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  1. Re:What's worse... on Microsoft Forces Desktop Search On Windows Update · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's because MP3 isn't a free codec. You're supposed to pay the patent holder for the right to use it - since most Linux distros are free-as-in-beer, you can see why this would be a problem.

  2. Re:Lazy Kids ! on Gen Y Tech Savvy, But Not Interested in a Career · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure I have. I also know that supply and demand aren't always (or usually, for that matter) restricted by the government. With IT certifications, there are two obvious ways you can affect supply and demand:

    1. Price: If you increase price, you decrease the supply of people that can afford to get your certification. Interestingly, if you set the price too low, too many people will get it, which will cause the demand for that certification in the workplace to go down - this, in turn, will eventually affect the demand for the certification itself. If you set the price high enough, fewer people will be able to afford it, which will cause the HR drones to think there may be value in the certification. This brings me to the next method...
    2. Difficulty: Make the test too easy and anyone can pass. This will eventually effect demand for the certification in much the same way that having a low price affects demand. By making the test difficult, you also restrict the supply of people that can pass your certification, which, in turn, helps to boost demand for that certification - if only the best can pass your test, people will assume that only the best passed your test and will hire accordingly.

    The key, of course, is to make sure you don't get too carried away in either direction. As I already mentioned, you don't want to make the test too easy or too inexpensive - if you do so, its value in the workplace will be minimal since just about anyone can get it. However, you also don't want to make it too expensive or too difficult - if it's too expensive, only corporate types will be able to afford it, and they have the nasty habit of doing ROI studies on such things sooner or later. If it's too difficult, nobody will want to take the test, especially if the individual's ROI on studying for the test doesn't make it worthwhile. Consequently, supply and demand for certifications is governed by the perceived value of the certification from the workplace, which, in turn, affects the perceived value of studying for and getting the certification for the individual. Also, the perceived value of the product you're getting certified in definitely plays a factor here. Everyone has heard of a "paper MCSE" - they exist because anyone that's interested in IT work "needs" an MCSE to prove they know more than the 15 year old kid down the street, so you have a lot of people studying for that series of tests. However, have you ever heard of a "paper ACSA"? What about a "paper dCAP"? Probably not, because neither Apple OS X or Asterisk are products that HR drones feel represent general knowledge of all IT or phone networks.

    That said, you are correct in that, since none of the certifications are required to work on a computer, they do not restrict the supply of people that can work on a computer. This is why Geek Squad is able to pay so little. However, there is a point (and it comes rather quickly) where, if you wish to get past "help desk drone" status, you're going to have to get a small alphabet soup going on your CV. This is similar to how, if you ever want to get past "front office receptionist at a law firm" or "candy striper at a local hospital" status, you're going to need to get some sort of certification.

  3. Re:Obvious replies on Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine Is Universal! · · Score: 1

    But will it blend? Yes, but you'll need an infinitely large blender to blend the infinitely long tape.

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. Impossible. Following the Wikipedia article on Beowulf clusters: "It does not contain any custom hardware components and is trivially reproducible." The entire machine (not including the infamous infinite tape) is a custom hardware component. You could make a cluster of these, though. It just wouldn't be a Beowulf cluster.

    One question to think about, though: Since Beowulf clusters are predominately open-source driven, would a cluster of Windows machines be a Grendel cluster?

    But will it run Linux? As has been already established earlier in the thread, it will run everything.

    In Soviet Russia, universal are turning machines. In Soviet Russia, the universe is Turing complete.
  4. Re:Lazy Kids ! on Gen Y Tech Savvy, But Not Interested in a Career · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of certifications! MCSE, CCNA, Linux+... heck, even BSD has a certification program now. Of course, any 15 year old can fix a PC for a fee, which I suppose we could stop. Then again, if we do that, we'll also have to stop people from performing first aid for minor injuries and we'll definitely have to shut down We The People.

  5. Re:Less is more on United Makes Plans to Drop 'Baggage Neutrality' · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Umm... that's precisely what the government does. What the police do is make a record of their investigation in finding your car so that you can hand it to your insurance agent and they can pay you back for the car, assuming you insured your car sufficiently for such an event. That said, assuming the government actually did pay you back for your car, there's a big difference between reimbursing you for the car and reimbursing you for the car, lost wages from not being able to make it to work that day, and lost wages from the raise you're certain you would've received if only you showed up to work on time that day, which is precisely what the bailout of the airline industry turned out to be.

  6. Re:Through Money tinted glasses on Microsoft Planning to Buy Open Source Companies? · · Score: 1

    Sage Timberline isn't a walk in the park, either, but neither Timberline nor ACT are as bad as my least favorite Sage product of all time - ACCPAC. A program that corrupts its databases because it can't be bothered to do sane version checking of its clients is a program I can personally do without.

  7. Re:Cry some more on Star Wars Television Series Moving Forward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Enormous Plot Holes? (The Jedi are mysterious, subtle, mystical monks in 4, 5, 6, and 1 and target practice in 2 and 3.) It's not like Episodes 4-6 were light on the plot holes, either. "Empire" is almost completely isolated from Episode 4 - suddenly, Leia goes from cute girl that Luke kisses to being his sister while Vader goes from being a completely mysterious bad guy that has some relation with Obi-Wan and killed Luke's father to being Luke's father. Oh, and, apparently, the Empire has enough resources lying around to not only ward off an insurrection but build a second moon-sized Death Star? Perhaps if they just spent the money on doubling their Star Destroyers, they wouldn't need to keep fighting the Rebellion off with big, highly destructive targets.

    Inverse Ninja Effect? (Two Sith vs hundreds of Jedi.) In the prequels, the Sith were the Ninjas. They won, remember? That was the entire point - they came from seemingly nowhere and completely overwhelemed the forces of good, in much the same way that the forces of good did that to them in Episodes 4-6.

    One and Two Dimensional Characters? At least Boba Fett got a dimension this time around. Han Solo wasn't terribly well developed, either, if you stop and think about it. He's a swashbuckler with heart of gold; that's about it. Luke and Darth Vader were probably the only characters fleshed out beyond a "Write a short paragraph about the character" point, which makes sense since they were the focal characters.

    Insipid Romance? At least nobody kissed their sister this time around. The only reason the Han-Leia romance was even remotely bearable is that Harrison Ford is really, really good at what he does. Besides, how insipid are most romances in the real world, anyways?

    Huge CGI sets which swallow the cast? Umm... Lucas basically invented CGI to pull off the original trilogy. By the standards of the time, the original trilogy had an overwhelming amount of special effects, too.

    Look, don't get me wrong - I'm not a huge fan of the prequels, either. The problem with prequels, especially with ones with as much time between the original movies and the prequels, is that it's very difficult to make it look like the past is really the "past". If you don't get what I'm taking about, compare the polish of your average "Enterprise" episode with TOS. When you're dealing with sci-fi, you can't really do that. Besides, I'm not sure the prequels were all that necessary. But, that's just my take.
  8. If you're going to be obligatory... on Star Wars Television Series Moving Forward · · Score: 1

    You might as well do it right.

    "It's a trap!"

  9. Re:stop breathing on Mythbusters to Test Cockroach Radiation Myth · · Score: 1

    Anyone can play? Ooh... my turn!

    Strange how little bacteria are protected in your view, but our non-DNA carrying viral friends, well, 2,000,000 can merrily risk their little lives in the name of you not having influenza.

    This is fun. Let's try another game.

    In Soviet Russia, bacteria sacrifice you!
    In Soviet Russia, cockroaches protect you!
    Imagine a beowulf cluster of cockro... okay, I'm done.

  10. Re:OT: scale of sociopolitical groups on What's Really Broken with Windows Update - Trust · · Score: 1

    Actually, if anything, capitalism scales a little TOO well - the more people there are, the more goods and services can be provided, no matter how obscure. In fact, when people are "objectified", rational selfish decisions can be made without caring about how the other person feels about it - of course, some of those decisions end up being at the expense of someone else. However, to quote far too many MS support articles, "the behavior is by design". If you want a good example of an economic system that works much better in small groups than large ones, take a look at communism. In small groups, it works surprisingly well - as long as everyone knows each other, it's much easier for everyone to keep track of one another and make sure everyone is contributing according to their ability and receiving according to their needs. After a certain point, however, it's much easier to slip through the cracks and not try as hard (about 1e4 or so).

    Democracy is a little more interesting. What's fascinating about it is that it's consistently inefficient. To understand what that means, consider an authoritarian government system - it's highly efficient provided that you have a strong leader who cares about the fate of his/her country and the people are generally united (voluntarily or otherwise) behind the leader. A good example of this would be Nazi Germany, which accomplished quite a bit with comparably fewer resources than its competition. Imperial Japan could also apply here. However, if either of those conditions does not hold true, the system becomes dangerously inefficient - people begin to starve, the economy breaks down, and all hell breaks loose. One example of this would be modern-day Zimbabwe, or perhaps even North Korea. Stalinist Russia flirted with this at various times, as well. Democracy, on the other hand, is consistently inefficient - by design, a strong leader won't accomplish much more than a weak leader, and a weak leader won't completely break the system. Power is diffused in enough places where the effect of weak leadership is minimized, at the loss of effectiveness of strong leadership for similar reasons. The end result is a very mediocre system of government - however, since it's consistently mediocre, it's much easier to build under. More importantly, people can make long-term plans under it since they know what to expect 50+ years later - more of the same frustrating but ultimately not quite horrible government that they've been living under for the past couple of centuries.

    Naturally, your mileage may vary.

  11. Re:Obligatory: on AOL Cutting 2000 Additional Jobs · · Score: 1

    No no... he's absolutely right!

  12. Re:Why Ubuntu? on Canonical Chases Deal to Ship Ubuntu Server OS · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server on a box. Let's see what's running...

    Netstat -an shows no open ports.
    The root account is disabled.
    Ps -ef shows some kernel modules, some gtty instances, and that's it.
    Oh, did I mention I don't have an X console or anything?

    Am I missing something? Last I tried CentOS (an older version, mind you), root was not only enabled, it was what you logged in as initially. When I installed Debian Sarge a few years ago for a class I was taking, the first thing we had to do after the initial install was shut down a couple of services so only SSH was running (FTP was one of them, if I remember correctly) - with Ubuntu Server, I'm going to have to turn SSH on, along with anything else I want on. That said, Ubuntu Server does make some interesting choices - for example, single user mode has network support. That's a little strange. Other than that, though, no complaints. Granted, SELinux isn't on, but that's fine by me - I didn't turn it on, and maybe I'd like to use something else. At least Ubuntu isn't trying to make that decision for me. Seeing as there's no way for anyone to access my box remotely at the moment anyways, I can make that decision on my own time.

    Anybody care to elaborate on this?

  13. Re:money well spent on Pluto Probe Makes Discoveries at Jupiter · · Score: 1

    I don't know, but I would suspect it would be due to the relatively low levels of light out there. Since there isn't an atmosphere in space to diffuse light and since there is less sunlight out there anyways, I would think that looking at Jupiter with a normal camera with normal coloration would be akin to looking at a model of Jupiter at night in your bedroom.

  14. Re:Skeptical on With OES 2.0, Novell Moves NetWare To Linux · · Score: 2, Informative

    As a Windows system administrator, I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

    There are, as I see it, some big problems with Windows:
    1. You're much more likely to get an inexperienced boob running your network than you are with any other system out there. Most people I know (insert witty comment about "plural of anecdote != data", etc.) start off with Windows, then go to Linux or something else once they have their feet wet. Put another way, if you started off with NetWare, it's because you started off over ten years ago.

    2. It's a royal pain in the rear to restore, especially if you're in a single server environment. Try restoring Active Directory on to a different machine - since it's wrapped up with System State, it's a crapshoot whether or not your new server will boot, much less have a working authentication system afterwards. I eagerly look forward to the day when I can restore Active Directory separately from the rest of my registry. With multiple servers, it's not quite so bad - you can get some redundancy going and migrate a new server in relatively cleanly. Exchange gets a little gnarly at times, though. Then again, when anything worth anything on Windows is a database (registry, Active Directory, Exchange, etc.), you're not going to be able to just "cp" your way out of your problems.

    3. Windows Server is better than it used to be about requiring a reboot after an update, but Windows 2000 was horrible about it. If someone says they're rebooting their Windows 2000 server repeatedly throughout the year, it's telling me they're installing security patches and the like on a regular basis. If they're saying the same thing about Windows 2003, it probably means something similar, but the frequency is going down a little. Then again, rebooting a server is not that hard - do it after hours. Of course, it'd be handy if shutdown.exe actually worked the way it was supposed to so you could reliably script it... it seems to work 75% of the time for me, personally, which is about 25% worse than "shutdown -h now" works on my Ubuntu laptop.

    4. Windows tries way too hard to be everything to everyone. It's built with the same mentality as Microsoft Word - yeah, you won't need 95% of the stuff that's there, but if MS did their job right, it'll be a different 95% for each customer. Trouble is, servers aren't word processors - when something goes wrong, you have to know about the other 95% and be able to troubleshoot it well enough to at least figure out if the problem is over there or if it's in the 5% you're actually using on a regular basis. Thankfully, a lot of that stuff is turned off by default, but if you've ever had to stare at group policy settings (especially pre-GPMC), well, you know what I'm talking about here.

    Other than that, Windows is great!

  15. Re:addiction on 'Neurotic' is Best RTS strategy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The door swings both ways. Biology + cultural reinforcement inclines women (at least American women) to want romance (especially to be seen in public with a man who is showering affection on her). Learn to grant and withold that, and you can start getting your way too. Women don't react rationally (or perhaps they do?) to such deprivation of stimuli - with them, if you deprive it once, they'll assume you will always deprive it and react accordingly. This would be consistent with the "pessimistic-neurotic" approach mentioned earlier, and is the complete opposite of the male "well, she put out once - maybe she'll do it again" school of thought. The solution, of course, would be for the male to realize that, if she's weaponizing sex, she will continue to weaponize sex even after the man "behaves", but that solution just leads to a scorched-earth policy called "divorce".
  16. Re:Apollo's archives on The New Moon Race · · Score: 1

    The folks who still have their shit together, like Google, don't need to go to the moon. They've got other ways to make money - like knowing what kind of waffles you might like to buy for breakfast. Wow. That definitely explains the Google Lunar X Prize. Absolutely. That said, I'm a little confused - no ads for waffles? Huh. Weird.
  17. Re:Jetsons on Web Creators Call Internet Outdated · · Score: 1

    Honda is making jets now. Does that count?

  18. Re:UNIX explains the singular triune God on Science In Islamic Countries · · Score: 4, Funny
    They have the same UID, but they're on three different boxes... something about NFS, load balancing, and redundancy or something like that. I'm still trying to figure out why He deleted his "Jesus" account and then recreated it three days later. Very strange. Perhaps He was rootkitted? I'll go check the logs...

    # tail bible.log

    22:17And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And he that heareth, let him say, Come. And he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, let him take the water of life freely.
    22:18I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues which are written in this book:
    22:19and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book.
    22:20He who testifieth these things saith, Yea: I come quickly. Amen: come, Lord Jesus.
    22:21The grace of the Lord Jesus be with the saints. Amen.
    Hmm... going to need to go farther back... this could take a while. I'll come back to you, 'k?
  19. Yes. on Excel 2007 Multiplication Bug · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yep - my office switched to Vista and Office 2007. Then again, we're a networking firm, so it's in our best interests to use stuff while it's still "beta" so we know the bugs and quirks before our customers start playing with it.

    As an aside, when I went to pick up a lease renewal form for my apartment complex, I noticed that the lady at the front counter was also running Office 2007, so I'd say it's out there - just not exceptionally widespread at the moment, compared to other versions of Office.

  20. Re:Wrong Increment on Gartner Touts Web 2.0, Scoffs At Web 3.0 · · Score: 1

    I'm still waiting for Web-2.6.23-rc8!

  21. Re:The UN? Surely you jest... on Soviet Union TLD Owners Snub ICANN · · Score: 1

    In the case of the example outlined above...

    Enemies: Those that call for the end of your existence and either possess the means to act on those words or are actively searching for the means to act on those words. In the above instance, they would either be the ruling party of a nation-state or possess similar resources as the ruling party of a nation-state.

    Oppression: Either ending the existence, or making said existence extremely miserable, of the group of people that is not in control of aforementioned nation-state.

    I hope that helps.

    As for international law, it's frequently violated by... um... just about everyone, not just the United States. Iraq violated international law when it invaded Kuwait, to say nothing of its actions against the Kurds and its indigenous Shiite population. Iran violated international law when it paraded British POWs in front of television cameras, in clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Let's not forget South Africa and apartheid. The list goes on. Since there's no way to enforce international law in the same way as local laws are enforced (i.e. we can't, or won't, just invade every country that violates international law), it only has the power that all parties choose to give it. Consequently, if one of those parties decide not to give it any power anymore, they most certainly can, frequently without any serious consequences.

    International law is a fiction. It's a useful fiction, and one which we all selectively agree to follow, but it's still a fiction nonetheless.

  22. Re:didn't openbsd do the same thing in reverse? on Theo de Raadt On Relicensing BSD Code · · Score: 1

    That works because Linux is just a kernel. BSD, however, isn't - it's the kernel and the userspace. Consequently, you can't "redistribute" BSD without including the entire BSD userspace, and doing that renders the point of a Linux distribution (Linux kernel, different but similar userspaces) moot. Hence why BSD has forks and Linux has distros.

  23. Re:The 85% SOLUTION on New Wonder Weed to Fuel Cars? · · Score: 1

    if you really want to make an impact on fuel consumption, change the way industry and agriculture work so that its less economical to make or grow everything somewhere else and transport it to the people who will buy it. The only way that's going to work is if you start making more of everything locally, and sometimes that's not practical. For example:

    1. Grow a citrus fruit in Canada.
    2. Grow almost anything in Nevada. (Yes, I know there's agriculture here - lots of cattle and alfalfa. Not enough to feed Nevada, though.)
    3. Grow almost anything in Wyoming. (See above.)
    4. Have non-canned fruit during winter in most of the Northern Hemisphere.

    That's just agriculture. We could throw in "make steel in the desert" (requires water), "generate power" (NIMBYs), and a host of other products that we rely on that are either location-specific or just aren't practical to produce in many parts of the world. In fact, in many respects, attempting to make something locally could consume more resources than if you created it in more ideal conditions (i.e. farming in an area that requires heavy irrigation and water rerouting vs. an area where enough water falls from the sky). That's why we ship stuff all over the place to begin with. We wouldn't do it if it wasn't more efficient at some point in time.
  24. Re:Blue Screen of Death on Web OS, ajaxWindows Launched · · Score: 1

    And I'd use a briefcase.

    (Wait - different methods of portability, each useful in different sets of circumstances? No...)

  25. Re:Oh dear God! on IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community · · Score: 1

    How does the Mac version of MS Exchange look?