Very rarely on average, but the likelihood increases significantly for the children of rich Mexicans. The likelihood of being shot by a crazed gunman is much more equal across the population of all American students.
I'm a cyclist, too, but I'm a cyclist who understands that my life depends on looking. I also have one of those crappy mirrors that sticks into my helmet to help me see what's on my left.
It is indeed crappy, however, it's better than having no mirror at all.
In my previous job, I telecommuted for a year and a half, and I was a first-line manager at the time. My entire staff was remote anyway (in another city, flying distance; or driving distance if I could spare 3 or 4 days to get there) and I only saw them a couple times a year unless they had to come to LA for something.
When my then-employer was acquired and relocated to another city (again, flying distance, but not much closer to the place my staff were), I declined to take that move and opted for a long-term transition package instead. It was supposed to be 9 months, but they asked me to stay on another 9 because they didn't do dick about finding my replacement during the first 9 months.
I'm pretty far from the "assburgers" type, but telecommuting worked well for me because I had a nice, comfortable dedicated office set up in my house, my computer equipment there was better than what I had at the office in that job, my home office was at the end of the hall and the hall had a door of its own, and my wife kept the kids out of there during the work day. I was very productive in that environment, more than I would have been after the one-way 40-mile commute in LA traffic to where my office was before it moved out of state. Managing my staff was not a problem because they were remote anyway, and communicating with my manager wasn't a problem because, well, IM and email work pretty well for that, at least if you have a decent manager and you're a decent employee. If either end of that relationship is not good, it won't work.
In my current gig I still work from home sometimes (I did it for a couple of months when my wife was sick) even though I only live four miles from my office. I usually go to the office, though, partly because I have a more interactive job than I had before, and partly because my home office setup isn't as good and can't be made as good. It's just the downstairs room in the house and when the kids are upstairs being noisy, it's harder to concentrate. It's also a lot harder for my wife to keep them from opening the door and coming downstairs to talk to daddy whenever they feel like it (they're young enough that "No, I'm working" just doesn't mean much to them).
Bottom line, all it really takes for a person to work from home successfully is a good home office environment, the ability to get things done without your boss watching you over your shoulder, and tasks that mostly don't require face-to-face communication with others. And a manager who can manage that way.
If not for that last one, I think most IT workers could work from home as long as they had a good home office. That last one cuts it down quite a bit.
You'd probably get thrown in jail for that, and it'll probably stick. Refusing to divulge your passphrase is protected by the Fifth Amendment, but if you give them a self-destruct phrase and tell them it's the passphrase, you have just destroyed potential evidence that is in their possession, and I'd be surprised indeed if that is not against one or more laws.
Being wasted in whose opinion, exactly? Certainly not the people's, most of whom would be quite happy to keep things just as they were. The digital TV cutover was solely a government-and-industry thing. The opinion of "The people" didn't matter.
Good point. The attack that was presented would more properly be described as eavesdropping + MITM. The attacker was intercepting the entire session, including the password, and passing the information along to the real site. Also intercepted was the other two-factor authentication information (IIRC it was using an image as a site key). The attacker kept the session open and was free to plunder the account after the victim thought he had logged off.
Precisely. OTP is supposed to be a protection against password compromise. "Got my password? No prob! The one you got will never work again anyway."
I was at a security conference last fall where a seen-in-the-wild MITM attack against a bank in Europe that used OTP was discussed. That OTP isn't secure against MITM is hardly news.
Having the government mandate that ISPs have ipv6 compatibility is/not/ a solution. Having the government mandate an HDTV cut-over date with no more analog wasn't really a solution either, insofar as HDTV is an answer to a problem that not many people have (yes, I have a large LCD TV now, but the large CRT TV it replaced fully met my needs and looked great; I would happily have bought another one but they've become scare on the ground). IPv6 is also largely solving a problem that (practically) no one has.
If IPv6 were really/needed/ the market would have already done far more to bring it into wider use. The fact of the matter is, everyone is getting along just fine on IPv4. No one out there today/needs/ 6. There are some people who want 6, and they tend to be running 6 tunnels, but even they don't need it. They just want it.
What would I do if my ISP cut over to 6 only tomorrow? Well, change ISPs. But if they all did, I'd just run a 6-to-4 gateway at my network edge and everything on the inside would still be 4. There's no need/no point in changing that, and for nearly everyone, NAT is the only solution really needed.
ISPs could take NAT even a step further than they do now; for customers in dynamic IP pools, those addresses could even be NATTed out of RFC 1918 space. Besides freeing up a lot of IPv4 addresses, it would have a pretty dramatic effect on a lot of botnets. Anyone who really needed a global IP at their network edge would just have to pony up for a static IP; but then, many of the people who really/need/ that global IP are already paying for a static one.
When IPv6 was laid out, a huge IP address shortage was seen coming over the horizon. No one realized then just how effectively NAT would solve that problem. IPv6 could be scrapped and the only people who'd care are those who've invested time/money/their emotions into it.
If you're a patent agent, you're a very poorly informed one.
Not only is he not obliged to do any sort of prior art search, he is likely forbidden by his legal department from doing so. At least, if his legal department is clued.
I used to work at a very large software company in the Pacific northwest, one which is well-known for filing a great many software patents. One thing that was explicitly forbidden by the legal department was doing any sort of patent search or search for prior art, whether working on something that might be patentable or not. The reason for this was simple: the fact that you searched for prior art, even if you failed to find any, could jeopardize the patent if it were ever challenged. That's the way the legal system works, according to their legal department.
Uhh, that would be "Borrows like a Democrat and spends like a drunken sailor." Borrows like a politician, anyway. There are damned few fiscal conservatives in government. The few there are tend to get pilloried by both their fellow legislators and much of their constituency. Here in California, the fastest way for a person to not get elected in the first place, or to lose the office s/he already has is to say "Whoa, we can't afford that. We need to cut spending, reduce the budget, and hold the line on taxes." We have a few people like that, but only the ones from very conservative counties manage to get elected and stay elected. I live in the Bay area and they have budgets that would make a communist country ashamed (I used to live in one, so that's not a joke).
I'm all for multiple viewpoints, but firmly believe that no media outlet, or chain of outlets, should be *required* to present them. Particularly in the Internet age, the only reasonable answer to someone who doesn't like a media outlet's stance on something is "So, go start your own." I believe that the negative value WRT the First Amendment of forcing multiple viewpoints greatly exceeds any theoretical benefit that could come from it.
If Clear Channel only wants to carry conservative talk shows, that's fine.
If Air America (are they still around?) only wants to carry liberal ones, that's fine.
That anchor thing actually works. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and cable cuts do tend to correlate with small drops in the spam flow, particularly for spam that tends to have a geographical connection and the right cable gets cut. For example, if Nigeria dropped off the Internet, the volume of 419/lottery scams would go way down.
We haven't seen any drop in spam, though. Interesting that some people are seeing such a big drop, but it's not a global phenomenon.
I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth, but I hope you don't think the Democrats are anything like fair and balanced, either. They're actually rather unbalanced.
Hate the middle class? Hmmm. Who wants to raise taxes on the middle class? Obama. Pelosi. People like that. Democrats.
Red Bushies? The Democrats are way more Red than the Republicans. I'm not saying the Republicans aren't Red, but c'mon.
Not that I support Bush. I'm sick of him. I'm also sick of the fact that yet again, the only two candidates with a chance of winning leave me with a choice of picking the one who sucks less (that would be McCain, for anyone confused on that issue).
Circling back to fair and balanced, I don't much care if a given paper, radio station, TV network, whatever, is fair and/or balanced. What I do care about is that so many of them (including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, etc.) *pretend* to be fair and balanced (with Fox explicitly calling itself that) while being nothing of the kind. Agendas are fine. It's hidden agendas that bug me, and I'd like to see all the media declare their allegiances openly. If they do so, fairness and balance will take care of themselves.
There is nothing humble about my opinion. Humble opinions are crap. Of course, there's nothing humble about yours, either. You just lied and said there was.
Not as many points as you'd lose sitting that thing broken down on the side of the freeway, waiting for a tow truck with my wife and kids (consider what that thing is made out of, after all). And good luck finding someone to repair it (depending on what broke) when you do get to a garage. I like custom cars (but prefer the cool kind), but a one-off machine with tons of custom parts doesn't usually make for good road trip material.
I don't need the geek cred points. Heck, I don't even qualify as much of a real geek. I can dance, my wife is good-looking, thin, and socially adept, and I have a life beyond computers:)
I make that same commute a couple times a year, but I don't think I'd want to do it in something that looked like that
Now, if somebody would make a hybrid minivan, and make it soon, that would meet my upcoming needs very well. I have two kids and a third on the way, and one small minivan right now (Mazda 5; a wonderful vehicle, we've owned it for two years and I still love it), but it's going to get a bit cramped for five, at least on long trips. That means that my well-maintained 10 year old economy car (gets over 30 highway if I keep the speed down and seats four comfortably) is going to have to be replaced sometime in the next couple years by a larger minivan than the Mazda 5. The first auto maker that can get a hybrid minivan to market in the USA first will get a sale right here. Unless it's Toyota; their vehicles tend to be overpriced and they won't negotiate much at the dealer. That price inflexibility is why I bought a Mazda and my neighbor and my brother both bought Honda after checking out Toyota.
A hybrid minivan would last me quite a few years, until EVs are really ready for prime time and widely available. I suspect that for most other people, a hybrid would also make more sense at this stage of the EV market.
Apple's hardware isn't crappy, at least not for any of the usual definitions of crappy.
Sure, it doesn't meet everyone's needs, but I like my company-issued MacBook Pro well enough that when my wife needed a replacement for her dead Thinkpad T30, I bought a MacBook Pro. I'm a long-time Thinkpad fan, have a couple of them running Linux, and may pick up a used motherboard for her dead T30 and resurrect it as yet another Linux Thinkpad in my house. That I'm this much of a Thinkpad fan and would buy an Apple notebook to replace a Thinkpad really speaks to the quality of the hardware. OK, some people would say it speaks to my stupidity, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it:)
So, Apple's hardware doesn't meet everyone's needs - there's nothing in their desktop line that I would buy; the Mac Mini is too lightweight (and unexpandable), the iMac is too unexpandable, and the Mac Pro is expandable but both too expensive for my needs and overkill for my needs - but the stuff that does meet people's needs is of pretty high quality. It's not crappy. Apple hardware typically lasts a long time and performs well, and they don't sell any low-end junk in their product line, something many PC desktop and notebook makers do.
I used to use street view but don't anymore because I didn't find it to be at all useful, in (large) part because because so few places that I went actually had a street view. That would make more sense to me if I lived in BFE, but I live in San Mateo County, on the San Francisco peninsula (next county south of San Francisco itself). This isn't exactly a remote area.
Actually, a lot. I'm in the email security industry and have access to what is probably the largest corpus of ham and spam in the world (unless the government has an even larger secret collection, which is entirely possible), and you wouldn't believe the kind of stuff that people send in clear text email, not even cryptographically signed. Passwords, account numbers, details of their personal lives that they really wouldn't want to have become general knowledge, etc. You name it, it's out there.
The fact that time is money is the reason more businesses are going to community-supported distros and moving away from things like Red Hat. For many problems, you can find the solution in less time than it would take to open a support incident, then get to work on implementing the solution. Even if you use vendor support and they tell you the solution, you're still the one that has to do it. As someone else mentioned, vendor support mostly comes in handy when there isn't a work-around and the vendor is your only option. That's true for Microsoft support as well.
I'm in email security, and I have a little sympathy for the TSA and believe that the level of criticism they are receiving WRT what they screen is at least somewhat unwarranted.
Is much of what they are doing fighting yesterday's battle? Sure it is. So is much of what we do in anti-spam/anti-virus. The trouble is that if we didn't close yesterday's holes and keep checking for those techniques, even if they are not so commonly used or attempted anymore, the attackers *would* keep using them.
Example from email security: using fixed netblocks to send spam doesn't work nearly as well as it used to, because they quickly wind up on the major public RBLs as well as the private ones maintained by anti-spam vendors. However, if we stopped the practice of RBLing those netblocks known to belong to spammers, we would quickly see a shift back to using them because it would make the current most popular technique (botnets) more trouble than just getting a netblock at some spam-friendly provider.
Another example from email security: anti-botnet efforts have been effective enough that some spammers, particularly phishers have for some months been targeting.edu (and some ISP) accounts for phishing, primarily for the purpose of obtaining those account credentials and using them to send spam through legit, real accounts using mail servers with good reputations. But if we stopped working so hard to counter botnets and counter abuse of free email services, they probably wouldn't bother with this attack vector because, again, it would be more trouble than using a botnet.
Examples from TSA practices: if they didn't check electronics for explosives, terrorists would certainly try getting explosives onto planes. They might still succeed if they tried, at least sometimes, but the odds of being caught are high enough that they are less likely to try that approach. If they didn't check shoes, someone else would try the Richard Reid approach. If box cutters and small knives were allowed, someone might try that one again (although after 9/11, I suspect trying to hijack a plane with a box cutter would just end with the would-be hijacker having the box cutter shoved up his ass by angry passengers). Etc.
That is, it's about raising the bar of success/lowering the odds of being able to use any given attack vector and successfully got on a plane and carry out the attack. Is much of what TSA has done so far consisted of picking the low-hanging fruit? Yes, I think it's fair to say that. Email security companies pick low-hanging fruit, too. Most spam is ridiculously easy to block. However, that doesn't mean the low-hanging fruit shouldn't be picked. If we didn't block the easy attack vectors, they'd keep using them. Spammers and terrorists are both no more ambitious than they have to be; if easy achieves they're goals, they aren't going to bother with hard.
Could TSA improve? Sure. Some of their procedures - liquids, for example - are aimed at techniques that (at least, based on what some experts have said) would be pretty hard to carry out, even with all the necessary components on board. I think the blanket ban on liquids not in tiny containers is aimed at keeping the lines moving. If they tried to actually inspect them all, the lines would crawl. It's not a great solution and I think in the longer term they could find some technology to speed that up, but I appreciate the problem they face: speed matters in message filtering, too, and we're always looking for ways to improve both performance and efficacy, while reducing false positives. It's not easy. Are we in the email security better at it than TSA? Sure, but we also have at least one tool available to us that they don't: profiling. Email security companies look at where a message is coming from and what reputation that source has in deciding whether to accept it, and, having accepted it, how to classify it thereafter.
If TSA were to even suggest profiling based on national origin or appearance, people would be all over them. Whether it
Torgiver answered the X11 question pretty well, but I'll echo it: X11 apps on a Mac are fugly, don't integrate well with Aqua, and the fact that Apple ships an X server and makes it not very hard to run X apps does nothing to change that.
It also does nothing to change the specific example which I cited and which you ignored. Go off and try building Evolution on Tiger or Leopard and you'll see what I mean. Granted having Aqua based on X would not solve all those problems, but it would mitigate them considerably, especially if Apple had used Qt or GTK to build Aqua.
I do not view computer usage as an end in itself per se, but I'm not being paid to sit around and spend half my day tinkering with things that neither build as-is nor work well even if you can get them to build, nor am I being paid to spend big amounts of time getting Linux to run bare metal on a MacBook Pro (I've done it on my own time, a considerable amount of which was invested). On my own time, as a hobby, yes, computer usage is an end in itself. I don't use any VMs on my own computers. Everything runs on bare metal or not at all.
When I say running Linux in a VM on a Mac is unsatisfying, I'm including slow and inconvenient within that, to clarify what I meant. I'm also including the clash of keybindings and the amount of time that has to be spent more or less rectifying that, and even after that time investment, it's still not totally fixed.
OK, I'll cop to slightly exaggerating the extent to which (most) employees believe that, but they're certainly told that on a regular basis, and Microsoft has a particularly bad case of "not invented here" syndrome. Steveb, even if he doesn't actually in his heart believe that, regularly professes beliefs that could probably be rephrased into those terms without distorting his intent.
I believe this grows in part from the concept of "eating our own dog food." That is, in principle, both a good thing and perfectly reasonable behavior. However, when a product line has been allowed to expand to the point where you have to use your own products for everything, whether they suck or not, it kind of naturally blossoms into not invented here syndrome. Microsoft would have better products if they weren't trying to be in every single market.
The huge propaganda banners in the Bldg. 34 cafeteria never ceased to amaze me. Nor did the little pop-ups on every table. Microsofties may not be completely brainwashed, but many of them are to at least some extent. Turning in my blue badge did feel a bit like getting out of the Borg collective:)
Don't know, I've never been there despite living and working in the Silicon Valley area, but if Apple employees see themselves as producing the best stuff in their market sector, I can understand that: in many cases they'd be right. I've been using Linux for 10 years and KDE for most of that time, and became a first-time Mac user when I joined my current employer about a year and a half ago and they handed me the engineering division standard-issue MacBook Pro. After a few weeks of learning curve, I came to really, really like it and can think of dozens of areas where I wish KDE was as good (and I don't particularly see KDE 4 as a step closer to being as good as a Mac; rather, it's got me looking at GNOME again and also at XFCE). The MacBook Pro simply rocks. I like it so much that when my wife's Thinkpad died a few months ago, I replaced it with a MacBook Pro. She's also a first-time Mac user and completely loves it. When a company can build a system that is loved both by somebody with 30 years of IT experience and somebody who wants a computer that just works and doesn't piss her off, they've done something very, very right.
That doesn't mean Apple is perfect. I wish pretty much every day that they'd based Aqua on X11 rather than just building their own GUI. That would make it far easier to run Free software on the Mac. I have to user Entourage at work, but would much rather run Evolution but have never gotten a fully usable build of it on the Mac and don't really want to run Linux in Fusion just for that. I don't like VMs, they just aren't as satisfying as the bare metal OS. Sadly, Linux on MBP is a rough proposition. I have a pre-Santa Rosa MBP and Ubuntu *still* doesn't support its Atheros hardware. Compiling Madwifi from source and using Wicd works, but it's at least a medium-level PITA to have to bother with that.
So, Apple's not perfect, but they're pretty effing good.
Slashdot Mirror
Very rarely on average, but the likelihood increases significantly for the children of rich Mexicans. The likelihood of being shot by a crazed gunman is much more equal across the population of all American students.
Yes, she does.
I forgot to mention, it's also better than being dead or in a hospital.
I'm a cyclist, too, but I'm a cyclist who understands that my life depends on looking. I also have one of those crappy mirrors that sticks into my helmet to help me see what's on my left.
It is indeed crappy, however, it's better than having no mirror at all.
In my previous job, I telecommuted for a year and a half, and I was a first-line manager at the time. My entire staff was remote anyway (in another city, flying distance; or driving distance if I could spare 3 or 4 days to get there) and I only saw them a couple times a year unless they had to come to LA for something.
When my then-employer was acquired and relocated to another city (again, flying distance, but not much closer to the place my staff were), I declined to take that move and opted for a long-term transition package instead. It was supposed to be 9 months, but they asked me to stay on another 9 because they didn't do dick about finding my replacement during the first 9 months.
I'm pretty far from the "assburgers" type, but telecommuting worked well for me because I had a nice, comfortable dedicated office set up in my house, my computer equipment there was better than what I had at the office in that job, my home office was at the end of the hall and the hall had a door of its own, and my wife kept the kids out of there during the work day. I was very productive in that environment, more than I would have been after the one-way 40-mile commute in LA traffic to where my office was before it moved out of state. Managing my staff was not a problem because they were remote anyway, and communicating with my manager wasn't a problem because, well, IM and email work pretty well for that, at least if you have a decent manager and you're a decent employee. If either end of that relationship is not good, it won't work.
In my current gig I still work from home sometimes (I did it for a couple of months when my wife was sick) even though I only live four miles from my office. I usually go to the office, though, partly because I have a more interactive job than I had before, and partly because my home office setup isn't as good and can't be made as good. It's just the downstairs room in the house and when the kids are upstairs being noisy, it's harder to concentrate. It's also a lot harder for my wife to keep them from opening the door and coming downstairs to talk to daddy whenever they feel like it (they're young enough that "No, I'm working" just doesn't mean much to them).
Bottom line, all it really takes for a person to work from home successfully is a good home office environment, the ability to get things done without your boss watching you over your shoulder, and tasks that mostly don't require face-to-face communication with others. And a manager who can manage that way.
If not for that last one, I think most IT workers could work from home as long as they had a good home office. That last one cuts it down quite a bit.
You'd probably get thrown in jail for that, and it'll probably stick. Refusing to divulge your passphrase is protected by the Fifth Amendment, but if you give them a self-destruct phrase and tell them it's the passphrase, you have just destroyed potential evidence that is in their possession, and I'd be surprised indeed if that is not against one or more laws.
Being wasted in whose opinion, exactly? Certainly not the people's, most of whom would be quite happy to keep things just as they were. The digital TV cutover was solely a government-and-industry thing. The opinion of "The people" didn't matter.
Good point. The attack that was presented would more properly be described as eavesdropping + MITM. The attacker was intercepting the entire session, including the password, and passing the information along to the real site. Also intercepted was the other two-factor authentication information (IIRC it was using an image as a site key). The attacker kept the session open and was free to plunder the account after the victim thought he had logged off.
Precisely. OTP is supposed to be a protection against password compromise. "Got my password? No prob! The one you got will never work again anyway."
I was at a security conference last fall where a seen-in-the-wild MITM attack against a bank in Europe that used OTP was discussed. That OTP isn't secure against MITM is hardly news.
Having the government mandate that ISPs have ipv6 compatibility is /not/ a solution. Having the government mandate an HDTV cut-over date with no more analog wasn't really a solution either, insofar as HDTV is an answer to a problem that not many people have (yes, I have a large LCD TV now, but the large CRT TV it replaced fully met my needs and looked great; I would happily have bought another one but they've become scare on the ground). IPv6 is also largely solving a problem that (practically) no one has.
If IPv6 were really /needed/ the market would have already done far more to bring it into wider use. The fact of the matter is, everyone is getting along just fine on IPv4. No one out there today /needs/ 6. There are some people who want 6, and they tend to be running 6 tunnels, but even they don't need it. They just want it.
What would I do if my ISP cut over to 6 only tomorrow? Well, change ISPs. But if they all did, I'd just run a 6-to-4 gateway at my network edge and everything on the inside would still be 4. There's no need/no point in changing that, and for nearly everyone, NAT is the only solution really needed.
ISPs could take NAT even a step further than they do now; for customers in dynamic IP pools, those addresses could even be NATTed out of RFC 1918 space. Besides freeing up a lot of IPv4 addresses, it would have a pretty dramatic effect on a lot of botnets. Anyone who really needed a global IP at their network edge would just have to pony up for a static IP; but then, many of the people who really /need/ that global IP are already paying for a static one.
When IPv6 was laid out, a huge IP address shortage was seen coming over the horizon. No one realized then just how effectively NAT would solve that problem. IPv6 could be scrapped and the only people who'd care are those who've invested time/money/their emotions into it.
If you're a patent agent, you're a very poorly informed one.
Not only is he not obliged to do any sort of prior art search, he is likely forbidden by his legal department from doing so. At least, if his legal department is clued.
I used to work at a very large software company in the Pacific northwest, one which is well-known for filing a great many software patents. One thing that was explicitly forbidden by the legal department was doing any sort of patent search or search for prior art, whether working on something that might be patentable or not. The reason for this was simple: the fact that you searched for prior art, even if you failed to find any, could jeopardize the patent if it were ever challenged. That's the way the legal system works, according to their legal department.
Uhh, that would be "Borrows like a Democrat and spends like a drunken sailor." Borrows like a politician, anyway. There are damned few fiscal conservatives in government. The few there are tend to get pilloried by both their fellow legislators and much of their constituency. Here in California, the fastest way for a person to not get elected in the first place, or to lose the office s/he already has is to say "Whoa, we can't afford that. We need to cut spending, reduce the budget, and hold the line on taxes." We have a few people like that, but only the ones from very conservative counties manage to get elected and stay elected. I live in the Bay area and they have budgets that would make a communist country ashamed (I used to live in one, so that's not a joke).
I'm all for multiple viewpoints, but firmly believe that no media outlet, or chain of outlets, should be *required* to present them. Particularly in the Internet age, the only reasonable answer to someone who doesn't like a media outlet's stance on something is "So, go start your own." I believe that the negative value WRT the First Amendment of forcing multiple viewpoints greatly exceeds any theoretical benefit that could come from it.
If Clear Channel only wants to carry conservative talk shows, that's fine.
If Air America (are they still around?) only wants to carry liberal ones, that's fine.
That anchor thing actually works. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and cable cuts do tend to correlate with small drops in the spam flow, particularly for spam that tends to have a geographical connection and the right cable gets cut. For example, if Nigeria dropped off the Internet, the volume of 419/lottery scams would go way down.
We haven't seen any drop in spam, though. Interesting that some people are seeing such a big drop, but it's not a global phenomenon.
I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth, but I hope you don't think the Democrats are anything like fair and balanced, either. They're actually rather unbalanced.
Hate the middle class? Hmmm. Who wants to raise taxes on the middle class? Obama. Pelosi. People like that. Democrats.
Red Bushies? The Democrats are way more Red than the Republicans. I'm not saying the Republicans aren't Red, but c'mon.
Not that I support Bush. I'm sick of him. I'm also sick of the fact that yet again, the only two candidates with a chance of winning leave me with a choice of picking the one who sucks less (that would be McCain, for anyone confused on that issue).
Circling back to fair and balanced, I don't much care if a given paper, radio station, TV network, whatever, is fair and/or balanced. What I do care about is that so many of them (including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, etc.) *pretend* to be fair and balanced (with Fox explicitly calling itself that) while being nothing of the kind. Agendas are fine. It's hidden agendas that bug me, and I'd like to see all the media declare their allegiances openly. If they do so, fairness and balance will take care of themselves.
There is nothing humble about my opinion. Humble opinions are crap. Of course, there's nothing humble about yours, either. You just lied and said there was.
Not as many points as you'd lose sitting that thing broken down on the side of the freeway, waiting for a tow truck with my wife and kids (consider what that thing is made out of, after all). And good luck finding someone to repair it (depending on what broke) when you do get to a garage. I like custom cars (but prefer the cool kind), but a one-off machine with tons of custom parts doesn't usually make for good road trip material.
I don't need the geek cred points. Heck, I don't even qualify as much of a real geek. I can dance, my wife is good-looking, thin, and socially adept, and I have a life beyond computers :)
Does shooting people in the head with your hand really work? I thought a gun was required for that sort of thing...
I make that same commute a couple times a year, but I don't think I'd want to do it in something that looked like that
Now, if somebody would make a hybrid minivan, and make it soon, that would meet my upcoming needs very well. I have two kids and a third on the way, and one small minivan right now (Mazda 5; a wonderful vehicle, we've owned it for two years and I still love it), but it's going to get a bit cramped for five, at least on long trips. That means that my well-maintained 10 year old economy car (gets over 30 highway if I keep the speed down and seats four comfortably) is going to have to be replaced sometime in the next couple years by a larger minivan than the Mazda 5. The first auto maker that can get a hybrid minivan to market in the USA first will get a sale right here. Unless it's Toyota; their vehicles tend to be overpriced and they won't negotiate much at the dealer. That price inflexibility is why I bought a Mazda and my neighbor and my brother both bought Honda after checking out Toyota.
A hybrid minivan would last me quite a few years, until EVs are really ready for prime time and widely available. I suspect that for most other people, a hybrid would also make more sense at this stage of the EV market.
Apple's hardware isn't crappy, at least not for any of the usual definitions of crappy.
Sure, it doesn't meet everyone's needs, but I like my company-issued MacBook Pro well enough that when my wife needed a replacement for her dead Thinkpad T30, I bought a MacBook Pro. I'm a long-time Thinkpad fan, have a couple of them running Linux, and may pick up a used motherboard for her dead T30 and resurrect it as yet another Linux Thinkpad in my house. That I'm this much of a Thinkpad fan and would buy an Apple notebook to replace a Thinkpad really speaks to the quality of the hardware. OK, some people would say it speaks to my stupidity, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it :)
So, Apple's hardware doesn't meet everyone's needs - there's nothing in their desktop line that I would buy; the Mac Mini is too lightweight (and unexpandable), the iMac is too unexpandable, and the Mac Pro is expandable but both too expensive for my needs and overkill for my needs - but the stuff that does meet people's needs is of pretty high quality. It's not crappy. Apple hardware typically lasts a long time and performs well, and they don't sell any low-end junk in their product line, something many PC desktop and notebook makers do.
I used to use street view but don't anymore because I didn't find it to be at all useful, in (large) part because because so few places that I went actually had a street view. That would make more sense to me if I lived in BFE, but I live in San Mateo County, on the San Francisco peninsula (next county south of San Francisco itself). This isn't exactly a remote area.
Actually, a lot. I'm in the email security industry and have access to what is probably the largest corpus of ham and spam in the world (unless the government has an even larger secret collection, which is entirely possible), and you wouldn't believe the kind of stuff that people send in clear text email, not even cryptographically signed. Passwords, account numbers, details of their personal lives that they really wouldn't want to have become general knowledge, etc. You name it, it's out there.
The fact that time is money is the reason more businesses are going to community-supported distros and moving away from things like Red Hat. For many problems, you can find the solution in less time than it would take to open a support incident, then get to work on implementing the solution. Even if you use vendor support and they tell you the solution, you're still the one that has to do it. As someone else mentioned, vendor support mostly comes in handy when there isn't a work-around and the vendor is your only option. That's true for Microsoft support as well.
I'm in email security, and I have a little sympathy for the TSA and believe that the level of criticism they are receiving WRT what they screen is at least somewhat unwarranted.
Is much of what they are doing fighting yesterday's battle? Sure it is. So is much of what we do in anti-spam/anti-virus. The trouble is that if we didn't close yesterday's holes and keep checking for those techniques, even if they are not so commonly used or attempted anymore, the attackers *would* keep using them.
Example from email security: using fixed netblocks to send spam doesn't work nearly as well as it used to, because they quickly wind up on the major public RBLs as well as the private ones maintained by anti-spam vendors. However, if we stopped the practice of RBLing those netblocks known to belong to spammers, we would quickly see a shift back to using them because it would make the current most popular technique (botnets) more trouble than just getting a netblock at some spam-friendly provider.
Another example from email security: anti-botnet efforts have been effective enough that some spammers, particularly phishers have for some months been targeting .edu (and some ISP) accounts for phishing, primarily for the purpose of obtaining those account credentials and using them to send spam through legit, real accounts using mail servers with good reputations. But if we stopped working so hard to counter botnets and counter abuse of free email services, they probably wouldn't bother with this attack vector because, again, it would be more trouble than using a botnet.
Examples from TSA practices: if they didn't check electronics for explosives, terrorists would certainly try getting explosives onto planes. They might still succeed if they tried, at least sometimes, but the odds of being caught are high enough that they are less likely to try that approach. If they didn't check shoes, someone else would try the Richard Reid approach. If box cutters and small knives were allowed, someone might try that one again (although after 9/11, I suspect trying to hijack a plane with a box cutter would just end with the would-be hijacker having the box cutter shoved up his ass by angry passengers). Etc.
That is, it's about raising the bar of success/lowering the odds of being able to use any given attack vector and successfully got on a plane and carry out the attack. Is much of what TSA has done so far consisted of picking the low-hanging fruit? Yes, I think it's fair to say that. Email security companies pick low-hanging fruit, too. Most spam is ridiculously easy to block. However, that doesn't mean the low-hanging fruit shouldn't be picked. If we didn't block the easy attack vectors, they'd keep using them. Spammers and terrorists are both no more ambitious than they have to be; if easy achieves they're goals, they aren't going to bother with hard.
Could TSA improve? Sure. Some of their procedures - liquids, for example - are aimed at techniques that (at least, based on what some experts have said) would be pretty hard to carry out, even with all the necessary components on board. I think the blanket ban on liquids not in tiny containers is aimed at keeping the lines moving. If they tried to actually inspect them all, the lines would crawl. It's not a great solution and I think in the longer term they could find some technology to speed that up, but I appreciate the problem they face: speed matters in message filtering, too, and we're always looking for ways to improve both performance and efficacy, while reducing false positives. It's not easy. Are we in the email security better at it than TSA? Sure, but we also have at least one tool available to us that they don't: profiling. Email security companies look at where a message is coming from and what reputation that source has in deciding whether to accept it, and, having accepted it, how to classify it thereafter.
If TSA were to even suggest profiling based on national origin or appearance, people would be all over them. Whether it
Torgiver answered the X11 question pretty well, but I'll echo it: X11 apps on a Mac are fugly, don't integrate well with Aqua, and the fact that Apple ships an X server and makes it not very hard to run X apps does nothing to change that.
It also does nothing to change the specific example which I cited and which you ignored. Go off and try building Evolution on Tiger or Leopard and you'll see what I mean. Granted having Aqua based on X would not solve all those problems, but it would mitigate them considerably, especially if Apple had used Qt or GTK to build Aqua.
I do not view computer usage as an end in itself per se, but I'm not being paid to sit around and spend half my day tinkering with things that neither build as-is nor work well even if you can get them to build, nor am I being paid to spend big amounts of time getting Linux to run bare metal on a MacBook Pro (I've done it on my own time, a considerable amount of which was invested). On my own time, as a hobby, yes, computer usage is an end in itself. I don't use any VMs on my own computers. Everything runs on bare metal or not at all.
When I say running Linux in a VM on a Mac is unsatisfying, I'm including slow and inconvenient within that, to clarify what I meant. I'm also including the clash of keybindings and the amount of time that has to be spent more or less rectifying that, and even after that time investment, it's still not totally fixed.
OK, I'll cop to slightly exaggerating the extent to which (most) employees believe that, but they're certainly told that on a regular basis, and Microsoft has a particularly bad case of "not invented here" syndrome. Steveb, even if he doesn't actually in his heart believe that, regularly professes beliefs that could probably be rephrased into those terms without distorting his intent.
I believe this grows in part from the concept of "eating our own dog food." That is, in principle, both a good thing and perfectly reasonable behavior. However, when a product line has been allowed to expand to the point where you have to use your own products for everything, whether they suck or not, it kind of naturally blossoms into not invented here syndrome. Microsoft would have better products if they weren't trying to be in every single market.
The huge propaganda banners in the Bldg. 34 cafeteria never ceased to amaze me. Nor did the little pop-ups on every table. Microsofties may not be completely brainwashed, but many of them are to at least some extent. Turning in my blue badge did feel a bit like getting out of the Borg collective :)
Don't know, I've never been there despite living and working in the Silicon Valley area, but if Apple employees see themselves as producing the best stuff in their market sector, I can understand that: in many cases they'd be right. I've been using Linux for 10 years and KDE for most of that time, and became a first-time Mac user when I joined my current employer about a year and a half ago and they handed me the engineering division standard-issue MacBook Pro. After a few weeks of learning curve, I came to really, really like it and can think of dozens of areas where I wish KDE was as good (and I don't particularly see KDE 4 as a step closer to being as good as a Mac; rather, it's got me looking at GNOME again and also at XFCE). The MacBook Pro simply rocks. I like it so much that when my wife's Thinkpad died a few months ago, I replaced it with a MacBook Pro. She's also a first-time Mac user and completely loves it. When a company can build a system that is loved both by somebody with 30 years of IT experience and somebody who wants a computer that just works and doesn't piss her off, they've done something very, very right.
That doesn't mean Apple is perfect. I wish pretty much every day that they'd based Aqua on X11 rather than just building their own GUI. That would make it far easier to run Free software on the Mac. I have to user Entourage at work, but would much rather run Evolution but have never gotten a fully usable build of it on the Mac and don't really want to run Linux in Fusion just for that. I don't like VMs, they just aren't as satisfying as the bare metal OS. Sadly, Linux on MBP is a rough proposition. I have a pre-Santa Rosa MBP and Ubuntu *still* doesn't support its Atheros hardware. Compiling Madwifi from source and using Wicd works, but it's at least a medium-level PITA to have to bother with that.
So, Apple's not perfect, but they're pretty effing good.