Saying that you can finish your backups in 15 minutes because you're doing incrementals is almost entirely false. You can finish your incremental backups in 15 minutes. You can backup the delta of your data in 15 minutes, but not the data itself. Where's the difference? Trying to restore to yesterday with a two year old full and a series of differentials will take ages and increase your risk of failure enormously. Trying to restore with a two year old full and a cumulative incremental is basically using two complete data sets instead of one.
Incrementals are a tool to be used alongside fulls. Synthetic fulls may be a way of avoiding actually backing up your entire data set, but it still takes time to spin tape (or disk), and is new technology.
Well, you've picked up on seven games. One of them was actually done by Ron's former partner, Tim Schaffer, back in the 'good old days.' Out of the remaining six, you could argue back and forth on whether they were story-based, or scenario-based, as Ron discusses. I haven't played Oblivion yet, but if it's like Morrowind, I'd give it a marginal rating on that scale. (Great game, but the degree to which the story was integral is arguable.)
There are some out there--mostly coming out of Europe. Runaway is one I'm in the midst of. Siberia I and II were moderately recent. Dreamfall is new and sounds rather good. However, these are REALLY rare--You list six games from the last decade, I could come up with ten more, and we probably wouldn't add up to the total number of games released in an average week in the industry. Furthermore, each year produces fewer than previous years. Games truly based on stories are dwindling and almost extinct.
Hmm. Apparently I wasn't clear enough in all of my arguments. The fact that I agree with what you say pretty much proves it.:-)
"I agree with that statement but disagree with the premise that one needs to be childish in order to adapt to a changing environment."
I didn't mean to make that claim--from what I gather, that's one of the arguments the original article (not the one on Discovery Channnel's website) put forth, although not necessarily as a hard fact. Personally, I wouldn't state that at all. I think that childlike attitudes towards learning and the environment may lead to better and faster adaption to a changing environment. Childish behaviour on the other hand, often accompanies such an attitude but I would say isn't necessarily a linked event. The former allows the latter for the most part, but doesn't necessitate it.
As for the cop-outs you mention, I was pointing to a number of individual examples, but trying to avoid claiming them as sole evidence for my hypothesis (and really, that's all it is). The examples serve to illustrate what I feel in my gut--that yes, we are getting less mature, and society is encouraging it, either implicitly or explicitly. However, I have to state something that in retrospect wasn't clear enough: We are all responsible for our own actions. Regardless of how Nike would like 40-year-olds to behave, it is our own choice if we behave maturely or not. My example with a coworker was exactly that--my instinct was to react to immaturity with more immaturity, but I consciously chose to not act on that instinct.
So now if we're all ultimately self-responsible, then how can we point fingers at society? Society--ANY society--defines out background, and our "normal" behaviour. Fifty or five-hundred years ago, it simply wasn't acceptable to behave like a bratty four-year-old at the age of 30. Therefore, the default action was to behave maturely. Thoughts and actions follow each other, so we arguably would have been more mature in our thinking in a more mature society. Simply put, it's more difficult to be mature in an immature environment, that is an environment that promotes and sells immaturity.
But ain't no one who can make you behave immaturely if you don't let 'em. YOUR maturity (or lack thereof) is YOUR responsibility. MY maturity (or lack thereof) is MY responsibility. What the media packages and sells to us is OUR responsibility to accept or ignore. If any of my blathering is to suggest a solution to the problem, then this is it: Behave well for yourself, those who depend on you, and those who don't. And yes, do have fun.
The article did a rather piss-poor job of explaining what the research is suggesting, which is a pity because the topic is an interesting and complex one. Only one paragraph got the proper consequences:
"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."
So yes, childlike wonder and flexibility are good for learning new stuff, and tend to follow with a more dynamic society. The consequences of it are that people are going to be unbalanced, rash, irritable, and childish.
There is a guy I work with. He's in his mid-30s, and generally a nice guy. However at times (typically six or eight times a day) I want to scream at him, "GROW UP!!! Take some responsibility for what you're doing!!!" However, I don't. Now there are three 'maturity' issues at play here. 1) His lack of self-responsibility is immature (lack of responsibility) 2) My instinctive reaction is immature (ranting and raving like a kid) 3) My actions are mature (either nothing, talking to his manager, or talking to him professionally)
I bring this up not to prove my maturity (there are a lot of other cases that aren't so complimentary to me:-), but to illustrate what almost everyone has experienced.
In a modern workforce, I would expect that maturity equates fairly close to professionalism, and I can definitely say that I've seen a decline in professionalism in the last decade or so. Outside of the workplace, it's a bit trickier. People with kids who try to hard to be their kids' best friends and refuse to apply any discipline are a target, but it's a hard line to draw cleanly. Similarly, one poster mentioned that he and his wife have decided against having kids, because they're not done being kids themselves. This personally strikes me as a bit selfish (a fundamentally immature behaviour), but at the same time they seem remarkably mature in their immaturity.
At the base of it, I put a lot of the blame on pop culture and society. We venerate and idolise people who embody every negative aspect of immaturity (actors, rock stars, etc.) and naturally come to not only forgive but accept and rationalise their behaviour. At the same time, we know that getting stoned and trashing a hotel room is wrong, so we don't emulate them--however, the bar has already been set, and it's sitting in the mud. We have such a LOW standard of behaviour to exceed that an average eight-year-old is a more mature person than the stars who show up in the tabloids.
Society's final anti-maturity shot is the entire 'hide your age' industry. Makeup, surgery, and clothes are all designed to avoid aging, because aging reminds us of death. We're a culture so terrified of death that we'll spend billions to shove it under the rug. Unfortunately, that leads to consciously NOT acting like we think grown-ups should do, but rather as kids.
I could also mention a lawsuit-happy culture discouraging people from taking responsibilty for their own actions, but that would be another page of text, and this post is long enough already.
Maturity means responsibility. Taking responsibilty for your own life and your own actions, as well as acting responsibly and dealing responsibly with the actions of those around you. It is my personal belief that it doesn't necessarily preclude doing frivolous or foolish things when appropriate, but that historically it was never considered appropriate for adults to do such things. (Anyone remember Mary Poppins?) One exception has always been academics--the image of an absentminded or childlike genius professor is an old one indeed. In contemporary society, immature behaviour is allowed for all adults, and even encouraged. The new marque of maturity will be one who behaves in a mature and responsible fashion (a) when necessary, and (b) when desirable, but not necessarily (c) when not needed.
Maybe it's really a weakening of true maturity, but as long as (a) and (b) are achieved, I can happily deal with a society that has accepted (c).
Directly, this shouldn't affect the rest of the world. However if it passes it will likely lead to the same sort of global creep that always stems from the US putting its foot down. (and historically, any dominant superpower.)
In time, the ex-US industry will follow suit in order to sell into the US. Once mandatory DRM is entrenched, the US will start to put friendly pressure on its allies in the EU--not too hard these days with Blair leading the dominant power in western Europe. One country then another will start to implement similar laws, until enough of them have done so that the EU will formally insist all member nations comply with a base-level policy, to be implemented however the country sees fit. Most will implement something stricter because they don't want to be the target of "loose laws lead to piracy" rhetoric. Eventually the US will point to the EU's now-tighter laws, and insist that they lock down their own laws further, "in order to align ourselves with international standards."
Looked at copyright laws lately? Same crap, different name. The key is that they lawmakers and industry leaders don't want the people to control the content. It's as simple as that.
There's been quite a lot of good advice posted here, as well (of course) as some crap. Allow me to sum up the good bits, keeping in mind that my wife has professional training in ergonomics, and I'm a SA who often spends ten hours a day in front of a computer out of necessity.
1) Every person is different. Therefore every solution will be different. This cannot be emphasised strongly enough! What works for some people won't work for others. A perfect chair that doesn't fit you won't help; a perfect chair that exacerbates your particular problems or weaknesses won't help. Find a solution that addresses your problems, not someone else's.
2) Spending 14 hours per day in front of a computer isn't a problem that can be solved with a chair. The chair might get rid of the back pain, but this just isn't healthy or good for you, from a physical OR 'lifestyle' point of view.
3) An essential part of avoiding back problems is exercise and good general health. Taken on its own, exercise won't save you from a bad chair. However; taken on its own, a great chair won't save you from being unable to move properly.
4) Today's solution isn't necessarily tomorrow's solution. Don't forget that you change as well. Archery is going to affect your posture and muscle tone, which will in turn change your requirements for a chair. Don't fall into the trap of believing, "I set this chair up two years ago and it was perfect, so now it must be something wrong with me."
Find something that works for you--do the research, borrow chairs from friends and coworkers, adjust things as necessary, and hopefully you can find a solution that will let you remain comfortable for ten hours of work a day or more. Then only use it for eight hours a day, and do something entirely different for the rest of your time.
Finally, a note on chair pricing. For the people who talk about how expensive these things are and how they'd love a good chair but can't afford it, I have to ask: How much money do you spend on computer gear that's obsolete in three years? If you work in IT, this is as much of an investment as a good monitor or a new computer, and will last longer than either one.
Take a deeper look into the literature. the "chronic dehydration epidemic" is little more than a fad that has mutated into an alternate health meme. Take a look at Snopes article for some good medical references.
Drinking a bit more water certainly won't hurt you, but chronic dehydration isn't a problem in the western world, and wouldn't lead to back problems at any rate.
"Developing good posture will alleviate your need for an ergonomic chair like this."
Incorrect.
Developing good posture may alleviate YOUR need for an ergonomic chair like this. Please don't presume to know what my back problems are caused by, and how they can be fixed.
As Grandpa used to say, "t'ain't no use closin' the barn doors after all the cattle hescaped."
There is one thing and one thing ONLY that will slow down spam at this point: A concerted and highly publicised series of spammer executions, taking place over the next two years.
Alan Ralsky? Bullet to the head. Tony Banks? Same thing.
Two years of putting _all_ major spammers to death might slow things down. Nothing less will.
Now I'm not saying that this is the right move, or a noble, honourable, or moral one. However, it's the only one that will stop spam.
If we wanted to stop spam, we needed to do it back in 1995.
This is how Tiered pricing SHOULD work. It's the model they use for selling videos, and it's remarkably successful there.
The companies have a captive audience. They get to set the prices. SOOooo, they crank the price UP on the popular movies to extract maximum profit from them. The movies that won't sell well at a high price, they move downwards. It's supply and demand, the way it should work.
Why do I like this? Because I could get all of the really good movies for next to nothing, and all of the CRAP would pass me by as $30/download.
Oh well. That's my fantasy and I'm sticking to it.
This is merely backing up a previous study, where they found that kids who were raised with exposure to topsoil (i.e. on a farm, or even with a garden) had significantly stronger immune systems than those who didn't.
The interesting part of that study was that kids who grew up in dirty areas of cities (I believe NY inner-city was one of the test cases) ended up with a significantly weakened system.
Appears that our immune systems are designed to operate best when exposed to 'traditional' antagonists.
Don't know when you last looked at Solaris, but I'm guessing it's was about Solaris 7 from your comments.
Since version 8, Solaris has performed on par with Linux on the same gear. As of Solaris 10, Linux is now substantially slower (~20%) for almost all tasks. As far as new life goes, Solaris 10 was a ground-up rewrite which in ten years will be 'the thing' that people talk about as the biggest change in Unix for ages. Service manifests, dtrace, zones, self-healing, and zfs are the five things that will change all *nix bases over time.
Sun "going" open source is nothing new--they've been open-source friendly since before anyone really worried too much about closed source, except for some weird and esoteric legal wranglings which led to the Lion's Book and such. Remember NFS? NIS? Even Java, from the standards and architecture point of view, is relatively open. Also worth considering is that Sun made the decision to go open-source about five years ago, and have been carefully and systematically purging their code of legal conflicts since then. Hardly bandwagon-jumping.
Anyways, I think that Sun is really hoping to tap into the frustrated-with-Linux developer base, rather than the actual Linux developer base. There has long been a subset of programmers with professional and structured attitudes who don't suffer the pseudo-anarchy of Linux well, but haven't had a lot of other places to go. The BSDs were about the only outlet for many of these folks, and regardless of how good the products are, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of fire there. OpenSolaris has provided that fire.
HP has actively thrown away all of their technical edge to become Yet Another PC Vendor.
They nearly created the printer market, and now their printers are crap. They've only released one new RPN calculator, and it's...questionable. They're actively trying to kill off the HP-UX server/OS line. They've already killed off the PA-RISC processor line....As well as the Alpha line which they acquired. All of their worthwhile tech gear got spun off as Agilent.
All they do now is make crappy printers and passable PCs in server cases. That's great--I'm sure they'll make tons of money grinding out crap without doing any basic research anymore, but it's lousy for the industry.
I don't think that HP will ever recover from Carly F. She destroyed the company and is still running free on the streets.
I've dealt with HP, Sun, and IBM training material and courses. If your company will pay for it, then take the course appropriate to your skills and environment. The 'intro sysadmin' course is a great starter at any level--I finally took one after six years of being a professional SA, and still learned things. After that, the advanced admin courses and subject-specific courses are great.
However, the only way you learn any of the stuff, courses or not, is by applying it and practicing it. Yes, computers require practice. Programming requires practice. Administration requires practice. Install it (repeatedly, if possible) and work with it daily.
And of course, man. You must know man pages and vi.
That's nice for you. Maybe your exchange admins suck. It sounds like it from the limitations you're stuck with.
I fought hard against exchange--I'm a sendmail admin, and I do NOT support MS's piece of crap. Still, I can't deny that the dedicated and skilled exchange admins where I work have kept exchange up and running nonstop for well over 400 days and counting.
I'm tempted to scream 'bullshit,' but I'll try to be rational instead.
You're confusing two independent items here: Ease of administration and quality of documentation. These are NOT the same thing, and one does NOT compensate for the other. As much as you can say, "lack of docs is total crap" (because Linux is SOOOOOO easy to administer), someone else can say that "Ease of administration is total crap" because no matter how obscure, it's properly documented.
As long as consistent, high-quality documentation is considered unnecessary (or for that matter, total crap), Linux will remain an OS that doesn't get taken seriously, regardless of who uses it.
Y'know what? It's true. Nobody really gives a shit about legal wranglings between companies, until it affects the software they get at home. Most of the time, even that won't stir people out of their chairs.
It's just not that big of a deal for 99+% of the population.
How many companies would balk at putting RFID scanners at the entrance to their offices, if the government subsidised their wages for immigrants? Malls would do it quite happily for the illusory target of 'increased security.' Eventually, RFID scanners would be everywhere near civilisation. If someone failed to be trackable, they'd raise a red flag.
I don't have a lot of problems with tracking dangerous offenders likely to repeat. However, what exactly does that have to do with tracking all immigrants? Here's the quote:
" he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace."
Are you suggesting that all immigrants are pedophiles?
If you could get your head out of your ass long enough to see something beyond file sharing, you'll discover that the site is about copyright infringement!
It's shitty, deceitful, and amoral, but it's not exclusively obsessed with file sharing. Unlike you, apparently.
When I was young, I always felt like my chemistry set was a poor imitation of what my dad had when he was a kid. Now I look at what's available, and mine looked like a goldmine of cool stuff.
Here's a newsflash: SOME CHEMICALS ARE DANGEROUS WHEN MISUSED!!! If people would properly recognise that fact and let idiots blow themselves up (rather than letting idiots sue companies for 'letting' them blow themselves up), then there would be less of a rush to legislate safety on everything, everywhere.
We're living in a world obsessed with safety and cleanliness. If it's dangerous or might have germs, it must be BANNED or STERILISED!!! God forbid we should actually live a little and accept some danger.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just get something out of the way here.
Incremental backups are not full backups.
There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?
Saying that you can finish your backups in 15 minutes because you're doing incrementals is almost entirely false. You can finish your incremental backups in 15 minutes. You can backup the delta of your data in 15 minutes, but not the data itself.
Where's the difference? Trying to restore to yesterday with a two year old full and a series of differentials will take ages and increase your risk of failure enormously. Trying to restore with a two year old full and a cumulative incremental is basically using two complete data sets instead of one.
Incrementals are a tool to be used alongside fulls. Synthetic fulls may be a way of avoiding actually backing up your entire data set, but it still takes time to spin tape (or disk), and is new technology.
Well, you've picked up on seven games. One of them was actually done by Ron's former partner, Tim Schaffer, back in the 'good old days.' Out of the remaining six, you could argue back and forth on whether they were story-based, or scenario-based, as Ron discusses. I haven't played Oblivion yet, but if it's like Morrowind, I'd give it a marginal rating on that scale. (Great game, but the degree to which the story was integral is arguable.)
There are some out there--mostly coming out of Europe. Runaway is one I'm in the midst of. Siberia I and II were moderately recent. Dreamfall is new and sounds rather good. However, these are REALLY rare--You list six games from the last decade, I could come up with ten more, and we probably wouldn't add up to the total number of games released in an average week in the industry. Furthermore, each year produces fewer than previous years. Games truly based on stories are dwindling and almost extinct.
Hmm. Apparently I wasn't clear enough in all of my arguments. The fact that I agree with what you say pretty much proves it. :-)
"I agree with that statement but disagree with the premise that one needs to be childish in order to adapt to a changing environment."
I didn't mean to make that claim--from what I gather, that's one of the arguments the original article (not the one on Discovery Channnel's website) put forth, although not necessarily as a hard fact. Personally, I wouldn't state that at all. I think that childlike attitudes towards learning and the environment may lead to better and faster adaption to a changing environment. Childish behaviour on the other hand, often accompanies such an attitude but I would say isn't necessarily a linked event. The former allows the latter for the most part, but doesn't necessitate it.
As for the cop-outs you mention, I was pointing to a number of individual examples, but trying to avoid claiming them as sole evidence for my hypothesis (and really, that's all it is). The examples serve to illustrate what I feel in my gut--that yes, we are getting less mature, and society is encouraging it, either implicitly or explicitly. However, I have to state something that in retrospect wasn't clear enough: We are all responsible for our own actions. Regardless of how Nike would like 40-year-olds to behave, it is our own choice if we behave maturely or not. My example with a coworker was exactly that--my instinct was to react to immaturity with more immaturity, but I consciously chose to not act on that instinct.
So now if we're all ultimately self-responsible, then how can we point fingers at society? Society--ANY society--defines out background, and our "normal" behaviour. Fifty or five-hundred years ago, it simply wasn't acceptable to behave like a bratty four-year-old at the age of 30. Therefore, the default action was to behave maturely. Thoughts and actions follow each other, so we arguably would have been more mature in our thinking in a more mature society. Simply put, it's more difficult to be mature in an immature environment, that is an environment that promotes and sells immaturity.
But ain't no one who can make you behave immaturely if you don't let 'em. YOUR maturity (or lack thereof) is YOUR responsibility. MY maturity (or lack thereof) is MY responsibility. What the media packages and sells to us is OUR responsibility to accept or ignore. If any of my blathering is to suggest a solution to the problem, then this is it: Behave well for yourself, those who depend on you, and those who don't. And yes, do have fun.
The article did a rather piss-poor job of explaining what the research is suggesting, which is a pity because the topic is an interesting and complex one. Only one paragraph got the proper consequences:
:-), but to illustrate what almost everyone has experienced.
"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."
So yes, childlike wonder and flexibility are good for learning new stuff, and tend to follow with a more dynamic society. The consequences of it are that people are going to be unbalanced, rash, irritable, and childish.
There is a guy I work with. He's in his mid-30s, and generally a nice guy. However at times (typically six or eight times a day) I want to scream at him, "GROW UP!!! Take some responsibility for what you're doing!!!" However, I don't. Now there are three 'maturity' issues at play here.
1) His lack of self-responsibility is immature (lack of responsibility)
2) My instinctive reaction is immature (ranting and raving like a kid)
3) My actions are mature (either nothing, talking to his manager, or talking to him professionally)
I bring this up not to prove my maturity (there are a lot of other cases that aren't so complimentary to me
In a modern workforce, I would expect that maturity equates fairly close to professionalism, and I can definitely say that I've seen a decline in professionalism in the last decade or so. Outside of the workplace, it's a bit trickier. People with kids who try to hard to be their kids' best friends and refuse to apply any discipline are a target, but it's a hard line to draw cleanly. Similarly, one poster mentioned that he and his wife have decided against having kids, because they're not done being kids themselves. This personally strikes me as a bit selfish (a fundamentally immature behaviour), but at the same time they seem remarkably mature in their immaturity.
At the base of it, I put a lot of the blame on pop culture and society. We venerate and idolise people who embody every negative aspect of immaturity (actors, rock stars, etc.) and naturally come to not only forgive but accept and rationalise their behaviour. At the same time, we know that getting stoned and trashing a hotel room is wrong, so we don't emulate them--however, the bar has already been set, and it's sitting in the mud. We have such a LOW standard of behaviour to exceed that an average eight-year-old is a more mature person than the stars who show up in the tabloids.
Society's final anti-maturity shot is the entire 'hide your age' industry. Makeup, surgery, and clothes are all designed to avoid aging, because aging reminds us of death. We're a culture so terrified of death that we'll spend billions to shove it under the rug. Unfortunately, that leads to consciously NOT acting like we think grown-ups should do, but rather as kids.
I could also mention a lawsuit-happy culture discouraging people from taking responsibilty for their own actions, but that would be another page of text, and this post is long enough already.
Maturity means responsibility. Taking responsibilty for your own life and your own actions, as well as acting responsibly and dealing responsibly with the actions of those around you. It is my personal belief that it doesn't necessarily preclude doing frivolous or foolish things when appropriate, but that historically it was never considered appropriate for adults to do such things. (Anyone remember Mary Poppins?) One exception has always been academics--the image of an absentminded or childlike genius professor is an old one indeed. In contemporary society, immature behaviour is allowed for all adults, and even encouraged. The new marque of maturity will be one who behaves in a mature and responsible fashion (a) when necessary, and (b) when desirable, but not necessarily (c) when not needed.
Maybe it's really a weakening of true maturity, but as long as (a) and (b) are achieved, I can happily deal with a society that has accepted (c).
Directly, this shouldn't affect the rest of the world. However if it passes it will likely lead to the same sort of global creep that always stems from the US putting its foot down. (and historically, any dominant superpower.)
In time, the ex-US industry will follow suit in order to sell into the US. Once mandatory DRM is entrenched, the US will start to put friendly pressure on its allies in the EU--not too hard these days with Blair leading the dominant power in western Europe. One country then another will start to implement similar laws, until enough of them have done so that the EU will formally insist all member nations comply with a base-level policy, to be implemented however the country sees fit. Most will implement something stricter because they don't want to be the target of "loose laws lead to piracy" rhetoric. Eventually the US will point to the EU's now-tighter laws, and insist that they lock down their own laws further, "in order to align ourselves with international standards."
Looked at copyright laws lately? Same crap, different name. The key is that they lawmakers and industry leaders don't want the people to control the content. It's as simple as that.
There's been quite a lot of good advice posted here, as well (of course) as some crap. Allow me to sum up the good bits, keeping in mind that my wife has professional training in ergonomics, and I'm a SA who often spends ten hours a day in front of a computer out of necessity.
1) Every person is different. Therefore every solution will be different. This cannot be emphasised strongly enough! What works for some people won't work for others. A perfect chair that doesn't fit you won't help; a perfect chair that exacerbates your particular problems or weaknesses won't help. Find a solution that addresses your problems, not someone else's.
2) Spending 14 hours per day in front of a computer isn't a problem that can be solved with a chair. The chair might get rid of the back pain, but this just isn't healthy or good for you, from a physical OR 'lifestyle' point of view.
3) An essential part of avoiding back problems is exercise and good general health. Taken on its own, exercise won't save you from a bad chair. However; taken on its own, a great chair won't save you from being unable to move properly.
4) Today's solution isn't necessarily tomorrow's solution. Don't forget that you change as well. Archery is going to affect your posture and muscle tone, which will in turn change your requirements for a chair. Don't fall into the trap of believing, "I set this chair up two years ago and it was perfect, so now it must be something wrong with me."
Find something that works for you--do the research, borrow chairs from friends and coworkers, adjust things as necessary, and hopefully you can find a solution that will let you remain comfortable for ten hours of work a day or more. Then only use it for eight hours a day, and do something entirely different for the rest of your time.
Finally, a note on chair pricing. For the people who talk about how expensive these things are and how they'd love a good chair but can't afford it, I have to ask: How much money do you spend on computer gear that's obsolete in three years? If you work in IT, this is as much of an investment as a good monitor or a new computer, and will last longer than either one.
Take a deeper look into the literature. the "chronic dehydration epidemic" is little more than a fad that has mutated into an alternate health meme. Take a look at Snopes article for some good medical references.
Drinking a bit more water certainly won't hurt you, but chronic dehydration isn't a problem in the western world, and wouldn't lead to back problems at any rate.
"Developing good posture will alleviate your need for an ergonomic chair like this."
Incorrect.
Developing good posture may alleviate YOUR need for an ergonomic chair like this. Please don't presume to know what my back problems are caused by, and how they can be fixed.
As Grandpa used to say, "t'ain't no use closin' the barn doors after all the cattle hescaped."
There is one thing and one thing ONLY that will slow down spam at this point: A concerted and highly publicised series of spammer executions, taking place over the next two years.
Alan Ralsky? Bullet to the head. Tony Banks? Same thing.
Two years of putting _all_ major spammers to death might slow things down. Nothing less will.
Now I'm not saying that this is the right move, or a noble, honourable, or moral one. However, it's the only one that will stop spam.
If we wanted to stop spam, we needed to do it back in 1995.
So what's your point?
He phoned the number you list, and was given the runaround.
This is how Tiered pricing SHOULD work. It's the model they use for selling videos, and it's remarkably successful there.
The companies have a captive audience. They get to set the prices. SOOooo, they crank the price UP on the popular movies to extract maximum profit from them. The movies that won't sell well at a high price, they move downwards. It's supply and demand, the way it should work.
Why do I like this? Because I could get all of the really good movies for next to nothing, and all of the CRAP would pass me by as $30/download.
Oh well. That's my fantasy and I'm sticking to it.
This is merely backing up a previous study, where they found that kids who were raised with exposure to topsoil (i.e. on a farm, or even with a garden) had significantly stronger immune systems than those who didn't.
The interesting part of that study was that kids who grew up in dirty areas of cities (I believe NY inner-city was one of the test cases) ended up with a significantly weakened system.
Appears that our immune systems are designed to operate best when exposed to 'traditional' antagonists.
"What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?"
The kind that believes industry analysts and experts who say outrageous things are likely talking out of their asses.
Half a billion? I really really doubt it.
Apparently internet piracy in the US is responsible for over 2% of the GDP.
Seriously, this is the stupidest number they've come up with yet.
Don't know when you last looked at Solaris, but I'm guessing it's was about Solaris 7 from your comments.
Since version 8, Solaris has performed on par with Linux on the same gear. As of Solaris 10, Linux is now substantially slower (~20%) for almost all tasks. As far as new life goes, Solaris 10 was a ground-up rewrite which in ten years will be 'the thing' that people talk about as the biggest change in Unix for ages. Service manifests, dtrace, zones, self-healing, and zfs are the five things that will change all *nix bases over time.
Sun "going" open source is nothing new--they've been open-source friendly since before anyone really worried too much about closed source, except for some weird and esoteric legal wranglings which led to the Lion's Book and such. Remember NFS? NIS? Even Java, from the standards and architecture point of view, is relatively open. Also worth considering is that Sun made the decision to go open-source about five years ago, and have been carefully and systematically purging their code of legal conflicts since then. Hardly bandwagon-jumping.
Anyways, I think that Sun is really hoping to tap into the frustrated-with-Linux developer base, rather than the actual Linux developer base. There has long been a subset of programmers with professional and structured attitudes who don't suffer the pseudo-anarchy of Linux well, but haven't had a lot of other places to go. The BSDs were about the only outlet for many of these folks, and regardless of how good the products are, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of fire there. OpenSolaris has provided that fire.
"Don't ask don't tell." Well, he told. In public. How dirty is it for the government to look up public information?
Furthermore, you have some very "creative" ideas about what socialism entails. You might want to spend some money on a dictionary.
HP has actively thrown away all of their technical edge to become Yet Another PC Vendor.
...As well as the Alpha line which they acquired.
They nearly created the printer market, and now their printers are crap.
They've only released one new RPN calculator, and it's...questionable.
They're actively trying to kill off the HP-UX server/OS line.
They've already killed off the PA-RISC processor line.
All of their worthwhile tech gear got spun off as Agilent.
All they do now is make crappy printers and passable PCs in server cases. That's great--I'm sure they'll make tons of money grinding out crap without doing any basic research anymore, but it's lousy for the industry.
I don't think that HP will ever recover from Carly F. She destroyed the company and is still running free on the streets.
I've dealt with HP, Sun, and IBM training material and courses. If your company will pay for it, then take the course appropriate to your skills and environment. The 'intro sysadmin' course is a great starter at any level--I finally took one after six years of being a professional SA, and still learned things. After that, the advanced admin courses and subject-specific courses are great.
However, the only way you learn any of the stuff, courses or not, is by applying it and practicing it. Yes, computers require practice. Programming requires practice. Administration requires practice. Install it (repeatedly, if possible) and work with it daily.
And of course, man. You must know man pages and vi.
That's nice for you. Maybe your exchange admins suck. It sounds like it from the limitations you're stuck with.
I fought hard against exchange--I'm a sendmail admin, and I do NOT support MS's piece of crap. Still, I can't deny that the dedicated and skilled exchange admins where I work have kept exchange up and running nonstop for well over 400 days and counting.
I'm tempted to scream 'bullshit,' but I'll try to be rational instead.
You're confusing two independent items here: Ease of administration and quality of documentation. These are NOT the same thing, and one does NOT compensate for the other. As much as you can say, "lack of docs is total crap" (because Linux is SOOOOOO easy to administer), someone else can say that "Ease of administration is total crap" because no matter how obscure, it's properly documented.
As long as consistent, high-quality documentation is considered unnecessary (or for that matter, total crap), Linux will remain an OS that doesn't get taken seriously, regardless of who uses it.
Y'know what? It's true. Nobody really gives a shit about legal wranglings between companies, until it affects the software they get at home. Most of the time, even that won't stir people out of their chairs.
It's just not that big of a deal for 99+% of the population.
How many companies would balk at putting RFID scanners at the entrance to their offices, if the government subsidised their wages for immigrants? Malls would do it quite happily for the illusory target of 'increased security.' Eventually, RFID scanners would be everywhere near civilisation. If someone failed to be trackable, they'd raise a red flag.
I don't have a lot of problems with tracking dangerous offenders likely to repeat. However, what exactly does that have to do with tracking all immigrants? Here's the quote:
" he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace."
Are you suggesting that all immigrants are pedophiles?
If you could get your head out of your ass long enough to see something beyond file sharing, you'll discover that the site is about copyright infringement!
It's shitty, deceitful, and amoral, but it's not exclusively obsessed with file sharing. Unlike you, apparently.
When I was young, I always felt like my chemistry set was a poor imitation of what my dad had when he was a kid. Now I look at what's available, and mine looked like a goldmine of cool stuff.
Here's a newsflash: SOME CHEMICALS ARE DANGEROUS WHEN MISUSED!!! If people would properly recognise that fact and let idiots blow themselves up (rather than letting idiots sue companies for 'letting' them blow themselves up), then there would be less of a rush to legislate safety on everything, everywhere.
We're living in a world obsessed with safety and cleanliness. If it's dangerous or might have germs, it must be BANNED or STERILISED!!! God forbid we should actually live a little and accept some danger.