I once had some metal thieves break into my house. They took my tools and then went into the basement where they ripped out the copper plumbing (doing immense damage to the ceilings and walls)... then they actually took the f*$king kitchen sink.
If I ever find the creeps, they'll rue the day.....
If BP was shredding documents, then that -- by itself -- is a criminal charge, and everybody (from CEO down) who was part of the process is liable. It's time to start stringing up some C-level executives. There is apparently a move to start going in that direction. BP could be a poster-boy for the process.
Unfortunately, OOXML doesn't follow the ISO standard, even though the standard was based on OOXML and was arguably the result of Microsoft corrupting the ISO process. There are, to my knowledge, no reference implementations of ISO/IEC 29500 -- not even from Microsoft.
If somebody wants to get new IPv4 addresses and can't route IPv6 over at least 75% (95%?) of their network, they should be denied unless they can document a really really good reason why implementing IPv6 isn't appropriate.
That, at least, should get ISPs looking really hard at what isn't IP6 capable at this late a point in time.
The way that patents work in the software industry should be declared unconstitutional.
The constitutional purpose of the patent exception in the first amendment is 'to forward the useful arts and sciences'. The way that patents are currently used do anything but that.
It would be a long fight, but I think it might be worth it.
As long as the patent office thinks it is, then the patent will be issued. If you think it's not valid for whatever reason, you will have to ask a judge to invalidate it. And until they agree with you and invalidate the patent, it is valid.
Not completely valid. An issued patent is presumed valid. A judge doesn't technically invalidate a patent, he just declares it invalid. Same thing with a patent office review. If they find that it's invalid, then it never was valid to begin with -- It was just never looked at properly before that.
There are a lot of invalid patents out there -- they just haven't been declared as such yet.
There are a couple of court decisions, recently, that have declared the burden of proof needed to invalidate a patent in court (clear and convincing) too high and that it should simply be 'balance of probability'. If those suits gain some traction in the world of precedent, then it might make things easier for people staring down clearly invalid patent claims.
which means that it's even less likely to end up on your death certificate than the walkman... unless you get it shoved down your throat by a raging motorist.
The funny thing about that comment is that the Good Samaritan wasn't about helping a stranger. A Samaritan was the heretic-outcast of the day. It was a parable of tolerance. If Jesus was alive and well and living in New York, today, it would probably be the "Tale of the Good Muslim".
In any case, if you were good and principled, and got sued, having all of your correspondence on file would be far more likely to help you than hurt you -- and in many cases it would have no effect at all.
If, on the other hand, you play fast and loose with the law, and treated the people around you like pawns to be used and abused, then having all of your correspondence on file would be more likely to prove fatal to the defense.
Back in the late 90's it was Sony Walkmans -- Pretty much the same problems, except that the units were much bigger (just the batteries were bigger than an ipod nano), and a casette tape only held about 2 hours of music (non-random access.. although you could fast-forward at much peril to your batteries).
At the time a friend of my roommate volunteered for North Shore Search and Rescue, and a friend of his was a medical examiner who hated Walkman and like devices. He saw all too many fatal accidents, where the cause of the accident was a walkman preventing the victim from hearing the warning noises (horn, grinding machinery, evacuation siren and/or the desperate yells of onlookers, etc), but the official cause of death was always something else (smacked by a car, crushed by machinery, head ripped, suffocated, etc.).
Thus it was that the Sony Walkman was always the bridesmaid of death, but never on the certificate.
Then one day, a girl was hit by a train while walking on the train tracks, listening to a Walkman.
The interesting thing is that she wasn't actually run over by the train. She was bounced off the track by the 'cow catcher' on the front of the train doing it's job. The real problem was that she was wearing the Walkman on her belt around the back.. just over the spleen (a very normal place to wear a walkman, since they were a bit too large to fit in most pockets). As a result, when she was hit by the train, instead of the force of the impact being relatively evenly distributed over her body by the cow-catcher, a good bit of it was concentrated into the Walkman and directed into her internal organs. Much like is claimed to have recently happened to a girl in Crete.
Although she seemed to (more or less) walk away from the accident, she soon collapsed and died from her internal injuries.
Since the Walkman was a major contributing cause of the accident, and effectively delivered the killing blow, the examiner was finally able to put on a death certificate:
I have kept every every email I have ever sent or received since 1990 with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well)...
You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true.;-)
Only if you do nasty things that you don't want people to know about. If you live by principles, treat people well and avoid doing things that you'd regret seeing the light of day, saving all of your communications can make you a defense lawyer's wet dream.
It's generally nasty people who like to do things in the dead of night. It's companies like Microsoft that force their $6digit-per-year employees to delete all emails more than 30 days old 'because we don't have the space', but can provide gigabytes of free email to hundreds of millions of strangers via hotmail.com .
Longhorn, WinFS, etc. were probably more a product of MS Marketing than the 'too many Geniuses' problem. It's an old trick that they probably learned from IBM's heydays.
Promise your existing customer base ('everyone') a miracle (vaporware) product that will do everything that they ever wanted. Promise it next year.
That way, when your competitors come out with a real product that does most of what your customers want -- or even all of what they really need, you can convince their CxO to "just wait until next year when our miracle product comes out -- then you won't have to deal with migration issues, etc.".
Then you can slowly move the target -- both what your 'miracle' product does and when it will be out -- until your promises and reality jive. By then your competitor's product will be easy to pooh-pooh as 'only slightly better than what we've got' and needing all of that migration work, etc.
Rinse, repeat.
Microsoft took a big hit with Longhorn -> Vista because Vista turned out to be such a massive dud. Now, MS is going to have a hard time convincing people to believe any of their long-term promises about much of anything.
Well, it's a bit more than that. Once you've created the selection, you then have to use select-> border to turn the border into the selection, and then fill that border. (this presumes that you actually want to draw the outline of the box, as opposed to the filled-in square.
... Or you can convert the selection to a path and then stroke the path. Your choice.
Weird, I just tried it... Double click on the anchor point, and then you can point the two control vectors in arbitrary directions... Voila! Instant corners.
Obviously, you haven't used gimp for a long, long time
One of the 'problems' (if you want to call it that) with evaluating freed software is that it tends to improve much faster than it's proprietary equivalents. Thus, a piece of software that was quite unmanageable a year or two ago may now be noticeably better than it's proprietary competition....
Then there's the Proprietary trolls who like to find places where people are talking about freed software vs proprietary so that they can 'complain' about how "I love open source, but it sucked for reason X when I last tried it (8 years ago)."
Let me just think, without looking at the patent. --- We've already got setups that prevent putting the battery in backwards by having an indent where the positive end is.
The obvious next step would be to put a little microswitch in... If you push it in, it's the positive end. If you don't it's the negative end.
The Infoworld article quotes from a Dell rep. (David Frink) who apparently called in to get a response on record.
The response in question is standard PR pablum. Factual, but meaningless. Let's take Frink's apart a sentence at a time:
The implication that this situation affects Dell currently is incorrect.
Effectively true. It's not the 5-year old optiplex problem that currently affects Dell, its the (apparent) fact that
the mindset that caused the problem persists that currently affects Dell.
The AIT lawsuit is three years old, and the Nichicon capacitors were used by Dell suppliers at certain times from 2003 to 2005.
True. Unfortunately, Dell has now gone 3 years without resolving the issue with their (former) customer.
We actively investigated the failures, audited the Nichicon plants and worked directly with customers to fix OptiPlex computers on a case-by-case basis.
True, true and... well, true. On the last of those three points, some OptiPlex customers got good results and others got the runaround. As he said, "On a case-by-case basis.".
And Dell extended the warranties on all OptiPlex motherboards to January 2008 in order to address the Nichicon capacitor problem.
OK. I'll believe that -- but Dell didn't announce the fact, they probably just hoped that customers would junk their dead machines and buy new ones (hopefully Dells).
The AIT lawsuit does not involve any current Dell products.
Again, true.
Frink added, "AIT was using the OptiPlex systems as servers, a use for which they weren't designed." (Dell's website has a fuller statement.)
Plausible... Probably true... Note that this is actually the first new information in the entire statement. Everything else that he said is information available from the original Infoworld article. Even the inference that the Capicitor problem is long past.
But, in any event this is (once again) useless information. Server boxes are (usually) designed to be more robust because it tends to be much more traumatic when they fail in their designed lifetime -- but the truth of the matter is that its not uncommon to see situations where the Desktops have a more robust service (especially in terms of CPU usage) than servers do. If you don't mind the occasional failute, then there's really no big problem using a 'desktop' for 'server' applications. There are two big differences between servers and desktops:
Nobody cares if the server fans are noisy, so designers can err on the side of air vs. silence. This makes heat death that much less likely
When a desktop dies, the user waits for it to be replaced (in many cases, using a spare machine to do their work while they're waiting). When a server dies, the whole company or division can grind to a halt until the problem is fixed.
(OK: Maybe just one).
Thing is, even though the OptiPlex isn't designed as a server, stats say that they were almost certain to die no matter what AIT did with it. I don't care what use a machine is designed for, a 97% death rate is still unacceptable.
How many have voter's sign up in advance as either republican or democrat and then hand out pre-filled in and/or custom ballots based on which party they have signed up for, and CAN'T vote differently on election day
Excuse my language, but are you f*cking serious!!??????
Back when IE4 came out, MS claimed that it became irretrievably bound to Windows 95..... To prove this, machines which installed IE4 and then tried to uninstall it became (more) unusable.
But my roommate, at the time, did Windows installations on grey boxes full-time. He discovered that if you used the IE3 uninstaller, IE4 would uninstall just fine, leaving a completely usable system (as far as Win95 was concerned).
This means that Microsoft added something to the IE4 uninstaller to willfully break machines that uninstalled iE4.
The creation of an IE-free version for the European market also underlies their claims.
Nonetheless, it does remain a legally perilous path for Microsoft to expressly admit that IE really isn't tied to the operating system.
uhm, no. the geoid is at negative height where the gravity is WEAKER. The geoid consists of a surface where a ball would never roll because the gravity differential would counteract the slope (or vice-versa)...
Think of it another way... The observed 'center' of gravity is always perpendicular to the slope of the geoid.
Thus consider a piece of slope tilted like a forward slash ( / ) The gravity would have to be stronger on the right hand side to hold the ball flat against the slope... Thus the gravity is stronger on the 'high' side, and weaker on the 'low' side.
It's one of those ones that you either get, or you don'... but it's lots of fun, once you get it, watching (and listening to) someone who doesn't try to figure it out.
Negotiating, in secret, a treaty that is likely to result in 'A responsibility' to pass a change in the laws of a country is intrinsically undemocratic and, as such, evil from a point of view of democratic principles.
Freedom of speech is meaningless if the issues about which one has cause to speak are shrouded in maximal secrecy.
Those of you who don't have access to Canadian media might not be much aware of Willie Picton, the pig farmer who was formally accused of killing 26 women, convicted of killing 6 (the trial for the other 20 killings is still on hold) and once claimed to have killed 49.
Although parts of his victims have been found, they mostly consisted of extremities (hands, feet and sliced-open heads). It's been revealed that he had ground up some of his victims and mixed them in with pork -- although the press have been very sure to say that none of his 'porked' victims ended up in the general food chain.
Personally, I don't believe these last claims (that his victims never made it into the regular food chain), because -- if they hadn't, then why were hands and feet found, but no limbs or torsos?
On the other hand, (if you'll excuse the pun), once extremities had been removed, and the victims cut into reasonably small pieces, their parts would be mostly indistinguishable from pig parts, and probably quite acceptable at most pig plants -- thus relieving Picton of the inconvenience of disposing of his victims bones.
In other words, pork lovers across Canada may have ended up as accidental cannibals.
It makes me feel like watching Soylent Green again.
Their first attempt at a top kill was bound to fail with the broken riser lying on the ocean floor and 25gallons/second flowing out of the pipe.... almost all of the mud that they pumped into the blowout preventer was going to be pushed back out the broken riser like mother earth was projectile vomiting.
With the new riser in place, you can expect that most of the mud is still going to be pushed back out of the leaking top hat on the blowout preventer, but a bunch is also going to be pushed up the new riser. This will provide some back pressure and allow you to tighten the top hat, and, thus, get a higher percentage of mud in the new pipe. Eventually (if all goes well), you'll be able to almost entirely fill the new riser with mud (which will provide about 2000-10000PSI of back pressure, depending on how dense the mud is)., and hopefullly enough that they can completely seal the system nd stop the oil flow.....
In fact, if things get good enough, the oil should, at some point, back-flow back into the blowout preventer, and down into the well, itself -- possibly eventually providing enough back-pressure in the lower well, itself, to allow a proper capping process to take place.
Slashdot Mirror
If I ever find the creeps, they'll rue the day.....
If BP was shredding documents, then that -- by itself -- is a criminal charge, and everybody (from CEO down) who was part of the process is liable. It's time to start stringing up some C-level executives. There is apparently a move to start going in that direction. BP could be a poster-boy for the process.
Interesting that the submitter of TFA gets his reply post marked 'off topic'. Methinks that some moderators have gone a bit overboard.
Unfortunately, OOXML doesn't follow the ISO standard, even though the standard was based on OOXML and was arguably the result of Microsoft corrupting the ISO process. There are, to my knowledge, no reference implementations of ISO/IEC 29500 -- not even from Microsoft.
That, at least, should get ISPs looking really hard at what isn't IP6 capable at this late a point in time.
The constitutional purpose of the patent exception in the first amendment is 'to forward the useful arts and sciences'. The way that patents are currently used do anything but that. It would be a long fight, but I think it might be worth it.
As long as the patent office thinks it is, then the patent will be issued. If you think it's not valid for whatever reason, you will have to ask a judge to invalidate it. And until they agree with you and invalidate the patent, it is valid.
Not completely valid. An issued patent is presumed valid. A judge doesn't technically invalidate a patent, he just declares it invalid. Same thing with a patent office review. If they find that it's invalid, then it never was valid to begin with -- It was just never looked at properly before that.
There are a lot of invalid patents out there -- they just haven't been declared as such yet.
There are a couple of court decisions, recently, that have declared the burden of proof needed to invalidate a patent in court (clear and convincing) too high and that it should simply be 'balance of probability'. If those suits gain some traction in the world of precedent, then it might make things easier for people staring down clearly invalid patent claims.
>You could be using a lab full od Linux PCs In fact three of the computers taken ran Linux.
In any event, it would be a lot easier to prove that you had no Microsoft software on your machine if it was running, say, Debian.
Its OK, the new ipod is slimmer than ever...
which means that it's even less likely to end up on your death certificate than the walkman... unless you get it shoved down your throat by a raging motorist.
In any case, if you were good and principled, and got sued, having all of your correspondence on file would be far more likely to help you than hurt you -- and in many cases it would have no effect at all.
If, on the other hand, you play fast and loose with the law, and treated the people around you like pawns to be used and abused, then having all of your correspondence on file would be more likely to prove fatal to the defense.
Back in the late 90's it was Sony Walkmans -- Pretty much the same problems, except that the units were much bigger (just the batteries were bigger than an ipod nano), and a casette tape only held about 2 hours of music (non-random access.. although you could fast-forward at much peril to your batteries).
At the time a friend of my roommate volunteered for North Shore Search and Rescue, and a friend of his was a medical examiner who hated Walkman and like devices. He saw all too many fatal accidents, where the cause of the accident was a walkman preventing the victim from hearing the warning noises (horn, grinding machinery, evacuation siren and/or the desperate yells of onlookers, etc), but the official cause of death was always something else (smacked by a car, crushed by machinery, head ripped, suffocated, etc.).
Thus it was that the Sony Walkman was always the bridesmaid of death, but never on the certificate.
Then one day, a girl was hit by a train while walking on the train tracks, listening to a Walkman.
The interesting thing is that she wasn't actually run over by the train. She was bounced off the track by the 'cow catcher' on the front of the train doing it's job. The real problem was that she was wearing the Walkman on her belt around the back .. just over the spleen (a very normal place to wear a walkman, since they were a bit too large to fit in most pockets). As a result, when she was hit by the train, instead of the force of the impact being relatively evenly distributed over her body by the cow-catcher, a good bit of it was concentrated into the Walkman and directed into her internal organs. Much like is claimed to have recently happened to a girl in Crete.
Although she seemed to (more or less) walk away from the accident, she soon collapsed and died from her internal injuries.
Since the Walkman was a major contributing cause of the accident, and effectively delivered the killing blow, the examiner was finally able to put on a death certificate:
I have kept every every email I have ever sent or received since 1990 with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well) ...
You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true. ;-)
Only if you do nasty things that you don't want people to know about. If you live by principles, treat people well and avoid doing things that you'd regret seeing the light of day, saving all of your communications can make you a defense lawyer's wet dream.
It's generally nasty people who like to do things in the dead of night. It's companies like Microsoft that force their $6digit-per-year employees to delete all emails more than 30 days old 'because we don't have the space', but can provide gigabytes of free email to hundreds of millions of strangers via hotmail.com .
Promise your existing customer base ('everyone') a miracle (vaporware) product that will do everything that they ever wanted. Promise it next year. That way, when your competitors come out with a real product that does most of what your customers want -- or even all of what they really need, you can convince their CxO to "just wait until next year when our miracle product comes out -- then you won't have to deal with migration issues, etc.".
Then you can slowly move the target -- both what your 'miracle' product does and when it will be out -- until your promises and reality jive. By then your competitor's product will be easy to pooh-pooh as 'only slightly better than what we've got' and needing all of that migration work, etc.
Rinse, repeat.
Microsoft took a big hit with Longhorn -> Vista because Vista turned out to be such a massive dud. Now, MS is going to have a hard time convincing people to believe any of their long-term promises about much of anything.
example image using a version of the recently released goce gravity map of earth.
Obviously, you haven't used gimp for a long, long time
One of the 'problems' (if you want to call it that) with evaluating freed software is that it tends to improve much faster than it's proprietary equivalents. Thus, a piece of software that was quite unmanageable a year or two ago may now be noticeably better than it's proprietary competition....
Then there's the Proprietary trolls who like to find places where people are talking about freed software vs proprietary so that they can 'complain' about how "I love open source, but it sucked for reason X when I last tried it (8 years ago)."
The obvious next step would be to put a little microswitch in... If you push it in, it's the positive end. If you don't it's the negative end.
Do I win a hero biscuit??????
Effectively true. It's not the 5-year old optiplex problem that currently affects Dell, its the (apparent) fact that the mindset that caused the problem persists that currently affects Dell.
True. Unfortunately, Dell has now gone 3 years without resolving the issue with their (former) customer.
True, true and ... well, true. On the last of those three points, some OptiPlex customers got good results and others got the runaround. As he said, "On a case-by-case basis.".
OK. I'll believe that -- but Dell didn't announce the fact, they probably just hoped that customers would junk their dead machines and buy new ones (hopefully Dells).
Again, true.
Plausible... Probably true... Note that this is actually the first new information in the entire statement. Everything else that he said is information available from the original Infoworld article. Even the inference that the Capicitor problem is long past.
But, in any event this is (once again) useless information. Server boxes are (usually) designed to be more robust because it tends to be much more traumatic when they fail in their designed lifetime -- but the truth of the matter is that its not uncommon to see situations where the Desktops have a more robust service (especially in terms of CPU usage) than servers do. If you don't mind the occasional failute, then there's really no big problem using a 'desktop' for 'server' applications. There are two big differences between servers and desktops:
(OK: Maybe just one).
Thing is, even though the OptiPlex isn't designed as a server, stats say that they were almost certain to die no matter what AIT did with it. I don't care what use a machine is designed for, a 97% death rate is still unacceptable.
It seems like the MS troll patrol got to you first.
How many have voter's sign up in advance as either republican or democrat and then hand out pre-filled in and/or custom ballots based on which party they have signed up for, and CAN'T vote differently on election day
Excuse my language, but are you f*cking serious!!??????
But my roommate, at the time, did Windows installations on grey boxes full-time. He discovered that if you used the IE3 uninstaller, IE4 would uninstall just fine, leaving a completely usable system (as far as Win95 was concerned). This means that Microsoft added something to the IE4 uninstaller to willfully break machines that uninstalled iE4.
The creation of an IE-free version for the European market also underlies their claims.
Nonetheless, it does remain a legally perilous path for Microsoft to expressly admit that IE really isn't tied to the operating system.
Think of it another way... The observed 'center' of gravity is always perpendicular to the slope of the geoid.
Thus consider a piece of slope tilted like a forward slash ( / ) The gravity would have to be stronger on the right hand side to hold the ball flat against the slope... Thus the gravity is stronger on the 'high' side, and weaker on the 'low' side.
(the (4) is a subscripted 4.
It's one of those ones that you either get, or you don' ... but it's lots of fun, once you get it, watching (and listening to) someone who doesn't try to figure it out.
Freedom of speech is meaningless if the issues about which one has cause to speak are shrouded in maximal secrecy.
Although parts of his victims have been found, they mostly consisted of extremities (hands, feet and sliced-open heads). It's been revealed that he had ground up some of his victims and mixed them in with pork -- although the press have been very sure to say that none of his 'porked' victims ended up in the general food chain.
Personally, I don't believe these last claims (that his victims never made it into the regular food chain), because -- if they hadn't, then why were hands and feet found, but no limbs or torsos? On the other hand, (if you'll excuse the pun), once extremities had been removed, and the victims cut into reasonably small pieces, their parts would be mostly indistinguishable from pig parts, and probably quite acceptable at most pig plants -- thus relieving Picton of the inconvenience of disposing of his victims bones.
In other words, pork lovers across Canada may have ended up as accidental cannibals.
It makes me feel like watching Soylent Green again.
With the new riser in place, you can expect that most of the mud is still going to be pushed back out of the leaking top hat on the blowout preventer, but a bunch is also going to be pushed up the new riser. This will provide some back pressure and allow you to tighten the top hat, and, thus, get a higher percentage of mud in the new pipe. Eventually (if all goes well), you'll be able to almost entirely fill the new riser with mud (which will provide about 2000-10000PSI of back pressure, depending on how dense the mud is)., and hopefullly enough that they can completely seal the system nd stop the oil flow.....
In fact, if things get good enough, the oil should, at some point, back-flow back into the blowout preventer, and down into the well, itself -- possibly eventually providing enough back-pressure in the lower well, itself, to allow a proper capping process to take place.