We're going to need every drop of it to invade all the other oil producing nations so we'll have even more oil. All sarcasm aside, this is a really going to be a set back to the American economy in the long run.
While we are spending our time and money pulling oil out of the ground we are not going to be making any effort to develop alternatives, while the rest of the world (except China) is actually going to work on developing alternative energies.
At some point we need to address the question of whether it's more important to lower the price of gas at the pump or take measures to develop more sustainable alternatives while we still have some oil to fall back onto. Alternatives to oil are not limited to the fuel pump, but all applications of oil. And plastic is going to be a hard one to replace.
Ultimately you are responsible for your own actions. You might get a lawyer to try and convince people otherwise, but you are still the one who has to bear the burden of your decisions.
This this through a little bit. If the bank is responsible for your security than before you can do on-line banking with them, they have to validate the security of your machine In order to do that they will need sufficient access to your machine to determine the following:
Current OS installed (Windows, OSX, Linux).
Current patch level of OS.
Current Anti-Virus software installed, including patch level and fingerprint libraries.
Determination of all installed user software to assess their security levels.
Scan for Adware/Spyware.
Access to all Security level settings, user file permissions, firewall ports.
And you will have to disclose any network architecture in the event you have a NAT.
And after all of that, if there are any currently active and unpatched security issues with this list they will have to unilaterally deny you access to your banking until the vendor can provide you with a patch.
That means you probably won't be able to do any online banking most of the time that you have access to online banking because you have just made the bank liable for security. Something that cannot be maintained on the internet with Windows (as a minimum).
You've also just handed your bank complete access to every detail of your computer, lifestyle, and usage patterns.
No one has the technology to keep banking 100% safe under any conditions. Acting as an internet idiot I have no doubt that I can circumvent the best you can offer by simply letting my computer get powned by every URL that shows up in my spam.
I hope it is a warning shot to consumers. They really need to start understanding that they are ultimately responsible for the security of their behaviour.
How do you bridge the gap between commerce and on-line banking when you have limited access to the internet? By limited I also mean compatibility with the commerce site designs and URL's that you've excluded by this approach.
Might sound good, but it's not practicaly. Neither is banning on-line banking, but that's going to be effective too.
Not so cut and dried as that. The economy is in pretty bad shape and in order to prevent a major depression in the US and potentially the world, all the politicians are aware that they have to ensure that the economy has some positive momentum not only for their re-election but for the country as a whole.
This started long before the House Market fell apart. This started back when China opened it's doors for economic growth. All the transferable bottom income jobs moved out of the US, leaving us with skilled labor, hi-tech, business management, and hair dressers (you can't out-source a haircut just yet.). But we as a nation failed to recognize that most people who is somewhere south of $50,000 a year is in jeopardy of permanently loosing there job same as the telegraph operator. The probability of job loss is inversely proportional to the salary.
As these jobs left the US, the economy naturally has to decline because there is less work and less salary being generated and so less economic momentum. But most people who lost their jobs didn't advance their capabilities into a new position, they just got another job of the same type. And that left them extremely vulnerable.
The jobs that remained in the US at the low end of the economic scale either can't be out-sourced (service jobs) or are not competing on a global scale (niche market in US) or in some way local to the US.
Now we introduce the terrorists and confidence declines. Economic momentum is like collecting Yu-Gi-Oh cards. They are valuable and long as people believe they are. But once confidence dropped there started a ripple effect of companies decreasing their orders and consumers canceling or lessening their non-vital services (hair dressers, manicures, lawn service, computer upgrades).
And now we starting hitting the housing market because people who expected a raise/advance in career didn't get it and through salary compression they started to lose the ability to fund their loans. And with the ARM coming due, they were wiped out.
Add to that the fact that most of the people who are losing their homes are not from a generation where 3% growth in a company is considered pretty decent. 1990 to 2001 represents a time of unusual economic growth and when we can no longer sustain 10-50% growth but only 5% it's considered a failure. But from 1900 to 1980 5% would have been considered good to great. The people who were moving into the McMansions had no clue how the world economy has historically operated and made a critical mistake. Personally I think it's their own fault and to bail them out is a crime in itself. But we have to keep the economic momentum.
With outsourcing, global competition, and the transfer of our lower work forces to other skills, we as a nation will be hard pressed to realize 5% growth over a continuous basis for some years to come.
And with that, we are very careful of the economic impacts we have with political decisions. Changing the economy by 3% against a nominal growth of 15% is nothing, but now we are risking 3% +/- 3% and that's too close to the edge. It's going to be a very difficult 20 years.
Well, this is actually great news. The continued use/abuse of people playing the Terrorist Card will have the same net effect as those that keep playing the Race Card or try to allegate that someone is playing the Race Card. It serves to raise a red flag of doubt on the speaker from that point forward. I guess it's a Chicken Little or Crying Wolf thing.
Here in Detroit we have a really swell mayor who decided to use the N-Word in his televised speech for dramatic effect of his plight after being found allegedly involved in perjury, obstruction of justice and is still under possible investigation for murder except that the police chief hasn't actually acted on any of over 2000 tips. But hey, who's counting.
The effect was to deliver a message that he is reaching so far for dramatic effect that there really must be something wrong with his defense of his performance. And now he's got far fewer supporters than he did a month ago.
Eventually, if not here, we will see the same erosion of the T-Word and it's political impact. Of course it will still take a generation to regain our freedoms that so many people admire. Good job Bush, way to really let the terrorist bitch slap the American Dream and you helped.
In that case whey don't they just email everyone their username/password for a website and let us fill it in ourselves. And take the ones that can't do it and have a manual cencus performance on the remaining residents. You'll probably end up with a pretty good correlation to the residents IQ or education at the same time.
Sure, these things get expensive. I'm sure that during the time that Harris made the bid, to the time now, there have been no additional requirements made upon the system design or implementation.
I have no doubt that OOXML has a lot more features than ODF does. However, I suspect that there are a lot of features that are Microsoft specific based on the rhetoric I've heard about OOXML tainting from that interest.
That said, would it make more sense to back out all the contested elements of the OOXML and approve a version of the specification that is complete within itself although many might consider it inadequate for the advanced feature sets of currently released software, Microsoft and ODF alike? At this way we have a document to put into use and start learning from and use those lessons to develop the next release of the document. Sounds to me like a release early & release often Agile approach. But it should work for Standard Documents as well.
At the very least, they are guilty of both being really shitty IT people and obstruction of justice in a Federal Investigation. Considering the case deals with cases of national security and defense, this can be extended to charges of treason against the people who supported the policies of having the email destroyed. And since the President is ultimately responsible for what goes on in his house, he's ultimately responsible for the treasonist acts therein.
You'd think the Federal Court system would have figured out by now that they are being played as the Presidents Bitch. I wonder how many decades it will be IF we are ever able to recover our national integrity. These times may be compared to McCarthyism and the Red Scare at the height of the Cold War.
It isn't any different. That's is point. And I agree with him completely.
I also think that Safari is showing how Apple has the full potential (partially demonstrated) to start becoming the next Microsoft in the bad sense. Now that they are experiencing the fastest growth of any significant company in the consumer IT world, they are making these assumptions that they will provide what is best for us. And that really pisses me off.
I've been using Mozilla/Thunderbird since the time when they were 0.x releases that were rather iffy. I remember running machines with their auto testing suite for hours just to gather crash data. I think these are far superior products and we would all benefit if the big companies could assume there may be a better product.
Rather than complain about it, perhaps Apple and Mozilla could agree on a standard set of API's between the two such that Apple, instead of insisting on Safari, can insist that your machine must have a Standardized browser application and failing that, use Safari. The idea is that whenever they have a call for a browser activity, rather than launching Safari inside iTunes, they can refactor the application so that you can use either Safari, Mozilla, or whomever makes the grade so that you can have the functionality you need.
I think the OS people need to start taking lessons from the Web 2.0 world. It's all about standardizing the interfaces such that you can start combining web sites as web services and build upon the internet as a whole into a larger application environment. The OS that is able to successfully control yet open it's interfaces for others to utilize will be the winning OS.
I know this is the point where I should mention Linux but they are actually running into the same problem that Windows has and some that no one has, which will inhibit their overall acceptance.
They are trying to run on all hardware at once, which is damn near impossible without a lot of help from the hardware manufacturers. But the hardware manufacturers don't support that idea very well. Some day it would be nice if they focused on supported specific hardware sets, like AMD + ATI +.. other specific brands or lines of hardware and just screw the rest. That's what Apple did and it's a success. That's also what Sun, HP, IBM do on their servers. The successful companies do not try to support everything that people can think of, they support what it makes sense to support. There is a business process to keep themselves sane.
Linux has a wide variety of interfaces, many of them based on trying to be like Windows. Well, Windows already did that design and it's actually quite lame. Apple digressed from that GUI and no one died from it. A lot of people like it. I think it's safe to digress from Windows and rethink the interface to the more practical solution. People have been calling for this for years, but some of them have been going way to far into the weeds. Here's a thought: WindowMaker and XFCE are similar, small, fast, functional, and do a good job of balancing resource load (boo KDE) and ease of use/modification (boo Gnome). Focus on finding the qualities that make sense and what you need. Remember, 60% of the features developed are never used, so take the approach of Agile and develop what you must have first and you probably won't need the rest.
These are the two most fundamental shortcoming that Linux has today. Perhaps it's not Linux, but the distros that Linux is built upon, but I don't install from source code so as a user I see them (Linux/Distro) as being one in the same.
Apple should be thinking about opening their interfaces just a little bit so that others can equally use their platform (see Google API's for examples of how this works as a business solution) rather than trying to keep everything there. It's this whole Honey/Vinegar problem that Windows has. Apple, with type of action, is demonstrating the same bad behaviour.
I wonder if anyone outside of China will have enough balls to stand up and say, "Hey China, you're all a bunch of ass-hats" with sufficient clarity and force that they (China) is put in a position where red-faced or not, they have to account for their actions.
This is another fine example of a situation where the USA and UN will do absolutely nothing to affect improving human rights in a nation with complete disregard for human rights unless doing so has some advantage to those parties. We ignore Darfur because no one gives a crap about a bunch of sand and we ignore China because everyone is afraid they'll miss the big growing economy boat. So if I get this right, if I have a positive growth economy I can do anything I want to?
I guess now is a good time to play the Hitler card and finish this thread. If Hitler had a global economy in Germany with 10-15% growth he could have wiped out the Jews with impunity and we would almost celebrate his actions for fear of being minimized in Germanys economic growth schema. Yeah, it's an extremist viewpoint and I've pissed off every German and Jew on this list. But China is rationalizing the process of removing an entire religious culture from their country through forceful means and no one will call them out on it. And how is this different from Crystal Night in November 1938? But then no one called Hitler out on that one either.
I supposed I could be a little more modern and play the Saddam Card and mention the chemical warfare attacks on the Kurds, there's a shitload of oil in it for whomever holds the territory. But then we did manage to invade that country and declare all oil production to be managed by US interests.
I clicked the Reply to This related to your storey. I wonder if I will be investigated by the FBI because the views you express are inconsistent with the views of the Republican message.
We are fast approaching an era where the internet is being used against us here to the same effect that we read about Chinese Socialist government using information to control their subjects. If I click a link, without knowing the contents, I can be given just cause for search and seizure. Contract this with the current laws and what happens when you hit a drug house.
12 agents bust into a known drug house and find seven guys sitting around a couple rooms, some under the influence of something and all of them withing plain view of a variety of illegal contraband. What do they tell the agents? "I just stopped by to use the phone." Agents can't really do anything. No one claims to have intentionally and purposefully entered the house.
But on the internet if I hit a link that takes me to an illegal site I can't claim the same type of reasoning.
Now before you start identifying the differences between drug houses and kiddie porn links let me ask you this: How difficult is it really to identify a drug house in real life? How does this differ from someones ability to identify a kiddie porn link? I don't think the honey pot links are going to look like links to BBC news stories or slashdot stories. At least I would hope they aren't that obscure -- but it still leaves you in a more risky environment than walking down a row of houses, two of which are drug houses and the rest not.
But the difference in how these laws operate are evidence of what is happening with the legal system in our modern era. These drug houses are well protected under legal structures where someone has to be clearly culpable for a crime. Thanks to the 60's and 70's for this one. Internet crimes have not been refined to such a point where there is any protection for the potential criminals.
Add to this the fact that I know people from my work are now reading my blog entries online and I'm at the point where the internet is turning into a real piece of crap for all but a very few uses.
Of course, we all know that if I really wanted to do something illegal I would turn off my cell phone, because they are used to track you without a warrant, and do it in the real world and stay the hell off the internet or go to Russia and do it there.
I don't say its bad, I say it's bad to simply have a one-way study group where someone gives all the answers and someone else just writes them down. If all you do is copy down answers for your EE class this semester then next semester you will fail your EE class.
But to just post all the answers on the wall so everyone can copy them down and go to the bar isn't good for academia, you, your EE class, or anyone else but the bar.
If you compare the languages, Objective C and Java, odds are that Java really can't bring anything to the table that is going to make it stand out from the crowd. Java works if Java can stay in memory, or be the entire application interface so it's always in memory, that's how is can make a decent application for phones -- be the application. That isn't the case here. Apple has their own OS that they are running and it's pretty good. They won't get rid of it. So now you are going to run two on tandem. Which will be very bad for Apple.
JVM based widgets will suck ass and everyone will want to blame Apple for their shitty phone that doesn't run Java apps really fast. Well, it wasn't designed to. But there are like a million little programmers running around saying "Go Java" and banging out every kind of widget they can think of anyways. And still people will blame Apple for making a shitty iPhone because Java widgets don't run fast. Recall that it still isn't designed to do that.
I have a very strong dislike for Java because of what Sun did with it. They lowered the entry barrier to Java by making is really easy for someone to get a certification in a week and then start programming at a job. Problem is you end up with a lot of programmers who are stupid shits and can't code their way out of a paper bag. The really amazing programmers still exist, but they've been diluted by the thousands of overnight contractors that have no experience.
So the net effect is that you end up with a lot of bad programmers making a lot of bad programs on a code base that is very sub-optimal for the applications and platform that they are going to be developing. And even the really good programmers are going to struggle because it's not a native Java machine and they'll have to fight against that one.
I guess I forgot to say, I don't think that there is any problem with what Apple is doing with their SDK and their product development model. They have a different approach to their products. They release what they can and need to in order to ensure functionality. This is contrary to Windows and others who release crap for everything all on the same day and then have a lot of people pissed off with things not working. It is the quality of their products that has been a corner stone in their success in the market.
Opening up the iPhone like this is going to mess that their perception of quality in the market and that is probably one of their most valuable selling points.
I might lose mod points on this, but can you please explain how swearing and freedom of speech are tied together. I don't think they are limiting what opinions you are permitted to express, rather that you chose a more civil tongue to do it in.
And to accuse someone of a subversive or alternative purpose will generally result in you losing the argument because you come off sounding like an immature paranoid. Rather, it's more valuable to raise sufficient awareness that people consider the protection against such abuse a requirement. And using the historical reasons for breaking up the FBI, Army, Police is a good starting point. But if they can address the abuse, then they get to proceed.
This is approaching cheating. You have a historical record of the questions and eventually direct answers to the homework questions. Remember, these questions generally come from books which are used over and over. So by the third semester these books are going to be pretty well answered on the internet.
What makes this different is that most people work out the problem with their peers and then move on, not keeping the answers out on the table for the next group of students. It's collaborative problem solving, not collaborative problem/answer posting. The real damage can be that no one learns anything other than how to sign-up to Facebook and troll for answers.
Volatile methods should be considered acceptable: IM, IRC, Email (without archives). These promote collaboration without promoting copy/paste.
I personally did very little with collaborative study groups because I found too often I was shelling out answers to people who were just writing stuff down and never returning any value to the group or me personally. As such, I saw no value to my academic career in continuing this practice. I would not advocate anyone seriously invest as this being the only study means, you just don't learn that much, like problem solving.
Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.
Information Delivery are websites where you are seeking some kind of information or news that you desire in your daily life. Examples of this are google, amazon, slashdot, ebay, bbc, csmonitor.com for most. This also includes sites for mysql, apache, postgresql, perl/cpan. These are all sites that, when you visit you often have a very specific purpose and end goal in mind.
Entertainment Delivery are sites that offer no hard end goal other than entertainment and can be represented by youtube, ask a ninja, webkinz, and other online game sites. On these sites, the web content is the entertainment and people would have more expectations of lots of flash load on their PC.
But there seems to be a lot of manufacturers and resale sites that are trying to do both at the same time and for most, they do an amazingly bad job without any real thought of delivering informational content about their products but just wowing the crap out of some board members. I tried to buy some Serengeti sunglasses because my experience has been that they are the best I've ever owned. But their website is one of the fattest and annoying places I've been to in years. And they don't even properly identify how to purchase their glasses. Had I been a marginal customer I would have walked a long time ago. In the past, I have walked from suppliers because their product catalog brought down my computer to a crawl and didn't do anything to provide me the information I needed.
Flash does not belong on Information Delivery websites.
I was in a rather lengthy conversation last week about the future of gaming on computers. Conclusion is that games are not going to survive long on computers for the primary reason that they are far too costly to support. The natural development is to move into highly specialized hardware and better manage the video requirements.
Here's the core of the problem: The video card becomes the single most expensive piece of hardware in a workstation chassis. Within six months I am buying games that marginally run on the equipment and at the end of the year I'm pretty much out. Even at the time of purchase, some video games won't run on the hardware. And gaming is the only segment of the software industry that is pushing against this hardware limitation. Office products, web browsers, email applications do not require this heavy hardware.
There is an increasing movement from desktop to a more distributed/mobile environment of notebooks and central workstations that act as servers for print, file, proxy applications. Notebooks are not built with 100W video cards. But notebooks are what you get when you go to college.
With the advent of PS3, Xbox360, Wii there are specialized pieces of hardware that are intended for gaming and have fixed hardware capabilities. These are the new gaming environments that people are moving into. The issue now is for them to solve how to do MMORPG and similar game constructs under this hardware platform. But by moving game development into this environment there is zero work they have to do in order to get the hardware compatability solved like they do with computers. It's a fixed environment.
I think part of the point, if not most of it, has been missed through limited explanation. I think there is some potential here and some added advantages. What if you had a Mock Plane in the waiting area which had all the seats in specific order layed out on the carpet? That has the advantage of lots of access points because there are no walls like planes so getting into that seating arrangement would be trivial. Moving from that seating area to the actual plane would consist of only the ticket check.
The added advantage would be able to get some idea ahead of time of how your trip is going to be. If you are sitting in the middle row of a group of college cheerleaders you might want to skip off to the bathroom to freshen up a little. If you are sitting next to the classic 300 pound salesman you might want to skip off to the bathroom/bar and medicate yourself so you don't have to suffer as much.
But seriously, that would accommodate a large part of the problems with people who arrive at the last minute or have heavy luggage that they can't lift. At least there is a chance of seeing it ahead of time. As for the guy who arrives late -- put him dead last in the boarding process if his seat has passed. But if he can still stage in the seating area in the terminal, then he's not late.
It would be preferred that the telcos just be the bit providers that we want them to be.
But as a business model, they will probably try to move in the direction that was originally layed out by AOL over a decade ago. AOL was a portal service that happened to include access to the internet. Prior to that they were just a really big BBS.
What he's advocating here is a return to the BBS system because it is a more captivated audience. Like buying food in an airport, everything is a premium.
I just hope someone is smart enough to try to other extreme of just providing a wire in your house and an email gateway. I'll take my own email delivery if you don't mind. My ISP can't filter spam to save their lives.
Good point. I generally just keep applications up and move to a new desktop when I need the real estate.
This is a Microsoft solution for Microsoft software design.
Please don't put it in my distro. If I use something large, like OO, I don't mind the start up time because once it's up, I can just leave it up all day long.
It seems all they are doing is using P2P as a cheap alternative to creating their own distributed hosting service. How is this different than using the Squid cache servers to do the same thing? Or for that matter -- how expensive is it really going to be to run 100 servers to simply act as distribution points?
I don't see the benefit of going with P2P versus going with something else. P2P has an awful lot of crap on it: porn, virus, spam, bots. Somewhat useless for a real network. I gave up on it years ago because it took forever to actually find anything and then it was difficult to even retrieve.
Slashdot Mirror
You might have made a better point if you weren't such a dingus about it.
And they absolutely do not have a fixed three percent profit margin. It's varied.
As for the government taxes, it's probably used for something pretty stupid.
Well of course we should use it.
We're going to need every drop of it to invade all the other oil producing nations so we'll have even more oil. All sarcasm aside, this is a really going to be a set back to the American economy in the long run.
While we are spending our time and money pulling oil out of the ground we are not going to be making any effort to develop alternatives, while the rest of the world (except China) is actually going to work on developing alternative energies.
At some point we need to address the question of whether it's more important to lower the price of gas at the pump or take measures to develop more sustainable alternatives while we still have some oil to fall back onto. Alternatives to oil are not limited to the fuel pump, but all applications of oil. And plastic is going to be a hard one to replace.
Ultimately you are responsible for your own actions. You might get a lawyer to try and convince people otherwise, but you are still the one who has to bear the burden of your decisions.
This this through a little bit. If the bank is responsible for your security than before you can do on-line banking with them, they have to validate the security of your machine In order to do that they will need sufficient access to your machine to determine the following:
- Current OS installed (Windows, OSX, Linux).
- Current patch level of OS.
- Current Anti-Virus software installed, including patch level and fingerprint libraries.
- Determination of all installed user software to assess their security levels.
- Scan for Adware/Spyware.
- Access to all Security level settings, user file permissions, firewall ports.
- And you will have to disclose any network architecture in the event you have a NAT.
And after all of that, if there are any currently active and unpatched security issues with this list they will have to unilaterally deny you access to your banking until the vendor can provide you with a patch.That means you probably won't be able to do any online banking most of the time that you have access to online banking because you have just made the bank liable for security. Something that cannot be maintained on the internet with Windows (as a minimum).
You've also just handed your bank complete access to every detail of your computer, lifestyle, and usage patterns.
No one has the technology to keep banking 100% safe under any conditions. Acting as an internet idiot I have no doubt that I can circumvent the best you can offer by simply letting my computer get powned by every URL that shows up in my spam.
I hope it is a warning shot to consumers. They really need to start understanding that they are ultimately responsible for the security of their behaviour.
That's rather near-sited of you.
How do you bridge the gap between commerce and on-line banking when you have limited access to the internet? By limited I also mean compatibility with the commerce site designs and URL's that you've excluded by this approach.
Might sound good, but it's not practicaly. Neither is banning on-line banking, but that's going to be effective too.
Not so cut and dried as that. The economy is in pretty bad shape and in order to prevent a major depression in the US and potentially the world, all the politicians are aware that they have to ensure that the economy has some positive momentum not only for their re-election but for the country as a whole.
This started long before the House Market fell apart. This started back when China opened it's doors for economic growth. All the transferable bottom income jobs moved out of the US, leaving us with skilled labor, hi-tech, business management, and hair dressers (you can't out-source a haircut just yet.). But we as a nation failed to recognize that most people who is somewhere south of $50,000 a year is in jeopardy of permanently loosing there job same as the telegraph operator. The probability of job loss is inversely proportional to the salary.
As these jobs left the US, the economy naturally has to decline because there is less work and less salary being generated and so less economic momentum. But most people who lost their jobs didn't advance their capabilities into a new position, they just got another job of the same type. And that left them extremely vulnerable.
The jobs that remained in the US at the low end of the economic scale either can't be out-sourced (service jobs) or are not competing on a global scale (niche market in US) or in some way local to the US.
Now we introduce the terrorists and confidence declines. Economic momentum is like collecting Yu-Gi-Oh cards. They are valuable and long as people believe they are. But once confidence dropped there started a ripple effect of companies decreasing their orders and consumers canceling or lessening their non-vital services (hair dressers, manicures, lawn service, computer upgrades).
And now we starting hitting the housing market because people who expected a raise/advance in career didn't get it and through salary compression they started to lose the ability to fund their loans. And with the ARM coming due, they were wiped out.
Add to that the fact that most of the people who are losing their homes are not from a generation where 3% growth in a company is considered pretty decent. 1990 to 2001 represents a time of unusual economic growth and when we can no longer sustain 10-50% growth but only 5% it's considered a failure. But from 1900 to 1980 5% would have been considered good to great. The people who were moving into the McMansions had no clue how the world economy has historically operated and made a critical mistake. Personally I think it's their own fault and to bail them out is a crime in itself. But we have to keep the economic momentum.
With outsourcing, global competition, and the transfer of our lower work forces to other skills, we as a nation will be hard pressed to realize 5% growth over a continuous basis for some years to come.
And with that, we are very careful of the economic impacts we have with political decisions. Changing the economy by 3% against a nominal growth of 15% is nothing, but now we are risking 3% +/- 3% and that's too close to the edge. It's going to be a very difficult 20 years.
Well, this is actually great news. The continued use/abuse of people playing the Terrorist Card will have the same net effect as those that keep playing the Race Card or try to allegate that someone is playing the Race Card. It serves to raise a red flag of doubt on the speaker from that point forward. I guess it's a Chicken Little or Crying Wolf thing.
Here in Detroit we have a really swell mayor who decided to use the N-Word in his televised speech for dramatic effect of his plight after being found allegedly involved in perjury, obstruction of justice and is still under possible investigation for murder except that the police chief hasn't actually acted on any of over 2000 tips. But hey, who's counting.
The effect was to deliver a message that he is reaching so far for dramatic effect that there really must be something wrong with his defense of his performance. And now he's got far fewer supporters than he did a month ago.
Eventually, if not here, we will see the same erosion of the T-Word and it's political impact. Of course it will still take a generation to regain our freedoms that so many people admire. Good job Bush, way to really let the terrorist bitch slap the American Dream and you helped.
In that case whey don't they just email everyone their username/password for a website and let us fill it in ourselves. And take the ones that can't do it and have a manual cencus performance on the remaining residents. You'll probably end up with a pretty good correlation to the residents IQ or education at the same time.
Sure, these things get expensive. I'm sure that during the time that Harris made the bid, to the time now, there have been no additional requirements made upon the system design or implementation.
I have no doubt that OOXML has a lot more features than ODF does. However, I suspect that there are a lot of features that are Microsoft specific based on the rhetoric I've heard about OOXML tainting from that interest.
That said, would it make more sense to back out all the contested elements of the OOXML and approve a version of the specification that is complete within itself although many might consider it inadequate for the advanced feature sets of currently released software, Microsoft and ODF alike? At this way we have a document to put into use and start learning from and use those lessons to develop the next release of the document. Sounds to me like a release early & release often Agile approach. But it should work for Standard Documents as well.
Access is not a database. Its a toy.
At the very least, they are guilty of both being really shitty IT people and obstruction of justice in a Federal Investigation. Considering the case deals with cases of national security and defense, this can be extended to charges of treason against the people who supported the policies of having the email destroyed. And since the President is ultimately responsible for what goes on in his house, he's ultimately responsible for the treasonist acts therein.
You'd think the Federal Court system would have figured out by now that they are being played as the Presidents Bitch. I wonder how many decades it will be IF we are ever able to recover our national integrity. These times may be compared to McCarthyism and the Red Scare at the height of the Cold War.
It isn't any different. That's is point. And I agree with him completely.
I also think that Safari is showing how Apple has the full potential (partially demonstrated) to start becoming the next Microsoft in the bad sense. Now that they are experiencing the fastest growth of any significant company in the consumer IT world, they are making these assumptions that they will provide what is best for us. And that really pisses me off.
I've been using Mozilla/Thunderbird since the time when they were 0.x releases that were rather iffy. I remember running machines with their auto testing suite for hours just to gather crash data. I think these are far superior products and we would all benefit if the big companies could assume there may be a better product.
Rather than complain about it, perhaps Apple and Mozilla could agree on a standard set of API's between the two such that Apple, instead of insisting on Safari, can insist that your machine must have a Standardized browser application and failing that, use Safari. The idea is that whenever they have a call for a browser activity, rather than launching Safari inside iTunes, they can refactor the application so that you can use either Safari, Mozilla, or whomever makes the grade so that you can have the functionality you need.
I think the OS people need to start taking lessons from the Web 2.0 world. It's all about standardizing the interfaces such that you can start combining web sites as web services and build upon the internet as a whole into a larger application environment. The OS that is able to successfully control yet open it's interfaces for others to utilize will be the winning OS.
I know this is the point where I should mention Linux but they are actually running into the same problem that Windows has and some that no one has, which will inhibit their overall acceptance.
They are trying to run on all hardware at once, which is damn near impossible without a lot of help from the hardware manufacturers. But the hardware manufacturers don't support that idea very well. Some day it would be nice if they focused on supported specific hardware sets, like AMD + ATI + .. other specific brands or lines of hardware and just screw the rest. That's what Apple did and it's a success. That's also what Sun, HP, IBM do on their servers. The successful companies do not try to support everything that people can think of, they support what it makes sense to support. There is a business process to keep themselves sane.
Linux has a wide variety of interfaces, many of them based on trying to be like Windows. Well, Windows already did that design and it's actually quite lame. Apple digressed from that GUI and no one died from it. A lot of people like it. I think it's safe to digress from Windows and rethink the interface to the more practical solution. People have been calling for this for years, but some of them have been going way to far into the weeds. Here's a thought: WindowMaker and XFCE are similar, small, fast, functional, and do a good job of balancing resource load (boo KDE) and ease of use/modification (boo Gnome). Focus on finding the qualities that make sense and what you need. Remember, 60% of the features developed are never used, so take the approach of Agile and develop what you must have first and you probably won't need the rest.
These are the two most fundamental shortcoming that Linux has today. Perhaps it's not Linux, but the distros that Linux is built upon, but I don't install from source code so as a user I see them (Linux/Distro) as being one in the same.
Apple should be thinking about opening their interfaces just a little bit so that others can equally use their platform (see Google API's for examples of how this works as a business solution) rather than trying to keep everything there. It's this whole Honey/Vinegar problem that Windows has. Apple, with type of action, is demonstrating the same bad behaviour.
I wonder if anyone outside of China will have enough balls to stand up and say, "Hey China, you're all a bunch of ass-hats" with sufficient clarity and force that they (China) is put in a position where red-faced or not, they have to account for their actions.
This is another fine example of a situation where the USA and UN will do absolutely nothing to affect improving human rights in a nation with complete disregard for human rights unless doing so has some advantage to those parties. We ignore Darfur because no one gives a crap about a bunch of sand and we ignore China because everyone is afraid they'll miss the big growing economy boat. So if I get this right, if I have a positive growth economy I can do anything I want to?
I guess now is a good time to play the Hitler card and finish this thread. If Hitler had a global economy in Germany with 10-15% growth he could have wiped out the Jews with impunity and we would almost celebrate his actions for fear of being minimized in Germanys economic growth schema. Yeah, it's an extremist viewpoint and I've pissed off every German and Jew on this list. But China is rationalizing the process of removing an entire religious culture from their country through forceful means and no one will call them out on it. And how is this different from Crystal Night in November 1938? But then no one called Hitler out on that one either.
I supposed I could be a little more modern and play the Saddam Card and mention the chemical warfare attacks on the Kurds, there's a shitload of oil in it for whomever holds the territory. But then we did manage to invade that country and declare all oil production to be managed by US interests.
I clicked the Reply to This related to your storey. I wonder if I will be investigated by the FBI because the views you express are inconsistent with the views of the Republican message.
We are fast approaching an era where the internet is being used against us here to the same effect that we read about Chinese Socialist government using information to control their subjects. If I click a link, without knowing the contents, I can be given just cause for search and seizure. Contract this with the current laws and what happens when you hit a drug house.
12 agents bust into a known drug house and find seven guys sitting around a couple rooms, some under the influence of something and all of them withing plain view of a variety of illegal contraband. What do they tell the agents? "I just stopped by to use the phone." Agents can't really do anything. No one claims to have intentionally and purposefully entered the house.
But on the internet if I hit a link that takes me to an illegal site I can't claim the same type of reasoning.
Now before you start identifying the differences between drug houses and kiddie porn links let me ask you this: How difficult is it really to identify a drug house in real life? How does this differ from someones ability to identify a kiddie porn link? I don't think the honey pot links are going to look like links to BBC news stories or slashdot stories. At least I would hope they aren't that obscure -- but it still leaves you in a more risky environment than walking down a row of houses, two of which are drug houses and the rest not.
But the difference in how these laws operate are evidence of what is happening with the legal system in our modern era. These drug houses are well protected under legal structures where someone has to be clearly culpable for a crime. Thanks to the 60's and 70's for this one. Internet crimes have not been refined to such a point where there is any protection for the potential criminals.
Add to this the fact that I know people from my work are now reading my blog entries online and I'm at the point where the internet is turning into a real piece of crap for all but a very few uses.
Of course, we all know that if I really wanted to do something illegal I would turn off my cell phone, because they are used to track you without a warrant, and do it in the real world and stay the hell off the internet or go to Russia and do it there.
I don't say its bad, I say it's bad to simply have a one-way study group where someone gives all the answers and someone else just writes them down. If all you do is copy down answers for your EE class this semester then next semester you will fail your EE class.
But to just post all the answers on the wall so everyone can copy them down and go to the bar isn't good for academia, you, your EE class, or anyone else but the bar.
If you compare the languages, Objective C and Java, odds are that Java really can't bring anything to the table that is going to make it stand out from the crowd. Java works if Java can stay in memory, or be the entire application interface so it's always in memory, that's how is can make a decent application for phones -- be the application. That isn't the case here. Apple has their own OS that they are running and it's pretty good. They won't get rid of it. So now you are going to run two on tandem. Which will be very bad for Apple.
JVM based widgets will suck ass and everyone will want to blame Apple for their shitty phone that doesn't run Java apps really fast. Well, it wasn't designed to. But there are like a million little programmers running around saying "Go Java" and banging out every kind of widget they can think of anyways. And still people will blame Apple for making a shitty iPhone because Java widgets don't run fast. Recall that it still isn't designed to do that.
I have a very strong dislike for Java because of what Sun did with it. They lowered the entry barrier to Java by making is really easy for someone to get a certification in a week and then start programming at a job. Problem is you end up with a lot of programmers who are stupid shits and can't code their way out of a paper bag. The really amazing programmers still exist, but they've been diluted by the thousands of overnight contractors that have no experience.
So the net effect is that you end up with a lot of bad programmers making a lot of bad programs on a code base that is very sub-optimal for the applications and platform that they are going to be developing. And even the really good programmers are going to struggle because it's not a native Java machine and they'll have to fight against that one.
I guess I forgot to say, I don't think that there is any problem with what Apple is doing with their SDK and their product development model. They have a different approach to their products. They release what they can and need to in order to ensure functionality. This is contrary to Windows and others who release crap for everything all on the same day and then have a lot of people pissed off with things not working. It is the quality of their products that has been a corner stone in their success in the market.
Opening up the iPhone like this is going to mess that their perception of quality in the market and that is probably one of their most valuable selling points.
I might lose mod points on this, but can you please explain how swearing and freedom of speech are tied together. I don't think they are limiting what opinions you are permitted to express, rather that you chose a more civil tongue to do it in.
And to accuse someone of a subversive or alternative purpose will generally result in you losing the argument because you come off sounding like an immature paranoid. Rather, it's more valuable to raise sufficient awareness that people consider the protection against such abuse a requirement. And using the historical reasons for breaking up the FBI, Army, Police is a good starting point. But if they can address the abuse, then they get to proceed.
This is approaching cheating. You have a historical record of the questions and eventually direct answers to the homework questions. Remember, these questions generally come from books which are used over and over. So by the third semester these books are going to be pretty well answered on the internet.
What makes this different is that most people work out the problem with their peers and then move on, not keeping the answers out on the table for the next group of students. It's collaborative problem solving, not collaborative problem/answer posting. The real damage can be that no one learns anything other than how to sign-up to Facebook and troll for answers.
Volatile methods should be considered acceptable: IM, IRC, Email (without archives). These promote collaboration without promoting copy/paste.
I personally did very little with collaborative study groups because I found too often I was shelling out answers to people who were just writing stuff down and never returning any value to the group or me personally. As such, I saw no value to my academic career in continuing this practice. I would not advocate anyone seriously invest as this being the only study means, you just don't learn that much, like problem solving.
Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.
Information Delivery are websites where you are seeking some kind of information or news that you desire in your daily life. Examples of this are google, amazon, slashdot, ebay, bbc, csmonitor.com for most. This also includes sites for mysql, apache, postgresql, perl/cpan. These are all sites that, when you visit you often have a very specific purpose and end goal in mind.
Entertainment Delivery are sites that offer no hard end goal other than entertainment and can be represented by youtube, ask a ninja, webkinz, and other online game sites. On these sites, the web content is the entertainment and people would have more expectations of lots of flash load on their PC.
But there seems to be a lot of manufacturers and resale sites that are trying to do both at the same time and for most, they do an amazingly bad job without any real thought of delivering informational content about their products but just wowing the crap out of some board members. I tried to buy some Serengeti sunglasses because my experience has been that they are the best I've ever owned. But their website is one of the fattest and annoying places I've been to in years. And they don't even properly identify how to purchase their glasses. Had I been a marginal customer I would have walked a long time ago. In the past, I have walked from suppliers because their product catalog brought down my computer to a crawl and didn't do anything to provide me the information I needed.
Flash does not belong on Information Delivery websites.
I was in a rather lengthy conversation last week about the future of gaming on computers. Conclusion is that games are not going to survive long on computers for the primary reason that they are far too costly to support. The natural development is to move into highly specialized hardware and better manage the video requirements.
Here's the core of the problem: The video card becomes the single most expensive piece of hardware in a workstation chassis. Within six months I am buying games that marginally run on the equipment and at the end of the year I'm pretty much out. Even at the time of purchase, some video games won't run on the hardware. And gaming is the only segment of the software industry that is pushing against this hardware limitation. Office products, web browsers, email applications do not require this heavy hardware.
There is an increasing movement from desktop to a more distributed/mobile environment of notebooks and central workstations that act as servers for print, file, proxy applications. Notebooks are not built with 100W video cards. But notebooks are what you get when you go to college.
With the advent of PS3, Xbox360, Wii there are specialized pieces of hardware that are intended for gaming and have fixed hardware capabilities. These are the new gaming environments that people are moving into. The issue now is for them to solve how to do MMORPG and similar game constructs under this hardware platform. But by moving game development into this environment there is zero work they have to do in order to get the hardware compatability solved like they do with computers. It's a fixed environment.
I think part of the point, if not most of it, has been missed through limited explanation. I think there is some potential here and some added advantages. What if you had a Mock Plane in the waiting area which had all the seats in specific order layed out on the carpet? That has the advantage of lots of access points because there are no walls like planes so getting into that seating arrangement would be trivial. Moving from that seating area to the actual plane would consist of only the ticket check.
The added advantage would be able to get some idea ahead of time of how your trip is going to be. If you are sitting in the middle row of a group of college cheerleaders you might want to skip off to the bathroom to freshen up a little. If you are sitting next to the classic 300 pound salesman you might want to skip off to the bathroom/bar and medicate yourself so you don't have to suffer as much.
But seriously, that would accommodate a large part of the problems with people who arrive at the last minute or have heavy luggage that they can't lift. At least there is a chance of seeing it ahead of time. As for the guy who arrives late -- put him dead last in the boarding process if his seat has passed. But if he can still stage in the seating area in the terminal, then he's not late.
It would be preferred that the telcos just be the bit providers that we want them to be.
But as a business model, they will probably try to move in the direction that was originally layed out by AOL over a decade ago. AOL was a portal service that happened to include access to the internet. Prior to that they were just a really big BBS.
What he's advocating here is a return to the BBS system because it is a more captivated audience. Like buying food in an airport, everything is a premium.
I just hope someone is smart enough to try to other extreme of just providing a wire in your house and an email gateway. I'll take my own email delivery if you don't mind. My ISP can't filter spam to save their lives.
That's what Microsoft said, for 12 years they were testing API's...
Good point. I generally just keep applications up and move to a new desktop when I need the real estate.
This is a Microsoft solution for Microsoft software design.
Please don't put it in my distro. If I use something large, like OO, I don't mind the start up time because once it's up, I can just leave it up all day long.
It seems all they are doing is using P2P as a cheap alternative to creating their own distributed hosting service. How is this different than using the Squid cache servers to do the same thing? Or for that matter -- how expensive is it really going to be to run 100 servers to simply act as distribution points?
I don't see the benefit of going with P2P versus going with something else. P2P has an awful lot of crap on it: porn, virus, spam, bots. Somewhat useless for a real network. I gave up on it years ago because it took forever to actually find anything and then it was difficult to even retrieve.
For me, there's not much point to this story. With the statement that RedHat is a minority of FOSS examples it becomes pretty clear that he either: