I think you're right - and wrong.
I'm a British (well English) person so I count as well Europeansish I guess. Well I can talk the same language(ish) as Americans - but politically more aligned with 'Europe'... I guess.. Well actually my political compass seems to point to 'left-wing' libertarian - so left-wing swing to Europe, but US libertarian seems to be right wing... and and and....
I think the take-away point is that everybody is unique and tends to get painted by others by the country they belong to. US stomps across the planet gunning for resources with an illiterate army equipped with the finest munitions on the planet etc etc. I conversely appear to have forgotten my bowler hat and am curiously happy about the loss of 'The Empire'
Anyhoo - we're all just people and all different and most of us are quite struck by the blindness of others (Evangelicals spout pretty much verbatim that of Al-Quaeda, with just the odd noun transposed).
All boils down to the basic human instict that "I'm right" - and where would we be if we were all in a perpetual state of flux and indecision?
To take for example a 'secularism' - We're not going to have god in our legal system... instead that's replaced by people pledging allegiance to a flag? Nobody notices anything strange here???
*waves hands*
I've travelled the world. Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East for work - everybody I've met has been lovely. Whole planet is filled with the same people and as a rule of thumb we're 'lovely'.
Sure any travellers here have had the same experience.
Oh I'm rambling on, losing my point, and this is going to be buried in the middle of an un-read thread - but...
Oh - back to the original point. Yes - we're shafted on prices in Europe. But somebody has sat down and worked out these prices as what people 'are willing to afford'. If you don't like them, don't buy them *shrugs* it's a free market.
Still arsey over the price of my Rock Band instruments - but hey - it's only money.
Situation in the UK is this:
You have two options Pay as you Go (PAYG) or contract.
Contract gets you any phone supported by the operator on a 12-24 month contract. Phones include all the high end models and price for the handset varies from free to not very much - they get their money in the huge monthly fees and heavily pushed extras like itemized billing, insurance etc. To complicate this, as the available subsidy on a long contract is often more than the price of a medium handset, they'll offer freebies (laptops, PS3 etc).
PAYG gets you a phone, on a network and you pay as you make calls (you charge up your phone with credits upfront). Phones you get tend to be low end, locked to the network and with no real discount on the handset. To muddy the waters all operators have various schemes to try to get you to use the phone more (charge up once a month with at least £x and you get y free etc).
Only other major difference is that in the UK (and actually pretty much every non-US country) you don't pay for incoming calls.
Each country has a selection of crimes, a selection of punishments available and in a fuzzy way associates the two together in sentencing guidelines.
Yes being executed for reading a blog is quite ridiculous, as I assume everybody in this thread has agreed with - but what seemed to be being missed is that a large number of citizens of this world find execution for anything ridiculous.
The Indian state believes that it is acceptable (actually it's more 'required' I guess) to kill some people deemed guilty of commiting an 'extreme crime'
Happy?
I just intend to seize upon 'punishable by death' thing that seems to be central to this post.
Let me just quickly shove up a list of which countries still think it's 'OK' to kill people
Afghanistan
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Botswana
Burundi
Cameroon
Chad
China (People's Republic)
Comoros
Congo (Democratic Republic)
Cuba
Dominica
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gabon
Ghana
Guatemala
Guinea
Guyana
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Korea, North
Korea, South
Kuwait
Laos
Lebanon
Lesotho
Libya
Malawi
Malaysia
Mongolia
Nigeria
Oman
Pakistan
Palestinian Authority
Qatar
St. Kitts and Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Saudi Arabia
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Somalia
Sudan
Swaziland
Syria
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Uganda
United Arab Emirates
UNITED STATES
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Did your mother ever tell you not to hang around with 'bad company'?
Personally if your country is on that list, you shouldn't really be allowed to criticize the others.
Bit of Devil's Advocacy to finish off - if the pen really is mightier than the sword, if you believe peaceful protest is to be more powerful than military might - well then blogging is potentially quite dangerous to a state. State's have a right to protect themselves - and if there're executions on the cards - what's one more?
with a standard router you can name the SSID 'Please use me' - but that's about it.
One vaguely interesting thing on the horizon are the dual SSID routers - the ridiculously over designed Belkin n router I understand allows you to have a private and a public/guest dual SSID thingie running. In my happy-clappy rainbow world all routers would be like that, with an option on setup for a 'non-LAN, throttled/low priority' public option available for easy selection on install. Think if people are given option to share without risk they'd click yes (well enough would).
with it. Then it's equivalent to your neighbour playing his stereo so loudly in his house that you can hear it - and then him turning up your doorstep trying to charge you for stealing his music.
Alternatively you can just remove the wifi part of the argument. You find a Cat-5 cable shoved through your letterbox and decide to plug your laptop into it. I'd have thought that the cable through your door was authorization enough to plug into it, much as opening a letter addressed to your house without a name on it doesn't immediately have you hauled in for interfering with the postal service.
Personally I'm more than happy for anybody to use an open connection I leave about - maybe the problem is just that there's no easy way to differentiate between a deliberately open router and a purposefully left open one...
it was 'goodwill' as such, more sympathy.
We all might have bitched and moaned about US foreign policy, but we meet Americans and by and large they're a lovely bunch of people. So we have a dichotomy - and resolved it by kindof deciding it was just a spot of mild ignorance/apathy (a pretty universal trait in all of us).
9/11 happened and we were all shocked, sympathetic - and this was then followed by wondering what US response would be?
Well response was pretty swift, involved a shit-load of ordinance and a couple of countries randomly picked from the 'people we don't like list' - hohum.
I think the bit that really really rankled was the complete and utter lack of sincerity and the gigantic gonads required to actually attempt to meld the rhetoric and actions. I mean this will be the high water mark of the Goebbelian scale.
Saudis blow you up - so you go after Afghanistan and Iraq.. Soo that's the taliban you armed against the soviets and Saddam who you armed against the Iranians. Now neither side 'nice' people, but blowback-tastic.
Now consider current situations - Iraq is falling apart and will need foreign occupation for generations to prevent it completely imploding. Well maybe it's not so much implosion, as the locals stopping selecting leaders you don't like. Afghanistan - we decided to get rid of the Taliban... but then decided to stamp out heroin... but then the locals didn't like that as they used the poppy money to feed their children with (a selfish people) so seemed to want the taliban back... so we decided maybe we'd let them grow poppies and look the other way.. Oh and we seem to have decided that a Pakistani dictatorship should be supported as he's friendly (and has nukes) - despite the fact there's a reasonab...
Oh I could blather on in this uninformed way for years...
Oh - point I meant to leap on was that the US public response seemed to be to remain deep-fried potatoes as a bunch of cheese-mongers didn't seem to leap on the US spiel (somebody owes somebody an apology - and look like you mean it). Oh and to top this all off, the US public seems to think that maybe they should withdraw from Iraq - why? Because some of your soldiers are getting hurt. FFS at least have the good grace to attempt to straighten up the mess you've made.
Hence the support provided to him in his war against Iran. FFS he was using chemical weapons with impunity - then he wanders into Kuwait and becomes a 'bad' person. Now we seem to have decided Iran is 'bad' again, but we've removed the hostile neighbour we were supporting... but we can't wander into Iran ourselves.. but.. Oh you just cannot take this stuff seriously any more.
egging him on to go for it - Spamming is wrong, but then so is speeding and a multitude of other things I excuse myself for doing each day.
Once you've got over the issue of "I'm going to spam", you need to get your sensible hat on. Do it once and they'll not pay much attention, do it many times and add them to your mailing list, they'll get pissy.
Sooo. Just mail them a really good one time offer. Whatever you think the competitor normally mails them - just a bit better. FFS do it at cost if you think it'll help. Spam is only spam if they don't want it - give them what they'd obviously signed up for at less - and everybody is happy (apart from the competitor - but if they can't control an email client, they deserve no sympathy).
the patent trolls, that keep their demands low.
Ask for a trillion dollars and you're going to be laughed at. Ask for $5k and.. well enough people will cough up to prevent them having to phone their lawyer and start the lawyer-clock ticking.
Added to the effect that as soon as you get a few to cough up, then suddenly the rest decide maybe it wouldn't be so bad to reach into their pocket (it's not extortion, it's merely the price of doing business).
Personally if I was on the end of the email, it'd be straight into the spam bin. It's equivalent of spam, where you know they're just gunning for the fraction of a % that respond.
will surely reduce the number of startups - but most of those that erm "don't start" will be the ones with less of a chance of success (i.e as a completely random guess, 50% less startups leading to only 30% less successful startups). People still have money to invest (it didn't vanish anywhere) they're just being more careful where they put it.
On the point of OSS productivity. I think if you're not working then you're probably going to be sitting in your underwear on the sofa with a beer. If you're in a startup you're going to be wildly flogging yourself to the bone to support your employer. Only time I ever feel like doing 'MY' coding is when I'm being productive at work and resenting every boring minute of it (i.e. have my work hat on, but am utterly uninspired by it).
With my limited knowledge - Platters currently provide the best storage per buck, but SSD provide better random access (although after timing my ipod touch vs 60G 5G iPod, I've come to realize that an SSD can be much much slower - thanks Steve).
Data Centres where there are very specific needs will I'm sure plump for one or the other - depending upon what their needs are. I'm sure eventually we might all go SSD, but that's way way off imho.
What the majority of us need is for some more intelligence in the box we put on the end of the SATA cable. I've been tempted by the idea of an SSD for boot volume and then a conventional platter drive for a storage volume - but well basically that sounds more trouble than a few seconds off my boot time is worth. How about combining the two intelligently (and no this doesn't mean a giant cache or the somewhat simplistic approaches we've seen for combining the two so far).
Imagine a 1TB drive (we seem to have stalled at this point) with say a 32G SSD integrated (this will be cheap in a year I swear). Selling point would be that the drive itself would have RAID like functionality shifting the most used files into the SSD partition. Average user could then just plug the drive in and not have to worry about optimizing anything - after a couple of boots he notices his OS is faster to start up etc.
That's it.
I'm sure exciting stuff was done IN this building - but the building is just a building.
"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community."
So - please explain how preserving a building is even remotely within their remit...
depend on your problem.
Free Queries against a live database a no-no - so set up a sync link of whatever flavour you like. Either host it yourself, or to a db on their site (guess it depends what the load and your link is like).
If you're trying to 'hide' the internal workings of your db, then just create some views that match the daily reports you send them and sync those.
Not entirely sure what your problem is..
Nice simple basic install, then (as I was running on windows) a bit of tweaking to get it running as a service - and it's been pretty much faultless from then on.
Currently setup so 'spam' is subject flagged by assp, mail server chuck spam flagged mail in separate folder on user machine, so it doesn't end up in inbox (but can be checked for false positives). Spam/Ham can be reported by end users just forwarding to a couple of mail addresses on the server - and if that's too hard for them to remember, then can just add some buttons to their mail gui.
so he managed to write some software that analyzed the internet - and managed to produce photos of some of the people that erm had already erm been identified.
Surely (and maybe I've misunderstood something here) a 'result' would be identifying people likely to commit terrorist attacks, allowing enforcement agencies to monitor them and prevent them from commiting future attacks. (and no - this doesn't mean off-shoring every muslin who downloaded the Jolly Roger Cookbook).
Recent versions of Windows mobile support push from your exchange server - and once it's got a reasonable UI stuck over the top of the god-awful defaults - it makes quite a nice phone.
Reason Blackberries have taken off is that they're well and truly owned by the employer. I can't a VPN token out of my employers for love nor money for my phone. They like Blackberries and if I want my email on the go, that's what I get. They give me a stitched up Blackberry (I can't fiddle with the settings to even add another email account) and it wil securely give me my office mail and that's about it. In fact that's the reason I think they've done so well, it's an appliance first and foremost (not a new toy I'd actually want - like an iphone).
when some standards have been defined and actually used.
I'm sure one day we'll have an 'ATX+' power supply. As well as the plethora of wires hanging out the back of it, we'll have some loops of tubing with heat-exchangers on the end. Maybe standard ones for chipset, CPU and a couple of GPU ones. Buy a new graphics card and just snap on the right heatsink.
It's never going to take off until the systems are all sealed (My mum is not going to buy a Dell with a bottle of 'UV Reactive' magic solvent).
Sealed systems are never going to take off until it comes with the heatexchanger you need already there.
And that's not going to happen until there's a standard 'fitting' for heat exhangers on the components.
Sensible place to integrate cooling is in the PSU. I therefore foresee a future where your PSU is rated with a wattage and a 'cooling value' and a list of electical and cooling sockets. In the same way your components currently have to rate below the wattage of your PSU, your components will have to rate below the cooling 'power' of your PSU.
Once a nice standard has been set for all the above, we can then start having desktop systems that aren't huge empty boxes.
He makes averagely bad straight-to-video style films - yet rises above the mass of other jobbing directors with his ability to drum up publicity.
FFS - how may other 'directors of his calibre' can you name?
Reason he's working (putting aside tax breaks), is that he takes a relatively small amount of money from producers, rights for a computer game and makes them all money on the film he produces.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're right - and wrong.
I'm a British (well English) person so I count as well Europeansish I guess. Well I can talk the same language(ish) as Americans - but politically more aligned with 'Europe'... I guess.. Well actually my political compass seems to point to 'left-wing' libertarian - so left-wing swing to Europe, but US libertarian seems to be right wing... and and and....
I think the take-away point is that everybody is unique and tends to get painted by others by the country they belong to. US stomps across the planet gunning for resources with an illiterate army equipped with the finest munitions on the planet etc etc. I conversely appear to have forgotten my bowler hat and am curiously happy about the loss of 'The Empire'
Anyhoo - we're all just people and all different and most of us are quite struck by the blindness of others (Evangelicals spout pretty much verbatim that of Al-Quaeda, with just the odd noun transposed).
All boils down to the basic human instict that "I'm right" - and where would we be if we were all in a perpetual state of flux and indecision?
To take for example a 'secularism' - We're not going to have god in our legal system... instead that's replaced by people pledging allegiance to a flag? Nobody notices anything strange here???
*waves hands*
I've travelled the world. Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East for work - everybody I've met has been lovely. Whole planet is filled with the same people and as a rule of thumb we're 'lovely'.
Sure any travellers here have had the same experience.
Oh I'm rambling on, losing my point, and this is going to be buried in the middle of an un-read thread - but... Oh - back to the original point. Yes - we're shafted on prices in Europe. But somebody has sat down and worked out these prices as what people 'are willing to afford'. If you don't like them, don't buy them *shrugs* it's a free market.
Still arsey over the price of my Rock Band instruments - but hey - it's only money.
Situation in the UK is this: You have two options Pay as you Go (PAYG) or contract. Contract gets you any phone supported by the operator on a 12-24 month contract. Phones include all the high end models and price for the handset varies from free to not very much - they get their money in the huge monthly fees and heavily pushed extras like itemized billing, insurance etc. To complicate this, as the available subsidy on a long contract is often more than the price of a medium handset, they'll offer freebies (laptops, PS3 etc). PAYG gets you a phone, on a network and you pay as you make calls (you charge up your phone with credits upfront). Phones you get tend to be low end, locked to the network and with no real discount on the handset. To muddy the waters all operators have various schemes to try to get you to use the phone more (charge up once a month with at least £x and you get y free etc). Only other major difference is that in the UK (and actually pretty much every non-US country) you don't pay for incoming calls.
Each country has a selection of crimes, a selection of punishments available and in a fuzzy way associates the two together in sentencing guidelines.
Yes being executed for reading a blog is quite ridiculous, as I assume everybody in this thread has agreed with - but what seemed to be being missed is that a large number of citizens of this world find execution for anything ridiculous.
The Indian state believes that it is acceptable (actually it's more 'required' I guess) to kill some people deemed guilty of commiting an 'extreme crime'
Happy?
I just intend to seize upon 'punishable by death' thing that seems to be central to this post. Let me just quickly shove up a list of which countries still think it's 'OK' to kill people Afghanistan Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belize Botswana Burundi Cameroon Chad China (People's Republic) Comoros Congo (Democratic Republic) Cuba Dominica Egypt Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Guatemala Guinea Guyana India Indonesia Iran Iraq Jamaica Japan Jordan Korea, North Korea, South Kuwait Laos Lebanon Lesotho Libya Malawi Malaysia Mongolia Nigeria Oman Pakistan Palestinian Authority Qatar St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Saudi Arabia Sierra Leone Singapore Somalia Sudan Swaziland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Trinidad and Tobago Uganda United Arab Emirates UNITED STATES Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe Did your mother ever tell you not to hang around with 'bad company'? Personally if your country is on that list, you shouldn't really be allowed to criticize the others. Bit of Devil's Advocacy to finish off - if the pen really is mightier than the sword, if you believe peaceful protest is to be more powerful than military might - well then blogging is potentially quite dangerous to a state. State's have a right to protect themselves - and if there're executions on the cards - what's one more?
Higher the demand, the lesser the skill pool and the more unpleasant the work - the more money you'll get.
with a standard router you can name the SSID 'Please use me' - but that's about it. One vaguely interesting thing on the horizon are the dual SSID routers - the ridiculously over designed Belkin n router I understand allows you to have a private and a public/guest dual SSID thingie running. In my happy-clappy rainbow world all routers would be like that, with an option on setup for a 'non-LAN, throttled/low priority' public option available for easy selection on install. Think if people are given option to share without risk they'd click yes (well enough would).
with it. Then it's equivalent to your neighbour playing his stereo so loudly in his house that you can hear it - and then him turning up your doorstep trying to charge you for stealing his music. Alternatively you can just remove the wifi part of the argument. You find a Cat-5 cable shoved through your letterbox and decide to plug your laptop into it. I'd have thought that the cable through your door was authorization enough to plug into it, much as opening a letter addressed to your house without a name on it doesn't immediately have you hauled in for interfering with the postal service. Personally I'm more than happy for anybody to use an open connection I leave about - maybe the problem is just that there's no easy way to differentiate between a deliberately open router and a purposefully left open one...
it was 'goodwill' as such, more sympathy. We all might have bitched and moaned about US foreign policy, but we meet Americans and by and large they're a lovely bunch of people. So we have a dichotomy - and resolved it by kindof deciding it was just a spot of mild ignorance/apathy (a pretty universal trait in all of us). 9/11 happened and we were all shocked, sympathetic - and this was then followed by wondering what US response would be? Well response was pretty swift, involved a shit-load of ordinance and a couple of countries randomly picked from the 'people we don't like list' - hohum. I think the bit that really really rankled was the complete and utter lack of sincerity and the gigantic gonads required to actually attempt to meld the rhetoric and actions. I mean this will be the high water mark of the Goebbelian scale. Saudis blow you up - so you go after Afghanistan and Iraq.. Soo that's the taliban you armed against the soviets and Saddam who you armed against the Iranians. Now neither side 'nice' people, but blowback-tastic. Now consider current situations - Iraq is falling apart and will need foreign occupation for generations to prevent it completely imploding. Well maybe it's not so much implosion, as the locals stopping selecting leaders you don't like. Afghanistan - we decided to get rid of the Taliban... but then decided to stamp out heroin... but then the locals didn't like that as they used the poppy money to feed their children with (a selfish people) so seemed to want the taliban back... so we decided maybe we'd let them grow poppies and look the other way.. Oh and we seem to have decided that a Pakistani dictatorship should be supported as he's friendly (and has nukes) - despite the fact there's a reasonab... Oh I could blather on in this uninformed way for years... Oh - point I meant to leap on was that the US public response seemed to be to remain deep-fried potatoes as a bunch of cheese-mongers didn't seem to leap on the US spiel (somebody owes somebody an apology - and look like you mean it). Oh and to top this all off, the US public seems to think that maybe they should withdraw from Iraq - why? Because some of your soldiers are getting hurt. FFS at least have the good grace to attempt to straighten up the mess you've made.
Hence the support provided to him in his war against Iran. FFS he was using chemical weapons with impunity - then he wanders into Kuwait and becomes a 'bad' person. Now we seem to have decided Iran is 'bad' again, but we've removed the hostile neighbour we were supporting... but we can't wander into Iran ourselves.. but..
Oh you just cannot take this stuff seriously any more.
egging him on to go for it - Spamming is wrong, but then so is speeding and a multitude of other things I excuse myself for doing each day. Once you've got over the issue of "I'm going to spam", you need to get your sensible hat on. Do it once and they'll not pay much attention, do it many times and add them to your mailing list, they'll get pissy. Sooo. Just mail them a really good one time offer. Whatever you think the competitor normally mails them - just a bit better. FFS do it at cost if you think it'll help. Spam is only spam if they don't want it - give them what they'd obviously signed up for at less - and everybody is happy (apart from the competitor - but if they can't control an email client, they deserve no sympathy).
the patent trolls, that keep their demands low. Ask for a trillion dollars and you're going to be laughed at. Ask for $5k and.. well enough people will cough up to prevent them having to phone their lawyer and start the lawyer-clock ticking. Added to the effect that as soon as you get a few to cough up, then suddenly the rest decide maybe it wouldn't be so bad to reach into their pocket (it's not extortion, it's merely the price of doing business). Personally if I was on the end of the email, it'd be straight into the spam bin. It's equivalent of spam, where you know they're just gunning for the fraction of a % that respond.
will surely reduce the number of startups - but most of those that erm "don't start" will be the ones with less of a chance of success (i.e as a completely random guess, 50% less startups leading to only 30% less successful startups). People still have money to invest (it didn't vanish anywhere) they're just being more careful where they put it. On the point of OSS productivity. I think if you're not working then you're probably going to be sitting in your underwear on the sofa with a beer. If you're in a startup you're going to be wildly flogging yourself to the bone to support your employer. Only time I ever feel like doing 'MY' coding is when I'm being productive at work and resenting every boring minute of it (i.e. have my work hat on, but am utterly uninspired by it).
With my limited knowledge - Platters currently provide the best storage per buck, but SSD provide better random access (although after timing my ipod touch vs 60G 5G iPod, I've come to realize that an SSD can be much much slower - thanks Steve). Data Centres where there are very specific needs will I'm sure plump for one or the other - depending upon what their needs are. I'm sure eventually we might all go SSD, but that's way way off imho. What the majority of us need is for some more intelligence in the box we put on the end of the SATA cable. I've been tempted by the idea of an SSD for boot volume and then a conventional platter drive for a storage volume - but well basically that sounds more trouble than a few seconds off my boot time is worth. How about combining the two intelligently (and no this doesn't mean a giant cache or the somewhat simplistic approaches we've seen for combining the two so far). Imagine a 1TB drive (we seem to have stalled at this point) with say a 32G SSD integrated (this will be cheap in a year I swear). Selling point would be that the drive itself would have RAID like functionality shifting the most used files into the SSD partition. Average user could then just plug the drive in and not have to worry about optimizing anything - after a couple of boots he notices his OS is faster to start up etc.
That's it. I'm sure exciting stuff was done IN this building - but the building is just a building. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community." So - please explain how preserving a building is even remotely within their remit...
depend on your problem. Free Queries against a live database a no-no - so set up a sync link of whatever flavour you like. Either host it yourself, or to a db on their site (guess it depends what the load and your link is like). If you're trying to 'hide' the internal workings of your db, then just create some views that match the daily reports you send them and sync those. Not entirely sure what your problem is..
Last bit of Chinese crowd control I saw used a tank - they want to switch to non-lethal sound weapons, I think this is a good thing.
but Bart PE - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - quite happily boots off a CD
Nice simple basic install, then (as I was running on windows) a bit of tweaking to get it running as a service - and it's been pretty much faultless from then on. Currently setup so 'spam' is subject flagged by assp, mail server chuck spam flagged mail in separate folder on user machine, so it doesn't end up in inbox (but can be checked for false positives). Spam/Ham can be reported by end users just forwarding to a couple of mail addresses on the server - and if that's too hard for them to remember, then can just add some buttons to their mail gui.
It's like your 8-year old hearing the answer on TV - and then spieling off 78 random answers + the answer he's just been told.
so he managed to write some software that analyzed the internet - and managed to produce photos of some of the people that erm had already erm been identified. Surely (and maybe I've misunderstood something here) a 'result' would be identifying people likely to commit terrorist attacks, allowing enforcement agencies to monitor them and prevent them from commiting future attacks. (and no - this doesn't mean off-shoring every muslin who downloaded the Jolly Roger Cookbook).
if people didn't make a profit from OSS, then htf would it exist. Please point me to an industry that exists without somebody making money.
Recent versions of Windows mobile support push from your exchange server - and once it's got a reasonable UI stuck over the top of the god-awful defaults - it makes quite a nice phone. Reason Blackberries have taken off is that they're well and truly owned by the employer. I can't a VPN token out of my employers for love nor money for my phone. They like Blackberries and if I want my email on the go, that's what I get. They give me a stitched up Blackberry (I can't fiddle with the settings to even add another email account) and it wil securely give me my office mail and that's about it. In fact that's the reason I think they've done so well, it's an appliance first and foremost (not a new toy I'd actually want - like an iphone).
when some standards have been defined and actually used. I'm sure one day we'll have an 'ATX+' power supply. As well as the plethora of wires hanging out the back of it, we'll have some loops of tubing with heat-exchangers on the end. Maybe standard ones for chipset, CPU and a couple of GPU ones. Buy a new graphics card and just snap on the right heatsink. It's never going to take off until the systems are all sealed (My mum is not going to buy a Dell with a bottle of 'UV Reactive' magic solvent). Sealed systems are never going to take off until it comes with the heatexchanger you need already there. And that's not going to happen until there's a standard 'fitting' for heat exhangers on the components. Sensible place to integrate cooling is in the PSU. I therefore foresee a future where your PSU is rated with a wattage and a 'cooling value' and a list of electical and cooling sockets. In the same way your components currently have to rate below the wattage of your PSU, your components will have to rate below the cooling 'power' of your PSU. Once a nice standard has been set for all the above, we can then start having desktop systems that aren't huge empty boxes.
He makes averagely bad straight-to-video style films - yet rises above the mass of other jobbing directors with his ability to drum up publicity. FFS - how may other 'directors of his calibre' can you name? Reason he's working (putting aside tax breaks), is that he takes a relatively small amount of money from producers, rights for a computer game and makes them all money on the film he produces.