Berlusconi didn't actually call the German politician a Nazi, he compared him to a Nazi prison commander in a poor taste joke. He has a complete stranglehold on the media, which he uses to his own political ends. He was facing corruption charges but passed a law that exempted himself from any form of criminal charges.
to business cards! So, if I am at a conference and I talk to someone doing interesting stuff, we can just have the business cards touch and exchange all necessary contact information. Now that would be really easy. If there were a way to wire this thing to your fingertips, you could exchange the information by shaking hands:)
Enough with the "Microsoft recognising talent" crap, hiring someone as PR fodder simply isn't the same thing. He may or many not be talented but I doubt that was the primary drive for hiring an ex-RedHat employee.
As for quoting "even companies that support open source are just as motivated by commercial interests as any other commercial software vendor", without putting any context around that it doesn't make any sense. If it means "all companies want to make money" then duh. If it means that every company will throw away its ethics and even act illegally (such as the company 'Microsoft') to make a profit then that simply isn't true.
But even more than Moore's documentary, I hope more and more images and video keeps coming out of Iraq in regards to the abuse, torture, rape and slaughter of Iraqi citizens, most of whom are guilty of no crime. That more than anything is Bush's legacy, his mark upon the world and truly the images that best define our Fascist Leader and his doctrines.
I'm sorry, George Bush is responsible for Iraqi women being raped? Can you please point us to examples of this? I've seen pictures of abuse by US troops but not torture (humiliation is awful, but doesn't compare to real sadistic physical torture practiced in many parts of the world). If you think rape, murder and torture are really Bush's real legacy to the world, you must be living in a parallel universe to the rest of us. They may be throwing away their civil liberties left, right and center, but America is certainly decades ahead of most of the other countries in the world when it comes to basic human rights.
Or: 1 invalid patent down.... n-1 invalid patents to go. Unfortunately the US legal system is non-deterministic, and so you may wish to use quantum theory to try and calculate the time until n=0
Without prohibition illegal drugs would cost 100th of their current price and would save the US over 15 billion dollars every year in law enforcement and prison costs.
About what it would cost in lost productivity.:-)
BTW, studies in the Netherlands showed that drug use did not increase with an easing supply.
I call BS on this one, unless they happened to all be junkies in the first place. Provide link to this study please.
Computer: The computer is an evolved version of something which has existed for some time and is based on numerous contributions. Modern digital computing though can be said to be based on a handful of significant inventions and ideas. The most important of these ideas are von Neumann architecture, based on work done by John von Neumann a Hungarian-American who did the majority of his most important work at Princeton. The most important inventions where transistors (invented by Bell Labs in 1947), integrated circuits (conceived of by Britain's Geoffrey W.A. Dummer in 1952 but not successfully constructed until 1958 by Jack Kilby of TI and made into a useful device in 1962 by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor), and the microprocessor (first developed by Marcian Hoff while working at Intel).
You missed probably the biggest credit: Alan Turing.
Second, what's the practical difference between uncertainty and doubt?
How about:
doubt - when you aren't sure if his gun is loaded
uncertainty - you don't know if he's going to pull the trigger
Why can't we just instill fear rather than spreading FUD? It's not butter or anything.
It's the perpetrator that instills the fear. The hapless victims spread the FUD, magnifying the attack and inflicting more damage on themselves in the process.
No! Incorrect assumptions like that are exactly why these fires and explosions keep occurring worldwide. The battery could obviously cause a fire, all but the very smallest batteries can, but the primary hazard is sparks caused by the RF voltage induced in the pump nozzle. Under certain conditions of dimensions and position there are resonances at some of the cellular frequencies, which will magnify the actual voltage to the level where a spark will occur.
You are suggesting it's RF resonance causing the explosion as opposed to a spark from the phone igniting the vapours or any static discharge? Please point us to a single piece of evidence.
It amazes me how in the UK, where warning notices are to be seen quite often in filling stations, that imbeciles continue their pathetic and unnecessary conversations while filling. If I see one near me, I move, and quickly...... It is a criminal offence under the petroleum spirit regulations, it is time that it was enforced properly.
I personally don't believe there is a risk, I'm with the static theory.
BTW most HF/VHF/UHF communications equipment is potentially lethal in these circumstances. I know that cellular base stations are sometimes sited on the premises, they are carefully positioned, and the inverse square law ensures that the signal level at the pumps is well below the safety limit.
We all know about the inverse square law, and it's enough to take a mobile phone power down to a level not to affect the brain a few millimeters away let alone a whacking great conductor (with no pointy bits) a few feet away. I refer you to my answer to paragraph one.
It is sad that the general public are so ignorant and ill-informed as to constantly put other people's lifes at risk by this stupid behaviour. In the UK the law requires you to switch off before entering the filling station, off means off, not standby, because if the mobile needs to access the network or respond to an incoming call, its first and unpredictable transmission will be at full power!
That's not what I've read on the GSM protocol. I've read it latches on to the lower power signal to conserve battery.
Don't get me started on where else they are lethal such as on aircraft, at least one businessman is, very properly, in jail in the UK as a result of his wilful ignorance on that score. If I were the judge, I would have made it a life sentence, because he put so many lives at risk, even when told not to. If stiff sentences were handed out for using mobiles in filling stations, the practice would diminish substantially. It would not stop entirely, there is always some idiot who knows better than the safety legislators.
What an irrelevant arguement. This law is about potentially disrupting computer systems on a craft, not about making them explode. And in fact the maximum risk is when the craft is on the ground and not in the air.
Knoppix is great sysadmin tool to carry around. I've fixed several NT machines with it skipping the need of complete reinstall. The read/write ntfs driver is what makes the cd so powerful. In most of the cases I've come across, it's enough to throw the cd in, reboot, mount the root ntfs, edit/replace boot.ini or some other system file with error, save, reboot, and there you have it, working NT box. It's awesome if you know what you're doing with it.
Knoppix was the first thing in my mind... why not take it one further? A specialised Knoppix which boots and then has one clickable icon on the desktop. Launching this automatically detects NTFS/FAT partitions, downloads the latest definition files over the 'net, and automatically cleans up a Windows machine. It can even detect if the user has Norton or another anti-virus and use that engine to do the cleaning.
It can also happen to have a few useful apps installed, plus a GUI to apt-get showing 1000's of titles ready to install immediately for free, in case they shouldn't wish to remove the CD upon next boot...
From there they proceed to show how Linux was (*shock*) a clone of Unix! (Probably leaving out the fact that there are literally dozens of them.)
I thought it was a clone of Minix, an education teaching tool. The fact that the same GNU toolset (which had nothing to do with UNIX) was ported onto it probably gave it a UNIX-like feel.
When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere.
Generating electricity = burning fossil fuel? Not true. A small but rapidly growing portion is generated by renewable energy, including solar, wind and tidal.
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Ignoring your repetition of an assertion that isn't true (for instance here in France 80% of the electricity is generated by nuclear power), even with traditional fossil fuels you have to consider the location. Would you rather have one large burner stuck out on the countryside somewhere or hundreds of thousands of mini-burners outside your house and where you walk? Equipment degrades over time... would you rather maintain and upgrade with new technology a small number of power stations or monitor and upgrade millions of vehicles? If vehicles become dependent on hydrogen you can generate it however you want, and phase out unhealthy power sources such as coal over time (think of hydrogen as a well documented and stable API, and coal as some legacy code). I really don't think you are thinking far enough ahead.
I've used Gentoo as my primary OS for years and never donated. I've just chipped in myself, despite not usually using my card over the net (the store is personally run by Daniel Robbins and so I trust it). After my donation I just feel like I've had the best value for money ever. All the pleasure and excitement Gentoo has given me, and the sheer amount of time saved and enhanced productivity through the power of emerge.
Daniel not only put in so much work into coding, but also seemed to live in the IRC chatrooms helping newbies with their problems in such a patient way. Hopefully he will still pop in when he gets time! He's such a nice guy. He certainly doesn't deserve to end up so much worse off after giving us Gentoo. If we can make it so he comes off with at least no ill-effects then that will be great.
I've use Gnome, then became comfortable with KDE, and now use xfce4. No matter which, I've always used ROX for my Filer. It's the best out there and works perfectly under all the window managers. I agree with some other posters, he should have reviewed Gnome and then said he was disatisfied with Nautilus and recommended another Filer (one of his preference).
The only thing that could possibly make your Linux TCO high now is perhaps re-training your tech staff who have undoubtedly been brought up on MS Windows if they went to college in the US, and that's not terribly expensive in the long run...
If they run xpde they won't even notice the difference.
You do realize that it was never a question of if Iraq had WMD's or not. The world saw him use them, for cryin out loud. The only question that remains is what he did with them. He was supposed to show the world proof that he destroyed the weapons. That never happened.
At last someone speaks some sense as opposed to the rather trendy abandoning of facts because it's the "politically correct barb". I feel you may be outnumbered by those that have a tabloid-like memory.
Baystar and Bank of Canado do NOT want to pull out of SCO, it is Linux infidels putting that in your head. In fact all the big American banks are trying to buy our stock. Shares in Red Hat and IBM are falling as we speak. Novell employees will be forced to eat their stock for sustenance. Join the winning side before it is too late. Send your CV to jobs@sco.com.
The other day they showed on TV how advanced Estonia is. You can pay your parking lot or buy flowers by SMS. Wow, that's really advanced and even if it so, I don't see how practical it can be. Come on, lose 2 minutes to type and SMS instead of paying by cash or credit card....
Would you rather lose those minutes whilst walking to where you want to go, or would you rather lose those minutes stuck in a queue?
When did the words like "around", "about", and "roughly" become inadequate to convey an approximation?
around: I'm about to round this number up to make it sound more impressive about: this is really a shot in the dark roughly: I counted ages ago, it can't have increased by much circa: I think I know but I'm using this word as a disclaimer just in case
This obviously needs to be a clear configuration option near the top of the list. Around half the people want email to go all into one folder, and the other half (including myself) want different accounts to go into different folders. Having the different folders was one of the reasons I moved to Thunderbird.
If I spend 2 hours comparing deals, checking competitors, and surfing sites to track down $50 savings on a gadget, did I gain anything? I could have spent that 2 hours with my family, working on consulting gigs, and doing other household chores. It is called the opportunity cost of time in economics. It didn't cost $0.00 to track down that $50 - there was a cost.
If you then buy regularly from that site, those two hours then become better and better value as the saving you made multiplies.
Ah yes, BASIC. I remember it distinctly as it's what I used for the longest time. Didn't have to declare your variables, had to contend with line numbers (that renum thing came in very handy), and of course the ever-popular GOTO statements.
Fortunately I've moved on from C to a language called PHP. There I don't need to declare my variables, and when there is an error at run-time it gives me the exact line number. Ah, how programming languages have advanced. I've never used GOTO in any language including the many years of BASIC.
Slashdot Mirror
Berlusconi didn't actually call the German politician a Nazi, he compared him to a Nazi prison commander in a poor taste joke. He has a complete stranglehold on the media, which he uses to his own political ends. He was facing corruption charges but passed a law that exempted himself from any form of criminal charges.
Phillip.
to business cards! So, if I am at a conference and I talk to someone doing interesting stuff, we can just have the business cards touch and exchange all necessary contact information. Now that would be really easy. If there were a way to wire this thing to your fingertips, you could exchange the information by shaking hands :)
That's been around for ages.
Phillip.
Enough with the "Microsoft recognising talent" crap, hiring someone as PR fodder simply isn't the same thing. He may or many not be talented but I doubt that was the primary drive for hiring an ex-RedHat employee.
As for quoting "even companies that support open source are just as motivated by commercial interests as any other commercial software vendor", without putting any context around that it doesn't make any sense. If it means "all companies want to make money" then duh. If it means that every company will throw away its ethics and even act illegally (such as the company 'Microsoft') to make a profit then that simply isn't true.
Phillip.
But even more than Moore's documentary, I hope more and more images and video keeps coming out of Iraq in regards to the abuse, torture, rape and slaughter of Iraqi citizens, most of whom are guilty of no crime. That more than anything is Bush's legacy, his mark upon the world and truly the images that best define our Fascist Leader and his doctrines.
I'm sorry, George Bush is responsible for Iraqi women being raped? Can you please point us to examples of this? I've seen pictures of abuse by US troops but not torture (humiliation is awful, but doesn't compare to real sadistic physical torture practiced in many parts of the world). If you think rape, murder and torture are really Bush's real legacy to the world, you must be living in a parallel universe to the rest of us. They may be throwing away their civil liberties left, right and center, but America is certainly decades ahead of most of the other countries in the world when it comes to basic human rights.
Phillip.
1 invalid patent down .... n invalid patents to go
.... n-1 invalid patents to go. Unfortunately the US legal system is non-deterministic, and so you may wish to use quantum theory to try and calculate the time until n=0
Or: 1 invalid patent down
Phillip.
Without prohibition illegal drugs would cost 100th of their current price and would save the US over 15 billion dollars every year in law enforcement and prison costs.
:-)
About what it would cost in lost productivity.
BTW, studies in the Netherlands showed that drug use did not increase with an easing supply.
I call BS on this one, unless they happened to all be junkies in the first place. Provide link to this study please.
Phillip.
Computer: The computer is an evolved version of something which has existed for some time and is based on numerous contributions. Modern digital computing though can be said to be based on a handful of significant inventions and ideas. The most important of these ideas are von Neumann architecture, based on work done by John von Neumann a Hungarian-American who did the majority of his most important work at Princeton. The most important inventions where transistors (invented by Bell Labs in 1947), integrated circuits (conceived of by Britain's Geoffrey W.A. Dummer in 1952 but not successfully constructed until 1958 by Jack Kilby of TI and made into a useful device in 1962 by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor), and the microprocessor (first developed by Marcian Hoff while working at Intel).
You missed probably the biggest credit: Alan Turing.
Phillip.
Second, what's the practical difference between uncertainty and doubt?
How about:
doubt - when you aren't sure if his gun is loaded
uncertainty - you don't know if he's going to pull the trigger
Why can't we just instill fear rather than spreading FUD? It's not butter or anything.
It's the perpetrator that instills the fear. The hapless victims spread the FUD, magnifying the attack and inflicting more damage on themselves in the process.
Phillip.
No! Incorrect assumptions like that are exactly why these fires and explosions keep occurring worldwide. The battery could obviously cause a fire, all but the very smallest batteries can, but the primary hazard is sparks caused by the RF voltage induced in the pump nozzle. Under certain conditions of dimensions and position there are resonances at some of the cellular frequencies, which will magnify the actual voltage to the level where a spark will occur.
You are suggesting it's RF resonance causing the explosion as opposed to a spark from the phone igniting the vapours or any static discharge? Please point us to a single piece of evidence.
It amazes me how in the UK, where warning notices are to be seen quite often in filling stations, that imbeciles continue their pathetic and unnecessary conversations while filling. If I see one near me, I move, and quickly...... It is a criminal offence under the petroleum spirit regulations, it is time that it was enforced properly.
I personally don't believe there is a risk, I'm with the static theory.
BTW most HF/VHF/UHF communications equipment is potentially lethal in these circumstances. I know that cellular base stations are sometimes sited on the premises, they are carefully positioned, and the inverse square law ensures that the signal level at the pumps is well below the safety limit.
We all know about the inverse square law, and it's enough to take a mobile phone power down to a level not to affect the brain a few millimeters away let alone a whacking great conductor (with no pointy bits) a few feet away. I refer you to my answer to paragraph one.
It is sad that the general public are so ignorant and ill-informed as to constantly put other people's lifes at risk by this stupid behaviour. In the UK the law requires you to switch off before entering the filling station, off means off, not standby, because if the mobile needs to access the network or respond to an incoming call, its first and unpredictable transmission will be at full power!
That's not what I've read on the GSM protocol. I've read it latches on to the lower power signal to conserve battery.
Don't get me started on where else they are lethal such as on aircraft, at least one businessman is, very properly, in jail in the UK as a result of his wilful ignorance on that score. If I were the judge, I would have made it a life sentence, because he put so many lives at risk, even when told not to. If stiff sentences were handed out for using mobiles in filling stations, the practice would diminish substantially. It would not stop entirely, there is always some idiot who knows better than the safety legislators.
What an irrelevant arguement. This law is about potentially disrupting computer systems on a craft, not about making them explode. And in fact the maximum risk is when the craft is on the ground and not in the air.
Phillip.
They're flammable and they originate mere inches from our cell phones.
You must be from Europe. I hear that in the USA the distance tends to be that little bit further.
Phillip.
Knoppix is great sysadmin tool to carry around.
I've fixed several NT machines with it skipping the need of complete reinstall.
The read/write ntfs driver is what makes the cd so powerful.
In most of the cases I've come across, it's enough to throw the cd in, reboot, mount the root ntfs, edit/replace boot.ini or some other system file with error, save, reboot, and there you have it, working NT box.
It's awesome if you know what you're doing with it.
Knoppix was the first thing in my mind... why not take it one further? A specialised Knoppix which boots and then has one clickable icon on the desktop. Launching this automatically detects NTFS/FAT partitions, downloads the latest definition files over the 'net, and automatically cleans up a Windows machine. It can even detect if the user has Norton or another anti-virus and use that engine to do the cleaning.
It can also happen to have a few useful apps installed, plus a GUI to apt-get showing 1000's of titles ready to install immediately for free, in case they shouldn't wish to remove the CD upon next boot...
Phillip.
From there they proceed to show how Linux was (*shock*) a clone of Unix!
(Probably leaving out the fact that there are literally dozens of them.)
I thought it was a clone of Minix, an education teaching tool. The fact that the same GNU toolset (which had nothing to do with UNIX) was ported onto it probably gave it a UNIX-like feel.
Phillip.
How can the source code be stolen, when Cisco still has it?
How can you have identity theft if you are still you?
Phillip.
Insightful?
When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere.
Generating electricity = burning fossil fuel? Not true. A small but rapidly growing portion is generated by renewable energy, including solar, wind and tidal.
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Ignoring your repetition of an assertion that isn't true (for instance here in France 80% of the electricity is generated by nuclear power), even with traditional fossil fuels you have to consider the location. Would you rather have one large burner stuck out on the countryside somewhere or hundreds of thousands of mini-burners outside your house and where you walk? Equipment degrades over time... would you rather maintain and upgrade with new technology a small number of power stations or monitor and upgrade millions of vehicles? If vehicles become dependent on hydrogen you can generate it however you want, and phase out unhealthy power sources such as coal over time (think of hydrogen as a well documented and stable API, and coal as some legacy code). I really don't think you are thinking far enough ahead.
Phillip.
I've used Gentoo as my primary OS for years and never donated. I've just chipped in myself, despite not usually using my card over the net (the store is personally run by Daniel Robbins and so I trust it). After my donation I just feel like I've had the best value for money ever. All the pleasure and excitement Gentoo has given me, and the sheer amount of time saved and enhanced productivity through the power of emerge.
Daniel not only put in so much work into coding, but also seemed to live in the IRC chatrooms helping newbies with their problems in such a patient way. Hopefully he will still pop in when he gets time! He's such a nice guy. He certainly doesn't deserve to end up so much worse off after giving us Gentoo. If we can make it so he comes off with at least no ill-effects then that will be great.
Phillip.
I've use Gnome, then became comfortable with KDE, and now use xfce4. No matter which, I've always used ROX for my Filer. It's the best out there and works perfectly under all the window managers. I agree with some other posters, he should have reviewed Gnome and then said he was disatisfied with Nautilus and recommended another Filer (one of his preference).
Phillip.
The only thing that could possibly make your Linux TCO high now is perhaps re-training your tech staff who have undoubtedly been brought up on MS Windows if they went to college in the US, and that's not terribly expensive in the long run...
If they run xpde they won't even notice the difference.
Phillip.
You do realize that it was never a question of if Iraq had WMD's or not. The world saw him use them, for cryin out loud. The only question that remains is what he did with them. He was supposed to show the world proof that he destroyed the weapons. That never happened.
At last someone speaks some sense as opposed to the rather trendy abandoning of facts because it's the "politically correct barb". I feel you may be outnumbered by those that have a tabloid-like memory.
Phillip.
Baystar and Bank of Canado do NOT want to pull out of SCO, it is Linux infidels putting that in your head. In fact all the big American banks are trying to buy our stock. Shares in Red Hat and IBM are falling as we speak. Novell employees will be forced to eat their stock for sustenance. Join the winning side before it is too late. Send your CV to jobs@sco.com.
Phillip.
SCO Information Minister
The other day they showed on TV how advanced Estonia is. You can pay your parking lot or buy flowers by SMS. Wow, that's really advanced and even if it so, I don't see how practical it can be. Come on, lose 2 minutes to type and SMS instead of paying by cash or credit card....
Would you rather lose those minutes whilst walking to where you want to go, or would you rather lose those minutes stuck in a queue?
Phillip.
When did the words like "around", "about", and "roughly" become inadequate to convey an approximation?
around: I'm about to round this number up to make it sound more impressive
about: this is really a shot in the dark
roughly: I counted ages ago, it can't have increased by much
circa: I think I know but I'm using this word as a disclaimer just in case
Phillip.
This obviously needs to be a clear configuration option near the top of the list. Around half the people want email to go all into one folder, and the other half (including myself) want different accounts to go into different folders. Having the different folders was one of the reasons I moved to Thunderbird.
Phillip.
If I spend 2 hours comparing deals, checking competitors, and surfing sites to track down $50 savings on a gadget, did I gain anything? I could have spent that 2 hours with my family, working on consulting gigs, and doing other household chores. It is called the opportunity cost of time in economics. It didn't cost $0.00 to track down that $50 - there was a cost.
If you then buy regularly from that site, those two hours then become better and better value as the saving you made multiplies.
Phillip.
"That action can not be performed. Please contact your system administrator."
I always felt like and idiot talking to myself...
Every time I tried calling him I got an engaged tone...
Phillip.
Ah yes, BASIC. I remember it distinctly as it's what I used for the longest time. Didn't have to declare your variables, had to contend with line numbers (that renum thing came in very handy), and of course the ever-popular GOTO statements.
Fortunately I've moved on from C to a language called PHP. There I don't need to declare my variables, and when there is an error at run-time it gives me the exact line number. Ah, how programming languages have advanced. I've never used GOTO in any language including the many years of BASIC.
Phillip.