"Cleaning the thing" is the overlooked variable in this discussion. The argument comes down to who has higher standards of cleanliness in the determination of the cleaning chore. If there is sufficient disparity in the periods between cleanings or subjective need, then the person who has the higher standard will typically end up doing the cleaning most of the time. It is not absolute, but there seems little doubt that the female of most heterosexual relationships has the higher standard of cleanliness in the bathroom, ergo: the woman is most often responsible for cleaning.
Here, gentlemen we find a peculiar irony, if women typically expect to clean the bathroom more, why then would they prefer the standard (for seat position) that makes it more likely that cleaning will be required? The answer, lies in their catastrophic aversion tendencies. The most important issue here is "falling in" which most women have experienced at some point in their lives. When that happens there is shocking discomfort, instant embarrassment, questions of hygienics and sometimes a need to change clothes. All of these things are most likely to happen when a woman is at her least prepared (groping in the night, blearily in the morning or distracted by other issues,) which compounds the issue by forcing a sudden reorientation of priorities. In short, it is a catastrophe if a woman falls in.
Meanwhile, if she can force the man to adopt the habit of always having the seat down, it avoids the possibility of having to deal with the potential life shattering experience of discovering the seat up the hard way. Cleaning more often has very little impact on her preference, and fear of the water torture has quite a bit.
Now the real issues are of effort and time. A man expends effort and also looses time when he has to raise and then re-lower the seat. He loses even more time and expends even more effort to sit rather than stand. The cleaner (typically the female) loses more time time in cleaning if she cannot convince the habitual stander to always sit. Yet, given all these reasons to consider alternatives, when confronted with even one splashdown, the answer is always to leave the seat down and to heck with the consequences.
Read what I said, I explained exactly why they should do what you seem so confused about.
Let me try to use small words and speak slowly:
GOOD
OPINIONS
MEAN
NEW
SALES.
BAD
OPINIONS
MEAN
CRYING
Does that help? Marketing, marketing, marketing. I can't believe people are too dense to realize that the money Intel could drop ($5M at a round number) in OLPC would not be beyond their normal marketing cost and would pay off a lot better.
Intel could donate a wad of cash to the OLPC project and come out smelling like roses... nearly. They mucked their chance a bit with the "ours is better" campaign but they could come out of it with a release something like: "We feel that the OLPC project would work better with our product, but we agree it is a good project and are going to help." It doesn't make them the immediate profit, but it could be used to run a "we're better than they are" campaign. It wouldn't take much to cast itself as the generous benefactor and AMD as the profit greedy company just by a single large contribution.
There has to be some marketing guru at Intel saying, please, let us sell our brand as the morally superior one! I have to admit that for a minute I considered moving to pushing for AMD purchases because I want to purchase from companies doing the greater good. I rethought my stance when I considered that AMD stands to be profiting from this, I seriously doubt they are taking a loss. Now that leaves me as a consumer with two choices, the company that is profiting from the OLPC project or the company jealous of the market. With a load of cash, Intel could change that to the profit hungry company vs. the morally kind company. That kind of advertising sways me FAR further than the kind I see slathered across the magazines and websites I read.
What I'm not clear on is whether Intel will be offering Classmates for sale to consumers here in the good 'ol USA. I might buy one for my kid, heck I might buy one for myself and use it as a remote desktop... That's one thing I'd like to see.
Then there is the possibility of an angel organization coming in and trading a lot of OLPCs for the Classmates, reselling the classmates and handing the government a wad of value in the same exchange. Lets pretend I've got $5,000,000 sitting around, I call the Bill and Melissa Gates foundation, say "Hi, I want to get your help, I'll supply half the money, in distributing vaccinations to country X. I'm buying back a shipment of Classmates for resale in the US, and the price difference is being donated in vaccinations." Okay, so I pick up the shipment of classmates, go on a massive e-bay campaign, send a wad of cash to B&MF, send a second wad of cash to the OLPC project and sign on the dotted line with a foreign leader.
Maybe I make a profit, maybe I take a loss but everybody else wins. The kids get laptops AND better health. The government in question looks like a shrewd negotiator and wise leadership, after all, now they get a laptop, and twice the value difference for the classmate in vacinations. B&MF gets to do the kind of thing they want to be known for, Intel gets all their sales, kids in the US get laptops they might not have been able to afford before (maybe I can afford to donate them, maybe just sell em for $50, lucky kids, whatever.) Even MS comes out ahead because they get their software put in front of the biggest likely consumers.
The only part that doesn't make me feel good is the trade off Linux gets, it gets put in the hands of developing nation children, but will they contribute as much as a plain old campaign here in the US would? I don't honestly know. It all depends on whether the recipients of the OLPC look back on it as a gift they want to give back to or whether they grow a resentment toward the people that took their chance at a better laptop ahead of them. I honestly think that as adults they will look back and think it was a great thing that was done for them and want to contribute back to the community.
Don't you wish you could actually get away with a lie like that? Everybody do something I'm not willing to do to support my preference in 3... 2... wait, where is everybody?
There is only so much time in the day and I typically listen to radio shows that teach me something. I considered Satellite radio but decided there was nothing on there that would really improve my personal satisfaction. NPR is one of the stations I listen to in the car. At work, I usually listen to classical music on Internet radio, because it makes it easier to ignore distractions while I try (sometimes vainly) to accomplish something.
Here is where we part ways though, I've listened to the "shock jocks" many times in my life. I crave humor and different perspectives. I enjoy being able to let my mind shut off for a while and just revel in the trivial. I used to anyway, but these days it seems to pointless, even for relaxation. I have listened to Opie and Anthony, but even when I was regularly listening to that genere, I found them absurd and pointless. I think that most people who shared my general taste for "shock jocks" felt the same.
The show has a cultish following though. "Most people" doesn't mean that a cause or idea is trivial. Most people don't know what Linux is, but that doesn't mean I don't support it. If I were going to try to sell software strictly for profit though, I expect I would try to sell software that I thought "Most people" want. I don't have MS on my home computers, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize the value of selling it.
The radio personalities in question offer a value to their employers, but when they embarrass the people who sign the paychecks enough, it shouldn't be surprising that they are removed from the air. The employer has to decide if the money they generate (from a minority of listeners) is worth the time and effort it takes to deal with the hassle keeping them on the air brings. Personally, I suspect that I would have been far less tolerant, and I would have asked the question "How much money do they bring in compared to how much they cost?" a long time ago. The margin there is absolutely the issue. If it's tremendous enough, then by all means keep them, but if it becomes tiny, or if it goes negative, boot to the head. My hunch is that all this publicity and current hassle brings them easily more money than they had coming in from keeping the show on air, and that after the ruckus dies down, there is no good financial reason to bring them back on.
Just as a side note, if they let me make those decisions, I would never have let them on in the first place. I don't want my name associated with anything so morally repulsive and wouldn't want to contribute to that mentality, just as an ethical call. I'm trying to pretend it was my job to make money for the station, not my job to care what reputation the station received. Fortunately for both myself and XM I have no plans to try to join their organization.
Amen. I considered the bus schedules (there are trains but none useful to my needs) and I came up with the result that with two bicycles, one at each end, I could actually manage to be at home for a total eight hours a day if I had to rely on public transportation. If there were a bus that ran between my city and the one I work in, and buses that came within half a mile of either from the central locations, I still would spend four hours a day in transit. I would not be willing to give up that time with my family and so we would either have to move to a FAR worse school district or I would have to find a job that would likely pay half as much, which would probably necessitate a much smaller house in a less safe and friendly neighborhood. I hate having to use a car, but it beats the heck out of my other options. If everybody had to give up driving then everything would change, and I could either work at a branch office or from home (dare to dream) but the billions it would cost for my geographical area won't be spent without impoverishing so many people it would probably wreck the state's economy.
There are ways to improve but the sad fact is that cars make our economy possible and that means that fuel cost is a real issue that needs to be addressed. If it costs five dollars for a candy bar and we could have better candy by raising the price to $20 then I really don't want the change regardless of how much better it might be, the huge change in cost is enough that I'd rather not have it at all. It is the same with public transport costs for me, I wish it was better but the cost makes it so prohibitive that I would have to give up income, safety, and many hours daily with my family to make a fair contribution to it. I'd rather skip it and focus on changing the gas prices instead. At current prices I pay around around $2,000 annually in fuel costs, and I could probably cut that by a third if I gave up things like family sports and visiting relatives. If prices go up much more, I'll have to give those things up anyway and that sucks.
Level of abstraction? Okay, explain how you're a walrus.
Software patents make as much sense as mechanical patents because both cover how to change something in one state to something that might be more useful in a different state. The usefulness of the patent is up for debate as it would be in any new industry, as is the innovation. The debatable questions are whether the innovation that goes into creating something that is novel in software deserves a patent, and whether allowing patents in software is good for society. Once those questions are sufficiently answered there will always be the secondary questions of a particular patent's worthiness, but it will be far easier to answer.
I'd say it doesn't really even matter how prevalent the actual incidences are, we need to drill for them because they're a legitimate fear both of the parents and children. My daughter takes karate with me not because it will help her defend herself any better than she already could (we practiced Bite Kick and Scream from a very young age) but because I believe it helps her gain confidence in herself in dangerous and/or scary situations. We talk regularly about how to deal with scary things from big storms and poisonous snakes to kidnappers. I seriously doubt she will ever face most of the dangers we talk about but if she does I want her to know how to respond and even if she never does I want her confident she knows what to do so that she doesn't spend extra time worrying about it.
Sounds reasonable to me:
MS: They're infringing on our patents! See, patent A, B, C.
Judge: Humm, you might be right, it is ordered that all source code and IP owned by MS shall be presented to this court, viewable by the public for review. Each submission shall have notes on the copyright ownership and patent relationship if any.
MS:... b.. er.. ... *cough* ... Uh...
Judge: By Wednesday. Anarchy ensues.
I always hate waking up from those dreams. As long as I'm contemplating reality, does anybody know if you have to sue each infringer and can it stand up if there was no request to cease and desist and what about international infringement? I'm thinking that if I wrote a snifty bit of code, submitted it and of course had no clue that it was infringing, I'd immediately quit work and distribution if somebody showed me it was infringing, heck I'd take a hard look if somebody even told me where to and that it might. I'd hope I'd be let loose with a stern "Look first next time" warning, but here comes the tricky bit, some Russian looks up my source code, gives me $10 for the copyright (I'd count myself lucky) and continues development. Now what? It's open source and the copyright is no longer mine, and the new maintainer/distributor doesn't have to answer to US patent insanity, what can MS do about it?
I'm thinking this is a good idea, get a serious organization behind fighting spam, not just one with serious goals and effort but one with serious authority. I wonder if the citizens (who are ultimately paying for it of course) have much control over how it is set up? I can envision a conflict between our marketing department and the government going something like this:
Marketing: "No, it's not spam, we put in opt out links and only send it to people we have a relationship with."
Gov: "But 200 people called it spam, you're now listed as a spammer. Sorry."
Marketing: "That's no fair! How do we change our status?"
Gov: "The will of the people has spoken, but I don't have lunch plans, maybe the people could buy....?"
Marketing: "Do you like steak?" ....Fast forward two years...
Gov: "I realize our office receives a lot of criticism for not allowing the public to mark mail as spam, but in reality many of the emails we receive are legitimate businesses using legal means to advertise. We will not allow the public to slur the good name of reputable companies."
within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer
When I read this I though "Okay, so you have to steal the box to get the content or do a lot of work to get the data off of the drive using the chip in the machine.. no big deal right?"
Then it occurred to me, maybe the host computer isn't the local Tivo box, maybe it is Tivo's system (remote) that they're calling the host. What does that mean? Now you can't get data off of the drive unless the Tivo calls home, swaps keys, and stores a decryption key/algorithm in RAM. This means that if Tivo says no, you can't get at data on the device you now own. So... well if you can hack the OS then you can just have the keys stored after/during exchange or you could read out of RAM, but maybe the OS is built off of a network boot scenario with the initial sending of the system happening only after the handshake. Tricky.
If (big if) that is the case then the way to beat it will have to be capturing the data in RAM from a running system. It sounds tough but I suspect you could do it by setting up a virtual machine that intercepts the call coming from the box, and on return sends all output from the chip normally destined for real RAM into virtual RAM (which is really filesystem based, heck make it a ram drive so it is as fast as RAM but readable as a file.) Copy the virtual ram file, and you've got an unencrypted OS. Hack your unencrypted OS to store the keys, and now you have your drive decryption key, your "call home" key and a hackable OS. Want to do something Tivo doesn't like? Make your OS think the commands came from Tivo, not too difficult now. Maybe they have a changing algorithm where the chip uses a new key (in predicted order) for each call home, incrementing after each successful exchange. Maybe then you have to talk to the chip every time with your Virtual Machine, but it still accomplishes the goal of having complete access and control.
Okay, what I think they really have is a scheme to make sure that a chip and drive are tied together so you can't get at the drive without the chip, thus no Tivo drive swapping and they really don't care right now anyway and just wanted to get the patent because they think their method might be marketable some day. I wonder if I'm giving them ideas.. nah, they'll never read this post, right?
I've seen a lot of this in my roles from first level CSR to middle management (yeah, I'm a PHB but I used to be a phone monkey.) I even tried to get our team to adopt the term Phone Monkey as our name, embrace and extend, but you have to have a thick skin for that. The parent post is in a classic "us vs them" mindset. If this is a common feeling for you Debian Cabbit, then please change jobs or find a new philosophy. You're going to be unhappy and spread your misery until you do. If its just a bad day, then sorry to hear it, but you need to chill a little.
The truth is that there are several possible scenarios that a customer can find themselves in and how they respond can make a huge difference in how the problem is resolved:
SOP/Imaginary land: Problem resolved quickly and efficiently. If its Standard Operating Procedure, sometimes all you have to do is ask. Lucky you.
Jerk for a CSR: Nothing the EU can do on this type of call will make this be resolved smoothly. Call back and hope for a different CSR. It doesn't fix the company's problem but they'll eventually get rid of bad reps and in the mean time you're better off finding somebody else to get service from.
Clueless CSR: Sometimes you can't get help because the person you're talking to doesn't know enough to help you. If that is the case then being assertive can help. If they can't answer your questions about the reason they can't help you then they're in the position of looking bad to their bosses. Sad to say, being beligerant can be useful in this case, but not unless you've tried being nice first. Being a jerk right off is a quick way to get back to case 2. If it's not getting you anywhere, give up and call back. One call (maybe to this very rep) took about an hour of my time and the call back took less than a minute. I didn't mind, I was in an evil mood and had time to kill that day. I figured that the more time I took from this rep would be less time some other poor sod had to deal with him.
Unresolvable request: Sometimes you have every reason to think you have a reasonable request but in fact there are good reasons it cannot be fufilled. If this is the case it should eventually come to a discussion of cost or law. If you have a request that the company absolutely will not fufill, then it boils down to either costing the company too much (in which case they can offer you a dollar amount, say 10 x $unreasonable) or cite the law that makes it impossible. Generally this type of resolution can only come from upper management. A good way to cut to the chase is to ask what law makes it illegal and if they can't cite one, than ask how to contact someone who can make decisions to change what they offer.
Too difficult for the CSR: If it takes a change to policy (see above) or complex resolutuion then the CSR may not have the ability to deal with the request. In these instances it becomes necessary for the EU to figure out what the real obstacle is and insist on resolving that. Sometimes this takes several phone calls. These are the type of calls that I still field. If it comes to my desk, then it isn't easy to resolve but if you already know what the real problem is or at least have ruled out the typical resolutions then there is a decent chance I can get the problem fixed. In some cases it takes years to work out these types of issues and sad to say, sometimes the best advice I can give is find an alternative way to get what you need. I can think of one case (deliberate vaugeness here) that we cannot resolve until we change one of our vendors and we're talking about six figure committments here so it won't happen until contracts are up and large sums of money change hands. If you're calling me about this, I can make you feel warm and fuzzy but if you need more then the best advice I can give is please try us again in X months.
Always ask for the name of the person you're dealing with and make a note of it. Call them by name. It gives them the feeling of being responsible
I'm not sure what the law is for interstate calls, but in my state (TX) the law used to be that at least one party had to be aware that the recording was being made. Anything further, notice, consent etc, is just courtsey. I think that is pretty much in line with federal law and doesn't extend it.
That means that CSRs in TX need not be able to stop the recording. If the company policy is to record all calls, then they'll be recorded. Personally I've found this useful. I had a recorder and recorded a call to our phone company that my wife made. When she was dropped, I called back and asked to speak with a manager. I was of course asked why and I explained that I wanted to play back the recorded call to the manager. The average CSR doesn't want to deal with the potential of being personally sued nor does the average manager want to deal with being responsible for the department where the suit is originating. Effective isn't a strong enough word.
Close. I'd call my grandchild to have him/her talk to the Roomba and if Google is broken again, I'd call the same kid. I'm soooo looking forward to being able to blame being a jerk on age and senility.
I do. I skim a half dozen news and article sites daily, have rss updates to tell me when the regulars put something out, but it isn't really serving the same purpose. When I pick up Linux Journal/Linux Magazine/Hackers Quarterly or one of the half dozen "free" newsletters and magazines that are sent to me, I know I'm getting two things:
A. I'm getting the advertisements that I actually might be interested in. I can't tell you how many times I've been shocked when somebody told me the price of their product, mostly because I'd seen so many ads in the magazines. It gives me a decent idea what something is worth and also an idea of what's available on the market. Yeah, ads clutter the world, but when I'm getting ready to make a purchase decision, I want a solid idea what is normal. I buy magazines that appeal to my interests or work and they tend to put ads in front of me that might come in handy. (We bought a SAN for $10K from a company I saw in a journal when the people that we'd been talking to were putting comparable storage around $175,000.)
B. Depth. Most of the things I read on the Internet are meant to be consumed in 15 minutes or less. That's what I want when I'm starting my morning or surfing, but sometimes I like articles with more meat to them. Yes, there are websites that do that, but when I'm doing that kind of reading, the laptop isn't as comfortable (and it isn't as upsetting when the magazine gets dropped in the toilet.) The editors realize that if I'm buying a magazine that I'm going to have for at least a month, they had better put something that sticks with me in front of me or they won't get any of my cash again. They tend to accomplish that goal, but then I only buy those magazines that do.
I haven't RTFA. I don't know enough to understand whether or not the various things posted by the parent are true. I have no more classical science education than a couple years as a non-major in college. Quantum mechanics doesn't make sense to me and string theory might as well be trying to explain snarks for all I grasp of it. I could examine a mouse brain and the most interesting information I could probably add would be how it tastes. Still I feel incited to venture an opinion. Obviously, I am not new here.
I find the phrase "slashdotters are basically waving goodbye to the only REAL chance humanity has" to be particularly poor taste. There has always been something poised to wipe out the world as we know it. Its pretty much a near universal religious principle. That doesn't make it any less true, but to espouse that the particular idea you've put your faith in is the only hope, well that is... actually pretty much what I believe too, but at least I call it a religious belief straight out instead of trying to pretend it's science.
For adding information key to a better understanding of what was going on: +5 pts.
For mangling good science with poor logic and blind faith: -100pts.
Now where is the slashdot eraser... what? You're kidding right?
Okay, it's bad for the govt to tell the press what they must report and how.
Still, there is something clearly left unsaid in TFA, and that is whether the new management is actually acting under direction by the govt. It seems clear that the govt is trying to force the media to portray it in a positive light and side with its ideology, but it is not clear whether this particular act is actually caused by the govt or just by some PHBs.
Either way it sucks but there is a difference:
A. Freedom to be stupid: PHBs like the govt and want to control what they can to support it
B. Freedom sanctioned: Govt controls PHBs through ideology law and forces trickle down effect
There is a big difference between the two in my way of thinking. One is something I support: freedom to be stupid, and the other is something I condemn for all the obvious reasons: force by govt to be stupid.
You could look at my personal life and say that I don't deserve the freedom to be stupid, but I have it and wouldn't want it any other way. In the same way, if it's PHB stupidity then I'm for it (the freedom that is, not the actual choices made with it,) but if it's govt forced stupidity, I'm against.
There is plenty of innuendo in the article, but where is that particular clarification?
Key: govt=government; PHB=Pointy Haired Boss, aka clueless management; my personal life=shambles
Okay, maybe a black hat tendency, but there might be alternatives.
There are plenty of security companies out there legitimately trying to sell their software, plenty of people who would love to be the only ones who have a defense against some secret hack. If you want me to spend time finding a vulnerability and then into writing an exploit, my time would not come cheap. I'm not even talented in that direction. Imagine that you're a security researcher who gets paid for your time investigating and resolving potential security breaches, what kind of payoff makes it worth investing your time in that gamble? It has to be a pretty penny or else you're better served doing what you do for a living.
"Give me the money" is a legit response when you've invested your time and effort into something with that as your goal. If he'd said "I don't hack for fun or evil, I only did this for the contest and expect to be given what I was promised" then I don't think you'd have the same take. There is a good chance that is exactly what he meant too. You might be shocked to learn that a lot of us who are considered computer geeks are not the world's foremost verbal communicators.
I love my job, but I won't work here long after they stop paying me.
Maybe if enough of us come together (with money), we could get the real mafia to 'take care' of them for us =D
Shame! Suggesting something like that is horribly immoral and sinks you to even lower than they are. Plus you didn't say where to send the check or who to make it out to. (Hypothetically of course.)
It seems reasonable that if your product is Product Sucks and you offer Product Sucks Messenger (PSM) and somebody else comes out with something that works like your product, only better and names it GNPSM (GPSM's Not PSM) then you'd have a reasonable complaint. It seems odd to me that this wasn't voluntarily changed years ago.
I personally have used both products and wouldn't use the "official" AOL client if I had any choice and in fact have never personally installed it on my computers. I've had the misfortune of using computers that had it foisted on them but sometimes its hard to convince people to switch when they already have something they "know how to use."
I'm sure the new name has wide approval and it's too late for suggestions, but I wish they'd gone with "Nonsucky Chat Client" instead.
I know it is coming so I'll head it off, yes your client is better for whatever reason you claim. Yes, I've used IRSSI, Zinc, XChat, Mozilla's whatever it was called and others. I like the client formerly known as Gaim because it was always easy to set up and easy to use and easy to explain.
Virtual Machine + TS = Fully encrypted OS?
on
TrueCrypt 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I use truecrypt because I need to be able to hand over my laptop to a gun wielding thug if it ever comes up. This got me to thinking, if its a virtual filesystem, and seen as such by Linux, what would happen if I put my entire virtual machine on an encrypted partition. Would it then be possible for me to use Linux with TS + Xen (or VMWare if you prefer) to provide an entirely encrypted OS, including its filesystem? I'd assume that I'd need to have no swap (or file based swap, also on an encrypted partition) but that seems pretty doable to me. If my machine gets stolen, then is everything on the encrypted partition as safe as my password?
I can think of one possibility that was left out, God exists without cause, created the universe and chooses to interact within its laws most of the time but occassionally does things the way He wants anyway, disregarding the rules He established, thus miracles.
The problem you describe isn't a problem with God exactly, it is a problem with causality. People believe that there must be a cause for every action. Turtles all the way down and so forth.
The attraction of a belief in a primary creator is that it steps outside of the cause/effect relationship. If there is a God who is not an effect, but exists simply as a permanant entity, then that makes it possible for there to be a primary cause. If not, then there needs to be a cause for God or a cause for the existance of the universe. The universe seems bent on this cause/effect pattern in those things we can observe so we tend to believe that either the universe exists outside of a primary cause or God exists outside of a primary cause. Since we observe cause and effect with all things related to the universe, we tend to believe that there must be a cause for it. Since we don't have an observable God to test, it is easier to believe that there is something that we cannot understand about God than something we can observe, the universe.
Of course if we can accept that either the universe or God exists without a primary cause then all these issues go away and we get to replace them with a whole new set. If we have to accept something is a primary cause and doesn't have a cause itself then we are right back to the faith question, God or the universe without a primary cause. The universe needs a cause because it is inflexible in how it can exist, but God has the advantage because we ascribe the ability to exist without a cause to God.
Don't care for that? Well then, we have to decide that physics is insufficient to describe itself which also means that the arguments against God (from scientific points of view) don't apply by the same logic.
Turtles all the way down. Personally I find that a belief and interaction with God do me more good personally than a belief that the universe exists without primary cause. I guess its a practicality thing.
It's just an opinion folks, but I believe he was right on both counts (or at least what I think the spirit of the comment was getting at.)
Honestly I don't think MS paid off VMWare, but I don't doubt that VMWare is loosing its focus. For a long time they were the best (nearly only serious) virtualization game in town. They had a heck of a product and sold out at what I think will have been their peak to EMC. EMC owns a LOT of what used to be serious companies. The problem is that EMC hasn't been spoken of as well recently as they used to be because they have had trouble coordinating their efforts. This is from various vendors we deal with. I'm dissatisfied to the extent that despite the fact that the company I work for has a significant investment in software they now own, still we'll be migrating off. I think VMWare is going to become more and more marginalized as virtualization in the hardware becomes more mainstream.
By offloading the virtualization to the hardware you get away from tremendous amounts of complicated code. Performance wise, the improvement isn't as tremendous as it seems like it should be, but the codebase maintenance is a world apart with hardware being the future trend. VMWare's strength was its ability to virtualize the hardware, but with the hardware doing essentially the same job, you now have millions (guessing) of lines of code that no longer are necessary for the job, but essential to the product. That means VMWare as a product is rapidly becoming harder to maintain than other virtualization products that can take advantage of the hardware advances. I've heard that government entities that have to audit code will be going with Xen because the auditing task is possible with Xen and untenatable with VMWare. Pair that with being managed by a company that can't seem to get its goals in line with the path technology is taking or keep a cohesive business plan and I think that VMWare will be a tiny niche and obsolete system in five years. That doesn't sound too terrible on the face of it since five years sounds like a long time, but IT managers are having to think about planning for that period and thus have to stick with what they think will be most viable for that period when they're making purchase decisions now. Bluntly put, I expect VMWare sales to drop steadily as more and more people migrate to the technologies with the most promising future. By the time most people are using Microsoft products that utilize paravirtualization and hardware virtualization I think VMWare will be just a memory and curiosity. By the way, XP can be virtualized to run in Xen WITHOUT hardware virtualization if you can tweak the source code. It has been done but of course you can't get "Windows virtualized OS for Xen" because MS isn't about to release it.
I can't imagine that there are too terribly many managers out there that will blow off VMWare as a solution solely because the management needs Windows, but it is a factor in our decisions. I think, more to the point, that EMC will do development to appeal to their target market for "ease of use" which will stave off some of the loss of sales at the cost of maintaining a reputation as being one of the best technical solutions. I have a faint hope that VMWare will jump on the paravirtualization and hardware virtualization bandwagons but I don't hold out much hope that EMC will make the necessary investment in development.
Xen is not Xensource. Xensource contributes a heck of a lot, but we have a Xen based server and after needing custom controls, custom setups and iscsi before they release it officially, we are not using the tools that come with the Xensource products in favor of the controls that are a part of the open source base. (We use the open source tools in preference to the pretty gui tools because they do what we want the way we want with less effort.) That said, it was easy to start with the free (as in beer) version they offer. If you need the extras their paid versions come with, I still wouldn't hold it against you. Every pen
First, I assume your blog is secure, if it wasn't you should have corrected that by now. Second, a whole lot of you people seem to be missing one of the fundamental benefits! Being able to say "I told you so" and prove it. That would apply to auto insurance, malpractice, shoddy customer service and arguments with your oh so significant other.
Here is how it should work:
I wear glasses (used to have contacts) and I can easily imagine a pair of glasses where the spring in them is just a little longer and one side includes a microphone and the other side has a camera. I'm not sure about powering the thing but if you could get it broadcasting wirelessly (yes heavily encrypted) to my cell phone which in turn uploads periodically to my glife (google's next product) then you'd be able to have an audio/visual recording of practically everything I see/say/hear.
All the video/audio is stored temporarily on my cell where I can also set the cease broadcast, cease recording or cease upload options. It is pretty handy to control it from there, but it also has the "instant replay" option for whatever storage capacity I can afford/prefer worth of time. I imagine that at home I'd put it on cease upload but at work and driving I'd be on broadcast/record/upload constantly. I imagine Progressive or Allstate would offer a "certified driver" program and I would enable the same sort of technology in my car but on a simulcast to trusted third party option for a hefty discount. I'd certainly opt for the "dump last hour of data to police on death" and the "call the frigging ambulance if you crash" options.
The next thing would be a password to access archives beyond my cell phone replay option. I would memorize 24 hour, 30 day, 90 day, 1 yr and 7 yr passwords which would lock the archive for those periods of times if I used them. You could set your archive with whatever default lock period you like and nobody would be able to tell if you deliberately locked it or not. Some people would doubtless like to record their lives but don't want them pried into until a statute of limitations would apply so you could always plausibly say that you were one of those people (or that you only know the 7 yr lock password if you're a doctor, lawyer etc and then rely on third parties, possibly pairs of other people.) It would be trivial to change the lock/archive periods so that what you do at work is locked for 7 years, driving for 24 and home not at all and not stored at all when you're feeling private.
Heck, the politician who has the longest period on record of "share with third party ethics auditors" would be a shoo-in for office. Call the other guy a liar and stand on your "Really moral and honest guy" rating if you can get it. If not, then maybe somebody who can will run.... that or a talented hacker.
I cannot imagine how many arguments I wish I could have solved with the "Wait, lets check out an instant replay" option. I can go a step further and say that it would doubtless have my wife agreeing with me far more often about what was said. She insists on debating what she or I said, and while I'm sure she is occassionally right, I am really good at that sort of thing. On the other hand I imagine that I would almost never argue with her about what she told me previously. The thing is that both of us know that the other person is better at some types of recall, but there is no way to tell how often or how much better quantitively. Even if we knew the likelyhood was that we'd be wrong, we could "check the replay" if we thought this might be the time we were the one who was right.
I would never need to tell people in the service industry they suck again, if they suck then I can post the entire episode on youtube! Yes, I mean you Sprint, Wafflehouse and York Tire!
Slashdot Mirror
"Cleaning the thing" is the overlooked variable in this discussion. The argument comes down to who has higher standards of cleanliness in the determination of the cleaning chore. If there is sufficient disparity in the periods between cleanings or subjective need, then the person who has the higher standard will typically end up doing the cleaning most of the time. It is not absolute, but there seems little doubt that the female of most heterosexual relationships has the higher standard of cleanliness in the bathroom, ergo: the woman is most often responsible for cleaning.
Here, gentlemen we find a peculiar irony, if women typically expect to clean the bathroom more, why then would they prefer the standard (for seat position) that makes it more likely that cleaning will be required? The answer, lies in their catastrophic aversion tendencies. The most important issue here is "falling in" which most women have experienced at some point in their lives. When that happens there is shocking discomfort, instant embarrassment, questions of hygienics and sometimes a need to change clothes. All of these things are most likely to happen when a woman is at her least prepared (groping in the night, blearily in the morning or distracted by other issues,) which compounds the issue by forcing a sudden reorientation of priorities. In short, it is a catastrophe if a woman falls in.
Meanwhile, if she can force the man to adopt the habit of always having the seat down, it avoids the possibility of having to deal with the potential life shattering experience of discovering the seat up the hard way. Cleaning more often has very little impact on her preference, and fear of the water torture has quite a bit.
Now the real issues are of effort and time. A man expends effort and also looses time when he has to raise and then re-lower the seat. He loses even more time and expends even more effort to sit rather than stand. The cleaner (typically the female) loses more time time in cleaning if she cannot convince the habitual stander to always sit. Yet, given all these reasons to consider alternatives, when confronted with even one splashdown, the answer is always to leave the seat down and to heck with the consequences.
Read what I said, I explained exactly why they should do what you seem so confused about.
Let me try to use small words and speak slowly:
GOOD
OPINIONS
MEAN
NEW
SALES.
BAD
OPINIONS
MEAN
CRYING
Does that help? Marketing, marketing, marketing. I can't believe people are too dense to realize that the money Intel could drop ($5M at a round number) in OLPC would not be beyond their normal marketing cost and would pay off a lot better.
NOTHING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD NAME
Intel could donate a wad of cash to the OLPC project and come out smelling like roses... nearly. They mucked their chance a bit with the "ours is better" campaign but they could come out of it with a release something like: "We feel that the OLPC project would work better with our product, but we agree it is a good project and are going to help." It doesn't make them the immediate profit, but it could be used to run a "we're better than they are" campaign. It wouldn't take much to cast itself as the generous benefactor and AMD as the profit greedy company just by a single large contribution.
There has to be some marketing guru at Intel saying, please, let us sell our brand as the morally superior one! I have to admit that for a minute I considered moving to pushing for AMD purchases because I want to purchase from companies doing the greater good. I rethought my stance when I considered that AMD stands to be profiting from this, I seriously doubt they are taking a loss. Now that leaves me as a consumer with two choices, the company that is profiting from the OLPC project or the company jealous of the market. With a load of cash, Intel could change that to the profit hungry company vs. the morally kind company. That kind of advertising sways me FAR further than the kind I see slathered across the magazines and websites I read.
What I'm not clear on is whether Intel will be offering Classmates for sale to consumers here in the good 'ol USA. I might buy one for my kid, heck I might buy one for myself and use it as a remote desktop... That's one thing I'd like to see.
Then there is the possibility of an angel organization coming in and trading a lot of OLPCs for the Classmates, reselling the classmates and handing the government a wad of value in the same exchange. Lets pretend I've got $5,000,000 sitting around, I call the Bill and Melissa Gates foundation, say "Hi, I want to get your help, I'll supply half the money, in distributing vaccinations to country X. I'm buying back a shipment of Classmates for resale in the US, and the price difference is being donated in vaccinations." Okay, so I pick up the shipment of classmates, go on a massive e-bay campaign, send a wad of cash to B&MF, send a second wad of cash to the OLPC project and sign on the dotted line with a foreign leader.
Maybe I make a profit, maybe I take a loss but everybody else wins. The kids get laptops AND better health. The government in question looks like a shrewd negotiator and wise leadership, after all, now they get a laptop, and twice the value difference for the classmate in vacinations. B&MF gets to do the kind of thing they want to be known for, Intel gets all their sales, kids in the US get laptops they might not have been able to afford before (maybe I can afford to donate them, maybe just sell em for $50, lucky kids, whatever.) Even MS comes out ahead because they get their software put in front of the biggest likely consumers.
The only part that doesn't make me feel good is the trade off Linux gets, it gets put in the hands of developing nation children, but will they contribute as much as a plain old campaign here in the US would? I don't honestly know. It all depends on whether the recipients of the OLPC look back on it as a gift they want to give back to or whether they grow a resentment toward the people that took their chance at a better laptop ahead of them. I honestly think that as adults they will look back and think it was a great thing that was done for them and want to contribute back to the community.
So who has $5M handy?
Okay.... hang on .... there. Done, now your turn.
Don't you wish you could actually get away with a lie like that? Everybody do something I'm not willing to do to support my preference in 3... 2... wait, where is everybody?
There is only so much time in the day and I typically listen to radio shows that teach me something. I considered Satellite radio but decided there was nothing on there that would really improve my personal satisfaction. NPR is one of the stations I listen to in the car. At work, I usually listen to classical music on Internet radio, because it makes it easier to ignore distractions while I try (sometimes vainly) to accomplish something.
Here is where we part ways though, I've listened to the "shock jocks" many times in my life. I crave humor and different perspectives. I enjoy being able to let my mind shut off for a while and just revel in the trivial. I used to anyway, but these days it seems to pointless, even for relaxation. I have listened to Opie and Anthony, but even when I was regularly listening to that genere, I found them absurd and pointless. I think that most people who shared my general taste for "shock jocks" felt the same.
The show has a cultish following though. "Most people" doesn't mean that a cause or idea is trivial. Most people don't know what Linux is, but that doesn't mean I don't support it. If I were going to try to sell software strictly for profit though, I expect I would try to sell software that I thought "Most people" want. I don't have MS on my home computers, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize the value of selling it.
The radio personalities in question offer a value to their employers, but when they embarrass the people who sign the paychecks enough, it shouldn't be surprising that they are removed from the air. The employer has to decide if the money they generate (from a minority of listeners) is worth the time and effort it takes to deal with the hassle keeping them on the air brings. Personally, I suspect that I would have been far less tolerant, and I would have asked the question "How much money do they bring in compared to how much they cost?" a long time ago. The margin there is absolutely the issue. If it's tremendous enough, then by all means keep them, but if it becomes tiny, or if it goes negative, boot to the head. My hunch is that all this publicity and current hassle brings them easily more money than they had coming in from keeping the show on air, and that after the ruckus dies down, there is no good financial reason to bring them back on.
Just as a side note, if they let me make those decisions, I would never have let them on in the first place. I don't want my name associated with anything so morally repulsive and wouldn't want to contribute to that mentality, just as an ethical call. I'm trying to pretend it was my job to make money for the station, not my job to care what reputation the station received. Fortunately for both myself and XM I have no plans to try to join their organization.
Amen. I considered the bus schedules (there are trains but none useful to my needs) and I came up with the result that with two bicycles, one at each end, I could actually manage to be at home for a total eight hours a day if I had to rely on public transportation. If there were a bus that ran between my city and the one I work in, and buses that came within half a mile of either from the central locations, I still would spend four hours a day in transit. I would not be willing to give up that time with my family and so we would either have to move to a FAR worse school district or I would have to find a job that would likely pay half as much, which would probably necessitate a much smaller house in a less safe and friendly neighborhood. I hate having to use a car, but it beats the heck out of my other options. If everybody had to give up driving then everything would change, and I could either work at a branch office or from home (dare to dream) but the billions it would cost for my geographical area won't be spent without impoverishing so many people it would probably wreck the state's economy.
There are ways to improve but the sad fact is that cars make our economy possible and that means that fuel cost is a real issue that needs to be addressed. If it costs five dollars for a candy bar and we could have better candy by raising the price to $20 then I really don't want the change regardless of how much better it might be, the huge change in cost is enough that I'd rather not have it at all. It is the same with public transport costs for me, I wish it was better but the cost makes it so prohibitive that I would have to give up income, safety, and many hours daily with my family to make a fair contribution to it. I'd rather skip it and focus on changing the gas prices instead. At current prices I pay around around $2,000 annually in fuel costs, and I could probably cut that by a third if I gave up things like family sports and visiting relatives. If prices go up much more, I'll have to give those things up anyway and that sucks.
Level of abstraction? Okay, explain how you're a walrus.
Software patents make as much sense as mechanical patents because both cover how to change something in one state to something that might be more useful in a different state. The usefulness of the patent is up for debate as it would be in any new industry, as is the innovation. The debatable questions are whether the innovation that goes into creating something that is novel in software deserves a patent, and whether allowing patents in software is good for society. Once those questions are sufficiently answered there will always be the secondary questions of a particular patent's worthiness, but it will be far easier to answer.
I'd say it doesn't really even matter how prevalent the actual incidences are, we need to drill for them because they're a legitimate fear both of the parents and children. My daughter takes karate with me not because it will help her defend herself any better than she already could (we practiced Bite Kick and Scream from a very young age) but because I believe it helps her gain confidence in herself in dangerous and/or scary situations. We talk regularly about how to deal with scary things from big storms and poisonous snakes to kidnappers. I seriously doubt she will ever face most of the dangers we talk about but if she does I want her to know how to respond and even if she never does I want her confident she knows what to do so that she doesn't spend extra time worrying about it.
Sounds reasonable to me: ... b.. er..
... *cough*
... Uh...
MS: They're infringing on our patents! See, patent A, B, C.
Judge: Humm, you might be right, it is ordered that all source code and IP owned by MS shall be presented to this court, viewable by the public for review. Each submission shall have notes on the copyright ownership and patent relationship if any.
MS:
Judge: By Wednesday.
Anarchy ensues.
I always hate waking up from those dreams. As long as I'm contemplating reality, does anybody know if you have to sue each infringer and can it stand up if there was no request to cease and desist and what about international infringement? I'm thinking that if I wrote a snifty bit of code, submitted it and of course had no clue that it was infringing, I'd immediately quit work and distribution if somebody showed me it was infringing, heck I'd take a hard look if somebody even told me where to and that it might. I'd hope I'd be let loose with a stern "Look first next time" warning, but here comes the tricky bit, some Russian looks up my source code, gives me $10 for the copyright (I'd count myself lucky) and continues development. Now what? It's open source and the copyright is no longer mine, and the new maintainer/distributor doesn't have to answer to US patent insanity, what can MS do about it?
I'm thinking this is a good idea, get a serious organization behind fighting spam, not just one with serious goals and effort but one with serious authority. I wonder if the citizens (who are ultimately paying for it of course) have much control over how it is set up? I can envision a conflict between our marketing department and the government going something like this:
....Fast forward two years...
Marketing: "No, it's not spam, we put in opt out links and only send it to people we have a relationship with."
Gov: "But 200 people called it spam, you're now listed as a spammer. Sorry."
Marketing: "That's no fair! How do we change our status?"
Gov: "The will of the people has spoken, but I don't have lunch plans, maybe the people could buy....?"
Marketing: "Do you like steak?"
Gov: "I realize our office receives a lot of criticism for not allowing the public to mark mail as spam, but in reality many of the emails we receive are legitimate businesses using legal means to advertise. We will not allow the public to slur the good name of reputable companies."
When I read this I though "Okay, so you have to steal the box to get the content or do a lot of work to get the data off of the drive using the chip in the machine.. no big deal right?"
Then it occurred to me, maybe the host computer isn't the local Tivo box, maybe it is Tivo's system (remote) that they're calling the host. What does that mean? Now you can't get data off of the drive unless the Tivo calls home, swaps keys, and stores a decryption key/algorithm in RAM. This means that if Tivo says no, you can't get at data on the device you now own. So... well if you can hack the OS then you can just have the keys stored after/during exchange or you could read out of RAM, but maybe the OS is built off of a network boot scenario with the initial sending of the system happening only after the handshake. Tricky.
If (big if) that is the case then the way to beat it will have to be capturing the data in RAM from a running system. It sounds tough but I suspect you could do it by setting up a virtual machine that intercepts the call coming from the box, and on return sends all output from the chip normally destined for real RAM into virtual RAM (which is really filesystem based, heck make it a ram drive so it is as fast as RAM but readable as a file.) Copy the virtual ram file, and you've got an unencrypted OS. Hack your unencrypted OS to store the keys, and now you have your drive decryption key, your "call home" key and a hackable OS. Want to do something Tivo doesn't like? Make your OS think the commands came from Tivo, not too difficult now. Maybe they have a changing algorithm where the chip uses a new key (in predicted order) for each call home, incrementing after each successful exchange. Maybe then you have to talk to the chip every time with your Virtual Machine, but it still accomplishes the goal of having complete access and control.
Okay, what I think they really have is a scheme to make sure that a chip and drive are tied together so you can't get at the drive without the chip, thus no Tivo drive swapping and they really don't care right now anyway and just wanted to get the patent because they think their method might be marketable some day. I wonder if I'm giving them ideas.. nah, they'll never read this post, right?
I've seen a lot of this in my roles from first level CSR to middle management (yeah, I'm a PHB but I used to be a phone monkey.) I even tried to get our team to adopt the term Phone Monkey as our name, embrace and extend, but you have to have a thick skin for that. The parent post is in a classic "us vs them" mindset. If this is a common feeling for you Debian Cabbit, then please change jobs or find a new philosophy. You're going to be unhappy and spread your misery until you do. If its just a bad day, then sorry to hear it, but you need to chill a little.
The truth is that there are several possible scenarios that a customer can find themselves in and how they respond can make a huge difference in how the problem is resolved:
Always ask for the name of the person you're dealing with and make a note of it. Call them by name. It gives them the feeling of being responsible
Standard disclaimer: IANAL
I'm not sure what the law is for interstate calls, but in my state (TX) the law used to be that at least one party had to be aware that the recording was being made. Anything further, notice, consent etc, is just courtsey. I think that is pretty much in line with federal law and doesn't extend it.
That means that CSRs in TX need not be able to stop the recording. If the company policy is to record all calls, then they'll be recorded. Personally I've found this useful. I had a recorder and recorded a call to our phone company that my wife made. When she was dropped, I called back and asked to speak with a manager. I was of course asked why and I explained that I wanted to play back the recorded call to the manager. The average CSR doesn't want to deal with the potential of being personally sued nor does the average manager want to deal with being responsible for the department where the suit is originating. Effective isn't a strong enough word.
Close. I'd call my grandchild to have him/her talk to the Roomba and if Google is broken again, I'd call the same kid. I'm soooo looking forward to being able to blame being a jerk on age and senility.
I do. I skim a half dozen news and article sites daily, have rss updates to tell me when the regulars put something out, but it isn't really serving the same purpose. When I pick up Linux Journal/Linux Magazine/Hackers Quarterly or one of the half dozen "free" newsletters and magazines that are sent to me, I know I'm getting two things:
A. I'm getting the advertisements that I actually might be interested in. I can't tell you how many times I've been shocked when somebody told me the price of their product, mostly because I'd seen so many ads in the magazines. It gives me a decent idea what something is worth and also an idea of what's available on the market. Yeah, ads clutter the world, but when I'm getting ready to make a purchase decision, I want a solid idea what is normal. I buy magazines that appeal to my interests or work and they tend to put ads in front of me that might come in handy. (We bought a SAN for $10K from a company I saw in a journal when the people that we'd been talking to were putting comparable storage around $175,000.)
B. Depth. Most of the things I read on the Internet are meant to be consumed in 15 minutes or less. That's what I want when I'm starting my morning or surfing, but sometimes I like articles with more meat to them. Yes, there are websites that do that, but when I'm doing that kind of reading, the laptop isn't as comfortable (and it isn't as upsetting when the magazine gets dropped in the toilet.) The editors realize that if I'm buying a magazine that I'm going to have for at least a month, they had better put something that sticks with me in front of me or they won't get any of my cash again. They tend to accomplish that goal, but then I only buy those magazines that do.
I haven't RTFA. I don't know enough to understand whether or not the various things posted by the parent are true. I have no more classical science education than a couple years as a non-major in college. Quantum mechanics doesn't make sense to me and string theory might as well be trying to explain snarks for all I grasp of it. I could examine a mouse brain and the most interesting information I could probably add would be how it tastes. Still I feel incited to venture an opinion. Obviously, I am not new here.
I find the phrase "slashdotters are basically waving goodbye to the only REAL chance humanity has" to be particularly poor taste. There has always been something poised to wipe out the world as we know it. Its pretty much a near universal religious principle. That doesn't make it any less true, but to espouse that the particular idea you've put your faith in is the only hope, well that is... actually pretty much what I believe too, but at least I call it a religious belief straight out instead of trying to pretend it's science.
For adding information key to a better understanding of what was going on: +5 pts.
Now where is the slashdot eraser... what? You're kidding right?For mangling good science with poor logic and blind faith: -100pts.
Okay, it's bad for the govt to tell the press what they must report and how.
Still, there is something clearly left unsaid in TFA, and that is whether the new management is actually acting under direction by the govt. It seems clear that the govt is trying to force the media to portray it in a positive light and side with its ideology, but it is not clear whether this particular act is actually caused by the govt or just by some PHBs.
Either way it sucks but there is a difference:
A. Freedom to be stupid: PHBs like the govt and want to control what they can to support it
B. Freedom sanctioned: Govt controls PHBs through ideology law and forces trickle down effect
There is a big difference between the two in my way of thinking. One is something I support: freedom to be stupid, and the other is something I condemn for all the obvious reasons: force by govt to be stupid.
You could look at my personal life and say that I don't deserve the freedom to be stupid, but I have it and wouldn't want it any other way. In the same way, if it's PHB stupidity then I'm for it (the freedom that is, not the actual choices made with it,) but if it's govt forced stupidity, I'm against.
There is plenty of innuendo in the article, but where is that particular clarification?
Key: govt=government; PHB=Pointy Haired Boss, aka clueless management; my personal life=shamblesOkay, maybe a black hat tendency, but there might be alternatives.
There are plenty of security companies out there legitimately trying to sell their software, plenty of people who would love to be the only ones who have a defense against some secret hack. If you want me to spend time finding a vulnerability and then into writing an exploit, my time would not come cheap. I'm not even talented in that direction. Imagine that you're a security researcher who gets paid for your time investigating and resolving potential security breaches, what kind of payoff makes it worth investing your time in that gamble? It has to be a pretty penny or else you're better served doing what you do for a living.
"Give me the money" is a legit response when you've invested your time and effort into something with that as your goal. If he'd said "I don't hack for fun or evil, I only did this for the contest and expect to be given what I was promised" then I don't think you'd have the same take. There is a good chance that is exactly what he meant too. You might be shocked to learn that a lot of us who are considered computer geeks are not the world's foremost verbal communicators.
I love my job, but I won't work here long after they stop paying me.
It seems reasonable that if your product is Product Sucks and you offer Product Sucks Messenger (PSM) and somebody else comes out with something that works like your product, only better and names it GNPSM (GPSM's Not PSM) then you'd have a reasonable complaint. It seems odd to me that this wasn't voluntarily changed years ago.
I personally have used both products and wouldn't use the "official" AOL client if I had any choice and in fact have never personally installed it on my computers. I've had the misfortune of using computers that had it foisted on them but sometimes its hard to convince people to switch when they already have something they "know how to use."
I'm sure the new name has wide approval and it's too late for suggestions, but I wish they'd gone with "Nonsucky Chat Client" instead.
I know it is coming so I'll head it off, yes your client is better for whatever reason you claim. Yes, I've used IRSSI, Zinc, XChat, Mozilla's whatever it was called and others. I like the client formerly known as Gaim because it was always easy to set up and easy to use and easy to explain.
I use truecrypt because I need to be able to hand over my laptop to a gun wielding thug if it ever comes up. This got me to thinking, if its a virtual filesystem, and seen as such by Linux, what would happen if I put my entire virtual machine on an encrypted partition. Would it then be possible for me to use Linux with TS + Xen (or VMWare if you prefer) to provide an entirely encrypted OS, including its filesystem? I'd assume that I'd need to have no swap (or file based swap, also on an encrypted partition) but that seems pretty doable to me. If my machine gets stolen, then is everything on the encrypted partition as safe as my password?
I can think of one possibility that was left out, God exists without cause, created the universe and chooses to interact within its laws most of the time but occassionally does things the way He wants anyway, disregarding the rules He established, thus miracles.
The problem you describe isn't a problem with God exactly, it is a problem with causality. People believe that there must be a cause for every action. Turtles all the way down and so forth.
The attraction of a belief in a primary creator is that it steps outside of the cause/effect relationship. If there is a God who is not an effect, but exists simply as a permanant entity, then that makes it possible for there to be a primary cause. If not, then there needs to be a cause for God or a cause for the existance of the universe. The universe seems bent on this cause/effect pattern in those things we can observe so we tend to believe that either the universe exists outside of a primary cause or God exists outside of a primary cause. Since we observe cause and effect with all things related to the universe, we tend to believe that there must be a cause for it. Since we don't have an observable God to test, it is easier to believe that there is something that we cannot understand about God than something we can observe, the universe.
Of course if we can accept that either the universe or God exists without a primary cause then all these issues go away and we get to replace them with a whole new set. If we have to accept something is a primary cause and doesn't have a cause itself then we are right back to the faith question, God or the universe without a primary cause. The universe needs a cause because it is inflexible in how it can exist, but God has the advantage because we ascribe the ability to exist without a cause to God.
Don't care for that? Well then, we have to decide that physics is insufficient to describe itself which also means that the arguments against God (from scientific points of view) don't apply by the same logic.
Turtles all the way down. Personally I find that a belief and interaction with God do me more good personally than a belief that the universe exists without primary cause. I guess its a practicality thing.
It's just an opinion folks, but I believe he was right on both counts (or at least what I think the spirit of the comment was getting at.)
Honestly I don't think MS paid off VMWare, but I don't doubt that VMWare is loosing its focus. For a long time they were the best (nearly only serious) virtualization game in town. They had a heck of a product and sold out at what I think will have been their peak to EMC. EMC owns a LOT of what used to be serious companies. The problem is that EMC hasn't been spoken of as well recently as they used to be because they have had trouble coordinating their efforts. This is from various vendors we deal with. I'm dissatisfied to the extent that despite the fact that the company I work for has a significant investment in software they now own, still we'll be migrating off. I think VMWare is going to become more and more marginalized as virtualization in the hardware becomes more mainstream.
By offloading the virtualization to the hardware you get away from tremendous amounts of complicated code. Performance wise, the improvement isn't as tremendous as it seems like it should be, but the codebase maintenance is a world apart with hardware being the future trend. VMWare's strength was its ability to virtualize the hardware, but with the hardware doing essentially the same job, you now have millions (guessing) of lines of code that no longer are necessary for the job, but essential to the product. That means VMWare as a product is rapidly becoming harder to maintain than other virtualization products that can take advantage of the hardware advances. I've heard that government entities that have to audit code will be going with Xen because the auditing task is possible with Xen and untenatable with VMWare. Pair that with being managed by a company that can't seem to get its goals in line with the path technology is taking or keep a cohesive business plan and I think that VMWare will be a tiny niche and obsolete system in five years. That doesn't sound too terrible on the face of it since five years sounds like a long time, but IT managers are having to think about planning for that period and thus have to stick with what they think will be most viable for that period when they're making purchase decisions now. Bluntly put, I expect VMWare sales to drop steadily as more and more people migrate to the technologies with the most promising future. By the time most people are using Microsoft products that utilize paravirtualization and hardware virtualization I think VMWare will be just a memory and curiosity. By the way, XP can be virtualized to run in Xen WITHOUT hardware virtualization if you can tweak the source code. It has been done but of course you can't get "Windows virtualized OS for Xen" because MS isn't about to release it.
I can't imagine that there are too terribly many managers out there that will blow off VMWare as a solution solely because the management needs Windows, but it is a factor in our decisions. I think, more to the point, that EMC will do development to appeal to their target market for "ease of use" which will stave off some of the loss of sales at the cost of maintaining a reputation as being one of the best technical solutions. I have a faint hope that VMWare will jump on the paravirtualization and hardware virtualization bandwagons but I don't hold out much hope that EMC will make the necessary investment in development.
Xen is not Xensource. Xensource contributes a heck of a lot, but we have a Xen based server and after needing custom controls, custom setups and iscsi before they release it officially, we are not using the tools that come with the Xensource products in favor of the controls that are a part of the open source base. (We use the open source tools in preference to the pretty gui tools because they do what we want the way we want with less effort.) That said, it was easy to start with the free (as in beer) version they offer. If you need the extras their paid versions come with, I still wouldn't hold it against you. Every pen
First, I assume your blog is secure, if it wasn't you should have corrected that by now. Second, a whole lot of you people seem to be missing one of the fundamental benefits! Being able to say "I told you so" and prove it. That would apply to auto insurance, malpractice, shoddy customer service and arguments with your oh so significant other.
Here is how it should work:
I wear glasses (used to have contacts) and I can easily imagine a pair of glasses where the spring in them is just a little longer and one side includes a microphone and the other side has a camera. I'm not sure about powering the thing but if you could get it broadcasting wirelessly (yes heavily encrypted) to my cell phone which in turn uploads periodically to my glife (google's next product) then you'd be able to have an audio/visual recording of practically everything I see/say/hear.
All the video/audio is stored temporarily on my cell where I can also set the cease broadcast, cease recording or cease upload options. It is pretty handy to control it from there, but it also has the "instant replay" option for whatever storage capacity I can afford/prefer worth of time. I imagine that at home I'd put it on cease upload but at work and driving I'd be on broadcast/record/upload constantly. I imagine Progressive or Allstate would offer a "certified driver" program and I would enable the same sort of technology in my car but on a simulcast to trusted third party option for a hefty discount. I'd certainly opt for the "dump last hour of data to police on death" and the "call the frigging ambulance if you crash" options.
The next thing would be a password to access archives beyond my cell phone replay option. I would memorize 24 hour, 30 day, 90 day, 1 yr and 7 yr passwords which would lock the archive for those periods of times if I used them. You could set your archive with whatever default lock period you like and nobody would be able to tell if you deliberately locked it or not. Some people would doubtless like to record their lives but don't want them pried into until a statute of limitations would apply so you could always plausibly say that you were one of those people (or that you only know the 7 yr lock password if you're a doctor, lawyer etc and then rely on third parties, possibly pairs of other people.) It would be trivial to change the lock/archive periods so that what you do at work is locked for 7 years, driving for 24 and home not at all and not stored at all when you're feeling private.
Heck, the politician who has the longest period on record of "share with third party ethics auditors" would be a shoo-in for office. Call the other guy a liar and stand on your "Really moral and honest guy" rating if you can get it. If not, then maybe somebody who can will run.... that or a talented hacker.
I cannot imagine how many arguments I wish I could have solved with the "Wait, lets check out an instant replay" option. I can go a step further and say that it would doubtless have my wife agreeing with me far more often about what was said. She insists on debating what she or I said, and while I'm sure she is occassionally right, I am really good at that sort of thing. On the other hand I imagine that I would almost never argue with her about what she told me previously. The thing is that both of us know that the other person is better at some types of recall, but there is no way to tell how often or how much better quantitively. Even if we knew the likelyhood was that we'd be wrong, we could "check the replay" if we thought this might be the time we were the one who was right.
I would never need to tell people in the service industry they suck again, if they suck then I can post the entire episode on youtube! Yes, I mean you Sprint, Wafflehouse and York Tire!