There is a trading method known as "shorting". I'll get into that in a minute. "Normal" trading is when you go "long" - you buy stock in anticipation that the stock price will rise. Your risk (of losing the investment) is basically made up of a) how likely the stocks are to drop in price and b) how many of them you have. You can attach a reasonable guess at where you think you want to "chicken out" and cash in your stock, at a higher price than you paid for them. Basically, you buy stock if you think the stock price will rise. Shorting, on the other hand, is used when you think the stock price will drop. You borrow stock from your broker (your broker will borrow it on your behalf for a small fee (about 1-3% although YMMV)). Your broker will "call" you on this at some point (at either a fixed time in the future, or at any time before this, depending on your broker's stock borrow conditions - we'll assume in 1 week with no early call). When you are called, you must return all stocks you borrowed. So let's say you shorted 100 stocks at $146 - this will cost you your stock borrow fees only at this point, but you can sell the immediately for $14,600. Now, in one week's time, let's say Cobalt are trading at $10. You buy 100 stocks (worth $1,000) to return to your broker. You've just made $13,600 (minus your stock borrow costs) for shuffling money around! Sounds too good, though doesn't it? You're right. If the price continues to rise, you lose big time. Say that the stock price continues to $200 when you must return your borrowed stocks. You now have to buy 100 stocks ($20,000) to return, so your loss is $5,400 plus stock borrow. The danger of shorting is that there is no brake on the upper price of a stock - if the market is really confident in the stock, it can skyrocket. You can predict what your maximum profit can be (ie if the stocks are near worthless by the time you have to return them) but not what your maximum possible loss could be. As there are big movers and shakers shorting these stocks over time, you will see a rallying fluctuation in the stock price after the first dump, as traders are buying back their borrowed stock, driving the market high again. This causes increased volatility in the market (amount the price fluctuates over time), and makes investment riskier. Basically, for a small investor rather than speculator, shorting stocks is a Bad Idea. Be aware, I am not an investment professional, don't sue me if you act on any of the above and lose money (I know how much you US guys love your lawsuits:) ). If you want a better description of stock market machinations, have a look at The Motley Fool.
If your really need that sort of type-ability, why not get a Psion series 5 instead? I've used the Palm, and hated it - too fiddly. The Psion, however, I can type full reports, songs (and record the melody with the built in mic & ADC) on the bus, tube, wherever. If I get a flat surface to put it on, I can type at about 60% of the speed that I can on a fullsize keyboard. And it's all self contained, no need for all these plugin accessories. Incidentally, I was first interested in Linux because of my Psion - it ran perfectly for nearly 2 years (until I spilt a whole pint of water on it!:) without the OS being downed. That was my first idea that an OS doesn't have to die every few days...
"Co-developed in Redmond, WA and Reading, PA" Prof Warwick is actually based in Reading, Berkshire. Which is in Britain (about 45 miles south of London). Only the British can produce eccentrics of this calibre - something to do with rigorous, assiduous and sadistic training from birth, I think. I forget who said it, but the difference between madness and eccentricity is how much money you have.....:)
A guy I work with had his spinal column severed about half way down in a motorcycle accident ten years ago. Paul is undergoing physio at the minute to build his leg muscles up, and has a strap-on "magic belt" and surface electrodes which allow him to stand during therapy sessions. If he continues the treatment, it will ultimately lead to implant technology so he can stand at will, by pressing the button. He is still a guinea pig, and is awaiting results of tests, but in 6 months time he hopes to become a bionic man, with surface electrodes being actually implanted onto nerve junctures. Give it 5 years or so, and the technology may allow him to walk again. The plan is to "bridge" the gap in his spinal column, once grafting techniques are perfected. I applaud Kevin Warwick for his efforts so far, and hope that his research may lead to my friend being able to walk again. Interesting times, indeed.
Again, big business has failed to grasp the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the hacker community. Good work, fellas!:) And even better, well done for publishing your work this early. Less scrupulous people would have kept this to themselves, and have a car boot sale industry in pirate DVD's booming by now. Why does big business seem to think copy protection is the magic bullet? Whatever can be engineered, can be reengineered. Even if they'd not a) hardcoded keys onto the media and b) not used a kitten weak security model, what on earth prompted the designers to think that people wouldn't try and break it, just for the sheer hell of it? Even if they'd used massive keys, I'd bet a pound to a penny there'd be an underground "CrackDVD@Home" distributed project running somewhere... And they're bound to get lucky sometime or other. And why should it impinge on recordable DVD's? Existing video media are a doddle to rip off (not that I am advocating this). In 10 years time, yes, DVD's will be the defacto standard in western countries for video data. But protecting your copyright for this media must either be uncrackable (_very_ hard in this scenario, without considerable overhead for the user - imagine having to plug in a different dongle per disc, type in a security key, or whatever before being able to watch the film...), or the video industry must lobby international support for piracy crackdowns to be more thorough. Just expecting technology to be the easy answer in this instance is foolish at best, and dangerous at worst. Until the price of the products the industry is hawking drops, and the penalty for illegal copies is made severe, piracy will still continue. But industry is too short sighted to see this, and will continue overcharging whilst whining about the pirate industry it is fuelling.
Look at the fight against the Poll Tax that happened in the UK, where mass civil disobedience (non-payment of the tax by over 30% of the population) led to the government backing down and withdrawing the tax. I think the massive street riots also had something to do with this, too... Frightening how easily the Governments worldwide adopt the nanny mentality for their politically motivated agendas (eg poll tax) - and how much opposition from the populace they must face before they will back down. And yet, difficult social policies which people would readily agree to if draconian legislation was to be introduced (eg massive reduction in pollution - everybody wants it but nobody is volunteering) - governments shy away from...
Don't waste the beer on slugs!!! Buy one of these machines, and rent it to your neighbours in exchange for the beer they would have used catching slugs in their own backyards! Isn't this part of the OSS creed - free beer from technology!:)
" way the brain processes optical information is pretty much "set"." I don't think this is actually true. I seem to recall people who'd had their hands / feet stitched back on following a mechanical injury recovering utility of the limb. Immediately following the injury & operation, the hand would be incorrectly "wired", so that trying to move your little finger would result in your index finger moving. But over time (with plenty of physioterorism:) the brain could be taught to accept the new nerve input. Quite how you'd do that for retinal implants I don't know, but at least it shows that the brain can be dynamic in the way it operates.
Yep, so did I. How's about a new/. poll on "how we solved the Y2K thingy" - should give us a clue for establishing "prior art" - I'm pretty sure I can still even remember the module (hooks.c) and the function (ValidateCCDate(...) ):
Windowing technique
What Y2K?
It's all Hemos' fault
I'll just pay McDonnell Douglas a large wad of cash...
I guess we can see where the overspill of Segfault is now residing... How's about a/.poll, Rob; "Best ways to rid yourself of immature, useless posters on an interactive website"...
I work in a banking environment. We don't have any groovy server names, but I've always thought the main trading server should be called "Breaking_The_Law":) And when it's a late day in trading, "Nightcrawler". Or on a thin day on profit & loss, "Desert Plains". When the markets are volatile, "Rocka Rolla"... And the audit people, of course, should log into "Electric Eye"...:)
You're mostly off-topic. You mostly missed the point I was making. So I'll chop it up into nice little MTV sized nuggets for you. Think a little further than the adoption of non proprietary software. Think about a future when the French government have invested some time & money in OSS stuff, and feed it back into the community. Except one of the basic tenets (and major strength) of OSS, that of peer review, is greatly hampered because the additions to the source are illegible to most other programmers, or at least a good deal harder to decode. So now we have something which is touted as "Open Source" yet intrinsically can not be exposed to the Open Source process of ongoing review by a very large peer group. So you get lower quality software (I'm not saying that the French government are going to write crap code, but everybody makes coding mistakes in non-trivial systems, even me:), but still with the high expectation that OSS carries. I'm sure you will agree this is a Bad Thing. Now, don't you think you are being myopic about this? Think a little further than immediate impact for once. I'd bet you are an MTV kid.
I'm sure you're one of those who think that there should be only one desktop project, one Linux distribution, preferably in English. Nope, I'd like to say you couldn't be more incorrect, but the content of your post leads me to believe you can. Vive la differance, I say!!! Through diversity comes strength. And I'd love to see Linux with Japanese ideograms on the screen!
Instead of complaining about Babelfish, learn a new language. I can maintain reasonable conversational and business French, can get by in Afrikaans, and could probably order a beer in most European languages, even after 8 pints. And that's not counting C, C++, x86 assembler, Perl, Java, Delphi, COBOL, SML...
If you want to make derogatory remarks about peoples' postings, don't you think you'd have more credibility if you didn't post as an AC? To quote Dilbert "You're mighty brave in cyberspace, flameboy"
"France is one of the most fiercely nationalistic (mainly in a good way) countries in Europe" Yeah, explain that to the Algerian immigrants living in terror that the extreme right wing opposition party in France doesn't increase their second place in French Parliament next election. Bearing in mind their radio stations are forbidden by law to play more than about 10% total non-French music, how exactly do you see them adopting to Open Source? I mean, you download Le Widgette from some French government mirror. You have a problem. Would you rather see: void * ObtenezBudgetInternationalSeMonte (char * RetourValeur) { // Ce procédé recueille tous les budgets internationaux et se monte à eux par pays . . . } or void * GetInternationalBudgetTotals (char * ReturnValue) { //This procedure gathers all international budgets and totals them by country . . . }
So now you'll be adding a trip to babelfish as part of your debugging. And even if there is a manual, good luck with babelfish. If you don't believe babelfish can make mistakes, type in "I love my growler", translate from English to French, copy the text & translate it back:). Now if the French government relaxes the language legislation for Open Source projects, then we're really onto a winner...
frequently takes action against dilution of French culture by overseas influences... Yeah, by testing nukes in the Pacific...
Of course we wish that the European Countries and others will follow. Yeah, like the French have such a good record for compliance of EU regulations... Beef included. I'm not going to a Pierre Victoire restaurant until either the EU or the British govt gets off their gravy trained arses & sorts out the beef. And gives free roast potatoes with that. Strikes me that when the UK had the BSE scare, the EU couldn't wait to nail us. Now the French have a similar issue, and what are the politicians doing ? Nothing, as usual. Except labelling us "Little Englanders" because our farmers rightly demand justice & regulation be applied uniformly. /Rant.
This is the latest in total madness!!! Historically, we've had Linux ported to small embedded devices - fine. This week on/. we had the MAME engine ported to a digital camera, and now this!!! Here's my predictions for the next devices running stuff you'd never think they would:
PNG viewer on a toaster (this is what your toast should have looked like... But it's mostly carbon now instead)
Flame simulator on a Cisco PIX firewall
MAME on one of those Japanese supertoilets (I like this idea!)
GIMP on your videophone. (Hmm, just add some horns to your PHB's head, a pitchfork, get the firewall to do the background....)
Windoze NT running stably on a PC (naaah - I'm kidding:)
What features do you see adopting in the next year to make Linux more desktop friendly? And do you think these features will come from the OSS movement, or will they be produced by the corporate sector of the Linux community?
Poll Tax was a phenomenally unpopular method of taxation for local councils. Depending on where you lived, local elected authorities would require you to pay differing amounts for the provision of rubbish collection, police, street cleaning etc. It was introduced by the Conservative (Tory) government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher, Thatcher, the milk snatcher, but that's another story!) amongst furious debate. To prove their point, that the Tax was workable, the Tories propped up the boroughs where their councils were elected (probably with donations made to the party by tobacco sponsors:)), so they could score political points about how inefficient Labour local governments were. Labour didn't do the people in their boroughs many favours by cranking their poll tax up a bit, just to show how unfair a system it was (although there were some sensationalist stories about the revenues generated in Labour controlled Wandsworth being lavishly spent on "battered lesbian single parent ethnic minorities womens shelters"). It wasn't a fair tax, but it was actually designed to be - it's successor - Council Tax (or Poll Tax v1.2) is much more equitable. Although Hackney borough council (where I live) seem more interested in providing expensive drop-in centres for disabled afro-carribean single parent transvestite blind lesbians than keeping the bloody streets clean. (If you think I'm joking or flamebaiting, drive up the A10 sometime... Go past Dalston Kingsland rail station, and count the number of drop in centres that are empty. Then estimate the tonnage of filth on the streets...:( ) Public feeling was so strong that there were some pretty bad riots about it - so much for the shy & retiring British stereotype!!! As an aside, would anyone agree that the only sport Britain truly leads the world in these days are:
"hacking is the only field where the media believes anyone who says they're a hacker." Finally. Would MTV please take note?
Still, given the industries recent propensity for requiring certification (CLP, MSCE etc), does this mean that there will be a H4X0rZ certificate?:)
And who will administrate it? Will there be one for NT, one for BeOS, and another for each implementation of *NIX? Must Red Hat start giving the Linux certificate? Still, can't wait for the new business cards - John Smith, BSc (Hons), h4X0R d00d...
Exam paper for Linux h4X0r d00d accreditation: Pick ONE of the multichoice for each question: Q1) Packet sniffing is: a) Using an NIC on the network to examine other traffic not addressed to that NIC. b) What your dog does to strangers' crotches c) What the Postal service does to suspicious mail Q2) A buffer overflow exploit is a) A data storage area can be flooded with a bit stream, enabling hijacking of the IP register to execute custom code. b) didn't malloc() properly. c) Shoe shine boy cleaned your shoes twice & charged you ten times the going rate. etc... --------------- NT h4X0r d00d exam as provided by MS Pick ONE of the multichoice for each question: Q1) Describe the NT security model a) Any breaches are hypothetical b) Any breaches are hypothetical c) CDC are liars Q2) Describe B02K a) A malicious hacking tool b) A malicious hacking tool c) CDC are liars etc.... And there'd have to be a grade at the end of the exam: 0-45% ScriptKiddie. Go back to AOL, stop trying to pass B02K off as your own, and QUIT WANKING! 45%-60% Wannabe. Keep trying! 60%-80% h4X0r. Stay away from milnet, you still aren't covering your tracks. 80%-100% 31337 h4X0r d00d!!! |/\|3 ph33r U! P13323 d0n7 h4X0r u5!!!
I forget who wrote it (think it was tucked into some AI textbook I read at Uni), it was a short story about how cybernetics (due to the demands of homo sapiens wanting perfect partners) had advanced to replicate humankind. The upshot was that people were no longer reproducing, and had been reduced to special preserves where "primitives" still had kids... Interesting reading, can anyone remember where it was published?
As well as a "me too" for all the "career" and "expense" type arguments, how about these factors?
Falling fertility in Western countries (15% drop in sperm count over last 10 years, IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong...)
Western civilisations support a larger percentage of people whose sexual activity is solely homosexual. (This is not intended as flamebait; merely that in less developed countries homosexuals are tolerated less. I'm sure there are about the same percentage homosexuals, but most in underdeveloped nations are forced by their societies to conform to their societies' norm and hence produce offspring).
What about the claims a few years ago that 75% of people in the larger African cities were HIV+? Is this (and other death rates) factored into these predictions? Or was it all FUD by the UN?
Divorce rates are rising in Western nations. People are increasingly single. Anybody in the UK remember a recent article claiming the UK is turning into a Singles' bar? Still, reduced population in the world can be viewed as a good thing. Technologies are becoming cleaner & greener, and as the nations which impose the largest damage to the environment shrink in size, there will be theoretically less impact. Add this to the alleged AIDS epidemic that the WHO promised us in was going on in Africa about 10 years ago - there will be mass deaths soon. Gaia cleans herself... I forget who said it, but we're behaving like insects.
Any kind of competition has got to be a Good Thing (tm). Now, Compaq must either a) supply cheaper or b) supply better quality. For my own part, whenever I've used Compaq, they have been awkward. Non standard partitions on the HDD's for the diags (can you say CDROM, Compaq?), crappy cases which have n different ways of removing them across supposedly equivalent product models, and don't get me started on Token Ring NIC's. I'd prefer a DOA box to one that drops off the network for no apparent reason. Dell, on the other hand, have been exactly what I've needed. Easy to remove cases, components are laid out intelligently inside. You actually get the idea that Dell understand that people will want to perform maintenance on their PC's at some point, and they realise that your average PC engineer doesn't have hands as small as a 4 year old. So, smart work Dell; put more effort in, Compaq. Interesting to draw parallels within the OS market - take this as a case study of how market forces can drive prices down and quality up. American DOJ please take note!
#define std_disclaimer "I am not a conspiracy theorist." But do any of you people really think this will be a) exhaustive and b) correct? One thing that strikes me as a common factor of government is it never likes being shown to have made mistakes or have done "the wrong thing". I'll bet a pound to a penny there's nothing of interest in here. Any controversy will have either have been reclassified as "top secret", or will have been mangled shortly after mistakes have been made. Or maybe that line of investigation is now very much non-PC. Think about it - even in Tech support, if you have stuffed some machine badly & will catch hell for it, how many of you have ever re-touched logfiles, or incorrectly blamed users? I'm not accusing anyone of gross incompetency or lack of professionalism, but if you can say you've never made a schoolboy mistake, then you've probably never learnt anything anyway. And in that case, if there's an easy way out ("Oh, that's NT's fault"), you will be tempted to take it. Do you really expect governments to work differently? Guess that'll get me nixed if Echelon's listening!
"I am also curious why AMD built their plant way over in eastern Germany. Maybe they can get cheaper educated labor?"
Doubt it. The UK has the lowest overall cost for manufacturing stuff in Europe; see how many Asian car companys are investing in the UK as opposed to the rest of Europe. Then again, with the unification of East & West, maybe the German government is feeling the pain, and is relaxing the cost of employing someone (more health / holiday / working practices to be observed in Germany than most other EU nations). Or maybe the German government is offering AMD "incentives" (ie cash) much the way the UK government did for Nissan...
Slashdot Mirror
There is a trading method known as "shorting". I'll get into that in a minute. "Normal" trading is when you go "long" - you buy stock in anticipation that the stock price will rise. Your risk (of losing the investment) is basically made up of a) how likely the stocks are to drop in price and b) how many of them you have. :) ).
You can attach a reasonable guess at where you think you want to "chicken out" and cash in your stock, at a higher price than you paid for them. Basically, you buy stock if you think the stock price will rise.
Shorting, on the other hand, is used when you think the stock price will drop. You borrow stock from your broker (your broker will borrow it on your behalf for a small fee (about 1-3% although YMMV)). Your broker will "call" you on this at some point (at either a fixed time in the future, or at any time before this, depending on your broker's stock borrow conditions - we'll assume in 1 week with no early call). When you are called, you must return all stocks you borrowed. So let's say you shorted 100 stocks at $146 - this will cost you your stock borrow fees only at this point, but you can sell the immediately for $14,600. Now, in one week's time, let's say Cobalt are trading at $10. You buy 100 stocks (worth $1,000) to return to your broker. You've just made $13,600 (minus your stock borrow costs) for shuffling money around!
Sounds too good, though doesn't it? You're right. If the price continues to rise, you lose big time. Say that the stock price continues to $200 when you must return your borrowed stocks. You now have to buy 100 stocks ($20,000) to return, so your loss is $5,400 plus stock borrow. The danger of shorting is that there is no brake on the upper price of a stock - if the market is really confident in the stock, it can skyrocket. You can predict what your maximum profit can be (ie if the stocks are near worthless by the time you have to return them) but not what your maximum possible loss could be.
As there are big movers and shakers shorting these stocks over time, you will see a rallying fluctuation in the stock price after the first dump, as traders are buying back their borrowed stock, driving the market high again. This causes increased volatility in the market (amount the price fluctuates over time), and makes investment riskier.
Basically, for a small investor rather than speculator, shorting stocks is a Bad Idea. Be aware, I am not an investment professional, don't sue me if you act on any of the above and lose money (I know how much you US guys love your lawsuits
If you want a better description of stock market machinations, have a look at The Motley Fool.
If your really need that sort of type-ability, why not get a Psion series 5 instead? I've used the Palm, and hated it - too fiddly. The Psion, however, I can type full reports, songs (and record the melody with the built in mic & ADC) on the bus, tube, wherever. If I get a flat surface to put it on, I can type at about 60% of the speed that I can on a fullsize keyboard. And it's all self contained, no need for all these plugin accessories. :) without the OS being downed. That was my first idea that an OS doesn't have to die every few days...
Incidentally, I was first interested in Linux because of my Psion - it ran perfectly for nearly 2 years (until I spilt a whole pint of water on it!
"Co-developed in Redmond, WA and Reading, PA" :)
Prof Warwick is actually based in Reading, Berkshire. Which is in Britain (about 45 miles south of London).
Only the British can produce eccentrics of this calibre - something to do with rigorous, assiduous and sadistic training from birth, I think.
I forget who said it, but the difference between madness and eccentricity is how much money you have.....
A guy I work with had his spinal column severed about half way down in a motorcycle accident ten years ago.
Paul is undergoing physio at the minute to build his leg muscles up, and has a strap-on "magic belt" and surface electrodes which allow him to stand during therapy sessions. If he continues the treatment, it will ultimately lead to implant technology so he can stand at will, by pressing the button. He is still a guinea pig, and is awaiting results of tests, but in 6 months time he hopes to become a bionic man, with surface electrodes being actually implanted onto nerve junctures. Give it 5 years or so, and the technology may allow him to walk again. The plan is to "bridge" the gap in his spinal column, once grafting techniques are perfected. I applaud Kevin Warwick for his efforts so far, and hope that his research may lead to my friend being able to walk again.
Interesting times, indeed.
Again, big business has failed to grasp the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the hacker community. Good work, fellas! :) And even better, well done for publishing your work this early. Less scrupulous people would have kept this to themselves, and have a car boot sale industry in pirate DVD's booming by now.
Why does big business seem to think copy protection is the magic bullet? Whatever can be engineered, can be reengineered. Even if they'd not a) hardcoded keys onto the media and b) not used a kitten weak security model, what on earth prompted the designers to think that people wouldn't try and break it, just for the sheer hell of it? Even if they'd used massive keys, I'd bet a pound to a penny there'd be an underground "CrackDVD@Home" distributed project running somewhere... And they're bound to get lucky sometime or other.
And why should it impinge on recordable DVD's? Existing video media are a doddle to rip off (not that I am advocating this). In 10 years time, yes, DVD's will be the defacto standard in western countries for video data. But protecting your copyright for this media must either be uncrackable (_very_ hard in this scenario, without considerable overhead for the user - imagine having to plug in a different dongle per disc, type in a security key, or whatever before being able to watch the film...), or the video industry must lobby international support for piracy crackdowns to be more thorough.
Just expecting technology to be the easy answer in this instance is foolish at best, and dangerous at worst. Until the price of the products the industry is hawking drops, and the penalty for illegal copies is made severe, piracy will still continue. But industry is too short sighted to see this, and will continue overcharging whilst whining about the pirate industry it is fuelling.
Look at the fight against the Poll Tax that happened in the UK, where mass civil disobedience (non-payment of the tax by over 30% of the population) led to the government backing down and withdrawing the tax.
I think the massive street riots also had something to do with this, too...
Frightening how easily the Governments worldwide adopt the nanny mentality for their politically motivated agendas (eg poll tax) - and how much opposition from the populace they must face before they will back down. And yet, difficult social policies which people would readily agree to if draconian legislation was to be introduced (eg massive reduction in pollution - everybody wants it but nobody is volunteering) - governments shy away from...
Don't waste the beer on slugs!!! :)
Buy one of these machines, and rent it to your neighbours in exchange for the beer they would have used catching slugs in their own backyards!
Isn't this part of the OSS creed - free beer from technology!
" way the brain processes optical information is pretty much "set"." :) the brain could be taught to accept the new nerve input. Quite how you'd do that for retinal implants I don't know, but at least it shows that the brain can be dynamic in the way it operates.
I don't think this is actually true. I seem to recall people who'd had their hands / feet stitched back on following a mechanical injury recovering utility of the limb. Immediately following the injury & operation, the hand would be incorrectly "wired", so that trying to move your little finger would result in your index finger moving. But over time (with plenty of physioterorism
Windowing technique
What Y2K?
It's all Hemos' fault
I'll just pay McDonnell Douglas a large wad of cash...
I guess we can see where the overspill of Segfault is now residing... /.poll, Rob; "Best ways to rid yourself of immature, useless posters on an interactive website"...
How's about a
I work in a banking environment. We don't have any groovy server names, but I've always thought the main trading server should be called "Breaking_The_Law" :)
And when it's a late day in trading, "Nightcrawler". Or on a thin day on profit & loss, "Desert Plains". When the markets are volatile, "Rocka Rolla"...
And the audit people, of course, should log into "Electric Eye"...:)
British Gas describes a new phenomenon "fire"
Ford announces the invention of the wheel.
British scientists successfully domesticate a sheep! Ethical row anticipated!
Xerox files for printing press patent
Hawking hit on the head by an apple, and appreciates the gravity on the situation
IBM announce revolutionary new reckoning machine - the "abacus"
You're mostly off-topic. :), but still with the high expectation that OSS carries. I'm sure you will agree this is a Bad Thing.
You mostly missed the point I was making. So I'll chop it up into nice little MTV sized nuggets for you.
Think a little further than the adoption of non proprietary software. Think about a future when the French government have invested some time & money in OSS stuff, and feed it back into the community. Except one of the basic tenets (and major strength) of OSS, that of peer review, is greatly hampered because the additions to the source are illegible to most other programmers, or at least a good deal harder to decode.
So now we have something which is touted as "Open Source" yet intrinsically can not be exposed to the Open Source process of ongoing review by a very large peer group. So you get lower quality software (I'm not saying that the French government are going to write crap code, but everybody makes coding mistakes in non-trivial systems, even me
Now, don't you think you are being myopic about this? Think a little further than immediate impact for once. I'd bet you are an MTV kid.
I'm sure you're one of those who think that there should be only one desktop project, one Linux distribution, preferably in English.
Nope, I'd like to say you couldn't be more incorrect, but the content of your post leads me to believe you can. Vive la differance, I say!!! Through diversity comes strength. And I'd love to see Linux with Japanese ideograms on the screen!
Instead of complaining about Babelfish, learn a new language.
I can maintain reasonable conversational and business French, can get by in Afrikaans, and could probably order a beer in most European languages, even after 8 pints. And that's not counting C, C++, x86 assembler, Perl, Java, Delphi, COBOL, SML...
If you want to make derogatory remarks about peoples' postings, don't you think you'd have more credibility if you didn't post as an AC? To quote Dilbert "You're mighty brave in cyberspace, flameboy"
"France is one of the most fiercely nationalistic (mainly in a good way) countries in Europe"
// Ce procédé recueille tous les budgets internationaux et se monte à eux par pays
.
.
.
//This procedure gathers all international budgets and totals them by country
.
.
.
:).
Yeah, explain that to the Algerian immigrants living in terror that the extreme right wing opposition party in France doesn't increase their second place in French Parliament next election.
Bearing in mind their radio stations are forbidden by law to play more than about 10% total non-French music, how exactly do you see them adopting to Open Source? I mean, you download Le Widgette from some French government mirror. You have a problem. Would you rather see:
void * ObtenezBudgetInternationalSeMonte (char * RetourValeur)
{
}
or
void * GetInternationalBudgetTotals (char * ReturnValue)
{
}
So now you'll be adding a trip to babelfish as part of your debugging. And even if there is a manual, good luck with babelfish. If you don't believe babelfish can make mistakes, type in "I love my growler", translate from English to French, copy the text & translate it back
Now if the French government relaxes the language legislation for Open Source projects, then we're really onto a winner...
frequently takes action against dilution of French culture by overseas influences...
Yeah, by testing nukes in the Pacific...
Of course we wish that the European Countries and others will follow.
/Rant.
Yeah, like the French have such a good record for compliance of EU regulations... Beef included.
I'm not going to a Pierre Victoire restaurant until either the EU or the British govt gets off their gravy trained arses & sorts out the beef. And gives free roast potatoes with that.
Strikes me that when the UK had the BSE scare, the EU couldn't wait to nail us. Now the French have a similar issue, and what are the politicians doing ? Nothing, as usual. Except labelling us "Little Englanders" because our farmers rightly demand justice & regulation be applied uniformly.
Historically, we've had Linux ported to small embedded devices - fine. This week on
Here's my predictions for the next devices running stuff you'd never think they would:
PNG viewer on a toaster (this is what your toast should have looked like... But it's mostly carbon now instead)
Flame simulator on a Cisco PIX firewall
MAME on one of those Japanese supertoilets (I like this idea!)
GIMP on your videophone. (Hmm, just add some horns to your PHB's head, a pitchfork, get the firewall to do the background....)
Windoze NT running stably on a PC (naaah - I'm kidding :)
What features do you see adopting in the next year to make Linux more desktop friendly?
And do you think these features will come from the OSS movement, or will they be produced by the corporate sector of the Linux community?
It was introduced by the Conservative (Tory) government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher, Thatcher, the milk snatcher, but that's another story!) amongst furious debate. To prove their point, that the Tax was workable, the Tories propped up the boroughs where their councils were elected (probably with donations made to the party by tobacco sponsors
Public feeling was so strong that there were some pretty bad riots about it - so much for the shy & retiring British stereotype!!!
As an aside, would anyone agree that the only sport Britain truly leads the world in these days are:
Darts.
Snooker.
F1 racing.
Riots.
"hacking is the only field where the media believes anyone who says they're a hacker."
:)
Finally. Would MTV please take note?
Still, given the industries recent propensity for requiring certification (CLP, MSCE etc), does this mean that there will be a H4X0rZ certificate?
And who will administrate it? Will there be one for NT, one for BeOS, and another for each implementation of *NIX? Must Red Hat start giving the Linux certificate?
Still, can't wait for the new business cards - John Smith, BSc (Hons), h4X0R d00d...
Exam paper for Linux h4X0r d00d accreditation: Pick ONE of the multichoice for each question:
Q1) Packet sniffing is:
a) Using an NIC on the network to examine other traffic not addressed to that NIC.
b) What your dog does to strangers' crotches
c) What the Postal service does to suspicious mail
Q2) A buffer overflow exploit is
a) A data storage area can be flooded with a bit stream, enabling hijacking of the IP register to execute custom code.
b) didn't malloc() properly.
c) Shoe shine boy cleaned your shoes twice & charged you ten times the going rate.
etc...
---------------
NT h4X0r d00d exam as provided by MS
Pick ONE of the multichoice for each question:
Q1) Describe the NT security model
a) Any breaches are hypothetical
b) Any breaches are hypothetical
c) CDC are liars
Q2) Describe B02K
a) A malicious hacking tool
b) A malicious hacking tool
c) CDC are liars
etc....
And there'd have to be a grade at the end of the exam:
0-45% ScriptKiddie. Go back to AOL, stop trying to pass B02K off as your own, and QUIT WANKING!
45%-60% Wannabe. Keep trying!
60%-80% h4X0r. Stay away from milnet, you still aren't covering your tracks.
80%-100% 31337 h4X0r d00d!!! |/\|3 ph33r U! P13323 d0n7 h4X0r u5!!!
I forget who wrote it (think it was tucked into some AI textbook I read at Uni), it was a short story about how cybernetics (due to the demands of homo sapiens wanting perfect partners) had advanced to replicate humankind. The upshot was that people were no longer reproducing, and had been reduced to special preserves where "primitives" still had kids... Interesting reading, can anyone remember where it was published?
Falling fertility in Western countries (15% drop in sperm count over last 10 years, IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong...)
Western civilisations support a larger percentage of people whose sexual activity is solely homosexual. (This is not intended as flamebait; merely that in less developed countries homosexuals are tolerated less. I'm sure there are about the same percentage homosexuals, but most in underdeveloped nations are forced by their societies to conform to their societies' norm and hence produce offspring).
What about the claims a few years ago that 75% of people in the larger African cities were HIV+? Is this (and other death rates) factored into these predictions? Or was it all FUD by the UN?
Divorce rates are rising in Western nations. People are increasingly single. Anybody in the UK remember a recent article claiming the UK is turning into a Singles' bar?
Still, reduced population in the world can be viewed as a good thing. Technologies are becoming cleaner & greener, and as the nations which impose the largest damage to the environment shrink in size, there will be theoretically less impact. Add this to the alleged AIDS epidemic that the WHO promised us in was going on in Africa about 10 years ago - there will be mass deaths soon.
Gaia cleans herself...
I forget who said it, but we're behaving like insects.
Any kind of competition has got to be a Good Thing (tm). Now, Compaq must either a) supply cheaper or b) supply better quality.
For my own part, whenever I've used Compaq, they have been awkward. Non standard partitions on the HDD's for the diags (can you say CDROM, Compaq?), crappy cases which have n different ways of removing them across supposedly equivalent product models, and don't get me started on Token Ring NIC's. I'd prefer a DOA box to one that drops off the network for no apparent reason.
Dell, on the other hand, have been exactly what I've needed. Easy to remove cases, components are laid out intelligently inside. You actually get the idea that Dell understand that people will want to perform maintenance on their PC's at some point, and they realise that your average PC engineer doesn't have hands as small as a 4 year old.
So, smart work Dell; put more effort in, Compaq. Interesting to draw parallels within the OS market - take this as a case study of how market forces can drive prices down and quality up. American DOJ please take note!
#define std_disclaimer "I am not a conspiracy theorist."
But do any of you people really think this will be a) exhaustive and b) correct?
One thing that strikes me as a common factor of government is it never likes being shown to have made mistakes or have done "the wrong thing".
I'll bet a pound to a penny there's nothing of interest in here. Any controversy will have either have been reclassified as "top secret", or will have been mangled shortly after mistakes have been made. Or maybe that line of investigation is now very much non-PC.
Think about it - even in Tech support, if you have stuffed some machine badly & will catch hell for it, how many of you have ever re-touched logfiles, or incorrectly blamed users? I'm not accusing anyone of gross incompetency or lack of professionalism, but if you can say you've never made a schoolboy mistake, then you've probably never learnt anything anyway. And in that case, if there's an easy way out ("Oh, that's NT's fault"), you will be tempted to take it.
Do you really expect governments to work differently?
Guess that'll get me nixed if Echelon's listening!
Didn't Clifford Stoll's (he wrote The Cuckoos' Nest) ex SO (Martha ?) teach kung fu or something? :)
Haaaaa-toi!
"I am also curious why AMD built their plant way over in eastern Germany. Maybe they can get cheaper educated labor?"
Doubt it. The UK has the lowest overall cost for manufacturing stuff in Europe; see how many Asian car companys are investing in the UK as opposed to the rest of Europe. Then again, with the unification of East & West, maybe the German government is feeling the pain, and is relaxing the cost of employing someone (more health / holiday / working practices to be observed in Germany than most other EU nations). Or maybe the German government is offering AMD "incentives" (ie cash) much the way the UK government did for Nissan...