I think that was the genesis of the prank -- someone had come across these pics from some Web site at my friend's work, and they said, "Hey let's have a laugh and just send these to some people to freak them out!" Pretty dumb.
You know, this is true. Something similar happened to me. A friend played a joke. I'm not famous by any stretch, but I'm a published writer and my work has appeared all over the place, including my local newspaper. So a friend decided (for whatever reason) to play this prank on me. He emailed me acting like he was somebody who had read something I'd written in the paper. At first it was just a regular "reader letter" type thing, but over the course of a few more emails he continued to escalate it onto some really weird and creepy stalker type thing. He'd say, email is so impersonal, how would you like to meet up to discuss this further? (No thanks.) Oh come on, we can meet at [a certain bar I go to regularly]. (Really, I'm not interested.) No? How about [this coffee shop right down the street from my house]? And the whole thing culminated in him sending me an email saying "I know you'll love this," along with a bunch of JPEGs of bloody dead bodies and people with injuries. Ha ha ha.
Now, I was maybe 70 percent sure that this was some kind of prank. I mean, who would care enough to really wish harm on me? But that 30 percent is a killer. It eats at you. There are some straaaaaannnge people out there -- just look around Slashdot. And in this day and age, it really is pretty hard to imagine that a stranger could not be able to narrow down my place of residence if they really felt like they wanted to. I have to admit that the whole thing made me pretty uncomfortable -- enough to take it seriously.
Anyway, my friend denied that he had anything to do with it, denied it and denied it again. So after the third denial I just said, "OK, well you've seen the emails. You should come down to the police station with me when I file the report." That's when he realized I was really serious, and he owned up -- and we all laughed at what a funny, funny, funny joke that was.
The New York Times has a more in-depth article on this case, and it seems strange indeed.
There's an old saying: "You can't con an honest man." Most cons work because they prey on the victim's own greed or baser emotions. I wonder how much of this was going on in this case?
The Times article contains a few choice tidbits. Apparently, once he got into cahoots with the scammers, Mr. Davidson got involved with some plot of theirs to sue Wachovia Bank for mismanaging Davidson's trust fund, among other things. That sounds suspiciously like the classic con, where you give the con man some of your money in return for the promise that he'll get you lots more money later.
If nothing else, Davidson does sound a little credulous, and possibly mentally ill. The scammers told him his life was supposedly in danger from a group of Polish priests with ties to Opus Dei, whom the scammers told him had a plan to overthrow the United States government. How plausible is that? But then, if you were already rabidly anti-Catholic, it might sound very plausible. Most of us probably wouldn't believe there was an international conspiracy on our lives in the first place, no matter how rich we were; but if you were mentally unstable with delusions of grandeur, you might.
The final paragraph of the NYT article says Davidson's outgoing voicemail message says, “If you leave an ad or any other such message, your telephone wire will be fried automatically.” Who would claim such a thing? You might as well say you're going to report them to the Men in Black.
It seems to me that if Davidson was thinking clearly, none of this would have played out the way it did -- but I guess we knew that already.
Maybe not. According to the Wall Street Journal, RIM is planning to move all of its devices toward a new OS based on QNX, beginning with the BlackBerry tablet. No word on what that might mean for Java development on the BlackBerry platform.
If strikes by 'stray' cosmic rays are a non-random phenominon, then you've just proved an intelligent super-powerful being deliberately interferes in evolution.
True, and if cosmic rays are green, then I've just proven that breakfast cereal is made of oats.
Or to put it another way: If a cosmic ray could strike an RNA molecule and sometimes it would cause a change in the molecule and sometimes it wouldn't, and no observable phenomenon could be used to determine when it would and when it wouldn't, then that would appear to be a random phenomenon. If every single time a cosmic ray strikes the molecule it causes a change, then that is a non-random, cause and effect phenomenon.
That's kind of interesting, but not really amazing. Something must be causing the "mistakes" no matter how "random" they appear to be -- whether it's a virus, a stray cosmic ray or something else. The fact that it seems much less random than you'd expect just points to the likelihood that we'll soon get to the bottom of the phenomenon.
The concept is easy: a function in the software that ties an ebook to the device and only allows transfer to another device if it successfully ties it to another device, and then disables the ebook on the original device. That would make ebooks behave exactly like regular books. Then you wouldn't need a stupid loan policy, you'd just give your friend your copy of the ebook, just like you would a physical book.
Um... this is exactly how e-book loaning works. The part that's the "stupid loaning policy" is the part where B&N and Amazon only allow you to do it once, and only allow the transfer to be in effect for 14 days. They don't "need" to do it that way, certainly. In case you missed it, the fact that they've decided to do it this way anyway is what makes people so mad.
it doesn't make much sense to build in the ability to give unlimited copies to everyone
What you don't seem to understand is that B&N's lending policy doesn't come remotely close to this -- in fact, it doesn't remotely come close to what you can do with a printed book. If I give the book to you, you can keep it as long as it takes you to finish reading it -- no need to return it in 14 days. If you want to borrow it again next year, you can ask me and I'll probably let you. In fact, I might just tell you to keep it, in which case you own it now, and you could loan it to other people or pass it along, too. I could also loan it to someone other than you, if I chose to keep it.
None of this is possible with the B&N e-reader loan policy. With a Nook, I can loan the book to you once. You can only have it for 14 days, after which it disappears from your Nook and reappears on mine. And from that moment forward, I can never lend it to anyone ever again. Not to you, not to anyone else. And that's that. That is a far, far cry from what people expect when they purchase a book.
It's not that giant of a fuck you, though. It's not like Mac OS X Server itself is going away. If I'm remembering right, aren't the Mac Pro tower cases rack mountable? They're not 1U, certainly, but it's not like you can't keep Mac servers in your datacenter. How many Xserves does an ad agency really need for LDAP and basic file and print? (And I'm betting ad agencies run Exchange like everybody else, so it's not like they lack the expertise to kick Apple out of the datacenter altogether if it made more sense.)
The way I remember it, Apple sold a lot of Xserves into media environments, for digital video processing, basic file storage, etc. Musicians and A/V professionals have a natural affinity for Macs and little interest in maintaining servers, so a plug-and-play server that worked with their Macs was a natural choice. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly large market.
Xserves were nice machines, but building and maintaining bulletproof server hardware -- including continually producing new models that keep up with the ongoing upgrade cycles from Intel and other component vendors -- just doesn't make sense if the products aren't competitive in the market. And Apple's servers weren't going to be competitive until it started shipping models with Linux and/or Windows Server as an option. Instead, Apple tried to be Sun and found out it simply didn't have the expertise and market savvy to be Sun -- and then, look what happened to Sun.
They almost certainly won't want to ship OS X Server for ARM for external use, because supporting another architecture would be a lot of effort for little return, but they might do if the market looks big enough.
So they're going to use it exclusively in-house, to the extent that they're going to replace all their Xserves, but they don't have enough faith in the ARM port to sell it? Just the fact that they put it into production use in-house means they'd have to "support" it. I think you're reaching.
As I just replied to a previous poster, the friend I see most often is from Zeist, which is technically in the province of Utrecht, but he refers to the country as a whole as Holland, almost universally. Maybe that's because he learned English in schools that had a UK-centric view of Europe, but I dunno.
The fantasy painter Frank Frazetta suffered a series of strokes toward the end of his life which gradually destroyed his muscle precision in both hands. He really couldn't paint anymore for several years before his death. So he took up clay sculpture, and the results were pretty badass.
This is my experience also. Maybe a really bad showing on Valentine's Day will convince some women to dump you, but on the other hand, if a woman's already half made up her mind to give you your walking papers, nothing you do on Valentine's Day is really going to convince her otherwise. She still won't break up with you before the holiday, though, because that's perceived as heartless -- and just maybe because she's a little bit afraid one of her girlfriends will snap you up in the pre-Valentine's panic.
And NYC was once called New Amsterdam, which is derived from the name of a Dutch city in Holland, the Netherlands. QED.
(BTW, the Dutch people I know refer to their home country as Holland; calling it the Netherlands is more formal, while if you're talking about your homeland it's Holland.)
Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the network. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of this hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the computers; the whirring buzzing computers whose humming will never let me sleep; the daemon computers that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the computers they can never hear; the computers, the computers in the walls.
Greenplum is another company that markets a commercial database based on PostgreSQL. I know EnterpriseDB contributes back to the core PostgreSQL project a lot, and I assume Greenplum does too, but as you say, neither "owns" PostgreSQL, which is developed in a pretty thoroughly community-based fashion.
The problem is larger than that. In economics, there's the phenomenon of "externalities" -- basically, costs incurred by business operations that aren't paid for by the business itself.
In the United States, for example, companies are generally expected to provide health insurance coverage for their workers. If a lot of workers get sick and file health claims, the employer's insurance rates go up -- so it's in the employer's interests to maintain a healthful work environment. But if the company doesn't provide health coverage, the costs are still caused by the business, but the expenses are picked up by someone else -- either the employees themselves or the taxpayers (because the employees end up getting many of their medical expenses waived, either intentionally or through bankruptcy). That's an externality.
The same is true of many of the environmental factors discussed in TFA. If I run a factory that dumps chemicals into a river, and there's no law that says I have to clean up that waste, then that's an externality -- someone is eventually going to have to do something about it, just not me.
The same with air pollution. If someone notices that the air is getting smoggier, but there's no regulation that says how much particulate matter I'm allowed to release into the atmosphere, then obviously nobody is going to be measuring my emissions and there will be no way to know how much of the smog I'm responsible for. Obviously I won't be factoring that into my balance sheet.
I'm further willing to venture that in a tightly-controlled authoritarian economy, such as China's, government and party officials are likely to have significant stakes in the businesses that are causing the pollution and health problems, and therefore the incentive to legislate those businesses will be low. Maybe it's worth considering how American businesses can be regulated such that they will be required to pick up costs incurred by their suppliers overseas. If those costs can't be properly accounted for, maybe the American companies should be required to take their business elsewhere.
MySQL was always a very different scenario from e.g. PostgreSQL. MySQL was launched by a commercial entity and the majority of its code was contributed by employees of that entity. More importantly, it required outside contributors to assign copyright to MySQL AB -- so the company that bought MySQL AB bought the whole shebang, source code and all. That's not the case with PostgreSQL and many other, more community-centric open source projects.
I thought they had a sponsoring company similar to MySql's sponsoring company that sells an "Enterprise" edition.
PostgreSQL does not have any such formal sponsor, but because it's under an MIT-style license, commercial companies are free to release commercial "enterprise" versions (and several do).
Errr... Windows NT, Windows Vista, and Windows NT are kinda all the same thing and Android isn't really a Java platform (you have to compile Java binaries into a different format before they will execute on Dalvik).
You could, however, have mentioned IBM z/OS and AS/400, and a number of smartphone platforms support Java ME or a superset thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seeing 64-bit ARM powered NAS boxes, too, dontchathink?
I think that was the genesis of the prank -- someone had come across these pics from some Web site at my friend's work, and they said, "Hey let's have a laugh and just send these to some people to freak them out!" Pretty dumb.
You know, this is true. Something similar happened to me. A friend played a joke. I'm not famous by any stretch, but I'm a published writer and my work has appeared all over the place, including my local newspaper. So a friend decided (for whatever reason) to play this prank on me. He emailed me acting like he was somebody who had read something I'd written in the paper. At first it was just a regular "reader letter" type thing, but over the course of a few more emails he continued to escalate it onto some really weird and creepy stalker type thing. He'd say, email is so impersonal, how would you like to meet up to discuss this further? (No thanks.) Oh come on, we can meet at [a certain bar I go to regularly]. (Really, I'm not interested.) No? How about [this coffee shop right down the street from my house]? And the whole thing culminated in him sending me an email saying "I know you'll love this," along with a bunch of JPEGs of bloody dead bodies and people with injuries. Ha ha ha.
Now, I was maybe 70 percent sure that this was some kind of prank. I mean, who would care enough to really wish harm on me? But that 30 percent is a killer. It eats at you. There are some straaaaaannnge people out there -- just look around Slashdot. And in this day and age, it really is pretty hard to imagine that a stranger could not be able to narrow down my place of residence if they really felt like they wanted to. I have to admit that the whole thing made me pretty uncomfortable -- enough to take it seriously.
Anyway, my friend denied that he had anything to do with it, denied it and denied it again. So after the third denial I just said, "OK, well you've seen the emails. You should come down to the police station with me when I file the report." That's when he realized I was really serious, and he owned up -- and we all laughed at what a funny, funny, funny joke that was.
The New York Times has a more in-depth article on this case, and it seems strange indeed.
There's an old saying: "You can't con an honest man." Most cons work because they prey on the victim's own greed or baser emotions. I wonder how much of this was going on in this case?
The Times article contains a few choice tidbits. Apparently, once he got into cahoots with the scammers, Mr. Davidson got involved with some plot of theirs to sue Wachovia Bank for mismanaging Davidson's trust fund, among other things. That sounds suspiciously like the classic con, where you give the con man some of your money in return for the promise that he'll get you lots more money later.
If nothing else, Davidson does sound a little credulous, and possibly mentally ill. The scammers told him his life was supposedly in danger from a group of Polish priests with ties to Opus Dei, whom the scammers told him had a plan to overthrow the United States government. How plausible is that? But then, if you were already rabidly anti-Catholic, it might sound very plausible. Most of us probably wouldn't believe there was an international conspiracy on our lives in the first place, no matter how rich we were; but if you were mentally unstable with delusions of grandeur, you might.
The final paragraph of the NYT article says Davidson's outgoing voicemail message says, “If you leave an ad or any other such message, your telephone wire will be fried automatically.” Who would claim such a thing? You might as well say you're going to report them to the Men in Black.
It seems to me that if Davidson was thinking clearly, none of this would have played out the way it did -- but I guess we knew that already.
Maybe not. According to the Wall Street Journal , RIM is planning to move all of its devices toward a new OS based on QNX, beginning with the BlackBerry tablet. No word on what that might mean for Java development on the BlackBerry platform.
If strikes by 'stray' cosmic rays are a non-random phenominon, then you've just proved an intelligent super-powerful being deliberately interferes in evolution.
True, and if cosmic rays are green, then I've just proven that breakfast cereal is made of oats.
Or to put it another way: If a cosmic ray could strike an RNA molecule and sometimes it would cause a change in the molecule and sometimes it wouldn't, and no observable phenomenon could be used to determine when it would and when it wouldn't, then that would appear to be a random phenomenon. If every single time a cosmic ray strikes the molecule it causes a change, then that is a non-random, cause and effect phenomenon.
Maybe you should have stayed in bed this morning.
I quoted the word mistakes because I don't believe they are mistakes, just like you say. You're chasing your own tail on this one.
That's kind of interesting, but not really amazing. Something must be causing the "mistakes" no matter how "random" they appear to be -- whether it's a virus, a stray cosmic ray or something else. The fact that it seems much less random than you'd expect just points to the likelihood that we'll soon get to the bottom of the phenomenon.
The concept is easy: a function in the software that ties an ebook to the device and only allows transfer to another device if it successfully ties it to another device, and then disables the ebook on the original device. That would make ebooks behave exactly like regular books. Then you wouldn't need a stupid loan policy, you'd just give your friend your copy of the ebook, just like you would a physical book.
Um... this is exactly how e-book loaning works. The part that's the "stupid loaning policy" is the part where B&N and Amazon only allow you to do it once, and only allow the transfer to be in effect for 14 days. They don't "need" to do it that way, certainly. In case you missed it, the fact that they've decided to do it this way anyway is what makes people so mad.
it doesn't make much sense to build in the ability to give unlimited copies to everyone
What you don't seem to understand is that B&N's lending policy doesn't come remotely close to this -- in fact, it doesn't remotely come close to what you can do with a printed book. If I give the book to you, you can keep it as long as it takes you to finish reading it -- no need to return it in 14 days. If you want to borrow it again next year, you can ask me and I'll probably let you. In fact, I might just tell you to keep it, in which case you own it now, and you could loan it to other people or pass it along, too. I could also loan it to someone other than you, if I chose to keep it.
None of this is possible with the B&N e-reader loan policy. With a Nook, I can loan the book to you once. You can only have it for 14 days, after which it disappears from your Nook and reappears on mine. And from that moment forward, I can never lend it to anyone ever again. Not to you, not to anyone else. And that's that. That is a far, far cry from what people expect when they purchase a book.
It's not that giant of a fuck you, though. It's not like Mac OS X Server itself is going away. If I'm remembering right, aren't the Mac Pro tower cases rack mountable? They're not 1U, certainly, but it's not like you can't keep Mac servers in your datacenter. How many Xserves does an ad agency really need for LDAP and basic file and print? (And I'm betting ad agencies run Exchange like everybody else, so it's not like they lack the expertise to kick Apple out of the datacenter altogether if it made more sense.)
That's a whole lot of speculation.
The way I remember it, Apple sold a lot of Xserves into media environments, for digital video processing, basic file storage, etc. Musicians and A/V professionals have a natural affinity for Macs and little interest in maintaining servers, so a plug-and-play server that worked with their Macs was a natural choice. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly large market.
Xserves were nice machines, but building and maintaining bulletproof server hardware -- including continually producing new models that keep up with the ongoing upgrade cycles from Intel and other component vendors -- just doesn't make sense if the products aren't competitive in the market. And Apple's servers weren't going to be competitive until it started shipping models with Linux and/or Windows Server as an option. Instead, Apple tried to be Sun and found out it simply didn't have the expertise and market savvy to be Sun -- and then, look what happened to Sun.
They almost certainly won't want to ship OS X Server for ARM for external use, because supporting another architecture would be a lot of effort for little return, but they might do if the market looks big enough.
So they're going to use it exclusively in-house, to the extent that they're going to replace all their Xserves, but they don't have enough faith in the ARM port to sell it? Just the fact that they put it into production use in-house means they'd have to "support" it. I think you're reaching.
As I just replied to a previous poster, the friend I see most often is from Zeist, which is technically in the province of Utrecht, but he refers to the country as a whole as Holland, almost universally. Maybe that's because he learned English in schools that had a UK-centric view of Europe, but I dunno.
No, the friend I see most often is from Zeist, east of the city of Utrecht, and he most definitely calls the country Holland, all the time.
The fantasy painter Frank Frazetta suffered a series of strokes toward the end of his life which gradually destroyed his muscle precision in both hands. He really couldn't paint anymore for several years before his death. So he took up clay sculpture, and the results were pretty badass.
This is my experience also. Maybe a really bad showing on Valentine's Day will convince some women to dump you, but on the other hand, if a woman's already half made up her mind to give you your walking papers, nothing you do on Valentine's Day is really going to convince her otherwise. She still won't break up with you before the holiday, though, because that's perceived as heartless -- and just maybe because she's a little bit afraid one of her girlfriends will snap you up in the pre-Valentine's panic.
And NYC was once called New Amsterdam, which is derived from the name of a Dutch city in Holland, the Netherlands. QED.
(BTW, the Dutch people I know refer to their home country as Holland; calling it the Netherlands is more formal, while if you're talking about your homeland it's Holland.)
Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the network. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of this hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the computers; the whirring buzzing computers whose humming will never let me sleep; the daemon computers that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the computers they can never hear; the computers, the computers in the walls.
When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.
I see what you did there.
Greenplum is another company that markets a commercial database based on PostgreSQL. I know EnterpriseDB contributes back to the core PostgreSQL project a lot, and I assume Greenplum does too, but as you say, neither "owns" PostgreSQL, which is developed in a pretty thoroughly community-based fashion.
The problem is larger than that. In economics, there's the phenomenon of "externalities" -- basically, costs incurred by business operations that aren't paid for by the business itself.
In the United States, for example, companies are generally expected to provide health insurance coverage for their workers. If a lot of workers get sick and file health claims, the employer's insurance rates go up -- so it's in the employer's interests to maintain a healthful work environment. But if the company doesn't provide health coverage, the costs are still caused by the business, but the expenses are picked up by someone else -- either the employees themselves or the taxpayers (because the employees end up getting many of their medical expenses waived, either intentionally or through bankruptcy). That's an externality.
The same is true of many of the environmental factors discussed in TFA. If I run a factory that dumps chemicals into a river, and there's no law that says I have to clean up that waste, then that's an externality -- someone is eventually going to have to do something about it, just not me.
The same with air pollution. If someone notices that the air is getting smoggier, but there's no regulation that says how much particulate matter I'm allowed to release into the atmosphere, then obviously nobody is going to be measuring my emissions and there will be no way to know how much of the smog I'm responsible for. Obviously I won't be factoring that into my balance sheet.
I'm further willing to venture that in a tightly-controlled authoritarian economy, such as China's, government and party officials are likely to have significant stakes in the businesses that are causing the pollution and health problems, and therefore the incentive to legislate those businesses will be low. Maybe it's worth considering how American businesses can be regulated such that they will be required to pick up costs incurred by their suppliers overseas. If those costs can't be properly accounted for, maybe the American companies should be required to take their business elsewhere.
MySQL was always a very different scenario from e.g. PostgreSQL. MySQL was launched by a commercial entity and the majority of its code was contributed by employees of that entity. More importantly, it required outside contributors to assign copyright to MySQL AB -- so the company that bought MySQL AB bought the whole shebang, source code and all. That's not the case with PostgreSQL and many other, more community-centric open source projects.
I thought they had a sponsoring company similar to MySql's sponsoring company that sells an "Enterprise" edition.
PostgreSQL does not have any such formal sponsor, but because it's under an MIT-style license, commercial companies are free to release commercial "enterprise" versions (and several do).
You'll find PostgreSQL primarily deployed in lightweight consumer facing web applications. This isn't Oracles primary DB market.
I think this is the point the GP was trying to make about MySQL, which is even less well-positioned to compete with Oracle for its primary market.
Errr... Windows NT, Windows Vista, and Windows NT are kinda all the same thing and Android isn't really a Java platform (you have to compile Java binaries into a different format before they will execute on Dalvik).
You could, however, have mentioned IBM z/OS and AS/400, and a number of smartphone platforms support Java ME or a superset thereof.