Is there any other way to call it? 'Race to the bottom' sounds so crass. Perhaps 'delivering better customer value by focusing on essential factors while reducing extraneous costs?' I raced to the bottom once and I found really weird stuff there..
You can do better than that! You didn't even use the words synergy or monetize! Try:
"Delivering customer value through synergy of customer strengths and monetization of non-essential factors to reduce extraneous costs"
You forgot a really big one: No 16 bit apps. It's not just old apps entirely written in 16 bit either. Anything with any component, installer, config util, ANYTHING in 16 bit just won't run.
I don't know about you but I don't want to throw away every single application that might have some 16 bit anywhere. A lot of it can be virtualized with VMWare and the like but it's a hassle. There's always the games too. They can't be virtualized easily.
Their government try to sell the country as a tourist destination. Well you know what, if I have tourist dollars to spend you can bet I won't be visiting a country where I can go to jail just for criticising someone.
and like any troll, the only way to react to it is ignore it
trolls feed on attention, any attention, psotive or negative. currently, north korea is basking in the joy of the world condemning it. just like a troll basks in the glory of watching people lose their temper over a purposely vitriolic post of theirs. just like westboro baptist church enjoys the hatred as they picket funerals
How many trolls do you know with a nuclear launch capability (or soon to aquire one).
By the way ignoring trolls sounds nice in theory but relies on rational attention seeking behaviour. Trolls most often aren't rational and ignoring them works no better than feeding them. The former allows them to bask in their own dillusional triumph, while the later boosts their self worth and sense of pleasure at the annoyance of others. The way to deal with them is to conclusively demonstrate that what they are saying is complete bunk and then refuse to argue further on the basis that they're not being rational.
How is this a failure? They launched an ICBM that cleared Japan before hitting the water, thus proving they now have the capability to deliver a nuclear strike against Japan.
I'm sorry but if you go to the firing range and hit something to the left of and behind the target, it does not prove you can hit the target.
I'm amazed at how supposedly intelligent people here on/. - engineers, scientists, IT professionals - often have no concept of what constitutes a proof.
"The old strategies of war". You can't just go invade half a continent anymore. The Commies aren't gonna fly 3,000 bombers across the arctic and bomb America. Hitler ain't gonna be able to just invade half of Europe. Those days are over. The Cold War marked the end of that kind of stuff.
I guess you've never heard of Kuwait or Iraq?
If there's land to be claimed that will always be a motivation. Perhaps not always the strongest one, but still never small enough to ignore. Even if the aggressor doesn't want land, they may well want the resources that lie on that land.
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy.
Yes, because it has eliminated warfare and we now have world peace, rainbows and butterflies.
You may not have had an all out world war, but to claim Nuclear weapons is a "most effective peace policy" is utterly foolish. In case you haven't noticed the world continues to be quite a hostile place.
In the event that nukes were somehow magically put back in the nuclear genie bottle, countries would simply go back to larger standing armies. Conventional armies with conventional weapons have proven their ability to kill in large quantity time and time again.
I'd argue multi-megaton warheads are much more effective at killing and maiming. A very small number could kill as many people as were killed in the 2 world wars, and it could happen in minutes or hours rather than years.
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
How many of your machines are running upgrades rather than reinstalls of Linux distros taht are 15 years old.
The current system is getting unreliable. If your father leaves it 10-15 years between upgrades the next system will be even less reliable.
Also realize that no matter how much you and your father dislike it, current machines aren't built to last as long as old machines were. The parts can do amazing things but wear out more quickly. I don't know if you'll get 15 years out of a modern disk drive (but then consider that a Gigabyte on one drive would have been a far fetched dream 15 years ago but is commonplace today).
The best thing to do is plan an upgrade cycle every say 5 years. Even then you might need to either buy spare parts of upgrade sooner than you expected if a key component fails and you can't find a spare. One way to combat this is to buy spares in advance but this will end up costing you a lot more in the long run since computer parts get cheaper over time and leaving it to the last minute can save you a fortune. You may also be able to replace older parts with parts that give you new capacity or capability if you adopt a just in time approach.
The other reason to go with a more reasonable upgrade cycle is that computers now tend to be interconnected, and having a 10 or 15 year old system you can no longer patch for security holes means its not as safe to leave on a network of any kind.
In other words, convince your father to upgrade more often (5 years max), backup your data, and buy spares for critical parts but only if you absolutely have to. Unfortunately the pace of change has increased and not putting time into upgrading more incrementally will make the big bang implementation you have to do much riskier.
I made no assertion that modern medicine doesn't have its place; it's a critical part of maintaining a healthy life. I'm certainly not advocating ignoring medical issues, simply pointing out that you don't have to fix a problem if it doesn't happen in the first place.
Your statement certainly seems to fall along the lines that you should blame people for their own medical conditions. You're forgetting that there is a genetic component to a lot of illnesses associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.
A lot of people walk around with the attitude that they can ignore the needs of their bodies and depend on medicine to fix those mistakes. Those views need to change, as prevention is the best medicine.
The problem is its not so black and white. Its easy to say someone should get regular exercise and eat healthy food when the reality is there may be things preventing them from doing so - medical conditions that make excercise difficult, a job that doesn't allow them the freedom to exercise, a lack of availability of healthy food (especially can be true outside of traditional 9-5 working hours when the only thing left open are convenience stores selling junk food). The person may have a metabolism that means they desperately need to lose weight but find it very difficult (Look up Syndrome X, also known as pre-diabetes). If it were easy to lose weight and live healthy, the long term weight loss stats would not be so incredibly bad. Blaming a handful of individuals for being lazy and weak willed is one thing, but when it turns out that the vast majority of people can't main weight loss for 5 years you have to stop and consider that it might not just be weak minds causing this. You call me pretentious but seem to be happy to blame people for their unhealthy state without taking the time to realize they have other pressures to deal with. It is this kind of attitude that allows an entire weight loss industry to spring up that guilts people into making drastic or unwise changes (like replacement shake diets) that also make people sick and place a strain on health care. Unfortunately there is a lot of money to be made conning people.
I'm a big fan of history, by the way.
Then you would know that despite some slippage over the last few decades, the human race is doing very well at keeping itself alive and healthy for longer, and that you'll never have a society where no one gets sick.
We here at google have decided to filter some images that you were about to view. We do this in recognition that some things cannot be "unseen". This is one of those times. This is not about hot porn which does not usually sting the brain with lasting effect. These images will gross you out so bad that no amount of unicorns dancing under rainbows will help. Trust us. Sending these images along will violate our mission statement of not doing evil. Regards, google.
I've seen this exact popup! I didn't believe it, and decided to use firefox to download the images anyway. It was a picture of a certain well known Google exec dressed as the devil having sex with Russian hookers with the caption "Haha you fell for my 'No no evil' routine. Now take it bitches!!!". I should have listened. Now I'm blind and am typing this in Braille. If only I had listened.
The potential for evil in the Google has only been questioned for a year or so, far too soon for you to utilize the term "usual" which assumes a long-term pattern.
Hey the mistrust may be new to some, but for those of us who view claims about a commercial company being founded on lofty principles like "do no evil" while it's founders get ridiculously rich with healthy scepticism, this is nothing new at all.
The human body is pretty darn good at healing itself. There is absolutely no replacement for a decent diet, moderate exercise, and a positive attitude. The last factor alone has been repeatedly shown to boost immune system health over a variety of drug-based treatments.
Sure, there's also no replacement for medical intervention when the body can't heal itself. Or are you forgetting that before modern medicine people died of things that we now treat quite easily, a large proportion of women died in childbirth, and life expectancy was much lower.
The problem is that the medical profession does not operate as scientifically as it pretends to, and so things are far from perfect. Still a lot better than they were a couple of hundred years ago. Just take a look at your history books.
Instead, companies should emulate the open source model of development
1. Your mother's basement isn't large enough for the whole company 2. There may be liability issues if you put your company on a diet of pizza and coke 3. Employees want to be paid. 4. It's hard to ship product when all you do is squabble and pull the project in different directions 5. Most of your employees will prefer to shower.
If you mod this as troll you have no sense of humour whatsoever
Not interested in looking at an agreement which Google is not bound to for the free version of the service. (Free = no monetary consideration = No contract).
And you're assuming that there wouldn't be a backup. You can still do that with IMAP, it's just no longer as critical when Google is handling the availability for you. (Contrast to your own in-house RAID -- you're one failed RAID controller away from downtime, if not data loss.)
Come on man! If the user won't back up local outlook express data, they're not going to go to the trouble of setting up IMAP or export the Google data. Which means Google is not a better solution. The correct solution is to back up no matter what service you use!...except there is a service agreement. See above.
Except it's not binding. See above. Even if it were binding the odds are the average user that isn't bothered backing up their own data isn't going to sue Google if something goes wrong.
I think the phrase "false sense of security" is the one that most comes to mind.
If you want to secure your email: 1) Store it locally so that it can't be sold or stolen due to a 3rd party's negligence. 2) Make local backups. Periodically make an archival remote backup. 3) Encrypt anything of importance since it passes through servers you do not control and could be intercepted. 4) Either learn how to do the above correctly or hire someone to do it.
GMail is probably NOT the best solution for this.
What I think you're actually trying to say (poorly) is that it's less of a pain relying on Google to backup your data than to do it yourself and that you prefer to have your fingers crossed hoping they won't stuff it up rather than to actually do it properly yourself.
It's bad enough when people in IT show there ignorance by using the term virii when talking about computer programs.
First of all, it has already been pointed out you used the wrong word "there" instead of "their" which is just brilliant irony.
Secondly both words "virii" and "viruses" have been used widely. Quoting a single source (poorly without previewing) to single one out as the "correct" one is just silly. At the very least if you're going to point out the mistake, point to some relevant information on why "viruses" is the correct pluralisation. Here I'll do it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Use_of_the_form_virii
Thirdly, why do you quote the rest of the definition of the word virus? I didn't realise this was some obscure and unknown word that needed to be explained.
In summary, pipe down you arrogant jackass. Correct your own mistakes before trolling over other people's.
Google is notorious for keeping most of it's apps in the Beta stages because if it works, it's considered a fantastic app and when some hacker finds a huge security flaw in it or something of that nature, Google can just throw up their hands and say "Hey, it's still in Beta".
Yeah there's a company I want to trust with all my data. Instead of "Do no evil" how about "We're like weasels"
Slashdot Mirror
NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection.
Some idiots spend that much on a cable!
Is there any other way to call it? 'Race to the bottom' sounds so crass. Perhaps 'delivering better customer value by focusing on essential factors while reducing extraneous costs?' I raced to the bottom once and I found really weird stuff there..
You can do better than that! You didn't even use the words synergy or monetize! Try:
"Delivering customer value through synergy of customer strengths and monetization of non-essential factors to reduce extraneous costs"
$spc="
Apart from the missing semi-colon, that's way too readable for Perl. Consider encoding $spc as a hex string or something.
You forgot a really big one: No 16 bit apps. It's not just old apps entirely written in 16 bit either. Anything with any component, installer, config util, ANYTHING in 16 bit just won't run.
I don't know about you but I don't want to throw away every single application that might have some 16 bit anywhere. A lot of it can be virtualized with VMWare and the like but it's a hassle. There's always the games too. They can't be virtualized easily.
Has it ever occurred to you that I may not be American? I am in fact Australian.
Their government try to sell the country as a tourist destination. Well you know what, if I have tourist dollars to spend you can bet I won't be visiting a country where I can go to jail just for criticising someone.
and like any troll, the only way to react to it is ignore it
trolls feed on attention, any attention, psotive or negative. currently, north korea is basking in the joy of the world condemning it. just like a troll basks in the glory of watching people lose their temper over a purposely vitriolic post of theirs. just like westboro baptist church enjoys the hatred as they picket funerals
How many trolls do you know with a nuclear launch capability (or soon to aquire one).
By the way ignoring trolls sounds nice in theory but relies on rational attention seeking behaviour. Trolls most often aren't rational and ignoring them works no better than feeding them. The former allows them to bask in their own dillusional triumph, while the later boosts their self worth and sense of pleasure at the annoyance of others. The way to deal with them is to conclusively demonstrate that what they are saying is complete bunk and then refuse to argue further on the basis that they're not being rational.
How is this a failure? They launched an ICBM that cleared Japan before hitting the water, thus proving they now have the capability to deliver a nuclear strike against Japan.
I'm sorry but if you go to the firing range and hit something to the left of and behind the target, it does not prove you can hit the target.
I'm amazed at how supposedly intelligent people here on /. - engineers, scientists, IT professionals - often have no concept of what constitutes a proof.
"The old strategies of war". You can't just go invade half a continent anymore. The Commies aren't gonna fly 3,000 bombers across the arctic and bomb America. Hitler ain't gonna be able to just invade half of Europe. Those days are over. The Cold War marked the end of that kind of stuff.
I guess you've never heard of Kuwait or Iraq?
If there's land to be claimed that will always be a motivation. Perhaps not always the strongest one, but still never small enough to ignore. Even if the aggressor doesn't want land, they may well want the resources that lie on that land.
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy.
Yes, because it has eliminated warfare and we now have world peace, rainbows and butterflies.
You may not have had an all out world war, but to claim Nuclear weapons is a "most effective peace policy" is utterly foolish. In case you haven't noticed the world continues to be quite a hostile place.
In the event that nukes were somehow magically put back in the nuclear genie bottle, countries would simply go back to larger standing armies. Conventional armies with conventional weapons have proven their ability to kill in large quantity time and time again.
I'd argue multi-megaton warheads are much more effective at killing and maiming. A very small number could kill as many people as were killed in the 2 world wars, and it could happen in minutes or hours rather than years.
I actually find it a complement when I'm kicked for "cheating" when I'm actually not :)
Wait, are we still talking about games or have we moved on to your marriage? ;-)
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
How many of your machines are running upgrades rather than reinstalls of Linux distros taht are 15 years old.
Three examples of sufficiently old distros:
Redhat/Fedora - You'd have literally had to start with Readhat version 1.0 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux#Version_history - and have moved to Fedora 9 or 10.
Debian - You'd have to have started with 0.9 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#1993.E2.80.932000
Slackware - Looks like you had to start with verison 1 or 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#History
It's nice in theory but has ANYONE EVER done this???
You know what I'd do with a million bucks?
Two kernels at the same time.
Just 2??? For a million bucks? You're aiming to low. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them!
The two machines only talk to each other - nobody's throwing a downloaded game cd or web browser on either of them.
Do you ever plan to:
- plug in a USB key
- attach an external drive
- insert a CD
They're all attack vectors. You're not safe just by staying off the Internet.
The current system is getting unreliable. If your father leaves it 10-15 years between upgrades the next system will be even less reliable.
Also realize that no matter how much you and your father dislike it, current machines aren't built to last as long as old machines were. The parts can do amazing things but wear out more quickly. I don't know if you'll get 15 years out of a modern disk drive (but then consider that a Gigabyte on one drive would have been a far fetched dream 15 years ago but is commonplace today).
The best thing to do is plan an upgrade cycle every say 5 years. Even then you might need to either buy spare parts of upgrade sooner than you expected if a key component fails and you can't find a spare. One way to combat this is to buy spares in advance but this will end up costing you a lot more in the long run since computer parts get cheaper over time and leaving it to the last minute can save you a fortune. You may also be able to replace older parts with parts that give you new capacity or capability if you adopt a just in time approach.
The other reason to go with a more reasonable upgrade cycle is that computers now tend to be interconnected, and having a 10 or 15 year old system you can no longer patch for security holes means its not as safe to leave on a network of any kind.
In other words, convince your father to upgrade more often (5 years max), backup your data, and buy spares for critical parts but only if you absolutely have to. Unfortunately the pace of change has increased and not putting time into upgrading more incrementally will make the big bang implementation you have to do much riskier.
You're coming off sounding pretty pretentious.
Do we really need such childish accusations?
I made no assertion that modern medicine doesn't have its place; it's a critical part of maintaining a healthy life. I'm certainly not advocating ignoring medical issues, simply pointing out that you don't have to fix a problem if it doesn't happen in the first place.
Your statement certainly seems to fall along the lines that you should blame people for their own medical conditions. You're forgetting that there is a genetic component to a lot of illnesses associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.
A lot of people walk around with the attitude that they can ignore the needs of their bodies and depend on medicine to fix those mistakes. Those views need to change, as prevention is the best medicine.
The problem is its not so black and white. Its easy to say someone should get regular exercise and eat healthy food when the reality is there may be things preventing them from doing so - medical conditions that make excercise difficult, a job that doesn't allow them the freedom to exercise, a lack of availability of healthy food (especially can be true outside of traditional 9-5 working hours when the only thing left open are convenience stores selling junk food). The person may have a metabolism that means they desperately need to lose weight but find it very difficult (Look up Syndrome X, also known as pre-diabetes). If it were easy to lose weight and live healthy, the long term weight loss stats would not be so incredibly bad. Blaming a handful of individuals for being lazy and weak willed is one thing, but when it turns out that the vast majority of people can't main weight loss for 5 years you have to stop and consider that it might not just be weak minds causing this. You call me pretentious but seem to be happy to blame people for their unhealthy state without taking the time to realize they have other pressures to deal with. It is this kind of attitude that allows an entire weight loss industry to spring up that guilts people into making drastic or unwise changes (like replacement shake diets) that also make people sick and place a strain on health care. Unfortunately there is a lot of money to be made conning people.
I'm a big fan of history, by the way.
Then you would know that despite some slippage over the last few decades, the human race is doing very well at keeping itself alive and healthy for longer, and that you'll never have a society where no one gets sick.
We here at google have decided to filter some images that you were about to view. We do this in recognition that some things cannot be "unseen". This is one of those times. This is not about hot porn which does not usually sting the brain with lasting effect. These images will gross you out so bad that no amount of unicorns dancing under rainbows will help. Trust us. Sending these images along will violate our mission statement of not doing evil. Regards, google.
I've seen this exact popup! I didn't believe it, and decided to use firefox to download the images anyway. It was a picture of a certain well known Google exec dressed as the devil having sex with Russian hookers with the caption "Haha you fell for my 'No no evil' routine. Now take it bitches!!!". I should have listened. Now I'm blind and am typing this in Braille. If only I had listened.
The potential for evil in the Google has only been questioned for a year or so, far too soon for you to utilize the term "usual" which assumes a long-term pattern.
Hey the mistrust may be new to some, but for those of us who view claims about a commercial company being founded on lofty principles like "do no evil" while it's founders get ridiculously rich with healthy scepticism, this is nothing new at all.
The human body is pretty darn good at healing itself. There is absolutely no replacement for a decent diet, moderate exercise, and a positive attitude. The last factor alone has been repeatedly shown to boost immune system health over a variety of drug-based treatments.
Sure, there's also no replacement for medical intervention when the body can't heal itself. Or are you forgetting that before modern medicine people died of things that we now treat quite easily, a large proportion of women died in childbirth, and life expectancy was much lower.
The problem is that the medical profession does not operate as scientifically as it pretends to, and so things are far from perfect. Still a lot better than they were a couple of hundred years ago. Just take a look at your history books.
Instead, companies should emulate the open source model of development
1. Your mother's basement isn't large enough for the whole company
2. There may be liability issues if you put your company on a diet of pizza and coke
3. Employees want to be paid.
4. It's hard to ship product when all you do is squabble and pull the project in different directions
5. Most of your employees will prefer to shower.
If you mod this as troll you have no sense of humour whatsoever
In particular, look at 12.2:
Not interested in looking at an agreement which Google is not bound to for the free version of the service. (Free = no monetary consideration = No contract).
And you're assuming that there wouldn't be a backup. You can still do that with IMAP, it's just no longer as critical when Google is handling the availability for you. (Contrast to your own in-house RAID -- you're one failed RAID controller away from downtime, if not data loss.)
Come on man! If the user won't back up local outlook express data, they're not going to go to the trouble of setting up IMAP or export the Google data. Which means Google is not a better solution. The correct solution is to back up no matter what service you use! ...except there is a service agreement. See above.
Except it's not binding. See above. Even if it were binding the odds are the average user that isn't bothered backing up their own data isn't going to sue Google if something goes wrong.
I think the phrase "false sense of security" is the one that most comes to mind.
If you want to secure your email:
1) Store it locally so that it can't be sold or stolen due to a 3rd party's negligence.
2) Make local backups. Periodically make an archival remote backup.
3) Encrypt anything of importance since it passes through servers you do not control and could be intercepted.
4) Either learn how to do the above correctly or hire someone to do it.
GMail is probably NOT the best solution for this.
What I think you're actually trying to say (poorly) is that it's less of a pain relying on Google to backup your data than to do it yourself and that you prefer to have your fingers crossed hoping they won't stuff it up rather than to actually do it properly yourself.
It's bad enough when people in IT show there ignorance by using the term virii when talking about computer programs.
First of all, it has already been pointed out you used the wrong word "there" instead of "their" which is just brilliant irony.
Secondly both words "virii" and "viruses" have been used widely. Quoting a single source (poorly without previewing) to single one out as the "correct" one is just silly. At the very least if you're going to point out the mistake, point to some relevant information on why "viruses" is the correct pluralisation. Here I'll do it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Use_of_the_form_virii
Thirdly, why do you quote the rest of the definition of the word virus? I didn't realise this was some obscure and unknown word that needed to be explained.
In summary, pipe down you arrogant jackass. Correct your own mistakes before trolling over other people's.
Perhaps they realised that people pay for Internet access so they can fucking well use it.
I keep having to click the close box on these asinine ads that block the bottom 3rd of the window. Anyone else finding them distracting?
Google is notorious for keeping most of it's apps in the Beta stages because if it works, it's considered a fantastic app and when some hacker finds a huge security flaw in it or something of that nature, Google can just throw up their hands and say "Hey, it's still in Beta".
Yeah there's a company I want to trust with all my data. Instead of "Do no evil" how about "We're like weasels"