Border length doesn't matter as much when the borders are entirely non-vegetated and often nearly inaccessible.
With a troop/population ratio of 0.006 in Iraq, and unless there is fancy automated satellite surveillence of all the borders all the time, the borders have to be wide-open. There is also the same situation of the enemy looking identical to allies, as it is guerilla warfare. Even the administration's claims that the majority of Iraq is peaceful are probably applicable to Vietnam, as the fighting there was certainly not evenly distributed over the whole country. I think the next several years will see the same pattern of official optimism and denial until history is indisputable.
There was a very interesting show, called Frontline, on PBS last night. It basically showed how the Bush administration ignored advice from military experts they personally disagreed with and went with their plan of insufficient troops, go straight to Baghdad, happy roses and candy afterwards. I wonder if they would be modest enough to say that hindsight is 20/20, but probably not.
I'm pretty convinced that Iraq is Vietnam II, given that we've been there for thirteen years, now, with no real end in sight. Iraq is also much much bigger than Vietnam, with longer borders, and with as many conflicting interests all around. At least Kerry understands this; Bush is either in complete denial or he is seriously covering his ass (Uh, I can't answer your questions about making mistakes, because I certainly don't want that legal liability and have an election coming up, you see.).
No, it doesn't. A Google search reveals that Intel sold only 100,000 Itaniums this year...a small fraction of Sun's business. SPARC outsells Itanium by 10x. At the low to mid range, Opteron and Intel's own AMD64 clones step in, as well as Mac G5. At the high end, there is POWER 5, also.
Itanic and Opteron running Linux seem to be the only growth players in the market...
I'd say it is actually PowerPC and Opteron. Besides SGI and HP, is there anyone really standing behind Itanium? I read that Opteron out-ships Itanium by 10x. Even Sun is selling Opterons in volume, and SPARC vastly out-sells Itanium. PowerPC is everything Mac plus IBM's big servers. For applying economies of scale to super computing, Itanium is really solidly in a small niche.
Kerry and most Dems think of the War on Terror like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, i.e. a metaphor. It isn't.
Yes, it is.
The West is now locked in a steel cage deathmatch with Radical Islam for world supremacy.
No, it is not.
Fact is, the terrorist attacks are criminal acts not acts of war. Al Queda is nothing more than a KKK or Mafia work-alile that uses coersion, threats, and cowardly attacks to advance their agenda. Afganistan was an extreme example that needed military-scale intervention, but, for the most part, terrorism is best dealt with on a law enforcement and first-responder level...just like we deal with the KKK and the Mafia. Have the KKK and Mafia terrorized and killed people in the past? Yes. Have we declared war against parts of Italy or the South-East USA? No.
Given that voting systems are bought with public money and that there really are not non-public markets for voting systems, it's pretty easy to argue that the software was directly paid for with public money and should be public domain. I'm pretty sure some government contracts already work this way...but I fear seeing what is actually in current voting systems' source code (if 'democrat' if rand().25 stdout =/dev/null...).
Despite the fact we have groups tearing up voter registration forms...
I wonder how easy it would be to make a case that destroying voter registrations is treason (the article says it is already a federal crime). Allow hangings for punishment. Televise the hangings.
BTW, I had to deny a mess of cookies at the reviewjournal site. Why is it that local newspaper and television station websites are always examples of the worst websites? Perhaps it is just a side effect of the quality of local journalism.
Sorry, I actually am a born-and-bred US citizen. My problem is that I paid attention to my Freshmen English professor, and I've regretted it almost every day.
The curious thing about the argument regarding IBM is that it avoided the fact that many Americans are not fluent in English, and that IBM apparently must hire only the subset of Americans who are fluent in English. If they don't, and, in reality, they actually hire Americans with a broad spectrum of English proficiency, then the argument defending IBM is moot.
I've worked with Americans my whole life (being an in the USA and all), and, truly, many, if not a majority, of Americans act as if they had just learned their ABCs. It is quite depressing having to read problem reports or e-mails that look like they were written by second graders.
Microsoft's plan is probably to be the only implementor and to license that implementation to the suckers...er, manufacturers. Providing a half-assed test suite is a perfect way to delay them long enough to allow the plan to take shape.
Windows Media Player would obviously play MPEG-4, but other platforms would not always have WMV9. MPEG-4 would be more ubiquitous, regardless of the "follow the winner" attitude people have about Microsoft. Microsoft really needs to be given the boot once and a while, and this is a good opportunity to do so.
I hope you're taking that opinion to the logical conclusion.
Sorry, I have really bad aim. But seriously, I have lived in urban, suburban, and rural places, and I really do rank them as rural, urban, and suburban in order of preference. Suburban life just reeks of people trying to make space for themselves where there is none. They end up living in denial about how their dogs certainly don't bother anyone, that thier area really is special even after they get a TGI Fridays, and that taking 30 minutes to go seven miles is normal. Suburbia is just perverse.
And take note that it will be unsecured debt that cannot be covered by selling something (an "education" is non-transferrable). You have to decide whether working for ten to fifteen years just to pay off school debt while simultaneously worrying about your family, buying a home/cars, and even affording furniture for a home is worth it. These are the things they never tell students, and students learn too late whether they made the right choices.
Also, you need to get a real major in addition to "pre med." "Pre med" is not a major that anyone will recognize--it is based on the assumption of going to med school, which has never been guaranteed. All you need to get into med school are the prerequisite courses and tests (Organic Chemistry, etc.). Major in science or economics or history or whatever, and you be in the wonderful position of both having a bachelor's degree you can hang your hat on plus having the option of applying to med school. If you decide that $250K is too much, you have a solid Plan B.
I have been wondering how the millions of other couples in america for whom this procedure might be the last chance are dealing with the cost. Going abroad maybe?
I don't know. Regardless, I am of the opinion that there are generally too many people in the USA already. Suburban life has created the cookie-cutter lifestyle with terrible traffic congestion and teeny plots of land, yet no one wants to pay for decent transportation systems. Urban life would be better, but people become very impersonal and the crime rates are higher. Rural is best, but rural is quickly ruined by adding more people. The only conclusion I can see is that American culture is just not tolerant of the medium population densities driven by over-reproduction and a desire for non-urban lifestyles.
Nope. What Windows recently added, OpenBSD had been doing for quite a while. OpenBSD uses GCC, so, yes, there is a way to get GCC to provide the stack protection. Also, both OpenBSD and Solaris can provide execute protections for RAM, at least on SPARC. I'm sure other systems have this too, but I just don't know at the moment.
Again, look to OpenBSD for the cutting edge (OpenSSH, stack protection, good firewall, audited code, clean install, etc.) and see it get implemented in Windows a few years down the road.
IMO, the key is to not focus on leading benchmarks but making the card feature-complete and easy to integrate into X Windows. Raw performance usually just isn't that big of a deal (any decent 3D card made in the last five to seven years is adequate for many people's work).
This means:
- a genuine and complete OpenGL implementation (most but not all needs to be in hardware)
- tested and easily installed drivers for the newest and previous major release of X Windows for Linux and at least one of the BSDs.
- an ability to drive respectably high resolutions at faster than 60Hz.
- focusing on visual quality over speed (antialiasing that doesn't suck would be nice)
Make a usably fast card that produces a very nice display output that also works nicely with X Windows, and you can have a very nice slice of the market. Give it basic modes for dealing with Windows' default drivers, and you could probably make a profit just off of the Linux/BSD crowd who are happy to finally have a company that cares. Get it packaged in those Wal-Mart/Linspire/Xandros/JDS PCs, too.
Scenery, puzzle books, magazines, even a semi-interactive Game Boy are better than continuing the Disney Decomposition of the highly-entertained yet totally non-interactive child. Do parents really want to raise a useless vegetable who is spoiled beyond belief and knows nothing of reality? Do parents really think that children's movies and cartoons are good for children, simply because they think kids can't enjoy things beyond Barney and Spongebob? Do they think that simply watching a Discovery Channel special provides enough foundation in marine biology that the kids can choose their college major based on it?
Fact is, there are a lot of children who are lied to their whole lives, and they don't realize it until they are half way through college, see that nothing is as their idealistic parents and teachers made it out to be, and feel trapped by having already made too great a commitment. This is when burnout and incurable cynicism occur. It can be prevented, but it requires parents taking their heads out of their asses and seeing that they are not raising children but future adults who will have to face the same financial and family decisions they had to.
PCs are fragile and they are unreliable. If you needed your injectors to get the right signal thousands of times a minute, every minute, over a 12-hour drive, do you think a PC with a vibration-sensitive hard drive, non-ECC RAM, and heatsinks held on by little clips is going to make it? There is a reason engine computers come in a brick of metal or plastic with big wiring harnesses, and even they fail occasionally.
a DVD player keeps the little brats quiet and entertained.
Great attitude. If you have kids, I hope they are smart enough to see that you are a bad role model--that is, if their brain hasn't already been fried by the DVD player.
To anyone who is reading this thread and works in the automotive industry: think about liability and your responsibility to the safety of your customers.
From the article: "Windows Automotive, by the way, does not share a network with the low-level systems of a vehicle--so a software crash won't result in, say, brake failure."
Keep it that way. If Windows sinks any lower into the control systems of the car, I will certainly never buy such a car, and I will warn everyone I know to avoid such a car. Anyone reading this from Consumer Reports or the auto insurance industry should take note, too. Windows is simply not safe for controlling anything--it isn't even safe for browsing the WWW! Just wait, it'll be a matter of weeks before someone figures out how to hack the stereo volume remotely; what if it were the throttle?
Yes, once a certain problem domain gets addressed in a FOSS project, it is, by definition, a commodity. So, let's see how Microsoft's product line is shaping up.
Microsoft Windows...Linux/GNOME/KDE--Linspire/JDS/etc. (operating environments are becoming a commodity) Microsoft Office...OpenOffice.org (office suites are becoming a commodity) IIS...Apache (web servers have been one quite a while now) SQL Server...PostgreSQL/MySQL (databases, too, at the low end)
The only markets that Microsoft will have solidly for a while are for things like Visual Studio or Access, where inexperienced developers use them because it is "Microsoft" and "point and click." But, even then, many people get over that and move to better tools. Other than that, the only thing propping up Microsoft in the near-term is familiarity, but that can shift within a matter of a few years. There will be the people who fiercely stand behind Microsoft as they become more irrelevant, but, by then, Microsoft will be a true niche company, like SGI.
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Border length doesn't matter as much when the borders are entirely non-vegetated and often nearly inaccessible.
With a troop/population ratio of 0.006 in Iraq, and unless there is fancy automated satellite surveillence of all the borders all the time, the borders have to be wide-open. There is also the same situation of the enemy looking identical to allies, as it is guerilla warfare. Even the administration's claims that the majority of Iraq is peaceful are probably applicable to Vietnam, as the fighting there was certainly not evenly distributed over the whole country. I think the next several years will see the same pattern of official optimism and denial until history is indisputable.
"Iraq: No new troops needed,...
There was a very interesting show, called Frontline, on PBS last night. It basically showed how the Bush administration ignored advice from military experts they personally disagreed with and went with their plan of insufficient troops, go straight to Baghdad, happy roses and candy afterwards. I wonder if they would be modest enough to say that hindsight is 20/20, but probably not.
I'm pretty convinced that Iraq is Vietnam II, given that we've been there for thirteen years, now, with no real end in sight. Iraq is also much much bigger than Vietnam, with longer borders, and with as many conflicting interests all around. At least Kerry understands this; Bush is either in complete denial or he is seriously covering his ass (Uh, I can't answer your questions about making mistakes, because I certainly don't want that legal liability and have an election coming up, you see.).
Itanium outsells SPARC
No, it doesn't. A Google search reveals that Intel sold only 100,000 Itaniums this year...a small fraction of Sun's business. SPARC outsells Itanium by 10x. At the low to mid range, Opteron and Intel's own AMD64 clones step in, as well as Mac G5. At the high end, there is POWER 5, also.
Itanic and Opteron running Linux seem to be the only growth players in the market...
I'd say it is actually PowerPC and Opteron. Besides SGI and HP, is there anyone really standing behind Itanium? I read that Opteron out-ships Itanium by 10x. Even Sun is selling Opterons in volume, and SPARC vastly out-sells Itanium. PowerPC is everything Mac plus IBM's big servers. For applying economies of scale to super computing, Itanium is really solidly in a small niche.
Kerry and most Dems think of the War on Terror like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, i.e. a metaphor. It isn't.
Yes, it is.
The West is now locked in a steel cage deathmatch with Radical Islam for world supremacy.
No, it is not.
Fact is, the terrorist attacks are criminal acts not acts of war. Al Queda is nothing more than a KKK or Mafia work-alile that uses coersion, threats, and cowardly attacks to advance their agenda. Afganistan was an extreme example that needed military-scale intervention, but, for the most part, terrorism is best dealt with on a law enforcement and first-responder level...just like we deal with the KKK and the Mafia. Have the KKK and Mafia terrorized and killed people in the past? Yes. Have we declared war against parts of Italy or the South-East USA? No.
Actually, I think it is half-sister...
Given that voting systems are bought with public money and that there really are not non-public markets for voting systems, it's pretty easy to argue that the software was directly paid for with public money and should be public domain. I'm pretty sure some government contracts already work this way...but I fear seeing what is actually in current voting systems' source code (if 'democrat' if rand()
Despite the fact we have groups tearing up voter registration forms...
I wonder how easy it would be to make a case that destroying voter registrations is treason (the article says it is already a federal crime). Allow hangings for punishment. Televise the hangings.
BTW, I had to deny a mess of cookies at the reviewjournal site. Why is it that local newspaper and television station websites are always examples of the worst websites? Perhaps it is just a side effect of the quality of local journalism.
Sorry, I actually am a born-and-bred US citizen. My problem is that I paid attention to my Freshmen English professor, and I've regretted it almost every day.
The curious thing about the argument regarding IBM is that it avoided the fact that many Americans are not fluent in English, and that IBM apparently must hire only the subset of Americans who are fluent in English. If they don't, and, in reality, they actually hire Americans with a broad spectrum of English proficiency, then the argument defending IBM is moot.
I've worked with Americans my whole life (being an in the USA and all), and, truly, many, if not a majority, of Americans act as if they had just learned their ABCs. It is quite depressing having to read problem reports or e-mails that look like they were written by second graders.
What were they thinking?
Sitting next to a billionaire feels really really cool.
Microsoft's plan is probably to be the only implementor and to license that implementation to the suckers...er, manufacturers. Providing a half-assed test suite is a perfect way to delay them long enough to allow the plan to take shape.
Windows Media Player would obviously play MPEG-4, but other platforms would not always have WMV9. MPEG-4 would be more ubiquitous, regardless of the "follow the winner" attitude people have about Microsoft. Microsoft really needs to be given the boot once and a while, and this is a good opportunity to do so.
I hope you're taking that opinion to the logical conclusion.
Sorry, I have really bad aim. But seriously, I have lived in urban, suburban, and rural places, and I really do rank them as rural, urban, and suburban in order of preference. Suburban life just reeks of people trying to make space for themselves where there is none. They end up living in denial about how their dogs certainly don't bother anyone, that thier area really is special even after they get a TGI Fridays, and that taking 30 minutes to go seven miles is normal. Suburbia is just perverse.
I'll owe about $250k for my education.
And take note that it will be unsecured debt that cannot be covered by selling something (an "education" is non-transferrable). You have to decide whether working for ten to fifteen years just to pay off school debt while simultaneously worrying about your family, buying a home/cars, and even affording furniture for a home is worth it. These are the things they never tell students, and students learn too late whether they made the right choices.
Also, you need to get a real major in addition to "pre med." "Pre med" is not a major that anyone will recognize--it is based on the assumption of going to med school, which has never been guaranteed. All you need to get into med school are the prerequisite courses and tests (Organic Chemistry, etc.). Major in science or economics or history or whatever, and you be in the wonderful position of both having a bachelor's degree you can hang your hat on plus having the option of applying to med school. If you decide that $250K is too much, you have a solid Plan B.
I have been wondering how the millions of other couples in america for whom this procedure might be the last chance are dealing with the cost. Going abroad maybe?
I don't know. Regardless, I am of the opinion that there are generally too many people in the USA already. Suburban life has created the cookie-cutter lifestyle with terrible traffic congestion and teeny plots of land, yet no one wants to pay for decent transportation systems. Urban life would be better, but people become very impersonal and the crime rates are higher. Rural is best, but rural is quickly ruined by adding more people. The only conclusion I can see is that American culture is just not tolerant of the medium population densities driven by over-reproduction and a desire for non-urban lifestyles.
Windows just might be ahead of *NIX here...
Nope. What Windows recently added, OpenBSD had been doing for quite a while. OpenBSD uses GCC, so, yes, there is a way to get GCC to provide the stack protection. Also, both OpenBSD and Solaris can provide execute protections for RAM, at least on SPARC. I'm sure other systems have this too, but I just don't know at the moment.
Again, look to OpenBSD for the cutting edge (OpenSSH, stack protection, good firewall, audited code, clean install, etc.) and see it get implemented in Windows a few years down the road.
IMO, the key is to not focus on leading benchmarks but making the card feature-complete and easy to integrate into X Windows. Raw performance usually just isn't that big of a deal (any decent 3D card made in the last five to seven years is adequate for many people's work).
This means:
- a genuine and complete OpenGL implementation (most but not all needs to be in hardware)
- tested and easily installed drivers for the newest and previous major release of X Windows for Linux and at least one of the BSDs.
- an ability to drive respectably high resolutions at faster than 60Hz.
- focusing on visual quality over speed (antialiasing that doesn't suck would be nice)
Make a usably fast card that produces a very nice display output that also works nicely with X Windows, and you can have a very nice slice of the market. Give it basic modes for dealing with Windows' default drivers, and you could probably make a profit just off of the Linux/BSD crowd who are happy to finally have a company that cares. Get it packaged in those Wal-Mart/Linspire/Xandros/JDS PCs, too.
Scenery, puzzle books, magazines, even a semi-interactive Game Boy are better than continuing the Disney Decomposition of the highly-entertained yet totally non-interactive child. Do parents really want to raise a useless vegetable who is spoiled beyond belief and knows nothing of reality? Do parents really think that children's movies and cartoons are good for children, simply because they think kids can't enjoy things beyond Barney and Spongebob? Do they think that simply watching a Discovery Channel special provides enough foundation in marine biology that the kids can choose their college major based on it?
Fact is, there are a lot of children who are lied to their whole lives, and they don't realize it until they are half way through college, see that nothing is as their idealistic parents and teachers made it out to be, and feel trapped by having already made too great a commitment. This is when burnout and incurable cynicism occur. It can be prevented, but it requires parents taking their heads out of their asses and seeing that they are not raising children but future adults who will have to face the same financial and family decisions they had to.
why not a PC-based solution
PCs are fragile and they are unreliable. If you needed your injectors to get the right signal thousands of times a minute, every minute, over a 12-hour drive, do you think a PC with a vibration-sensitive hard drive, non-ECC RAM, and heatsinks held on by little clips is going to make it? There is a reason engine computers come in a brick of metal or plastic with big wiring harnesses, and even they fail occasionally.
a DVD player keeps the little brats quiet and entertained.
Great attitude. If you have kids, I hope they are smart enough to see that you are a bad role model--that is, if their brain hasn't already been fried by the DVD player.
To anyone who is reading this thread and works in the automotive industry: think about liability and your responsibility to the safety of your customers.
From the article: "Windows Automotive, by the way, does not share a network with the low-level systems of a vehicle--so a software crash won't result in, say, brake failure."
Keep it that way. If Windows sinks any lower into the control systems of the car, I will certainly never buy such a car, and I will warn everyone I know to avoid such a car. Anyone reading this from Consumer Reports or the auto insurance industry should take note, too. Windows is simply not safe for controlling anything--it isn't even safe for browsing the WWW! Just wait, it'll be a matter of weeks before someone figures out how to hack the stereo volume remotely; what if it were the throttle?
Windows was a pirate culture from day 1, at least by the accounts of how DOS began in the 1980s.
Yes, once a certain problem domain gets addressed in a FOSS project, it is, by definition, a commodity. So, let's see how Microsoft's product line is shaping up.
Microsoft Windows...Linux/GNOME/KDE--Linspire/JDS/etc. (operating environments are becoming a commodity)
Microsoft Office...OpenOffice.org (office suites are becoming a commodity)
IIS...Apache (web servers have been one quite a while now)
SQL Server...PostgreSQL/MySQL (databases, too, at the low end)
The only markets that Microsoft will have solidly for a while are for things like Visual Studio or Access, where inexperienced developers use them because it is "Microsoft" and "point and click." But, even then, many people get over that and move to better tools. Other than that, the only thing propping up Microsoft in the near-term is familiarity, but that can shift within a matter of a few years. There will be the people who fiercely stand behind Microsoft as they become more irrelevant, but, by then, Microsoft will be a true niche company, like SGI.
At one office I worked in, my hands would become almost immobile and typing was often difficult.