I'm just curious -- Centrify claims to offer Windows group policy management for Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. Aside from the cost, was there some reason why that wasn't going to cut it for you? Cuz I kinda doubt you'll find a cheaper solution that's more mature...
If you lose your notebook with all your data the attacker also gets access to the Trusted Platform Module and can decrypt the disk.
Yes, but on the other hand, this seems like it could help prevent cases where employees steal the hard drives out of servers. (It's a lot easier to walk out the front door with a couple of hard drives in a duffel bag than it is to make off with two or three complete rack-mount servers.)
Booting Tiger on my old G4/733MHz (with drives from the same era, etc.) is lightning-fast compared to XP, Vista, or Ubuntu on a much newer machine. I've seen similar behavior on Intel hardware with newer versions of Mac OS X. If your only experience is with the first one or two releases of Mac OS X, you really need to check it out again.
Also, I was under the impression from the comic and doing some research online that Nixon was still in office because The Comedian had assassinated Woodward and Bernstein (the journalists who uncovered the Watergate).
There's that, too. But by the "present day" of the Watchmen universe, Nixon is on his fourth term, which means they actually had to modify the Constitution just for him. In Watchmen, Nixon hasn't just dodged Watergate -- as the president who was master of the atom, he's an actual, bona fide national hero.
Hmmm. Maybe you just missed something, or maybe the movie does put a different spin on things. In the book, it's clear: they have no powers. They fight; they've obviously been trained to fight with their fists to some extent. But mostly they're just people in costumes. When Night Owl and Silk Spectre have a big fight against a bunch of gang punks, there's a panel where they're standing there panting afterward.
Also, in the book it's pretty clear that the reason we're looking at an "alternate" 1985 -- the direct source and reason for ALL of the things that diverged from our timeline -- is Dr. Manhattan. He won Vietnam for the U.S. and that's why Nixon is still in office. He's able to synthesize just about anything he feels like, and that's why we have all these divergent technologies (like the dirigibles). In the same way that the atom bomb changed the world, Dr. Manhattan changed it even more.
The superheroes existed before Dr. Manhattan, but they were just people. When a REAL superhero came on the scene, it very conveniently coincided with the government choosing to outlaw vigilantes. You can tell from the attitude of a few of the characters that they feel like it's really just as well -- there's no way that they could ever measure up to the standard of a real, actual superhero with the power to disassemble them with a wave of his hand. If the Comedian doesn't feel this way -- if he still chooses to keep doing what he does in spite of everything -- it's because he's the Comedian.
I think that if you tried to submit something as heavily-obfuscated as the binary form of something which was originally written in a high-level language to a patent examiner, they'd throw it out.
Likewise, a patent application for a new type of drill that consisted of a prototype of the drill and nothing else would be thrown out. A patent application consists of a description of the invention, plus any relevant articles (such as a prototype). No description, no patent.
But the parent's point stands -- humans have interpreted all sorts of binary codes since the dawn of computing, and continue to do so. Just because you can't understand a given code doesn't mean somebody else can't. If I'm applying for protection under intellectual property law, why should I only be protected from you but not from someone more technically sophisticated than you?
Comparing binary "data" to an executable seems extremely flawed to me, due to the huge difference in the level of complexity usually seen.
There's no difference in complexity. Bytes is bytes.
Yes, I am being dead serious. In my younger days I used to input machine language -- yes, you heard that right, I did not say assembly language -- programs directly into the system monitor as hexadecimal numbers. One needed to decode the same numbers in order to crack the copyright protection on computer games. All of this was commonplace, once.
I'm not saying that it just as easy to decipher machine code as it is source code, but so far as I know there's no "harder to do" provision in intellectual property law. It's harder to make a bit-for-bit copy of a CD than to copy an LP record to cassette tape, but both are equally against the law.
As is saying "I can reverse-engineer it, therefor it doesn't need patent protection"
I don't think anyone has ever made that argument. What they're saying is that computer software is already adequately covered by copyright law and therefore does not need the additional (and problematic) protection of patents.
Try doing that usefully when the copyright has expired / would have expired, then we'll talk. By then, the hardware used to run the software used to read the modified data will be such ancient history it will be hard to even determine what it was named. Had you the source code, you have to admit it would likely be easier to derive from.
I don't understand this paragraph at all.
Re:Watchmen non-fan
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 2, Informative
Haha, wow. I couldn't disagree more. I did first read it when I was about 16, but I don't feel nostalgic about it at all. It's difficult to digest, the ending isn't particularly satisfying, and it was full of cultural references that I was too young to really appreciate (Nixon, Vietnam, 1940s superheroes).
Furthermore, the characters seemed "unrealistic" even then, because I was smart enough to realize that the Watchmen is mostly a comic book about comic books. The book quite clearly sets up the concept of "superheroes in the real world" and then proceeds immediately to "superheroes in the real world don't work."
Compared to most superhero comics, which are just rehashes of adolescent power fantasies, Watchmen reads like The Bridges of Madison County.
Big ol' SPOILER-laden question
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
So I'm reading some of the reviews/opinions about the movie, and I'm pleased to see that a lot of people seem to get the idea that most of these "superheroes" are just people in costumes. Night Owl has all the gadgets etc., but he doesn't really seem to have the temperament to be a hero. Plus, though he may have all the gadgets and everything, it's safe to say that the Owlship can fly for the same reason that the sky is full of dirigibles and people smoke weird cigarettes with bubbles at the end -- namely, because of Dr. Manhattan.
Dr. Manhattan, we are told, is the only one of the bunch with any superpowers. And, unfortunately for all the rest of the so-called superheroes, he has the ultimate superpower -- basically, control of time and space. Nobody else is ever going to match him. Might as well close the book. The catch, however, is that all this godlike power has made him (quite naturally) detached from humanity.
OK, that's all well and good so far. But I always thought that one of the major, MAJOR themes of the novel revolved around Ozymandias, and the reader's slowly-dawning realization that there might not be only one superhero in the world. There might be two.
Dr. Manhattan may be the world's only literal comic-book superhero, but Ozymandias represents more the Nietzschian "superman" -- a normal human being who has transformed himself into the ultimate that the human race can hope for. He's billed as "the smartest man on Earth," sure -- but the mere fact that he [REDACTED] shows that he's also one of the top physical specimens on Earth, too. That guy was one tough mofo! And by the end of the story, we see that Ozymandias really, actually can catch a bullet in his bare hand; it's no parlor trick.
So the ultimate question is: What does it mean to be a superman?
We've shown that it has distanced Dr. Manhattan from humanity. But it's easy to say "that's only natural, Dr. Manhattan really isn't human anymore," and maybe in fact he is redeemed at the end. But Ozymandias is human, yet his superiority over the rest of us seems to have isolated him in exactly the same way as Dr. Manhattan. Maybe he can't fly to Mars, but think of him sitting in that big chair at the bottom of the world with his cat for company, watching rows of television screens bringing him images of the decay of civilization. Think about what he decides to do about it. Is there humanity in his plan? Is he a hero? A villain? Does he find redemption?
Does the world need supermen? Is there even a place for them?
I always thought these were some of the major themes of Watchmen, but I rarely hear them discussed, and it's not clear to me whether they're represented in the movie. (Are they?)
Just thought I'd throw it out there to give us all something to waste time with on a Friday afternoon. Cheers!
Alan Moore did some work for 2000 A.D. (the magazine that featured Judge Dredd), some of it famous, but I'm not sure that he ever wrote a Judge Dredd story. Most of the famous Judge Dredd story arcs were written by Judge Dredd co-creator John Wagner.
Software is often distributed in binary form: a form which cannot be derived from.
That's just not true. Back in junior high, I figured out the binary format that Origin Systems used to store the maps for the game Ultima III. Using a floppy disk sector editor, I went in and changed the maps and then distributed copies of my modified version of the game to my friends who were certifiable Ultima III junkies. I bet it wouldn't take much to convince a jury that I had created a derivative work.
OK, bad phrasing. But in my recollection, when you run Linux on a mainframe you actually run it on special processor modules based on IBM Power chips... so the point still holds, this is not just "hey I'll install Linux," the way you would on an x86 server.
I heard a story on National Public Radio about a similar service (in English, for Americans). Some guy had published a tell-all essay about his days being one of the people who wrote papers for money. He said he usually did an honest job and wrote a quality paper, but most of the time, in his heart he knew that the English of the people paying for the service was so poor that any teacher who was even moderately paying attention would catch the cheaters. On some occasions, however, he'd have a bad experience -- the customer wouldn't pay, or they'd complain or be rude -- and in those cases, he'd rat them out to their own professors. As he pointed out, there was nothing in the contract that said he wouldn't.
This brings up a very interesting topic for debate...thinking about digital libraries, that is. Why, legally, can a dead-tree library exist, but a digital one cannot? Why can I not get digitized books for free on my Kindle?
The answer to your last question has been discussed at length in other threads. In answer to the first, however, FYI you can "check out" and view electronic editions of books from the San Francisco Public Library. There is some form of DRM involved, and the restrictions are the same as for regular books: The library owns X number of copies of the e-book, and each can be checked out by one reader at a time. When I have a copy of an e-book checked out, nobody else can check it out until I "return it." That's the model libraries use for paper books, so now you get that model for e-books.
Personally, if this model worked somehow on a Kindle and my library had a sufficient number of e-books (including mainstream fiction and new releases), then I would buy a Kindle.
Some of the mainframes in question are apparently built out of "Intel" processors (presumably either x86-64 or Itanium);
In a past they were using Itanium, presumably for the mainframiness. More recently they've begun migrating to Xeon. As the rest of the industry previously observed, Unisys now feels that there just aren't that many real benefits to Itanium.
A well built mainframe combined with a suitable power supply (e.g. backup generator etc) has up-times measured in YEARS.
Worth noting that this is not the same thing as that old legend about the Novell NetWare server that got sealed up in a room for years and ran fine. That was just luck. Mainframes, on the other hand, are designed to have uptimes measured in years. Typically, every single component is redundant and the system is designed for failover in the event of a hardware outage. In a transaction-processing environment, a mainframe can detect things like RAM and CPU failure in the middle of a transaction and fail over to a different processor module or addressing space without a hitch. Try that on your Linux box.
Mainframes tend to be designed with support for transaction processing baked into the OS, software, and the hardware, which is what makes them attractive to financial institutions who really, really, really need their transactions to process quickly and reliably 100 percent of the time.
Another thing to consider: VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products are essentially trying to recreate a computing environment that is new to the world of commodity x86/x64 hardware, but that existed on mainframes at least as far back as the 1970s. What makes VMware's achievements so remarkable is that the x86 hardware was never meant to do this sort of thing. Mainframes, on the other hand, were designed for it. That makes it a lot more efficient and reliable on the mainframe.
The bottom line is that a mainframe is not just an old-fashioned idea of what a server should be. Think of them instead as purpose-built, industrial-grade hardware. Think about power tools, then think about the equipment you'd find in a factory. That's the difference.
Seriously, what a strange focus for an article. It's phrased like a knock on Joomla, when one could just as easily say that WordPress is an admirable example of an open source project that has put a lot of effort into usability, and leave it at that.
I run a WordPress site, and the ease of use, flexibility, and attention to detail of the WordPress developers have really impressed me. And I don't say that often. SO SCREW JOOMLA!!!!
Then you probably don't want to hear that the treatment for strep throat is bed rest, plus maybe some antibiotics to speed up recovery and minimize communicability (though they aren't really necessary).
I go across the street to the ER and be sure immediately it was just a sore throat...
Because unlike a car accident victim, you needed to know about your sore throat immediately...
...rather than something else
Such as? When is a sore throat not a sore throat? If you had difficulty breathing, fine. Weird swelling, okay. Even then you could have scheduled an ordinary doctor's visit. But a sore throat?
As far as "driving the cost up for everyone," no, I paid for it.
No, your insurance paid for it. And I pay for my own insurance, the rates of which climb steeply every year, whether I use it or not.
As far as wasting time, it took 5 minutes, don't know how long he spent on paperwork, but it wasn't like I tied him up for hours
And yet you don't know how long he spent. Might want to look into the trend where private-practice doctors no longer handle insurance paperwork at all, because the time it takes to process all the paperwork hampers their ability to deliver quality care.
had it been something more serious and I had ignored it until it became an actual emergency, that would have wasted more of their time.
So I guess the thing to do would have been to go to a regular doctor instead of ignoring it as long as you did, huh?
Seriously, it's not that obvious, which is why people make these mistakes, not sure why you're making a federal case out of it, or why you're acting as if we willfully threw a wrench into the system.
You just sound pretty foolish, that's all. Hopefully the next guy can read this thread and not get his education the hard way, like you did.
My point again was that not everyone has innate knowledge of the health industry and that can be costly.
He said his mom is a nurse.
Seriously, how much "innate knowledge" do you have to have to know that a sore throat is not an emergency? His behavior is part of what's driving up medical costs for all of us. The only "lesson" he admits to have learned is that healthcare is expensive. That's not even an accurate lesson. Doctor's treatment of a sore throat without insurance consists of about 70 wasted dollars, and if he even bothered to try he could probably find a clinic that would see him the same day. For that matter, his school probably has a nurse practitioner on-site. I'm sorry, but I don't think you need to be any kind of insider to think to flip open the yellow pages before you waste everybody's time at a critical care facility.
Well, it sounds like your mistake was going to the emergency room. Emergency rooms eat a lot of expenses. If you can pay, chances are you're going to pay big. Why not just go to a regular doctor for something like a sore throat? An "emergency," to me, is when you've been shot, you've lost a hand, or you keep losing consciousness. Any doctor could tell you if a sore throat was anything serious inside of five minutes.
Re:If we're gonna have a medicine flamewar...
on
Why Doctors Hate Science
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where are you getting this "half a semester's tuition" figure? A visit to a doctor's office doesn't cost any more than a visit to a hair stylist, and it takes a lot less time. You can fill a prescription for three months' worth of painkillers at Wal-Mart for $10.
I honestly don't get it. If your car got a bad flat you'd buy a new tire. You'd tell yourself "I have no choice." But when it's your own body that breaks down, instead of paying to get it repaired, you'd rather complain about it and act like you're a hero for enduring the injury. As a result, you'll probably end up with advanced arthritis at a young age and you'll never regain full physical function. Way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Manhattan killed Rosebud? That was Charles Foster Kane's favorite sled!!
I'm just curious -- Centrify claims to offer Windows group policy management for Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. Aside from the cost, was there some reason why that wasn't going to cut it for you? Cuz I kinda doubt you'll find a cheaper solution that's more mature...
If you lose your notebook with all your data the attacker also gets access to the Trusted Platform Module and can decrypt the disk.
Yes, but on the other hand, this seems like it could help prevent cases where employees steal the hard drives out of servers. (It's a lot easier to walk out the front door with a couple of hard drives in a duffel bag than it is to make off with two or three complete rack-mount servers.)
OS X slow as hell from a cold boot though.
Booting Tiger on my old G4/733MHz (with drives from the same era, etc.) is lightning-fast compared to XP, Vista, or Ubuntu on a much newer machine. I've seen similar behavior on Intel hardware with newer versions of Mac OS X. If your only experience is with the first one or two releases of Mac OS X, you really need to check it out again.
Also, I was under the impression from the comic and doing some research online that Nixon was still in office because The Comedian had assassinated Woodward and Bernstein (the journalists who uncovered the Watergate).
There's that, too. But by the "present day" of the Watchmen universe, Nixon is on his fourth term, which means they actually had to modify the Constitution just for him. In Watchmen, Nixon hasn't just dodged Watergate -- as the president who was master of the atom, he's an actual, bona fide national hero.
Hmmm. Maybe you just missed something, or maybe the movie does put a different spin on things. In the book, it's clear: they have no powers. They fight; they've obviously been trained to fight with their fists to some extent. But mostly they're just people in costumes. When Night Owl and Silk Spectre have a big fight against a bunch of gang punks, there's a panel where they're standing there panting afterward.
Also, in the book it's pretty clear that the reason we're looking at an "alternate" 1985 -- the direct source and reason for ALL of the things that diverged from our timeline -- is Dr. Manhattan. He won Vietnam for the U.S. and that's why Nixon is still in office. He's able to synthesize just about anything he feels like, and that's why we have all these divergent technologies (like the dirigibles). In the same way that the atom bomb changed the world, Dr. Manhattan changed it even more.
The superheroes existed before Dr. Manhattan, but they were just people. When a REAL superhero came on the scene, it very conveniently coincided with the government choosing to outlaw vigilantes. You can tell from the attitude of a few of the characters that they feel like it's really just as well -- there's no way that they could ever measure up to the standard of a real, actual superhero with the power to disassemble them with a wave of his hand. If the Comedian doesn't feel this way -- if he still chooses to keep doing what he does in spite of everything -- it's because he's the Comedian.
I think that if you tried to submit something as heavily-obfuscated as the binary form of something which was originally written in a high-level language to a patent examiner, they'd throw it out.
Likewise, a patent application for a new type of drill that consisted of a prototype of the drill and nothing else would be thrown out. A patent application consists of a description of the invention, plus any relevant articles (such as a prototype). No description, no patent.
But the parent's point stands -- humans have interpreted all sorts of binary codes since the dawn of computing, and continue to do so. Just because you can't understand a given code doesn't mean somebody else can't. If I'm applying for protection under intellectual property law, why should I only be protected from you but not from someone more technically sophisticated than you?
Comparing binary "data" to an executable seems extremely flawed to me, due to the huge difference in the level of complexity usually seen.
There's no difference in complexity. Bytes is bytes.
Yes, I am being dead serious. In my younger days I used to input machine language -- yes, you heard that right, I did not say assembly language -- programs directly into the system monitor as hexadecimal numbers. One needed to decode the same numbers in order to crack the copyright protection on computer games. All of this was commonplace, once.
I'm not saying that it just as easy to decipher machine code as it is source code, but so far as I know there's no "harder to do" provision in intellectual property law. It's harder to make a bit-for-bit copy of a CD than to copy an LP record to cassette tape, but both are equally against the law.
As is saying "I can reverse-engineer it, therefor it doesn't need patent protection"
I don't think anyone has ever made that argument. What they're saying is that computer software is already adequately covered by copyright law and therefore does not need the additional (and problematic) protection of patents.
Try doing that usefully when the copyright has expired / would have expired, then we'll talk. By then, the hardware used to run the software used to read the modified data will be such ancient history it will be hard to even determine what it was named. Had you the source code, you have to admit it would likely be easier to derive from.
I don't understand this paragraph at all.
Haha, wow. I couldn't disagree more. I did first read it when I was about 16, but I don't feel nostalgic about it at all. It's difficult to digest, the ending isn't particularly satisfying, and it was full of cultural references that I was too young to really appreciate (Nixon, Vietnam, 1940s superheroes).
Furthermore, the characters seemed "unrealistic" even then, because I was smart enough to realize that the Watchmen is mostly a comic book about comic books. The book quite clearly sets up the concept of "superheroes in the real world" and then proceeds immediately to "superheroes in the real world don't work."
Compared to most superhero comics, which are just rehashes of adolescent power fantasies, Watchmen reads like The Bridges of Madison County.
So I'm reading some of the reviews/opinions about the movie, and I'm pleased to see that a lot of people seem to get the idea that most of these "superheroes" are just people in costumes. Night Owl has all the gadgets etc., but he doesn't really seem to have the temperament to be a hero. Plus, though he may have all the gadgets and everything, it's safe to say that the Owlship can fly for the same reason that the sky is full of dirigibles and people smoke weird cigarettes with bubbles at the end -- namely, because of Dr. Manhattan.
Dr. Manhattan, we are told, is the only one of the bunch with any superpowers. And, unfortunately for all the rest of the so-called superheroes, he has the ultimate superpower -- basically, control of time and space. Nobody else is ever going to match him. Might as well close the book. The catch, however, is that all this godlike power has made him (quite naturally) detached from humanity.
OK, that's all well and good so far. But I always thought that one of the major, MAJOR themes of the novel revolved around Ozymandias, and the reader's slowly-dawning realization that there might not be only one superhero in the world. There might be two.
Dr. Manhattan may be the world's only literal comic-book superhero, but Ozymandias represents more the Nietzschian "superman" -- a normal human being who has transformed himself into the ultimate that the human race can hope for. He's billed as "the smartest man on Earth," sure -- but the mere fact that he [REDACTED] shows that he's also one of the top physical specimens on Earth, too. That guy was one tough mofo! And by the end of the story, we see that Ozymandias really, actually can catch a bullet in his bare hand; it's no parlor trick.
So the ultimate question is: What does it mean to be a superman?
We've shown that it has distanced Dr. Manhattan from humanity. But it's easy to say "that's only natural, Dr. Manhattan really isn't human anymore," and maybe in fact he is redeemed at the end. But Ozymandias is human, yet his superiority over the rest of us seems to have isolated him in exactly the same way as Dr. Manhattan. Maybe he can't fly to Mars, but think of him sitting in that big chair at the bottom of the world with his cat for company, watching rows of television screens bringing him images of the decay of civilization. Think about what he decides to do about it. Is there humanity in his plan? Is he a hero? A villain? Does he find redemption?
Does the world need supermen? Is there even a place for them?
I always thought these were some of the major themes of Watchmen, but I rarely hear them discussed, and it's not clear to me whether they're represented in the movie. (Are they?)
Just thought I'd throw it out there to give us all something to waste time with on a Friday afternoon. Cheers!
I have the comics here.
Better pull them out, then. You may be thinking of Alan Grant, but John Wagner wrote most of it solo.
Alan Moore did some work for 2000 A.D. (the magazine that featured Judge Dredd), some of it famous, but I'm not sure that he ever wrote a Judge Dredd story. Most of the famous Judge Dredd story arcs were written by Judge Dredd co-creator John Wagner.
Software is often distributed in binary form: a form which cannot be derived from.
That's just not true. Back in junior high, I figured out the binary format that Origin Systems used to store the maps for the game Ultima III. Using a floppy disk sector editor, I went in and changed the maps and then distributed copies of my modified version of the game to my friends who were certifiable Ultima III junkies. I bet it wouldn't take much to convince a jury that I had created a derivative work.
OK, bad phrasing. But in my recollection, when you run Linux on a mainframe you actually run it on special processor modules based on IBM Power chips ... so the point still holds, this is not just "hey I'll install Linux," the way you would on an x86 server.
I heard a story on National Public Radio about a similar service (in English, for Americans). Some guy had published a tell-all essay about his days being one of the people who wrote papers for money. He said he usually did an honest job and wrote a quality paper, but most of the time, in his heart he knew that the English of the people paying for the service was so poor that any teacher who was even moderately paying attention would catch the cheaters. On some occasions, however, he'd have a bad experience -- the customer wouldn't pay, or they'd complain or be rude -- and in those cases, he'd rat them out to their own professors. As he pointed out, there was nothing in the contract that said he wouldn't.
This brings up a very interesting topic for debate...thinking about digital libraries, that is. Why, legally, can a dead-tree library exist, but a digital one cannot? Why can I not get digitized books for free on my Kindle?
The answer to your last question has been discussed at length in other threads. In answer to the first, however, FYI you can "check out" and view electronic editions of books from the San Francisco Public Library. There is some form of DRM involved, and the restrictions are the same as for regular books: The library owns X number of copies of the e-book, and each can be checked out by one reader at a time. When I have a copy of an e-book checked out, nobody else can check it out until I "return it." That's the model libraries use for paper books, so now you get that model for e-books.
Personally, if this model worked somehow on a Kindle and my library had a sufficient number of e-books (including mainstream fiction and new releases), then I would buy a Kindle.
Some of the mainframes in question are apparently built out of "Intel" processors (presumably either x86-64 or Itanium);
In a past they were using Itanium, presumably for the mainframiness. More recently they've begun migrating to Xeon. As the rest of the industry previously observed, Unisys now feels that there just aren't that many real benefits to Itanium.
A well built mainframe combined with a suitable power supply (e.g. backup generator etc) has up-times measured in YEARS.
Worth noting that this is not the same thing as that old legend about the Novell NetWare server that got sealed up in a room for years and ran fine. That was just luck. Mainframes, on the other hand, are designed to have uptimes measured in years. Typically, every single component is redundant and the system is designed for failover in the event of a hardware outage. In a transaction-processing environment, a mainframe can detect things like RAM and CPU failure in the middle of a transaction and fail over to a different processor module or addressing space without a hitch. Try that on your Linux box.
Mainframes tend to be designed with support for transaction processing baked into the OS, software, and the hardware, which is what makes them attractive to financial institutions who really, really, really need their transactions to process quickly and reliably 100 percent of the time.
Another thing to consider: VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products are essentially trying to recreate a computing environment that is new to the world of commodity x86/x64 hardware, but that existed on mainframes at least as far back as the 1970s. What makes VMware's achievements so remarkable is that the x86 hardware was never meant to do this sort of thing. Mainframes, on the other hand, were designed for it. That makes it a lot more efficient and reliable on the mainframe.
The bottom line is that a mainframe is not just an old-fashioned idea of what a server should be. Think of them instead as purpose-built, industrial-grade hardware. Think about power tools, then think about the equipment you'd find in a factory. That's the difference.
Of course not. You should wait until they're at their 10-year peak and then buy them.
Sadly, we have yet to understand the full repercussions of Suffixgate, but I suspect they will be with us for a long, long time.
Seriously, what a strange focus for an article. It's phrased like a knock on Joomla, when one could just as easily say that WordPress is an admirable example of an open source project that has put a lot of effort into usability, and leave it at that.
I run a WordPress site, and the ease of use, flexibility, and attention to detail of the WordPress developers have really impressed me. And I don't say that often. SO SCREW JOOMLA!!!!
For all I knew, it could have been strep throat.
Then you probably don't want to hear that the treatment for strep throat is bed rest, plus maybe some antibiotics to speed up recovery and minimize communicability (though they aren't really necessary).
I go across the street to the ER and be sure immediately it was just a sore throat...
Because unlike a car accident victim, you needed to know about your sore throat immediately...
...rather than something else
Such as? When is a sore throat not a sore throat? If you had difficulty breathing, fine. Weird swelling, okay. Even then you could have scheduled an ordinary doctor's visit. But a sore throat?
As far as "driving the cost up for everyone," no, I paid for it.
No, your insurance paid for it. And I pay for my own insurance, the rates of which climb steeply every year, whether I use it or not.
As far as wasting time, it took 5 minutes, don't know how long he spent on paperwork, but it wasn't like I tied him up for hours
And yet you don't know how long he spent. Might want to look into the trend where private-practice doctors no longer handle insurance paperwork at all, because the time it takes to process all the paperwork hampers their ability to deliver quality care.
had it been something more serious and I had ignored it until it became an actual emergency, that would have wasted more of their time.
So I guess the thing to do would have been to go to a regular doctor instead of ignoring it as long as you did, huh?
Seriously, it's not that obvious, which is why people make these mistakes, not sure why you're making a federal case out of it, or why you're acting as if we willfully threw a wrench into the system.
You just sound pretty foolish, that's all. Hopefully the next guy can read this thread and not get his education the hard way, like you did.
My point again was that not everyone has innate knowledge of the health industry and that can be costly.
He said his mom is a nurse.
Seriously, how much "innate knowledge" do you have to have to know that a sore throat is not an emergency? His behavior is part of what's driving up medical costs for all of us. The only "lesson" he admits to have learned is that healthcare is expensive. That's not even an accurate lesson. Doctor's treatment of a sore throat without insurance consists of about 70 wasted dollars, and if he even bothered to try he could probably find a clinic that would see him the same day. For that matter, his school probably has a nurse practitioner on-site. I'm sorry, but I don't think you need to be any kind of insider to think to flip open the yellow pages before you waste everybody's time at a critical care facility.
Well, it sounds like your mistake was going to the emergency room. Emergency rooms eat a lot of expenses. If you can pay, chances are you're going to pay big. Why not just go to a regular doctor for something like a sore throat? An "emergency," to me, is when you've been shot, you've lost a hand, or you keep losing consciousness. Any doctor could tell you if a sore throat was anything serious inside of five minutes.
Where are you getting this "half a semester's tuition" figure? A visit to a doctor's office doesn't cost any more than a visit to a hair stylist, and it takes a lot less time. You can fill a prescription for three months' worth of painkillers at Wal-Mart for $10.
I honestly don't get it. If your car got a bad flat you'd buy a new tire. You'd tell yourself "I have no choice." But when it's your own body that breaks down, instead of paying to get it repaired, you'd rather complain about it and act like you're a hero for enduring the injury. As a result, you'll probably end up with advanced arthritis at a young age and you'll never regain full physical function. Way to go.