Well, the DGSE has industrial espionage as one of it's chartered goals. Supposedly they spend about 25% of their resources on industrial espionage. Hate to break it to you, but if it's not the NSA, it's the DGSE, or MI6, or the FSB, or Mossad or (insert three letter agency here).
So to the think the NSA or the Untied States has some monopoly on using state intelligence services for corporate spying is rather naive.
The reality is there will always be those with power who will use it to their gain no matter what. And there is very little if nothing you can do about it. It's always been that way and always will be.
Recently my car got crushed by stuff falling off the roof of a business. So I've been the market for a new car. I looked at toyota between the Corola and the Prius. Both are similar size, but the Prius gets about 10 miles more to the gallon...for $6000 more.
I did the back of the envelope calculations and there was no way that I'd make up the $6000 price difference in the time that I am likely to own the vehicle. Even if gas goes back to USD 4.00 a gallon.
Do what my friend did who is really into digital photography, but his daughter is in college. So a new Mac Pro was out of the question. He bought a Mac Mini to replace a dual 867 G4 PowerMac. It works great for running Photoshop and Aperture. Then he slapped 4 320GB drives (which were the best bang for the $$$ at the time) into the PowerMac and uses it as a file server over Firewire 400.
It works like a charm and I know he has well over 200k digital images between his 10MP digital camera and lots and lots of scanned slides. I think he spent about $1100 total for the Mac Mini and the extra HDD's.
I've deployed multiple sites on both Wordpress and Joomla. Currently our content portal uses both. Joomla for CMS and then Wordpress for blogging. My problem with both of them is that they take up a bit of time to maintain security updates. They are the favourite platform of script kiddies from Turkey and asian spammers.
Drupal is arguabely a more powerful platform than either, but you need a technical person to admin the damn thing. Trying to explain the concept of content nodes to the average person who just needs to update pages.
Recently I came across concrete5 (concrete5.org). It is certainly not a blogging platform. But if you have sites that maybe need updates once a week or month and needs to be maintained by none web people, it is by far the most easy to use, easy to understand CMS I've ever seen. What is lacking is a lot of "features" that will come in time. But if you have a developer, the framework is easy enough to figure out.
We just put in solar panels last october. Our building and roof is angled to the south. Our electric bill has been cut by more than half except when it gets into the single digits and we have to crank the heat up. (Ceramic tile floors get most of that morning sun and helps keep the place fairly warm through out the day.)
But solar is not the ideal for all climates. Even in the winter time we still get about 10 hours of day light on the shortest days. If we were much further north or in a place like Seattle, then you have a point.
The solution to the energy question is going to be what works best in your area. There is not going to be one magic bullet for this.
Actually, Apple's move away from PPC had more to with IBM demanding that Apple invest more in the R&D side of things and the fact that the PPC900 series just was not going to make its way into a notebook any time soon. And notebook computer sales were/are Apple's life blood. Intel on the other hand was designing efficient chips that were ideal for the notebook market.
I still like PPC better for certain things and I still run on PowerPC Macs for the most part. But recently I had to get an Intel MacMini for iPhone development. I imagine that a new MacBook is on the horizon in the next year as well. Which is a shame, because I still love this little 12.1" powerbook.
That may be true, but for TCO, we're talking set up costs vs. money saved over the expected life span of the panels. We put some up at work, enough to cover about 50 - 70% of our energy needs depending on the time of year. (we ran out of roof space to cover 100% of our energy needs) Now we viewed that as a sunk cost on the part of the business. Last year we all couldn't take anymore money home without getting bumped up into higher tax brackets. So we decided to reinvest the profits to help improve cash flow. Which it has. It freed up enough to hire a jr. developer.
Total time to ROI is about 7 - 9 years by the absolute numbers in terms of savings on our utility bills. But the extra developer allowed us to put a product on the market this quarter instead of late Q2 or even Q3 of this year. Already it is earning enough to cover 40% of his salary and should be profitable by the end of the year. The product could make enough by this time next year to pay for the solar panels. If not next year, certainly within 24 months. If the solar panels last us 15 years, we're looking at recovering a good long term ROI even figuring in the replacement of certain parts at least once during that period.
I would like to see more people putting these on their homes where it makes sense. Obviously places like Seattle aren't ideal candidates, but if you could turn every house and flat roof into a power producer instead of consumer. I'm sure the power companies don't want that. And I'm not sure if the current government would like that since it would empower people to take individual action to meet their energy needs instead of relying on the government. Even if every home/business just produced 20% of the power they used, it would reduce the load on the power grid by that much. And it would make life easier for places that are already having brown outs etc.. (California)
We just bought two Quad core desktop machines with 8GB of Ram & 750 GB hard drives for $550 each. Granted, one is for database development, and the other is an emergency, emergency emergency database back up for our live site. (If the other 3 hosting providers would some how fail).
When I was more into the video production side of things, I lugged around a 17" powerbook. It was big, heavy, and inconvenient to use, especially on airplanes. That's why I moved to the 12.1 Powerbook that I am STILL using to type this.
If you are going to get a 17" to sit and park on a desk, or move from the home to the office, for that amount of money, you could get a pair of really, really good desktops and an external hard drive or use VNC.
I had one of the bundles with TV, internet, and phone service. I cancelled it all back in August. I was getting ready to take on a project at work that was going to eat most of my time. And I got to looking. I was spending about $140 per month for all of it and really only watch 3 TV's show that I could purchase for $40 per season at iTunes. I had internet at work, and much faster than at home, and I had my cell phone. So I just cut it all off. And I can't say that I've missed it that much.
I love watching St. Louis Cardinals baseball. $110 and I get to watch all the games live over the internet via MLB.tv. So basically, I get all the entertainment I want for about 2 months of what I was paying.
once US manned missions stop, they won't continue in the US until funded by private enterprise if ever. The gap between the end of shuttle and the launch of Orion is long enough for people to start asking, "Do we really miss a manned space program? Maybe we should fund education or XYZ or ABC...."
Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
Mantis is good for bug tracking an application. We used it internally before we switched to using google code and/or a private SVN/Trac hosting for development projects.
I'm not sure how well it scales. We were just using it between 5 developers and 60 end users. On average we only filed less than 5 bug reports per day, and most of those were between the development team members saying their latest revisions broke someone elses code.
It's because Verizon does it's damnest to take an otherwise decent phone, put their crapware that is vcast on the phone, and cripple any and every feature that could be useful to a third party developer.
The only people they've not been able to play this game with is Blackberry as far as I can tell. They've got a great network, but cripple the phones. I left Cingular a couple years ago because connection down here sucked. Went to Verizon, put up with their crap for two year, then got an iPhone. .
I forget the title of the book she wrote, but she was making the point that the problem with the newspapers is that they have cut all the local investigative journalism (because it's expensive), just reprint wire stories that everyone read the day before, and then wonder why no one is buying the newspapers. So in order to combat this, they decide to cut more staff from their newsrooms, buy more wire stories, and continue to shrink into irrelevance.
My father subscribed to the local major city news paper for 35 years. He remarked how the newspaper had continued to shrink year after year in the past 10 years. Finally they cut out the listing of stocks to just a few blue chips and the bigger local employers and the sports section, which he could read free online. So about a year ago he canceled his subscription and now reads the local sports section online.
Frankly, there is more local news in the local throw away rag that we get twice a week, free. They seem to be doing okay. Are they raking in millions? No, but they are profitable, keep on top of local issues that you won't find elsewhere and people at least skim the headlines.
Depends. I've not downloaded a lot of apps, but only a few remain. A lot get deleted because I down load 2 - 3 freebies for a task and then keep the one I like best, usually purchasing the "pro" version if available. That's what I did for an RPN calculator. (I really wish someone would develop an HP48 emulator) .
But I have a whole screen of apps that I bought that I don't use on a daily basis. They are an SSH terminal, RDP, and VNC client. I don't use them "everyday", but in a pinch they come in handy. Same with some PostgreSQL utilities. Basically, I can log into our servers and fix whatever I need to from anywhere I have an Edge or 3G connection. And I've used them to fix problems remotely. Then I have a few more apps that get used about once a week, like Paypal, Flixter, Wikitap. Same with Google's apps. We share business docs via google docs and it's handy to be able to read, just wish I could edit.
I have a few apps that I use everyday (The Weather Channel, AOL radio, Pandora, Sourceforge).
I wonder how many people have apps they use, just not "everyday".
It may sound funny, but I once heated a 1 bedroom, 700 sq. foot apartment with a PowerMac quad core, 6 mac minis, and an AMD Athlon machine. Used them to do 3D rendering for fun. Granted, utilities were included in the rent, so I didn't feel the need to conserve.
Now that I pay the utilities, only two of the mac minis stay on when I'm not using them.
I love Apple laptops and desktops. Hate Xserve and I've found OSX-Server to be nothing to write home about. When I was an Apple Certified consultant, I saw a much higher than average failure rate with Xserve hardware. It got to the point to where we'd only deploy OSX-server on PowerMac/MacPro machines. I know some people love their OSX-server tools admin package. It is a pretty slick GUI. I will give them that. But really, I can do just about anything OSX-Server can on a default OSX install. And for the price, I can build reliable servers with FreeBSD a lot cheaper with the same functionality, and arugably even more functionality than OSX-Server.
Now I hope they've got the rendering problems solved. Our site now renders fine in IE 6 and 7, but didn't work at all in 8 Beta. In RC1, it worked, but looked really funky with some divs being split in two with one half rendering on spot on the screen and the other half rendering somewhere else.
60% of our traffic is still MSIE based since most people are ordering from work and their office PC's have MSIE installed by default.
There is only one iPhone, but with some 12M users plus iPod Touch owners as well is a much larger customer base. We've been looking at support for mobile smart phones recently and hands down the iPhone became the priority 1 application to develop for followed by a generic mobile version of our site for everyone else.
In the US history books, our history up until 19-teens could be summed up this way:
"Determined as we are to avoid, if possible, wasting the energies of our people in war and destruction, we shall avoid implicating ourselves with the powers of Europe, even in support of principles which we mean to pursue. They have so many other interests different from ours, that we must avoid being entangled in them. We believe we can enforce these principles as to ourselves by peaceable means, now that we are likely to have our public councils detached from foreign views." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1801. ME 10:223
That dictated American political thought until WWII.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the DGSE has industrial espionage as one of it's chartered goals. Supposedly they spend about 25% of their resources on industrial espionage. Hate to break it to you, but if it's not the NSA, it's the DGSE, or MI6, or the FSB, or Mossad or (insert three letter agency here).
So to the think the NSA or the Untied States has some monopoly on using state intelligence services for corporate spying is rather naive.
The reality is there will always be those with power who will use it to their gain no matter what. And there is very little if nothing you can do about it. It's always been that way and always will be.
Recently my car got crushed by stuff falling off the roof of a business. So I've been the market for a new car. I looked at toyota between the Corola and the Prius. Both are similar size, but the Prius gets about 10 miles more to the gallon...for $6000 more.
I did the back of the envelope calculations and there was no way that I'd make up the $6000 price difference in the time that I am likely to own the vehicle. Even if gas goes back to USD 4.00 a gallon.
Do what my friend did who is really into digital photography, but his daughter is in college. So a new Mac Pro was out of the question. He bought a Mac Mini to replace a dual 867 G4 PowerMac. It works great for running Photoshop and Aperture. Then he slapped 4 320GB drives (which were the best bang for the $$$ at the time) into the PowerMac and uses it as a file server over Firewire 400.
It works like a charm and I know he has well over 200k digital images between his 10MP digital camera and lots and lots of scanned slides. I think he spent about $1100 total for the Mac Mini and the extra HDD's.
I've deployed multiple sites on both Wordpress and Joomla. Currently our content portal uses both. Joomla for CMS and then Wordpress for blogging. My problem with both of them is that they take up a bit of time to maintain security updates. They are the favourite platform of script kiddies from Turkey and asian spammers.
Drupal is arguabely a more powerful platform than either, but you need a technical person to admin the damn thing. Trying to explain the concept of content nodes to the average person who just needs to update pages.
Recently I came across concrete5 (concrete5.org). It is certainly not a blogging platform. But if you have sites that maybe need updates once a week or month and needs to be maintained by none web people, it is by far the most easy to use, easy to understand CMS I've ever seen. What is lacking is a lot of "features" that will come in time. But if you have a developer, the framework is easy enough to figure out.
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-What-About-Health-Care-Crisis/dp/0312383010/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235966206&sr=8-1
And modeled on the UK system where a review board develops a formula the determines if the cost-benefit is worth it or not.
Sounds all good and all, but basically this is what HMO's try to do now.
Only difference I can tell is that the government will be the ones telling you what treatments you can/cannot get instead of the HMO's.
We just put in solar panels last october. Our building and roof is angled to the south. Our electric bill has been cut by more than half except when it gets into the single digits and we have to crank the heat up. (Ceramic tile floors get most of that morning sun and helps keep the place fairly warm through out the day.)
But solar is not the ideal for all climates. Even in the winter time we still get about 10 hours of day light on the shortest days. If we were much further north or in a place like Seattle, then you have a point.
The solution to the energy question is going to be what works best in your area. There is not going to be one magic bullet for this.
Actually, Apple's move away from PPC had more to with IBM demanding that Apple invest more in the R&D side of things and the fact that the PPC900 series just was not going to make its way into a notebook any time soon. And notebook computer sales were/are Apple's life blood. Intel on the other hand was designing efficient chips that were ideal for the notebook market.
I still like PPC better for certain things and I still run on PowerPC Macs for the most part. But recently I had to get an Intel MacMini for iPhone development. I imagine that a new MacBook is on the horizon in the next year as well. Which is a shame, because I still love this little 12.1" powerbook.
That may be true, but for TCO, we're talking set up costs vs. money saved over the expected life span of the panels. We put some up at work, enough to cover about 50 - 70% of our energy needs depending on the time of year. (we ran out of roof space to cover 100% of our energy needs) Now we viewed that as a sunk cost on the part of the business. Last year we all couldn't take anymore money home without getting bumped up into higher tax brackets. So we decided to reinvest the profits to help improve cash flow. Which it has. It freed up enough to hire a jr. developer.
Total time to ROI is about 7 - 9 years by the absolute numbers in terms of savings on our utility bills. But the extra developer allowed us to put a product on the market this quarter instead of late Q2 or even Q3 of this year. Already it is earning enough to cover 40% of his salary and should be profitable by the end of the year. The product could make enough by this time next year to pay for the solar panels. If not next year, certainly within 24 months. If the solar panels last us 15 years, we're looking at recovering a good long term ROI even figuring in the replacement of certain parts at least once during that period.
I would like to see more people putting these on their homes where it makes sense. Obviously places like Seattle aren't ideal candidates, but if you could turn every house and flat roof into a power producer instead of consumer. I'm sure the power companies don't want that. And I'm not sure if the current government would like that since it would empower people to take individual action to meet their energy needs instead of relying on the government. Even if every home/business just produced 20% of the power they used, it would reduce the load on the power grid by that much. And it would make life easier for places that are already having brown outs etc.. (California)
We just bought two Quad core desktop machines with 8GB of Ram & 750 GB hard drives for $550 each. Granted, one is for database development, and the other is an emergency, emergency emergency database back up for our live site. (If the other 3 hosting providers would some how fail).
When I was more into the video production side of things, I lugged around a 17" powerbook. It was big, heavy, and inconvenient to use, especially on airplanes. That's why I moved to the 12.1 Powerbook that I am STILL using to type this.
If you are going to get a 17" to sit and park on a desk, or move from the home to the office, for that amount of money, you could get a pair of really, really good desktops and an external hard drive or use VNC.
It's in print, therefore it's libel technically.
I had one of the bundles with TV, internet, and phone service. I cancelled it all back in August. I was getting ready to take on a project at work that was going to eat most of my time. And I got to looking. I was spending about $140 per month for all of it and really only watch 3 TV's show that I could purchase for $40 per season at iTunes. I had internet at work, and much faster than at home, and I had my cell phone. So I just cut it all off. And I can't say that I've missed it that much.
I love watching St. Louis Cardinals baseball. $110 and I get to watch all the games live over the internet via MLB.tv. So basically, I get all the entertainment I want for about 2 months of what I was paying.
once US manned missions stop, they won't continue in the US until funded by private enterprise if ever. The gap between the end of shuttle and the launch of Orion is long enough for people to start asking, "Do we really miss a manned space program? Maybe we should fund education or XYZ or ABC...."
Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
Mantis is good for bug tracking an application. We used it internally before we switched to using google code and/or a private SVN/Trac hosting for development projects.
I'm not sure how well it scales. We were just using it between 5 developers and 60 end users. On average we only filed less than 5 bug reports per day, and most of those were between the development team members saying their latest revisions broke someone elses code.
It's because Verizon does it's damnest to take an otherwise decent phone, put their crapware that is vcast on the phone, and cripple any and every feature that could be useful to a third party developer.
The only people they've not been able to play this game with is Blackberry as far as I can tell. They've got a great network, but cripple the phones. I left Cingular a couple years ago because connection down here sucked. Went to Verizon, put up with their crap for two year, then got an iPhone.
.
I forget the title of the book she wrote, but she was making the point that the problem with the newspapers is that they have cut all the local investigative journalism (because it's expensive), just reprint wire stories that everyone read the day before, and then wonder why no one is buying the newspapers. So in order to combat this, they decide to cut more staff from their newsrooms, buy more wire stories, and continue to shrink into irrelevance.
My father subscribed to the local major city news paper for 35 years. He remarked how the newspaper had continued to shrink year after year in the past 10 years. Finally they cut out the listing of stocks to just a few blue chips and the bigger local employers and the sports section, which he could read free online. So about a year ago he canceled his subscription and now reads the local sports section online.
Frankly, there is more local news in the local throw away rag that we get twice a week, free. They seem to be doing okay. Are they raking in millions? No, but they are profitable, keep on top of local issues that you won't find elsewhere and people at least skim the headlines.
But can I vnc into my desktop from the phone?
Depends. I've not downloaded a lot of apps, but only a few remain. A lot get deleted because I down load 2 - 3 freebies for a task and then keep the one I like best, usually purchasing the "pro" version if available. That's what I did for an RPN calculator. (I really wish someone would develop an HP48 emulator) .
But I have a whole screen of apps that I bought that I don't use on a daily basis. They are an SSH terminal, RDP, and VNC client. I don't use them "everyday", but in a pinch they come in handy. Same with some PostgreSQL utilities. Basically, I can log into our servers and fix whatever I need to from anywhere I have an Edge or 3G connection. And I've used them to fix problems remotely. Then I have a few more apps that get used about once a week, like Paypal, Flixter, Wikitap. Same with Google's apps. We share business docs via google docs and it's handy to be able to read, just wish I could edit.
I have a few apps that I use everyday (The Weather Channel, AOL radio, Pandora, Sourceforge).
I wonder how many people have apps they use, just not "everyday".
Did you not understand that this trial is a Swedish trial? American law actually is a joke until it's applicable in Sweden.
But hey, between the WIPO and WTO, we're working on making American law applicable everywhere. It's for your own good(TM).
It may sound funny, but I once heated a 1 bedroom, 700 sq. foot apartment with a PowerMac quad core, 6 mac minis, and an AMD Athlon machine. Used them to do 3D rendering for fun. Granted, utilities were included in the rent, so I didn't feel the need to conserve.
Now that I pay the utilities, only two of the mac minis stay on when I'm not using them.
I love Apple laptops and desktops. Hate Xserve and I've found OSX-Server to be nothing to write home about. When I was an Apple Certified consultant, I saw a much higher than average failure rate with Xserve hardware. It got to the point to where we'd only deploy OSX-server on PowerMac/MacPro machines. I know some people love their OSX-server tools admin package. It is a pretty slick GUI. I will give them that. But really, I can do just about anything OSX-Server can on a default OSX install. And for the price, I can build reliable servers with FreeBSD a lot cheaper with the same functionality, and arugably even more functionality than OSX-Server.
Now I hope they've got the rendering problems solved. Our site now renders fine in IE 6 and 7, but didn't work at all in 8 Beta. In RC1, it worked, but looked really funky with some divs being split in two with one half rendering on spot on the screen and the other half rendering somewhere else.
60% of our traffic is still MSIE based since most people are ordering from work and their office PC's have MSIE installed by default.
There is only one iPhone, but with some 12M users plus iPod Touch owners as well is a much larger customer base. We've been looking at support for mobile smart phones recently and hands down the iPhone became the priority 1 application to develop for followed by a generic mobile version of our site for everyone else.
For the average user, the question is:
Can I install the program I just bought at BIg Box Land on Ubuntu?