GDP of a country is directly proportional to the Gas consumption. Take the GDP of a country in trillions/year and the number would almost exactly match the number of millions of barrels of oil consumed in a year.(US =13 trillion, 10 billion barrels, China 2, 2)
The idea is that on a per person basis China consumes comparably smaller number of barrels of oil per person and as a consequence they are also poorer. Asking them to cut their production by 20% is far more tougher than getting US to cut an equivalent percentage. As the GDP/person matches, the restrictions should be equal.
Another,cynical, way of looking at it is that US has already polluted its way to development, we'll let China do it for a while now
Atleast that's the theory. Implementation is far more different though -- US has developed in a way (no public transport, wide highways, scattered towns, low population density) that it is tough for US to cut any emissions without its effects being felt. Hence nobody cut the prices and Oil prices shot up in the short-term.
BTW, about green technologies, I have not yet seen a technology that is going to break even below $50 / barrel. We may have to cut some production somewhere if US wants to keep Florida .
I believe making Napalm is not really dangerous
All you need is to dissolve natural rubber in Gasoline. In fact the current formulation of Napalm is prevalent only because rubber was too expensive
If you want the real formulation it is only slightly more difficult - it requires powdered aluminum (not very easy to make - and if made useful for much more fun stuff like aluminothermic welding) and Palmitic acid. Palmitic acid is easily found in soaps (or natural oils like palm oil or coconut oil).
Anyway, I have no idea why anyone would want to make Napalm - it is a dirty killer and useless outside wars and terroristic activities. It does'nt go Booom!! , neither is it useful for rocketry.
You may be right, but you are arguing about it the wrong way.
Fact: Press was more positive about Obama
Statement: Press is biased
Counter argument: No, press is reflecting reality as they should. Obama was more positive
At this point, you should really counter the counter argument saying, here is the data, Obama was not positive. You could point to advertising spends or to some other instances. You could also say the press was positive while Obama was not - for example point to incorrect or biased coverage of a fact and its interpretation by the press
But instead you seem to be saying that counter argument is comical and then goes on to point to consequences of the statement. The statement is what you should be trying to pull down. Pointing to consequences of a statement that is not proven does not help move the discussion forward.
Again not saying that you are not correct - just pointing to a better way of discussing.
If the news paper publishes 10 stories saying thiefs shot policemen, it does not necessarily mean that they are supporting policemen or have a conservative bias. It does not mean they favor policemen any more than they favor thiefs. It just means that it is the way the city was the last day.
On the other hand if the paper ignored the fact that the policemen had shot the thiefs and the so called thiefs were acting in self defense, it indicates a bias.
The real question that needs to be answered before we determine a bias based on positive stories favoring Obama is whether Obama was in general a more positive candidate.
And on that question, I believe that by percentage of ads Obama wins. He also wins by his personal statements. But I believe compared by number of ads (since Obama advertised more), atleast in the penultimate month they were a draw.
Forget the eye candy, it should be the kernel that really should matter . Here are my suggestions -- not saying they are how they are, just that thats how it ought to be
On a server OS, the kernel should be optimised to run background applications faster. On a desktop the kernel should drop everything and respond to user requests.
Once you step away from the kernel, the userland services should be similarly different. A server should run services to avoid crashes and losses of data - A server can afford to increase bootup time just to ensure that everything started up correctly. The services also need not expect to be handled carelessly, but should be very careful about data. On a desktop, the services should start fast and can afford a bit of tardiness and lack of perfection. On the other hand they should expect the user to behave randomly (start a service , stop , reboot etc. 5 times in a row) and should be able to handle it
Applications on the other hand are something that the user can always add - the Os should not matter here.
I posted the story originally with the title "Malaysian Court Frees Blogger" (I remember because I used the same title that New York times did).
The "anti-islamic" comment is not mine I don't believe this has anything to do with religion, most developing nations use religion, public order, morality etc. as an excuse for authoritarianism.
I do hope that it will change and that freer communications and exposure to the rest of the world is a factor in bringing about cultural change, not just change to internet.
eject is a useful tool, If you have a rack of servers all alike and you need to identify one of them . Some servers have blinking lights etc. but mine had no audio nor lights. But it had a CD tray.
I simply put eject and "eject -t" in a loop and go look in the server room -- the hyperactive server is the one I was looking for.
svn is overkill, I think
rcs might be the easiest to set-up and with a small script that runs every once in a while (especially on the $TEMP folder if you have ooffice or word running).
I am not sure that idea about Amber was that bad He had to provide explanation somehow, or else it would be like magic. Remember that a lot of people (non-scientists) at that time did not even know that DNA represented almost all the information about the species. If you said you created a dinosaur they'd simply ask where you got Dino eggs from.
I read the Jurassic park and it was presented very very cleverly. It is a slighlty older idea that was in discussion during the time of publication that he extended.
You have to remember that this was well before animal DNA had even been sequenced.
His speculation about SIDS being blamed for unexplained child deaths and about diet of Dinosaurs were pretty much on target too.
Now I really disliked his later books (Airframe, State of Fear), but Jurassic park was a pretty interesting book - and if nothing else should receive credit for making children interested in Dinosaurs and Geology.
Offtopic - BTW your sig is just encouragement for all women readers to mod you down. You probably should have an AND condition in there somewhere.
You control clusters, but clouds are really not under your control -- Google controls them and you only worry about your data. The seperation of ownership of data and computers is the first difference.
Another is the fact that you don't need a cluster to form a cloud - I could set my computer to provide some sort of document processing and offer it as a service to you. I only have a computer, while your computer and mine don't form any meaningful cluster. You do receive services from me, which constitutes a "cloud".
Similarly, in clusters each node is aware of other nodes or central servers (more or less) , but in a cloud it is the client which makes a lot of decisions - for example the Google Docs can all be on a cluster while Google mail is an entirely on a different cluster - If I provide you a service which couples both of them, then it is the client machine which decides which cluster is going to be used .
Cloud encompasses a cluster, but also has the idea of specific services that run on it.
They are different, but if you don't like the word cloud, thats different. I believe IBM came up with the term and for lack of a better term, it stayed.
That's a bit of a kneejerk reaction, there. I am no MSFT apologist, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater..
1. Can turn off access to any application, at will.
It may be a good thing, considering how many people don't patch
2. Can force upgrade$, even when perfectly happy with an older version of an application.
Again, good thing, sometimes
3. Can nickle-and-dime you for every piece of the OS, similar to purchasing your car one bolt at-a-time.
More like leasing a car or renting one.
4. Over tax our still not-ready-for-prime-time broadband.
Not the OS vendors mistake - and anyway market should price this into the cost they pay and msft stands to loss.
I have the exact same problem. One of the issues is that the page margins on Word and OOo are different. Similarly the default fonts are different, so is the size of the bullets for lists.
In short, if you write a resume in Open office, immediately export to pdf.
I had to learn it the hard way too... sigh
It appears that US actually won't be paying for this in any direct manner.
Rather than a longterm decline, I believe what is more likely is a sharp reversal of fortunes for the US.
As I said in another post, While this was a great opportunity to re-value the dollar and reverse the trade deficit, it appears that China and Russia are buying more of US debt as a result of the crash, not less.
This means that it is those countries which are going to pay for a failure of the US when their assets get revalued. US on the other hand may experience a sharp increase in cost of capital, immediately followed by a devalued dollar reversing the effect (somewhat). It will make labor more expensive, exports competitive and possibly lose the economic superpower status for US. But as long as anyone in US still knows how to run an industry, they should be able to rebuild their lifes.
A lot of what you said is correct, but I am not sure The orgy of spending and borrowing has ended
Usually when a government goes bankrupt (or significantly loses money) , no one would buy their bonds . This means that no one is willing to lend them any more money - this should cause them to pay a higher interest rate. In the case of the U.S.A, it is the exact opposite. When US government announced that it was going to print $700 bn more of money and use it on an dubious plan, the rest of the world should have seen that US cannot reasonably pay back this amount and panicked. But on the other hand , the yields on the treasuries actually went down, i.e the interest rates the US govt has to pay is less than inflation.
This is due to the unique nature of US currency in the world economy - In fact the exact opposite happened to the Euro when the panic hit.
If the world wants to lend money to USA while knowing perfectly well that they are going to get papers not backed by economic production, why should the US not take the money? It is the rest of the world that is being stupid in stockpiling the money, not USA.
Whenever this "orgy" as you called it ends, the US dollar has to depreciate atleast by 50% against the yen (If I use the simple Big Mac index of prices) and more against lot of other currencies. Until this happens, enjoy it while it lasts.
You missed one crucial point which seems to be the only one the article seems to hold culpable
While most securities are traded openly using an intermediary, market maker or a broker, in this case the banks originated and purchased these things hidden from the open markets. They also conveniently pushed them off the balance sheet onto strange accounting entities (SPVs etc) whose purpose was solely to hide what they were holding. They did this so as to avoid the fluctuation of prices on their balance sheet and to avoid the mark to market rules that exist on securities.
What this did is that these assets could not be priced in the market. Since market could not price them, the banks started using computer models to price these assets - In would go conditions like 1% default rates, 2% prepayment rates and assumptions on what your neighbor was pricing them at and out would come the prices for the securities
These assumptions were flawed and the increasing prices for these things led the assumptions being even more off-reality. This was supposed to start as mark-to-market , it deteriorated into mark-to-model and then what Warren Buffett (in his 2004 letter) called mark-to-myth.
As long as reality did not interfere with the computer predictions, it let the banks create trillions of non existing assets. What we are seeing now is ofcourse a hard dose of reality.
So in summary, while there was greed at the lowest levels it should have been caught earlier if that reality had trickled back up to the computer models. The people in charge of the computers turned out to be wrong about the assumptions they were feeding the computers.
The court clearly says economic damages were involved The judge's decision was appealed in the Federal Circuit Court. A large number of Open Source projects and their attorneys, working for free, filed a "friend of the court" brief. What the appeals court found was, essentially, that the Free Software license was a license, rather than a contract, that it does not require that both parties agree before it can be binding, that its terms can be enforced, that if you violate the license you're a copyright infringer, and that violation of an Open Source license causes real economic damage to the copyright holder even though the copyright holder doesn't charge money for his software
I know for a fact that Huwaei E220 works with the kernel included in Ubuntu Hardy heron (2.6.24?)
Run Wvdialconf, and then run wvdial (or run a ppp connection manually) - and you are connected. Googling will bring up tons of troubleshooting tips too.
There is nothing competitive in Europe?
You clearly have'nt looked hard enough. I've been traveling Europe and the easiest way to get internet without going through the complicated identification requirements is to get a mobile internet connection. In Vodafone and Orange have similar services in UK and portugal. Spain has Yoigo, Orange etc. France has the same operators, but I am not sure they'll let you use it on a day-to-day basis
In India Reliance/Airtel will let you dial-up for a month for something like $10. (whats that 6 euros? )
The T mobile plan is expensive and certainly not the first.
In Spain Yoigo offers daily dial-up at 1.5 Euros a day (while Euro trades at 1.5 to the dollar, a pound is worth 1.7 ). I am actually using that to post right now. The speed sucks (Yoigos, that is, no idea about Tmobile) so I have virtually unlimited bandwidth - there is no way I am going to hit the maximum download limit
The pleasant surprise is that the Huwaei E220 modem that the gave me is supported on ubuntu. All I had to do was run wvdialconf and it started working.
It is a very straightforward explanation, except for the fact that all things needed by a country are not produced locally. This is not a problem in a country where the value of exports equal the value of imports and which has a balanced budget - but in case of America the young don't produce nearly enough compared to what they consume. This is inspite of the fact that there is massive immigration of working class populatoin. So it may be possible for parts of Europe to sit on their asses on strength of Euro (Euro is an appreciating asset that they just happened to chance on - nobody "earns" it) while US has already been doing this for a while.
He is not using Redhat. He is using CentOS.
He never reported the issue to Redhat - so there really is no way of commenting about how good or how bad the RH Support is
I used to work for a large (very large) h/w manufacturer and dealt both with Microsoft and Redhat. I also have filed bugs externally. From what I know, Redhat support is excellent if you communicate either directly with them or through their website - You will get atleast a developer comment on it (with atleast enough info to patch it yourself if needed).
Microsoft support is great too - especially with comments on the developer blogs that they have. Unfortunately when they say, "Thanks for isolating the issue, the bug is in XYZ section.We'll fix it later" there is no way of patching the code. But otherwise (especially when you don't want to patch OS code) , Microsoft is good too.
On the otherhand what you said above (fixing own problems) is exactly what the author did - Used an unsupported OS, Fixed issues and blamed RedHat to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
GDP of a country is directly proportional to the Gas consumption. Take the GDP of a country in trillions/year and the number would almost exactly match the number of millions of barrels of oil consumed in a year.(US =13 trillion, 10 billion barrels, China 2, 2) ,cynical, way of looking at it is that US has already polluted its way to development, we'll let China do it for a while now
The idea is that on a per person basis China consumes comparably smaller number of barrels of oil per person and as a consequence they are also poorer. Asking them to cut their production by 20% is far more tougher than getting US to cut an equivalent percentage. As the GDP/person matches, the restrictions should be equal.
Another
Atleast that's the theory. Implementation is far more different though -- US has developed in a way (no public transport, wide highways, scattered towns, low population density) that it is tough for US to cut any emissions without its effects being felt. Hence nobody cut the prices and Oil prices shot up in the short-term.
BTW, about green technologies, I have not yet seen a technology that is going to break even below $50 / barrel. We may have to cut some production somewhere if US wants to keep Florida .
I believe making Napalm is not really dangerous
All you need is to dissolve natural rubber in Gasoline. In fact the current formulation of Napalm is prevalent only because rubber was too expensive
If you want the real formulation it is only slightly more difficult - it requires powdered aluminum (not very easy to make - and if made useful for much more fun stuff like aluminothermic welding) and Palmitic acid. Palmitic acid is easily found in soaps (or natural oils like palm oil or coconut oil).
Anyway, I have no idea why anyone would want to make Napalm - it is a dirty killer and useless outside wars and terroristic activities. It does'nt go Booom!! , neither is it useful for rocketry.
You may be right, but you are arguing about it the wrong way.
Fact: Press was more positive about Obama
Statement: Press is biased
Counter argument: No, press is reflecting reality as they should. Obama was more positive
At this point, you should really counter the counter argument saying, here is the data, Obama was not positive. You could point to advertising spends or to some other instances. You could also say the press was positive while Obama was not - for example point to incorrect or biased coverage of a fact and its interpretation by the press
But instead you seem to be saying that counter argument is comical and then goes on to point to consequences of the statement. The statement is what you should be trying to pull down. Pointing to consequences of a statement that is not proven does not help move the discussion forward.
Again not saying that you are not correct - just pointing to a better way of discussing.
If the news paper publishes 10 stories saying thiefs shot policemen, it does not necessarily mean that they are supporting policemen or have a conservative bias. It does not mean they favor policemen any more than they favor thiefs. It just means that it is the way the city was the last day.
On the other hand if the paper ignored the fact that the policemen had shot the thiefs and the so called thiefs were acting in self defense, it indicates a bias.
The real question that needs to be answered before we determine a bias based on positive stories favoring Obama is whether Obama was in general a more positive candidate.
And on that question, I believe that by percentage of ads Obama wins. He also wins by his personal statements. But I believe compared by number of ads (since Obama advertised more), atleast in the penultimate month they were a draw.
Foxnews is'nt conservative - it is right-populist.
Wall Street Journal is conservative.
Forget the eye candy, it should be the kernel that really should matter . Here are my suggestions -- not saying they are how they are, just that thats how it ought to be
On a server OS, the kernel should be optimised to run background applications faster. On a desktop the kernel should drop everything and respond to user requests.
Once you step away from the kernel, the userland services should be similarly different. A server should run services to avoid crashes and losses of data - A server can afford to increase bootup time just to ensure that everything started up correctly. The services also need not expect to be handled carelessly, but should be very careful about data. On a desktop, the services should start fast and can afford a bit of tardiness and lack of perfection. On the other hand they should expect the user to behave randomly (start a service , stop , reboot etc. 5 times in a row) and should be able to handle it
Applications on the other hand are something that the user can always add - the Os should not matter here.
I posted the story originally with the title "Malaysian Court Frees Blogger" (I remember because I used the same title that New York times did).
The "anti-islamic" comment is not mine
I don't believe this has anything to do with religion, most developing nations use religion, public order, morality etc. as an excuse for authoritarianism.
I do hope that it will change and that freer communications and exposure to the rest of the world is a factor in bringing about cultural change, not just change to internet.
eject is a useful tool, If you have a rack of servers all alike and you need to identify one of them . Some servers have blinking lights etc. but mine had no audio nor lights. But it had a CD tray.
I simply put eject and "eject -t" in a loop and go look in the server room -- the hyperactive server is the one I was looking for.
svn is overkill, I think
rcs might be the easiest to set-up and with a small script that runs every once in a while (especially on the $TEMP folder if you have ooffice or word running).
I really need a command like that for Window managers - Alt-Tab just is'nt fast enough.
This was way back when we were in college and we got our logins to our first Unix account.
Some idiot decided to email a file called "*" to everyone.
I am not sure that idea about Amber was that bad
He had to provide explanation somehow, or else it would be like magic. Remember that a lot of people (non-scientists) at that time did not even know that DNA represented almost all the information about the species. If you said you created a dinosaur they'd simply ask where you got Dino eggs from.
I read the Jurassic park and it was presented very very cleverly. It is a slighlty older idea that was in discussion during the time of publication that he extended.
You have to remember that this was well before animal DNA had even been sequenced.
His speculation about SIDS being blamed for unexplained child deaths and about diet of Dinosaurs were pretty much on target too.
Now I really disliked his later books (Airframe, State of Fear), but Jurassic park was a pretty interesting book - and if nothing else should receive credit for making children interested in Dinosaurs and Geology.
Offtopic - BTW your sig is just encouragement for all women readers to mod you down. You probably should have an AND condition in there somewhere.
You control clusters, but clouds are really not under your control -- Google controls them and you only worry about your data. The seperation of ownership of data and computers is the first difference.
Another is the fact that you don't need a cluster to form a cloud - I could set my computer to provide some sort of document processing and offer it as a service to you. I only have a computer, while your computer and mine don't form any meaningful cluster. You do receive services from me, which constitutes a "cloud".
Similarly, in clusters each node is aware of other nodes or central servers (more or less) , but in a cloud it is the client which makes a lot of decisions - for example the Google Docs can all be on a cluster while Google mail is an entirely on a different cluster - If I provide you a service which couples both of them, then it is the client machine which decides which cluster is going to be used .
Cloud encompasses a cluster, but also has the idea of specific services that run on it.
They are different, but if you don't like the word cloud, thats different. I believe IBM came up with the term and for lack of a better term, it stayed.
That's a bit of a kneejerk reaction, there. I am no MSFT apologist, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater..
1. Can turn off access to any application, at will.
It may be a good thing, considering how many people don't patch
2. Can force upgrade$, even when perfectly happy with an older version of an application.
Again, good thing, sometimes
3. Can nickle-and-dime you for every piece of the OS, similar to purchasing your car one bolt at-a-time.
More like leasing a car or renting one.
4. Over tax our still not-ready-for-prime-time broadband.
Not the OS vendors mistake - and anyway market should price this into the cost they pay and msft stands to loss.
Dell has that market covered
I have the exact same problem. One of the issues is that the page margins on Word and OOo are different. Similarly the default fonts are different, so is the size of the bullets for lists. ... sigh
In short, if you write a resume in Open office, immediately export to pdf.
I had to learn it the hard way too
It appears that US actually won't be paying for this in any direct manner.
Rather than a longterm decline, I believe what is more likely is a sharp reversal of fortunes for the US.
As I said in another post, While this was a great opportunity to re-value the dollar and reverse the trade deficit, it appears that China and Russia are buying more of US debt as a result of the crash, not less.
This means that it is those countries which are going to pay for a failure of the US when their assets get revalued. US on the other hand may experience a sharp increase in cost of capital, immediately followed by a devalued dollar reversing the effect (somewhat). It will make labor more expensive, exports competitive and possibly lose the economic superpower status for US. But as long as anyone in US still knows how to run an industry, they should be able to rebuild their lifes.
A lot of what you said is correct, but I am not sure The orgy of spending and borrowing has ended
Usually when a government goes bankrupt (or significantly loses money) , no one would buy their bonds . This means that no one is willing to lend them any more money - this should cause them to pay a higher interest rate. In the case of the U.S.A, it is the exact opposite. When US government announced that it was going to print $700 bn more of money and use it on an dubious plan, the rest of the world should have seen that US cannot reasonably pay back this amount and panicked. But on the other hand , the yields on the treasuries actually went down, i.e the interest rates the US govt has to pay is less than inflation.
This is due to the unique nature of US currency in the world economy - In fact the exact opposite happened to the Euro when the panic hit.
If the world wants to lend money to USA while knowing perfectly well that they are going to get papers not backed by economic production, why should the US not take the money? It is the rest of the world that is being stupid in stockpiling the money, not USA.
Whenever this "orgy" as you called it ends, the US dollar has to depreciate atleast by 50% against the yen (If I use the simple Big Mac index of prices) and more against lot of other currencies. Until this happens, enjoy it while it lasts.
You missed one crucial point which seems to be the only one the article seems to hold culpable
While most securities are traded openly using an intermediary, market maker or a broker, in this case the banks originated and purchased these things hidden from the open markets. They also conveniently pushed them off the balance sheet onto strange accounting entities (SPVs etc) whose purpose was solely to hide what they were holding. They did this so as to avoid the fluctuation of prices on their balance sheet and to avoid the mark to market rules that exist on securities.
What this did is that these assets could not be priced in the market. Since market could not price them, the banks started using computer models to price these assets - In would go conditions like 1% default rates, 2% prepayment rates and assumptions on what your neighbor was pricing them at and out would come the prices for the securities
These assumptions were flawed and the increasing prices for these things led the assumptions being even more off-reality. This was supposed to start as mark-to-market , it deteriorated into mark-to-model and then what Warren Buffett (in his 2004 letter) called mark-to-myth.
As long as reality did not interfere with the computer predictions, it let the banks create trillions of non existing assets. What we are seeing now is ofcourse a hard dose of reality.
So in summary, while there was greed at the lowest levels it should have been caught earlier if that reality had trickled back up to the computer models. The people in charge of the computers turned out to be wrong about the assumptions they were feeding the computers.
The court clearly says economic damages were involved
The judge's decision was appealed in the Federal Circuit Court. A large number of Open Source projects and their attorneys, working for free, filed a "friend of the court" brief. What the appeals court found was, essentially, that the Free Software license was a license, rather than a contract, that it does not require that both parties agree before it can be binding, that its terms can be enforced, that if you violate the license you're a copyright infringer, and that violation of an Open Source license causes real economic damage to the copyright holder even though the copyright holder doesn't charge money for his software
I know for a fact that Huwaei E220 works with the kernel included in Ubuntu Hardy heron (2.6.24?)
Run Wvdialconf, and then run wvdial (or run a ppp connection manually) - and you are connected. Googling will bring up tons of troubleshooting tips too.
There is nothing competitive in Europe?
You clearly have'nt looked hard enough. I've been traveling Europe and the easiest way to get internet without going through the complicated identification requirements is to get a mobile internet connection. In Vodafone and Orange have similar services in UK and portugal. Spain has Yoigo, Orange etc. France has the same operators, but I am not sure they'll let you use it on a day-to-day basis
In India Reliance/Airtel will let you dial-up for a month for something like $10. (whats that 6 euros? )
The T mobile plan is expensive and certainly not the first.
In Spain Yoigo offers daily dial-up at 1.5 Euros a day (while Euro trades at 1.5 to the dollar, a pound is worth 1.7 ). I am actually using that to post right now. The speed sucks (Yoigos, that is, no idea about Tmobile) so I have virtually unlimited bandwidth - there is no way I am going to hit the maximum download limit
The pleasant surprise is that the Huwaei E220 modem that the gave me is supported on ubuntu. All I had to do was run wvdialconf and it started working.
It is a very straightforward explanation, except for the fact that all things needed by a country are not produced locally. This is not a problem in a country where the value of exports equal the value of imports and which has a balanced budget - but in case of America the young don't produce nearly enough compared to what they consume. This is inspite of the fact that there is massive immigration of working class populatoin. So it may be possible for parts of Europe to sit on their asses on strength of Euro (Euro is an appreciating asset that they just happened to chance on - nobody "earns" it) while US has already been doing this for a while.
He is not using Redhat. He is using CentOS.
He never reported the issue to Redhat - so there really is no way of commenting about how good or how bad the RH Support is
I used to work for a large (very large) h/w manufacturer and dealt both with Microsoft and Redhat. I also have filed bugs externally. From what I know, Redhat support is excellent if you communicate either directly with them or through their website - You will get atleast a developer comment on it (with atleast enough info to patch it yourself if needed).
Microsoft support is great too - especially with comments on the developer blogs that they have. Unfortunately when they say, "Thanks for isolating the issue, the bug is in XYZ section.We'll fix it later" there is no way of patching the code. But otherwise (especially when you don't want to patch OS code) , Microsoft is good too.
On the otherhand what you said above (fixing own problems) is exactly what the author did - Used an unsupported OS, Fixed issues and blamed RedHat to boot.