I guess all (smart) people fit in any of the three categories. As long as they do the work without being too much of a nuisance it's not big of a problem. The 2nd category can actually be worked around if the person does the work (or more of it) that you expect from an average employee. If they get tolerated to the extent of other people leaving or having a hard time working around them then you should seriously considering having a little talk with the person.
However, how indispensable those people are is what really makes the difference. The problem of firing them arises when you can't get them being hit by a bus without the company tanking at which point you need to bite the bullet and hire somebody (or a team) to take over their work and kick him out.
Sometimes all those people need is somebody to lightly boss around. A single employee or a team that can do the menial work because that's why they are reacting like that, they have to do the menial stuff day-in-day-out and little pet projects the higher ups want done quickly without being able to concentrate on the real problems. They also need to get heard by the upper management. It's not for nothing they think the higher ups are morons, usually it is because they're actually morons and don't want to listen to good advice. If you have seriously problematic people that are indispensable, you have serious managerial problems and it won't get fixed by other people taking their place.
Deadlocks, badly implemented (blocking) loops, blocking or slow IPC, blocking file io (where it has to wait for the hard drive to return confirmation of the write), waiting on interrupts from various sources, exhausted entropy etc. etc.
There are a lot of things that programmers and compilers do wrong. There are a lot of things that can't be parallelized yet and there is a lot of contention over a few limited resources (RAM, hard drive, external IO) which makes a computer slow.
Schools and private teachers were widely available since people were settling down in a fixed location and the elderly could survive. Their experience was passed down to the younger generations in order to be more successful. Every holy book since ancient times orders or encourages the tutoring of children and/or subjects into the teachings of said book and sometimes even establishes a caste or group for teachers.
Schooling as we know it (with classrooms and dedicated teachers) has been around since the Middle Ages and really hasn't changed much since. We're still in this Catholic thinking pattern that shipping your children off to total strangers to copy books other people wrote is the best way to gain knowledge. This worked good back in the day when science was a simple set of rules which weren't supposed to be changed but these days information is readily available perpetually and children need to learn how to channel this information into usable bits of knowledge and work with it to explore further. We're still teaching Newton's Laws like it's some religious dogma in high school instead of explaining how to derive them and how Einstein (and others) built further on it. People learn stuff in high school that they'll have to ignore and re-learn in college which they'll have to again discard and re-learn in the workplace.
The latest iDevices and Blackberries are encrypted by default (AES256) by the password and you can require stronger passwords than the 4-digits. That's how remote wipe works - it just sends a command which removes the encryption keys from the first block of memory in a few milliseconds, older devices took a few minutes/hours to completely wipe.
Windows Server only supports 4 sockets and up to 32GB RAM unless you pay for the Enterprise version and we are currently physically limited to 4-6 real cores (12 with HT) per CPU.
For a workstation in the scientific or engineering field it is quite feasible to have a 4-socket system and more than 32GB of RAM SuperMicro makes quite a few of them in tower version.
The complaint is that there is a limit based on the license you buy. This is really annoying that people can't use $OS_of_choice and have to use a Server OS for their applications purely because the licensing won't allow it.
I'm a devout Linux/Mac user that has to support Windows 7 for a living. I can say that it's a dog. - It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines - Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself - Still no decent backup system - XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions) - Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support - Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world - Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution. - You still have to download a virus scanner, there is none built-in nor is the OS self-contained enough to be used without one.
They're called FPGA accelerators and they already exist. You just won't find them in your general desktop as the entry level cards cost about as much as a high-end workstation.
No, what happens is that China buys the first 5 loco's for 5M/piece and as they progressed they kept paying the same money for less stuff. In the end they just paid 20M or so for all the licenses and tech expertise and the GE manager that made the deal got a promotion because he had a series of VERY good financial end-of-quarter reports.
Actually with analog controls you can be quite precise as well. The problem is that people that grew up on consoles (the 16 year olds these days) have gotten used to consoles dumbing down the controls to the point that many don't know they can be more precise. There's many times I play with my younger brother-in-law and beat him in FPS I haven't played before and when I look at his screen he doesn't even bother aiming before shooting. I have seen the same from a number of gamers even those that are ranked pretty high.
That's what I was thinking too. EMC, Apple and Oracle/Sun all rely somehow on open source components for their OS or major components of it. I think the common thread is that they're all commonly sued by the likes of Paul Allen, Acacia and the Constellation group as well as companies that are going down and in last hopes try to monetize their patent base (Motorola, RIM, Nokia, SCO) and they need to use their own heaps of patents to defend against it. By combining these patents and signing a deal not to sue each other they can defend better against patent trolls as well as give the rest of the industry incentive to join them.
The question is, if there were cables leaked back in the day on how the US thought about Sadam and how they wanted to put him in power, would Sadam have been in power? If not, what would the alternative be? The same goes here, the West is supporting yet another dictator (a dictator is made when you put a single person in ultimate power) and making him out to be the best thing since JC. The cables got leaked this time.
What the west needs to do is support the democratic process that puts in power parties and groups of people through checks and balances, not just a single person to save the day. Also, this is Africa, tribes are still fighting among each other and whenever a tribe gets in power, they'll have their front man become the chieftain of the area. This is what happened with Mugabe and most likely will happen with Tvangirai or whoever you put in power over a divided African country.
It is the same false statistic that is used to justify Government CCTV in your city of choice. The crime rate went down after CCTV got installed but it wasn't taken into account that global street crime and burglary rates went down over the past few years. These days it's just not profitable anymore to steal an MP3 player or a cell phone because you can't fence them for more than 5 bucks anyway and some of them have tracking and remote kill switches. Same goes for stereo's and TV systems. When you can get a 32" at Wal-Mart for under $300 it's just not worth breaking into a home and only getting $50-100 for an old one.
I work in education and cheating in general has gone down over the years because tests have been simplified (no cheating necessary), open book examinations, camera's are monitoring large test rooms and testing is slowly but surely changing from "punch a hole in the right location and feed it into a scanner" to essays or papers on the subject, written and oral examinations. My wife is participating in a pilot to do some tests for her college from home. All they require is a webcam and a microphone in a quiet environment. Some professors (especially the younger generation coming in) are understanding that pure knowledge tests are unnecessary in this day and age and rather get some type of original paper where the student delves into his/hers specific interest on the subject.
We left mainframes because they were slow and expensive and they got to be more expensive than a desktop.
That is still true today. To give your VDI some decent performance you need SSD's or 10k RPM disk cabinets, a couple of 8-core servers and a very good interconnect between it all. Then you have to deal with the licensing which isn't very cheap. Total investment cost for decent performance on just 20-50 virtual desktops is usually around $40,000 and you'll still need thin client systems near $200 a piece. You can get computers for under $500 that will give you the same performance as your virtual desktop.
Even if we had broadband Internet back in the day, the Internet (and any network for that matter) is too unstable to be acceptable. If you think about the amount of things that can and frequently do go wrong (DNS, DHCP, LDAP, BOOTP, TFTP, switches, cables, capacity) on top of what is basically a full computer on both sides you'll understand that in many situations it isn't what you were looking for.
The places it does make sense for is where it is going to be used. High-risk (of data or physical theft) or very uniform systems (such as call centers, single applications, kiosks, cashier stands, classrooms,...) that require both a minimum of management and minimum interactivity.
There are other solutions besides using VDI. If data loss because of device theft is an issue, use encryption. If any data loss is an issue, use networked data/home drives. If you want a uniform system booted every morning, use netboot.
This is InfoWorld, the people that keep sending you 'free' magazines because you work in the IT business. They are written by idiots who get the specs for their stories from whoever paid for the advertisement. Off course open source is older than 12 years or even the OSI organization. Back in the 70's and 80's everything that was not AT&T's Unix was open source.
If God is (or has to be) omnipotent and omniscient as you say, then can God make a stone he himself can not lift? And how do you explain free will if he already knows the future? Can God bend the laws of physics (whether or not they have been discovered by mankind) and violate causality?
For God to exist (logically) he cannot be omnipotent nor omniscient. He could influence the way things go to go his way because of his supernatural power but he could not possibly predict the outcome of a choice based out of free will although he could statistically get a most likely outcome and work around either choice for his will to be done.
Most likely the blood centrifuge and the x-ray machine have ethernet ports these days. My dentist gets the X-Ray results from 1 machine right on the computer in one of the rooms. I am subscribed to an IT Support mailing list from a hospital and there are regularly 'system updates' for Windows XP systems running everything from fetal monitoring systems to sleep center monitors and these days bedside e-health systems.
but if they were written correctly this should not really be much of an issue.
Even open source programs that are intended to run on multiple platforms suffer from developers fixing stuff for theirs and unintentionally breaking stuff on other platforms. If you've ever done it, you know it's actually a major issue unless you write very good code without shortcuts/optimizations or you write in an interpreted language.
Microsoft should be able to get Office to run on ARM without too much hassle, even then the Microsoft Office Web Apps will still work. There are HTML+Javascript and Silverlight versions of these.
A browser-based application will work even on non-Windows systems. Running a full-blown Office on ARM is going to pose some serious problems. Even Office for Mac or the versions they had for Windows Mobile had major issues and they didn't ever port Visual Basic Script or ActiveX on those platforms. They did rewrite versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint but they were majorly different than their Windows counterparts, even in their layout-engine.
Also all programs written in.NET should automatically be compatible without recompiling..NET has been touted as an interpreted language but I haven't seen even a single concept where it runs on other platforms. A lot of.NET applications still have legacy Win32 in it somewhere and even the libraries are very closely linked to Win32. Besides, JIT has never been very good in.NET, I wouldn't give it much better chances on the classically less powerful ARM chips.
The kernel (for Linux) is cross-platform and only requires minor changes (the x86-bits). The same could be said for NT if NT hasn't done major x86 optimizations or ASM code.
The main problem is the applications. You can't just take a random app in Linux and put it on an ARM-based system. Some will cross-compile if the developer wrote very good code or if you're willing to do minor changes, others are written in interpreted languages like Perl. But besides that, the applications are limited.
And if you're going to rewrite or write your application from scratch, why not forgo the whole paying for licensing deal and just use a proven and stable system that has already been running on those type of CPU's for years. Windows for ARM will not be without major bugs and inconveniences for at least a few years and it's not like you could fix it yourself or recompile the kernel if your custom SOC doesn't behave well with the stock kernel.
"FIRST look left, THEN look right, THEN cross the streets" to our kids, did they forgo that in your country? Yes they did, the parents of the children of this generation are generally irresponsible (being raised by baby boomers) and can't even take care of the basic needs of their own kids. They won't learn it in schools either as the slowest kid in the class won't know what Left or Right is so the rest of the class won't be able to move on.
First, are there not traffic lights in your country? Hardly. There are a lot of 4-way stops. The problem is that lights need electricity and electricity would need to be ran to the remotest parts. Since we can't even get broadband in those areas (which is simpler with fiber requiring no power for miles) I doubt we can get the infrastructure for electric lights/car recharging stations. Solar panels are a big no-no here since it doesn't use coal or oil.
At least where it counts, i.e. where there's actually a chance to meet a car on the road? This is the US, everybody has at least 2 cars (especially out in the country) but nobody knows how to keep them up or drive them. I've seen an accident once on a crossroads where the only surroundings were 4 big empty fields. It might be hard however to meet a pedestrian on the road. I live in a city and there are hardly any people walking here compared to Europe's cities.
Are there no pedestrian crossing areas on your roads? No. And if there are, people ignore them. Or they simply don't work. There are some pedestrian crossings where it takes a full 2 minutes for the pedestrians to be able to walk (the white light) so everybody just ignores them.
Are drivers in your country so reckless that they ignore those traffic lights that LOOKING ain't enough to cross the road safely, you have to listen? Yes. And even if you see a pedestrian you might not be able to stop in time since there is absolutely no requirement for your brakes (or anything but your emissions sensors) to actually work to pass inspection. All the brake system is inspected for is if whether the brake pads are not worn down to the thread and even then they'll tell you you should probably change them soon and pass you. And even if you have a working car the freaking things are so heavy they require a 200m stopping distance.
And most of all, are there still teenagers in your country that remove those iPod earphones from time to time from their ears? Are there in your country? I've seen the same trend worldwide.
1) Yes you can accidentally retain sniffed traffic logs. Run Kismet for instance. I have once accidentally left it on, sniffing all encrypted and non-encrypted traffic in my neighborhood (~15 networks) for about 48 hours: ~10GB. Google did not sniff all traffic, it only sniffed (or sampled) a few packets from every hotspot (maybe 10-20kb). With standard disk sizes being 250GB it takes a really, really long time to fill up your disk with random samples.
2) People are pissed for what? Not securing their own wireless? Transmitting their passwords in clear text over an insecure medium? They only correlated what any WLAN tracker/sniffer can provide. If you own a wireless network you might know that your MAC addresses and SSID's get transferred and being able to correlate them against GPS locations has been done not just by Google. Even so, it's still legal in most places to receive radio transmissions (since it's physically impossible not to) and you can do whatever you want with them those transmitting those radio transmissions should know that there can be eavesdroppers anywhere.
3) It's not slightly creepy. I have done it as have probably many others here. Ever been at a location where you need internet? Maybe at your local coffee shop or at a hotel? You open your laptop and scan for networks hoping to find an unsecured one - you're now wardriving. Doing it for profit has been done before, there are companies that sell these databases successfully since at least the last '90's, not just Google.
First of all, you're going to be racking up the student loans. The investment in a good school for just 4 years is 200-250k in tuition for the lowest ranked 'top universities', think more near to 1M if you want Harvard or others in the Ivy League. If you need to get housing, it's an additional 50-100k+ for on-campus housing or if you can find something among the locals 25k+. You'll be making 18k/year at the local McD to cover your food and fuel expenses during this period. You'll have lots of stress trying to balance it all. In the mean time you're 'investment' is going to accrue interest at ~2% a year (or roughly $5-20k/year).
Then you're going to have to find an entry-level job, before you even make enough money to start paying off the balance (not the interest) you're another 5 years further. That's 9-10 years of your life you're under water (debt wise) in which you won't even be able to save enough to do anything.
If you go to a local community college you'll get the same paper, less debt and you'll have less stress. You'll be able to buy a house after 2 years working and you're debt should be paid off ~2-3 years after that. Plus, you won't be too highly qualified (or feel underpaid) for that job.
And that's if you're lucky and get that job in the industry. A bunch of college kids feel inadequately educated and end up working at the local pizza shop anyway. I was able to work in the IT industry right out of high school (albeit at a lower entry-level income) and have been able to work up to mid-level in the time it would've taken me to finish a University education. I now have over a decade of experience in the industry which makes me a good candidate for just about any job I interview for. I can afford a house, cars, a family and have absolutely no debt.
1) This DDoS attack does not seem to be originating from Anonymous but from AnonOps which is a cybergang-related IRC server and the DDoS seems to be originating from a real botnet of hijacked Windows computers, not LOIC. 2) Spamhaus warned about wikileaks.info which seems to be hosted by the same criminals and is posting false Wikileaks statements. 3) Wikileaks.org has been taken over by these criminals and is redirecting to http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ which is NOT sourcing from wikileaks.ch (and other mirrors like http://www.wlmirror.com/)
It seems to me the US Gov'mint has 'fixed' their Wikileaks problem by a campaign of misinformation and probably paid these Russian criminals to host the false Wikileaks site. It wouldn't surprise me if the wikileaks.info sites started to have certain damning documents disappear or specific ones infected just to track who's reading what.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess all (smart) people fit in any of the three categories. As long as they do the work without being too much of a nuisance it's not big of a problem. The 2nd category can actually be worked around if the person does the work (or more of it) that you expect from an average employee. If they get tolerated to the extent of other people leaving or having a hard time working around them then you should seriously considering having a little talk with the person.
However, how indispensable those people are is what really makes the difference. The problem of firing them arises when you can't get them being hit by a bus without the company tanking at which point you need to bite the bullet and hire somebody (or a team) to take over their work and kick him out.
Sometimes all those people need is somebody to lightly boss around. A single employee or a team that can do the menial work because that's why they are reacting like that, they have to do the menial stuff day-in-day-out and little pet projects the higher ups want done quickly without being able to concentrate on the real problems. They also need to get heard by the upper management. It's not for nothing they think the higher ups are morons, usually it is because they're actually morons and don't want to listen to good advice. If you have seriously problematic people that are indispensable, you have serious managerial problems and it won't get fixed by other people taking their place.
Deadlocks, badly implemented (blocking) loops, blocking or slow IPC, blocking file io (where it has to wait for the hard drive to return confirmation of the write), waiting on interrupts from various sources, exhausted entropy etc. etc.
There are a lot of things that programmers and compilers do wrong. There are a lot of things that can't be parallelized yet and there is a lot of contention over a few limited resources (RAM, hard drive, external IO) which makes a computer slow.
Schools and private teachers were widely available since people were settling down in a fixed location and the elderly could survive. Their experience was passed down to the younger generations in order to be more successful. Every holy book since ancient times orders or encourages the tutoring of children and/or subjects into the teachings of said book and sometimes even establishes a caste or group for teachers.
Schooling as we know it (with classrooms and dedicated teachers) has been around since the Middle Ages and really hasn't changed much since. We're still in this Catholic thinking pattern that shipping your children off to total strangers to copy books other people wrote is the best way to gain knowledge. This worked good back in the day when science was a simple set of rules which weren't supposed to be changed but these days information is readily available perpetually and children need to learn how to channel this information into usable bits of knowledge and work with it to explore further. We're still teaching Newton's Laws like it's some religious dogma in high school instead of explaining how to derive them and how Einstein (and others) built further on it. People learn stuff in high school that they'll have to ignore and re-learn in college which they'll have to again discard and re-learn in the workplace.
The latest iDevices and Blackberries are encrypted by default (AES256) by the password and you can require stronger passwords than the 4-digits. That's how remote wipe works - it just sends a command which removes the encryption keys from the first block of memory in a few milliseconds, older devices took a few minutes/hours to completely wipe.
Windows Server only supports 4 sockets and up to 32GB RAM unless you pay for the Enterprise version and we are currently physically limited to 4-6 real cores (12 with HT) per CPU.
For a workstation in the scientific or engineering field it is quite feasible to have a 4-socket system and more than 32GB of RAM SuperMicro makes quite a few of them in tower version.
The complaint is that there is a limit based on the license you buy. This is really annoying that people can't use $OS_of_choice and have to use a Server OS for their applications purely because the licensing won't allow it.
I'm a devout Linux/Mac user that has to support Windows 7 for a living. I can say that it's a dog.
- It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
- Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
- Still no decent backup system
- XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
- Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
- Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
- Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
- You still have to download a virus scanner, there is none built-in nor is the OS self-contained enough to be used without one.
They're called FPGA accelerators and they already exist. You just won't find them in your general desktop as the entry level cards cost about as much as a high-end workstation.
No, what happens is that China buys the first 5 loco's for 5M/piece and as they progressed they kept paying the same money for less stuff. In the end they just paid 20M or so for all the licenses and tech expertise and the GE manager that made the deal got a promotion because he had a series of VERY good financial end-of-quarter reports.
When you fly private you don't have to put up with the TSA's rules.
What does Artificial Intelligence have to do with this?
Actually with analog controls you can be quite precise as well. The problem is that people that grew up on consoles (the 16 year olds these days) have gotten used to consoles dumbing down the controls to the point that many don't know they can be more precise. There's many times I play with my younger brother-in-law and beat him in FPS I haven't played before and when I look at his screen he doesn't even bother aiming before shooting. I have seen the same from a number of gamers even those that are ranked pretty high.
That's what I was thinking too. EMC, Apple and Oracle/Sun all rely somehow on open source components for their OS or major components of it. I think the common thread is that they're all commonly sued by the likes of Paul Allen, Acacia and the Constellation group as well as companies that are going down and in last hopes try to monetize their patent base (Motorola, RIM, Nokia, SCO) and they need to use their own heaps of patents to defend against it. By combining these patents and signing a deal not to sue each other they can defend better against patent trolls as well as give the rest of the industry incentive to join them.
The question is, if there were cables leaked back in the day on how the US thought about Sadam and how they wanted to put him in power, would Sadam have been in power? If not, what would the alternative be? The same goes here, the West is supporting yet another dictator (a dictator is made when you put a single person in ultimate power) and making him out to be the best thing since JC. The cables got leaked this time.
What the west needs to do is support the democratic process that puts in power parties and groups of people through checks and balances, not just a single person to save the day. Also, this is Africa, tribes are still fighting among each other and whenever a tribe gets in power, they'll have their front man become the chieftain of the area. This is what happened with Mugabe and most likely will happen with Tvangirai or whoever you put in power over a divided African country.
It is the same false statistic that is used to justify Government CCTV in your city of choice. The crime rate went down after CCTV got installed but it wasn't taken into account that global street crime and burglary rates went down over the past few years. These days it's just not profitable anymore to steal an MP3 player or a cell phone because you can't fence them for more than 5 bucks anyway and some of them have tracking and remote kill switches. Same goes for stereo's and TV systems. When you can get a 32" at Wal-Mart for under $300 it's just not worth breaking into a home and only getting $50-100 for an old one.
I work in education and cheating in general has gone down over the years because tests have been simplified (no cheating necessary), open book examinations, camera's are monitoring large test rooms and testing is slowly but surely changing from "punch a hole in the right location and feed it into a scanner" to essays or papers on the subject, written and oral examinations. My wife is participating in a pilot to do some tests for her college from home. All they require is a webcam and a microphone in a quiet environment. Some professors (especially the younger generation coming in) are understanding that pure knowledge tests are unnecessary in this day and age and rather get some type of original paper where the student delves into his/hers specific interest on the subject.
We left mainframes because they were slow and expensive and they got to be more expensive than a desktop.
That is still true today. To give your VDI some decent performance you need SSD's or 10k RPM disk cabinets, a couple of 8-core servers and a very good interconnect between it all. Then you have to deal with the licensing which isn't very cheap. Total investment cost for decent performance on just 20-50 virtual desktops is usually around $40,000 and you'll still need thin client systems near $200 a piece. You can get computers for under $500 that will give you the same performance as your virtual desktop.
Even if we had broadband Internet back in the day, the Internet (and any network for that matter) is too unstable to be acceptable. If you think about the amount of things that can and frequently do go wrong (DNS, DHCP, LDAP, BOOTP, TFTP, switches, cables, capacity) on top of what is basically a full computer on both sides you'll understand that in many situations it isn't what you were looking for.
The places it does make sense for is where it is going to be used. High-risk (of data or physical theft) or very uniform systems (such as call centers, single applications, kiosks, cashier stands, classrooms, ...) that require both a minimum of management and minimum interactivity.
There are other solutions besides using VDI. If data loss because of device theft is an issue, use encryption. If any data loss is an issue, use networked data/home drives. If you want a uniform system booted every morning, use netboot.
well designed language that teaches good habits
Except for teaching you line/statement endings and how to share your source code through channels that don't keep track of tabs and spaces.
This is InfoWorld, the people that keep sending you 'free' magazines because you work in the IT business. They are written by idiots who get the specs for their stories from whoever paid for the advertisement. Off course open source is older than 12 years or even the OSI organization. Back in the 70's and 80's everything that was not AT&T's Unix was open source.
If God is (or has to be) omnipotent and omniscient as you say, then can God make a stone he himself can not lift? And how do you explain free will if he already knows the future? Can God bend the laws of physics (whether or not they have been discovered by mankind) and violate causality?
For God to exist (logically) he cannot be omnipotent nor omniscient. He could influence the way things go to go his way because of his supernatural power but he could not possibly predict the outcome of a choice based out of free will although he could statistically get a most likely outcome and work around either choice for his will to be done.
Most likely the blood centrifuge and the x-ray machine have ethernet ports these days. My dentist gets the X-Ray results from 1 machine right on the computer in one of the rooms. I am subscribed to an IT Support mailing list from a hospital and there are regularly 'system updates' for Windows XP systems running everything from fetal monitoring systems to sleep center monitors and these days bedside e-health systems.
but if they were written correctly this should not really be much of an issue.
Even open source programs that are intended to run on multiple platforms suffer from developers fixing stuff for theirs and unintentionally breaking stuff on other platforms. If you've ever done it, you know it's actually a major issue unless you write very good code without shortcuts/optimizations or you write in an interpreted language.
Microsoft should be able to get Office to run on ARM without too much hassle, even then the Microsoft Office Web Apps will still work. There are HTML+Javascript and Silverlight versions of these.
A browser-based application will work even on non-Windows systems. Running a full-blown Office on ARM is going to pose some serious problems. Even Office for Mac or the versions they had for Windows Mobile had major issues and they didn't ever port Visual Basic Script or ActiveX on those platforms. They did rewrite versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint but they were majorly different than their Windows counterparts, even in their layout-engine.
Also all programs written in .NET should automatically be compatible without recompiling. .NET has been touted as an interpreted language but I haven't seen even a single concept where it runs on other platforms. A lot of .NET applications still have legacy Win32 in it somewhere and even the libraries are very closely linked to Win32. Besides, JIT has never been very good in .NET, I wouldn't give it much better chances on the classically less powerful ARM chips.
The kernel (for Linux) is cross-platform and only requires minor changes (the x86-bits). The same could be said for NT if NT hasn't done major x86 optimizations or ASM code.
The main problem is the applications. You can't just take a random app in Linux and put it on an ARM-based system. Some will cross-compile if the developer wrote very good code or if you're willing to do minor changes, others are written in interpreted languages like Perl. But besides that, the applications are limited.
And if you're going to rewrite or write your application from scratch, why not forgo the whole paying for licensing deal and just use a proven and stable system that has already been running on those type of CPU's for years. Windows for ARM will not be without major bugs and inconveniences for at least a few years and it's not like you could fix it yourself or recompile the kernel if your custom SOC doesn't behave well with the stock kernel.
This is the US:
"FIRST look left, THEN look right, THEN cross the streets" to our kids, did they forgo that in your country?
Yes they did, the parents of the children of this generation are generally irresponsible (being raised by baby boomers) and can't even take care of the basic needs of their own kids. They won't learn it in schools either as the slowest kid in the class won't know what Left or Right is so the rest of the class won't be able to move on.
First, are there not traffic lights in your country?
Hardly. There are a lot of 4-way stops. The problem is that lights need electricity and electricity would need to be ran to the remotest parts. Since we can't even get broadband in those areas (which is simpler with fiber requiring no power for miles) I doubt we can get the infrastructure for electric lights/car recharging stations. Solar panels are a big no-no here since it doesn't use coal or oil.
At least where it counts, i.e. where there's actually a chance to meet a car on the road?
This is the US, everybody has at least 2 cars (especially out in the country) but nobody knows how to keep them up or drive them. I've seen an accident once on a crossroads where the only surroundings were 4 big empty fields. It might be hard however to meet a pedestrian on the road. I live in a city and there are hardly any people walking here compared to Europe's cities.
Are there no pedestrian crossing areas on your roads?
No. And if there are, people ignore them. Or they simply don't work. There are some pedestrian crossings where it takes a full 2 minutes for the pedestrians to be able to walk (the white light) so everybody just ignores them.
Are drivers in your country so reckless that they ignore those traffic lights that LOOKING ain't enough to cross the road safely, you have to listen?
Yes. And even if you see a pedestrian you might not be able to stop in time since there is absolutely no requirement for your brakes (or anything but your emissions sensors) to actually work to pass inspection. All the brake system is inspected for is if whether the brake pads are not worn down to the thread and even then they'll tell you you should probably change them soon and pass you. And even if you have a working car the freaking things are so heavy they require a 200m stopping distance.
And most of all, are there still teenagers in your country that remove those iPod earphones from time to time from their ears?
Are there in your country? I've seen the same trend worldwide.
1) Yes you can accidentally retain sniffed traffic logs. Run Kismet for instance. I have once accidentally left it on, sniffing all encrypted and non-encrypted traffic in my neighborhood (~15 networks) for about 48 hours: ~10GB. Google did not sniff all traffic, it only sniffed (or sampled) a few packets from every hotspot (maybe 10-20kb). With standard disk sizes being 250GB it takes a really, really long time to fill up your disk with random samples.
2) People are pissed for what? Not securing their own wireless? Transmitting their passwords in clear text over an insecure medium? They only correlated what any WLAN tracker/sniffer can provide. If you own a wireless network you might know that your MAC addresses and SSID's get transferred and being able to correlate them against GPS locations has been done not just by Google. Even so, it's still legal in most places to receive radio transmissions (since it's physically impossible not to) and you can do whatever you want with them those transmitting those radio transmissions should know that there can be eavesdroppers anywhere.
3) It's not slightly creepy. I have done it as have probably many others here. Ever been at a location where you need internet? Maybe at your local coffee shop or at a hotel? You open your laptop and scan for networks hoping to find an unsecured one - you're now wardriving. Doing it for profit has been done before, there are companies that sell these databases successfully since at least the last '90's, not just Google.
First of all, you're going to be racking up the student loans. The investment in a good school for just 4 years is 200-250k in tuition for the lowest ranked 'top universities', think more near to 1M if you want Harvard or others in the Ivy League. If you need to get housing, it's an additional 50-100k+ for on-campus housing or if you can find something among the locals 25k+. You'll be making 18k/year at the local McD to cover your food and fuel expenses during this period. You'll have lots of stress trying to balance it all. In the mean time you're 'investment' is going to accrue interest at ~2% a year (or roughly $5-20k/year).
Then you're going to have to find an entry-level job, before you even make enough money to start paying off the balance (not the interest) you're another 5 years further. That's 9-10 years of your life you're under water (debt wise) in which you won't even be able to save enough to do anything.
If you go to a local community college you'll get the same paper, less debt and you'll have less stress. You'll be able to buy a house after 2 years working and you're debt should be paid off ~2-3 years after that. Plus, you won't be too highly qualified (or feel underpaid) for that job.
And that's if you're lucky and get that job in the industry. A bunch of college kids feel inadequately educated and end up working at the local pizza shop anyway. I was able to work in the IT industry right out of high school (albeit at a lower entry-level income) and have been able to work up to mid-level in the time it would've taken me to finish a University education. I now have over a decade of experience in the industry which makes me a good candidate for just about any job I interview for. I can afford a house, cars, a family and have absolutely no debt.
1) This DDoS attack does not seem to be originating from Anonymous but from AnonOps which is a cybergang-related IRC server and the DDoS seems to be originating from a real botnet of hijacked Windows computers, not LOIC.
2) Spamhaus warned about wikileaks.info which seems to be hosted by the same criminals and is posting false Wikileaks statements.
3) Wikileaks.org has been taken over by these criminals and is redirecting to http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ which is NOT sourcing from wikileaks.ch (and other mirrors like http://www.wlmirror.com/)
It seems to me the US Gov'mint has 'fixed' their Wikileaks problem by a campaign of misinformation and probably paid these Russian criminals to host the false Wikileaks site. It wouldn't surprise me if the wikileaks.info sites started to have certain damning documents disappear or specific ones infected just to track who's reading what.