Exactly. Sort've. One problem with the article is it seems to treat all cars as equal. You could strap a hybrid system onto an economy car and sell it for about $15,000. But when you start comparing features and luxuary, the Prius is more comparable to a Camry than a Dodge Neon. If your only goal is low TCO, then a moped would be your best bet. For my money, a TDI Jetta or Passat would probably be the nexus of features, efficiancy, luxory and durability. But I figure it'll be about 4-5 more years before my '98 Plymouth Breeze is ready for the scrap heap, and I'm content to drive it into the ground.
Amatures. It is not at "tin foil hat". Anyone trying to sell you on a simple tin foil hat ought to be flogged. It is an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie. There are very important distinctions. Furthermore, looking at the article, it's no wonder their AFDBs are inefective. They have horrible technique. For added results, you also need metal hangers dangling from the ceiling, or as we like to call them, the poor man's Faraday cage. I can't tell you how many poor zombies I've seen who made the mistake of using plastic (as that was more conveniant for their clothes).
Most physicist regard it as a non-question. The Big Bang was the beginning of everything and the phrase "prior to the big bang" is semantically null.
Which is just as much of a cop-out as "God made it all" although presented as being self-evident truth and therefore intellectually superior.
Interestingly enough, several years back, one of my Physics TAs was doing his dissertation on the behavior of a perfect vaccuum and whether in a perfect vaccuum a proton and antiproton might simultaneously generate and then anihilate each other. I don't recall him having any success though. The point here being that we can at least theorize and then try to create experiments to understand this stuff.
But here's what amuses me on a personal level. It takes many examples and experiments to prove a theory. However, it only takes one example to debunk a theory. Interestingly, evolution, ID and creationism can all be debunked in one shinning stunning example: the duck billed platypus. Unless of course, you happen to believe that your God has a rather sick and twisted sense of humor - which could explain a lot about this planet. I can find no other explanation for the existance of this animal. Another couutner example: the dodo bird. At least evolution explains its extinction, just not its origin.
No, not me. A national privacy law would be so littered with excepitons and utterly lacking in teeth that it would be worthless with the added bonus of gutting state laws. There is no real need for privacy laws. In fact, the best thing the Feds could do to increase privacy is to stop using the SSN for everything. But it's so darn conveniant to have a universal id for everyone that this isn't going to happen. And that's the achilles' heel of privacy.
As you can probably imagine, this is an area of intense research. Note today's earlier article about IBM slowing down light. Also note all the stories that come up about low power CPUs. The trick is getting all the performance you need. As per your light bulb example, people don't ues LED light bulbs because they're still terribly expensive, though they're much cheaper to operate. If you want to light up the room, you get a big incandescant. It'll typically take several years or longer of average use before the LED bulb saves enough electricity to pay for itself. Likewise, there are lower power CPUs available. Some that get pretty good performance on as little as 5 watts. But they're premium priced. Most CIOs would rather put the added cost into buying a much faster processor necessitating fewer servers. Fewer servers take a smaller staff to manage and therefore see a much lower TCO. But after payroll, electricity is usually the number 2 expense of a datacenter.
In any event, food/beverage patents are pretty difficult to get due both to the wealth of prior art available and the issue of "non obvious to one skilled in the art." Unless they've come up with a revolutionary new brewing process (which I doubt highly), at best, if they get anything, it'll likely be a patent specific to their exact recipie.
Regardless, I won't be drinking this new beverage. I'll stick with my two favorite beers; Summit Extra Pale Ale for when I'm feeling upscale and Grain Belt for when I'm slumming it.
though the subscriber downloads are extremely slow at the moment as expected.
It took me about 5 tries to get a connection to download my ISO. I refuse to write production code with beta software, so I've been forcing myself to work largely in VS2003. I am not, however, going to wait another 2 weeks for a DVD to show up with my MSDN subscription. Instead, I'll be waiting about 13 hours at T1 speeds. At least it'll be ready to go when I get to work Monday morning. My only complaint is they don't seem to have updated system.net.dns to do anything useful yet. [grumble]. Despite all the anti-Microsoft folks out there, I'll happily take the new Studio for all my development needs.
Here's the beauty of it, though: The GMs that he spoke with might not have recognized who he is. However, someone with a position of power at Blizzard will definately see the rant and the discussion and he may well quietly get his name back.
[yellow flag comes flying out] Personal Foul: Troll. 15 yards and loss of Karma.
You want to talk about community? My local public school district serves a "community" of around 100,000 people. That's not a community. I can send my kid there, or I can send her to a good private school where she's one of just a few hundread students. Where the principal knows every student by name and where her teachers all have my cell number. That sounds much more like my idea of community. You want to send your kid to public school? Be my guest. Where I come from, we call that socialism and it stinks. Want to fix public schools? Give every parent the right to dictate which school gets their tax dollars. Money talks, and when money walks, things change in a hurry.
So I'm at least partially right. It's been several years since I took a serious look at copyright laws. In any event, the Feds do not hold a copyright on the seal of the president. I haven't found any evidance that it's at all trademarked either (though my research is limited to a few quick searches on Google). And from a strict constituitonal view, my statement that restrictions on the seal are limited to areas of interstate commerce is correct, though the prevailing 5-4 majority of SCOTUS seems to have an absurdly expansive view of what constitutes interstate commerce. In any event, the Onion is clearly engaged in a commercial venture (selling advertising) across state lines, and that is depenant upon their publication of a satirical newspaper.
But beyond all that, I thank you, sir, for educating us all about our schizophrenic government.
Because, by law the Federal Governement can not hold copyrights. I'm pretty sure they can't get a trademark or patent either. Restrictions on the use of the Presidential seal are pretty much limited to areas of interstate commerce. Anything else would be unconstitutional. And, of course, a C&D letter has no force what so ever. It's really just a way of intimidating someone without actually taking them to court.
Which is what makes this emotional, but largely unimportant. DNS works by large scale consensus. It could be scrapped altogether and the internet would still technically function. In fact, a mischevious ISP could easily redirect one popular site to another for their users (note to self: start screwing with my wife's favorite sites). On the other hand, a fracturing of the IP number space would be far more chaotic; it's one layer below DNS. Interestingly enough, a fracturing of the Ethernet MAC number space - a layer below IP - would have virtually no noticable impact on the internet.
MCE does support HDTV cards, but with a catch. It apparently won't find the HD card unless you meet 2 other requirements. You need an existing analog card that's supported by MCE and you need an MPEG2 decoder installed (that's supported by MCE). As I only have an ATI HDTV wonder, I wasn't able to get MCE to work. Just as well, I suppose, because though it's got XP Pro under the hood, it won't let you join a domain, which interferes with my home networking plans.
So far, I've been using the ATI MMC which comes with the card and have not been happy with it. It does well enough with analog TV, but on the HD end, it's still too buggy to be reliable. I'm sure the problem is in the software since recorded shows playback beautifully. Watching live HDTV with the MMC is dissapointing, even with the latest software (choppy sound, can't find a fix). Recording shows is also still problematic and managing the media library is a pain. I'm planning on trying the programs mentioned to see if they'll even work with the card in HD mode.
The difference is that Microsoft doesn't have a strong tie in here. They don't market a portable music player. Compare this to the X-Box where the long term goal is to monopolize the market and get the kind of returns that Sony has seen from the Playstation line. That's not a practical goal in downloadable music. All Microsoft really has going for them is that they can integreate sales into MSN and Media Player (except where penalties from AntiTrust cases apply).
On the other hand, I'm surprised that the lables aren't operating their own download stores where they can charge as much or little as they want and change prices in real-time. Then again, I'd expect the same thing from musicians, except that most are under contract, and those that aren't need the labels for exposure and distribution. Radio play still sells more albums than anything else. And there are plenty of sites out there pushing little independant artists, but frankly, most of them suck.
Really, I think it's more likely that the developers tried to answer the questions, then the PR department came in and sanitized the whole thing. The responses were clearly not written (in their final form) by the development team. A programmer will give you a blunt but technical answer. A designer will tell you about their grand sweeping vision. PR will give you a paragraph that says nothing, but technically (usually) responds to the question.
Personally, I'm waiting to hear how this is a result of Bush's environmental policies.
On the other hand, the 4th largest in the last 15 years. Wow, that's quite a record and part of a very disturbing trend no less. Time to move to the hills and hide in a cave.
I'll agree with that for different reasons. I thought the play control on Ocarina was awful and I haven't touched Zelda since then. If there's one thing I hate more than a FPS, it's a 3rd person over the shoulder view. Ugh.
Certification accomplishes a few things. First, it's a great way to get a resume through human resources. A lot of HR departments don't even read resumes. They just match buzzwords. If the job posting lists ASP.NET, MCSE, MCSD and Java, then you'd better have everyone of those somewhere on your resume. If you can't get hired, it doesn't matter too much what you know. Again, landing the first job is the hard part. A long resume with references speaks louder than anything. In general, a CS degree will also get you farther than a cert.
Second, it's something to tell your customers. A lot of folks don't know the first thing about contracting with an IT shop. That's where the sales department steps in and says, "We're an licensed Microsoft Soultions Provider." This is very similar to the HR scenario, it's a foot in the door with a customer. And of course, for the shop to get the Microsoft Certified Partner designation, the employees therein need to hold certain certifications.
There is finally, one last thing that it does: it forces you to at least learn the preferred Cisco or Microsoft or Sun way of doing things. In reality, that may or may not always be a good way of doing things, but it forces you to pick up that background. The one constant in the IT field is that if you're not continually learning something new, you better be a COBOL programmer.
Disclaimer: I almost have an MCSE, but quit taking the tests 5 years ago 'cuz I landed a job. The job didn't require it and I didn't feel it was worth the cost.
Bison aren't doing too bad either, especially out in South Dakota. Took a family vacation out to the Black Hills several years ago, saw hundreads of the beasts without making any attempt to do so. There even a few that felt like grazing in front of the cabin we were staying in. Couldn't go 20 feet without stepping on a buffalo chip.
Wolf numbers are looking good, but there still aren't near enough of 'em. The damn deer are breeding faster than we can shoot them. They come and eat the berries out of my garden then get depressed and throw themselves in front of my neighbor's car. I'm all for letting some lions and tigers loose if they'll help eat the damn deer.
Agreed. Budgeting IT in terms of per employee or as a percentage of revenue is idiotic. Identify your needs, wants and objectives. Prioritize. Also plan for the future, think big. In any event, after you work up a budget, you'll show it to your boss who'll say that it's too much and you need to cut it. Then, you'll protest, price out a more modest server and backup solution, arguer with the boss some more and finally get an approval. Contrast this with a government job where you're told up front how much is in the budget, then it's your job to spend that - to the penny.
FreeBSD is dying
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 3, Funny
But BSD is dying! I thought everyone knew that. I guess someone forgot to tell CmdrTaco.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Sort've. One problem with the article is it seems to treat all cars as equal. You could strap a hybrid system onto an economy car and sell it for about $15,000. But when you start comparing features and luxuary, the Prius is more comparable to a Camry than a Dodge Neon. If your only goal is low TCO, then a moped would be your best bet. For my money, a TDI Jetta or Passat would probably be the nexus of features, efficiancy, luxory and durability. But I figure it'll be about 4-5 more years before my '98 Plymouth Breeze is ready for the scrap heap, and I'm content to drive it into the ground.
Amatures. It is not at "tin foil hat". Anyone trying to sell you on a simple tin foil hat ought to be flogged. It is an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie. There are very important distinctions. Furthermore, looking at the article, it's no wonder their AFDBs are inefective. They have horrible technique. For added results, you also need metal hangers dangling from the ceiling, or as we like to call them, the poor man's Faraday cage. I can't tell you how many poor zombies I've seen who made the mistake of using plastic (as that was more conveniant for their clothes).
Most physicist regard it as a non-question. The Big Bang was the beginning of everything and the phrase "prior to the big bang" is semantically null.
Which is just as much of a cop-out as "God made it all" although presented as being self-evident truth and therefore intellectually superior.
Interestingly enough, several years back, one of my Physics TAs was doing his dissertation on the behavior of a perfect vaccuum and whether in a perfect vaccuum a proton and antiproton might simultaneously generate and then anihilate each other. I don't recall him having any success though. The point here being that we can at least theorize and then try to create experiments to understand this stuff.
But here's what amuses me on a personal level. It takes many examples and experiments to prove a theory. However, it only takes one example to debunk a theory. Interestingly, evolution, ID and creationism can all be debunked in one shinning stunning example: the duck billed platypus. Unless of course, you happen to believe that your God has a rather sick and twisted sense of humor - which could explain a lot about this planet. I can find no other explanation for the existance of this animal. Another couutner example: the dodo bird. At least evolution explains its extinction, just not its origin.
No, not me. A national privacy law would be so littered with excepitons and utterly lacking in teeth that it would be worthless with the added bonus of gutting state laws. There is no real need for privacy laws. In fact, the best thing the Feds could do to increase privacy is to stop using the SSN for everything. But it's so darn conveniant to have a universal id for everyone that this isn't going to happen. And that's the achilles' heel of privacy.
As you can probably imagine, this is an area of intense research. Note today's earlier article about IBM slowing down light. Also note all the stories that come up about low power CPUs. The trick is getting all the performance you need. As per your light bulb example, people don't ues LED light bulbs because they're still terribly expensive, though they're much cheaper to operate. If you want to light up the room, you get a big incandescant. It'll typically take several years or longer of average use before the LED bulb saves enough electricity to pay for itself. Likewise, there are lower power CPUs available. Some that get pretty good performance on as little as 5 watts. But they're premium priced. Most CIOs would rather put the added cost into buying a much faster processor necessitating fewer servers. Fewer servers take a smaller staff to manage and therefore see a much lower TCO. But after payroll, electricity is usually the number 2 expense of a datacenter.
In any event, food/beverage patents are pretty difficult to get due both to the wealth of prior art available and the issue of "non obvious to one skilled in the art." Unless they've come up with a revolutionary new brewing process (which I doubt highly), at best, if they get anything, it'll likely be a patent specific to their exact recipie.
Regardless, I won't be drinking this new beverage. I'll stick with my two favorite beers; Summit Extra Pale Ale for when I'm feeling upscale and Grain Belt for when I'm slumming it.
though the subscriber downloads are extremely slow at the moment as expected.
It took me about 5 tries to get a connection to download my ISO. I refuse to write production code with beta software, so I've been forcing myself to work largely in VS2003. I am not, however, going to wait another 2 weeks for a DVD to show up with my MSDN subscription. Instead, I'll be waiting about 13 hours at T1 speeds. At least it'll be ready to go when I get to work Monday morning. My only complaint is they don't seem to have updated system.net.dns to do anything useful yet. [grumble]. Despite all the anti-Microsoft folks out there, I'll happily take the new Studio for all my development needs.
Here's the beauty of it, though: The GMs that he spoke with might not have recognized who he is. However, someone with a position of power at Blizzard will definately see the rant and the discussion and he may well quietly get his name back.
[yellow flag comes flying out] Personal Foul: Troll. 15 yards and loss of Karma.
You want to talk about community? My local public school district serves a "community" of around 100,000 people. That's not a community. I can send my kid there, or I can send her to a good private school where she's one of just a few hundread students. Where the principal knows every student by name and where her teachers all have my cell number. That sounds much more like my idea of community. You want to send your kid to public school? Be my guest. Where I come from, we call that socialism and it stinks. Want to fix public schools? Give every parent the right to dictate which school gets their tax dollars. Money talks, and when money walks, things change in a hurry.
So I'm at least partially right. It's been several years since I took a serious look at copyright laws. In any event, the Feds do not hold a copyright on the seal of the president. I haven't found any evidance that it's at all trademarked either (though my research is limited to a few quick searches on Google). And from a strict constituitonal view, my statement that restrictions on the seal are limited to areas of interstate commerce is correct, though the prevailing 5-4 majority of SCOTUS seems to have an absurdly expansive view of what constitutes interstate commerce. In any event, the Onion is clearly engaged in a commercial venture (selling advertising) across state lines, and that is depenant upon their publication of a satirical newspaper.
But beyond all that, I thank you, sir, for educating us all about our schizophrenic government.
Because, by law the Federal Governement can not hold copyrights. I'm pretty sure they can't get a trademark or patent either. Restrictions on the use of the Presidential seal are pretty much limited to areas of interstate commerce. Anything else would be unconstitutional. And, of course, a C&D letter has no force what so ever. It's really just a way of intimidating someone without actually taking them to court.
Which is what makes this emotional, but largely unimportant. DNS works by large scale consensus. It could be scrapped altogether and the internet would still technically function. In fact, a mischevious ISP could easily redirect one popular site to another for their users (note to self: start screwing with my wife's favorite sites). On the other hand, a fracturing of the IP number space would be far more chaotic; it's one layer below DNS. Interestingly enough, a fracturing of the Ethernet MAC number space - a layer below IP - would have virtually no noticable impact on the internet.
Of course he's nuts. He doesn't just work for the GNU foundation, he's a True Believer(tm).
MCE does support HDTV cards, but with a catch. It apparently won't find the HD card unless you meet 2 other requirements. You need an existing analog card that's supported by MCE and you need an MPEG2 decoder installed (that's supported by MCE). As I only have an ATI HDTV wonder, I wasn't able to get MCE to work. Just as well, I suppose, because though it's got XP Pro under the hood, it won't let you join a domain, which interferes with my home networking plans.
So far, I've been using the ATI MMC which comes with the card and have not been happy with it. It does well enough with analog TV, but on the HD end, it's still too buggy to be reliable. I'm sure the problem is in the software since recorded shows playback beautifully. Watching live HDTV with the MMC is dissapointing, even with the latest software (choppy sound, can't find a fix). Recording shows is also still problematic and managing the media library is a pain. I'm planning on trying the programs mentioned to see if they'll even work with the card in HD mode.
The difference is that Microsoft doesn't have a strong tie in here. They don't market a portable music player. Compare this to the X-Box where the long term goal is to monopolize the market and get the kind of returns that Sony has seen from the Playstation line. That's not a practical goal in downloadable music. All Microsoft really has going for them is that they can integreate sales into MSN and Media Player (except where penalties from AntiTrust cases apply).
On the other hand, I'm surprised that the lables aren't operating their own download stores where they can charge as much or little as they want and change prices in real-time. Then again, I'd expect the same thing from musicians, except that most are under contract, and those that aren't need the labels for exposure and distribution. Radio play still sells more albums than anything else. And there are plenty of sites out there pushing little independant artists, but frankly, most of them suck.
Attaching this sort of crap to other bills ought to be illegal. That's why I live in Minnesota, where it is.
Really, I think it's more likely that the developers tried to answer the questions, then the PR department came in and sanitized the whole thing. The responses were clearly not written (in their final form) by the development team. A programmer will give you a blunt but technical answer. A designer will tell you about their grand sweeping vision. PR will give you a paragraph that says nothing, but technically (usually) responds to the question.
Personally, I'm waiting to hear how this is a result of Bush's environmental policies.
On the other hand, the 4th largest in the last 15 years. Wow, that's quite a record and part of a very disturbing trend no less. Time to move to the hills and hide in a cave.
I'll agree with that for different reasons. I thought the play control on Ocarina was awful and I haven't touched Zelda since then. If there's one thing I hate more than a FPS, it's a 3rd person over the shoulder view. Ugh.
Certification accomplishes a few things. First, it's a great way to get a resume through human resources. A lot of HR departments don't even read resumes. They just match buzzwords. If the job posting lists ASP.NET, MCSE, MCSD and Java, then you'd better have everyone of those somewhere on your resume. If you can't get hired, it doesn't matter too much what you know. Again, landing the first job is the hard part. A long resume with references speaks louder than anything. In general, a CS degree will also get you farther than a cert.
Second, it's something to tell your customers. A lot of folks don't know the first thing about contracting with an IT shop. That's where the sales department steps in and says, "We're an licensed Microsoft Soultions Provider." This is very similar to the HR scenario, it's a foot in the door with a customer. And of course, for the shop to get the Microsoft Certified Partner designation, the employees therein need to hold certain certifications.
There is finally, one last thing that it does: it forces you to at least learn the preferred Cisco or Microsoft or Sun way of doing things. In reality, that may or may not always be a good way of doing things, but it forces you to pick up that background. The one constant in the IT field is that if you're not continually learning something new, you better be a COBOL programmer.
Disclaimer: I almost have an MCSE, but quit taking the tests 5 years ago 'cuz I landed a job. The job didn't require it and I didn't feel it was worth the cost.
Bison aren't doing too bad either, especially out in South Dakota. Took a family vacation out to the Black Hills several years ago, saw hundreads of the beasts without making any attempt to do so. There even a few that felt like grazing in front of the cabin we were staying in. Couldn't go 20 feet without stepping on a buffalo chip.
Wolf numbers are looking good, but there still aren't near enough of 'em. The damn deer are breeding faster than we can shoot them. They come and eat the berries out of my garden then get depressed and throw themselves in front of my neighbor's car. I'm all for letting some lions and tigers loose if they'll help eat the damn deer.
Agreed. Budgeting IT in terms of per employee or as a percentage of revenue is idiotic. Identify your needs, wants and objectives. Prioritize. Also plan for the future, think big. In any event, after you work up a budget, you'll show it to your boss who'll say that it's too much and you need to cut it. Then, you'll protest, price out a more modest server and backup solution, arguer with the boss some more and finally get an approval. Contrast this with a government job where you're told up front how much is in the budget, then it's your job to spend that - to the penny.
But BSD is dying! I thought everyone knew that. I guess someone forgot to tell CmdrTaco.