Ubuntu is a necessary good. For some reason, we need a distro for the Windows masses.
Fixed that for you.
I'm surprised that the reason behind having a distribution with a more consistent look and feel and a bit of "polish" to it would be quite so hard to understand for a lot of the Slashdot crowd.
From the perspective of end-users who like to change some advanced settings, without becoming a certified sysadmin in the process; Linux as an OS is a stubborn, inconsistent, misleading, and often frustrating piece of crap by and large. Some parts of it are examples of exceptional engineering and sleek design (I can't think of one at the moment though). Other parts leave you wondering if anyone has even looked at it from the mindset of a user in the 2000's instead of the 70's when everything was timeshares and terminals.
There is a large subset of users between the type like someone's grandmother who never touches or needs to understand a thing (only be shown how to do it one way to follow their written instructions) and a system programmer (who knows how it all connects on the inside) which want to have some control over things like printers, modems, dual-monitor displays, VPN connections, network file sharing, media playback codecs / applications, games, wireless internet, Firewalls, Digital Cameras, MP3 Players, and such but not be inundated with mundane, backwards, or otherwise archaic nonsense when trying to change only semi-complex settings. Things like which of two monitors is the primary desktop, how to set their printer to a different paper size, configure their default browser for links opened throughout the system, how to get a software firewall to auto configure based on network they attached to, setup their wireless network connection to always connect to their home network when it's in range, how to open files on another machine in their house, how to setup their scanner, etc. These are some tasks which still have a long way to go to be reasonable for the average sorta-knows-whats-going-on Joe under many circumstances because they have little "gotcha" type bugs which crop up frequently or simply poor design from the beginning. Unfortunately these little "gotcha" bugs tend to come with 40 pages of reading about every other technology even remotely related to try and understand the problem.
Some people want to actually use their mp3 player instead of learning how shitty the sound system in their operating system is or why their sound card only runs with one program at a time (depending on Distro). Some people want to play games without learning what a binary video driver is or how it taints the kernel licensing / support. Some people want to print their business cards without learning all about CUPS. They just want to plug, click, go. There is nothing wrong with that really.
Also, Ubuntu has something to offer the Mac users in the same vein which other distributions may not have done quite so well with in the past. As Apple is considered to have one of the more "polished" operating systems of the three I am discussing for end users.
Most people just want consistency and functionality. Some others want security and flexibility. Everyone wants something a little different. All (K)Ubuntu attempts to do is bridge the consistency/usability and security/flexibility gap. Judging by their popularity they must be doing a decent job so far.
- Toast
P.S. Now while my post may read as a flame on Linux it is not. Linux is only what people make of it and it is constantly evolving and for the better in my opinion. My post is a flame on the prevailing attitude around here of everyone needing to understand the really useless crap and have a well formed reflex to having to learn a little about 40 things to make 1 simple thing happen, and that they should like it. Linux is just as complex of a beast as Macintosh and Windows just below the surface, it just doesn't hide that fact as well as some of it's competitors and tends to drown the "power user but not administrator" types with it's incessant little quirks for a great many "normal" activities which people have grown accustomed to being "easy" and relatively "thought free".
Not as a counter to your point, but rather to make sure you are aware, he has Parkinson's Disease. His apparent mental difficulties cannot be entirely attributed to his fighting career.
Epic fail. As stated in my post the magnetic field issue pertains to Mars due to its small size, not Venus.
Transforming another planet in our solar system into something habitable is wishful thinking in it's entirety at this point. OTOH, simply finding other planets is something we can already do, we just need to refine the techniques and technology.
As far as terraforming goes we have been met with moderate failure just trying to build a self contained biosphere on planet earth (which we know to be an inhabitable body for fact): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Along that same line of logic: How come we haven't found them and said "Hi!"? I would suggest that problems we face may not be terribly different from problems other potential civilizations have come across (should they exist).
I'm sure there are plenty more issues we have yet to discover with long-range communications through space. Let alone the process of finding other intelligent beings to communicate with or finding an intelligible way to communicate between two entirely different species... Don't let the dreamed up solutions from Sci-Fi movies make you think there are easy or even possible solutions to those problems.
Ever try and carry on a conversation with a dolphin for example? How about over thousands of light-years worth of space?
Venus will never be a good candidate for habitation unless we build platforms which "float" on its atmosphere's surface due to the close proximity to the sun. Wikipedia has some decent overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
Mars is also quite small and does not hold onto its atmosphere very well (which coincidentally means it also doesn't have a strong magnetic field of it's own in which to protect potential inhabitants from solar radiation amongst other things (again due to its size)), so colonizing it will only really be possible if we build sealed enclosures on its surface or find a way to generate a LOT of atmosphere over a long time AND we find a way to protect our self from radiation from space in a feasible manner.
I am not an educated member in these related fields, but this is the information I have picked up while taking a passing interest in this stuff.
On top of that, finding other planets which are earth like does not have to happen in an either / or situation with attempting to colonize other planets. Both research paths can and are being pursued at the same time because it takes an entirely different scientist and research field to find extra-planetary bodies than it will to find a way to terraform one.
The users still don't give a flying fuck about any of that. Parent poster is still correct.
Since when do kernel developers support end users too btw?
And if Nvidia drivers cause a bluescreen on your Windows PC do you call Microsoft? Or would you more likely contact Nvidia? After all, Nvidia can contact Microsoft if they find a kernel bug in Windows (or develop a workaround)... Same holds true for Linux. Nvidia can contact the kernel developers if they find a bug in the interface they use for their drivers.
The idea of only using open drivers for some ideological goal of having a 100% "pure" system can take a hike for people like me. Once a vendor has either released specs to create open drivers (preferable) or have created their own binary drivers (but support my OS) that's all I care about as a user. If there is a bug, or if their drivers cause a bug in something else I still know who I can contact about it (or what products I will avoid recommending to my friends).
Do I advocate and support companies willing to release detailed hardware specs so good and open drivers can be created? Absolutely. Will I abandon non-open but functional drivers in favor of hack-ups created by reverse engineering their hardware and only on the premise of having an ideologically pure machine? Not a chance.
Your analogy of open heart surgery would hold true if technologists expected her to do something as intricate as diagnosing BIOS error codes with a hexadecimal readout and then soldiering a couple of leads together on the mainboard to correct a clock shift error in the timing circuitry due to a shady voltage regulator. No one expects the users to understand anything close to that.
This was something more akin to her getting confused by the ruler being in centimeters on the hole punch on her desk when she needed to know inches. The Hole-Punch vendor told her she could still use the metric ruler for the same effect (but failed to teach her the metric system), and the people who wanted the holes punched in the first place told her they already gave her the right measurements and didn't know what she was talking about. And instead of finding out how to fix that issue by using a simple converter she quit her job and bitched to the media about the metric travesty which just took place on her desk. Those of us who understand the simple matter of conversion then are left in awe over the sheer stupidity of the matter.
She is a case of social engineering or fraud just waiting to happen. Unfortunately, that cannot really be anybody's fault but hers. The information she needed to know before she even ventured into computerland is readily available in thousands of forms. You can even buy it through infomercials or leech it off of friends for free. People which are still WILLFULLY ignorant to computer basics get no sympathy from me.
- Toast
P.S. The number of operating systems on the market since personal computers became common place has never been reduced to 1. Microsoft may have had the largest market share RECENTLY but there has always been other ones around like Macintosh, DOS, Amiga, Linux, BSD Unix, etc. Don't excuse the attitude people take with thinking there is only one option they even need to know the name of (15 years ago Microsoft wasn't even the most dominant in most areas and in 15 years probably will not be the dominant player once again). Remember, Mac was the dominant player long before Microsoft entered the personal computing scene as a serious player, it's best that users never become complacent and think that Microsoft is the only thing they will ever need to know.
I will agree with your statement but would you also agree that in situations like whistle blowers, 3rd party reporting of cases such as the position P.J. is in, newspaper sources for inside stories, and other circumstances where real harm could come to a person whose anonymity becomes compromised in general, it might be a good idea to leave anonymous enough alone and attempt to judge it upon it's merits of argument instead of the source?
Let's suppose for a moment that she was/is under some kind of financial agreement with IBM, then that changes things entirely. I am by no means suggesting this is the case but regarding it as a possibility - especially given the bias in her posts.
I am curious as to what changes entirely even if she is hired. Maybe you are on to something, but convincing me that she was hired along does not prove anything to me at all. Are there holes where her opinion does not meet fact which would severely change a readers opinion? If so, where?
Maybe my post was trolling, but it's something I have the right to do and you should not undermine. Something more constructive towards the debate would have been appreciated rather than contempt and mockery.
I will apologize in that you seem to have taken my post to be directed at you instead of your argument. That was not my intention.
Here is my side: If you are going to insinuate that someone relatively anonymous has ulterior motives on a public forum, maybe showing us why it is that you might think that would be more enlightening and maybe +5 insightful than simply speculating.
- Toast
P.S. The internet is a place full of assholes and wing-nuts. I'm not trying to be either, but that is always a matter of opinion. It's a lot easier to not take a single thing you read out here personally.
P.P.S And to the poster futher below me listing their conspiracy theory. I checked out the documents listed there but I'm not really interested in whether or not Pamela Jones was hired unless it factually changes the proceedings of the court. I realize and accept that she happens to be very pro-IBM in these cases as I happen to share the opinion to some degree. However, if there is something she has factually warped in order to persuade the public at large then I am also interested to hear it. Just be prepared for the [citation needed].
t wasn't my intention to actually debate this with anyone in particular, however it seems we actually do have a small but functional debate specifically since neither of us are caught up in trying to identify each other to try to prove ill intentions. Rather, we are debating the actual merits of each others opinion on the topic at hand, regardless of the fact that neither of us are readily identifiable.
Also, Bush is a readily identifiable public figure with a verifiable past of misleading the general public. He also wields great power capable of changing many people's lives based on what he says simply because of his position within the government. Verifying his intentions is a different and more logical beast entirely.
And so is the desire to remove anonymity. Both are acceptable.
Anonymity should be an even exchange for credibility as I see it. Since you could meet me in meat-space and I could lie to you about everything from my identity down to my intentions what can you prove simply by knowing my "name" or "address"? Hell, I could even gather up some paid "friends" to spread some good rumors about what my intentions are too (just for good measure). Volunteering your real identity to add credibility to something you say is nothing more than a token gesture to me. The rest of what you say has to jive too.
On the flip side, protecting my real identity when I'm online is relatively important at all times to my real physical safety and well being. I won't consciously make it easier for some nut-job which doesn't like what I have to say to find out who I really am. And I'm not even a high profile target. Knowing who I am reflects nothing of the credibility of what comes out of my mouth in all reality.
Once you have been misdirected to arguing the facts of the presenter instead of the facts of the matter everything you will do is an exercise in straw-man assembly and inspection and rarely will you ever get anywhere productive at all.
- Toast
P.S. Thought for the day: When you argue with someone. Are you the type which calls their character into question before or after you call their argument it's self into question?
Doesn't this lend credit to the idea that perhaps PJ was hired solely to cover the SCO trial?
Was her mysterious identity ever uncovered?
Why in hell should a person subject their identity and private information to the whim of the trolls on the Internet in any capacity, just to "prove" they aren't hiding something sinister? Try proving there WAS something sinister, I'll certainly take that complaint more credibly.
Internet anonymity is here to stay (as it should be) as there is no proof positive way to identify other Internet going users without subjecting them to very real risks in meat-space (stalkers, or worse). Come to think of it there are very very few ways to positively identify people in meat-space (even with fingerprints and SSN cards) let alone verify their intentions...
It is ALWAYS up to you, the reader, browser, and consumer to attempt to determine truth and fiction based on your own balance of values, experiences, and interpretations. Use your own trust network to find that out for yourself. Come back and stir the pot once you have something more legitimate than a suspicion about someone else's suspicion about someone else's theory. Second hand truth is better than third hand theory in my opinion.
If you think there is bias in her reporting then go ahead and think there is bias in her reporting. Seek another truth if you believe it to exist. However, in that same stroke, the air of credibility seems to be on PJ's side to many many people. I have found minimal reason to be concerned personally with whether or not she WAS hired. I'm just glad to be informed of her take on the matter.
However, you are perfectly free to be paranoid about her identity all you like, but expecting her identity to be proven in an environment of suspicion is just stupidity. Being proven so you feel better about it is simple idiocy.
Fanatics and conspiracy nuts will always be good at inadvertently burying the truth when it comes out in a sea of accusations anyways because people are blinded by their opinions. So what does it matter? The truth could already have been said.
- Toast
P.S. Nothing personal, I'm having my second Monday of the week here at work...
Is (service provider of choice) doing a better job? At least with government we might have a chance to find out where that $200b went to.
After all, would we be even having this conversation at all if private industry held up their end of the deal?
Is YOUR broadband cheap, fast, and available everywhere (compared globally)? I know mine is not.
- Toast
P.S. I look at the way water and roads are handled. And I fail to see a system worse off now compared to when private industry would have controlled it.
Is that $50 pricing for filling up the car based on volume of fuel necessary to power said car from oil or biomass based fuel?
Currently it might take $50 worth of gasoline, but the dollar value is the wrong conversion between gas and biomass. What would be more useful is to compare how much energy it takes to power a vehicle for 400 miles and compare volumes of necessary fuel produced from biomass or oil. Then figure out the required area & cost necessary to produce the required volume of biomass.
Gasoline and Diesel (indeed oil based products) have a very high energy potential by volume / weight which is what makes them more viable than say burning wood to power a vehicle. Biomass based oils however have a multitude of potential benefits, namely the fact that they can be "grown" and "harvested" as opposed to "drilled" and fought over.
Anything we can do to convert "waste" plant matter (not including that which is used for our food supplies!) into a renewable fuel, even if only used for powering camping gear, space heaters, and other small appliances would be useful even if just in the name of exploring the science behind it.
- Toast
P.S. It would be ESPECIALLY useful if the technology behind creating a renewable fuel like this alludes to could be exported to third world countries for use in their machinery (instead of much more insidious fuels) as they industrialize. I can't help but imagine that it would be useful for keeping pollution down in third world countries (if it's cheap or readily attainable). It would also be good for keeping these countries self-sufficient instead of having to "partner" with oil producing countries which may have a totally different agenda which keeps them dependent.
The technology might not be enough to power our nation as it stands now, but it certainly could power many people who don't lead as energy dependent lives as ourselves (I.E. almost anyone else on the planet).
Considering your VMware client OS is using the VMware video driver to power a virtual video card and it doesn't support any graphical acceleration at all, it probably won't do anything faster than 2d frame buffer based video cards from 15 years ago would.
VMWare video performance has been known to suck horribly for 3d accelerated graphics since it's inception.
Someday maybe they will have some sort of driver translation to at least enable openGL or the like to pass instructions directly to the video hardware. Then again I understand that there may be multiple issues including security and reliability if your client OS has control over your video driver (at least in Windows where that can crash your host OS) where the client OS assumes that it has complete control over the entire screen real-estate.
Considering cable connections are asynchronous if your outbound pipe fills up your whole connection will slow to a crawl since the acknowledgment packets will be unable to be delivered outbound in a timely manner to tell the nodes you are downloading from to send more data.
Basically if you have 500KB/s inbound and 100KB/s outbound, if you saturate all 100KB/s outbound you can expect your inbound traffic to drop to 100KB/s or less as well as increasing the latency over the connection to 2 seconds or more (on some connections).
The way to fix this is to throttle your outbound maximum traffic in your BT client to less than 80% of your maximum cap as tested through sites like speedtest.tds.net or whatever your favorite site is. This should allow for overhead traffic like ACK packets to leave your network in a timely manner.
You would still have a firewall to open ports / IP addresses up on and you would have to keep track of either DNS entries or IP addresses for each device anyways so whats the difference?
That is... unless you want to just hook up your appliances and computers sans-firewall to the net...
Nothing like a hacker being able to hold your food hostage...
As a system administrator, I can't tell you how many times a failure to receive a customer's e-mail was due to a poorly-configured mail server on the sender's network.
Fixed that for you. I think the number of mis-configured mail servers and DNS records far exceeds the number of mis-configured spam filters.
Reason #1 that spam filters tend to be ineffective: Sysadmins do not fill out the suggested (or even required) information in DNS, FQDN identification strings, etc. Because Admin's tend to get ahead of themselves and do not test for strict compatibility with the RFC standards. A lot of false-positive flagging by spam filters is because messages are coming from unverified sources because of missing PTR records, no SPF / DomainKeys information, Server HELO string containing garbage, etc.
If you setup your mail system with proper forward and reverse lookup addresses (stop using PTR records for your MX address!), proper message routing and anti-splashback, sane retry and throttling settings, SPF / Domainkeys, and HELO identification strings, you will likely have 0 problem sending mail to just about anyone. With the exception of Yahoo.com and BellSouth.net of course as they have drunk squirrels running their filters...)
I always operate off of the rule that my mail servers will comply with the RFC requirements to the letter while sending messages. While accepting messages I have to be a bit more lenient though because the other administrators on the net aren't quite as attentive (or even competent)...
Note: The filters and systems I administer process 30,000 messages daily for multiple domain names at multiple locations. This has been our biggest cause of marking messages as junk incorrectly when we are receiving them. Though less savvy sender system administrators like to blame us for having misconfigured junk mail rules.
The problem is not that she made the yahoo account easily accessible, it's that there were e-mails in the account which look suspiciously like they should have never existed there in the first place.
Do you really store e-mail so valuable in a yahoo account which would make you that upset if someone broke into it? Really? Do you mail (postal) letters to people with a pile of cash inside when you pay your bills? That would be about as foolish.
The principle of the matter isn't that a yahoo account was breached, it's that there was a politician keeping government messages inside.
If he "broke in" and ONLY found e-mail with baby pictures, some family reunion stuff, her asking someone to lunch, etc. do you think this would have made a story at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu is a necessary good. For some reason, we need a distro for the Windows masses.
Fixed that for you.
I'm surprised that the reason behind having a distribution with a more consistent look and feel and a bit of "polish" to it would be quite so hard to understand for a lot of the Slashdot crowd.
From the perspective of end-users who like to change some advanced settings, without becoming a certified sysadmin in the process; Linux as an OS is a stubborn, inconsistent, misleading, and often frustrating piece of crap by and large. Some parts of it are examples of exceptional engineering and sleek design (I can't think of one at the moment though). Other parts leave you wondering if anyone has even looked at it from the mindset of a user in the 2000's instead of the 70's when everything was timeshares and terminals.
There is a large subset of users between the type like someone's grandmother who never touches or needs to understand a thing (only be shown how to do it one way to follow their written instructions) and a system programmer (who knows how it all connects on the inside) which want to have some control over things like printers, modems, dual-monitor displays, VPN connections, network file sharing, media playback codecs / applications, games, wireless internet, Firewalls, Digital Cameras, MP3 Players, and such but not be inundated with mundane, backwards, or otherwise archaic nonsense when trying to change only semi-complex settings. Things like which of two monitors is the primary desktop, how to set their printer to a different paper size, configure their default browser for links opened throughout the system, how to get a software firewall to auto configure based on network they attached to, setup their wireless network connection to always connect to their home network when it's in range, how to open files on another machine in their house, how to setup their scanner, etc. These are some tasks which still have a long way to go to be reasonable for the average sorta-knows-whats-going-on Joe under many circumstances because they have little "gotcha" type bugs which crop up frequently or simply poor design from the beginning. Unfortunately these little "gotcha" bugs tend to come with 40 pages of reading about every other technology even remotely related to try and understand the problem.
Some people want to actually use their mp3 player instead of learning how shitty the sound system in their operating system is or why their sound card only runs with one program at a time (depending on Distro). Some people want to play games without learning what a binary video driver is or how it taints the kernel licensing / support. Some people want to print their business cards without learning all about CUPS. They just want to plug, click, go. There is nothing wrong with that really.
Also, Ubuntu has something to offer the Mac users in the same vein which other distributions may not have done quite so well with in the past. As Apple is considered to have one of the more "polished" operating systems of the three I am discussing for end users.
Most people just want consistency and functionality. Some others want security and flexibility. Everyone wants something a little different. All (K)Ubuntu attempts to do is bridge the consistency/usability and security/flexibility gap. Judging by their popularity they must be doing a decent job so far.
- Toast
P.S. Now while my post may read as a flame on Linux it is not. Linux is only what people make of it and it is constantly evolving and for the better in my opinion. My post is a flame on the prevailing attitude around here of everyone needing to understand the really useless crap and have a well formed reflex to having to learn a little about 40 things to make 1 simple thing happen, and that they should like it. Linux is just as complex of a beast as Macintosh and Windows just below the surface, it just doesn't hide that fact as well as some of it's competitors and tends to drown the "power user but not administrator" types with it's incessant little quirks for a great many "normal" activities which people have grown accustomed to being "easy" and relatively "thought free".
Not as a counter to your point, but rather to make sure you are aware, he has Parkinson's Disease. His apparent mental difficulties cannot be entirely attributed to his fighting career.
- Toast
I'll try to be more discreet next time. Sorry.
- Toast
Also, objects such as Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy let off enormous amounts of radiation. You can read more about problems encountered by the Galileo probes for Jupiter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(spacecraft)#Other_radiation_related_anomalies
And other sources about radiation on Mars:
http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive07/undergroundmars_0205.html
http://www.lip.pt/events/2006/ecrs/proc/ecrs06-s0-141.pdf
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2003-03/a-2003-03-14-11-Mars.cfm
Epic fail. As stated in my post the magnetic field issue pertains to Mars due to its small size, not Venus.
Transforming another planet in our solar system into something habitable is wishful thinking in it's entirety at this point. OTOH, simply finding other planets is something we can already do, we just need to refine the techniques and technology.
As far as terraforming goes we have been met with moderate failure just trying to build a self contained biosphere on planet earth (which we know to be an inhabitable body for fact): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
- Toast
Along that same line of logic: How come we haven't found them and said "Hi!"? I would suggest that problems we face may not be terribly different from problems other potential civilizations have come across (should they exist).
I'm sure there are plenty more issues we have yet to discover with long-range communications through space. Let alone the process of finding other intelligent beings to communicate with or finding an intelligible way to communicate between two entirely different species... Don't let the dreamed up solutions from Sci-Fi movies make you think there are easy or even possible solutions to those problems.
Ever try and carry on a conversation with a dolphin for example? How about over thousands of light-years worth of space?
- Toast
Venus will never be a good candidate for habitation unless we build platforms which "float" on its atmosphere's surface due to the close proximity to the sun. Wikipedia has some decent overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
Mars is also quite small and does not hold onto its atmosphere very well (which coincidentally means it also doesn't have a strong magnetic field of it's own in which to protect potential inhabitants from solar radiation amongst other things (again due to its size)), so colonizing it will only really be possible if we build sealed enclosures on its surface or find a way to generate a LOT of atmosphere over a long time AND we find a way to protect our self from radiation from space in a feasible manner.
I am not an educated member in these related fields, but this is the information I have picked up while taking a passing interest in this stuff.
On top of that, finding other planets which are earth like does not have to happen in an either / or situation with attempting to colonize other planets. Both research paths can and are being pursued at the same time because it takes an entirely different scientist and research field to find extra-planetary bodies than it will to find a way to terraform one.
- Toast
The users still don't give a flying fuck about any of that. Parent poster is still correct.
Since when do kernel developers support end users too btw?
And if Nvidia drivers cause a bluescreen on your Windows PC do you call Microsoft? Or would you more likely contact Nvidia? After all, Nvidia can contact Microsoft if they find a kernel bug in Windows (or develop a workaround)... Same holds true for Linux. Nvidia can contact the kernel developers if they find a bug in the interface they use for their drivers.
The idea of only using open drivers for some ideological goal of having a 100% "pure" system can take a hike for people like me. Once a vendor has either released specs to create open drivers (preferable) or have created their own binary drivers (but support my OS) that's all I care about as a user. If there is a bug, or if their drivers cause a bug in something else I still know who I can contact about it (or what products I will avoid recommending to my friends).
Do I advocate and support companies willing to release detailed hardware specs so good and open drivers can be created? Absolutely. Will I abandon non-open but functional drivers in favor of hack-ups created by reverse engineering their hardware and only on the premise of having an ideologically pure machine? Not a chance.
- Toast
Your analogy of open heart surgery would hold true if technologists expected her to do something as intricate as diagnosing BIOS error codes with a hexadecimal readout and then soldiering a couple of leads together on the mainboard to correct a clock shift error in the timing circuitry due to a shady voltage regulator. No one expects the users to understand anything close to that.
This was something more akin to her getting confused by the ruler being in centimeters on the hole punch on her desk when she needed to know inches. The Hole-Punch vendor told her she could still use the metric ruler for the same effect (but failed to teach her the metric system), and the people who wanted the holes punched in the first place told her they already gave her the right measurements and didn't know what she was talking about. And instead of finding out how to fix that issue by using a simple converter she quit her job and bitched to the media about the metric travesty which just took place on her desk. Those of us who understand the simple matter of conversion then are left in awe over the sheer stupidity of the matter.
She is a case of social engineering or fraud just waiting to happen. Unfortunately, that cannot really be anybody's fault but hers. The information she needed to know before she even ventured into computerland is readily available in thousands of forms. You can even buy it through infomercials or leech it off of friends for free. People which are still WILLFULLY ignorant to computer basics get no sympathy from me.
- Toast
P.S. The number of operating systems on the market since personal computers became common place has never been reduced to 1. Microsoft may have had the largest market share RECENTLY but there has always been other ones around like Macintosh, DOS, Amiga, Linux, BSD Unix, etc. Don't excuse the attitude people take with thinking there is only one option they even need to know the name of (15 years ago Microsoft wasn't even the most dominant in most areas and in 15 years probably will not be the dominant player once again). Remember, Mac was the dominant player long before Microsoft entered the personal computing scene as a serious player, it's best that users never become complacent and think that Microsoft is the only thing they will ever need to know.
I will agree with your statement but would you also agree that in situations like whistle blowers, 3rd party reporting of cases such as the position P.J. is in, newspaper sources for inside stories, and other circumstances where real harm could come to a person whose anonymity becomes compromised in general, it might be a good idea to leave anonymous enough alone and attempt to judge it upon it's merits of argument instead of the source?
- Toast
Let's suppose for a moment that she was/is under some kind of financial agreement with IBM, then that changes things entirely. I am by no means suggesting this is the case but regarding it as a possibility - especially given the bias in her posts.
I am curious as to what changes entirely even if she is hired. Maybe you are on to something, but convincing me that she was hired along does not prove anything to me at all. Are there holes where her opinion does not meet fact which would severely change a readers opinion? If so, where?
Maybe my post was trolling, but it's something I have the right to do and you should not undermine. Something more constructive towards the debate would have been appreciated rather than contempt and mockery.
I will apologize in that you seem to have taken my post to be directed at you instead of your argument. That was not my intention.
Here is my side: If you are going to insinuate that someone relatively anonymous has ulterior motives on a public forum, maybe showing us why it is that you might think that would be more enlightening and maybe +5 insightful than simply speculating.
- Toast
P.S. The internet is a place full of assholes and wing-nuts. I'm not trying to be either, but that is always a matter of opinion. It's a lot easier to not take a single thing you read out here personally.
P.P.S And to the poster futher below me listing their conspiracy theory. I checked out the documents listed there but I'm not really interested in whether or not Pamela Jones was hired unless it factually changes the proceedings of the court. I realize and accept that she happens to be very pro-IBM in these cases as I happen to share the opinion to some degree. However, if there is something she has factually warped in order to persuade the public at large then I am also interested to hear it. Just be prepared for the [citation needed].
t wasn't my intention to actually debate this with anyone in particular, however it seems we actually do have a small but functional debate specifically since neither of us are caught up in trying to identify each other to try to prove ill intentions. Rather, we are debating the actual merits of each others opinion on the topic at hand, regardless of the fact that neither of us are readily identifiable.
Also, Bush is a readily identifiable public figure with a verifiable past of misleading the general public. He also wields great power capable of changing many people's lives based on what he says simply because of his position within the government. Verifying his intentions is a different and more logical beast entirely.
- Toast
And so is the desire to remove anonymity. Both are acceptable.
Anonymity should be an even exchange for credibility as I see it. Since you could meet me in meat-space and I could lie to you about everything from my identity down to my intentions what can you prove simply by knowing my "name" or "address"? Hell, I could even gather up some paid "friends" to spread some good rumors about what my intentions are too (just for good measure). Volunteering your real identity to add credibility to something you say is nothing more than a token gesture to me. The rest of what you say has to jive too.
On the flip side, protecting my real identity when I'm online is relatively important at all times to my real physical safety and well being. I won't consciously make it easier for some nut-job which doesn't like what I have to say to find out who I really am. And I'm not even a high profile target. Knowing who I am reflects nothing of the credibility of what comes out of my mouth in all reality.
Once you have been misdirected to arguing the facts of the presenter instead of the facts of the matter everything you will do is an exercise in straw-man assembly and inspection and rarely will you ever get anywhere productive at all.
- Toast
P.S. Thought for the day: When you argue with someone. Are you the type which calls their character into question before or after you call their argument it's self into question?
Doesn't this lend credit to the idea that perhaps PJ was hired solely to cover the SCO trial?
Was her mysterious identity ever uncovered?
Why in hell should a person subject their identity and private information to the whim of the trolls on the Internet in any capacity, just to "prove" they aren't hiding something sinister? Try proving there WAS something sinister, I'll certainly take that complaint more credibly.
Internet anonymity is here to stay (as it should be) as there is no proof positive way to identify other Internet going users without subjecting them to very real risks in meat-space (stalkers, or worse). Come to think of it there are very very few ways to positively identify people in meat-space (even with fingerprints and SSN cards) let alone verify their intentions...
It is ALWAYS up to you, the reader, browser, and consumer to attempt to determine truth and fiction based on your own balance of values, experiences, and interpretations. Use your own trust network to find that out for yourself. Come back and stir the pot once you have something more legitimate than a suspicion about someone else's suspicion about someone else's theory. Second hand truth is better than third hand theory in my opinion.
If you think there is bias in her reporting then go ahead and think there is bias in her reporting. Seek another truth if you believe it to exist. However, in that same stroke, the air of credibility seems to be on PJ's side to many many people. I have found minimal reason to be concerned personally with whether or not she WAS hired. I'm just glad to be informed of her take on the matter.
However, you are perfectly free to be paranoid about her identity all you like, but expecting her identity to be proven in an environment of suspicion is just stupidity. Being proven so you feel better about it is simple idiocy.
Fanatics and conspiracy nuts will always be good at inadvertently burying the truth when it comes out in a sea of accusations anyways because people are blinded by their opinions. So what does it matter? The truth could already have been said.
- Toast
P.S. Nothing personal, I'm having my second Monday of the week here at work...
FTFA:
"The open version does not compile to VHDL, C/C++, or Haskell, and does not produce the formal models used for equivalence checking."
So does this mean the open version (trial version) which we might have access to does not do much of what it is touted to be good for?
Just another advertisement for a commercial product methinks. Maybe cool, but still a slashvertisement.
- Toast
Is (service provider of choice) doing a better job? At least with government we might have a chance to find out where that $200b went to.
After all, would we be even having this conversation at all if private industry held up their end of the deal?
Is YOUR broadband cheap, fast, and available everywhere (compared globally)? I know mine is not.
- Toast
P.S. I look at the way water and roads are handled. And I fail to see a system worse off now compared to when private industry would have controlled it.
If it costs $50 bux to fill up the car...
Is that $50 pricing for filling up the car based on volume of fuel necessary to power said car from oil or biomass based fuel?
Currently it might take $50 worth of gasoline, but the dollar value is the wrong conversion between gas and biomass. What would be more useful is to compare how much energy it takes to power a vehicle for 400 miles and compare volumes of necessary fuel produced from biomass or oil. Then figure out the required area & cost necessary to produce the required volume of biomass.
Gasoline and Diesel (indeed oil based products) have a very high energy potential by volume / weight which is what makes them more viable than say burning wood to power a vehicle. Biomass based oils however have a multitude of potential benefits, namely the fact that they can be "grown" and "harvested" as opposed to "drilled" and fought over.
Anything we can do to convert "waste" plant matter (not including that which is used for our food supplies!) into a renewable fuel, even if only used for powering camping gear, space heaters, and other small appliances would be useful even if just in the name of exploring the science behind it.
- Toast
P.S. It would be ESPECIALLY useful if the technology behind creating a renewable fuel like this alludes to could be exported to third world countries for use in their machinery (instead of much more insidious fuels) as they industrialize. I can't help but imagine that it would be useful for keeping pollution down in third world countries (if it's cheap or readily attainable). It would also be good for keeping these countries self-sufficient instead of having to "partner" with oil producing countries which may have a totally different agenda which keeps them dependent.
The technology might not be enough to power our nation as it stands now, but it certainly could power many people who don't lead as energy dependent lives as ourselves (I.E. almost anyone else on the planet).
Considering your VMware client OS is using the VMware video driver to power a virtual video card and it doesn't support any graphical acceleration at all, it probably won't do anything faster than 2d frame buffer based video cards from 15 years ago would.
VMWare video performance has been known to suck horribly for 3d accelerated graphics since it's inception.
Someday maybe they will have some sort of driver translation to at least enable openGL or the like to pass instructions directly to the video hardware. Then again I understand that there may be multiple issues including security and reliability if your client OS has control over your video driver (at least in Windows where that can crash your host OS) where the client OS assumes that it has complete control over the entire screen real-estate.
Check your outbound usage.
Considering cable connections are asynchronous if your outbound pipe fills up your whole connection will slow to a crawl since the acknowledgment packets will be unable to be delivered outbound in a timely manner to tell the nodes you are downloading from to send more data.
Basically if you have 500KB/s inbound and 100KB/s outbound, if you saturate all 100KB/s outbound you can expect your inbound traffic to drop to 100KB/s or less as well as increasing the latency over the connection to 2 seconds or more (on some connections).
The way to fix this is to throttle your outbound maximum traffic in your BT client to less than 80% of your maximum cap as tested through sites like speedtest.tds.net or whatever your favorite site is. This should allow for overhead traffic like ACK packets to leave your network in a timely manner.
You would still have a firewall to open ports / IP addresses up on and you would have to keep track of either DNS entries or IP addresses for each device anyways so whats the difference?
That is... unless you want to just hook up your appliances and computers sans-firewall to the net...
Nothing like a hacker being able to hold your food hostage...
Lack of public IP space he owns or is globally available with IPv4? lol...
I meant to say stop using CNAME records for MX resolution, not PTR records. Doh!
As a system administrator, I can't tell you how many times a failure to receive a customer's e-mail was due to a poorly-configured mail server on the sender's network.
Fixed that for you. I think the number of mis-configured mail servers and DNS records far exceeds the number of mis-configured spam filters.
Reason #1 that spam filters tend to be ineffective: Sysadmins do not fill out the suggested (or even required) information in DNS, FQDN identification strings, etc. Because Admin's tend to get ahead of themselves and do not test for strict compatibility with the RFC standards. A lot of false-positive flagging by spam filters is because messages are coming from unverified sources because of missing PTR records, no SPF / DomainKeys information, Server HELO string containing garbage, etc.
If you setup your mail system with proper forward and reverse lookup addresses (stop using PTR records for your MX address!), proper message routing and anti-splashback, sane retry and throttling settings, SPF / Domainkeys, and HELO identification strings, you will likely have 0 problem sending mail to just about anyone. With the exception of Yahoo.com and BellSouth.net of course as they have drunk squirrels running their filters...)
I always operate off of the rule that my mail servers will comply with the RFC requirements to the letter while sending messages. While accepting messages I have to be a bit more lenient though because the other administrators on the net aren't quite as attentive (or even competent)...
Note: The filters and systems I administer process 30,000 messages daily for multiple domain names at multiple locations. This has been our biggest cause of marking messages as junk incorrectly when we are receiving them. Though less savvy sender system administrators like to blame us for having misconfigured junk mail rules.
The problem is not that she made the yahoo account easily accessible, it's that there were e-mails in the account which look suspiciously like they should have never existed there in the first place.
Do you really store e-mail so valuable in a yahoo account which would make you that upset if someone broke into it? Really? Do you mail (postal) letters to people with a pile of cash inside when you pay your bills? That would be about as foolish.
The principle of the matter isn't that a yahoo account was breached, it's that there was a politician keeping government messages inside.
If he "broke in" and ONLY found e-mail with baby pictures, some family reunion stuff, her asking someone to lunch, etc. do you think this would have made a story at all?
LAMP => WAMP.
Haha, Or maybe WIMP if the Apache stuff doesn't work out?
(W)indows (I)IS (M)ySQL (P)HP
(python, perl, whatever)
- Toast