I bought an HP2133 with Vista even though it is available with SUSE. When I bought it the only way to get the most powerful hardware was to buy the Vista configuration. It was my first experience with Vista so I played with it for a few days, but now it is happily running Kubuntu. It is not even dual boot; 100% all Linux. If I could have gotten the big iron with SUSE I would have.
It doesn't matter if Microsoft is paying H1B workers $100,000 a year.
Economic growth since early 2000, when the Dow reached its previous peak, hasn't been exceptional. But after-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, because workers' productivity is up, but their wages aren't -- and because companies have dealt with rising health insurance premiums by denying insurance to ever more workers." --NY Times
Compared to the cost of living and worker productivity, workers in the US have not benefited from from their own increases in productivity. "Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1 percent, while the real income of the richest 1 percent -- people with incomes of more than $277,000 in 2004 -- rose 135 percent. --NY Times Microsoft may pay H1B workers $100,000 a year (or not) but even if they do, it is not a fair wage relative to the cost of living and the increase in worker productivity. There is no question that H1B workers hold down wage increases. If Microsoft and other tech companies increased wages, reduced demands for unpaid overtime, and attempted to retain workers older than 35, they wouldn't have any trouble hiring. Instead they import low wage workers and as a result hold down all wages increasing corporate profits at the expense of the workers.
This is not "Big Oil". This is Exxon Mobile. Exxon Mobile is clearly on the record denying global warming and fighting tooth and nail and dollar against anyone who says otherwise or who wants to do something.
Shell Oil and BP are just as firmly on the record saying that global warming is real and trying to help do something about it. You can argue about whether they are part of the problem or whether they are doing enough to help solve it, but they are not global warming deniers.
See this article for an overview of Big Oil and global warming.
I'm not a Linux expert, but I'm no noob either. I started using Unix in 1982 and I've used Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, and Gentoo over the years. I use Red Hat every day at work. I just installed a Ubuntu machine and although my install is much more complicated and more difficult than the standard 6 step install, it is still far and away the best experience I've ever hand with Linux. (Gentoo was far and away the worst. I've got better things to do with my time than recompile code that has already be compiled thousands of times before.) I've actually been enjoying using it, at least when things go well. I'll probably pick up the book and I'm sure I'll learn some stuff.
TopLink existed as a Smalltalk product in the early 90's, '93 or '94. I know because my company developed a Smalltalk OR mapping product that competed with TopLink.
It takes more discipline than I have to try to understand a patent, but I'd be astonished if the there isn't a ton of prior art, starting with TopLink.
Where is XForms support? Yes I know about the Mozilla plug in and all of the other external support, but until it is built into the browser I can't even think about using it in my web sites. The current HTML forms support is crude at best, yet it is crucial for any kind of application. The XForms spec has been around since 2003 and still no browser supports it. Don't wait on MS; they won't support it since it makes the browser a more capable platform for delivering apps and that competes with their OS/application strategy. Opera is supporting Web Forms 2.0, but that is not the W3C standard. I wish the browser community, Firefox, would stop messing around and provide a real step forward in browser capability, XForms support.
Mercedes already offer a comperable system on the 2004 SL, CL, and S class. This has been availble in the CL since the 2000 model year. This page is pure Flash, but it describes the system. http://www.mbusa.com/media/richmedia/main/models/t ech_demos/abc/abc.swf
The best camcorder for 2003 according to some is the Panasonic PV-DV953. It is a 3-CCD camcorder for barely under $1000. It's biggest drawback is its poor low light performance. This is intrinsic to inexpensive 3-CCD camcorders.
The light sensitivity of a camcorder is proportional to the size of the pixels. The bigger the pixels the more photons they collect, the more sensitive they are to light. The cost of a camcorder is also proportional to the size of the pixels. The bigger the pixels, the bigger the CCD, and the more expensive the CCD. In a 3-CCD camera the cost of the CCD is multiplied by 3, so increasing the size of the CCD greatly increases the cost of the camcorder.
So, choose two, best picture quality, good low light capability, low cost.
I can get a phone that includes a color video camera, but I can't get a phone (not a PDA cum phone) that will store street addresses. I don't carry a PDA. I don't need one. But when I ship a birthday present to my niece, I have to write her mailing address down on a PostIt and carry that with me to the FedEx dropoff so that I can fill out the shipping label. If I want to give directions to a friend's house, I don't have the street address unless I'm at home or call my friend. My phone will store 60 gazillion phone numbers and email addresses (and who sends email from their phone) but won't store a street address. I mean, how hard is it to store a simple street address in the "address book".
I shop in the store in Moraga a couple of times a week and I have never seen anyone using the thing. There are racks at the check-outs where the devices are returned after the shopper is finished. Never seen one in one of those racks. When it was first introduced there were people in the store pushing customers to sign up. I don't recall seeing anyone signing up. From what I have seen it is a total flop.
A few years ago there was an informal poll of OO programmers. The conclusion was that people who grew up playing with Legos were more likely to be Smalltalk programmers. Those who grew up playing with Meccano were more likely to be C++ programmers. Both groups were pleased with the results and felt it confirmed their point of view.
Personally, I never hand the manual dexterity to put all those tiny little screws together. I suppose that's why I spent most of the past 20 years writing Smalltalk. Is manual dexterity a prerequsite for C++ programmers?
I've got 1500 feet of CAT5 under my 2300 sq ft house and it's not enough. I've got two cables to each box and two boxes in each room except the bathrooms and closets. It's all home run to a central wiring closet. Total cost of the cable, $150. Took me two weekends to install crawling under the house.
If I had it to do over I'd run four or six cables to each box and use sheilded CAT5. I've gotten some noise problems from power cables and from the timing pulse on the ISDN phone line. It wouldn't take that much longer to run more cables nor cost that much more.
I use the CAT5 for dual networks (home, work), phone, and audio. I think I could get video to work as well, but I haven't tried it. I could have pulled coax for video, fiber, or even "future-proof" (hah!) cable. Each of those would cost much more ("future-proof" is $$ per foot) and is much harder to work with.
Sure six shielded CAT5 per box is too much, today. But so what. The cost of the cable is minimal and if you are pulling it, be sure to pull too much so you won't be saying (like me) "I wish I'd pulled another cable."
In my experience repeatedly installing and uninstalling software makes a system suck. Each (un)install screws up the system configuration a little bit, adding, changeing, or deleting. Sort of like running text thru the fish multiple times. The end result is a system that doesn't work anymore.
OSs are not designed to accomodate the (un)installation of software. There are hacks, e.g. RPM, that make (un)installation easier, but the cruft in the system accumulates unchecked.
I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to make (un)installation as easy and reliable as possible. The goal would be that installing A, installing B, then uninstalling A would be indistinguishable from just installing B. If this were always true no matter how poorly the A and B (un)installers were written, software would suck less.
I have a Pacific Bell GSM phone (Nokia 5190). I recently drove across the country from Boston to San Francisco. According to PacBell's coverage map I should have had coverage in almost every city I went thru and most larger towns. Wrong. I had coverage in Boston, St. Louis, and from Reno to San Francisco.
I like GSM and am satisfied with PacBell, but the coverage sucks. Coverage around the SF Bay Area is ok and I rarely travel, so I get by.
My wife has a Sprint phone. She had coverage for most of the trip. Her coverage only dropped out when we were way out in the boonies. Her phone is dual band however and much of the time it was analog only.
If you are really concerned about nation wide coverage, get an analog (yes, I know the problems with analog) or better yet, dual-band phone.
My wife's Sprint calling plan gets something like 600 nation wide minutes a month for $70. Something like that. But that's digital minutes only. Analog minutes cost (lots) extra. She travels a lot and uses her phone a lot and is happy with it.
My concern about Echelon is not the existance of Echelon per se, but the way that the NSA is probably using it.
It is against the law for the NSA to intercept communications within the US. They can only legally intecept communication where the endpoint of one leg of the communication is outside the US. Thus it is illegal for them to intercept my call from San Francisco to Honolulu via undersea cable direct. But if the call is routed to Cabo San Lucas (sp?) Mexico, and then to Honolulu, the NSA can legally intercept it.
Personally, I think this is just fine. The world is a dangerous place what with North Korea building long range missles and trying to build atomic bombs. It's a good thing to know a lot about what's going on in the world and eavesdropping on communications is a good way to learn. The problem I have is that the NSA seems to be skirting the rules on spying on US based communications by giving their keyword lists to the Austrailians, Kiwis, etc and asking them to spy on US based communications, passing the results on to the NSA. The Austrailians, Kiwis etc can do this because Echelon is truly international. A lot of US based comm traffic gets caught up in it. The NSA can't search it, but their proxies can and of course have a duty to turn over to the NSA any "threats" they uncover as part of their own surviellance.
Why should we care about this. Because it's illegal and the NSA is probably doing it. It's a separate argument as to whether it should be illegal.
Many moons ago I worked at Xerox and knew some of the engineers who worked with Xerox's then new daisy wheel printers. They were trying to get one of the printers Tempest certified. They did all the standard stuff, shielding etc., submitted the printer and it failed. The only feedback was one bit, passed/failed. Make changes. Submit. Fail. Repeat several times.
Finally, I think around the seventh submission, one of the guys at the certification facility had some mercy. He only said one word, "sound".
Consider the difference between a "." and a "W". The printer better not hit the "." as hard as the "W" otherwise it'll just punch holes in the paper. So the printers were designed with multiple impact levels and used different ones for different letters.
They reprogrammed the printer to use the same intemediate impact level for all characters (never mind what that did to print quality) and sure enough the printer was Tempest certified.
We guessed that the differences in sound of the different impact levels were enough that some useful information could be extracted by listening to the printer print. So Tempest isn't just about electronic emissions, it also includes other emissions like sound.
It has recently been reported that Russian banks under criminal control modified their ATM machines to capture customer PINs, then used the PINs to withdraw money from the customer accounts. How severe do you consider this problem and what can be done about it? In particular are there any software only solutions or does it require some sort of hardware key?
You can't easily store Java objects in the database. You can do it, but there's no built-in support for it. You can create Java objects from data in the database; there's a lot of support for that. But when you store the Java object you turn it back into RDBMS data. It's no longer an object.
That said, Java in the database is still very useful. One important thing to note is that each connected user gets his/her own VM. This means that instead of having to write your own multi-threaded, multi-user app, you can write a single threaded, single user app and let the Oracle handle the multi-user bit. Oracle provides all sorts of dispatching, load-balancing, and security features, features that are critical for real-life server apps.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, the only visible proprietary classes are the classes that implement JDBC. Everything else is either invisible or is not Oracle proprietary.
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I bought an HP2133 with Vista even though it is available with SUSE. When I bought it the only way to get the most powerful hardware was to buy the Vista configuration. It was my first experience with Vista so I played with it for a few days, but now it is happily running Kubuntu. It is not even dual boot; 100% all Linux. If I could have gotten the big iron with SUSE I would have.
This is not "Big Oil". This is Exxon Mobile. Exxon Mobile is clearly on the record denying global warming and fighting tooth and nail and dollar against anyone who says otherwise or who wants to do something.
Shell Oil and BP are just as firmly on the record saying that global warming is real and trying to help do something about it. You can argue about whether they are part of the problem or whether they are doing enough to help solve it, but they are not global warming deniers.
See this article for an overview of Big Oil and global warming.
I'm not a Linux expert, but I'm no noob either. I started using Unix in 1982 and I've used Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, and Gentoo over the years. I use Red Hat every day at work. I just installed a Ubuntu machine and although my install is much more complicated and more difficult than the standard 6 step install, it is still far and away the best experience I've ever hand with Linux. (Gentoo was far and away the worst. I've got better things to do with my time than recompile code that has already be compiled thousands of times before.) I've actually been enjoying using it, at least when things go well. I'll probably pick up the book and I'm sure I'll learn some stuff.
TopLink existed as a Smalltalk product in the early 90's, '93 or '94. I know because my company developed a Smalltalk OR mapping product that competed with TopLink.
It takes more discipline than I have to try to understand a patent, but I'd be astonished if the there isn't a ton of prior art, starting with TopLink.
Where is XForms support? Yes I know about the Mozilla plug in and all of the other external support, but until it is built into the browser I can't even think about using it in my web sites. The current HTML forms support is crude at best, yet it is crucial for any kind of application. The XForms spec has been around since 2003 and still no browser supports it. Don't wait on MS; they won't support it since it makes the browser a more capable platform for delivering apps and that competes with their OS/application strategy. Opera is supporting Web Forms 2.0, but that is not the W3C standard. I wish the browser community, Firefox, would stop messing around and provide a real step forward in browser capability, XForms support.
Mercedes already offer a comperable system on the 2004 SL, CL, and S class. This has been availble in the CL since the 2000 model year. This page is pure Flash, but it describes the system. http://www.mbusa.com/media/richmedia/main/models/t ech_demos/abc/abc.swf
The light sensitivity of a camcorder is proportional to the size of the pixels. The bigger the pixels the more photons they collect, the more sensitive they are to light. The cost of a camcorder is also proportional to the size of the pixels. The bigger the pixels, the bigger the CCD, and the more expensive the CCD. In a 3-CCD camera the cost of the CCD is multiplied by 3, so increasing the size of the CCD greatly increases the cost of the camcorder.
So, choose two, best picture quality, good low light capability, low cost.
I can get a phone that includes a color video camera, but I can't get a phone (not a PDA cum phone) that will store street addresses. I don't carry a PDA. I don't need one. But when I ship a birthday present to my niece, I have to write her mailing address down on a PostIt and carry that with me to the FedEx dropoff so that I can fill out the shipping label. If I want to give directions to a friend's house, I don't have the street address unless I'm at home or call my friend. My phone will store 60 gazillion phone numbers and email addresses (and who sends email from their phone) but won't store a street address. I mean, how hard is it to store a simple street address in the "address book".
I shop in the store in Moraga a couple of times a week and I have never seen anyone using the thing. There are racks at the check-outs where the devices are returned after the shopper is finished. Never seen one in one of those racks. When it was first introduced there were people in the store pushing customers to sign up. I don't recall seeing anyone signing up. From what I have seen it is a total flop.
A few years ago there was an informal poll of OO programmers. The conclusion was that people who grew up playing with Legos were more likely to be Smalltalk programmers. Those who grew up playing with Meccano were more likely to be C++ programmers. Both groups were pleased with the results and felt it confirmed their point of view.
Personally, I never hand the manual dexterity to put all those tiny little screws together. I suppose that's why I spent most of the past 20 years writing Smalltalk. Is manual dexterity a prerequsite for C++ programmers?
I've got 1500 feet of CAT5 under my 2300 sq ft house and it's not enough. I've got two cables to each box and two boxes in each room except the bathrooms and closets. It's all home run to a central wiring closet. Total cost of the cable, $150. Took me two weekends to install crawling under the house.
If I had it to do over I'd run four or six cables to each box and use sheilded CAT5. I've gotten some noise problems from power cables and from the timing pulse on the ISDN phone line. It wouldn't take that much longer to run more cables nor cost that much more.
I use the CAT5 for dual networks (home, work), phone, and audio. I think I could get video to work as well, but I haven't tried it. I could have pulled coax for video, fiber, or even "future-proof" (hah!) cable. Each of those would cost much more ("future-proof" is $$ per foot) and is much harder to work with.
Sure six shielded CAT5 per box is too much, today. But so what. The cost of the cable is minimal and if you are pulling it, be sure to pull too much so you won't be saying (like me) "I wish I'd pulled another cable."
In my experience repeatedly installing and uninstalling software makes a system suck. Each (un)install screws up the system configuration a little bit, adding, changeing, or deleting. Sort of like running text thru the fish multiple times. The end result is a system that doesn't work anymore.
OSs are not designed to accomodate the (un)installation of software. There are hacks, e.g. RPM, that make (un)installation easier, but the cruft in the system accumulates unchecked.
I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to make (un)installation as easy and reliable as possible. The goal would be that installing A, installing B, then uninstalling A would be indistinguishable from just installing B. If this were always true no matter how poorly the A and B (un)installers were written, software would suck less.
I have a Pacific Bell GSM phone (Nokia 5190). I recently drove across the country from Boston to San Francisco. According to PacBell's coverage map I should have had coverage in almost every city I went thru and most larger towns. Wrong. I had coverage in Boston, St. Louis, and from Reno to San Francisco.
I like GSM and am satisfied with PacBell, but the coverage sucks. Coverage around the SF Bay Area is ok and I rarely travel, so I get by.
My wife has a Sprint phone. She had coverage for most of the trip. Her coverage only dropped out when we were way out in the boonies. Her phone is dual band however and much of the time it was analog only.
If you are really concerned about nation wide coverage, get an analog (yes, I know the problems with analog) or better yet, dual-band phone.
My wife's Sprint calling plan gets something like 600 nation wide minutes a month for $70. Something like that. But that's digital minutes only. Analog minutes cost (lots) extra. She travels a lot and uses her phone a lot and is happy with it.
My concern about Echelon is not the existance of Echelon per se, but the way that the NSA is probably using it.
It is against the law for the NSA to intercept communications within the US. They can only legally intecept communication where the endpoint of one leg of the communication is outside the US. Thus it is illegal for them to intercept my call from San Francisco to Honolulu via undersea cable direct. But if the call is routed to Cabo San Lucas (sp?) Mexico, and then to Honolulu, the NSA can legally intercept it.
Personally, I think this is just fine. The world is a dangerous place what with North Korea building long range missles and trying to build atomic bombs. It's a good thing to know a lot about what's going on in the world and eavesdropping on communications is a good way to learn. The problem I have is that the NSA seems to be skirting the rules on spying on US based communications by giving their keyword lists to the Austrailians, Kiwis, etc and asking them to spy on US based communications, passing the results on to the NSA. The Austrailians, Kiwis etc can do this because Echelon is truly international. A lot of US based comm traffic gets caught up in it. The NSA can't search it, but their proxies can and of course have a duty to turn over to the NSA any "threats" they uncover as part of their own surviellance.
Why should we care about this. Because it's illegal and the NSA is probably doing it. It's a separate argument as to whether it should be illegal.
Many moons ago I worked at Xerox and knew some of the engineers who worked with Xerox's then new daisy wheel printers. They were trying to get one of the printers Tempest certified. They did all the standard stuff, shielding etc., submitted the printer and it failed. The only feedback was one bit, passed/failed. Make changes. Submit. Fail. Repeat several times.
Finally, I think around the seventh submission, one of the guys at the certification facility had some mercy. He only said one word, "sound".
Consider the difference between a "." and a "W". The printer better not hit the "." as hard as the "W" otherwise it'll just punch holes in the paper. So the printers were designed with multiple impact levels and used different ones for different letters.
They reprogrammed the printer to use the same intemediate impact level for all characters (never mind what that did to print quality) and sure enough the printer was Tempest certified.
We guessed that the differences in sound of the different impact levels were enough that some useful information could be extracted by listening to the printer print. So Tempest isn't just about electronic emissions, it also includes other emissions like sound.
It has recently been reported that Russian banks under criminal control modified their ATM machines to capture customer PINs, then used the PINs to withdraw money from the customer accounts. How severe do you consider this problem and what can be done about it? In particular are there any software only solutions or does it require some sort of hardware key?
You can't easily store Java objects in the database. You can do it, but there's no built-in support for it. You can create Java objects from data in the database; there's a lot of support for that. But when you store the Java object you turn it back into RDBMS data. It's no longer an object.
That said, Java in the database is still very useful. One important thing to note is that each connected user gets his/her own VM. This means that instead of having to write your own multi-threaded, multi-user app, you can write a single threaded, single user app and let the Oracle handle the multi-user bit. Oracle provides all sorts of dispatching, load-balancing, and security features, features that are critical for real-life server apps.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, the only visible proprietary classes are the classes that implement JDBC. Everything else is either invisible or is not Oracle proprietary.