Well 60% of websites are hosted in the U.S. And nearly 100% of bank transactions go through the U.S. You may have a local bank that is used through a website, but chances are that bank is owned by a parent bank in the U.S. So if the world decides to run off on their own, they essentially have set up a brand new infastructure (not physical, but dns servers and stuff, or at least reconfigure), modify certain pieces of software, set up the first international tax (a very bad thing), decide what is allowed and what isn't and who gets control of what and how. Mind you that this will be a mind numbingly slow process as you have to get 190 nations to agree on every little thing like should "Sex" or "Democracy" be allowed in domain names. The truth is, about 70% of the nations in the U.N. would prefer that words like that are banned. Hell, even London is trying to make relgious jokes illegal. So I do hope the U.N. tries to cut itself off from the U.S's internet infastructure. I hope you enjoy your international taxes, your censorship, and the decade long period it takes for all the nations to agree on anything. Then factor in the large amounts of corruption rampant through the U.N. The truth is, itd be a mess and the U.S. is one of the few remaining truly free countries and is probably the best candidate to keep control. Not to mention, the internet is very dynamic and requires fairly quick responses to issues... the U.N. is not exactly known for being quick so at least with just the U.S. in control, decisions can be made. Other countries need to get over themselves, they aren't entitled to anything... you only fear what we have because of what you would do with it if you yourself had it. This whole issue is absurd. Regards, Steve
You are the dumbest CS professor I've ever heard. Yes, kids get benefits from technology. They have access to more information and they can experience things with computers that they couldn't normally. In addition, if you are taught to program a computer, you kind of have your own little universe in which you control everything. Do you think the hordes of computer related fields today came out of thin air? People had to be comfortable with computers becfore they worked with computers, and introducing computers in school achieved that.Even for people who didn't go into a technology field, when they entered the business world they weren't fearful of these machines and what they could do, or if they'd take over their jobs. Getting people familiar with the technology is the biggest key to the success of the technology... otherwise people fear what they aren't familiar with and reject it. Computers play an intelgral part in today's society. We would *not* be where we are without them. Sure money for teachers, etc.. sounds good, but there already is that and if there isn't enough it doesn't matter... this laptop is still important. The nice folks from MIT probably can't afford to send a few million over to other countries for education, but they can afford to design a computer that is extremely cheap so that when the money for teachers comes from some where else, and those teachers wish to teach some form of modern technology, they can do so at a more affordable price. How the hell do you expect any civilization to be brought up to 21st century standards when they don't have computers or fear them because they've never used them before? You just outright disregard the benefits of the computers, what an outrageous and ignorant position you took. These guys are helping how they can, its just not by directly donating cash. Regards, Steve
There are legal requirements that must be followed and most countries have really shitty laws in that regard. America isn't the most popular kid in the class because everyone else is wishing they were them, its called jealousy, get over yourself. Whenever another country needs a favor, they always come to America first. You're probably in the same group of people that wants the U.N. to control domain servers and set precedent for an international tax, not to mention extreme censorcism of the net according to the agendas of not only the highly corrupt U.N. but also by many of the individual nation. Most countries are far worse off than the U.S., and they just kind of ignore their own problems while laughing at the U.S. The funny thing is that they just keep getting worse while the U.S. makes real progress in areas that matter. Regards, Steve
Being more efficient will only get us so far. And as far as continuing the species goes... the only reason you were born was to continue the species. Its what you are designed to do, everything else you do in life simply supports that goal. The only reason anything is born it to continue the species. Animals don't adapt so they live longer, they adapt so that they can effectively give birth and ensure the security of their species. If one of the side effects of that is a longer life span then so be it. Regardless, when it comes down to it, your whole existence is for nothing but the contiuation of the species. Humans being capable of intelligent thought are redefining that a bit, but in any other animal that is life. Not to metion, its only time to go when we say so. If we are successful in avoiding a catastrophe, then it obviously wasn't our time. There is no such thing as fate, we are in control of our destiny. Methods are being researched for mass food production, and we have a better handle on disease than ever before. In the next few decades you'll see nanobots and other technologies start to let humans self heal, and quickly. With most of the advances that science is making right now, in a few decades we'll be pretty well off. Don't be selfish and just sit around waiting for our species to die off... I'm sure the billions of unborn children would hate to know that people think like that. Regards, Steve
a) We need to learn to use other planets as resources so that when the population of earth is say... 16 billion people and the average life expectancy is say 5 times higher than it is now or even the possibility of death being a thing of the past, that we can ship people off into the universe like its no big deal.
b) Diversify, diversify, diversify. Right now we keep all our eggs in one basket. One meteor, one huge earthquake or mega volcanic eruption could wipe out anywhere from 25% to 95% after all of the side effects are taken into account (i.e. tsunamis and climate changes). By living on other planets the chances of our extinction as a species becomes much smaller.
c) Exploration and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Sure we can do most of that stuff with robots, but what fun is that... and while living in space we may learn a thing or two about the robustness (or lack thereof) of our bodies and ability to adapt. Perhaps new methods of farming or food creation will become the norm. There are many other benefits but I won't list them now.
d) Like it or not, not only are we an intelligent species, but a moral one. The intelligence factor leads us to dominating our surrounding environment, the problem is we are smart enough to not be happy with what we have and instead modify it to our needs (I see nothing wrong with this, we are a part of nature, whatever we do is natural despite however many animals may die, even if we do it in a viral manner). As a result of this extra level of comfort we tend to take up more space and consume more resources. We also tend to live longer and longer... eventually reaching the point of no death according to many in the sciences. This is where the moral part kicks in... we won't enforce population control, we won't just start killing people for the sake of killing people. Therefore our population is bound to spiral out of control at some point within the next century or so.
Any one of those points is worth sending civilizations into space. Regards, Steve
Actually, my understanding is that this shortage is being caused by two factors. A) Market demand for the XBox 360 is not as high as it was estimated a year ago it would be and B) The XBox started being manufactured late in the game, but rather than push back the release, they are just releasing less until more can be made. Regards, Steve
You sir are on crack. Stop spreading FUD. There is one court case about religion in science class and the religious folks will probably lose. Other than that science is alive and well in the U.S. You saying otherwise simply proves that you aren't apart of the scientific community and get all your facts from biased and sensationalist media sources. This is an international effort, it doesn't matter where the telescope is built. We use particle accelerators not within out borders too, big deal. I'm not going to argue any further with you though because you tend to have absurd extremist views, and are stubborn in your ignorant position. Its okay, you'll be left behind while everyone moves foward and your stuck in the back doing nothing but complaining. Regards, Steve
Err actually, the stock has been downgraded by several investment firms. Its expected drop a bit further even with the restructure. This will be like the 7th restructuring Novell has done in a little over a decade, if this doesn't pan out I don't think anyone will want their stock. Regards, Steve
Perl's regular expressions are Turing complete... has nothing to do with being a good programming language or not. Visual Basic is *bad*, basic in general is bad for the brain. As Dijkstra himself said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." I would prefer Linux's userbase be smaller, yet filled with higher quality programmers who actually know how their code affects the system and have somewhat of an understanding of what programming does, then to have hoards of visual basic "programmers". VB.net has apparently been made more like C# which isn't a bad thing, but VB in general is a bad thing, its not designed for maintainability and it teaches bad habits. Just like we try to teach children good habits, even though those good habits may take some extra initial effort to get a hold of, we shouldn't just let things like visual basic go on... if we can stop that maddness, by all means we must. Regards, Steve
I like the way openoffice.org looks. I like the fonts. I like the fonts of linux overall better then the window's counterparts, in particular the bitstream font package. I like my fonts anti-aliased, which you for some ungodly reason turn off. You sure you don't just have vision problems or something? The one thing I think linux has had going for it for at least 2 or 3 years now is the superior font rendering over windows. It is much more painful reading fonts under windows. So I guess this means that your oppinion is just that, an oppinion. I like the way linux looks, I hope it isn't changed. Windows is horrific, and I'm not that big of a fan of OS X either. Regards, Steve
Red Hat has been shipping Xen enabled kernels for months now in Fedora and I believe they are available for RHEL too. They have had quite a few people dedicated to working on Xen for some time, and that is a *good* thing . Virtualization is the future, and its good that a big company like Red Hat is pushing it further. Xen and SELinux are two killer technologies that Red Hat has really made viable, so kudos to them for keeping open source on the forefront of innovative (or at least uncommon, but much needed) technologies. For a truncated list of other cool technologies Red Hat is pushing in OSS, check out the Fedora projects page, you'll see virtualization, and SELinux in addition to the directory server, stateless linux, and system tap (our answer to Solaris' dtrace, granted it still is under heavy development and is far from ready for prime time) Regards, Steve
Those are nice features, but *nix still had MS beat on several other fronts. The fact that MS still inconveniences its users with defragmenting says plenty about the situation, but filesystems like ReaiserFS and EXT3 still have plenty of other features that MS needs to implement before we worry about having to catch up to them.Regards, Steve
I think most people'e problems with ID is that it is just plain non-sense being taught, where as those other theories that you mention are plausible can be tested, observed, or in the worst case at least studied to see if evidence and/or history supports your assertation. There is no such evidence in ID, its saying "You're theory has a little hole over there that doesn't completely solve the problem so instead its all wrong and you must just assume that everything magically came into existence against all natural law." (btw, i disagree about the "hole" mentioned, as I've studied evolution in both an academic environment and on personal time and any holes mentioned by ID advocates have always had answers, including the eye). I'm a Roman Catholic, I believe in God, but evolution *is* the way we were created, to anyone who has actually studied the science it makes sense just as the laws of gravity do. Please prove to me that Santa Claus doesn't exist (you can't), please prove to me that gravity will remain in affect 1 second from now so that if I drop a pen I can be certain it will fall. You can't disprove Santa, and you can't 100% prove gravity will still be in affect 1 second from now, but using a little common sense, observational evidence, and testing you can be pretty certain that Santa doesn't exist and the gravity will continue to be there. The evidence for evolution is just as strong, if not stronger, than that of gravity, look at the facts, take a class at your local college if you have to. Regards, Steve
Organisms decompose very quickly.Regardless, there are literally hundreds of thousands of transitional species and fossils. Study the damn science before you assert dumb ass claims that were made by your local lunatic religious person.
For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)
Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.
is a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. Please everyone stop spreading misinformation, this I.D. stuff is getting out of hand. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is. Regards, Steve
Except that if you RTFA and looked at the history of the NSA, they've been pretty up front about security. They don't tell us everything they know, but what they do tell us has always been credible and useful (i.e. making SHA more secure without actually telling us how it worked). This guide is for everyone, including securing government systems, those same systems that may need to securely exchange data with the NSA, Pentagon, White House, etc... The NSA has every reason to make this guide as accurate as possible. The NSA's job is not only collecting data, but also securing the nation's data and this fits perfectly within that realm. Regards, Steve
Re:Is DOD screwing up great NSA plans?
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Patents vs. Secrecy
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· Score: 2, Informative
The NSA, despite being secretive as hell, is one of the few government agencies that has consistently been upfront with the public. Multiple times they've found weaknesses in algorithms and fixed them, never giving an explanation, just a fix. In some cases it was years later that anyone started figuring out how exactly the changes worked to make the algorithm more secure, and some modifications still aren't understood by the public, but its been shown that they all increase the overall security of the algorithms in question. The NSA has motivation to make these as secure as possible simply because they also use these algorithms to securely exchange information among contractors and other agencies. I've read before that the NSA is as much as 50 to 100 years more advanced in mathematics than the rest of the world, now I don't know how accurate this is, but judging from their history it probably isn't too far off. Regards, Steve
Red Hat's market cap is 25% higher than Novell's and they are consistently reported to outperform. Novell is highly mismanage and consistently reported to underperform. Also, last I checked IBM had more contracts with Red Hat than they did with Novell, granted that may have changed. Regards, Steve
This isn't FUD. Novell has been underperforming for years now. Its investors have been clamoring for massive layoffs and a major revampment. They wany Novell to sell off every thing that isn't profitable, and unless SuSE starts brining in a lot more cash, they *will* sell off that division. This isn't hard to believe either, look at Novell's history... they've always just moved from one tech to the other as each of their attempts failed. They are running out of the piles of cash aquired in the mid to late 90s and all the major investors are getting peeved.
Novell's management is one of the most disfunctional units in any major corporation, its great that they bought SuSE and all, except that they haven't done anything with the product since they've bought it. Sure they hired Nat, and he's done some cool things, but when it comes down to it, Novell is still testing the waters with Linux and right now its not looking too good for them. Don't be surprised if they sell off that unit. Last quarter they only earned 2 million dollars, and now they are spending 200 million to buyback stock and bump up their stock prices so investors are a little happier.
Investors have also already pushed Novell to sell off its consulting unit. Now they are also laying off at a minimum of 120 people in Europe. Most investment firms predict Novell will continue to underperform for sometime. Novell bought SuSE because it was on the market to be purchased and it was fairly cheap, Red Hat was offered the chance to buy SuSE first but they declined. Red Hat, unlike Novell, is riddled with major OSS advocates from the top down (i.e. the guy who wrote the first gnu c++ compiler is their VP of OSS affairs) and they believe in healthy competition, especially since with OSS everyone benefits from eachother's work, also it would have made them look bad as being a monopoly on the market. Novell saw a cheap way to test if Linux was profitable and its turning out to not be the golden goose that they needed. Novell is literally just a big mess and its been that way for over half a decade. They *can't* keep at this pace for another year or two. Regards, Steve
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
Fedora has kind of side stepped this problem with GCJ. All of OpenOffice's Java stuff runs natively, and despite the fact that GCJ doesn't optimize Java code as good as GCC optimizes C code, it still runs blazingly faster than on systems where a JVM is necessary for full functionality. Pretty nifty if you ask me. Regards, Steve
No, the problem here is price. Its $1/per hour/per cpu. If I have something that takes on average 60 days to calculate using a 20 node cluster and I do this yearly, it will cost me $28,800 per year to use Sun's grid. I could buy a 25 to 30 node grid for that kind of money with comparable node to node performance. So I'd be getting more nodes to work with and I would have a cluster that can be used for probably the next 5 years of that same computation, and during the times where its not needed for that computation it could be used in other areas. Also, it could be in a nice little rack or two in the corner of the office somewhere, so it taking up space is not an issue. The cost savings, plus benefits, of keeping it in house is astounding, just from raw hardware costs you save $115,200. Both clusters would have to be administered, but you have a much higher level of control in house, not to mention porting is probably easier and you can be certain that you won't have to port again for at least 5 years. In order for Sun to make this cost effective for anyone, they need to make it outrageosly cheap, like 1 or 2 cents per hour per cpu, and that still might not be enough to overlook the advantages of having an in house cluster. Regards, Steve
You've never used Fedora I guess. It currently is ranked 3rd in linux servers after RHEL and Debian. It surpassed SuSE in a little over a year and is close to passing Debian (All according to netcraft). Fedora is IMHO the best distro on the market, and quite frankly the only one currently worth using because it is the only one that has a great balance of desktop orientation, but built with running as a server in mind as well. As far as Debian goes, they don't have the enterprise management tools that corporations need. With Red Hat, you can literally manage thousands of machines with no sweat from one box, although its possible in other distro's like Debian, the solutions are hacks and the distribution wasn't designed with doing that in mind (when things go wwrong, they go really wrong). Red Hat offers a lot more than most realize and that is why it is so successful and popular, the enterprise network management is just the beginning. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Well 60% of websites are hosted in the U.S. And nearly 100% of bank transactions go through the U.S. You may have a local bank that is used through a website, but chances are that bank is owned by a parent bank in the U.S. So if the world decides to run off on their own, they essentially have set up a brand new infastructure (not physical, but dns servers and stuff, or at least reconfigure), modify certain pieces of software, set up the first international tax (a very bad thing), decide what is allowed and what isn't and who gets control of what and how. Mind you that this will be a mind numbingly slow process as you have to get 190 nations to agree on every little thing like should "Sex" or "Democracy" be allowed in domain names. The truth is, about 70% of the nations in the U.N. would prefer that words like that are banned. Hell, even London is trying to make relgious jokes illegal. So I do hope the U.N. tries to cut itself off from the U.S's internet infastructure. I hope you enjoy your international taxes, your censorship, and the decade long period it takes for all the nations to agree on anything. Then factor in the large amounts of corruption rampant through the U.N. The truth is, itd be a mess and the U.S. is one of the few remaining truly free countries and is probably the best candidate to keep control. Not to mention, the internet is very dynamic and requires fairly quick responses to issues... the U.N. is not exactly known for being quick so at least with just the U.S. in control, decisions can be made. Other countries need to get over themselves, they aren't entitled to anything... you only fear what we have because of what you would do with it if you yourself had it. This whole issue is absurd.
Regards,
Steve
You are the dumbest CS professor I've ever heard. Yes, kids get benefits from technology. They have access to more information and they can experience things with computers that they couldn't normally. In addition, if you are taught to program a computer, you kind of have your own little universe in which you control everything. Do you think the hordes of computer related fields today came out of thin air? People had to be comfortable with computers becfore they worked with computers, and introducing computers in school achieved that.Even for people who didn't go into a technology field, when they entered the business world they weren't fearful of these machines and what they could do, or if they'd take over their jobs. Getting people familiar with the technology is the biggest key to the success of the technology... otherwise people fear what they aren't familiar with and reject it. Computers play an intelgral part in today's society. We would *not* be where we are without them. Sure money for teachers, etc.. sounds good, but there already is that and if there isn't enough it doesn't matter... this laptop is still important. The nice folks from MIT probably can't afford to send a few million over to other countries for education, but they can afford to design a computer that is extremely cheap so that when the money for teachers comes from some where else, and those teachers wish to teach some form of modern technology, they can do so at a more affordable price. How the hell do you expect any civilization to be brought up to 21st century standards when they don't have computers or fear them because they've never used them before? You just outright disregard the benefits of the computers, what an outrageous and ignorant position you took. These guys are helping how they can, its just not by directly donating cash.
Regards,
Steve
The literacy rate in America is over 97%, most homeless people here can even read and do basic arithmetic, what the hell are you on?
Regards,
Steve
There are legal requirements that must be followed and most countries have really shitty laws in that regard. America isn't the most popular kid in the class because everyone else is wishing they were them, its called jealousy, get over yourself. Whenever another country needs a favor, they always come to America first. You're probably in the same group of people that wants the U.N. to control domain servers and set precedent for an international tax, not to mention extreme censorcism of the net according to the agendas of not only the highly corrupt U.N. but also by many of the individual nation. Most countries are far worse off than the U.S., and they just kind of ignore their own problems while laughing at the U.S. The funny thing is that they just keep getting worse while the U.S. makes real progress in areas that matter.
Regards,
Steve
Being more efficient will only get us so far. And as far as continuing the species goes... the only reason you were born was to continue the species. Its what you are designed to do, everything else you do in life simply supports that goal. The only reason anything is born it to continue the species. Animals don't adapt so they live longer, they adapt so that they can effectively give birth and ensure the security of their species. If one of the side effects of that is a longer life span then so be it. Regardless, when it comes down to it, your whole existence is for nothing but the contiuation of the species. Humans being capable of intelligent thought are redefining that a bit, but in any other animal that is life. Not to metion, its only time to go when we say so. If we are successful in avoiding a catastrophe, then it obviously wasn't our time. There is no such thing as fate, we are in control of our destiny. Methods are being researched for mass food production, and we have a better handle on disease than ever before. In the next few decades you'll see nanobots and other technologies start to let humans self heal, and quickly. With most of the advances that science is making right now, in a few decades we'll be pretty well off. Don't be selfish and just sit around waiting for our species to die off... I'm sure the billions of unborn children would hate to know that people think like that.
Regards,
Steve
a) We need to learn to use other planets as resources so that when the population of earth is say... 16 billion people and the average life expectancy is say 5 times higher than it is now or even the possibility of death being a thing of the past, that we can ship people off into the universe like its no big deal.
b) Diversify, diversify, diversify. Right now we keep all our eggs in one basket. One meteor, one huge earthquake or mega volcanic eruption could wipe out anywhere from 25% to 95% after all of the side effects are taken into account (i.e. tsunamis and climate changes). By living on other planets the chances of our extinction as a species becomes much smaller.
c) Exploration and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Sure we can do most of that stuff with robots, but what fun is that... and while living in space we may learn a thing or two about the robustness (or lack thereof) of our bodies and ability to adapt. Perhaps new methods of farming or food creation will become the norm. There are many other benefits but I won't list them now.
d) Like it or not, not only are we an intelligent species, but a moral one. The intelligence factor leads us to dominating our surrounding environment, the problem is we are smart enough to not be happy with what we have and instead modify it to our needs (I see nothing wrong with this, we are a part of nature, whatever we do is natural despite however many animals may die, even if we do it in a viral manner). As a result of this extra level of comfort we tend to take up more space and consume more resources. We also tend to live longer and longer... eventually reaching the point of no death according to many in the sciences. This is where the moral part kicks in... we won't enforce population control, we won't just start killing people for the sake of killing people. Therefore our population is bound to spiral out of control at some point within the next century or so.
Any one of those points is worth sending civilizations into space.
Regards,
Steve
There is an operating system written in java. JNode.
Regards,
Steve
Actually, my understanding is that this shortage is being caused by two factors. A) Market demand for the XBox 360 is not as high as it was estimated a year ago it would be and B) The XBox started being manufactured late in the game, but rather than push back the release, they are just releasing less until more can be made.
Regards,
Steve
You sir are on crack. Stop spreading FUD. There is one court case about religion in science class and the religious folks will probably lose. Other than that science is alive and well in the U.S. You saying otherwise simply proves that you aren't apart of the scientific community and get all your facts from biased and sensationalist media sources. This is an international effort, it doesn't matter where the telescope is built. We use particle accelerators not within out borders too, big deal. I'm not going to argue any further with you though because you tend to have absurd extremist views, and are stubborn in your ignorant position. Its okay, you'll be left behind while everyone moves foward and your stuck in the back doing nothing but complaining.
Regards,
Steve
Err actually, the stock has been downgraded by several investment firms. Its expected drop a bit further even with the restructure. This will be like the 7th restructuring Novell has done in a little over a decade, if this doesn't pan out I don't think anyone will want their stock.
Regards,
Steve
Perl's regular expressions are Turing complete... has nothing to do with being a good programming language or not. Visual Basic is *bad*, basic in general is bad for the brain. As Dijkstra himself said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." I would prefer Linux's userbase be smaller, yet filled with higher quality programmers who actually know how their code affects the system and have somewhat of an understanding of what programming does, then to have hoards of visual basic "programmers". VB.net has apparently been made more like C# which isn't a bad thing, but VB in general is a bad thing, its not designed for maintainability and it teaches bad habits. Just like we try to teach children good habits, even though those good habits may take some extra initial effort to get a hold of, we shouldn't just let things like visual basic go on... if we can stop that maddness, by all means we must.
Regards,
Steve
I like the way openoffice.org looks. I like the fonts. I like the fonts of linux overall better then the window's counterparts, in particular the bitstream font package. I like my fonts anti-aliased, which you for some ungodly reason turn off. You sure you don't just have vision problems or something? The one thing I think linux has had going for it for at least 2 or 3 years now is the superior font rendering over windows. It is much more painful reading fonts under windows. So I guess this means that your oppinion is just that, an oppinion. I like the way linux looks, I hope it isn't changed. Windows is horrific, and I'm not that big of a fan of OS X either.
Regards,
Steve
Red Hat has been shipping Xen enabled kernels for months now in Fedora and I believe they are available for RHEL too. They have had quite a few people dedicated to working on Xen for some time, and that is a *good* thing . Virtualization is the future, and its good that a big company like Red Hat is pushing it further. Xen and SELinux are two killer technologies that Red Hat has really made viable, so kudos to them for keeping open source on the forefront of innovative (or at least uncommon, but much needed) technologies. For a truncated list of other cool technologies Red Hat is pushing in OSS, check out the Fedora projects page, you'll see virtualization, and SELinux in addition to the directory server, stateless linux, and system tap (our answer to Solaris' dtrace, granted it still is under heavy development and is far from ready for prime time)
Regards,
Steve
Those are nice features, but *nix still had MS beat on several other fronts. The fact that MS still inconveniences its users with defragmenting says plenty about the situation, but filesystems like ReaiserFS and EXT3 still have plenty of other features that MS needs to implement before we worry about having to catch up to them.Regards,
Steve
I think most people'e problems with ID is that it is just plain non-sense being taught, where as those other theories that you mention are plausible can be tested, observed, or in the worst case at least studied to see if evidence and/or history supports your assertation. There is no such evidence in ID, its saying "You're theory has a little hole over there that doesn't completely solve the problem so instead its all wrong and you must just assume that everything magically came into existence against all natural law." (btw, i disagree about the "hole" mentioned, as I've studied evolution in both an academic environment and on personal time and any holes mentioned by ID advocates have always had answers, including the eye). I'm a Roman Catholic, I believe in God, but evolution *is* the way we were created, to anyone who has actually studied the science it makes sense just as the laws of gravity do. Please prove to me that Santa Claus doesn't exist (you can't), please prove to me that gravity will remain in affect 1 second from now so that if I drop a pen I can be certain it will fall. You can't disprove Santa, and you can't 100% prove gravity will still be in affect 1 second from now, but using a little common sense, observational evidence, and testing you can be pretty certain that Santa doesn't exist and the gravity will continue to be there. The evidence for evolution is just as strong, if not stronger, than that of gravity, look at the facts, take a class at your local college if you have to.
Regards,
Steve
Read my post, and be sure to read my response which is a slight correction (One of my links got messed up).
Regards,
Steve
Sorry, my tag for the cladogram for the killer whale got messed up, here it is.
Regards,
Steve
Organisms decompose very quickly.Regardless, there are literally hundreds of thousands of transitional species and fossils. Study the damn science before you assert dumb ass claims that were made by your local lunatic religious person.
For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)
Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.
is a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. Please everyone stop spreading misinformation, this I.D. stuff is getting out of hand. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is.
Regards,
Steve
Except that if you RTFA and looked at the history of the NSA, they've been pretty up front about security. They don't tell us everything they know, but what they do tell us has always been credible and useful (i.e. making SHA more secure without actually telling us how it worked). This guide is for everyone, including securing government systems, those same systems that may need to securely exchange data with the NSA, Pentagon, White House, etc... The NSA has every reason to make this guide as accurate as possible. The NSA's job is not only collecting data, but also securing the nation's data and this fits perfectly within that realm.
Regards,
Steve
The NSA, despite being secretive as hell, is one of the few government agencies that has consistently been upfront with the public. Multiple times they've found weaknesses in algorithms and fixed them, never giving an explanation, just a fix. In some cases it was years later that anyone started figuring out how exactly the changes worked to make the algorithm more secure, and some modifications still aren't understood by the public, but its been shown that they all increase the overall security of the algorithms in question. The NSA has motivation to make these as secure as possible simply because they also use these algorithms to securely exchange information among contractors and other agencies. I've read before that the NSA is as much as 50 to 100 years more advanced in mathematics than the rest of the world, now I don't know how accurate this is, but judging from their history it probably isn't too far off.
Regards,
Steve
Red Hat's market cap is 25% higher than Novell's and they are consistently reported to outperform. Novell is highly mismanage and consistently reported to underperform. Also, last I checked IBM had more contracts with Red Hat than they did with Novell, granted that may have changed.
Regards,
Steve
This isn't FUD. Novell has been underperforming for years now. Its investors have been clamoring for massive layoffs and a major revampment. They wany Novell to sell off every thing that isn't profitable, and unless SuSE starts brining in a lot more cash, they *will* sell off that division. This isn't hard to believe either, look at Novell's history... they've always just moved from one tech to the other as each of their attempts failed. They are running out of the piles of cash aquired in the mid to late 90s and all the major investors are getting peeved.
Novell's management is one of the most disfunctional units in any major corporation, its great that they bought SuSE and all, except that they haven't done anything with the product since they've bought it. Sure they hired Nat, and he's done some cool things, but when it comes down to it, Novell is still testing the waters with Linux and right now its not looking too good for them. Don't be surprised if they sell off that unit. Last quarter they only earned 2 million dollars, and now they are spending 200 million to buyback stock and bump up their stock prices so investors are a little happier.
Investors have also already pushed Novell to sell off its consulting unit. Now they are also laying off at a minimum of 120 people in Europe. Most investment firms predict Novell will continue to underperform for sometime. Novell bought SuSE because it was on the market to be purchased and it was fairly cheap, Red Hat was offered the chance to buy SuSE first but they declined. Red Hat, unlike Novell, is riddled with major OSS advocates from the top down (i.e. the guy who wrote the first gnu c++ compiler is their VP of OSS affairs) and they believe in healthy competition, especially since with OSS everyone benefits from eachother's work, also it would have made them look bad as being a monopoly on the market. Novell saw a cheap way to test if Linux was profitable and its turning out to not be the golden goose that they needed. Novell is literally just a big mess and its been that way for over half a decade. They *can't* keep at this pace for another year or two.
Regards,
Steve
Fedora has kind of side stepped this problem with GCJ. All of OpenOffice's Java stuff runs natively, and despite the fact that GCJ doesn't optimize Java code as good as GCC optimizes C code, it still runs blazingly faster than on systems where a JVM is necessary for full functionality. Pretty nifty if you ask me.
Regards,
Steve
No, the problem here is price. Its $1/per hour/per cpu. If I have something that takes on average 60 days to calculate using a 20 node cluster and I do this yearly, it will cost me $28,800 per year to use Sun's grid. I could buy a 25 to 30 node grid for that kind of money with comparable node to node performance. So I'd be getting more nodes to work with and I would have a cluster that can be used for probably the next 5 years of that same computation, and during the times where its not needed for that computation it could be used in other areas. Also, it could be in a nice little rack or two in the corner of the office somewhere, so it taking up space is not an issue. The cost savings, plus benefits, of keeping it in house is astounding, just from raw hardware costs you save $115,200. Both clusters would have to be administered, but you have a much higher level of control in house, not to mention porting is probably easier and you can be certain that you won't have to port again for at least 5 years. In order for Sun to make this cost effective for anyone, they need to make it outrageosly cheap, like 1 or 2 cents per hour per cpu, and that still might not be enough to overlook the advantages of having an in house cluster.
Regards,
Steve
You've never used Fedora I guess. It currently is ranked 3rd in linux servers after RHEL and Debian. It surpassed SuSE in a little over a year and is close to passing Debian (All according to netcraft). Fedora is IMHO the best distro on the market, and quite frankly the only one currently worth using because it is the only one that has a great balance of desktop orientation, but built with running as a server in mind as well. As far as Debian goes, they don't have the enterprise management tools that corporations need. With Red Hat, you can literally manage thousands of machines with no sweat from one box, although its possible in other distro's like Debian, the solutions are hacks and the distribution wasn't designed with doing that in mind (when things go wwrong, they go really wrong). Red Hat offers a lot more than most realize and that is why it is so successful and popular, the enterprise network management is just the beginning.
Regards,
Steve