Windows has better video drivers, and it has a tons of teams at Microsoft working on things like directx that directly support gaming. Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games.
Oh, and sound just works on Windows, did I mention that? That's pretty important for games. I have surround sound working on my Linux install, which took some doing, but as soon as I plug in my USB headset so I can use skype, the Linux sound system explodes. That means that even if left for dead was on Linux, I still wouldn't be able to play it.
IMHO proprietary Windows drivers are just as crappy as the Linux side. The open source drivers in Linux are usually great while on Windows there are hardly open source drivers for anything. Recently had an exotic S3 and Voodoo card (yeah the companies don't exist anymore) for some or another mini solution I had to get working again. Good luck finding anything for that. Linux worked great, Windows support ended around Windows 2000 so I couldn't get anything but VGA-resolution.
Either way, same holds for DirectX. DirectX is a crutch imho. Ever had to virtualize DirectX? Don't work very well. OpenGL on the other hand works great (albeit a bit slower) since it doesn't require a hole in the kernel.
Depends on where you're at. In Europe it's not uncommon to be able to get your cash out in less than 15 seconds. Put your card in, select how much you want, pin and you get it right away. Here in the US for some or another reason it seems like all ATM's still need to dial in on 56k after you typed in your pin. It's also not uncommon to be able to get more than $500/atm. I've been able to get 2000 out of ATM's before.
I have a book here that talks about C++. It says something like this: don't think a file as just a series of data. Think of a file as the variable data in a serialized object that happens to be saved on disk for later retrieval. Basically the book goes (deep) into the algorithms of saving files for your program and what all you have to think of to save a file as an object (the book is from the early 90's with the examples on a 5.14" floppy for DOS). It shows you how to make your program portable to both DOS and Unix and makes it object oriented (to support multiple processes etc.) by basically writing your own database filesystem.
Bonjour is the network discovery protocol (DAAP) that makes it so your computer can find and connect networked or wireless speakers, printers, share music libraries and more without having to manually find and type in IP addresses especially when you're on DHCP in your house (which you most likely are). I use it at work to advertise machines with certain services (like distributed computing/compiling) to the network so that I don't have to scan for them. It also gives you great DNS services without needing to configure a DNS server (like P2P for DNS).
Bonjour is one of the reasons networking is so 'easy' on Mac's and even on Linux (if you install it). It's similar to Windows' equivalent of Windows Zeroconfig (Microsoft's Link-local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR)) but it adheres to the published and open standards unlike Microsoft implementation which is also the reason that there is only 1 printer at my job that is discovered through Microsoft's protocol and ALL printers (HP Laserjet, Brother and inkjets) are discovered through Bonjour.
I have been able to configure KDE to look exactly like Windows for the last 5 years. There are Windows themes for KDE and with a bit of icon toying you can make it look exactly like Windows 98/2000/XP. I don't know about Vista because I honestly haven't even seen a Vista installation and I hope I never will. My parents have been running Ubuntu for the last 2 years, I run Mac's, Fedora, Ubuntu and virtualized Windows XP at work so there is no real reason to pay for upgrades.
Well, who is there to kill in Utah? You have basically groups of mormons - 50% of the population - who (when living in religious communities) like to keep that type of things under covers among their elders or are told not to report so no official reports exist of rapes and abuse unless somebody finds (or is honest enough to report) a body much like the Amish. There is otherwise nothing or nobody in Utah to commit crimes for (it's mostly empty).
Yep that's right. I remember back in the day, I worked at a Microsoft "Very Valued" Partner which basically meant they could screw you over whenever they wanted just because and if you didn't comply, no more partner for you (*yank MSDN library and cheap licensing*). I almost brought the company to the brink of losing their partnership just by recommending Linux machines (which we did sell but apparently not advertised) to users that needed a xAMP stack.
Either way, the company had to build their own ERP (simply because they wanted to - this was the.com era) and Microsoft somehow got involved which trumpeted Visual Basic everywhere, the early releases of.NET were not stable yet and according to them.NET was not yet ready for business. Of course, if you ever did VB you would know that once you're done, the code looks like crap, the thing is as slow as hell and crashed every so often. 2 months later, the same people told us that it would be better to do it in.NET (which was then just out as 1.0) and it would all be very well. If you ever worked with VB.NET back then you would know that it was just as buggy as classic VB although 'neater' to code for and the functionality was all well so the company folded to the MS pressure and rebuilt it. All fine and dandy until MS came out with C#. All of a sudden early.NET (preview and 1.0) became largely deprecated (what, this was supposed to be a stable and EXTENDIBLE language!) and with it also VB was heavily modified to fit the 1.1 framework and so there was another rebuild of some code. Of course some parts were still in classic VB and old.NET code and in the mean time new programmers had come and external things had started to happen so just rebuilding pieces of the application started breaking. Also major security holes were found, were patched and broke stuff and thus the application had to be rewritten from the ground up (again) in C# for.NET to fit the thing.
I left the company later after that. In the mean time 2.0 and 3.0 came out. I wonder if they have been rewriting stuff for almost a decade now. Maybe if they just stuck to PHP and C++. I read a good (older) book recently on C++ and it said a good extensible program (algorithm) in an OO language is written twice: once to know what classes you are going to need to build, second time to apply what you got to know in well documented code, classes and libraries. I believe writing something more than 3 times just because the libraries you got to rely on changed is just bad practice.
The Dutch have sweet mayonnaise (which honestly tastes slightly disgusting) and the Belgians have standard mayonnaise (which you can get here in the US too). Belgium has a lot of sauces though. Tartar sauce is also available in the US and it tastes similar. What I wonder is who ever invented 'American' Sauce (it looks bad, it's slightly hot and you can only eat a little bit because it's way too heavy - similar to garbage plate 'beef sauce' but more solid like mayonnaise).
The more north you go anywhere (Americas, Europe, Asia) the worse the food starts tasting (in general). In the south you have the spicy hotness and while you go up you pass through culinary gems like New Orleans, Italy and Belgium. Where it is cold (The Netherlands, North America and Canada) it seems like the foods and drinks get more watery (eg. Budweiser) although far north they do know how to brew some really strong drinks (to stay warm?).
Not necessarily. If the 100k guy is really good and the 50k guy really blows, then you can still make a loss (lost productivity, lost sales, training costs and lost knowledge).
It's similar to those 10% theories. You can shed 10% of your workforce only once: when your workforce has become stagnant and smells like dead fish. If you keep shedding every year or every quarter you will have high turnover rates in the big departments that don't require a large level of competence (HR, sales, 1st line support) and the brains of your operation will slowly but surely drain out of the pool (people might have had a bad period, people become afraid or people might have a more stable opportunity elsewhere).
I work at an MRI research site. My clients are named after parts of the brain, Windows machines are named after brain diseases and servers are named after the most important parts of the brain (head (computing), spine (mail and web - communications in the body), hippocampus (files - short memory), skull (backup server - protects the brain)...).
You can be inventive yet informative. Similar schemes would be possible for your favorite show/story
The problem is that spam remains profitable even after all those anti-spam measures. Currently I have no spam coming through my box (Amavis, SpamAssassin) and I have been with providers that implemented solutions similar to parents, grandparents and all other posts 'proposing' a solution. We have SSL-based (both client and server) e-mail, we have authenticated SMTP, we have rate limiting, we have blacklists, whitelists and greylists. Put together they all limit the spam but they are all expensive on the receiving (or intermediary) servers.
The senders costs however are very low (next to nothing) and they can afford to lose 50-90% of their e-mail on technical measures, the other 10% is still successful enough to be profitable.
There is no simple measure against spam simply because it's profitable for the sender and the companies/individuals that sell services to those senders. It's kinda like the physical junk mail that you get. Without it, I would be a lot happier and I wonder who actually buys their junk and how it is profitable at the current rates of stamps and paper but without junk mail the postal services would have to increase their rates and at the current incompetence of those organizations they probably would go under because FedEx, DHL and UPS does their jobs much better at those price points.
We can't really get rid of spam and if we get rid of SMTP, spammers will jump on whatever 'alternative' we have. Spammers have already jumped on web ads, domain names, IM, VoIP and several other technologies that are used to communicate freely with one another (without too much restrictions) even though those technologies are much more limited in scope and user base.
Really, there are plenty H1B's out there that work for 75-50% of the standard wages. If you're out of a job, what would you rather have: 0% or 50% of what you used to make? If Americans don't want to work at those wages, then they don't get the job, there are always people who want to work whether you import them or not. It's not because you're American that you're entitled to get higher wages. The economy is down the crapper, you have to pay your bills; get a job or become homeless. If you don't want to work for the bank at 45k, there is always pizza delivery or McD for 25k.
I work and live in America as a permanent resident. I made 2 years ago well above average and got a bit of savings, the last two I make slightly below but I have a much better work environment and at least I still have a job and job security for at least a few years even if the economy gets worse. If you're forgoing jobs because you hope you get a better offer, that's your problem and good luck if you can get it in this economy. In the mean time I'll just build up my credit and buy a house within a few months. Hopefully you'll deserve a tip when you serve me my food.
Because some iTunes' features are built around those technologies. Eg. if you have wireless speakers or another library/machine/appliance you want to share your music with, Bonjour will auto-detect it and list it in iTunes. Here Microsoft is including spyware targeted at their competition (Firefox) in their own updates in order to make Firefox look bad. It's like Apple including an update to Microsoft Office so that information on every document gets sent to them or including an Internet Explorer extension to send out personal or system information to the pages they're visiting.
it's slipping spyware/crapware into a competitor's product? That's even worse than Sony and many others (where you can usually opt out or at least you know where it's coming from). Microsoft is stooping very, very low these days. They deserve another conviction... soon.
...hmm let's see... gettext anyone? I mean, we recently uploaded our strings to one of those sites (https://launchpad.net/rosetta) where open source translators work together... for free we now have 12-something languages and a lot of corrections to even the original strings.
https://launchpad.net/rosetta: Launchpad Translations (codenamed "Rosetta") is a platform for open source application translation on the internet. It lets anybody help translate their favorite open source application into their favourite spoken language. Launchpad supports most localizable open-source applications.
Really, Citrix? If anyone ever asks me about it again I will go postal. Are you seriously saying you need 4 beefy servers to run 50 users' Outlook and Internet Explorer and then still have it go dog slow.
Citrix has some good ideas and technology. The implementation however is usually very bad. It's the Peoplesoft of virtualization.
I don't know how the US hopes to enforce it's laws in INTERNATIONAL waters. In their own territory, sure but since the US didn't ratify the UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea they (should) still abide by the olden laws of the high seas which allowed for everybody to do whatever they want except for 'enemies of mankind' which are mainly pirates and slave traders. Even under the new conventions they would have to abide by the laws of or deliver them to the country which flag the vessel flies under.
SSD shouldn't be for paging. That would become very expensive (even with wear leveling) if you have a minimal amount of RAM (say 256M) to run large (say 16G) operations. It would also be slow since you have the overhead of whatever bus system your hard drive/ssd is connected to.
Technically hard drives aren't supposed to be paging either, it's just a cheap and simple trick to avoid having people pay a lot for (expensive) RAM or have their programs crash when occasionally they run out of RAM. However if your system is paging heavily it's better and faster with more RAM.
Anecdote: I worked at a place once where cheap ($500) hardware was sold as dedicated SQL/IIS servers (you could fit 10 of them in 5U) and a lot of customers thought they could run whatever they wanted (Microsoft ran MSN for a whole country of one for a while) in them but they only supported a maximum of 2G RAM (4G according to BIOS but the modules back then were too expensive). Of course PHB just said: let them swap and besides the heavy slow downs they ran fairly fine. Well, those heavy users all crashed their software-RAID's in less than a year (the heavy load made Windows get the RAID system out of sync and then you had the first hard drive fail). The temperature was fine but simply swapping out was too much for the cheap hard drives (Maxtor and Seagate) and they all failed.
Actually banks have to keep your money safe to keep your business so they are the ones that implement the best (imho) workable authentication. All banks these days have SSL certificates (I think required by law), they have some sort of picture system where the bank shows you something to authenticate who THEY are (so MITM are more difficult as long as your or their computer isn't compromised) and then they have a username and password which the user is responsible for and a lot of banks are implementing (optional for now, required for certain transactions) an RSA-keyfob-like structure (whether it be on your cellphone or they charge you for a keyfob) where you get a one-time generated key that is valid for less than 10 minutes. Some accounts (>10.000) get that stuff for free.
Sure you can think of more safe versions of the above but in the end it has to be 1) usable by the very people we hate so much: Computer Illiterate Users 2) affordable for the common man (a free checking account with less than $100 in doesn't even cover the costs to provide online banking let alone extra's) 3) not drive customers away because of reason 1 or by being so complicated or expensive nobody wants to use it.
Obama (Barack Hussein Obama) lives currently on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500 and there are plenty of people that would rather have a non-black president (KKK, Aryan Nations,...) and have probably even tried to organize something to get rid of him. He's in his forties and he has 2 kids and a wife. Those things are all matter of public record and can be easily found on quite a few websites, Google Maps, the freaking phone book or a host of other papers that are matter of public record.
No I wouldn't expect the hosts of an open, free-speech, public forum to be seized. They can ask politely to remove it and they probably would. However this reeks of a plumbing job trying to find (private) information on people (eg. journalists, people that believe non-government controlled media to be better sources, informers, private investigators, whistleblowers and a host of other people).
In this case however all information from Indymedia even if they receive back their machines will be considered compromised and useless for any objective investigation into any of the articles they recently covered.
I'm a European that moved to the USA and I'm happy about it. Sure welfare isn't the best here, but back in Europe, welfare is abused by everyone.
It's not 'embarrassing' for most to go to the welfare office, it's a matter of being able to pull off going to the welfare office under several different names while you haven't even worked for it (you just claim you had a bad time at whatever country you came from and here you go, free money, free housing, free food and we'll assist you getting a job) or with the same name to several different welfare offices in different parts of the state/province/country without getting caught because the IT contractors can't seem to communicate simple XML files between databases.
Then there are those like me that are honest locals that make some money then they fall upon bad times and then on two different times you get a reply like: you didn't work long enough (9 mo. netting $700/mo) or you made too much last year (netting $1200/mo) while you have two people to feed at insane rates for basic food and having to buy bottled water because the tap is too chlorinated, $500 rent $200 gas and electric in a moderate climate (no air-conditioning, just heating a very small apartment). Then you get your tax note and you still have to pay more taxes after vat on everything that is not bread and water (electricity and gas over the absolutely minimum (which is calculated back about the power to turn a single 100W bulb on day and night) is also luxury taxed)
No I'm happy I'm in the USA. Sure there are some unfortunates but I was also unfortunate back in Europe (always late with rent and bills) and there were more beggars in the streets and train stations than many places here in the US. Yes, you have to contribute mainly to your own welfare but at least I can choose to do so at my own rate and at least I'm not contributing (or at least less) to the endless stream of illegal immigrants or plain run-away criminals from shady countries and not getting anything in return. If I choose not to and something happens to me, then that's my own fault, my bad decisions don't get caught that well by a net but at least people either learn from it and pick themselves up or weed themselves (and with them some stupidity) out.
Being here you actually can see what the real situation is. There are many horror stories in Europe about Americans losing their job or having health issues and it destroys their whole life and they have to go homeless just because of that single event. Well, I have seen several people get (really) sick or have no job for a while, it doesn't necessarily destroy their life. Sure they have to downgrade their lifestyle or have some hardship, but those that planned for it don't have that big of a problem. Those that didn't plan for it and hoped their whole life would be sweet without sickness are the ones that get hit hardest. They will have to get rid of their mansions they could only afford by not contributing to a health plan and their hummers they payed off by not contributing or emptying their IRA.
The problem is that as a developing economy, a lot of people in tech in India took up engineering or IT because it is a great chance to make money. That was the same a few years ago in the west. Almost all of the youngsters in my family took up IT classes just because they followed my example (I consider myself a valuable employee and I make quite a bit of money) and one of them is actually good at it, the other ones however have their knowledge only from playing games and whatever crap they teach in colleges. A lot of people in my high school went to IT but they all failed miserably. The problem is that nobody could afford to outsource TO us.
The end result is that for every talented person, there are a ton of others who have no clue whatsoever. This is made worse by corporate greed by the various outsourcing companies who just use folks with backgrounds in anything vaguely technical, "train" them in IT and get them to do the grunt work. These people do not understand technology, do not care for technology and are nothing more than grunt workers, every single one of them. Wipro? TCS? Infosys? Satyam? They are ALL the same. TekSystems, Robert Half...
IT in India is a joke. The vast majority of them have no clue, and worse yet, do not have a passion for what they do. The problem is endemic, and results in poor quality code, service and the worst of all - attitude. I have the same problem with a lot of people here in the US too, they have a worst attitude. Some Indian guys (especially if they had a rural upbringing) are quite mellow and can be thought though but some of these US people... especially managers.
Look at New York State. They have government sponsored health insurance but they are also the state with the largest deficits, the most employers leaving and the highest taxes and fees.
My family can't profit from it (my income is too high) and neither could my in-laws with 4 children because they 'earned too much' (~60k between the parents) and I know hardly anyone that can profit from it. Yet I pay for it and any 'bonus' that I get is largely eaten by New York State and (less) Federal health taxes.
Some people like to skip large pieces of code while reading code (eg. an if-statement or a loop). In vi you can do that easily by going to the brace at the start of the expression, pressing % and tada you're at the end of that piece. GUI's have functions like code folding where you double click on the function, it's braces or in the sidebar and it will fold it close effectively removing that piece of code out of view.
Another thing is when pieces of code has been going through web posts or similar copy-paste (e-mail) and the original tab/space structure is gone or difficult to find (not everybody knows about or uses <pre> tags. It's not because the whole file is easy to read that the code others wrote is easy to read and use in big projects.
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Windows has better video drivers, and it has a tons of teams at Microsoft working on things like directx that directly support gaming. Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games.
Oh, and sound just works on Windows, did I mention that? That's pretty important for games. I have surround sound working on my Linux install, which took some doing, but as soon as I plug in my USB headset so I can use skype, the Linux sound system explodes. That means that even if left for dead was on Linux, I still wouldn't be able to play it.
IMHO proprietary Windows drivers are just as crappy as the Linux side. The open source drivers in Linux are usually great while on Windows there are hardly open source drivers for anything. Recently had an exotic S3 and Voodoo card (yeah the companies don't exist anymore) for some or another mini solution I had to get working again. Good luck finding anything for that. Linux worked great, Windows support ended around Windows 2000 so I couldn't get anything but VGA-resolution.
Either way, same holds for DirectX. DirectX is a crutch imho. Ever had to virtualize DirectX? Don't work very well. OpenGL on the other hand works great (albeit a bit slower) since it doesn't require a hole in the kernel.
Depends on where you're at. In Europe it's not uncommon to be able to get your cash out in less than 15 seconds. Put your card in, select how much you want, pin and you get it right away. Here in the US for some or another reason it seems like all ATM's still need to dial in on 56k after you typed in your pin. It's also not uncommon to be able to get more than $500/atm. I've been able to get 2000 out of ATM's before.
I have a book here that talks about C++. It says something like this: don't think a file as just a series of data. Think of a file as the variable data in a serialized object that happens to be saved on disk for later retrieval. Basically the book goes (deep) into the algorithms of saving files for your program and what all you have to think of to save a file as an object (the book is from the early 90's with the examples on a 5.14" floppy for DOS). It shows you how to make your program portable to both DOS and Unix and makes it object oriented (to support multiple processes etc.) by basically writing your own database filesystem.
Bonjour is the network discovery protocol (DAAP) that makes it so your computer can find and connect networked or wireless speakers, printers, share music libraries and more without having to manually find and type in IP addresses especially when you're on DHCP in your house (which you most likely are). I use it at work to advertise machines with certain services (like distributed computing/compiling) to the network so that I don't have to scan for them. It also gives you great DNS services without needing to configure a DNS server (like P2P for DNS).
Bonjour is one of the reasons networking is so 'easy' on Mac's and even on Linux (if you install it). It's similar to Windows' equivalent of Windows Zeroconfig (Microsoft's Link-local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR)) but it adheres to the published and open standards unlike Microsoft implementation which is also the reason that there is only 1 printer at my job that is discovered through Microsoft's protocol and ALL printers (HP Laserjet, Brother and inkjets) are discovered through Bonjour.
I have been able to configure KDE to look exactly like Windows for the last 5 years. There are Windows themes for KDE and with a bit of icon toying you can make it look exactly like Windows 98/2000/XP. I don't know about Vista because I honestly haven't even seen a Vista installation and I hope I never will. My parents have been running Ubuntu for the last 2 years, I run Mac's, Fedora, Ubuntu and virtualized Windows XP at work so there is no real reason to pay for upgrades.
Well, who is there to kill in Utah? You have basically groups of mormons - 50% of the population - who (when living in religious communities) like to keep that type of things under covers among their elders or are told not to report so no official reports exist of rapes and abuse unless somebody finds (or is honest enough to report) a body much like the Amish. There is otherwise nothing or nobody in Utah to commit crimes for (it's mostly empty).
Yep that's right. I remember back in the day, I worked at a Microsoft "Very Valued" Partner which basically meant they could screw you over whenever they wanted just because and if you didn't comply, no more partner for you (*yank MSDN library and cheap licensing*). I almost brought the company to the brink of losing their partnership just by recommending Linux machines (which we did sell but apparently not advertised) to users that needed a xAMP stack.
Either way, the company had to build their own ERP (simply because they wanted to - this was the .com era) and Microsoft somehow got involved which trumpeted Visual Basic everywhere, the early releases of .NET were not stable yet and according to them .NET was not yet ready for business. Of course, if you ever did VB you would know that once you're done, the code looks like crap, the thing is as slow as hell and crashed every so often. 2 months later, the same people told us that it would be better to do it in .NET (which was then just out as 1.0) and it would all be very well. If you ever worked with VB.NET back then you would know that it was just as buggy as classic VB although 'neater' to code for and the functionality was all well so the company folded to the MS pressure and rebuilt it. All fine and dandy until MS came out with C#. All of a sudden early .NET (preview and 1.0) became largely deprecated (what, this was supposed to be a stable and EXTENDIBLE language!) and with it also VB was heavily modified to fit the 1.1 framework and so there was another rebuild of some code. Of course some parts were still in classic VB and old .NET code and in the mean time new programmers had come and external things had started to happen so just rebuilding pieces of the application started breaking. Also major security holes were found, were patched and broke stuff and thus the application had to be rewritten from the ground up (again) in C# for .NET to fit the thing.
I left the company later after that. In the mean time 2.0 and 3.0 came out. I wonder if they have been rewriting stuff for almost a decade now. Maybe if they just stuck to PHP and C++. I read a good (older) book recently on C++ and it said a good extensible program (algorithm) in an OO language is written twice: once to know what classes you are going to need to build, second time to apply what you got to know in well documented code, classes and libraries. I believe writing something more than 3 times just because the libraries you got to rely on changed is just bad practice.
The Dutch have sweet mayonnaise (which honestly tastes slightly disgusting) and the Belgians have standard mayonnaise (which you can get here in the US too). Belgium has a lot of sauces though. Tartar sauce is also available in the US and it tastes similar. What I wonder is who ever invented 'American' Sauce (it looks bad, it's slightly hot and you can only eat a little bit because it's way too heavy - similar to garbage plate 'beef sauce' but more solid like mayonnaise).
The more north you go anywhere (Americas, Europe, Asia) the worse the food starts tasting (in general). In the south you have the spicy hotness and while you go up you pass through culinary gems like New Orleans, Italy and Belgium. Where it is cold (The Netherlands, North America and Canada) it seems like the foods and drinks get more watery (eg. Budweiser) although far north they do know how to brew some really strong drinks (to stay warm?).
Not necessarily. If the 100k guy is really good and the 50k guy really blows, then you can still make a loss (lost productivity, lost sales, training costs and lost knowledge).
It's similar to those 10% theories. You can shed 10% of your workforce only once: when your workforce has become stagnant and smells like dead fish. If you keep shedding every year or every quarter you will have high turnover rates in the big departments that don't require a large level of competence (HR, sales, 1st line support) and the brains of your operation will slowly but surely drain out of the pool (people might have had a bad period, people become afraid or people might have a more stable opportunity elsewhere).
I work at an MRI research site. My clients are named after parts of the brain, Windows machines are named after brain diseases and servers are named after the most important parts of the brain (head (computing), spine (mail and web - communications in the body), hippocampus (files - short memory), skull (backup server - protects the brain)...).
You can be inventive yet informative. Similar schemes would be possible for your favorite show/story
The problem is that spam remains profitable even after all those anti-spam measures. Currently I have no spam coming through my box (Amavis, SpamAssassin) and I have been with providers that implemented solutions similar to parents, grandparents and all other posts 'proposing' a solution. We have SSL-based (both client and server) e-mail, we have authenticated SMTP, we have rate limiting, we have blacklists, whitelists and greylists. Put together they all limit the spam but they are all expensive on the receiving (or intermediary) servers.
The senders costs however are very low (next to nothing) and they can afford to lose 50-90% of their e-mail on technical measures, the other 10% is still successful enough to be profitable.
There is no simple measure against spam simply because it's profitable for the sender and the companies/individuals that sell services to those senders. It's kinda like the physical junk mail that you get. Without it, I would be a lot happier and I wonder who actually buys their junk and how it is profitable at the current rates of stamps and paper but without junk mail the postal services would have to increase their rates and at the current incompetence of those organizations they probably would go under because FedEx, DHL and UPS does their jobs much better at those price points.
We can't really get rid of spam and if we get rid of SMTP, spammers will jump on whatever 'alternative' we have. Spammers have already jumped on web ads, domain names, IM, VoIP and several other technologies that are used to communicate freely with one another (without too much restrictions) even though those technologies are much more limited in scope and user base.
Really, there are plenty H1B's out there that work for 75-50% of the standard wages. If you're out of a job, what would you rather have: 0% or 50% of what you used to make? If Americans don't want to work at those wages, then they don't get the job, there are always people who want to work whether you import them or not. It's not because you're American that you're entitled to get higher wages. The economy is down the crapper, you have to pay your bills; get a job or become homeless. If you don't want to work for the bank at 45k, there is always pizza delivery or McD for 25k.
I work and live in America as a permanent resident. I made 2 years ago well above average and got a bit of savings, the last two I make slightly below but I have a much better work environment and at least I still have a job and job security for at least a few years even if the economy gets worse. If you're forgoing jobs because you hope you get a better offer, that's your problem and good luck if you can get it in this economy. In the mean time I'll just build up my credit and buy a house within a few months. Hopefully you'll deserve a tip when you serve me my food.
Because some iTunes' features are built around those technologies. Eg. if you have wireless speakers or another library/machine/appliance you want to share your music with, Bonjour will auto-detect it and list it in iTunes. Here Microsoft is including spyware targeted at their competition (Firefox) in their own updates in order to make Firefox look bad. It's like Apple including an update to Microsoft Office so that information on every document gets sent to them or including an Internet Explorer extension to send out personal or system information to the pages they're visiting.
it's slipping spyware/crapware into a competitor's product? That's even worse than Sony and many others (where you can usually opt out or at least you know where it's coming from). Microsoft is stooping very, very low these days. They deserve another conviction... soon.
...hmm let's see... gettext anyone? I mean, we recently uploaded our strings to one of those sites (https://launchpad.net/rosetta) where open source translators work together... for free we now have 12-something languages and a lot of corrections to even the original strings.
https://launchpad.net/rosetta: Launchpad Translations (codenamed "Rosetta") is a platform for open source application translation on the internet. It lets anybody help translate their favorite open source application into their favourite spoken language.
Launchpad supports most localizable open-source applications.
Really, Citrix? If anyone ever asks me about it again I will go postal. Are you seriously saying you need 4 beefy servers to run 50 users' Outlook and Internet Explorer and then still have it go dog slow.
Citrix has some good ideas and technology. The implementation however is usually very bad. It's the Peoplesoft of virtualization.
I don't know how the US hopes to enforce it's laws in INTERNATIONAL waters. In their own territory, sure but since the US didn't ratify the UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea they (should) still abide by the olden laws of the high seas which allowed for everybody to do whatever they want except for 'enemies of mankind' which are mainly pirates and slave traders. Even under the new conventions they would have to abide by the laws of or deliver them to the country which flag the vessel flies under.
SSD shouldn't be for paging. That would become very expensive (even with wear leveling) if you have a minimal amount of RAM (say 256M) to run large (say 16G) operations. It would also be slow since you have the overhead of whatever bus system your hard drive/ssd is connected to.
Technically hard drives aren't supposed to be paging either, it's just a cheap and simple trick to avoid having people pay a lot for (expensive) RAM or have their programs crash when occasionally they run out of RAM. However if your system is paging heavily it's better and faster with more RAM.
Anecdote: I worked at a place once where cheap ($500) hardware was sold as dedicated SQL/IIS servers (you could fit 10 of them in 5U) and a lot of customers thought they could run whatever they wanted (Microsoft ran MSN for a whole country of one for a while) in them but they only supported a maximum of 2G RAM (4G according to BIOS but the modules back then were too expensive). Of course PHB just said: let them swap and besides the heavy slow downs they ran fairly fine. Well, those heavy users all crashed their software-RAID's in less than a year (the heavy load made Windows get the RAID system out of sync and then you had the first hard drive fail). The temperature was fine but simply swapping out was too much for the cheap hard drives (Maxtor and Seagate) and they all failed.
Actually banks have to keep your money safe to keep your business so they are the ones that implement the best (imho) workable authentication. All banks these days have SSL certificates (I think required by law), they have some sort of picture system where the bank shows you something to authenticate who THEY are (so MITM are more difficult as long as your or their computer isn't compromised) and then they have a username and password which the user is responsible for and a lot of banks are implementing (optional for now, required for certain transactions) an RSA-keyfob-like structure (whether it be on your cellphone or they charge you for a keyfob) where you get a one-time generated key that is valid for less than 10 minutes. Some accounts (>10.000) get that stuff for free.
Sure you can think of more safe versions of the above but in the end it has to be 1) usable by the very people we hate so much: Computer Illiterate Users 2) affordable for the common man (a free checking account with less than $100 in doesn't even cover the costs to provide online banking let alone extra's) 3) not drive customers away because of reason 1 or by being so complicated or expensive nobody wants to use it.
Obama (Barack Hussein Obama) lives currently on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500 and there are plenty of people that would rather have a non-black president (KKK, Aryan Nations, ...) and have probably even tried to organize something to get rid of him. He's in his forties and he has 2 kids and a wife. Those things are all matter of public record and can be easily found on quite a few websites, Google Maps, the freaking phone book or a host of other papers that are matter of public record.
No I wouldn't expect the hosts of an open, free-speech, public forum to be seized. They can ask politely to remove it and they probably would. However this reeks of a plumbing job trying to find (private) information on people (eg. journalists, people that believe non-government controlled media to be better sources, informers, private investigators, whistleblowers and a host of other people).
In this case however all information from Indymedia even if they receive back their machines will be considered compromised and useless for any objective investigation into any of the articles they recently covered.
Don't worry, he's a statistician for a political group.
I'm a European that moved to the USA and I'm happy about it. Sure welfare isn't the best here, but back in Europe, welfare is abused by everyone.
It's not 'embarrassing' for most to go to the welfare office, it's a matter of being able to pull off going to the welfare office under several different names while you haven't even worked for it (you just claim you had a bad time at whatever country you came from and here you go, free money, free housing, free food and we'll assist you getting a job) or with the same name to several different welfare offices in different parts of the state/province/country without getting caught because the IT contractors can't seem to communicate simple XML files between databases.
Then there are those like me that are honest locals that make some money then they fall upon bad times and then on two different times you get a reply like: you didn't work long enough (9 mo. netting $700/mo) or you made too much last year (netting $1200/mo) while you have two people to feed at insane rates for basic food and having to buy bottled water because the tap is too chlorinated, $500 rent $200 gas and electric in a moderate climate (no air-conditioning, just heating a very small apartment). Then you get your tax note and you still have to pay more taxes after vat on everything that is not bread and water (electricity and gas over the absolutely minimum (which is calculated back about the power to turn a single 100W bulb on day and night) is also luxury taxed)
No I'm happy I'm in the USA. Sure there are some unfortunates but I was also unfortunate back in Europe (always late with rent and bills) and there were more beggars in the streets and train stations than many places here in the US. Yes, you have to contribute mainly to your own welfare but at least I can choose to do so at my own rate and at least I'm not contributing (or at least less) to the endless stream of illegal immigrants or plain run-away criminals from shady countries and not getting anything in return. If I choose not to and something happens to me, then that's my own fault, my bad decisions don't get caught that well by a net but at least people either learn from it and pick themselves up or weed themselves (and with them some stupidity) out.
Being here you actually can see what the real situation is. There are many horror stories in Europe about Americans losing their job or having health issues and it destroys their whole life and they have to go homeless just because of that single event. Well, I have seen several people get (really) sick or have no job for a while, it doesn't necessarily destroy their life. Sure they have to downgrade their lifestyle or have some hardship, but those that planned for it don't have that big of a problem. Those that didn't plan for it and hoped their whole life would be sweet without sickness are the ones that get hit hardest. They will have to get rid of their mansions they could only afford by not contributing to a health plan and their hummers they payed off by not contributing or emptying their IRA.
The problem is that as a developing economy, a lot of people in tech in India took up engineering or IT because it is a great chance to make money.
That was the same a few years ago in the west. Almost all of the youngsters in my family took up IT classes just because they followed my example (I consider myself a valuable employee and I make quite a bit of money) and one of them is actually good at it, the other ones however have their knowledge only from playing games and whatever crap they teach in colleges. A lot of people in my high school went to IT but they all failed miserably. The problem is that nobody could afford to outsource TO us.
The end result is that for every talented person, there are a ton of others who have no clue whatsoever. This is made worse by corporate greed by the various outsourcing companies who just use folks with backgrounds in anything vaguely technical, "train" them in IT and get them to do the grunt work. These people do not understand technology, do not care for technology and are nothing more than grunt workers, every single one of them. Wipro? TCS? Infosys? Satyam? They are ALL the same.
TekSystems, Robert Half...
IT in India is a joke. The vast majority of them have no clue, and worse yet, do not have a passion for what they do. The problem is endemic, and results in poor quality code, service and the worst of all - attitude.
I have the same problem with a lot of people here in the US too, they have a worst attitude. Some Indian guys (especially if they had a rural upbringing) are quite mellow and can be thought though but some of these US people... especially managers.
Look at New York State. They have government sponsored health insurance but they are also the state with the largest deficits, the most employers leaving and the highest taxes and fees.
My family can't profit from it (my income is too high) and neither could my in-laws with 4 children because they 'earned too much' (~60k between the parents) and I know hardly anyone that can profit from it. Yet I pay for it and any 'bonus' that I get is largely eaten by New York State and (less) Federal health taxes.
Some people like to skip large pieces of code while reading code (eg. an if-statement or a loop). In vi you can do that easily by going to the brace at the start of the expression, pressing % and tada you're at the end of that piece. GUI's have functions like code folding where you double click on the function, it's braces or in the sidebar and it will fold it close effectively removing that piece of code out of view.
Another thing is when pieces of code has been going through web posts or similar copy-paste (e-mail) and the original tab/space structure is gone or difficult to find (not everybody knows about or uses <pre> tags. It's not because the whole file is easy to read that the code others wrote is easy to read and use in big projects.