When I first learned of privatized prisons I was flabbergasted. There is no logical rationale for doing this, and this story is a perfect example why.
Privatization of such has been bleeding into mental institutions, garbage collection, etc., and all have had problems that are as bad as or worse than the problems they were supposed to solve.
Think long and hard to decide whether it makes sense for any of the 3 I mentioned to be for-profit companies: prisons, mental institutions, garbage collection. If you agree they make sense then I have to assume you're a politician on the payrolls of these corporations.
Computers in schools have been a colossal waste of money.
Perhaps the stimulus needs to be geared toward proper teachers because it's the curriculum that is important. One can learn critical thinking skills by learning programming algorithms with a BASIC language (pun intended), and typing proficiency rather than a particular word processor.
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
When I sat down to price out Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL a few years ago I was surprised to find out the costs were roughly equivalent for a small/medium installation.
MySQL is free because it's open source but by the time you opt for useful add-ons like hot backups and support the costs get up there. People opt for SQL Server due to Windows familiarity, but frankly Oracle is rock-solid on Windows too. From a functionality perspective neither offer any functional advantage over that Oracle, so it becomes a fairly simple decision.
Most consulting companies (that engage clients) happen upon their first gig by default (e.g., a client you work with at a day job wants to continue to engage you, perhaps after you leave your day job). There's some luck there.
To continue with that requires word of mouth, marketing, advertising, and most of all networking. Attend user groups and talk to people, advertise somewhere (I hate to say this but they even do jobs on craig's list), eventually you'll wind up with a set of consistent clients that, frankly, give you more consistent employment and income than most full time employment positions.
Many people here are arguing that Apple has a right to restrict sales of OSX to their own hardware, and that it is not monopolistic because there are other OS choices. However, this issue is not about software, but about hardware. Is it Apple's right to be the only seller of OSX compatible hardware?
The answer is no, if you draw a parallel with the Intel vs AMD/Cyrix lawsuits. Intel lost the right to sell their proprietary version of the microprocessor even though there were others on the market.
However, Apple has successfully sued and won similar cases over the decades with Apple II and Macintosh clones. Maybe things have changed enough in the legal and computer landscape making it ripe enough for Pystar to win.
Even though it was part jest, part flamebait whineymacfanboy's post was originally +5 Insightful. Due to the fact that I've recently had very similar point by point non-joking discussions, I had to reply as a result.
The summary of those serious discussions is this: Mac users are very adamant about the benefits of consistent UI over choice and Windows users are adamant about developer focus on the most popular platform. Both are actually tough to argue about, but both boil down to a disturbing tendency in people to stray from choice.
The choice between MS, Apple & Linux is superfluous. Let's go with the most popular choice - that way developers can concentrate on one platform.
You are onto something except for one major flaw.
At one point in time DOS was the most popular choice. Why aren't we still using and designing for the DOS platform? Probably because the world goes on to better ideas. The most popular choice implies you will never change platforms, ever again.
The choice between Firefox & Safari on OSX is superfluous. Apple's team of professional interface designers should make the choice for us; all those OS X users using Firefox are just delusional.
It is a a mistake to mix the concepts of functionality and user interface. From a purist perspective, browsers have no UI, they're all about functionality (plugin support, fast javascript, etc), because UI is done by web designers.
Since it would cost far more to develop a float device that's accurate at all levels, they just use one that is accurate when you need it to be, and less precise when you don't.
I think there is some truth in your "by design" comment, that it hasn't been important enough to worry about.
However it's pretty darned easy to have a little logic between the gauge and the float that takes into account the shape of the tank to give a proper reading.
Selling an "unlocked" version of OS X retail for $400-$500 would cover their profits nicely. They screwed up on the original clones by selling the OS for too little to pay for the lost sales.
Operating systems are a loss-leader for other software designed for the OS. Don't assume that Apple under-priced their OS -- anyone who purchases it will most likely purchase other Apple software too.
Might want to take a gander at one of Cringely's latest columns disputing the moth story as the origin of a "bug"
It turns out that "bug" was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878. This is no earthshaking news, of course, but simply reminds me how self-centered we are as an industry and there really isn't much that's truly new.
In a world where most people consider MP3 encoding to be equivalant to CD quality, I guess it's not surprising to find so many people who would not think twice about turning down a Trinitron monitor in favor of a entry level Dell monitor or a cheap TV from Best Buy. Worse yet, how many people have you found running LCDs at non-native resolution... it's awful!
There's a much greater difference between low and high end TVs and monitors than there is between the equivalent shadow mask vs Trinitron monitors, so if picture really matters to you, solve the quality problem first. I'm a real stickler about monitor quality, comparing shadow mask vs Trinitron monitors side by side whenever I've had the chance and not once have I preferred a shadow mask monitor, unless the Trinitron had lower resolution or refresh rate. The difference was not huge in some cases, but shadow mask usually gave me the impression of having a more "muddy" feel. I'd rather see a wire once every 6 months than have 365 days of slightly fuzzier text.
But that's me and there is some subjectivity involved. Whie I can find the tension wires when I try, in practice they have hardly ever been noticeable. Maybe in a new word processing document with the entire screen white, or image editing with largely flat white background, but never beyond that.
Flat panel display technology is still trying to make par with the viewing angles, colors and longevity offered in CRTs. Give it a couple more years and maybe those deficiencies will be worked out with laser TVs, large OLEDs, or whatever is next.
I have a 25 year old 14" trinitron which I still use on a daily basis, which has never had a repair done on the tube itself (just the tuner), and still looks as good as it did in 1983! For a time it was my color computer monitor for my Commodore 64, Apple ][ and IBM PC AT, back when color monitors were too expensive or weren't readily available.
Every TV I've had since then has either died or had the tube electronics fixed multiple times.
I've always had (still have, in fact) several trinitron based monitors for my computers that had the best picture available IMO. I only took the leap to LCD 1 year ago due to nothing more than display size. What are the odds that LCD will still work in 25 years?
The fact is, if you were choosing a database for your enterprise and knew nothing of either database, MySQL would be eliminated on name alone. That's the irony of it all.
The original was an internal email at Starbucks corporate:
"The effects of CAFFEINE on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to A GRANDE CAFFE LATTE or HERBAL TEA. The study finds that compared to HERBAL TEA, in the CAFFEINE-exposed subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased. Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms related to CAFFE LATTE use, appear to have more headaches AFTER actual CAFFFEINE exposure as compared to HERBAL TEA exposure."
The real driving force behind Wii is not that it is a "must-have-one-too" Christmas toy, but rather that the Wii is a social system. People play with their friends and/or family members' system, and decide that it is fun enough that they want one of their own. Sounds contradictory. A must have Christmas toy is typically one which people want because their friend has one and they want one too.
Yes they are leaving money on the table, but it is also a known business practice to create increased demand with intended artificial restrictions on product availability. The iPhone is the most recent example of this.
And if you think that "I'm feeling lucky" is not the default behavior you want, configure it to do a normal Google search:
Create (or edit) a file "user.js" in your Firefox profile directory and add the following:
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");
Now unless you enter a valid URL the the location bar, it will perform a Google search for you and return the first page of Google results. It's a useability thing for me...makes life much easier to use one entry box with one keyboard command to get to it for either purpose. In fact at that point I reduce the size of the search bar to make more room for the location bar.
I customize it even further so that I can do quicker lookups for other search engines with keywords. Want to look up a wikipedia entry? I type "w " in the location bar. Dictionary lookup? I type "d " in the location bar. Much faster than navigating to the search bar and using a mouse to find the search engine I want in a dropdown.
Man, there sure is a lot of crud posted on this topic by people who feel like posting rather than posting solutions. I went down this road a couple years back and even I've got a couple partially implemented solutions I'll give a quick rundown of the proper thought process:
1. Cheapest, Fastest: Just buy another hard disk and put it in your PC. You'd be amazed how far you get with that. You have a 250G drive as your main drive, buy a 750G+ drive and store several images on this backup hard disk with your software method of choice. I'm not going into the whys or wherefores of each one to stick with hardware, but you can use things like rsync, unison, norton ghost, ghost for linux, etc... You can do this also with a USB2 drive, but if you have space in your case, what's the point? USB2 is slower than an internal drive, requires external power (another power plug that are most likely already in short supply for you), and buys you only the ability to disconnect from one PC and attach to another. If that's what you want, then you start thinking about NAS.
2. Auto-backups. Many motherboards come with RAID 1 built on (mirroring). Buy two drives, mirror them and you can weather the loss of one of the drives. What I did was do this and use it as my primary data disk requiring no specific backups because the mirroring does it automatically. Just replace the bad drive whenever it fails.
3. Accessibility. There are many reasons to go with an external NAS device to store files. First and foremost is so that multiple PCs can use it as their backup. The NSLU2 (the slug) is one of the better solutions here because of it's configurability and low power requirements. This is important... LOW POWER REQUIREMENTS. Why go with everyone's recommendations to use an old PC with a noisy 250W power supply? I got a Kuro Box (an open version of the Buffalo Linkstation) which uses 17W of power with an internal hard drive running. It's silent, takes up little room, and you can run your favorite Linux utilities on it. With its 128M ram I can use it as network attached storage using NFS or Samba protocols, run a media server on it for my Avel Linkplayer.. and not require the space, noise, or power requirements of an old PC. For those expressing concern over which pre-configured NAS device supports which protocols.. get an open one and put what you want on it. It's IMPOSSIBLE to find a NAS device that does exactly what YOU want unless it's open and fully configurable.
4. Most costly. If you have the cash, buy one of the nice external RAID devices like the Buffalo Terastation, Infrant ReadyNAS, etc. You get the fault tolerance of RAID enabling you to use it as primary storage without risk of data loss, and higher speed. Consumer NAS devices are slow...slower than USB2. That's the focus of point #2... use RAID when using it as your primary storage to avoid having to do your own backups. As solely backup storage, you might as well just use some basic copy utility and one or more disks as a backup.
Summary: Internal drives fast. External drives slow. If all you're concerned about is backing up your data just use one or more internal drives. When you go to external storage you're probably more concerned about access to that data from multiple PCs or using it as a media server, etc, and you have to deal with the tradeoffs.
Well that covers about 1/4 of the topic, but by the nature of the original post this plenty of info for most of us.
All the nasty details about how much money the bands DON'T get from record companies make me want to download a free copy of a band's CD and send a buck to each band member in the mail.
That gives me an idea. Add a "Make Money Fast" type of sob letter about record companies exploits to each downloadable CD available on bit torrent that includes the name and address of each band member. "Just Send $1 to each of the following addresses below..." At a pay rate of 38% a 4 person band gets gets $1.52 per download.
Listen for how clear each instrument (and voice) comes out on each speaker. Sometimes I wish people took this much care to choose which lossy format sounds best with their music. Unlike speakers, it costs nothing to choose a better codec than MP3, arguably one of the worst available at this point in time, not to mention all the copyright hinderances. Too bad that's the only common denominator between all the music providers, DAP players, cell phones, etc.
No, it's not misleading at all. It says the "standards are open to public", which doesn't have to imply source code. If, for example, the standard is to do all counting with a paper ballot, does it matter if the source code for the computer which generates the paper ballot is open (as long as the paper ballot is verifiable by the voter)?
I'm not sure why Oracle wants BEA Systems, which appears to be antiquated and riddled with issues at this point. As other posters have indicated, switching to JBoss is not only successful it saves a ton of money. It was near a year ago Oracle bid for JBoss, losing out to Red Hat, then created their own "Unbreakable Linux" distribution based on Red Hat Linux. If they're willing to plunk down $6.8 billion for BEA Systems, Red Hat, at a market cap of $4.15 billion is not only a relative bargain but seems to be a no-brainer.
If internet taxing was put into place some one would have to keep track of what tax is applicable to what zip code, be able to assess that for every customer upfront, and then remit possibly 25,000 different payments every month.
If the flat rate was 5% they would need to designate how much went to each interested party (Fed, State, County, City). They would also need to supply a more streamline remittance process because no small company could process or keep track of where their tax collections needed to go. These two statements are a bit contradictory. While it's reasonable to assume small businesses don't have the wherewithal to collect and pay country-wide sales tax, they already have mechanisms in place to collect state sales tax. Those same mechanisms would basically work for all states (i.e., a larger tax database). Remittance becomes an issue, but proposing the goverment becomes that clearinghouse is just pushing the burden to goverment... rather private companies spring up and act as a tax clearing house to relieve that burden from small companies, which then incurs a much smaller cost than each small company hiring the personnell to deal with the taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first learned of privatized prisons I was flabbergasted. There is no logical rationale for doing this, and this story is a perfect example why.
Privatization of such has been bleeding into mental institutions, garbage collection, etc., and all have had problems that are as bad as or worse than the problems they were supposed to solve.
Think long and hard to decide whether it makes sense for any of the 3 I mentioned to be for-profit companies: prisons, mental institutions, garbage collection. If you agree they make sense then I have to assume you're a politician on the payrolls of these corporations.
Computers in schools have been a colossal waste of money.
Perhaps the stimulus needs to be geared toward proper teachers because it's the curriculum that is important. One can learn critical thinking skills by learning programming algorithms with a BASIC language (pun intended), and typing proficiency rather than a particular word processor.
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
When I sat down to price out Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL a few years ago I was surprised to find out the costs were roughly equivalent for a small/medium installation.
MySQL is free because it's open source but by the time you opt for useful add-ons like hot backups and support the costs get up there. People opt for SQL Server due to Windows familiarity, but frankly Oracle is rock-solid on Windows too. From a functionality perspective neither offer any functional advantage over that Oracle, so it becomes a fairly simple decision.
Most consulting companies (that engage clients) happen upon their first gig by default (e.g., a client you work with at a day job wants to continue to engage you, perhaps after you leave your day job). There's some luck there.
To continue with that requires word of mouth, marketing, advertising, and most of all networking. Attend user groups and talk to people, advertise somewhere (I hate to say this but they even do jobs on craig's list), eventually you'll wind up with a set of consistent clients that, frankly, give you more consistent employment and income than most full time employment positions.
Many people here are arguing that Apple has a right to restrict sales of OSX to their own hardware, and that it is not monopolistic because there are other OS choices. However, this issue is not about software, but about hardware. Is it Apple's right to be the only seller of OSX compatible hardware?
The answer is no, if you draw a parallel with the Intel vs AMD/Cyrix lawsuits. Intel lost the right to sell their proprietary version of the microprocessor even though there were others on the market.
However, Apple has successfully sued and won similar cases over the decades with Apple II and Macintosh clones. Maybe things have changed enough in the legal and computer landscape making it ripe enough for Pystar to win.
Even though it was part jest, part flamebait whineymacfanboy's post was originally +5 Insightful. Due to the fact that I've recently had very similar point by point non-joking discussions, I had to reply as a result.
The summary of those serious discussions is this: Mac users are very adamant about the benefits of consistent UI over choice and Windows users are adamant about developer focus on the most popular platform. Both are actually tough to argue about, but both boil down to a disturbing tendency in people to stray from choice.
The choice between MS, Apple & Linux is superfluous. Let's go with the most popular choice - that way developers can concentrate on one platform.
You are onto something except for one major flaw. At one point in time DOS was the most popular choice. Why aren't we still using and designing for the DOS platform? Probably because the world goes on to better ideas. The most popular choice implies you will never change platforms, ever again.
The choice between Firefox & Safari on OSX is superfluous. Apple's team of professional interface designers should make the choice for us; all those OS X users using Firefox are just delusional.
It is a a mistake to mix the concepts of functionality and user interface. From a purist perspective, browsers have no UI, they're all about functionality (plugin support, fast javascript, etc), because UI is done by web designers.
Since it would cost far more to develop a float device that's accurate at all levels, they just use one that is accurate when you need it to be, and less precise when you don't.
I think there is some truth in your "by design" comment, that it hasn't been important enough to worry about. However it's pretty darned easy to have a little logic between the gauge and the float that takes into account the shape of the tank to give a proper reading.
Selling an "unlocked" version of OS X retail for $400-$500 would cover their profits nicely. They screwed up on the original clones by selling the OS for too little to pay for the lost sales.
Operating systems are a loss-leader for other software designed for the OS. Don't assume that Apple under-priced their OS -- anyone who purchases it will most likely purchase other Apple software too.
In a world where most people consider MP3 encoding to be equivalant to CD quality, I guess it's not surprising to find so many people who would not think twice about turning down a Trinitron monitor in favor of a entry level Dell monitor or a cheap TV from Best Buy. Worse yet, how many people have you found running LCDs at non-native resolution... it's awful!
There's a much greater difference between low and high end TVs and monitors than there is between the equivalent shadow mask vs Trinitron monitors, so if picture really matters to you, solve the quality problem first. I'm a real stickler about monitor quality, comparing shadow mask vs Trinitron monitors side by side whenever I've had the chance and not once have I preferred a shadow mask monitor, unless the Trinitron had lower resolution or refresh rate. The difference was not huge in some cases, but shadow mask usually gave me the impression of having a more "muddy" feel. I'd rather see a wire once every 6 months than have 365 days of slightly fuzzier text.
But that's me and there is some subjectivity involved. Whie I can find the tension wires when I try, in practice they have hardly ever been noticeable. Maybe in a new word processing document with the entire screen white, or image editing with largely flat white background, but never beyond that.
Flat panel display technology is still trying to make par with the viewing angles, colors and longevity offered in CRTs. Give it a couple more years and maybe those deficiencies will be worked out with laser TVs, large OLEDs, or whatever is next.
I have a 25 year old 14" trinitron which I still use on a daily basis, which has never had a repair done on the tube itself (just the tuner), and still looks as good as it did in 1983! For a time it was my color computer monitor for my Commodore 64, Apple ][ and IBM PC AT, back when color monitors were too expensive or weren't readily available.
Every TV I've had since then has either died or had the tube electronics fixed multiple times.
I've always had (still have, in fact) several trinitron based monitors for my computers that had the best picture available IMO. I only took the leap to LCD 1 year ago due to nothing more than display size. What are the odds that LCD will still work in 25 years?
The fact is, if you were choosing a database for your enterprise and knew nothing of either database, MySQL would be eliminated on name alone. That's the irony of it all.
This is a more appropriate union name: United Blogger's Union.
... sit!
Sit UBU
The original was an internal email at Starbucks corporate:
"The effects of CAFFEINE on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to A GRANDE CAFFE LATTE or HERBAL TEA. The study finds that compared to HERBAL TEA, in the CAFFEINE-exposed subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased. Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms related to CAFFE LATTE use, appear to have more headaches AFTER actual CAFFFEINE exposure as compared to HERBAL TEA exposure."
Given the fact that you give not a single advantage to Bluray, I'll just assume you're at best a Toshiba employee, or at worst a troll.
If Nintendo says they need 5 months advance notice, they had it. http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/12/nintendo-planning-to-milk-its-wii-shortage-through-the-holidays/
Yes they are leaving money on the table, but it is also a known business practice to create increased demand with intended artificial restrictions on product availability. The iPhone is the most recent example of this.
And if you think that "I'm feeling lucky" is not the default behavior you want, configure it to do a normal Google search:
// Change to normal Google search:
Create (or edit) a file "user.js" in your Firefox profile directory and add the following:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");
Now unless you enter a valid URL the the location bar, it will perform a Google search for you and return the first page of Google results. It's a useability thing for me...makes life much easier to use one entry box with one keyboard command to get to it for either purpose. In fact at that point I reduce the size of the search bar to make more room for the location bar.
I customize it even further so that I can do quicker lookups for other search engines with keywords. Want to look up a wikipedia entry? I type "w " in the location bar. Dictionary lookup? I type "d " in the location bar. Much faster than navigating to the search bar and using a mouse to find the search engine I want in a dropdown.
Man, there sure is a lot of crud posted on this topic by people who feel like posting rather than posting solutions. I went down this road a couple years back and even I've got a couple partially implemented solutions I'll give a quick rundown of the proper thought process:
1. Cheapest, Fastest: Just buy another hard disk and put it in your PC. You'd be amazed how far you get with that. You have a 250G drive as your main drive, buy a 750G+ drive and store several images on this backup hard disk with your software method of choice. I'm not going into the whys or wherefores of each one to stick with hardware, but you can use things like rsync, unison, norton ghost, ghost for linux, etc... You can do this also with a USB2 drive, but if you have space in your case, what's the point? USB2 is slower than an internal drive, requires external power (another power plug that are most likely already in short supply for you), and buys you only the ability to disconnect from one PC and attach to another. If that's what you want, then you start thinking about NAS.
2. Auto-backups. Many motherboards come with RAID 1 built on (mirroring). Buy two drives, mirror them and you can weather the loss of one of the drives. What I did was do this and use it as my primary data disk requiring no specific backups because the mirroring does it automatically. Just replace the bad drive whenever it fails.
3. Accessibility. There are many reasons to go with an external NAS device to store files. First and foremost is so that multiple PCs can use it as their backup. The NSLU2 (the slug) is one of the better solutions here because of it's configurability and low power requirements. This is important... LOW POWER REQUIREMENTS. Why go with everyone's recommendations to use an old PC with a noisy 250W power supply? I got a Kuro Box (an open version of the Buffalo Linkstation) which uses 17W of power with an internal hard drive running. It's silent, takes up little room, and you can run your favorite Linux utilities on it. With its 128M ram I can use it as network attached storage using NFS or Samba protocols, run a media server on it for my Avel Linkplayer.. and not require the space, noise, or power requirements of an old PC. For those expressing concern over which pre-configured NAS device supports which protocols.. get an open one and put what you want on it. It's IMPOSSIBLE to find a NAS device that does exactly what YOU want unless it's open and fully configurable.
4. Most costly. If you have the cash, buy one of the nice external RAID devices like the Buffalo Terastation, Infrant ReadyNAS, etc. You get the fault tolerance of RAID enabling you to use it as primary storage without risk of data loss, and higher speed. Consumer NAS devices are slow...slower than USB2. That's the focus of point #2... use RAID when using it as your primary storage to avoid having to do your own backups. As solely backup storage, you might as well just use some basic copy utility and one or more disks as a backup.
Summary: Internal drives fast. External drives slow. If all you're concerned about is backing up your data just use one or more internal drives. When you go to external storage you're probably more concerned about access to that data from multiple PCs or using it as a media server, etc, and you have to deal with the tradeoffs.
Well that covers about 1/4 of the topic, but by the nature of the original post this plenty of info for most of us.
All the nasty details about how much money the bands DON'T get from record companies make me want to download a free copy of a band's CD and send a buck to each band member in the mail.
..." At a pay rate of 38% a 4 person band gets gets $1.52 per download.
That gives me an idea. Add a "Make Money Fast" type of sob letter about record companies exploits to each downloadable CD available on bit torrent that includes the name and address of each band member. "Just Send $1 to each of the following addresses below
No, it's not misleading at all. It says the "standards are open to public", which doesn't have to imply source code. If, for example, the standard is to do all counting with a paper ballot, does it matter if the source code for the computer which generates the paper ballot is open (as long as the paper ballot is verifiable by the voter)?
I'm not sure why Oracle wants BEA Systems, which appears to be antiquated and riddled with issues at this point. As other posters have indicated, switching to JBoss is not only successful it saves a ton of money. It was near a year ago Oracle bid for JBoss, losing out to Red Hat, then created their own "Unbreakable Linux" distribution based on Red Hat Linux. If they're willing to plunk down $6.8 billion for BEA Systems, Red Hat, at a market cap of $4.15 billion is not only a relative bargain but seems to be a no-brainer.