Let me add to the explanation about how sales/profits do not necessarily correlate with the CoreBrand measure:
I think that one of the things which is eating away at Microsoft's reputation is that companies are having to upgrade much more frequently because of security issues. Some PHBs figure that it's just the way computer are but there are many other business manager types who are looking at the tech budget compared to the way it used to be and figuring that they are paying Microsoft to fix security mistakes and not getting much improvement in basic functionality for the money. Without a technical background, a business manager may give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that the situation is mostly due to increased threats from outside, but they still aren't happy about it. I even talked to one CEO of a small company who sees it as a perverse situation where Microsoft, with their monopoly power, can reap huge profits specifically because of their own poor quality. It's a businessman's way of looking at the same sort of thing which geeks have criticized Microsoft for for a long time. That's all anecdotal but I think it's a possible explanation why they are making lot's of money at the same time their reputation is taking a nose dive.
Back in the early days of the web, it was often easier to use a web index rather than a search engine. You would go to a site like Yahoo and lookup what you wanted in a hierarchy of categories. That was often the best way to do it before search engines became more sophisticated.
In early 2007, I was consulting in India, when a bunch of superstitious idiots tasted the (polluted) water coming from Mahim Creek into the ocean. It tasted sweet, not salty! Of course that was probably due to contamination from some chemical like antifreeze or something.
That sounds like ethylene glycol, which is used as an antifreeze, particularly in automotive applications. It is well known to taste sweet because it has two hydroxyl groups close to each other, resembling a structure common to many sugars. The problem is that it is metabolized to oxalic acid which causes crystals damaging to the kidneys.
No shit. What the fuck is up with the UK these days?...
One part of UK history which you didn't mention is the whole bit with Northern Ireland. If you look at all that was done to fight the IRA, it puts the present situation in context.
A number of people posting in this discussion have pointed out that Apache is used in technically different ways from IIS. A site with lots of complex middle components, PHP, etc. is more likely to use Apache for technical reasons. That shows that there can be a sort of apples to oranges comparison in looking at total statistics.
Similarly, what about the possibility that sites who know that they are more likely to be a target for defacement will choose a web server or platform accordingly. Could it be that more sensitive sites tend to pick Apache more often because of real or perceived security advantages and then proceed to get defaced anyway because of poor systems administration, weak passwords, etc.
Why yes. It's called Secular Humanism. It was actually the Fundies themselves who first coined the term to refer to what they thought was an implicit religion taught by materials (books, etc.) which were attempting to keep religion out of schools. Later, some opponents of these fundies thought it would not be a bad idea to have a religion that was actually a movement for logic, reason and freedom from religion.
The problem I see with that is that there is an official speed limit and an unofficial one. There's a lot of room in the "above official speed limit" range for large differences in speed.
Actually, I was using two Macs. Mac OS 10.4 and higher can easily configure TCP/IP over FireWire and that's what I compared to the ethernet crossover cable. I used AppleShare for the file transfer and that is often criticized for using small packets. So that's consistent with what you're saying. It's the USB cable that should have had the unfair advantage because that was a target disk mode connection (and Finder copy). There have been numerous occasions where FireWire just seems to work the best but I didn't quantify it. There have also been several times that I have used GigE, with various equipment (admittedly not the best), but where a gigabit connection was indicated and failed to even get 100 Mbps. That's using various protocols including SMB and SCP.
Perhaps the MacBook Air is the G4 Cube of our time. It's the right general idea but overpriced and not configured exactly right. Maybe in the future there will be a new model that is to the MacBook Air what the Mac Mini is to the G4 Cube.
Apple and Microsoft had patent sharing arrangement as a part of their big deal back in 1997 but the whole thing was only for five years. As far as I know, they never renewed the deal after it expired.
Maybe they figure that Diebold with offer synergy with their other wannabe shadowy businesses like making silent black helicopters. I live near the Sikorsky plant and they do, in fact, make black helicopters. They will have to work on the silent part, however. These black helicopters are most definitely not silent.
I've spent more time on this than it probably deserves and I have found that the order of performance can be the opposite of the advertised speeds. With all other hardware equal, I have found that, usually, FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0 which is faster than gigabit ethernet (with a cat 6 crossover cable).
The chances of getting killed by a terrorist in the US is probably about as small as the chances of being struck by lightning, if not smaller. The illusion is that we need draconian measures to protect us.
This is part of the reason for the Additional Decryption Key (ADK) functionality of PGP. Individual users within the organization can encrypt and decrypt with their own keys but there is always the additional key for backup, in the possession of the organization, to decrypt data in case users' keys are lost. I don't see how someone stealing keys is likely to cause much of a DoS situation when an organization is using ADK.
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think revoking a key only affects future uses of the key for creating valid digital signatures. You can still decrypt data without a problem. Someone coming in and revoking keys on you is only a DoS attack in the sense that you need to take the time to issue new keys and fix whatever security breach allowed the attacker access to the old keys.
We use RDF stores instead of databases in some places as they are very good at representing graph structures, which are a real pain to real with in SQL. You often hear the "what can RDF do that SQL can't" type arguments, which are all just nonsense. What can SQL do that a field database, or a bunch of flat files can't? It's all about what you can do easily enough that you will be bothered to do it.
Without knowing the details of your circumstances, it sounds like, maybe, the real point is that what you want is an object oriented database rather than relational one. RDF allows for much more of an object oriented design than a traditional RDBMS does.
A fully normalised SQL database has many of the attributes of an RDF store, but
a) when was the last time you saw one in production use?
I've seen lot's of poorly normalized databases and even situations, with a database of my own design, where I realized later that I should have done things differently. Still, there always seems to be a way to work around the shortcomings. My question is: Is it really easier to follow the best practices of the Symantec Web than the best practices of relational database design.
b) how much of a pain was it to write big queries with outer joins?
My experience has been that you only need to solve a few of those big query problems once and use the solutions to create views. Then you can have a very well normalized database but still be able to query it easily.
BUT, and this is the catch, YOU pick the level of authentication with OpenID. You get to decide how secure is secure, if you think it's ok to just go with a username/password. Then that's your choice and you can do that. But if you would prefer to go 'Fort Knox', it's entirely possible for you to do so, because you get to choose who does the authentication and therefore what authentication is being done.
Or I suppose that you could have two or three OpenID accounts at different levels of security. Use the lowest level of security for membership sites like Slashdot and the highest level (with two-factor identification, etc.) for financial sites like your online banking.
LGBT lifestyles are an example of a situation where some people think that a particular activity is perfectly moral while others don't. Not everyone who is in such a minority group wants to be an activist. Some just want to lead the lifestyle in private and not let it affect their professional life. Shouldn't people have that choice?
I think you do have some expectation of privacy at private party, especially if it's at someone's home (rather than a hotel, convention center or similar location). Privacy has it's value.
The Democrats will either nominate Obama (the most likely) or Clkinton. There are too many people, especially Republicans, who hate them both for either to be elected. And neither of them are moderates.
No, Clinton is a moderate. Jimmy Carter said that she's not liberal enough for him. It's also why Ted Kennedy and a lot of the rest of the liberal establishment of the Democratic Party endorsed Obama. The Clintons are hated by conservatives but it's not because of their Ideology. It's because of their effectiveness.
What if it wasn't you that posted the pictures of Facebook (or wherever). What if you didn't even know that anyone had a camera at that party with the drunk transvestites and then pictures of you show up on someone else's page somewhere.
In the article, Venter says that they will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction. In talking about gene activation, Biologists often use the term "ordered cascade" to describe what's happening when one gene activates a few more and those genes, in turn, activate other genes. If you think about it, it's exactly like subroutines of a program. Construction of the bacterial flagellum, for example, starts with the activation of one gene, which activates others, leading to the contribution of about 25 genes. These genes contribute various parts of the flagellum and activation of the cellular machinery to put it together and attach it to the cell wall.
Part of the problem is that there are two distinct ways people commonly do quotations in email. The quick and lazy way is to just hit reply, quoting the sender's entire message below, and write your reply above. The more precise way is to quote specific lines from the original message and write your reply below each set of lines. What I really hate is when the two methods get mixed. For example, I use the more precise method to reply to a message and the someone else quotes the whole thing with their reply above, the message goes through another round or two of replies and then gets forwarded on to someone else who was not one of the original recipients. Good luck figuring out the track of the conversation.
But, of course, Mac users generally behave even more like cattle than Microsoft users and want to hand their money to someone else to think for them, and that's what Microsoft is doing. And when it comes to applications, they're more concerned with whether the buttons are shiny enough than whether the application gets the job done.
Mac users do tend to be very concerned with the design of a GUI over other design concerns but it's not just shiny buttons. It's overall elegant design and usability for the end user that they want and they will complain if they don't get it. That hardly makes them cattle. OpenOffice copies the MS Office GUI very closely which means there's no innovation in that area at all. Mac users like applications like iWork, Nisus Writer, Papyrus Office, etc. because they do innovate in the area of GUI design. Using MS office is a compromise. In many work environments having MS Office available is necessary to justify the purchase of a Mac.
EndNote is able to operate directly on some other file formats, like RTF. You just don't get the easy menu items straight in your word processor.
I'm not sure what the company will do about future development with EndNote. There are a lot of Mac users in their customer base, especially in areas like Biology. On the technical side, they have really gone in for xml in their own file formats in recent years. I wouldn't be surprised if what they do, ultimately, is make EndNote into it's own word processor which will work with ODF and OOXML documents. That's part of the point in having an open standard xml format, as I see it. You can edit the same file with different applications and use each to do the kind of editing that it does best.
I have no problem with BT on Comcast either but my guess is that it's because I live in an area with lots of computer geeks and competition among multiple broadband providers. With educated consumers and stiff competition, they can't get away with much here.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me add to the explanation about how sales/profits do not necessarily correlate with the CoreBrand measure:
I think that one of the things which is eating away at Microsoft's reputation is that companies are having to upgrade much more frequently because of security issues. Some PHBs figure that it's just the way computer are but there are many other business manager types who are looking at the tech budget compared to the way it used to be and figuring that they are paying Microsoft to fix security mistakes and not getting much improvement in basic functionality for the money. Without a technical background, a business manager may give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that the situation is mostly due to increased threats from outside, but they still aren't happy about it. I even talked to one CEO of a small company who sees it as a perverse situation where Microsoft, with their monopoly power, can reap huge profits specifically because of their own poor quality. It's a businessman's way of looking at the same sort of thing which geeks have criticized Microsoft for for a long time. That's all anecdotal but I think it's a possible explanation why they are making lot's of money at the same time their reputation is taking a nose dive.
Back in the early days of the web, it was often easier to use a web index rather than a search engine. You would go to a site like Yahoo and lookup what you wanted in a hierarchy of categories. That was often the best way to do it before search engines became more sophisticated.
One part of UK history which you didn't mention is the whole bit with Northern Ireland. If you look at all that was done to fight the IRA, it puts the present situation in context.
A number of people posting in this discussion have pointed out that Apache is used in technically different ways from IIS. A site with lots of complex middle components, PHP, etc. is more likely to use Apache for technical reasons. That shows that there can be a sort of apples to oranges comparison in looking at total statistics. Similarly, what about the possibility that sites who know that they are more likely to be a target for defacement will choose a web server or platform accordingly. Could it be that more sensitive sites tend to pick Apache more often because of real or perceived security advantages and then proceed to get defaced anyway because of poor systems administration, weak passwords, etc.
"Consider that two wrongs never make a right... but that three lefts do."
Why yes. It's called Secular Humanism. It was actually the Fundies themselves who first coined the term to refer to what they thought was an implicit religion taught by materials (books, etc.) which were attempting to keep religion out of schools. Later, some opponents of these fundies thought it would not be a bad idea to have a religion that was actually a movement for logic, reason and freedom from religion.
The problem I see with that is that there is an official speed limit and an unofficial one. There's a lot of room in the "above official speed limit" range for large differences in speed.
Actually, I was using two Macs. Mac OS 10.4 and higher can easily configure TCP/IP over FireWire and that's what I compared to the ethernet crossover cable. I used AppleShare for the file transfer and that is often criticized for using small packets. So that's consistent with what you're saying. It's the USB cable that should have had the unfair advantage because that was a target disk mode connection (and Finder copy). There have been numerous occasions where FireWire just seems to work the best but I didn't quantify it. There have also been several times that I have used GigE, with various equipment (admittedly not the best), but where a gigabit connection was indicated and failed to even get 100 Mbps. That's using various protocols including SMB and SCP.
Perhaps the MacBook Air is the G4 Cube of our time. It's the right general idea but overpriced and not configured exactly right. Maybe in the future there will be a new model that is to the MacBook Air what the Mac Mini is to the G4 Cube.
Apple and Microsoft had patent sharing arrangement as a part of their big deal back in 1997 but the whole thing was only for five years. As far as I know, they never renewed the deal after it expired.
Maybe they figure that Diebold with offer synergy with their other wannabe shadowy businesses like making silent black helicopters. I live near the Sikorsky plant and they do, in fact, make black helicopters. They will have to work on the silent part, however. These black helicopters are most definitely not silent.
I've spent more time on this than it probably deserves and I have found that the order of performance can be the opposite of the advertised speeds. With all other hardware equal, I have found that, usually, FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0 which is faster than gigabit ethernet (with a cat 6 crossover cable).
The chances of getting killed by a terrorist in the US is probably about as small as the chances of being struck by lightning, if not smaller. The illusion is that we need draconian measures to protect us.
This is part of the reason for the Additional Decryption Key (ADK) functionality of PGP. Individual users within the organization can encrypt and decrypt with their own keys but there is always the additional key for backup, in the possession of the organization, to decrypt data in case users' keys are lost. I don't see how someone stealing keys is likely to cause much of a DoS situation when an organization is using ADK.
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think revoking a key only affects future uses of the key for creating valid digital signatures. You can still decrypt data without a problem. Someone coming in and revoking keys on you is only a DoS attack in the sense that you need to take the time to issue new keys and fix whatever security breach allowed the attacker access to the old keys.
LGBT lifestyles are an example of a situation where some people think that a particular activity is perfectly moral while others don't. Not everyone who is in such a minority group wants to be an activist. Some just want to lead the lifestyle in private and not let it affect their professional life. Shouldn't people have that choice?
I think you do have some expectation of privacy at private party, especially if it's at someone's home (rather than a hotel, convention center or similar location). Privacy has it's value.
What if it wasn't you that posted the pictures of Facebook (or wherever). What if you didn't even know that anyone had a camera at that party with the drunk transvestites and then pictures of you show up on someone else's page somewhere.
In the article, Venter says that they will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction. In talking about gene activation, Biologists often use the term "ordered cascade" to describe what's happening when one gene activates a few more and those genes, in turn, activate other genes. If you think about it, it's exactly like subroutines of a program. Construction of the bacterial flagellum, for example, starts with the activation of one gene, which activates others, leading to the contribution of about 25 genes. These genes contribute various parts of the flagellum and activation of the cellular machinery to put it together and attach it to the cell wall.
Part of the problem is that there are two distinct ways people commonly do quotations in email. The quick and lazy way is to just hit reply, quoting the sender's entire message below, and write your reply above. The more precise way is to quote specific lines from the original message and write your reply below each set of lines. What I really hate is when the two methods get mixed. For example, I use the more precise method to reply to a message and the someone else quotes the whole thing with their reply above, the message goes through another round or two of replies and then gets forwarded on to someone else who was not one of the original recipients. Good luck figuring out the track of the conversation.
EndNote is able to operate directly on some other file formats, like RTF. You just don't get the easy menu items straight in your word processor.
I'm not sure what the company will do about future development with EndNote. There are a lot of Mac users in their customer base, especially in areas like Biology. On the technical side, they have really gone in for xml in their own file formats in recent years. I wouldn't be surprised if what they do, ultimately, is make EndNote into it's own word processor which will work with ODF and OOXML documents. That's part of the point in having an open standard xml format, as I see it. You can edit the same file with different applications and use each to do the kind of editing that it does best.
I have no problem with BT on Comcast either but my guess is that it's because I live in an area with lots of computer geeks and competition among multiple broadband providers. With educated consumers and stiff competition, they can't get away with much here.