For starters, why is saying anything negative about OS-X considered "badmouthing"? Oh, right, this is/.
[But for the record, I've been using and programming Macs since 1984 -- yes, 1984 -- and since I'm in an environment where the higher-ups prefer Windows, have taken more than my share of flak for it.]
Hardware is not the issue -- I'm comparing 10.4 to 10.3 running on a G5 tower, an XServe, and a G5 iMac. I'm not running this stuff on a G3.
But the core program I'm trying to maximize the speed on (a large C++ program compiled on gcc; terminal interface) runs about 20% - 25% slower under 10.4 than under 10.3. That is a significant hit; something is going on.
Similarily, compare the speed of a standard program such as Folding@Home (which I run on all three machines) -- one can get a lot more horsepower out of the G5 processors under XServe than under one of the user OS's.
I will, however, try your suggestions: they seem well-informed.
Anyone know what a similar exercise looks like for Mac OS-10.4? It is not, shall we say, exactly a speed demon and it would be nice to know what could be safely turned off when one is running CPU-intensive processes. Thanks.
I am just so happy that we are providing money so that these very highly-paid clowns can sit on their butts writing bad science fiction rather than, say
armoring vehicles in Iraq
providing for the future medical care of the soldiers currently being maimed in Iraq
providing real security against terrorist attacks (e.g. inspecting container ships)
providing all of the reconstruction aid we'd originally said we'd provide in Afghanistan and Iraq and that the military (the real ones, not the civilians like Cheney, Bush and Wolfowitz who pretend to be) said was absolutely essential for stabilization
So, we can't even secure the London Underground and these people are worried about the Chinese at the L5 points. Give me a break...
True, the military doesn't want a draft, but if current enlistment trends continue, they may have no choice. And draftees could be useful in many jobs.
The military doesn't need cannon fodder at the moment, but it needs a lot of people who can do very routine jobs close to civilian skills, most notably driving trucks. Manning a checkpoint (badly, it should be noted, but, as the old military saying goes "if you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad...") doesn't take much more in the way of skills. Same with routine patrols looking for IEDs (which, periodically, are discovered the hard way, when they go off).
For war fighting, one needs well-trained, skilled and motivated troops. But this is a long-term occupation, and involves a lot of routine. Always has. Save the regular troops for war fighting (e.g. against North Korea), and let the draftees do the routine crap. Also that might finally get the US public paying attention to the war.
In general a university environment is a tradeoff of money for security: salaries are less than in the private sector, but unless you are working on a "soft-money" (externally funded) project, the likelihood of major layoffs, downsizing and mergers is nearly zero. However, the salary structure is compressed by private sector standards -- the ratio of the highest to lowest pay may well be less than 2 -- and there are no stock options (closest thing would be to get football or basketball tickets to scalp, but even that perk is rare now). In recent years many institutions in the U.S. have eliminated things like free or reduced tuition due to tax implications.
So, the key thing to check is where is the money for the position coming from? Is it from the central budget (which is relatively stable) or from an external grant? The latter typically only last a couple of years: if you are in a lab run by an experienced senior investigator, he or she may keep things going for years through multiple grants, but if the well runs dry (or, more commonly, that researcher gets hired elsewhere), the project disappears once the grant runs out. You would typically have a month or two (quite possibly a lot more) warning on this, but the timing is unpredictable.
Same problem on equipment: institutional budgets are generally limited and set on an annual basis with very little flexibility after they are set, and project budgets are more or less fixed at the beginning. Projects that are equipment-intensive -- e.g. electrical engineering -- may have access to a lot of goodies, but in other cases you may be stuck well behind the state of the art.
The other thing you may (or may not) find odd is the constant turnover -- undergraduates stay around two or three years after they get involved with a project, competent graduate students and post-docs just a bit longer. Many professional staff stay around a much longer time (way too long in some instances -- there's a downside to never having lay-offs) -- but you'll probably spend a lot more time training people only to see them graduate.
Every university I've been involved with has a core of really competent IT people who hang around because they like the environment or have family connections in the area. That core is surrounded by a diffuse halo of incompetents -- some in managerial positions -- who hang around because they can't or won't be fired. But I doubt this is a whole lot different than any other organization.
Gee, what a coincidence -- like [apparently] many Slashdotters, I was spending Sunday afternoon experimenting with Tiger (rather than, say, watching the kids play soccer, talking with the wife, mowing the lawn, the things other people do on Sunday afternoon) and clicked on a widget download at the Apple site (which had opened in Safari -- this is what Dashboard does automatically -- needless to say I'm usually running Firefox, not Safari). I then spent five minutes trying to find the silly thing in my standard downloading folder so that I could move it to the/Libary/widgets and then noticed -- holy shit! -- it had already installed itself.
I've got a BAAADDDD feeling about this -- looks way too much like Apple has been drinking Microsoft Kool-Aid. I don't want anything to install itself automatically on a Macintosh...
The reason Kansas has a reputation for being flat is that most people who experience it on the ground (as opposed to flying over, where everything looks flat) travel on Interstate 70.
Now, follow me closely on this one...
Interstate-70 was situated to connect the major towns in Kansas
[duh...]
The towns were situated along the railroads [duh^2...]
The railroads were built where the land was as flat as they could find it [duh^3...]
Therefore, you insensitive clods, I-70 follows that flattest possible route through Kansas. Drive ten miles off the interstate at numerous points and you'll encounter considerably more variation in elevation.
[But, to return to topic, you'll also encounter a Bible-thumpin', gay-bashing, gun-loving state board of "education" that epitomizes Molly Ivins' characterization of the typical Texan politician "Not only did humans evolve from monkeys, but damn recently!"]
I just walked (in the rain...) over to the campus bookstore to purchase Tiger and, while there are signs all over the place about it, they can't actually sell it until 6 p.m. Meanwhile the guy in the office next to mine got his in the mail yesterday. Grrrr...
This general problem -- making everything subject to a political litmus test -- has been referred to elsewhere as the triumph of the hacks over the wonks.
The wonks are the people who actually know how to make policy -- know what options are on the table, which of them might actually work, which have been tried before and didn't work, and so forth. In immense detail. If you read/., you are probably a wonk (or at least could be a wonk -- if you have a life, you aren't a wonk).
Hacks know one thing and one thing only -- politics -- and they do it 24/7. They are the kids who spent high school impeaching each other on the student council, and then got into college and did the same thing in student government. Now they have a real government to play with, and play they will. Nothing else matters to them. If you know someone who merely claims to read/., they are a hack.
The hacks have triumphed because of the "permanent campaign" that was brought about by C-SPAN and the cable news channels. If a politician thinks that it is vital to respond to everything within a single news cycle, they by necessity surround themselves with hacks -- wonks actually have to spend time learning things and thinking things through! Can't have that now, can we?
As an information provider in this environment, let me assure you that the likelihood of a student who hasn't had sufficient interest to make it to class listening to an entire lecture, probably recorded on a crappy omnidirectional mike, with lots of extraneous noise [insert South Park fart jokes here], and no visuals [Hey Ashley, I missed calculus class! No problem Zach, I've got it all here on my iPod!] approaches zero.
Duke either has an IP lawyer with too much time on his/her hands (probably) or a few professors who took way too many drugs as undergraduates and forget the nuances of the experience (probably)
I can't testify about high schools, but I've tried this at the freshman-sophomore level in a public university, which is about the same thing (high school with more free time, less supervision and more booze). It's a complete disaster in the classroom because the whole point of classroom teaching is to provide instruction via the human interactions between the teacher and students (with the students learning from each other as well, and more often than one imagines, the teacher learning from students). Even the very best instructional software (and there isn't much of it) has a tiny fraction of the ability of all but the worst teachers (of which there are too many) to anticipate where a discussion is heading, respond to novel circumstances, distinguish whether students are bored or thinking, and so forth.
Outside the classroom and as parts of assignments: great. The web is a fantastic research tool, I wish half the students taking calculus (which most will never use) would take programming instead, and there are some decent programs that students can productively work with one-on-one. But seldom if ever do those programs need to take but significant classroom times -- just make sure that students know how to get them running, politely suggest they RTFM (yeah, right...just like us professionals...), and mostly let'em figure it out on their own time. Which they will.
The critical issue is not whether this system will produce translations comparable to those done by a translator fluent in both languages -- it won't. However, it may do as well or better than translations by someone barely competent in one of the languages (or who is essentially just doing dictionary-based translation). English speakers have lots of examples of nearly incomprehensible technical translations from Chinese and Korean, and the Chinese and Koreans would probably have comparable examples of bad translations from English except for the fact the US doesn't make anything they want to buy that requires a manual (soybeans and car-chase movies don't require manuals). Okay, maybe software -- there is a story (probably apochryphal) that an early Spanish version of the manual for the DOS operating system (command line Windows without the viruses, for you young'uns) translated every instance of DOS as "two"
It's like the old joke about the two backpackers who encounter a hungry bear in the woods. One stops and puts on his running shoes. The other says "Why do that? You can't outrun a bear." The response: "Right, but I can outrun you."
This sort of problem goes back at least to the McCarthy red-baiting era: the typical exercise then was to present people with either the Bill of Rights or parts of the Declaration of Independence and indicate which were considered subversive. Typically
Most people wouldn't recognize the source;
About 2/3rds would consider it subversive
This is when schools were supposedly better.
Also, classical electronic media (broadcast radio and TV) have always been under more government control than print media because the electronic spectrum was considered a limited resource that had to be mangaged in the [cough, cough] "public interest." This is why Howard Stern is moving to satellite, and one can see considerable anatomy on cable whereas the exposure of a select bit of Janet Jackson creates an apparent national crisis.
But the print media have had far less censorship -- individuals could (and did) publish pretty much anything. As the cost of printing dropped in the 1960s with the introduction of inexpensive offset printing, the alternative press florished, and it sure wasn't because Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover thought this was a cool idea. Same thing was true a century earlier when being a journalist was a working-class job and not something confined to people with expensive hairdos -- even small towns would have papers expressing a wide variety of political opinions, rather than the "McNews" we put up with today.
Italy, one of the most Catholic countries in Europe (proximity effects...) also has the lowest birth rate. Which suggests either that Italians do not have the love life they are so famous for (or at the very least, self-promote), or else they've found other ways around the birth problem.
About four years ago I was working with an Army colonel who was writing an M.A. thesis on the problem of the internet and critical infrastructure. One of the things he kept worrying about was electrical utilities that had control of their grids (including, supposedly, things like the ability to increase power from hydro-electric facilities) accessible from the internet. His concern was that bad guys -- back in those days, it was the Chinese -- might hack these systems and do unpleasant things.
I kept objecting that this was a completely crazy system, and all you needed to eliminate that problem was making sure that some reasonably intelligent guy named Joe (or Jane) had to read messages from a terminal and walk across the room before setting the controls on Hoover Dam to "How long can you tread water?" rather than letting this be controlled directly through the Web. I've subsequently learned that this is known as placing an "air gap" in the controls -- it is standard in high-security systems.
He tells me -- based on sources he can't reveal (hey all you students out there working on end-of-the-semester term papers, don't you wish you could use that excuse?? And meanwhile, stop reading/. and get back work!! [slap, slap, slap]) -- that these facilities have to be under instant control because this is how electricity trading works and if Joe/Jane had to intervene manually, billions of dollars would be lost in electricity markets because these depend on split-second manipulation.
So, fast forward to the present. Who was [nominally] making those billions of dollars? Enron. How helpful. Meanwhile after 9/11, I lost track of the guy -- he's doubtlessly in one of those jobs now where if he told me what he was doing, he'd have to kill me.
Critical infrastructure on the web -- doesn't sound like a good idea to me (though I still can't believe the system is as vulnerable as he implied it was -- like, we're stupid but are we really that stupid??). At least some folks in the U.S. government have been concerned about this for quite some time, and that may be what Tenet (who, it should be noted, has as much influence on current policy as John Kerry has...less actually) is getting at.
Tolkien is in fact one of the greatest medievalists of the 20th century, and Lewis one of its most notable lay theologians. The fact that both could also write popular fantasy -- and translate some of the most deeply-rooted mythical themes of Western culture into a medium that appealed to the modern world -- makes them all that more remarkable.
"Chaucer??? That long-winded blowhard. In a year, nobody'll read that crap about Canterbury pilgrims..."
Iraqi soldiers knew the US was going to invade (they had access to televisions and radios, and, most importantly, a huge gossip network). From their experience in 1991, they had a very good idea what was going to happen -- only a few of the very top Saddam flunkies (who we saw endlessly on our TVs) believed otherwise, and probably even that was an act.
Contrary to the image seen on TV, some of the Iraqi units did stand and fight -- talk to anyone in the US units who were at the front line of the attack (of course, many of those are now back in Iraq for their second or third tour, but some are Stateside). The assault wasn't the advertised "cakewalk"; there was real fighting. Of course, those Iraqis who fought, often as not, died as a consequence.
As for most of the remainder -- who didn't want to be there in the first place, and had no love for Saddam and his cronies -- they did what men in any army in history would do in a similar set of circumstances: they deserted as soon as the opportunity arose to do so without risking punishment.
And finally, some percentage -- it is unclear how many -- disappeared, went into hiding for about six months, and then emerged to fight a classical guerrilla war. Which, unfortunately for the stability of the region, they are doing with considerable skill. Some folks that earlier deserted (particularly Sunnis; the Shi'a have decided to wait until they can win the election that the US is generously arranging for them) have joined them, as have an unknown number of outsiders.
This is a nice neat plausible story without the email, which probably had little if any effect. The Iraqi Army (as distinct from Baath apologists and lackies, plus their fearless leader) had no illusions about its chances against the US -- after all, this organization fought two major wars within the memory of its current officer corps. They probably found the emails a bit of comic relief prior to dealing with the inevitable.
Every license for Office plus Windows in Brazil -- a country in which 22 million people are starving -- means we have to export 60 sacks of soybeans. For the right to use one copy of Office plus Windows for one year or a year and half, until the next upgrade, we have to till the earth, plant, harvest, and export to the international markets that much soy. When I explain this to farmers, they go nuts.
Macelo D'Elia Branco
In order to use M$, Brazil has to pay $$ (as in "USD"). And because Brazil does not (you inconsiderate clods...) have a convertable currency, it has to convert something tangible -- soybeans will do -- into $$. Since the marginal cost of reproducing open-source software is more or less zero, whereas the marginal cost of producing soybeans (or whatever) is decidedly greater than zero, it's an easy decision.
The US, in contrast, simply prints more dollars (figuratively -- actually we sell treasury bills) and, as long as other countries (read: China, Japan) accept those freshly printed dollars, we get stuff without necessarily having to generate a comparable amount of items (a.k.a. "trade deficit").
Nice deal, as long as it works.
And it will work forever, won't it? Won't it???
begin
Seems like a limited (and rather verbose) language now, but it was UCSD Pascal for the Apple II and shortly thereafter Turbo Pascal for DOS that made it possible to create sophisticated and transportable programs on personal computers without spending a fortune on development tools. Prior to that point it was either assembly-level hacking (which produced some amazing work, but didn't generalize well) or BASIC (no more need be said...)
end;
Slashdot Mirror
[But for the record, I've been using and programming Macs since 1984 -- yes, 1984 -- and since I'm in an environment where the higher-ups prefer Windows, have taken more than my share of flak for it.]
Hardware is not the issue -- I'm comparing 10.4 to 10.3 running on a G5 tower, an XServe, and a G5 iMac. I'm not running this stuff on a G3.
But the core program I'm trying to maximize the speed on (a large C++ program compiled on gcc; terminal interface) runs about 20% - 25% slower under 10.4 than under 10.3. That is a significant hit; something is going on.
Similarily, compare the speed of a standard program such as Folding@Home (which I run on all three machines) -- one can get a lot more horsepower out of the G5 processors under XServe than under one of the user OS's.
I will, however, try your suggestions: they seem well-informed.
Anyone know what a similar exercise looks like for Mac OS-10.4? It is not, shall we say, exactly a speed demon and it would be nice to know what could be safely turned off when one is running CPU-intensive processes. Thanks.
- armoring vehicles in Iraq
- providing for the future medical care of the soldiers currently being maimed in Iraq
- providing real security against terrorist attacks (e.g. inspecting container ships)
- providing all of the reconstruction aid we'd originally said we'd provide in Afghanistan and Iraq and that the military (the real ones, not the civilians like Cheney, Bush and Wolfowitz who pretend to be) said was absolutely essential for stabilization
So, we can't even secure the London Underground and these people are worried about the Chinese at the L5 points. Give me a break...True, the military doesn't want a draft, but if current enlistment trends continue, they may have no choice. And draftees could be useful in many jobs.
The military doesn't need cannon fodder at the moment, but it needs a lot of people who can do very routine jobs close to civilian skills, most notably driving trucks. Manning a checkpoint (badly, it should be noted, but, as the old military saying goes "if you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad...") doesn't take much more in the way of skills. Same with routine patrols looking for IEDs (which, periodically, are discovered the hard way, when they go off).
For war fighting, one needs well-trained, skilled and motivated troops. But this is a long-term occupation, and involves a lot of routine. Always has. Save the regular troops for war fighting (e.g. against North Korea), and let the draftees do the routine crap. Also that might finally get the US public paying attention to the war.
In general a university environment is a tradeoff of money for security: salaries are less than in the private sector, but unless you are working on a "soft-money" (externally funded) project, the likelihood of major layoffs, downsizing and mergers is nearly zero. However, the salary structure is compressed by private sector standards -- the ratio of the highest to lowest pay may well be less than 2 -- and there are no stock options (closest thing would be to get football or basketball tickets to scalp, but even that perk is rare now). In recent years many institutions in the U.S. have eliminated things like free or reduced tuition due to tax implications.
So, the key thing to check is where is the money for the position coming from? Is it from the central budget (which is relatively stable) or from an external grant? The latter typically only last a couple of years: if you are in a lab run by an experienced senior investigator, he or she may keep things going for years through multiple grants, but if the well runs dry (or, more commonly, that researcher gets hired elsewhere), the project disappears once the grant runs out. You would typically have a month or two (quite possibly a lot more) warning on this, but the timing is unpredictable.
Same problem on equipment: institutional budgets are generally limited and set on an annual basis with very little flexibility after they are set, and project budgets are more or less fixed at the beginning. Projects that are equipment-intensive -- e.g. electrical engineering -- may have access to a lot of goodies, but in other cases you may be stuck well behind the state of the art.
The other thing you may (or may not) find odd is the constant turnover -- undergraduates stay around two or three years after they get involved with a project, competent graduate students and post-docs just a bit longer. Many professional staff stay around a much longer time (way too long in some instances -- there's a downside to never having lay-offs) -- but you'll probably spend a lot more time training people only to see them graduate.
Every university I've been involved with has a core of really competent IT people who hang around because they like the environment or have family connections in the area. That core is surrounded by a diffuse halo of incompetents -- some in managerial positions -- who hang around because they can't or won't be fired. But I doubt this is a whole lot different than any other organization.
I've got a BAAADDDD feeling about this -- looks way too much like Apple has been drinking Microsoft Kool-Aid. I don't want anything to install itself automatically on a Macintosh...
The reason Kansas has a reputation for being flat is that most people who experience it on the ground (as opposed to flying over, where everything looks flat) travel on Interstate 70.
Now, follow me closely on this one...
Therefore, you insensitive clods, I-70 follows that flattest possible route through Kansas. Drive ten miles off the interstate at numerous points and you'll encounter considerably more variation in elevation.
[But, to return to topic, you'll also encounter a Bible-thumpin', gay-bashing, gun-loving state board of "education" that epitomizes Molly Ivins' characterization of the typical Texan politician "Not only did humans evolve from monkeys, but damn recently!"]
Perhaps I should move to the Gilbert Islands...
The wonks are the people who actually know how to make policy -- know what options are on the table, which of them might actually work, which have been tried before and didn't work, and so forth. In immense detail. If you read /., you are probably a wonk (or at least could be a wonk -- if you have a life, you aren't a wonk).
Hacks know one thing and one thing only -- politics -- and they do it 24/7. They are the kids who spent high school impeaching each other on the student council, and then got into college and did the same thing in student government. Now they have a real government to play with, and play they will. Nothing else matters to them. If you know someone who merely claims to read /., they are a hack.
The hacks have triumphed because of the "permanent campaign" that was brought about by C-SPAN and the cable news channels. If a politician thinks that it is vital to respond to everything within a single news cycle, they by necessity surround themselves with hacks -- wonks actually have to spend time learning things and thinking things through! Can't have that now, can we?
Duke either has an IP lawyer with too much time on his/her hands (probably) or a few professors who took way too many drugs as undergraduates and forget the nuances of the experience (probably)
Outside the classroom and as parts of assignments: great. The web is a fantastic research tool, I wish half the students taking calculus (which most will never use) would take programming instead, and there are some decent programs that students can productively work with one-on-one. But seldom if ever do those programs need to take but significant classroom times -- just make sure that students know how to get them running, politely suggest they RTFM (yeah, right...just like us professionals...), and mostly let'em figure it out on their own time. Which they will.
It's like the old joke about the two backpackers who encounter a hungry bear in the woods. One stops and puts on his running shoes. The other says "Why do that? You can't outrun a bear." The response: "Right, but I can outrun you."
- Most people wouldn't recognize the source;
- About 2/3rds would consider it subversive
This is when schools were supposedly better.Also, classical electronic media (broadcast radio and TV) have always been under more government control than print media because the electronic spectrum was considered a limited resource that had to be mangaged in the [cough, cough] "public interest." This is why Howard Stern is moving to satellite, and one can see considerable anatomy on cable whereas the exposure of a select bit of Janet Jackson creates an apparent national crisis.
But the print media have had far less censorship -- individuals could (and did) publish pretty much anything. As the cost of printing dropped in the 1960s with the introduction of inexpensive offset printing, the alternative press florished, and it sure wasn't because Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover thought this was a cool idea. Same thing was true a century earlier when being a journalist was a working-class job and not something confined to people with expensive hairdos -- even small towns would have papers expressing a wide variety of political opinions, rather than the "McNews" we put up with today.
Italy, one of the most Catholic countries in Europe (proximity effects...) also has the lowest birth rate. Which suggests either that Italians do not have the love life they are so famous for (or at the very least, self-promote), or else they've found other ways around the birth problem.
Here's the sort of thing he may be talking about:
About four years ago I was working with an Army colonel who was writing an M.A. thesis on the problem of the internet and critical infrastructure. One of the things he kept worrying about was electrical utilities that had control of their grids (including, supposedly, things like the ability to increase power from hydro-electric facilities) accessible from the internet. His concern was that bad guys -- back in those days, it was the Chinese -- might hack these systems and do unpleasant things.
I kept objecting that this was a completely crazy system, and all you needed to eliminate that problem was making sure that some reasonably intelligent guy named Joe (or Jane) had to read messages from a terminal and walk across the room before setting the controls on Hoover Dam to "How long can you tread water?" rather than letting this be controlled directly through the Web. I've subsequently learned that this is known as placing an "air gap" in the controls -- it is standard in high-security systems.
He tells me -- based on sources he can't reveal (hey all you students out there working on end-of-the-semester term papers, don't you wish you could use that excuse?? And meanwhile, stop reading /. and get back work!! [slap, slap, slap]) -- that these facilities have to be under instant control because this is how electricity trading works and if Joe/Jane had to intervene manually, billions of dollars would be lost in electricity markets because these depend on split-second manipulation.
So, fast forward to the present. Who was [nominally] making those billions of dollars? Enron. How helpful. Meanwhile after 9/11, I lost track of the guy -- he's doubtlessly in one of those jobs now where if he told me what he was doing, he'd have to kill me.
Critical infrastructure on the web -- doesn't sound like a good idea to me (though I still can't believe the system is as vulnerable as he implied it was -- like, we're stupid but are we really that stupid??). At least some folks in the U.S. government have been concerned about this for quite some time, and that may be what Tenet (who, it should be noted, has as much influence on current policy as John Kerry has...less actually) is getting at.
"Chaucer??? That long-winded blowhard. In a year, nobody'll read that crap about Canterbury pilgrims..."
Contrary to the image seen on TV, some of the Iraqi units did stand and fight -- talk to anyone in the US units who were at the front line of the attack (of course, many of those are now back in Iraq for their second or third tour, but some are Stateside). The assault wasn't the advertised "cakewalk"; there was real fighting. Of course, those Iraqis who fought, often as not, died as a consequence.
As for most of the remainder -- who didn't want to be there in the first place, and had no love for Saddam and his cronies -- they did what men in any army in history would do in a similar set of circumstances: they deserted as soon as the opportunity arose to do so without risking punishment.
And finally, some percentage -- it is unclear how many -- disappeared, went into hiding for about six months, and then emerged to fight a classical guerrilla war. Which, unfortunately for the stability of the region, they are doing with considerable skill. Some folks that earlier deserted (particularly Sunnis; the Shi'a have decided to wait until they can win the election that the US is generously arranging for them) have joined them, as have an unknown number of outsiders.
This is a nice neat plausible story without the email, which probably had little if any effect. The Iraqi Army (as distinct from Baath apologists and lackies, plus their fearless leader) had no illusions about its chances against the US -- after all, this organization fought two major wars within the memory of its current officer corps. They probably found the emails a bit of comic relief prior to dealing with the inevitable.
In order to use M$, Brazil has to pay $$ (as in "USD"). And because Brazil does not (you inconsiderate clods...) have a convertable currency, it has to convert something tangible -- soybeans will do -- into $$. Since the marginal cost of reproducing open-source software is more or less zero, whereas the marginal cost of producing soybeans (or whatever) is decidedly greater than zero, it's an easy decision.
The US, in contrast, simply prints more dollars (figuratively -- actually we sell treasury bills) and, as long as other countries (read: China, Japan) accept those freshly printed dollars, we get stuff without necessarily having to generate a comparable amount of items (a.k.a. "trade deficit").
Nice deal, as long as it works. And it will work forever, won't it? Won't it???
Start practicing your Portuguese...
begin
Seems like a limited (and rather verbose) language now, but it was UCSD Pascal for the Apple II and shortly thereafter Turbo Pascal for DOS that made it possible to create sophisticated and transportable programs on personal computers without spending a fortune on development tools. Prior to that point it was either assembly-level hacking (which produced some amazing work, but didn't generalize well) or BASIC (no more need be said...)
end;