I suspect that they always knew their attempts to fix it would fall short, this is all make-busy to give the appearance that everything that could be done is being done. The correct solution appears to be forcing oil companies to drill relief wells for existing exploitation. The idea here is that the relief well is mostly completed so that if a disaster occurs, instead of taking months to connect to the main well, the work can be done within days.
BP's experience is showing us that the relief well is the only solution that will work.
It's why the Canadian government is taking the position that one must be drilled at the same time as a new well is being built. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are already lobbying hard to have these measures curtailed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-will-take-tough-stand-on-offshore-drilling/article1557095/
"At issue in talks between the oil industry and the National Energy Board on relief wells in the North is whether they must be drilled during the same season as the primary exploration well.
The window for drilling in the North is only a few months because of ice conditions. However, allowing oil companies to wait a season to drill relief wells could leave a new well exposed to a potential rupture for a year or more.
Mr. Pryce at CAPP said the policy for relief wells was devised in the 1970s, and alternative technology for dealing with ruptures has advanced considerably. "
It's marketing noise. In my opinion some genius at marketing has come up with the idea that since they can get people to pre-pay for games, maybe they can get them to pay for a partial and then pay again for the full release..
garbage... the only way this could possibly work is if the cost of the download was later subtracted from the full retail price.
I didn't buy Bioware's expansion because it was overpriced, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy any demo.
After all these years... it's still Windows and Office. After all these years and new products.
It's time to fire some executives. Microsoft apparently can't make money at anything new it does. Unlike Apple.
Well, it's true the OS is tied to the computer, but I'd like to point out that the kind of license checking we're talking about isn't present on any of Apple's software that I have used.
iWork, Aperture, Quicktime, Final Cut Express etc....
Those do not "phone home" and check your licensing. It is worth noting the fact that Apple typically offers an attractively priced family pack for those with multiple computers to update. I'd imagine that has something to do why the license checking isn't needed.
Google did the right thing, eventually.
At the end of the day we are more than employees. We are citizens that benefit from freedoms hard earned. It is the utmost height of hypocrisy to then turn around and pretend there is nothing wrong with assisting the repression of people in foreign countries.
One day, China may very well be the powerhouse of the world, western corporations' eagerness at supplying tools to assist Chinese repression will then come back to haunt us. Our failure to stand up against this hypocrisy will then have transformed into a failure to fight for our democratic rights.
I fail to see how pulling out of China counts as a boost to competition. Unless you think that Microsoft is rubbing its hands with glee at the opportunity replace Google there and kiss the censors asses in the hope to win market-share over Google.
I search extensively all day long for my work and Google is my preference by far. Your reasoning that bing is better than Google is subjective and makes you sound very biased.
Google had some of its IP stolen too. It's hard to do business in a country where the government has no qualms about stealing your stuff and hurting your customers.
Not to be a party pooper, but you are faulting China for doing something congress tries hard at every opportunity it can to do as well: force government procurement to buy American first. And lets not get started on agricultural subsidies.
Sections 10 (a-d) of Title 41 of the United States Code are known as the Buy American Act (BAA). U.S. government exceptions under NAFTA Chapter 10 and the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement allow for such procurement preferences.
The Buy American Act applies to all U.S. federal government agency purchases of goods valued over the micropurchase threshold, but does not apply to services. Under the Act, all goods for public use (articles, materials, or supplies) must be produced in the U.S., and manufactured items must be manufactured in the U.S. from U.S. materials. Many states and municipalities include similar geographic production requirements in their procurements.
Damnit, apparently the earth is running OSX and somebody has tried to "undo" the last ten years; this has resulted in the spinning beach ball of death.
It should also be pointed out that Microsoft bundled its own store entry point as part of Vista called Windows Marketplace, where downloadable software for purchase is available. Actually as I check my "Windows Marketplace" link in the Windows (to make sure I have the names right) Control Panel, I see that the store has possibly not been successful as I am now greeted with: "Windows marketplace has transitioned from an e-commerce site to a reference site". I wonder what happens to the digital locker on my PC if I upgrade to Windows 7.
Firefox has crashed a bit more lately, but I suspect it might be flash that is to blame, not Firefox.
I use Firefox on Linux, Windows and the Mac. The extensions I use and the ability to maintain bookmarks and preferences across computers are simply so awesome that I can put up with the occasional crash.
The GPL is in fact quite useful to people interested in charging for the commercial/proprietary use of their work.
If that is less accomodating to people wanting a free ride, that's their problem.
It may be popular. But in my limited sample of the world, on my server, there is a lot of frustration with the way the game is currently being developed.
Many of the long standing players I know quite frankly are already bored just months after the last expansion. Bored because in five years, Blizzard hasn't changed the formula of the game on bit. Bored and frustrated with the way Blizzard is managing changes to character classes.
Ultima Online, back in 1997, had more variety for game content and far less resources.
In addition, Blizzard appears to be getting quite a bit more touchy dealing with community feedback. Mass deletions of forum posts that are complaining about an issue might look good for forum maintenance, but it doesn't actually stop the bitching.
Maybe it's arrogance from their successes.. who knows. What I do know is that it's currently debatable whether many of the people I know will still be around when the Lich King content is introduced.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see a collapse in their subscribed base over the next year for Warcraft.
The problem is that this is going to change my paren't computer to use IE after they've been using Firefox for years. This is yet another in a long list of Microsoft annoyances.
At this rate I'm going to have to write a script that forces the browser to be Firefox at every reboot.
1. personal computer 2. wife's computer 3. work computer 4. wife's work computer 5. family room media device
So while it's true in my sample case that these people would NOT play at the same time on all these devices, they will have already reached the limit of authorized devices.
Is it so hard to envision more devices being needed by this family in the near future? Why 5 devices anyways?
Personally, the biggest annoyance is not being able to sync my iPod across the different computers I own. It's my music, my iTunes account and my computer. It's the #1 reason iTunes sucks.
This is shit and indefensible except to those who have a vested interest in it.
I know one person who had the blue screen problem however. I've heard it's related to 3rd party software that is incompatible with Leopard.
That said, I have to say that Leopard is a LOT of fun and I"m personally very pleased with the upgrade.
I like the changes to the email client the most, followed by the new backup system which is intuitive and beyond easy to use and setup. There so much new stuff.. iChat is still inferior to Adium though in my books. SMB support is noticeably improved and easier to use. The new developer tools are significantly better than the old stuff in my opinion as well.
I'm not sure why Java users are complaining. I'm pretty sure the DVD had the JRE/JDK on it which I manually installed along with all the the XCode stuff. Apple's own pages continue to refer to java as an important language for the OS. http://developer.apple.com/java/
I did not have any problems with the upgrade, but I did take some precautions before doing it. I downloaded Superduper (proprietary software but it works and you can use it cost-free for this purpose) and made a full bootable backup of the system. It took hours, but gave me a way to back-out of the installation. In the end everything was fine.
Here's something pretty damned amazing I ran into on a vista machine.
I was working with a folder inside a user's folder. The folder contained directories and code retrieved from an svn repository.
Anyways, here's a long story short:
1. Attempt to move folder from one location inside user's Documents folder to another clean location inside the same Documents folder. Verify that user has ownership of all files in the security tab. 2. Vista immediately pops up the "You are trying to change the machine" dialog. 3. Black screen of "Allow or Deny" pops up, click Allow 4. Get new window of "Permission Denied, you need Administrative rights". Click "yes" I want to acquire administrative rights. 5. Then, as Administrator, the move operation fails again with an obscure "Permission Denied" error window. 6. WTF, I start swearing. I'M RUNNING AS ADMINISTRATOR AND I AM GOD YOU FUCKING STUPID OS. MOVE THE GODDAMNED DIRECTORY. 7. Give up, and reboot machine. Watch as the move as operation now works and cry at how much longer you have to work with Vista.
Note, this was never a "file in use error" always a permissions error.
If your company is thinking about a move to Vista, fight, scratch, plead, threaten, and bribe your way into at the very least postponing the move for at least two years. You will thank me.
The web is a convenience. Professional photographers in Africa may find this idea slightly annoying I would expect.
Adobe needs to hire a CEO that understands the web. The web is well suited to communication tasks but is poor with respect to confidentiality.
Would you put your company's future strategy plans inside a google document? What if you were Microsoft?
Adobe needs a CEO who understands how to leverage the web apparently. If I were Adobe, I would be concentrating on trying to help content producers publish their work. Adobe should have bought Flikr; started something like YouTube.... Facebook.. etc... the internet is about communication and putting people in touch with each other.
Arnold is doing this to manage his image. That is all. This is yet more legislation that won't do anything other than get him a lot of media notes about "the governor trying to protect kids". And perhaps, more importantly, shore up support amongst conservative voters upset some of his other stances.
It's also another nice deflector issue he can use to talk about instead of the hard-core financial ones gripping California right now. Don't wanna answer the tough questions? Solution is come up with useless crap to "save the children" and talk about that instead.
This is all too common. Today's problems are hard, complexe and don't have sexy solutions you can talk about in little sound bites. That's a big problem for politicians trying to be seen as working hard for the voter.
Voters in large part carry the blame for this by being wholly uninterested for the most part in being self-informed. When 90% of the electorate has the attention-span of a canary on major issues, you need easy-to-understand crap you can toss at them so they think you are doing good things.
And lets not forget how the media today reports badly and often incorrectly about pretty much everything they inform on that is even slightly technical or requires an expertise.
Since Open Source rigorously discloses every flaw known in it, what is the value of comparisons of one Vendor's chosen disclosures versus that which is 100% transparent?
None
Microsoft only discloses what it has to and is often at odds with security researchers about problems only to be proven wrong later. One claim from a blog was that Vista shipped with 60,000 bugs. How many of those are documented for the public?
I can say that on my test certified Vista machine, brand new from Dell, I've already seen the network card totally disappear from the system only to reappear again an hour later. The Broadcom diagnostic tool reported no hardware issues. The Explorer shell still crashes/stalls frequently. Files get locked with no way aside from a reboot to unlock them. Wifi fails to reconnect to the same network it was previously connected to when sspi broadcast for that network is disabled. I just tried restoring a hibernated laptop, previously connected to a domain. Black screen & hard reboot.
Beyond that, on this brand new machine, specced for Vista. Vista is SLOW.
MS, concentrate on making Vista better instead of having people do useless studies. kthnxbye
Slashdot Mirror
Not interested in being a slave to the Blizzard content masters.
Schmidt, as long as governments can have their privacy and hide what they do from the public, citizens should also have protections and privacy.
I suspect that they always knew their attempts to fix it would fall short, this is all make-busy to give the appearance that everything that could be done is being done. The correct solution appears to be forcing oil companies to drill relief wells for existing exploitation. The idea here is that the relief well is mostly completed so that if a disaster occurs, instead of taking months to connect to the main well, the work can be done within days.
BP's experience is showing us that the relief well is the only solution that will work.
It's why the Canadian government is taking the position that one must be drilled at the same time as a new well is being built. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are already lobbying hard to have these measures curtailed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-will-take-tough-stand-on-offshore-drilling/article1557095/
"At issue in talks between the oil industry and the National Energy Board on relief wells in the North is whether they must be drilled during the same season as the primary exploration well. The window for drilling in the North is only a few months because of ice conditions. However, allowing oil companies to wait a season to drill relief wells could leave a new well exposed to a potential rupture for a year or more. Mr. Pryce at CAPP said the policy for relief wells was devised in the 1970s, and alternative technology for dealing with ruptures has advanced considerably. "
It's marketing noise. In my opinion some genius at marketing has come up with the idea that since they can get people to pre-pay for games, maybe they can get them to pay for a partial and then pay again for the full release.. garbage... the only way this could possibly work is if the cost of the download was later subtracted from the full retail price. I didn't buy Bioware's expansion because it was overpriced, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy any demo.
There is enough reality distortion propaganda coming from Fox me to disagree with the sentiment that Fox is just being choosy with what they report.
After all these years... it's still Windows and Office. After all these years and new products. It's time to fire some executives. Microsoft apparently can't make money at anything new it does. Unlike Apple.
Well, it's true the OS is tied to the computer, but I'd like to point out that the kind of license checking we're talking about isn't present on any of Apple's software that I have used. iWork, Aperture, Quicktime, Final Cut Express etc ....
Those do not "phone home" and check your licensing. It is worth noting the fact that Apple typically offers an attractively priced family pack for those with multiple computers to update. I'd imagine that has something to do why the license checking isn't needed.
Google did the right thing, eventually. At the end of the day we are more than employees. We are citizens that benefit from freedoms hard earned. It is the utmost height of hypocrisy to then turn around and pretend there is nothing wrong with assisting the repression of people in foreign countries. One day, China may very well be the powerhouse of the world, western corporations' eagerness at supplying tools to assist Chinese repression will then come back to haunt us. Our failure to stand up against this hypocrisy will then have transformed into a failure to fight for our democratic rights.
I fail to see how pulling out of China counts as a boost to competition. Unless you think that Microsoft is rubbing its hands with glee at the opportunity replace Google there and kiss the censors asses in the hope to win market-share over Google. I search extensively all day long for my work and Google is my preference by far. Your reasoning that bing is better than Google is subjective and makes you sound very biased.
Google had some of its IP stolen too. It's hard to do business in a country where the government has no qualms about stealing your stuff and hurting your customers.
Not to be a party pooper, but you are faulting China for doing something congress tries hard at every opportunity it can to do as well: force government procurement to buy American first. And lets not get started on agricultural subsidies.
The Buy American Act
Sections 10 (a-d) of Title 41 of the United States Code are known as the Buy American Act (BAA). U.S. government exceptions under NAFTA Chapter 10 and the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement allow for such procurement preferences.
The Buy American Act applies to all U.S. federal government agency purchases of goods valued over the micropurchase threshold, but does not apply to services. Under the Act, all goods for public use (articles, materials, or supplies) must be produced in the U.S., and manufactured items must be manufactured in the U.S. from U.S. materials. Many states and municipalities include similar geographic production requirements in their procurements.
Damnit, apparently the earth is running OSX and somebody has tried to "undo" the last ten years; this has resulted in the spinning beach ball of death.
It should also be pointed out that Microsoft bundled its own store entry point as part of Vista called Windows Marketplace, where downloadable software for purchase is available. Actually as I check my "Windows Marketplace" link in the Windows (to make sure I have the names right) Control Panel, I see that the store has possibly not been successful as I am now greeted with: "Windows marketplace has transitioned from an e-commerce site to a reference site". I wonder what happens to the digital locker on my PC if I upgrade to Windows 7.
Firefox has crashed a bit more lately, but I suspect it might be flash that is to blame, not Firefox. I use Firefox on Linux, Windows and the Mac. The extensions I use and the ability to maintain bookmarks and preferences across computers are simply so awesome that I can put up with the occasional crash.
The GPL is in fact quite useful to people interested in charging for the commercial/proprietary use of their work. If that is less accomodating to people wanting a free ride, that's their problem.
It may be popular. But in my limited sample of the world, on my server, there is a lot of frustration with the way the game is currently being developed. Many of the long standing players I know quite frankly are already bored just months after the last expansion. Bored because in five years, Blizzard hasn't changed the formula of the game on bit. Bored and frustrated with the way Blizzard is managing changes to character classes.
Ultima Online, back in 1997, had more variety for game content and far less resources.
In addition, Blizzard appears to be getting quite a bit more touchy dealing with community feedback. Mass deletions of forum posts that are complaining about an issue might look good for forum maintenance, but it doesn't actually stop the bitching.
Maybe it's arrogance from their successes.. who knows. What I do know is that it's currently debatable whether many of the people I know will still be around when the Lich King content is introduced. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see a collapse in their subscribed base over the next year for Warcraft.
The problem is that this is going to change my paren't computer to use IE after they've been using Firefox for years. This is yet another in a long list of Microsoft annoyances.
At this rate I'm going to have to write a script that forces the browser to be Firefox at every reboot.
Most people eh? let's see:
1. personal computer
2. wife's computer
3. work computer
4. wife's work computer
5. family room media device
So while it's true in my sample case that these people would NOT play at the same time on all these devices, they will have already reached the limit of authorized devices.
Is it so hard to envision more devices being needed by this family in the near future? Why 5 devices anyways?
Personally, the biggest annoyance is not being able to sync my iPod across the different computers I own. It's my music, my iTunes account and my computer. It's the #1 reason iTunes sucks.
This is shit and indefensible except to those who have a vested interest in it.
I know one person who had the blue screen problem however. I've heard it's related to 3rd party software that is incompatible with Leopard.
That said, I have to say that Leopard is a LOT of fun and I"m personally very pleased with the upgrade.
I like the changes to the email client the most, followed by the new backup system which is intuitive and beyond easy to use and setup. There so much new stuff.. iChat is still inferior to Adium though in my books. SMB support is noticeably improved and easier to use. The new developer tools are significantly better than the old stuff in my opinion as well.
I'm not sure why Java users are complaining. I'm pretty sure the DVD had the JRE/JDK on it which I manually installed along with all the the XCode stuff. Apple's own pages continue to refer to java as an important language for the OS. http://developer.apple.com/java/
I did not have any problems with the upgrade, but I did take some precautions before doing it. I downloaded Superduper (proprietary software but it works and you can use it cost-free for this purpose) and made a full bootable backup of the system. It took hours, but gave me a way to back-out of the installation. In the end everything was fine.
Here's something pretty damned amazing I ran into on a vista machine.
I was working with a folder inside a user's folder. The folder contained directories and code retrieved from an svn repository.
Anyways, here's a long story short:
1. Attempt to move folder from one location inside user's Documents folder to another clean location inside the same Documents folder. Verify that user has ownership of all files in the security tab.
2. Vista immediately pops up the "You are trying to change the machine" dialog.
3. Black screen of "Allow or Deny" pops up, click Allow
4. Get new window of "Permission Denied, you need Administrative rights". Click "yes" I want to acquire administrative rights.
5. Then, as Administrator, the move operation fails again with an obscure "Permission Denied" error window.
6. WTF, I start swearing. I'M RUNNING AS ADMINISTRATOR AND I AM GOD YOU FUCKING STUPID OS. MOVE THE GODDAMNED DIRECTORY.
7. Give up, and reboot machine. Watch as the move as operation now works and cry at how much longer you have to work with Vista.
Note, this was never a "file in use error" always a permissions error.
If your company is thinking about a move to Vista, fight, scratch, plead, threaten, and bribe your way into at the very least postponing the move for at least two years. You will thank me.
The web is a convenience. Professional photographers in Africa may find this idea slightly annoying I would expect.
.. etc... the internet is about communication and putting people in touch with each other.
Adobe needs to hire a CEO that understands the web. The web is well suited to communication tasks but is poor with respect to confidentiality.
Would you put your company's future strategy plans inside a google document? What if you were Microsoft?
Adobe needs a CEO who understands how to leverage the web apparently. If I were Adobe, I would be concentrating on trying to help content producers publish their work. Adobe should have bought Flikr; started something like YouTube.... Facebook
The article makes the claim that the "hijacked keywords" are going to redirection websites that do not "appear to be hosted anywhere".
:)
:)
That seems a little incredible to me.
Invisible, IPless, Chinese web-servers are taking over Google! Personally, I'll just let Google worry about trying to protect its search engines.
Arnold is doing this to manage his image. That is all. This is yet more legislation that won't do anything other than get him a lot of media notes about "the governor trying to protect kids". And perhaps, more importantly, shore up support amongst conservative voters upset some of his other stances.
It's also another nice deflector issue he can use to talk about instead of the hard-core financial ones gripping California right now. Don't wanna answer the tough questions? Solution is come up with useless crap to "save the children" and talk about that instead.
This is all too common. Today's problems are hard, complexe and don't have sexy solutions you can talk about in little sound bites. That's a big problem for politicians trying to be seen as working hard for the voter.
Voters in large part carry the blame for this by being wholly uninterested for the most part in being self-informed. When 90% of the electorate has the attention-span of a canary on major issues, you need easy-to-understand crap you can toss at them so they think you are doing good things.
And lets not forget how the media today reports badly and often incorrectly about pretty much everything they inform on that is even slightly technical or requires an expertise.
What they're counting is the number of times WGA pops up to confirm that your copy of Windows is valid.
....
.... you like using the computer you paid for right? We'll fix you good if you don't comply."
It's just retarded how many times that fucking thing pops up.... Microsoft wants to double quadruple check or something....
User: "but you already checked!!!"
MS: "yes and we're going to check again, bend over please
Since Open Source rigorously discloses every flaw known in it, what is the value of comparisons of one Vendor's chosen disclosures versus that which is 100% transparent?
None
Microsoft only discloses what it has to and is often at odds with security researchers about problems only to be proven wrong later. One claim from a blog was that Vista shipped with 60,000 bugs. How many of those are documented for the public?
I can say that on my test certified Vista machine, brand new from Dell, I've already seen the network card totally disappear from the system only to reappear again an hour later. The Broadcom diagnostic tool reported no hardware issues. The Explorer shell still crashes/stalls frequently. Files get locked with no way aside from a reboot to unlock them. Wifi fails to reconnect to the same network it was previously connected to when sspi broadcast for that network is disabled. I just tried restoring a hibernated laptop, previously connected to a domain. Black screen & hard reboot.
Beyond that, on this brand new machine, specced for Vista. Vista is SLOW.
MS, concentrate on making Vista better instead of having people do useless studies. kthnxbye