Lets not forget the thousands of Iraqis who were tortured on a daily basis and the thousands more abused under the Iraqi government.
Yes, I'm glad that stopped.
But that has not been a consistent good reason for invading another country.
If it were, why isn't the United States invading other countries with appalling records of human rights abuse?
PRC, North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo, just about every other country in the Middle East, etc.
It's becoming clear that GWB made a mistake. If the evidence for WMD was just so compelling, then it certainly ought to have turned up by now, as American forces have free reign to look anywhere in Iraq. Many American choose to believe his warnings about WMD in Iraq. The evidence he presented months ago was not compelling, but one could always argue that he was supplied with greater evidence that he could not reveal due to concerns of national security and preserving an intelligence-gathering capability. That is, we had to trust him that he really dug deep into the evidence and knew categorically that WMD in Iraq were a problem. [The supposed tie between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was as weak as they get. If removing bin Laden's support network were the real object, the USA would have invaded Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and not Iraq.]
I support American troops, who are dedicated men and women, and have sworn an oath to obey their commander in chief. They're great people we can ill afford to lose and they're putting their lives on the line.
Theremore, the commander in chief has an incredibly important responsibility to exercise, and he has not done it properly.
I don't believe GWB is malicious or evil, just not capable of acting as President of the United States with the dedication and thoroughness the office deserves. He's made a mistake in gullibility, believing Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and accepting their appointments inthe first place, not willing to do the homework it takes to know what is really going on. Before you commit someone else's life to a military objective, you owe it to them to be as smart as you can, as hardworking as you can, willing question your advisors, get alternative opinions, etc.
The United States Armed Forces, the people of the United States, and the world at large, all deserve the best possible person in that position. Sadly, the best person is not there now.
There are still other calls to make besides pitches thrown kinda over home plate, and umps will still be needed to make those.
This technological advance should basically have a positive impact on baseball.
Other developments, such as genetically-engineered baseball players, could be more problematic.
A major reason people are willing to watch baseball games is that the players are, in principle, human beings of limited capacity, acting heroically (for the most part), and being models of persons that fans can identify with.
Once a fan concludes that baseball is being played by creatures or machines that don't share the same human limitations as the fan, then they won't watch anymore. It would be like watching computers play chess against one another.
Arguably, some baseball fan attrition has already occurred because they can't readily identify with players that make eight figure salaries.
Re:Check out transgaming - was "No 3D?"
on
Win4Lin 5.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Besides, emulation is important for legacy applications.
Bingo.
A lot of folks are happy as clams running their small business on 5-15 year old versions of Windows.
MS is using every means it can to force those users into buying new versions of the OS, new versions of applications, new subscriptions to ?
If a Linux box can allow them to extend the life of their legacy Windows system, that's a benefit to them.
Then, because the basic platform is Linux, they have the opportunity to write new apps on that platform, instead of being restricted to Windows only.
Can YOU imagine being on the end of the phone, trying to help somebody recover a server and every few minutes find that they were running with experimental kernel patches, or ancient/buggy software, or that a fault seemed to be caused by a random frob off SourceForge that you'd never heard of?
The correct solution is to write the procurement to require that any and all software provide a complete specification of the data formats and the rules for display of data. Such a requirement seems reasonable in a governmental context where documents frequently have a lifetime longer than Word processing software. With the specs, future programmers would be able to decipher the important hieroglyphics even if the latest word processor won't.
If Microsoft software doesn't comply with the degree of openness you require, then simply don't buy Microsoft software.
That's all.
Buying Microsoft software and then assessing penalties against MS would be blatantly unfair.
If new releases came out less frequently, there would be more time for the developers to test their code in the different configurations, to throw it to Aunt Tillie the sysadmin and to see how it might hose their internal corporate network.
It's always bothered me that the periodic table of the elements puts the f orbital elements (you know, the actinide and lanthanide series) in a separate row.
New columns should be inserted for the f elements in the same way new columns are inserted for the p and the d orbital elements.
All I can think is that the correct aspect ratio of the table would be too extreme and it would be hard to print efficiently and legibly on conventionally-sized paper.
I love these names. Initiative for Software Choice. I wonder if the people that think them up can help smirking when they unveil it to their paymasters.
It reminds of election time here in the good ole US of A, when I hear radio ads "Paid for by Citizens for Better Government" or some other such name.
Of course, the one-two punch analogy to elections won't be complete until opponents suggest that "pro open source" is "pro pedophilia" and "pro terrorist".
[Context: I have an SUV and used to have a 40+ mpg Honda Civic for years until it was brutally rear-ended by a mid-sized sedan].
I and a lot of other folks might have a profoundly shifting perception of what we really "need" if the price of gasoline in the U.S. were to climb from current levels to what it is in Europe or Japan over some timeline created by intelligent tax policies to slowly and predictably ramp up the price so that when oil really does become scarce and expensive we'll have a viable alternative.
Instead, we'll wait for the "free" market to act on a very short time scale, in a few weeks, during the next military action in an oil-rich, politically volatile area, to find that we'd like to trade in our SUVs for an 40 mpg economy car.
Oh well, knee-jerk decision-making is a way of life here. I'll have plenty of company of people that guessed wrong about what gasoline prices will be in the future. It won't be the first time I've slammed into a near-vertical learning curve.
is that in the drive to push the price of Lindows PCs down far below Windows PCs and to sell to a mass market, that some good means are made available for utilizing software modems (a.k.a. Winmodems) that have plagued Linux users for years as (i)being ubiquitous, (ii) having proprietary, hard to decipher interfaces.
Digital Divide
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I once worked a on large programming project where there was a big shift to move from an old style legacy codebase into the latest fashion of object oriented programming.
All the developers from the old project knew a lot about what the new project should have in the way of functionality, etc., but were not familiar with the intracacies of C++.
Younger people had spent their time learning the latest languages like C++ and so were in a position to write the new code, but they were not as familiar with what exactly the old code did (did well, did poorly, etc.)
Consequently, the project ended up winning some and losing some. It uses some recent sophisticated programming techniques to achieve, well, less than it could.
Obviously, what's best is to have both quick, sharp, uptodate young people and wise, experienced old people and to have them working together and communicating a lot to each other.
Discriminating against either the old or the young will set you back one way or another.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Amen.
If that is what you're competing against.
OTOH, if your products builds on top of Linux and cheap hardware, then you potentially have a way of building a very good product for very little money.
When servers start to cost US$19.99 and fit into a box that is mounted right onto the wall plug outlet, and the base line free part includes Linux on x86 with a JRE (and give me some WiFi), then we'll see some growth in market for all kinds of Web-enabled sensors and actuators, industrial and home.
Re:Scalability and cost
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sun's current "low-end" tactic of trying to replace Linux with Sun on x86 is going to win a lot of converts.
I disagree.
Solaris/x86 is too much of a niche OS, doesn't get the attention from commercial and FOSS providers that Linux or even the BSDs do.
Migrating to Solaris/x86 is taking a needles baby step across a relatively small stream for long time Solaris users that are conservative and nervous about Linux.
I've used Suns workstations since the mid 1980s and they've been great in their time. But in the last several years, the only market remaining for Suns was in big 64-way servers full of disks, inas much as their market at the lower end has been eaten up by cheaper x86 hardware that is not only performing "good enough" for the low end, but better in a lot of cases.
And so while we still run Sun servers for high capacity network-based storage (and Hitachi does their SANs), our new single-purpose servers are increasingly Lintel based. It's only a matter of time before iSCSI and Gigabit Ethernet eat into the network storage market, too.
Sun's contributed a lot to UNIX over the years (RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenOffice) and I'd like to see them stick around because I think they have a lot of talented people that could contribute a lot more. But they need to move on into different markets because the old markets are disappearing into commoditized Lintel boxes.
My view is that Sun should focus on providing software and services for enterprise wide LAN management and integration since this is one area where Linux needs some help. Desktop Linux deployments are increasing and they need to be managed efficiently and integrated effectively into heterogeneous corporate environments. Sun could do this if they decided they wanted to.
Yeah, right Dell'll jump right on the chance to offer a free OpenOffice and short-circuit the $300 pre-paved path their customers are meant to take from MS Works to MS Office.
Heartbeat - until MS rips out their pacemaker slowly by the leads ("What? You didn't get our latest XP refresh that fixed that chipset error? I apologize for the mixup, we'll send it for sure in three weeks.")
Everyone knows you don't mess with an 800 lb gorilla and you especially don't mess with his supply of bananas.
I like AMD as much as the next guy (running an 1800 XP), but I'm not sure why Intel needs to be defeated... good company, good products.
Intel doesn't need to be defeated, just "competed".
Intel (and every other company) simply needs to be in competition, in a hotly-contested race to produce high quality products for the lowest price in a well-informed marketplace
Absence of competition permits, even encourages companies to produce lower quality products because they can charge high prices for them [1[PDF]][2[PDF]] and make a greater profit doing so.
If Intel hasn't done this so much yet, then it's to their credit, but without competition, nothing will prevent it from happening in the future.
Everyone in the group will contribute their particular grievance until the sum, to a single individual, seems like overwhelming evidence of company management being incompetent, callous, petty, vindictive and just so damned malevolent.
Well, in reality, they're not that malevolent, anymore than villains in real life are that malevolent.
The groups helps to build a story. And it is good to share.
But don't get caught up in the herd mentality, because the mob will rampage for less reason than a thoughtful individual. And, even if the individuals in your department are, by and large, good folk, the conglomeration of your grievances will goad you into doing things you'll regret later.
Act rationally, calmly, professionally, thoughtfully (of everyone), and deliberately consider your actions, making allowance for the fact that you still do not have (nor will ever have) the complete, uncolored truth.
If you leave, it should be on professional and agreeable terms.
Some particularly aggreived and emotional members of your group will want management to "get what's coming to them" by having a valuable department leave en masse, telling them off, and basically burning bridges.
As a professional, you know better than to burn bridges behind you.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets not forget the thousands of Iraqis who were tortured on a daily basis and the thousands more abused under the Iraqi government.
Yes, I'm glad that stopped.
But that has not been a consistent good reason for invading another country.
If it were, why isn't the United States invading other countries with appalling records of human rights abuse?
PRC, North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo, just about every other country in the Middle East, etc.
It's becoming clear that GWB made a mistake. If the evidence for WMD was just so compelling, then it certainly ought to have turned up by now, as American forces have free reign to look anywhere in Iraq. Many American choose to believe his warnings about WMD in Iraq. The evidence he presented months ago was not compelling, but one could always argue that he was supplied with greater evidence that he could not reveal due to concerns of national security and preserving an intelligence-gathering capability. That is, we had to trust him that he really dug deep into the evidence and knew categorically that WMD in Iraq were a problem. [The supposed tie between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was as weak as they get. If removing bin Laden's support network were the real object, the USA would have invaded Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and not Iraq.]
I support American troops, who are dedicated men and women, and have sworn an oath to obey their commander in chief. They're great people we can ill afford to lose and they're putting their lives on the line.
Theremore, the commander in chief has an incredibly important responsibility to exercise, and he has not done it properly.
I don't believe GWB is malicious or evil, just not capable of acting as President of the United States with the dedication and thoroughness the office deserves. He's made a mistake in gullibility, believing Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and accepting their appointments inthe first place, not willing to do the homework it takes to know what is really going on. Before you commit someone else's life to a military objective, you owe it to them to be as smart as you can, as hardworking as you can, willing question your advisors, get alternative opinions, etc.
The United States Armed Forces, the people of the United States, and the world at large, all deserve the best possible person in that position. Sadly, the best person is not there now.
Just because you are a member of a group does not mean you always have to agree with the majority.
I know. I'm an American.
This should be quick.
The next release of MSN and of Windows will have a "special" DNS lookup for Google.
[Paraphrasing] No, you didn't really want to go there today!
There are still other calls to make besides pitches thrown kinda over home plate, and umps will still be needed to make those.
This technological advance should basically have a positive impact on baseball.
Other developments, such as genetically-engineered baseball players, could be more problematic.
A major reason people are willing to watch baseball games is that the players are, in principle, human beings of limited capacity, acting heroically (for the most part), and being models of persons that fans can identify with.
Once a fan concludes that baseball is being played by creatures or machines that don't share the same human limitations as the fan, then they won't watch anymore. It would be like watching computers play chess against one another.
Arguably, some baseball fan attrition has already occurred because they can't readily identify with players that make eight figure salaries.
Besides, emulation is important for legacy applications.
Bingo.
A lot of folks are happy as clams running their small business on 5-15 year old versions of Windows.
MS is using every means it can to force those users into buying new versions of the OS, new versions of applications, new subscriptions to ?
If a Linux box can allow them to extend the life of their legacy Windows system, that's a benefit to them.
Then, because the basic platform is Linux, they have the opportunity to write new apps on that platform, instead of being restricted to Windows only.
The linked article is kind of high-level and sketchy on details. Some questions come to mind:
Maybe someone knows a URL for the 3 preprint PDFs going to Phys Rev Lett?
Can YOU imagine being on the end of the phone, trying to help somebody recover a server and every few minutes find that they were running with experimental kernel patches, or ancient/buggy software, or that a fault seemed to be caused by a random frob off SourceForge that you'd never heard of?
Yes, unfortunately.
The correct solution is to write the procurement to require that any and all software provide a complete specification of the data formats and the rules for display of data. Such a requirement seems reasonable in a governmental context where documents frequently have a lifetime longer than Word processing software. With the specs, future programmers would be able to decipher the important hieroglyphics even if the latest word processor won't.
If Microsoft software doesn't comply with the degree of openness you require, then simply don't buy Microsoft software.
That's all.
Buying Microsoft software and then assessing penalties against MS would be blatantly unfair.
I was intrigued by the aluminum half cylinder they used to attenuate the X-rays going through the core sample.
Is this some crude kind of X-ray lens?
It's been talked about over here, too.
Thanks!
democracy2autarchy is a closed source software project, but it has been having some success, enough to be lucrative.
I've tried to install it myself but can't get past the point of needing libmoney.a
That's an excellent idea.
If new releases came out less frequently, there would be more time for the developers to test their code in the different configurations, to throw it to Aunt Tillie the sysadmin and to see how it might hose their internal corporate network.
It's always bothered me that the periodic table of the elements puts the f orbital elements (you know, the actinide and lanthanide series) in a separate row.
New columns should be inserted for the f elements in the same way new columns are inserted for the p and the d orbital elements.
All I can think is that the correct aspect ratio of the table would be too extreme and it would be hard to print efficiently and legibly on conventionally-sized paper.
I love these names. Initiative for Software Choice. I wonder if the people that think them up can help smirking when they unveil it to their paymasters.
It reminds of election time here in the good ole US of A, when I hear radio ads "Paid for by Citizens for Better Government" or some other such name.
Of course, the one-two punch analogy to elections won't be complete until opponents suggest that "pro open source" is "pro pedophilia" and "pro terrorist".
notice that his "old" address is properly obscured, but the "new" one is not.
What?
You mean I'm not supposed to "remove the animal" from Linus' email address?
Damn.
No wonder my patches weren't getting through to him.
may need an SUV
Ah, yes, "need"
[Context: I have an SUV and used to have a 40+ mpg Honda Civic for years until it was brutally rear-ended by a mid-sized sedan].
I and a lot of other folks might have a profoundly shifting perception of what we really "need" if the price of gasoline in the U.S. were to climb from current levels to what it is in Europe or Japan over some timeline created by intelligent tax policies to slowly and predictably ramp up the price so that when oil really does become scarce and expensive we'll have a viable alternative.
Instead, we'll wait for the "free" market to act on a very short time scale, in a few weeks, during the next military action in an oil-rich, politically volatile area, to find that we'd like to trade in our SUVs for an 40 mpg economy car.
Oh well, knee-jerk decision-making is a way of life here. I'll have plenty of company of people that guessed wrong about what gasoline prices will be in the future. It won't be the first time I've slammed into a near-vertical learning curve.
I buy treasuries every week through treasurydirect.gov but I earn is 4.66%. If you are saving up for a house
These days, I've heard of home mortgage rates lower than that.
If it weren't for the U.S. tax policies, there'd be a way to make some serious money lending to the Feds and borrowing, as if for a house.
is that in the drive to push the price of Lindows PCs down far below Windows PCs and to sell to a mass market, that some good means are made available for utilizing software modems (a.k.a. Winmodems) that have plagued Linux users for years as (i)being ubiquitous, (ii) having proprietary, hard to decipher interfaces.
I once worked a on large programming project where there was a big shift to move from an old style legacy codebase into the latest fashion of object oriented programming.
All the developers from the old project knew a lot about what the new project should have in the way of functionality, etc., but were not familiar with the intracacies of C++.
Younger people had spent their time learning the latest languages like C++ and so were in a position to write the new code, but they were not as familiar with what exactly the old code did (did well, did poorly, etc.)
Consequently, the project ended up winning some and losing some. It uses some recent sophisticated programming techniques to achieve, well, less than it could.
Obviously, what's best is to have both quick, sharp, uptodate young people and wise, experienced old people and to have them working together and communicating a lot to each other.
Discriminating against either the old or the young will set you back one way or another.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Amen.
If that is what you're competing against.
OTOH, if your products builds on top of Linux and cheap hardware, then you potentially have a way of building a very good product for very little money.
When servers start to cost US$19.99 and fit into a box that is mounted right onto the wall plug outlet, and the base line free part includes Linux on x86 with a JRE (and give me some WiFi), then we'll see some growth in market for all kinds of Web-enabled sensors and actuators, industrial and home.
Sun's current "low-end" tactic of trying to replace Linux with Sun on x86 is going to win a lot of converts.
I disagree.
Solaris/x86 is too much of a niche OS, doesn't get the attention from commercial and FOSS providers that Linux or even the BSDs do.
Migrating to Solaris/x86 is taking a needles baby step across a relatively small stream for long time Solaris users that are conservative and nervous about Linux.
I've used Suns workstations since the mid 1980s and they've been great in their time. But in the last several years, the only market remaining for Suns was in big 64-way servers full of disks, inas much as their market at the lower end has been eaten up by cheaper x86 hardware that is not only performing "good enough" for the low end, but better in a lot of cases.
And so while we still run Sun servers for high capacity network-based storage (and Hitachi does their SANs), our new single-purpose servers are increasingly Lintel based. It's only a matter of time before iSCSI and Gigabit Ethernet eat into the network storage market, too.
Sun's contributed a lot to UNIX over the years (RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenOffice) and I'd like to see them stick around because I think they have a lot of talented people that could contribute a lot more. But they need to move on into different markets because the old markets are disappearing into commoditized Lintel boxes.
My view is that Sun should focus on providing software and services for enterprise wide LAN management and integration since this is one area where Linux needs some help. Desktop Linux deployments are increasing and they need to be managed efficiently and integrated effectively into heterogeneous corporate environments. Sun could do this if they decided they wanted to.
No, this is not a big surprise to the very large crowd of people who think MS got off lightly for what they have done.
The significance, though, is that there are still a couple of states (WV, MA, I think) holding out on the DOJ settlement.
Their case could be made stronger if they can show the settlement is not working properly.
I can see Dell jumping on this in a heartbeat.
Yeah, right Dell'll jump right on the chance to offer a free OpenOffice and short-circuit the $300 pre-paved path their customers are meant to take from MS Works to MS Office.
Heartbeat - until MS rips out their pacemaker slowly by the leads ("What? You didn't get our latest XP refresh that fixed that chipset error? I apologize for the mixup, we'll send it for sure in three weeks.")
Everyone knows you don't mess with an 800 lb gorilla and you especially don't mess with his supply of bananas.
I like AMD as much as the next guy (running an 1800 XP), but I'm not sure why Intel needs to be defeated... good company, good products.
Intel doesn't need to be defeated, just "competed".
Intel (and every other company) simply needs to be in competition, in a hotly-contested race to produce high quality products for the lowest price in a well-informed marketplace
Absence of competition permits, even encourages companies to produce lower quality products because they can charge high prices for them [1[PDF]][2[PDF]] and make a greater profit doing so.
If Intel hasn't done this so much yet, then it's to their credit, but without competition, nothing will prevent it from happening in the future.
You need to be real careful about this.
Everyone in the group will contribute their particular grievance until the sum, to a single individual, seems like overwhelming evidence of company management being incompetent, callous, petty, vindictive and just so damned malevolent.
Well, in reality, they're not that malevolent, anymore than villains in real life are that malevolent.
The groups helps to build a story. And it is good to share.
But don't get caught up in the herd mentality, because the mob will rampage for less reason than a thoughtful individual. And, even if the individuals in your department are, by and large, good folk, the conglomeration of your grievances will goad you into doing things you'll regret later.
Act rationally, calmly, professionally, thoughtfully (of everyone), and deliberately consider your actions, making allowance for the fact that you still do not have (nor will ever have) the complete, uncolored truth.
If you leave, it should be on professional and agreeable terms.
Some particularly aggreived and emotional members of your group will want management to "get what's coming to them" by having a valuable department leave en masse, telling them off, and basically burning bridges.
As a professional, you know better than to burn bridges behind you.