You put "man" in quotes, presumably to show that the referenced individuals are less than a real man. Does a woman ignoring the situation also qualify as less than a real woman? If not, why not?
You apparently witnessed these occasions yourself. If "not a single person" stopped to help, does that include you? Why didn't you stop to help? Can we conclude that you are less than a real man/woman? If not, why not?
You claim this is a sign of the times. Presumably this means that there was a previous time when things were better. When exactly was this? Was it before or after Luke 10:25-37 was written?
I agree that quantum computing is too far ahead of the curve to exist in a secret government lab.
However, I don't think it would be necessary for the government to have a "clandestine army of engineers and physicists that far outclassed our brightest minds in academia." All that's needed is a clandestine brigade of engineers and physicists that equals the brightest minds in academia. The secret researchers presumably have access to all the papers published by academia, as well as to fantastic lab resources and the ability to spend all their time working on the science rather than doing grant-writing. This would be more than enough to keep them well ahead of the academic state of the art.
What if there is an academic line of research which will result in a novel way to factor large numbers next year, rendering PGP much more breakable than we thought? If so, there's no reason to think that the NSA didn't figure it out last year.
They haven't become evident yet, because everyone's still dealing with application and driver compatibility.
Once the drivers and applications work, enterprises will adopt Vista for the new group policy features alone. There's no reason MS couldn't have done this on XP, and I'm sure customers will demand that MS backport it. But if Microsoft hangs tough, it's so compelling a feature that enterprises will follow MS to Vista just to get it.
Working network-layer access control is also a big enterprise feature, although it doesn't work well until everyone in the environment has upgraded. This is the feature that will sell the last handful of Vista licenses, when IT turns on access control on the switches and your XP machine is suddenly on GuestNet.
AUP is at its core a good idea (it should be, it's been a best practice on Unix for more than 20 years). It's been implemented horribly badly, but no doubt there will be a Vista SP1 which will fix the worst of the problems. If it turns out to have good real-world results vs. malware, word will get out.
The Vista installer makes it easier to do hardware-independent remote installs. On the server side, RIS has been replaced with Windows Deployment Server, which will be better once everyone figures out how it works. No more hand-rewriting INF files to get a driver to integrate into your RIS image. Also, WinPE is now available to everyone with a valid Vista license, so bootable utility discs (or PXE images) can finally come out of the closet.
So yes, there are reasons to upgrade. None of them matter if your apps or drivers aren't supported, but give it a year and I think we'll see businesses moving to Vista. I don't think the new activation server requirement is going to slow adoption much, even if I personally think it should.
It means these systems will turn into walled gardens where their users only ever talk to each other, which is good for me because they're out of my hair.
Those of us who use e-mail for business probably rank the value of any given email by how *few* we get from that person (spam not included) - particularly if we work near sales. The one e-mail I got this month from Mr Big Shot Customer is vastly more important to me than the 30 from Sue down the hall nattering on about why the refrigerator isn't cleaned up yet.
The Israelis wanted to translate Hebrew to Dutch, right? So how come the excerpt from the tranlsation is in English?
Also, surely every foreign ministry in the world receives a generous daily helping of incoherent email from spammers and the mentally ill. How did they know to choose this particular one to have an incident over?
You are correct, of course, that filesharers are acting out of personal greed, as are the RIAA member labels. But so what? The American revolutionaries were acting out of personal greed; they didn't want to pay taxes to the British government. But we still call them freedom fighters. The question isn't whether people are acting out of noble motives; it is whether or not their greed is justified.
At the time of the American revolution, the British government made all the same arguments the RIAA members make now. The British government / RIAA can say that they paid to create the desirable item, that they paid to promote it and make its desirability evident, that they have the courts and legal system backing their ownership of it, and that people who take it without paying are thieves - or if not thieves, then some other kind of criminals (copyright infringers / tax avoiders). Freedom fighers are always criminals, because if the law respected the freedoms they (greedily) desire, they would not have to fight for them.
So yes, filesharers are acting out of personal greed. But that doesn't mean their cause is wrong. The principled argument in favor of filesharing is that copyright exists not to convey absolute property rights to the creator of a work, but to promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences; that this implies the public has an ownership in copyrighted works just as essential and protected as that of the creator; and that current copyright law excessively rewards the creators of works without giving due consideration to the public interest. If you buy this argument, then filesharers are freedom fighters, regardless of their motives.
Yeah, the final episode blew chunks. A lot of people stopped watching midway through the first or early in the second season, then tuned in for the finale and said "yep, didn't miss anything." Except they did. The third season really was worth watching.
Don't make the mistake of equating market capitalization to "size."
Google has $10 billion in assets, $6 billion in revenues and 10,000 employees. Yahoo! has $10 billion in assets, $5 billion in revenues and 11,000 employees. Microsoft, on the other hand, has $70 billion in assets, $44 billion in revenues, and 71,000 employees.
Google's market capitalization means that overall, the market has spent $144 billion in cash in order to own Google's $10 billion in assets. The market believes that somehow, it will make future profits with a current value over $134 billion.
To do this, Google would either have to start paying dividends within a few years, and pay out an amount well in excess of the company's total assets every year for 20+ years; or it would have to see revenue growth such that the company turns a profit 5 or 10 times better than the best Microsoft has ever done.
None of these scenarios are remotely plausible; the market has clearly overvalued Google. As such, the market cap figure is not very useful for valuation or market-strategic purposes.
It seems like a con job because of the way it was reported in the media. Civilization as we know it was supposed to collapse, traffic lights would go green both ways, hot water would come out of the cold tap, and airplanes would suddenly flip upside down.
Since when does an IT systems failure look like that?
The real risk was that lots of computer systems might break down. You might get a bill from the power company for a million dollars, or not be able to buy peanut butter at the grocery store because they can't run your credit card.
To the extent that the risks were misrepresented, yes, it was a con job. But the real risks were nevertheless real, with significant economic consequences, and they were correctly addressed.
In my environment we had real systems that exhibited real failures in a test environment. Had we done nothing, the office would have had to shut down for a day or two. We fixed the problems before 1/1/00, so didn't experience this downtime. We spent an inordinate amount of time testing everything to find the few problems we actually had, and fixing them was pretty easy. So it wasn't exciting enough to make the front page. But some of it was real.
I've been on Slashdot too long. I just naturally assumed you were going to make a pr0n joke. I got to the end wondering what happened to the punchline, then I realized you were serious.
How can you talk about 3-d silicon models and mean it?
This isn't the first time. For example, in Shakespeare's day, to do something "presently" meant you would do it immediately (in the present). By Oscar Wilde's day, it meant you would do it after you finished the newspaper and got dressed, perhaps hours from now. Today, the association between "presently" and "the present" has been lost.
I'm sure the same thing will happen with "literally," although I think it will come to mean "emphatically" rather than "metaphorically."
Older examples: To "suffer" something used to mean you gave permission for it to happen; to "prove" something meant to test to see if it was true; "true" meant straight; and "gay" meant uncomplicatedly happy in a brightly colored motif.
This kind of crap happens all the time. Can anyone tell me what "begging the question" really means in a given context, without resorting to deduction from the surrounding text?
If they want a phone that actually works on launch day, then they have to partner with a carrier. There are two ways to do that: Become a private label operator like Virgin Mobile on the Sprint PCS network, or release the phone on a carrier network.
All cell phone carriers have spotty radio coverage and poor customer service. This is unavoidable. If Apple becomes a private label carrier then the Apple brand has to absorb the damage of being in the cell carrier business. There's no reason on earth why Apple would want that.
So they partner with Cingular. Then, either the iPhone flops or it wildly succeeds. (Given the development costs that went into it, anything short of define-a-new-subculture success can be counted as failure.) If it succeeds and drives substantial consumer demand to Cingular, then every other carrier will find a way to have one. Most likely they will all do deals with Apple, just like they all did deals for the Treo.
If, unthinkably, Apple was dumb enough to sign an exclusivity agreement with Cingular, then we get to see what vPhone and sPhone and T-Phone look like (my guess on the vPhone: you interact with it as per a Rubik's Cube, except it costs you a buck every time you turn something).
I'm not a troll of the first order. I just found it somewhat offensive that you hijacked the thread to pontificate on how Word data structures are different from WordPerfect, as if that were somehow new information or shed any light on the point at hand.
From that point it was just self-perpetuating. Every one of your posts is self-referentially ironic, in that you enumerate my sins while simultaneously committing them yourself. You accuse me of straying from the topic in a post which strays from the topic. You call me a troll and say you will cease feeding me in a post that would itself be feeding me, were I a troll. And so on.
My point is that the View Source button may not be as useless as you think, because secretaries still wish they had Reveal Codes, which is similar. I understand *why* they can't have Reveal Codes. I wrote a parser of the Word 2.0 doc file format back in the day - I am completely conversant with the technical issues involved. But none of that changes the fact that the secretaries still *wish* they had it, even though (uncontroversially) they can't. They are smarter than most geeks give them credit for. So perhaps they will find a use for View Source.
I don't think I look like an ass, but then again, sometimes I'm blind to the nuances of social interaction. Many people often discover they look like an ass, but were quite unaware of it until someone pointed it out to them. Thanks for doing me this essential service.
I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be some subtle shade of meaning that somehow relates to the topic of discussion, but it is beyond my ability to discern. Since it is unimaginable that you would criticize my failure to contribute to the discussion in a post which itself also fails to contribute in precisely the same way, I can only apologize for my lack of perception.
By the way, best of luck in your crusade to make sure everyone knows what internal formats different word processors use. It is important work and the world would be a much better place if only more people would take the time to do it. I'm sure the secretaries at your company really love you for your efforts. At my company, they bake me cookies. What do you get? It must be really excellent.
When you get a minute, do you think you could shine some of your illuminating intellect on the question of whether OLPC's "View Source" key is a useful idea or not? I'm sure we would all be riveted by your opinions on the topic, given that you apparently read an article on Word internals once.
You have no idea how many secretaries have asked me when they're going to get a "Reveal Codes" option in Word, like they had in WordPerfect. Some of them are now too young to remember WordPerfect, so the concept of "Reveal Codes" has passed into legend and oral tradition, with the older secretaries passing it on to the younger ones.
If you tell them: "View Source" is the new "Reveal Codes" they will be all over it in a heartbeat.
Don't touch that patch! I applied it and while it meticulously fixed the or/xor error, it also broke several unrelated subsystems, some of which turned out to be mission critical - particularly in the bedroom!
There's no rollback option - I'm just stuck waiting for a 2.0 release. My support contract for 1.x doesn't cover this upgrade, so it's going to be hugely expensive. If you've got a functional 1.0, stick with it - just work around the parser bugs.
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You put "man" in quotes, presumably to show that the referenced individuals are less than a real man. Does a woman ignoring the situation also qualify as less than a real woman? If not, why not?
You apparently witnessed these occasions yourself. If "not a single person" stopped to help, does that include you? Why didn't you stop to help? Can we conclude that you are less than a real man/woman? If not, why not?
You claim this is a sign of the times. Presumably this means that there was a previous time when things were better. When exactly was this? Was it before or after Luke 10:25-37 was written?
Thanks in advance for your considered reply.
-Graham
Even with 5 digits, you're still closer to me than I am to alta.
-Graham
Maybe this is off-topic, but Interix (aka Services for Unix) has grown up to be something not altogether horrible. Surprisingly enough.
-Graham
I agree that quantum computing is too far ahead of the curve to exist in a secret government lab.
However, I don't think it would be necessary for the government to have a "clandestine army of engineers and physicists that far outclassed our brightest minds in academia." All that's needed is a clandestine brigade of engineers and physicists that equals the brightest minds in academia. The secret researchers presumably have access to all the papers published by academia, as well as to fantastic lab resources and the ability to spend all their time working on the science rather than doing grant-writing. This would be more than enough to keep them well ahead of the academic state of the art.
What if there is an academic line of research which will result in a novel way to factor large numbers next year, rendering PGP much more breakable than we thought? If so, there's no reason to think that the NSA didn't figure it out last year.
-Graham
They haven't become evident yet, because everyone's still dealing with application and driver compatibility.
Once the drivers and applications work, enterprises will adopt Vista for the new group policy features alone. There's no reason MS couldn't have done this on XP, and I'm sure customers will demand that MS backport it. But if Microsoft hangs tough, it's so compelling a feature that enterprises will follow MS to Vista just to get it.
Working network-layer access control is also a big enterprise feature, although it doesn't work well until everyone in the environment has upgraded. This is the feature that will sell the last handful of Vista licenses, when IT turns on access control on the switches and your XP machine is suddenly on GuestNet.
AUP is at its core a good idea (it should be, it's been a best practice on Unix for more than 20 years). It's been implemented horribly badly, but no doubt there will be a Vista SP1 which will fix the worst of the problems. If it turns out to have good real-world results vs. malware, word will get out.
The Vista installer makes it easier to do hardware-independent remote installs. On the server side, RIS has been replaced with Windows Deployment Server, which will be better once everyone figures out how it works. No more hand-rewriting INF files to get a driver to integrate into your RIS image. Also, WinPE is now available to everyone with a valid Vista license, so bootable utility discs (or PXE images) can finally come out of the closet.
So yes, there are reasons to upgrade. None of them matter if your apps or drivers aren't supported, but give it a year and I think we'll see businesses moving to Vista. I don't think the new activation server requirement is going to slow adoption much, even if I personally think it should.
-Graham
It means these systems will turn into walled gardens where their users only ever talk to each other, which is good for me because they're out of my hair.
Those of us who use e-mail for business probably rank the value of any given email by how *few* we get from that person (spam not included) - particularly if we work near sales. The one e-mail I got this month from Mr Big Shot Customer is vastly more important to me than the 30 from Sue down the hall nattering on about why the refrigerator isn't cleaned up yet.
-Graham
The Israelis wanted to translate Hebrew to Dutch, right? So how come the excerpt from the tranlsation is in English?
Also, surely every foreign ministry in the world receives a generous daily helping of incoherent email from spammers and the mentally ill. How did they know to choose this particular one to have an incident over?
-Graham
Are you aware of Exchange/Outlook delegates and "send on behalf of" permissions?
You are correct, of course, that filesharers are acting out of personal greed, as are the RIAA member labels. But so what? The American revolutionaries were acting out of personal greed; they didn't want to pay taxes to the British government. But we still call them freedom fighters. The question isn't whether people are acting out of noble motives; it is whether or not their greed is justified.
At the time of the American revolution, the British government made all the same arguments the RIAA members make now. The British government / RIAA can say that they paid to create the desirable item, that they paid to promote it and make its desirability evident, that they have the courts and legal system backing their ownership of it, and that people who take it without paying are thieves - or if not thieves, then some other kind of criminals (copyright infringers / tax avoiders). Freedom fighers are always criminals, because if the law respected the freedoms they (greedily) desire, they would not have to fight for them.
So yes, filesharers are acting out of personal greed. But that doesn't mean their cause is wrong. The principled argument in favor of filesharing is that copyright exists not to convey absolute property rights to the creator of a work, but to promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences; that this implies the public has an ownership in copyrighted works just as essential and protected as that of the creator; and that current copyright law excessively rewards the creators of works without giving due consideration to the public interest. If you buy this argument, then filesharers are freedom fighters, regardless of their motives.
-Graham
That explains the beard - it's to hide the neck scars from when Sean Connery almost cut his head off.
Yeah, the final episode blew chunks. A lot of people stopped watching midway through the first or early in the second season, then tuned in for the finale and said "yep, didn't miss anything." Except they did. The third season really was worth watching.
-Graham
You must have missed the last season of Enterprise. It sucked for a long time, but it got good again - right before they cancelled it.
-Graham
Not according to René Magritte, who probably spoke better French than you or I.
-Graham
Ceci n'est pas une sig, surely? "Signature" is feminine.
-Graham
Don't make the mistake of equating market capitalization to "size."
Google has $10 billion in assets, $6 billion in revenues and 10,000 employees. Yahoo! has $10 billion in assets, $5 billion in revenues and 11,000 employees. Microsoft, on the other hand, has $70 billion in assets, $44 billion in revenues, and 71,000 employees.
Google's market capitalization means that overall, the market has spent $144 billion in cash in order to own Google's $10 billion in assets. The market believes that somehow, it will make future profits with a current value over $134 billion.
To do this, Google would either have to start paying dividends within a few years, and pay out an amount well in excess of the company's total assets every year for 20+ years; or it would have to see revenue growth such that the company turns a profit 5 or 10 times better than the best Microsoft has ever done.
None of these scenarios are remotely plausible; the market has clearly overvalued Google. As such, the market cap figure is not very useful for valuation or market-strategic purposes.
-Graham
...or they did in 2000, anyway. Not so much now.
It seems like a con job because of the way it was reported in the media. Civilization as we know it was supposed to collapse, traffic lights would go green both ways, hot water would come out of the cold tap, and airplanes would suddenly flip upside down.
Since when does an IT systems failure look like that?
The real risk was that lots of computer systems might break down. You might get a bill from the power company for a million dollars, or not be able to buy peanut butter at the grocery store because they can't run your credit card.
To the extent that the risks were misrepresented, yes, it was a con job. But the real risks were nevertheless real, with significant economic consequences, and they were correctly addressed.
In my environment we had real systems that exhibited real failures in a test environment. Had we done nothing, the office would have had to shut down for a day or two. We fixed the problems before 1/1/00, so didn't experience this downtime. We spent an inordinate amount of time testing everything to find the few problems we actually had, and fixing them was pretty easy. So it wasn't exciting enough to make the front page. But some of it was real.
-Graham
I've been on Slashdot too long. I just naturally assumed you were going to make a pr0n joke. I got to the end wondering what happened to the punchline, then I realized you were serious.
How can you talk about 3-d silicon models and mean it?
-Graham
This isn't the first time. For example, in Shakespeare's day, to do something "presently" meant you would do it immediately (in the present). By Oscar Wilde's day, it meant you would do it after you finished the newspaper and got dressed, perhaps hours from now. Today, the association between "presently" and "the present" has been lost.
I'm sure the same thing will happen with "literally," although I think it will come to mean "emphatically" rather than "metaphorically."
Older examples: To "suffer" something used to mean you gave permission for it to happen; to "prove" something meant to test to see if it was true; "true" meant straight; and "gay" meant uncomplicatedly happy in a brightly colored motif.
This kind of crap happens all the time. Can anyone tell me what "begging the question" really means in a given context, without resorting to deduction from the surrounding text?
-Graham
If they want a phone that actually works on launch day, then they have to partner with a carrier. There are two ways to do that: Become a private label operator like Virgin Mobile on the Sprint PCS network, or release the phone on a carrier network.
All cell phone carriers have spotty radio coverage and poor customer service. This is unavoidable. If Apple becomes a private label carrier then the Apple brand has to absorb the damage of being in the cell carrier business. There's no reason on earth why Apple would want that.
So they partner with Cingular. Then, either the iPhone flops or it wildly succeeds. (Given the development costs that went into it, anything short of define-a-new-subculture success can be counted as failure.) If it succeeds and drives substantial consumer demand to Cingular, then every other carrier will find a way to have one. Most likely they will all do deals with Apple, just like they all did deals for the Treo.
If, unthinkably, Apple was dumb enough to sign an exclusivity agreement with Cingular, then we get to see what vPhone and sPhone and T-Phone look like (my guess on the vPhone: you interact with it as per a Rubik's Cube, except it costs you a buck every time you turn something).
-Graham
I'm not a troll of the first order. I just found it somewhat offensive that you hijacked the thread to pontificate on how Word data structures are different from WordPerfect, as if that were somehow new information or shed any light on the point at hand.
From that point it was just self-perpetuating. Every one of your posts is self-referentially ironic, in that you enumerate my sins while simultaneously committing them yourself. You accuse me of straying from the topic in a post which strays from the topic. You call me a troll and say you will cease feeding me in a post that would itself be feeding me, were I a troll. And so on.
My point is that the View Source button may not be as useless as you think, because secretaries still wish they had Reveal Codes, which is similar. I understand *why* they can't have Reveal Codes. I wrote a parser of the Word 2.0 doc file format back in the day - I am completely conversant with the technical issues involved. But none of that changes the fact that the secretaries still *wish* they had it, even though (uncontroversially) they can't. They are smarter than most geeks give them credit for. So perhaps they will find a use for View Source.
-Graham
I don't think I look like an ass, but then again, sometimes I'm blind to the nuances of social interaction. Many people often discover they look like an ass, but were quite unaware of it until someone pointed it out to them. Thanks for doing me this essential service.
I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be some subtle shade of meaning that somehow relates to the topic of discussion, but it is beyond my ability to discern. Since it is unimaginable that you would criticize my failure to contribute to the discussion in a post which itself also fails to contribute in precisely the same way, I can only apologize for my lack of perception.
By the way, best of luck in your crusade to make sure everyone knows what internal formats different word processors use. It is important work and the world would be a much better place if only more people would take the time to do it. I'm sure the secretaries at your company really love you for your efforts. At my company, they bake me cookies. What do you get? It must be really excellent.
-Graham
What would we ever do without you?
When you get a minute, do you think you could shine some of your illuminating intellect on the question of whether OLPC's "View Source" key is a useful idea or not? I'm sure we would all be riveted by your opinions on the topic, given that you apparently read an article on Word internals once.
-Graham
You have no idea how many secretaries have asked me when they're going to get a "Reveal Codes" option in Word, like they had in WordPerfect. Some of them are now too young to remember WordPerfect, so the concept of "Reveal Codes" has passed into legend and oral tradition, with the older secretaries passing it on to the younger ones.
If you tell them: "View Source" is the new "Reveal Codes" they will be all over it in a heartbeat.
-Graham
Don't touch that patch! I applied it and while it meticulously fixed the or/xor error, it also broke several unrelated subsystems, some of which turned out to be mission critical - particularly in the bedroom!
There's no rollback option - I'm just stuck waiting for a 2.0 release. My support contract for 1.x doesn't cover this upgrade, so it's going to be hugely expensive. If you've got a functional 1.0, stick with it - just work around the parser bugs.
-Graham