Let's see... an article the pretty much rips into someone who is "one of IBM's representatives in the W3C XML Query Working Group", "author of two books on the DB2 database system" and "a staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center".
At the foot of the page, we have a "sponsored by Oracle" graphic.
Well, at the moment Skype is saving me over GBP50 a month in international call charges, so I couldn't give a flying fuck whether it's a 'proper' phone or just a walkie talkie.
When I want to brag about it to the great unwashed, I can just send a text to them:)
I frequently take my company laptop out of the EU and never bother with any note from Customs.
I say get hold of some company asset stickers ("Property of Foobar Ltd. Asset #123456") and put one on the laptop if you want to brazen it out. Or just take the chance that you won't get caught and 'fess up right off if you get stopped going through "Nothing To Declare" (I don't think they like it when you lie to them and they have the power to do... internal searches:)
Despite it getting the odd bit of bad press, legislation like the Data Protection Act in the UK is very good in this area.
While doctors have every right to gather this sort of data and make it available (and I can see why they would want to, for self-defence reasons in a highly vexatious country like the US), the DPA gives the people in the database some key rights, such as the right to have inaccurate information corrected or removed, and some ability to prevent automated decision making being bade on your data.
Sure, you can always build a database such as this, but in the EU, you have to do it in a responsible manner. Unless you're the government of course:)
If I send a letter to George Bush using Saddam Hussein for the return address, the president will not believe that the letter is really from Iraq! Why? (other than Saddam being captured?) The postmark on the envelope will say Pullman, Wa!
Good analogy, but I think you seriously overestimate Dubya's powers of reasoning in this case...
Especially the lead character I feel like I shouldn't be watching someone make that much of a dick of himself... and more disturbingly it appears to be the only part he can play.
David Brent is such a significant character that it could be easy for Ricky Gervais easy to find himself typecast in the future - we'll have to see how well avoids the trap.
Incidentally, he and Stephen Merchant (Office collaborator) have a radio show on London's XFM that can be very funny (they broadcast on the net also).
I'm british, therefore a citizen of one of the magic 28 countries. The UK government doesn't feel a need to fingerprint me.
Then you haven't committed a crime recently. Or been accused of one. Because our government would like to permanently add the DNA data of anyone who gets arrested to the two million or so Britons who are already on the UK DNA database (although to give them credit, they do currently say this will be for "serious" crimes only, so you probably won't be added if caught speeding - yet)
And if course, it's likely that your next passport will also contain the latest biometric du jour (which will presumably be fully accessible to the Americans when/if you visit using it and they put it through their machine reader). And it's not just the UK who will be handing the fingerprints of its citizens to the US, the EU is quite keen on it too.
Hmmm, looks like slashcode's added a couple of extra whitespaces in there. Won't compile.
Re:What are our options on election day?
on
CNN Reports on Diebold
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously, is there a way to refuse to use those damned machines and still participate in the election?
That's one of the problems isn't it? Even if you choose not to participate, or maybe manage to vote in some more secure manner that's available only to people who go out of their way, the vast majority will use whatever is put in front of them in the booth. Just as the vast majority use whatever OS comes on their computer.
Since elections are won by force of numbers, then individuals opting out of bad technologies will not help - we depend on the electoral authorities to watch our backs...
An alternative is a comibation - RAID 0+1, striping and mirroring. You get both speed and redundancy, although you obviously get to use only 50% of your physical storage.
I tend to recommend this to people with intensive I/O requirements in preference to RAID 5, particularly if there is a lot of writing (due to the interleaved parity information, RAID 5 is less hot at writing operations for large files).
That's for clients though, who can easily afford the $$$ for proper RAID arrays, unlike me. I'm about to build myself a new home machine and RAID is an option, but I have no idea how good the IDE RAID controllers are (I don't want to try software RAID).
Dexy's vs Public Enemy
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 2, Informative
My favourite bootleg (for amusement value mainly) is Dexy's Midnight Runners vs Public Enemy, which I heard on London's best radio station - they've been playing this stuff on their Remix show for a while.
The track is a mix of Come On Eileen and Bring Tha Noize - there's a crap mp3 of it hanging around on Audiogalaxy.
[The BBC] license costs approx. £120 (GBP, ~$180) per year, and a massive infrastructure exists to prevent avoidance - Detector vans, databases etc... Last I heard public opinion was split about 50/50 as to whether to replace the license with advertising on these two channels, and therefore lose the massive cost of operating this infrastructure into the bargain.
I'm not sure about "massive" collection costs - the BBC list "transmission and collection costs" at about £250M, which is about 10% of the budget. I suspect that transmission costs make up the larger chunk of that value. Compare this sum to the cost of acquiring sports rights - also in the hundreds of millions per year, for something that doesn't have real mainstream appeal and would be better off as subscription/pay per view for the large majority of it (IMO).
The real value of the BBC is that it doesn't have to chase a populist audience (although it has been doing a little too much of just that recently), resulting in a higher standard of programming. You live in.uk - do you watch ITV [The main commercial network over here]? I hardly ever do - on the whole it's crap.
I'm not saying that advertising funded telly is always bad - we also have the state-owned but advertising-funded Channel 4 which is generally excellent - but I'm glad that here in the UK we have a broadcaster that is able to produce programmes where they are more concerned about the quality of the programme than how many people will watch it and whether it pleases the advertisers.
The downside of this is that the small minority of people who never watch the BBC but instead stick to ITV/BSkyB/EuroSmut still have to subsidise it, but I say screw 'em:-) I can think of a number of things that I subsidise through my taxes that I don't personally make much use of, but I don't begrudge them (with the exception of the Railtrack fat cats, of course, but that's entirely another matter).
Of course, what I really want is for Rupert Murdoch to buy up the rights to all Snooker, so I never have to put up with it displacing Star Trek/Buffy again:-)
I see that/. now auto-inserts domains as plain text after URLs. Should stop those goatsex guys from making an impact until they get cleverer at hiding the target.
Haven't decided whether it looks irratating or not yet...
... This is one of my pet hates on websites -- being bugged by new cookies with every single page -- and rapidly makes an otherwise good website too annoying to bother with.
So use a browser like Mozilla that handles this for you or get hold of Cookie Pal or similar.
Unless your home is wired for cat5, or you are using wireless ethernet, having rackmounted boxes in another room doesn't make sense. Most rackmount systems won't make any consideration for low power useage (Energy Star, etc.), so likely these systems aren't even appropriate for home use.
Not entirely fair, I think. Energy concerns are valid (particularly if you live in California I guess), but if you have Unix servers at home that are supposed to act as servers (and this isn't exactly unreasonable, is it?) then you probably don't want them powering themselves down anyway.
Then, if you take it as a given that you have these servers happily whirring and humming away, you probably do want to put them in another room from the one that you actually work/live/watch tv in.
At risk of being on-topic, I'd say that racks are expensive largely for the same reasons that SCSI hard drives are expensive - economies of scale (or rather the lack of them).
The coolest rack I've seen recently is the one that comes "free" with a Sun 4800. So buy one of those and stick your boxes in the spare space. Or maybe not:-)
For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.
I would have thought that many companies would want to kick laid-off employees off this sort of thing straight away - it would be a pretty embarrassing place for someone to put up a page with some pointed comments.
Given SGI's situation, maybe they are acting in advance:-(
Neighbouring India, do these folks a favour, invade and give em some net access!
I guess net access is not on the top of the peoples list of priorities somehow;)
Of course, the Internet is banned because in such a society it can help the people achieve freedom by acting as a relatively safe channel for the voice of dissent and counter-propoganda.
In a liberated society, the Internet becomes means to different ends. Like pr0n, mp3s and general timewasting on a scale never before dreamed of by our forefathers. How can we stand idly by while people across the world are deprived of such things?
Mind you, we should also consider the other countries where people may be prosecuted for Internet activities such as posting details of politicians' business interests. Such as most of Europe - at least according to the C4 Mark Thomas Product programme here in.uk, who's latest site http://www.mepsinterests.com looks like it's been nobbled. Technical difficulties my arse.
ANAL, but last time I checked, info gleaned from the trash was admissable under certain conditions.
Here in.uk we have a character known as Benjy "The Binman" Pell, who's career is built on rummaging through the rubbish bins of the rich and famous (and more productively, those of their lawyers and agents) and selling stuff to newspapers.
Unfortunately in the Real World, many people who should know better can't even "delete" paper documents, let alone electronic ones. Whether ot not it's admissible in court, some of the stuff he comes up with can be very damaging to people's careers. A legal limitation would be nice, but there's no substitute for educating people about the value and persistence of information and the need to consider this.
Evidently you either didn't play long enough or there are versions that don't actually launch.
I guess I didn't play for long enough then:-) My old computer got so bogged down once you filled up the whole map that it was a little unplayable (and there's only so long that you can carry on playing - I belive I used to have a life or something back then...)
Am I the only one who was disappointed with the arco's in Sim City 2000? The docs hinted that they may do something interesting, but they never seemed to - I was kind of hoping that the Launch Arco would, well, launch. Or something.
We may someday view mobile phones with the same horror that we view those shoe store 'magic boxes' today.
ISTR that radium was considered *the* thing to include in health drinks in the 1920's or so.
As an electrical engineer I am quite happy to let the rest of you run the safety experiments on your own brains; that is an experiment I decline to participate in.
That's your choice. However, we all take many risks in life, although most people don't generally appreciate the concept of risk, mainly because large numbers like 1:1000000 are hard to comprehend (and because the understanding of maths in the general populace is poor, but I digress).
Moderate use of a mobile (preferably with a headset) is a risk that I do personally take, given that I already happily get in my car and drive on a regular basis - even excluding my personal driving style, there is a significant, proven, risk associated with that activity - hence my annual £1000+ insurance bill:-(
A Biochemist friend of mine also cheerfully assures me that your genetic inheritance also plays a key role. Some people are simply more susceptible to these things, others less. Much as we wish to exercise control over our own mortality, we don't always get to choose...
Slashdot Mirror
At the foot of the page, we have a "sponsored by Oracle" graphic.
I'm sure those two things are entirely unrelated.
When I want to brag about it to the great unwashed, I can just send a text to them :)
I say get hold of some company asset stickers ("Property of Foobar Ltd. Asset #123456") and put one on the laptop if you want to brazen it out. Or just take the chance that you won't get caught and 'fess up right off if you get stopped going through "Nothing To Declare" (I don't think they like it when you lie to them and they have the power to do... internal searches :)
While doctors have every right to gather this sort of data and make it available (and I can see why they would want to, for self-defence reasons in a highly vexatious country like the US), the DPA gives the people in the database some key rights, such as the right to have inaccurate information corrected or removed, and some ability to prevent automated decision making being bade on your data.
Sure, you can always build a database such as this, but in the EU, you have to do it in a responsible manner. Unless you're the government of course :)
Good analogy, but I think you seriously overestimate Dubya's powers of reasoning in this case...
David Brent is such a significant character that it could be easy for Ricky Gervais easy to find himself typecast in the future - we'll have to see how well avoids the trap.
Incidentally, he and Stephen Merchant (Office collaborator) have a radio show on London's XFM that can be very funny (they broadcast on the net also).
Then you haven't committed a crime recently. Or been accused of one. Because our government would like to permanently add the DNA data of anyone who gets arrested to the two million or so Britons who are already on the UK DNA database (although to give them credit, they do currently say this will be for "serious" crimes only, so you probably won't be added if caught speeding - yet)
And if course, it's likely that your next passport will also contain the latest biometric du jour (which will presumably be fully accessible to the Americans when/if you visit using it and they put it through their machine reader). And it's not just the UK who will be handing the fingerprints of its citizens to the US, the EU is quite keen on it too.
Hmmm, looks like slashcode's added a couple of extra whitespaces in there. Won't compile.
That's one of the problems isn't it? Even if you choose not to participate, or maybe manage to vote in some more secure manner that's available only to people who go out of their way, the vast majority will use whatever is put in front of them in the booth. Just as the vast majority use whatever OS comes on their computer.
Since elections are won by force of numbers, then individuals opting out of bad technologies will not help - we depend on the electoral authorities to watch our backs...
... but Moses scores on the rebound!
I tend to recommend this to people with intensive I/O requirements in preference to RAID 5, particularly if there is a lot of writing (due to the interleaved parity information, RAID 5 is less hot at writing operations for large files).
That's for clients though, who can easily afford the $$$ for proper RAID arrays, unlike me. I'm about to build myself a new home machine and RAID is an option, but I have no idea how good the IDE RAID controllers are (I don't want to try software RAID).
The track is a mix of Come On Eileen and Bring Tha Noize - there's a crap mp3 of it hanging around on Audiogalaxy.
There's some interesting stuff here too.
The real value of the BBC is that it doesn't have to chase a populist audience (although it has been doing a little too much of just that recently), resulting in a higher standard of programming. You live in .uk - do you watch ITV [The main commercial network over here]? I hardly ever do - on the whole it's crap.
I'm not saying that advertising funded telly is always bad - we also have the state-owned but advertising-funded Channel 4 which is generally excellent - but I'm glad that here in the UK we have a broadcaster that is able to produce programmes where they are more concerned about the quality of the programme than how many people will watch it and whether it pleases the advertisers.
The downside of this is that the small minority of people who never watch the BBC but instead stick to ITV/BSkyB/EuroSmut still have to subsidise it, but I say screw 'em :-) I can think of a number of things that I subsidise through my taxes that I don't personally make much use of, but I don't begrudge them (with the exception of the Railtrack fat cats, of course, but that's entirely another matter).
Of course, what I really want is for Rupert Murdoch to buy up the rights to all Snooker, so I never have to put up with it displacing Star Trek/Buffy again :-)
Dave
Dave
Some people have no taste :-)
Haven't decided whether it looks irratating or not yet...
Then, if you take it as a given that you have these servers happily whirring and humming away, you probably do want to put them in another room from the one that you actually work/live/watch tv in.
At risk of being on-topic, I'd say that racks are expensive largely for the same reasons that SCSI hard drives are expensive - economies of scale (or rather the lack of them).
The coolest rack I've seen recently is the one that comes "free" with a Sun 4800. So buy one of those and stick your boxes in the spare space. Or maybe not :-)
Given SGI's situation, maybe they are acting in advance :-(
I guess net access is not on the top of the peoples list of priorities somehow ;)
Of course, the Internet is banned because in such a society it can help the people achieve freedom by acting as a relatively safe channel for the voice of dissent and counter-propoganda.
In a liberated society, the Internet becomes means to different ends. Like pr0n, mp3s and general timewasting on a scale never before dreamed of by our forefathers. How can we stand idly by while people across the world are deprived of such things?
Mind you, we should also consider the other countries where people may be prosecuted for Internet activities such as posting details of politicians' business interests. Such as most of Europe - at least according to the C4 Mark Thomas Product programme here in .uk, who's latest site http://www.mepsinterests.com looks like it's been nobbled. Technical difficulties my arse.
Perhaps we should ask India to invade us too?
Dave
Here in .uk we have a character known as Benjy "The Binman" Pell, who's career is built on rummaging through the rubbish bins of the rich and famous (and more productively, those of their lawyers and agents) and selling stuff to newspapers.
Unfortunately in the Real World, many people who should know better can't even "delete" paper documents, let alone electronic ones. Whether ot not it's admissible in court, some of the stuff he comes up with can be very damaging to people's careers. A legal limitation would be nice, but there's no substitute for educating people about the value and persistence of information and the need to consider this.
Dave
I guess I didn't play for long enough then :-) My old computer got so bogged down once you filled up the whole map that it was a little unplayable (and there's only so long that you can carry on playing - I belive I used to have a life or something back then...)
Am I the only one who was disappointed with the arco's in Sim City 2000? The docs hinted that they may do something interesting, but they never seemed to - I was kind of hoping that the Launch Arco would, well, launch. Or something.
D
ISTR that radium was considered *the* thing to include in health drinks in the 1920's or so.
As an electrical engineer I am quite happy to let the rest of you run the safety experiments on your own brains; that is an experiment I decline to participate in.
That's your choice. However, we all take many risks in life, although most people don't generally appreciate the concept of risk, mainly because large numbers like 1:1000000 are hard to comprehend (and because the understanding of maths in the general populace is poor, but I digress).
Moderate use of a mobile (preferably with a headset) is a risk that I do personally take, given that I already happily get in my car and drive on a regular basis - even excluding my personal driving style, there is a significant, proven, risk associated with that activity - hence my annual £1000+ insurance bill :-(
A Biochemist friend of mine also cheerfully assures me that your genetic inheritance also plays a key role. Some people are simply more susceptible to these things, others less. Much as we wish to exercise control over our own mortality, we don't always get to choose...