What confuses me as soon as it says "$100 more" is that you are at $299 and for another $150 you can wander into BestBuy and splash $450 on a decent laptop that comes with Vista. Knocking $80 or what ever for the OEM version means that you are talking $370 or so for a decent laptop with a decent screen and a decent disk et al and this is for something with a dual core Intel processor.
Now given Moore's Law around the hardware, and screen real estate, its a bit odd that $299 gets you a computer that is that crap. Now I can see why at the $100 limit you'll be cutting loads of corners especially if you want it to work on low power, but the concept of a $299 machine with crap specs doesn't sound cheap.
$100 means cutting lots of corners, but at $299 it just sounds, somewhat bizarrely, like a bit of a rip off.
One of the worst areas of this is where it asks for justification of where the private sector has failed, but of course leaves the judgement of the failure up to the executive. So lets ask ourselves
Climate Change v Car Industry & Exxon Evolution v Some Christian Fundy "private" research organisation Effect of Torture v Halliburton
Saying that you have to prove where private research has failed is just offering those corporations a blank cheque to perform dodgy research. Federally funded research on things like Smoking, Asbestos, Drugs and more have consistently held private corporations to account specifically because they could start research on the basis of questioning data rather than having actual proof of failure.
It takes research to disprove a theory, unfortunately this is effectively about invalidating the scientific method. By requiring people to demonstrate failure of a theory BEFORE THEY HAVE DONE THE RESEARCH quite neatly makes sure that corporate research cannot be questioned.
I travel alot, and a lack of internet access for 12 hours or so is one of the things I really don't miss. I do a hell a lot of work on flights and a major reason for that is that I have to plan in advance, make sure I've got all the info I need and then I'm away. If I was on the internet I'd be expected to connect back to base, read and respond to emails and basically get less actual work done as people sent emails like "have you landed yet".
I like the fact that for 12 hours I'm out of communications and I can settle down and do what I want to do. I land, sync with the airport's WiFi and by the time I'm in the cab I'm responding to all those emails anyway, 30 minutes later I'm in the hotel and connected and the emails are all sent.
Lufthansa tried this a few years ago and then cancelled it because simply put the folks in business class (who would pay for this stuff) preferred to drink the nice wine, have a nice meal and have a sleep rather than browse the internet and get their emails.
Over the past 30 years the FAA has consistently demonstrated that it is not capable of deploying a single pan-USA system to improve air-traffic control in the United States. They've wasted tens of billions of dollars in badly thought out schemes to replace the current system and have consistently not learnt from the lessons of other major ATC areas such as Asia and most especially Europe.
Why on earth would anyone think that the FAA, who have delivered bugger all in 30 years, will be able to deliver now? Its time to take a new view on what Air Traffic Control in the US should look like and take delivery of the next ATC system out of the hands of the FAA.
The FAA in technology terms are the dunce of the class in global Air Traffic Control terms, sure people can point to the "ooh its a big country" but Europe has a single upper airways control centre in Maastrict (Netherlands) and has continued to churn out new approaches and solutions from its single policy, R&D and Simulation organisation Eurocontrol. Europe is also embarking on a single pan-european system which will be deployed in around 15 years time (this is the HARD end of technology).
Part of the issue is the FAAs view that it knows best (despite the evidence to the contary) so when new approaches to ATC are created elsewhere (mainly Japan and Europe) they push back against them and try and create their own solution. They are continually trying to take the short cut (expensive short cut) with some new technology gizmo rather than doing the hard way of actually planning a pan-USA federated ATC system with a single upper airway controller and decent federation around the major hubs and then delivering that incrementally focusing on the key cruch points in the existing systems. They just look for the silver bullet.
The FAA is a case study on how not to do large scale IT, and a case study on how not to learn from others.
Seriously what a load of tosh. The idea that the US (the world's largest per-capita polluter by a mile) has had strong environmental laws that are being "weakened" due to competition is laughable. Auto-manufacturing is suffering due to from competition from... Japan (hardly "3rd world"). Canadians (NAFTA) have stronger environmental legislation than the US.
Claiming environmental legislation is being weakened in the name of free trade is just rubbish. I'd bet pretty heavy money that had BP been building this plant in Sweden, or even across the lake in Canada, that they would have been subject to tighter environmental restrictions.
Free trade generates jobs, its what made the USA the economy that it is. Economic protectionism is actually what is destroying the environment in the US, e.g. subsidising non-green corn for bio-fuel while punishing much cleaner Brazilian ethanol. Corporations always try and get away with things, governments should enforce things. Unfortunately in the US the environment is just an excuse for bad subsidies and anti-competitive behaviour rather than using the Free market to adopt solutions that are working elsewhere.
Blame NAFTA, Blame Japan, Blame China. In fact Blame Canada... anything rather than admit the problem is rather closer to home.
Everytime I travel to the US and look at the ingredients its there on the side of the can every single time. Over in europe we use this amazing new invention called "sugar" instead.
So its not quite true to say that America are shipping the crap that is High Fructose Corn Syrup on the rest of the world, its actually that AMERICAN companies are using that on AMERICANS and using more natural ingredients outside of the US. This appears to be due to costs (its cheaper to use HFCS in the US, as sugar imports are penalised) meaning that the world's richest economy is using the cheapest and crappiest ingredients.
Does anyone have a link to the actual "Google Security Team" report on the issue, or an announcement from them on having discovered the issue?
The article rages about the whole universe being at risk (ignoring the fact that Java has had an auto-update mechanism for quite a while) but doesn't say which JVMs are at risk.
I can't actually find ANYTHING else beyond the chicken licken article here on what the issue is.
The first thing you do every morning is check the sev 1 problems that have occurred when you are out. Next off you look at the 24 hour report to see what is out of whack. Anything odd you follow up on. If everything is fine then you have a cup of strong coffee and wait for the first dumb question of the day.
Deal with the disasters first, after that everything in the day is a lightweight bonus.
On the previous Slashdot patent post I was suggesting a way of formalising the prior art. Like lots of people have said in the threads here "surely someone has done X before" the problem is that if you can't prove it was published externally and could have been read by other people then it doesn't count as Prior Art in a patent application.
I believe the first F-117 Stealth (invisible to all high tech anti-air defenses)
The "Stealth" planes are one of the greatest examples of why there are no advanced Alien Technologies. The F-117 is very visibile to most modern high-tech anti-air defense radar, its just a smaller bleep than it should be which makes it slightly trickier. This makes it difficult for crap 20+ year old radars to see it, e.g. the ones that the French, US and Brits sold to Iraq. If the F-117 was actually invisible to radar then they wouldn't be flying it at 30,000ft all the time.
If the US really does have alien technology and it led to the F-117 I'd really suggest complaining back to the "superior" race that invented it.
Now Stealth Ships however tend to work because they build on the radar clutter that the sea causes thus making the ships nearly impossible to make out from the background noise.
One of the worst things about the last 7 years of US government has been the destruction of rational debate. Everything is now about opinion rather than about facts and its become perfectly okay to have a firm opinion, no matter how insane it is (Cheney and his "I'm not in the executive" for starters).
Its hard to see this changing in the next few years because it is actively supported by the media who much prefer a strong opinion to some dull and boring facts.
At least he didn't claim everyone against him was supporting terrorists......
Holy crap, someone who actually believes the crap that comes out of mouths of sociologists.
All of the aboves are STORIES which are MADE UP by people to impress stupid people and bend them to their will... they aren't REAL.
Its like all those idots who say things like "we shouldn't do that because it offends the beliefs of X" when science does something that proves that they've been smoking too much and their belief is rubbish (you know like the 6,000 year old earth, world wide flood, Lightning being made by Thor etc).
Given that they are admitting to planning murder and more its hard to see the big faults that they are hiding. Genocide perhaps? Or being behind Pauly Shore?
HTTP is a protocol, P2P are a classification of applications, some of which use the HTTP protocol as a transport layer.
Comparing the two is as pointless as comparing Real Player with TCP/IP. P2P is used to shift big binaries files around, HTTP to shift small TEXT files.
Firehose has actually made the quality of stories go down!
And one of the reasons is that most commercial projects just don't have the "tinkering" problem that GIT aims to solve and they also don't have the "multiple people one file" problem either. This is because in a commercial project there tend to be a limited number of shared files (and these will be religiously guarded) and people are delivering to requirements.
GIT works for Linus, but that doesn't mean that the distributed paradigm makes sense for everyone.
But do Microsoft really support their developers that well these days? I mean compare VS2005 (note the year folks) with what is coming out of eclipse (let alone the commercial extensions to eclipse) and its hard to justify the claim that VS is the "best" developer IDE, its just that VS folks haven't used the alternatives whereas the Java folks can switch like the wind. So IDE wise they aren't supporting their developers. Even things like the testing framework are an issue, most people use the open source JUnit or NUnit but MS couldn't stand that so created their own, bulkier and worse, alternative, again not great for developers.
So what about features? Well if you do enterprise software they haven't had a major revision of the set since 2004(!) and even on the desktop with things like Office the amount of porting information from old to ribbon isn't as great as you'd expect (its more this is how you BUILD stuff with ribbon).
There is MDSN which is great for software access (and you pay for it) and some of the forums are pretty good. The problem with MS is that the community is so MS centric, what I mean by this is that when you compare with Java you aren't asking whether Sun support Java people better than MS but whether SAP, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun, Open Source, etc support Java people better.
I've regularly sat on both sides of the fence, and I think that competition between vendors tends to give developers better support.
Not to pick a hole in the history but lets be clear that WWII with the Nazi regime in Germany committing genocide and the enforced slavery and prostitution going on in Japan started quite a few years before... by 1941 pretty much all of Europe was occupied and large parts of Eastern Asia were equally suffering.
So its interesting on the shape and all... but its only on the verge of the US entering WWII, most certainly not on the verge of the war itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Extending it to patent trolls would, I feel, certainly act as a deterrent.
And this is Texas after all....
What confuses me as soon as it says "$100 more" is that you are at $299 and for another $150 you can wander into BestBuy and splash $450 on a decent laptop that comes with Vista. Knocking $80 or what ever for the OEM version means that you are talking $370 or so for a decent laptop with a decent screen and a decent disk et al and this is for something with a dual core Intel processor.
Now given Moore's Law around the hardware, and screen real estate, its a bit odd that $299 gets you a computer that is that crap. Now I can see why at the $100 limit you'll be cutting loads of corners especially if you want it to work on low power, but the concept of a $299 machine with crap specs doesn't sound cheap.
$100 means cutting lots of corners, but at $299 it just sounds, somewhat bizarrely, like a bit of a rip off.
Is that Balmer has run out of chairs. By doing this he hopes to gain access to all the Open Source communities chairs.
the artist is probably richer than his wildest dreams
Keith Richards has some pretty wild dreams....
One of the worst areas of this is where it asks for justification of where the private sector has failed, but of course leaves the judgement of the failure up to the executive. So lets ask ourselves
Climate Change v Car Industry & Exxon
Evolution v Some Christian Fundy "private" research organisation
Effect of Torture v Halliburton
Saying that you have to prove where private research has failed is just offering those corporations a blank cheque to perform dodgy research. Federally funded research on things like Smoking, Asbestos, Drugs and more have consistently held private corporations to account specifically because they could start research on the basis of questioning data rather than having actual proof of failure.
It takes research to disprove a theory, unfortunately this is effectively about invalidating the scientific method. By requiring people to demonstrate failure of a theory BEFORE THEY HAVE DONE THE RESEARCH quite neatly makes sure that corporate research cannot be questioned.
Astonishingly dreadful
I travel alot, and a lack of internet access for 12 hours or so is one of the things I really don't miss. I do a hell a lot of work on flights and a major reason for that is that I have to plan in advance, make sure I've got all the info I need and then I'm away. If I was on the internet I'd be expected to connect back to base, read and respond to emails and basically get less actual work done as people sent emails like "have you landed yet".
I like the fact that for 12 hours I'm out of communications and I can settle down and do what I want to do. I land, sync with the airport's WiFi and by the time I'm in the cab I'm responding to all those emails anyway, 30 minutes later I'm in the hotel and connected and the emails are all sent.
Lufthansa tried this a few years ago and then cancelled it because simply put the folks in business class (who would pay for this stuff) preferred to drink the nice wine, have a nice meal and have a sleep rather than browse the internet and get their emails.
Over the past 30 years the FAA has consistently demonstrated that it is not capable of deploying a single pan-USA system to improve air-traffic control in the United States. They've wasted tens of billions of dollars in badly thought out schemes to replace the current system and have consistently not learnt from the lessons of other major ATC areas such as Asia and most especially Europe.
Why on earth would anyone think that the FAA, who have delivered bugger all in 30 years, will be able to deliver now? Its time to take a new view on what Air Traffic Control in the US should look like and take delivery of the next ATC system out of the hands of the FAA.
The FAA in technology terms are the dunce of the class in global Air Traffic Control terms, sure people can point to the "ooh its a big country" but Europe has a single upper airways control centre in Maastrict (Netherlands) and has continued to churn out new approaches and solutions from its single policy, R&D and Simulation organisation Eurocontrol. Europe is also embarking on a single pan-european system which will be deployed in around 15 years time (this is the HARD end of technology).
Part of the issue is the FAAs view that it knows best (despite the evidence to the contary) so when new approaches to ATC are created elsewhere (mainly Japan and Europe) they push back against them and try and create their own solution. They are continually trying to take the short cut (expensive short cut) with some new technology gizmo rather than doing the hard way of actually planning a pan-USA federated ATC system with a single upper airway controller and decent federation around the major hubs and then delivering that incrementally focusing on the key cruch points in the existing systems. They just look for the silver bullet.
The FAA is a case study on how not to do large scale IT, and a case study on how not to learn from others.
Seriously what a load of tosh. The idea that the US (the world's largest per-capita polluter by a mile) has had strong environmental laws that are being "weakened" due to competition is laughable. Auto-manufacturing is suffering due to from competition from... Japan (hardly "3rd world"). Canadians (NAFTA) have stronger environmental legislation than the US.
Claiming environmental legislation is being weakened in the name of free trade is just rubbish. I'd bet pretty heavy money that had BP been building this plant in Sweden, or even across the lake in Canada, that they would have been subject to tighter environmental restrictions.
Free trade generates jobs, its what made the USA the economy that it is. Economic protectionism is actually what is destroying the environment in the US, e.g. subsidising non-green corn for bio-fuel while punishing much cleaner Brazilian ethanol. Corporations always try and get away with things, governments should enforce things. Unfortunately in the US the environment is just an excuse for bad subsidies and anti-competitive behaviour rather than using the Free market to adopt solutions that are working elsewhere.
Blame NAFTA, Blame Japan, Blame China. In fact Blame Canada... anything rather than admit the problem is rather closer to home.
Everytime I travel to the US and look at the ingredients its there on the side of the can every single time. Over in europe we use this amazing new invention called "sugar" instead.
So its not quite true to say that America are shipping the crap that is High Fructose Corn Syrup on the rest of the world, its actually that AMERICAN companies are using that on AMERICANS and using more natural ingredients outside of the US. This appears to be due to costs (its cheaper to use HFCS in the US, as sugar imports are penalised) meaning that the world's richest economy is using the cheapest and crappiest ingredients.
Does anyone have a link to the actual "Google Security Team" report on the issue, or an announcement from them on having discovered the issue?
The article rages about the whole universe being at risk (ignoring the fact that Java has had an auto-update mechanism for quite a while) but doesn't say which JVMs are at risk.
I can't actually find ANYTHING else beyond the chicken licken article here on what the issue is.
Nope, you lose irony and sarcasm during the compression :)
Oh and the ability to pronounce the "h" in Herb
The first thing you do every morning is check the sev 1 problems that have occurred when you are out. Next off you look at the 24 hour report to see what is out of whack. Anything odd you follow up on. If everything is fine then you have a cup of strong coffee and wait for the first dumb question of the day.
Deal with the disasters first, after that everything in the day is a lightweight bonus.
On the previous Slashdot patent post I was suggesting a way of formalising the prior art. Like lots of people have said in the threads here "surely someone has done X before" the problem is that if you can't prove it was published externally and could have been read by other people then it doesn't count as Prior Art in a patent application.
Blog and tag those obvious ideas.
Genius, so you take a phone and "unlock it" thus meaning it is no longer a phone.
I believe the first F-117 Stealth (invisible to all high tech anti-air defenses)
The "Stealth" planes are one of the greatest examples of why there are no advanced Alien Technologies. The F-117 is very visibile to most modern high-tech anti-air defense radar, its just a smaller bleep than it should be which makes it slightly trickier. This makes it difficult for crap 20+ year old radars to see it, e.g. the ones that the French, US and Brits sold to Iraq. If the F-117 was actually invisible to radar then they wouldn't be flying it at 30,000ft all the time.
If the US really does have alien technology and it led to the F-117 I'd really suggest complaining back to the "superior" race that invented it.
Now Stealth Ships however tend to work because they build on the radar clutter that the sea causes thus making the ships nearly impossible to make out from the background noise.
One of the worst things about the last 7 years of US government has been the destruction of rational debate. Everything is now about opinion rather than about facts and its become perfectly okay to have a firm opinion, no matter how insane it is (Cheney and his "I'm not in the executive" for starters).
Its hard to see this changing in the next few years because it is actively supported by the media who much prefer a strong opinion to some dull and boring facts.
At least he didn't claim everyone against him was supporting terrorists......
Holy crap, someone who actually believes the crap that comes out of mouths of sociologists.
All of the aboves are STORIES which are MADE UP by people to impress stupid people and bend them to their will... they aren't REAL.
Its like all those idots who say things like "we shouldn't do that because it offends the beliefs of X" when science does something that proves that they've been smoking too much and their belief is rubbish (you know like the 6,000 year old earth, world wide flood, Lightning being made by Thor etc).
4 digit slashdot ID and a 2 digit IQ.
Given that they are admitting to planning murder and more its hard to see the big faults that they are hiding. Genocide perhaps? Or being behind Pauly Shore?
HTTP is a protocol, P2P are a classification of applications, some of which use the HTTP protocol as a transport layer.
Comparing the two is as pointless as comparing Real Player with TCP/IP. P2P is used to shift big binaries files around, HTTP to shift small TEXT files.
Firehose has actually made the quality of stories go down!
neighbor [...] ex-English teacher
Sorry to out pedant you, but to be accurate you used to be an ex-American-English teacher, the correct English spelling is "neighbour".
Hey its Monday morning and I haven't had coffee yet.
And one of the reasons is that most commercial projects just don't have the "tinkering" problem that GIT aims to solve and they also don't have the "multiple people one file" problem either. This is because in a commercial project there tend to be a limited number of shared files (and these will be religiously guarded) and people are delivering to requirements.
GIT works for Linus, but that doesn't mean that the distributed paradigm makes sense for everyone.
But do Microsoft really support their developers that well these days? I mean compare VS2005 (note the year folks) with what is coming out of eclipse (let alone the commercial extensions to eclipse) and its hard to justify the claim that VS is the "best" developer IDE, its just that VS folks haven't used the alternatives whereas the Java folks can switch like the wind. So IDE wise they aren't supporting their developers. Even things like the testing framework are an issue, most people use the open source JUnit or NUnit but MS couldn't stand that so created their own, bulkier and worse, alternative, again not great for developers.
So what about features? Well if you do enterprise software they haven't had a major revision of the set since 2004(!) and even on the desktop with things like Office the amount of porting information from old to ribbon isn't as great as you'd expect (its more this is how you BUILD stuff with ribbon).
There is MDSN which is great for software access (and you pay for it) and some of the forums are pretty good. The problem with MS is that the community is so MS centric, what I mean by this is that when you compare with Java you aren't asking whether Sun support Java people better than MS but whether SAP, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun, Open Source, etc support Java people better.
I've regularly sat on both sides of the fence, and I think that competition between vendors tends to give developers better support.
Not to pick a hole in the history but lets be clear that WWII with the Nazi regime in Germany committing genocide and the enforced slavery and prostitution going on in Japan started quite a few years before... by 1941 pretty much all of Europe was occupied and large parts of Eastern Asia were equally suffering.
So its interesting on the shape and all... but its only on the verge of the US entering WWII, most certainly not on the verge of the war itself.
Ahhhh some transatlantic things are just too wonderful to read...
the Indy 500 is unique in motor sports, like the Kentucky Derby is in horse racing.
So you mean its just a copy of something from Europe? The Derby was first raced over 1779 and is where we all get the term "Derby" from.
Monaco v Indy 500.... and you think there is a competition?