"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."
What happens when the company behind a proprietary piece of software disappears or decides they don't want to support the software you are using any more? Isn't using proprietary software a huge risk?
Nobody said you can switch for free. But neither can you stay for free. And notice that Microsoft has done whatever they can to make the cost of switching as high as possible. The price is now so high that they can also start increasing the price for anybody to stay with their software.
In practice the "stay" option can also mean that you need to upgrade according to Microsoft's schedule. So the options are more "pay to switch to something else according to your schedule" or "pay to keep switching when MS says to".
OK, so lay out a plan for me to move my 100 person company from an Active Directory and Exchange based company that does 66%.NET web development (the other 33% is a combinaation of Java and Flash) to a non-Microsoft platform.
So you have spent huge amounts of money on products which have only existed for at most a few years. If you can afford to spend money at that rate how can rapidly switching platforms be an issue for your company. Since you must have just done exactly that within the last few years.
And we do.NET because our clients are asking for it.
Most companies are not in the business of supplying software to third parties in the first place. To them software is an infrastructure.
Your point is "why not use linux when it's a viable alternative" and mine is that for most of what we use MS technology for, it's not a viable alternative. Mail servers, backups? Sure. Collaboration and.NET development?
What did you do before.NET more to the point what do you intend to do after.NET?
If you run a business of anything beyond a dozen people, you cannot just drop your IT Infrastructure and switch to Macs and/or Linux.
In which case you take Windows out the same way it went in.
But I am not a whole company. I also didn't invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into my current set up.
If this company has been in existance for any length of time the fact that they had "hundreds of thousands of dollers" invested in some other system didn't stop them switching to windows.
Telling a business "Can't you just switch" or "If you don't like it, do use it" is completely naive.
Unless that is the advice of Microsoft's advertising wing...
Which one of those suicide hijackers used a book from a library on how to crash a plane into a building?
If they did it would probably be one from the fiction section. e.g. "The Running Man", "Chains of Command", etc. Best ban thrillers. Using a plane as an improvised cruise missile isn't actually that original anyway.
One may have learned how to fly a plane in the US, but what's wrong with that? A man wants to learn to fly a plane. Not even close to a crime.
On around the 13 or 14 of September 2001 some journalists were able to replicate what had happened, with MS Flight Sim. Don't see Bill Gates being hauled away for possibly helping terrorists.
consider the fact that Senate Bill 742 [yahoo.com] in Oregon, introduced by Republican John Minnis, would define as a terrorist, a person who "plans or participates in an act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt" business, transportation, schools, government, or free assembly."
Presumably with exemptions for government and police. Otherwise a cop who hassles a demonstrator would be considered a "terrorist". Indeed were the definition strictly applied the senator himself would be considered a terrorist according to the definition of his bill.
Its not about justice here, no, its about having the big conviction numbers, whether or not the criminals are still roaming the streets.
Also number of arrests can be used as a metric of law enforcement. Also poltically important is conviction rate. You are far more likely to see a politican saying about the "guilty" "getting away with it". Than one saying that there appear to be rather too many innocent people being dragged before courts. Or asking why the prosecution went forward of a case where there was no evidence against the accused in the first place.
And now the FBI wants to maintain a database on everyone (oops, did I say "maintain"? That kind of suggests some effort in upkeep and keeping it correct)
This being the same FBI who have just been told they don't have to put as much effort into maintaining their database as they were doing before...
and is using terrorist arrests and secret trials which always end in conviction
Or have someone plead guilty, thus avoiding the possibility that they might be found not guilty.
They want access to all personal data, in the name of national security, but there is no control over how that data is actually used.
At the same time no-one has access to their personal data. History shows that such a situation is more likely to attract the crooked than the honest.
If the government wants to know that I have read "such and such author", they should be required to tell me that they want to know, and further they should show a good reason for neededing the information.
At the same time they should have a very good reason for not telling you what they have been up to.
It's just that if, after the fact you're under investigation for being a terrorist, yeah, having checked out books on making bombs just might be relevant to the investigation!
Of course these people would never target anyone for political reasons. They would never want increase the number of people arrested, because number of arrests can be mistakenly seen as a performance metric... A brief look at history shows that security services in supposedly democratic countries, including the US, get up to all sorts of subversive activity. One of the reasons being that the issue of "who watches the watchers" is rarely addressed.
MP3 is not a magic format, but is helpful when you'd like to store audio data in less space:
There is also an advantage to the station in terms of cataloguing and actually finding the music. They don't have to go and physically find a disk once they have decided what to play.
Actually, IIRC there is significant effort being put forth to digitally watermark the audio so that even if you convert the digital to analog and back to digital, the watermark can still be detected... i.e. the watermark is subtly embedded and spread throughout the audio.
Does "significent effort" translate into "no-one can actually make this work". Consider that in the process the sound winds up going through a D->A, various signal processing, an A->D and probably some digital signal procssing. You need to have some kind of "watermark" which will survive that and won't be obvious.
The polonium source is always hot, whether or not it is being used. The article states that "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges - it could run a small town.
What would you put them in, so as not to wind up with a pool of radioactive liquid.
And when in use, each burst (of which you can fire 170 per minute) has an internal energy dissipation of 16.4KW
Or even 16.4 MJ per shot. Anyway this is only 45% of the energy output even fireing at that rate.
No kidding. You'd need several inches of shuttle thermal tile just to hold this thing.
You'd need a very good thermal protection suit simply to go near the thing, let alone pick it up.
Also polonium 210 is very rare in nature. It is usually produced by bombarding Bismuth 209 with neutrons (typically in a nuclear reactor).
More specifically the idea is to form Bismuth 210 which then beta decays to Polonium 210. Polonium decays to Lead 208 which is stable.
In the current form, this weapon is an invitation for radioactive contamination disaster.
But only fairly short term contamination because of the short half life and the lack of radioactive daughter elements. Compare this with U238, a 4.5 billion year half life and all sorts of radioactive daughter elements.
Any product, including oil, is going to require energy to get it to a usable state.
Or even to get it where it is needed. An obvious advantage of fuel from plants if you can simply choose an appropriate plant species for wherever the fuel is needed. As opposed to shipping stuff half way around the planet.
Hemp doesn't require much effort compared to other plants like corn; it can practically grow itself. (It's called weed for a reason!)
On the negative side, there is a lot of fuel involved in raising, the turkeys (equipment relating to feed, transport of feed, raising the turkeys, transporting them, slaughtering them, transporting the guts to the factory, etc).
All this is being done anyway. The whole point of this is to turn a waste product into something useful. All that needs to be done is to install the fuel making plant near where the turkey guts would otherwise end up. You either install the waste processing near the waste source or use it instead of a waste disposal facility.
Why is it that I have to go outside this country for good news?
Somehow the much trumpeted "freedom of the press" in the US dosn't translate to much in practice. Even corporate ownership dosn't explain this, since the media in other parts of the world also has massive corporate ownership sometimes even the same ownership.
Why is it that CNN's coverage improves the instant you leave the USA?
Yet CNN is owned by the same corporation worldwide. Similarly Fox News and Sky News are both owned by Newscorp.
Why is it that although there is more widespread support for this war in Israel than there is in the US, that Ha'aretz is far more ballanced than even the New York Times?
IIRC Israel is the only country on the planet where there is majority support from the public. Anyway when it comes to anything to do with Israel in the US media you need a large bag of salt. Given the strange relationship the 2 countries have.
Why is it that when the American troups parachuted into Northern Iraq, the press portrays this as a glorious moment, rather than the result of a diplomatic failure (to get Turkey to let us use their land as a staging area for a northern front)?
Or to ask questions about how easily US forces can manage the logistics of supplying those troups. Especially in the light of resupply problems occuring in the South.
They DID try to oust Saddam, and the freakin US told them to rise up and do so (Bush Sr. that is, in 1981).
More likely you mean 1991. In 1981 Iraq was still "best friends" with the US, since they were attacking "those nasty Iranians".
When they asked for help, the US turned their backs on them, after we promised to help them - and they were brutally slaughtered.
IIRC one of the things the US refused to do was give anti-Hussain generals control of capured military hardware.
Bush then did nothing to help. He allowed Iraq tanks and Republican Guard units to move, to put down the rebels, IN SPITE of ceasefire conditions in which he was not allowed to move those units. In the north, he allowed Iraq to use helicopter gun ships, even though there was a ban on flights.
Only later did the US government start making a big fuss about the "no fly zones", which were never endorsed by the UN in the first place.
These were not accidental decisions of the Bush administration. This was a conscious decision that it was better for Saddam Hussein to remain in power than for the Shiites in the south to succeed
With these same people not being too happy to be invaded. They might not like the government in Baghdad, but they don't like being invaded by soldiers from thousands of miles away either.
Does the water company charge me more because I have more sinks than my next door neighbour? They may charge me more if I use more water but having more sinks doesn't matter, it is the flow that matters.
Similarly with electricity/gas/etc. Imagine how daft it would be to have to have the water company come around and reassess how much to charge you any time plumbing was changes.
Now that media covergence is drastically changing the landscape, turning voice data into just another type of packet on the network, the phone companies are surely in a tizzy. The whole concept of a "long distance call" is undergoing a complete rennaissance, since one can now pass voice data over the internet, completely bypassing the traditional call switching mechanism. One could conceivably setup a couple of PSTN gateways and pass calls end-to-end without any long distance charges.
Consider if you are an organisation (commercial or otherwise) who has offices in different places. You want to link your offices up either by direct leased lines or some kind of VPN over the public internet. For your telephones you get a modern integrated PBX. Which is hooked up to some phone lines and the network. Any interoffice calls go over the WAN, incomming calls might also wind up being sent to a different office and outgoing calls will use phone lines in the office nearest their destination.
There's at least one thing they'll have to reconcile: It's not considered a "long distance" service if I interact with a remote server from my local ISP connection, but somehow, it magically turns into a "long distance" issue if voice data is involved. What do you bet that they propose slapping a charge on ALL interstate internet traffic
International as well as interstate. Anyway it's quite often the case that telephone call charges have little relation to the route the call takes,
What were legislators smoking when they wrote that clause?
How much does it cost and where is it sold...
That's so ridiculously overbroad that it could even be interpreted to make it illegal to call someone from a payphone without telling them where you are.
Best not use a phone connected to a PBX. Since that might give the telephone company a false idea where you are. If you are a corporation with a private telephone network the caller could be on the other side of the planet from wherever the call connects into the public network. The kit to do this is available off the shelf. You don't even need to be a multi-national corporation to do the latter. Quite a few companies offer VoIP services to individuals then there is the tpc.int service. Wonder if they have any nodes in Michigan!
Even worse is the tiered penalties for these activities. If you use more than 5 devices, including software you are subject to greater and greater fines. Each device can be a separate charge as well. Over 10 the penalties get worse.
Not good news if you are a company with a few hundred employees. Each of which have a computer and telephone. But you only have a handful of IP addresses and a handful of PSTN phone lines.
After all, how many businesses (that have even just email and basic networks set up) do you know of that do *not* use NAT or Proxy servers, specifically b/c they can only afford 4-24 IP addresses from the ISP, and have dozens or thousands of computers behind their connection server(s) [NAT or Proxy] in order to support these?
Or who have hundreds/thousands of telephones connected to a PBX, even a private telephone network. Consider a company with several sites and a telephone system which routes outgoing telephone calls to the nearest site before connecting to the public network. That would be covered by these kind of laws and the telephone companies can moan about all their lost potential profit.
If the legislators (*cough* idiots *cough*) were to actually put through this law, it would kill any company that had more computers than IP's that needed to be online.
It could do in any company which needed telecommunications. Nothing here appears specific to IP.
*ponders* come to think of it, I wonder how many government agencies use NAT/firewalls or proxy servers - it would be hysterical to find out that the group of legislators who put this bill into consideration use such technology in their own office, wouldn't it? *hehe*
It certainly wouldn't be the first time legislators have shot themselves in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."
What happens when the company behind a proprietary piece of software disappears or decides they don't want to support the software you are using any more? Isn't using proprietary software a huge risk?
Nobody said you can switch for free. But neither can you stay for free. And notice that Microsoft has done whatever they can to make the cost of switching as high as possible. The price is now so high that they can also start increasing the price for anybody to stay with their software.
In practice the "stay" option can also mean that you need to upgrade according to Microsoft's schedule.
So the options are more "pay to switch to something else according to your schedule" or "pay to keep switching when MS says to".
OK, so lay out a plan for me to move my 100 person company from an Active Directory and Exchange based company that does 66% .NET web development (the other 33% is a combinaation of Java and Flash) to a non-Microsoft platform.
.NET because our clients are asking for it.
.NET development?
.NET more to the point what do you intend to do after .NET?
So you have spent huge amounts of money on products which have only existed for at most a few years. If you can afford to spend money at that rate how can rapidly switching platforms be an issue for your company. Since you must have just done exactly that within the last few years.
And we do
Most companies are not in the business of supplying software to third parties in the first place. To them software is an infrastructure.
Your point is "why not use linux when it's a viable alternative" and mine is that for most of what we use MS technology for, it's not a viable alternative. Mail servers, backups? Sure. Collaboration and
What did you do before
If you run a business of anything beyond a dozen people, you cannot just drop your IT Infrastructure and switch to Macs and/or Linux.
In which case you take Windows out the same way it went in.
But I am not a whole company. I also didn't invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into my current set up.
If this company has been in existance for any length of time the fact that they had "hundreds of thousands of dollers" invested in some other system didn't stop them switching to windows.
Telling a business "Can't you just switch" or "If you don't like it, do use it" is completely naive.
Unless that is the advice of Microsoft's advertising wing...
While I on the subject of crappy ISP's I don't understand what is the point of all these conditions.
At a guess they either employed or retained an overpriced "lawyer" who then has to do something to appear to be useful.
Which one of those suicide hijackers used a book from a library on how to crash a plane into a building?
If they did it would probably be one from the fiction section. e.g. "The Running Man", "Chains of Command", etc. Best ban thrillers. Using a plane as an improvised cruise missile isn't actually that original anyway.
One may have learned how to fly a plane in the US, but what's wrong with that? A man wants to learn to fly a plane. Not even close to a crime.
On around the 13 or 14 of September 2001 some journalists were able to replicate what had happened, with MS Flight Sim. Don't see Bill Gates being hauled away for possibly helping terrorists.
consider the fact that Senate Bill 742 [yahoo.com] in Oregon, introduced by Republican John Minnis, would define as a terrorist, a person who "plans or participates in an act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt" business, transportation, schools, government, or free assembly."
Presumably with exemptions for government and police. Otherwise a cop who hassles a demonstrator would be considered a "terrorist".
Indeed were the definition strictly applied the senator himself would be considered a terrorist according to the definition of his bill.
Its not about justice here, no, its about having the big conviction numbers, whether or not the criminals are still roaming the streets.
Also number of arrests can be used as a metric of law enforcement.
Also poltically important is conviction rate. You are far more likely to see a politican saying about the "guilty" "getting away with it". Than one saying that there appear to be rather too many innocent people being dragged before courts. Or asking why the prosecution went forward of a case where there was no evidence against the accused in the first place.
And now the FBI wants to maintain a database on everyone (oops, did I say "maintain"? That kind of suggests some effort in upkeep and keeping it correct)
This being the same FBI who have just been told they don't have to put as much effort into maintaining their database as they were doing before...
and is using terrorist arrests and secret trials which always end in conviction
Or have someone plead guilty, thus avoiding the possibility that they might be found not guilty.
They want access to all personal data, in the name of national security, but there is no control over how that data is actually used.
At the same time no-one has access to their personal data. History shows that such a situation is more likely to attract the crooked than the honest.
If the government wants to know that I have read "such and such author", they should be required to tell me that they want to know, and further they should show a good reason for neededing the information.
At the same time they should have a very good reason for not telling you what they have been up to.
There's a difference between "terrorist" and "potential terrorist." You jail the first, you simply pay close attention to the second.
In theory. In practice governments can turn a blind eye even support terrorists and potential terrorists.
It's just that if, after the fact you're under investigation for being a terrorist, yeah, having checked out books on making bombs just might be relevant to the investigation!
Of course these people would never target anyone for political reasons. They would never want increase the number of people arrested, because number of arrests can be mistakenly seen as a performance metric...
A brief look at history shows that security services in supposedly democratic countries, including the US, get up to all sorts of subversive activity. One of the reasons being that the issue of "who watches the watchers" is rarely addressed.
MP3 is not a magic format, but is helpful when you'd like to store audio data in less space:
There is also an advantage to the station in terms of cataloguing and actually finding the music. They don't have to go and physically find a disk once they have decided what to play.
Actually, IIRC there is significant effort being put forth to digitally watermark the audio so that even if you convert the digital to analog and back to digital, the watermark can still be detected... i.e. the watermark is subtly embedded and spread throughout the audio.
Does "significent effort" translate into "no-one can actually make this work". Consider that in the process the sound winds up going through a D->A, various signal processing, an A->D and probably some digital signal procssing. You need to have some kind of "watermark" which will survive that and won't be obvious.
The polonium source is always hot, whether or not it is being used. The article states that "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges - it could run a small town.
What would you put them in, so as not to wind up with a pool of radioactive liquid.
And when in use, each burst (of which you can fire 170 per minute) has an internal energy dissipation of 16.4KW
Or even 16.4 MJ per shot. Anyway this is only 45% of the energy output even fireing at that rate.
No kidding. You'd need several inches of shuttle thermal tile just to hold this thing.
You'd need a very good thermal protection suit simply to go near the thing, let alone pick it up.
Also polonium 210 is very rare in nature. It is usually produced by bombarding Bismuth 209 with neutrons (typically in a nuclear reactor).
More specifically the idea is to form Bismuth 210 which then beta decays to Polonium 210. Polonium decays to Lead 208 which is stable.
In the current form, this weapon is an invitation for radioactive contamination disaster.
But only fairly short term contamination because of the short half life and the lack of radioactive daughter elements. Compare this with U238, a 4.5 billion year half life and all sorts of radioactive daughter elements.
Even if we developed a perfect alternative tomorrow, it would take us several years to transition automobiles.
Assuming you need to do anything to transition them. The engine dosn't care where its hydrocarbons come from.
Any product, including oil, is going to require energy to get it to a usable state.
Or even to get it where it is needed. An obvious advantage of fuel from plants if you can simply choose an appropriate plant species for wherever the fuel is needed. As opposed to shipping stuff half way around the planet.
Hemp doesn't require much effort compared to other plants like corn; it can practically grow itself. (It's called weed for a reason!)
Can you make paper, fabric or drugs from corn?
On the negative side, there is a lot of fuel involved in raising, the turkeys (equipment relating to feed, transport of feed, raising the turkeys, transporting them, slaughtering them, transporting the guts to the factory, etc).
All this is being done anyway. The whole point of this is to turn a waste product into something useful. All that needs to be done is to install the fuel making plant near where the turkey guts would otherwise end up. You either install the waste processing near the waste source or use it instead of a waste disposal facility.
Why is it that I have to go outside this country for good news?
Somehow the much trumpeted "freedom of the press" in the US dosn't translate to much in practice. Even corporate ownership dosn't explain this, since the media in other parts of the world also has massive corporate ownership sometimes even the same ownership.
Why is it that CNN's coverage improves the instant you leave the USA?
Yet CNN is owned by the same corporation worldwide. Similarly Fox News and Sky News are both owned by Newscorp.
Why is it that although there is more widespread support for this war in Israel than there is in the US, that Ha'aretz is far more ballanced than even the New York Times?
IIRC Israel is the only country on the planet where there is majority support from the public. Anyway when it comes to anything to do with Israel in the US media you need a large bag of salt. Given the strange relationship the 2 countries have.
Why is it that when the American troups parachuted into Northern Iraq, the press portrays this as a glorious moment, rather than the result of a diplomatic failure (to get Turkey to let us use their land as a staging area for a northern front)?
Or to ask questions about how easily US forces can manage the logistics of supplying those troups. Especially in the light of resupply problems occuring in the South.
They DID try to oust Saddam, and the freakin US told them to rise up and do so (Bush Sr. that is, in 1981).
More likely you mean 1991. In 1981 Iraq was still "best friends" with the US, since they were attacking "those nasty Iranians".
When they asked for help, the US turned their backs on them, after we promised to help them - and they were brutally slaughtered.
IIRC one of the things the US refused to do was give anti-Hussain generals control of capured military hardware.
Bush then did nothing to help. He allowed Iraq tanks and Republican Guard units to move, to put down the rebels, IN SPITE of ceasefire conditions in which he was not allowed to move those units. In the north, he allowed Iraq to use helicopter gun ships, even though there was a ban on flights.
Only later did the US government start making a big fuss about the "no fly zones", which were never endorsed by the UN in the first place.
These were not accidental decisions of the Bush administration. This was a conscious decision that it was better for Saddam Hussein to remain in power than for the Shiites in the south to succeed
With these same people not being too happy to be invaded. They might not like the government in Baghdad, but they don't like being invaded by soldiers from thousands of miles away either.
Does the water company charge me more because I have more sinks than my next door neighbour? They may charge me more if I use more water but having more sinks doesn't matter, it is the flow that matters.
Similarly with electricity/gas/etc. Imagine how daft it would be to have to have the water company come around and reassess how much to charge you any time plumbing was changes.
Now that media covergence is drastically changing the landscape, turning voice data into just another type of packet on the network, the phone companies are surely in a tizzy. The whole concept of a "long distance call" is undergoing a complete rennaissance, since one can now pass voice data over the internet, completely bypassing the traditional call switching mechanism. One could conceivably setup a couple of PSTN gateways and pass calls end-to-end without any long distance charges.
Consider if you are an organisation (commercial or otherwise) who has offices in different places. You want to link your offices up either by direct leased lines or some kind of VPN over the public internet. For your telephones you get a modern integrated PBX. Which is hooked up to some phone lines and the network. Any interoffice calls go over the WAN, incomming calls might also wind up being sent to a different office and outgoing calls will use phone lines in the office nearest their destination.
There's at least one thing they'll have to reconcile: It's not considered a "long distance" service if I interact with a remote server from my local ISP connection, but somehow, it magically turns into a "long distance" issue if voice data is involved. What do you bet that they propose slapping a charge on ALL interstate internet traffic
International as well as interstate. Anyway it's quite often the case that telephone call charges have little relation to the route the call takes,
What were legislators smoking when they wrote that clause?
How much does it cost and where is it sold...
That's so ridiculously overbroad that it could even be interpreted to make it illegal to call someone from a payphone without telling them where you are.
Best not use a phone connected to a PBX. Since that might give the telephone company a false idea where you are. If you are a corporation with a private telephone network the caller could be on the other side of the planet from wherever the call connects into the public network. The kit to do this is available off the shelf.
You don't even need to be a multi-national corporation to do the latter. Quite a few companies offer VoIP services to individuals then there is the tpc.int service. Wonder if they have any nodes in Michigan!
Even worse is the tiered penalties for these activities. If you use more than 5 devices, including software you are subject to greater and greater fines. Each device can be a separate charge as well. Over 10 the penalties get worse.
Not good news if you are a company with a few hundred employees. Each of which have a computer and telephone. But you only have a handful of IP addresses and a handful of PSTN phone lines.
After all, how many businesses (that have even just email and basic networks set up) do you know of that do *not* use NAT or Proxy servers, specifically b/c they can only afford 4-24 IP addresses from the ISP, and have dozens or thousands of computers behind their connection server(s) [NAT or Proxy] in order to support these?
Or who have hundreds/thousands of telephones connected to a PBX, even a private telephone network. Consider a company with several sites and a telephone system which routes outgoing telephone calls to the nearest site before connecting to the public network. That would be covered by these kind of laws and the telephone companies can moan about all their lost potential profit.
If the legislators (*cough* idiots *cough*) were to actually put through this law, it would kill any company that had more computers than IP's that needed to be online.
It could do in any company which needed telecommunications. Nothing here appears specific to IP.
*ponders* come to think of it, I wonder how many government agencies use NAT/firewalls or proxy servers - it would be hysterical to find out that the group of legislators who put this bill into consideration use such technology in their own office, wouldn't it? *hehe*
It certainly wouldn't be the first time legislators have shot themselves in the foot.