The 52 most dangerous American officials
on
TIA Project to End
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I found a very interesting article about some French people thinking that 9/11 was organized by US official in order to achive specific personal political and financial benefits. Here is the text of the article in case if it will be slashdotted:
PARIS, Sept. 25 -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the Ace of Spades and al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden a Joker in a provocative pack of French playing cards depicting "the 52 most dangerous American officials."
A RIPOSTE TO the "most-wanted" cards of Iraqi leaders issued to U.S. soldiers, the deck is the latest commercial offering by a radical think tank whose conspiracy theory account of the Sept. 11 attacks stormed French bestseller charts last year.
"We've already sold some 2,500 decks. That's not bad considering we couldn't find anyone who was willing to print them at first," said Thierry Meyssan, president of the Paris-based Reseau Voltaire group.
"We were shocked by the indecency of the cards distributed by the U.S. military. It was as if arresting people was some kind of game," Meyssan told Reuters Thursday.
Two hundred packs of the original Pentagon-devised U.S. cards were sent to U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The American public has since snapped up hundreds of thousands of the decks, which portray Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as the Ace of Spades.
The French cards bestow that honor not on President Bush but Rumsfeld. Under his mug shot, he is accused of using the Sept. 11 attacks "to increase military budgets and plan an army in space that could completely dominate Earth."
As King of Diamonds -- the suit chosen to represent economic power in the U.S. administration -- Bush is described merely as "head of a baseball club... designated president of the United States by friends of his father at the Supreme Court."
In the 2000 election, the Court stopped a potentially decisive recount in Florida, a move that handed the presidency to Bush.
Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida network Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. landmarks, is a Joker described as "a CIA agent charged... with provoking a clash between the 'Arab-Muslim' and 'Judeo-Christian' worlds."
Meyssan won notoriety for his book "L'Effroyable Imposture" ("The Appalling Fraud"), which suggested U.S. military insiders were probably behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
I am now looking to buy that french deck of cards - cood be a very insightful gift here in North America (especially here in Canada) for people who has not completely lost the sense of humor:)
What if all banks do the same? What use is to ditch yahoo?
Basically you suggest to give up. As an extreme you may want me, like Dr Knuth, to abandon the usage of email altogether. No email - no spam. Right?
Wrong! I don't want to give up. I want any organization, if taking my email address - to use it carefully with all respect to my privacy. And I want the law that will effectively work for it. For example, the law will say that any organization after taking my email must take my list of topics I am ready to receive as well as my list of topic I explicitely cannot accept in my mailbox. Also every such organization must have and use a valid return address with specified and guarantied time of response. Cannot afford it? Do not take email addresses of people you have account for.
Can the new law help me? No? I don't need such a law.
Also, of course, how would you perform a JOIN (e.g. relate two lists)?
There are at least one known effort: ZSQLCatalog: querying Zope Catalog with SQL.
ZSQLCatalog is an extension to the traditional Zope ZCatalog and Indexes. It currently implements an Index which uses an SQL database as external storage. It allows to query a Zope Catalog with a combination of traditional Zope Catalog queries (field based, text based) and with complex queries implemented as SQL methods.
By using ZSQLCatalog, it is possible to develop a whole system with an object oriented approach and forget about external relational databases yet provide to users the usual experience of SQL queries.
The ZCatalog is Zope's built in search engine. It allows you to categorize and search all kinds of Zope objects. You can also use it to search external data such as relational data, files, and remote web pages. In addition to searching you can use the ZCatalog to organize collections of objects.
The ZCatalog supports a rich query interface. You can perform full text searching, and can search multiple indexes at once. In addition, the ZCatalog keeps track of meta-data about indexed objects.
You can do even named and nested queries with ZCatalog thus building ad-hoc queries.
Searching the ZCatalog works a lot like searching a relational database, except that the searching is more object-oriented.
What is referential integrity in RDBMS? It's a hidden "BEFORE" trigger checking the constraint that the refered obejct does exist. Same thing about explicit logical constraints.
In ZODB you store you Python objects, which are instances of Python classes, which can have pre-coded constraint-triggers as well.
So, ZODB does support "logical" integrity. Without it Zope would not be capable to bring a real content management in a such consistent way. I worked with several other content-management implementations and whenever it's build without acarying about logical integgrity - the content becomes a mess in no time after such management.
Then it's a matter of time that spammers will switch to the new channel - they will send me the spam through their partners. Guess who will be their new partners? That's right - my bank, my ISP, Yahoo and eBay. So, now what?
There is even a more serious problem, then just a cross the state borders:
My bank, my ISP, eBay and Yahoo - they all have my email adress that I gave them by myself. Because I have an account there. Periodically they send the information I really need: about some problems or some events specifically related to my account for example. But very often they spam me with the staff I have never asked them to send me about! ISP is trying to sell me more services that I dont need. Bank is tryng to give me the credit I haven't asked about. Yahoo... they even disactivate "this is spam" link when they send it to me.
How can I complain in the court and prove that the spam they all send me is unsolicited email?
And what if many "anonymous" spammers will turn to subcontract their traffic to such unhonest account holders? How about "Y!Viagra" or "new credit to help Nigeria people"?
Perhaps MIPS chips sometimes are cheaper than some x86 ones. But I doubt that the whole desktop system based on MIPS would be cheaper than performance-equal x86 ones.
Generally, it's hard to build the desktop solution cheaper than x86 compatible one, as too many vendors of hardware x86-compatible components are compteting to each other. Less competition - higher prices, usually.
Perhaps PPC chips sometimes are cheaper than top-x86 ones. But the whole desktop system based on PPC was never cheaper. I guess that counts at least RS6Ks and Macs. I am not sure about Amigas though.
Generally, it's hard to build the desktop solution cheaper than x86 compatible one, as too many vendors of hardware x86-compatible components are compteting to each other. Less competition - higher prices, usually.
I for one encourage Asia to forget about any fears of FUD from Intel. When it will be adopted by at least three countries: China, South Korea and Japan - it will be a standard already.
But seems like EU goes same way as Asia (in a broad sense: from Microsoft to Linux/OSS). And so do Latin America and Australia. So, who's left sticking to "old standards" (read: to really-proprietary wintel)?
then it would become practical for Linux users to question whey they should run on an expensive Intel chip instead of a cheaper non-x86 CPU from another vendor.
Just curious, what would be the name of that cheaper non-x86 CPU? As for now I see all non-x86 personal computers and workstations are more expensive than same performance x86 ones. Or did I miss some one?
API and threading are features of an implementation (VM, interpreter, compiler), not of a language itself. For example, SBCL has threading.
Complains about APIs in Lisp were true some years ago, but not today - you can find libraries for LISP for any area, including opengl, gtk and databases.
I disagree to call Java's pakage structure as "sane". IMHO it's "insane" - it disturbs more than it helps. It proves that the knowledge become a primitive data when it fails to a tree-like structure, instead it must be described based on more general rules.
Apart of Lisp, many other FP languages have excelent support for concurrent programming, either emebedded to the language (Erlang, Mozart, Mercury) or as an extensions (Haskell, ML). For example, after doing concurrent programming in Erlang you would certainly complain of being forced to go back to Java.
No one loves it? Well, those of us who used to use C++ appreciate it a hell of a lot.
The other list of languages which former users appreciate Java:
Asm
Cobol
PL/1
Paskal
Ada
The rest of us, who already know Lisp, Python, Haskell, ML and Perl, have a real problem to love Java - nobody wants to move from a better language to a bad one.
Not yet! He could promise that if they will vote against software patents then he would move to Europe. Such example would demonstrate the trend of moving famous tech people to Europe from US because of political reasons and that would give the signal for investors. Boom! Europian economy is up, American economy is further down. All they need is just to vote against software patents!:)
I don't think that Linus or Alan has any IP law skills enough to help. Well, it's good that they have sent the letter anyway. But the real guy who must help is RMS. We heard so many IP law related arguments from him, so many battles he was in the middle. Why isn't he there now? Or is he?
I can get PPC clusters and even supercompters running Linux from several vendors, including IBM and Terrasoft. Why should I get big irons from Sun?
My previous employer used to buy server hardware from Sun. And you know what? 80% of server has hardware problems (with downtime) within 2 years. 40% - within first year. The downtime was proportial to amount you pay for the service contract. After that I will never go back to advise getting any hardware from Sun if there will be a choice.
Lintel for low-end servers, Linux/PPC clusters for high-end servers - that's the most optimal way to minimize TCO today.
Am I alone thinking that Sun is in exact point of choice: either to go after SCO and collapse to the final bancropt or... what?
No matter what Sun is trying to do about Linux, its sales of Sparc hardware, expensive and unreliable, is shrinking and doing that very fast.
If Sun will declare the death of Solaris in a long term and long term plans of Linux/Sparc then those customers who has already run Sparcs, will trust to invest money further to new Sun hardware as in a long term they can run the same OS on both Sparc and x86 (cutting the cost of ownership). That the way Sun will collapse, but not shutdown. Potentially it can even get the market share from HP and SGI, as they still stick to their proprietary OSes.
If Sun will keep insisting on Solaris then it will collapse down to the ground and eventually shutdown the business. Customers already experienced with Sparc (like I do) don't want to come back to it being so disappointed by too high prices and too bad quality. New potential customers won't invest money to unknown propretary (and incompatible by many aspects) OS as they can get Linux on RISC from IBM cutting the total cost of ownership when maintaining Linux on all platforms acrosss the whole company.
I think Sun is making a strategic mistake: they insist on Solaris on Intel, where Linux with BSD work for 99% of installations much better in many aspects. Instead they should sell Sparcs with Linux helping customer to cut the TCO.
Obviously, it's been a long time last time you've checked. PostgreSQL has native one-file win32-native installer already for months. For example, you can get it from here. As for Cygwin - PostgreSQL is there for years. Personally I prefer it in Cygwin: I love to have everything from sources. But some people still prefer one-file installers.
Have you ever worked with customer support? Especially in a software development company? you customers may have different combinations of various software installed on their side and if your customer support engineers discover that they cannot replicate the same error as reported then they have to repicate at first on the testing PC an environment as close to the customer's one as possible. That's the case number one.
Same story but in MIS supporting other departments in a big corporation is a case number two.
More crazy case is some boss who likes to reinstall software. Don't ask why. Nobody knows anyway.
Well, perhaps 10 times in a rando order is too crazy. But don't you agree that I have right to do that if I own those versions? And now you see that there are situations in real life when something like that happens.
If all above looks crazy then here is another one. I remember doing beta testing of MS SQL Server 7.0. When the beta testing program was over Microsoft has send the document saying that in order to install normal (not beta, but the release) version of MS SQL Server 7.0 we have to re-format the system hard drive and re-install the whole system. Why? In a special seminar Microsoft reps said that's because MS SQL Server 7.0 Beta has created some registries and they are locked by the the OS kernel. Those registries are blocking a release version from being installed. The only convinient way to get rid of them is to re-format the hard-drive. Officially. From Microsoft.
That was the lesson for me. Later, I had sometimes a similar experience with other Microsoft products. Rarely, but it was there. And now I already know: the registry database is the most common reason of such problems. It's not designed for "too intensive re-installations". Period. Confirmed officially by Microsoft reps.
Perfect. Now try to reinstall each of them at least 10 times in a random order all together. Each time change the version of the software jumping up and down in release/version/patch numbers. Once you'll finish come back with your crash report.
Obviously you still think exactly in a same way as all (or most) QA engineers of Microsoft do.
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I am now looking to buy that french deck of cards - cood be a very insightful gift here in North America (especially here in Canada) for people who has not completely lost the sense of humor :)
Oh, well, when I've tried to burn the audio CD with my friends songs (from the audio tape) that DVD/CD didn't recognize it as well.
Normal audio CDs are playing well n that DVD (as CD of course).
Corrupted and home-brew audio CDs are playing well on low-end CD players.
Go figure.
Basically you suggest to give up. As an extreme you may want me, like Dr Knuth, to abandon the usage of email altogether. No email - no spam. Right?
Wrong! I don't want to give up. I want any organization, if taking my email address - to use it carefully with all respect to my privacy. And I want the law that will effectively work for it. For example, the law will say that any organization after taking my email must take my list of topics I am ready to receive as well as my list of topic I explicitely cannot accept in my mailbox. Also every such organization must have and use a valid return address with specified and guarantied time of response. Cannot afford it? Do not take email addresses of people you have account for.
Can the new law help me? No? I don't need such a law.
There are at least one known effort: ZSQLCatalog: querying Zope Catalog with SQL.
You can do even named and nested queries with ZCatalog thus building ad-hoc queries.
Searching the ZCatalog works a lot like searching a relational database, except that the searching is more object-oriented.
So in some extent ZODB has ad-hoc queries.
In ZODB you store you Python objects, which are instances of Python classes, which can have pre-coded constraint-triggers as well.
So, ZODB does support "logical" integrity. Without it Zope would not be capable to bring a real content management in a such consistent way. I worked with several other content-management implementations and whenever it's build without acarying about logical integgrity - the content becomes a mess in no time after such management.
He would be the most famous US governor of this century yet, would he do it.
More votes would be from banning software patents!
I have a better idea for Davis: how about to ban software patents in California?
Then it's a matter of time that spammers will switch to the new channel - they will send me the spam through their partners. Guess who will be their new partners? That's right - my bank, my ISP, Yahoo and eBay. So, now what?
My bank, my ISP, eBay and Yahoo - they all have my email adress that I gave them by myself. Because I have an account there. Periodically they send the information I really need: about some problems or some events specifically related to my account for example. But very often they spam me with the staff I have never asked them to send me about! ISP is trying to sell me more services that I dont need. Bank is tryng to give me the credit I haven't asked about. Yahoo... they even disactivate "this is spam" link when they send it to me.
How can I complain in the court and prove that the spam they all send me is unsolicited email?
And what if many "anonymous" spammers will turn to subcontract their traffic to such unhonest account holders? How about "Y!Viagra" or "new credit to help Nigeria people"?
Generally, it's hard to build the desktop solution cheaper than x86 compatible one, as too many vendors of hardware x86-compatible components are compteting to each other. Less competition - higher prices, usually.
Generally, it's hard to build the desktop solution cheaper than x86 compatible one, as too many vendors of hardware x86-compatible components are compteting to each other. Less competition - higher prices, usually.
I though the original subject was about personal computers and workstations. No?
But seems like EU goes same way as Asia (in a broad sense: from Microsoft to Linux/OSS). And so do Latin America and Australia. So, who's left sticking to "old standards" (read: to really-proprietary wintel)?
Just curious, what would be the name of that cheaper non-x86 CPU? As for now I see all non-x86 personal computers and workstations are more expensive than same performance x86 ones. Or did I miss some one?
Complains about APIs in Lisp were true some years ago, but not today - you can find libraries for LISP for any area, including opengl, gtk and databases.
I disagree to call Java's pakage structure as "sane". IMHO it's "insane" - it disturbs more than it helps. It proves that the knowledge become a primitive data when it fails to a tree-like structure, instead it must be described based on more general rules.
Apart of Lisp, many other FP languages have excelent support for concurrent programming, either emebedded to the language (Erlang, Mozart, Mercury) or as an extensions (Haskell, ML). For example, after doing concurrent programming in Erlang you would certainly complain of being forced to go back to Java.
The other list of languages which former users appreciate Java:
- Asm
- Cobol
- PL/1
- Paskal
- Ada
The rest of us, who already know Lisp, Python, Haskell, ML and Perl, have a real problem to love Java - nobody wants to move from a better language to a bad one.Not yet! He could promise that if they will vote against software patents then he would move to Europe. Such example would demonstrate the trend of moving famous tech people to Europe from US because of political reasons and that would give the signal for investors. Boom! Europian economy is up, American economy is further down. All they need is just to vote against software patents! :)
I don't think that Linus or Alan has any IP law skills enough to help. Well, it's good that they have sent the letter anyway. But the real guy who must help is RMS. We heard so many IP law related arguments from him, so many battles he was in the middle. Why isn't he there now? Or is he?
My previous employer used to buy server hardware from Sun. And you know what? 80% of server has hardware problems (with downtime) within 2 years. 40% - within first year. The downtime was proportial to amount you pay for the service contract. After that I will never go back to advise getting any hardware from Sun if there will be a choice.
Lintel for low-end servers, Linux/PPC clusters for high-end servers - that's the most optimal way to minimize TCO today.
Am I alone thinking that Sun is in exact point of choice: either to go after SCO and collapse to the final bancropt or ... what?
No matter what Sun is trying to do about Linux, its sales of Sparc hardware, expensive and unreliable, is shrinking and doing that very fast.
If Sun will declare the death of Solaris in a long term and long term plans of Linux/Sparc then those customers who has already run Sparcs, will trust to invest money further to new Sun hardware as in a long term they can run the same OS on both Sparc and x86 (cutting the cost of ownership). That the way Sun will collapse, but not shutdown. Potentially it can even get the market share from HP and SGI, as they still stick to their proprietary OSes.
If Sun will keep insisting on Solaris then it will collapse down to the ground and eventually shutdown the business. Customers already experienced with Sparc (like I do) don't want to come back to it being so disappointed by too high prices and too bad quality. New potential customers won't invest money to unknown propretary (and incompatible by many aspects) OS as they can get Linux on RISC from IBM cutting the total cost of ownership when maintaining Linux on all platforms acrosss the whole company.
I think Sun is making a strategic mistake: they insist on Solaris on Intel, where Linux with BSD work for 99% of installations much better in many aspects. Instead they should sell Sparcs with Linux helping customer to cut the TCO.
Obviously, it's been a long time last time you've checked. PostgreSQL has native one-file win32-native installer already for months. For example, you can get it from here. As for Cygwin - PostgreSQL is there for years. Personally I prefer it in Cygwin: I love to have everything from sources. But some people still prefer one-file installers.
Same story but in MIS supporting other departments in a big corporation is a case number two.
More crazy case is some boss who likes to reinstall software. Don't ask why. Nobody knows anyway.
Well, perhaps 10 times in a rando order is too crazy. But don't you agree that I have right to do that if I own those versions? And now you see that there are situations in real life when something like that happens.
If all above looks crazy then here is another one. I remember doing beta testing of MS SQL Server 7.0. When the beta testing program was over Microsoft has send the document saying that in order to install normal (not beta, but the release) version of MS SQL Server 7.0 we have to re-format the system hard drive and re-install the whole system. Why? In a special seminar Microsoft reps said that's because MS SQL Server 7.0 Beta has created some registries and they are locked by the the OS kernel. Those registries are blocking a release version from being installed. The only convinient way to get rid of them is to re-format the hard-drive. Officially. From Microsoft.
That was the lesson for me. Later, I had sometimes a similar experience with other Microsoft products. Rarely, but it was there. And now I already know: the registry database is the most common reason of such problems. It's not designed for "too intensive re-installations". Period. Confirmed officially by Microsoft reps.
Obviously you still think exactly in a same way as all (or most) QA engineers of Microsoft do.