This was about 15 years ago when we bought my stereo. We were looking at 2 models that were IDENTICAL in terms of looks and function at Best Buy and Circuit City. Well, one or the other had an ad flyer advertisting the unit being $50 cheaper than the other store. Both had the, "We'll beat our competitor by 10%" deals.
Well walked into the store, they looked at the model numbers and basically one was Model# 12345C1 the one on their Shelve was Model# 12345B1 and the sales guy was like, "Nope, these are different models, see the numbers are different." There was no difference between the two. They looked the same, had the exact same functions, just different numbers on the box.
We promptly walked out, went across the street and bought the one on sale. But that was the last time I bothered with any of those kind of deals. Rarely will manufactures sell the exact same "model" to two different stores to avoid this kind of thing.
My last old Windows laptop finally died 2 weeks ago. I'm still clinging to my 12.1" last generation PowerBook for most of my day to day work, but there are two applications that are windows-only that I need to run at least once a week. I was about to break down and buy a new 15" MBP, but happened to be at Best Buy and saw the Acer One.
Specs:
1.6Ghz Atom 1GB Ram 120GB HDD Built-in wireless Built-in Web Cam XP home Price: $375 after all taxes.
I get a good 5 hours of battery life, it runs the two applications I need to run, and for the price, it was worth every penny.
We do tend to be more spread out in this country as opposed to places like Japan, where they have huge population densities. Same in Europe, most of the people tend to live in rather compact cities. People tend to forget that we installed the phone system in this country over the course of 50+ years. Hell, my grandmother still had a Party Line up until the early 1990's! It wasn't like one day everyone woke up and suddenly had phone service to their homes.
I don't see iTunes and FairPlay going anywhere anytime soon. Hell, even after their spat earlier in the year when NBC moved to Amazon after Apple said no to their pricing scheme is now back on iTunes. But then again, I've said Apple got it right years ago. Offers some kind of production the media companies want, yet once I download it, I am free do whatever I want, like burning to CD's, installing and playing on a number of PC's/MP3 players, etc. without a lot of hassles. In the end, consumers don't mind DRM so long as it is reasonable.
Obtrusive Draconian DRM designed to make you pay for every device you want to listen on, etc.. Yeah, that idea is pretty much dead.
Gee, given that iTunes has sold a couple billion songs @ $0.99 each, I'd say more than enough people are willing to go for it at that price. And outside of Slashdot, I'd don't hear a lot of people complaining. Most folks I know seem to think that a dollar a song is a fair and reasonable price. As do I.
I have a friend who has a 17" gaming laptop and on occastion we'll hook up at the coffee shop and play around of Ghost Recon 1. (Yes the original version). I'm usually playing on a 12.1" PowerBook and there is a hell of a difference. He can snipe me down because he can easily see the movement on his screen. There are places where he can be running and I can barely make him out.
Same if I play Halo on the Mac, but not quite as bad.
I know, 2001 called and want their games back, but my point is that 17" vs. 12" screens do make a difference..
I've worked in Sun Shops before, and I've seen Sun support folks come in to repair 15 year old boxes that were running mission critical databases. Also, if you write sun certified software, they tend to bend over backwards to ensure it will be backwards compatible. I've even seen Sun send engineers when a Solaris 6 App stopped working in Solaris 8 to help the shop solve the problem.
That may not seem like much to you, but if your a decent sized business that is making millions of dollars per year and it has to work, Sun is a worthy look if for no other reason than you only have to develop that application once with reasonable assurance that it will work on future versions of the OS.
will start hyping some super bug of the year. Will it be SARS II, Super Spanish Bird Flu, or will it be another year where I get a bad cold for 3 - 4 days, get over it and move on without a flu shot.
Come on, these pandemic scares happen every fall and it's boy crying wolf at this point. History indicates that eventually they will be right, but will that be this year or in 50 years...
That being said, I can understand disaster planning and having a plan just in case. But it's that time of the year when all the 24 hours news outlets will start harping what will be the next killer flu that does not materialize.
Or it could be that the only way to rescue a shuttle crew going to Hubble is another shuttle? The Soyuz does not have the room to bring back a 7 man Shuttle crew IIRC. So is it more logical that it is a political dog and pony show or that another shuttle is the only option should something go wrong.
And remind me the track record of ESA doing manned missions again? When was the last time the Ariane rockets put a man into space again? Oh wait, I think all the ESA astronauts have gone into orbit either atop a US or Russian craft.
Perhaps, but when lawyers gets sued or accused of a crime, they other lawyers to defend them. Even if you have a JD and have passed the Bar Exam, the man who represents himself still has a fool for a client.
I've used Devshed for more than a decade. Usually I've been able to at least find people to point me in the right direction. Okay, layout and ads are a pain, but it's free.
I remember when the company I am working for now was hashing out pricing plans and marketing. I knew what was required to cover the overhead costs with our services and I threw in what I thought our price should be...that set the floor. Then the sales reps went out and were often coming back with clients willing to pay twice and even three times what I thought the service could be sold for. So we're selling our products and services at the higher price.
Point of business is to charge the most you can for your products/services until you reach the point where people will no longer pay or someone else enters the business and tries to under cut you.
The main problem with the X-33/Venture Star programme was the Single-Stage to Orbit pipe dream some have been chasing for the past 30 years. I mean if we want to go back in time, remember that McDonnell Douglas had the DCX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X , which had a prototype built and in proof of concept testing when the final contract was awarded to Locheed, who had a pretty picture of the X-33 and that was it. I remember wondering why in the hell NASA gave the contract to Locheed who just had a pretty picture and that was about it. (Later learned more to do with the bureaucracy of DOD/NASA contracts and it was more to do with it was Locheed's turn that anything else. Also, by that time, the DOD wanted 3 aerospace contractors so I'm sure there were already discussions about merging McDonnell with Boeing. )
It seems that the best way to get to space cheaply for manned missions is a dual stage to orbit much like SpaceShip One and the white knight. And it is a lot more technically feasible as well.
Explains the number of HP laptops I've seen with failed wireless cards. I live in a small college town. The coffee shop I work out of sees a lot of laptops and the number of times I've seen students with HP laptops about 6 - 9 months old digging out a USB wireless card is amazing. Repeatedly, people will come in, suddenly can't get on, and I'll see it's an HP laptop. Sure enough, the wifi card is bad and apparently they're part of the motherboard and can't be replaced, like a mini-pci.
I don't know about percentages, but it is an extremely high number for such a small area.
8.9" screen, 1GB of Ram, 1.6Ghz Atom processor, and 120GB regular HDD...for USD 350 with XP Home oh and a web cam. We picked them up for our two sales reps who will be on the road a lot. I can't really see how the Dell is any better than that.
They started with Webkit, created by Apple for Safari which was forked from KHTML a number of years ago now. So they started with the same basic rendering engine that powers Safari and extended from there. And it should be Acid compliant as Safari/Webkit was the first to reach ACID 3 compliance.
I use Safari on most days, FF if I'm forced to be on a windows box. No OSX support yet so I won't be using it. But again, Chrome is a browser designed to make web-apps better so they can put more of their ads in front of your eyeballs. Google has shifted from a search-engine to the new double click. If the core engine is that much better, look to see said features in Safari 4, only minus the phone homes and the ability to use Safari AdBlock.
My father retired 13 years ago at 55. That was his plan. He didn't get married till he was 30 and I wasn't born until he was forty. I was an only child and my mother worked until I was born. For that several years they used her paycheck to pay off the house (in less than 5 years), and then started saving. Back when he first started work he read a pension report that said in the 1960's, someone who retired at 62 drew a pension on average for 18 months before they croaked. We always bought new cars, paid for in cash, and drove them for 150k miles or 10 years. And we bought mid-priced Chevy's, nothing fancy. We always went on a vacation in the summer, but usually drove and stayed in comfort inns or holiday ins, never the fancy stuff. (exception was when I went to live in and study in Germany for a year. It was the once in a life time that we were going to be over there and we dropped close to $15k in 2 months of traveling...back when the dollar was worth a little more than Euro).
He did spend 30 years working for the same company and did well. But I remember having the sit down on family finances right after he retired (I was 16 at the time). Things lined up nicely, his pensions just about covered what it cost for us to live back then and he was still banking investment money.
He spent the first couple years out of retirement taking care of my mother as she fought a loosing battle with Cancer, then it was taking care of his mother for the last couple years of her life and eventual loosing battle with cancer. Since then we took over the family farms and they are his retirement project. He's spent $500k on capital improvements (leveling the land, putting in irrigation, putting up grain storage), bought a tractor and we've gone back into raising about 15 acres of watermelons and selling them to various outlets. So he's still working even at 68. But if he didn't have the farms to play with, I'm not sure what he would do.
Point is, he budgeted, and didn't live a fancy life. Between the farms and his IRA portfolio, he is still putting almost as much money away as he did when he worked. (Farms are an excellent tax shelter in this company.) He lived within his means with a goal. There are reasons despite making decent money for my age, I still drive a Chevy and have putting $2k into my Roth IRA since I was 21.
Ditto. When I started working here they had Windows a combination of Windows (POS, Laptops) and linux on the servers (Some Fedora, others Gentoo, CentOS, and a couple debain boxes). Basically the owner of the business had his IT infrastructure built over the past 4 years by different contractors, most students from the local university. So it was a mash up of whatever the flavor of the year was back when.
Personally, that has been one of my biggest beefs with Linux over the past 8 years is that every year a different distro seem to be the next big thing. At least until it gets to be too large and "mainstream/corporate" and everyone decides some other distro is the next big thing. It's just like the kid who developed the wireless access tool swore it wouldn't run on anything but Gentoo. I remember by the end of the meeting I had the code installed and running off my PowerBook.
When I started working here my first goal was to get everything running off of one platform. We evaluated several distros of Linux as well as FreeBSD on the servers/PC BSD on the desktops and it ended up everything was moved to OSX. Ironically, it was the only platform where everything just worked from top to bottom.
If you look at the overall federal budget, NASA gets a drop in the bucket compared to Social Services and Defense. The move to extend the Shuttle for a few more years is not a surprise. I don't know, I just get the feeling that if the manned space program ever ends, that will be it. People will start to ask, "Do we really need it?" If there is not something to replace the shuttle, especially if it is 5+ years from flying, politicians and people will start to ask, "What has NASA done lately? Oh just sink billions into that new rocket that is still in development and has another delay to 2018." So the budget shrinks from 15B a year to 10B or stays the same @ 15B a year, yet 15B today will not buy the same amount of stuff next year, things continue to get delayed and eventually, it's the end of the manned space program.
The shuttle is far from perfect, but it's all we got. And until that something better comes along...
Maybe not abandon, but move to higher ground. No matter what, N.O. is still a vital link in the economic chain as a great many goods flow down the Mississippi to the ports for export. But at the same time, it is a city fighting a battle against mother nature that it will eventually loose. The city is sinking and sea levels rising. People are still going to be required to live in the area to support those operations. But do they have to live in the city proper? Why can't they live on higher ground? Why can't some of the lowest lying land next to the levees be reserved for parks and what not.
I like New Orleans as well, but it begs the question what is the most efficient use of resources: building some kind of Dutch like flood prevention system or moving people to higher ground. In the US, the likely answer to that is move to higher ground. We still have plenty of land on high ground. Now people still may want to live in the area, let them. But make them sign a waiver that they fully understand that no flood insurance will be offered. You move into that area knowing damn good and well that if it floods, it's your problem. Don't come running to the government to bail you out.
The major problem now is that not all the levees have been repaired and reinforced from when they broke the time before. These storms are likely to hit every couple years. It is a given. If NO keeps getting hit before repairs can be completed from the last storm the problems will continue to just be compounded and at some point becomes a big black hole of dollars being spent. It just seems logical for the long run to declare the lowest places next to these off-limits to development and let it flood.
don't spy on the communications in and out of their countries? The US does not have a monopoly on signals intelligence. This is one of those issues where any country that has any sig int capabilities are using it to monitor the tubes.
Or maybe iTunes is proof that people will accept DRM so long as it does not interfere with what most would deem "fair-use". I guess I'm a sell out because I'm willing to pay $.99 a song, iTunes is easy to use, works well, and I can burn all the music I buy to CD to listen in my car, stream to other PC's in my house, listen on up to 5 computers, etc..
I know people on/. will then say, "What about Ogg or Flac", and my response is I don't care. I'm not an audiophile nor is the vast majority of people who listen to music. Ask most people what format iTunes music store uses and they'll just say MP3. MP3 = a digital music file in most people's vocabulary. They don't know the difference between MP3 vs. AAC vs. M4a etc.. Nor do they want to know. All they want is the ability to easily purchase music at a reasonable price and then put on their ipod, CD player or stereo with the least amount of fuss.
iTunes does exactly that. It works and works well for most people. Is it perfect? Not really. And I'm sure as more and more allow DRM free music, you'll see that more and more on iTunes as well.
I will say kudos to Apple because they actually got it right in that balance between what the studios wanted and what people could do with their music. Maybe that's why they've been the most successful online music retailer to date.
....and I should have kept my Apple stock instead of selling @ 90. MS will push people away, but to Apple, not Linux. Because OSX runs MS Office and a host of other common applications such as Quickbooks for small businesses as well as Adobe's line up. While it does cost money to switch, Apple already has many of the common applications being used by people right now. It's not "Something mostly compatible". It is Quickbooks. And that means a lot to people wanting to switch.
Because linux can't run exchange. And no one has yet to come up with something in the OSS that can easily replace it. I used to be more anti-microsoft as well, but the past few projects it seems like we've been deploying PHP/MySQL apps on Windows 2003 servers. And I have to admit that we've had no problems what so ever.
Also, for most businesses it is far easier to find someone that can deal with the MS setup. Where I live now, there are 3 IT services firms. All three are Microsoft solution providers. If you don't like one, you have two more to choose from. In the Unix world, there is me....and me. I do the Linux, Unix & Mac consulting for all 3 firms when needed.
So if one of their techs gets hit by a bus tomorrow, they have replacements. If a medium sized business's windows based IT person gets hit by a bus, they can go to one of those 3 firms at least for a while until they find a replacement.
If I get hit by a bus, the clients I support are screwed. There are a couple other Linux enthusiasts around, but none with over 10 years of experience dealing with various unix platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
This was about 15 years ago when we bought my stereo. We were looking at 2 models that were IDENTICAL in terms of looks and function at Best Buy and Circuit City. Well, one or the other had an ad flyer advertisting the unit being $50 cheaper than the other store. Both had the, "We'll beat our competitor by 10%" deals.
Well walked into the store, they looked at the model numbers and basically one was Model# 12345C1 the one on their Shelve was Model# 12345B1 and the sales guy was like, "Nope, these are different models, see the numbers are different." There was no difference between the two. They looked the same, had the exact same functions, just different numbers on the box.
We promptly walked out, went across the street and bought the one on sale. But that was the last time I bothered with any of those kind of deals. Rarely will manufactures sell the exact same "model" to two different stores to avoid this kind of thing.
My last old Windows laptop finally died 2 weeks ago. I'm still clinging to my 12.1" last generation PowerBook for most of my day to day work, but there are two applications that are windows-only that I need to run at least once a week. I was about to break down and buy a new 15" MBP, but happened to be at Best Buy and saw the Acer One.
Specs:
1.6Ghz Atom
1GB Ram
120GB HDD
Built-in wireless
Built-in Web Cam
XP home
Price: $375 after all taxes.
I get a good 5 hours of battery life, it runs the two applications I need to run, and for the price, it was worth every penny.
We do tend to be more spread out in this country as opposed to places like Japan, where they have huge population densities. Same in Europe, most of the people tend to live in rather compact cities. People tend to forget that we installed the phone system in this country over the course of 50+ years. Hell, my grandmother still had a Party Line up until the early 1990's! It wasn't like one day everyone woke up and suddenly had phone service to their homes.
I don't see iTunes and FairPlay going anywhere anytime soon. Hell, even after their spat earlier in the year when NBC moved to Amazon after Apple said no to their pricing scheme is now back on iTunes. But then again, I've said Apple got it right years ago. Offers some kind of production the media companies want, yet once I download it, I am free do whatever I want, like burning to CD's, installing and playing on a number of PC's/MP3 players, etc. without a lot of hassles. In the end, consumers don't mind DRM so long as it is reasonable.
Obtrusive Draconian DRM designed to make you pay for every device you want to listen on, etc.. Yeah, that idea is pretty much dead.
Gee, given that iTunes has sold a couple billion songs @ $0.99 each, I'd say more than enough people are willing to go for it at that price. And outside of Slashdot, I'd don't hear a lot of people complaining. Most folks I know seem to think that a dollar a song is a fair and reasonable price. As do I.
I have a friend who has a 17" gaming laptop and on occastion we'll hook up at the coffee shop and play around of Ghost Recon 1. (Yes the original version). I'm usually playing on a 12.1" PowerBook and there is a hell of a difference. He can snipe me down because he can easily see the movement on his screen. There are places where he can be running and I can barely make him out.
Same if I play Halo on the Mac, but not quite as bad.
I know, 2001 called and want their games back, but my point is that 17" vs. 12" screens do make a difference..
I've worked in Sun Shops before, and I've seen Sun support folks come in to repair 15 year old boxes that were running mission critical databases. Also, if you write sun certified software, they tend to bend over backwards to ensure it will be backwards compatible. I've even seen Sun send engineers when a Solaris 6 App stopped working in Solaris 8 to help the shop solve the problem.
That may not seem like much to you, but if your a decent sized business that is making millions of dollars per year and it has to work, Sun is a worthy look if for no other reason than you only have to develop that application once with reasonable assurance that it will work on future versions of the OS.
will start hyping some super bug of the year. Will it be SARS II, Super Spanish Bird Flu, or will it be another year where I get a bad cold for 3 - 4 days, get over it and move on without a flu shot.
Come on, these pandemic scares happen every fall and it's boy crying wolf at this point. History indicates that eventually they will be right, but will that be this year or in 50 years...
That being said, I can understand disaster planning and having a plan just in case. But it's that time of the year when all the 24 hours news outlets will start harping what will be the next killer flu that does not materialize.
Or it could be that the only way to rescue a shuttle crew going to Hubble is another shuttle? The Soyuz does not have the room to bring back a 7 man Shuttle crew IIRC. So is it more logical that it is a political dog and pony show or that another shuttle is the only option should something go wrong.
And remind me the track record of ESA doing manned missions again? When was the last time the Ariane rockets put a man into space again? Oh wait, I think all the ESA astronauts have gone into orbit either atop a US or Russian craft.
Perhaps, but when lawyers gets sued or accused of a crime, they other lawyers to defend them. Even if you have a JD and have passed the Bar Exam, the man who represents himself still has a fool for a client.
I've used Devshed for more than a decade. Usually I've been able to at least find people to point me in the right direction. Okay, layout and ads are a pain, but it's free.
I remember when the company I am working for now was hashing out pricing plans and marketing. I knew what was required to cover the overhead costs with our services and I threw in what I thought our price should be...that set the floor. Then the sales reps went out and were often coming back with clients willing to pay twice and even three times what I thought the service could be sold for. So we're selling our products and services at the higher price.
Point of business is to charge the most you can for your products/services until you reach the point where people will no longer pay or someone else enters the business and tries to under cut you.
The main problem with the X-33/Venture Star programme was the Single-Stage to Orbit pipe dream some have been chasing for the past 30 years. I mean if we want to go back in time, remember that McDonnell Douglas had the DCX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X , which had a prototype built and in proof of concept testing when the final contract was awarded to Locheed, who had a pretty picture of the X-33 and that was it. I remember wondering why in the hell NASA gave the contract to Locheed who just had a pretty picture and that was about it. (Later learned more to do with the bureaucracy of DOD/NASA contracts and it was more to do with it was Locheed's turn that anything else. Also, by that time, the DOD wanted 3 aerospace contractors so I'm sure there were already discussions about merging McDonnell with Boeing. )
It seems that the best way to get to space cheaply for manned missions is a dual stage to orbit much like SpaceShip One and the white knight. And it is a lot more technically feasible as well.
Explains the number of HP laptops I've seen with failed wireless cards. I live in a small college town. The coffee shop I work out of sees a lot of laptops and the number of times I've seen students with HP laptops about 6 - 9 months old digging out a USB wireless card is amazing. Repeatedly, people will come in, suddenly can't get on, and I'll see it's an HP laptop. Sure enough, the wifi card is bad and apparently they're part of the motherboard and can't be replaced, like a mini-pci.
I don't know about percentages, but it is an extremely high number for such a small area.
8.9" screen, 1GB of Ram, 1.6Ghz Atom processor, and 120GB regular HDD...for USD 350 with XP Home oh and a web cam. We picked them up for our two sales reps who will be on the road a lot. I can't really see how the Dell is any better than that.
They started with Webkit, created by Apple for Safari which was forked from KHTML a number of years ago now. So they started with the same basic rendering engine that powers Safari and extended from there. And it should be Acid compliant as Safari/Webkit was the first to reach ACID 3 compliance.
I use Safari on most days, FF if I'm forced to be on a windows box. No OSX support yet so I won't be using it. But again, Chrome is a browser designed to make web-apps better so they can put more of their ads in front of your eyeballs. Google has shifted from a search-engine to the new double click. If the core engine is that much better, look to see said features in Safari 4, only minus the phone homes and the ability to use Safari AdBlock.
My father retired 13 years ago at 55. That was his plan. He didn't get married till he was 30 and I wasn't born until he was forty. I was an only child and my mother worked until I was born. For that several years they used her paycheck to pay off the house (in less than 5 years), and then started saving. Back when he first started work he read a pension report that said in the 1960's, someone who retired at 62 drew a pension on average for 18 months before they croaked. We always bought new cars, paid for in cash, and drove them for 150k miles or 10 years. And we bought mid-priced Chevy's, nothing fancy. We always went on a vacation in the summer, but usually drove and stayed in comfort inns or holiday ins, never the fancy stuff. (exception was when I went to live in and study in Germany for a year. It was the once in a life time that we were going to be over there and we dropped close to $15k in 2 months of traveling...back when the dollar was worth a little more than Euro).
He did spend 30 years working for the same company and did well. But I remember having the sit down on family finances right after he retired (I was 16 at the time). Things lined up nicely, his pensions just about covered what it cost for us to live back then and he was still banking investment money.
He spent the first couple years out of retirement taking care of my mother as she fought a loosing battle with Cancer, then it was taking care of his mother for the last couple years of her life and eventual loosing battle with cancer. Since then we took over the family farms and they are his retirement project. He's spent $500k on capital improvements (leveling the land, putting in irrigation, putting up grain storage), bought a tractor and we've gone back into raising about 15 acres of watermelons and selling them to various outlets. So he's still working even at 68. But if he didn't have the farms to play with, I'm not sure what he would do.
Point is, he budgeted, and didn't live a fancy life. Between the farms and his IRA portfolio, he is still putting almost as much money away as he did when he worked. (Farms are an excellent tax shelter in this company.) He lived within his means with a goal. There are reasons despite making decent money for my age, I still drive a Chevy and have putting $2k into my Roth IRA since I was 21.
Ditto. When I started working here they had Windows a combination of Windows (POS, Laptops) and linux on the servers (Some Fedora, others Gentoo, CentOS, and a couple debain boxes). Basically the owner of the business had his IT infrastructure built over the past 4 years by different contractors, most students from the local university. So it was a mash up of whatever the flavor of the year was back when.
Personally, that has been one of my biggest beefs with Linux over the past 8 years is that every year a different distro seem to be the next big thing. At least until it gets to be too large and "mainstream/corporate" and everyone decides some other distro is the next big thing. It's just like the kid who developed the wireless access tool swore it wouldn't run on anything but Gentoo. I remember by the end of the meeting I had the code installed and running off my PowerBook.
When I started working here my first goal was to get everything running off of one platform. We evaluated several distros of Linux as well as FreeBSD on the servers/PC BSD on the desktops and it ended up everything was moved to OSX. Ironically, it was the only platform where everything just worked from top to bottom.
If you look at the overall federal budget, NASA gets a drop in the bucket compared to Social Services and Defense. The move to extend the Shuttle for a few more years is not a surprise. I don't know, I just get the feeling that if the manned space program ever ends, that will be it. People will start to ask, "Do we really need it?" If there is not something to replace the shuttle, especially if it is 5+ years from flying, politicians and people will start to ask, "What has NASA done lately? Oh just sink billions into that new rocket that is still in development and has another delay to 2018." So the budget shrinks from 15B a year to 10B or stays the same @ 15B a year, yet 15B today will not buy the same amount of stuff next year, things continue to get delayed and eventually, it's the end of the manned space program.
The shuttle is far from perfect, but it's all we got. And until that something better comes along...
Maybe not abandon, but move to higher ground. No matter what, N.O. is still a vital link in the economic chain as a great many goods flow down the Mississippi to the ports for export. But at the same time, it is a city fighting a battle against mother nature that it will eventually loose. The city is sinking and sea levels rising. People are still going to be required to live in the area to support those operations. But do they have to live in the city proper? Why can't they live on higher ground? Why can't some of the lowest lying land next to the levees be reserved for parks and what not.
I like New Orleans as well, but it begs the question what is the most efficient use of resources: building some kind of Dutch like flood prevention system or moving people to higher ground. In the US, the likely answer to that is move to higher ground. We still have plenty of land on high ground. Now people still may want to live in the area, let them. But make them sign a waiver that they fully understand that no flood insurance will be offered. You move into that area knowing damn good and well that if it floods, it's your problem. Don't come running to the government to bail you out.
The major problem now is that not all the levees have been repaired and reinforced from when they broke the time before. These storms are likely to hit every couple years. It is a given. If NO keeps getting hit before repairs can be completed from the last storm the problems will continue to just be compounded and at some point becomes a big black hole of dollars being spent. It just seems logical for the long run to declare the lowest places next to these off-limits to development and let it flood.
don't spy on the communications in and out of their countries? The US does not have a monopoly on signals intelligence. This is one of those issues where any country that has any sig int capabilities are using it to monitor the tubes.
Or maybe iTunes is proof that people will accept DRM so long as it does not interfere with what most would deem "fair-use". I guess I'm a sell out because I'm willing to pay $.99 a song, iTunes is easy to use, works well, and I can burn all the music I buy to CD to listen in my car, stream to other PC's in my house, listen on up to 5 computers, etc..
I know people on /. will then say, "What about Ogg or Flac", and my response is I don't care. I'm not an audiophile nor is the vast majority of people who listen to music. Ask most people what format iTunes music store uses and they'll just say MP3. MP3 = a digital music file in most people's vocabulary. They don't know the difference between MP3 vs. AAC vs. M4a etc.. Nor do they want to know. All they want is the ability to easily purchase music at a reasonable price and then put on their ipod, CD player or stereo with the least amount of fuss.
iTunes does exactly that. It works and works well for most people. Is it perfect? Not really. And I'm sure as more and more allow DRM free music, you'll see that more and more on iTunes as well.
I will say kudos to Apple because they actually got it right in that balance between what the studios wanted and what people could do with their music. Maybe that's why they've been the most successful online music retailer to date.
Netcraft has confirmed that...
I guess that my cue to go home for the day.
....and I should have kept my Apple stock instead of selling @ 90. MS will push people away, but to Apple, not Linux. Because OSX runs MS Office and a host of other common applications such as Quickbooks for small businesses as well as Adobe's line up. While it does cost money to switch, Apple already has many of the common applications being used by people right now. It's not "Something mostly compatible". It is Quickbooks. And that means a lot to people wanting to switch.
Because linux can't run exchange. And no one has yet to come up with something in the OSS that can easily replace it. I used to be more anti-microsoft as well, but the past few projects it seems like we've been deploying PHP/MySQL apps on Windows 2003 servers. And I have to admit that we've had no problems what so ever.
Also, for most businesses it is far easier to find someone that can deal with the MS setup. Where I live now, there are 3 IT services firms. All three are Microsoft solution providers. If you don't like one, you have two more to choose from. In the Unix world, there is me....and me. I do the Linux, Unix & Mac consulting for all 3 firms when needed.
So if one of their techs gets hit by a bus tomorrow, they have replacements. If a medium sized business's windows based IT person gets hit by a bus, they can go to one of those 3 firms at least for a while until they find a replacement.
If I get hit by a bus, the clients I support are screwed. There are a couple other Linux enthusiasts around, but none with over 10 years of experience dealing with various unix platforms.