Cat5 cable has 4 pairs. While 10 and 100 didn't use them, they were all in the spec and cables conforming to the Cat5 spec must have them.
IEEE802.3ab or 1000Base-T is for gigabit networking over Cat5 UTP cable. From what I understand, Cat5e is not not in the spec and is not necessary.
That said, if I were running or buying cables, I'd go with Cat5e. The price premium is minimal and totally worth it. Just don't think you have to rip out Cat5 and replace it with Cat5e to get your gigabit ethernet working.
Good point. If you wont need one soon it's not worth getting one now. Odds are the gigabit switches will be half the price they are now in two years. The difference in price would be enough to pay for your 10/100 and you'd have both.
If you you will want one soon and have no reason for an extra 10/100 switch though it might be a good investment.
Firstly, I'd be careful about buying a $20 switch. A flakey switch is much more trouble than it's worth. I'd at least get a Dlink DSS-8+ or netgear DS108. Those are more in the $50-$70 range. Still not $150 but closer.
The tiny price premium is in relation to other things. People who have multiple computers that are capable of gigabit speeds have usually spent a lot of money to get to that point. The $100 extra to make it all talk fast is a tiny price premium in relation to that.
My first networking was working with a 10base2 corperate network. Anything from before that is pretty irrelivant today.
...a phenomenon which your extensive experience with... ahem... Netgear, would be unable to explain.
Like I said. A corperate network is a complicated beast. We aren't talking about corperate networks here, we're talking about a small home network. They aren't as touchy.
I probably shouldn't go into corperate networking strategy since it sounds like yours is a mess but in my experience a good fast flat network is always more reliable than one with lots of layer 3 rules and messy topologies. Newer isn't always faster or better but in networking speed is king. You reduce bakcups, and latencies and percentage of bandwith taken up by useless chatter. I would not put any of these home/desktop devices near a core but a busy core can usually do with a healthy dose of gigabit.
There are no other gigabit switches I would allow on my network. They have fans which is unacceptable to me. To me, any device that has a small fan might as well not exist. Fans die, small ones can die very fast (the record in my hardware is 2 weeks). In a switch when the fan goes or starts to go you get strange instability and quirks in the network that are hard to track down. You can keep that headache.
Also, this switch happens to sit right near my right ear. You can keep that headache too.
Do you know that the Netgear doesn't support jumbo frames? I just don't run it since I have lots of 10/100 switches on my network and I didn't think it would be wise. I turned them on for a bit when I was using a crossover cable but didn't really notice a difference.
Ug. It's not about "sharing" in the classic sence. It's the same idea as SAN's are based on. Do the sorage in one place and do it RIGHT. The blocks on the device would be dedicated to the client computer. They would just connect to it over gigabit ethernet instead of IDE. You could the put good caching and read ahead buffering in there on the serving computer to create a nice high performance disk subsystem.
Booting a machine over iSCSI will work fine. The problem is you need a $400 iSCSI hardware card which destroys the cost savings from centralizing your storage. I'm imagining having a setup like this: You have 8, $150 diskless computers that boot from partitions they accessed over their built in gigabit ethernet cards. In the bios they have the IP address (or MAC address if it's done outside IP) and "id" of their partitions. A little cheap hardware chip get's those things set inside it, connects to the server and establishes a translation table. It then looks to the computer like it has block devices on it (this is probably very similar to iSCSI but it should be done cheap.)
You do not eliminate bottlenecks- you can only move them around.
That axiom is funny, useful, and false. It's used to explain that when you eliminate one bottleneck, your speed will still be limited by other factors.
The concept of a bottleneck is not that without it you have unlimited speed. The concept is a single point that is significantly slower than the rest of the system and therefore the limiting factor for speed. I would argue that a system with a disk that can transfer at 25 mb/s, a motherboard that can transfer at 25mb/s, a network that can transfer at 25mb/s and a receiving computer that can ingest at 25 mb/s doesn't have a bottleneck. That same system with a network capable of 8 mb/s does. Swap out the network with a faster one and there is no bottleneck in the system.
A bottleneck isn't simply something that has a speed limitation. It's a limiting factor in a system that, without that limitation, would have the potential for significantly increased speed. The axiom holds up well in a corperate environment though where the systems are way to complicated for the speeds of everything to be equal and therefore be without bottlenecks.
I'm not saying gigabit is for everyone. It obviously isn't. You need a computer setup that is fast enough and has gigabit networking and you need an application you use where you would notice a difference. These days those things aren't rare though and to pretend it is is to stick your head in the sand. 100 mbit will be plenty fast enough for most people for a long time. gigabit is coming though. Be ready.
It's your money
Actually, it's Netgears. They've had it for a while. I'm happy with my purchase.
Another reason to buy gigabit is if you are planning ahead. An 8 port 10mbit switch isn't very useful today. It won't be too long before a new 100 mbit switch will be the thing you pull out as a last resort when you run out of the fast ones. If you are going to get a desktop switch, you might as well make it gigabit.
Is it an EG008W or a SD2008? Linksys makes 2 different 8 port gigabit switches now. The first one they came out with is in their old clasic case design (EG008W) and the other is a new model in a new case (SD2008). I read somewhere the EG008W has a fan. I'm interested in knowing if the SD2008 has one too.
Would it be possible to use one computer as a SAN for other diskless workstations?
I love this idea. I've thought about it for a while and I think it could be good stuff. Unfortunately, there is no standard protocol for using a network card as a block device. NFS is ok but try booting your Windows box over NFS. There needs to be a protocol similar to i-scsi that allows you to route disk io over an ethernet card on the hardware level but that is cheap and capable of simultaneously acting as an ethernet card for the OS/s networking. Then you could buy a nice huge high speed raid 5 array and use it for disk in all your machines instead of the little cheap slow unreliable things that machines usually have inside them.
>You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.
I'll just point out that 400mbps is 4x the speed of 100mbit. That's not a small difference. Seems worth the tiny price premium.
This is a home network we are talking about. Latency, routing and prioritization isn't really an issue. Usually only 1 or 2 things will be going on at a time. What will be noticed is raw bandwidth during large file transfers. I have a gigabit network here. It's very noticeable..
I have a NetGear 4 port gigabit switch. I have found I can transfer files about 2.5x as fast as with 100mbit (without jumbo frames). In my book, that's worth the few extra bucks a gigabit switch will cost you.
A warning though, I've heard most of the cheap gigabit switches have fans in them. Fans reduce the reliability of a switch many fold and make them LOUD. I like my 4 port Netgear and they now make an 8 port version which is also fanless and very reasonably priced.
Does anyone have a Linksys or D-Link gigabit switch who can confirm or deny the presence of a fan?
One note I'd like to throw in: Gigabit ethernet requires Cat-5 cable. Not Cat-5e, Not Cat-6, Cat-5. Better cables may be less prone to issues but they aren't part of the gigabit ethernet standard so don't go out and re-cable your house just for a little Gig-E.
The voice actors are not the tallent that keeps the Simpson's going. The writers are. Homer isn't funny because Dan Castellaneta does his voice, he's funny because of what the writers and cartoonists make him do. The only reason he's making $150k per episode rather than $1k is because his replacement would be noticeable to the viewers. Writers are underpaid and undervalued because their replacement, whil it may severely impact the quality of the show, is not immediatly noticeable by the general public. If fox had voice manipulations software in there that make it so anyone could do the voice acting, suddenly what Dan Castellaneta does wouldn't be worth much. It's because he has a virtual monopoly over that work that he makes so much for it.
I agree he should be well compensated but what he get's is more than enough. They are just being greedy.
There's too much money in entertainment these days. Actors, Professional Atheletes, Recording Artists, they all seem to make obscene ammounts of money. This stuff shouldn't be this profitable. What happened to the starving artist?. Why is simple entertainment getting so much more expensive when it's production and delivery is getting cheaper every day?
I'll believe Microsoft's hype about.NET (and managed C++, and all the other blahblahblah) as the second coming when I see:
1) MS Exchange Server, MS SQL Server, MS IIS rewritten in managed code
2) MS Office writen in C#/.NET assemblies.
Microsoft touts how much cheaper migrations are when you stay within Windows, so clearly these tasks can't be too difficult. And they have the gigantic advantage of being in-house.
Exactly..NET's management system only works for things running in the.NET environment. That's a small subset of the programs that run under Windows. Zero Install is targetted to everything that runs on the platform. It sounds like a good idea but it's still not enough. A we need a robust package management system with lots of add-on packages that works on ALL VERSIONS of Linux.
Companies can easily make a setup.exe that will install and work properly on Windows 95, Windows Server 2003 and everything inbetween. When we get a system that will do that for all versions of Linux (with the same cpu architecture), we'll have something. Then, add the ability to install that same package to only be available by a single user without root privs, and you have a winner.
You can't legislate efficiency and innovation. The only way is to introduce competition. Sometimes, as we see with Linux, the best competition is a free offering. I think the US government should put up a Broadcast TV satellite and hand out transmission rights to it the way they do VHF and UHF channels (or maybe even a better, more democratic system.) Make it capable of delivering 500 channels (or 100 high quality and 300 regular quality channels) and make access to it free, forever.
A big problem with cable is that the content providers are wanting money simply to allow the cable companies to carry their content. The best (most watched) content is still on the networks that broadcast over the airwaves for free. This is the way TV has worked for years and this is the way it still should work. Let the cable companies scramble over Internet, Phone and Pay-per-view/premium services but make your standard basic cable free.
If widely adopted this could be a huge boost to the economy since many people's monthly bills would go down $30-$50.
Absolutely! Not only should you follow it to the letter but ASAP figure out the cost to replace all business necessary functionality that your cell phone filled. Put together a project plan for how long it will take you to reconfigure things. Find out how much it will cost for a pager etc. and if you are salary (most IT people are) leave your cell in the car and make sure your boss knows when you are leaving the building to make a phone call. "I'm going to make a call, I'll be back in 5 minutes." Most companies don't enforce no personal call rules anymore because they've shown studies that people work more if they can take care of personal issues quickly and keep working. It's a real pain in the butt sometimes to point out obviously stupid decisions but actions speak louder than words and in the end, money trumps all things in business.
The you could also silently ignore the stupid policy but that won't get it changed. Another approach is to try and use technology to work around the stupid policy. Forward a personal number to a work number while you are at work or use VoIP software to make personal calls from your desk.
Bad managers have a tendency to treat employees as resources and try to extract as much value as possible instead of viewing them as someone with whom they have a mutually beneficial business relationship. A humorous result of this is that Contractors are often given much more respect since they are handled as a business relationship. You might consider trying to use that to your advantage and becoming a contractor with explicit terms of employment.
This guy is falling into the old trap of thinking that open source software is all written by unpaid volunteers. THIS IS NOT TRUE. People who work for companies use open source software to do their jobs. Often they fix and update that open source software when they find something wrong that they are capable of fixing. People also make money writing open source software full time. Open source often makes business sense and therefor it's worth it for businesses to support it.
That said, I agree that not all software should be free. Programmers wouldn't have motivation to write software if they never got paid for it. But the author also points out another very important point: building things on open source software is more profitable. Companies who build things on open source software make more money because their costs are less. The key is to take advantage of that but when you do that, it also makes sense to support and improve the software that allows you to be so profitable.
Open source is not about no-cost software. The costs are still there but they are radically different and they are paid for in very different ways than the pay-for-license model. OSS also doesn't make much sence in a lot of places. Comodity infrastructure software like operating systems, office suits, web browsers, etc.. are the best candidates for open sourcing. The benefits to having a standardized infrastructure that is available everywhere are huge but if a company has ownership of the one standard, they gain monopoly power and charge monopoly prices. People blame Microsoft for being evil but any other company in their place would do the same thing. Having the infrastructure be open source makes good business and ecanomic sense. The burdon of development can easily be spread out.
I've always heard that it's a good idea to do a migration like this slowly but MS stuff intentionally doesn't play well with other software which makes migration away from it hard. This kind of thing needs to be planned long term.
I do like the rip it out and replace it all approach though. It'll be fun to see how it goes (assuming it doesn't crash and burn). A lot of people are going to be learning a lot about Linux fast. If I spoke any German I might offer to help a little.
I think the main difference between science and (traditional) religion is that scientists are willing to eventually give up their current beliefs if the evidence against it becomes overwhelming.
That's funny because if you pay attention you'll notice that religions do exactly the same thing. The beliefs they teach at the churches of today are very different from the ones of 300 years ago. Most things stay the same, the ones that change the most are the ones with the most evidence against them. The churches all used to insist that the world was flat but that doesn't work well when technology advances to the point where it is obvious that isn't true so they change.
There are lots of scientists who believe so strongly in the underpinnings of their work they refuse to concider the posibility that it could be wrong. It's normal to not challenge assumptions that much of your life is based on. It would be hard to make progress if we did.
Also, in science, the "Laws" are generally assumed to be true. True, you can never prove anything to be true for all time under all circumstances but they are generally accepted to be true just like in religion, core philosophies are generally accepted to be true.
Yea, agnostic is a pretty loose term that people pull out a lot. I think one of the interesting things is that being agnostic is'nt really saying much at all. You can be agnostic and still believe in a religion. Agnosticism is basically conceding that there is no way to prove or disprove the existance of god. The concept of god or anything supernatural is bascially by definition unprovable since for something to be supernatural there can be no possible natural explanation of it. Since it is impossible to know everything that is possible you can't know if something is supernatural. Also, even if the world is found to always follow certain rules exactly (which is most likely impossible to prove) you can't know that there isn't something at work behind the scenes. In computer terms it would be explained by the question "how can you write a program that knows if it is running under a perfect emulator." The answer is, of course, you can't because by definition a perfect emulator is undetectable.
Religion isn't about knowing something to be true. If it were, it would be science, not religeon. Religion is about believing in something that can not be proven true. (Of course, all sciences are based on beliefs that can't be proven but that's another agrument.) In that way, athiesm is also a religion since you can't disprove the existance of god, you have to believe there is none.
It's my understanding that it depends on how the vehicle is used. For cars it is 20-40% more efficient. For something that constantly stops and starts like a city bus, it's much more than that since the electric braking system recovers the kenetic energy of the bus when stopping so it can be reused when starting back up.
I'm simply taking issue with the 60% number. If it is true, it is versus conventional technology, not other similar tried and true gas-electric hybrids.
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Cat5 cable has 4 pairs. While 10 and 100 didn't use them, they were all in the spec and cables conforming to the Cat5 spec must have them.
IEEE802.3ab or 1000Base-T is for gigabit networking over Cat5 UTP cable. From what I understand, Cat5e is not not in the spec and is not necessary.
That said, if I were running or buying cables, I'd go with Cat5e. The price premium is minimal and totally worth it. Just don't think you have to rip out Cat5 and replace it with Cat5e to get your gigabit ethernet working.
Good point. If you wont need one soon it's not worth getting one now. Odds are the gigabit switches will be half the price they are now in two years. The difference in price would be enough to pay for your 10/100 and you'd have both.
If you you will want one soon and have no reason for an extra 10/100 switch though it might be a good investment.
The cheapest 100mbit switches are $20
Firstly, I'd be careful about buying a $20 switch. A flakey switch is much more trouble than it's worth. I'd at least get a Dlink DSS-8+ or netgear DS108. Those are more in the $50-$70 range. Still not $150 but closer.
The tiny price premium is in relation to other things. People who have multiple computers that are capable of gigabit speeds have usually spent a lot of money to get to that point. The $100 extra to make it all talk fast is a tiny price premium in relation to that.
I've been working in networking for years now
My first networking was working with a 10base2 corperate network. Anything from before that is pretty irrelivant today.
Like I said. A corperate network is a complicated beast. We aren't talking about corperate networks here, we're talking about a small home network. They aren't as touchy.
I probably shouldn't go into corperate networking strategy since it sounds like yours is a mess but in my experience a good fast flat network is always more reliable than one with lots of layer 3 rules and messy topologies. Newer isn't always faster or better but in networking speed is king. You reduce bakcups, and latencies and percentage of bandwith taken up by useless chatter. I would not put any of these home/desktop devices near a core but a busy core can usually do with a healthy dose of gigabit.
There are no other gigabit switches I would allow on my network. They have fans which is unacceptable to me. To me, any device that has a small fan might as well not exist. Fans die, small ones can die very fast (the record in my hardware is 2 weeks). In a switch when the fan goes or starts to go you get strange instability and quirks in the network that are hard to track down. You can keep that headache.
Also, this switch happens to sit right near my right ear. You can keep that headache too.
Do you know that the Netgear doesn't support jumbo frames? I just don't run it since I have lots of 10/100 switches on my network and I didn't think it would be wise. I turned them on for a bit when I was using a crossover cable but didn't really notice a difference.
Ug. It's not about "sharing" in the classic sence. It's the same idea as SAN's are based on. Do the sorage in one place and do it RIGHT. The blocks on the device would be dedicated to the client computer. They would just connect to it over gigabit ethernet instead of IDE.
You could the put good caching and read ahead buffering in there on the serving computer to create a nice high performance disk subsystem.
Booting a machine over iSCSI will work fine. The problem is you need a $400 iSCSI hardware card which destroys the cost savings from centralizing your storage. I'm imagining having a setup like this:
You have 8, $150 diskless computers that boot from partitions they accessed over their built in gigabit ethernet cards. In the bios they have the IP address (or MAC address if it's done outside IP) and "id" of their partitions. A little cheap hardware chip get's those things set inside it, connects to the server and establishes a translation table. It then looks to the computer like it has block devices on it (this is probably very similar to iSCSI but it should be done cheap.)
Cool. I've had Pro/1000MT's from the start (I actually have a dual Intel 1000 in my server). No problems here either.
Good to know you like the GS108. I've been thinking of adding one in.
You do not eliminate bottlenecks- you can only move them around.
That axiom is funny, useful, and false. It's used to explain that when you eliminate one bottleneck, your speed will still be limited by other factors.
The concept of a bottleneck is not that without it you have unlimited speed. The concept is a single point that is significantly slower than the rest of the system and therefore the limiting factor for speed. I would argue that a system with a disk that can transfer at 25 mb/s, a motherboard that can transfer at 25mb/s, a network that can transfer at 25mb/s and a receiving computer that can ingest at 25 mb/s doesn't have a bottleneck. That same system with a network capable of 8 mb/s does. Swap out the network with a faster one and there is no bottleneck in the system.
A bottleneck isn't simply something that has a speed limitation. It's a limiting factor in a system that, without that limitation, would have the potential for significantly increased speed. The axiom holds up well in a corperate environment though where the systems are way to complicated for the speeds of everything to be equal and therefore be without bottlenecks.
I'm not saying gigabit is for everyone. It obviously isn't. You need a computer setup that is fast enough and has gigabit networking and you need an application you use where you would notice a difference. These days those things aren't rare though and to pretend it is is to stick your head in the sand. 100 mbit will be plenty fast enough for most people for a long time. gigabit is coming though. Be ready.
It's your money
Actually, it's Netgears. They've had it for a while. I'm happy with my purchase.
Another reason to buy gigabit is if you are planning ahead. An 8 port 10mbit switch isn't very useful today. It won't be too long before a new 100 mbit switch will be the thing you pull out as a last resort when you run out of the fast ones. If you are going to get a desktop switch, you might as well make it gigabit.
Is it an EG008W or a SD2008? Linksys makes 2 different 8 port gigabit switches now. The first one they came out with is in their old clasic case design (EG008W) and the other is a new model in a new case (SD2008). I read somewhere the EG008W has a fan. I'm interested in knowing if the SD2008 has one too.
Would it be possible to use one computer as a SAN for other diskless workstations?
I love this idea. I've thought about it for a while and I think it could be good stuff. Unfortunately, there is no standard protocol for using a network card as a block device. NFS is ok but try booting your Windows box over NFS. There needs to be a protocol similar to i-scsi that allows you to route disk io over an ethernet card on the hardware level but that is cheap and capable of simultaneously acting as an ethernet card for the OS/s networking. Then you could buy a nice huge high speed raid 5 array and use it for disk in all your machines instead of the little cheap slow unreliable things that machines usually have inside them.
I can transfer large files from one machine to another at arround 25mb/s with my gigabit switch. Try doing that with 10/100.
Just because you can't saturate the gigabit doesn't mean you won't get a benefit from it.
>You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.
I'll just point out that 400mbps is 4x the speed of 100mbit. That's not a small difference. Seems worth the tiny price premium.
This is a home network we are talking about. Latency, routing and prioritization isn't really an issue. Usually only 1 or 2 things will be going on at a time. What will be noticed is raw bandwidth during large file transfers. I have a gigabit network here. It's very noticeable..
I have a NetGear 4 port gigabit switch. I have found I can transfer files about 2.5x as fast as with 100mbit (without jumbo frames). In my book, that's worth the few extra bucks a gigabit switch will cost you.
A warning though, I've heard most of the cheap gigabit switches have fans in them. Fans reduce the reliability of a switch many fold and make them LOUD. I like my 4 port Netgear and they now make an 8 port version which is also fanless and very reasonably priced.
Does anyone have a Linksys or D-Link gigabit switch who can confirm or deny the presence of a fan?
One note I'd like to throw in: Gigabit ethernet requires Cat-5 cable. Not Cat-5e, Not Cat-6, Cat-5. Better cables may be less prone to issues but they aren't part of the gigabit ethernet standard so don't go out and re-cable your house just for a little Gig-E.
The voice actors are not the tallent that keeps the Simpson's going. The writers are. Homer isn't funny because Dan Castellaneta does his voice, he's funny because of what the writers and cartoonists make him do. The only reason he's making $150k per episode rather than $1k is because his replacement would be noticeable to the viewers. Writers are underpaid and undervalued because their replacement, whil it may severely impact the quality of the show, is not immediatly noticeable by the general public. If fox had voice manipulations software in there that make it so anyone could do the voice acting, suddenly what Dan Castellaneta does wouldn't be worth much. It's because he has a virtual monopoly over that work that he makes so much for it.
I agree he should be well compensated but what he get's is more than enough. They are just being greedy.
There's too much money in entertainment these days. Actors, Professional Atheletes, Recording Artists, they all seem to make obscene ammounts of money. This stuff shouldn't be this profitable. What happened to the starving artist?. Why is simple entertainment getting so much more expensive when it's production and delivery is getting cheaper every day?
Exactly.
Companies can easily make a setup.exe that will install and work properly on Windows 95, Windows Server 2003 and everything inbetween. When we get a system that will do that for all versions of Linux (with the same cpu architecture), we'll have something. Then, add the ability to install that same package to only be available by a single user without root privs, and you have a winner.
You can't legislate efficiency and innovation. The only way is to introduce competition. Sometimes, as we see with Linux, the best competition is a free offering. I think the US government should put up a Broadcast TV satellite and hand out transmission rights to it the way they do VHF and UHF channels (or maybe even a better, more democratic system.) Make it capable of delivering 500 channels (or 100 high quality and 300 regular quality channels) and make access to it free, forever.
A big problem with cable is that the content providers are wanting money simply to allow the cable companies to carry their content. The best (most watched) content is still on the networks that broadcast over the airwaves for free. This is the way TV has worked for years and this is the way it still should work. Let the cable companies scramble over Internet, Phone and Pay-per-view/premium services but make your standard basic cable free.
If widely adopted this could be a huge boost to the economy since many people's monthly bills would go down $30-$50.
Absolutely! Not only should you follow it to the letter but ASAP figure out the cost to replace all business necessary functionality that your cell phone filled. Put together a project plan for how long it will take you to reconfigure things. Find out how much it will cost for a pager etc. and if you are salary (most IT people are) leave your cell in the car and make sure your boss knows when you are leaving the building to make a phone call. "I'm going to make a call, I'll be back in 5 minutes." Most companies don't enforce no personal call rules anymore because they've shown studies that people work more if they can take care of personal issues quickly and keep working. It's a real pain in the butt sometimes to point out obviously stupid decisions but actions speak louder than words and in the end, money trumps all things in business.
The you could also silently ignore the stupid policy but that won't get it changed. Another approach is to try and use technology to work around the stupid policy. Forward a personal number to a work number while you are at work or use VoIP software to make personal calls from your desk.
Bad managers have a tendency to treat employees as resources and try to extract as much value as possible instead of viewing them as someone with whom they have a mutually beneficial business relationship. A humorous result of this is that Contractors are often given much more respect since they are handled as a business relationship. You might consider trying to use that to your advantage and becoming a contractor with explicit terms of employment.
That is not what he said. What Clemens said was, "don't be an unpaid volunteer (i.e. sucker)."
But he also equated working on OSS to being an unpaid volunteer.
I agree with the "don't be an unpaid volunteer" part.
I disagree with the "working on OSS is for suckers" part.
This guy is falling into the old trap of thinking that open source software is all written by unpaid volunteers. THIS IS NOT TRUE. People who work for companies use open source software to do their jobs. Often they fix and update that open source software when they find something wrong that they are capable of fixing. People also make money writing open source software full time. Open source often makes business sense and therefor it's worth it for businesses to support it.
That said, I agree that not all software should be free. Programmers wouldn't have motivation to write software if they never got paid for it. But the author also points out another very important point: building things on open source software is more profitable. Companies who build things on open source software make more money because their costs are less. The key is to take advantage of that but when you do that, it also makes sense to support and improve the software that allows you to be so profitable.
Open source is not about no-cost software. The costs are still there but they are radically different and they are paid for in very different ways than the pay-for-license model. OSS also doesn't make much sence in a lot of places. Comodity infrastructure software like operating systems, office suits, web browsers, etc.. are the best candidates for open sourcing. The benefits to having a standardized infrastructure that is available everywhere are huge but if a company has ownership of the one standard, they gain monopoly power and charge monopoly prices. People blame Microsoft for being evil but any other company in their place would do the same thing. Having the infrastructure be open source makes good business and ecanomic sense. The burdon of development can easily be spread out.
I've always heard that it's a good idea to do a migration like this slowly but MS stuff intentionally doesn't play well with other software which makes migration away from it hard. This kind of thing needs to be planned long term.
I do like the rip it out and replace it all approach though. It'll be fun to see how it goes (assuming it doesn't crash and burn). A lot of people are going to be learning a lot about Linux fast. If I spoke any German I might offer to help a little.
Technology rarely causes me stress. People cause me stress.
Unless you are in a technology support roll, machines rarely grab your attention and make you do something. People, however, do that all the time.
In fact, I telecommute almost every day which dramatically reduces my stress level.
I think the main difference between science and (traditional) religion is that scientists are willing to eventually give up their current beliefs if the evidence against it becomes overwhelming.
That's funny because if you pay attention you'll notice that religions do exactly the same thing. The beliefs they teach at the churches of today are very different from the ones of 300 years ago. Most things stay the same, the ones that change the most are the ones with the most evidence against them. The churches all used to insist that the world was flat but that doesn't work well when technology advances to the point where it is obvious that isn't true so they change.
There are lots of scientists who believe so strongly in the underpinnings of their work they refuse to concider the posibility that it could be wrong. It's normal to not challenge assumptions that much of your life is based on. It would be hard to make progress if we did.
Also, in science, the "Laws" are generally assumed to be true. True, you can never prove anything to be true for all time under all circumstances but they are generally accepted to be true just like in religion, core philosophies are generally accepted to be true.
Yea, agnostic is a pretty loose term that people pull out a lot. I think one of the interesting things is that being agnostic is'nt really saying much at all. You can be agnostic and still believe in a religion. Agnosticism is basically conceding that there is no way to prove or disprove the existance of god. The concept of god or anything supernatural is bascially by definition unprovable since for something to be supernatural there can be no possible natural explanation of it. Since it is impossible to know everything that is possible you can't know if something is supernatural. Also, even if the world is found to always follow certain rules exactly (which is most likely impossible to prove) you can't know that there isn't something at work behind the scenes. In computer terms it would be explained by the question "how can you write a program that knows if it is running under a perfect emulator." The answer is, of course, you can't because by definition a perfect emulator is undetectable.
Religion isn't about knowing something to be true. If it were, it would be science, not religeon. Religion is about believing in something that can not be proven true. (Of course, all sciences are based on beliefs that can't be proven but that's another agrument.) In that way, athiesm is also a religion since you can't disprove the existance of god, you have to believe there is none.
It's my understanding that it depends on how the vehicle is used. For cars it is 20-40% more efficient. For something that constantly stops and starts like a city bus, it's much more than that since the electric braking system recovers the kenetic energy of the bus when stopping so it can be reused when starting back up.
I agree. Kudos to them for actually doing it.
I'm simply taking issue with the 60% number. If it is true, it is versus conventional technology, not other similar tried and true gas-electric hybrids.