When I go to donate blood they ask a long series of questions before accepting my blood. Among the many "did you ever have sex with another male" , "or with some one who had..." yadda yadda yadda there is a telling question: "Have you ever been incarcerated and held in a jail for more than 72 hours."
Looks like the blood bank thinks, prisoners will get AIDS after three days in jail.
May be I should have just stopped after "what is going on". I realize now that I was speculating without knowing much. Dangerous thing to do. Should try to speculate like this less often. Thanks for the correction.
I knew MS doc format was a very dumb hack, but never realized how bad it was. One of the most common complaints by people about XML is that "XML files are too large. It wastes space. It is very verbose. yadda yadda yadda". And now comes MS and says that its doc format takes up four times as much space as XML? What the hell is going on?
Two possibilities:
1. It is not XML at all. It is highly compressed, encrypted, obfuscated, binary data sitting between XML tags. Make sure no body can read/write these files. OpenOffice can read Office97 format? Well, let us see how they read Office2007 format. That will show them. Call it XML. Then make sure it is not readable by anyone else. Make sure even trying to read it an offence under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
2. DOC format is that extravagent in its use of disk space. Most of the fanboys of MS-Office talk about the very long wait times for OpenOffice to launch. Even Bill Gates reportedly derided the long file open times of OpenOffice. So it is possible, to make the difference more apparent and to drive home the advantage, some kooky manager added things to make rendering of the first screen within microseconds a high priority. Save some quick to render stuff very early in the doc file, and render it on one thread while the other thread is continuing to read the file. Such decisions have a way of coming back and biting the backsides.
Either way touting 75% lower storage requirements looks stupid these days. How many terabytes of storage one can buy if you skip upgrading to Office2007?
The cost for users to stop using youtube and use a different service is very low. If the switching cost is low, they will switch. There is nothing intrinsically special about YouTube. Remember the old names of search market? Lycos, Web Crawler, HotBot? Blown away because of better technology.
However if the youtube and its imitators replacing the Akimbo service and the other video delivery services they might be in the money. But video content producers are so vary of delivering it via the internet, I wont be holding my breath.
Thanks for the tip about Dr Diamond. I have not only read Guns Germs and Steel but also the precursor to that book, an 8 page abstact he published in the Discover Magazine in 1993.
You lost me with, This particular argument is a poor choice for an evolution debate because immunities can be attained by an individual (as opposed to a gene pool) through exposure and not necessarily by evolution.
The ability of individuals to acquire immunity through exposure is explained by evolution. How do ID/Creationists, FSMists explain it?
Could not find the list of the six software tested. Dont know if Zone Alarm was tested and found to be defective too. But I would be surprised. Everytime I update FireFox, Zone Alarm knows that the exe file has changed and alerts me to renew permission for it to connect to the internet.
Slashdotters, please no jokes about how boring life must be in England if chucking a boot passes for sport. There are some redeeming qualities for this sport and one can guess how it got to be established.
In England they play this infernal thing called cricket. Some two guys take turns to face a red ball that is chucked from some 22 yards away surrounded by some 11 players and two umpires. It goes on and on for some three days. They break every hour for drinks, and then take a lunch break and a tea break. Then they take a rest day. Then they all come back and continue the damn thing for two more days. One would think it has long enough and they will have a winner at the end. But the most common result after five days is, get it, a DRAW .
Fans, or monorons who paid good money and their time watch this farce pretending to be a sport, threw whatever they had in their hands at the players and the umpires out of frustration and one guy managed to hit the umpire with a well aimed wellington boot. Thus was born the great sport of well chucking. Say what you will about it. The contest is over quickly and the winner is declared. Take that you fanboys of MCC.
Our verdict? While some features of the Swash 800 made our sit-down experience more of a luxury, we were unconvinced by its bidet-like cleaning and drying process.
Most Asians consider wiping with paper not hygenic enough. Must wash with liberal quantities of water to be clean and to feel clean. In India and Middle East the recent toilets have a simple non-digital non-electronic bidet like attachment. It dispenses a horizontal stream of water from behind. In India it is quite common to see a hand shower attachement next to the flush tank.
Only left hand should be used for washing. So the left hand is considered to be unclean and it is considered very disrespectful to give/accept something from someone using the left hand, in the Middle East and India.
mm! Wonder how MS persuaded Go Daddy to switch. Surveys of Total Cost Of Ownership delivered by girls in spaghetty strap tops with bad quality stitches may be?;-)
I've heard it mentioned many times that Macs do not suffer from viruses because they have a smaller market share,
When people say something like that, hold them by hand and take them over to netcraft.com and show them the market share of Web servers. Apache has been owning >60% of it for a long long time compared with ~20% share for IIS. And point out that almost all the worms attack IIS and not Apache. The reason why Windows/IIS remain vulnerable is because MS wrote them, not becuase of their high/low market share.
When you own 90% of the market, not being interoperable with others is a commercial advantage. Yes, security is compromised, but it (MS) has trained corporations and individuals it is THEIR (I mean user's) responsibility to install and update "critical" security updates and install firewalls and antivirus software and keep them up to date. Now MS is going to sell anti-virus products. It is going to profit from the shoddiness of its own product. It is a great scam if you can get into it.
As long as corporations confuse interoperability with "windows compatibility" the scam will go on. Only when the commercial user who forks over billions of dollars to MS every year demand true interoperability and injects real competition, it will end. There is no advantage in being the first among the users pushing for it. Pepsi will not care as long as Coke is also spending relatively the same amount of money for similar services. But someday somewhere some corp will bite the bullet and spend what it takes to break the vendor-lock in, and only after that the security situation will improve.
Well, May be it is real may be it is a trap. We will know which by the kind of "non disclosure" agreements they have to sign to get accepted. Further, will these developers be allowed to post the bugs/ porting issues they find openly in Bugzilla?
Yes, cost of computing is falling like a rock. Yes, tons and tons of data are available and increasing more accessible. What XML tags and electronic submission requirements by SEC. So there is big money in "programmed trades"?
When everyone is crunching numbers on their head, the computing might give an advantage. If everyone is computing with compters, the advantage goes to the one with better algorithm. And the better "algorithm" might actually turn out to be thinking and looking at the global picture instead of madly computing.
When huge trades are decided by these algorithms it is almost like a huge herd of milling cattle. When the stampede, just get out of the way. But if someone could trigger a stampede and send it over the cliff, there will be rich pickings later. And in free markets, if there is a way for someone to make money, someone will.
I think algorithmic investing is the new name for the old "programmed trades" and it might actually make the thinking and studying fundamentals investors richer.
Well, not all the stars. There was this King Trishanku, who wanted to ascend to the heavens with his body. So he commissioned the sage Vishwamitra to perform the sacrifices and the rituals. But as King Trishanku was rising towards the heavens, Indra, the Lord of Heavens, struck him down with his weapon Vajrayutha. Vishwamitra suspended Trishanku in mid air. He eventually became a galaxy known as the Trishanku Mandala. So you see, atleast some stars were made by Sage Vishwamitra.
Even if the cost of transporting Moon gold to Earth is zero, it will not make goldmining profitable in Moon. It would just make gold mining unprofitable on Earth.
For example Amethyst used to included in the list of cardinal gems, (i.e. diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald). But huge discoveries in Russia and South America has erorded its value to almost that of costume jewellery. On my way to work I pass a shop window displaying an Amethyst geode some three feet long and 1 feet across, partially opened. Must weight a few kilograms. Price? 1750$.
So sudden discovery of huge quantities of chiefly ornamental substance will only diminish the value.
Back in late 80s and early 90s, all the businesses were demanding Compatibility with IBM-PC. Remember the old joke about Cray supercomputer with the punch line "Is it IBM-PC compatible?". The older generation of IT managers knew compatibility and interoperability was important. But they did not fully understand the concept of vendor lock in. They confused IBM-PC compatibility with interoperability. Accepting a closed proprietary standard owned by a profit making corporation was a very bad idea. But those guys did not know it then.
Now slowly the next generation of IT managers with more experience are coming up. Now a days software costs lot more than hardware. Hardware prices have been dropping like a stone for decades and the software costs have stopped dropping after Microsoft consolidated its market lead and vendor lock in. In 1994 I paid 2700$ for a 90 MHz Pentium with 570 KB disk and 2X CD-ROM. MS Word was already above a 100$ then. In 1990 MS-Word was selling for 50$.
I keep returning to my favourite examples of light bulbs and car tires. Would anyone buy a car that can accept only Goodyear tires or build a home that can only accept GE bulbs? Car tire standards are set by SAE not GM or Toyota. It is just a matter of time before we have full interoperability to standards defined by a body like IEEE. Heck, if the Fortune 500 companies chip in a million bucks each to set up an "Institute for Sofware Ineroperability Standards" to work with IEEE and ACM to make experts define interoperability they will recoup the investments in no time.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope the judge follows the precedence set by another federal judge, as he ordered here.
Looks like the blood bank thinks, prisoners will get AIDS after three days in jail.
It just goes to prove crime does not pay. if you cant get away with it
Other posters have filled in. Stoting is a survival mechanism.
May be I should have just stopped after "what is going on". I realize now that I was speculating without knowing much. Dangerous thing to do. Should try to speculate like this less often. Thanks for the correction.
Two possibilities:
1. It is not XML at all. It is highly compressed, encrypted, obfuscated, binary data sitting between XML tags. Make sure no body can read/write these files. OpenOffice can read Office97 format? Well, let us see how they read Office2007 format. That will show them. Call it XML. Then make sure it is not readable by anyone else. Make sure even trying to read it an offence under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
2. DOC format is that extravagent in its use of disk space. Most of the fanboys of MS-Office talk about the very long wait times for OpenOffice to launch. Even Bill Gates reportedly derided the long file open times of OpenOffice. So it is possible, to make the difference more apparent and to drive home the advantage, some kooky manager added things to make rendering of the first screen within microseconds a high priority. Save some quick to render stuff very early in the doc file, and render it on one thread while the other thread is continuing to read the file. Such decisions have a way of coming back and biting the backsides.
Either way touting 75% lower storage requirements looks stupid these days. How many terabytes of storage one can buy if you skip upgrading to Office2007?
However if the youtube and its imitators replacing the Akimbo service and the other video delivery services they might be in the money. But video content producers are so vary of delivering it via the internet, I wont be holding my breath.
We knew windows were very unsecure. Now we know locks are unsecure either. People switch to Linux. NOW
You lost me with, This particular argument is a poor choice for an evolution debate because immunities can be attained by an individual (as opposed to a gene pool) through exposure and not necessarily by evolution.
The ability of individuals to acquire immunity through exposure is explained by evolution. How do ID/Creationists, FSMists explain it?
Could not find the list of the six software tested. Dont know if Zone Alarm was tested and found to be defective too. But I would be surprised. Everytime I update FireFox, Zone Alarm knows that the exe file has changed and alerts me to renew permission for it to connect to the internet.
To clarify the subject line: I had a greater than sign in the subject line between washing and wiping. The html tags checker ate it.
In England they play this infernal thing called cricket. Some two guys take turns to face a red ball that is chucked from some 22 yards away surrounded by some 11 players and two umpires. It goes on and on for some three days. They break every hour for drinks, and then take a lunch break and a tea break. Then they take a rest day. Then they all come back and continue the damn thing for two more days. One would think it has long enough and they will have a winner at the end. But the most common result after five days is, get it, a DRAW .
Fans, or monorons who paid good money and their time watch this farce pretending to be a sport, threw whatever they had in their hands at the players and the umpires out of frustration and one guy managed to hit the umpire with a well aimed wellington boot. Thus was born the great sport of well chucking. Say what you will about it. The contest is over quickly and the winner is declared. Take that you fanboys of MCC.
Most Asians consider wiping with paper not hygenic enough. Must wash with liberal quantities of water to be clean and to feel clean. In India and Middle East the recent toilets have a simple non-digital non-electronic bidet like attachment. It dispenses a horizontal stream of water from behind. In India it is quite common to see a hand shower attachement next to the flush tank.
Only left hand should be used for washing. So the left hand is considered to be unclean and it is considered very disrespectful to give/accept something from someone using the left hand, in the Middle East and India.
... for an anatomical opening to expel the byproducts of digestion and sue everyone in sight with an a*****e.
June 2006. Atleast that is what US-CERT seems to be saying.
mm! Wonder how MS persuaded Go Daddy to switch. Surveys of Total Cost Of Ownership delivered by girls in spaghetty strap tops with bad quality stitches may be? ;-)
Yes, looks like IIS has picked up considerable market share since I last looked. Wonder why and how.
When people say something like that, hold them by hand and take them over to netcraft.com and show them the market share of Web servers. Apache has been owning >60% of it for a long long time compared with ~20% share for IIS. And point out that almost all the worms attack IIS and not Apache. The reason why Windows/IIS remain vulnerable is because MS wrote them, not becuase of their high/low market share.
As long as corporations confuse interoperability with "windows compatibility" the scam will go on. Only when the commercial user who forks over billions of dollars to MS every year demand true interoperability and injects real competition, it will end. There is no advantage in being the first among the users pushing for it. Pepsi will not care as long as Coke is also spending relatively the same amount of money for similar services. But someday somewhere some corp will bite the bullet and spend what it takes to break the vendor-lock in, and only after that the security situation will improve.
Well, May be it is real may be it is a trap. We will know which by the kind of "non disclosure" agreements they have to sign to get accepted. Further, will these developers be allowed to post the bugs/ porting issues they find openly in Bugzilla?
When everyone is crunching numbers on their head, the computing might give an advantage. If everyone is computing with compters, the advantage goes to the one with better algorithm. And the better "algorithm" might actually turn out to be thinking and looking at the global picture instead of madly computing.
When huge trades are decided by these algorithms it is almost like a huge herd of milling cattle. When the stampede, just get out of the way. But if someone could trigger a stampede and send it over the cliff, there will be rich pickings later. And in free markets, if there is a way for someone to make money, someone will.
I think algorithmic investing is the new name for the old "programmed trades" and it might actually make the thinking and studying fundamentals investors richer.
The code is
if( InputDataIsGood() && AlgorithmIsGood() && AlgorithmIsBetterThanOthers()){
Output(profit);
}else{
Output(loss);
}
I am surprised they went with a quotation from Shaw. More appropriate would have been the question, "Who is John Galt?".
For more details
For example Amethyst used to included in the list of cardinal gems, (i.e. diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald). But huge discoveries in Russia and South America has erorded its value to almost that of costume jewellery. On my way to work I pass a shop window displaying an Amethyst geode some three feet long and 1 feet across, partially opened. Must weight a few kilograms. Price? 1750$. So sudden discovery of huge quantities of chiefly ornamental substance will only diminish the value.
Now slowly the next generation of IT managers with more experience are coming up. Now a days software costs lot more than hardware. Hardware prices have been dropping like a stone for decades and the software costs have stopped dropping after Microsoft consolidated its market lead and vendor lock in. In 1994 I paid 2700$ for a 90 MHz Pentium with 570 KB disk and 2X CD-ROM. MS Word was already above a 100$ then. In 1990 MS-Word was selling for 50$.
I keep returning to my favourite examples of light bulbs and car tires. Would anyone buy a car that can accept only Goodyear tires or build a home that can only accept GE bulbs? Car tire standards are set by SAE not GM or Toyota. It is just a matter of time before we have full interoperability to standards defined by a body like IEEE. Heck, if the Fortune 500 companies chip in a million bucks each to set up an "Institute for Sofware Ineroperability Standards" to work with IEEE and ACM to make experts define interoperability they will recoup the investments in no time.