Marketing in charge of technical products also gets you Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Excel and SharePoint.
Are you using a Sharepoint as a model of a *good* product? Are you kidding me? Sharepoint is the worst piece of crap ever. I can't tell you how many nightmares I've seen over the years with regards to different versions of Sharepoint, how much time and money wasted on it and so forth. Thankfully I was always at an arm's length from the project. You're actually boasting about Sharepoint? Are you kidding?
And then you're boasting about Exchange Server? Another giant piece of crap with lots of bizarro Microsoft features - we had to give it its own DNS server because of whatever wacko requirements put in with regards to DNS and so that those wouldn't affect our normal DNS server. Not to mention how it handles mail and so on. The best I can say about it is at least it isn't Sharepoint.
I am not someone who thinks one language is good for every job, so I accept if some department at some company thinks Visual Basic works best for them, so be it. I don't have high regards for it, but I'll be neutral, to each his own.
Excel is a decent product. I never get that complicated in my spreadsheets though, and use Gnumeric instead of shelling out however much for Excel. Visual Studio is decent as well.
If you fluorescent lights over you, consider wearing a trucker's cap or the like. Put a few inches between you and the monitor. Change the OS background to a dark color like black. Put an anti-glare screen on your monitor. Look away from your monitor once in a while - if you forget to do this, a program like xwrits can help (yes, xwrits, not xwrist).
This seems to fly in the face of Condoleeza Rice's letter regarding
ICANN. "The history of the Internet's extraordinary growth and adaptation, based on private-sector innovation and investment, offers compelling arguments against burdening the network with a new intergovernmental structure for oversight."
Of course, the Internet did not grow out of private-sector innovation and investment but off the government teat - for decades. I don't see much innovation either other than wiz-bang graphics, the ability to download crappy movies and shop. Things seem to have gone backwards since the mid 1990s to me - an open, social chat system like IRC is replaced by corporate mostly one-on-one chat like AIM (also security has lessened - everyone used to have DCC chat etc.) An open, sometimes intelligent message board like Internet went downhill.
The Fed has open its vaults and floats not only Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase, but all of Wall Street, the latter going mostly unnoticed due to the headlines about the former. Across the country from the Internet, to military contractors and the aerospace industry, business is propped up by government spending. Yet we are told how horrible big government and socialism and the like is because of so-called private sector innovation and investment. Right after 9/11, when Congress bailed out the airline stockholders, but not the workers, Dick Armey said bailing out the workers as well was not "commensurate with the American spirit". He's got that right.
In Minsky's book "The Emotion Machine" he describes what we know about the human brain from observation and such. When one encounters a tough problem, one turns different parts of the brain on and off in an attempt to solve it. First might be a trial-and-error brain agent, then an analogy brain agent that searches memory for some similar situation and so forth. That is why there is a difference between blitz chess and tournament chess - in tournament chess, where you have several minutes to make a decision for each move, you can draw on memory, make tactical and strategical decisions and the like quicker than the snap decisions made in blitz chess. It's also why we often go to sleep working on a tough (programming etc.) problem and wake up with the answer - our "unconscious" brain put the answer together while we slept.
I'm not "given" anything. I do the work, I create the wealth, and the parasites who collect the majority of the dividends from the company I work at live off my sweat and labor. The one doing the giving is me - not them.
As far as trust - since beginning my working life I have been subjected to urine drug tests, fingerprint samples sent to the FBI, security badges that record every time I open a door, video cameras in the hallways, Sarbanes-Oxley constraints, background checks and so on and so forth. Nor of course am I trusted access to the financial data, i.e. how much money I am really creating for the company. And of course, all management decisions are at the end of the day directives from on high for me to implement. And you talk about trust?
Earning and maintaining the trust and respect of my boss is overrated. If I don't worship my boss, that means I don't have self-respect? What kind of logic is that? That's what they call on the Oprah show, "Co-dependency". I worry about trust and respect amongst my family, friend and co-workers. My bosses and the rich heirs who are the majority shareowners of my Fortune 1000 company can go to hell.
At many jobs, I have had access to my boss's, and his boss's (etc.) e-mail since I ran the e-mail server. I am not going to make any legal admissions here, but why wouldn't I read it? I would find out ahead of time about such things as layoffs and that type of thing. Being that I am a wage slave, I want to know about this sort of thing. This is like the "ethics" of slave snooping on their slave master. I am waiting for a Lenin/Pol Pot type to come along and wipe out these bosses, company boards, majority shareholders and the like, so the e-mail snooping is a no-brainer.
I have been using gNewsense since October of last year. I have been happy with it. I actually did a major upgrade earlier this month due to wanting the latest version of I-don't-even-remember-anymore, which had X number of dependencies, so it asked to upgrade everything and I went for it. It did run into a few problems, and I even had to edit/var/lib/dpkg/status for one tricky and broken dependency chain, but all was well that ends well and all of that is on the Ubuntu side anyhow. I have an old Debian system in another location which I also did not update much and started to break hard on the upgrading circa spring-summer of 2007, so I just leave everything as it was in spring-summer 2007, especially considering I only have remote access to the machine most of the time. As I said, this is all Debian/Ubuntu related though, and not Gnewsense related.
I had a problem with Gnewsense prior to May where sound would conk off once in a while. The latest update of everything seems to have fixed that. I have to say I have been pretty happy with Gnewsense, I have been surprised about how much has worked automagically.
One exception to this is my HP printer. I am not a CUPS or HP driver expert, but I hooked it up, it detected it - as the proper HP printer, but it is not printing to it. I guess one fear you have with Gnewsense in these situations is some firmware blob that would just make it work is not included - although the situation might be the same on an Ubuntu, I don't know what the problem is, but I only spent a few hours looking at it.
I do install things like non-GPL'd-yet Sun Java, mplayer, vlc and the like on my Gnewsense system in its own little segregatd section. The main thing is, I know they are not free. It is really an awareness thing for me, I have all of the non-free stuff segregated in its own little section. I just installed Gnash, and will test it out and see how well it works. Most of the non-free stuff I use revolves around Java (which is being GPL'd) and movie players. I want to at least be aware of this stuff and have it segregated. Otherwise I might as well use Windows.
This is quite typical for them. My web sites are on a two processor system, which means the load average shouldn't really go above 2, yet it is above 7 currently, and this is quite common. Sometimes the load is even higher, and my website goes down to a crawl. I wrote a script to monitor the load every minute, but they killed it. They kill my script, but they are not killing whatever is sending the load to way over what it should be (7 is low, it goes higher often). I can't see what sends it over as they limit my ps abilities. I have sent this to the notification of their tech people several times over the past few years, to little effect. Only when it gets mind numbingly slow for long periods of time and I begin complaining over and over and over do they tell me they're going to move me to another server or the like, and then it goes to the usual high load and spike until months down the road where it crawls all the time cycle.
Nonetheless, for the $160 a year I pay it is OK. When I was looking for places to host my site for $160 or so a year, this was one of the handful people said was OK. Aside from their processors always being overloaded double and triple what they should be, and more than that every so often, they have been OK. It is better they are upfront about not offering whiz-bang mail to medium/large sized businesses, one of the good things about Dreamhost is they are not trying to BS their customers like a lot of places.
This is simply not correct. China never declared Hezbollah to be a terrorist group. They never did so, and considering their foreign policy, it doesn't make sense that they would either. The only countries other than Holland that consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist group are current or former British colonies.
Anyone who says the Six-Day War was "started by Syria" is so steeped in Zionist delusion and propaganda, they're hopeless. Hell, Israel even attacked the US Navy during the Six Day war, and I am quite sure the Zionists in private discussion blame the US for that talking about how the US Navy "started it" by sending a signals intelligence ship anywhere near them. Of course, this kind of delusion is not one stated publicly.
Javed Iqbal is in a US jail for setting up satellites to watch al-Manar, Hezbollah's television station. Funny how Americans are so concerned about Syria but not what happens in their own country. Israel invaded and occupies part of Syria by the way, an occupation that the US supports to the tune of over a billion a year in military aid to Israel every year.
Of course, Hezbollah is a terrorist group...if you happen to live in a current or former British colony. Outside of that type of person, no other country considers Hezbollah to be such, except for Holland for some reason. They consider it to be representative of the Palestinians who were exiled from Palestine to Lebanon when the Zionists burned down their homes in Palestine and forced them.
But hey, why worry about Javed Iqbal rotting in an American jail when the US can point fingers at the lack of "freedom of speech" in a country under siege by the US and its Zionist neighbor, whom as I said, invaded and occupied part of their country, the Golan Heights.
Regarding the typical kdawson buzzwords...first of all, insofar as government being "steeped in bureaucracy", how about a large corporation? I have worked at large companies where it would be a dream that the red tape was as low a level as covers for TPS reports...many of them were natural monopolies that European governments would have never let stand - but the US government does - so they can afford to blow money.
Secondly, why is the private sector "efficient"? Instead of paying just labor costs and capital costs, you now have add the expenses for the profit that will be taken as well, so the only thing new about this is the majority shareholders, whom Federal Reserve studies show are multimillionaires and billionaires, will be getting a check as well. Plus the company will be lobbying the government regarding how this money is doled out. Look at the agricultural industry in the US for starters.
Despite having had to swallow a lifetime of propaganda about how much more efficient it is to have something handled when a billionaire is getting a profit paycheck as opposed to a government project, I don't swallow it. Maybe in the US or UK, where government attempts to do so are sabotaged, but I have seen Scandinavian government "bureaucracies" that make the "efficiency" of the typical pointy headed bosses company in the US look laughable.
Go to the library and get a bunch of books on electronics. Then go to Radio Shack and buy a bread board. A bread board is a board where you test circuit designs out. You don't need to do any soldering on it. A strip board is for a more permanent circuit that you don't plan on changing. One thing I recommend if you're going to be soldering on a strip board is FLUX. It makes soldering a hell of a lot easier. Components to buy from Radio Shack: A soldering iron, solder, flux, a breadboard or two. Also get a few 9 volt plugs to plug into the bread board or strip board and 9 volt batteries. Radio Shack also has a few cases you can put your circuit in, although there isn't much selection. You're going to need wire of course.
Now the question is - what do you want to build? The library books will have some circuits. So will bookstores. You can find them on the net as well. This girl from MIT has a lot of
cool circuits and kits. Once you decide what to put together you will also probably be getting some other components like capacitors, resistors and chips like 555 timers. You can find 555 timers and chips like that from Radio Shack, but for more obscure chips you might want to look to see if there are electronics components stores in your area that sell this stuff. If not, go to Mouser.com or Digikey where you can usually buy whatever you need, unless it is a specialized chip that they don't have. This should get you a start on putting boards together.
Considering that ExxonMobil has the
second largest revenue in the world of any corporation - $361,000,000,000 in revenues in the last year - I would say yes, that is one powerful monopoly they're forming.
Noam Chomsky said a number of years ago that since conservatives have been successful in rolling back virtually all of the New Deal (with Social Security the only thing left really), they were now working on rolling back the achievements of the Progressive Era. The prime example of that for me was the Exxon (aka Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (aka Standard Oil of New York) merger, putting back together an oil monopoly that had been broken up by the government in 1911. Now that the Progressive Era seems beginning to falter, it looks like they are taking an ax to an even older structure. Which would be the foundations of liberalism (classical or otherwise) and the Enlightenment - rationality and the scientific process.
I know someone who worked as a consultant for a tiger team of a Big Four accounting firm. He also told me the batting average his particular team had - they batted 1000. They always got in, every time.
Even with that, he complained about how his hands were tied during these penetrations - the team had permission to probe the security of the said company, but he wasn't able to say break into Microsoft or Sun or IBM and learn about unpatched bugs, or break into the local Bell company and reroute or monitor calls and circuits of the company, things he had been able to do in days when his "hat" was less alabaster. Another friend of mine, who had also switched hats and was working for a large consulting company used to complain how what he was doing was cookie cutter - they would install vendor-approved patches and the like, but were not actually securing the systems from stuff floating around in the wild which had not been patched yet. He used to go against company policy and fix stuff not on his checklist anyhow.
I think this is a fallacy. The bank always has one interest rate for savings accounts - about 1%. Anything over that is just inflation tacked on. The interest rate does not change, it just takes account of inflation. If you're "making" 8% a year in interest, then inflation is 7%. If you're making 3% then inflation is 2%. You're always making the same amount.
Of course, this is all in the domestic sense. You can have low inflation but your currency can be becoming worthless relative to other commodities and currencies, e.g. the US dollar. But that's a whole different story.
Gawker.com regularly makes fun of how the New York Times approaches a question the reporter knows little about and comes away with a convoluted answer. The article asks "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking". The best answer they come up with is "there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new". There is an enduring advantage, although they don't go into what it is, and put it in a misleading way actually. It's cheap. Some of these companies have been putting business logic and programs into these systems since the 1950s. The cost of moving them from 370 to 390 to zSeries is minimal, as is replacing parts that break down etc. And it works. Sometimes better than modern machines - some of these machines have uptime of decades. High availability is not a new concept for them.
What would be the cost of hiring on top of the existing mainframe admins and developers a team to migrate this stuff to Windows or UNIX? Remember some of this code is written by people who not only have left the company but may have died. Then you have to hire new developers and administrators for the UNIX/Windows systems. Change always creates the potential for problems, so expect a higher percentage of disruptions to the business as you're doling out all this money. If IBM is making it easy for you to keep what you have going, and also allows Linux, web etc. capability, why spend all that money to transition? The answer is that a lot of times companies don't. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that still had plenty of IBM mainframes. They even had a lot of their printing handled by the mainframes, although there were Windows and UNIX gateways into the print queue.
...Sinn Fein from talking for years, even though Sinn Fein MPs were being elected to the British Parliament. When Gerry Adams appeared on television, an actor would have to read his lines. Even documentaries covering events in Ireland from decades ago ran into problems. And as this pertains to the BBC, we we won't even get into the British government banning books like Spycatcher and so forth.
Yaa, it's always the slant-eyed reds who won't bow down to the US who are the censoring types who kdawson has to post "news" articles about again and again and again. Never mind that people in the US who sell PAID-FOR satellite access to Al Manar are thrown into prison to rot. Never mind that the Great Firewall of China was mostly built not in China but by the largest companies dotting the San Francisco Bay area. As Easter just ended, a quote from old JC - look not for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own.
it's called Mbone. It was created 15 years ago by a bunch of people including Van Jacobson, who had already helped create TCP/IP, wrote traceroute, tcpdump and so forth.
It would have made Internet broadcasting much more efficient, but it never took off. Why? Because providers never wanted to turn it on, fearing their tubes would get filled with video. So what happened? People broadcast videos anyhow, they just don't use the more efficient Mbone multicasting method.
Furthermore, when I download a video via Bittorrent, there are usually only a few people, whether they have a complete seed or not, who are sending out data. So how local they are doesn't matter. If there are more people connected, usually most people are sending data out at less than 10K, while there is one (or maybe 2) people sending data out at anywhere from 10K to 200K. So usually I wanted to be hooked to them, no matter where they are - I am getting data from them at many multiples of the average person.
I care about speed, not locality. The whole point of the Internet and World Wide Web is locality doesn't matter. Speed is what matters to me. For Verizon however, they would prefer most traffic goes over their own network - that way they don't have to worry about exchanging traffic with other providers and so forth. Another thing is - there is tons of fiber crisscrossing the country and world, we have plenty of inter-LATA bandwidth, the whole problem is with bandwidth from the home to the local Central Office. In a lot of countries, natural monopolies are controlled by the government - I always hear about how inefficient that would be and how backwards it would be, but here we have the "last mile" controlled by monopolies and they have been giving us decades-old technology for decades. In fact, the little attacks by the government have been rolled back, in a reversal of the Bell breakup, AT&T now owns a lot of last mile in this country. Hey, it's a safe monopoly that the capitalists, I mean, shareholders, I mean, investors can get nice fat dividends from in stead of re-investing in bleeding edge capital equipment, so why give people a fast connection to their homes? Better to spend money on lawyers fighting public wifi and the like, or commissars and think tanks to brag about how efficient capitalism is in the US of A in 2008.
"Actually, most of the civilized world considers Hezbullah to be a terrorist organization. Further, the US takes illegal satellite dishes seriously. Go talk to the DirecTV or Dish pirates."
No it doesn't. Outside of current and former UK colonies (like the US), and Holland for some reason, no other country has Hezbollah listed as a terrorist organization.
The satellite dish in this case is not illegal like DirecTV, which wants people to pay to see their signal. It is illegal because the US does not want Americans to hear news from the representative organization of the Shia in southern Lebanon - Hezbollah.
"actual totalitarian regimes are far more dangerous and damaging to individual freedoms and the free flow of information, in a very real and tangible sense, than even the wildest imagined conspiracy theories"
Actual totalitarian regimes - you mean like the CIA puppet regime in Iran before the Iranian revolution, whose SAVAK tortured so many secular leftists and liberals to death that when the puppet was finally kicked out, the revolution was directed from the churches, to the surprise of everyone (including the USSR)? Totalitarian regimes like the Israel occupation regime over the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians live under? Totalitarian regimes like US supported Saudi Arabia, where censorship and government make Iran look like a paradise of freedom?
I would not make the claim that Iran has completely fair elections or that there is no censorship there. However, the government is widely supported by the population, and the government alternates between hardliners and reformers, both of whom go by their policies. Despite painting Iran as a country full of religious fanatics, there is a large secular professional class there, whom the US claims to support but does exactly the opposite, it tries to destroy it as it has been trying to do for decades. The US government steps in and bans coders like Roozbeh Pournader from coming to do some programming in Google's Summer of Code. It wants Iran to be and to be perceived as a bunch of all isolated religious fanatics.
Javed Iqbal was sent to jail in the US. His crime? Hooking up people to be able to see Hezbollah's satellite station. Of course Hezbollah is a terrorist group - if you live in a current or former British colony, like the US. For some reason Holland considers it as such as well. The rest of the world sees Hezbollah as what it was, the organization that represents and defends the Shia of southern Lebanon, many of whom were driven out of their homes in Palestine by Jewish European colonizers over the past half century. Why is the fact that Javed Iqbal is languishing in jail not a headline, but some country the US is banging the war drums against is?
Let's not even talk about Saudi Arabia, where we don't even talk about attempts of censorship since Saudi Arabia always has total censorship of media. Also, if you want to criticize the elections in Iran and interference and ballot-striking when someone is too reform-minded, not that there isn't anything to criticize, why not talk about Saudi Arabia where they don't even have elections. Saudi Arabia doesn't have problems with their electoral process it doesn't have problems at all. Of course, Saudi Arabia always does what the rich people in the US tell it to do, always does what the "US" (meaning the interests of very rich Americans) wants it to so it is rarely criticized. Iran has the gall to kick out the CIA installed puppet and run their own government so they have to constantly be bashed, US puppet regimes like Saudi Arabia which are much worse get a pass. US jailing people for letting people see Al-Manar gets a pass as well. What a fraud. The biggest enemy of a secular, social democratic, pan Arab Middle East has always been the United States. The US wants the Middle East to be one big Saudi Arabia/Egypt/Jordan/Pakistan - dictatorial US/Israel bootlickers whose citizens get sent to madrassas instead of schools. The mujahideen and Hamas were creations (heavily funded and supported) by the US and Israel to fight and destroy the secular, social democratic, pan-Arab forces in their country - have fun sucking up the rewards.
Your country gave us the Common Law, the Magna Carta and the foundations of Representative Democracy. You stood alone against Hitler for all those lonely months between the Fall of France and the involvement of the Soviet Union and United States. That stand likely saved Western Democracy from Communism or Fascism.
As my family is from Ulster, and I still have family in Ulster, part of which is said to be part of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", I can add on to your list of gifts to the world from the UK...common law, magna carta etc. and those other terms. I have some terms of my own to add - internment without trial, shoot-to-kill policy, army occupation, police/paramilitary collaboration, rubber bullets, Bloody Sunday, imperialism, colonization.
Slashdot Mirror
Marketing in charge of technical products also gets you Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Excel and SharePoint.
Are you using a Sharepoint as a model of a *good* product? Are you kidding me? Sharepoint is the worst piece of crap ever. I can't tell you how many nightmares I've seen over the years with regards to different versions of Sharepoint, how much time and money wasted on it and so forth. Thankfully I was always at an arm's length from the project. You're actually boasting about Sharepoint? Are you kidding?
And then you're boasting about Exchange Server? Another giant piece of crap with lots of bizarro Microsoft features - we had to give it its own DNS server because of whatever wacko requirements put in with regards to DNS and so that those wouldn't affect our normal DNS server. Not to mention how it handles mail and so on. The best I can say about it is at least it isn't Sharepoint.
I am not someone who thinks one language is good for every job, so I accept if some department at some company thinks Visual Basic works best for them, so be it. I don't have high regards for it, but I'll be neutral, to each his own.
Excel is a decent product. I never get that complicated in my spreadsheets though, and use Gnumeric instead of shelling out however much for Excel. Visual Studio is decent as well.
If you fluorescent lights over you, consider wearing a trucker's cap or the like. Put a few inches between you and the monitor. Change the OS background to a dark color like black. Put an anti-glare screen on your monitor. Look away from your monitor once in a while - if you forget to do this, a program like xwrits can help (yes, xwrits, not xwrist).
Of course, the Internet did not grow out of private-sector innovation and investment but off the government teat - for decades. I don't see much innovation either other than wiz-bang graphics, the ability to download crappy movies and shop. Things seem to have gone backwards since the mid 1990s to me - an open, social chat system like IRC is replaced by corporate mostly one-on-one chat like AIM (also security has lessened - everyone used to have DCC chat etc.) An open, sometimes intelligent message board like Internet went downhill.
The Fed has open its vaults and floats not only Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase, but all of Wall Street, the latter going mostly unnoticed due to the headlines about the former. Across the country from the Internet, to military contractors and the aerospace industry, business is propped up by government spending. Yet we are told how horrible big government and socialism and the like is because of so-called private sector innovation and investment. Right after 9/11, when Congress bailed out the airline stockholders, but not the workers, Dick Armey said bailing out the workers as well was not "commensurate with the American spirit". He's got that right.
In Minsky's book "The Emotion Machine" he describes what we know about the human brain from observation and such. When one encounters a tough problem, one turns different parts of the brain on and off in an attempt to solve it. First might be a trial-and-error brain agent, then an analogy brain agent that searches memory for some similar situation and so forth. That is why there is a difference between blitz chess and tournament chess - in tournament chess, where you have several minutes to make a decision for each move, you can draw on memory, make tactical and strategical decisions and the like quicker than the snap decisions made in blitz chess. It's also why we often go to sleep working on a tough (programming etc.) problem and wake up with the answer - our "unconscious" brain put the answer together while we slept.
As far as trust - since beginning my working life I have been subjected to urine drug tests, fingerprint samples sent to the FBI, security badges that record every time I open a door, video cameras in the hallways, Sarbanes-Oxley constraints, background checks and so on and so forth. Nor of course am I trusted access to the financial data, i.e. how much money I am really creating for the company. And of course, all management decisions are at the end of the day directives from on high for me to implement. And you talk about trust?
Earning and maintaining the trust and respect of my boss is overrated. If I don't worship my boss, that means I don't have self-respect? What kind of logic is that? That's what they call on the Oprah show, "Co-dependency". I worry about trust and respect amongst my family, friend and co-workers. My bosses and the rich heirs who are the majority shareowners of my Fortune 1000 company can go to hell.
At many jobs, I have had access to my boss's, and his boss's (etc.) e-mail since I ran the e-mail server. I am not going to make any legal admissions here, but why wouldn't I read it? I would find out ahead of time about such things as layoffs and that type of thing. Being that I am a wage slave, I want to know about this sort of thing. This is like the "ethics" of slave snooping on their slave master. I am waiting for a Lenin/Pol Pot type to come along and wipe out these bosses, company boards, majority shareholders and the like, so the e-mail snooping is a no-brainer.
I had a problem with Gnewsense prior to May where sound would conk off once in a while. The latest update of everything seems to have fixed that. I have to say I have been pretty happy with Gnewsense, I have been surprised about how much has worked automagically.
One exception to this is my HP printer. I am not a CUPS or HP driver expert, but I hooked it up, it detected it - as the proper HP printer, but it is not printing to it. I guess one fear you have with Gnewsense in these situations is some firmware blob that would just make it work is not included - although the situation might be the same on an Ubuntu, I don't know what the problem is, but I only spent a few hours looking at it.
I do install things like non-GPL'd-yet Sun Java, mplayer, vlc and the like on my Gnewsense system in its own little segregatd section. The main thing is, I know they are not free. It is really an awareness thing for me, I have all of the non-free stuff segregated in its own little section. I just installed Gnash, and will test it out and see how well it works. Most of the non-free stuff I use revolves around Java (which is being GPL'd) and movie players. I want to at least be aware of this stuff and have it segregated. Otherwise I might as well use Windows.
Here is an uptime I just did on their server -
This is quite typical for them. My web sites are on a two processor system, which means the load average shouldn't really go above 2, yet it is above 7 currently, and this is quite common. Sometimes the load is even higher, and my website goes down to a crawl. I wrote a script to monitor the load every minute, but they killed it. They kill my script, but they are not killing whatever is sending the load to way over what it should be (7 is low, it goes higher often). I can't see what sends it over as they limit my ps abilities. I have sent this to the notification of their tech people several times over the past few years, to little effect. Only when it gets mind numbingly slow for long periods of time and I begin complaining over and over and over do they tell me they're going to move me to another server or the like, and then it goes to the usual high load and spike until months down the road where it crawls all the time cycle.Nonetheless, for the $160 a year I pay it is OK. When I was looking for places to host my site for $160 or so a year, this was one of the handful people said was OK. Aside from their processors always being overloaded double and triple what they should be, and more than that every so often, they have been OK. It is better they are upfront about not offering whiz-bang mail to medium/large sized businesses, one of the good things about Dreamhost is they are not trying to BS their customers like a lot of places.
This is simply not correct. China never declared Hezbollah to be a terrorist group. They never did so, and considering their foreign policy, it doesn't make sense that they would either. The only countries other than Holland that consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist group are current or former British colonies.
Anyone who says the Six-Day War was "started by Syria" is so steeped in Zionist delusion and propaganda, they're hopeless. Hell, Israel even attacked the US Navy during the Six Day war, and I am quite sure the Zionists in private discussion blame the US for that talking about how the US Navy "started it" by sending a signals intelligence ship anywhere near them. Of course, this kind of delusion is not one stated publicly.
Of course, Hezbollah is a terrorist group...if you happen to live in a current or former British colony. Outside of that type of person, no other country considers Hezbollah to be such, except for Holland for some reason. They consider it to be representative of the Palestinians who were exiled from Palestine to Lebanon when the Zionists burned down their homes in Palestine and forced them.
But hey, why worry about Javed Iqbal rotting in an American jail when the US can point fingers at the lack of "freedom of speech" in a country under siege by the US and its Zionist neighbor, whom as I said, invaded and occupied part of their country, the Golan Heights.
Secondly, why is the private sector "efficient"? Instead of paying just labor costs and capital costs, you now have add the expenses for the profit that will be taken as well, so the only thing new about this is the majority shareholders, whom Federal Reserve studies show are multimillionaires and billionaires, will be getting a check as well. Plus the company will be lobbying the government regarding how this money is doled out. Look at the agricultural industry in the US for starters.
Despite having had to swallow a lifetime of propaganda about how much more efficient it is to have something handled when a billionaire is getting a profit paycheck as opposed to a government project, I don't swallow it. Maybe in the US or UK, where government attempts to do so are sabotaged, but I have seen Scandinavian government "bureaucracies" that make the "efficiency" of the typical pointy headed bosses company in the US look laughable.
Go to the library and get a bunch of books on electronics. Then go to Radio Shack and buy a bread board. A bread board is a board where you test circuit designs out. You don't need to do any soldering on it. A strip board is for a more permanent circuit that you don't plan on changing. One thing I recommend if you're going to be soldering on a strip board is FLUX. It makes soldering a hell of a lot easier. Components to buy from Radio Shack: A soldering iron, solder, flux, a breadboard or two. Also get a few 9 volt plugs to plug into the bread board or strip board and 9 volt batteries. Radio Shack also has a few cases you can put your circuit in, although there isn't much selection. You're going to need wire of course.
Now the question is - what do you want to build? The library books will have some circuits. So will bookstores. You can find them on the net as well. This girl from MIT has a lot of cool circuits and kits. Once you decide what to put together you will also probably be getting some other components like capacitors, resistors and chips like 555 timers. You can find 555 timers and chips like that from Radio Shack, but for more obscure chips you might want to look to see if there are electronics components stores in your area that sell this stuff. If not, go to Mouser.com or Digikey where you can usually buy whatever you need, unless it is a specialized chip that they don't have. This should get you a start on putting boards together.
Considering that ExxonMobil has the second largest revenue in the world of any corporation - $361,000,000,000 in revenues in the last year - I would say yes, that is one powerful monopoly they're forming.
Noam Chomsky said a number of years ago that since conservatives have been successful in rolling back virtually all of the New Deal (with Social Security the only thing left really), they were now working on rolling back the achievements of the Progressive Era. The prime example of that for me was the Exxon (aka Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (aka Standard Oil of New York) merger, putting back together an oil monopoly that had been broken up by the government in 1911. Now that the Progressive Era seems beginning to falter, it looks like they are taking an ax to an even older structure. Which would be the foundations of liberalism (classical or otherwise) and the Enlightenment - rationality and the scientific process.
Even with that, he complained about how his hands were tied during these penetrations - the team had permission to probe the security of the said company, but he wasn't able to say break into Microsoft or Sun or IBM and learn about unpatched bugs, or break into the local Bell company and reroute or monitor calls and circuits of the company, things he had been able to do in days when his "hat" was less alabaster. Another friend of mine, who had also switched hats and was working for a large consulting company used to complain how what he was doing was cookie cutter - they would install vendor-approved patches and the like, but were not actually securing the systems from stuff floating around in the wild which had not been patched yet. He used to go against company policy and fix stuff not on his checklist anyhow.
Of course, this is all in the domestic sense. You can have low inflation but your currency can be becoming worthless relative to other commodities and currencies, e.g. the US dollar. But that's a whole different story.
What would be the cost of hiring on top of the existing mainframe admins and developers a team to migrate this stuff to Windows or UNIX? Remember some of this code is written by people who not only have left the company but may have died. Then you have to hire new developers and administrators for the UNIX/Windows systems. Change always creates the potential for problems, so expect a higher percentage of disruptions to the business as you're doling out all this money. If IBM is making it easy for you to keep what you have going, and also allows Linux, web etc. capability, why spend all that money to transition? The answer is that a lot of times companies don't. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that still had plenty of IBM mainframes. They even had a lot of their printing handled by the mainframes, although there were Windows and UNIX gateways into the print queue.
Yaa, it's always the slant-eyed reds who won't bow down to the US who are the censoring types who kdawson has to post "news" articles about again and again and again. Never mind that people in the US who sell PAID-FOR satellite access to Al Manar are thrown into prison to rot. Never mind that the Great Firewall of China was mostly built not in China but by the largest companies dotting the San Francisco Bay area. As Easter just ended, a quote from old JC - look not for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own.
It would have made Internet broadcasting much more efficient, but it never took off. Why? Because providers never wanted to turn it on, fearing their tubes would get filled with video. So what happened? People broadcast videos anyhow, they just don't use the more efficient Mbone multicasting method.
Furthermore, when I download a video via Bittorrent, there are usually only a few people, whether they have a complete seed or not, who are sending out data. So how local they are doesn't matter. If there are more people connected, usually most people are sending data out at less than 10K, while there is one (or maybe 2) people sending data out at anywhere from 10K to 200K. So usually I wanted to be hooked to them, no matter where they are - I am getting data from them at many multiples of the average person.
I care about speed, not locality. The whole point of the Internet and World Wide Web is locality doesn't matter. Speed is what matters to me. For Verizon however, they would prefer most traffic goes over their own network - that way they don't have to worry about exchanging traffic with other providers and so forth. Another thing is - there is tons of fiber crisscrossing the country and world, we have plenty of inter-LATA bandwidth, the whole problem is with bandwidth from the home to the local Central Office. In a lot of countries, natural monopolies are controlled by the government - I always hear about how inefficient that would be and how backwards it would be, but here we have the "last mile" controlled by monopolies and they have been giving us decades-old technology for decades. In fact, the little attacks by the government have been rolled back, in a reversal of the Bell breakup, AT&T now owns a lot of last mile in this country. Hey, it's a safe monopoly that the capitalists, I mean, shareholders, I mean, investors can get nice fat dividends from in stead of re-investing in bleeding edge capital equipment, so why give people a fast connection to their homes? Better to spend money on lawyers fighting public wifi and the like, or commissars and think tanks to brag about how efficient capitalism is in the US of A in 2008.
No it doesn't. Outside of current and former UK colonies (like the US), and Holland for some reason, no other country has Hezbollah listed as a terrorist organization.
The satellite dish in this case is not illegal like DirecTV, which wants people to pay to see their signal. It is illegal because the US does not want Americans to hear news from the representative organization of the Shia in southern Lebanon - Hezbollah.
Actual totalitarian regimes - you mean like the CIA puppet regime in Iran before the Iranian revolution, whose SAVAK tortured so many secular leftists and liberals to death that when the puppet was finally kicked out, the revolution was directed from the churches, to the surprise of everyone (including the USSR)? Totalitarian regimes like the Israel occupation regime over the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians live under? Totalitarian regimes like US supported Saudi Arabia, where censorship and government make Iran look like a paradise of freedom?
I would not make the claim that Iran has completely fair elections or that there is no censorship there. However, the government is widely supported by the population, and the government alternates between hardliners and reformers, both of whom go by their policies. Despite painting Iran as a country full of religious fanatics, there is a large secular professional class there, whom the US claims to support but does exactly the opposite, it tries to destroy it as it has been trying to do for decades. The US government steps in and bans coders like Roozbeh Pournader from coming to do some programming in Google's Summer of Code. It wants Iran to be and to be perceived as a bunch of all isolated religious fanatics.
Let's not even talk about Saudi Arabia, where we don't even talk about attempts of censorship since Saudi Arabia always has total censorship of media. Also, if you want to criticize the elections in Iran and interference and ballot-striking when someone is too reform-minded, not that there isn't anything to criticize, why not talk about Saudi Arabia where they don't even have elections. Saudi Arabia doesn't have problems with their electoral process it doesn't have problems at all. Of course, Saudi Arabia always does what the rich people in the US tell it to do, always does what the "US" (meaning the interests of very rich Americans) wants it to so it is rarely criticized. Iran has the gall to kick out the CIA installed puppet and run their own government so they have to constantly be bashed, US puppet regimes like Saudi Arabia which are much worse get a pass. US jailing people for letting people see Al-Manar gets a pass as well. What a fraud. The biggest enemy of a secular, social democratic, pan Arab Middle East has always been the United States. The US wants the Middle East to be one big Saudi Arabia/Egypt/Jordan/Pakistan - dictatorial US/Israel bootlickers whose citizens get sent to madrassas instead of schools. The mujahideen and Hamas were creations (heavily funded and supported) by the US and Israel to fight and destroy the secular, social democratic, pan-Arab forces in their country - have fun sucking up the rewards.
As my family is from Ulster, and I still have family in Ulster, part of which is said to be part of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", I can add on to your list of gifts to the world from the UK...common law, magna carta etc. and those other terms. I have some terms of my own to add - internment without trial, shoot-to-kill policy, army occupation, police/paramilitary collaboration, rubber bullets, Bloody Sunday, imperialism, colonization.