In this case I don't think you need to worry about that.
NTP is the one gaming the system here -- the NY Times called them a "virtual corporation" (according to Engadget), and they're nothing but a holding company with a fat war chest set up to create landmine lawsuits over the patents that they hold.
In terms of patent abuse, these guys make Microsoft look like Mother Teresa. They don't make anything (except lawsuits), they don't do anything, and the only way they have of making money is by going after the 'deep pockets' of established, successful companies. In short, they're an inherently parasitic business.
Is what they're doing legal? Yes. Should it be? Clearly not.
It would be different if they actually had a wireless-email product which was being infringed on by the Blackberry, but they don't and never did. All they ever wanted to do was bleed RIM for about a half billion dollars, and the hell with anyone who uses the service.
I think RIM is going to come out of this okay, and kudos to them for standing up to NTP. Regardless of what I'm sure were self-interested reasons for doing so, it was the right thing to do.
The vast majority of telegrams ever sent were never encoded in Morse. They were sent using a teletype, probably using 5-bit BAUDOT, or more rarely, ASCII or any of the other encoding schemes that have fallen by the wayside.
I'm not sure if I would argue that they were the first digital communications medium or not, but I just thought it's just worth pointing out that most Western Union Telegrams had nothing to do with the CW electrical telegraph that they're so closely associated with.
I'm a ham also, and a few years ago I heard somebody talking about a project to send a bunch of test messages into the traffic handling system and analyze them to come up with ways to improve the way large batches of messages are handled and routed in an emergency. They were going to use the same sort of analysis methods that are used to optimize distributed-hub networks like retail distribution and UPS. (This was their area, not mine -- I don't remember any more technical details.)
As a secondary goal it also would have created some metrics to use in discussing Amateur Radio emergency traffic handling with homeland security types. (e.g., "Most messages reach their destination in x hours," etc.)
I thought it was a pretty neat idea -- of course I'm not sure whether the people that work the nets would really appreciate getting flooded with 10,000 essentially garbage messages, but I appreciated the concept anyway. I never heard if there was any attempt made to do anything with it.
I wasn't aware of this -- thanks for the heads-up.
I haven't sold anything in a while, but back when I was doing it more actively, I really liked BidPay. I've never been a fan of PayPal since they started requiring you to "upgrade" (big fat sarcasm quotes on that, in case you didn't notice) to a Premier account to accept Credit Card payments. In return for this "feature," they take a percentage of all your incoming transfers -- regardless of whether or not it comes from a credit card -- from then on. And the best part? You can only "down" grade from Premier back to the free service ONCE. If you accept another credit card payment after that, you're stuck with them taking a significant percentage of all payments, permanently. And eBay doesn't provide a convenient way of specifying that you accept PayPal, but not if it's funded by a Credit Card.
I always liked BidPay because it gave me a way to let buyers use credit cards if they really wanted to, without shifting that expensive over to me, or requring me to jack up all my prices by several percent in order to cover PayPal's Premier service overhead.
And as a buyer, it was a lot more convenient than going to the Post Office and buying a Money Order. It will be missed.
I think his point is that his Army buddy was not the sort of person who would have a cell phone.
I can believe this -- although they're ubiquitous among most of the people who have internet access, there are a lot of people who for one reason or another don't have them. I can imagine a lot of people in the military might not bother, if they're on their way out of the country. (Because the majority of US cellphones don't work internationally anyway, or only do for a really exorbitant fee.)
But not enough people exist, I guess, who both cannot afford a cellphone and would be willing to pay what Western Union would have to charge per telegram to keep the service operating at such a low demand.
I don't know if the network still exists, but the last time I looked into it, there was still a lot of infrastructure set up to handle telexes, especially internationally.
I just did a quick Google and it seems that International Telex (that's Telex with a capital T, as opposed to 'telex' as the generic term) has either changed its or been bought out by somebody else called Citycomm.
They claim that "Telex is still the only legally recognized method of sending an electronic message. Facsimile (Fax) and electronic mail (E-mail), contrary to popular belief, do not constitute a legal document. Telex messages are used in the banking and brokerage industry to electronically confirm billions of dollars in financial transactions daily."
So I guess the market is pretty safe, for now anyway.
What I can't figure out is whether the telex networks that used to exist are still around anymore. It seems easy to believe that they just got absorbed into the Internet, but they were pretty interesting when they were operating. I don't pretend to understand it completely, but it was a separate system from regular voice phone lines, and Telex numbers (I think) had a different number of digits. I still have business cards of my father's that list a Telex number, although not with me to look at right now.
It seems like the telex systems used now are just operating on the regular PSTN network, similar to fax machines.
If anybody here uses telex services today and wants to comment on how they work, I'd be interested in what the situation is like.
I don't know if this service is being discontinued as well, but Western Union used to offer the ability for a person to type in a message, and have it hand-delivered to his Congressperson. It was fairly expensive, but I'm told reasonably popular when you really wanted to make a statement.
Given that I can't find any information about it on their site anymore, I'm going to guess it's been discontinued.
Probably given that most politicians are less adverse to email now than they used to be (particularly with the new post-9/11 and post-anthrax security precautions), the demand for it didn't exist anymore. But until recently, it was widely believed -- and perhaps is still true -- that sending your opinion by email just didn't give it the impact that a piece of paper did; especially a piece of paper that everyone knew you spent quite a bit of money sending, like a telegram.
Do civilian airlines use JP-8? The civilian airlines use Jet A or Jet A-1 fuel, which are virtually identical to JP-8, but with a different performance-enhancing additive package.
Well, duh. There's no way we could justify paying 1200% of what U.S. Air pays, if it was *exactly* the same.
Both Japan and Germany lost the war, were bombed to dust, but in the decades after they developed at a marvelous pace. The myth about those countries 'just imitating' should be debunked by now. Both did this with no or just a small army. Many economist think the reason for this 'wirtschaftswunder' was the absence of the economic burden of an army.
I've got another theory for you. How about it's because the winners of that war pumped today's equivalent of trillions of dollars into rebuilding the infrastructure and civilian institutions of those countries, and effectively babysat them until they became trading partners?
If anything like what had been traditionally done by victors in war -- basically, making out with everything of value that wasn't tied down -- had been done by the Allies to Germany and Japan, both of those countries would probably look pretty sorry right now. (In the case of Germany, it would probably just be the remains of a very large Soviet strip-mining operation.)
The success of those countries says a lot more in regards to post-war reconstruction than it does to military spending decisions in those countries -- especially since Germany's modern Army isn't exactly (and never has been) insignificant; IIRC it's the second-largest in Europe after France, and their spending as a percentage of GDP is higher than many.
I support the troops and I feel a lot more comfortable having cute little OS in charge that lets say an OS with a questionable reputation.
I know I wouldn't want a vehicle following me, designed by the people who brought the world Clippy, the Shifty-Eyed Paper Clip.
There always was something... unwholesome... about that guy. He's just the kind of computer intelligence that you can imagine waiting until you're not suspecting it, and then crushing you to a pulp. It's probably all the pent-up rage he harbors for being replaced by that dog.
...for a charge no more than the cost of physically performing source distribution...
However, given that the physical distribution of said source code would probably be conducted by a military contractor, I suspect that cost will be roughly equal to the GDP of Uruguay.
Nobody at Microsoft would touch the ReactOS source code with an eight-foot pole. It would too easily produce the reverse situation -- if a person who had at some point seen the ReactOS code worked on Windows, then Microsoft would be open to accusations that they had stolen GPL code, and would have to do a code audit of their own to prevent it. (As well as probably behead all the people responsible.)
Sure, if MS was really interested, they could hire some outside agent to audit the ReactOS code and compare it to the Windows code, but that would cost a lot of money, and you can bet Microsoft isn't going to pay for it. They'd rather undercut ReactOS' audit if anything, that way they can make vague threats later to anyone who might think about using ReactOS about lawsuits -- pull a page from the SCO "FUD Playbook," if you will.
This story is about an entirely internal issue to the ReactOS project team. Somehow, they discovered some code that someone thought was suspect (how they would know this isn't entirely clear) and now they're doing a code audit, and reviewing reverse engineering practices to make sure everyone is in compliance with US intellectual property laws. In the future, anyone who doesn't agree to follow the stricter practices (and put this in writing) won't be allowed to make major contributions to the project.
This is not entirely a response to your post, but it's related so I thought I'd ask anyway...
Does anyone know where there is a good description of how the WoW client and server interacts? Or is it all kept under wraps by Blizzard?
I'm not particularly interested in hacking (or cheating) or anything else malicious, I'm more just curious how much work gets done on the client end versus the server end.
For instance, let's say you shoot an arrow or something: when you miss in the game, you'll actually see the arrow/bullet/whatever miss it's target. Is the drawing of the arrow's flightpath and other physics modeling stuff done on the client, and the server just communicates where it's a hit or a miss, and everybody's computer figures the rest out separately? Or does it actually communicate the flightpath, so everyone sees the same thing (as an FPS-style game would)?
That's just an example; I guess what I'm really wondering is 'how thick is the client?' And whether there's anything out there about it that's not hugely technical but not just a game review either.
Huh? How old a release are you talking about. Sure, at some point they stop releasing patches for older versions of the OS -- you can't honestly expect them to maintain it forever -- but they do generally offer most patches for the second-most-recent version, if the vunerability exists on both. At least for a while following the upgrade. But after a certain point you can't expect them to make a version of the patch for every release of OS X since the Public Beta, just because somebody out there might be running it.
Given that Apple seems to only do pay upgrades every two years or so, by my reckoning you get about a 3-year patched life out of each version. That's not too bad at all, for a consumer desktop OS.
You're a moron. There are two problems with the ACLU, putting your math exercise aside for a moment. One is that, in ignoring the Second Amendment, they undermine the very thing they claim to stand for, namely to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person... by the Constitution and laws of the United States." Their statement of purpose doesn't leave much room for picking and choosing rights, yet they do it anyway.
The NRA, on the other hand, doesn't claim to support any of your rights, except as they relate to the Second Amendment. They actually do quite a bit of First Amendment stuff, but mostly in ways that you don't hear about and that probably wouldn't interest most people (related to political speech, etc.). And they also defend hunting and land-use rights, which have next to nothing to do with the Second Amendment at all.
Furthermore, the NRA aims to help any law-abiding person who wants to make use of the Second Amendment. The ACLU has a long track record of cherry-picking defendents who are either members of a minority group, or have such an absurdly controversial stance that it will create a lot of PR (e.g., Nazis, pedophiles, etc.). Good luck getting help out of them as a member of the majority. And that's not even getting into their stances on discrimatory government programs, which I cannot understand how they reconcile with their mission, except through a heavy dose of White Guilt. And on Constitutional issues that might really affect average people -- things like eminent domain abuse -- they seem strangely silent in the public sphere and in the media.
So, here's my exercise for you: who's living up to their stated purpose? The NRA may have a relatively narrow scope, but it does its job well; the ACLU on contrast seems spread too thin to help average folks, and is philosophically inconsistent (or worse, blatantly hypocritical) when it comes to hand-selecting the people they do want to work with.
The NRA helps the Constitution more by picking one issue and working on it well, than the ACLU does by trying to approach all issues, and doing it poorly. If the ACLU restricted themselves to one issue (say, free speech) they would be more effective, and their supporters would be doing more of a good thing by standing behind them for the country in general.
I just wanted to say, I agree completely. I wouldn't hold your breath to be modded up by the Slashmind, but I think you summed up the problem a lot of people have with the ACLU, myself included.
I support the EFF and the NRA, because they both have objectives that they actually seem to try to live up to. In the case of the EFF, it's "working to protect your digital rights." In the case of the NRA, it's mainly the 2nd Amendment, plus various hunting and land-use rights.
The ACLU, on the other hand, has as its goal to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person... by the Constitution and laws of the United States." However they seem to cherry-pick which of those 'rights and liberties' they want to defend pretty selectively, and with a very clear bias. As you pointed out, they'll happily defend you if you can prove that you're somehow a member of a 'victimized' minority class, while seemingly ignoring everyone else. I'm sure that they've done the necessary mental gymnastics to rationalize all this, but I'm not interested in hearing it. If it looks like hypocrisy, smells like hypocrisy... it's probably hypocrisy.
Frankly, there are a lot of organizations which I don't support, which I have more respect for than I do for the ACLU. A lot of right-wing anti-abortion Christian organizations, for instance. I probably couldn't disagree with what they have to say more, but I respect that they are mainly doing exactly what they say they do.
Perhaps this is because, in general, I tend to prefer 'specialist' organizations to broadly defined ones, and the ACLU on paper is the ultimate 'broad scope' organization. But I would easily tolerate that if they even seemed to care at all about their princicples, in anything except their own fund-raising literature.
If the ACLU changed its name and its stated goals to be more in line with the function it actually performs, they'd move up a lot in my book. I probably wouldn't cut them a check anytime soon (they'd have to really start from a blank slate -- or better yet, a copy of the Bill of Rights -- if they wanted that), but I probably wouldn't gag every time I heard them mentioned on CNN, either.
I'm surprised this didn't get modded up. It should.
It gives you the experience and (questionable) geek cred of running your own server, but without any of the hassle. You can even run your server as a virtual instance on your desktop, if it's suitably powerful, I suppose. But the point is you keep everything that the outside world touches in the colo building; you just get to do the "fun stuff" of building your site, your blog, whatever. And if you want to switch hosting companies? No biggie -- you have everything in your house. Or if the your house gets wiped out by a fire/flood/meteor strike? Again, no problem. Well, actually a big problem for you, but nobody reading your website will notice. (As long as you keep paying the bill, of course.)
It gives you uptime, without having to worry about the QoS of the internet to your house -- probably expensive, if available at all -- or the power brownouts, or HVAC, or any of the other infrastructure stuff. And, perhaps most importantly, you aren't risking your job by running your blog on your company's server (which I think is such a uniquely stupid idea, I can't believe anyone in this day in age would actually consider it -- I won't have unencrypted personal IM conversations from my work laptop... much less run a server from the office!).
In the end I don't think it would be that much more expensive an option than running a server out of your house and doing it right would cost; for the price of a good internet connection (synchronous, 1d onsite support) in a residential area, you can get a 1U colo or an VM on a shared server, and use a computer you have around the house to build the site and rsync it to the colo. In my mind, that's the way to go.
My theory on why the specs are so high is because IBM can afford to do that, without cutting into much of their marketshare. At least on the hardware end -- IBM does offer some lower-end servers, but their bread and butter are the high-end ones. So where somebody like Microsoft has to limit the specs on the free version pretty severely, because otherwise they won't have a retail product to sell, IBM knows that a lot of people want to run their database on big iron. And big iron is a lot of money, not just in the hardware, but also in the service contracts and stuff that go along with it.
If your database is mostly used on commodity, low-end hardware, you can't give away a version that runs on a quad-core, 4GB machine: that's eating into your home market. IBM can, because a lot of their revenue (I'm guessing) comes from machines much further up the specification ladder than that. In fact, they would love you to run DB/2 on a high end machine, because the sooner you do, the sooner you'll make use of it, and probably the sooner you'll find its limits. (Following the general rule that software expands to fill whatever resources you allocate to it.) And when you hit the limits of the commodity/low-end hardware, IBM would be more than happy to help you migrate your DB/2 install into something a little sweeter. For a price, naturally.
Also, since they're last to the free-version game, they want to one-up everyone else. Simple competition.
Anyway, I think the "spec creep" is a good thing for consumers, both IBM's and otherwise, because it might cause a 'free version war,' that can only be a good thing in the end.
It changes less than you'd think, though. The ThinkPads were made in China before IBM sold that division to Lenovo, and they're still being made in the same factories, using the same tooling, probably by the same people, now that they're Lenovo. From a consumer standpoint, nothing changed.
I always thought it was odd that IBM never offered a Thinkpad without Windows, but I guess they have the same problem that every other manufacturer did -- start offering an alternative to Windows, and watch your 'most favored reseller' license and pricing to Windows disappear.
That said, you can sometimes get used Thinkpads that are only a year or two old on eBay. They're remarkably well-built, and you don't have to pay the MS tax directly. Whether you're still paying it indirectly, when you're buying a machine with a wiped hard drive but which originally sold with Windows, is an open question though.
I keep hearing rumors/statements that MySQL's support for transactions and commits is lacking or "is a hack." It's not really my area, and I've played around with it only on a very superficial level on a home server, but in its default configuration it did not seem to do commits, but rather changed elements of the database in real time as it was being given the data, with the possibility of a half-created record being left in the system if (say) the client got disconnected halfway through. This would make it unsuitable for any kind of transaction-based processing, where the integrity of what was in the database was paramount.
Can anyone who's used MySQL respond to this? I'm sure there has to be a way to do it, but it gets spread around quite a bit by people who want to write MySQL off as a 'hobbyist' platform.
I think the reason Sun wants to open up Solaris is because right now, adoption isn't moving very quickly because of the lack of hardware compatibility.
Their HCL *sucks.* I've never been a huge booster of Linux hardware compatibility, but if you go over and look at your options when you have Solaris x86 installed, it's a vast range of options you have for Linux in comparison. I think there is ONE 801.11x wireless card listed on their HCL. I don't know if that means that there are more compatible ones that just aren't listed, or if WL on Solaris is just a joke right now, but it pretty much turned me off to trying it.
The problem, I'm told, is that a lot of the Linux kernel modules that give hardware compatibility and which are licensed under the GPL, aren't compatible with the OpenSolaris license, and thus there's no way for OpenSolaris to benefit from the Linux community's efforts. The only way to get the full benefit that Sun wanted to garner by going open-source, would be to go the rest of the way and GPL it.
Honestly, I don't think most users care whether an OS is GPL-compatible or not. If it's free-as-in-beer, they'll use it, provided it does what they want it to do. However, when the license restricts hardware compatibility, you're not going to increase userbase, and that's what Sun is (hopefully) catching on to.
I have a slightly cynical theory as to why people don't call that "GNU/Solaris" already -- it's because they paid (until recently, anyway) a whole lot of money for Solaris, and they don't want to invite comparisons between "GNU/Solaris" and "GNU/x" where x is a free kernel, particularly Linux.
If you're going to call it that, then you're going to eventually have to field the question of "What's so superior about having the SunOS kernel?" and I think there are quite a few Sun users who just don't want to go there. For one reason or another, they want to differentiate their OS choice from the free alternatives. I'm sure they may have good reasons for doing so; but regardless I doubt they want to have to go over them with everyone above them in their chain of command.
It's my understanding that dtrace is in the process of being ported under the OpenSolaris license to run on BSD. Yes, it's not FSF/GNU compatible, but as a standalone userland utility I'm not sure why that would matter to a user. (I.e. if you just want to use it, and not link it to anything, does it matter a lot?)
A future Linux version might not be able to be included in some of the more "pure" GNU/Linux distributions (Debian), but it could end up in nonfree and still be useful as an application.
I happen to think that censored Google in China is better for the Chinese people than no Google in China,
Except that's not the situation at all. Prior to Google's decision to "offer" the censored service, you could get regular Google (the.com, US version) in China. By Google's own admission on their blog, it had 90% uptime -- pretty good, in my opinion. But they got rid of it.
Why? My theory is because they couldn't offer local advertising without a presence in-country, and they couldn't establish a presence without bowing to the government. While the US version is still ad-supported, very few of the services it advertises are applicable to Chinese viewers, and thus probably didn't get Google much revenue. Nothing like what they're going to get from the ads they'll sell on the new version.
Their shoddy attempt to put a good face on it is ridiculous. I wish they had just say "hey guys, there are a billion people in china for us to make money off of" and been done with it. Their attempt to rationalize it is sickening.
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In this case I don't think you need to worry about that.
NTP is the one gaming the system here -- the NY Times called them a "virtual corporation" (according to Engadget), and they're nothing but a holding company with a fat war chest set up to create landmine lawsuits over the patents that they hold.
In terms of patent abuse, these guys make Microsoft look like Mother Teresa. They don't make anything (except lawsuits), they don't do anything, and the only way they have of making money is by going after the 'deep pockets' of established, successful companies. In short, they're an inherently parasitic business.
Is what they're doing legal? Yes. Should it be? Clearly not.
It would be different if they actually had a wireless-email product which was being infringed on by the Blackberry, but they don't and never did. All they ever wanted to do was bleed RIM for about a half billion dollars, and the hell with anyone who uses the service.
I think RIM is going to come out of this okay, and kudos to them for standing up to NTP. Regardless of what I'm sure were self-interested reasons for doing so, it was the right thing to do.
The vast majority of telegrams ever sent were never encoded in Morse. They were sent using a teletype, probably using 5-bit BAUDOT, or more rarely, ASCII or any of the other encoding schemes that have fallen by the wayside.
I'm not sure if I would argue that they were the first digital communications medium or not, but I just thought it's just worth pointing out that most Western Union Telegrams had nothing to do with the CW electrical telegraph that they're so closely associated with.
I'm a ham also, and a few years ago I heard somebody talking about a project to send a bunch of test messages into the traffic handling system and analyze them to come up with ways to improve the way large batches of messages are handled and routed in an emergency. They were going to use the same sort of analysis methods that are used to optimize distributed-hub networks like retail distribution and UPS. (This was their area, not mine -- I don't remember any more technical details.)
As a secondary goal it also would have created some metrics to use in discussing Amateur Radio emergency traffic handling with homeland security types. (e.g., "Most messages reach their destination in x hours," etc.)
I thought it was a pretty neat idea -- of course I'm not sure whether the people that work the nets would really appreciate getting flooded with 10,000 essentially garbage messages, but I appreciated the concept anyway. I never heard if there was any attempt made to do anything with it.
I wasn't aware of this -- thanks for the heads-up.
I haven't sold anything in a while, but back when I was doing it more actively, I really liked BidPay. I've never been a fan of PayPal since they started requiring you to "upgrade" (big fat sarcasm quotes on that, in case you didn't notice) to a Premier account to accept Credit Card payments. In return for this "feature," they take a percentage of all your incoming transfers -- regardless of whether or not it comes from a credit card -- from then on. And the best part? You can only "down" grade from Premier back to the free service ONCE. If you accept another credit card payment after that, you're stuck with them taking a significant percentage of all payments, permanently. And eBay doesn't provide a convenient way of specifying that you accept PayPal, but not if it's funded by a Credit Card.
I always liked BidPay because it gave me a way to let buyers use credit cards if they really wanted to, without shifting that expensive over to me, or requring me to jack up all my prices by several percent in order to cover PayPal's Premier service overhead.
And as a buyer, it was a lot more convenient than going to the Post Office and buying a Money Order. It will be missed.
I think his point is that his Army buddy was not the sort of person who would have a cell phone.
I can believe this -- although they're ubiquitous among most of the people who have internet access, there are a lot of people who for one reason or another don't have them. I can imagine a lot of people in the military might not bother, if they're on their way out of the country. (Because the majority of US cellphones don't work internationally anyway, or only do for a really exorbitant fee.)
But not enough people exist, I guess, who both cannot afford a cellphone and would be willing to pay what Western Union would have to charge per telegram to keep the service operating at such a low demand.
I don't know if the network still exists, but the last time I looked into it, there was still a lot of infrastructure set up to handle telexes, especially internationally.
I just did a quick Google and it seems that International Telex (that's Telex with a capital T, as opposed to 'telex' as the generic term) has either changed its or been bought out by somebody else called Citycomm.
They claim that "Telex is still the only legally recognized method of sending an electronic message. Facsimile (Fax) and electronic mail (E-mail), contrary to popular belief, do not constitute a legal document. Telex messages are used in the banking and brokerage industry to electronically confirm billions of dollars in financial transactions daily."
So I guess the market is pretty safe, for now anyway.
What I can't figure out is whether the telex networks that used to exist are still around anymore. It seems easy to believe that they just got absorbed into the Internet, but they were pretty interesting when they were operating. I don't pretend to understand it completely, but it was a separate system from regular voice phone lines, and Telex numbers (I think) had a different number of digits. I still have business cards of my father's that list a Telex number, although not with me to look at right now.
It seems like the telex systems used now are just operating on the regular PSTN network, similar to fax machines.
If anybody here uses telex services today and wants to comment on how they work, I'd be interested in what the situation is like.
I don't know if this service is being discontinued as well, but Western Union used to offer the ability for a person to type in a message, and have it hand-delivered to his Congressperson. It was fairly expensive, but I'm told reasonably popular when you really wanted to make a statement.
Given that I can't find any information about it on their site anymore, I'm going to guess it's been discontinued.
Probably given that most politicians are less adverse to email now than they used to be (particularly with the new post-9/11 and post-anthrax security precautions), the demand for it didn't exist anymore. But until recently, it was widely believed -- and perhaps is still true -- that sending your opinion by email just didn't give it the impact that a piece of paper did; especially a piece of paper that everyone knew you spent quite a bit of money sending, like a telegram.
My favorite line from that FAQ:
Do civilian airlines use JP-8?
The civilian airlines use Jet A or Jet A-1 fuel, which are virtually identical to JP-8, but with a different performance-enhancing additive package.
Well, duh. There's no way we could justify paying 1200% of what U.S. Air pays, if it was *exactly* the same.
Both Japan and Germany lost the war, were bombed to dust, but in the decades after they developed at a marvelous pace. The myth about those countries 'just imitating' should be debunked by now. Both did this with no or just a small army. Many economist think the reason for this 'wirtschaftswunder' was the absence of the economic burden of an army.
I've got another theory for you. How about it's because the winners of that war pumped today's equivalent of trillions of dollars into rebuilding the infrastructure and civilian institutions of those countries, and effectively babysat them until they became trading partners?
If anything like what had been traditionally done by victors in war -- basically, making out with everything of value that wasn't tied down -- had been done by the Allies to Germany and Japan, both of those countries would probably look pretty sorry right now. (In the case of Germany, it would probably just be the remains of a very large Soviet strip-mining operation.)
The success of those countries says a lot more in regards to post-war reconstruction than it does to military spending decisions in those countries -- especially since Germany's modern Army isn't exactly (and never has been) insignificant; IIRC it's the second-largest in Europe after France, and their spending as a percentage of GDP is higher than many.
I support the troops and I feel a lot more comfortable having cute little OS in charge that lets say an OS with a questionable reputation.
... unwholesome ... about that guy. He's just the kind of computer intelligence that you can imagine waiting until you're not suspecting it, and then crushing you to a pulp. It's probably all the pent-up rage he harbors for being replaced by that dog.
I know I wouldn't want a vehicle following me, designed by the people who brought the world Clippy, the Shifty-Eyed Paper Clip.
There always was something
...for a charge no more than the cost of physically performing source distribution...
However, given that the physical distribution of said source code would probably be conducted by a military contractor, I suspect that cost will be roughly equal to the GDP of Uruguay.
Welcome to the robot future, where the first world supports war, as long as it doesn't cost too much.
Actually the First World supports war only as long as it's ridiculously, mindlessly expensive.
That way it limits the number of countries that can really compete.
Huh?
Nobody at Microsoft would touch the ReactOS source code with an eight-foot pole. It would too easily produce the reverse situation -- if a person who had at some point seen the ReactOS code worked on Windows, then Microsoft would be open to accusations that they had stolen GPL code, and would have to do a code audit of their own to prevent it. (As well as probably behead all the people responsible.)
Sure, if MS was really interested, they could hire some outside agent to audit the ReactOS code and compare it to the Windows code, but that would cost a lot of money, and you can bet Microsoft isn't going to pay for it. They'd rather undercut ReactOS' audit if anything, that way they can make vague threats later to anyone who might think about using ReactOS about lawsuits -- pull a page from the SCO "FUD Playbook," if you will.
This story is about an entirely internal issue to the ReactOS project team. Somehow, they discovered some code that someone thought was suspect (how they would know this isn't entirely clear) and now they're doing a code audit, and reviewing reverse engineering practices to make sure everyone is in compliance with US intellectual property laws. In the future, anyone who doesn't agree to follow the stricter practices (and put this in writing) won't be allowed to make major contributions to the project.
This is not entirely a response to your post, but it's related so I thought I'd ask anyway ...
Does anyone know where there is a good description of how the WoW client and server interacts? Or is it all kept under wraps by Blizzard?
I'm not particularly interested in hacking (or cheating) or anything else malicious, I'm more just curious how much work gets done on the client end versus the server end.
For instance, let's say you shoot an arrow or something: when you miss in the game, you'll actually see the arrow/bullet/whatever miss it's target. Is the drawing of the arrow's flightpath and other physics modeling stuff done on the client, and the server just communicates where it's a hit or a miss, and everybody's computer figures the rest out separately? Or does it actually communicate the flightpath, so everyone sees the same thing (as an FPS-style game would)?
That's just an example; I guess what I'm really wondering is 'how thick is the client?' And whether there's anything out there about it that's not hugely technical but not just a game review either.
Thoughts?
Huh? How old a release are you talking about. Sure, at some point they stop releasing patches for older versions of the OS -- you can't honestly expect them to maintain it forever -- but they do generally offer most patches for the second-most-recent version, if the vunerability exists on both. At least for a while following the upgrade. But after a certain point you can't expect them to make a version of the patch for every release of OS X since the Public Beta, just because somebody out there might be running it.
Given that Apple seems to only do pay upgrades every two years or so, by my reckoning you get about a 3-year patched life out of each version. That's not too bad at all, for a consumer desktop OS.
You're a moron. There are two problems with the ACLU, putting your math exercise aside for a moment. One is that, in ignoring the Second Amendment, they undermine the very thing they claim to stand for, namely to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person ... by the Constitution and laws of the United States." Their statement of purpose doesn't leave much room for picking and choosing rights, yet they do it anyway.
The NRA, on the other hand, doesn't claim to support any of your rights, except as they relate to the Second Amendment. They actually do quite a bit of First Amendment stuff, but mostly in ways that you don't hear about and that probably wouldn't interest most people (related to political speech, etc.). And they also defend hunting and land-use rights, which have next to nothing to do with the Second Amendment at all.
Furthermore, the NRA aims to help any law-abiding person who wants to make use of the Second Amendment. The ACLU has a long track record of cherry-picking defendents who are either members of a minority group, or have such an absurdly controversial stance that it will create a lot of PR (e.g., Nazis, pedophiles, etc.). Good luck getting help out of them as a member of the majority. And that's not even getting into their stances on discrimatory government programs, which I cannot understand how they reconcile with their mission, except through a heavy dose of White Guilt. And on Constitutional issues that might really affect average people -- things like eminent domain abuse -- they seem strangely silent in the public sphere and in the media.
So, here's my exercise for you: who's living up to their stated purpose? The NRA may have a relatively narrow scope, but it does its job well; the ACLU on contrast seems spread too thin to help average folks, and is philosophically inconsistent (or worse, blatantly hypocritical) when it comes to hand-selecting the people they do want to work with.
The NRA helps the Constitution more by picking one issue and working on it well, than the ACLU does by trying to approach all issues, and doing it poorly. If the ACLU restricted themselves to one issue (say, free speech) they would be more effective, and their supporters would be doing more of a good thing by standing behind them for the country in general.
I just wanted to say, I agree completely. I wouldn't hold your breath to be modded up by the Slashmind, but I think you summed up the problem a lot of people have with the ACLU, myself included.
... by the Constitution and laws of the United States." However they seem to cherry-pick which of those 'rights and liberties' they want to defend pretty selectively, and with a very clear bias. As you pointed out, they'll happily defend you if you can prove that you're somehow a member of a 'victimized' minority class, while seemingly ignoring everyone else. I'm sure that they've done the necessary mental gymnastics to rationalize all this, but I'm not interested in hearing it. If it looks like hypocrisy, smells like hypocrisy ... it's probably hypocrisy.
I support the EFF and the NRA, because they both have objectives that they actually seem to try to live up to. In the case of the EFF, it's "working to protect your digital rights." In the case of the NRA, it's mainly the 2nd Amendment, plus various hunting and land-use rights.
The ACLU, on the other hand, has as its goal to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person
Frankly, there are a lot of organizations which I don't support, which I have more respect for than I do for the ACLU. A lot of right-wing anti-abortion Christian organizations, for instance. I probably couldn't disagree with what they have to say more, but I respect that they are mainly doing exactly what they say they do.
Perhaps this is because, in general, I tend to prefer 'specialist' organizations to broadly defined ones, and the ACLU on paper is the ultimate 'broad scope' organization. But I would easily tolerate that if they even seemed to care at all about their princicples, in anything except their own fund-raising literature.
If the ACLU changed its name and its stated goals to be more in line with the function it actually performs, they'd move up a lot in my book. I probably wouldn't cut them a check anytime soon (they'd have to really start from a blank slate -- or better yet, a copy of the Bill of Rights -- if they wanted that), but I probably wouldn't gag every time I heard them mentioned on CNN, either.
I'm surprised this didn't get modded up. It should.
... much less run a server from the office!).
It gives you the experience and (questionable) geek cred of running your own server, but without any of the hassle. You can even run your server as a virtual instance on your desktop, if it's suitably powerful, I suppose. But the point is you keep everything that the outside world touches in the colo building; you just get to do the "fun stuff" of building your site, your blog, whatever. And if you want to switch hosting companies? No biggie -- you have everything in your house. Or if the your house gets wiped out by a fire/flood/meteor strike? Again, no problem. Well, actually a big problem for you, but nobody reading your website will notice. (As long as you keep paying the bill, of course.)
It gives you uptime, without having to worry about the QoS of the internet to your house -- probably expensive, if available at all -- or the power brownouts, or HVAC, or any of the other infrastructure stuff. And, perhaps most importantly, you aren't risking your job by running your blog on your company's server (which I think is such a uniquely stupid idea, I can't believe anyone in this day in age would actually consider it -- I won't have unencrypted personal IM conversations from my work laptop
In the end I don't think it would be that much more expensive an option than running a server out of your house and doing it right would cost; for the price of a good internet connection (synchronous, 1d onsite support) in a residential area, you can get a 1U colo or an VM on a shared server, and use a computer you have around the house to build the site and rsync it to the colo. In my mind, that's the way to go.
My theory on why the specs are so high is because IBM can afford to do that, without cutting into much of their marketshare. At least on the hardware end -- IBM does offer some lower-end servers, but their bread and butter are the high-end ones. So where somebody like Microsoft has to limit the specs on the free version pretty severely, because otherwise they won't have a retail product to sell, IBM knows that a lot of people want to run their database on big iron. And big iron is a lot of money, not just in the hardware, but also in the service contracts and stuff that go along with it.
If your database is mostly used on commodity, low-end hardware, you can't give away a version that runs on a quad-core, 4GB machine: that's eating into your home market. IBM can, because a lot of their revenue (I'm guessing) comes from machines much further up the specification ladder than that. In fact, they would love you to run DB/2 on a high end machine, because the sooner you do, the sooner you'll make use of it, and probably the sooner you'll find its limits. (Following the general rule that software expands to fill whatever resources you allocate to it.) And when you hit the limits of the commodity/low-end hardware, IBM would be more than happy to help you migrate your DB/2 install into something a little sweeter. For a price, naturally.
Also, since they're last to the free-version game, they want to one-up everyone else. Simple competition.
Anyway, I think the "spec creep" is a good thing for consumers, both IBM's and otherwise, because it might cause a 'free version war,' that can only be a good thing in the end.
It changes less than you'd think, though. The ThinkPads were made in China before IBM sold that division to Lenovo, and they're still being made in the same factories, using the same tooling, probably by the same people, now that they're Lenovo. From a consumer standpoint, nothing changed.
I always thought it was odd that IBM never offered a Thinkpad without Windows, but I guess they have the same problem that every other manufacturer did -- start offering an alternative to Windows, and watch your 'most favored reseller' license and pricing to Windows disappear.
That said, you can sometimes get used Thinkpads that are only a year or two old on eBay. They're remarkably well-built, and you don't have to pay the MS tax directly. Whether you're still paying it indirectly, when you're buying a machine with a wiped hard drive but which originally sold with Windows, is an open question though.
I keep hearing rumors/statements that MySQL's support for transactions and commits is lacking or "is a hack." It's not really my area, and I've played around with it only on a very superficial level on a home server, but in its default configuration it did not seem to do commits, but rather changed elements of the database in real time as it was being given the data, with the possibility of a half-created record being left in the system if (say) the client got disconnected halfway through. This would make it unsuitable for any kind of transaction-based processing, where the integrity of what was in the database was paramount.
Can anyone who's used MySQL respond to this? I'm sure there has to be a way to do it, but it gets spread around quite a bit by people who want to write MySQL off as a 'hobbyist' platform.
I think the reason Sun wants to open up Solaris is because right now, adoption isn't moving very quickly because of the lack of hardware compatibility.
Their HCL *sucks.* I've never been a huge booster of Linux hardware compatibility, but if you go over and look at your options when you have Solaris x86 installed, it's a vast range of options you have for Linux in comparison. I think there is ONE 801.11x wireless card listed on their HCL. I don't know if that means that there are more compatible ones that just aren't listed, or if WL on Solaris is just a joke right now, but it pretty much turned me off to trying it.
The problem, I'm told, is that a lot of the Linux kernel modules that give hardware compatibility and which are licensed under the GPL, aren't compatible with the OpenSolaris license, and thus there's no way for OpenSolaris to benefit from the Linux community's efforts. The only way to get the full benefit that Sun wanted to garner by going open-source, would be to go the rest of the way and GPL it.
Honestly, I don't think most users care whether an OS is GPL-compatible or not. If it's free-as-in-beer, they'll use it, provided it does what they want it to do. However, when the license restricts hardware compatibility, you're not going to increase userbase, and that's what Sun is (hopefully) catching on to.
I have a slightly cynical theory as to why people don't call that "GNU/Solaris" already -- it's because they paid (until recently, anyway) a whole lot of money for Solaris, and they don't want to invite comparisons between "GNU/Solaris" and "GNU/x" where x is a free kernel, particularly Linux.
If you're going to call it that, then you're going to eventually have to field the question of "What's so superior about having the SunOS kernel?" and I think there are quite a few Sun users who just don't want to go there. For one reason or another, they want to differentiate their OS choice from the free alternatives. I'm sure they may have good reasons for doing so; but regardless I doubt they want to have to go over them with everyone above them in their chain of command.
It's my understanding that dtrace is in the process of being ported under the OpenSolaris license to run on BSD. Yes, it's not FSF/GNU compatible, but as a standalone userland utility I'm not sure why that would matter to a user. (I.e. if you just want to use it, and not link it to anything, does it matter a lot?)
A future Linux version might not be able to be included in some of the more "pure" GNU/Linux distributions (Debian), but it could end up in nonfree and still be useful as an application.
The website of the FreeBSDTrace project is allegedly http://web.pulltheplug.org/dtrace/, but it's apparently down right now. The developer's blog is http://www.sitetronics.com/wordpress/?cat=8
I happen to think that censored Google in China is better for the Chinese people than no Google in China,
.com, US version) in China. By Google's own admission on their blog, it had 90% uptime -- pretty good, in my opinion. But they got rid of it.
Except that's not the situation at all. Prior to Google's decision to "offer" the censored service, you could get regular Google (the
Why? My theory is because they couldn't offer local advertising without a presence in-country, and they couldn't establish a presence without bowing to the government. While the US version is still ad-supported, very few of the services it advertises are applicable to Chinese viewers, and thus probably didn't get Google much revenue. Nothing like what they're going to get from the ads they'll sell on the new version.
Their shoddy attempt to put a good face on it is ridiculous. I wish they had just say "hey guys, there are a billion people in china for us to make money off of" and been done with it. Their attempt to rationalize it is sickening.