Keep in mind that China's recently launched aircraft carrier was ostensibly purchased from the Ukraine to be a "floating casino" in Macau. For an entertaining recap of how they got the ship, see the wikipedia article here:
While public deception is certainly not unique to China, I think most people would agree that their military aspirations are more opaque than most people think.
I wouldn't trust those clods with printed maps (which are all censored to suit their tastes) so why on earth would I trust them to not only provide me with nav data, but to have the ability to track my receiver? Jeebus....
All this while the vast majority of their country lives in what most first world countries would consider abject poverty.
At short distances, a metal coat hanger will be indistinguishable from "audiophile" speaker cable in a blind listening test. You've got to laugh at the folks that spend thousands on interconnects, power cables and speaker cables. I liken it to people buying a Bentley instead of a Hyundai when the design requirement is to deliver groceries from point A to point B. However, human nature being what it is, these folks will always find a way to rationalize the expense with smoke, mirrors, and flowery words. And there's always that segment of people who will buy the most expensive of anything simply because they can. *shrug*
Find yourself a cheap econobox gasser and convert it to electric. I have a soft spot for 1st generation Saturns since they're light and reasonably resistant to rust. It's not THAT expensive to do (US$10K in parts plus your labor) since the original car is practically free.
This "army" has been a staple of the CCP for years. They're usually pretty easy to spot on Chinese language sites and (increasingly) on English language sites. The name comes from the reputed 5 mao (or 1/2 of a Chinese yuan) they're paid for each message. That's about 7 US cents. For the Chinese psyche, it's much more satisfying to see a large number of shill posts that "agree" with the party line than to "waste" effort on even a thin veneer of truth.
No problem. But China Telecom must do so through a joint venture where they only get 49% ownership and their partners with 51% must be domestic US companies. I'm sure China Telecom will understand how this is the manner in which to invest in a foreign country while tailoring operations to the foreign culture and history and thereby maximizing success. A win-win for everyone right?
Muahahaha. What's good for the goose. Though I suspect your sarcasm is lost on the wu mao dang who will inevitably post snide replies to this.
I completely agree. Many firms/individuals have the chops/staff to manage things without a support contract. We've got a few hundred production Linux boxes around (mixture of Redhat/CentOS/Oracle) and I can't remember us EVER dropping the dime on a call to RH for anything. We've got enough Linux savvy admins around that we can usually get things sorted quickly on our own. Our corporate overlord has dictated that we stop using RHEL (cuz the support contracts are expensive) and begin standardizing on Oracle's "unbreakable" cruft, which is apparently cheaper to buy support contracts for. Fortunately, the CIO of our subsidiary had some sack and backed our decision to go the free route. We decided to skip the circus that is the CentOS development team/process and will be standardizing on Scientific Linux for all new installs and will be migrating any public facing boxes to SL since CentOS has been unable to meet commitments to get updates out in a timely manner for a couple of years now.
So if you don't need support, there's no moral imperative to buy any. Personally, I'd rather use our finite budget on hardware and making sure my staff is appropriately paid.
It wasn't only this release. Their releases have been slipping farther and father behind as time has gone on. The unforgivable part was the complete lack of updates for CentOS5 while the hamster wheels were spinning trying to get 5.6 out the door. We're talking several months. That's just not acceptable. When people complained, they got a steady diet of "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere." OK, message received.
We've stopped using it at work as a result and will be using SL going forward.
That is absolutely the case. The "wheels of justice" in China only turn that quickly if you've run afoul of a well connected (government cadre) earner. Given the size of Foxconn and the amount of money involved, it's got to be someone (or a number of people) VERY high up in the CCP food chain....hence the harsh and fast sentence.
Anyone making this out as some attempt at enforcing IP laws is kidding themselves.
Changing the user experience for the sake of "changing the user experience" doesn't do it for me. Gnome3 is a downgrade for me and a nudge to check out KDE.
I guess you can't please all the people all the time, but this effort is headed in the wrong direction.
Both the 1955 and 1981 ("purists prefer the former") recordings are pure genius if you can ignore Gould humming in the background while he plays. It's unfortunate that Gould is no longer around to play yet another rendition to publicize a freely available score.
So you get an extortion note. Then what? Do you settle? If not, do you hire a lawyer? Do you do nothing and wait to see if an actual trial happens?
Who's to say that someone isn't being naughty and spoofing your address? Or perhaps someone has sniffed enough of your wireless AP traffic to divine the password and go to town downloading crap?
It took me YEARS to wean most of my AOL using friends/relatives off of AOL. Once something winds up getting "automatically charged" on their credit card every month, a lot of folks are just too lazy to change. None of them were using any of AOL's "value added services" and it was just an email application for them. Most of them already had high speed internet from their cable company or a telco DSL line already. They're all using gmail now.
A few months ago, I stumbled on a box full of DAT backup tapes from the early 90's. Back then I was getting a "full" USENET feed from UUnet via a 56K link using CNEWS plus a bunch of custom hacks on a BSDI box running on some uber expensive 486DX system. In those days I did a simple dump of each filesystem to DAT once a day so a simple restore was able to recover data from a few of the tapes on my CentOS 5.5 desktop. A lot of the tapes had become unreadable though. One of the readable ones contained my news spool for a downstream site.:)
Amazing what seemed to be "risque" on alt.sex.* is now fodder for Oprah on weekday mornings. LOL
Not really. These aren't "protesters trying to stop a building project." Like it or not, they're also criminals who are disrupting websites and networks that other folks are paying to use. However, let's humor you and say they're simple protesters. As every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, you've got to be prepared to be arrested/punished. The long arm of the law doesn't always roll their eyes and wait for you to go away.
More accurately, it's more of Who's Who of Chinese financial aid and economic development assistance recipients.
Nothing to see here. They did the same thing to snub Taiwan at the UN/Olympics/etc. You've gotta love the childlike kneejerk political tantrums tough....
I work for a subsidiary of a large American corporation (cough....GE...cough). My department has had a consistent problem training and retaining the revolving door of TCS (Tata Consulting) and other (mostly Indian) contract workers. The maddening thing is that we're funneled by GE into dealing with these agencies because "we have no headcount" and therefore are not allowed to hire permanent employees often at salaries that American staff would be quite happy with. I came to find out that we're paying $100-110k on an annualized basis for very junior level programmers. We're talking 25 year olds...many straight out of college. Of that, TCS is probably pocketing 30-40% (or perhaps more). Instead of getting these inexperienced folks and handing wads of cash to Tata, I could pay say $100k to an American programmer with a few years of actual/verifiable work experience in our field. The employee would be happy, I'd be tickled to not have to retrain someone for that spot annually, etc. I don't know what loophole in accounting makes this "cheaper" for the US corporation since we lose a LOT of productivity due to the constant revolving door, poor employee integration/communication/etc.
The current system is clearly broken. I think I'm in agreement that a good solution would be to require that H1-B employees be paid a premium over local staff. That way, they're available if you really need them, but there's incentive to source locally first.
Having been involved in developing one of the early GoogleTV apps, I can say that Netflix does indeed work. So it is possible and it's possible with DRM.
However...
For higher end 720p-1080p content, ok....sure, I get it. Make it marginally harder to steal while your "new release" DVDs and BluRay content is in stores for whatever makes sense as a honeymoon period. But for your typical mobile content which is normally at much lower audio/video resolution, spare me.
Be happy that you got your micropayment from whatever android kiosk the owner used, even if it means that someone can "steal" that low rez crap later. Chances are if they really wanted to steal the content, they'd just download a ripped DVD/BluRay disk from the net, so it seems a bit silly to make it harder for folks to pay for the convenience of not bothering with all that.
Those aren't words one would usually hear associated with Paypal. Their customer service is rather poor in my experience so I shiver to think what bank customer service must be like in Australia.
It will be oddly similar to the US/EU standard, sport a Luis Vuitton label, will cost 90% less, and will fail after 3 dockings. Warranty claims will be met by a government official surnamed "Wang" stating that his brother's ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the company that produced them is no longer in business and that the principals have fled to Belize along with the proceeds of their sales. A full investigation will be promised, but appeals for transparency will be met with "mind your own fucking business, laowai!"
Actually, no. The higher combustion temps associated with turbines increases fuel efficiency. The thing to do would be to tune the size/output of a small turbine to act as a generator and then use electric motors to propel the car. I suspect this hasn't been done due to the cost/complexity of a small turbine engine rather than a lack of fuel efficiency.
As an end user, what does LO offer me that I don't/won't get from Oo?
I guess when my distro(s) switch I'll follow along, but is there anything functionally better with LO that would convince an end user like me to be bothered with switching sooner rather than later?
And on another note:
To be frank, I've had a hell of time even getting my company to accept Oo as an alternative to Microsoft's Office product. And now I'll have to explain to a room full of PHBs why it would be better to change to LO after FINALLY getting some traction in having people actually look at Oo as an alternative. Sigh....the petty squabbling on both sides of this issue is just playing into M$'s hands.
There's a shocker...a company monitoring employee use of one of its own products.
Sure, it's a little creepy, but why would any of those employees NOT expect a company like Salesforce (remember, they're in the data mining business) to be looking at employee use of one of their own tools?
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that China's recently launched aircraft carrier was ostensibly purchased from the Ukraine to be a "floating casino" in Macau. For an entertaining recap of how they got the ship, see the wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Varyag
While public deception is certainly not unique to China, I think most people would agree that their military aspirations are more opaque than most people think.
Best,
I wouldn't trust those clods with printed maps (which are all censored to suit their tastes) so why on earth would I trust them to not only provide me with nav data, but to have the ability to track my receiver? Jeebus....
All this while the vast majority of their country lives in what most first world countries would consider abject poverty.
At short distances, a metal coat hanger will be indistinguishable from "audiophile" speaker cable in a blind listening test. You've got to laugh at the folks that spend thousands on interconnects, power cables and speaker cables. I liken it to people buying a Bentley instead of a Hyundai when the design requirement is to deliver groceries from point A to point B. However, human nature being what it is, these folks will always find a way to rationalize the expense with smoke, mirrors, and flowery words. And there's always that segment of people who will buy the most expensive of anything simply because they can. *shrug*
Find yourself a cheap econobox gasser and convert it to electric. I have a soft spot for 1st generation Saturns since they're light and reasonably resistant to rust. It's not THAT expensive to do (US$10K in parts plus your labor) since the original car is practically free.
http://www.phoenixeaa.com/photoalbum/streetevs/suiter1/main.html
This "army" has been a staple of the CCP for years. They're usually pretty easy to spot on Chinese language sites and (increasingly) on English language sites. The name comes from the reputed 5 mao (or 1/2 of a Chinese yuan) they're paid for each message. That's about 7 US cents. For the Chinese psyche, it's much more satisfying to see a large number of shill posts that "agree" with the party line than to "waste" effort on even a thin veneer of truth.
China Telecom Mulls Entry Into US Telecoms Market
No problem. But China Telecom must do so through a joint venture where they only get 49% ownership and their partners with 51% must be domestic US companies. I'm sure China Telecom will understand how this is the manner in which to invest in a foreign country while tailoring operations to the foreign culture and history and thereby maximizing success. A win-win for everyone right?
Muahahaha. What's good for the goose. Though I suspect your sarcasm is lost on the wu mao dang who will inevitably post snide replies to this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
I completely agree. Many firms/individuals have the chops/staff to manage things without a support contract. We've got a few hundred production Linux boxes around (mixture of Redhat/CentOS/Oracle) and I can't remember us EVER dropping the dime on a call to RH for anything. We've got enough Linux savvy admins around that we can usually get things sorted quickly on our own. Our corporate overlord has dictated that we stop using RHEL (cuz the support contracts are expensive) and begin standardizing on Oracle's "unbreakable" cruft, which is apparently cheaper to buy support contracts for. Fortunately, the CIO of our subsidiary had some sack and backed our decision to go the free route. We decided to skip the circus that is the CentOS development team/process and will be standardizing on Scientific Linux for all new installs and will be migrating any public facing boxes to SL since CentOS has been unable to meet commitments to get updates out in a timely manner for a couple of years now.
So if you don't need support, there's no moral imperative to buy any. Personally, I'd rather use our finite budget on hardware and making sure my staff is appropriately paid.
Best,
Ya think? :)
I think I'll decline (on both memberships).
It wasn't only this release. Their releases have been slipping farther and father behind as time has gone on. The unforgivable part was the complete lack of updates for CentOS5 while the hamster wheels were spinning trying to get 5.6 out the door. We're talking several months. That's just not acceptable. When people complained, they got a steady diet of "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere." OK, message received.
We've stopped using it at work as a result and will be using SL going forward.
Best,
That is absolutely the case. The "wheels of justice" in China only turn that quickly if you've run afoul of a well connected (government cadre) earner. Given the size of Foxconn and the amount of money involved, it's got to be someone (or a number of people) VERY high up in the CCP food chain....hence the harsh and fast sentence.
Anyone making this out as some attempt at enforcing IP laws is kidding themselves.
Changing the user experience for the sake of "changing the user experience" doesn't do it for me. Gnome3 is a downgrade for me and a nudge to check out KDE.
I guess you can't please all the people all the time, but this effort is headed in the wrong direction.
Best,
by which others are judged.
Both the 1955 and 1981 ("purists prefer the former") recordings are pure genius if you can ignore Gould humming in the background while he plays. It's unfortunate that Gould is no longer around to play yet another rendition to publicize a freely available score.
For those who care:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould
So you get an extortion note. Then what? Do you settle? If not, do you hire a lawyer? Do you do nothing and wait to see if an actual trial happens?
Who's to say that someone isn't being naughty and spoofing your address? Or perhaps someone has sniffed enough of your wireless AP traffic to divine the password and go to town downloading crap?
It took me YEARS to wean most of my AOL using friends/relatives off of AOL. Once something winds up getting "automatically charged" on their credit card every month, a lot of folks are just too lazy to change. None of them were using any of AOL's "value added services" and it was just an email application for them. Most of them already had high speed internet from their cable company or a telco DSL line already. They're all using gmail now.
A few months ago, I stumbled on a box full of DAT backup tapes from the early 90's. Back then I was getting a "full" USENET feed from UUnet via a 56K link using CNEWS plus a bunch of custom hacks on a BSDI box running on some uber expensive 486DX system. In those days I did a simple dump of each filesystem to DAT once a day so a simple restore was able to recover data from a few of the tapes on my CentOS 5.5 desktop. A lot of the tapes had become unreadable though. One of the readable ones contained my news spool for a downstream site. :)
Amazing what seemed to be "risque" on alt.sex.* is now fodder for Oprah on weekday mornings. LOL
Best,
Not really. These aren't "protesters trying to stop a building project." Like it or not, they're also criminals who are disrupting websites and networks that other folks are paying to use. However, let's humor you and say they're simple protesters. As every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, you've got to be prepared to be arrested/punished. The long arm of the law doesn't always roll their eyes and wait for you to go away.
Best,
More accurately, it's more of Who's Who of Chinese financial aid and economic development assistance recipients.
Nothing to see here. They did the same thing to snub Taiwan at the UN/Olympics/etc. You've gotta love the childlike kneejerk political tantrums tough....
I work for a subsidiary of a large American corporation (cough....GE...cough). My department has had a consistent problem training and retaining the revolving door of TCS (Tata Consulting) and other (mostly Indian) contract workers. The maddening thing is that we're funneled by GE into dealing with these agencies because "we have no headcount" and therefore are not allowed to hire permanent employees often at salaries that American staff would be quite happy with. I came to find out that we're paying $100-110k on an annualized basis for very junior level programmers. We're talking 25 year olds...many straight out of college. Of that, TCS is probably pocketing 30-40% (or perhaps more). Instead of getting these inexperienced folks and handing wads of cash to Tata, I could pay say $100k to an American programmer with a few years of actual/verifiable work experience in our field. The employee would be happy, I'd be tickled to not have to retrain someone for that spot annually, etc. I don't know what loophole in accounting makes this "cheaper" for the US corporation since we lose a LOT of productivity due to the constant revolving door, poor employee integration/communication/etc.
The current system is clearly broken. I think I'm in agreement that a good solution would be to require that H1-B employees be paid a premium over local staff. That way, they're available if you really need them, but there's incentive to source locally first.
Having been involved in developing one of the early GoogleTV apps, I can say that Netflix does indeed work. So it is possible and it's possible with DRM.
However...
For higher end 720p-1080p content, ok....sure, I get it. Make it marginally harder to steal while your "new release" DVDs and BluRay content is in stores for whatever makes sense as a honeymoon period. But for your typical mobile content which is normally at much lower audio/video resolution, spare me.
Be happy that you got your micropayment from whatever android kiosk the owner used, even if it means that someone can "steal" that low rez crap later. Chances are if they really wanted to steal the content, they'd just download a ripped DVD/BluRay disk from the net, so it seems a bit silly to make it harder for folks to pay for the convenience of not bothering with all that.
Best,
Those aren't words one would usually hear associated with Paypal. Their customer service is rather poor in my experience so I shiver to think what bank customer service must be like in Australia.
Seems odd that CNBC would be an "early adopter" and NBC would be actively sandbagging the same project.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/458030-Google_TV_Tunes_To_Turner_HBO_CNBC_Netflix_And_Others.php
It will be oddly similar to the US/EU standard, sport a Luis Vuitton label, will cost 90% less, and will fail after 3 dockings. Warranty claims will be met by a government official surnamed "Wang" stating that his brother's ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the company that produced them is no longer in business and that the principals have fled to Belize along with the proceeds of their sales. A full investigation will be promised, but appeals for transparency will be met with "mind your own fucking business, laowai!"
Film at 11.
Actually, no. The higher combustion temps associated with turbines increases fuel efficiency. The thing to do would be to tune the size/output of a small turbine to act as a generator and then use electric motors to propel the car. I suspect this hasn't been done due to the cost/complexity of a small turbine engine rather than a lack of fuel efficiency.
As an end user, what does LO offer me that I don't/won't get from Oo?
I guess when my distro(s) switch I'll follow along, but is there anything functionally better with LO that would convince an end user like me to be bothered with switching sooner rather than later?
And on another note:
To be frank, I've had a hell of time even getting my company to accept Oo as an alternative to Microsoft's Office product. And now I'll have to explain to a room full of PHBs why it would be better to change to LO after FINALLY getting some traction in having people actually look at Oo as an alternative. Sigh....the petty squabbling on both sides of this issue is just playing into M$'s hands.
There's a shocker...a company monitoring employee use of one of its own products.
Sure, it's a little creepy, but why would any of those employees NOT expect a company like Salesforce (remember, they're in the data mining business) to be looking at employee use of one of their own tools?
Must be a slow news week.