Nonsense, they don't care about the individual, they care about statistically significant shifts in the group.
Think about it, if burgundy carpets makes ten percent of the customers purchase a more expensive salad, and with no identifiable negatives, then it makes sense to install burgundy carpets if they want to shift more of these salads. It doesn't matter that it has no effect on 90% of the customers - indeed they would be well aware that it has no effect on them.
Stores run promotions all the time that are aimed at shifting a tiny proportion of their customers to a more expensive product. It doesn't work for the majority, but increasing your profit per customer for even a small proportion makes sense if you can do it without detriment to the majority of your customer base.
Similarly, while you may guess at why people made a choice, there's no need to know exactly why, just that you can record a statistically significant shift in their patters when you change one stimuli.
So you don't mind the government saying gas will now be $8 a gallon as in Europe to cover the impact on the environment, but you do mind the government saying that the average fuel consumption across a range of new vehicles must improve?
Can you cite an ordinance to back that up? Certainly state law permits their use in snow.
625 ILCS 5, Section 12-401 Nothing in this Section shall be deemed to prohibit the use of tire chains of reasonable proportion upon any vehicle when required for safety because of snow, ice or other conditions tending to cause a vehicle to skid.
It says you can only use studded tires between 1st November and 15 April and can use snow chains at any time when there is snow or ice on the road or in the immediate vicinity.
mostly - as in not all. As in there are other things too. As in, well as in 'mostly'.
Sure there are security updates, but to find out if they're a) good or b) effective will take some time.
If we're lucky, we will see some dramatic improvement in the number of programs available that will run correctly under a limited user account. If the majority of windows programs had run effectively under limited user accounts, many many of the problems windows has faced could have been alleviated.
My primary desktops run SUSE and Ubuntu, but I have a new laptop that runs Vista and to be honest I don't see what the fuss is about.
Windows 2k used more resources than windows 98 and offered a host of new features. Windows XP used more resources than win2k but was mostly eye candy.
Vista looks to me like it's mostly eye candy. Some of the UI changes take some getting used to, but so does upgrading gnome or kde.
I don't think vista is a compelling reason to upgrade, but new machines will run it because that's what MS sell, and the transition will happen slowly, but it will still happen. I certainly don't think it's going to become another Windows ME - at least Microsoft seem to have learned that lesson.
From an open source perspective it's certainly a good thing MS haven't come up with anything terribly new and innovative. If they had, it would almost certainly be patented and have become another reason for folk not switching to the linux desktop.
While it may still be fair use to copy your DVD to another storage device, the trouble is the disk is normally encrypted. So if you live somewhere covered by the DMCA you may be entitled to move your movie to another format, but only if you have permission to circumvent the encryption for that purpose, hence Jobs can make $$$ selling you what is already yours.
I guess if you don't like it, you shouldn't blame Jobs who's trying to exploit a commercial opportunity, but rather contact your lawmaker and explain in layman's terms why this is messed up.
So your argument is that you're better off *not* knowing?
I guess you hit reply before engaging your eyes... or did you just ignore where in not one, but two posts, I supported making the data readily available.
You seem to agree that support should be available for those that need it, but others should have the data freely available. The trouble is most folk wouldn't know they need support until they get the bad news. Is it better we demand a psychological evaluation before allowing folk to have the test?
I don;t think so. I believe the data should be affordable, available, and delivered by someone trained to do so. I've yet to see a reasoned argument as to why unregulated tests with no FDA oversight and no professional backing in the event of bed news being discovered is somehow of benefit to the consumer.
As for not being able to think of any reasons not to know, how about getting future life insurance? Buying future houses? getting medical insurance? Getting a car loan? Having a family? Getting married? Getting a new job? Imagine any of those asking for a simple deceleration that you know of no impediment to you getting the job/insurance/loan etc? Are you really sure the country is ready for the population to be armed with this information? What about when insurers start asking for the test as a precondition to coverage?
Do you have a wife? Kids? Maybe just thinking about buying a house and starting a family? Imagine being in that position and suddenly finding out that a 30 year mortgage isn't going to happen... Imagine you were trying for kids, just got good news from your wife, then get an email and find out you most likely won't see your unborn son graduate high school.
Then you sit down, take it in and realise there's a 25% chance you gave X disease to your son too.
As I said, I believe you are entitled to know - it's your DNA, but the impact of knowing on a great many people could be enormous. For that reasons the medical profession train folk for years to deliver this information - to explain what it really means, for you and for your family. To discuss your options. The data should be available,should be affordable, and should be delivered by a professional, not by an email.
After that, I'm all for it. Not even a needle prick is needed
And if the report comes back to say you have an 85% likelihood of developing an untreatable disease that will kill you before you turn 50, you think it would be a good idea to receive that sort of news in the post, rather than from a trained counsellor?
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that you should be entitled to find out that information if you want to know it, but I also think that we train people to deliver these sort of results for a reason.
Looking at their links, it seems just about every professional medical organisation has a statement explaining why they think this is a bad idea.
If you are sending sensitive information through unencrypted email at all you have much bigger problems to worry about than whether or not it is on your servers or google's......
Perhaps you missed where he said it wasn't allowed off campus infrastructure by policy.
It's quite strightforward to ensure email is encrypted from the desktop to the recipient if it stays on your network using TLS/SSL. It's quite another thing if you hand it over to, say, google. Gmail doesn't even use SSL while you are reading your mail.
Yes, I admin some... but 8 slots of RAM * 4GB sticks maxes out at 32GB. My 2U servers have room for 8 2.5" drives, and these drives are non volatile. Crucial will sell me 32GB of ECC RAM for $4,799.96 - this laptop costs $1,500 less than that, so I'd guess their drive is in the $1,000 range, possibly much less.
This looks like a much cheaper solution than huge quantities of RAM.
Basically because "read" is fast but "write" is slow and limited in the number of times you can write.
perhaps, but doesn't this sound exactly like the 'average' relational database with expensive writes and cheap reads. Most our database info changes rarely, and any decent DB should make it easy to store some tables on one storage mechanism and other tables on another that's perhaps more suited to the data or write ratio.
I was under the impression that the number of writes possible had improved greatly in recent years, but am not sure if it's still a limiting factor.
I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.
As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.
What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops?
Central London and most major Airports. I believe the other entworks will also roll out these speeds early next year and start covering most the other UK cities.
I believe Vodafone charge £25/month for unlimited data with a 3GB cap. Other providers like t-mobile charge less
Oh FFS - just change encrypting to decrypting above and everything makes sense, as anyone else reading the post was able to comprehend. Only you were naive enough to think it needed another post to explain.
Hushmail now lets you encrypt & decrypt messages on their servers rather than using an applet. As a result you have to hand over your private keys and it's a simple matter for Hushmail to capture the plaintext of your password that protects your private key.
Plaintext messages are now sent to hushmail for encryption before being sent. Received messages are converted to plaintext before being delivered to your browser. Hushmail have access to plaintext in either direction because users didn't like the 'inconvenience' of using an applet.
The Register ran an article on this last week. From their piece:
US federal law enforcement agencies have obtained access to clear text copies of encrypted emails sent through Hushmail as part a of recent drug trafficking investigation.
The access was only granted after a court order was served on Hush Communications, the Canadian firm that offers the service.
Hush Communications said it would only accede to requests made in respect to targeted accounts and via court orders filed through Canadian court.
This is only possible because users want the convenience of letting the Hushmail servers do the encryption on their behalf. To do this they have to hand over their encryption key, and once it's out of your control, so should be any expectation of privacy.
I'm not sure what users expect. If a legitimate legal request that is clearly going to stand up to any legal challenge comes in and you give the company the ability to decrypt the messages you send, the company has no option but to comply.
If Hushmail users want privacy they need to put up with the inconvenience of using an applet to sign their messages, and should be checking the hash of the Applet each time it is downloaded too so they can ensure it hasn't had a backdoor added. ideally the applet shouldn't send anything over the network, it should just encrypt the text and pass the pgp encrypted text content to the browser compose window. Then the user can check the data doesn't include anything they didn't put there themselves.
I'm not sure which two you mean?
Myspace - 100 million accounts
Livejournal - 14 million accounts
Orkut - 67 million accounts
Firendster - 50 million accounts
LinkedIn - 15 million accounts
Salesforce.com - 1 million subscribers
Tianji - 700,000 members
For context, Wikipedia reports that Facebook has 42 million accounts as of October 2007.
Now there's certainly some variation, and probably lots of duplication amongst accounts, but seriously, these are big sites, with huge traffic figures. TO dismiss it as one or two and the rest you've never heard seems a tad petulant.
If you can afford Office 2007 go ahead and buy it, but as already discussed, this machine isn't going to be very good at running windows, so you'll need a different PC too.
Be aware though, that as OpenOffice continues to develop and becomes more of a competitor, you as a MS user will benefit, through more money being spent on R&D to bring you new features, as MS try to maintain their lead, as well as lower costs as MS try remain competitive.
Without competition, you'll see MS continue to develop their software like they did between 1999 and 2006 where windows saw only an incremental improvement between Windows 2K and Windows XP and Office changed even less.
My television is perfectly capable of receiving unencrypted digital cable in SD or HD without a set top box.
To keep costs down on the low end packages it is possible that they will continue to offer those channels in an unencrypted format so modern TVs can receive the signal without the need for an extra box. If not, then we'll all be buying TVs with cablecard slots again negating the need for a set top box.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense, they don't care about the individual, they care about statistically significant shifts in the group.
Think about it, if burgundy carpets makes ten percent of the customers purchase a more expensive salad, and with no identifiable negatives, then it makes sense to install burgundy carpets if they want to shift more of these salads. It doesn't matter that it has no effect on 90% of the customers - indeed they would be well aware that it has no effect on them.
Stores run promotions all the time that are aimed at shifting a tiny proportion of their customers to a more expensive product. It doesn't work for the majority, but increasing your profit per customer for even a small proportion makes sense if you can do it without detriment to the majority of your customer base.
Similarly, while you may guess at why people made a choice, there's no need to know exactly why, just that you can record a statistically significant shift in their patters when you change one stimuli.
So you don't mind the government saying gas will now be $8 a gallon as in Europe to cover the impact on the environment, but you do mind the government saying that the average fuel consumption across a range of new vehicles must improve?
625 ILCS 5, Section 12-401
Nothing in this Section shall be deemed to prohibit the use of tire chains of reasonable proportion upon any vehicle when required for safety because of snow, ice or other conditions tending to cause a vehicle to skid.
It says you can only use studded tires between 1st November and 15 April and can use snow chains at any time when there is snow or ice on the road or in the immediate vicinity.
mostly - as in not all. As in there are other things too. As in, well as in 'mostly'.
Sure there are security updates, but to find out if they're a) good or b) effective will take some time.
If we're lucky, we will see some dramatic improvement in the number of programs available that will run correctly under a limited user account. If the majority of windows programs had run effectively under limited user accounts, many many of the problems windows has faced could have been alleviated.
My primary desktops run SUSE and Ubuntu, but I have a new laptop that runs Vista and to be honest I don't see what the fuss is about.
Windows 2k used more resources than windows 98 and offered a host of new features. Windows XP used more resources than win2k but was mostly eye candy.
Vista looks to me like it's mostly eye candy. Some of the UI changes take some getting used to, but so does upgrading gnome or kde.
I don't think vista is a compelling reason to upgrade, but new machines will run it because that's what MS sell, and the transition will happen slowly, but it will still happen. I certainly don't think it's going to become another Windows ME - at least Microsoft seem to have learned that lesson.
From an open source perspective it's certainly a good thing MS haven't come up with anything terribly new and innovative. If they had, it would almost certainly be patented and have become another reason for folk not switching to the linux desktop.
While it may still be fair use to copy your DVD to another storage device, the trouble is the disk is normally encrypted. So if you live somewhere covered by the DMCA you may be entitled to move your movie to another format, but only if you have permission to circumvent the encryption for that purpose, hence Jobs can make $$$ selling you what is already yours.
I guess if you don't like it, you shouldn't blame Jobs who's trying to exploit a commercial opportunity, but rather contact your lawmaker and explain in layman's terms why this is messed up.
You seem to agree that support should be available for those that need it, but others should have the data freely available. The trouble is most folk wouldn't know they need support until they get the bad news. Is it better we demand a psychological evaluation before allowing folk to have the test?
I don;t think so. I believe the data should be affordable, available, and delivered by someone trained to do so. I've yet to see a reasoned argument as to why unregulated tests with no FDA oversight and no professional backing in the event of bed news being discovered is somehow of benefit to the consumer.
As for not being able to think of any reasons not to know, how about getting future life insurance? Buying future houses? getting medical insurance? Getting a car loan? Having a family? Getting married? Getting a new job? Imagine any of those asking for a simple deceleration that you know of no impediment to you getting the job/insurance/loan etc? Are you really sure the country is ready for the population to be armed with this information? What about when insurers start asking for the test as a precondition to coverage?
Do you have a wife? Kids? Maybe just thinking about buying a house and starting a family? Imagine being in that position and suddenly finding out that a 30 year mortgage isn't going to happen... Imagine you were trying for kids, just got good news from your wife, then get an email and find out you most likely won't see your unborn son graduate high school.
Then you sit down, take it in and realise there's a 25% chance you gave X disease to your son too.
As I said, I believe you are entitled to know - it's your DNA, but the impact of knowing on a great many people could be enormous. For that reasons the medical profession train folk for years to deliver this information - to explain what it really means, for you and for your family. To discuss your options. The data should be available,should be affordable, and should be delivered by a professional, not by an email.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that you should be entitled to find out that information if you want to know it, but I also think that we train people to deliver these sort of results for a reason.
Looking at their links, it seems just about every professional medical organisation has a statement explaining why they think this is a bad idea.
It's quite strightforward to ensure email is encrypted from the desktop to the recipient if it stays on your network using TLS/SSL. It's quite another thing if you hand it over to, say, google. Gmail doesn't even use SSL while you are reading your mail.
Yes, I admin some... but 8 slots of RAM * 4GB sticks maxes out at 32GB. My 2U servers have room for 8 2.5" drives, and these drives are non volatile. Crucial will sell me 32GB of ECC RAM for $4,799.96 - this laptop costs $1,500 less than that, so I'd guess their drive is in the $1,000 range, possibly much less.
This looks like a much cheaper solution than huge quantities of RAM.
I was under the impression that the number of writes possible had improved greatly in recent years, but am not sure if it's still a limiting factor.
I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.
As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.
What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops?
Central London and most major Airports. I believe the other entworks will also roll out these speeds early next year and start covering most the other UK cities.
I believe Vodafone charge £25/month for unlimited data with a 3GB cap. Other providers like t-mobile charge less
Oh FFS - just change encrypting to decrypting above and everything makes sense, as anyone else reading the post was able to comprehend. Only you were naive enough to think it needed another post to explain.
Hushmail now lets you encrypt & decrypt messages on their servers rather than using an applet. As a result you have to hand over your private keys and it's a simple matter for Hushmail to capture the plaintext of your password that protects your private key.
Plaintext messages are now sent to hushmail for encryption before being sent. Received messages are converted to plaintext before being delivered to your browser. Hushmail have access to plaintext in either direction because users didn't like the 'inconvenience' of using an applet.
As I said, that's not a wise compromise to make.
US federal law enforcement agencies have obtained access to clear text copies of encrypted emails sent through Hushmail as part a of recent drug trafficking investigation.
The access was only granted after a court order was served on Hush Communications, the Canadian firm that offers the service.
Hush Communications said it would only accede to requests made in respect to targeted accounts and via court orders filed through Canadian court.
This is only possible because users want the convenience of letting the Hushmail servers do the encryption on their behalf. To do this they have to hand over their encryption key, and once it's out of your control, so should be any expectation of privacy.
I'm not sure what users expect. If a legitimate legal request that is clearly going to stand up to any legal challenge comes in and you give the company the ability to decrypt the messages you send, the company has no option but to comply.
If Hushmail users want privacy they need to put up with the inconvenience of using an applet to sign their messages, and should be checking the hash of the Applet each time it is downloaded too so they can ensure it hasn't had a backdoor added. ideally the applet shouldn't send anything over the network, it should just encrypt the text and pass the pgp encrypted text content to the browser compose window. Then the user can check the data doesn't include anything they didn't put there themselves.
I'm not sure which two you mean? Myspace - 100 million accounts Livejournal - 14 million accounts Orkut - 67 million accounts Firendster - 50 million accounts LinkedIn - 15 million accounts Salesforce.com - 1 million subscribers Tianji - 700,000 members For context, Wikipedia reports that Facebook has 42 million accounts as of October 2007. Now there's certainly some variation, and probably lots of duplication amongst accounts, but seriously, these are big sites, with huge traffic figures. TO dismiss it as one or two and the rest you've never heard seems a tad petulant.
If you can afford Office 2007 go ahead and buy it, but as already discussed, this machine isn't going to be very good at running windows, so you'll need a different PC too.
Be aware though, that as OpenOffice continues to develop and becomes more of a competitor, you as a MS user will benefit, through more money being spent on R&D to bring you new features, as MS try to maintain their lead, as well as lower costs as MS try remain competitive.
Without competition, you'll see MS continue to develop their software like they did between 1999 and 2006 where windows saw only an incremental improvement between Windows 2K and Windows XP and Office changed even less.
It may have taken almost eight years, but at last the $billions spent have finally been justified.
My television is perfectly capable of receiving unencrypted digital cable in SD or HD without a set top box. To keep costs down on the low end packages it is possible that they will continue to offer those channels in an unencrypted format so modern TVs can receive the signal without the need for an extra box. If not, then we'll all be buying TVs with cablecard slots again negating the need for a set top box.