Ofcourse that's very sad and tragic. But I can live with it.
Yeah, but the reality is that women only have sex to secure a partner and make babies. Once they've got you, the sex dwindles off rapidly unless/until she decides she wants a child.
This policy by the British ID system/database (and its inevitable US counterpart) is going to flush freedom down the toilet. Ironically, when the government overreacts to terrorist threats and takes away freedoms...THE TERRORISTS WIN.
You are way too late there.
I don't know where you're from or how much you know about British politics, but in the UK political parties of late have been run along very tight lines - politicians will completely ignore any personal feelings and tow the party line almost blindly, regardless of how idiotic the party line is. Even the Iraq war, far more contentious than ID cards, was only opposed by a handful of rebel MPs. Something like ID cards (which few MPs seem to see a problem with - if the public didn't trust the government they wouldn't have been voted in, right?) is simply never going to get a "No" vote.
Combine that with the fact that we have a simple first-past-the-post political system and the systematic dismantling of the House of Lords[1] to replace it with a bunch of appointed cronies
Write to your MP? You might as well write a letter to a brick wall.
[1] British politicical matters are decided by the House of Commons (elected representatives) and the House of Lords (historically unelected, inherited positions). Of course, the government feels that the concept behind the House of Lords is fundamentally opposed to a modern democracy - so they replaced it with a bunch of people who were appointed by the present government. The irony is the House of Lords was full of people who'd had a reasonably good education and didn't need to care about being re-elected so they tended to vote through what made sense for the public, not what made sense for the politicians.
This is high school physics done badly. Very poor analysis.
Their physics may be appalling but the conclusion that it is possible for a tiger to escape the enclosure at San Francisco zoo appears on first glance to be sound.
Unless you can back this up, I'd be very surprised if it's true.
The story goes that MS tried to migrate Hotmail from FreeBSD to NT4 Server back when they bought them. It failed miserably and eventually they gave up and put everything back on FreeBSD. But they learnt a lot from the experience - things like "systems admins like to automate every repetetive task they can think of" - seriously, this was news to Microsoft back in the day - and when 2K server came out they slowly migrated Hotmail to it with rather more success.
If a Netcraft check of www.hotmail.com reveals it's being served by Linux, chances are that's because they're using someone else to provide a caching frontend. They use Akamai for www.microsoft.com, but an nslookup of www.hotmail.com suggests Hotmail uses something by Savvis.
Microsoft is smart. They did not get where they are by being idiots.
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
From a technology perspective, historically they've lagged behind almost everything else that's available. They've improved that significantly in the last few years (IIS 6 isn't the security and stablity nightmare earlier versions were, for instance, and Windows SBS is pretty good value for money) but if you look at their product lineup over the course of the last 25 years, virtually everything there is a second-rate clone of something else that's already on the market.
Smaller businesses are happy with what they have right now - probably because quite honestly, the level of functionality SBS gives you for the money is actually pretty damn good. I defy anyone to build a Linux-based solution with the same level of functionality for less cost when the cost of their time is taken into account.
The things you'll have trouble with are:
- Exchange - there's no Free equivalent which integrates as sweetly with Outlook and a web based client doesn't do you much good when you're on the road and reliable web access isn't guaranteed.
- SQL server. Well, not SQL server as such, more the boring business applications which depend on it.
Try telling a business owner who's looking for a computer system rather than a religion that they can't computerise their payroll because there isn't a free application which does a half-decent job of payroll management. Oh, and they might want to double-check the figures they send to Revenue and Customs (or whatever their local equivalent is) because the only accounting package you could find hasn't been fully localised to account for the tax legislation in this country.
Lots of people pick MS without really evaluating whether or not there are any alternatives which may suit them better. Furthermore, a lot of small businesses get their IT supplied by the local chap down the road who happens to know a bit about computers - and 9 times out of 10, what that means is he'll install Windows SBS because it's what he knows.
Or perhaps you're referring to the failed attack in Glasgow Airport where the terrorists got their ideas about what happens when you set fire to petrol from watching too many films?
You could also say: "Men without girlfriends are over represented in terrorist groups."
This is actually one of the ideas about terrorism's root causes.
Broadly speaking, the theory states that the culture in some Middle Eastern countries doesn't like baby girls (for whatever reason - perhaps women get married and look after the husband and his family, so parents with a lot of girls may not have anyone to look after them in their dotage, perhaps the bride's family is expected to pay a hefty dowry), and abortions and infanticide of girls is relatively common.
The net result being there are fewer women to go around, and a significant percentage of men will probably never find a mate. In essence, sexual frustration causes terrorism.
The techology companies have paid lip service to trying to solve the problem.
This might be because fundamentally, a computer is a general purpose machine for storing, processing and outputting ones and zeroes.
It neither knows nor cares what, if any, special significance should be attached to a particular sequence of ones and zeroes, save those that form its instructions. As soon as you try to retrofit this capability, the computer stops being a general purpose machine. This may suit the media companies, but they don't form the majority of customers.
The Internet is a general purpose means of getting a sequence of ones and zeroes from A to B. Via C, D, E and F if necessary. Nothing on the Internet knows or cares what significance should be attached to any particular sequence, save those parts of the sequence which are inserted in order to ensure that data gets from A to B. Again, retrofitting this capability removes the "general purpose" aspect, and again the people who could do so are in no way beholden to the media companies.
As a final thought. Its now possible to buy music, on a track by track basis, for a reasonable amount of money, without DRM. Has this made a dint in illegal filesharing?
It's now possible provided you're in the USA.
But there are so many variables that have been discussed over and over again that I fear to retread them now would gain nothing and waste my time.
Firstly, they've been able to retain copyright over all their records. (Christ knows how they managed this - I imagine it was a lot easier when they started out)
Secondly, IIRC royalties are shared equally between band members and Paul McGuinness.
Basically, they're one of very few bands that has actually had a reasonably fair deal with their record label for a very long time - I don't know enough about their history but it seems fair to say that they have no recollection of record labels screwing them over, so as far as they're concerned they're happy and any change to the status quo is likely a Very Bad Thing.
There's a lot of mail admins out there - and a lot who consider a quick & dirty mail relay running Linux and ClamAV to be a pretty good first line of defense against email-borne trojans and virii. Seeing as ClamAV doesn't have a daemon mode, and end users in any large organisation can seldom be trusted to run their own AV scans as required[1] that's pretty much the biggest use for it.
[1] Yes I know all you geeks might be OK. But you're not the sort to open every silly email you receive. The receptionist who forwards all the "Look Out for the Terrible Good Times Virus!!!111OMGWTFBBQ" emails she receives is, and if she could be relied upon to follow good computing practices, we wouldn't need AV software in the first place.
Another thing I've seen mentioned is that the majority of compromised hosts seem to be in hosting companies.
I wonder how many hosting companies always configure customer systems with the same root password per default? Because I'll bet there's at least a handful. And of those, a number of customers probably don't bother to change the root password - particularly if it seems like a reasonably secure password.
Of course, the password is drastically less secure if it happens to be the same for 40% of the hosts in a particular IP block - because you only need one idiot admin and then everyone's compromised.
As far as I can gather, this amounts to the following:
There exists a perfectly good tag which in essence states "I know what I'm doing; this is the version of HTML I'm using, please render this strictly". This is the DOCTYPE tag.
It turns out that many pages which have the DOCTYPE tag were written by someone who clearly didn't know what they were doing. Thus, they broke because IE6 had a curious definition of what constituted strict rendering.
Microsoft's proposal is an HTTP header which may be embedded with a META tag, the meaning of which is "I know what I'm doing, this is the browser I'm targeting, please render this as per that browser". A mechanism which may make sense if the only browser which has ever existed is IE, and the only thing you need to worry about is different versions of IE, but is completely nonsensical when there are many other browsers which are now garnering enough attention that they're actually getting used and are being accounted for in site development - the only way it can work across the board is if everyone else reverse engineers the rendering model used by every version of IE and re-implements it.
I think they need to get back to "thinking different".
I disagree. "Let's take the biggest selling points of our flagship product and break them!" is most definitely thinking very different to most established ideas.
Too right. The only gripe I have with Postgres is that it's only relatively recently that the development team has started to take performance seriously and getting it running as fast as is humanly possible on the available hardware can be a bit of a black art.
Mind you, Postgres tends to take a serious approach to data integrity, so this is a tradeoff I'm prepared to live with.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
- Hal Abelson
So men are now downgraded to just a lustobject?
Ofcourse that's very sad and tragic. But I can live with it.
Yeah, but the reality is that women only have sex to secure a partner and make babies. Once they've got you, the sex dwindles off rapidly unless/until she decides she wants a child.
Now you'll have to decide how serious I am....
"Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006..."
You know, I'm sure the most basic Debian install is at least that many packages.
This policy by the British ID system/database (and its inevitable US counterpart) is going to flush freedom down the toilet. Ironically, when the government overreacts to terrorist threats and takes away freedoms...THE TERRORISTS WIN.
You are way too late there.
I don't know where you're from or how much you know about British politics, but in the UK political parties of late have been run along very tight lines - politicians will completely ignore any personal feelings and tow the party line almost blindly, regardless of how idiotic the party line is. Even the Iraq war, far more contentious than ID cards, was only opposed by a handful of rebel MPs. Something like ID cards (which few MPs seem to see a problem with - if the public didn't trust the government they wouldn't have been voted in, right?) is simply never going to get a "No" vote.
Combine that with the fact that we have a simple first-past-the-post political system and the systematic dismantling of the House of Lords[1] to replace it with a bunch of appointed cronies
Write to your MP? You might as well write a letter to a brick wall.
[1] British politicical matters are decided by the House of Commons (elected representatives) and the House of Lords (historically unelected, inherited positions). Of course, the government feels that the concept behind the House of Lords is fundamentally opposed to a modern democracy - so they replaced it with a bunch of people who were appointed by the present government. The irony is the House of Lords was full of people who'd had a reasonably good education and didn't need to care about being re-elected so they tended to vote through what made sense for the public, not what made sense for the politicians.
This is high school physics done badly. Very poor analysis.
Their physics may be appalling but the conclusion that it is possible for a tiger to escape the enclosure at San Francisco zoo appears on first glance to be sound.
Unless you can back this up, I'd be very surprised if it's true.
The story goes that MS tried to migrate Hotmail from FreeBSD to NT4 Server back when they bought them. It failed miserably and eventually they gave up and put everything back on FreeBSD. But they learnt a lot from the experience - things like "systems admins like to automate every repetetive task they can think of" - seriously, this was news to Microsoft back in the day - and when 2K server came out they slowly migrated Hotmail to it with rather more success.
If a Netcraft check of www.hotmail.com reveals it's being served by Linux, chances are that's because they're using someone else to provide a caching frontend. They use Akamai for www.microsoft.com, but an nslookup of www.hotmail.com suggests Hotmail uses something by Savvis.
Microsoft is smart. They did not get where they are by being idiots.
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
From a technology perspective, historically they've lagged behind almost everything else that's available. They've improved that significantly in the last few years (IIS 6 isn't the security and stablity nightmare earlier versions were, for instance, and Windows SBS is pretty good value for money) but if you look at their product lineup over the course of the last 25 years, virtually everything there is a second-rate clone of something else that's already on the market.
Cialis vincit disfunctio penilis!
People called Cialis they disfunctional conquering penises?
(with apologies to Monty Python)
Of course I can't. But I wasn't.
Smaller businesses are happy with what they have right now - probably because quite honestly, the level of functionality SBS gives you for the money is actually pretty damn good. I defy anyone to build a Linux-based solution with the same level of functionality for less cost when the cost of their time is taken into account.
The things you'll have trouble with are:
- Exchange - there's no Free equivalent which integrates as sweetly with Outlook and a web based client doesn't do you much good when you're on the road and reliable web access isn't guaranteed.
- SQL server. Well, not SQL server as such, more the boring business applications which depend on it.
Try telling a business owner who's looking for a computer system rather than a religion that they can't computerise their payroll because there isn't a free application which does a half-decent job of payroll management. Oh, and they might want to double-check the figures they send to Revenue and Customs (or whatever their local equivalent is) because the only accounting package you could find hasn't been fully localised to account for the tax legislation in this country.
None of the people responsible for the US' current political system were exactly poor, y'know.
2 does not necessarily follow on from 1.
Lots of people pick MS without really evaluating whether or not there are any alternatives which may suit them better. Furthermore, a lot of small businesses get their IT supplied by the local chap down the road who happens to know a bit about computers - and 9 times out of 10, what that means is he'll install Windows SBS because it's what he knows.
Not true, actually.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=331637&cid=21021947 (Topic: "Monster Black Hole Busts Theory")
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=228367&cid=18507905 (Topic: "Cassini probes the Hexagon on Saturn")
(Do I get an "Informative" mod for carrying on this discussion?)
How much money do you think big drugs companies would pay to bury your AIDS cure?
...and if you refused to sell for some philanthropic reason, how many horses heads do you think you'll find in your bed?
Someone gets hit by a bus and that knowledge is lost forevermore.
Solution: Stop hitting people with busses.
Otherwise all you get is a bunch of talkers, not doers, or at least doers who blow themselves up more often, and who fail to even reach their targets.
What, you mean like the failed London bombings which took place on 21 July 2005?
Or perhaps you're referring to the failed attack in Glasgow Airport where the terrorists got their ideas about what happens when you set fire to petrol from watching too many films?
You could also say: "Men without girlfriends are over represented in terrorist groups."
This is actually one of the ideas about terrorism's root causes.
Broadly speaking, the theory states that the culture in some Middle Eastern countries doesn't like baby girls (for whatever reason - perhaps women get married and look after the husband and his family, so parents with a lot of girls may not have anyone to look after them in their dotage, perhaps the bride's family is expected to pay a hefty dowry), and abortions and infanticide of girls is relatively common.
The net result being there are fewer women to go around, and a significant percentage of men will probably never find a mate. In essence, sexual frustration causes terrorism.
The techology companies have paid lip service to trying to solve the problem.
This might be because fundamentally, a computer is a general purpose machine for storing, processing and outputting ones and zeroes.
It neither knows nor cares what, if any, special significance should be attached to a particular sequence of ones and zeroes, save those that form its instructions. As soon as you try to retrofit this capability, the computer stops being a general purpose machine. This may suit the media companies, but they don't form the majority of customers.
The Internet is a general purpose means of getting a sequence of ones and zeroes from A to B. Via C, D, E and F if necessary. Nothing on the Internet knows or cares what significance should be attached to any particular sequence, save those parts of the sequence which are inserted in order to ensure that data gets from A to B. Again, retrofitting this capability removes the "general purpose" aspect, and again the people who could do so are in no way beholden to the media companies.
As a final thought. Its now possible to buy music, on a track by track basis, for a reasonable amount of money, without DRM. Has this made a dint in illegal filesharing?
It's now possible provided you're in the USA.
But there are so many variables that have been discussed over and over again that I fear to retread them now would gain nothing and waste my time.
U2 are a bit of an odd case.
Firstly, they've been able to retain copyright over all their records. (Christ knows how they managed this - I imagine it was a lot easier when they started out)
Secondly, IIRC royalties are shared equally between band members and Paul McGuinness.
Basically, they're one of very few bands that has actually had a reasonably fair deal with their record label for a very long time - I don't know enough about their history but it seems fair to say that they have no recollection of record labels screwing them over, so as far as they're concerned they're happy and any change to the status quo is likely a Very Bad Thing.
Yes, you're quite right. I was thinking of a local Windows client with realtime filesystem scanning.
I completely mis-worded that.
There's a lot of mail admins out there - and a lot who consider a quick & dirty mail relay running Linux and ClamAV to be a pretty good first line of defense against email-borne trojans and virii. Seeing as ClamAV doesn't have a daemon mode, and end users in any large organisation can seldom be trusted to run their own AV scans as required[1] that's pretty much the biggest use for it.
[1] Yes I know all you geeks might be OK. But you're not the sort to open every silly email you receive. The receptionist who forwards all the "Look Out for the Terrible Good Times Virus!!!111OMGWTFBBQ" emails she receives is, and if she could be relied upon to follow good computing practices, we wouldn't need AV software in the first place.
Presumably 10,000 people would get $1 each.
Another thing I've seen mentioned is that the majority of compromised hosts seem to be in hosting companies.
I wonder how many hosting companies always configure customer systems with the same root password per default? Because I'll bet there's at least a handful. And of those, a number of customers probably don't bother to change the root password - particularly if it seems like a reasonably secure password.
Of course, the password is drastically less secure if it happens to be the same for 40% of the hosts in a particular IP block - because you only need one idiot admin and then everyone's compromised.
As far as I can gather, this amounts to the following:
There exists a perfectly good tag which in essence states "I know what I'm doing; this is the version of HTML I'm using, please render this strictly". This is the DOCTYPE tag.
It turns out that many pages which have the DOCTYPE tag were written by someone who clearly didn't know what they were doing. Thus, they broke because IE6 had a curious definition of what constituted strict rendering.
Microsoft's proposal is an HTTP header which may be embedded with a META tag, the meaning of which is "I know what I'm doing, this is the browser I'm targeting, please render this as per that browser". A mechanism which may make sense if the only browser which has ever existed is IE, and the only thing you need to worry about is different versions of IE, but is completely nonsensical when there are many other browsers which are now garnering enough attention that they're actually getting used and are being accounted for in site development - the only way it can work across the board is if everyone else reverse engineers the rendering model used by every version of IE and re-implements it.
I think they need to get back to "thinking different".
I disagree. "Let's take the biggest selling points of our flagship product and break them!" is most definitely thinking very different to most established ideas.
A good under rated database.
Too right. The only gripe I have with Postgres is that it's only relatively recently that the development team has started to take performance seriously and getting it running as fast as is humanly possible on the available hardware can be a bit of a black art.
Mind you, Postgres tends to take a serious approach to data integrity, so this is a tradeoff I'm prepared to live with.