Personally, I say F* 'em and let them kill each other cause it's not worth the price we're paying.
Well, disregarding the humanitarian aspects of the massive refugee crisis that would result if we up and left, the main problem with your strategy is that the problems wouldn't remain contained within Iraq. Instead, you'd have a much bigger version of what Lebanon became in the '80s a lawless space that hosts a broad variety of terrorist groups, destabilizing the region, and potentially launching attacks against America.
The main concern is that, if web sites are coded in a cross-browser compatible manner, it makes the OS that the browser is running on irrelevant. After all, if your web-apps don't require IE, then is there any reason for you to be running Windows?
Couple the above sentiment with the growth of web based apps and the migration of existing applications (like word processors, etc.) to the web, and you've got a pretty serious threat to Microsoft's OS monopoly in the long term. After all, you can use Google Docs equally well from your Linux based EEE and your Windows based desktop.
Well that sounds like more of an issue with your particular job than with the IT field in general. There are plenty of companies out there that have jobs that don't require you to spend your free time thinking about work related things.
Yeah... that's what happened in France and all the other countries involved in WWII.
Well, perhaps not France, but I'm sure East Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, and pretty much every country east of Austria would beg to differ with that statement.
Another aside, God help us if this country ever has to fight another real war. To date we have 4101 dead. Not to belittle their sacrifice one bit, but that is over five years. We lost half that on D-Day. How in the world would people be able stomach what would need to be done if there were a real war on?
If it were a "real" war, with a proper justification, I'm sure the public and our allies would be 100% behind the President. Hell, they were 100% behind the administration when we chose to invade Afghanistan. Its only after we got distracted by Iraq that our allies started to split, and public disaffection began to rise. If we'd committed the same amount of effort to Afghanistan as we're spending on Iraq, I'm willing to bet that the Bush administration would have had far more support amongst the public and our foreign allies.
Completely OT, but, if you're asking for street addresses, it helps to phrase the question so that the context of driving directions isn't there. Something like, "If I was sending a letter to you, what would I write on the envelope?" would be a good choice.
All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song.
Not according to the RIAA. After all, these are the people who say that copying songs from your CD to your iPod is illegal.
Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.
How, precisely? This new technology allows for hardware manufacturers to create uniquely keyed processors, just as MasterLock can create uniquely keyed locks. If the song is encrypted, and your digital audio player is the decryption key, then it doesn't matter how you "hack" the song, you'll have to pass around your player with the file in order to get it to play. Of course, if your player breaks, you're SOL, but that's a feature from the record companies' point of view.
Huh? Did you even read your own link? From the second result (the first led me to a 404):
Skepticism: questioning the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual; a doubting attitude; even doubting the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.
Where does it suggest innately resisting things because they are new?
skepticism is simply an innate resistance to something new.
Uh, no. Skepticism is a resistance to anything that doesn't have sufficient evidence backing it up. Generally, yes, these things are usually "new", but it doesn't have to be the case.
Also, lets not forget that we can be skeptical of old things as well. After all, astrology has existed for thousands of years, but that doesn't mean we ought to take astrologers at face value.
meanwhile, the idea that skepticism should or could be taught, when it is already in all of us, is rather silly. skepticism requires very little mental effort, all you have to do is resist another person's idea. this is not difficult to achieve.
On the contrary, it can be very difficult to reject the prevailing worldview, especially when such rejection carries financial or personal costs. Was it easy for Galileo to repeatedly state that Earth moved around the sun, rather than vice versa?
if you have ever spent any time around 2 or 3 year olds, you will find that skepticism is the default reaction to anyone or anything new
You've never actually spent time around young children have you? The natural instinct in children is to trust. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't have to tell kids to not talk to strangers.
One way could be to demonstrate a situation in which skepticism and questioning could have saved lives. For example, in James R. Chiles' book, Inviting Disaster, he mentions the example of a British flight where the right engine had caught fire, but the pilot went on the PA and announced that he was shutting down the left engine (based upon misread instruments, according to crash investigators). At this point, if one of the passengers had been skeptical of the pilots judgment, and had stood up and alerted the flight crew, the subsequent crash may have been avoided.
In another example from the same book, Chiles shows that one of the main reasons the Three Mile Island incident turned out as badly as it did was because of the fact that the operators were trained to not be skeptical of their instruments, despite the fact that many of these instruments had documented constraints on their measurement ability (like temperature sensors that failed to show readings outside of a certain range). If the reactor crew had exercised more skepticism about some of the inconsistent readings they were getting, billions of dollars of damage could have been prevented.
There are many traits that are only useful if they distinguish the bearer from other members of his or her species. Look at mollusks for example. While the vast majority of mollusk shells have right-handed chirality, there are always a certain percentage of mollusks that have left-handed shells. Why is this? Its because the crustaceans that prey on the mollusks have evolved to deal with right-handed shells, and so have difficulty attacking mollusks with left handed shells.
Could geekiness, skepticism and logical mindsets be analogous? Perhaps skeptics are valuable only when they are different from the rest of their peers.
The prices are generally determined by folks who are smarter than I...
No, the prices are set (indirectly) by you, the consumer. After all, if you're not willing to buy, then the producer has to lower its price until you are.
The reason most people don't complain about the cost of Windows is that they never see it. Computer manufacturers include Windows in the cost of the hardware, and customers never see it when they configure their machines, so many assume that Windows is free.
Second, Microsoft is able to engage in price discrimination because of its position as a monopoly supplier. It charges OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo far less than it charges consumers, because OEMs are able to place large orders, guaranteeing a revenue stream.
I bet a lot more people would complain about (and perhaps even forgo) Windows if Microsoft charged OEMs the same amount it charged retail, and the federal anti-trust regulars forced computer manufacturers to offer other operating systems (like retail copies of SuSE, or Red Hat) so that people could compare prices and make an informed choice.
I was speaking to the following quote (perhaps I should have been more clear in my original post):
Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind.
If your customers are overseas and they get the nerfed version of your site that doesn't allow for logins on any sort of interaction they'll certainly take their business to someone who does allow that sort of thing.
Well, originally, the browser was called "Phoenix", for the obvious reason. However, I believe Phoenix was trademarked, so the Mozilla folk couldn't use it.
Oh yeah, because the Windows graphics model is oh so much better. GDI+, anyone?
Like the other stuff is really that much better?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is no other explanation for me for why Xorg and X11 in general are so poor, no one is being paid to develop them like other competing systems.
I don't know about Mac, but, I wouldn't be surprised if the display management code for Windows was at least as quirky that of X.Org.
Basically, developing window managers is hard. Any sort of clean display manager implementation will be severely hampered by the fact that it'll completely break backwards compatibility for almost every application. Even Windows has this problem; look at the incompatibilities and window drawing quirks present in XP and Vista.
Apple got around the issue by saying, "We don't care about backwards compatibility," and providing a virtual machine for those who really needed the older OS to make their apps run.
Of course, if you're working on graphics driver, a VMWare instance is of no use to you, unless you're working on the drivers for the VMWare emulated graphics card.
Its quite tempting to think, "This code sucks; I bet I could make a better, faster, cheaper version in my spare time!" However, if you read the software engineering literature, you'll see that from-scratch rewrites are no more likely to be bug free and on schedule than releases from improving the existing codebase. This is because the new team usually ends up making mistakes that were fixed in the old version, or making small changes to behavior that add up to significant incompatibilities.
In essence, you either end up rewriting the same code from scratch, or you have code that isn't backwards compatible with the existing version. For an important bit of software like X, which has lots of downstream dependencies, neither is an acceptable choice.
Not to to mention the fact that, in all the software engineering literature I've seen, from-scratch rewrites have been more likely to miss schedule targets than releases based on the existing codebase.
If you're operating a U.S. bank, why in the world would you want Vietnamese and Chinese IPs visiting your site or hammering your firewall ?
As a U.S. bank are you really going to tell your customers, "By the way, if you ever need to access your account while on vacation outside the country, you're out of luck?"
Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind.
Most of your customers assume that World Wide Web means just that: world wide. If I were a business owner, I'd certainly think twice before potentially driving away customers by telling them, in essence, "I can't trust you because you're not from the same country I am."
Except not. When I went to the dealership last year to buy my new Hyundai Elantra there were equal numbers of manuals and automatics. If I'd wanted to, I could have driven off the lot with a manual.
Well, sort of. In my opinion, the War Powers Resolution sets the bar too low. It allows for Congressional "authorization", which could be something as small as a nonbinding resolution. I don't think that's a strong enough requirement. Congress should have to formally declare war in order for US troops to be deployed.
Now, for cases like Osama bin Laden, where war cannot be declared, that's what Bills of Attainder are for.
Y'know, this'd be the perfect place to put in a "WHOOSH" comment, but I won't. That's because the joke flew so far above your head, you couldn't even see the contrail.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, disregarding the humanitarian aspects of the massive refugee crisis that would result if we up and left, the main problem with your strategy is that the problems wouldn't remain contained within Iraq. Instead, you'd have a much bigger version of what Lebanon became in the '80s a lawless space that hosts a broad variety of terrorist groups, destabilizing the region, and potentially launching attacks against America.
Right. I was just pointing out that not all the countries liberated from German occupation enjoyed peace, prosperity and democracy.
The main concern is that, if web sites are coded in a cross-browser compatible manner, it makes the OS that the browser is running on irrelevant. After all, if your web-apps don't require IE, then is there any reason for you to be running Windows?
Couple the above sentiment with the growth of web based apps and the migration of existing applications (like word processors, etc.) to the web, and you've got a pretty serious threat to Microsoft's OS monopoly in the long term. After all, you can use Google Docs equally well from your Linux based EEE and your Windows based desktop.
Well that sounds like more of an issue with your particular job than with the IT field in general. There are plenty of companies out there that have jobs that don't require you to spend your free time thinking about work related things.
Well, perhaps not France, but I'm sure East Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, and pretty much every country east of Austria would beg to differ with that statement.
Another aside, God help us if this country ever has to fight another real war. To date we have 4101 dead. Not to belittle their sacrifice one bit, but that is over five years. We lost half that on D-Day. How in the world would people be able stomach what would need to be done if there were a real war on?If it were a "real" war, with a proper justification, I'm sure the public and our allies would be 100% behind the President. Hell, they were 100% behind the administration when we chose to invade Afghanistan. Its only after we got distracted by Iraq that our allies started to split, and public disaffection began to rise. If we'd committed the same amount of effort to Afghanistan as we're spending on Iraq, I'm willing to bet that the Bush administration would have had far more support amongst the public and our foreign allies.
Completely OT, but, if you're asking for street addresses, it helps to phrase the question so that the context of driving directions isn't there. Something like, "If I was sending a letter to you, what would I write on the envelope?" would be a good choice.
Not according to the RIAA. After all, these are the people who say that copying songs from your CD to your iPod is illegal.
Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.How, precisely? This new technology allows for hardware manufacturers to create uniquely keyed processors, just as MasterLock can create uniquely keyed locks. If the song is encrypted, and your digital audio player is the decryption key, then it doesn't matter how you "hack" the song, you'll have to pass around your player with the file in order to get it to play. Of course, if your player breaks, you're SOL, but that's a feature from the record companies' point of view.
Huh? Did you even read your own link? From the second result (the first led me to a 404):
Skepticism: questioning the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual; a doubting attitude; even doubting the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.Where does it suggest innately resisting things because they are new?
Uh, no. Skepticism is a resistance to anything that doesn't have sufficient evidence backing it up. Generally, yes, these things are usually "new", but it doesn't have to be the case.
Also, lets not forget that we can be skeptical of old things as well. After all, astrology has existed for thousands of years, but that doesn't mean we ought to take astrologers at face value.
meanwhile, the idea that skepticism should or could be taught, when it is already in all of us, is rather silly. skepticism requires very little mental effort, all you have to do is resist another person's idea. this is not difficult to achieve.On the contrary, it can be very difficult to reject the prevailing worldview, especially when such rejection carries financial or personal costs. Was it easy for Galileo to repeatedly state that Earth moved around the sun, rather than vice versa?
if you have ever spent any time around 2 or 3 year olds, you will find that skepticism is the default reaction to anyone or anything newYou've never actually spent time around young children have you? The natural instinct in children is to trust. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't have to tell kids to not talk to strangers.
One way could be to demonstrate a situation in which skepticism and questioning could have saved lives. For example, in James R. Chiles' book, Inviting Disaster, he mentions the example of a British flight where the right engine had caught fire, but the pilot went on the PA and announced that he was shutting down the left engine (based upon misread instruments, according to crash investigators). At this point, if one of the passengers had been skeptical of the pilots judgment, and had stood up and alerted the flight crew, the subsequent crash may have been avoided.
In another example from the same book, Chiles shows that one of the main reasons the Three Mile Island incident turned out as badly as it did was because of the fact that the operators were trained to not be skeptical of their instruments, despite the fact that many of these instruments had documented constraints on their measurement ability (like temperature sensors that failed to show readings outside of a certain range). If the reactor crew had exercised more skepticism about some of the inconsistent readings they were getting, billions of dollars of damage could have been prevented.
Why do you suggest that Darwin is napping?
There are many traits that are only useful if they distinguish the bearer from other members of his or her species. Look at mollusks for example. While the vast majority of mollusk shells have right-handed chirality, there are always a certain percentage of mollusks that have left-handed shells. Why is this? Its because the crustaceans that prey on the mollusks have evolved to deal with right-handed shells, and so have difficulty attacking mollusks with left handed shells.
Could geekiness, skepticism and logical mindsets be analogous? Perhaps skeptics are valuable only when they are different from the rest of their peers.
No, the prices are set (indirectly) by you, the consumer. After all, if you're not willing to buy, then the producer has to lower its price until you are.
The reason most people don't complain about the cost of Windows is that they never see it. Computer manufacturers include Windows in the cost of the hardware, and customers never see it when they configure their machines, so many assume that Windows is free.
Second, Microsoft is able to engage in price discrimination because of its position as a monopoly supplier. It charges OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo far less than it charges consumers, because OEMs are able to place large orders, guaranteeing a revenue stream.
I bet a lot more people would complain about (and perhaps even forgo) Windows if Microsoft charged OEMs the same amount it charged retail, and the federal anti-trust regulars forced computer manufacturers to offer other operating systems (like retail copies of SuSE, or Red Hat) so that people could compare prices and make an informed choice.
I was speaking to the following quote (perhaps I should have been more clear in my original post):
Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind.If your customers are overseas and they get the nerfed version of your site that doesn't allow for logins on any sort of interaction they'll certainly take their business to someone who does allow that sort of thing.
Well, originally, the browser was called "Phoenix", for the obvious reason. However, I believe Phoenix was trademarked, so the Mozilla folk couldn't use it.
Oh yeah, because the Windows graphics model is oh so much better. GDI+, anyone?
I don't know about Mac, but, I wouldn't be surprised if the display management code for Windows was at least as quirky that of X.Org.
Basically, developing window managers is hard. Any sort of clean display manager implementation will be severely hampered by the fact that it'll completely break backwards compatibility for almost every application. Even Windows has this problem; look at the incompatibilities and window drawing quirks present in XP and Vista.
Apple got around the issue by saying, "We don't care about backwards compatibility," and providing a virtual machine for those who really needed the older OS to make their apps run.
Of course, if you're working on graphics driver, a VMWare instance is of no use to you, unless you're working on the drivers for the VMWare emulated graphics card.
Its quite tempting to think, "This code sucks; I bet I could make a better, faster, cheaper version in my spare time!" However, if you read the software engineering literature, you'll see that from-scratch rewrites are no more likely to be bug free and on schedule than releases from improving the existing codebase. This is because the new team usually ends up making mistakes that were fixed in the old version, or making small changes to behavior that add up to significant incompatibilities.
In essence, you either end up rewriting the same code from scratch, or you have code that isn't backwards compatible with the existing version. For an important bit of software like X, which has lots of downstream dependencies, neither is an acceptable choice.
Not to to mention the fact that, in all the software engineering literature I've seen, from-scratch rewrites have been more likely to miss schedule targets than releases based on the existing codebase.
Just something to think about: What's more American, a Toyota assembled in Kentucky, or a GM assembled in Mexico?
As a U.S. bank are you really going to tell your customers, "By the way, if you ever need to access your account while on vacation outside the country, you're out of luck?"
Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind.Most of your customers assume that World Wide Web means just that: world wide. If I were a business owner, I'd certainly think twice before potentially driving away customers by telling them, in essence, "I can't trust you because you're not from the same country I am."
Heh. In that case, forget 90 days; 90 seconds ought to suffice.
Except not. When I went to the dealership last year to buy my new Hyundai Elantra there were equal numbers of manuals and automatics. If I'd wanted to, I could have driven off the lot with a manual.
Well, sort of. In my opinion, the War Powers Resolution sets the bar too low. It allows for Congressional "authorization", which could be something as small as a nonbinding resolution. I don't think that's a strong enough requirement. Congress should have to formally declare war in order for US troops to be deployed.
Now, for cases like Osama bin Laden, where war cannot be declared, that's what Bills of Attainder are for.
Y'know, this'd be the perfect place to put in a "WHOOSH" comment, but I won't. That's because the joke flew so far above your head, you couldn't even see the contrail.