are part of that process. Your fingernails are not aware, which is why you feel no sympathy for those parts of your body when you mercilessly cut them off and throw them away, unceremoniously in the trash. Awareness is a feedback loop which exists in anything with a spinal cord. This feedback loop is increasingly complex in more evolved species, culminating in... man? Perhaps. Perhaps marine mammals have a more complex awareness. We're not sure. Certainly we combine awareness and a drive to manipulate our environment to an extent which is unrivaled.
Is there a scientific definition for life? I don't mean the using energy and waste - has dna - reproduces - want to will to survive stuff. You're confused. That's life. You're looking for a definition of intelligence, and frankly, no. There's no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. Part of the problem is that we have only one example of what we consider to be "an intelligent species," and it's that species that is trying to produce the definition. Does the spectrum of intelligence continue past our point of development? Would a more intelligent species have a very different definition? Do we process information in ways that make it impossible to objectively define intelligence? We don't know.
Like a clump of matter one day, then aware of its own existence the next day, what a transition!! This is a gross oversimplification, on par with "a trickle of water one day, and the grand canyon the next day, what a transition!!" No, it took *billions* of years to reach the stage of simple bacterial life forms on Earth. Just moving from ape-like creatures to humans as we see them today took over a million years (think of it as 50,000 repetitions of "great" before the phrase "grand monkey"). Now look back at Europe in the middle ages, just handfulls of generations ago when humans were about 80% of our current average height. Imagine the possible changes in humanity over 100-1000 times that span of time. Now, multiply that amount of change times 1,000-2,000 and you have roughly the period that it took life on Earth to evolve from microbes. This is not "matter one day, then aware of its own existence the next day." Even when measured against the development of the entire universe, this is a very substantial period of time. Think about that. Galaxies formed in about the time than it took Earth to go from lifeless rock to our home.
It is a start, but it hardly makes a dent in the proprietary software world. I am at a university right now, and here is an abbreviated list of free vs. proprietary software in use:
Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE That's about what I'd expect. As proprietary software is edged out, it will be the plethora of specialized applications that hold on the longest. The list of software that you give encompasses thousands of programs, but you notice thaat you called out very few individual open source programs. That's because the open source equivalent of Oracle that comes free with Linux is just a commodity. The open source equivalent of Acrobat that comes for free with Linux is just a commodity. Many organizations don't even realize that they already have this software installed, and buy proprietary equivalents.
This is ultimately a good thing. As the potential for savings increases, a small number of businesses will start making wise fiscal decisions, and they will beat their competition. It will all play out in the long run.
The Reason article is, Be Afraid of President McCain. It's a great piece for Republicans to read, and IMHO is one of the most powerful reasons to vote for McCain.
The article essentially paints the left as exactly what Republicans want America to think they are: rabidly opposed to any form of patriotism, and hostile toward any form of government reforms. The article most aims to pain McCain as a supporter of the Iraq War and as the primary architect of The Surge. This may or may not be true. He's certainly in favor of a military solution in Iraq, but I'll give the man credit for having a plan, which Bush lacked for years. I may not agree with his plan, but it's hardly the fear-inspiring fascist wet dream that this article paints.
As for the rest of the article. Let me quote:
"Like almost every past McCain crusade, from fining Big Tobacco to drug-testing athletes to restricting political speech in the name of campaign finance reform, the surge involved an increase in the power of the federal government, particularly in the executive branch." They don't actually explore how any of these other "crusades" expanded executive power, but they certainly do make an excellent list of McCain's resume high-points.
"Like many of his reform measures--identifying weapons pork, eliminating congressional airport perks, even banning torture--the escalation had as much to do with appearances... as it did with reality." Again an excellent tour of the reasons to vote for McCain, but the assertion is weak at best. Opposing rendition cost McCain dearly with the administration, and had the 2006 elections gone differently, he would have been in the dog house over that move. Appearance was clearly not the goal.
"McCain's dazzling résumé--war hero, campaign finance Quixote, chauffeur of the Straight Talk Express, reassuring National Uncle--tends to distract people from his philosophy of government." This bit had me hoping. I thought that at last, we'd get some insight into his seedy plan for executive power. Instead the article takes a left turn (no pun intended):
"McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. [he] comes from a military family [...] the Navy captain son of a four-star admiral who was the son of another four-star admiral, all named John Sidney McCain. And that just scratches the surface." No really. The article just tried to assert that because he comes from a long line of military men, he's some kind of fascist-in-waiting. Really. It just asserted that trying to rekindle patriotism was wrong, and tried to tie it to some perceived plan to use military force... perhaps against Americans.
If you are a Republican, and you were not planning on voting for McCain, PLEASE read this article. Read it, and read it again. It's a laundry-list of the reasons that you should vote for him. It's also a sad comment on how badly the Democrats are mis-reading the American public. There's a reason that, even after a disastrous term in the executive branch, Republicans might retain the office. As a Democrat, this makes me sad, frustrated and just plain tired. I want my party back, dammit!
Sun Microsystems said, "The rise of the open-source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors"?! OK, I'm looking around, but I don't see Rod Serling anywhere....
Joking aside, I guess it's a sign of things to come. Sun's dance with open source almost certainly presages the end of the behemoth proprietary software vendors. This makes sense, of course. Typical software that runs typical computers is now a commodity, downloadable for free over the Internet, and modifiable by all comers. The business world must adapt to this change, and re-define the software industry in terms of it, while finding a way to maintain their revenue streams.
OK, you guys can hack at this argument but, we could have been stuck with king ALGORE. Fortunately, the President of the United States is not a king. In fact, it was very important to the founding fathers that we not have a king. I really wish that people would remember this.
Al Gore is a fairly decent politician as their species go. He's pissed me off a few times (his Global Warming rhetoric is dangerously misleading), but I started tracking his career in the mid-80s when this oddball started telling Congress that this Internet thing was going to be important, and needed more research funding. It seemed strange to be listening to a politician push for a technical agenda that, at the time, only techies knew was going to be important (how important, I don't think any of us realized).
After that, I decided that I'd vote for him if he ever ran for anything in my jurisdiction. So, warts and all, I voted for him for President. Fat lot of good it did me:-(
Frankly, I'm amazed that a Republican apologist can find it in their hearts at this stage to suggest that Gore would have been the more dangerous choice. Bush is (and I say this as someone who's fairly sympathetic to the Republican agenda as a whole), a disaster. He makes the U.S. look like a country full of idiots, and his response to crisis is dangerously ill-planned. Gore might not have come out of 9/11 looking like a savior, but I doubt that he would have invaded Iraq, and I'm very certain that the USAPATRIOT act would not have been the crushing defeat for civil liberties that the current one is. With just those two changes, he would be an orders of magnitude better president. His energy policy might have been worrisome, depending on how he handled it, but that's easily a third-order concern.
> Now they lost their trust in Apple, and Steve Jobs is trying to buy it back.
No, there is some PR aspects to this deal but Apple didn't need to do this. It's a way to make sure they keep happy customers [...] tossing half the price cut back to every buyer and the full difference to everyone who bought in the last two weeks is just high class. Indeed. I'm often shocked by how much more open hostility there is on Slashdot toward organizations that try to treat their customers well. Google is constantly accused of being "evil" for... well, for anything they do. Apple is slammed whenever they produce a new gadget. IBM can't give away enough patents to the open source community to let people give them the time of day. AMD releases specs for the ATI cards after less than a year of owning the company, and people have the gall to complain that it took too long.
Over and over we see the same thing. Companies that do right by the community are attacked. Cutthroat and downright evil companies that just ignore us (G.E. comes to mind) are ignored in turn. We're training the corporate world to do us no favors.
Cheney is potentially worse than Giuliani, but he had two huge limitations: 1) he's not good at managing those who disagree with him and 2) he had to work through an idiot.
You're clearly an optimist. Would it be cruel for me to point out that it's not January 20, 2009 yet? In this respect, I'm not really. I do fear this administration's lame duck period more than any other in modern history. However, I'm not sure that Cheney wants to be remembered as the guy that stole the silver on the way out the door.
The funniest (saddest?) part is that I agree with the Bush/Cheney platform on a number of issues. If the Republican party would put forth a candidate who I didn't think was champing and the bit to put the Constitution in a shredder, I'd probably vote for them, but I don't get the impression that's on the horizon. Bring me a Dwight D. Eisenhower, and I'll vote for him in a heartbeat. Heck, I'd even settle for a John McCain.
Given Giuliani as a choice, though, I'll probably either vote for Obama if he's nominated or a third party. I've never much trusted Ms. Clinton, and her, "I take money from PACs because that's how I connect with good people like nurses and teachers," spewage convinced me that I should steer as clear as possible. If she'd come out and said, "my campaign finances depend on PAC money, right now," then I could have respected her, but the blatant lie was reprehensible.
Journaling has been around for decades. You never used big iron I take it? Journaling for filesystems (not databases) were, as far as I know, a 1980s technology. Prior to that the large systems that I was using had various ways of versioning, but nothing like a journaling filesystem. If you have a source that says otherwise, I'd be happy to read it. NetApp's tech was developed during the 1980s, so while I don't think (and didn't say) that they invented journaling filesystems, I think they were almost certainly involved in some of the early innovations.
Do you really think that Giuliani would be worse than Bush/Cheney? Possibly. Bush is an idiot. Cheney is potentially worse than Giuliani, but he had two huge limitations: 1) he's not good at managing those who disagree with him and 2) he had to work through an idiot.
GTA:SA is reported to work under Cedega when you use nocd to get around their copy-protection (I love "copy-protection" that only serves to support Windows PC gaming monopoly... grr).
In 2000, Daniel Phillips started developing a new Linux filesystem that would have many of the features netapps WAFL has, and ZFS has now.
This filesystem was called Tux2.
He was quite sure that the patents NetApp had on this weren't valid, because of prior art, and because his algorithm was quite different and quite a bit smarter I can't speak to his algorithm, but the assumption that there's lots of prior art for what NetApp did is a VERY common mistake. What NetApp did looked like the simple creation of an NFS-based (no direct-attach option back in the day) RAID array. However, as you look closer, their technology gets more and more interesting.
Certainly their use of an NVRAM-based journal was the first I'd ever heard of, but it might not be unique.
Their use of RAID4, however was highly novel. Typically, no one uses RAID4 because of the performance penalty you take. Basically RAID4 is where you allocate one disk as parity. In RAID5 (the more popular option), you stripe the parity information across all disks in the set. NetApp used RAID4, but because they precisely calibrated the spindle/head movement and used the journal to build a timing strategy for each write, they never got stuck in the bottleneck that other RAID4 implementations did (because they have to write to the parity disk for every write, regardless of what other disk the write goes to). This was, as far as I know, the origin of this particular innovation with respect to RAID4.
Next, was their filesystem itself. They were, to my knowledge, the first company to build an instant (relatively speaking) copy-on-write filesystem. That is, you could lock the filesystem (the part of the operation that could take a while, as the journal had to be flushed), copy the root inode, and unlock the filesystem. Because all blocks obeyed the copy-on-write status of their parent file, and the files obeyed the copy-on-write status of their parent directories, the entire filesystem was now preserved as-is. Subsequent writes would begin copying the blocks that they were targeted for, and writing to the copies which would become the new live filesystem. Now, there are many so-called "snapshot" filesystems, but I'd never heard of this particular approach prior to NetApp.
As for journaling, I'm not sure that they did anything novel there, but they were certainly very early on the journaling filesystem bandwagon, pre-dating the major players by years. This means that there were almost certainly some innovations in the NetApp filesystem's journal management that were unique and patent-worthy if only because of how early they came onto the stage.
Overall, if NetApp's patents (and those of all software) were to have lasted for 4-5 years, I don't think anyone would have begrudged them the monopoly status on their technologies. They certainly did innovate on a number of levels.
It's the over-long software patents that are crippling the innovation in this industry.
How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences." Actually, I see NetApp as a great example of how patents on software can be useful. They developed some very unique ways of managing network-accessible data, and improved on the state of the art dramatically. Had the duration of their patents been reasonable for the industry (typically this means about 3-4x the period that it takes to get an idea developed and brought to market), then there would be no problem. The fact of the matter is that NetApp got those patents forever ago in this industry's timeline, and really should not be controlling a monopoly interest in those technologies any longer. They should have been made to go out and innovate again and again to maintain their position.
Interesting that Apple shares are down 3.5% with this news. Was there a financial disclosure, or were investors expecting something different? Apple has been up all week. This is a loss of yesterday's gains only. I think there was some speculative buying around the idea that Apple would announce some large content deal or something else big. Most investors knew that this would be a "big, but not earth-shattering," announcement about the line and that nothing big has yet happened on the content front, so there's not that much change overall.
The problem is in defining what it is that Spamhaus does. I think it's fair that they market a means by which people can block email. They give very specific instructions on how to use their service for this purpose.
That said, they're providing a service that their customers ask for. They clearly outline their criteria and let their customers decide if and how to use it. It seems to me that the spammers only have a legitimate complaint against the ISPs that use the Spamhaus data. Even then, it would be a hard sell, since the blocking of spammers is one of the selling points for ISPs.
My work desktop, like my home desktop, is Linux, and doesn't include a solitaire version in the default install. However, I was speaking more about the sorts of games I like to play. Something turn-based might work, but I'd never go back to it. Typically, I just browse Slashdot when I need a mental break. That works just as well.
I know that in my line of work, playing games during the day just isn't workable for the most part.
Basically, any game that I can't put down for 4-6 hours while I do real work, and come back to for 5 minutes would be useless. PBM games might be workable.
The problem is, as I see it, that their ToS is "fluid". In other words, the ToS can be changed at any time by the company. Whether or not this is in fact legal remains to be seen, but I suspect that it probably is (at least in the U.S. which is where I assume we are referring). Recent decisions have changed the playing-field for revisions to contracts over the Web. Unless Comcast sent their updates out to customers, I'm not sure the updates will hold up.
Slashdot Mirror
To make it clearer, re-cast your argument in terms of someone being charged nearly $5000 because the "enter" key on their new computer's keyboard was specially interpreted by the pre-installed operating system as a signal to accept a customer service fee for requesting email-based help on the current application. There's simply no way that would fly in court, no matter what the manual said.
In practice, this isn't really going to happen in most Web-based text, but for electronic versions of non-Web text, it can be a win. Overall, however, I agree with you that there's more benefit in using UTF-8 universally.
And then what happened?
And if what they claim (that they use, but haven't modified vnc/openssh) then there's no problem here, and no, as per their Web site, it isn't open source.Slashdot really is scraping the "slow news day barrel" this week.
Uh? It seems as if you're suggesting that these guys were different from us, only the living conditions (and the lack of medical knowledge) made them smaller for example, otherwise they were 100% identical to us. This is a very fine line to cut. Height is not a well understood factor in human genetic drift over the last millennium. Certainly some groups of humans have varied in height dramatically over the past thousand years, both becoming taller and shorter. See Men From Early Middle Ages Were Nearly As Tall As Modern People. Each generation applies unique pressures to its populations, and it would take many generations of a consistent pressure (or a species-threatening event) to permanently alter the genetic makeup of a species, but drift happens every generation. One generation might be taller (say, because food supplies needed for larger people are plentiful). The next shorter (perhaps due to famine, where the tallest will die first, needing more food). If these forcers were permanent (at least when measured on the scale of a millennium or so), then you might see the genetic markers for the less successful types of human completely disappear from the species. This is how evolution happens. It's not a straight-line between fish and man, but a slow, halting process of minor changes, most of which are reversed. It's one step forward, two steps back, with thousands of branch-points that lead to dead-ends or other species.
Of course, no neuron is self-aware, just as no neuron is capable of making you walk, and no individual employee of a company makes the company function. your neurons, taken as a whole, however, are quite self-aware, and will remain so even when isolated from your hands, your feet, your vocal cords, or any other part of your body that isn't required in order to bring them oxygen.
Free: Linux, Solaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, VNC, OpenSSH, GNU, GIMP
Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE That's about what I'd expect. As proprietary software is edged out, it will be the plethora of specialized applications that hold on the longest. The list of software that you give encompasses thousands of programs, but you notice thaat you called out very few individual open source programs. That's because the open source equivalent of Oracle that comes free with Linux is just a commodity. The open source equivalent of Acrobat that comes for free with Linux is just a commodity. Many organizations don't even realize that they already have this software installed, and buy proprietary equivalents.
This is ultimately a good thing. As the potential for savings increases, a small number of businesses will start making wise fiscal decisions, and they will beat their competition. It will all play out in the long run.
The article essentially paints the left as exactly what Republicans want America to think they are: rabidly opposed to any form of patriotism, and hostile toward any form of government reforms. The article most aims to pain McCain as a supporter of the Iraq War and as the primary architect of The Surge. This may or may not be true. He's certainly in favor of a military solution in Iraq, but I'll give the man credit for having a plan, which Bush lacked for years. I may not agree with his plan, but it's hardly the fear-inspiring fascist wet dream that this article paints.
As for the rest of the article. Let me quote:
If you are a Republican, and you were not planning on voting for McCain, PLEASE read this article. Read it, and read it again. It's a laundry-list of the reasons that you should vote for him. It's also a sad comment on how badly the Democrats are mis-reading the American public. There's a reason that, even after a disastrous term in the executive branch, Republicans might retain the office. As a Democrat, this makes me sad, frustrated and just plain tired. I want my party back, dammit!
Sun Microsystems said, "The rise of the open-source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors"?! OK, I'm looking around, but I don't see Rod Serling anywhere....
Joking aside, I guess it's a sign of things to come. Sun's dance with open source almost certainly presages the end of the behemoth proprietary software vendors. This makes sense, of course. Typical software that runs typical computers is now a commodity, downloadable for free over the Internet, and modifiable by all comers. The business world must adapt to this change, and re-define the software industry in terms of it, while finding a way to maintain their revenue streams.
I once had someone apply for a network security position who had their SSN on their resume. Needless to say there was no interview.
Al Gore is a fairly decent politician as their species go. He's pissed me off a few times (his Global Warming rhetoric is dangerously misleading), but I started tracking his career in the mid-80s when this oddball started telling Congress that this Internet thing was going to be important, and needed more research funding. It seemed strange to be listening to a politician push for a technical agenda that, at the time, only techies knew was going to be important (how important, I don't think any of us realized).
After that, I decided that I'd vote for him if he ever ran for anything in my jurisdiction. So, warts and all, I voted for him for President. Fat lot of good it did me
Frankly, I'm amazed that a Republican apologist can find it in their hearts at this stage to suggest that Gore would have been the more dangerous choice. Bush is (and I say this as someone who's fairly sympathetic to the Republican agenda as a whole), a disaster. He makes the U.S. look like a country full of idiots, and his response to crisis is dangerously ill-planned. Gore might not have come out of 9/11 looking like a savior, but I doubt that he would have invaded Iraq, and I'm very certain that the USAPATRIOT act would not have been the crushing defeat for civil liberties that the current one is. With just those two changes, he would be an orders of magnitude better president. His energy policy might have been worrisome, depending on how he handled it, but that's easily a third-order concern.
No, there is some PR aspects to this deal but Apple didn't need to do this. It's a way to make sure they keep happy customers [...] tossing half the price cut back to every buyer and the full difference to everyone who bought in the last two weeks is just high class. Indeed. I'm often shocked by how much more open hostility there is on Slashdot toward organizations that try to treat their customers well. Google is constantly accused of being "evil" for
Over and over we see the same thing. Companies that do right by the community are attacked. Cutthroat and downright evil companies that just ignore us (G.E. comes to mind) are ignored in turn. We're training the corporate world to do us no favors.
You're clearly an optimist. Would it be cruel for me to point out that it's not January 20, 2009 yet? In this respect, I'm not really. I do fear this administration's lame duck period more than any other in modern history. However, I'm not sure that Cheney wants to be remembered as the guy that stole the silver on the way out the door.
The funniest (saddest?) part is that I agree with the Bush/Cheney platform on a number of issues. If the Republican party would put forth a candidate who I didn't think was champing and the bit to put the Constitution in a shredder, I'd probably vote for them, but I don't get the impression that's on the horizon. Bring me a Dwight D. Eisenhower, and I'll vote for him in a heartbeat. Heck, I'd even settle for a John McCain.
Given Giuliani as a choice, though, I'll probably either vote for Obama if he's nominated or a third party. I've never much trusted Ms. Clinton, and her, "I take money from PACs because that's how I connect with good people like nurses and teachers," spewage convinced me that I should steer as clear as possible. If she'd come out and said, "my campaign finances depend on PAC money, right now," then I could have respected her, but the blatant lie was reprehensible.
Bah. Politicians suck.
Giuliani lacks these shortcomings.
GTA:SA is reported to work under Cedega when you use nocd to get around their copy-protection (I love "copy-protection" that only serves to support Windows PC gaming monopoly... grr).
would have many of the features netapps WAFL has, and ZFS has now.
This filesystem was called Tux2.
He was quite sure that the patents NetApp had on this weren't valid,
because of prior art, and because his algorithm was quite
different and quite a bit smarter I can't speak to his algorithm, but the assumption that there's lots of prior art for what NetApp did is a VERY common mistake. What NetApp did looked like the simple creation of an NFS-based (no direct-attach option back in the day) RAID array. However, as you look closer, their technology gets more and more interesting.
Certainly their use of an NVRAM-based journal was the first I'd ever heard of, but it might not be unique.
Their use of RAID4, however was highly novel. Typically, no one uses RAID4 because of the performance penalty you take. Basically RAID4 is where you allocate one disk as parity. In RAID5 (the more popular option), you stripe the parity information across all disks in the set. NetApp used RAID4, but because they precisely calibrated the spindle/head movement and used the journal to build a timing strategy for each write, they never got stuck in the bottleneck that other RAID4 implementations did (because they have to write to the parity disk for every write, regardless of what other disk the write goes to). This was, as far as I know, the origin of this particular innovation with respect to RAID4.
Next, was their filesystem itself. They were, to my knowledge, the first company to build an instant (relatively speaking) copy-on-write filesystem. That is, you could lock the filesystem (the part of the operation that could take a while, as the journal had to be flushed), copy the root inode, and unlock the filesystem. Because all blocks obeyed the copy-on-write status of their parent file, and the files obeyed the copy-on-write status of their parent directories, the entire filesystem was now preserved as-is. Subsequent writes would begin copying the blocks that they were targeted for, and writing to the copies which would become the new live filesystem. Now, there are many so-called "snapshot" filesystems, but I'd never heard of this particular approach prior to NetApp.
As for journaling, I'm not sure that they did anything novel there, but they were certainly very early on the journaling filesystem bandwagon, pre-dating the major players by years. This means that there were almost certainly some innovations in the NetApp filesystem's journal management that were unique and patent-worthy if only because of how early they came onto the stage.
Overall, if NetApp's patents (and those of all software) were to have lasted for 4-5 years, I don't think anyone would have begrudged them the monopoly status on their technologies. They certainly did innovate on a number of levels.
It's the over-long software patents that are crippling the innovation in this industry.
The problem is in defining what it is that Spamhaus does. I think it's fair that they market a means by which people can block email. They give very specific instructions on how to use their service for this purpose.
That said, they're providing a service that their customers ask for. They clearly outline their criteria and let their customers decide if and how to use it. It seems to me that the spammers only have a legitimate complaint against the ISPs that use the Spamhaus data. Even then, it would be a hard sell, since the blocking of spammers is one of the selling points for ISPs.
Maybe AA (no, not the other one) should apply for tax breaks as an official religion.
I think that's been done in the past, perhaps not by this particular organization.Certainly, there's the UU church which counts many atheists among their membership.
My work desktop, like my home desktop, is Linux, and doesn't include a solitaire version in the default install. However, I was speaking more about the sorts of games I like to play. Something turn-based might work, but I'd never go back to it. Typically, I just browse Slashdot when I need a mental break. That works just as well.
I know that in my line of work, playing games during the day just isn't workable for the most part.
Basically, any game that I can't put down for 4-6 hours while I do real work, and come back to for 5 minutes would be useless. PBM games might be workable.