Your post has many details that suggest knowledge of your subject, but you're not a reliable source. I don't have time to fact-check your whole post, but here are two obvious and significant errors:
First, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon, not one. The articles charged obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress - not "telling an untruth on national television."
Second, a majority of the Senate did NOT vote to convict Clinton. There were two articles of impeachment, and the Senate voted 55-45 to ACQUIT on the first article, and 50-50 on the second. I distinctly remember Trent Lott furiously exhorting Arlen Specter (R. Pa.) during the vote, stopping just short of physically twisting his arm, trying unsuccessfully to get a vote for conviction from him so the Republicans could claim a majority vote for conviction on at least one of the counts. Specter proved his integrity to history by voting his conscience, for acquittal.
I can't even find the warning anymore in the documentation for Apache 1.3, though Google came up with a cached copy of the warning in the docs for an earlier 1.3 build. It makes me wonder what obsolete version of Apache they have installed, and whether their other platform software is obsolete as well.
The GAO's new name, adopted last year, reflects the broadened role Congress has given the GAO in recent times. Its original function was mainly doing audits, but it has become Congress's investigative arm and the scope of its investigations goes far beyond bookkeeping.
Re:Proof that first to market doesn't equal succes
on
Rio Brand Closes Doors
·
· Score: 1
We now know that, back in the bubble, the real reason venture capitalists wnated to be first in a market was so they could flip an IPO before everyone realized their business plan was a loser.
The last time I went to a theater, after not going for a year or two, I was appalled not just by the commercials, but by their VOLUME! In a tiny shoebox theater, they blasted the commercials twice as loud as the movie. I always used to enjoy previews, but the commercials are enough to keep me home with my Blockbuster Online DVDs.
The best tool for editing CSS (and the HTML/XHTML that goes with it) is TopStyle Pro, from Nick Bradbury, the original creator of the HomeSite editor. Unfortunately, TopStyle is for Windows only. (Nick codes in Delphi.)
We know the free market is more efficient, responsive and innovative than Soviet-style centralized planning. So why do we allow political bureaucracy to educate our children? Besides that the bureaucracy likes being our sole source?
Education is a basic need that should be met the same way we meet people's medical needs. Government writes a check and each eligible citizen decides where to spend it. As George Will wrote 20-some years ago, government is good at writing checks. It is not good at providing goods and services.
I'm a hard-core Democrat, but I don't sacrifice my kids to teachers' unions. I visited all the schools in my area before I picked a kindergarten, and the public schools here may have good teachers but the administrators I met were lazy bureaucrats. Private-school staff tries to sell you on their schools.
The weirdest argument against using public funds for private education is that it benefits the rich. The rich are in private schools because, today, it's mainly the rich who can afford them. A lot of middle-class parents kill themselves to pay for private education, and a few poor families do it with financial aid from the schools. Subsidies would bring the most benefit to families who have the most trouble affording private school now.
In my area, public school systems spend more than $10,000 per student per year, and more than half of that is spent on central administration. You can buy a lot of private education for that kind of money.
Another weird argument against public payments to private schools is that private schools may turn some students away. One of the benefits of privatization is diversification. Kids find their matches: the arts school, the academic school, the athletic school, the single-sex school, or maybe the school for kids who have behavior problems. School choice wouldn't mean much if every choice were the same, so let's allow schools to be different, and a big source of difference is how they recruit and select their students.
Being in a school that is well suited for a student is far healthier, to my mind, than putting them in big, government-run warehouses and hoping they find a healthy niche. It's an abomination that, in so many schools, the future prospects, self-esteem, and social relations of young people are determined at an early age by whether the system tracks them as gifted-and-talented or not-gifted-and-talented. That bureaucratic, depersonalized system is absolutely contrary to the way I want my children to see themselves and others.
It's a sacrifice - our car is old and we've never been to Disney World - but my kids go to private school. It's just a little galling that I pay so much in taxes for dysfunctional schools, and receive no help from the government in educating my children.
But I know some fat-headed idiots, and some fleshy weaklings. The size of the anatomy may indicate capacity, but its development is an independent variable and a large factor in actual ability.
they were the slashdot of their time (mid 80's-early 90's.)
Yup, Slashdot is in a lineage of threaded discussion forums - including BBSes, Fidonet, CompuServe and Usenet - where, for better or worse, I've hung out for almost 20 years. The obvious downside is the timesink. But on the upside, I've learned a lot, I've often been entertained, and I've had a soapbox from which to make remarks that I sometimes felt were appreciated by others.
One advantage the old BBS forums had was their sense of community. The communities were often local, and even when they were international (as on CompuServe's forums) the number of active participants was small enough that you got to know many of the members' personalities, and to feel that you were known to others. On Slashdot, I must admit I don't have that awareness of individual identities, except for a couple editors. There are so many participants here, and so many articles I don't read, I just haven't noticed who "the regulars" are, and I don't feel like one myself.
On the other hand, the huge variety of posts on Slashdot produces more gems than the BBSes yielded. Quantity and quality tend to trump community.
"It has the same power as a stun gun. It knocks you down."
Stun gunscanbelethal. I don't think sovereign immunity would protect the government from claims of gross negligence toward the general public, notwithstanding any disclaimers of liability in the click-through license. The Army might well use shocks to train soldiers, though. Volunteer soldiers have effectively signed their lives away at enlistment.
You say you are concerned about the overhead of wrapping and unwrapping XML, so you are considering using a database that keeps everything in XML all the time. I think you are trying to solve the wrong problem.
Have you timed the job of wrapping/unwrapping XML? My guess is that on modern hardware, that task is trivial. Bandwidth is a more common bottleneck for XML data transfers, and that problem is usually mitigated by compressing the XML before transfer. But I never heard anyone complain about a CPU taking too much time to extract the data from XML.
If your application queries the data selectively, you will probably find that the difference in query-processing time, between a traditional SQL database and a native XML database, more then makes up for any difference in format-conversion time.
Let your database use its own, efficient, optimized internal data formats. XML is much more suitable for data transfer than for data manipulation.
A hostile country has developed nukes that threaten us and our allies. Thank God we are protected by the Bush Doctrine so we can invade and take their nukes away.
Oops, I forgot, the U.S. can't invade. Our army has been busy the past two years taking away the non-existent nuclear capability of Iraq.
So a French court entered a judgment. Is that judgment automatically enforceable against Google's assets in the U.S., presumably under a reciprocal treaty? Or can Google argue in a U.S. court that the French ruling should not be enforced because it violates some U.S. policy, such as our Constitutional protection of free speech?
Yup, I'm the crackhead. I tried to mod the post "Interesting." (I, too, do volunteer tech work at my kids' school, and I agree that schools usually have better things to spend their money on than computers.) Apparently, when I scrolled down the page my selection changed to "Offtopic" before I clicked the "Moderate" button. I reported my accidental abuse to Slashdot, but I don't know whether they can do anything about it.
I'm posting this comment in the hope that it will cancel my moderation on this discussion. That will cancel my positive moderation of someone else's insightful comment, but that's better than modding down a post I meant to mod up.
There's quite a bit of academic research supporting your view, saying kids thrive from unstructured outdoor play, and their development is stunted by too much screen time. One non-profit group that's been making this case is the Alliance for Childhood. Of course, there's a big "educational technology" industry out there, arguing the opposite.
When Microsoft paid Veritest to show that Windows 2003 Server was faster than Linux, they did some heavy tweaking to the Windows registry and other configuration switches. Give the lab credit for listing the tweaks in their reports. It would take more smarts than I have to tell whether the tweaks were legitimate and even-handed, but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't be done by 99.99% of Windows 2003 Server administrators. And I don't see how it can be legitimate in a server comparison to tweak registry settings in the client computers.
TrustCommerce is very developer-friendly. They don't provide a ready-made payment form for your website, but if you or your shopping cart can collect the data, they have a solid, simple gateway API for processing it. And with regard to the topic of the article, TrustCommerce claims that its redundant systems offer 100% availability through failover.
I've been using TrustCommerce for a small site for several months, and I'm now implementing a large site with them. I've had no problem with their payment gateway or with their "vault" interface for manually entering transactions and viewing reports.
Their documentation is thorough and they support multiple code interfaces to their API: PHP, Python, Java, EJB, Perl, Ruby, ColdFusion, C, and COM/.NET/OCX/ActiveX.
TrustCommerce has given me good customer service and very good developer support. In my first project, I was using a hosted server and one of TC's developers helped me talk to my hosting company about installing the TCLink module that communicates directly with the gateway. My host had a policy against installing custom modules on the webserver, so TrustCommerce had an alternative solution, sending transactions securely through HTTPS/POST and using Curl to read the results back, and that method has worked fine.
For my new project, I've built my own webserver so I can use the TCLink module without begging a hosting company for customization. My server uses Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9, and I found out the hard way that TrustCommerce built its Linux RPM module for TCLink-PHP on Red Hat. (On SLES, I should have installed and compiled the "UNIX" package instead of the "Linux/RPM" package. You probably won't have the same problem if you use Debian because debian-unstable includes TCLink modules for PHP, Perl, Python and Lisp.) I'm a Linux newbie, but TrustCommerce's developer support patiently talked me through creating the symlinks I needed to make the rpm module work on SLES.
Borland isn't infatuated with.NET. Borland just pointed Delphi toward.NET because no one was buying Delphi's Linux version (Kylix) and Microsoft had essentially deprecated the Win32 API in favor of.NET. Since Microsoft was taking Windows to.NET, Borland had to take Delphi there if it wanted to remain current on the Windows platform. And besides, new features and new APIs can sell compiler upgrades. Moreover, Borland thought that.NET's promise of language neutrality could help potential customers overcome their fear of buying a non-Microsoft language tool. (Indeed, maybe that's part of why Delphi sales are up.)
Borland's other big language tool, JBuilder, is its cross-platform offering. Delphi, on the other hand, is designated to stay close to native Windows APIs, and according to Microsoft's roadmap, that means.NET.
Me, I'm still using Delphi to develop Win32 apps, and I've saved a few thousand bucks by not upgrading Delphi since version 5. Meanwhile, Borland and the early adopters of.NET are working out the kinks, so when I eventually need to develop.NET apps, Delphi will be ready for me. I can't complain about that.
After the routine updates, I'll load Rhapsody for my mom. She has a broadband connection and she enjoys music but wouldn't know where to find it online. I love the Rhapsody service myself - a huge selection of albums, including reissues from when my mom started buying records, well organized and easy to explore.
It would be matricide-suicide to give my mom one of the adware-supported programs like Kazaa, truly penny-wise and pound-foolish. But the legitimate digital music services are a great application of computers and broadband.
iTunes, bought by the song, seems more for kids who want to burn their favorite hits, or wealthier and mobile yuppies who will take their iPods with them everywhere. The free radio in Windows Media Player and Real Player is nice but doesn't always scratch a specific itch. Rhapsody doesn't provide easy mobility (though it does allow CD burning), but it offers a huge selection of albums for listening near the computer, and intelligent links from one artist to others, for a modest price.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post has many details that suggest knowledge of your subject, but you're not a reliable source. I don't have time to fact-check your whole post, but here are two obvious and significant errors:
First, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon, not one. The articles charged obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress - not "telling an untruth on national television."
Second, a majority of the Senate did NOT vote to convict Clinton. There were two articles of impeachment, and the Senate voted 55-45 to ACQUIT on the first article, and 50-50 on the second. I distinctly remember Trent Lott furiously exhorting Arlen Specter (R. Pa.) during the vote, stopping just short of physically twisting his arm, trying unsuccessfully to get a vote for conviction from him so the Republicans could claim a majority vote for conviction on at least one of the counts. Specter proved his integrity to history by voting his conscience, for acquittal.
I can't even find the warning anymore in the documentation for Apache 1.3, though Google came up with a cached copy of the warning in the docs for an earlier 1.3 build. It makes me wonder what obsolete version of Apache they have installed, and whether their other platform software is obsolete as well.
The GAO's new name, adopted last year, reflects the broadened role Congress has given the GAO in recent times. Its original function was mainly doing audits, but it has become Congress's investigative arm and the scope of its investigations goes far beyond bookkeeping.
We now know that, back in the bubble, the real reason venture capitalists wnated to be first in a market was so they could flip an IPO before everyone realized their business plan was a loser.
The last time I went to a theater, after not going for a year or two, I was appalled not just by the commercials, but by their VOLUME! In a tiny shoebox theater, they blasted the commercials twice as loud as the movie. I always used to enjoy previews, but the commercials are enough to keep me home with my Blockbuster Online DVDs.
The best tool for editing CSS (and the HTML/XHTML that goes with it) is TopStyle Pro, from Nick Bradbury, the original creator of the HomeSite editor. Unfortunately, TopStyle is for Windows only. (Nick codes in Delphi.)
We know the free market is more efficient, responsive and innovative than Soviet-style centralized planning. So why do we allow political bureaucracy to educate our children? Besides that the bureaucracy likes being our sole source?
Education is a basic need that should be met the same way we meet people's medical needs. Government writes a check and each eligible citizen decides where to spend it. As George Will wrote 20-some years ago, government is good at writing checks. It is not good at providing goods and services.
I'm a hard-core Democrat, but I don't sacrifice my kids to teachers' unions. I visited all the schools in my area before I picked a kindergarten, and the public schools here may have good teachers but the administrators I met were lazy bureaucrats. Private-school staff tries to sell you on their schools.
The weirdest argument against using public funds for private education is that it benefits the rich. The rich are in private schools because, today, it's mainly the rich who can afford them. A lot of middle-class parents kill themselves to pay for private education, and a few poor families do it with financial aid from the schools. Subsidies would bring the most benefit to families who have the most trouble affording private school now.
In my area, public school systems spend more than $10,000 per student per year, and more than half of that is spent on central administration. You can buy a lot of private education for that kind of money.
Another weird argument against public payments to private schools is that private schools may turn some students away. One of the benefits of privatization is diversification. Kids find their matches: the arts school, the academic school, the athletic school, the single-sex school, or maybe the school for kids who have behavior problems. School choice wouldn't mean much if every choice were the same, so let's allow schools to be different, and a big source of difference is how they recruit and select their students.
Being in a school that is well suited for a student is far healthier, to my mind, than putting them in big, government-run warehouses and hoping they find a healthy niche. It's an abomination that, in so many schools, the future prospects, self-esteem, and social relations of young people are determined at an early age by whether the system tracks them as gifted-and-talented or not-gifted-and-talented. That bureaucratic, depersonalized system is absolutely contrary to the way I want my children to see themselves and others.
It's a sacrifice - our car is old and we've never been to Disney World - but my kids go to private school. It's just a little galling that I pay so much in taxes for dysfunctional schools, and receive no help from the government in educating my children.
Closer to home, have you seen the giant cat?
But I know some fat-headed idiots, and some fleshy weaklings. The size of the anatomy may indicate capacity, but its development is an independent variable and a large factor in actual ability.
Yup, Slashdot is in a lineage of threaded discussion forums - including BBSes, Fidonet, CompuServe and Usenet - where, for better or worse, I've hung out for almost 20 years. The obvious downside is the timesink. But on the upside, I've learned a lot, I've often been entertained, and I've had a soapbox from which to make remarks that I sometimes felt were appreciated by others.
One advantage the old BBS forums had was their sense of community. The communities were often local, and even when they were international (as on CompuServe's forums) the number of active participants was small enough that you got to know many of the members' personalities, and to feel that you were known to others. On Slashdot, I must admit I don't have that awareness of individual identities, except for a couple editors. There are so many participants here, and so many articles I don't read, I just haven't noticed who "the regulars" are, and I don't feel like one myself.
On the other hand, the huge variety of posts on Slashdot produces more gems than the BBSes yielded. Quantity and quality tend to trump community.
Microsoft has a website for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The site has a pseudo-technical overview of the product, and more detailed information for developers.
You say you are concerned about the overhead of wrapping and unwrapping XML, so you are considering using a database that keeps everything in XML all the time. I think you are trying to solve the wrong problem.
Have you timed the job of wrapping/unwrapping XML? My guess is that on modern hardware, that task is trivial. Bandwidth is a more common bottleneck for XML data transfers, and that problem is usually mitigated by compressing the XML before transfer. But I never heard anyone complain about a CPU taking too much time to extract the data from XML.
If your application queries the data selectively, you will probably find that the difference in query-processing time, between a traditional SQL database and a native XML database, more then makes up for any difference in format-conversion time.
Let your database use its own, efficient, optimized internal data formats. XML is much more suitable for data transfer than for data manipulation.
You're completely wrong.
What makes India and Pakistan negotiate is not their own nukes, but the other one's nukes.
A hostile country has developed nukes that threaten us and our allies. Thank God we are protected by the Bush Doctrine so we can invade and take their nukes away.
Oops, I forgot, the U.S. can't invade. Our army has been busy the past two years taking away the non-existent nuclear capability of Iraq.
Kids, do you know how to "duck and cover"?
So a French court entered a judgment. Is that judgment automatically enforceable against Google's assets in the U.S., presumably under a reciprocal treaty? Or can Google argue in a U.S. court that the French ruling should not be enforced because it violates some U.S. policy, such as our Constitutional protection of free speech?
Yup, I'm the crackhead. I tried to mod the post "Interesting." (I, too, do volunteer tech work at my kids' school, and I agree that schools usually have better things to spend their money on than computers.) Apparently, when I scrolled down the page my selection changed to "Offtopic" before I clicked the "Moderate" button. I reported my accidental abuse to Slashdot, but I don't know whether they can do anything about it.
I'm posting this comment in the hope that it will cancel my moderation on this discussion. That will cancel my positive moderation of someone else's insightful comment, but that's better than modding down a post I meant to mod up.
There's quite a bit of academic research supporting your view, saying kids thrive from unstructured outdoor play, and their development is stunted by too much screen time. One non-profit group that's been making this case is the Alliance for Childhood. Of course, there's a big "educational technology" industry out there, arguing the opposite.
When Microsoft paid Veritest to show that Windows 2003 Server was faster than Linux, they did some heavy tweaking to the Windows registry and other configuration switches. Give the lab credit for listing the tweaks in their reports. It would take more smarts than I have to tell whether the tweaks were legitimate and even-handed, but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't be done by 99.99% of Windows 2003 Server administrators. And I don't see how it can be legitimate in a server comparison to tweak registry settings in the client computers.
TrustCommerce is very developer-friendly. They don't provide a ready-made payment form for your website, but if you or your shopping cart can collect the data, they have a solid, simple gateway API for processing it. And with regard to the topic of the article, TrustCommerce claims that its redundant systems offer 100% availability through failover.
I've been using TrustCommerce for a small site for several months, and I'm now implementing a large site with them. I've had no problem with their payment gateway or with their "vault" interface for manually entering transactions and viewing reports.
Their documentation is thorough and they support multiple code interfaces to their API: PHP, Python, Java, EJB, Perl, Ruby, ColdFusion, C, and COM/.NET/OCX/ActiveX.
TrustCommerce has given me good customer service and very good developer support. In my first project, I was using a hosted server and one of TC's developers helped me talk to my hosting company about installing the TCLink module that communicates directly with the gateway. My host had a policy against installing custom modules on the webserver, so TrustCommerce had an alternative solution, sending transactions securely through HTTPS/POST and using Curl to read the results back, and that method has worked fine.
For my new project, I've built my own webserver so I can use the TCLink module without begging a hosting company for customization. My server uses Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9, and I found out the hard way that TrustCommerce built its Linux RPM module for TCLink-PHP on Red Hat. (On SLES, I should have installed and compiled the "UNIX" package instead of the "Linux/RPM" package. You probably won't have the same problem if you use Debian because debian-unstable includes TCLink modules for PHP, Perl, Python and Lisp.) I'm a Linux newbie, but TrustCommerce's developer support patiently talked me through creating the symlinks I needed to make the rpm module work on SLES.
A broader critique of technology for children, Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology , was recently released by the Alliance for Childhood.
The brain is wired by experience. How can hours of screen time each day not affect a child's development?
Borland isn't infatuated with .NET. Borland just pointed Delphi toward .NET because no one was buying Delphi's Linux version (Kylix) and Microsoft had essentially deprecated the Win32 API in favor of .NET. Since Microsoft was taking Windows to .NET, Borland had to take Delphi there if it wanted to remain current on the Windows platform. And besides, new features and new APIs can sell compiler upgrades. Moreover, Borland thought that .NET's promise of language neutrality could help potential customers overcome their fear of buying a non-Microsoft language tool. (Indeed, maybe that's part of why Delphi sales are up.)
.NET.
.NET are working out the kinks, so when I eventually need to develop .NET apps, Delphi will be ready for me. I can't complain about that.
Borland's other big language tool, JBuilder, is its cross-platform offering. Delphi, on the other hand, is designated to stay close to native Windows APIs, and according to Microsoft's roadmap, that means
Me, I'm still using Delphi to develop Win32 apps, and I've saved a few thousand bucks by not upgrading Delphi since version 5. Meanwhile, Borland and the early adopters of
After the routine updates, I'll load Rhapsody for my mom. She has a broadband connection and she enjoys music but wouldn't know where to find it online. I love the Rhapsody service myself - a huge selection of albums, including reissues from when my mom started buying records, well organized and easy to explore.
It would be matricide-suicide to give my mom one of the adware-supported programs like Kazaa, truly penny-wise and pound-foolish. But the legitimate digital music services are a great application of computers and broadband.
iTunes, bought by the song, seems more for kids who want to burn their favorite hits, or wealthier and mobile yuppies who will take their iPods with them everywhere. The free radio in Windows Media Player and Real Player is nice but doesn't always scratch a specific itch. Rhapsody doesn't provide easy mobility (though it does allow CD burning), but it offers a huge selection of albums for listening near the computer, and intelligent links from one artist to others, for a modest price.
Suse Linux 9.2 is already certified to comply with LSB 2.0. These other guys are just announcing their intent to catch up.