I was checking my logs and noticed the entire site being downloaded by two computers on the same subnet. It was really clunky, not wget or anything, just a couple people downloading with Firefox. They grabbed everything -- audio files, images, attachments. So I checked it out -- China. Contacted the admin and got a note back saying, "Sorry, we liked your site and wanted to make it easier for Chinese people to find." It was sort of flattering.
You're right to a certain extent -- our own civic apathy certainly hasn't helped -- but it's not as simple as that. The "need to know" culture of the alphabet soup agencies opens up a barrel of worms. Un-elected people in covert scenarios use tools/resources that the civilian leadership itself fears.
There's a balance somewhere. Why do you think they call it a police state? The founders were wise to restrict and separate power. All-powerful law enforcement is no more desirable than an all-powerful unitary executive.
You mention large societies, but what about large organizations? The larger an organization becomes (U.S. govt, FBI, Enron, whatever...) the greater are the chances that corrupt cadres will use its resources to nefarious ends. When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, you have problems.
Great point. Statistically, you are *far* more likely to be killed by a member of your own family than by a terrorist, and that was true in the anomalous year of 2001 as well: In that year ~3000 Americans were killed by terrorists, but there were five times that many murders, most of them committed by someone close to the victims.
Clearly, a War on Families is in order.
When an argument starts like that, you know it's faulty.
Cost reduction would be another way. We pay twice as much as anybody else per capita and have worse results by most metrics.
The reason our costs are so high is that insurance companies make such huge profits, both on health policies and on malpractice. Big pharma's profits aren't helping, either.
Outside of insurance and pharma, universal health care would be a great thing for most businesses.
Why? Maybe because you like having total control over your apps. Maybe because you appreciate low latency. Maybe because you want to save thousands of dollars on software. Maybe because you're not lazy. Maybe just because you can.
Personally, I don't mind adding a line or two to my modprobe.conf file if it saves me a thousand bucks and results in far superior sound quality in both recording and listening.
Seriously, recording quality is one advantage, but the output is amazing. Listening to oldies in low latency is quite an experience. It's like you're in Muddy Waters' ribcage listening to his heart beat. I think that will be the deal breaker for a lot of current proprietary software users -- at some point they'll hear how much more pure the output is in super low latency, how perfect is the rendering of sound without all those little delays and say, "Why am I paying so much for inferior sound quality, again?"
"...a central interface to bind them all together..."
JACK works great for this, and the latency is lower than you'll ever get on any Windows setup.
Sure, if you want a GUI that looks like an old-fashioned rack, Reason is nice. If you want to be able to sync everything up with near zero latency and incredibly clean output, you'll use JACK plus the many applications that plug into it. It is audio software, right? Who cares what it looks like!
The only area where Linux is lacking is in pre-made soundfonts and sample libraries, but you can make your own. Cripes, the Beatles didn't need any sample libraries. Beethoven didn't need them. Real musicians don't need them.
Solid analysis. Probably something to it.
At the same time, a lot of people in the financial industry have probably profited enormously from Google's meteoric rise.
So the right of companies to compete in the global market undoes the rights of sovereign nations to make the laws that suit them?
Even if so, the playing field is not made the least bit unlevel by different laws. Companies from non-patent countries would still have to comply with laws in patent countries, and vice-versa.
Without a citation of a "Gramscian" case, that's just a rehashing of far-right propaganda. The ACLU has defended far-rightists including Rush Limbaugh, despite all the nasty propaganda he spread against them. Very Christian of them in the, "Love thy Neighbor" sense if not the Bushbot sense.
You got it. I can't believe your score is only 1 for this highly insightful comment. It blows my mind that anybody on a tech site would advocate dirty, 100-year old technologies over cleaner, newer technologies.
More energy hits the surface of the Earth each day from the sun than will be burned in the form of fossil fuels over the entire history of fossil fuels. If we had a government that cared about us, there would be a huge initiative to put solar panels on every roof, at least in areas that get a certain amount of sunshine.
Why do we use natural gas to heat water in places like Phoenix and San Diego? Building a solar hot water system is easy -- a polyurethane-covered black box with copper piping going through it, a tiny pump, a thermometer, and a well insulated tank -- that's it. My dad and I built such a system when I was in high school, and it provided 90 percent of our hot water.
...there's better people than you securing your freedoms.
Says a lot. "better people" -- are you saying that military people are better than civilians? That's funny because constitutionally, the military is subserviant to civilian rule which is why only Congress has the power to declare war and why the president is the CIC.
This kind of attitude is what has led to every fascist state in the history of the world, by the way: Civilians (or maybe just certain types of civilians) are untermensch, therefore, it's OK to bash down their doors in the middle of the night and disappear them. Yeah, I feel a lot safer with someone "better than me" "guarding my freedoms."
The truth is, our freedoms are like muscles. If we exercise them, we keep them. Blowing up poor people on the other side of the world has naught to do with preserving my freedom and everything to do with securing oil and preserving the power of billionaires. The last thing the energy companies want is for everybody to slap a few solar panels on their roofs -- that would give us true freedom and independence. Much better to send "better people" off to kill and die for "our freedom."
Orwell had it so right:
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
We have always been at war with EastAsia.
It really seems to have come to that.
Further to that, the negative effects are more than outweighed by the positive effects, namely diversity and choice. One of the primary reasons Linux writ large will always be more secure is that it will be difficult to write a virus that will, for example, effect a buffer overflow in every distribution. With so many distros out there, if one becomes a target, people will simply switch to others. With Windows, once the vulnerabilities are found, a one-size-fits-all virus will do nicely. Diversity is good in gene pools, and it's good in the world of operating systems. It's also nice to be able to choose a distro to suit a specific need.
Sure, there are negatives to diversity, but on net it's a positive.
Right you are. Institutions are the basis of all social stability. Even "bad" institutions are better than no/weak/non-credible institutions -- witness Iraq. When systems break down, things get ugly.
Fortunately for us, due to its distributed nature, the internet will succumb only very slowly to the anarcho-capitalism that grabbed the controls of the printing press, radio, and TV.
Oh, undoubtedly the new paradigm opens up some new cans of worms that MS knows about but won't say anything about until some cracker exploits them. Don't want to give anyone any ideas, but I can think of at least two security "advantages" of Vista that could open up some huge vulnerabilities.
Vista is probably an improvement, but I would still guess that it's utterly inferior to any *nix from the standpoints of performance and security.
Fedora works well, but the speed with which it goes from one version to the next can be a real PITA. Seems every time I get my system working the way I want it, it's time to upgrade.
That being said, the upgrades are fairly painless so long as you don't skip a version (i.e., don't go straight from 3 to 5).
...this is nowhere near the oppression of the Soviet system.
How do you figure? I distinctly remember growing up and hearing about how the poor Soviet citizens were not allowed to travel without the government's permission, making them, essentially, prisoners. How bad do things have to get before you realize that this is EXACTLY the kind of oppression of the Soviet system! Sure, they may not be bashing people's doors in and hauling them off to detention without charge yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid for that. Wake up!
I think what they mean is that there are many threats generally targeted at creating mischief and not really at causing real harm, but I've been known to misinterpret corporatese from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
I was checking my logs and noticed the entire site being downloaded by two computers on the same subnet. It was really clunky, not wget or anything, just a couple people downloading with Firefox. They grabbed everything -- audio files, images, attachments. So I checked it out -- China. Contacted the admin and got a note back saying, "Sorry, we liked your site and wanted to make it easier for Chinese people to find." It was sort of flattering.
You're right to a certain extent -- our own civic apathy certainly hasn't helped -- but it's not as simple as that. The "need to know" culture of the alphabet soup agencies opens up a barrel of worms. Un-elected people in covert scenarios use tools/resources that the civilian leadership itself fears.
There's a balance somewhere. Why do you think they call it a police state? The founders were wise to restrict and separate power. All-powerful law enforcement is no more desirable than an all-powerful unitary executive. You mention large societies, but what about large organizations? The larger an organization becomes (U.S. govt, FBI, Enron, whatever...) the greater are the chances that corrupt cadres will use its resources to nefarious ends. When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, you have problems.
Great point. Statistically, you are *far* more likely to be killed by a member of your own family than by a terrorist, and that was true in the anomalous year of 2001 as well: In that year ~3000 Americans were killed by terrorists, but there were five times that many murders, most of them committed by someone close to the victims. Clearly, a War on Families is in order.
Exactly. If the public doesn't have the right to know the exact methodology used to count votes and tabulate results, what rights do we have?
Why? Maybe because you like having total control over your apps. Maybe because you appreciate low latency. Maybe because you want to save thousands of dollars on software. Maybe because you're not lazy. Maybe just because you can. Personally, I don't mind adding a line or two to my modprobe.conf file if it saves me a thousand bucks and results in far superior sound quality in both recording and listening. Seriously, recording quality is one advantage, but the output is amazing. Listening to oldies in low latency is quite an experience. It's like you're in Muddy Waters' ribcage listening to his heart beat. I think that will be the deal breaker for a lot of current proprietary software users -- at some point they'll hear how much more pure the output is in super low latency, how perfect is the rendering of sound without all those little delays and say, "Why am I paying so much for inferior sound quality, again?"
"...a central interface to bind them all together..." JACK works great for this, and the latency is lower than you'll ever get on any Windows setup. Sure, if you want a GUI that looks like an old-fashioned rack, Reason is nice. If you want to be able to sync everything up with near zero latency and incredibly clean output, you'll use JACK plus the many applications that plug into it. It is audio software, right? Who cares what it looks like! The only area where Linux is lacking is in pre-made soundfonts and sample libraries, but you can make your own. Cripes, the Beatles didn't need any sample libraries. Beethoven didn't need them. Real musicians don't need them.
Solid analysis. Probably something to it. At the same time, a lot of people in the financial industry have probably profited enormously from Google's meteoric rise.
If all you need to do is kill millions of people to be considered evil, it's a wonder that there isn't more evil in the world.
So the right of companies to compete in the global market undoes the rights of sovereign nations to make the laws that suit them? Even if so, the playing field is not made the least bit unlevel by different laws. Companies from non-patent countries would still have to comply with laws in patent countries, and vice-versa.
Without a citation of a "Gramscian" case, that's just a rehashing of far-right propaganda. The ACLU has defended far-rightists including Rush Limbaugh, despite all the nasty propaganda he spread against them. Very Christian of them in the, "Love thy Neighbor" sense if not the Bushbot sense.
Windows '95 was kind of cool for its time. Everything since then has sucked, including XtraPain
How about this one: "Keep mining! Let the bastards experience 10,000 Katrinas!"
You got it. I can't believe your score is only 1 for this highly insightful comment. It blows my mind that anybody on a tech site would advocate dirty, 100-year old technologies over cleaner, newer technologies. More energy hits the surface of the Earth each day from the sun than will be burned in the form of fossil fuels over the entire history of fossil fuels. If we had a government that cared about us, there would be a huge initiative to put solar panels on every roof, at least in areas that get a certain amount of sunshine. Why do we use natural gas to heat water in places like Phoenix and San Diego? Building a solar hot water system is easy -- a polyurethane-covered black box with copper piping going through it, a tiny pump, a thermometer, and a well insulated tank -- that's it. My dad and I built such a system when I was in high school, and it provided 90 percent of our hot water.
Further to that, the negative effects are more than outweighed by the positive effects, namely diversity and choice. One of the primary reasons Linux writ large will always be more secure is that it will be difficult to write a virus that will, for example, effect a buffer overflow in every distribution. With so many distros out there, if one becomes a target, people will simply switch to others. With Windows, once the vulnerabilities are found, a one-size-fits-all virus will do nicely. Diversity is good in gene pools, and it's good in the world of operating systems. It's also nice to be able to choose a distro to suit a specific need. Sure, there are negatives to diversity, but on net it's a positive.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I find Linux eye candy quite sleek.
Right you are. Institutions are the basis of all social stability. Even "bad" institutions are better than no/weak/non-credible institutions -- witness Iraq. When systems break down, things get ugly. Fortunately for us, due to its distributed nature, the internet will succumb only very slowly to the anarcho-capitalism that grabbed the controls of the printing press, radio, and TV.
Oh, undoubtedly the new paradigm opens up some new cans of worms that MS knows about but won't say anything about until some cracker exploits them. Don't want to give anyone any ideas, but I can think of at least two security "advantages" of Vista that could open up some huge vulnerabilities. Vista is probably an improvement, but I would still guess that it's utterly inferior to any *nix from the standpoints of performance and security.
Fedora does make networking a snap, especially with Windows networks, BUT I would be surprised if Ubuntu hadn't made some progress on that front.
Fedora works well, but the speed with which it goes from one version to the next can be a real PITA. Seems every time I get my system working the way I want it, it's time to upgrade. That being said, the upgrades are fairly painless so long as you don't skip a version (i.e., don't go straight from 3 to 5).
How the hell were you not rated "5 - Funny" on this! My sinuses turned inside out. C'mon, mods, show the poster above some love!
I think what they mean is that there are many threats generally targeted at creating mischief and not really at causing real harm, but I've been known to misinterpret corporatese from time to time.