Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!
I think it's a tough call between the two: both cause enormous waste. You probably don't realize just how much email is spam because companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do a pretty damn good job of filtering it out of their webmail products. Similarly your employer probably has spam filters etc. All of that junk email costs time, money and power; and those resources could probably be more effectively used elsewhere.
Furthermore it is easy for a competent admin to easily customize and lock down FF. We just started rolling out FF to 10000 PCs globally. We have a Windows PC/Active Directory environment. GPOs were used to force the user's profile locations to be a network share, configure proxy settings etc. For anyone who might be contemplating deploying FF I'd say "Yes - you can use your well-known Windows management tools such as SCCM and GPOs to deploy and manage Firefox. All the settings, configuration etc are very well-documented.".
The real endgame will be context sensitive interfaces that allow the computer to guess what you want to do, with an override for people who prefer to keep menus in the same place.
The technology will provide the location of the individual wearing the shoes within 9m (30 feet), anywhere on the planet.
Just as long as they are not in a tunnel, inside a large building, in a canyon, or have any other obstacles around them that block signal from the GPS or block the signal that this device transmits, of course! Why do marketers continue to insist that GPS is some kind of magic technology that works everywhere, and ignore the limitations of technology? This probably won't even work inside some of the nursing homes where Alzheimer's patients normally reside!
Plus they might wander off in their slippers, barefoot, in someone else's shoes etc... My grandmother (who had Alzeheimer's) regularly went for long walks in her slippers, nightie and robe. Luckily she had lived in a small village for almost 50 years - and everyone who found her knew who she was. Giving her GPS shoes would have been a waste of money and time.
Almost any LDAP Directory service will work for your directory needs. I think the real question should be "is the cost of the Windows Server 2008+CALs outweighed by the extra features I get?". If you're considering Active Directory then you should know that as a bare minimum you will need two Windows Servers. But you will get GPOs, centralized security (domain users and groups) etc. Do you need all that? If you're a startup then spend money on getting your business up and running, not on keeping Ballmer's office stocked with chairs. So stick with any of the worthy Linux-based. FOSS solutions - I have limited experience with them so I'll leave others to comment on which is "best". (Disclaimer: I deployed AD to my company - they're a 10,000 employee global company that was running Windows NT everywhere when I joined.)
If you refuse such simple, harmless and costless request, you are not really their friend either.
This is total bullshit. He spent his own money (or borrowed money) to buy his computer. It is not a costless request. Nor should he need to buy his friends with CPU time.
Here's a pointer: if you need to pay someone to be nice to you then it's not friendship it's prostitution.
Also, air cooled engines are still widely used in motorcycles. I think the main motive for not using them in cars anymore is due mostly to the difficulty in cooling in an enclosed region, have you seen how cramped is a modern car under the hood?
Water-cooled engines are quieter. In addition to the sound-baffling that water provides, many air-cooled engines need additional fans. Think of the original VW Beetle or the older Porsche 911's. Their engines sound a lot different from most cars.
...you can't use it when you don't have an internet connection. Why doesn't anyone think about this?
Isn't Google Gears supposed to fix that? I guess those morons at Google finally got something right./sarcasm
Seriously - this is not news. Anyone who considers SAAS or web-based apps must have seen the same pros and cons that various posters have pointed out. RMS may look like an Old Testament prophet but that doesn't mean every pronouncement has to be dissected, studied and followed.
There's a reason that VCs reporting practices are "obscured from the average citizen's eye". The average citizen almost never has any interaction with VCs. In the vast majority of cases average citizens will only have money invested in VC funds via a mutual fund, 401k etc. Even then the proportion of the mutual fund/401k fund that is invested in a VC is very low - usually around 5%.
VCs build pools of money from funds, and make large numbers of small investments in highly risky new ventures. A huge proportion of those investments are lost. Every aspect of the process is private and regulated by the contracts each party signs. The investments are not open to the general public.
When I travel from New York City to Boston I always take the train. It is expensive, but when I factor in: the time to get to/from the airports, taxi fares, the time spent in security lines, time spent at check-in, time spent on the runway, time spent circling the airport, money spent buying shitty, overpriced food/drinks in the airport, comfort of train compared to 'plane (I'm over 6'), power sockets in trains (with tables that are comfortable to use) it's actually a bargain to take the train. There's less hassle, I arrive fresher, more relaxed etc.
I'd love to see the infrastructure improved along 3 or 4 major corridors (eg East Coast from Boston to Miami, West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, Midwest from Chicago to Houston), but I think the bulk of the money should be spent on improving rail links from suburbs to major centers of employment/industry. Combine that with stricter zoning requirements for housing, and higher road taxes and maybe we can reduce sprawl as well as cutting traffic.
The question "What is a human?" was recently answered:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/584833 The Human Ecosystem, Posted 12/23/2008, Matthew Child; George Macfarlane
Genetic analysis shows that our gastrointestinal tracts are home to more than 100 000 billion (1014) individual micro-organisms of perhaps 36 000 different species. And more than 90% of the cells in our bodies are non-human.[1] These bacteria form a diverse and complex ecosystem with a total gene pool (microbiome) more than 100 times larger than the human genome -- in effect we are hybrid "superorganisms." The types and numbers of bacteria differ from the stomach to the distal colon, reflecting the changes in pH, concentration of oxygen, and availability of nutrients. Small numbers persist in the stomach (notably Helicobacter pylori, which causes ulcers) and the small intestine, but most of these organisms are found in the anaerobic environment of the large intestine ( Table ).
So I think there's a lot of tough questions to ask before allowing legislation like this to pass. We can't even define "human" very well, and we already appear to be hybrids (mitochondrial DNA etc).
Why not combine the WOL and the RDP connection in one handy utility called, say, "Connect to my PC"? As far as the user is concerned it's one.exe but you know that under the covers you send a WOL magic packet, then ping the host until it's up, and then initiate an RDP connection.
We have many of the same issues. In fact our biggest problem has been finding a way to force standby (against the wishes of some apps), and wake up PCs on schedule to get their AV updates, Windows patches, software installations etc etc. Windows XP is pretty unsophisticated. We ended up writing our own service to do it but you could buy Verdiem's suite to do it. http://www.verdiem.com/surveyor.aspx
I am not associated with Verdiem in any way, but this is one of the products that seemed to be a leader in the field.
I worked as head of Critical Factilities Engineering for a major financial services provider with a 1 MM sq ft campus. There were just over 4000 employees on the campus, each one with at least 1 computer at his/her office/cube. After having a very expensive energy audit performed, a potential savings was (big surprise) shutting down PCs.
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea. Why marketing? Because the company had just gone through a "rebranding" and the marketing department had designed a new screensaver for all workstations with the new logo/slogan. None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to themselves!
No, I'm not kidding.
Sounds like you worked in the same company that I work in. We had exactly the same situation and I happen to work in a 4500 employee campus of a major financial services provider. Luckily the marketing people have since died or departed (so we got rid of the CPU- and disk-intensive screensaver and let the LCDs go to sleep), and the head of my department (IT) has been reassigned. He was the genius (I'm being sarcastic) who said to me: "Don't work on getting the PCs shut down overnight. Wait until senior management asks for it, then we'll be heroes." Fucking gutless moron.
When I visited New York and Los Angeles I noticed they have some sort of reverse TARDIS technology going on with their cabs - huge on the outside, with the turning radius of an oil tanker, but tiny on the inside, with my knees scraping against the seat (and I am a short guy). Why not make the car smaller on the outside and bigger on the inside, like London cabs? You can even buy some of the older models (e.g. the TXII) in the USA now...
As a Londoner living in NYC I heartily applaud this idea. The current taxi fleet has GPS etc but the cars are horrible.
They all seem to disappear when it rains, which I assume is because they can't get wet. So, they need to be waterproofed, or at least be given big umbrellas.
Umbrellas might work, actually. The umbrella vendors pop up out of nowhere when it rains, like hibernating frogs in the desert. Maybe they could be put to good use covering up the taxis.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's a 180deg V - ie a special case. Like a square is a special type of rectangle.
She's bad.
A little perspective please...
Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!
I think it's a tough call between the two: both cause enormous waste. You probably don't realize just how much email is spam because companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do a pretty damn good job of filtering it out of their webmail products. Similarly your employer probably has spam filters etc. All of that junk email costs time, money and power; and those resources could probably be more effectively used elsewhere.
Some good stats are in this informative article: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/2008-year-in-spam.html
The average number of spam emails a user would have received per day: 194.
The Darwin Awards website called. They want to record you performing this stunt.
I think I'm going to cry. What a beautiful moment.
Furthermore it is easy for a competent admin to easily customize and lock down FF. We just started rolling out FF to 10000 PCs globally. We have a Windows PC/Active Directory environment. GPOs were used to force the user's profile locations to be a network share, configure proxy settings etc. For anyone who might be contemplating deploying FF I'd say "Yes - you can use your well-known Windows management tools such as SCCM and GPOs to deploy and manage Firefox. All the settings, configuration etc are very well-documented.".
or 1/(time spent on Slashdot per day)
The real endgame will be context sensitive interfaces that allow the computer to guess what you want to do, with an override for people who prefer to keep menus in the same place.
Didn't Microsoft do this with Bob and Clippy?
The technology will provide the location of the individual wearing the shoes within 9m (30 feet), anywhere on the planet. Just as long as they are not in a tunnel, inside a large building, in a canyon, or have any other obstacles around them that block signal from the GPS or block the signal that this device transmits, of course! Why do marketers continue to insist that GPS is some kind of magic technology that works everywhere, and ignore the limitations of technology? This probably won't even work inside some of the nursing homes where Alzheimer's patients normally reside!
Plus they might wander off in their slippers, barefoot, in someone else's shoes etc... My grandmother (who had Alzeheimer's) regularly went for long walks in her slippers, nightie and robe. Luckily she had lived in a small village for almost 50 years - and everyone who found her knew who she was. Giving her GPS shoes would have been a waste of money and time.
Unlimited plans $20 per month, but all the plans offer SSL.
Almost any LDAP Directory service will work for your directory needs. I think the real question should be "is the cost of the Windows Server 2008+CALs outweighed by the extra features I get?". If you're considering Active Directory then you should know that as a bare minimum you will need two Windows Servers. But you will get GPOs, centralized security (domain users and groups) etc. Do you need all that? If you're a startup then spend money on getting your business up and running, not on keeping Ballmer's office stocked with chairs. So stick with any of the worthy Linux-based. FOSS solutions - I have limited experience with them so I'll leave others to comment on which is "best". (Disclaimer: I deployed AD to my company - they're a 10,000 employee global company that was running Windows NT everywhere when I joined.)
If you refuse such simple, harmless and costless request, you are not really their friend either.
This is total bullshit. He spent his own money (or borrowed money) to buy his computer. It is not a costless request. Nor should he need to buy his friends with CPU time.
Here's a pointer: if you need to pay someone to be nice to you then it's not friendship it's prostitution.
Also, air cooled engines are still widely used in motorcycles. I think the main motive for not using them in cars anymore is due mostly to the difficulty in cooling in an enclosed region, have you seen how cramped is a modern car under the hood?
Water-cooled engines are quieter. In addition to the sound-baffling that water provides, many air-cooled engines need additional fans. Think of the original VW Beetle or the older Porsche 911's. Their engines sound a lot different from most cars.
How would they have helped, if they're only for show ?
Dude - cos the whole damn thing is being filmed on a Hollywood backlot. You don't *seriously* believe they actually flew this stuff to Mars?
My guess would be
You forgot:
But I thought the twists were needed because the signal is polarized!!!
...you can't use it when you don't have an internet connection. Why doesn't anyone think about this?
Isn't Google Gears supposed to fix that? I guess those morons at Google finally got something right. /sarcasm
Seriously - this is not news. Anyone who considers SAAS or web-based apps must have seen the same pros and cons that various posters have pointed out. RMS may look like an Old Testament prophet but that doesn't mean every pronouncement has to be dissected, studied and followed.
Gliese 581 d is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material...
Even if it isn't habitable, it might still be large enough to have a habitable moon perhaps?
That's no moon.
There's a reason that VCs reporting practices are "obscured from the average citizen's eye". The average citizen almost never has any interaction with VCs. In the vast majority of cases average citizens will only have money invested in VC funds via a mutual fund, 401k etc. Even then the proportion of the mutual fund/401k fund that is invested in a VC is very low - usually around 5%.
VCs build pools of money from funds, and make large numbers of small investments in highly risky new ventures. A huge proportion of those investments are lost. Every aspect of the process is private and regulated by the contracts each party signs. The investments are not open to the general public.
I'd love to see the infrastructure improved along 3 or 4 major corridors (eg East Coast from Boston to Miami, West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, Midwest from Chicago to Houston), but I think the bulk of the money should be spent on improving rail links from suburbs to major centers of employment/industry. Combine that with stricter zoning requirements for housing, and higher road taxes and maybe we can reduce sprawl as well as cutting traffic.
The Human Ecosystem, Posted 12/23/2008, Matthew Child; George Macfarlane
Genetic analysis shows that our gastrointestinal tracts are home to more than 100 000 billion (1014) individual micro-organisms of perhaps 36 000 different species. And more than 90% of the cells in our bodies are non-human.[1] These bacteria form a diverse and complex ecosystem with a total gene pool (microbiome) more than 100 times larger than the human genome -- in effect we are hybrid "superorganisms." The types and numbers of bacteria differ from the stomach to the distal colon, reflecting the changes in pH, concentration of oxygen, and availability of nutrients. Small numbers persist in the stomach (notably Helicobacter pylori, which causes ulcers) and the small intestine, but most of these organisms are found in the anaerobic environment of the large intestine ( Table ).
To see the full article you need some kind of login which I don't have, but SlashDot had a similar story a couple of days ago: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/15/0252219
So I think there's a lot of tough questions to ask before allowing legislation like this to pass. We can't even define "human" very well, and we already appear to be hybrids (mitochondrial DNA etc).
Why not combine the WOL and the RDP connection in one handy utility called, say, "Connect to my PC"? As far as the user is concerned it's one .exe but you know that under the covers you send a WOL magic packet, then ping the host until it's up, and then initiate an RDP connection.
We have many of the same issues. In fact our biggest problem has been finding a way to force standby (against the wishes of some apps), and wake up PCs on schedule to get their AV updates, Windows patches, software installations etc etc. Windows XP is pretty unsophisticated. We ended up writing our own service to do it but you could buy Verdiem's suite to do it. http://www.verdiem.com/surveyor.aspx
I am not associated with Verdiem in any way, but this is one of the products that seemed to be a leader in the field.
I worked as head of Critical Factilities Engineering for a major financial services provider with a 1 MM sq ft campus. There were just over 4000 employees on the campus, each one with at least 1 computer at his/her office/cube. After having a very expensive energy audit performed, a potential savings was (big surprise) shutting down PCs. Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea. Why marketing? Because the company had just gone through a "rebranding" and the marketing department had designed a new screensaver for all workstations with the new logo/slogan. None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to themselves! No, I'm not kidding.
Sounds like you worked in the same company that I work in. We had exactly the same situation and I happen to work in a 4500 employee campus of a major financial services provider. Luckily the marketing people have since died or departed (so we got rid of the CPU- and disk-intensive screensaver and let the LCDs go to sleep), and the head of my department (IT) has been reassigned. He was the genius (I'm being sarcastic) who said to me: "Don't work on getting the PCs shut down overnight. Wait until senior management asks for it, then we'll be heroes." Fucking gutless moron.
When I visited New York and Los Angeles I noticed they have some sort of reverse TARDIS technology going on with their cabs - huge on the outside, with the turning radius of an oil tanker, but tiny on the inside, with my knees scraping against the seat (and I am a short guy). Why not make the car smaller on the outside and bigger on the inside, like London cabs? You can even buy some of the older models (e.g. the TXII) in the USA now...
As a Londoner living in NYC I heartily applaud this idea. The current taxi fleet has GPS etc but the cars are horrible.
They all seem to disappear when it rains, which I assume is because they can't get wet. So, they need to be waterproofed, or at least be given big umbrellas.
Umbrellas might work, actually. The umbrella vendors pop up out of nowhere when it rains, like hibernating frogs in the desert. Maybe they could be put to good use covering up the taxis.
The umbrella salesmen *are* the cab drivers.