Fair enough - although I think per capita GDP is probably pretty misleading when you have a distribution of wealth like Saudi Arabia has. There seem to be indications of significant poverty in Saudi Arabia, and 2004 estimates of unemployment are between 13-25%, which is pretty staggering. It's also worth mentioning that per capita income has dropped dramatically (300%-ish) in the last 20 years, so the case for broad, individual wealth in Saudi Arabia just doesn't seem to be there.
Even so, in the case of the Middle East, I do believe that the gaps in wealth and quality of life are certainly a catalyst for extremism. I'll admit that by itself it doesn't explain the behavior, but I would also argue that you would not see fundamentalism flourish if there were a broad sense of individual wealth. Having a personal stake in your nation's stability (something which we do enjoy in the US) naturally checks radical behavior.
But I do get your point - poverty alone doesn't breed extremists. That much is true, because there are plenty of impoverished nations that don't exhibit fundamentalist behavior. Nonetheless, the (original) point remains (by your own example) that extremist behavior is not characteristic of Muslim nations, and I think the point also remains that, based on their own history, Christians are equally capable of violence and persecution ('yes, but who have we persecuted lately?' doesn't count).
That's not meant to be a dig on either religion - just a candid recognition that people are the same no matter where you go. Given the economic conditions and the degree of religious indoctrination (of Christianity or Islam) you see in the Middle East, I think you could easily work up a violent fundamentalist movement right here in the United States.
I don't think being poor makes you do bad things and being rich makes you do good things. I just think that being poor means you have much less to lose in the event that you decide to do bad things. Subsequently, you don't necessarily get that same 'is this really worth going to prison for?' sensation that a relatively wealthy person would get just moments before setting fire to an embassy.
It certainly doesn't mean that poor people don't do good things or that rich people don't do bad things. It's just the natural deterrent that exists when you have a large middle class that's doing well enough to not want to rock the boat.
I think that people are people wherever you go. It doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a Muslim, and both religions have had their ugly moments. The key difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists right now is that Christain fundamentalists typically have a pretty decent quality of life, and Islamic fundamentalists don't. The Christian fundamentalists are capable of the same self-righteous rampaging as the Islamic fundamentalists, but the Christian fundamentalists have so much to lose right now, it seems unimaginable to behave that way (who can afford to burn down a building and go to jail when they're working off that second mortgage?). If you took all of the wealth in the US and Europe and handed it over to the Middle East, I have a feeling that you'd soon see an awful lot of poor, desperate, angry Christians burning flags in the street while a bunch of well-fed, well-clothed Muslim families watched from their living rooms and wondered what in the hell could possibly make those Christian lunatics so rabid.
Fundamentalists of any religion are crazy, and poor, desperate fundamentalists of any religion are dangerous.
...why it's Google's job to take China to task for human rights? Doesn't it seem a little unfair, given we as a nation completely and utterly condone their practice implicitly by importing billions of dollars worth of goods and permanantly extending MFN status and whatnot? If Congress is so righteous about China, let's see some legislation. Oh, you mean it's easier and safer to have public hearings and just blame some tech companies? Okay, yeah, let's do that instead.
Seriously, am I the only one who finds it the peak of hypocrisy to see the legislative body of a lone superpower blaming Google for not doing enough to bring about human rights reform in China?
I'll second that. Over the years I've had to write a handful of small web tools to get things done around the office, and my biggest lament was always that data entry really and truly sucks with forms that have to submit and reload. Then I read about this ajax stuff a while back and retooled a few interfaces to use it instead. Now, my whites are whiter and my colors are brighter, I get better gas milage, my lawn is thicker and greener, and my golf game is better than ever.
Actually, none of that other stuff happened, but the data entry interfaces are much, much more usable than they used to be. Three cheers for new stuff!
Just wait until companies have to insure themselves against this type of liability. Who gets to sue MS when there's a bug? Everybody? Yeah, that's a good plan. Making an individual (or a small team of individuals) responsible is an even better idea. Developers would have to insure themselves just to work in the field. But hey, if you want building a multimedia player to be as expensive and drawn out as building a bridge, then by all means, let's tighten those screws.
Or maybe we could just accept that software is extremely dynamic and complex, let companies patch their problems as quickly as they can, and let consumers vote with their wallets on how important security is to them.
Then just to have it said, I totally dig my Tivo. I think the price is reasonable, and the interface is fantastic. My wife set it up all by herself, which I assure you is a ringing endorsement for its ease of use. I suppose I could build a MythTV box (and it did occur to me to just do that), but I feel like I'm getting my money's worth and that Tivo deserves some reward for being the guys who effectively reinvented the TV for us. As long as they treat me fairly, I won't look to replace them with a DIY alternative. In short, I've got zero complaints and plenty of praise for Tivo, and it's welcome to sit on top of my entertainment center for as long as it remains a great product at a reasonable price.
So that's my commercial for Tivo. Feel free to fast-forward through this comment and expedite your return to our regularly-scheduled programming.:-)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?
on
Dell Dumping Itanium
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We buy a lot of Dell hardware, and we've asked this question every single year for the last 3 years. Every time, the answer has been that AMD can't provide chips fast enough to make them viable for distribution. Basically, they don't feel like they'd be able to meet demand, and they'd have customers waiting on hardware that may or may not be coming some time soon. That's what they tell us, at least.
While it's pretty hard to feel sorry for a guy who just made $200M, it's even harder to feel sorry for the production company that pulled down $4B and doesn't want to make good on the terms of the contract they signed.
Besides, I only want $1M, and nobody feels sorry for me:-)
It seems almost reasonable at first to say that as long as it's for the 'public good', then it's probably okay for the city to take this land. Justice O'Conner's dissent very clearly states what is wrong with that thinking, though:
"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."
In short, the ruling today has decided that being in the 'public good' is simply a matter of being 'generally kind of better than what was there before, maybe' (although specifically, they find that there is no burden on the developer to ensure that the 'public good' is ever actually realized).
Basically, private property owners like you and me get the shaft when developers decide they can do something more publicly beneificial with our land than we can. Totally nuts.
I read this on CNN this morning, and it made absolutely no sense at all. People who send spam aren't running SMTP servers, they're connecting to YOUR SMTP server. So the plan is to connect back to their hypothetical SMTP server and send the bad message back to them? The best you're going to do is flood some source IP's firewall with ill-fated connection requests. If they're not running a firewall, then you'll even get a reset back. Maybe they figure if you have enough people sending small packets to a single host, it'll shut them down even without the actual mail delivery.
Kind of reminds me of EFNet in the early days, actually.
No, a fitting tribute would be for the asteroid now to hit Earth and destroy it. The space would subsequently be used to make way for an Intergalactic Bypass.
All of this is true, and there's really no defending the dude that broke the NDA. But Anubis333 does have a point, too. Part of marketing is corporate image, and if Apple's image is 'petty' or 'childish', then that can speak just as loudly as any commercial.
Apple is certainly within their rights to sue this guy, and they have every right to guard specs about their new products any way they see fit. Along the same lines, folks like the parent poster are equally free to find that behavior a little unattractive, and if it impacts their buying decisions, maybe that opinion matters a little bit to Apple, too.
We use Oracle behind our websites, and on all of them together, we probably get 500,000 hits a week.
Oh yeah, I forgot - not just Oracle... Oracle RAC.
Yeah...
I think the same thing that's happening to Sun is going to happen to Oracle (though I admit both of them do have excellent products). People don't really know how much database they need, and they're just starting to realize that there are scads of mid-sized solutions out there that will cover 90% of the market. The same thing happened to Sun with Linux -- once everybody realized they could run their websites and services on a $2k commodity x86 box, they stopped buying $20k Sun servers.
Sun is for the very high end. Oracle is also for the very high end. For the small and midsize solutions, which I think includes most everybody that isn't a bank, Linux and Postgres are perfect. And, of course, the price is right.
I know some people like it and some people hate it, but Consumer Reports puts out a car buying guide each year that actually does compile some useful information on which cars are reliable and which ones totally suck. They base their information on surveys and give you an idea of how many folks report reliability problems with the different components of their cars. They also have an annual list of best bets and worst bets for used cars that includes year, make, and model.
That having been said, I don't actually subscribe. Still, I do always find a copy somewhere and take a quick glance when I'm looking to buy a car. So far, they've been pretty accurate (in my experience).
No doubt, everything you're saying here is 100% true. Whether or not the world will ever be unified enough to focus their collective attention on a problem like this is way up in the air. Still, it doesn't take a unified world to accomplish something great, and we'll probably still be fighting disease and poverty the same day we begin colonizing another planet (assuming it ever happens, of course).
Purely from a survival perspective, it makes the most sense to attack the colonization problem as early as possible in hopes of finding a solution before the statistical inevitability occurs. The more practical question of whether or not we can, or even deserve to find a solution to that problem is, like you suggest, open for a considerable amount of debate.
I agree, we definitely could go a long way to defending the planet from these types of events, and it's certainly not a bad idea to pursue that. But in the end, it comes back to all of our eggs being in one basket. It's hard to comprehend, much less respond to every potential threat that might come along and wipe out the planet. As Mr. Miyagi says, 'best defense - no be there'.
I'd also go so far as to say that colonizing other planets is now the most important thing mankind can achieve. Purely from the perspective of preserving our species, it's the next critical step. If you consider how susceptible we are not only to external threats (meteors, epidemics, space locusts, etc), but also just the day-to-day concerns that we might accidentally annihilate ourselves with the war-de-jour, the best way to increase our chances for survival is to spread out a little bit and prevent an accident like that from doing us all in at once. Bottom line is, if you're all about doing something great for mankind, this is a really important problem to solve.
Think of it as a consumer-side reinterpretation of RedHat's business model. If we had to pay RHEL prices for every linux installation, we would either not use linux, or we would use another distribution of linux. In either case, RedHat would get zero dollars and zero cents out of the deal.
Whitebox and CentOS allow us to run a homogeneous linux environment (which is important to many companies) without having to pay a premium, and that allows us to do business with RedHat for our critical production servers. We pay for a supported, certified environment where it's important, and we pay traditional linux prices ($0.00) where it's not. RedHat certainly gets some money, but only for exactly what they add to linux - enterprise certification and support.
So the answer, I suppose, is that it's the combination of requirements like ours plus the fact that they started off with GPL software that makes RedHat's business model feasible in a mid-size shop like ours. Change either one of those two things, and RedHat simply would not have a place on our network.
Amen to that -- when RedHat announced that Enterprise Linux was going to be $350/yr minimum, I thought they were nuts. So instead of deploying a lot of expensive RHEL boxes with recurring annual fees, we only used RHEL for the mission-critical systems that required supported configurations. For everything else, we used Whitebox. In the end, I'd say maybe 20% of our linux boxes are subscription-based RHEL installations, and everything else is Whitebox. When you average it all out and factor in the bulk licensing we get from Dell for buying multiple RHEL subscriptions, our linux servers end up costing us about $70/yr a pop, and that ain't bad at all.
And don't forget this little gem:
For being a self-admitted 'Fake News' program, The Daily Show really has had pretty good coverage over the last year. They obviously lean left, but when they start putting clips of speeches up against each other, it's pretty difficult to refute some of what they're saying. They also pull down some amazing interviews, not the least of which was John Kerry himself a few weeks back. John McCain has been on several times, Ed Gillespie more than once, and even Bill Clinton did an interview with them. I'd take that over CNN or Fox any day of the week.
Hey, you forgot to wave your wand and run up the number of supported 'layers of information'. Fix it, quickly, before another ski resort's sales are lost to this shameful inadequacy.
Slashdot Mirror
\d\a\t\a
There, that took like 5 seconds. And I didn't even read the book.
Fair enough - although I think per capita GDP is probably pretty misleading when you have a distribution of wealth like Saudi Arabia has. There seem to be indications of significant poverty in Saudi Arabia, and 2004 estimates of unemployment are between 13-25%, which is pretty staggering. It's also worth mentioning that per capita income has dropped dramatically (300%-ish) in the last 20 years, so the case for broad, individual wealth in Saudi Arabia just doesn't seem to be there.
Even so, in the case of the Middle East, I do believe that the gaps in wealth and quality of life are certainly a catalyst for extremism. I'll admit that by itself it doesn't explain the behavior, but I would also argue that you would not see fundamentalism flourish if there were a broad sense of individual wealth. Having a personal stake in your nation's stability (something which we do enjoy in the US) naturally checks radical behavior.
But I do get your point - poverty alone doesn't breed extremists. That much is true, because there are plenty of impoverished nations that don't exhibit fundamentalist behavior. Nonetheless, the (original) point remains (by your own example) that extremist behavior is not characteristic of Muslim nations, and I think the point also remains that, based on their own history, Christians are equally capable of violence and persecution ('yes, but who have we persecuted lately?' doesn't count).
That's not meant to be a dig on either religion - just a candid recognition that people are the same no matter where you go. Given the economic conditions and the degree of religious indoctrination (of Christianity or Islam) you see in the Middle East, I think you could easily work up a violent fundamentalist movement right here in the United States.
I don't think being poor makes you do bad things and being rich makes you do good things. I just think that being poor means you have much less to lose in the event that you decide to do bad things. Subsequently, you don't necessarily get that same 'is this really worth going to prison for?' sensation that a relatively wealthy person would get just moments before setting fire to an embassy.
It certainly doesn't mean that poor people don't do good things or that rich people don't do bad things. It's just the natural deterrent that exists when you have a large middle class that's doing well enough to not want to rock the boat.
I think that people are people wherever you go. It doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a Muslim, and both religions have had their ugly moments. The key difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists right now is that Christain fundamentalists typically have a pretty decent quality of life, and Islamic fundamentalists don't. The Christian fundamentalists are capable of the same self-righteous rampaging as the Islamic fundamentalists, but the Christian fundamentalists have so much to lose right now, it seems unimaginable to behave that way (who can afford to burn down a building and go to jail when they're working off that second mortgage?). If you took all of the wealth in the US and Europe and handed it over to the Middle East, I have a feeling that you'd soon see an awful lot of poor, desperate, angry Christians burning flags in the street while a bunch of well-fed, well-clothed Muslim families watched from their living rooms and wondered what in the hell could possibly make those Christian lunatics so rabid.
Fundamentalists of any religion are crazy, and poor, desperate fundamentalists of any religion are dangerous.
...why it's Google's job to take China to task for human rights? Doesn't it seem a little unfair, given we as a nation completely and utterly condone their practice implicitly by importing billions of dollars worth of goods and permanantly extending MFN status and whatnot? If Congress is so righteous about China, let's see some legislation. Oh, you mean it's easier and safer to have public hearings and just blame some tech companies? Okay, yeah, let's do that instead.
Seriously, am I the only one who finds it the peak of hypocrisy to see the legislative body of a lone superpower blaming Google for not doing enough to bring about human rights reform in China?
I'll second that. Over the years I've had to write a handful of small web tools to get things done around the office, and my biggest lament was always that data entry really and truly sucks with forms that have to submit and reload. Then I read about this ajax stuff a while back and retooled a few interfaces to use it instead. Now, my whites are whiter and my colors are brighter, I get better gas milage, my lawn is thicker and greener, and my golf game is better than ever.
Actually, none of that other stuff happened, but the data entry interfaces are much, much more usable than they used to be. Three cheers for new stuff!
Just wait until companies have to insure themselves against this type of liability. Who gets to sue MS when there's a bug? Everybody? Yeah, that's a good plan. Making an individual (or a small team of individuals) responsible is an even better idea. Developers would have to insure themselves just to work in the field. But hey, if you want building a multimedia player to be as expensive and drawn out as building a bridge, then by all means, let's tighten those screws.
Or maybe we could just accept that software is extremely dynamic and complex, let companies patch their problems as quickly as they can, and let consumers vote with their wallets on how important security is to them.
Then just to have it said, I totally dig my Tivo. I think the price is reasonable, and the interface is fantastic. My wife set it up all by herself, which I assure you is a ringing endorsement for its ease of use. I suppose I could build a MythTV box (and it did occur to me to just do that), but I feel like I'm getting my money's worth and that Tivo deserves some reward for being the guys who effectively reinvented the TV for us. As long as they treat me fairly, I won't look to replace them with a DIY alternative. In short, I've got zero complaints and plenty of praise for Tivo, and it's welcome to sit on top of my entertainment center for as long as it remains a great product at a reasonable price.
:-)
So that's my commercial for Tivo. Feel free to fast-forward through this comment and expedite your return to our regularly-scheduled programming.
We buy a lot of Dell hardware, and we've asked this question every single year for the last 3 years. Every time, the answer has been that AMD can't provide chips fast enough to make them viable for distribution. Basically, they don't feel like they'd be able to meet demand, and they'd have customers waiting on hardware that may or may not be coming some time soon. That's what they tell us, at least.
It'll bring a whole new meaning to the term 'next hop'
I don't think I have 14 speakers in my entire house, and I'm counting both alarm clocks.
While it's pretty hard to feel sorry for a guy who just made $200M, it's even harder to feel sorry for the production company that pulled down $4B and doesn't want to make good on the terms of the contract they signed.
:-)
Besides, I only want $1M, and nobody feels sorry for me
In short, the ruling today has decided that being in the 'public good' is simply a matter of being 'generally kind of better than what was there before, maybe' (although specifically, they find that there is no burden on the developer to ensure that the 'public good' is ever actually realized).
Basically, private property owners like you and me get the shaft when developers decide they can do something more publicly beneificial with our land than we can. Totally nuts.
I read this on CNN this morning, and it made absolutely no sense at all. People who send spam aren't running SMTP servers, they're connecting to YOUR SMTP server. So the plan is to connect back to their hypothetical SMTP server and send the bad message back to them? The best you're going to do is flood some source IP's firewall with ill-fated connection requests. If they're not running a firewall, then you'll even get a reset back. Maybe they figure if you have enough people sending small packets to a single host, it'll shut them down even without the actual mail delivery.
Kind of reminds me of EFNet in the early days, actually.
No, a fitting tribute would be for the asteroid now to hit Earth and destroy it. The space would subsequently be used to make way for an Intergalactic Bypass.
All of this is true, and there's really no defending the dude that broke the NDA. But Anubis333 does have a point, too. Part of marketing is corporate image, and if Apple's image is 'petty' or 'childish', then that can speak just as loudly as any commercial.
Apple is certainly within their rights to sue this guy, and they have every right to guard specs about their new products any way they see fit. Along the same lines, folks like the parent poster are equally free to find that behavior a little unattractive, and if it impacts their buying decisions, maybe that opinion matters a little bit to Apple, too.
I'll second that.
We use Oracle behind our websites, and on all of them together, we probably get 500,000 hits a week.
Oh yeah, I forgot - not just Oracle... Oracle RAC.
Yeah...
I think the same thing that's happening to Sun is going to happen to Oracle (though I admit both of them do have excellent products). People don't really know how much database they need, and they're just starting to realize that there are scads of mid-sized solutions out there that will cover 90% of the market. The same thing happened to Sun with Linux -- once everybody realized they could run their websites and services on a $2k commodity x86 box, they stopped buying $20k Sun servers.
Sun is for the very high end. Oracle is also for the very high end. For the small and midsize solutions, which I think includes most everybody that isn't a bank, Linux and Postgres are perfect. And, of course, the price is right.
I know some people like it and some people hate it, but Consumer Reports puts out a car buying guide each year that actually does compile some useful information on which cars are reliable and which ones totally suck. They base their information on surveys and give you an idea of how many folks report reliability problems with the different components of their cars. They also have an annual list of best bets and worst bets for used cars that includes year, make, and model.
That having been said, I don't actually subscribe. Still, I do always find a copy somewhere and take a quick glance when I'm looking to buy a car. So far, they've been pretty accurate (in my experience).
No doubt, everything you're saying here is 100% true. Whether or not the world will ever be unified enough to focus their collective attention on a problem like this is way up in the air. Still, it doesn't take a unified world to accomplish something great, and we'll probably still be fighting disease and poverty the same day we begin colonizing another planet (assuming it ever happens, of course).
Purely from a survival perspective, it makes the most sense to attack the colonization problem as early as possible in hopes of finding a solution before the statistical inevitability occurs. The more practical question of whether or not we can, or even deserve to find a solution to that problem is, like you suggest, open for a considerable amount of debate.
I agree, we definitely could go a long way to defending the planet from these types of events, and it's certainly not a bad idea to pursue that. But in the end, it comes back to all of our eggs being in one basket. It's hard to comprehend, much less respond to every potential threat that might come along and wipe out the planet. As Mr. Miyagi says, 'best defense - no be there'.
I'd also go so far as to say that colonizing other planets is now the most important thing mankind can achieve. Purely from the perspective of preserving our species, it's the next critical step. If you consider how susceptible we are not only to external threats (meteors, epidemics, space locusts, etc), but also just the day-to-day concerns that we might accidentally annihilate ourselves with the war-de-jour, the best way to increase our chances for survival is to spread out a little bit and prevent an accident like that from doing us all in at once. Bottom line is, if you're all about doing something great for mankind, this is a really important problem to solve.
...but we just use it to set users on fire.
Think of it as a consumer-side reinterpretation of RedHat's business model. If we had to pay RHEL prices for every linux installation, we would either not use linux, or we would use another distribution of linux. In either case, RedHat would get zero dollars and zero cents out of the deal.
Whitebox and CentOS allow us to run a homogeneous linux environment (which is important to many companies) without having to pay a premium, and that allows us to do business with RedHat for our critical production servers. We pay for a supported, certified environment where it's important, and we pay traditional linux prices ($0.00) where it's not. RedHat certainly gets some money, but only for exactly what they add to linux - enterprise certification and support.
So the answer, I suppose, is that it's the combination of requirements like ours plus the fact that they started off with GPL software that makes RedHat's business model feasible in a mid-size shop like ours. Change either one of those two things, and RedHat simply would not have a place on our network.
Amen to that -- when RedHat announced that Enterprise Linux was going to be $350/yr minimum, I thought they were nuts. So instead of deploying a lot of expensive RHEL boxes with recurring annual fees, we only used RHEL for the mission-critical systems that required supported configurations. For everything else, we used Whitebox. In the end, I'd say maybe 20% of our linux boxes are subscription-based RHEL installations, and everything else is Whitebox. When you average it all out and factor in the bulk licensing we get from Dell for buying multiple RHEL subscriptions, our linux servers end up costing us about $70/yr a pop, and that ain't bad at all.
And don't forget this little gem: For being a self-admitted 'Fake News' program, The Daily Show really has had pretty good coverage over the last year. They obviously lean left, but when they start putting clips of speeches up against each other, it's pretty difficult to refute some of what they're saying. They also pull down some amazing interviews, not the least of which was John Kerry himself a few weeks back. John McCain has been on several times, Ed Gillespie more than once, and even Bill Clinton did an interview with them. I'd take that over CNN or Fox any day of the week.
Hey, you forgot to wave your wand and run up the number of supported 'layers of information'. Fix it, quickly, before another ski resort's sales are lost to this shameful inadequacy.