"** That's why they haven't even invaded little baby Taiwan. **"
While the US has being putting up with crap from little baby North Korea for years because they're scared shitless of a confrontation with China. But don't let reality get in the way of a pissing contest...
"Oh and for those stupid enough to argue with me:" "links"
All of which counts for nothing if the country with those resources is run by, and populated by, cowards who only use it to pick on tiny opponents because actually losing people in wars is something that US voters stopped tolerating in the 1960s. Here is a list of some countries the mighty US military machine has been used against since the end of WWII:
North Korea Viet Nam Libya Granada Panama Iraq Bosnia Somalia Afghanistan Iraq (again)
Some of those countries have nearly 1/20th the US's population, and one or two even had small airforces, navies, and 1950s era SCUD missiles! China would obviously be a mere bagatelle compared with the near unlimited military might of opponents like these.
And like "Tom and Jerry", the ones from the "classic period" (1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) were originally made for primarily adult audiences in the days when a movie ticket to a main feature by the big studios was preceded by a cartoon and one or more "B" movies (e.g. a comedy short by the likes of The Three Stooges, and then a full length "B" movie).
"While an extreme example, it helps illustrate that we appear to be at the point where the largest companies ARE making more money than many of the world's smallest countries."
This has been the case for hundreds of years though, e.g. the British East India Company, whose income sometimes dwarfed that of many developed (by the standards of the day) nations. Note also that using military power (or the threat of it) to enforce the trading rights of rich business lobbies is something that goes back at least as far as the Phoenicians, and the Romans and British Empire did on a regular basis, so it's not something that was suddenly invented by corporations in the 20th century. This is why most (possibly all) wars throughout history have, when one cuts through the usually religious or nationalistic rhetoric that leaders use to justify them, actually been a case of one bunch of wealthy, powerful people sacrificing large numbers of the expendable non-wealthy to amass even more riches and influence for themselves.
"Apple will be introducing a line of macrobiotic vegan hemp-based iPods"
These can be easily recycled in the privacy of your own home using the new iBong, which is sold strictly as a piece of decorative memorabilia, not as a method of using the high hemp content in the new "iPod Green" as a recreational drug.
"The target market is *not* geek, it's rich people who consider themselves savvy and cool."
While I agree on the "not geek" bit, I dispute the idea that the iPhone is only aimed at rich people. While it's true that not many have $500 regularly kicking around to spend on "cool" items, most who aren't completely destitute have credit cards and access to other forms of "instant" loans that mean an iPhone purchase will actually equate to $50 a month for a year including interest, which is _far_ less than each of my wife's two twenty-something daughters spend on shoes, clothes, perfumes, beauty products / hairdressers / etc. per month, so they wouldn't think twice about buying an iPhone if it became "the thing to have".
No big corporation is above screwing their customers -- a friend of mine for example was recently quoted nearly 700 Euros by HP to replace the backlight in a 4 year old laptop.
"I won't consider VB6 mature until someone writes an OS kernel in it. After all, that is the ultimate test of any programming language."
It is the ultimate test of a systems programming language. Very few programmers actually do any real systems programming, hence the fact that only a small minority of languages are designed for that particular role.
NB: I am not defending VB here, because I think it's a horrid language. This does not however come from the fact that it isn't a systems programming language -- VB would still be horrible even if there were several excellent operating system kernels written in it.
There's a hereditary form of rickets that's caused by kidneys that can't retain phosphates. It can also manifest itself in people with certain digestive disorders that affect the ability to absorb fats (e.g. Crohn's disease, Sprue), so one should not necessarily assume that such cases are due to malnutrition caused by parental neglect.
Its isn't the predilection for cancer, but the fact that Vitamin D deficiency leads to rickets in children, which can be far more detrimental to health than the bowed legs commonly associated with it. Note also that vitamin D deficiency in adults can cause osteomalacia, which will result in them being (sometimes significantly) weaker than those without it, and can also cause pelvic and spinal deformities.
Given the frequently debilitating or even fatal effects of severe vitamin D deficiency, it should be fairly obvious that those who are less prone to the worst symptoms would not only significantly out-breed their less fortunate brethren, whose offspring would be disadvantaged not only because of their own illnesses, but also due to the fact that their parents would be less able to provide for them. If a small population managed to survive at all under such unfavourable conditions, it wouldn't take very many generations for all the very dark skinned individuals to be completely replaced by much lighter ones because there is already enough of a natural variation in skin colour within any population to ensure that some individuals in each generation would have a small advantage over others.
"The Spanish, Turks and Greeks are all dark and they are all in Western Europe"
And all have been both invaded and settled by non-Europeans on a regular basis over many thousands of years. Note also that these countries have _many_ more hours of sun per year than those in Northern Europe, so people who live there with nominally the same skin colour as other Europeans (which is the vast majority in Spain and Greece) will tend to be at least a shade darker due to natural tanning. I'm British for example but currently live in (eastern) Spain, and friends in the UK remark on how dark my face and hands are compared with theirs despite the fact that I don't sunbathe or spend a huge amount of time outdoors, or live in the hottest, sunniest part.
"Like a tobacco lobbyist ranting about individual choice, Darl McBride's helps cast doubt on the intellectual property of Linux."
Not even the most anti-Linux members of the computer press believe that SCO's claims of (a) owning any significant UNIX copyrights that (b) they have proof Linux infringes hold any water whatsoever. Their obvious and constant delaying tactics, failure to produce _any_ evidence whatsoever of Linux infringement or indeed that they actually own any rights that could be infringed, endless last minute changes in the nature of what they are claiming, and a bunch of rulings that have gone against them have resulted in this being seen by management types for what it was -- an attempt to shake down IBM that failed dismally, and then turned into a pump-and-dump scam to try and ensure that various major investors come out ahead when SCO inevitably goes down the toilet.
"You may be underestimating Microsoft's willingness to continue spreading FUD, long after intelligent technology people recognize it as malicious rumor-mongering. "
Microsoft will continue to finance FUD campaigns if they think PHBs will believe them, but this ceased to be the case for SCO once the case moved from being largely technical in nature to something that business people recognise and understand, i.e. a shakedown attempt followed by repeated bouts of pumping and dumping on the back of increasingly obvious and ever more desperate legal delaying manoeuvres. PHBs may not know much about the technology that was supposedly at the heart of this, so like large portions of the press, they were willing to give SCO the benefit of the doubt initially, but they are very familiar indeed with attempting to get bought out, stock market manipulation, and slimy lawyering, all of which have been the most notable and obvious aspects of this particular case for at least the last two years.
"Inexperienced people will invest in the "known" or "safe" or "supported" vendor even when the vendor's history of customer abuse and fraud and lack of compatibility. "
FUD campaigns are not however aimed at the inexperienced or "arse coverers" who would choose MS anyway, but at those who are actively considering other options. The SCO case has ceased to be of any relevance to those who may be considering another option instead of Windows: they won't be choosing SCO UNIX because nobody wants it; they won't be paying SCO for a licence to use Linux due to the fact that nobody believes SCO has any worthwhile IP anymore; which also means that they won't be influenced by any FUD based on them having said IP.
"Take a look at the BBC's decision to use Windows Media for its new Iplayer service for an example of such a policy, founded in avoiding difficulty with intellectual property or support issues."
I don't see where this has any relevance to the discussion. The BBC's decision was based entirely on protecting their own IP, and they chose Windows Media DRM because it was the only easily licensable format that 95% of their potential customers for the service can already play. The only FUD here was therefore the same FUD that led to so many other media organisations opting for DRM in the first place, and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the SCO case or anything Microsoft said or did.
"Microsoft doesn't necessarily want SCO to *win*. They want SCO weak to prevent any good products coming from that particular UNIX vendor, and to continue the demonstrably false rumors that Linux developers steal from UNIX."
SCO was far too weak to be any threat to Microsoft long before this case started, and any FUD value it might once have had is now gone due to the fact that it's dragged on for so long, and has turned out to be so full of obvious crap from SCO and their lawyers that most geeks have lost interest in it, let alone everybody else. Microsoft's FUD-generation funds are thus now being spent on injecting money into commercial Linux vendors like Novell so they can make a noise about the possibility of Linux infringing on _their_ IP, which they have such vast quantities of that, unlike SCO's laughable (to geeks) claims, isn't easy for even the most diligent open source developers to discount because of the loose and wide-ranging nature of software patents.
From Microsoft's POV therefore, SCO has already served its purpose, and there's no reason for them to waste money propping up a case that even known shills like Laura Didio seem to have given up on, especially when that same money could be spent far more productively on their current "Linux probably infringes several of our patents" FUD campaign.
"Geneva Convention "war". Works pretty well. Won in WWII and Korea."
The Korean war was a limited war because it was restricted to Korea itself despite the fact that China directly intervened by sending huge numbers of men who directly fought against UN forces, and defeated them on a number of occasions, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. In a WWII-style conflict, this would have resulted in massive retaliation against China itself, probably by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese cities, which MacArthur was seriously considering before being replaced (the fact that China had no airforce would have made this a low-risk affair in a military sense, but the possibility of direct USSR intervention meant that it was very politically risky).
Note also that we (i.e. the UN forces which were predominantly but far from exclusively US forces) did not win the Korean war, because it ended in a stalemate which culminated in a ceasefire agreement that essentially established the same North / South border that had been in place before the war. This ceasefire is still in place, so the war hasn't officially ended, hence a half century long armed stand-off between the two opposing sides. This wasn't the goal of the US / UN side, or the one the North Koreans had, although it does seem to have been what China wanted (the Chinese didn't intervene until UN forces were near to their borders with North Korea; they'd warned the UN that this would happen on several occasions, but the CIA told Truman they were bluffing, so the warnings were ignored). It would therefore be fair to say that the only true winner was China, while both the UN / US and North Korea can be regarded as net losers because neither managed to realise their military or political goals.
" isn't that Bill Gates' vision of the future? Hardware will be free and people will only pay for software."
Whereas what we've ended up with is one where an increasingly large proportion of the world's computer users happily buy their hardware, but pay either nothing or very little for software (piracy, FOSS, free stuff from the likes of Google, ad-ware, etc., etc.).
"I've used the blue masking tape with great success to hold things like 2x4's together before nailing/screwing together"
That's because, as I said, it isn't masking tape.
"Regular masking tape does a great job of sticking stuff together once a little heat is applied."
Heat (and indeed cold) changes the properties of most adhesives. There is a whole class of them called "thermosetting adhesives" that rely on this fact.
It's more likely to be electrical insulating tape. Masking tape is usually made of paper, and isn't particularly sticky because it's manufactured for easy removal after painting without leaving adhesive on the surfaces it was applied to.
"early all of the video cards were not memory mapped. I know, I used to run a store that sold these."
While this is true, you obviously don't know _why_ they were built this way, otherwise you wouldn't be spouting tripe about it being due to a limitation in the Z80 (then again, it's hardly surprising that what amounts to a computer salesman is pretending to know far more about technical details that is in fact the case). Remember something called CP/M 2.2? CP/M itself took up 7K from the Z80's 64K maximum address space, and people who wanted to run popular software like WordStar wanted all the rest for their applications. Memory mapped graphics on CP/M business machines were not therefore a practical option, so manufacturers adopted a strategy of writing to ports instead.
"Perhaps you were not fully familiar with all the Z-80 sellers. Northstar, Cormenco"
It was Cromenco, not Cormenco. I was more usually involved with Micromation equipment. They made an MP/M based multiuser system that could have up to 16 independent Z80 computer cards in it, one of which would act as a master I/O controller, with the other 15 serving one user each. It absolutely blew most of the single CPU timesharing minicomputers of the day out of the water in terms of multiuser performance.
"Essentially everything that was s-100 bus worked this way"
Again, rubbish. The S100 could be configured as two independent 8 bit buses or a single 16 bit bus. It was quite feasible to put memory expansions for a Z80 on it, and memory expansions are by by their nature _memory mapped_. It also had advanced features such as bus-mastering that PCs didn't get for well over a decade.
"The same was true for most early CGA using the IBM bus."
"Essentially none of the early implementaitons were able to use this"
This is utter and complete baloney. No production Z80 was shipped without a fully working DRAM refresh system.
"Anyhow my main point was about the megahertz myth not these details. 6502s were much less of a kludge than the z80 which was an augmented 8080 instruction set."
Considering how (to be kind) light on facts the rest of your post is, this particular assertion obviously needs to be taken with a few Dead Sea's worth of salt..
" is there anything in the patent that isn't in javax.swing? That goes back well before that patent"
Java's very much a johnny-come-lately as far as MVC goes. Trygve Reenskaug described it in 1979 when working at Xerox Xerox PARC, and this 1987 paper on using it with Smalltalk-80 (http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/mv c.html) has an in-depth treatment. Other notable early implementations were NextStep and indeed the document/view architecture in Microsoft's own MFC C++ framework.
"It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost (or none? The point is I've never come across one) no viruses or worms"
There were at least 20 viruses for various types of Mac OS prior to OS X, and a whole bunch of worms etc. for different versions of MS Office running on those systems (conceptually similar to the Word / Excel macro malware that targeted Windows Office users). Note that these were all "in the wild" malware that infected people, not the sort of "proof of concept" or plain non-working stuff that AV companies have trumpeted about in an transparent attempt at selling their wares to OS X users.
"Windows machines suffer for a variety of reasons, but not really because they have more bugs"
I don't regard most security holes as "bugs" in the classic sense of the term unless they're present in something whose primary function is security (e.g. the ones that were found Norton's security tools). A bug is a malfunction that manifests itself during a program's normal operation such as the document corruption issue in MS Word, whereas many (although not all) security holes are the result of deliberately abnormal operation such as attacking the stack or heap from outside to partially crash software, or using malformed content that the programmers didn't bother to check for because it didn't occur to them that people would deliberately do something like that. Newsflash: people who are determined to fuck something up can fuck it up, irrespective of how well it may fulfil its original design and manufacturing goals.
"Users were just more vigilant, and the operating system's transparency (the degree to which the way the system worked was obvious to the end user) meant end users had a better idea of the consequences of their actions"
The ratio of knowledgeable users to idiots is pretty similar on both Macs and Windows, so while there is a much larger number of idiots using Windows overall, there is also a far smaller number of non-idiots with Macs!
"If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus."
However, that elsewhere isn't the "Windows gets attacked more because it's a bigger target" argument that MS defenders keep spouting, because that completely fails to explain why OS X has precisely no effective pieces of malware in the wild despite having 5% of the market (with a high proportion of affluent users with next to no computing knowledge who would be very tempting targets for key loggers and the like), or the fact that Linux with a larger number of servers deployed than Windows has massively less server-based malware. I would have imagined that these servers would be ideal hosts for bot-nets because they're usually powerful machines connected to extremely fat pipes that aren't throttled back by ADSL's slow transmission speeds, so a few of these babies would easily spit out far more spam per second than several hundred desktop PCs. And while a good many of them are being run by quite knowledgeable people, this is far from being universal, so there are likely to be a large number of Linux systems that could be "pwnd" if doing so was feasible. Where then is all the bot-net software for Linux?
NB: not all vulnerabilities are equally severe, and those that are may not be anything like as easy to exploit on one OS as they are on another. One cannot therefore judge the relative levels of two different systems' overall security by comparing how many vulnerabilities are reported for each of them, or even how quickly they are patched, as a patch for a non-severe bug that's never been exploited which takes a year to appear is still better than one for a critical bug that appears two weeks after malware that's exploited it has already infected tens of thousands of systems.
"Doing that is awfully slow for a database that is bigger than tiny"
I have two real-world application with pretty large databases that return result sets from text searches on blobs in a second or so. One is an application running on an old Interbase 4.2 with a fairly large number of simultaneous users and around 1/2 million records which has been in daily use since the 1990s, and is constantly being updated from several simultaneous news feeds, so the contents are constantly changing. Another heavily deployed medical system from a company I'm involved with uses Firebird with a fairly complex (several hundred tables, some with more than 100 fields) database. The type of searches being performed (case insensitivity is important) mean that the "CONTAINING" predicate is in all cases, and this could explain the fairly good performance -- "LIKE" for example is _much_ slower (although I haven't bothered to benchmark the differences on these data sets because I'm a programmer, not a reviewer).
"which is what I think the other poster was refering to"
If that's what he meant, then he should have said so in his post.
"MySQL has a fulltext index feature (only for MyISAM tables currently) that does just that"
Unfortunately, it's implemented sub-optimally. The system works well if the entire text index fits in RAM and no result sorting is required, but degrades significantly when this is not the case (sometimes _very_ significantly). As with many other things in MySQL, it's an excellent mechanism for those whose requirements are within a set of fairly narrow boundaries, but falls well short of being a generic solution for high performance text searching.
"Most other RDBMS also have similar"
Oracle has this facility, SQL-Server, Informix, and DB2 don't (SQL-Server and DB2 use external tools to build and maintain indices, one via the OS services, the other with a supplied proprietary program). If 1/4 counts as "most", then you are correct that "most" other RDBMS systems do indeed have this facility!
"Firebird still hasn't any, thus applications need to build and keep their own indexes"
My experience indicates that performance is more than adequate without them for records containing text data of 64K / field (document size before being placed in the database itself -- IB / FB have compressed large VARCHAR / text blob fields for well over a decade) in real-world applications with a significant data-set using CONTAINING. Performance will obviously degrade notably as field sizes grow, as of course would be the case with queries across several fields and / or tables because the volume of data that needs to be searched is obviously greater, and as I said previously, LIKE is reportedly a _lot_ slower.
"applications need to build and keep their own indexes, which is often slower and requires more storage space than the RDBMs integrated fulltext search indexes."
While this is true, the same can be said for those using Informix, SQL-Server, and DB2, and indeed MySQL installations whose text querying requirements are beyond the capabilities of the internal system to handle efficiently (or handle at all). Thus, while MySQL's text indexing is certainly a point in its favour, the limitations and performance caveats of its implementation mean that unlike for example Oracle's CTXRULE and CONTEXT indices, it doesn't always eliminate the need for an external text indexing and search system.
"MySQL has some basic full-text search built-in. For FB you need to code it yourself or get a third-party solution."
Firebird has Interbase's LIKE, CONTAINING, and STARTING WITH clauses, all of which are specifically designed for pattern-based full text searches. For example:
"select * from people where last_name like 'Ma%' "returns all records where the "last_name" begins with the letters "Ma".
"select * from people where last_name starting with 'Ma'" is functionally equivalent to the above.
"select * from people where last_name containing 'Ma'" performs a case-insensitive search for records where the two characters occur anywhere in the "last_name" field.
The above clauses can be combined using AND and NOT to perform fairly sophisticated text searches. Interestingly, CONTAINING can also be used with non-text fields as well, and the same may be true of the other the other two (I'm not sure if this is actually the case, though).
While it was certainly politics that lost that war, it had little to do with hippies. Politicians in plush Washington offices thousands of miles away from the people who were actually dealing with the situation directly micromanaged things that should have been left to field commanders, and constantly formulated new and ever more absurd rules of engagement to hobble their army, navy, and airforce with. Add in a 1 year term of service that ensured green recruits far outnumbered experienced veterans, and you have an ideal recipe for low troop morale, which is a disaster for any army.
The US would therefore have lost that war even if there hadn't been mass peace demonstrations -- they'd have simply taken longer to do it, and more Americans would have died. The prior Korean war had already shown that the doctrine of "limited war" doesn't work if the limits are only imposed on your side while the enemy does as they please, so it was inevitable that it would also fail in Viet Nam, just as it's failing today in Iraq. As WWII amply demonstrated, modern wars are won by turning the places the enemy gets its supplies and people from into piles of blood-soaked rubble, not leaving them as refuges where they can regroup and re-equip, and any country that assists them ends up in a similarly brick and limb-strewn state. If a nation lacks either the political will or military might to face this notably brutal and barbarous reality, then they'll also have to accept the fact that they're going to regularly lose engagements against much smaller and immeasurably less well equipped opponents.
"Saber tooth cats had teeth so long as to hinder eating"
Balderdash. The people who say this are notably unaware of the fact that sabre toothed cats had a different jaw structure from other sorts of cats, permitting (for example) Smilodon to open them by 120 degrees, compared to a modern lion's 65 degrees. Smilodon was around for 2.5 million years, and managed to survive for at least 2,000 years after the non-sabre toothed American lion had become extinct, which would obviously not have been the case if it couldn't eat properly. Note also that sabre teeth have evolved in a large number of felines and feline ancestors of all sizes over the last 35 million years, and also evolved in several non-feline predators (e.g. the marsupial sporacodonta such as thylacosmilus), so they must have conferred notable advantages on the animals that had them, otherwise some of them couldn't have survived for in excess of 15 million years (e.g. afrosmilus, albanosmilus). Note also that fossils of sabre-toothed predators have been found in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, so this particular adaptation was widespread geographically, temporally, and in terms of animal types, which points at it being notably advantageous rather than a hindrance.
"Hence two thousand pound lions no longer threaten humans with extinction"
Smilodon popular (the biggest of the six known species) weighed around 600 pounds, not 2,000. By comparison, the American lion and Eurasian cave lion (both of which were contemporaries, and are the biggest true lions that ever lived) weighed 600-700lbs, but were larger overall than smilodon popular (which was a more compact, heavily built animal), and much more likely to pose a threat to humans than the more specialised smilodon. The only predator that lived alongside homo sapiens weighing 2,000lbs was the European cave bear, which was very similar to the American brown bear, but 30% bigger (altars discovered in caves indicate that humans may have worshipped these notably impressive creatures).
Which is 1/3 of Switzerland's homicide rate (4.2 / 1000). When one considers that England and Wales have nearly ten times Switzerland's population, that there's a far bigger disparity between the richest and poorest people, and also much more ethnic and cultural diversity, it's perhaps understandable that the pro gun lobby tend to avoid actual statistical homicide rate comparisons when citing Switzerland as a shining example of an armed society (note that I'm neither anti-gun nor pro-gun. Britain's homicide rate was even lower when the firearms laws were less strict, but this correlation does not, as the UK press sometimes like to pretend, imply a causal relationship because there have been many other significant changes in the nature of British society since then).
"the homicide rate in the US for 2005 was 5.6 per 100,000. Yes, there is a difference, but it's not nearly as large as some people here suggest"
It's quite a bit higher than the UK, but in the same ballpark as Switzerland. Note also that comparing the US as a whole against individual European countries isn't really valid (and I say this as a European) because its population and land area is massively bigger, and there is a huge variation in the figures for each state - it would therefore be fairer to look at things on a state by state basis, as a state is in many ways an independent entity with its own government, laws, police forces, courts, and ethnic / religious population distribution. This table for example (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_05.html) shows that while The District Of Columbia have a massive 35.4 / 1000 murder rate, others states such as Iowa (1.3), and Main and New Hampshire (both 1.4) are comparable to England and Wales, and much better than Switzerland.
"I imagine part of the difference in the homicide rate is due to other social factors, too. (For example, violence is not as acceptable or common on TV in Europe.)
There are indeed many differences in social factors, just as there are differences in social factors between different states in the US, and indeed the cities and rural areas within those states. However, television is not in my experience (I'm fairly well travelled) one of them. The UK for example is very similar to the US in the nature of its television broadcast policies, but most of the rest of Europe is considerably less restrictive, with some countries lacking even "watershed" policies to prevent certain types of content from being broadcast while children are likely to be watching. As with most things that attempt to tie something as complex as human behaviour to a single factor, nobody has been able to successfully show a hard correlation between very liberal broadcast policies and violent crime, so the sometimes rather glaring differences in what each country regards as acceptable are unlikely to change in the near term.
Slashdot Mirror
"** That's why they haven't even invaded little baby Taiwan. **"
While the US has being putting up with crap from little baby North Korea for years because they're scared shitless of a confrontation with China. But don't let reality get in the way of a pissing contest...
"Oh and for those stupid enough to argue with me:"
"links"
All of which counts for nothing if the country with those resources is run by, and populated by, cowards who only use it to pick on tiny opponents because actually losing people in wars is something that US voters stopped tolerating in the 1960s. Here is a list of some countries the mighty US military machine has been used against since the end of WWII:
North Korea
Viet Nam
Libya
Granada
Panama
Iraq
Bosnia
Somalia
Afghanistan
Iraq (again)
Some of those countries have nearly 1/20th the US's population, and one or two even had small airforces, navies, and 1950s era SCUD missiles! China would obviously be a mere bagatelle compared with the near unlimited military might of opponents like these.
"Looney Tunes, Merri Melodies, Pepe lePew == Warner Brothers (not Disney)"
And like "Tom and Jerry", the ones from the "classic period" (1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) were originally made for primarily adult audiences in the days when a movie ticket to a main feature by the big studios was preceded by a cartoon and one or more "B" movies (e.g. a comedy short by the likes of The Three Stooges, and then a full length "B" movie).
"While an extreme example, it helps illustrate that we appear to be at the point where the largest companies ARE making more money than many of the world's smallest countries."
This has been the case for hundreds of years though, e.g. the British East India Company, whose income sometimes dwarfed that of many developed (by the standards of the day) nations. Note also that using military power (or the threat of it) to enforce the trading rights of rich business lobbies is something that goes back at least as far as the Phoenicians, and the Romans and British Empire did on a regular basis, so it's not something that was suddenly invented by corporations in the 20th century. This is why most (possibly all) wars throughout history have, when one cuts through the usually religious or nationalistic rhetoric that leaders use to justify them, actually been a case of one bunch of wealthy, powerful people sacrificing large numbers of the expendable non-wealthy to amass even more riches and influence for themselves.
"Apple will be introducing a line of macrobiotic vegan hemp-based iPods"
These can be easily recycled in the privacy of your own home using the new iBong, which is sold strictly as a piece of decorative memorabilia, not as a method of using the high hemp content in the new "iPod Green" as a recreational drug.
"The target market is *not* geek, it's rich people who consider themselves savvy and cool."
While I agree on the "not geek" bit, I dispute the idea that the iPhone is only aimed at rich people. While it's true that not many have $500 regularly kicking around to spend on "cool" items, most who aren't completely destitute have credit cards and access to other forms of "instant" loans that mean an iPhone purchase will actually equate to $50 a month for a year including interest, which is _far_ less than each of my wife's two twenty-something daughters spend on shoes, clothes, perfumes, beauty products / hairdressers / etc. per month, so they wouldn't think twice about buying an iPhone if it became "the thing to have".
"Apple isn't above screwing its customers."
No big corporation is above screwing their customers -- a friend of mine for example was recently quoted nearly 700 Euros by HP to replace the backlight in a 4 year old laptop.
"I won't consider VB6 mature until someone writes an OS kernel in it. After all, that is the ultimate test of any programming language."
It is the ultimate test of a systems programming language. Very few programmers actually do any real systems programming, hence the fact that only a small minority of languages are designed for that particular role.
NB: I am not defending VB here, because I think it's a horrid language. This does not however come from the fact that it isn't a systems programming language -- VB would still be horrible even if there were several excellent operating system kernels written in it.
There's a hereditary form of rickets that's caused by kidneys that can't retain phosphates. It can also manifest itself in people with certain digestive disorders that affect the ability to absorb fats (e.g. Crohn's disease, Sprue), so one should not necessarily assume that such cases are due to malnutrition caused by parental neglect.
Its isn't the predilection for cancer, but the fact that Vitamin D deficiency leads to rickets in children, which can be far more detrimental to health than the bowed legs commonly associated with it. Note also that vitamin D deficiency in adults can cause osteomalacia, which will result in them being (sometimes significantly) weaker than those without it, and can also cause pelvic and spinal deformities.
Given the frequently debilitating or even fatal effects of severe vitamin D deficiency, it should be fairly obvious that those who are less prone to the worst symptoms would not only significantly out-breed their less fortunate brethren, whose offspring would be disadvantaged not only because of their own illnesses, but also due to the fact that their parents would be less able to provide for them. If a small population managed to survive at all under such unfavourable conditions, it wouldn't take very many generations for all the very dark skinned individuals to be completely replaced by much lighter ones because there is already enough of a natural variation in skin colour within any population to ensure that some individuals in each generation would have a small advantage over others.
"The Spanish, Turks and Greeks are all dark and they are all in Western Europe"
And all have been both invaded and settled by non-Europeans on a regular basis over many thousands of years. Note also that these countries have _many_ more hours of sun per year than those in Northern Europe, so people who live there with nominally the same skin colour as other Europeans (which is the vast majority in Spain and Greece) will tend to be at least a shade darker due to natural tanning. I'm British for example but currently live in (eastern) Spain, and friends in the UK remark on how dark my face and hands are compared with theirs despite the fact that I don't sunbathe or spend a huge amount of time outdoors, or live in the hottest, sunniest part.
"Like a tobacco lobbyist ranting about individual choice, Darl McBride's helps cast doubt on the intellectual property of Linux."
Not even the most anti-Linux members of the computer press believe that SCO's claims of (a) owning any significant UNIX copyrights that (b) they have proof Linux infringes hold any water whatsoever. Their obvious and constant delaying tactics, failure to produce _any_ evidence whatsoever of Linux infringement or indeed that they actually own any rights that could be infringed, endless last minute changes in the nature of what they are claiming, and a bunch of rulings that have gone against them have resulted in this being seen by management types for what it was -- an attempt to shake down IBM that failed dismally, and then turned into a pump-and-dump scam to try and ensure that various major investors come out ahead when SCO inevitably goes down the toilet.
"You may be underestimating Microsoft's willingness to continue spreading FUD, long after intelligent technology people recognize it as malicious rumor-mongering. "
Microsoft will continue to finance FUD campaigns if they think PHBs will believe them, but this ceased to be the case for SCO once the case moved from being largely technical in nature to something that business people recognise and understand, i.e. a shakedown attempt followed by repeated bouts of pumping and dumping on the back of increasingly obvious and ever more desperate legal delaying manoeuvres. PHBs may not know much about the technology that was supposedly at the heart of this, so like large portions of the press, they were willing to give SCO the benefit of the doubt initially, but they are very familiar indeed with attempting to get bought out, stock market manipulation, and slimy lawyering, all of which have been the most notable and obvious aspects of this particular case for at least the last two years.
"Inexperienced people will invest in the "known" or "safe" or "supported" vendor even when the vendor's history of customer abuse and fraud and lack of compatibility. "
FUD campaigns are not however aimed at the inexperienced or "arse coverers" who would choose MS anyway, but at those who are actively considering other options. The SCO case has ceased to be of any relevance to those who may be considering another option instead of Windows: they won't be choosing SCO UNIX because nobody wants it; they won't be paying SCO for a licence to use Linux due to the fact that nobody believes SCO has any worthwhile IP anymore; which also means that they won't be influenced by any FUD based on them having said IP.
"Take a look at the BBC's decision to use Windows Media for its new Iplayer service for an example of such a policy, founded in avoiding difficulty with intellectual property or support issues."
I don't see where this has any relevance to the discussion. The BBC's decision was based entirely on protecting their own IP, and they chose Windows Media DRM because it was the only easily licensable format that 95% of their potential customers for the service can already play. The only FUD here was therefore the same FUD that led to so many other media organisations opting for DRM in the first place, and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the SCO case or anything Microsoft said or did.
"Microsoft doesn't necessarily want SCO to *win*. They want SCO weak to prevent any good products coming from that particular UNIX vendor, and to continue the demonstrably false rumors that Linux developers steal from UNIX."
SCO was far too weak to be any threat to Microsoft long before this case started, and any FUD value it might once have had is now gone due to the fact that it's dragged on for so long, and has turned out to be so full of obvious crap from SCO and their lawyers that most geeks have lost interest in it, let alone everybody else. Microsoft's FUD-generation funds are thus now being spent on injecting money into commercial Linux vendors like Novell so they can make a noise about the possibility of Linux infringing on _their_ IP, which they have such vast quantities of that, unlike SCO's laughable (to geeks) claims, isn't easy for even the most diligent open source developers to discount because of the loose and wide-ranging nature of software patents.
From Microsoft's POV therefore, SCO has already served its purpose, and there's no reason for them to waste money propping up a case that even known shills like Laura Didio seem to have given up on, especially when that same money could be spent far more productively on their current "Linux probably infringes several of our patents" FUD campaign.
I'm sure he'll be pleased to when other commercial OS vendors also let people do whatever they like with their products.
"Geneva Convention "war". Works pretty well. Won in WWII and Korea."
The Korean war was a limited war because it was restricted to Korea itself despite the fact that China directly intervened by sending huge numbers of men who directly fought against UN forces, and defeated them on a number of occasions, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. In a WWII-style conflict, this would have resulted in massive retaliation against China itself, probably by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese cities, which MacArthur was seriously considering before being replaced (the fact that China had no airforce would have made this a low-risk affair in a military sense, but the possibility of direct USSR intervention meant that it was very politically risky).
Note also that we (i.e. the UN forces which were predominantly but far from exclusively US forces) did not win the Korean war, because it ended in a stalemate which culminated in a ceasefire agreement that essentially established the same North / South border that had been in place before the war. This ceasefire is still in place, so the war hasn't officially ended, hence a half century long armed stand-off between the two opposing sides. This wasn't the goal of the US / UN side, or the one the North Koreans had, although it does seem to have been what China wanted (the Chinese didn't intervene until UN forces were near to their borders with North Korea; they'd warned the UN that this would happen on several occasions, but the CIA told Truman they were bluffing, so the warnings were ignored). It would therefore be fair to say that the only true winner was China, while both the UN / US and North Korea can be regarded as net losers because neither managed to realise their military or political goals.
" isn't that Bill Gates' vision of the future? Hardware will be free and people will only pay for software."
Whereas what we've ended up with is one where an increasingly large proportion of the world's computer users happily buy their hardware, but pay either nothing or very little for software (piracy, FOSS, free stuff from the likes of Google, ad-ware, etc., etc.).
"I've used the blue masking tape with great success to hold things like 2x4's together before nailing/screwing together"
That's because, as I said, it isn't masking tape.
"Regular masking tape does a great job of sticking stuff together once a little heat is applied."
Heat (and indeed cold) changes the properties of most adhesives. There is a whole class of them called "thermosetting adhesives" that rely on this fact.
"The blue tape is masking tape for painting"
It's more likely to be electrical insulating tape. Masking tape is usually made of paper, and isn't particularly sticky because it's manufactured for easy removal after painting without leaving adhesive on the surfaces it was applied to.
"early all of the video cards were not memory mapped. I know, I used to run a store that sold these."
While this is true, you obviously don't know _why_ they were built this way, otherwise you wouldn't be spouting tripe about it being due to a limitation in the Z80 (then again, it's hardly surprising that what amounts to a computer salesman is pretending to know far more about technical details that is in fact the case). Remember something called CP/M 2.2? CP/M itself took up 7K from the Z80's 64K maximum address space, and people who wanted to run popular software like WordStar wanted all the rest for their applications. Memory mapped graphics on CP/M business machines were not therefore a practical option, so manufacturers adopted a strategy of writing to ports instead.
"Perhaps you were not fully familiar with all the Z-80 sellers. Northstar, Cormenco"
It was Cromenco, not Cormenco. I was more usually involved with Micromation equipment. They made an MP/M based multiuser system that could have up to 16 independent Z80 computer cards in it, one of which would act as a master I/O controller, with the other 15 serving one user each. It absolutely blew most of the single CPU timesharing minicomputers of the day out of the water in terms of multiuser performance.
"Essentially everything that was s-100 bus worked this way"
Again, rubbish. The S100 could be configured as two independent 8 bit buses or a single 16 bit bus. It was quite feasible to put memory expansions for a Z80 on it, and memory expansions are by by their nature _memory mapped_. It also had advanced features such as bus-mastering that PCs didn't get for well over a decade.
"The same was true for most early CGA using the IBM bus."
All CGAs were memory mapped, from the very first to the very last. This page has details about them: http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/cga.html
"Essentially none of the early implementaitons were able to use this"
This is utter and complete baloney. No production Z80 was shipped without a fully working DRAM refresh system.
"Anyhow my main point was about the megahertz myth not these details. 6502s were much less of a kludge than the z80 which was an augmented 8080 instruction set."
Considering how (to be kind) light on facts the rest of your post is, this particular assertion obviously needs to be taken with a few Dead Sea's worth of salt..
" is there anything in the patent that isn't in javax.swing? That goes back well before that patent"
v c.html) has an in-depth treatment. Other notable early implementations were NextStep and indeed the document/view architecture in Microsoft's own MFC C++ framework.
Java's very much a johnny-come-lately as far as MVC goes. Trygve Reenskaug described it in 1979 when working at Xerox Xerox PARC, and this 1987 paper on using it with Smalltalk-80 (http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/m
"It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost (or none? The point is I've never come across one) no viruses or worms"
There were at least 20 viruses for various types of Mac OS prior to OS X, and a whole bunch of worms etc. for different versions of MS Office running on those systems (conceptually similar to the Word / Excel macro malware that targeted Windows Office users). Note that these were all "in the wild" malware that infected people, not the sort of "proof of concept" or plain non-working stuff that AV companies have trumpeted about in an transparent attempt at selling their wares to OS X users.
"Windows machines suffer for a variety of reasons, but not really because they have more bugs"
I don't regard most security holes as "bugs" in the classic sense of the term unless they're present in something whose primary function is security (e.g. the ones that were found Norton's security tools). A bug is a malfunction that manifests itself during a program's normal operation such as the document corruption issue in MS Word, whereas many (although not all) security holes are the result of deliberately abnormal operation such as attacking the stack or heap from outside to partially crash software, or using malformed content that the programmers didn't bother to check for because it didn't occur to them that people would deliberately do something like that. Newsflash: people who are determined to fuck something up can fuck it up, irrespective of how well it may fulfil its original design and manufacturing goals.
"Users were just more vigilant, and the operating system's transparency (the degree to which the way the system worked was obvious to the end user) meant end users had a better idea of the consequences of their actions"
The ratio of knowledgeable users to idiots is pretty similar on both Macs and Windows, so while there is a much larger number of idiots using Windows overall, there is also a far smaller number of non-idiots with Macs!
"If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus."
However, that elsewhere isn't the "Windows gets attacked more because it's a bigger target" argument that MS defenders keep spouting, because that completely fails to explain why OS X has precisely no effective pieces of malware in the wild despite having 5% of the market (with a high proportion of affluent users with next to no computing knowledge who would be very tempting targets for key loggers and the like), or the fact that Linux with a larger number of servers deployed than Windows has massively less server-based malware. I would have imagined that these servers would be ideal hosts for bot-nets because they're usually powerful machines connected to extremely fat pipes that aren't throttled back by ADSL's slow transmission speeds, so a few of these babies would easily spit out far more spam per second than several hundred desktop PCs. And while a good many of them are being run by quite knowledgeable people, this is far from being universal, so there are likely to be a large number of Linux systems that could be "pwnd" if doing so was feasible. Where then is all the bot-net software for Linux?
NB: not all vulnerabilities are equally severe, and those that are may not be anything like as easy to exploit on one OS as they are on another. One cannot therefore judge the relative levels of two different systems' overall security by comparing how many vulnerabilities are reported for each of them, or even how quickly they are patched, as a patch for a non-severe bug that's never been exploited which takes a year to appear is still better than one for a critical bug that appears two weeks after malware that's exploited it has already infected tens of thousands of systems.
"Doing that is awfully slow for a database that is bigger than tiny"
I have two real-world application with pretty large databases that return result sets from text searches on blobs in a second or so. One is an application running on an old Interbase 4.2 with a fairly large number of simultaneous users and around 1/2 million records which has been in daily use since the 1990s, and is constantly being updated from several simultaneous news feeds, so the contents are constantly changing. Another heavily deployed medical system from a company I'm involved with uses Firebird with a fairly complex (several hundred tables, some with more than 100 fields) database. The type of searches being performed (case insensitivity is important) mean that the "CONTAINING" predicate is in all cases, and this could explain the fairly good performance -- "LIKE" for example is _much_ slower (although I haven't bothered to benchmark the differences on these data sets because I'm a programmer, not a reviewer).
"which is what I think the other poster was refering to"
If that's what he meant, then he should have said so in his post.
"MySQL has a fulltext index feature (only for MyISAM tables currently) that does just that"
Unfortunately, it's implemented sub-optimally. The system works well if the entire text index fits in RAM and no result sorting is required, but degrades significantly when this is not the case (sometimes _very_ significantly). As with many other things in MySQL, it's an excellent mechanism for those whose requirements are within a set of fairly narrow boundaries, but falls well short of being a generic solution for high performance text searching.
"Most other RDBMS also have similar"
Oracle has this facility, SQL-Server, Informix, and DB2 don't (SQL-Server and DB2 use external tools to build and maintain indices, one via the OS services, the other with a supplied proprietary program). If 1/4 counts as "most", then you are correct that "most" other RDBMS systems do indeed have this facility!
"Firebird still hasn't any, thus applications need to build and keep their own indexes"
My experience indicates that performance is more than adequate without them for records containing text data of 64K / field (document size before being placed in the database itself -- IB / FB have compressed large VARCHAR / text blob fields for well over a decade) in real-world applications with a significant data-set using CONTAINING. Performance will obviously degrade notably as field sizes grow, as of course would be the case with queries across several fields and / or tables because the volume of data that needs to be searched is obviously greater, and as I said previously, LIKE is reportedly a _lot_ slower.
"applications need to build and keep their own indexes, which is often slower and requires more storage space than the RDBMs integrated fulltext search indexes."
While this is true, the same can be said for those using Informix, SQL-Server, and DB2, and indeed MySQL installations whose text querying requirements are beyond the capabilities of the internal system to handle efficiently (or handle at all). Thus, while MySQL's text indexing is certainly a point in its favour, the limitations and performance caveats of its implementation mean that unlike for example Oracle's CTXRULE and CONTEXT indices, it doesn't always eliminate the need for an external text indexing and search system.
"MySQL has some basic full-text search built-in. For FB you need to code it yourself or get a third-party solution."
Firebird has Interbase's LIKE, CONTAINING, and STARTING WITH clauses, all of which are specifically designed for pattern-based full text searches. For example:
"select * from people where last_name like 'Ma%' "returns all records where the "last_name" begins with the letters "Ma".
"select * from people where last_name starting with 'Ma'" is functionally equivalent to the above.
"select * from people where last_name containing 'Ma'" performs a case-insensitive search for records where the two characters occur anywhere in the "last_name" field.
The above clauses can be combined using AND and NOT to perform fairly sophisticated text searches. Interestingly, CONTAINING can also be used with non-text fields as well, and the same may be true of the other the other two (I'm not sure if this is actually the case, though).
While it was certainly politics that lost that war, it had little to do with hippies. Politicians in plush Washington offices thousands of miles away from the people who were actually dealing with the situation directly micromanaged things that should have been left to field commanders, and constantly formulated new and ever more absurd rules of engagement to hobble their army, navy, and airforce with. Add in a 1 year term of service that ensured green recruits far outnumbered experienced veterans, and you have an ideal recipe for low troop morale, which is a disaster for any army.
The US would therefore have lost that war even if there hadn't been mass peace demonstrations -- they'd have simply taken longer to do it, and more Americans would have died. The prior Korean war had already shown that the doctrine of "limited war" doesn't work if the limits are only imposed on your side while the enemy does as they please, so it was inevitable that it would also fail in Viet Nam, just as it's failing today in Iraq. As WWII amply demonstrated, modern wars are won by turning the places the enemy gets its supplies and people from into piles of blood-soaked rubble, not leaving them as refuges where they can regroup and re-equip, and any country that assists them ends up in a similarly brick and limb-strewn state. If a nation lacks either the political will or military might to face this notably brutal and barbarous reality, then they'll also have to accept the fact that they're going to regularly lose engagements against much smaller and immeasurably less well equipped opponents.
"Saber tooth cats had teeth so long as to hinder eating"
Balderdash. The people who say this are notably unaware of the fact that sabre toothed cats had a different jaw structure from other sorts of cats, permitting (for example) Smilodon to open them by 120 degrees, compared to a modern lion's 65 degrees. Smilodon was around for 2.5 million years, and managed to survive for at least 2,000 years after the non-sabre toothed American lion had become extinct, which would obviously not have been the case if it couldn't eat properly. Note also that sabre teeth have evolved in a large number of felines and feline ancestors of all sizes over the last 35 million years, and also evolved in several non-feline predators (e.g. the marsupial sporacodonta such as thylacosmilus), so they must have conferred notable advantages on the animals that had them, otherwise some of them couldn't have survived for in excess of 15 million years (e.g. afrosmilus, albanosmilus). Note also that fossils of sabre-toothed predators have been found in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, so this particular adaptation was widespread geographically, temporally, and in terms of animal types, which points at it being notably advantageous rather than a hindrance.
"Hence two thousand pound lions no longer threaten humans with extinction"
Smilodon popular (the biggest of the six known species) weighed around 600 pounds, not 2,000. By comparison, the American lion and Eurasian cave lion (both of which were contemporaries, and are the biggest true lions that ever lived) weighed 600-700lbs, but were larger overall than smilodon popular (which was a more compact, heavily built animal), and much more likely to pose a threat to humans than the more specialised smilodon. The only predator that lived alongside homo sapiens weighing 2,000lbs was the European cave bear, which was very similar to the American brown bear, but 30% bigger (altars discovered in caves indicate that humans may have worshipped these notably impressive creatures).
"Ok, that's a homicide rate of 1.4 per 100,000"
) shows that while The District Of Columbia have a massive 35.4 / 1000 murder rate, others states such as Iowa (1.3), and Main and New Hampshire (both 1.4) are comparable to England and Wales, and much better than Switzerland.
Which is 1/3 of Switzerland's homicide rate (4.2 / 1000). When one considers that England and Wales have nearly ten times Switzerland's population, that there's a far bigger disparity between the richest and poorest people, and also much more ethnic and cultural diversity, it's perhaps understandable that the pro gun lobby tend to avoid actual statistical homicide rate comparisons when citing Switzerland as a shining example of an armed society (note that I'm neither anti-gun nor pro-gun. Britain's homicide rate was even lower when the firearms laws were less strict, but this correlation does not, as the UK press sometimes like to pretend, imply a causal relationship because there have been many other significant changes in the nature of British society since then).
"the homicide rate in the US for 2005 was 5.6 per 100,000. Yes, there is a difference, but it's not nearly as large as some people here suggest"
It's quite a bit higher than the UK, but in the same ballpark as Switzerland. Note also that comparing the US as a whole against individual European countries isn't really valid (and I say this as a European) because its population and land area is massively bigger, and there is a huge variation in the figures for each state - it would therefore be fairer to look at things on a state by state basis, as a state is in many ways an independent entity with its own government, laws, police forces, courts, and ethnic / religious population distribution. This table for example (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_05.html
"I imagine part of the difference in the homicide rate is due to other social factors, too. (For example, violence is not as acceptable or common on TV in Europe.)
There are indeed many differences in social factors, just as there are differences in social factors between different states in the US, and indeed the cities and rural areas within those states. However, television is not in my experience (I'm fairly well travelled) one of them. The UK for example is very similar to the US in the nature of its television broadcast policies, but most of the rest of Europe is considerably less restrictive, with some countries lacking even "watershed" policies to prevent certain types of content from being broadcast while children are likely to be watching. As with most things that attempt to tie something as complex as human behaviour to a single factor, nobody has been able to successfully show a hard correlation between very liberal broadcast policies and violent crime, so the sometimes rather glaring differences in what each country regards as acceptable are unlikely to change in the near term.