If you have the in house talent to provide your company with support and do your own upgrades, then what reason would you use red hat? Grab a free, unadulterated distribution, like Slackware, and do it from scratch.
Because 3rd party software vendors like Oracle and BEA; and hardware vendors like HP and IBM don't officially support "weird" distributions like slackware? Because you don't want to F-around with building your own updates from the source tree every time an exploit gets posted to bugtraq?
If you need to have your software or hardware vendor support your linux distro you only have a few options:
Run RedHat, either deal with the upgrade every year thing or spend for the enterprise version.
Run SuSE, I'm not that familiar with SuSE, but they seem to have almost as much ISV support as RedHat. They also have a reputation for being more stable with better QC. Their licensing seems to be less expensive as well.
Run another commercial distro. While some of these can be "better" than RedHat or SuSE from a stablity or features standpoint they don't really have the same 3rd party application or hardware vendor support.
Run Debian. Again the hardware vendor and commercial application support isn't what RedHat and SuSE have, but it is probably the best of the non-commercial distributions and is better than many commercial distros. Debian does have the advantage of being stable as hell, easy to update, and supported with security patches nearly forever. For those who need it there are companies who provide support for Debian similar to what RedHat and SuSE provide for enterprise customers.
I know that if you have Oracle in your environment, Red Hat is going to push you to use Advance Server 2.1. Too be honest there is not really that much difference between the two except how they configured the kernel and advance server is specialized for clustering. Which you can do on your own. But if you are looking for support for products like Oracle or any other corporate solutions go with advance server. If you are just using it for email, web server, file server, etc (isn't linux wonderful) then stick with the "consumer version". It's cheaper.
If you are spending the kind of cash Oracle, DB2, SAP, or other enterprise software licensing requires you might as well spend the cash required for the enterprise versions of RedHat or SuSE. You also want to be sure to run EXACTLY the version of the distribution your application vendor and hardware vendor support. When you are spending 5 or 6 figures to roll out an application it really isn't worth fucking around on something as basic as OS support.
Even if you are just using the linux box as a web server, email server, DNS server, etc. it is worth getting both the support and product lifetime the enterprise distributions provide. I've got better things to do with my time than test, certify, and deploy to multiple locations a new version of the linux distribution every 12 months. Besides at 3am I need to be sure I can get support, that my hardware is supported by my OS vendor, and that my OS is supported by my hardware vendor.
With IT staff costing roughly $40/hr each or more if you are using consultants paying for stablity and real support starts to look cheap. Add in the cost to the company of downtime and support is a bargan.
One of the very points I was making was that while MySQL may not have all the high-end features, it's stable. You will find that reports of data corruption or downtime are extremely rare for MySQL.
Does MySQL support clusters? Can you replicate a MySQL database across multiple servers and take down one of those servers without losing a query?
Um. Okay. How about NASA? Or Yahoo! Finance? Or the U.S. Census Bureau? If you don't think those are "good enough" then I have dozens more I can keep posting. Lots of companies use MySQL, and Slashdot certainly shows that MySQL can keep up with the "Slashdot effect" (since Slashdot itself is using MySQL).
None of those are what you would call "line of business" applications. Show me someone who keeps their financial data, inventory, orders, or personel records in MySQL.
I never said MySQL wasn't suited for backing websites like Slashdot or Yahoo! Finance, however that doesn't mean you should use it in an application where the cost of downtime is measured in millions of dollars per minute.
ERP and CRM applications like SAP, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards are the sort of mission critical applications where you want the features a "real" database like oracle or DB2 provides.
Anyone considering a CRM or ERP deployment for a company of any size with MySQL for the back-end database needs to have their head examined.
Well, MySQL is a triple-threat -- simplicity, stability, speed. It's easier than Oracle, it "just works" and keeps working, and it returns results just as fast as Oracle does, even under heavy load. We recently had MySQL processing 169 queries per second (Sun E450, running Apache, MySQL, and PHP) during our peak time, and while the site was slower than off-peak times, it was still responsive and enjoyable to use. Some people just don't need the high-end features -- or more to the point, for some people, the "high-end" features are stability & speed.
ERP, CRM, and HR application suites such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards sell are one of the major drivers of those "high-end" features you so casually handwave away.
MySQL is good in its place but it doesn't currently have the features to support mission-critical applications. Things like the supply chain management system for GM, account management for Bank of America, or even the student record system for UCB have very little tolerance for downtime or record corruption.
Go ahead and try implementing a major business application for a global 1000 company on MySQL, but please let us know who was stupid enough to do this so we can short their stock.
Before you go spouting off about how MySQL is just as good as Oracle or DB2 next time please learn something about transaction processing and real back-end enterprise applications.
The figures I saw placed China much higer in defense spending. Only #2 behind the US. I think the total was around $200 Billion or so.
Most of the lists of world military budgets and defense spending mention that getting an accurate figure for China is somewhat difficult.
For example here is what the CIA world fact book has to say:
Military expenditures - percent of GDP: 1.6% (2002); note - this is the officially announced figure, but actual defense spending is more likely between 3.5% to 5.0% of GDP for 2002
This gives a low of $96 billion using the official Chinese figures (based on $6 trillion in GDP), and a high of somewhere between $210 billion and $300 billion using the US government estimates.
The figure for Japan isn't all that supprising given that they are allowed to spend up to 1% of GDP and that they have a $4 trillion dollar economy.
Re:What the CIA needs:
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Ignoring the rest of this conspiracy theory tripe I have to respond to this: Same thing with this SARS garbage. Tell everyone there's a deadly effect to something, then let the media and the gov create the cause.
SARS is the real deal. People are getting sick from it and dying. I seriously doubt you'd get every country that has been effected to "go along" with creating a public scare. It is also not a bioweapon "field test". While our genetic technology has come a long way in 40 years we really don't understand viruses all that well yet, certainly not well enough to make one to order. The famly of viruses that SARS is thought to belong to is well known for periodicly mutating on its own, this is why there isn't a vaccine for the common cold among other things.
But is the US spending that money to stay ahead? Doesn't look like it to me. Most US corporations are starving or scrapping their R&D departments. Everytime we have a military excursion in the Middle East, that's billions of dollars that is not going to improving infrastructure or R&D. Then look at our demographics in the next 20 years. What ever money we have then will be put into paying off social security, and not enough young bodies to stick into warmachines. The US will not be able throw around their weight like they do today. Tragically, I think its going to take an egregious military fiasco before America learns some restraint.
The US and China are the world's #1 and #2 spenders on defense respectively. The US spends more on military research than most of the other countries in the world combined, not to mention all of the private sector research that has military applications as well. Yes the Chinese are trying to rapidly improve their capablities, but the US has a lead and isn't sitting still either.
As for "not having enough bodies" one of the results of technological advancement is not requiring nearly the manpower of the past. A single soldier able to call in an accurate artilery or air strike on an enemy position can be far more effective than an entire WWII division.
But getting back to maintenance of technological advantage, look at the weapon systems the US are researching today. Where is the milestone shattering technological improvements? For example, the F-22 may be harder to find on radar, but its not much more capable than an F-15. The best dogfighter in the world is still probably the F-16. There's no way of improving the turn radius performance of a future fighter (the pilot blacks out when it goes beyond 9G turns). Technology will not be able to improve a plane beyond what the plane is currently capable of performing. Linear expenditure or even exponential expenditure in research does not necessarily result in a corresponding increase in performance improvement. The Chinese does not need to surpass the US in technological achievement. They can merely steal them. They will achieve a form of technological parity with the West, and it will not take decades to do it. Or you can think like Wang in the '80s, and believe those pathetic PCs will never replace a SOTA wordprocessing system.
You are overlooking entirely the promise of UACV's. Some advocate that the F-22 be cancelled and the money be spent on developing UCAV weapons. There isn't the problem of the pilot blacking out as there is no pilot on the plane.
While it is possible to "steal" technology from others it doesn't give you the industrial base necessary to build it, nor the experience and doctrine necessary to deploy it effectively. Look at large aircraft carriers, even the French had difficulty duplicating a US nuclear carrier.
Finally, its foolish to think the new cold war will work the same as the previous cold war. War is merely a matter of the population's will. The Chinese will attack Taiwan if they don't think reunification will occur quickly enough. Is the US citizen willing to live in a radioactive crater to prevent it?
The Chinese aren't willing to turn most of their cities into radioactive craters in order to get Taiwan back. Deterrance worked against Stalin, there is no reason to belive it wouldn't work against the far more rational leadership of China.
You're a fucking idiot if you think numbers are irrelevant. During WWII, the Germans were a superb fighting force able to inflict serious casualties against the Russians, the numerically superior and tactically inferior opponent. Who won that theatre of war?
Russian equipment and tactics weren't much inferior to the Germans. In the later stages of the war the equipment and tactics of the Russians were arguably better. While the Germans had some very advanced weapons they didn't have many of them and much of the fighting they did later in the war was with older equipmen
I don't think SCO cares if anyone believes them or not. The only thing that matters is whether or not a judge finds their legal argument sound enough to award them a judgement. Anything else they say is just smoke and mirrors, a nod in the general direction of Publik Opeenion.
This may all be true, but IBM certainly has access to very experienced IP and contract litigation attorneys. Presumably IBM will be able to mount a very credible defense should this case ever make it to court. Then of course there is the little problem of that huge IBM patent portfolio. SCO is kidding themselves if they think IBM isn't going to use that defensively.
IBM still hasn't really fired back at SCO yet, in light of Novell's assertions I'm sure it isn't going to be pretty when it happens.
IBM will probably respond with a countersuit alleging patent infringement by SCO and breach of contract and trade secret violations related to project Monterey.
I'm sure Novell is probably checking its agreement with SCO right now to see if SCO has possibly violated the contract. If so expect Novell to sue SCO for breach of contract.
If both of these happen SCO will be out of business quite quickly.
If SCO was to sue Linus for infringing on patents they don't own, I'm sure he would have no problem finding donations for his legal defense fund. Heck he might even get a good IP lawyer on contingency considering suing someone for violating patents you don't own is a good basis for a countersuit.
Ok, then compare Microsoft to Monsanto, Union Carbide, or Enron. Microsoft doesn't pollute, kill people, or actively steal from shareholders and employees.
While I don't think that Microsoft is any stronghold of corprate ethics they are far from the worst example.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far... if anything, I'd expect the "all-you-can-eat" rates go up, but I don't see telcos and ISPs abandoning the idea any time soon.
The higher cost DSL providers like Earthlink and Speakeasy are already there. They are charging everyone enough to provision their network adaquately and cover the bandwidth costs of all their users.
While the pricing isn't quite as low as Comcast or Verizon for the same speed typically the terms are better and there is little pressure to raise rates.
As for the southpark episodes - so.. there's no legal way for me watch them anyway, so again, the 'best' thing to do is just do without.
I suspect we may eventually see some changes on this front. Content producers are going to want to make their stuff availible in a convienient and affordable way to people who want it. Eisner among others has realized this is the future. I don't think the transition is going to be pretty as it breaks the business model of the current distribution system, but the networks are just going to have to buck up and accept the changes.
Thanks to WorldCom inflating growth figures (that's what got them into trouble) for nearly 10 years, there is a tremendous amount of fiber lines just sitting there doing nothing. Don't believe the hype, there is enough base infrastructure in the US to give every body a T1 or better (but then we wouldn't need phones, cable/satellite TV, radios, etc...heh). Wireless meshes are popping up all over the place (in cities anyways) that also can allow joe average to distribute broadband content (within the mesh). The next 10 years, eveything will shift to some form of wireless (just wait til the RIAA and pals start going after spectrum rules...man the fur is gonna fly)
While I will agree that there is a boatload of unused long-haul fiber in the US that is not the only cost in operating a network. Somebody's got to staff the carrier's NOC, perform maintenance, pay the leases for equpment rooms, etc. For an ISP there is also the cost of procuring and maintianing routers to consider. I suspect this ia a major component of the bandwidth related costs for a large backbone carrier.
With any luck competition will hopefuly keep bandwidth charges down near their actual costs.
As for comparisons, the only real comparison would be to compare total expenditure devided by inhabitants (especially since the EU has a larger populace than the US)...and then the US still spends a lot more per capita.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that percentage of GDP or per-capita defense spending is really the ony valid way to do a comparision. No in the sense that the US should not be compared to the EU as a whole as the individual countries in the EU maintain their own defense budgets. Some EU countries like France and the UK have substantial defense budgets while some have almost none.
In any case the US does spend a larger percentage of GDP than any EU contry on the military it is not that much more (1% or so more than the biggest spenders in the EU). This will lead to a much larger defense budget than any individual EU contry due to the much larger size of the US (at least as compared to individual EU countries).
No, this isn't correct either. What usually happens is that those on your side of this argument will try to portray those on my side as being pro-Saddam, when nothing could be further from the truth.
You are either claiming Saddam was not responsible or not any worse than the US for every act he is commonly accused of.
There a big different between being benign and being so malignant as to warrant an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
Well current US foreign policy is no worse than French foreign policy around the time of Andrew Jackson. In other words we do it because we can.
That said, he is probably no more despicable than most of the other leaders in the world, including our own GWB. Murdering their citizens, exploiting the natural resources for themselves and their friends, I mean this is hardly news.
Ok above you say you are not pro-Saddam, but now you are saying he is no worse than the other leaders in the world. This is implying he is benign. While I'm no fan of GWB I hardly think he and Saddam are in the same category.
And the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people.
What are you trying to say by this? That Saddam had no responsiblity toward the Kurds or that because of events that occured in this country over 150 years ago we have no right to judge treatment of minority groups in other countries? I suppose you think we should have let the Serbs slaughter everyone in Bosnia and Kosovo too.
Again, the best information is that they didn't gas the Kurds. That this was an act performed by the Iranians. You could ask why Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare with Iran, and I suppose that would be a valid point were it not for the fact that we sit in a nation poised ready to incinerate any nation we may choose with our nuclear arsenal. It's hard to condemn others for acts we are only to ready and willing to engage in ourselves.
What is your source of this information? Everything I've seen points to Saddam using chemical weapons against the Kurds.
The US nuclear arsenal is not the same thing as chemical weapon use during the Iran-Iraq war or using chemical weapons against the Kurds. For one thing we haven't used them since 1945. For another the UK, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan all have nuclear weapons as well. In the case of the UK, France, Russia, and China they have both a large enough arsenal and the delivery systems to attack anyone they choose.
The potential dead from our drug policy is astronomical.
I would hardly compare US drug policy to Saddam's brutal repression of his own people.
Go learn your own national budget before you make an even bigger fool of yourself. The US national budget is 1.2 trillion, with 450 billion set aside for military spending. And please note that in what's left there's another chunk that's set aside for defense, homeland security and other related issues.
Your numbers are just a bit off. For FY2003 the total US Federal outlays are projected at $2.1 trillion total. Military spending for FY2003 is estimated at $392 billion or 19% of the total budget. (source: Congressional Budget Office)
This is still nowhere near "more than half" of the budget.
It's interesting though that you felt the need to open your mouth, without having anything of substance to say?
Is your only complaint with my posts over something I never said?
You were implying Saddam didn't do anything he was accused of, usually the implication of this sort of argument is the leader in question is quite benign.
No, he didn't gas his own people. This is a lie. You need to start watching something other than Fox News. And as Noam Chomsky once observed, saying that the Kurds are Saddam Hussein's own people is like saying that the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people. It's misleading at best, ridiculous at worst.
And Chomsky isn't just as skewed a source as Fox news?
The Kurds in question were living within the internationally recognized borders of Iraq which makes them his people by most measures. Or are you saying gassing the Kurds (or the Iranians) was justified?
Assuming this is true, how does this differ from America. Have you been following the war on drugs lately?
Sorry, again I'm no fan of the war on drugs but I don't think this is the same as Saddams brutal repression of those who opposed his regime. How exactly is the US killing thousands of people in the war on drugs?
Like Morpheus said, some people just aren't ready to be unplugged.
So you are saying Saddam was a great humanitarian and we just don't know it because of the imperialist US propiganda?
I think you are the one who needs to read something other than Chomsky and Z-Magazine for a change.
I didn't know you could get the Daily Mail in the US - there is no other source of news that would paint such a hysterical and unfounded view of the EU.
Its a not uncommon view over here for those of us who pay attention to what happens on the other side of the pond. Don't get me wrong the current vision the EU has for itself is great, as long as you want to be just like France.
The US cell phone market is uncompetitive in that it's not possible to take your existing handset and number to another network.
There is actually some ability to do this with GSM phones in the US. The main reason nobody cares about being able to move handsets here is due to the heavy subsidies. It is not uncommon to get a handset for "free" as part of the sign-on package. If handsets were more expensive there might be more demand to be able to switch them between networks. While we don't have number portablity today it is coming.
The land line network provides cheap local calls but seems to more than make up for it with high subscription fees and high long-distance charges (depending on provider and package). For comparison, here in the UK I can get phone service for £9.50/month with call charges of 1-3p/min ($15/month, 1.5-5 cents/min) with no local/national distinction. BT has a Light User Scheme with a subscription charge of as little as £11.30/quarter (I think) - this is probably mandated by the regulator, Oftel. I can call the US and much of Europe for 3-5p/min through a separate pre-paid service with no subscription charge. It seems like the US system works nicely for very heavy users but not light users.
Depends on what you mean by "high subscription fees and high long-distance charges". Basic flat rate local service is around $20/month if you don't get any bells and whistles like Caller ID or Voice mail. Typical long distance is 8-10cents/min. If you use more you can get flat rate nationwide long distance for not too much. While this may seem expensive it includes all of the US and Canada. International long-distance to Western Europe is inexpensive depending on the carrier.
The cost of land-lines here really isn't a factor for most people here unless they do a lot of international calling, even then there are some good cost-saving plans. The flat rate local service may have something to do with why broadband adoption isn't as good as in Europe. There really isn't a need to get around per-minute charges for using dialup.
Slashdot Mirror
Because 3rd party software vendors like Oracle and BEA; and hardware vendors like HP and IBM don't officially support "weird" distributions like slackware? Because you don't want to F-around with building your own updates from the source tree every time an exploit gets posted to bugtraq?
If you need to have your software or hardware vendor support your linux distro you only have a few options:
I know that if you have Oracle in your environment, Red Hat is going to push you to use Advance Server 2.1. Too be honest there is not really that much difference between the two except how they configured the kernel and advance server is specialized for clustering. Which you can do on your own. But if you are looking for support for products like Oracle or any other corporate solutions go with advance server. If you are just using it for email, web server, file server, etc (isn't linux wonderful) then stick with the "consumer version". It's cheaper.
If you are spending the kind of cash Oracle, DB2, SAP, or other enterprise software licensing requires you might as well spend the cash required for the enterprise versions of RedHat or SuSE. You also want to be sure to run EXACTLY the version of the distribution your application vendor and hardware vendor support. When you are spending 5 or 6 figures to roll out an application it really isn't worth fucking around on something as basic as OS support.
Even if you are just using the linux box as a web server, email server, DNS server, etc. it is worth getting both the support and product lifetime the enterprise distributions provide. I've got better things to do with my time than test, certify, and deploy to multiple locations a new version of the linux distribution every 12 months. Besides at 3am I need to be sure I can get support, that my hardware is supported by my OS vendor, and that my OS is supported by my hardware vendor.
With IT staff costing roughly $40/hr each or more if you are using consultants paying for stablity and real support starts to look cheap. Add in the cost to the company of downtime and support is a bargan.
One of the very points I was making was that while MySQL may not have all the high-end features, it's stable. You will find that reports of data corruption or downtime are extremely rare for MySQL.
Does MySQL support clusters? Can you replicate a MySQL database across multiple servers and take down one of those servers without losing a query?
Um. Okay. How about NASA? Or Yahoo! Finance? Or the U.S. Census Bureau? If you don't think those are "good enough" then I have dozens more I can keep posting. Lots of companies use MySQL, and Slashdot certainly shows that MySQL can keep up with the "Slashdot effect" (since Slashdot itself is using MySQL).
None of those are what you would call "line of business" applications. Show me someone who keeps their financial data, inventory, orders, or personel records in MySQL.
I never said MySQL wasn't suited for backing websites like Slashdot or Yahoo! Finance, however that doesn't mean you should use it in an application where the cost of downtime is measured in millions of dollars per minute.
ERP and CRM applications like SAP, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards are the sort of mission critical applications where you want the features a "real" database like oracle or DB2 provides.
Anyone considering a CRM or ERP deployment for a company of any size with MySQL for the back-end database needs to have their head examined.
Well, MySQL is a triple-threat -- simplicity, stability, speed. It's easier than Oracle, it "just works" and keeps working, and it returns results just as fast as Oracle does, even under heavy load. We recently had MySQL processing 169 queries per second (Sun E450, running Apache, MySQL, and PHP) during our peak time, and while the site was slower than off-peak times, it was still responsive and enjoyable to use. Some people just don't need the high-end features -- or more to the point, for some people, the "high-end" features are stability & speed.
ERP, CRM, and HR application suites such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards sell are one of the major drivers of those "high-end" features you so casually handwave away.
MySQL is good in its place but it doesn't currently have the features to support mission-critical applications. Things like the supply chain management system for GM, account management for Bank of America, or even the student record system for UCB have very little tolerance for downtime or record corruption.
Go ahead and try implementing a major business application for a global 1000 company on MySQL, but please let us know who was stupid enough to do this so we can short their stock.
Before you go spouting off about how MySQL is just as good as Oracle or DB2 next time please learn something about transaction processing and real back-end enterprise applications.
Most of the lists of world military budgets and defense spending mention that getting an accurate figure for China is somewhat difficult.
For example here is what the CIA world fact book has to say:
This gives a low of $96 billion using the official Chinese figures (based on $6 trillion in GDP), and a high of somewhere between $210 billion and $300 billion using the US government estimates.
The figure for Japan isn't all that supprising given that they are allowed to spend up to 1% of GDP and that they have a $4 trillion dollar economy.
Ignoring the rest of this conspiracy theory tripe I have to respond to this: Same thing with this SARS garbage. Tell everyone there's a deadly effect to something, then let the media and the gov create the cause.
SARS is the real deal. People are getting sick from it and dying. I seriously doubt you'd get every country that has been effected to "go along" with creating a public scare. It is also not a bioweapon "field test". While our genetic technology has come a long way in 40 years we really don't understand viruses all that well yet, certainly not well enough to make one to order. The famly of viruses that SARS is thought to belong to is well known for periodicly mutating on its own, this is why there isn't a vaccine for the common cold among other things.
But is the US spending that money to stay ahead? Doesn't look like it to me. Most US corporations are starving or scrapping their R&D departments. Everytime we have a military excursion in the Middle East, that's billions of dollars that is not going to improving infrastructure or R&D. Then look at our demographics in the next 20 years. What ever money we have then will be put into paying off social security, and not enough young bodies to stick into warmachines. The US will not be able throw around their weight like they do today. Tragically, I think its going to take an egregious military fiasco before America learns some restraint.
The US and China are the world's #1 and #2 spenders on defense respectively. The US spends more on military research than most of the other countries in the world combined, not to mention all of the private sector research that has military applications as well. Yes the Chinese are trying to rapidly improve their capablities, but the US has a lead and isn't sitting still either.
As for "not having enough bodies" one of the results of technological advancement is not requiring nearly the manpower of the past. A single soldier able to call in an accurate artilery or air strike on an enemy position can be far more effective than an entire WWII division.
But getting back to maintenance of technological advantage, look at the weapon systems the US are researching today. Where is the milestone shattering technological improvements? For example, the F-22 may be harder to find on radar, but its not much more capable than an F-15. The best dogfighter in the world is still probably the F-16. There's no way of improving the turn radius performance of a future fighter (the pilot blacks out when it goes beyond 9G turns). Technology will not be able to improve a plane beyond what the plane is currently capable of performing. Linear expenditure or even exponential expenditure in research does not necessarily result in a corresponding increase in performance improvement. The Chinese does not need to surpass the US in technological achievement. They can merely steal them. They will achieve a form of technological parity with the West, and it will not take decades to do it. Or you can think like Wang in the '80s, and believe those pathetic PCs will never replace a SOTA wordprocessing system.
You are overlooking entirely the promise of UACV's. Some advocate that the F-22 be cancelled and the money be spent on developing UCAV weapons. There isn't the problem of the pilot blacking out as there is no pilot on the plane.
While it is possible to "steal" technology from others it doesn't give you the industrial base necessary to build it, nor the experience and doctrine necessary to deploy it effectively. Look at large aircraft carriers, even the French had difficulty duplicating a US nuclear carrier.
Finally, its foolish to think the new cold war will work the same as the previous cold war. War is merely a matter of the population's will. The Chinese will attack Taiwan if they don't think reunification will occur quickly enough. Is the US citizen willing to live in a radioactive crater to prevent it?
The Chinese aren't willing to turn most of their cities into radioactive craters in order to get Taiwan back. Deterrance worked against Stalin, there is no reason to belive it wouldn't work against the far more rational leadership of China.
You're a fucking idiot if you think numbers are irrelevant. During WWII, the Germans were a superb fighting force able to inflict serious casualties against the Russians, the numerically superior and tactically inferior opponent. Who won that theatre of war?
Russian equipment and tactics weren't much inferior to the Germans. In the later stages of the war the equipment and tactics of the Russians were arguably better. While the Germans had some very advanced weapons they didn't have many of them and much of the fighting they did later in the war was with older equipmen
That's what implying ... the lack of common sense in our courts and laws just amazes me. I don't put it past the courts judging SCO to be in the right.
I suspect IBM will be able to find some lawyers of their own quite capable of convincing a judge that SCO is utterly full of it.
I don't think SCO cares if anyone believes them or not. The only thing that matters is whether or not a judge finds their legal argument sound enough to award them a judgement. Anything else they say is just smoke and mirrors, a nod in the general direction of Publik Opeenion.
This may all be true, but IBM certainly has access to very experienced IP and contract litigation attorneys. Presumably IBM will be able to mount a very credible defense should this case ever make it to court. Then of course there is the little problem of that huge IBM patent portfolio. SCO is kidding themselves if they think IBM isn't going to use that defensively.
IBM still hasn't really fired back at SCO yet, in light of Novell's assertions I'm sure it isn't going to be pretty when it happens.
IBM will probably respond with a countersuit alleging patent infringement by SCO and breach of contract and trade secret violations related to project Monterey.
I'm sure Novell is probably checking its agreement with SCO right now to see if SCO has possibly violated the contract. If so expect Novell to sue SCO for breach of contract.
If both of these happen SCO will be out of business quite quickly.
If SCO was to sue Linus for infringing on patents they don't own, I'm sure he would have no problem finding donations for his legal defense fund. Heck he might even get a good IP lawyer on contingency considering suing someone for violating patents you don't own is a good basis for a countersuit.
Perhaps SCO is just the hired help and the real driving force behind SCO's actions is in Washington State somewhere?
Novell could end up getting SCO for FREE!!!
The problem is who would want SCO? SCO is sort of like fruitcake or herpes, its the sort of "gift" you want your enemies to have.
Yea, pronouncing it the same way the only Nuclear Engineer to occupy the White House is so wrong. How dim of him having a bit of an accent!
Amusing but quite true, Carter and Bush pronounce "Nuclear" the same way.
Carter was indeed a Nuclear Engineer in the Navy.
Ok, then compare Microsoft to Monsanto, Union Carbide, or Enron. Microsoft doesn't pollute, kill people, or actively steal from shareholders and employees.
While I don't think that Microsoft is any stronghold of corprate ethics they are far from the worst example.
I have to agree, Enron, Global Crossing, or Adelphia make Microsoft look like a bunch of chior boys.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far... if anything, I'd expect the "all-you-can-eat" rates go up, but I don't see telcos and ISPs abandoning the idea any time soon.
The higher cost DSL providers like Earthlink and Speakeasy are already there. They are charging everyone enough to provision their network adaquately and cover the bandwidth costs of all their users.
While the pricing isn't quite as low as Comcast or Verizon for the same speed typically the terms are better and there is little pressure to raise rates.
As for the southpark episodes - so.. there's no legal way for me watch them anyway, so again, the 'best' thing to do is just do without.
I suspect we may eventually see some changes on this front. Content producers are going to want to make their stuff availible in a convienient and affordable way to people who want it. Eisner among others has realized this is the future. I don't think the transition is going to be pretty as it breaks the business model of the current distribution system, but the networks are just going to have to buck up and accept the changes.
Thanks to WorldCom inflating growth figures (that's what got them into trouble) for nearly 10 years, there is a tremendous amount of fiber lines just sitting there doing nothing. Don't believe the hype, there is enough base infrastructure in the US to give every body a T1 or better (but then we wouldn't need phones, cable/satellite TV, radios, etc...heh). Wireless meshes are popping up all over the place (in cities anyways) that also can allow joe average to distribute broadband content (within the mesh). The next 10 years, eveything will shift to some form of wireless (just wait til the RIAA and pals start going after spectrum rules...man the fur is gonna fly)
While I will agree that there is a boatload of unused long-haul fiber in the US that is not the only cost in operating a network. Somebody's got to staff the carrier's NOC, perform maintenance, pay the leases for equpment rooms, etc. For an ISP there is also the cost of procuring and maintianing routers to consider. I suspect this ia a major component of the bandwidth related costs for a large backbone carrier.
With any luck competition will hopefuly keep bandwidth charges down near their actual costs.
As for comparisons, the only real comparison would be to compare total expenditure devided by inhabitants (especially since the EU has a larger populace than the US)...and then the US still spends a lot more per capita.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that percentage of GDP or per-capita defense spending is really the ony valid way to do a comparision. No in the sense that the US should not be compared to the EU as a whole as the individual countries in the
EU maintain their own defense budgets. Some EU countries like France and the UK have substantial defense budgets while some have almost none.
In any case the US does spend a larger percentage of GDP than any EU contry on the military it is not that much more (1% or so more than the biggest spenders in the EU). This will lead to a much larger defense budget than any individual EU contry due to the much larger size of the US (at least as compared to individual EU countries).
No, this isn't correct either. What usually happens is that those on your side of this argument will try to portray those on my side as being pro-Saddam, when nothing could be further from the truth.
You are either claiming Saddam was not responsible or not any worse than the US for every act he is commonly accused of.
There a big different between being benign and being so malignant as to warrant an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
Well current US foreign policy is no worse than French foreign policy around the time of Andrew Jackson. In other words we do it because we can.
That said, he is probably no more despicable than most of the other leaders in the world, including our own GWB. Murdering their citizens, exploiting the natural resources for themselves and their friends, I mean this is hardly news.
Ok above you say you are not pro-Saddam, but now you are saying he is no worse than the other leaders in the world. This is implying he is benign. While I'm no fan of GWB I hardly think he and Saddam are in the same category.
And the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people.
What are you trying to say by this? That Saddam had no responsiblity toward the Kurds or that because of events that occured in this country over 150 years ago we have no right to judge treatment of minority groups in other countries? I suppose you think we should have let the Serbs slaughter everyone in Bosnia and Kosovo too.
Again, the best information is that they didn't gas the Kurds. That this was an act performed by the Iranians. You could ask why Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare with Iran, and I suppose that would be a valid point were it not for the fact that we sit in a nation poised ready to incinerate any nation we may choose with our nuclear arsenal. It's hard to condemn others for acts we are only to ready and willing to engage in ourselves.
What is your source of this information? Everything I've seen points to Saddam using chemical weapons against the Kurds.
The US nuclear arsenal is not the same thing as chemical weapon use during the Iran-Iraq war or using chemical weapons against the Kurds. For one thing we haven't used them since 1945. For another the UK, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan all have nuclear weapons as well. In the case of the UK, France, Russia, and China they have both a large enough arsenal and the delivery systems to attack anyone they choose.
The potential dead from our drug policy is astronomical.
I would hardly compare US drug policy to Saddam's brutal repression of his own people.
Go learn your own national budget before you make an even bigger fool of yourself. The US national budget is 1.2 trillion, with 450 billion set aside for military spending. And please note that in what's left there's another chunk that's set aside for defense, homeland security and other related issues.
Your numbers are just a bit off. For FY2003 the total US Federal outlays are projected at $2.1 trillion total. Military spending for FY2003 is estimated at $392 billion or 19% of the total budget. (source: Congressional Budget Office)
This is still nowhere near "more than half" of the budget.
It's interesting though that you felt the need to open your mouth, without having anything of substance to say?
Is your only complaint with my posts over something I never said?
You were implying Saddam didn't do anything he was accused of, usually the implication of this sort of argument is the leader in question is quite benign.
No, he didn't gas his own people. This is a lie. You need to start watching something other than Fox News. And as Noam Chomsky once observed, saying that the Kurds are Saddam Hussein's own people is like saying that the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people. It's misleading at best, ridiculous at worst.
And Chomsky isn't just as skewed a source as Fox news?
The Kurds in question were living within the internationally recognized borders of Iraq which makes them his people by most measures. Or are you saying gassing the Kurds (or the Iranians) was justified?
Assuming this is true, how does this differ from America. Have you been following the war on drugs lately?
Sorry, again I'm no fan of the war on drugs but I don't think this is the same as Saddams brutal repression of those who opposed his regime. How exactly is the US killing thousands of people in the war on drugs?
Like Morpheus said, some people just aren't ready to be unplugged.
So you are saying Saddam was a great humanitarian and we just don't know it because of the imperialist US propiganda?
I think you are the one who needs to read something other than Chomsky and Z-Magazine for a change.
I didn't know you could get the Daily Mail in the US - there is no other source of news that would paint such a hysterical and unfounded view of the EU.
Its a not uncommon view over here for those of us who pay attention to what happens on the other side of the pond. Don't get me wrong the current vision the EU has for itself is great, as long as you want to be just like France.
The US cell phone market is uncompetitive in that it's not possible to take your existing handset and number to another network.
There is actually some ability to do this with GSM phones in the US. The main reason nobody cares about being able to move handsets here is due to the heavy subsidies. It is not uncommon to get a handset for "free" as part of the sign-on package. If handsets were more expensive there might be more demand to be able to switch them between networks. While we don't have number portablity today it is coming.
The land line network provides cheap local calls but seems to more than make up for it with high subscription fees and high long-distance charges (depending on provider and package). For comparison, here in the UK I can get phone service for £9.50/month with call charges of 1-3p/min ($15/month, 1.5-5 cents/min) with no local/national distinction. BT has a Light User Scheme with a subscription charge of as little as £11.30/quarter (I think) - this is probably mandated by the regulator, Oftel. I can call the US and much of Europe for 3-5p/min through a separate pre-paid service with no subscription charge. It seems like the US system works nicely for very heavy users but not light users.
Depends on what you mean by "high subscription fees and high long-distance charges". Basic flat rate local service is around $20/month if you don't get any bells and whistles like Caller ID or Voice mail. Typical long distance is 8-10cents/min. If you use more you can get flat rate nationwide long distance for not too much. While this may seem expensive it includes all of the US and Canada. International long-distance to Western Europe is inexpensive depending on the carrier.
The cost of land-lines here really isn't a factor for most people here unless they do a lot of international calling, even then there are some good cost-saving plans. The flat rate local service may have something to do with why broadband adoption isn't as good as in Europe. There really isn't a need to get around per-minute charges for using dialup.
Since the demise of the Russian GLONASS system, GPS is the only game in town.
What happened to GLONASS? I know people were using it as recently as a couple of years ago. When and why did it shut down?