...my wife and I bought each other the Seiko Kinetics for our wedding, and they are great! The titanium one I got is light, and looks really cool, plus they wind themselves with a pendulum inside as you walk, move, type, etc. Definitely has geek appeal there!!
I agree, the Seiko Kinetic watches are a nice concept, though I wish they weren't so *thick*, as the current fashion is for bulky, ironman, scuba diver watches with enough hardware on them to run a vacuum chamber.
These THICK watches are always catching onto things - you'd think they had built-in grappling hooks and caribiners for climbing sheer walls.
A few years back my ultra-thin Casio LCD watch gave out and I'm making due with a grocery store cheapie until I can find a suitable replacement that provides great functionality in a case that is less than 2 mm thick.
If you search around on the web you can find evidence of local, grass roots opposition to the ruthlessly efficient business practices of Walmart of building a megastore in an otherwise small or undeveloped neighborhood.
There's a great deal of money involved, and Walmart has used it's advertising dollars well by getting Paul Harvey, the Voice of Trust as far as many midwesterners are concerned, to talk about how they are "good neighbors", trumpeting charitable giving (even if it's really financed by local employee donations instead of corporate largesse), etc.
The reality is somewhat different from the Walmart advertising. Everyone loves the cheap goods that result from the economies of scale that Walmart enjoys. They dislike the congestion around a Walmart store, wouldn't want one located right next door to their house, dislike the anti shoplifting guards at the store exits snooping over their receipts, and find that the jobs are generally part-time, low-paying, without lots of benefits, staffed by retirees who need the income to supplement their meager social security checks.
Apart from devastating small local merchants, the Walmart stores tend to use a pricing structure so that certain loss leader items are buttressed by the less common items being overpriced.
And, IMHO, the quality of the goods from Walmart is less than from Sears or from other retail outlets. Low price, low price, low price.
Then there's the homogenizing effect of Walmart on our culture. In America, it's just kind of depressing, while in Europe, I think there is downright antagonism to Walmart.
When their marketing surveys show a need for a change of venue, Walmart has no compunction leaving a big box store vacant and building a brand new one in a different, erstwhile pristine, location. You've never seen a sorrier looking place than an old, abandoned Walmart store.
I don't mean to single out Walmart for heavy criticism; there are other retailers that behave similarly. It's just that it today's world, you get plenty of advertising to tell you one version of reality and the other version you just kind of have to pick up.
And, you can't argue that they haven't been successful as a business. Owning Walmart stock for the past decade has been lucrative.
But, despite some advantages their size gives them over their competitors, Walmart is not a monopoly in the sense that Microsoft is a monopoly. When 90% of most retail goods are sold through Walmart, and when suppliers start to get browbeaten by Walmart executives to thwart competitors, then one can start to make a comparison.
Someone needs to say it, just to thrash out the issue.
But, with how much money has been going into EM spectrum auctions, I would venture to say that some interests would be very protective of such investments.
There, it's done. Call me a conspiracy theorist!
Dreadful Convergence of Interests
on
The Crime of Sharing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One of the things that struck me the other day was how much two apparently disparate issues are going to converge shortly.
What I'm talking about is this:
Issue One: Freedom to Share Digital Data (MPAA, DRM, DMCA, etc.)
Issue Two: Right to Individual Privacy (doubleclick, direct marketing, etc.)
I see where those advocating strict controls on how copyrighted material is distributed over the net can share an interest with those who advocate that commercial entities not have unrestricted ability to exchange data about individuals, the kind of data that makes up profiles in the direct marketers' databases.
In one case you might be talking about Metallica MP3's being traded by individuals and the other case you might be talking about YourBuyingProfile being traded by corporate entities. In either case, you could argue about who the data really belongs to and what fair use of that data constitutes.
If complete digital freedom to exchange data exists, then will you ever have any hope to restrict the data that is being gathered about you every day from being exchanged? Maybe you don't need or care to restrict the data flow, but you have to admit that restricting or liberating it for one purpose makes it fair for another purpose.
If this alternative seen this day on Freshmeat is any indication (one of the more depressing license agreements you'll read), then your marital happiness will be inversely related to your productivity as a programmer.
Maybe Sun/Star took a lesson from Corel, who got onto the Java "platform independent GUI" bandwagon too early.
IIRC, an effort to rewrite a new version of Wordperfect in Java failed because the resulting application was deemed too slow.
Perhaps things have improved since then and Java is carrying the more baggage than it deserves about GUI sloth due to the early overhype [this happens with a lot of projects, IMHO].
Are there other examples besides WorldBook on MacOS that provide more contemporary evidence of Java's speed for interactive GUI applications? For that matter, numerically intensive applications in Java have also been plagued in the past by poor performance.
I love Java as a programming language, wish I could use it more, and hate having to live inside the infested jungle of C++ due to decisions made 7 years ago.
You arent losing freedom from this kinda security.
Perhaps not in this particular case.
But you could potentially lose a great many freedoms in the future. Say they decide that, oh, say randomly, "Linux gamers" represent part of a profile that indicates subversive potential for terrorism?
I agree that good surveillance is more important these days now that we know what is possible in our society (9/11).
But I'd hate to just give a blank check to the authorities in this matter. Track records show the great potential for misuse.
I'd advocate increased surveillance alongside some reasonable means of assuring accountability for the information that is gathered. Something along the lines of a citizen's review board that could insure that internal security agencies were treating the information properly and not using it to target political dissidents, opponents of friends, etc.
Basically, the greater the trust you invest in a particular agency or institution, the greater your need for accountability from that agency or institution.
February 15, Redmond, Washington (AP) -- "Microsoft officials, who were initially outraged over the rebel states' request for source code access adopted an abruptly accommodating stance late yesterday."
"It seems that Bill Gates had started an internal initiative to find the best way to obfuscate the Windows source code in the event the states' request were to receive a successful ruling."
"Almost immediately, some of the top programmers from Microsoft, some of whom had spent years working on the Windows product, declared that native source itself already represented a sufficiently obtuse format and that not further obfuscation could better fulfill Bill's objectives."
"Let them have it!" declared one programmer gleefully and without hesitation."
I was pretty happy with KDE 1 and remain happy with KDE 2.0
I'm sure to get Troll -1'd into oblivion for this, but
Why is KDE 3.0 so good that it's worth getting excited about from the standpoint of the end user?
Re:Something that isn't pointed out enough
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 2
I say if you have a use for it, use it!
Your point is well taken. If the RAM doesn't cost a great deal of money, then who cares if the secretary's copy of Word, IE and XP chews up more RAM (and uses a more powerful CPU) than was used to forecast weather on a supercomputer in 1973?
Likewise, if given enough RAM, the Linux kernel will just gobble it up caching for the filesystem and improving performance thereby. That's fine.
But, I would say that having some flexibility is a definite plus, for two reasons.
Older hardware, especially in donated computers sitting in the Third World (that would include, of course, U.S. public education).
Embedded and application-specific devices.
where you would rather not have a magic frog/prince cut-off value for RAM and usability. A smooth degradation of performance with less capable hardware is classier in my book.
Captains Go Down with Ships
on
Dot.Con
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One of the more interesting aspects I've read about the dot{bomb,con} phenomena was that, by and large, many of the chief officers of the companies rode them gallantly into failure: despite having huge paper gains as measured by stock values right after the IPO, they held on to those shares even as their companies went into power dives.
From that perspective, the former CEO's and CTO's of the dot.gone companies deserve a little more respect than, say, the former executives of Enron, who finagled with SPE's while selling out stock at high prices.
We've been running Framemaker on Sun's for about a decade.
Due to the superior raw price performance of the x86 platform, we will be moving to Linux over the next year.
We'd love to have Framemaker for Linux and would gladly pay for it. Many people feel it represents a superior offering for WYSIWYG document preparation compared to Microsoft Word, for example.
Unfortunately, it looks like Adobe is deliberately eroding its customer base for Framemaker on UNIX by not supporting Linux.
I expect our users will run Framemaker over the network via X windows from Sun servers if they really need it. Meanwhile, they will also probably start experimenting more with MS Word under VMWare (which connects well with Office Bees in the rest of the corporation), or try StarOffice 5.2 and, later, 6.0. A trend of the number of Frame users at our site decreasing year by year will continue and possibly accelerate as a consequence of Adobe's reluctance to bring out a Linux version of Frame.
Ever since they got bought out by Adobe I've had the impression that Framemaker is being managed in a short-sighted way. Either that, or there is a "bigger picture" with the rest of their products, etc. that I am missing.
However, with MacOS X, perhaps there's some hope that someone will see that "multiplatform support" in the UNIX world is no where near the bugaboo they fear from their years of experience with "multiplatform support" meaning Windows+Mac.
We'll do our migration to Linux with or without Adobe. Whether we do it with or without Framemaker several years from now is entirely up to them.
I've been using CVS for years and read with great interest the recent Linux Journal article about the Subversion project to created a CVS replacement that is better than CVS.
to individuals and corporations who can't (or don't want to) afford the licensing fees and the cost of upgrades.
Hmmm... as if any of our new potential users of Linux have much choice in the matter of upgrade. (Kind of like the choice Aunt Tilly has of just accepting IE that came with her PC, or downloading and installing Netscape over her 28k modem:)
AFAICT, consumers consider an OS part of the computer and would no more want to muck around with the OS than they would want to change motherboards, another essential part of a PC. All they want is to make sure than whatever shrink-wrapped application they bought several years ago will run on their PC.
Corporate users (don't you just hate the new word "prosumers") usually have even less choice about their desktop operating system. Corporate IT wants to keep costs down by enforcing uniformity and, despite the costs of MS OS's, are afraid of the fact that "everyone uses Word" and we can't make another choice.
In almost every other venue where corporate purchasing decisions are made, there is some uneasiness about sole suppliers, or being restricted to a single vendor. But in the arena of PC operating systems for the desktop, this healthy attitude is somehow suspended.
We have a heterogenous site where traditionally we've run Netscape 4.* on PCs, Macs and UNIX boxes.
Now, with N4.7 getting so clunky, there's a move afoot to migrate to IE on the PCs and Macs and use "Netscape" on UNIX.
I'd like to advocate Mozilla as a good open source (thereby more secure than any binary) alternative that runs on all three platforms, is standards compliant, is fast, easy to use and doesn't crash.
It looks like good progress is being made, but the biggest stumbling block right now are internal corporate web sites that do not behave well with a user agent string from Mozilla and some behavior of Javascript. I've sent mail to the internal web site folks, so hopefully they'll be able to do a better job of determing browser capabilities than seeing if Mozilla version is <= 4
Since IE is freebeer these days, reasonably fast and non-crashy and somewhat standards compliant, the security aspects of open source are one of the biggest points in favor of Mozilla, while being able to use the same browser on multiple platforms is also nice (but not as big of a win.)
With that many vulnerabilities and that much press, I would say that Linux has arrived! (All the *BSD folks are green with envy and wish they had such attention)
You could say that old distros and less experienced sysadmins are facing a hacker culture that probably is more adept with open source tools than they are shooting bullets into Windows and IIS for BO's.
So, then, how much monetary loss is attributed to Windows insecurities vs Linux insecurities, eh?
This harkens to a couple of big issues that I see with Linux on the desktop. I think the upfront cost of Linux on x86 hardware for the desktop is extremely attractive. Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.
Furthermore, with big vendors like HP and IBM working with 3rd party hardware and software suppliers gives Linux desktops much needed credibility and momentum.
Both of those companies are in great positions relative to the other traditional UNIX desktop companies, Sun and SGI, in that they not only possess a lot of experience with UNIX as a software environment, but also possess a hardware arm of the company that has been producing x86 desktops for many years. Despite some forays into the x86 desktop world by both Sun and SGI, they don't have the same depth of experience that IBM and HP do in this arena, and I think it puts them at a disadvantage in the Linux desktop market that I think will become tremendously important within the next 12 months.
Redundancy is a better solution than disposable media backup.
This reminds me of a time when I was doing my PhD thesis.
After working on the manuscript for the better part of a year, I began to get Beautiful Mind syndrome about losing it catastrophically due to fire, flood, etc.
So I started to regularly ftp updated versions to a supercomputer site some 400 miles distant.
This only applies to the deposition gathering process. This is the normal way such things are done. Allowing public access, as was done in the DOJ proceedings, is the exception.
OK, I'll have to trust you on this part. So the deposition gathering process is closed, but I'm presuming that key parts of the proceedings will still be available to the public.
My major concern was to see Bill Gates answering questions in his usual sideways style, because it's so entertaining. I can see him going goggle eyed when asked about "air supply".
In which case, we can begin with your information first: SSN, mother's maiden name, full name, date of birth, place of residence, and all of your credit card numbers. I thank you profusely in advance for your cooperation.
I've already complied! (You don't need to thank me, though.)
All of these pieces of information you mention have been dribbled out numerous times for the most stupid of reasons and over some of the most insecure channels available and are sitting in primitive unprotected databases all over the Internet!
[Seriously, though, your point is well taken. I was just complaining this morning to my health plan administrator about their casual use of the SSN and wanted them to use a different number. This, after some co-workers were subject to identity theft that was a direct result of someone leaking their SSNs and other information from a local health care provider.]
I guess there's limits to information sharing. You're right. I'll try to keep secret the URL to the polygraph I'm hooked up to, as well as the URL to the electric shock collar my employer has installed as part of our new Quality Initiative.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, the Seiko Kinetic watches are a nice concept, though I wish they weren't so *thick*, as the current fashion is for bulky, ironman, scuba diver watches with enough hardware on them to run a vacuum chamber.
These THICK watches are always catching onto things - you'd think they had built-in grappling hooks and caribiners for climbing sheer walls.
A few years back my ultra-thin Casio LCD watch gave out and I'm making due with a grocery store cheapie until I can find a suitable replacement that provides great functionality in a case that is less than 2 mm thick.
If you search around on the web you can find evidence of local, grass roots opposition to the ruthlessly efficient business practices of Walmart of building a megastore in an otherwise small or undeveloped neighborhood.
There's a great deal of money involved, and Walmart has used it's advertising dollars well by getting Paul Harvey, the Voice of Trust as far as many midwesterners are concerned, to talk about how they are "good neighbors", trumpeting charitable giving (even if it's really financed by local employee donations instead of corporate largesse), etc.
The reality is somewhat different from the Walmart advertising. Everyone loves the cheap goods that result from the economies of scale that Walmart enjoys. They dislike the congestion around a Walmart store, wouldn't want one located right next door to their house, dislike the anti shoplifting guards at the store exits snooping over their receipts, and find that the jobs are generally part-time, low-paying, without lots of benefits, staffed by retirees who need the income to supplement their meager social security checks.
Apart from devastating small local merchants, the Walmart stores tend to use a pricing structure so that certain loss leader items are buttressed by the less common items being overpriced.
And, IMHO, the quality of the goods from Walmart is less than from Sears or from other retail outlets. Low price, low price, low price.
Then there's the homogenizing effect of Walmart on our culture. In America, it's just kind of depressing, while in Europe, I think there is downright antagonism to Walmart.
When their marketing surveys show a need for a change of venue, Walmart has no compunction leaving a big box store vacant and building a brand new one in a different, erstwhile pristine, location. You've never seen a sorrier looking place than an old, abandoned Walmart store.
I don't mean to single out Walmart for heavy criticism; there are other retailers that behave similarly. It's just that it today's world, you get plenty of advertising to tell you one version of reality and the other version you just kind of have to pick up.
And, you can't argue that they haven't been successful as a business. Owning Walmart stock for the past decade has been lucrative.
But, despite some advantages their size gives them over their competitors, Walmart is not a monopoly in the sense that Microsoft is a monopoly. When 90% of most retail goods are sold through Walmart, and when suppliers start to get browbeaten by Walmart executives to thwart competitors, then one can start to make a comparison.
Someone needs to say it, just to thrash out the issue.
There, it's done. Call me a conspiracy theorist!
One of the things that struck me the other day was how much two apparently disparate issues are going to converge shortly.
What I'm talking about is this:
- Issue One: Freedom to Share Digital Data (MPAA, DRM, DMCA, etc.)
- Issue Two: Right to Individual Privacy (doubleclick, direct marketing, etc.)
I see where those advocating strict controls on how copyrighted material is distributed over the net can share an interest with those who advocate that commercial entities not have unrestricted ability to exchange data about individuals, the kind of data that makes up profiles in the direct marketers' databases.In one case you might be talking about Metallica MP3's being traded by individuals and the other case you might be talking about YourBuyingProfile being traded by corporate entities. In either case, you could argue about who the data really belongs to and what fair use of that data constitutes.
If complete digital freedom to exchange data exists, then will you ever have any hope to restrict the data that is being gathered about you every day from being exchanged? Maybe you don't need or care to restrict the data flow, but you have to admit that restricting or liberating it for one purpose makes it fair for another purpose.
On getting accepted!
If this alternative seen this day on Freshmeat is any indication (one of the more depressing license agreements you'll read), then your marital happiness will be inversely related to your productivity as a programmer.
"Why isn't staroffice programmed in Java?"
Maybe Sun/Star took a lesson from Corel, who got onto the Java "platform independent GUI" bandwagon too early.
IIRC, an effort to rewrite a new version of Wordperfect in Java failed because the resulting application was deemed too slow.
Perhaps things have improved since then and Java is carrying the more baggage than it deserves about GUI sloth due to the early overhype [this happens with a lot of projects, IMHO].
Are there other examples besides WorldBook on MacOS that provide more contemporary evidence of Java's speed for interactive GUI applications? For that matter, numerically intensive applications in Java have also been plagued in the past by poor performance.
I love Java as a programming language, wish I could use it more, and hate having to live inside the infested jungle of C++ due to decisions made 7 years ago.
You arent losing freedom from this kinda security.
Perhaps not in this particular case.
But you could potentially lose a great many freedoms in the future. Say they decide that, oh, say randomly, "Linux gamers" represent part of a profile that indicates subversive potential for terrorism?
I agree that good surveillance is more important these days now that we know what is possible in our society (9/11).
But I'd hate to just give a blank check to the authorities in this matter. Track records show the great potential for misuse.
I'd advocate increased surveillance alongside some reasonable means of assuring accountability for the information that is gathered. Something along the lines of a citizen's review board that could insure that internal security agencies were treating the information properly and not using it to target political dissidents, opponents of friends, etc.
Basically, the greater the trust you invest in a particular agency or institution, the greater your need for accountability from that agency or institution.
February 15, Redmond, Washington (AP) -- "Microsoft officials, who were initially outraged over the rebel states' request for source code access adopted an abruptly accommodating stance late yesterday."
"It seems that Bill Gates had started an internal initiative to find the best way to obfuscate the Windows source code in the event the states' request were to receive a successful ruling."
"Almost immediately, some of the top programmers from Microsoft, some of whom had spent years working on the Windows product, declared that native source itself already represented a sufficiently obtuse format and that not further obfuscation could better fulfill Bill's objectives."
"Let them have it!" declared one programmer gleefully and without hesitation."
Btw legally I'm pro-choice, morally I'm pro-life
Ditto. I've always figured the whole raging debate over abortion is overblown.
IMHO, the obvious answer is from Deut 30:19 -- "...choose life."
I was pretty happy with KDE 1 and remain happy with KDE 2.0
I'm sure to get Troll -1'd into oblivion for this, but
I say if you have a use for it, use it!
Your point is well taken. If the RAM doesn't cost a great deal of money, then who cares if the secretary's copy of Word, IE and XP chews up more RAM (and uses a more powerful CPU) than was used to forecast weather on a supercomputer in 1973?
Likewise, if given enough RAM, the Linux kernel will just gobble it up caching for the filesystem and improving performance thereby. That's fine.
But, I would say that having some flexibility is a definite plus, for two reasons.
- Older hardware, especially in donated computers sitting in the Third World (that would include, of course, U.S. public education).
- Embedded and application-specific devices.
where you would rather not have a magic frog/prince cut-off value for RAM and usability. A smooth degradation of performance with less capable hardware is classier in my book.One of the more interesting aspects I've read about the dot{bomb,con} phenomena was that, by and large, many of the chief officers of the companies rode them gallantly into failure: despite having huge paper gains as measured by stock values right after the IPO, they held on to those shares even as their companies went into power dives.
From that perspective, the former CEO's and CTO's of the dot.gone companies deserve a little more respect than, say, the former executives of Enron, who finagled with SPE's while selling out stock at high prices.
My organization is in exactly the same situation.
We've been running Framemaker on Sun's for about a decade.
Due to the superior raw price performance of the x86 platform, we will be moving to Linux over the next year.
We'd love to have Framemaker for Linux and would gladly pay for it. Many people feel it represents a superior offering for WYSIWYG document preparation compared to Microsoft Word, for example.
Unfortunately, it looks like Adobe is deliberately eroding its customer base for Framemaker on UNIX by not supporting Linux.
I expect our users will run Framemaker over the network via X windows from Sun servers if they really need it. Meanwhile, they will also probably start experimenting more with MS Word under VMWare (which connects well with Office Bees in the rest of the corporation), or try StarOffice 5.2 and, later, 6.0. A trend of the number of Frame users at our site decreasing year by year will continue and possibly accelerate as a consequence of Adobe's reluctance to bring out a Linux version of Frame.
Ever since they got bought out by Adobe I've had the impression that Framemaker is being managed in a short-sighted way. Either that, or there is a "bigger picture" with the rest of their products, etc. that I am missing.
However, with MacOS X, perhaps there's some hope that someone will see that "multiplatform support" in the UNIX world is no where near the bugaboo they fear from their years of experience with "multiplatform support" meaning Windows+Mac.
We'll do our migration to Linux with or without Adobe. Whether we do it with or without Framemaker several years from now is entirely up to them.
Now I'm confused!
I've been using CVS for years and read with great interest the recent Linux Journal article about the Subversion project to created a CVS replacement that is better than CVS.
Then I see a Slashdot story about arch.
Now, my FearLessLeader starts using Bitkeeper.
Should I move from CVS and, if so, which is best?
to individuals and corporations who can't (or don't want to) afford the licensing fees and the cost of upgrades.
Hmmm... as if any of our new potential users of Linux have much choice in the matter of upgrade. (Kind of like the choice Aunt Tilly has of just accepting IE that came with her PC, or downloading and installing Netscape over her 28k modem:)
AFAICT, consumers consider an OS part of the computer and would no more want to muck around with the OS than they would want to change motherboards, another essential part of a PC. All they want is to make sure than whatever shrink-wrapped application they bought several years ago will run on their PC.
Corporate users (don't you just hate the new word "prosumers") usually have even less choice about their desktop operating system. Corporate IT wants to keep costs down by enforcing uniformity and, despite the costs of MS OS's, are afraid of the fact that "everyone uses Word" and we can't make another choice.
In almost every other venue where corporate purchasing decisions are made, there is some uneasiness about sole suppliers, or being restricted to a single vendor. But in the arena of PC operating systems for the desktop, this healthy attitude is somehow suspended.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
We have a heterogenous site where traditionally we've run Netscape 4.* on PCs, Macs and UNIX boxes.
Now, with N4.7 getting so clunky, there's a move afoot to migrate to IE on the PCs and Macs and use "Netscape" on UNIX.
I'd like to advocate Mozilla as a good open source (thereby more secure than any binary) alternative that runs on all three platforms, is standards compliant, is fast, easy to use and doesn't crash.
It looks like good progress is being made, but the biggest stumbling block right now are internal corporate web sites that do not behave well with a user agent string from Mozilla and some behavior of Javascript. I've sent mail to the internal web site folks, so hopefully they'll be able to do a better job of determing browser capabilities than seeing if Mozilla version is <= 4
Since IE is freebeer these days, reasonably fast and non-crashy and somewhat standards compliant, the security aspects of open source are one of the biggest points in favor of Mozilla, while being able to use the same browser on multiple platforms is also nice (but not as big of a win.)
With that many vulnerabilities and that much press, I would say that Linux has arrived! (All the *BSD folks are green with envy and wish they had such attention)
You could say that old distros and less experienced sysadmins are facing a hacker culture that probably is more adept with open source tools than they are shooting bullets into Windows and IIS for BO's.
So, then, how much monetary loss is attributed to Windows insecurities vs Linux insecurities, eh?
This harkens to a couple of big issues that I see with Linux on the desktop. I think the upfront cost of Linux on x86 hardware for the desktop is extremely attractive. Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.
Furthermore, with big vendors like HP and IBM working with 3rd party hardware and software suppliers gives Linux desktops much needed credibility and momentum.
Both of those companies are in great positions relative to the other traditional UNIX desktop companies, Sun and SGI, in that they not only possess a lot of experience with UNIX as a software environment, but also possess a hardware arm of the company that has been producing x86 desktops for many years. Despite some forays into the x86 desktop world by both Sun and SGI, they don't have the same depth of experience that IBM and HP do in this arena, and I think it puts them at a disadvantage in the Linux desktop market that I think will become tremendously important within the next 12 months.
Funny, Bush didn't mention the increased funding for the War on Stupidity last night...
Well, doh - like- uh, Stupidity is one of our most plentiful national assets. Why would we be so much in a hurry to declare a war on stupidity?
Redundancy is a better solution than disposable media backup.
This reminds me of a time when I was doing my PhD thesis.
After working on the manuscript for the better part of a year, I began to get Beautiful Mind syndrome about losing it catastrophically due to fire, flood, etc.
So I started to regularly ftp updated versions to a supercomputer site some 400 miles distant.
Just in case....
This only applies to the deposition gathering process. This is the normal way such things are done. Allowing public access, as was done in the DOJ proceedings, is the exception.
OK, I'll have to trust you on this part. So the deposition gathering process is closed, but I'm presuming that key parts of the proceedings will still be available to the public.
My major concern was to see Bill Gates answering questions in his usual sideways style, because it's so entertaining. I can see him going goggle eyed when asked about "air supply".
They can start by...
releasing Chai as open source?
The other great app, for those who might remember HP calculators from a couple of decades back, is
I loved that app, and haven't found an equal in functionality or polish, despite all the development that's taken place for Gnome and KDE.In which case, we can begin with your information first: SSN, mother's maiden name, full name, date of birth, place of residence, and all of your credit card numbers. I thank you profusely in advance for your cooperation.
I've already complied! (You don't need to thank me, though.)
All of these pieces of information you mention have been dribbled out numerous times for the most stupid of reasons and over some of the most insecure channels available and are sitting in primitive unprotected databases all over the Internet!
[Seriously, though, your point is well taken. I was just complaining this morning to my health plan administrator about their casual use of the SSN and wanted them to use a different number. This, after some co-workers were subject to identity theft that was a direct result of someone leaking their SSNs and other information from a local health care provider.]
I guess there's limits to information sharing. You're right. I'll try to keep secret the URL to the polygraph I'm hooked up to, as well as the URL to the electric shock collar my employer has installed as part of our new Quality Initiative.
OK, I'd love to have a KVM capable of handling high resolution and high refresh rates (or, better, DVI).
But can any of those KVMs run over gigabit ethernet?
I'd have to say Not at all since I don't have one.
Good for you.
But I have to think your life is either simpler than most, or has become a battle to which you're accustomed.
Have you tried booking an airline flight lately, with a rental car at the other end? Or purchased something online?