Yes - sure, but for one thing, Lightroom allows the same (even allowing two different apps to be called from within lightroom -- in my case, these would be Photoshop and DXO (for which, I think, there also isn't a linux alternative).
But the 'trick' is more about not needing most of the programs for most of the time; or being able to batch-use them (like DXO, which I can run once every new import or so to work on all new pictures in one go).
Just as a bit of background - for someone 'occasionally' shooting photos, the whole gimp + various other things for different jobs might work fine. On the other hand, my photo library is about 20.000 photos - many of these still need to be sorted/sifted through to filter it down further, but if I wouldn't have a well integrated package like lightroom, I would probably have given up on it long ago. Thanks TO apps like lightroom, I'm much less hesitant to take LOTS of photos, because I know sorting/ordering/filtering/pruning is going to be both quick and easy. When I say lots, I do mean take several images of the same shot (often with bracketing) and then look through afterwards deciding which to take.
Regarding calling gimp / photoshop, it's a nice feature to have, but for the most time, I won't need it - Photoshop mostly comes into play for filtering options Lightroom doesn't have - e.g. perspective correction. For most photos, the various development options in lightroom are more than enough.
(the above is just as valid for Aperture - I think both Lightroom and Aperture are on about equal footing; I just happen to prefer lightroom (after using each separately for a while).
Lightroom and Aperture are so good BECAUSE they are integrated.
There is nothing really in Lightroom that you can't do with Photoshop - but the way it's integrated and how it's able to work with / organise large collections of photos makes Lightroom one of the most run Apps on my Mac.
As long as Linux doesn't offer a good competitor to Lightroom / Aperture, I will keep doing my photography stuff on the Mac...
Ah - so you'd rather have a politician who promises specific things and breaks them after the election (e.g. 'No more taxes!')?
Wake up and smell the coffee - the only difference is that someone has the honesty of saying in advance he doesn't know how much CAN actually be changed past all goings on on Capitol Hill. The other candidate may promise whatever specific things (like, say, 'No more taxes!' - but you don't have any recourse if he breaks them after the election.
Hmm - what will happen to the fungus, once the banana is extinct? It will probably have to change, and quick, right?
So - if the spread is going THAT fast, can't we put enough seeds of the bananas in safe storage somewhere let the wilt kill the bananas and bring them back 5-10 years later? (and obviously in the meantime we would need to find something else to grow to provide us with food). Unlike animals going extinct, we should be able to keep virtually any number of seeds back to re-introduce again at a later stage. (With animals you would only be able to keep a 'few' alive somewhere and would later need to give them time to breed and give them an opportunity to re-establish themselves in the wilderness - both rather long term issues. With plants that should be less of a problem, shouldn't it?
I also seem to remember something quite a while back here on slashdot about some annual internet usage survey, which also kind of highlighted that the US is leading the pack in technology, but that Europe/Far East are leading in technology adoption.
Having the 'might' of the US IT industry doesn't necessarily mean that joe bloggs automatically has the highest possible speed/quality internet connectivity there is. You will probably still be able to find very good offerings of this technology in the US - but it might not be quite as widespread as in some other nations.
Yes, I guess it still is - HE may be willing to give away free copies of his works - but his publisher might not be too happy about it (i.e. he's giving away their share of the profit as well, not just his).
a) the X axis is time - yes, storage becomes cheaper; but how long will it be before it becomes *truly* affordable. Given the drive size, I would expect them to go more after the business market, rather than end-users - as such, the price decrease will not be too quick.
b) Some items may well fade out and be replaced with something 'better' instead of falling below certain thresholds (luxury items usually fall into this category) - though, I don't quite see this as a luxury item that people would buy because of status...
The really important bit about the announcement is that the drive has enough space to hold roughly 1.8 million ZX Spectrum 48K games......eh - wait - there weren't that many...:-/
There's your problem right there - if you look at party systems, you either have 2 parties and you pick the lesser of two evils (especially nowadays there doesn't seem to be that much difference left between the major parties apart from the candidates - sure, each will point out the fallacy of the other parties policies as a whole - but more often than not, their own are only 'inches' away from the other).
On the other hand, you had the massive multi-party setups like the Weimar republic, where no party got enough to rule so had to form coalitions with multiple parties - eventually bringing everything to a dead-lock and giving rise to some demagogue pointing out the flaws and changing it 'all for the better' (I think, the world is still pissed at how much 'better' it got -- how many people died in WW2 again?).
There is a three-fold problem with party systems:
a) different parties set up different programs on what they think is best. Unfortunately, you only get the choice between the lesser of the N evils - UNLESS, one party matches EXACTLY what you think is right (which will not be often if you only look at issues; rather than party politics). As an example, I would support Bush's decision on stem-cell research (though, not on religious grounds; but rather ethical ones; on the other hand, I had been completely set against various aspects of his foreign 'policy' and the treatment of basic rights as in Guantanamo). IF I was an American and allowed to vote in your elections, I would therefore most likely vote Democrats - even though they are FOR stem-cell research.
b) gaps in election programs - if there is an issue that you might find important, but the parties find not important enough (or not palatable enough) to deal with in the election campaign (i.e. how to actually DEAL with national debt, instead of just continuing to amass more), you will not find any authorative statement of what 'your' party choice is going to do until they get to power. The same goes for any issue that only really arises during a term in office - nobody in the US really seemed to have spent that much time thinking about terrorism and its consequences until it finally hit you in 9/11 - and at that time, you were stuck with whoever you had voted into office at the time - no matter, whether that candidate was any good for the situation, or not.
c) 'campaign promises' - Bush Sr. 'no more taxes' anyone? You vote for a candidate - and once the candidate is in office, you have virtually no chance of getting rid of the incumbent until the next election - no matter what the incumbent is going to do about whatever he/she promised during the voting campaign.
(This should not be seen generally as a rant against the US or any other nation - I *do* see that anything but a relatively simple few party system was virtually impossible even a hundred years ago - the modes of communication and the general level of information available to everyone would prevent that. Which is why you had your electoral college - which seems fairly quaint if you look at it in the lights of what should be possible today).
Each of the above in itself should make a case against those democracies we 'value' in the West. Having lived in Switzerland for a few years, I did notice that their processes are SLOWER than 'ours' in the rest of the Western world, but I also saw that they actually deal more with issues than other nations do. Of course, they currently DO have a problem with a 'demagogue' (Christoph Blocher, in my opinion is nothing less), but even Blocher can't make people vote for or against something they see as intrinsically wrong - and even in power, there was little Blocher could actually DO without the final say-so from the people during their *quarterly* (yes, 4 times a year, not once every 4 years) polls - which are on the individual ISSUES, not on party politics - just to name a few things that they did vote on in the last few years: legalisation of drugs (failed), funding for massive railway expansions "NEAT" (appro
Well, I'm sure we can assume that anyone with a 6 digit UID calling those with 7 digits 'kids' is merely just precotious - you're not THAT much older, kiddo...;-)
I'm perfectly happy with my 4 digit ID - though, yes, for a brief moment I *was* thinking about bidding on the 3digit one a few months back (auction for EFF); but then - there are less than 5k users that can claim a lower UID, so why bother...
Ehhmmm... You have never really thought that set absolutes might also depend on some other conditions?
In Switzerland, 50.000 is a fairly significant number - it's more than 1 in 200 of their population signing up for something.
Obviously, in a country with 300.000.000 you might want to set this number proportionally higher.
Similarly, while someone might be able to force a debate, that does not mean those people would also be able to force through some measure or other -- for that they still need the majority of states and people to agree with them in a referendum.
Direct Democracies tend to fall apart with large numbers of people. Switzerland has ~8 million people. New York city alone has 8 million people.
The problem becomes numbers of people that need to be involved. I keep hearing this argument, but those that give it usually have no idea about how democracy works in Switzerland... Even Switzerland would come to a complete stop, if everyone had to vote whether to build a new townhall in a village of 300 people most Swiss hadn't heard about - that is why they have 3 'layers' where laws can be set (including taxation) --
1. there are national referenda (e.g. do we want to allow abortion?, or the national income tax,...)
2. there are cantonal ('state') referenda, which could be about, say, allowed shop opening times, and cantonal income tax,...)
3. local (villages/boroughs/cities) referenda, which would be about, say, local building initiatives, local taxes,...
This btw. has some rather interesting consequences, like people moving to different boroughs for changes in their income tax, since virtually every town has a different tax level (your income tax comprises of a national tax part, a cantonal/state tax part, and a local part). While this sounds a bit complicated at first, it also brings in a certain amount of competition for the towns and cantons, since raising taxes always comes at the potential cost of people just moving to a neighbouring village to get better rates -- that is, IF the local government manages to get the majority of people behind tax-raising plans.
I think, similar models could be even implemented in countries the population of China; maybe just as it is; or maybe by adding a fourth layer (say, 'district' as an intermediate step between villages/boroughs/cities and states which in China have loads more inhabitants than Switzerland alone).
I've lived in Switzerland for about 8 1/2 years, and I had been seriously impressed by how they run their country. Personally, all Western 'democracies' in comparison aren't much more than 'electoral dictatorships' -- just elect someone to run the country for 4 years - and that guy/party can basically screw you over any way they want and their election promises are worth VERY little.
If the rule of law is not enforced in a country, should that really mean we should abuse it as well (i.e. sink down to their level)?
I can go with the suggestion of stopping the delivery of OLPC systems to Nigeria because of this - but simply ignoring the law is not the answer if in some time we would wish for their judicial system to become more effective. Or do you think we Westerners could really make a good case for proper law enforcement, if we chose to bypass it ourselves just for some mere convenience? If 'we' should choose to bypass it for ANY issue, then forget about an end to Nigerian scams and similar issues, because they won't have any initiative in sorting out their law enforcement.
Besides, in the mid to long term, any road block in their education (say through the lack of the educational material in the OLPC), will also ensure that nothing will change for the better (ignorance begets ignorance?)...
Actually, that 'low memory bug' has already been fixed - I've downloaded the beta and installed it on WinXP - after looking at 2 pages, Firefox 2 memory usage was at about 45MB; Firefox 3's memory usage was up to about 750MB after less than 5 minutes (and the same 2 pages; in two tabs, just as with Firefox 2.0.0.9), completely bringing the machine to a crawl (1GB mem; and apart from Firefox, Outlook, Eclipse and SquirrelSQL were open)...
I'm reverting back to Firefox 2 for the time being, and will file a bug report once I have some more time to find out what's causing the issue...
You put 'more secure' under Vista Pros, AND you are wondering why a business would want to switch to Vista? If Vista should offer security enhancements, that alone should make businesses think about upgrading to Vista. As for you Vista Cons:
'slower' - do you see that as much of an impact for the average business user using Word/Excel/Powerpoint? I can't quite see a business user going 'those slides take an extra millisecond to render - it's totally unusable. If anyone is after the last bit of performance, it's more likely the gamers...
'expensive' - small point... but doesn't hurt businesses too much -> cost will likely be deducted from tax...
'driver problems' - small point; but I'd guess that the average business user has pretty much run-of-the-mill absolutely-MASS-produced kind of hardware, which is more likely than not supported (as Microsoft will also know that they NEED to support it FOR the businesses).
'compatibility issues' - average business user uses very little software - Office (which will work), and maybe 2-4 other business applications - a good number of which will probably be ported quickly. The ones with tons of programs on their machine are probably more likely home-users installing every other little extra toy that comes along... Sure, there is a chance that some business critical application will not (yet) run on Vista - in which case, there won't even be a discussion about an upgrade UNTIL compatibility is restored.
It's kind of 'interesting' this has been modded to 'interesting' - I don't see the original poster actually pointing to major issues that will keep most BUSINESSES off Vista. If anything, with the potential additional security mentioned as a 'pro', he's making a case FOR the upgrade, not against.
That said, I'm happy with my Mac and my Linux boxes (including the yet to be improved Leopard; but as long as I'm behind a firewall in the broadband modem, I feel safe enough). My only Windows installation is Windows XP (in VMware Fusion), and I have no plans to upgrade it - but there is only one app I need on it, which doesn't listen for any network traffic, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem for me)...
I beg to differ - I certainly wouldn't add a DB super-user equivalent login to a web-service. If I open a DB port I am giving up a good deal of control over what can be done on the connection as well.
Also, the web-service grants you another layer of protection in that it doesn't offer all accesses to the database, but just the ones needed for the task at hand.
Sure, I have to code it in a way that SQL injection attacks etc. won't work - but I'd rather do that than trying to make sure that noone can get free access to my DB through a DB login I spread across the Internet.
The same argument could be made about ANY service/port, including http, ftp, etc. The premise of the article - that "port open == bad all by itself" - is junk.
You're missing something here - if you leave the DB port open, you must give your application/applet the necessary credentials to log in to the database; hence you're providing those to the outside. If you use a webservice, you may have the user authenticate himself, but also you can sanity-check data before forwarding it to the database.
If you don't take any precaution with your data, you're going to lose, no matter how many layers -- but somehow I can't find myself agreeing that giving the raw DB socket and passing all necessary authentication info to the world at large within the applet I'm sending out is a good way either. (of course, you can try and lock down the DB user so that the user within the DB can't do much damage, but you're still opening a hole through which you might also try and hack for other DB accounts with more permissions).
Thanks for that, I really hadn't seen that option before... Nice!
(still - this only takes care of the file-system side of things; not the app-support around it; but, at least for my linux servers, I will have a look at that...)
speaking of the sexy interface - it's one of the things more likely to piss me off about it - the animation of a wormhole (presumably) and the moving stars are just plain annoying......not quite on the scale of the paper-clip, but annoying nonetheless...
(oh - and unlike the paperclip, this one is limited to one particular screen and doesn't just 'jump up' because you use a function that isn't used every other day)...
On the positive side - what Apple HAS achieved with it, is that people begin to take backups more seriously, and even so far (even if just for playing around with it) that in the beginning they might create a few files and then occasionally modify them and finally delete them, just to see how easy it is to get the file back... (personally, for MOST backup software I have used, I have not really gone through the trouble of trying to seriously create, backup and restore some files 'just for the fun of it', because getting the data back is almost as painful as creating it in the first place. (and I simply trusted the backup solution to actually work -- the one time I actually needed an amanda backup restored a few years back, at first I had to spend 20 odd minutes looking through the documentation on how to actually do it (and I did exactly know which file I needed). The one time I tried it with TimeMachine, it just DID THE RIGHT THING (tm)...
OK - there are a number of things - if you use rsync for hourly snapshots to keep everything for the past 24 hours, you would probably do that by creating 24 separate target repositories (i.e. 24 full backups); OR, you allow rsync to create backups for your files - at most 24, but you purge any file older than a day (i.e. if there are only 2 versions for a day, the 3rd version older than 1 day gets deleted).
Now you want to extend this to keep ONE daily snapshot. Either again, create full repositories; OR you need to make your purging routines for numbered backups smarter in only purging all 'hourly' backups older than a day; but leave the last change for each day before in there as well.
If you have that, you have the FILESYSTEM side covered.
But, this does not allow you yet, to transparently go back in 'view only' to look at past events within your applications (this needs the application to support your backup tool, which is one of the reasons why a number of applications need to be changed for Leopard). Take the earlier example of an accidentally deleted address book entry - which you can restore from within TimeMachine - simply start TM while your addressbook is the 'current application' (the one having input focus). In TM, you will see your open address book, going back in time it will show the state of the applications saved data 1, 2, 3 or more hours or days ago (depending on your selection). In iPhoto, it would show you the state of the Albums you had at the time; but neither of the two apps would allow you to SAVE back into the past. Once you find the record you like, you select it and click restore, and TM will go back to the desktop and the data you have selected goes back into your app (this can even be a PARTIAL restore of the data, say ONE of two albums you deleted).
In terms of Leopard compatibility and apps, most apps need updates, because they do not keep their application data in sync on the disk -- e.g. you could have a partially updated file at the time TM takes the backup, which might result in unusable data for that particular snapshot. I haven't looked on what exactly the app needs to do, but TM will interact with the applications directly to save the correct states; or to display the correct information if you go 'back in time'.
And this part definitely goes way beyond other backup solutions I have seen, because backups up to now only care about what the filesystem says; and do not care about integration with applications.
That said, what I do not like about TimeMachine is that it is restricted to one destination volume (my MacPro has about 1.7TB in disk space; there is no single disk that could take a full backup of everything. Luckily, I have a sizable amount of data that rarely changes - so I back that up manually and exclude this from TM. Otherwise I would basically need a separate RAID to put the backups on...
re Antitrust - I don't think Apple + Adobe would come anywhere close to monopolising the market, so Antitrust IMHO doesn't apply here (for MS + Adobe it would more likely be applicable - but then again - did antitrust even raise an eyebrow when Visio was bought up?)
re establishes Apple as THE platform for photographers - Apple is already the 'choice' platform for most photographers. BUT, if Adobe was bought up by Apple, Apple would find a big new competitor in the not so distant future - M$... What's a billion here or there to throw at yet another big project in order to kill the competition? As long as Adobe's software is available on both Windows and Macs, M$ doesn't have a problem with them - the moment they go to Apple, M$ *will* create a direct competitor to it a year or two down the line, and that would be bad news for Apple in the long run.
And - and secure underground parking would not solve this issue?
Besides - now you don't just have a gas guzzling car, but you can waste loads of energy just getting it up to your floor. (Unless, of course, you'd want the house to make Al Gore's home electricity consumption look "moderate")
The whole sounds pretty braindead to me (plus - I don't want to see what happens when the first depressed rich guy commits suicide by driving his car out through the wall on the 10th or so floor -- structural damage to the building; not to mention passers by underneath;...)
On top of that, I'm not sure I'd even want the exhaust gas from the car (just the bit from driving in/out of the elevator) in my flat.
Oh - and if I have USD4.7m to spend on a flat - what makes you think I have a one-car household; or will I get my own personal parking deck holding 3 or 4 cars)?
a) I see this as a great way of stifling innovation (while you may get a temporary reprieve from malware, until the malware begins breaking into your programs [e.g. via word-macros,... - or would we need to get macros added to the whitelist, too?])...
b) I see that this may end up in taxing innovation as well (if the whitelist was free, it could be fairly easily knocked out by everyone who hates it writing some small 'hello world' program and requesting their program to be put on the whitelist. (if this should be restricted to network-only programs, make your own hello world translate the string 'hello world' on the fly via google's translation service). This alone would force whoever organizes the whitelist to charge for any examination, if only to prevent themselves getting completely swamped in applications.
c) What are the political ramifications of this? Would you have one place in every country adding to the same global whitelist; or just one global whitelist? If every country has a place, how do you keep out corruption as a factor (say, bribing someone to accept a malicious program on the whitelist).... If there is only ONE, how do you make sure that this doesn't get abused for political purposes (i.e. we don't want an office program developed in China; they can use MS Office, which incidentally is on the list already)?
You think spam, virii and trojans are bad? This will be worse...
Warning! Number 4 may cut both ways - if the overall company (i.e. compare your 'LAMP' region to the overall) is a predominantly MS outfit, then the argument might even backfire - why keep this codebase, when everyone else is developing for the other? -- Especially given if your region and the rest of the company might occasionally both need to code the same thing just so that all regions may start offering a new service 'xyz'.
But - given the original management style of "if it's any good, why do they give it away for free?", that also has a simple opposite - "if it were no good, why would companies like IBM support it, and companies like Dell starting to deliver machines with Linux pre-installed?" (i.e. if the free software was crap, these companies would be massively cutting their own flesh to provide it to customers).
I think there might be another flaw in the article - the limit on H1B visas in the US certainly doesn't apply to their hiring for their labs abroad (e.g. in the UK and other countries). Google might well complain that they can't hire enough competent people WITHIN THE US; while at the same time hiring them abroad bringing on those financial analyst comments about increasing payroll.
I'm wondering if it has anything to do with a growing dislike for America/American companies? Haven't been to Germany for years and I don't keep up with the news anymore. Germans still pissed at America? Two points here -
a) I don't think this has got anything to do with Germans pissed with the Americans - many Germans still might be; and now with Angela Merkel being Chancellor, that's only going to 'increase' - not because she would want it to increase, but because she is probably as willing to side with the US, as Tony Blair used to be. Angela Merkel, as leader of the opposition, travelled to visit George Bush in the run-up to Iraq, and stated to him that Schroeder was isolated with his views and detached from the German people, when every poll in Germany suggested that something like 90% of the Germans did NOT want a war... If she is seen as following Bush to willingly, German resentment of the US government will only rise (though, not as much as the resentment against our own government will)...
b) Important point to consider: Deutsche Telekom was still wholly owned by the German government at the time of that court case - and there was certainly (indirect) pressure to make sure the privatization of Deutsche Telekom would go off without a hitch...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - sure, but for one thing, Lightroom allows the same (even allowing two different apps to be called from within lightroom -- in my case, these would be Photoshop and DXO (for which, I think, there also isn't a linux alternative).
But the 'trick' is more about not needing most of the programs for most of the time; or being able to batch-use them (like DXO, which I can run once every new import or so to work on all new pictures in one go).
Just as a bit of background - for someone 'occasionally' shooting photos, the whole gimp + various other things for different jobs might work fine. On the other hand, my photo library is about 20.000 photos - many of these still need to be sorted/sifted through to filter it down further, but if I wouldn't have a well integrated package like lightroom, I would probably have given up on it long ago. Thanks TO apps like lightroom, I'm much less hesitant to take LOTS of photos, because I know sorting/ordering/filtering/pruning is going to be both quick and easy. When I say lots, I do mean take several images of the same shot (often with bracketing) and then look through afterwards deciding which to take.
Regarding calling gimp / photoshop, it's a nice feature to have, but for the most time, I won't need it - Photoshop mostly comes into play for filtering options Lightroom doesn't have - e.g. perspective correction. For most photos, the various development options in lightroom are more than enough.
(the above is just as valid for Aperture - I think both Lightroom and Aperture are on about equal footing; I just happen to prefer lightroom (after using each separately for a while).
But that's part of the shortfall...
Lightroom and Aperture are so good BECAUSE they are integrated.
There is nothing really in Lightroom that you can't do with Photoshop - but the way it's integrated and how it's able to work with / organise large collections of photos makes Lightroom one of the most run Apps on my Mac.
As long as Linux doesn't offer a good competitor to Lightroom / Aperture, I will keep doing my photography stuff on the Mac...
Ah - so you'd rather have a politician who promises specific things and breaks them after the election (e.g. 'No more taxes!')?
Wake up and smell the coffee - the only difference is that someone has the honesty of saying in advance he doesn't know how much CAN actually be changed past all goings on on Capitol Hill.
The other candidate may promise whatever specific things (like, say, 'No more taxes!' - but you don't have any recourse if he breaks them after the election.
Hmm - what will happen to the fungus, once the banana is extinct? It will probably have to change, and quick, right?
So - if the spread is going THAT fast, can't we put enough seeds of the bananas in safe storage somewhere let the wilt kill the bananas and bring them back 5-10 years later? (and obviously in the meantime we would need to find something else to grow to provide us with food). Unlike animals going extinct, we should be able to keep virtually any number of seeds back to re-introduce again at a later stage. (With animals you would only be able to keep a 'few' alive somewhere and would later need to give them time to breed and give them an opportunity to re-establish themselves in the wilderness - both rather long term issues. With plants that should be less of a problem, shouldn't it?
Would you rather hear it from from the Wall Street Journal's principal tech columnist Walt Mossberg? (Listen to the first part of Mossberg's comments on the video: http://www.macrumors.com/2008/04/05/mossberg-3g-iphone-in-60-days/ )
I also seem to remember something quite a while back here on slashdot about some annual internet usage survey, which also kind of highlighted that the US is leading the pack in technology, but that Europe/Far East are leading in technology adoption.
Having the 'might' of the US IT industry doesn't necessarily mean that joe bloggs automatically has the highest possible speed/quality internet connectivity there is. You will probably still be able to find very good offerings of this technology in the US - but it might not be quite as widespread as in some other nations.
Yes, I guess it still is - HE may be willing to give away free copies of his works - but his publisher might not be too happy about it (i.e. he's giving away their share of the profit as well, not just his).
There are two points here -
...eh - wait - there weren't that many... :-/
a) the X axis is time - yes, storage becomes cheaper; but how long will it be before it becomes *truly* affordable. Given the drive size, I would expect them to go more after the business market, rather than end-users - as such, the price decrease will not be too quick.
b) Some items may well fade out and be replaced with something 'better' instead of falling below certain thresholds (luxury items usually fall into this category) - though, I don't quite see this as a luxury item that people would buy because of status...
The really important bit about the announcement is that the drive has enough space to hold roughly 1.8 million ZX Spectrum 48K games...
There's your problem right there - if you look at party systems, you either have 2 parties and you pick the lesser of two evils (especially nowadays there doesn't seem to be that much difference left between the major parties apart from the candidates - sure, each will point out the fallacy of the other parties policies as a whole - but more often than not, their own are only 'inches' away from the other).
On the other hand, you had the massive multi-party setups like the Weimar republic, where no party got enough to rule so had to form coalitions with multiple parties - eventually bringing everything to a dead-lock and giving rise to some demagogue pointing out the flaws and changing it 'all for the better' (I think, the world is still pissed at how much 'better' it got -- how many people died in WW2 again?).
There is a three-fold problem with party systems:
a) different parties set up different programs on what they think is best. Unfortunately, you only get the choice between the lesser of the N evils - UNLESS, one party matches EXACTLY what you think is right (which will not be often if you only look at issues; rather than party politics). As an example, I would support Bush's decision on stem-cell research (though, not on religious grounds; but rather ethical ones; on the other hand, I had been completely set against various aspects of his foreign 'policy' and the treatment of basic rights as in Guantanamo). IF I was an American and allowed to vote in your elections, I would therefore most likely vote Democrats - even though they are FOR stem-cell research.
b) gaps in election programs - if there is an issue that you might find important, but the parties find not important enough (or not palatable enough) to deal with in the election campaign (i.e. how to actually DEAL with national debt, instead of just continuing to amass more), you will not find any authorative statement of what 'your' party choice is going to do until they get to power. The same goes for any issue that only really arises during a term in office - nobody in the US really seemed to have spent that much time thinking about terrorism and its consequences until it finally hit you in 9/11 - and at that time, you were stuck with whoever you had voted into office at the time - no matter, whether that candidate was any good for the situation, or not.
c) 'campaign promises' - Bush Sr. 'no more taxes' anyone? You vote for a candidate - and once the candidate is in office, you have virtually no chance of getting rid of the incumbent until the next election - no matter what the incumbent is going to do about whatever he/she promised during the voting campaign.
(This should not be seen generally as a rant against the US or any other nation - I *do* see that anything but a relatively simple few party system was virtually impossible even a hundred years ago - the modes of communication and the general level of information available to everyone would prevent that. Which is why you had your electoral college - which seems fairly quaint if you look at it in the lights of what should be possible today).
Each of the above in itself should make a case against those democracies we 'value' in the West.
Having lived in Switzerland for a few years, I did notice that their processes are SLOWER than 'ours' in the rest of the Western world, but I also saw that they actually deal more with issues than other nations do. Of course, they currently DO have a problem with a 'demagogue' (Christoph Blocher, in my opinion is nothing less), but even Blocher can't make people vote for or against something they see as intrinsically wrong - and even in power, there was little Blocher could actually DO without the final say-so from the people during their *quarterly* (yes, 4 times a year, not once every 4 years) polls - which are on the individual ISSUES, not on party politics - just to name a few things that they did vote on in the last few years: legalisation of drugs (failed), funding for massive railway expansions "NEAT" (appro
Well, I'm sure we can assume that anyone with a 6 digit UID calling those with 7 digits 'kids' is merely just precotious - you're not THAT much older, kiddo... ;-)
I'm perfectly happy with my 4 digit ID - though, yes, for a brief moment I *was* thinking about bidding on the 3digit one a few months back (auction for EFF); but then - there are less than 5k users that can claim a lower UID, so why bother...
Ehhmmm... You have never really thought that set absolutes might also depend on some other conditions?
In Switzerland, 50.000 is a fairly significant number - it's more than 1 in 200 of their population signing up for something.
Obviously, in a country with 300.000.000 you might want to set this number proportionally higher.
Similarly, while someone might be able to force a debate, that does not mean those people would also be able to force through some measure or other -- for that they still need the majority of states and people to agree with them in a referendum.
The problem becomes numbers of people that need to be involved. I keep hearing this argument, but those that give it usually have no idea about how democracy works in Switzerland... Even Switzerland would come to a complete stop, if everyone had to vote whether to build a new townhall in a village of 300 people most Swiss hadn't heard about - that is why they have 3 'layers' where laws can be set (including taxation) --
1. there are national referenda (e.g. do we want to allow abortion?, or the national income tax,
2. there are cantonal ('state') referenda, which could be about, say, allowed shop opening times, and cantonal income tax,
3. local (villages/boroughs/cities) referenda, which would be about, say, local building initiatives, local taxes,
This btw. has some rather interesting consequences, like people moving to different boroughs for changes in their income tax, since virtually every town has a different tax level (your income tax comprises of a national tax part, a cantonal/state tax part, and a local part). While this sounds a bit complicated at first, it also brings in a certain amount of competition for the towns and cantons, since raising taxes always comes at the potential cost of people just moving to a neighbouring village to get better rates -- that is, IF the local government manages to get the majority of people behind tax-raising plans.
I think, similar models could be even implemented in countries the population of China; maybe just as it is; or maybe by adding a fourth layer (say, 'district' as an intermediate step between villages/boroughs/cities and states which in China have loads more inhabitants than Switzerland alone).
I've lived in Switzerland for about 8 1/2 years, and I had been seriously impressed by how they run their country. Personally, all Western 'democracies' in comparison aren't much more than 'electoral dictatorships' -- just elect someone to run the country for 4 years - and that guy/party can basically screw you over any way they want and their election promises are worth VERY little.
How is this 'insightful'?
If the rule of law is not enforced in a country, should that really mean we should abuse it as well (i.e. sink down to their level)?
I can go with the suggestion of stopping the delivery of OLPC systems to Nigeria because of this - but simply ignoring the law is not the answer if in some time we would wish for their judicial system to become more effective. Or do you think we Westerners could really make a good case for proper law enforcement, if we chose to bypass it ourselves just for some mere convenience?
If 'we' should choose to bypass it for ANY issue, then forget about an end to Nigerian scams and similar issues, because they won't have any initiative in sorting out their law enforcement.
Besides, in the mid to long term, any road block in their education (say through the lack of the educational material in the OLPC), will also ensure that nothing will change for the better (ignorance begets ignorance?)...
Actually, that 'low memory bug' has already been fixed - I've downloaded the beta and installed it on WinXP - after looking at 2 pages, Firefox 2 memory usage was at about 45MB; Firefox 3's memory usage was up to about 750MB after less than 5 minutes (and the same 2 pages; in two tabs, just as with Firefox 2.0.0.9), completely bringing the machine to a crawl (1GB mem; and apart from Firefox, Outlook, Eclipse and SquirrelSQL were open)...
I'm reverting back to Firefox 2 for the time being, and will file a bug report once I have some more time to find out what's causing the issue...
Errhhhh...
You put 'more secure' under Vista Pros, AND you are wondering why a business would want to switch to Vista? If Vista should offer security enhancements, that alone should make businesses think about upgrading to Vista.
As for you Vista Cons:
'slower' - do you see that as much of an impact for the average business user using Word/Excel/Powerpoint? I can't quite see a business user going 'those slides take an extra millisecond to render - it's totally unusable. If anyone is after the last bit of performance, it's more likely the gamers...
'expensive' - small point... but doesn't hurt businesses too much -> cost will likely be deducted from tax...
'driver problems' - small point; but I'd guess that the average business user has pretty much run-of-the-mill absolutely-MASS-produced kind of hardware, which is more likely than not supported (as Microsoft will also know that they NEED to support it FOR the businesses).
'compatibility issues' - average business user uses very little software - Office (which will work), and maybe 2-4 other business applications - a good number of which will probably be ported quickly. The ones with tons of programs on their machine are probably more likely home-users installing every other little extra toy that comes along... Sure, there is a chance that some business critical application will not (yet) run on Vista - in which case, there won't even be a discussion about an upgrade UNTIL compatibility is restored.
It's kind of 'interesting' this has been modded to 'interesting' - I don't see the original poster actually pointing to major issues that will keep most BUSINESSES off Vista. If anything, with the potential additional security mentioned as a 'pro', he's making a case FOR the upgrade, not against.
That said, I'm happy with my Mac and my Linux boxes (including the yet to be improved Leopard; but as long as I'm behind a firewall in the broadband modem, I feel safe enough). My only Windows installation is Windows XP (in VMware Fusion), and I have no plans to upgrade it - but there is only one app I need on it, which doesn't listen for any network traffic, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem for me)...
I beg to differ - I certainly wouldn't add a DB super-user equivalent login to a web-service. If I open a DB port I am giving up a good deal of control over what can be done on the connection as well.
Also, the web-service grants you another layer of protection in that it doesn't offer all accesses to the database, but just the ones needed for the task at hand.
Sure, I have to code it in a way that SQL injection attacks etc. won't work - but I'd rather do that than trying to make sure that noone can get free access to my DB through a DB login I spread across the Internet.
You're missing something here - if you leave the DB port open, you must give your application/applet the necessary credentials to log in to the database; hence you're providing those to the outside. If you use a webservice, you may have the user authenticate himself, but also you can sanity-check data before forwarding it to the database.The same argument could be made about ANY service/port, including http, ftp, etc. The premise of the article - that "port open == bad all by itself" - is junk.
If you don't take any precaution with your data, you're going to lose, no matter how many layers -- but somehow I can't find myself agreeing that giving the raw DB socket and passing all necessary authentication info to the world at large within the applet I'm sending out is a good way either. (of course, you can try and lock down the DB user so that the user within the DB can't do much damage, but you're still opening a hole through which you might also try and hack for other DB accounts with more permissions).
Thanks for that, I really hadn't seen that option before... Nice!
(still - this only takes care of the file-system side of things; not the app-support around it; but, at least for my linux servers, I will have a look at that...)
speaking of the sexy interface - it's one of the things more likely to piss me off about it - the animation of a wormhole (presumably) and the moving stars are just plain annoying... ...not quite on the scale of the paper-clip, but annoying nonetheless...
(oh - and unlike the paperclip, this one is limited to one particular screen and doesn't just 'jump up' because you use a function that isn't used every other day)...
On the positive side - what Apple HAS achieved with it, is that people begin to take backups more seriously, and even so far (even if just for playing around with it) that in the beginning they might create a few files and then occasionally modify them and finally delete them, just to see how easy it is to get the file back... (personally, for MOST backup software I have used, I have not really gone through the trouble of trying to seriously create, backup and restore some files 'just for the fun of it', because getting the data back is almost as painful as creating it in the first place. (and I simply trusted the backup solution to actually work -- the one time I actually needed an amanda backup restored a few years back, at first I had to spend 20 odd minutes looking through the documentation on how to actually do it (and I did exactly know which file I needed). The one time I tried it with TimeMachine, it just DID THE RIGHT THING (tm)...
OK - there are a number of things -
if you use rsync for hourly snapshots to keep everything for the past 24 hours, you would probably do that by creating 24 separate target repositories (i.e. 24 full backups); OR, you allow rsync to create backups for your files - at most 24, but you purge any file older than a day (i.e. if there are only 2 versions for a day, the 3rd version older than 1 day gets deleted).
Now you want to extend this to keep ONE daily snapshot. Either again, create full repositories; OR you need to make your purging routines for numbered backups smarter in only purging all 'hourly' backups older than a day; but leave the last change for each day before in there as well.
If you have that, you have the FILESYSTEM side covered.
But, this does not allow you yet, to transparently go back in 'view only' to look at past events within your applications (this needs the application to support your backup tool, which is one of the reasons why a number of applications need to be changed for Leopard).
Take the earlier example of an accidentally deleted address book entry - which you can restore from within TimeMachine - simply start TM while your addressbook is the 'current application' (the one having input focus). In TM, you will see your open address book, going back in time it will show the state of the applications saved data 1, 2, 3 or more hours or days ago (depending on your selection). In iPhoto, it would show you the state of the Albums you had at the time; but neither of the two apps would allow you to SAVE back into the past. Once you find the record you like, you select it and click restore, and TM will go back to the desktop and the data you have selected goes back into your app (this can even be a PARTIAL restore of the data, say ONE of two albums you deleted).
In terms of Leopard compatibility and apps, most apps need updates, because they do not keep their application data in sync on the disk -- e.g. you could have a partially updated file at the time TM takes the backup, which might result in unusable data for that particular snapshot. I haven't looked on what exactly the app needs to do, but TM will interact with the applications directly to save the correct states; or to display the correct information if you go 'back in time'.
And this part definitely goes way beyond other backup solutions I have seen, because backups up to now only care about what the filesystem says; and do not care about integration with applications.
That said, what I do not like about TimeMachine is that it is restricted to one destination volume (my MacPro has about 1.7TB in disk space; there is no single disk that could take a full backup of everything. Luckily, I have a sizable amount of data that rarely changes - so I back that up manually and exclude this from TM. Otherwise I would basically need a separate RAID to put the backups on...
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment -
re Antitrust - I don't think Apple + Adobe would come anywhere close to monopolising the market, so Antitrust IMHO doesn't apply here (for MS + Adobe it would more likely be applicable - but then again - did antitrust even raise an eyebrow when Visio was bought up?)
re establishes Apple as THE platform for photographers - Apple is already the 'choice' platform for most photographers. BUT, if Adobe was bought up by Apple, Apple would find a big new competitor in the not so distant future - M$... What's a billion here or there to throw at yet another big project in order to kill the competition?
As long as Adobe's software is available on both Windows and Macs, M$ doesn't have a problem with them - the moment they go to Apple, M$ *will* create a direct competitor to it a year or two down the line, and that would be bad news for Apple in the long run.
And - and secure underground parking would not solve this issue?
...)
Besides - now you don't just have a gas guzzling car, but you can waste loads of energy just getting it up to your floor.
(Unless, of course, you'd want the house to make Al Gore's home electricity consumption look "moderate")
The whole sounds pretty braindead to me (plus - I don't want to see what happens when the first depressed rich guy commits suicide by driving his car out through the wall on the 10th or so floor -- structural damage to the building; not to mention passers by underneath;
On top of that, I'm not sure I'd even want the exhaust gas from the car (just the bit from driving in/out of the elevator) in my flat.
Oh - and if I have USD4.7m to spend on a flat - what makes you think I have a one-car household; or will I get my own personal parking deck holding 3 or 4 cars)?
a) I see this as a great way of stifling innovation (while you may get a temporary reprieve from malware, until the malware begins breaking into your programs [e.g. via word-macros,... - or would we need to get macros added to the whitelist, too?])...
b) I see that this may end up in taxing innovation as well (if the whitelist was free, it could be fairly easily knocked out by everyone who hates it writing some small 'hello world' program and requesting their program to be put on the whitelist. (if this should be restricted to network-only programs, make your own hello world translate the string 'hello world' on the fly via google's translation service). This alone would force whoever organizes the whitelist to charge for any examination, if only to prevent themselves getting completely swamped in applications.
c) What are the political ramifications of this? Would you have one place in every country adding to the same global whitelist; or just one global whitelist? If every country has a place, how do you keep out corruption as a factor (say, bribing someone to accept a malicious program on the whitelist).... If there is only ONE, how do you make sure that this doesn't get abused for political purposes (i.e. we don't want an office program developed in China; they can use MS Office, which incidentally is on the list already)?
You think spam, virii and trojans are bad? This will be worse...
Warning! Number 4 may cut both ways - if the overall company (i.e. compare your 'LAMP' region to the overall) is a predominantly MS outfit, then the argument might even backfire - why keep this codebase, when everyone else is developing for the other? -- Especially given if your region and the rest of the company might occasionally both need to code the same thing just so that all regions may start offering a new service 'xyz'.
But - given the original management style of "if it's any good, why do they give it away for free?", that also has a simple opposite - "if it were no good, why would companies like IBM support it, and companies like Dell starting to deliver machines with Linux pre-installed?" (i.e. if the free software was crap, these companies would be massively cutting their own flesh to provide it to customers).
I think there might be another flaw in the article - the limit on H1B visas in the US certainly doesn't apply to their hiring for their labs abroad (e.g. in the UK and other countries).
Google might well complain that they can't hire enough competent people WITHIN THE US; while at the same time hiring them abroad bringing on those financial analyst comments about increasing payroll.
a) I don't think this has got anything to do with Germans pissed with the Americans -
many Germans still might be; and now with Angela Merkel being Chancellor, that's only going to 'increase' - not because she would want it to increase, but because she is probably as willing to side with the US, as Tony Blair used to be. Angela Merkel, as leader of the opposition, travelled to visit George Bush in the run-up to Iraq, and stated to him that Schroeder was isolated with his views and detached from the German people, when every poll in Germany suggested that something like 90% of the Germans did NOT want a war... If she is seen as following Bush to willingly, German resentment of the US government will only rise (though, not as much as the resentment against our own government will)...
b) Important point to consider: Deutsche Telekom was still wholly owned by the German government at the time of that court case - and there was certainly (indirect) pressure to make sure the privatization of Deutsche Telekom would go off without a hitch...