That 15% OT is mandatory now which translates to ~7.5 extra work days/year depending on where...
And the odd thing is that we all get Thinkpads specifically to work the odd hour or so at home and then get dirty looks (well not actual dirty looks, but some of us get the virtual dirty look in the form of never getting more than a 2 no matter what, never ever ever) if we dare to leave the office before the divorced twice, never home workaholic boss does.
But 70 hours a week is not managing anything. Sorry, but if I had a section head who required everyone to work 70 hours a week I would fire that person. 70 hours a week is churning client billables to insure that your own bonus is guaranteed off the backs of the people who work for you and are subject to your control. Threatening to fire people who don't can't or won't work 70 hours a week is criminal. Actually it is in many states and localities. You would be hard pressed legally to demonstrate that 70 hours a week was a known, described, understood and necessary job requirement or at the very least a long term convention of everyone doing that class of job aka medical residents.
This kind of thinking is where workplace violence comes from. At the very least you're courting burnout, long term failure, increased absence, sick leave, slacking, substance abuse and depression.
No really. MSNBC dos-covers that Whistler is great. OK I'll stop chortling now.
Anyway if you go back to the other article you'll find that:
MS unified consumer and corporate code bases? Who broke them apart to begin with?
Has a new OS that's just as stable as 2K and is also usable. Is this a rousing endorsement? Which is worse, that everything other than 2K is not stable or 2K is not usable?
WTF is the PROFESSIONAL CLIENT? Isn't that precisely what MS in the first sentence of the article is getting away from? What is this >> more better faster good Whistler? The Real Whistler?
Can also run W9x apps? And it's more stable running them than native Win9x? Uh, you buy this? And there is a database of tweaks to help the now unified corporateconsumer (tm) run stuff? Yeah we used to call this the read me file.
And there is a Win9x compatibility mode. We have that now its called a DOSBOX and the drivers don't work the same way. Alternatively you can DOSBOOT now if you don't mind filename problems.
What kind of applications don't work well or at all with Whitlesser? Are these MS logoed apps?
The driver DB will be unified? When will that occur? When MS forces the application houses to scrap or rewrite all of their applications to fit yet another arbitrary MS requirement?
The reason MS is not a player in the handheld market is not because of a distinction between NT and Win9x that is blurred by PDA's. Who writes this shit? MS is not a player in the PDA market because Wince is shit plain and simple. Nobody likes it, it doesn't work and the hardware vendors can't keep up with the hamster wheel changes from MS.
YAAAAAAAAY the GUI is different. The windows appear "flatter". Uh sounds like BeOS or Gnome. Wooopeeeee! I gues this is what they mean when they say INNOVA-SHUN.
Clear Type - wow that's great.
Stacked buttons on the task bar that explode to cascading lists. I'm shocked that they didn't patent this. After all anything that slows you down should be fiercely protected as a unique enhancement. Why do they have this? Couldn't they just make the buttons smaller using the new easy to read clear type fonts. Ug - smack on head. I forgot, Clear Type doesn't actually work except with MS Office.
Requesting remote takeover using email? So I send a request to tech support allowing them to take over my machine and fix it when I SAY SO. Ok I guess they'll just respond immediately and jump on that while I watch. Yeah sure, they are just waiting around now for the phone to ring.
I didn't hear the hardware requirements so here is my guess:
700Mhz P3 or better (1Ghz recommended)
256MB SDRAM or more (half gig recommended)
700MB disk space (not inclding 500MB Swap space)
Voodoo3 or similar video or better.
And let's not forget:
There is no migration from Win9x, no tools to do so w/o a complete tear down and rebuild.
There is no possible migration path from W2k to Whistler because the cost of 2k is so much higher.
There is no possible integration of Whistler clients an 2K clients on the same MS network because the security model is different. The tools to do that integration will be made available on a later version of 2K server that will require new licenses and completely different network topology using a new and improved version of Active Directory.
Well maybe some of this will not occur, but is none of it true? Does 25 years of glarking this gronked crud not tell you anything????
MS 'improvements' are the IUDs of computer code - - - for the truly unloved.
Yeah - just add it the list of items an annual internal audit has to verify; an inventory of software assets that is provably licenced. Doesn't seem to be that big a deal to me. Oh sure mechanically its a real nightmare to actually track what packages you have deployed to whom and what the lic. #'s are. Or alternatively you count the number of packages and hope that if you're '99% reliant on MS' you have some kind VPA, site licence or similar agreement. Then the auditors come in, say whether they can pass you on that task or not. If yes, great, if no then you've failed your audit and are usually given an amount of time to remediate. If you can't remediate then 1 or two things happen: a) the vendor, MS takes you to court for damages. b) your bond rating drops. Either way its no big deal for a government. It's not likely that anything like this could bankrupt a government but even if it did technically then you would have a default and things would continue on as normal except w/o capital improvements and other vendors, etc. getting paid.
Something strange happens between the 127th and 327th decimal. It's the name of G_d or something like that. All subsequent digits have got to be leftover resonating turbulence.
This is America where you have the right to rebel for the freedom to be like everyone else. I think the poor kid got off easy with a suspension. Chances are if this happened somewhere less liberal the student would have been charged with conspiracy to commit a violent act, insurrection, bad manners and daring to have an opinion no matter how sophomoric the expression of that opinion. Go down to God Fearin Amurrcan Heartland and there is a better than average chance the kid's house would've had some windows broken or worse and mom & dad could've caught some shit at work for not raisin' em up raht.
What bothers you, the use of the word 'nation'? Does it mean a government or a community? Does that distinction matter? At any rate I think its covenient to talk about Lieberman because what he says is not altogether inflammatory and who basically talks the talk of modern Orthodoxy.No real surprises there it's what you expect to hear from someone who not only is deeply religious but someone who was brought up that way, that is, someone who hasn't come to their religion in middle age full of that y'all-gonna-burn-in-hellfire sanctimony. On the other hand I'm much more worried about people who shout "God hates you and it is my holy mission to execute His will". Whether you belive that they are sincere or not, be not confused that people like that will easily rationalize their own participation in another genocide.
1 We have same number of people with drug problems now as we did 80 years ago before criminalization. Except now we have crminals. And 2 million people locked up on drug charges. Several thousand locked up for LIFE for selling a few ounces of weed.
2 We've seen the beginnings of a 'Protestant roots and awareness' movement (a quote not my words) to stop the tide of anti-Christian godlessness. This ought to chill you.
3 I'm on going to say this one million times. THE PRESIDENT CANNOT SET TAX POLICY THAT IS CONGRESS'S JOB. Any candidate for any office in the executive branch that tells you anything about what he or she is going to do about taxes is deceiving you or doesn't know basic civics.
4 What difference does an electoral system make where the difference between the candidates is almost zero. We would be better served with a random lottery. Who cares about if a candidate gets 10% of the pop vote but 0 electoral votes. Isn't it much more serious when a candidate wins with say 45% of the total vote and that vote represents 45% of the people who can vote. One could say that you no longer live in a Democracy with numbers like that.
5 Is this thing on? Who buys candidates? Organizations with serious money in in IP. Why? That is the way you legally justify beating the shit out of people via lawyers. Are you serious? IP Reform. You might as well ask for free water or clean air.
6 Encryption. Wonk wonk wonk wonk. Both candidates are asleep by now. That's a nit that propjockeys like you and me are concerned with. The real question is how many civil rights are you willing to give up in the face of some hysterical call to pull the wagons in a circle?
7 First off there has not been a rise. They've always been there on the front lines. You just notice it more now. Second: These are the little people. They don't count. Even the unions don't count. What counts is money.
8 Asteroid.....In case you haven't been listening we don't have the attention span to watch a music video unless there is something else going on on the screen at the same time. 2 minutes 45 tops. You expect anyone to give a shit or even pay attention to something that might happen in the next century? You expect someone to pay for it? I can't someone to come 3 times in a row to mow my lawn and you expect me to worry about taking years out to devise a complex solution for this.
9 National mission? This is our national mission. Its our fucking manifest destiny. Push ever onward until everyone in the world is us or just like us so we'll have something in common with the people we kill or let kill each other. Here's a quick quiz. See if you can find the thing that is not like the others:
Sports
News
Politics
Entertainment
Religion
Technology
Warfare
purple balloons
Did you get it? Did you find the one item that isn't another name for each of the other items. Good. Now don't look up, push another fucking cheeseburger in your face, beat your wife, turn on the tube and shut the fuck up while we run shit. If you have any stupid fucking questions about that we suggest you run naked into a police station, waving a gun.
In the notebook market no consumer cares one whit whether the CPU is Intel, AMD, Crusoe or hamsters on a wheel. It's about prices features weight and to some extent, gee-whiz factor. Nobody I mean nobody gives a crap whether it uses.1 watt or 10 watts in idle. And here's a news flash for all of you - - nobody really cares that much about battery life either. For the minority of folks who can't use or carry around a powersupply, car lighter adapter or extra battery, yeah ok extended battery life is a great benefit. But look around how many people actually fall into that category? And how many people are actually going to be concerned with how much time they get on their battery when THEY'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING? That is, how much more battery do you get on a Crusoe when you're actually running some apps? Think about the components that sell notebooks: DVD, big screen, big drive and coolness factor.
Under what scenarios do those factors lead you to use a notebook strictly on battery for extended amounts of time? So in the end Crusoe is a way cool code morphing hunka hunka burnin love but so what.
You have to be able to make a VAIO C1XR sized machine that weighs less than 2lbs and can run 10+hrs on a charge while playing a DVD. And while your at it - since I want to feel comfortable leaving everything but the notebook itself behind you have to build the thing inside of a shell that I can carry around comfortably without a bag, in one hand without worrying about damaging it. Oh and while you're at it, put a cell phone on a PCCARD and let me leave that other device home as well.
Hmmmm.. other than the 10+ hrs battery I think I can do that already with a VAIO or a Libretto.
This is probably why IBM is still thinking about it.
Knock knock. Oh yeah? Opportunity who?
on
IBM Releases AFS
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· Score: 2
I don't get it. I suppose some people just like to piss and moan about how their asses aren't being correctly kissed on BOTH cheeks. WTF could there possibly be to complain about this announcement. AFS is great A robust distributed file system that was designed to handle huge gobs of data and huge numbers of users. And this is bad how?
If you think this is something to complain about then shut the fuck up and work on the code.
This is a variation on conditional voting where you push and pull fractional votes around based on the conditional outcome of other related events. So for example you would vote yes on prop 'A' if candidate 'X' wins by > z% in district 'q' else no on prop one. And so on. This way you could split pieces of a unit vote cast say.7 for nader,.1 for gore,.2 for whomever is the leader or 2nd place finisher, etc.
The logical extension of this is to create dynamic models that compete with one another so that one could subscribe to large pool of dynamic votes that constantly optimize against other gaming strategies. Basically a "my guy model" vs. a "your guy model" where apsects of the model are designed to optimize your own desired outcome and more importantly degrade and disoptimize your opponent models, forcing them to vote contrary to their own optimization.
Consequently you could put all or part of your sum total vote unit up for bid, purchase or lend based on some payback promised you.
This is nothing more than externalizing what people do when they hear phrases like 'prescription drug subsidies, umm... reform' and 'public subsidies for religious, unm...character education'.
I for one want my vote for sale. I think it would do more good that way with a contract between the voter and the candidate instead of empty blather which neither party is capable of fullfilling nor believes. Why not - you promise me something like tax reform - and when it suddenly occurs to me that - - -- - oh yeah I forgot, presidents can't set tax policy, that's congress's job !!! I can withdraw my vote. A kind of parlimentary no confidence system but with a more immediate feedback loop.
Something that is sort of like something else but not enough to be legally like something else such as copyright or trademark infringement. Nice to see some altruistic NGO taking on the burden of legal arbiter. Especially in domains that it has no parvue. Here's my plan. Start a church called the Chruch of Jefus Chrisp. Let's see if millions of bewildered souls are confused and accidently contribute to it. Heck, if the response rate is anything like direct mail then I can retire tomorrow and buy my own country.
This is a joke people - so don't get carried away. Oh wait - I forgot this is/. No humor allowed. Only self righteous bullshit. The kind of one dimensional moral absolutism you pick up freshman or sophmore year. If you have found any typos in this note so far please sue me. I wouldn't want stupid people to accidently confuse me with someone else.
I can't wait to see what's next - maybe someone will create a domain that is intentionally misspelled or vague just so they can sue everyone else. And then those people can cry to the WIPO about how they were wronged by someone who was intentionally vague in the hope of being sued.
We have instructions on shampoo bottles - w'dya expect?
If you had an infinite number of infinitely smart resources you could approach but not reach perfect secrity. But it is in fact asymtotic. So what's it worth to you.
Give you an example - I used to work in an office that had a scanner that could tell if a source document had been previously photocopied so that you could make a guess about whether the 'x' of 'y' mark on the doc was accurate. You have to decide:
what is this information worth to you
what do you do once you have it.
Of course you could reverse engineer the drive controller. It would easier still to pull the platters out altogether and mount them into some clean room prototype device and have at them in a controlled enviroment where you scan the platters with an electron microscope, subject it to magnetic flux testing, etc etc. etc. but again - what is it worth to you.
"Investigators today discovered that the Kursk was sunk by a failure in an experimental launch system that was using stolen MS source code." Records recovered from the sub included this fragment:
"ok boot the launch system"
"roger"
"prime the payload"
"roger"
"uh we have a problem with the launch system"
"shutdown payload initiate"
"failure to shutdown payload, launch system will not start <garbled> blue screen <garbled>"
"payload is arming"
"Shut it down shut the <garbled> down"
"Can't - it won't start or stop, it's frozen. The <garbled> shows blue screen"
"Abort abort"
"payload is armed with proximity fusing"
"holy mother of God, shut the <garbled> down"
"complete lockout, no response, launch system failure, reboot reboot reb"
Loud blast noise followed by sounds of bulkhead failure. Air escape, bubbles, rumbling. Silence.
"
and oh yeah - lock and key. If someone is determined to take what you have there is little you can do to stop them so if encryption and safe storage don't seem safe enough for you then you should consider not putting sensitive information out in the open and auditing EVERYONE under threat of instant termination to comply. If that's not enough then don't permit local storage at all and give everyone a dumb -err - thin terminal.
Audit everyone anyway. Establish a clear security policy and stick to it. Compartmentalize your security so that it is not hierarchical. This avoids the problem of giving the most sensitive information to the alpha monkey.
Log everything.
Have a building property pass or something to slow someone down when they're walking out the door late at night with a couple of laptops under their arm and a car waiting at the curb.
Install docking stations and tethers for laptops. Install trip alarm cards in your desktop machines and keylock the cabinets and keep the keys under seperate lock and key.
There is a Swiss company that makes exploding CDROM disks. That's right they can be programmed to self destruct.
Remove all hard drives from desktop machines..
Remove all floppy drives and tape drives from desktop machines. Remove all CDROMs, CDRs CDRW's DVD's from all machines. Outlaw bringing any equipment onto the site that didn't orginate there.
No cameras no recording devices or any kind. No briefcases in or out and everybody gets searched in both directions.
You get the picture. Do whatever it takes to protect your stuff as long as the cost of that is less than the value of the information or the equipment.
Hell, I once worked in a site where we had to shred everything daily including diskettes and they were reshredded and burned. Printer platens and ribbons were removed and destroyed weekly. An armed guard was in visual contact at all times. Do you want to go that far?
OF course one could disagree with the specifics. The problem I have is that many many people who claim on some level a populist sentiment if for no other reason than to distance themselves from either major party, and label through which that populist sentiment is categorized is Libertarianism then that is what I have to use as some mental guidepost for what Libertarianism is. I don't quibble that a few vocal people may have appropriated the term, Libertarian. None the less if I hear the same strident rhetoric day after day peppered with a belief system I can only classify as a blend between Charles Lindburg's America First party and 19th century robber barons I have to conclude that this in fact is a representative sample of what that term Libertarian means. I need only turn on the radio and listen to a mouthpiece from the John Locke Institute state that:
Taxes are bad and should be eliminated regarldless of what they're for. The government has enough of our money now and should be happy we alllow them to have that.
We should use some of whatever tax dollars that are left to subsidize private religious education in the form of vouchers because paying for two systems will somehow magically crowd the public sector out.
Government bonds are bad because they ultimately lead to foreign investment in America's infrastructure. I'm still waiting for some factual evidence of this or even a statement of why it's bad on it's face. Debt is a product that this country manufactures and exports and exporting debt is always better than exporting jobs.
Hate Clinton in all his garb and splendor. 'Nuff said.
Guns are good, <more> gun laws are bad. Because...because.....because...well they just are the Constitution says so and there is some old guy somewhere in America I can get here on the radio to tell his story about how he foiled a home invasion with his Glock as proof.
Owing the UN a billion or so dollars is good because then we can strong arm them to do whatever we want. I might agree with this. If it's come that then we should just default and pull out.
NGO's form a secret shadow world government bent on domination through manipulation of world financial markets.
I could go on but why bother, just tune in to your local self proclaimed Libertarian radio talk show. If they don't represent you then you should call in and tell them that.
I think you proved my point. It's whatever you say it is and if somehow it doesn't represent the pure line of thinking then it must be misinformed, misguided or misrepresenting what it claims to be. Either way if an outsider comes into the tent looking for a reasonable summary of what Libertarianism is the message is so horribly garbled as to be meaningless.
Been saying that for years. My parents generation, the Tom Brokaw 'greatest' or the one just a few years younger was the recipient of more federal aid, social breaks, tax waivers, subsidized education then any other on the face of this earth. Ever. And to compound it saw their financial health by and large increase more and faster than any growth of the middle class in the history of civilization. The net increase in property values alone says that. These were the people who grew up hungry in the Depression and retired on the golf course on AOL stock- in large part thanks to an interventionist Federal government that bled money from 1945 to 1994. And in large part put in place by Eisenhower - a Republican. Now these same people, who as a group receive NOW, 10x more Federal money percapita than the children they purport to be so concerned with are chomping at the bit to exhaust and bankrupt the system in THEIR lifetime.
Libertarianism has come to mean whatever you want it to. It's inclusive of everything from the far right to the far left and if there is anything there you don't agree with just claim those other people are misguided. Honestly, is it simply entertainment or a real, thought out postion when Boortz says things like "maybe it's a mistake that women can vote". Or that 2 income households should be outlawed. Are we supposed to take seriously this altdotblackhelicopters thinking? When right wing self professed Libertarians claim on a show like Boortz or Limbaugh that those liberals in the "major media' secretly control what you see and hear, and it's evil I have to laugh.
Now maybe they don't represent what the rest of you consider mainstream Libertarianism but that's my point. Anyone from Ghengis Khan to Leon Trotsky can claim to be Libertarian. After all the "S" in Nazi was for "Socialism" - you can twist words to mean whatever you want. All I can tell you is that I live in a state where at one time Jesse Helms was considered the more liberal of two Senators and I've heard the self defined Libertarian rhetoric: anti gov't, pro-gun, eliminate the sep. of church and state, no immigrants, no taxation, eliminate all but the vestiges of a federal system, power to the states, responsibility to the individual, yah ya yah. It's Ruby Ridge with a soccer mom face. I read the book I saw the movie. It was by Leni Reifenstahl. Be afraid.
Can you imagine flying through the airport that's between my house and my job? How about pushing each other out of the way to launch and land? What are the effects of cutting each other off. Air-Rage?. Do they have running lights so they don't crash into each other in rush hour? Bad weather? How do you police them? Drunk drivers? What about the prop wash from the inevitable 6-fan 6 passenger SUC (sport utility copter)?
The cost of upgrading software in the corporate environ is at least 7-9x more than the cost of replacing hardware that is on a 3 year depreciation schedule. Mostly because of the labor involved. Even if you have a sophisticated ESD tool the work in packaging and testing the deployable bundles is quite high compared to the expense of writing off the old HW and shipping new. But that's not the problem. The problem is that many corps have SW maintenance agreements with VARs and resellers - not SW houses. What happens is that MS-Something gets deployed after much bloodshed. The next year the VAR comes back and 'suggests' that the customer now upgrade to MS-Something+1. Corp says yes because why else are they paying 15-18% year over year to maintain it if they're not going to upgrade and the VAR is probably telling the customer that if they wait another year they won't get the great price break they can ostensibly get now. After all they've paid for it already up front and the VAR won't be able to get favorable terms from MS a year after introduction and certainly can't skip a level in the MS mandated update cycle.
...Anyway.....
With each new turn of the crank comes a bundle of MS software that takes more and more hardware. More of everything. Office 2000 can't effectively run on a machine with <128MB RAM, 400MB of disk and at least a 500Mhz CPU. At least not with the performance expectation in a corporate environment that the customer has come to expect fomr the last version.
A couple-three iterations of this and you replacing the hardware faster than the depreciation schedule and so it goes. The hardware upgrade-replacement arms rae goes out of control.
Just make sure the next version of MS-OS requires a 128bit, 9 stage pipelined, superscalar, 6 ops/click, 1Ghz or better, quarter or half Gig of memory, a new video design, a new HCL, new different board connectors, a 'better' bus design, a proprietary DSP interface, host processing everything and you will insure that people will buy new PC's - Afterall what kind of performance can you expect out of Word with only a Pentium2-266? Not much.
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That 15% OT is mandatory now which translates to ~7.5 extra work days/year depending on where...
And the odd thing is that we all get Thinkpads specifically to work the odd hour or so at home and then get dirty looks (well not actual dirty looks, but some of us get the virtual dirty look in the form of never getting more than a 2 no matter what, never ever ever) if we dare to leave the office before the divorced twice, never home workaholic boss does.
But 70 hours a week is not managing anything. Sorry, but if I had a section head who required everyone to work 70 hours a week I would fire that person. 70 hours a week is churning client billables to insure that your own bonus is guaranteed off the backs of the people who work for you and are subject to your control. Threatening to fire people who don't can't or won't work 70 hours a week is criminal. Actually it is in many states and localities. You would be hard pressed legally to demonstrate that 70 hours a week was a known, described, understood and necessary job requirement or at the very least a long term convention of everyone doing that class of job aka medical residents.
This kind of thinking is where workplace violence comes from. At the very least you're courting burnout, long term failure, increased absence, sick leave, slacking, substance abuse and depression.
This is why software sucks.
No really. MSNBC dos-covers that Whistler is great. OK I'll stop chortling now.
Anyway if you go back to the other article you'll find that:
MS unified consumer and corporate code bases? Who broke them apart to begin with?
Has a new OS that's just as stable as 2K and is also usable. Is this a rousing endorsement? Which is worse, that everything other than 2K is not stable or 2K is not usable?
WTF is the PROFESSIONAL CLIENT? Isn't that precisely what MS in the first sentence of the article is getting away from? What is this >> more better faster good Whistler? The Real Whistler?
Can also run W9x apps? And it's more stable running them than native Win9x? Uh, you buy this? And there is a database of tweaks to help the now unified corporateconsumer (tm) run stuff? Yeah we used to call this the read me file.
And there is a Win9x compatibility mode. We have that now its called a DOSBOX and the drivers don't work the same way. Alternatively you can DOSBOOT now if you don't mind filename problems.
What kind of applications don't work well or at all with Whitlesser? Are these MS logoed apps?
The driver DB will be unified? When will that occur? When MS forces the application houses to scrap or rewrite all of their applications to fit yet another arbitrary MS requirement?
The reason MS is not a player in the handheld market is not because of a distinction between NT and Win9x that is blurred by PDA's. Who writes this shit? MS is not a player in the PDA market because Wince is shit plain and simple. Nobody likes it, it doesn't work and the hardware vendors can't keep up with the hamster wheel changes from MS.
YAAAAAAAAY the GUI is different. The windows appear "flatter". Uh sounds like BeOS or Gnome. Wooopeeeee! I gues this is what they mean when they say INNOVA-SHUN.
Clear Type - wow that's great.
Stacked buttons on the task bar that explode to cascading lists. I'm shocked that they didn't patent this. After all anything that slows you down should be fiercely protected as a unique enhancement. Why do they have this? Couldn't they just make the buttons smaller using the new easy to read clear type fonts. Ug - smack on head. I forgot, Clear Type doesn't actually work except with MS Office.
Requesting remote takeover using email? So I send a request to tech support allowing them to take over my machine and fix it when I SAY SO. Ok I guess they'll just respond immediately and jump on that while I watch. Yeah sure, they are just waiting around now for the phone to ring.
I didn't hear the hardware requirements so here is my guess:
700Mhz P3 or better (1Ghz recommended)
256MB SDRAM or more (half gig recommended)
700MB disk space (not inclding 500MB Swap space)
Voodoo3 or similar video or better.
And let's not forget:
There is no migration from Win9x, no tools to do so w/o a complete tear down and rebuild.
There is no possible migration path from W2k to Whistler because the cost of 2k is so much higher.
There is no possible integration of Whistler clients an 2K clients on the same MS network because the security model is different. The tools to do that integration will be made available on a later version of 2K server that will require new licenses and completely different network topology using a new and improved version of Active Directory.
Well maybe some of this will not occur, but is none of it true? Does 25 years of glarking this gronked crud not tell you anything????
MS 'improvements' are the IUDs of computer code - - - for the truly unloved.
Yeah - just add it the list of items an annual internal audit has to verify; an inventory of software assets that is provably licenced. Doesn't seem to be that big a deal to me. Oh sure mechanically its a real nightmare to actually track what packages you have deployed to whom and what the lic. #'s are. Or alternatively you count the number of packages and hope that if you're '99% reliant on MS' you have some kind VPA, site licence or similar agreement. Then the auditors come in, say whether they can pass you on that task or not. If yes, great, if no then you've failed your audit and are usually given an amount of time to remediate. If you can't remediate then 1 or two things happen: a) the vendor, MS takes you to court for damages. b) your bond rating drops. Either way its no big deal for a government. It's not likely that anything like this could bankrupt a government but even if it did technically then you would have a default and things would continue on as normal except w/o capital improvements and other vendors, etc. getting paid.
Something strange happens between the 127th and 327th decimal. It's the name of G_d or something like that. All subsequent digits have got to be leftover resonating turbulence.
This is America where you have the right to rebel for the freedom to be like everyone else. I think the poor kid got off easy with a suspension. Chances are if this happened somewhere less liberal the student would have been charged with conspiracy to commit a violent act, insurrection, bad manners and daring to have an opinion no matter how sophomoric the expression of that opinion. Go down to God Fearin Amurrcan Heartland and there is a better than average chance the kid's house would've had some windows broken or worse and mom & dad could've caught some shit at work for not raisin' em up raht.
What bothers you, the use of the word 'nation'? Does it mean a government or a community? Does that distinction matter? At any rate I think its covenient to talk about Lieberman because what he says is not altogether inflammatory and who basically talks the talk of modern Orthodoxy .No real surprises there it's what you expect to hear from someone who not only is deeply religious but someone who was brought up that way, that is, someone who hasn't come to their religion in middle age full of that y'all-gonna-burn-in-hellfire sanctimony. On the other hand I'm much more worried about people who shout "God hates you and it is my holy mission to execute His will". Whether you belive that they are sincere or not, be not confused that people like that will easily rationalize their own participation in another genocide.
1 We have same number of people with drug problems now as we did 80 years ago before criminalization. Except now we have crminals. And 2 million people locked up on drug charges. Several thousand locked up for LIFE for selling a few ounces of weed.
2 We've seen the beginnings of a 'Protestant roots and awareness' movement (a quote not my words) to stop the tide of anti-Christian godlessness. This ought to chill you.
3 I'm on going to say this one million times. THE PRESIDENT CANNOT SET TAX POLICY THAT IS CONGRESS'S JOB. Any candidate for any office in the executive branch that tells you anything about what he or she is going to do about taxes is deceiving you or doesn't know basic civics.
4 What difference does an electoral system make where the difference between the candidates is almost zero. We would be better served with a random lottery. Who cares about if a candidate gets 10% of the pop vote but 0 electoral votes. Isn't it much more serious when a candidate wins with say 45% of the total vote and that vote represents 45% of the people who can vote. One could say that you no longer live in a Democracy with numbers like that.
5 Is this thing on? Who buys candidates? Organizations with serious money in in IP. Why? That is the way you legally justify beating the shit out of people via lawyers. Are you serious? IP Reform. You might as well ask for free water or clean air.
6 Encryption. Wonk wonk wonk wonk. Both candidates are asleep by now. That's a nit that propjockeys like you and me are concerned with. The real question is how many civil rights are you willing to give up in the face of some hysterical call to pull the wagons in a circle?
7 First off there has not been a rise. They've always been there on the front lines. You just notice it more now. Second: These are the little people. They don't count. Even the unions don't count. What counts is money.
8 Asteroid.....In case you haven't been listening we don't have the attention span to watch a music video unless there is something else going on on the screen at the same time. 2 minutes 45 tops. You expect anyone to give a shit or even pay attention to something that might happen in the next century? You expect someone to pay for it? I can't someone to come 3 times in a row to mow my lawn and you expect me to worry about taking years out to devise a complex solution for this.
9 National mission? This is our national mission. Its our fucking manifest destiny. Push ever onward until everyone in the world is us or just like us so we'll have something in common with the people we kill or let kill each other. Here's a quick quiz. See if you can find the thing that is not like the others:
Sports
News
Politics
Entertainment
Religion
Technology
Warfare
purple balloons
Did you get it? Did you find the one item that isn't another name for each of the other items. Good. Now don't look up, push another fucking cheeseburger in your face, beat your wife, turn on the tube and shut the fuck up while we run shit. If you have any stupid fucking questions about that we suggest you run naked into a police station, waving a gun.
That is all. Dismissed.
In the notebook market no consumer cares one whit whether the CPU is Intel, AMD, Crusoe or hamsters on a wheel. It's about prices features weight and to some extent, gee-whiz factor. Nobody I mean nobody gives a crap whether it uses .1 watt or 10 watts in idle. And here's a news flash for all of you - - nobody really cares that much about battery life either. For the minority of folks who can't use or carry around a powersupply, car lighter adapter or extra battery, yeah ok extended battery life is a great benefit. But look around how many people actually fall into that category? And how many people are actually going to be concerned with how much time they get on their battery when THEY'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING? That is, how much more battery do you get on a Crusoe when you're actually running some apps? Think about the components that sell notebooks: DVD, big screen, big drive and coolness factor.
Under what scenarios do those factors lead you to use a notebook strictly on battery for extended amounts of time? So in the end Crusoe is a way cool code morphing hunka hunka burnin love but so what.
You have to be able to make a VAIO C1XR sized machine that weighs less than 2lbs and can run 10+hrs on a charge while playing a DVD. And while your at it - since I want to feel comfortable leaving everything but the notebook itself behind you have to build the thing inside of a shell that I can carry around comfortably without a bag, in one hand without worrying about damaging it. Oh and while you're at it, put a cell phone on a PCCARD and let me leave that other device home as well.
Hmmmm.. other than the 10+ hrs battery I think I can do that already with a VAIO or a Libretto.
This is probably why IBM is still thinking about it.
I don't get it. I suppose some people just like to piss and moan about how their asses aren't being correctly kissed on BOTH cheeks. WTF could there possibly be to complain about this announcement. AFS is great A robust distributed file system that was designed to handle huge gobs of data and huge numbers of users. And this is bad how?
If you think this is something to complain about then shut the fuck up and work on the code.
This is a variation on conditional voting where you push and pull fractional votes around based on the conditional outcome of other related events. So for example you would vote yes on prop 'A' if candidate 'X' wins by > z% in district 'q' else no on prop one. And so on. This way you could split pieces of a unit vote cast say .7 for nader, .1 for gore, .2 for whomever is the leader or 2nd place finisher, etc.
The logical extension of this is to create dynamic models that compete with one another so that one could subscribe to large pool of dynamic votes that constantly optimize against other gaming strategies. Basically a "my guy model" vs. a "your guy model" where apsects of the model are designed to optimize your own desired outcome and more importantly degrade and disoptimize your opponent models, forcing them to vote contrary to their own optimization.
Consequently you could put all or part of your sum total vote unit up for bid, purchase or lend based on some payback promised you.
This is nothing more than externalizing what people do when they hear phrases like 'prescription drug subsidies, umm... reform' and 'public subsidies for religious, unm...character education'.
I for one want my vote for sale. I think it would do more good that way with a contract between the voter and the candidate instead of empty blather which neither party is capable of fullfilling nor believes. Why not - you promise me something like tax reform - and when it suddenly occurs to me that - - -- - oh yeah I forgot, presidents can't set tax policy, that's congress's job !!! I can withdraw my vote. A kind of parlimentary no confidence system but with a more immediate feedback loop.
Something that is sort of like something else but not enough to be legally like something else such as copyright or trademark infringement. Nice to see some altruistic NGO taking on the burden of legal arbiter. Especially in domains that it has no parvue. Here's my plan. Start a church called the Chruch of Jefus Chrisp. Let's see if millions of bewildered souls are confused and accidently contribute to it. Heck, if the response rate is anything like direct mail then I can retire tomorrow and buy my own country.
/. No humor allowed. Only self righteous bullshit. The kind of one dimensional moral absolutism you pick up freshman or sophmore year. If you have found any typos in this note so far please sue me. I wouldn't want stupid people to accidently confuse me with someone else.
This is a joke people - so don't get carried away. Oh wait - I forgot this is
I can't wait to see what's next - maybe someone will create a domain that is intentionally misspelled or vague just so they can sue everyone else. And then those people can cry to the WIPO about how they were wronged by someone who was intentionally vague in the hope of being sued.
We have instructions on shampoo bottles - w'dya expect?
If you had an infinite number of infinitely smart resources you could approach but not reach perfect secrity. But it is in fact asymtotic. So what's it worth to you.
Give you an example - I used to work in an office that had a scanner that could tell if a source document had been previously photocopied so that you could make a guess about whether the 'x' of 'y' mark on the doc was accurate. You have to decide:
what is this information worth to you
what do you do once you have it.
Of course you could reverse engineer the drive controller. It would easier still to pull the platters out altogether and mount them into some clean room prototype device and have at them in a controlled enviroment where you scan the platters with an electron microscope, subject it to magnetic flux testing, etc etc. etc. but again - what is it worth to you.
"Investigators today discovered that the Kursk was sunk by a failure in an experimental launch system that was using stolen MS source code." Records recovered from the sub included this fragment:
"ok boot the launch system"
"roger"
"prime the payload"
"roger"
"uh we have a problem with the launch system"
"shutdown payload initiate"
"failure to shutdown payload, launch system will not start <garbled> blue screen <garbled>"
"payload is arming"
"Shut it down shut the <garbled> down"
"Can't - it won't start or stop, it's frozen. The <garbled> shows blue screen"
"Abort abort"
"payload is armed with proximity fusing"
"holy mother of God, shut the <garbled> down"
"complete lockout, no response, launch system failure, reboot reboot reb"
Loud blast noise followed by sounds of bulkhead failure. Air escape, bubbles, rumbling. Silence.
"
1 power on password
2 hard drive password
my thinkpad does both
and oh yeah - lock and key. If someone is determined to take what you have there is little you can do to stop them so if encryption and safe storage don't seem safe enough for you then you should consider not putting sensitive information out in the open and auditing EVERYONE under threat of instant termination to comply. If that's not enough then don't permit local storage at all and give everyone a dumb -err - thin terminal.
Audit everyone anyway. Establish a clear security policy and stick to it. Compartmentalize your security so that it is not hierarchical. This avoids the problem of giving the most sensitive information to the alpha monkey.
Log everything.
Have a building property pass or something to slow someone down when they're walking out the door late at night with a couple of laptops under their arm and a car waiting at the curb.
Install docking stations and tethers for laptops. Install trip alarm cards in your desktop machines and keylock the cabinets and keep the keys under seperate lock and key.
There is a Swiss company that makes exploding CDROM disks. That's right they can be programmed to self destruct.
Remove all hard drives from desktop machines..
Remove all floppy drives and tape drives from desktop machines. Remove all CDROMs, CDRs CDRW's DVD's from all machines. Outlaw bringing any equipment onto the site that didn't orginate there.
No cameras no recording devices or any kind. No briefcases in or out and everybody gets searched in both directions.
You get the picture. Do whatever it takes to protect your stuff as long as the cost of that is less than the value of the information or the equipment.
Hell, I once worked in a site where we had to shred everything daily including diskettes and they were reshredded and burned. Printer platens and ribbons were removed and destroyed weekly. An armed guard was in visual contact at all times. Do you want to go that far?
We control the vertical. Do not attempt to adjust your television set.
OF course one could disagree with the specifics. The problem I have is that many many people who claim on some level a populist sentiment if for no other reason than to distance themselves from either major party, and label through which that populist sentiment is categorized is Libertarianism then that is what I have to use as some mental guidepost for what Libertarianism is. I don't quibble that a few vocal people may have appropriated the term, Libertarian. None the less if I hear the same strident rhetoric day after day peppered with a belief system I can only classify as a blend between Charles Lindburg's America First party and 19th century robber barons I have to conclude that this in fact is a representative sample of what that term Libertarian means. I need only turn on the radio and listen to a mouthpiece from the John Locke Institute state that:
Taxes are bad and should be eliminated regarldless of what they're for. The government has enough of our money now and should be happy we alllow them to have that.
We should use some of whatever tax dollars that are left to subsidize private religious education in the form of vouchers because paying for two systems will somehow magically crowd the public sector out.
Government bonds are bad because they ultimately lead to foreign investment in America's infrastructure. I'm still waiting for some factual evidence of this or even a statement of why it's bad on it's face. Debt is a product that this country manufactures and exports and exporting debt is always better than exporting jobs.
Hate Clinton in all his garb and splendor. 'Nuff said.
Guns are good, <more> gun laws are bad. Because...because.....because...well they just are the Constitution says so and there is some old guy somewhere in America I can get here on the radio to tell his story about how he foiled a home invasion with his Glock as proof.
Owing the UN a billion or so dollars is good because then we can strong arm them to do whatever we want. I might agree with this. If it's come that then we should just default and pull out.
NGO's form a secret shadow world government bent on domination through manipulation of world financial markets.
I could go on but why bother, just tune in to your local self proclaimed Libertarian radio talk show. If they don't represent you then you should call in and tell them that.
I think you proved my point. It's whatever you say it is and if somehow it doesn't represent the pure line of thinking then it must be misinformed, misguided or misrepresenting what it claims to be. Either way if an outsider comes into the tent looking for a reasonable summary of what Libertarianism is the message is so horribly garbled as to be meaningless.
Been saying that for years. My parents generation, the Tom Brokaw 'greatest' or the one just a few years younger was the recipient of more federal aid, social breaks, tax waivers, subsidized education then any other on the face of this earth. Ever. And to compound it saw their financial health by and large increase more and faster than any growth of the middle class in the history of civilization. The net increase in property values alone says that. These were the people who grew up hungry in the Depression and retired on the golf course on AOL stock- in large part thanks to an interventionist Federal government that bled money from 1945 to 1994. And in large part put in place by Eisenhower - a Republican. Now these same people, who as a group receive NOW, 10x more Federal money percapita than the children they purport to be so concerned with are chomping at the bit to exhaust and bankrupt the system in THEIR lifetime.
Libertarianism has come to mean whatever you want it to. It's inclusive of everything from the far right to the far left and if there is anything there you don't agree with just claim those other people are misguided. Honestly, is it simply entertainment or a real, thought out postion when Boortz says things like "maybe it's a mistake that women can vote". Or that 2 income households should be outlawed. Are we supposed to take seriously this altdotblackhelicopters thinking? When right wing self professed Libertarians claim on a show like Boortz or Limbaugh that those liberals in the "major media' secretly control what you see and hear, and it's evil I have to laugh.
Now maybe they don't represent what the rest of you consider mainstream Libertarianism but that's my point. Anyone from Ghengis Khan to Leon Trotsky can claim to be Libertarian. After all the "S" in Nazi was for "Socialism" - you can twist words to mean whatever you want. All I can tell you is that I live in a state where at one time Jesse Helms was considered the more liberal of two Senators and I've heard the self defined Libertarian rhetoric: anti gov't, pro-gun, eliminate the sep. of church and state, no immigrants, no taxation, eliminate all but the vestiges of a federal system, power to the states, responsibility to the individual, yah ya yah. It's Ruby Ridge with a soccer mom face. I read the book I saw the movie. It was by Leni Reifenstahl. Be afraid.
Can you imagine flying through the airport that's between my house and my job? How about pushing each other out of the way to launch and land? What are the effects of cutting each other off. Air-Rage?. Do they have running lights so they don't crash into each other in rush hour? Bad weather? How do you police them? Drunk drivers? What about the prop wash from the inevitable 6-fan 6 passenger SUC (sport utility copter)?
The cost of upgrading software in the corporate environ is at least 7-9x more than the cost of replacing hardware that is on a 3 year depreciation schedule. Mostly because of the labor involved. Even if you have a sophisticated ESD tool the work in packaging and testing the deployable bundles is quite high compared to the expense of writing off the old HW and shipping new. But that's not the problem. The problem is that many corps have SW maintenance agreements with VARs and resellers - not SW houses. What happens is that MS-Something gets deployed after much bloodshed. The next year the VAR comes back and 'suggests' that the customer now upgrade to MS-Something+1. Corp says yes because why else are they paying 15-18% year over year to maintain it if they're not going to upgrade and the VAR is probably telling the customer that if they wait another year they won't get the great price break they can ostensibly get now. After all they've paid for it already up front and the VAR won't be able to get favorable terms from MS a year after introduction and certainly can't skip a level in the MS mandated update cycle.
...Anyway.....
With each new turn of the crank comes a bundle of MS software that takes more and more hardware. More of everything. Office 2000 can't effectively run on a machine with <128MB RAM, 400MB of disk and at least a 500Mhz CPU. At least not with the performance expectation in a corporate environment that the customer has come to expect fomr the last version.
A couple-three iterations of this and you replacing the hardware faster than the depreciation schedule and so it goes. The hardware upgrade-replacement arms rae goes out of control.
W/O wings, bumbler that I am.
Kind of the way that Mercedes-Benz is an average car in Germany but roughly twice as expensive in the US.
Just make sure the next version of MS-OS requires a 128bit, 9 stage pipelined, superscalar, 6 ops/click, 1Ghz or better, quarter or half Gig of memory, a new video design, a new HCL, new different board connectors, a 'better' bus design, a proprietary DSP interface, host processing everything and you will insure that people will buy new PC's - Afterall what kind of performance can you expect out of Word with only a Pentium2-266? Not much.