Hearing about specific insults directed at specific friends and neighbors in the press enflames people much more than knowing its going on and that specific incidents are being supressed.
You are grasping. This information is available to them through their neighbours and friends themselves. Blatant manipulation of the press is simply adding insult to already well known injury. For example, in the communist countries, all press was controlled by the state and yet nothing of importance happened, particularly during the final stages of their collapse, which was not widely known within days simply via mouth-to-ear transmission backed up by underground leaflets. The situation is virtually identical in Iraq in this respect.
They Iraqies don't need proof we subvert their system they know about it quite well
Additional discovered and widely publicised instances of such subversion simply add to the body of evidence those people have (and for the rest of the world, which did not have as direct evidence) that the US is indeed the most dangerous, rogue terrorist nation of the world.
You see you forgot that the US is operating under the pretense of "Spreading Freedom and Democracy" throughout the world and that constant exposure of the true intents and purposes of the US simply puts the planet on notice to best prepare for one day having to put the US out of its own misery should the empire not collapse fast enough on its own. Producing damning evidence of one's own hypocrisy and exposing thus the true agenda for all to see is simply counter-acting the expense and effort of the US propaganda meant to dull the senses of the undecided or the ignorantly sympathetic people on the planet. Stuffing the press is yet another counter-productive strategy the US has deployed in its pig-headed (and quite incompetent) campaign to remake the world for its own benefit. Simply transitioning straight to Nazi-like war machine and proceeding to exterminate the Iraqis (and all others whose resources the US might covet or who dare to oppose the US) via genocide would have produced far more efficient, in the short term, results for the US, although I am afraid that in the end the US will still end up precisely in the same spot the current strategy leads it to within a few decades: oblivion.
For a large company to use thin clients involves them spending significant funds in writing their own solutions and integrating the many processes. Small businesses can't afford this and defray that investment by buying fully loaded PC's with all the MS bells and whistles, then grafting in a server to act as a central repository. It works well, and has been easy to implement in the many companies I have worked with.
Many of my clients are small businesses (as small as 5 stations) where I deployed MS Windows Terminal Services + $100 thin clients (no moving parts + 10 years warranty for some models) or old decrepid existing PCs (some Windows 3.1 even!) as terminals. Terminal Services does not require any custom applications, is compatible with majority of existing ones (with the exception of CAD/CAM and similarly graphics-intensive ones) and allows for worker mobility between workstations and full access to the system from their homes and for mobile staff from hotels and what not. If you know what you are doing, the administration is a breeze, all users are running in restricted accounts preventing them from installing junk (with restricted access to selected applications they need), applications are available to all who need them with a single installation, etc and so on, essentially all the advantages of a mainfraime. Add to it a Linux firewall/mail server/fax to email gateway on an old junk server and you got 2-server thin client solution for small business. Note that it also improves performance greatly for all those small business non-SQL-server database applications as now all application<->database activity is no longer over LAN and is instead internal to the server and goes between the RAM and the SCSI disk array. Speaking of servers, you can get a reasonable 2 CPU one (which with hyper-threading ends up looking as 4 CPUs) for around $2k (add 3xSCSI disks + controller + backup system). Did I mention that the backup now backs up the entire company in one shot, not only the server as it is with PC-centric systems (unless you deploy backup agents and get multi-terrabyte backup systems)? That the single server-side UPS now is capable of preserving all worker's work for about 10 minutes even if the terminals all power down, since the sessions will reconnect when power comes back to their respective users, with cursor still blinking at the end of the last word they typed in?
So much for thin client not being suitable to small business. Unless you mean places with less then 5 terminals where things indeed get questionable.
Early PC application development was a radical change from the style used by Mainframe developers, it was much more immediate, and it had the capacity to involve much more hardware interfacing.
That is not true. It was simply another step in a progression from mainframes to minis to micros to PCs. All of which had increasing immediacy and increasing direct hardware access. Lest you forget that Apollo spaceships and moon landers were operated by computers looong before the PCs came about? Programmers who started on PCs with no prior experience simply thought, due to their blinding ignorance (combined with considerable egos), that they were braking some new, unheard of before theoretical ground, while in fact they were for the most part re-inventing the wheel. Just look at such "achievements" as the FAT file system (Bill Gates even wrote once a pre-word to "MS Bible" proudly extrolling his "inventing" of this "breakthrough") and later at DOS/Windows sloppily and badly reinventing things which mainframes and UNIX had for many decades already. So now we are back to UNIX-like systems (Linux, BSD and Mac OS X) and Windows is desperately struggling to bring true multi-user and thin client capabilities. And you are telling me of PCs being as radical a change as quantum computing or transputers? Please. Nothing in PCs, other then their scale is fundamentally different from their larger counterparts. They still operate on the same theoretical principle, have the same major subsystems which operate similarly and have essentially the same software development techniques all the way down to COBOL implementations on DOS and Windows.
They will be mocking the latest in light based, trans-dimensional, quantum computing, and its young bright eyed groupies.
You made a great, unwarranted leap in reasoning there. You see "trans-dimentional, quantum computing" would very likely require a whole completely unimaginable now approach to programming, having absolutely no resemblance to our present day glorified Turing tape machines. So when that happens, it would be indeed a radical shift in the approach. If it would be "progress" will depend on how these systems are used. If, for example, all their computing power is used up to run Windows 2025 3D dekstops with movie-quality animations of window borders and application buttons, or 3-terrabyte MS Access applications managing 40 rows in a table with 15 columns, then, in business environment, we have no progress, only waste and more inordinate expense and chaos. As to rose tainted glasses again, noone would seriously consider using punch cards or 3030 disk arrays these days. Yet certain models of computing retain their optimal status even though the hardware has changed radically, because both their underlying fundamental theoretical foundations and the business environment in which these systems operate have not. You are simply dismissing wisdom and experience as jealousy. Most thin client systems I deploy today have some graphical capabilities, yet this does not change the fact that as thin as possible clients (which includes dumb terminals) are still the optimal way to operate the administration side of a typical business, where order-processing, accounting, simple text processing and general administrative tasks constitute 90% of the computing activity.
Anyway, I like my hair on fire, going a million miles an hour, with no clue where I'm going. Do you know where your going? Is your life that pre-ordained that you have to live it ignominiously?;-)
In some respects it can be fun but not when you are in charge of making people's business computing run smoothly. Then, with most clients, you quicky learn the lessons (usually the hard way) or you get booted out, sued and end up going into organic farming or something...
In the daily operation of a business, in case you did not notice, "monotonous" (as in working to the point that you do not even think about it), "boring" and "efficient" are compliments. Things you for sure do not want are "exciting", "fashionable" or "latest". That is for the consumption outside of the company, where the marketing departament cons fools into falling for it. The horrendous, unproductive waste which things such as web surfing and HTML email are for an average US corporation are beyond appalling. Not to mention the exorbitant price, support and maintenance costs of thousands of PCs (which, speaking of obscolesence, are obsolete the moment they get unpacked, and are unuseably clogged with crap 2 months later). So one should be careful with accusations of wearing "rose colored" glasses.
It was ugly and nasty code, that had every hallmark of being legacy code the moment I wrote it - just like every other terminal programmers output.
"Legacy" is a relative term. C is supposedly "legacy". Linux Kernel is written in C. Ergo Linux is an obsolete "legacy", no? "Legacy" is a marketing word, coined by those who want to sell you crap. As to being ugly and nasty, that is more a function of a programmer I am afraid as there is nothing inherently more complex or ugly about old terminal code versus wacky GUIs with piles of threads and event handlers to do most basic things. And just like a modern GUI programmer would avoid all that by getting a GUI abstraction library so would an old-timer get a terminal abstraction one.
What evidence do you have they are enflamed anymore by this?
Let me get this straight:
"truly free press inflames the Sunnis against us" and "non-free press, stiffling Sunni views, where US is meddling heavily, when discovered" does not?
As far as I can tell it didn't cause much suprise at all in the Arab press.
You must be kidding. It was an extravaganza of: "See?! We told you so! Now we have proof: Freedom and Democracy are American lies, all they want is to own Iraq!" etc and so on. Al-Jazeera website for example run a picture of a bloodied camera lying on the ground with a caption: "Washington tries to spread propaganda in the Iraqi media!"
That is only sane of course if the law is either simple enough to be comprehended by an average citizen or is intuitively obvious. Unfortunately, not only this is no longer true, some, particularly those who profit from this situation, do everything in their power to make sure that average citizens do not have a chance to understand the law. Thus yet another form of tyranny is born. And it is no coincidence that a vast majority of politicians are ex-lawyers.
b) A manipulated press, which when discovered, inflames Sunnis against the US even more (and bonus: destroys any remaining traces of US credibility with Sunnis and the rest of the planet)
I knew that if I held onto that VT100, it would come back in style.
Long live the mainframe:
You laugh but some of the most reliable (and still widely used) applications in business run on things like IBM AS400 and are accessed via terminal emulators (3270 in this case, not VT100, but still).
One point of failure for many users (server) and one place to concentrate attacks - server must be very robust because it is a single, fixed, information rich target.
Which is usually reasonably easy to achieve as the entire technical staff can concentrate all their efforts on the server where redundant, high-end hardware can be deployed in a rack, under fully controlled conditions, traffic can be monitored and precautions taken to prevent attacks, etc and so on. None of this is possible in a thick client, distributed environment, especially where clients are running on non-homogeneous hardware and are under control of users with next to no knowledge about the technology.
The trick, of course, is what constitutes the "best fit solution." And there is no one answer to that.
Granted, there are many applications (such as heavy-duty, high-performance 3D graphics) which do not lend themselves to a thin-client scenario. But it is my experience of many, many years that a vast majority of applications in business are served far better by client solutions which are as "thin" as possible.
Re:What is it with those thick/thin client gyratio
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The Future is XHTML 2.0
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So I'm not the only one who thinks the ultimate goal of the browser is to become an X-Windows server.
That's probably where its going. My personal feeling however is that for things like phones and even business applications an efficient VNC-like client is the way to go, as X11 is already a huge overkill for these tasks as far as remote clients go. I see X11 as being useful as the server-side per-user virtual graphics engine which renders its output into a memory buffer which is then analysed for pixel changes, which are then compressed and transmitted to the client.
What is it with those thick/thin client gyrations?
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The Future is XHTML 2.0
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· Score: 3, Insightful
the demand for 'rich client" behavior exemplified by Ajax applications.
Here we go again. "Thin client is the future!" -- "No the users demand bloated clients with millions of animated doodads!".. "No wait, the thick client is a mess full of security holes!" -- "No, the server-side processing and thin clients are future, again" -- "No, wait, the rich contents thick like a brick clients are the future!" --
[interlude] Bah, "the client-server paradigm" is the future! [/interlude]
.. "Idiots, can't you see that thin is the future again!"... "Morons, thick is the shtick!"... "Thin!"... "Thick!"... etc and so on...
Seriously though, thin, simple and reliable client coupled with powerful server-side processing is the staple of reliablity and usually the highest performance and security. The "rich client" is a fancy word for going back to "everybody needs a huge multimedia client (i.e a 23GHz CPU 3-core phone) to access this page with 4 lines of text on it!" and fat servers because the clients although bloated and huge are too dumb to do anything besides being pretty and acting like the swiss cheese of security. I think we've been there before, and it was called ActiveX, no?
I don't actually defend McCarthy's actions: just his objectives.
McCarthy's take on his objectives was also highly suspect, since the number of Soviet operatives throughought the post WWII years remained insignificant in the big national picture. Not only that, but those who did exist were far more effectively located and dealt with by the established counter-espionage agencies and not bumbling witch doctors in search of power and personal aggrandisement on national TV. McCarthy's irresponsible actions were in fact quite counter-productive to any serious efforts of combating Soviet espionage, and only ensured that the KGB's operatives were free of any American Communist Party connotations. What he was doing amounted to a most crude and hamfisted version of the proverbial "fishing with dynamite". Which is pretty much the maximum level of sophistication to which the Bush administration is capable of ascending in its effort to locate Al-Queda members. Consequently, and not surprisingly, Al-Queda's business is booming as never before, Osama is gleefuly busy sending gift video tapes and those old KGB operatives, who McCarthy was after, smile nostaligically when seeing their old Gulags full of kidnapped people undergoing "interrogation" again or the old good times of every phone being tapped returning.
McCarthy was right - he did find a lot of communists
Well, golly gee! It would be rather suprising if he did not, since even now there is a quite legal Communist Party in the US, which also was far more popular in the 1930-1950s. But you of course knew that. You merely attempted to mislead anyone not familiar with this fact into somehow feeling confused by McCarthy's reputation or even sympathetic towards him. What the McCarthy witch-hunt was supposedly about however was Soviet (not communist) spies and saboteurs. And the objection to McCarthy lies primarily in his method, which was, roughly: "if he is not an Evangelical, right-wing redneck, chances are good he/she must be a Soviet communist spy and I will destroy him/her to prove it". That is why McCarthyism stands as one of the most disguisting and evil examples of mindless opression, right along the tactics used by Nazi brownshirts and stupidity employed in the Salem Witch Trials. Anyone who defends McCarthy therefore automatically forfeits any moral ground in a discussion of indimidation or oppression since clearly he has no clue as even the most extreme cases of such activity.
There are probably thousands more laws that keep competition low.
While wacky laws and misguided regulation have a lot of impact, pure capitalism in itself is an unstable, competition-reducing system. Contrary to the theory, the only stable capitalist equilibrium is in practice a monopoly or a cartel. Ponder for example the implications of a cabal of companies having exclusive ownership of unique resources upon which most of the civilization depends and the abilities of some of the other large companies to create artificial barriers to entry for any but the wealthiest competitors....
Also, certain kinds of regulation are necessary as it was proven empirically in the past: corporations and their owners are amoral, in the name of profit they will pollute, expose their workers to harm, abuse, even enslave them if given an opportunity. The laws protecting the employees and environment today are a direct result of the experience with the Robber Barrons of the Gilded Age of capitalism. Very bad experience.
Also eventually the cost to manufacture goods overseas in developing countries has to be met with some sort of tariff so that more research in mechanized manufacturing can take place in the U.S
The problem with tariffs is that they do not work (it is proven historically, in many different instances). Their impact is simply to induce inflation and promote abuse and profiteering for some very few people. Much smarter measures then simple tariffs need to be employed.
Upper management can't simply push all manufacturing overseas and bring in the money for themselves.
Unfortunately, according to tenets of capitalism, profit is the only valid motive for a company. More profit by any means necessary is a good thing as far as they are concerned. Also long-term strategies are not exactly a strong suit of those people. "Get rich quick and screw the rest" is the overriding motto for something like 90% of businesspeople and investors.
It will only happen after an economic disaster though. We'll see what happens when the U.S. housing bubble pops.
What will happen is what happened before: the very same socialists whom everyone in the media pisses on these days will be forced to rescue this whole mess from itself and people from starvation, for which they will be paid by a decade of grumbling resentment followed by another 50 years or so of outright hate and ridicule for daring to stand in the way of greed, until the next market implosion. I have no hope as to this whatsowver. People simply do not learn and there is far more dumbasses to be bamboozled by slick media circuses then those whith critical reasoning abilities who would think before they cast a vote.
It would be much better to be able to channel the money for political purposes instead of damming it up.
I am afraid that money influencing politics is as ancient as politics itself and quite an intractable problem. Your solution has all the same weaknesses as all the other solutions before it: it is quite easily circum-navigated by crooks. Perheaps something from one of the ancient democracies, i.e. a demand that all politicians take life-long poverty vows would cure it. But then again there are still their immediate families to give money to...
My personal belief is that this problem has to be tackled from the opposide end of things: by making sure that the discrepancies in wealth between people are within sane levels (i.e. 10:1 richest to poorest or something like it, instead of 100000000000:1 as it is with some individuals and corporations vs. average citizens). Then the "money influencing politics" problem would no longer be so devastating. But then again I am a hard-core socialist when it comes to economy.
but I just don't understand what was wrong, or why this particular case is such a big deal. Could someone explain?
I will give it a shot:
There are rules which govern giving money to politicians (yea, I know, funny but true). What Abramoff did is to violate those rules, i.e. ask for very specific favours in exchange for the contributions. There are also allegations that some of his "political contributions" were of a personal nature, i.e. not to the re-election fund or something like it, but to the personal accounts of the said politicos.
I swear there is some kind of virgin devaluation thing going on here, last I heard it was said that there were 7 virgins to be had for perishing in some jihad de jeur. Now its 72. Makes me wonder. Either the quality of the virigins is not what was expected and they are trying to make up for it in quantity, there is waning interest from the would-be jihadis and the ante has to go up (unlikely judging by the news), or the jihadis are being influenced by the Great Satan of the Internet and have concluded after watching some of the moving pictures present there that 7 naughty women is what every godless westerner gets without even having to read the Qur'an. Someone figure this out, it might be of a profound geopolitical significance.
As far as I've been able to find though, joomla is made up.
"Joomla" is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word "Jumla", which
means "all together" or "as a whole".
And sounds completely ridiculous.
That is in the eye (ear?) of the beholder. To me all of the above "codenames" sound equally ridiculous and irrelevant to the projects they are attached to.
Tell them its a "codename", like, say, "Longhorn" (for Vista - also rather stupid, don't you think?) or "Whidbey" (for Visual Studio.NET 2005) or "Orcas" (Successor to VS.NET 2005) etc and so on. I for one fail to see a difference in silliness between Joomla and Longhorn or Vista for that matter.
The people coming up with these names really have to step back and see how they sound in a boardroom.
Apparently the difference is not in the name but who is doing the naming. From what I listed, Microsoft could name their next relase of Visual Studio "Bozo the Clown" and still have your managment's respect.
As far as I know 32 bit mplayer runs on 64 bit systems and you need that (I think) for the Win32 codecs which are only available in 32 bits as many are legacy all the way back to win 3.1 era. There is a 64 bit version of mplayer but then you have to abandon the win32 codecs and use the OSS equivalents which are rather limited. I am not sure about Win64 codecs compatibility with mplayer 64 bit.
Dude, mplayer is your friend. It is capable of using native Win32 codecs (included on many sites as a tarball) and it will play just about any format known to man. There are also plugins for Firefox which allow you to start mplayer by clicking on them funky Windows Media Player "only" links.
A few hours and 6 radar-homing rockets later, they were gone.
Which only goes to show the laughable incompetence of the Iraqi "army". How about a hidden system with a set of cheap, disposable antennas connected to it at a disatnce? Antenna: $50, anti-radiation missile: $300k, continuing jamming of GPS signals and completely pissed off USAF personell dropping bombs on orphanages and thus helping to sustain a 20-year long guerilla campaign, $200 billion in costs and finally a lost war: priceless.
Come to think of it, I am told the Russians are perfecting devices made out of cheap, sub $50, Chinese microwave ovens for the purpose of attracting US warplanes on anti-radar missions and adding a few billion, give or take, to the costs on the US side of the equation.
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants -- most of them college students -- to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
This would create massive "bias" towards the "left" as soon as ACLU (which I guarantee you was counted as "far left") enters the fray. It is an extremely active organisation, involved in a multitude of high profile lawsuits over the years and it alone, by the virtue of all of the news programs being forced to mention them, would, by this insane criteria, create "left bias".
The actual measuring stick is far harder and a matter of interpretation as the example of the so called Main Stream Media shows clearly, most liberals believe it to be slanted right and most conservatives the exact oposite.
What this whole hoopla misses is that the true reporters' job is quite different. They are not supposed to offer any commentary, by any think tanks, left, right, polka-dotted or any other kind. Their only masters are verifiability and accuracy. The rest is up to the think tanks and talking heads to deal with themselves on their respective obscure soapboxes, somewhere else. The reporter's job is to investigate and report anything of any consequence. They are in fact our, the voter's, "Intelligence Service". They are supposed to relentlessly spy on our behalf, particularly on the activities of our elected officials, regardless of party or affiliation.
For example, if the stupid news media were doing their job, the WMD Iraq fiasco would never happen. The Bush administration WMD rationale would have been shot down and deflated looong before any military action started and he would have to either get a new, more compelling, rationale or back off. That is the true measure of the media bias. In this particular case most media were cowed and submissive to the thundering "patriotic" rhetoric of the Bush administration and by doing so reinforced the jingoistic, uncritical march to war. Real newsmen would not be so easily "embeded" into the machinations of a few politicians, no matter how intimidating or popular.
The headline was "War on the Middle Class". That's left biased, don't you think?
How so? Can you explain? I would think its simply stupid. A "war" is not waged here, there are no bullets flying or tanks rolling. Next, who exactly is waging this "war"? Depending on the answer on this question you could try to ascertain his bias. But seeing Dobbs drivel a few times before I would assume he was moaning about nebulous "corporate crooks". That is, in his view, the whole economic policy of globalisation is fine and dandy but the job exporting is a result of "unpatriotic", "crooked" companies who take advantage of US tax breaks and then export jobs. This is not a "lefty" stance. A leftist would consider the whole concept of multi-nationals and urestricted free trade to be lunatic and thus all such activities perpetrated by these companies would be simply included in it. Lou on the other hand is a conservative who is trying to be a populist and therefore he looks for "crimes" that are commited by these companies, instead at the whole systemic disaster which the WTO-friendly trade policies are. He is appealing to "patriotism" instead to looking at the economic mechanisms put in place not only by Bush administration but a while host of others before them, starting with Regan (and yes, that includes Clinton).
In short, Lou is just an incompetent ass who is desperately looking for ratings, while his personal views are far closer to that of "conservatives" then the US "liberals".
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You are grasping. This information is available to them through their neighbours and friends themselves. Blatant manipulation of the press is simply adding insult to already well known injury. For example, in the communist countries, all press was controlled by the state and yet nothing of importance happened, particularly during the final stages of their collapse, which was not widely known within days simply via mouth-to-ear transmission backed up by underground leaflets. The situation is virtually identical in Iraq in this respect.
They Iraqies don't need proof we subvert their system they know about it quite well
Additional discovered and widely publicised instances of such subversion simply add to the body of evidence those people have (and for the rest of the world, which did not have as direct evidence) that the US is indeed the most dangerous, rogue terrorist nation of the world.
You see you forgot that the US is operating under the pretense of "Spreading Freedom and Democracy" throughout the world and that constant exposure of the true intents and purposes of the US simply puts the planet on notice to best prepare for one day having to put the US out of its own misery should the empire not collapse fast enough on its own. Producing damning evidence of one's own hypocrisy and exposing thus the true agenda for all to see is simply counter-acting the expense and effort of the US propaganda meant to dull the senses of the undecided or the ignorantly sympathetic people on the planet. Stuffing the press is yet another counter-productive strategy the US has deployed in its pig-headed (and quite incompetent) campaign to remake the world for its own benefit. Simply transitioning straight to Nazi-like war machine and proceeding to exterminate the Iraqis (and all others whose resources the US might covet or who dare to oppose the US) via genocide would have produced far more efficient, in the short term, results for the US, although I am afraid that in the end the US will still end up precisely in the same spot the current strategy leads it to within a few decades: oblivion.
Many of my clients are small businesses (as small as 5 stations) where I deployed MS Windows Terminal Services + $100 thin clients (no moving parts + 10 years warranty for some models) or old decrepid existing PCs (some Windows 3.1 even!) as terminals. Terminal Services does not require any custom applications, is compatible with majority of existing ones (with the exception of CAD/CAM and similarly graphics-intensive ones) and allows for worker mobility between workstations and full access to the system from their homes and for mobile staff from hotels and what not. If you know what you are doing, the administration is a breeze, all users are running in restricted accounts preventing them from installing junk (with restricted access to selected applications they need), applications are available to all who need them with a single installation, etc and so on, essentially all the advantages of a mainfraime. Add to it a Linux firewall/mail server/fax to email gateway on an old junk server and you got 2-server thin client solution for small business. Note that it also improves performance greatly for all those small business non-SQL-server database applications as now all application<->database activity is no longer over LAN and is instead internal to the server and goes between the RAM and the SCSI disk array. Speaking of servers, you can get a reasonable 2 CPU one (which with hyper-threading ends up looking as 4 CPUs) for around $2k (add 3xSCSI disks + controller + backup system). Did I mention that the backup now backs up the entire company in one shot, not only the server as it is with PC-centric systems (unless you deploy backup agents and get multi-terrabyte backup systems)? That the single server-side UPS now is capable of preserving all worker's work for about 10 minutes even if the terminals all power down, since the sessions will reconnect when power comes back to their respective users, with cursor still blinking at the end of the last word they typed in?
So much for thin client not being suitable to small business. Unless you mean places with less then 5 terminals where things indeed get questionable.
Early PC application development was a radical change from the style used by Mainframe developers, it was much more immediate, and it had the capacity to involve much more hardware interfacing.
That is not true. It was simply another step in a progression from mainframes to minis to micros to PCs. All of which had increasing immediacy and increasing direct hardware access. Lest you forget that Apollo spaceships and moon landers were operated by computers looong before the PCs came about? Programmers who started on PCs with no prior experience simply thought, due to their blinding ignorance (combined with considerable egos), that they were braking some new, unheard of before theoretical ground, while in fact they were for the most part re-inventing the wheel. Just look at such "achievements" as the FAT file system (Bill Gates even wrote once a pre-word to "MS Bible" proudly extrolling his "inventing" of this "breakthrough") and later at DOS/Windows sloppily and badly reinventing things which mainframes and UNIX had for many decades already. So now we are back to UNIX-like systems (Linux, BSD and Mac OS X) and Windows is desperately struggling to bring true multi-user and thin client capabilities. And you are telling me of PCs being as radical a change as quantum computing or transputers? Please. Nothing in PCs, other then their scale is fundamentally different from their larger counterparts. They still operate on the same theoretical principle, have the same major subsystems which operate similarly and have essentially the same software development techniques all the way down to COBOL implementations on DOS and Windows.
You made a great, unwarranted leap in reasoning there. You see "trans-dimentional, quantum computing" would very likely require a whole completely unimaginable now approach to programming, having absolutely no resemblance to our present day glorified Turing tape machines. So when that happens, it would be indeed a radical shift in the approach. If it would be "progress" will depend on how these systems are used. If, for example, all their computing power is used up to run Windows 2025 3D dekstops with movie-quality animations of window borders and application buttons, or 3-terrabyte MS Access applications managing 40 rows in a table with 15 columns, then, in business environment, we have no progress, only waste and more inordinate expense and chaos. As to rose tainted glasses again, noone would seriously consider using punch cards or 3030 disk arrays these days. Yet certain models of computing retain their optimal status even though the hardware has changed radically, because both their underlying fundamental theoretical foundations and the business environment in which these systems operate have not. You are simply dismissing wisdom and experience as jealousy. Most thin client systems I deploy today have some graphical capabilities, yet this does not change the fact that as thin as possible clients (which includes dumb terminals) are still the optimal way to operate the administration side of a typical business, where order-processing, accounting, simple text processing and general administrative tasks constitute 90% of the computing activity.
Anyway, I like my hair on fire, going a million miles an hour, with no clue where I'm going. Do you know where your going? Is your life that pre-ordained that you have to live it ignominiously? ;-)
In some respects it can be fun but not when you are in charge of making people's business computing run smoothly. Then, with most clients, you quicky learn the lessons (usually the hard way) or you get booted out, sued and end up going into organic farming or something ...
In the daily operation of a business, in case you did not notice, "monotonous" (as in working to the point that you do not even think about it), "boring" and "efficient" are compliments. Things you for sure do not want are "exciting", "fashionable" or "latest". That is for the consumption outside of the company, where the marketing departament cons fools into falling for it. The horrendous, unproductive waste which things such as web surfing and HTML email are for an average US corporation are beyond appalling. Not to mention the exorbitant price, support and maintenance costs of thousands of PCs (which, speaking of obscolesence, are obsolete the moment they get unpacked, and are unuseably clogged with crap 2 months later). So one should be careful with accusations of wearing "rose colored" glasses.
It was ugly and nasty code, that had every hallmark of being legacy code the moment I wrote it - just like every other terminal programmers output.
"Legacy" is a relative term. C is supposedly "legacy". Linux Kernel is written in C. Ergo Linux is an obsolete "legacy", no? "Legacy" is a marketing word, coined by those who want to sell you crap. As to being ugly and nasty, that is more a function of a programmer I am afraid as there is nothing inherently more complex or ugly about old terminal code versus wacky GUIs with piles of threads and event handlers to do most basic things. And just like a modern GUI programmer would avoid all that by getting a GUI abstraction library so would an old-timer get a terminal abstraction one.
Let me get this straight:
"truly free press inflames the Sunnis against us" and "non-free press, stiffling Sunni views, where US is meddling heavily, when discovered" does not?
As far as I can tell it didn't cause much suprise at all in the Arab press.
You must be kidding. It was an extravaganza of: "See?! We told you so! Now we have proof: Freedom and Democracy are American lies, all they want is to own Iraq!" etc and so on. Al-Jazeera website for example run a picture of a bloodied camera lying on the ground with a caption: "Washington tries to spread propaganda in the Iraqi media!"
That is only sane of course if the law is either simple enough to be comprehended by an average citizen or is intuitively obvious. Unfortunately, not only this is no longer true, some, particularly those who profit from this situation, do everything in their power to make sure that average citizens do not have a chance to understand the law. Thus yet another form of tyranny is born. And it is no coincidence that a vast majority of politicians are ex-lawyers.
The actual choice "b" is:
b) A manipulated press, which when discovered, inflames Sunnis against the US even more (and bonus: destroys any remaining traces of US credibility with Sunnis and the rest of the planet)
And that too is a myth in most cases. Well writen terminal applications have menu driven interfaces and on-screen help systems.
You laugh but some of the most reliable (and still widely used) applications in business run on things like IBM AS400 and are accessed via terminal emulators (3270 in this case, not VT100, but still).
Which is usually reasonably easy to achieve as the entire technical staff can concentrate all their efforts on the server where redundant, high-end hardware can be deployed in a rack, under fully controlled conditions, traffic can be monitored and precautions taken to prevent attacks, etc and so on. None of this is possible in a thick client, distributed environment, especially where clients are running on non-homogeneous hardware and are under control of users with next to no knowledge about the technology.
The trick, of course, is what constitutes the "best fit solution." And there is no one answer to that.
Granted, there are many applications (such as heavy-duty, high-performance 3D graphics) which do not lend themselves to a thin-client scenario. But it is my experience of many, many years that a vast majority of applications in business are served far better by client solutions which are as "thin" as possible.
That's probably where its going. My personal feeling however is that for things like phones and even business applications an efficient VNC-like client is the way to go, as X11 is already a huge overkill for these tasks as far as remote clients go. I see X11 as being useful as the server-side per-user virtual graphics engine which renders its output into a memory buffer which is then analysed for pixel changes, which are then compressed and transmitted to the client.
Here we go again. "Thin client is the future!" -- "No the users demand bloated clients with millions of animated doodads!" .. "No wait, the thick client is a mess full of security holes!" -- "No, the server-side processing and thin clients are future, again" -- "No, wait, the rich contents thick like a brick clients are the future!" --
[interlude] Bah, "the client-server paradigm" is the future! [/interlude]
Seriously though, thin, simple and reliable client coupled with powerful server-side processing is the staple of reliablity and usually the highest performance and security. The "rich client" is a fancy word for going back to "everybody needs a huge multimedia client (i.e a 23GHz CPU 3-core phone) to access this page with 4 lines of text on it!" and fat servers because the clients although bloated and huge are too dumb to do anything besides being pretty and acting like the swiss cheese of security. I think we've been there before, and it was called ActiveX, no?
McCarthy's take on his objectives was also highly suspect, since the number of Soviet operatives throughought the post WWII years remained insignificant in the big national picture. Not only that, but those who did exist were far more effectively located and dealt with by the established counter-espionage agencies and not bumbling witch doctors in search of power and personal aggrandisement on national TV. McCarthy's irresponsible actions were in fact quite counter-productive to any serious efforts of combating Soviet espionage, and only ensured that the KGB's operatives were free of any American Communist Party connotations. What he was doing amounted to a most crude and hamfisted version of the proverbial "fishing with dynamite". Which is pretty much the maximum level of sophistication to which the Bush administration is capable of ascending in its effort to locate Al-Queda members. Consequently, and not surprisingly, Al-Queda's business is booming as never before, Osama is gleefuly busy sending gift video tapes and those old KGB operatives, who McCarthy was after, smile nostaligically when seeing their old Gulags full of kidnapped people undergoing "interrogation" again or the old good times of every phone being tapped returning.
Well, golly gee! It would be rather suprising if he did not, since even now there is a quite legal Communist Party in the US, which also was far more popular in the 1930-1950s. But you of course knew that. You merely attempted to mislead anyone not familiar with this fact into somehow feeling confused by McCarthy's reputation or even sympathetic towards him. What the McCarthy witch-hunt was supposedly about however was Soviet (not communist) spies and saboteurs. And the objection to McCarthy lies primarily in his method, which was, roughly: "if he is not an Evangelical, right-wing redneck, chances are good he/she must be a Soviet communist spy and I will destroy him/her to prove it". That is why McCarthyism stands as one of the most disguisting and evil examples of mindless opression, right along the tactics used by Nazi brownshirts and stupidity employed in the Salem Witch Trials. Anyone who defends McCarthy therefore automatically forfeits any moral ground in a discussion of indimidation or oppression since clearly he has no clue as even the most extreme cases of such activity.
While wacky laws and misguided regulation have a lot of impact, pure capitalism in itself is an unstable, competition-reducing system. Contrary to the theory, the only stable capitalist equilibrium is in practice a monopoly or a cartel. Ponder for example the implications of a cabal of companies having exclusive ownership of unique resources upon which most of the civilization depends and the abilities of some of the other large companies to create artificial barriers to entry for any but the wealthiest competitors ....
Also, certain kinds of regulation are necessary as it was proven empirically in the past: corporations and their owners are amoral, in the name of profit they will pollute, expose their workers to harm, abuse, even enslave them if given an opportunity. The laws protecting the employees and environment today are a direct result of the experience with the Robber Barrons of the Gilded Age of capitalism. Very bad experience.
Also eventually the cost to manufacture goods overseas in developing countries has to be met with some sort of tariff so that more research in mechanized manufacturing can take place in the U.S
The problem with tariffs is that they do not work (it is proven historically, in many different instances). Their impact is simply to induce inflation and promote abuse and profiteering for some very few people. Much smarter measures then simple tariffs need to be employed.
Upper management can't simply push all manufacturing overseas and bring in the money for themselves.
Unfortunately, according to tenets of capitalism, profit is the only valid motive for a company. More profit by any means necessary is a good thing as far as they are concerned. Also long-term strategies are not exactly a strong suit of those people. "Get rich quick and screw the rest" is the overriding motto for something like 90% of businesspeople and investors.
It will only happen after an economic disaster though. We'll see what happens when the U.S. housing bubble pops.
What will happen is what happened before: the very same socialists whom everyone in the media pisses on these days will be forced to rescue this whole mess from itself and people from starvation, for which they will be paid by a decade of grumbling resentment followed by another 50 years or so of outright hate and ridicule for daring to stand in the way of greed, until the next market implosion. I have no hope as to this whatsowver. People simply do not learn and there is far more dumbasses to be bamboozled by slick media circuses then those whith critical reasoning abilities who would think before they cast a vote.
I am afraid that money influencing politics is as ancient as politics itself and quite an intractable problem. Your solution has all the same weaknesses as all the other solutions before it: it is quite easily circum-navigated by crooks. Perheaps something from one of the ancient democracies, i.e. a demand that all politicians take life-long poverty vows would cure it. But then again there are still their immediate families to give money to...
My personal belief is that this problem has to be tackled from the opposide end of things: by making sure that the discrepancies in wealth between people are within sane levels (i.e. 10:1 richest to poorest or something like it, instead of 100000000000:1 as it is with some individuals and corporations vs. average citizens). Then the "money influencing politics" problem would no longer be so devastating. But then again I am a hard-core socialist when it comes to economy.
I will give it a shot:
There are rules which govern giving money to politicians (yea, I know, funny but true). What Abramoff did is to violate those rules, i.e. ask for very specific favours in exchange for the contributions. There are also allegations that some of his "political contributions" were of a personal nature, i.e. not to the re-election fund or something like it, but to the personal accounts of the said politicos.
I swear there is some kind of virgin devaluation thing going on here, last I heard it was said that there were 7 virgins to be had for perishing in some jihad de jeur. Now its 72. Makes me wonder. Either the quality of the virigins is not what was expected and they are trying to make up for it in quantity, there is waning interest from the would-be jihadis and the ante has to go up (unlikely judging by the news), or the jihadis are being influenced by the Great Satan of the Internet and have concluded after watching some of the moving pictures present there that 7 naughty women is what every godless westerner gets without even having to read the Qur'an. Someone figure this out, it might be of a profound geopolitical significance.
"Joomla" is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word "Jumla", which means "all together" or "as a whole".
And sounds completely ridiculous.
That is in the eye (ear?) of the beholder. To me all of the above "codenames" sound equally ridiculous and irrelevant to the projects they are attached to.
Tell them its a "codename", like, say, "Longhorn" (for Vista - also rather stupid, don't you think?) or "Whidbey" (for Visual Studio .NET 2005) or "Orcas" (Successor to VS.NET 2005) etc and so on. I for one fail to see a difference in silliness between Joomla and Longhorn or Vista for that matter.
The people coming up with these names really have to step back and see how they sound in a boardroom.
Apparently the difference is not in the name but who is doing the naming. From what I listed, Microsoft could name their next relase of Visual Studio "Bozo the Clown" and still have your managment's respect.
As far as I know 32 bit mplayer runs on 64 bit systems and you need that (I think) for the Win32 codecs which are only available in 32 bits as many are legacy all the way back to win 3.1 era. There is a 64 bit version of mplayer but then you have to abandon the win32 codecs and use the OSS equivalents which are rather limited. I am not sure about Win64 codecs compatibility with mplayer 64 bit.
Dude, mplayer is your friend. It is capable of using native Win32 codecs (included on many sites as a tarball) and it will play just about any format known to man. There are also plugins for Firefox which allow you to start mplayer by clicking on them funky Windows Media Player "only" links.
Which only goes to show the laughable incompetence of the Iraqi "army". How about a hidden system with a set of cheap, disposable antennas connected to it at a disatnce? Antenna: $50, anti-radiation missile: $300k, continuing jamming of GPS signals and completely pissed off USAF personell dropping bombs on orphanages and thus helping to sustain a 20-year long guerilla campaign, $200 billion in costs and finally a lost war: priceless.
Come to think of it, I am told the Russians are perfecting devices made out of cheap, sub $50, Chinese microwave ovens for the purpose of attracting US warplanes on anti-radar missions and adding a few billion, give or take, to the costs on the US side of the equation.
From the article:
This would create massive "bias" towards the "left" as soon as ACLU (which I guarantee you was counted as "far left") enters the fray. It is an extremely active organisation, involved in a multitude of high profile lawsuits over the years and it alone, by the virtue of all of the news programs being forced to mention them, would, by this insane criteria, create "left bias".
The actual measuring stick is far harder and a matter of interpretation as the example of the so called Main Stream Media shows clearly, most liberals believe it to be slanted right and most conservatives the exact oposite.
What this whole hoopla misses is that the true reporters' job is quite different. They are not supposed to offer any commentary, by any think tanks, left, right, polka-dotted or any other kind. Their only masters are verifiability and accuracy. The rest is up to the think tanks and talking heads to deal with themselves on their respective obscure soapboxes, somewhere else. The reporter's job is to investigate and report anything of any consequence. They are in fact our, the voter's, "Intelligence Service". They are supposed to relentlessly spy on our behalf, particularly on the activities of our elected officials, regardless of party or affiliation.
For example, if the stupid news media were doing their job, the WMD Iraq fiasco would never happen. The Bush administration WMD rationale would have been shot down and deflated looong before any military action started and he would have to either get a new, more compelling, rationale or back off. That is the true measure of the media bias. In this particular case most media were cowed and submissive to the thundering "patriotic" rhetoric of the Bush administration and by doing so reinforced the jingoistic, uncritical march to war. Real newsmen would not be so easily "embeded" into the machinations of a few politicians, no matter how intimidating or popular.
How so? Can you explain? I would think its simply stupid. A "war" is not waged here, there are no bullets flying or tanks rolling. Next, who exactly is waging this "war"? Depending on the answer on this question you could try to ascertain his bias. But seeing Dobbs drivel a few times before I would assume he was moaning about nebulous "corporate crooks". That is, in his view, the whole economic policy of globalisation is fine and dandy but the job exporting is a result of "unpatriotic", "crooked" companies who take advantage of US tax breaks and then export jobs. This is not a "lefty" stance. A leftist would consider the whole concept of multi-nationals and urestricted free trade to be lunatic and thus all such activities perpetrated by these companies would be simply included in it. Lou on the other hand is a conservative who is trying to be a populist and therefore he looks for "crimes" that are commited by these companies, instead at the whole systemic disaster which the WTO-friendly trade policies are. He is appealing to "patriotism" instead to looking at the economic mechanisms put in place not only by Bush administration but a while host of others before them, starting with Regan (and yes, that includes Clinton).
In short, Lou is just an incompetent ass who is desperately looking for ratings, while his personal views are far closer to that of "conservatives" then the US "liberals".