In-house IT can timeline an issue for repair more reliably than a cloud vendor (see the Amazon outage).
Not really. The larger the company, the larger the IT department to support. IT departments are pretty much ignored, understaffed, and under-funded. That's the nature of IT. As a result, while they can try to time things to be more timely, the end result is that they may not enough resources to really predict how well it's going to go, and you may end-up with a lot of downtime that was still completely unplanned for because they couldn't do it in time, or roll-back to a working system in failure.
For example, one large company I use to work for did an email system upgrade - Exchange (yeah, I know - a problem unto itself). They scheduled it for the weekend when it shouldn't have been a problem. They had tested in their labs prior, so it should have gone through, right? no. A whole chunk of the organization that relied on the servers being updated (may be 1/16th of the entire (very very large) company b/c of how their system was configured) was out of e-mail for one whole week - including a top-level manager that had regular communications with government, as well as people at all levels trying to win contracts. They tried. They failed. They couldn't restore it. They brought it Microsoft to help; but it still took a week.
(Personally, I would have changed their whole email infrastructure as each site or division had their own dedicated email infrastructure instead of a single corporate-wide system. Yes, the site systems interplayed somehow into the larger corporate systems so that authentication, etc. worked. But it was still a mish-mash infrastructure.)
Just saying - even in-house IT can't really be relied upon any more than an external company you're paying to provide service. But then, the in-house IT folks see themselves as both mission critical and able to take their time to do whatever they want since besides their individual paychecks, the in-house IT organization doesn't have to fend for its right to live based on how well it provides service - it just provides service, users be damned. Where as the external company depends quite well on how well they provide service to you; you're paying them to do so and they (generally) want to retain that business instead of losing it to a competitor.
The biggest problem I've come across in IT is having a department and infrastructure that is just simply too big, where you don't have enough skill overlap (especially UP THE CHAIN OF COMMAND).
The biggest problem in IT is that it is highly neglected and poorly understood - at pretty much every level, not to mention especially in small organizations it tends to have a high turn-over rate, thereby it also has a very poor vision for how to provide the services rendered to the organization, and poor direction on doing so; and more often than not, not having enough people to support it either.
Good IT can be done. But IT leaderships is like CEOs these days - always moving on before the piper comes a calling.
Nothing new here. You've been able to buy it directly from Apple at full price all along, and actually those prices are a little cheaper then when I did the comparison about 1.5 years ago when I bought my Nexus One - then the 32GB version was a whopping $799. Apple still makes you get a contract though - probably part of their data plan agreements, one of the reasons I didn't go for it (not to mention that aside from the SDD drive size, dual camera, and a few mm in dimensions, even the Nexus One is superior).
The last thing 'coders' need is another book telling them exactly what practices they should be following. As with most things, the focus should always be on creating a working product first. After you've built something, then you can refine it and clean it up. Too often when the focus is on how it is to be completed instead of actually completing it, the latter never happens. Re-factoring is a much easier task when you already have it working, already know exactly what it should do and when, and have experience using it which helps break it down more intelligently.
The problem, as your 20 years of programming experience should tell you, is that often management will never allow the "clean-it-up" so you get saddled with how you did it the first time, even if you only meant it to be a prototype. So, doing your best to get it as close to right the first time - through discipline and good practices to start with, will help you all the more in the long run.
While I haven't RTFB, I will have to agree that more information on this topic is very, very necessary. Often, programmers do not know how to estimate their time - it's skipped in CS/IS/IT/SE curriculum - and there's not much good stuff on the topic available, with most everyone saying "it's too hard". Good material will help the field mature in ways that are desperately needed, and old-timers saying "not another book" is not going to help that.
Go out and read a book or two on plasma dynamics before you post somewhere claiming to have "solved" a plasma engineering problem.
Didn't say I solved it. Just pointed out the OP how it would work supposing it is possible. At present our technological ability is not sufficient to make it possible.
Nothing drives me nuts more than armchair engineers. They have this insane faith in engineering to produce impossible solutions, and feel that if engineers haven't created their device for them, then the engineers just aren't trying
A light saber that used plasma would likely be hot. Hot enough that holding it would get very uncomfortable, magnetic field or no.
Valid point. Though temperature is highly dependent on the substance used to make the plasma and the amount of plasma to start with. And since we're in this fictional world - the handle could have a built-in cooling method that abates the temperature as it gets closer to the holder - that could even be part of the power system used to heat the plasma.
And if the magnetic field is confining it, how does it get through the porous metal? Without destroying the metal?
The magnetic field would need to exist outside the porous metal by at least a few millimeters to as much as a couple inches. Whether or not the metal is destroyed depends on the metal and its melting point. Thereby the metal used would have to have a melting point considerably higher than the temperature of the plasma.
Where does the plasma come from if it's constantly leaking out?
The magnetic field contains the plasma so while it is leaking out of the porous metal, it gets recycled back in later on. Thereby, no loss of substance. Perhaps the hottest parts are extruded from the tip and fall back towards the handle as they cool, following the flow of the magnetic field.
Why do lightsabers require focusing gems?
Perhaps to keep the temperature of the plasma just right? Perhaps to run the power source?
How does a light saber deflect blaster and laser hits that would otherwise melt metal?
Magnetic fields are well known for changing the direction of light, even subtly. Of course, aside from the fact that the field/plasma would burn/melt a bullet - it wouldn't be much help in all cases.
How can lightsabers be an ancient weapon and the guy who designed them is still living on some planet somewhere?
Depends on your definition of ancient. The guy could be from a race that lives for a very, very long time. Yoda was nearly 1000 when he died in episode 5; and the Palpatine was at least as old as Yoda from the back story given - yet didn't look it until the end of Episode 3 when he had to draw from everything built up in him to fight off the Jedi as opposed to using it to maintain his age. So anything is possible - especially in such a fictional universe.
Of course, this also means that the magnetic field would have to be finely tuned for the materials used (perhaps accounting for the differences in color between different light sabers), and it would also suffer from magnetic interference from numerous sources - some of which would be fatal to its use or longevity as a weapon.
And, of course, there is the simpler solution which applies only in the fictional Star Wars Universe - the light saber itself is not actually a laser/light/plasma blade but made up of the force (in a physical, more concentrated form of the midoclorians) as manipulated by its wielder, thereby requiring the ability to manipulate the force to use it (consistent with Star Wars AFAIK). Stronger users of the force could therefore have longer blades if desired, and the focusing gem is just a focal point for the wielder. In other words, the light saber is just a smaller, more useful version of the lightning emitted by powerful Jedi/Sithe that can be used with less skill in the force by those that have been properly trained. Sadly, this does nothing for science in the real world.
Thats what you need to keep avionics from being disrupted and vice versa according to the DoD, they've done a lot of testing on that stuff over the last 30 years.
You do realize that DoD is more concerned with the security of the information on those devices than anything else, right? Sure, it also has the added benefit of decreasing interference with the planes - but those planes also have very heavily shielded cabling and components, again for the same reason - security.
So that does not necessarily have anything to do with the interference of the PDS/PEDs and the aircraft.
As of today, I am looking for more Outlook-like abilities from TB, there is no built-in calendar, there is no to-do lists. I have to look for other solutions like Google, but I hate the corporation thinking of G. Hope the enhancements I am hoping for arrives with this new v. Already downloading it.
Use the Lightening add-on; they're suppose to provide it with TB at some point - or at least they were making a good try to do so with TB3. Pretty much does what you want. I've got a full Calendar - both off-line provided by TB+Lightening and on-line, synchronized calendars (iCal, CalDAV, etc.). There's also a task list.
Well, LO/TDF didn't instill much confidence at least in me that they were going to be better than what they cried fowl with per Oracle - the only difference being they didn't require copyright assignment. So I am quite pleased to see ASF receiving OOo, and hope it does very well there. I'm sure it will pick up steam and again become the de facto driver of OOo and its derivatives especially as this brings great clarity to what is going on with OOo - something that has been lacking since LO split, and probably the main driver behind the loss of momentum behind OOo itself.
except the oil was mostly the same. in this case manufacturers building cheapo products will damage microsoft's brand perception which is what they want to avoid
How could it get any worse? Microsoft has never had very good branch perception beyond the board room.
I agree 100% of what your post. Illegal or not it worked and created the monopoly. I do not agree with all of his tactics or like all of his products when he was CEO of Microsoft, but he knows how to make sure people use them and pay Microsoft large sums of money for them. This is something shareholders drool on.
Only if they wanted billions of dollars set aside for further anti-trust actions...I know I wouldn't.
Yes the Windows powered phones had a terrible interface, and yes the MS Office teams crippled the tablet on purpose. However, this is something that Balmer should have improved upon. Microsoft won these products and the idea of a smartphone was there thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft did make great profits when these 2 products for came out.
Hate to break to you but those came out under Gates (as the Chief Software Architect - still wielding the same power as when he was CEO as far as the product lines went). They were cripped - both OS and Office - on purpose to try to keep people on the desktop. Microsoft has fought tooth and nail to keep people on the desktop. That's one of the reasons why Windows Mobile has never really been any good - and was simply another version of the Desktop version of Windows.
MS typically likes to put their toes in the water and gradually improve their product quality after it starts generating revenue under Gates. Windows NT and Word were horrible at first. MS cornered these markets and left them right open for Apple after Balmer let them die out. Gates himself said that Ipod is obsolete as users will switch to cell phones right before he left. What did Balmer do? Let Apple take over that market with the Iphone 2 years later. lol
Again, Ballmer and Gates both want to keep people only on the Desktop. So again, it's no surprise that Apple did the iPhone while Microsoft sat by and watched. It would have happened with Gates as CEO too; he is infamous for missing the boat on technology trends.
My point is he had a vision and if he stayed on Microsoft would be making a lot more money. Just as he bashed employees for leaving IE and Office behind compared to their competitors, he would make sure Windows Mobile would look pretty and so would the tablet edition of XP and Windows 7. Hate him all you want but Gates knows how to make money very well. After all, Dos/Windows 3.11 were the biggest pieces of dodo on the face of the earth yet they took over. That says a lot about him as a business man to pull that one off.
Gates (and Microsoft) is most famous for enforcing others to abide by contracts while weaseling out of abiding by the contracts themselves. THat is the primary reason why DOS/Windows took off. And again, Gates would not have done anything different for the tablet or Windows Mobile - he led that for a long time. Microsoft sees the Desktop and nothing else - especially under Gates. If Gates had not stepped aside, then WP7 would have just been another iteration of WinMobile 6 - a micro-desktop. (Not saying that WP7 is any good - it sucks. Just pointing that the interface change would not have happened under Gates rule.)
As a user I do not want him back strong arming everyone again, but if I were a shareholder or bank you bet I would be begging him.
See first response.
In all fairness it maybe too little too late now as once you lose the standards bar it is near impossible to gain it back to use twisted standards for your gain. MS no longer sets the standard in phones or html/css anymore.
Microsoft never set standards other than de facto standards through their EEE philosophy. For example, they took CIFS and extended it to make SMB, later adding a modified LDAP and modified Kerberos (neither of which are compatible with standard LDAP and Kerberos) to make ActiveDirectory. They only managed not to do that to TCP/IP as they were late on the game for network
Let me see where MS was when Gates left? Oh yeah...
1. IE owned 90% of the browser market
And was found guilty of anti-trust behavior for how they got there. (EU)
2. SQL Server was rapidly gaining marketshare over Oracle and DB2
And MySQL and others were relatively new on the scene and missing major chunks of functionality (e.g. transactions, server-side procedures) that major deployments require. Notice that MySQL and PostgreSQL are also eating Oracle and DB2's lunch.
3. WindowsCE aka Windows Mobile owned 90% of the smart phone market
When there was no definition of a smart phone. Honestly, the only time WinCE/WinMo ruled was prior to the whole concept of what a smart phone really is. They ruled, along with Symbian, in the Feature Phone category - a category left behind long ago. Smart Phones didn't truly exist until iPhone and Android were released.
And, fwiw, MS tried to just put the "Desktop" on a device and call it a day.
4. Windows owned 95% of the desktop operating system market
And they were found guilty of anti-trust for how they got there. (US)
5. Customers upgrading Windows/Office every 2-3 years during life cycling desktops.
Okay, I'll give you this one. It wasn't until right about the time that Gates stepped aside that MS screwed itself when it changed is Volume Licensing structure in a manner that (i) was detrimental to many of the customers, and (ii) was followed on by non-delivery of expectations that lead to (iii) most customers not renewing their Volume Licenses in the new program and (iv) many started evaluating Linux as an alternative or put more emphasis on doing so in order to (v) leave Windows behind or reduce use of Windows Servers on the next upgrade cycle instead of renewing their Volume Licenses. (It was well publicized at the time that only 66% renewed on the change, and then only 33% of those renewed at the end of the contract.)
6. MS was first with the MS tablet
But again, they tried to just toss a desktop on it and call it a day. They did not treat it as what it really is - something very different from the desktop.
In all honesty, yes, Bill Gates is probably the only person that can really run Microsoft only if you want it to run in the anti-competitive manner it has since its inception. However, for the long term success of Microsoft, then all management under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer need to be exorcised and an entirely new management team - at every layer - needs to take over - a team that would actually enable the company to work well with the FLOSS community, release stuff under GPL, etc - a team that would not be out to devour all competition but help make the company work with others to build standards instead of employing the infamous EEE methodology.
No, Bill Gates is not the leader for that. Neither is Ballmer. However, both of them still have enough influence to make it continue in its self-destructive, industry-destructive nature.
Same tactic MS has used against other companies via a third party investor - get someone to buy some stock, then start a movement against their board of directors and officers to get people they favor in management positions. They've used that tactic for years - to gut companies (ala Novell, Nokia) and to get their products in when the company otherwise wouldn't use them (Nokia). Interesting seeing it used on them for a change.:D
Unless your game is using a non-standard keyboard. Example: Try playing Sid Meier's Red Storm Rising on an emulator. Since he wrote it to work with a C64 keyboard, you really need a C64. Hence the need for the original hardware.
But other than that, yes I agree emulators are easier to maintain and keep working. Unless you are playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time which uses the unique N64 controller, and is nigh-impossible to play on an emulator.
So then you emulate the keyboard too. Emulators make it so you don't need the real hardware - you just need to emulate the appropriate bits of the hardware - keyboard included.
KDE has been moving to support more platforms than ever - even (eventually) replacing the Windows Explorer shell on Windows with KDE4's Plasma. Meanwhile GNOME has of late seemed to be isolating itself from the rest of the world, and there seems to be movement to drop support for anything but their one desired platform.
Guess they can't really get over the GNU+Linux thing too...too bad for them that Linux works with a lot more than just the GNU tools, and will continue to do so.
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
My first thought was also, these are not planets. But I don't know if that's an issue with the IAU definition.
First, obviously not a planet--doesn't orbit a star. But I'd say that's a feature, not a bug, of the definition.
Status as a 'Planet' tells you not only something of the objects origins but also it's current state. These objects share the origins of planets, but have a different current state. We just need a different term to capture that distinction.
I suggest, 'objects formerly known as planets'.
Well yes and no - they could be a result of dieing stars that loss enough gravitational force to carry them on, or they could be far enough away from the star they are orbiting that we just don't know which star(s) it is yet. Numerous reasons why they could be there and yet still be officially called planets.
My first thought was, wonder if this accounts for the whole "Dark Matter" issue.
... the software publishers will just compile their stuff for ARM. How hard can that be?
The problem is all the hidden bugs that will result due to how Microsoft implements their APIs. Porting to a new architecture is not exactly an easy thing to do when you are highly depend on the implementation of HANDLE, LPVOID, BOOL, DWORD, BYTE, etc. There's a reason why C/C++ standardized on uint8_t, uint16_t, int32_t, etc; there's a reason why Linux and the Unix world generally uses such notations when making things cross-architecture compatible.
One of the main problems with keys is that they're much too long for most users to remember, so they almost always end up stored in a file or database of some sort. This act alone reduces the overall security far, far more than the risk of a brute-force attack.
Uh, no it doesn't. You not only have to get into my machine to find the key file, you also have to break the passphrase on that key file.
So at worst it's no less secure than a password, and at best it's far more secure.
First, you can crack keys. Bit length determines how long. So if you are using a short bit-length (e.g. 40-bit, 56-bit) as opposed to a long big length (e.g. 4096-bit, 16384 bit) then it is no different from an easy password (e.g. password) versus a harder password (e.g. #839djAiejf@938). Cracking the key does not require knowledge of the passphrase - you only need that if you gain access to the stored private key file.
Second, a stored key file does not require a passphrase - that is optional, and not everyone adds uses passphrases.
Third, if you do gain access to the stored private key file - then it is as vulnerable as the passphrase used to protect it, and can be brute forced the same way a standard password can.
Fourth, if you do gain access to the private key - via any of the above or other means - then every access point that uses that key is now exposed and you have no way of tracking it or knowing it. For instance, if they gained your private key and brute forced it off-site, then started using it - you would have no clue that they did so. Comparatively, password based systems typically have a retry limit - you get it wrong 3 or 5 times then it locks you out either permanently or for a short time, usually a short time.
So, ultimately keys are no more secure than passwords. They do possibly add another layer to security, but it is also a layer that is more vulnerable when broken - as it is (i) untraceable aside from knowing the proper login occurred, (ii) unstoppable until detected and until all systems are changed, (iii) leaves no evidence of the cracks employed, and (iv) leaves all systems exposed once broken.
Ultimately keys are simply shared secrets - security through obscurity - but ones that typically take longer to brute force. But brute forcing is possible.
The only recourse is to regenerate all your keys on a periodic basis and use different keys with different passphrases for every system you interact with. However, that does not solve the problem, just increases the burden of implementing it. It does reduce the attack footprint when one system is broken, but you again run into the same problem with passwords - either too many to remember or you use the same one; thus making it easy to advance on relatively quickly - and the more passphrases the attacker learns, the faster they will be able to come up with a profile for how you make your passphrases and thus the easier it becomes to predict others. (And again, if they gain access to one system, they can copy all keys on that system and brute force them without your knowledge, thus breaking down the extra layer - again, without any traces on your own system.)
If you end up charging too much, just use the remainder to help maintain the electrical grid.
In government there is no remainder, same as in big organizations, due to how funds are dolled out. If you don't use all your funds this budget cycle then you won't get everything you ask for next budget cycle. It's a sad system that encourages waste as opposed to efficiency.
Then you can perhaps hang out with friends who are studying/have a PhD in another subject or have cross-disciplinary research teams? Today, you really need in-depth knowledge to be able to advance your field (which is actually the point of a PhD) because we've advanced a lot since the 1800s. I don't see any point in establishing a broad know-something-about-everything type of degree, it won't keep us going forward as a civilization.
There are some advancements that will only take place due to interdisciplinary study and not specialization. Yes, a certain amount of specialization is needed; but a greater amount of interdisciplinary study is needed as well in order to truly advance the fields as there are connections that will only be made through interdisciplinary study - not simply staking with your friends in those other fields, but actually studying them yourself as well.
He generalizes the situation in some subjects (e.g. philosophical sciences). The situation in natural sciences is different. Having a PhD in physics (and not being an idiot who does not look left or right) enables you to talk to a lot of people and understand a lot of people. And you usually get you degree in 3-5 years (after the master) and not 12. And yes, i agree with him, weed out the subjects in the PhD courses where people waste, badly supervised, their valuable lifetime and replace the PhD courses by more appropriate new topics and fields. My feeling however is that this is more a problem for the philosophical faculties than for the science faculties.
It's a problem for natural sciences too - where many PhDs are so specialized they can't see outside their bubble, or make connections that they should otherwise be able to make if only they talked to someone in another field of research.
Slashdot Mirror
In-house IT can timeline an issue for repair more reliably than a cloud vendor (see the Amazon outage).
Not really. The larger the company, the larger the IT department to support. IT departments are pretty much ignored, understaffed, and under-funded. That's the nature of IT. As a result, while they can try to time things to be more timely, the end result is that they may not enough resources to really predict how well it's going to go, and you may end-up with a lot of downtime that was still completely unplanned for because they couldn't do it in time, or roll-back to a working system in failure.
For example, one large company I use to work for did an email system upgrade - Exchange (yeah, I know - a problem unto itself). They scheduled it for the weekend when it shouldn't have been a problem. They had tested in their labs prior, so it should have gone through, right? no. A whole chunk of the organization that relied on the servers being updated (may be 1/16th of the entire (very very large) company b/c of how their system was configured) was out of e-mail for one whole week - including a top-level manager that had regular communications with government, as well as people at all levels trying to win contracts. They tried. They failed. They couldn't restore it. They brought it Microsoft to help; but it still took a week.
(Personally, I would have changed their whole email infrastructure as each site or division had their own dedicated email infrastructure instead of a single corporate-wide system. Yes, the site systems interplayed somehow into the larger corporate systems so that authentication, etc. worked. But it was still a mish-mash infrastructure.)
Just saying - even in-house IT can't really be relied upon any more than an external company you're paying to provide service. But then, the in-house IT folks see themselves as both mission critical and able to take their time to do whatever they want since besides their individual paychecks, the in-house IT organization doesn't have to fend for its right to live based on how well it provides service - it just provides service, users be damned. Where as the external company depends quite well on how well they provide service to you; you're paying them to do so and they (generally) want to retain that business instead of losing it to a competitor.
The biggest problem I've come across in IT is having a department and infrastructure that is just simply too big, where you don't have enough skill overlap (especially UP THE CHAIN OF COMMAND).
The biggest problem in IT is that it is highly neglected and poorly understood - at pretty much every level, not to mention especially in small organizations it tends to have a high turn-over rate, thereby it also has a very poor vision for how to provide the services rendered to the organization, and poor direction on doing so; and more often than not, not having enough people to support it either.
Good IT can be done. But IT leaderships is like CEOs these days - always moving on before the piper comes a calling.
We always wondered who the idiots were that bought them.
Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.
Nothing new here. You've been able to buy it directly from Apple at full price all along, and actually those prices are a little cheaper then when I did the comparison about 1.5 years ago when I bought my Nexus One - then the 32GB version was a whopping $799. Apple still makes you get a contract though - probably part of their data plan agreements, one of the reasons I didn't go for it (not to mention that aside from the SDD drive size, dual camera, and a few mm in dimensions, even the Nexus One is superior).
The last thing 'coders' need is another book telling them exactly what practices they should be following. As with most things, the focus should always be on creating a working product first. After you've built something, then you can refine it and clean it up. Too often when the focus is on how it is to be completed instead of actually completing it, the latter never happens. Re-factoring is a much easier task when you already have it working, already know exactly what it should do and when, and have experience using it which helps break it down more intelligently.
The problem, as your 20 years of programming experience should tell you, is that often management will never allow the "clean-it-up" so you get saddled with how you did it the first time, even if you only meant it to be a prototype. So, doing your best to get it as close to right the first time - through discipline and good practices to start with, will help you all the more in the long run.
While I haven't RTFB, I will have to agree that more information on this topic is very, very necessary. Often, programmers do not know how to estimate their time - it's skipped in CS/IS/IT/SE curriculum - and there's not much good stuff on the topic available, with most everyone saying "it's too hard". Good material will help the field mature in ways that are desperately needed, and old-timers saying "not another book" is not going to help that.
Didn't say I solved it. Just pointed out the OP how it would work supposing it is possible. At present our technological ability is not sufficient to make it possible.
+1000
Magnetic fields don't change the direction of light. And they certainly aren't "well known" for it. Name one example.
Magnetic fields are well known because of magnets. Sheesh.
And a CRT monitor - which utilizes magnetic fields to do just that - would disagree with you.
Valid point. Though temperature is highly dependent on the substance used to make the plasma and the amount of plasma to start with. And since we're in this fictional world - the handle could have a built-in cooling method that abates the temperature as it gets closer to the holder - that could even be part of the power system used to heat the plasma.
The magnetic field would need to exist outside the porous metal by at least a few millimeters to as much as a couple inches. Whether or not the metal is destroyed depends on the metal and its melting point. Thereby the metal used would have to have a melting point considerably higher than the temperature of the plasma.
The magnetic field contains the plasma so while it is leaking out of the porous metal, it gets recycled back in later on. Thereby, no loss of substance. Perhaps the hottest parts are extruded from the tip and fall back towards the handle as they cool, following the flow of the magnetic field.
Perhaps to keep the temperature of the plasma just right? Perhaps to run the power source?
Magnetic fields are well known for changing the direction of light, even subtly. Of course, aside from the fact that the field/plasma would burn/melt a bullet - it wouldn't be much help in all cases.
Depends on your definition of ancient. The guy could be from a race that lives for a very, very long time. Yoda was nearly 1000 when he died in episode 5; and the Palpatine was at least as old as Yoda from the back story given - yet didn't look it until the end of Episode 3 when he had to draw from everything built up in him to fight off the Jedi as opposed to using it to maintain his age. So anything is possible - especially in such a fictional universe.
Of course, this also means that the magnetic field would have to be finely tuned for the materials used (perhaps accounting for the differences in color between different light sabers), and it would also suffer from magnetic interference from numerous sources - some of which would be fatal to its use or longevity as a weapon.
And, of course, there is the simpler solution which applies only in the fictional Star Wars Universe - the light saber itself is not actually a laser/light/plasma blade but made up of the force (in a physical, more concentrated form of the midoclorians) as manipulated by its wielder, thereby requiring the ability to manipulate the force to use it (consistent with Star Wars AFAIK). Stronger users of the force could therefore have longer blades if desired, and the focusing gem is just a focal point for the wielder. In other words, the light saber is just a smaller, more useful version of the lightning emitted by powerful Jedi/Sithe that can be used with less skill in the force by those that have been properly trained. Sadly, this does nothing for science in the real world.
Have you seen how heavily shielded the cables and connections for PDAs and other PEDs are in US military aircraft?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E-8_crewmembers.JPG
Thats what you need to keep avionics from being disrupted and vice versa according to the DoD, they've done a lot of testing on that stuff over the last 30 years.
You do realize that DoD is more concerned with the security of the information on those devices than anything else, right? Sure, it also has the added benefit of decreasing interference with the planes - but those planes also have very heavily shielded cabling and components, again for the same reason - security.
So that does not necessarily have anything to do with the interference of the PDS/PEDs and the aircraft.
As of today, I am looking for more Outlook-like abilities from TB, there is no built-in calendar, there is no to-do lists. I have to look for other solutions like Google, but I hate the corporation thinking of G. Hope the enhancements I am hoping for arrives with this new v. Already downloading it.
Use the Lightening add-on; they're suppose to provide it with TB at some point - or at least they were making a good try to do so with TB3. Pretty much does what you want. I've got a full Calendar - both off-line provided by TB+Lightening and on-line, synchronized calendars (iCal, CalDAV, etc.). There's also a task list.
"The egos in both organizations are entrenched now, merging would be very difficult."
Let's wait and see. Oracle has stated that they will pass OOo to Apache, they haven't told under which license. I bet it won't be under GPL.
Many details should be forthcoming from ASF, especially via http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal. No need to be GPL/LGPL, ASF licensing requirements are generally very good.
I'm looking forward to OOo being releases from ASF.
Well, LO/TDF didn't instill much confidence at least in me that they were going to be better than what they cried fowl with per Oracle - the only difference being they didn't require copyright assignment. So I am quite pleased to see ASF receiving OOo, and hope it does very well there. I'm sure it will pick up steam and again become the de facto driver of OOo and its derivatives especially as this brings great clarity to what is going on with OOo - something that has been lacking since LO split, and probably the main driver behind the loss of momentum behind OOo itself.
except the oil was mostly the same. in this case manufacturers building cheapo products will damage microsoft's brand perception which is what they want to avoid
How could it get any worse? Microsoft has never had very good branch perception beyond the board room.
I agree 100% of what your post. Illegal or not it worked and created the monopoly. I do not agree with all of his tactics or like all of his products when he was CEO of Microsoft, but he knows how to make sure people use them and pay Microsoft large sums of money for them. This is something shareholders drool on.
Only if they wanted billions of dollars set aside for further anti-trust actions...I know I wouldn't.
Yes the Windows powered phones had a terrible interface, and yes the MS Office teams crippled the tablet on purpose. However, this is something that Balmer should have improved upon. Microsoft won these products and the idea of a smartphone was there thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft did make great profits when these 2 products for came out.
Hate to break to you but those came out under Gates (as the Chief Software Architect - still wielding the same power as when he was CEO as far as the product lines went). They were cripped - both OS and Office - on purpose to try to keep people on the desktop. Microsoft has fought tooth and nail to keep people on the desktop. That's one of the reasons why Windows Mobile has never really been any good - and was simply another version of the Desktop version of Windows.
MS typically likes to put their toes in the water and gradually improve their product quality after it starts generating revenue under Gates. Windows NT and Word were horrible at first. MS cornered these markets and left them right open for Apple after Balmer let them die out. Gates himself said that Ipod is obsolete as users will switch to cell phones right before he left. What did Balmer do? Let Apple take over that market with the Iphone 2 years later. lol
Again, Ballmer and Gates both want to keep people only on the Desktop. So again, it's no surprise that Apple did the iPhone while Microsoft sat by and watched. It would have happened with Gates as CEO too; he is infamous for missing the boat on technology trends.
My point is he had a vision and if he stayed on Microsoft would be making a lot more money. Just as he bashed employees for leaving IE and Office behind compared to their competitors, he would make sure Windows Mobile would look pretty and so would the tablet edition of XP and Windows 7. Hate him all you want but Gates knows how to make money very well. After all, Dos/Windows 3.11 were the biggest pieces of dodo on the face of the earth yet they took over. That says a lot about him as a business man to pull that one off.
Gates (and Microsoft) is most famous for enforcing others to abide by contracts while weaseling out of abiding by the contracts themselves. THat is the primary reason why DOS/Windows took off. And again, Gates would not have done anything different for the tablet or Windows Mobile - he led that for a long time. Microsoft sees the Desktop and nothing else - especially under Gates. If Gates had not stepped aside, then WP7 would have just been another iteration of WinMobile 6 - a micro-desktop. (Not saying that WP7 is any good - it sucks. Just pointing that the interface change would not have happened under Gates rule.)
As a user I do not want him back strong arming everyone again, but if I were a shareholder or bank you bet I would be begging him.
See first response.
In all fairness it maybe too little too late now as once you lose the standards bar it is near impossible to gain it back to use twisted standards for your gain. MS no longer sets the standard in phones or html/css anymore.
Microsoft never set standards other than de facto standards through their EEE philosophy. For example, they took CIFS and extended it to make SMB, later adding a modified LDAP and modified Kerberos (neither of which are compatible with standard LDAP and Kerberos) to make ActiveDirectory. They only managed not to do that to TCP/IP as they were late on the game for network
And was found guilty of anti-trust behavior for how they got there. (EU)
And MySQL and others were relatively new on the scene and missing major chunks of functionality (e.g. transactions, server-side procedures) that major deployments require. Notice that MySQL and PostgreSQL are also eating Oracle and DB2's lunch.
When there was no definition of a smart phone. Honestly, the only time WinCE/WinMo ruled was prior to the whole concept of what a smart phone really is. They ruled, along with Symbian, in the Feature Phone category - a category left behind long ago. Smart Phones didn't truly exist until iPhone and Android were released.
And, fwiw, MS tried to just put the "Desktop" on a device and call it a day.
And they were found guilty of anti-trust for how they got there. (US)
Okay, I'll give you this one. It wasn't until right about the time that Gates stepped aside that MS screwed itself when it changed is Volume Licensing structure in a manner that (i) was detrimental to many of the customers, and (ii) was followed on by non-delivery of expectations that lead to (iii) most customers not renewing their Volume Licenses in the new program and (iv) many started evaluating Linux as an alternative or put more emphasis on doing so in order to (v) leave Windows behind or reduce use of Windows Servers on the next upgrade cycle instead of renewing their Volume Licenses. (It was well publicized at the time that only 66% renewed on the change, and then only 33% of those renewed at the end of the contract.)
But again, they tried to just toss a desktop on it and call it a day. They did not treat it as what it really is - something very different from the desktop.
In all honesty, yes, Bill Gates is probably the only person that can really run Microsoft only if you want it to run in the anti-competitive manner it has since its inception. However, for the long term success of Microsoft, then all management under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer need to be exorcised and an entirely new management team - at every layer - needs to take over - a team that would actually enable the company to work well with the FLOSS community, release stuff under GPL, etc - a team that would not be out to devour all competition but help make the company work with others to build standards instead of employing the infamous EEE methodology.
No, Bill Gates is not the leader for that. Neither is Ballmer. However, both of them still have enough influence to make it continue in its self-destructive, industry-destructive nature.
Same tactic MS has used against other companies via a third party investor - get someone to buy some stock, then start a movement against their board of directors and officers to get people they favor in management positions. They've used that tactic for years - to gut companies (ala Novell, Nokia) and to get their products in when the company otherwise wouldn't use them (Nokia). Interesting seeing it used on them for a change. :D
Unless your game is using a non-standard keyboard. Example: Try playing Sid Meier's Red Storm Rising on an emulator. Since he wrote it to work with a C64 keyboard, you really need a C64. Hence the need for the original hardware.
But other than that, yes I agree emulators are easier to maintain and keep working. Unless you are playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time which uses the unique N64 controller, and is nigh-impossible to play on an emulator.
So then you emulate the keyboard too. Emulators make it so you don't need the real hardware - you just need to emulate the appropriate bits of the hardware - keyboard included.
KDE has been moving to support more platforms than ever - even (eventually) replacing the Windows Explorer shell on Windows with KDE4's Plasma. Meanwhile GNOME has of late seemed to be isolating itself from the rest of the world, and there seems to be movement to drop support for anything but their one desired platform.
Guess they can't really get over the GNU+Linux thing too...too bad for them that Linux works with a lot more than just the GNU tools, and will continue to do so.
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
My first thought was also, these are not planets. But I don't know if that's an issue with the IAU definition.
First, obviously not a planet--doesn't orbit a star. But I'd say that's a feature, not a bug, of the definition.
Status as a 'Planet' tells you not only something of the objects origins but also it's current state. These objects share the origins of planets, but have a different current state. We just need a different term to capture that distinction.
I suggest, 'objects formerly known as planets'.
Well yes and no - they could be a result of dieing stars that loss enough gravitational force to carry them on, or they could be far enough away from the star they are orbiting that we just don't know which star(s) it is yet. Numerous reasons why they could be there and yet still be officially called planets.
My first thought was, wonder if this accounts for the whole "Dark Matter" issue.
... the software publishers will just compile their stuff for ARM. How hard can that be?
The problem is all the hidden bugs that will result due to how Microsoft implements their APIs. Porting to a new architecture is not exactly an easy thing to do when you are highly depend on the implementation of HANDLE, LPVOID, BOOL, DWORD, BYTE, etc. There's a reason why C/C++ standardized on uint8_t, uint16_t, int32_t, etc; there's a reason why Linux and the Unix world generally uses such notations when making things cross-architecture compatible.
If only they did a keyboard...sadly they seem to have focused on only a couple brass instruments. Hardly revolutionary.
One of the main problems with keys is that they're much too long for most users to remember, so they almost always end up stored in a file or database of some sort. This act alone reduces the overall security far, far more than the risk of a brute-force attack.
Uh, no it doesn't. You not only have to get into my machine to find the key file, you also have to break the passphrase on that key file.
So at worst it's no less secure than a password, and at best it's far more secure.
First, you can crack keys. Bit length determines how long. So if you are using a short bit-length (e.g. 40-bit, 56-bit) as opposed to a long big length (e.g. 4096-bit, 16384 bit) then it is no different from an easy password (e.g. password) versus a harder password (e.g. #839djAiejf@938). Cracking the key does not require knowledge of the passphrase - you only need that if you gain access to the stored private key file.
Second, a stored key file does not require a passphrase - that is optional, and not everyone adds uses passphrases.
Third, if you do gain access to the stored private key file - then it is as vulnerable as the passphrase used to protect it, and can be brute forced the same way a standard password can.
Fourth, if you do gain access to the private key - via any of the above or other means - then every access point that uses that key is now exposed and you have no way of tracking it or knowing it. For instance, if they gained your private key and brute forced it off-site, then started using it - you would have no clue that they did so. Comparatively, password based systems typically have a retry limit - you get it wrong 3 or 5 times then it locks you out either permanently or for a short time, usually a short time.
So, ultimately keys are no more secure than passwords. They do possibly add another layer to security, but it is also a layer that is more vulnerable when broken - as it is (i) untraceable aside from knowing the proper login occurred, (ii) unstoppable until detected and until all systems are changed, (iii) leaves no evidence of the cracks employed, and (iv) leaves all systems exposed once broken.
Ultimately keys are simply shared secrets - security through obscurity - but ones that typically take longer to brute force. But brute forcing is possible.
The only recourse is to regenerate all your keys on a periodic basis and use different keys with different passphrases for every system you interact with. However, that does not solve the problem, just increases the burden of implementing it. It does reduce the attack footprint when one system is broken, but you again run into the same problem with passwords - either too many to remember or you use the same one; thus making it easy to advance on relatively quickly - and the more passphrases the attacker learns, the faster they will be able to come up with a profile for how you make your passphrases and thus the easier it becomes to predict others. (And again, if they gain access to one system, they can copy all keys on that system and brute force them without your knowledge, thus breaking down the extra layer - again, without any traces on your own system.)
Sadly, too few recognize the above - even US DoD.
In government there is no remainder, same as in big organizations, due to how funds are dolled out. If you don't use all your funds this budget cycle then you won't get everything you ask for next budget cycle. It's a sad system that encourages waste as opposed to efficiency.
Then you can perhaps hang out with friends who are studying/have a PhD in another subject or have cross-disciplinary research teams? Today, you really need in-depth knowledge to be able to advance your field (which is actually the point of a PhD) because we've advanced a lot since the 1800s. I don't see any point in establishing a broad know-something-about-everything type of degree, it won't keep us going forward as a civilization.
There are some advancements that will only take place due to interdisciplinary study and not specialization. Yes, a certain amount of specialization is needed; but a greater amount of interdisciplinary study is needed as well in order to truly advance the fields as there are connections that will only be made through interdisciplinary study - not simply staking with your friends in those other fields, but actually studying them yourself as well.
He generalizes the situation in some subjects (e.g. philosophical sciences). The situation in natural sciences is different. Having a PhD in physics (and not being an idiot who does not look left or right) enables you to talk to a lot of people and understand a lot of people. And you usually get you degree in 3-5 years (after the master) and not 12. And yes, i agree with him, weed out the subjects in the PhD courses where people waste, badly supervised, their valuable lifetime and replace the PhD courses by more appropriate new topics and fields. My feeling however is that this is more a problem for the philosophical faculties than for the science faculties.
It's a problem for natural sciences too - where many PhDs are so specialized they can't see outside their bubble, or make connections that they should otherwise be able to make if only they talked to someone in another field of research.