I've worked with lots of graphic artists on web sites for Fortune 50 companies. There's a standand process that usually works best. The stages are in the following order in terms of tools.
Starting: Paper, Paper, Paper.
Making an attractive web site is mostly art and very little technology. Artists use paper. Period. Even if you use "natural media" tools like Painter, it's still like drawing/painting with one hand tied behind your back. If you use a computer for the art-part, it's not because it's the best way or the easiest way - it's only the way to do it because it buys you something in later stages of production somehow.
Usually large format sheets get used for the graphic feel of the pages. Post-Its and string (seriously) for navigation and storyboarding.
It's just too easy to get lost in the technical minutiae of computer-based tools and completely 1) forget the actual goal of the website, and 2) lock youself into a design simply because your tools do it only one way.
Next: Photoshop or Fireworks
Once the concepts of the basic page and navigation layout are solid, only then you use a computer. Even then it's with Photoshop or Fireworks, usually using layers to allow re-compositing of the page components in response to the predictable whims, insanity and backtracking of management. Also layers help with building the three (3) designs/color schemes that will be shown to the key stakeholders for sign-off. Why three? 1 or 2 invites questions of completeness of options; 4 or more is confusing and overwhelming. 3 choices just works best to minimize additional rework.
Last: GoLive, Dreamweaver, et al.
This is where the guideline cutting features of Photoshop or Fireworks come in real handy. You can fragment your prototype and get the necessary graphic element automatically without further manual manipulation. The Adobe and Macromedia companion HTML tools will suck up the design and graphic pieces and build the page almost by themselves.
The "supposed" terrorist who fled was in fact just an Indian businessman in textile import/export who routinely books and skips flights for business, just in case, just like thousands of American business executives. The Dehli-Paris-Los Angeles was a regular route he had been booking (and apparently continues to book) for years.
The US government was informed immediately by the Indian government but didn't care to listen to the details of how he also skipped the Dehli-Paris leg already, was a regular, legitimate traveler, and most important, had a name that simply is as common in that part of the world as "John Smith" is in the US, and which to an ignorant desk-jockey in Washington thought sounded like a name used by a terrorist.
In others words: the whole Christmas "terrorist alert" was a crock caused by moronic goverment incompetence, at best.
> Why can't you just buy the shares?
> I have never understood this part.
If you had the cash to actually buy them, sure, but do the math on how much that might be: # shared circulated * current market price. Disney has 2.05B shares issued @ $27.40 = ~$50B, or ~$25B in cash to "simply buy 51%"! If you had that much cash lying around you could just start up a competitor to Disney anyway - none of the legacy issues, just a fresh start! But Comcast isn't buying Disney because they want to be able to make cool movies and go to Disneyland for free - they just want content to support their cable products better so they can charge more so they make more money.
Just like the average USian consumer, people/companies who do hostile takeovers don't have that much money lying around for big purchases either: they borrow for a big purchase just like we borrow for a car or house.
All the famous Corporate Raiders of the 70s and 80s all used borrowed money to do it. Usually they cut a deal with the lender for part of the liquidation profits that resulted. Pretty slimy on the part of NY investment banks, of course, but this is the same crowd that was involved in Enron and 150-odd years of sliminess dating back to the transcontinental railroad investments.
But say you could get the money, why borrow when you don't have to? Why not just get other people to do what you need: vote for your take-over bid. It costs you nothing beyond the cost to convince them. If you tell them that they'll make more money with a takeover than with following the current status quo ROI from the company, they may "give you" the value of shares by virtue of their vote for you. Shares are just the right of ownership which is mostly the right to vote on the board, directly or by proxy - the board of directors is to corporate ownership what the electoral college and legislature is to citizen ownership of the US government.
The borrowing part is also why "hostile takeovers" are also often called "leveraged buyouts" (leverage is business-speak for "borrow" because it gives you large advantage with small effort like a lever) as in they borrowed the money to buyout the minority shareholders or to create the impression through "large enough" minority ownership to appear to be a legitimate "black knight" with enough apparent power to do the job. The cost and requirements of the latter depend on the articles of incorporation for the company which includes a section on how strategic decisions are made by company. The term "poison pill" refers to changing these rules where they specifically relate to voting rights on decisions. So companies may "adopt a poison pill" to protect against takeover, or hope for a "white knight" to do a friendly takeover instead.
$12K a pop! That won't be on my Christmas list for a while. I'm sure people will whip up an open-source clone project. Interestingly this a lot like something I "invented" as a teen (on paper anyway, I still have the drawings in my garage)! I won't give away my age, except to say that was more than one patent life ago.:-)
BTW, the secret to finding prices on a web site for products that "don't list price" is to check the press releases - reporters tend to ignore press leads that don't have an estimated price. It would not look good with readers to present rave article for a product none of them can afford or budget for.
The last time was about when gopher+ came out (not sure of the date). The changes to the license pushed me from being a gopher enthusiast into becoming a web enthusiast and gopher-hater. By accident of employment I was on the wrong side of the new UMinn license, despite working on an open-source derivative that was going to be open-source itself.
I had been working on a C++ version of gopherd and gopher back then. UMinn legal pulled a nasty one on loyal users and contributors: if you were a commerical user or coming from a.com domain, you have to pay us. They claimed to own the protocol so even separate development would cost. It wasn't based on what you did with it or what you added to it like most of today's open source licenses, just the "color" of your domain. Definitely an open license moving to a closed license.
The commerical-academic-government balkanization was quite strong on the internet back then. No advertising allowed. You had to be careful about regular discussion sometimes (Will this post be seen as an innocent "product support" answer or would it perceived as disallowed commercial speech?). A lot of the nostalgic "gentility" of the old Internet was due to this kind of self-censorship.
At the time the web seemed more (and unnecessarily) complicated as a technology (remember we had just ftp, telnet, usenet and e-mail to compare it against). However, more importantly, there were no 2nd class citizen clauses on the license unlike gopher+.
The UMinn license changes pushed me to research web and html further, which I might not have done otherwise - which was financially rewarding a few short years later. I know other folks had a similar reaction and experience. I shutdown all my gopher servers and converted the content to html.
The thing about reliability testing is that you can never be good at it until you already know how things can fail. That's sort of the curse; you perceive the least need for a Reliability department/program when you already have good reliability and the converse as well. It can be a "generational" thing; the old-timers remember how bad it was when you did it other ways, including the new (old) way; while the new turks don't have the experience to understand the implications of the new way. This is why it takes self-discipline and knowledge to keep reliability which includes oftentimes saying "no" to the latest, greatest, most popular thing or opinion . Since I have a personality for being on the bleeding edge this is something I've had to learn this the hard way!
Anytime you change a variable in your manufacturing process you risk having to throw-out your entire knowledge-base about product reliability. This is why Intel is positively anal about tweaks to their processes and why they sometimes *seem* to be trailing on usage of the latest technologies (e.g. Copper).
The bigger the change or the older the technology you replace, the greater the risk of losing the reliability recipe. Another analogy is software refactoring: there was a story a while back about how major refactoring can sometimes be worse than minor tweaking. It's much the same dynamic. Manufacturing a product is a multivariate, nonlinear system which humans can only, at best, grok to its local linear approximation.
Pick the right bean - my personal preference is Sumatran or other Indonesian coffees like Celebes
Grind it yourself - you don't want to grind it too fine because it gets bitter. My grinder is set to the 2nd or 3rd coarsest grind.
Use good water - we have nasty tasting tap water here and it affects the taste of everything noticeably, especially coffee - I have a filter on kitchen main which makes it drinkable directly and makes good coffee to boot
Result: good coffee - most of my friends rave about it
This is mostly wishful thinking by the companies that market the phones. Every product manufacturer wants to "differentiate" their products. The add features that others don't have. When it comes to phones, what do you really need beyond the basic function of land-line phones? Well, either features you can't afford to implement cheaply or quickly (too much infrastructure missing) or features that are intrinsically inane like "games".
At some point this morphs into believing that "because we're offering it, it must be what the market wants". Basically people making the standard mistake of confusing cause-and-effect and also cause-vs-correlation.
Market "researchers" who make a living off this play off this fuzzy thinking all the time. Obviously if you tell people what they want to hear ("you're doing a great job trying to put an expresso maker in a cellphone"), they like you more and pay you money!
If you read the Canon page, it says that 1) you have to explicitly turn on the feature to enable it at all, and 2) you have to use special hardware and software to exact the photo. In other words you have to have taken the photo and uploaded yourself to get the feature and to maintain the chain of evidence.
Think about that. The only real potential use is police and insurance work. Even then, once it leaves the Canon software, all bets are off.
It's not clear if the image can be revalidated after it's been saved to the PC filesystem, or even how they maintain the "keyring" for uploaded file (must always have the physical camera attached??), or if simple, yet benign Photoshopping like cropping or scaling destroy the identify enough to destroy the checksum (seems like it would). So those popular blown-up presentation pictures in a trial could be unverifiable to the original upload. On most cameras the smartcard is just a filesystem - what's to keep someone from uploading another photo - particular if it's from the same camera - and then uploading through the proscribed "verification" system (shades of "Minority Report").
It also means that this type of verification is only as assured as the process and it people around it. A "bad act" by someone in the chain invalidates the verification. It's no better than what exists without it.
The problem is that space has multiple types of radiation, and shielding that protects from one type can actually increase the radiation exposure due to another. Simply putting everything in "thicker box" will make overall radiation effects worse and add more weight to boot.
This radiation problem (for both electronics and humans) is one of the major reasons a mars mission wasn't jumped at after the moon landings in the 70s (aside from the bad economy at the time). It's one of the likely factors that could doom the Bush mars project. The astronauts will be getting a significant radiation exposure and there's probably nothing that can prevent it - it's possible the exposure could be enough to be fatal, especially if there is a solar flare at any time during the mission. See Mitchner's book Space - it's depiction of the radiation risks in human space travel is very accurate.
Since e-mail server isn't company property the standard justification for violating/having no employee privacy isn't there!
Further if there was no specific provision in the "lease/service contract" there is probably no extension of it to the server. This might even hold for "IP" rights of what on the server.
It's really not any worse than going between the various commercial Unixes or between SysV and BSD. I cut my admin teeth SysV boxes and it was a bit jarring going to BSD, but most of that wears off quickly with all the commonality. MacOS is abot the same, except it has more Next-isms, which isn't bad thing by any means. Admittedly I've been using Unix since the early 80s so I've seen plenty of OSes and plenty of Unix flavors.
This does seem like a Troll, but maybe it's simple ignorance about the operating environment of space.
COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) parts don't last long above LEO (low-earth orbit). I used to be involved in testing COTS and RAD parts for space use; in most cases COTS parts died permanently within seconds to minutes when exposed to "typical" interplanetary or deep space radiation levels, while parts from IBM's rad hard line lasted longer that we were able to test them.
Too much shielding for SEU actually increases the total dose exposure due to spallation/bremstrahlung. So if you want both SEU and total dose protection you must minimize Z-shielding and go toward circuit-based hardening, just as the article mentions shielding with "capacitors and resistors".
I never feel guilty using Mac OS X instead of Linux (definitely when I use Windows, as another poster mentioned).
If you map OS to building architecture:
Linux: Silicon Valley concrete tilt-up, military quonset hut or similar general purpose warehouse. Fundamentally utilitarian but infinitely malleable. Generally not pretty or aesthetically pleasing beyond the utilitarian ideal.
BSD: a higher end business or cognicenti chic utilitarian building like a modern skyscraper with cubes or actually Apple's HQ building. More presentable and reliable yet nicely utilitarian, but the art on the walls is commercial art, nothing bleeding edge or daring.
Windows: the old house that's had add-ons for 100 years with obvious clashing and bad-taste mixes of styles like colonial combined with ranch combined with roccoco, or 3rd generation white-trash trailer decorated with velvet Elvis paintings and tourist kitsch with mail-order sun porch added. Nice if you are impressed by shiny objects or think a gun-rack is a living room accessory.
Mac OS 9: beautiful, monolithic museum or gov't building. Inspires and creates loyalty with those who don't need to worry if or how the boiler repairs are done. Not very customizable when you dig deeper or want to alter the basic aethetic assumptions but always pretty, slim and presentable. The old SGI building off 101 that is the new Computer Musuem. The NY Guggenhiem. The US Capital.
Mac OS X: the same pretty exterior as Mac OS 9 but now you suddenly find the beauty is stage dressing for the Linux/BSD-style utiliarianism. More like a Hollywood soundstage where things are tweakable yet the illusion of any aesthetic you choose is on top. Sort of the Riemann Sphere of utilitarianism vs. usability and aesthetics (the extremes of the axis have all met at infinity - if it weren't such an obtusely nerdy analogy it'd be a great marketing line).
BTW, if you find these analogies interestings you might want to read Stewart Brand's book "How Buildings Learn" - highly recommended particularly vis-a-vis design patterns, usability from an architectural (building) view - all applicable to computers and software. Yes, the same Stewart Brand as Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, and Clock of the Long Now.
> Are the free lawyers actually any good in Norway?
Well, in his case he faced Double Jeopardy (illegal in the US... at the moment, who knows with more Patriot Acts in the future) and still was cleared, twice. Either his public lawyer was pretty gosh darn good or the prosecution's case was spectactularly bad even with the laws that were on the books.
IANAL, but this may also be laying the groundwork for possible legal action against SCO if SCO continues to send letters or makes other threats, harrassment, etc. For example, it establishes communication (and a paper trail for it) that defines the beginning of losses (of valuable time) could lead to libel, slander, harrassment, etc. It could even become an initial paper trail for criminal charges (I don't know, could racketeering, extortion, etc. apply to what SCO is doing? A lot of similarities to a Mafia protection scam). An interesting angle would be in proceedings of disbarment of their legal counsel and/or law firms' attornies.
If you have rogue cert server "popping up" doesn't this suggest that a need is not being met by the existing IT strategy and infrastructure? Is centralization really going to make that need decrease, or more likely, simply increase?!
I know, the PHBs said this was the solution that needed to be implemented. Nevermind!
This sounds too much like the old DOS complaint about the Unix filesystem being case sensitive. Being case-INsensitive would be a far greater flaw.
For heaven's sake, if you mispelled on case in a program, 99% of the time you'll pick it up in the first compile - problem solved!! Sounds like poor programming discipline and laziness more than anything else.
They only succeed in creating more black markets (aka file sharing) and more arbitraging "middlemen" (file sharers). The economic demand will always be met, no matter what price-fixers wish or pretend would happen. And there will always be collateral damage (DMCA, DRM, etc.). The same economics applies to illegal drugs (with collateral damage of Asset Seizure laws, private citizens' planes shotdown in jungles, etc).
Do these people never learn from history? Haven't they noticed that fixed exchange rates/prices and draconian attempts to control those goods (like the Soviet Union had or the US War on Drugs (WOD)) always create black markets that try to bring prices to the actually demand price? It's abundantly clear that absolutely no one in Music Industry management has ever taken a single economics course! If they did nothing seeped in. Perhaps that's a forbidden subject.
WOD price goal: set price of drugs to infinity to eliminate demand/use; civil rights are largely irrelevant compared to moral and social control of "incorrent and dangerous" goods (moral monopoly) Blackmarket response: offer drugs supply and price at increasingly lower prices to meet demand
Soviet price goal: control economic system for ideological purity and assure party control of country: both use 10-year plans on production without appropriate feedback basic as actual economic demand is largely irrelevant compared to ideology/party control (political monopoly) Blackmarket response: offer illegal foreign currency that can buy goods or goods themselves that are actually wanted/needed
RIAA price goal: set price to maximize profits; music quality and customer satisfaction are largely irrelevant (market monopoly). Microsoft, SCO and similar also qualify on goals and tactics. Blackmarket response: offer music, for free by file sharing, or at a reasonable market price, which people actually want; if an arbitrager can get RIAA price > offered price > free, someone would try; perhaps Apple Music Store is an example, where price includes opportunity cost savings due to choice of individual song vs. buying the whole album.
In other words, you can see the kind of historic friends and company the RIAA keeps - the goals and methods are essentially identical. No wonder everyone hates them. No wonder the pattern of failure and doom pervades all three.
Actually I really do love BMWs; they drive like they are on rails - no other car is like it. It's a combination of the suspension, weight and engine power. IMO Mercedes are underpowered for the weight. VWs tend to be geared oddly for the power/weight - it's only Tiptronic or manual transmission that make them tolerable. Audis are just about right but are overpriced for the value offered (barely a super-VW).
Since you mention it, I actually have a VW Passat; when my 5-series was totalled a while back (rear-ended and crushed between two semis, one going ~40 mph, while I waiting at a stop light - the BMW safety claims are true! Not a scratch on me) I wasn't willing to bite off that much with the measley settlement I got. That set the price of my brand loyalty! If I were rolling in cash it would be an easy decision, even today. Sort of like why I prefer my Mac to my PC:-) I still have a 3-series though.
With regard to the dumb ads, I suppose it won't be much of a problem most of the time as I don't frequent most of the sites mention. I rarely use IE on any platform, unless it's someone else's box and default. It's already pretty noisy on the web if you don't lock-down; I recently was browsing on a virgin IE install without a firewall on someone else's Window box - the pop-ups and rpc windows and sound exploded off the first couple of pages. The web is already pretty unusable and TV-like for the average newbie web user.
Slashdot Mirror
Making an attractive web site is mostly art and very little technology. Artists use paper. Period. Even if you use "natural media" tools like Painter, it's still like drawing/painting with one hand tied behind your back. If you use a computer for the art-part, it's not because it's the best way or the easiest way - it's only the way to do it because it buys you something in later stages of production somehow.
Usually large format sheets get used for the graphic feel of the pages. Post-Its and string (seriously) for navigation and storyboarding.
It's just too easy to get lost in the technical minutiae of computer-based tools and completely 1) forget the actual goal of the website, and 2) lock youself into a design simply because your tools do it only one way.
Once the concepts of the basic page and navigation layout are solid, only then you use a computer. Even then it's with Photoshop or Fireworks, usually using layers to allow re-compositing of the page components in response to the predictable whims, insanity and backtracking of management. Also layers help with building the three (3) designs/color schemes that will be shown to the key stakeholders for sign-off. Why three? 1 or 2 invites questions of completeness of options; 4 or more is confusing and overwhelming. 3 choices just works best to minimize additional rework.
This is where the guideline cutting features of Photoshop or Fireworks come in real handy. You can fragment your prototype and get the necessary graphic element automatically without further manual manipulation. The Adobe and Macromedia companion HTML tools will suck up the design and graphic pieces and build the page almost by themselves.
The US government was informed immediately by the Indian government but didn't care to listen to the details of how he also skipped the Dehli-Paris leg already, was a regular, legitimate traveler, and most important, had a name that simply is as common in that part of the world as "John Smith" is in the US, and which to an ignorant desk-jockey in Washington thought sounded like a name used by a terrorist.
In others words: the whole Christmas "terrorist alert" was a crock caused by moronic goverment incompetence, at best.
> I have never understood this part.
If you had the cash to actually buy them, sure, but do the math on how much that might be: # shared circulated * current market price. Disney has 2.05B shares issued @ $27.40 = ~$50B, or ~$25B in cash to "simply buy 51%"! If you had that much cash lying around you could just start up a competitor to Disney anyway - none of the legacy issues, just a fresh start! But Comcast isn't buying Disney because they want to be able to make cool movies and go to Disneyland for free - they just want content to support their cable products better so they can charge more so they make more money.
Just like the average USian consumer, people/companies who do hostile takeovers don't have that much money lying around for big purchases either: they borrow for a big purchase just like we borrow for a car or house. All the famous Corporate Raiders of the 70s and 80s all used borrowed money to do it. Usually they cut a deal with the lender for part of the liquidation profits that resulted. Pretty slimy on the part of NY investment banks, of course, but this is the same crowd that was involved in Enron and 150-odd years of sliminess dating back to the transcontinental railroad investments.
But say you could get the money, why borrow when you don't have to? Why not just get other people to do what you need: vote for your take-over bid. It costs you nothing beyond the cost to convince them. If you tell them that they'll make more money with a takeover than with following the current status quo ROI from the company, they may "give you" the value of shares by virtue of their vote for you. Shares are just the right of ownership which is mostly the right to vote on the board, directly or by proxy - the board of directors is to corporate ownership what the electoral college and legislature is to citizen ownership of the US government.
The borrowing part is also why "hostile takeovers" are also often called "leveraged buyouts" (leverage is business-speak for "borrow" because it gives you large advantage with small effort like a lever) as in they borrowed the money to buyout the minority shareholders or to create the impression through "large enough" minority ownership to appear to be a legitimate "black knight" with enough apparent power to do the job. The cost and requirements of the latter depend on the articles of incorporation for the company which includes a section on how strategic decisions are made by company. The term "poison pill" refers to changing these rules where they specifically relate to voting rights on decisions. So companies may "adopt a poison pill" to protect against takeover, or hope for a "white knight" to do a friendly takeover instead.
Nerd with an MBA
BTW, the secret to finding prices on a web site for products that "don't list price" is to check the press releases - reporters tend to ignore press leads that don't have an estimated price. It would not look good with readers to present rave article for a product none of them can afford or budget for.
I had been working on a C++ version of gopherd and gopher back then. UMinn legal pulled a nasty one on loyal users and contributors: if you were a commerical user or coming from a .com domain, you have to pay us. They claimed to own the protocol so even separate development would cost. It wasn't based on what you did with it or what you added to it like most of today's open source licenses, just the "color" of your domain. Definitely an open license moving to a closed license.
The commerical-academic-government balkanization was quite strong on the internet back then. No advertising allowed. You had to be careful about regular discussion sometimes (Will this post be seen as an innocent "product support" answer or would it perceived as disallowed commercial speech?). A lot of the nostalgic "gentility" of the old Internet was due to this kind of self-censorship.
At the time the web seemed more (and unnecessarily) complicated as a technology (remember we had just ftp, telnet, usenet and e-mail to compare it against). However, more importantly, there were no 2nd class citizen clauses on the license unlike gopher+.
The UMinn license changes pushed me to research web and html further, which I might not have done otherwise - which was financially rewarding a few short years later. I know other folks had a similar reaction and experience. I shutdown all my gopher servers and converted the content to html.
Anytime you change a variable in your manufacturing process you risk having to throw-out your entire knowledge-base about product reliability. This is why Intel is positively anal about tweaks to their processes and why they sometimes *seem* to be trailing on usage of the latest technologies (e.g. Copper).
The bigger the change or the older the technology you replace, the greater the risk of losing the reliability recipe. Another analogy is software refactoring: there was a story a while back about how major refactoring can sometimes be worse than minor tweaking. It's much the same dynamic. Manufacturing a product is a multivariate, nonlinear system which humans can only, at best, grok to its local linear approximation.
JGski
At some point this morphs into believing that "because we're offering it, it must be what the market wants". Basically people making the standard mistake of confusing cause-and-effect and also cause-vs-correlation.
Market "researchers" who make a living off this play off this fuzzy thinking all the time. Obviously if you tell people what they want to hear ("you're doing a great job trying to put an expresso maker in a cellphone"), they like you more and pay you money!
Think about that. The only real potential use is police and insurance work. Even then, once it leaves the Canon software, all bets are off.
It's not clear if the image can be revalidated after it's been saved to the PC filesystem, or even how they maintain the "keyring" for uploaded file (must always have the physical camera attached??), or if simple, yet benign Photoshopping like cropping or scaling destroy the identify enough to destroy the checksum (seems like it would). So those popular blown-up presentation pictures in a trial could be unverifiable to the original upload. On most cameras the smartcard is just a filesystem - what's to keep someone from uploading another photo - particular if it's from the same camera - and then uploading through the proscribed "verification" system (shades of "Minority Report").
It also means that this type of verification is only as assured as the process and it people around it. A "bad act" by someone in the chain invalidates the verification. It's no better than what exists without it.
"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"
semi-quote from Aliens :-)
The problem is that space has multiple types of radiation, and shielding that protects from one type can actually increase the radiation exposure due to another. Simply putting everything in "thicker box" will make overall radiation effects worse and add more weight to boot.
This radiation problem (for both electronics and humans) is one of the major reasons a mars mission wasn't jumped at after the moon landings in the 70s (aside from the bad economy at the time). It's one of the likely factors that could doom the Bush mars project. The astronauts will be getting a significant radiation exposure and there's probably nothing that can prevent it - it's possible the exposure could be enough to be fatal, especially if there is a solar flare at any time during the mission. See Mitchner's book Space - it's depiction of the radiation risks in human space travel is very accurate.
JGski
Further if there was no specific provision in the "lease/service contract" there is probably no extension of it to the server. This might even hold for "IP" rights of what on the server.
IANAL. Talk to lawyer about this.
It's really not any worse than going between the various commercial Unixes or between SysV and BSD. I cut my admin teeth SysV boxes and it was a bit jarring going to BSD, but most of that wears off quickly with all the commonality. MacOS is abot the same, except it has more Next-isms, which isn't bad thing by any means. Admittedly I've been using Unix since the early 80s so I've seen plenty of OSes and plenty of Unix flavors.
COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) parts don't last long above LEO (low-earth orbit). I used to be involved in testing COTS and RAD parts for space use; in most cases COTS parts died permanently within seconds to minutes when exposed to "typical" interplanetary or deep space radiation levels, while parts from IBM's rad hard line lasted longer that we were able to test them.
Too much shielding for SEU actually increases the total dose exposure due to spallation/bremstrahlung. So if you want both SEU and total dose protection you must minimize Z-shielding and go toward circuit-based hardening, just as the article mentions shielding with "capacitors and resistors".
Linux: Silicon Valley concrete tilt-up, military quonset hut or similar general purpose warehouse. Fundamentally utilitarian but infinitely malleable. Generally not pretty or aesthetically pleasing beyond the utilitarian ideal.
BSD: a higher end business or cognicenti chic utilitarian building like a modern skyscraper with cubes or actually Apple's HQ building. More presentable and reliable yet nicely utilitarian, but the art on the walls is commercial art, nothing bleeding edge or daring.
Windows: the old house that's had add-ons for 100 years with obvious clashing and bad-taste mixes of styles like colonial combined with ranch combined with roccoco, or 3rd generation white-trash trailer decorated with velvet Elvis paintings and tourist kitsch with mail-order sun porch added. Nice if you are impressed by shiny objects or think a gun-rack is a living room accessory.
Mac OS 9: beautiful, monolithic museum or gov't building. Inspires and creates loyalty with those who don't need to worry if or how the boiler repairs are done. Not very customizable when you dig deeper or want to alter the basic aethetic assumptions but always pretty, slim and presentable. The old SGI building off 101 that is the new Computer Musuem. The NY Guggenhiem. The US Capital.
Mac OS X: the same pretty exterior as Mac OS 9 but now you suddenly find the beauty is stage dressing for the Linux/BSD-style utiliarianism. More like a Hollywood soundstage where things are tweakable yet the illusion of any aesthetic you choose is on top. Sort of the Riemann Sphere of utilitarianism vs. usability and aesthetics (the extremes of the axis have all met at infinity - if it weren't such an obtusely nerdy analogy it'd be a great marketing line).
BTW, if you find these analogies interestings you might want to read Stewart Brand's book "How Buildings Learn" - highly recommended particularly vis-a-vis design patterns, usability from an architectural (building) view - all applicable to computers and software. Yes, the same Stewart Brand as Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, and Clock of the Long Now.
At least I thought he was being prosecuted under criminal code...
Well, in his case he faced Double Jeopardy (illegal in the US... at the moment, who knows with more Patriot Acts in the future) and still was cleared, twice. Either his public lawyer was pretty gosh darn good or the prosecution's case was spectactularly bad even with the laws that were on the books.
...Microsoft repeated its denial that the Windows monoculture is a threat to national security.
IANAL, but this may also be laying the groundwork for possible legal action against SCO if SCO continues to send letters or makes other threats, harrassment, etc. For example, it establishes communication (and a paper trail for it) that defines the beginning of losses (of valuable time) could lead to libel, slander, harrassment, etc. It could even become an initial paper trail for criminal charges (I don't know, could racketeering, extortion, etc. apply to what SCO is doing? A lot of similarities to a Mafia protection scam). An interesting angle would be in proceedings of disbarment of their legal counsel and/or law firms' attornies.
I know, the PHBs said this was the solution that needed to be implemented. Nevermind!
For heaven's sake, if you mispelled on case in a program, 99% of the time you'll pick it up in the first compile - problem solved!! Sounds like poor programming discipline and laziness more than anything else.
Do these people never learn from history? Haven't they noticed that fixed exchange rates/prices and draconian attempts to control those goods (like the Soviet Union had or the US War on Drugs (WOD)) always create black markets that try to bring prices to the actually demand price? It's abundantly clear that absolutely no one in Music Industry management has ever taken a single economics course! If they did nothing seeped in. Perhaps that's a forbidden subject.
WOD price goal: set price of drugs to infinity to eliminate demand/use; civil rights are largely irrelevant compared to moral and social control of "incorrent and dangerous" goods (moral monopoly)
Blackmarket response: offer drugs supply and price at increasingly lower prices to meet demand
Soviet price goal: control economic system for ideological purity and assure party control of country: both use 10-year plans on production without appropriate feedback basic as actual economic demand is largely irrelevant compared to ideology/party control (political monopoly)
Blackmarket response: offer illegal foreign currency that can buy goods or goods themselves that are actually wanted/needed
RIAA price goal: set price to maximize profits; music quality and customer satisfaction are largely irrelevant (market monopoly). Microsoft, SCO and similar also qualify on goals and tactics.
Blackmarket response: offer music, for free by file sharing, or at a reasonable market price, which people actually want; if an arbitrager can get RIAA price > offered price > free, someone would try; perhaps Apple Music Store is an example, where price includes opportunity cost savings due to choice of individual song vs. buying the whole album.
In other words, you can see the kind of historic friends and company the RIAA keeps - the goals and methods are essentially identical. No wonder everyone hates them. No wonder the pattern of failure and doom pervades all three.
Actually I really do love BMWs; they drive like they are on rails - no other car is like it. It's a combination of the suspension, weight and engine power. IMO Mercedes are underpowered for the weight. VWs tend to be geared oddly for the power/weight - it's only Tiptronic or manual transmission that make them tolerable. Audis are just about right but are overpriced for the value offered (barely a super-VW).
Since you mention it, I actually have a VW Passat; when my 5-series was totalled a while back (rear-ended and crushed between two semis, one going ~40 mph, while I waiting at a stop light - the BMW safety claims are true! Not a scratch on me) I wasn't willing to bite off that much with the measley settlement I got. That set the price of my brand loyalty! If I were rolling in cash it would be an easy decision, even today. Sort of like why I prefer my Mac to my PC :-) I still have a 3-series though.
With regard to the dumb ads, I suppose it won't be much of a problem most of the time as I don't frequent most of the sites mention. I rarely use IE on any platform, unless it's someone else's box and default. It's already pretty noisy on the web if you don't lock-down; I recently was browsing on a virgin IE install without a firewall on someone else's Window box - the pop-ups and rpc windows and sound exploded off the first couple of pages. The web is already pretty unusable and TV-like for the average newbie web user.
Oh, so you're complaining because they left you out of this lovely service? :-) :-) :-)