Google's dirty tactics include using and selling personal information on end users. They also include purchasing interesting and/or rival companies at fair prices, as opposed to just running rivals out of business. Google has some evil ways, but nothing to compare to Microsoft's history.
Apple has their pretty little walled garden, but they don't mess with the unwashed masses outside that garden. They work pretty aggressively to protect the stuff inside that garden, but they've never actively worked to undermine companies and OS's that stay well outside of that garden.
Microsoft, on the other hand, should have been broken up into multiple companies long ago when the government was accusing them of monopoly abuse. The behemoth has done a lot of harm in the computing world. It has done some good, but not nearly so much real good as some people think.
Personally, I still resent the AARD code that contributed to the collapse of DRDOS. DRDOS was superior to most other DOS operating systems in some ways - among others, it was the first to achieve 32 bit disk access. With a level playing field, I'm pretty certain that DRDOS would have remained in the game, and contributed much more to computer science. No one can possibly say where computing might be today, had Microsoft not worked hard to shut other players out of the field. Android may never have happened for instance - something much better may have been developed, and much sooner instead. Certainly, Linux would have advanced faster if there had been more active support from hardware vendors.
I share that sentiment. To bad that it's happening about 20 years later than it should have. I have no sympathy for struggling PC makers. All of the top dogs in the industry cooperated for a couple decades in feeding that behemoth known as Microsoft. They have been happily paying that Microsoft Tax, and passing the cost on to the end users. I would be perfectly happy to see some of those big dogs go bankrupt. Smaller companies that have struggled to supply alternate OS's and no-OS machines may finally get a well deserved break here.
Like yourself, I'll withhold judgement. When I'm ready to purchase new hardware, if I can buy good hardware and install Linux without a problem, I'll be quite happy. If it proves difficult to install Linux, I'll be less happy. My happiness will decrease with the amount of difficulty involved.
I can't say, because at that time I was only a driver. I had recently left the Navy, and my interests didn't include the boss's worries, expenses, and troubles. I do know that the tractor was old and nearly worn out, and that it had been passed down to the most junior driver in the fleet - me. The trailer was much newer, maybe only four or five years old.
I have furthered my education since then, but I never went back to learn the purchase cost of my ex-boss's trucks, or the lifetime cost efficiency of those trucks.
I will add a few details here though. The entire cab of that Cruiseliner was made of aluminum, whereas a lot of cabs today are built with a few metal members, and a lot of plastics. I helped to extract a driver from a wrecked Freightliner east of Atlanta one night, by simply kicking my way inside through the roof of the sleeper.
The frame rails were aluminum, and most of the crossmembers were aluminum as well. But, there was still quite a bit of steel in the engine hangers, transmission hangers, and axle mounts. The frame did have some stress points, at those hangers, that had been repaired multiple times. It seems that the particular alloy used in the frame developed stress fractures over time. It didn't appear that corrosion was the problem, it appeared to be just weak spots that might have been overcome with a different alloy, or possibly more metal in those areas. That said - I am not, and never was, a metal worker. If you had the opportunity to talk to one of the mechanics who kept a Cruiseliner running, he might tell you a different story.
What I can tell you is that the mechanics all liked that old Cruiseliner. They had a few trucks that they hated, for various reasons, but they all liked the Cruiseliner because it was relatively easy to work on, and to keep in good repair. Other shops may have reported different opinions.
This is why you maintain relations with former good drivers. Retirees, among others. People who have moved on to other occupations, but might be laid off during the winter months and/or Christmas season. Oddly enough, my employers were always able to bring in known, good drivers when they were needed. People you might call "casual labor", but were dependable. In some instances, those drivers were related to the management and staff. We never had to settle for kids who recently graduated from those jokes known as "driver academies".
Of course, many companies see no need to cultivate good relations with former employees, so those resources wouldn't be available.
That same tactic is working against us in Afghanistan today. Look carefully. An entrenched political machine keeps us on the defensive, while the puppet we support tries to pretend that he is in charge. The only part of the Vietnamese equation that is missing from Afghanistan, is China. Pakistan makes a piss poor imitation of China, but Pakistan does fulfill some of the functions of China in the Vietnam war.
You sound like a young person, with that post. Maybe not though - some older people think in a similar way.
The real reasons we lost in Vietnam?
1. Popular support. We were, after all, the invaders. Few people like the idea of foreign invaders coming into their country, and trying to run things.
2. Foreign support. All those war material coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail were supplied by China. Or routed through China.
3. S. Vietnam Government corruption. Out of every ten dollars value pumped into Vietnam, corruption ate six dollars. Food, weapons, ammo - everything just fell into a vast black hole. And, that corruption helped to defeat us by feeding that popular support, and the foreign support of the North.
That defensiveness you mention? Yeah, it played a part, but it really wasn't a major part. And, the reason for THAT is not exactly what you might think, either. Basically, we agreed to play a defensive game in Vietnam, because we allowed ourselves to be coerced by China. The bombing of Hanoi, for instance. China TOLD US that if we bombed downtown Hanoi, then the Chinese army would come in and kick our asses. Our politicians didn't want to face China, so they caved. China also TOLD US that if we bombed any staging areas on their side of the border, then their army would come in and kick our asses. Again, our politicians believed them. There were numerous, lesser ultimatums issued by the Chinese leadership, most of which our politicians just obeyed. Not all, but most.
It can be argued - convincingly argued if you work hard enough - that we lost the war due to politics. Our own politicians failed to support our troops properly. But, even if you fail to make that argument very convincing, the reasons stated above will suffice.
You do make a helluva good point. But, we also saw what happened in Vietnam. I'm not old enough to be a Viet Vet, so I base all my thinking on hearsay and history books. But, the Ho Chi Minh trail proved quite effective for the opposition. They moved personnel, vehicles, weapons and equipment, food, and other material pretty freely. Ultimately, we lost that one.
Well, hey - realistically speaking, how many organizations do you think are capable of facing a million man army, which can draft a half billion man army on short notice? Come on, now, there aren't anywhere near a million squids and jarheads in the Department of the Navy.
On the plus side - when they've got our asses surrounded, we don't need to worry to much about target acquisition! "Target rich environments" do have their benefits!
Fewer and fewer cars are capable of hauling a trailer. The wife has a Taurus that we wanted to put a trailer hitch on. Almost no one sells a proper hitch that will fit up properly. When I finally found two sources, the hitch was a class 1 hitch, with a maximum tongue weight of 200 pounds. I could, of course, make my own hitch - but the way liability works these days, I'm not sure I want to mess with it. Better to beg, borrow, or steal a pickup when I really need to move stuff.
Well, I need a truck. I ride a motorcycle most of the time. Rarely, I drive a car. But, sometimes I need a truck. That's when I call my son, and say, "Son, I need your truck tomorrow for a few hours." If he actually has plans that require the use of the truck that day, we just beat each other up, call each other names, and raise a fuss until the wife interferes. Alright, I exaggerate a little. The kid seldom uses his truck, because he likes the 50+ mpg he gets on his own motorcycles. That damned Ford pickup only gets a little over 20 mpg, and neither one of us likes to pay for all that gasoline.
Gross weight for a class 8 tractor trailer combination on US highways is 80,000 pounds. Guys who had all steel tractors and trailers were sometimes unable to load 43,000 pounds. Most were able to load 45,000 pounds. Just about no one was able to load 47,000 pounds, and still be legal. With my aluminum Mack and aluminum Cobra trailer, I routinely loaded 51,000 pounds, and scaled it legally.
Since I got paid a percentage of what the load grossed, you can see that I was effectively being paid for ten loads, with the same time and effort that other drivers were being paid for nine.
Double that 20 years. I drove an aluminum truck way back in 1984, which was already old and nearly worn out when I got it. I never investigated why the aluminum trucks were dropped - it probably had something to do with the company downsizing, and pulling back to Pennsylvania. During such an operation, I suppose a corporation is going to drop those parts of it's business that are perceived as "risky".
Where does hate come in to this equation? When and where did I imply that I hate anyone? Are we speaking the same language?
If you walk out into the street of your home town, and find a pack of wild dogs attacking a child, what do you do? I would destroy the dogs. Not because I hate the dogs, but because the child has more value to society than any number of dogs. Hate? Being filled with hatred of dogs would impede your ability to deal with the threat to the child. Hatred cripples you.
I just want to see the threat that those militant atheists represent to be ended. They have no right to impose their world view on other people. Nor do Christians have a right to impose their world view on other people. It's written into our consitution, and as I've already mentioned, it was written there by a group of men who were mostly Christian.
IMHO, executives should all be veterans. The army has a reputation for having the finest motor pool mechanics and drivers in the world. They have a maintenance schedule and an operator's checklist that is pretty amazing. Taking shortcuts can and will cost a man his career. The Navy is similar. Ships are never at "peace" - the ocean is the enemy, if all other enemies have given up. We do our PM's religiously, and gundecking the logs will cost an otherwise good sailor his career. I have no experience with aviation, but aviators certainly face the same risks we do at sea. The Marines, of course, are part of the Department of the Navy, and their discipline is far more rigorous than us mere sailors. PM'ing equipment is just as much a religious experience for them, as it is for us.
We all understand that our lives depend on the condition and the readiness of our tools and equipment.
If executives of companies both large and small had the same sense of dependence on their tools and equipment, their businesses would be so much better - we wouldn't even recognize those businesses.
I worked for Brown and Root before they sold out to Kellog. They ran their business quite like the military does. Cranes, trucks, whatever, all were PM'd to a pretty rigorous schedule. B&R readily wrote equipment off when it became expensive, but they quickly replaced that equipment, then rigorously maintenanced that equipment.
We simply don't see a lot of that today.
The company that I work for now scrimps and cheats on maintenance. Our PM schedule is about half, or maybe less, what the books call for. The attitude that leads to such practices has run the company into the ground. Right now, the company is up for sale, and none of us knows if we will have jobs next month.
So much of management in this country is simply incompetent. All they can see is the very short term return on investment.
Ehhh - I guess the best thing to do is smile. Things are going to get worse.
There really is a simple solution to this hazard. Modify existing building codes to require that a cutoff switch be installed right next to the meter. Those solar panels will simply be routed through a knife-blade disconnect on an exterior wall, accessible by emergency personnel. I can't understand why the disconnect would be located on the roof - your meter isn't on the roof after all. Any home that routes power directly from the solar power panels into the house would then be out of compliance with building codes, and the owners would be liable for modifying their homes to comply.
"When governments unethically and immorally, but legally force the turnover of keys that won't change."
FTFY
I have a better idea. The police forces and security services should do actual police work, instead of eavesdropping on the entire population. Detective work and investigations are labor intensive, but the US constitution demands that such labor be used instead of just spying on everyone.
I'm not so very sure of that. We have seasonal peaks in holiday travel. The airlines manage to move amazing numbers of people during the holidays. What happens to all those aircraft during off-peak seasons, when we can be quite sure they are not full of travelers?
Granted, maintenance schedules can be manipulated to some extent. In the run up to the holidays, aviation techs are probably working overtime to ensure that the entire fleet is in the air during the most critical days. And, those same techs probably work some overtime in the days after the peak, ensuring that any minor work that was delayed for a couple of weeks is made up.
But, it's probably a safe bet that each of the major airlines has a few extra aircraft, that get rotated into and out of active status.
I'm sure that small airlines aren't capable of doing that. If they only own five aircraft, and those aircraft are filled to 80% or more of capacity most of the year, then they don't figure into this equation at all. An airline that operates fifty aircraft may have an extra craft that fills in when necessary. I really don't know where the breaking point would be, from an economic point of view.
Since the name Torvalds became internationally known, people have been bashing Linux as a CLI operating system. 85% and more of the population of earth has refused to understand what happens under the hood. It's safe to say that 75% of earth's population has never opened a terminal to perform maintenance on their system, or to perform tasks like connecting to a remote machine.
Within Linux, there has been a determined drive to provide GUI users with the tools necessary to maintain their systems. Ubuntu has lead that drive in recent years.
In point of fact, Linux has reached the point that administrators of single boxes and small networks can actually do a decent job with minimal use of the terminal. Not a good job, mind you, but a decent job. If those administrators are keeping good, reliable backups, they can totally wreck a system, and restore it, and convince less knowledgable people that they are Linux gurus.
From the point of view of all those unwashed masses, Linux has advanced beyond the CLI.
Hey - when I saw that I might head off a totally meaningless first post from AC, I rushed my post a little. Forgive me.;^)
Well said. Some of my other posts have indicated that somebody's late Christmas present is of little importance. You have driven that point home with your post.
Yes, I am a Christian. I'm not the imaginary Christian that everyone expects to turn the other cheek though. Distasteful as you might find it, some Christians are willing and able to stand up for themselves.
AC above, for instance, imagines that those militant atheists are standing up for his rights. Little does he understand that it was Christians who saw to it that the freedom of religion was enshrined into our constitution.
ROFLMAO - as a matter of fact, I AM a racist. No one is as good as my race. There is my family, and my wife's family, and our family. Everyone else are outsiders.
Ahhhh - BUT - I'm so damned good at my job, that I can get a job anytime at all. I don't have to kiss some fool's ass just because he thinks that working class people should kowtow to him.
Fuck all the managers and assorted crybabies who think they run the world. You should have done a tour in the military. Colonels and generals don't get shit done - it's the NCO or PO who actually makes things happen. The next time you decide that you have some goal to meet, climb down off your pedestal, and talk to the people who are actually going to do the job.
No, I'm not a good little capitalist. I'm the man that the capitalists need to ensure their money isn't just pissed away on meaningless dreams.
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand everything in it--almost:
Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me."
What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective; but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS, perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned.
MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring
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Google's dirty tactics include using and selling personal information on end users. They also include purchasing interesting and/or rival companies at fair prices, as opposed to just running rivals out of business. Google has some evil ways, but nothing to compare to Microsoft's history.
Apple has their pretty little walled garden, but they don't mess with the unwashed masses outside that garden. They work pretty aggressively to protect the stuff inside that garden, but they've never actively worked to undermine companies and OS's that stay well outside of that garden.
Microsoft, on the other hand, should have been broken up into multiple companies long ago when the government was accusing them of monopoly abuse. The behemoth has done a lot of harm in the computing world. It has done some good, but not nearly so much real good as some people think.
Personally, I still resent the AARD code that contributed to the collapse of DRDOS. DRDOS was superior to most other DOS operating systems in some ways - among others, it was the first to achieve 32 bit disk access. With a level playing field, I'm pretty certain that DRDOS would have remained in the game, and contributed much more to computer science. No one can possibly say where computing might be today, had Microsoft not worked hard to shut other players out of the field. Android may never have happened for instance - something much better may have been developed, and much sooner instead. Certainly, Linux would have advanced faster if there had been more active support from hardware vendors.
I share that sentiment. To bad that it's happening about 20 years later than it should have. I have no sympathy for struggling PC makers. All of the top dogs in the industry cooperated for a couple decades in feeding that behemoth known as Microsoft. They have been happily paying that Microsoft Tax, and passing the cost on to the end users. I would be perfectly happy to see some of those big dogs go bankrupt. Smaller companies that have struggled to supply alternate OS's and no-OS machines may finally get a well deserved break here.
Like yourself, I'll withhold judgement. When I'm ready to purchase new hardware, if I can buy good hardware and install Linux without a problem, I'll be quite happy. If it proves difficult to install Linux, I'll be less happy. My happiness will decrease with the amount of difficulty involved.
I can't say, because at that time I was only a driver. I had recently left the Navy, and my interests didn't include the boss's worries, expenses, and troubles. I do know that the tractor was old and nearly worn out, and that it had been passed down to the most junior driver in the fleet - me. The trailer was much newer, maybe only four or five years old.
I have furthered my education since then, but I never went back to learn the purchase cost of my ex-boss's trucks, or the lifetime cost efficiency of those trucks.
I will add a few details here though. The entire cab of that Cruiseliner was made of aluminum, whereas a lot of cabs today are built with a few metal members, and a lot of plastics. I helped to extract a driver from a wrecked Freightliner east of Atlanta one night, by simply kicking my way inside through the roof of the sleeper.
The frame rails were aluminum, and most of the crossmembers were aluminum as well. But, there was still quite a bit of steel in the engine hangers, transmission hangers, and axle mounts. The frame did have some stress points, at those hangers, that had been repaired multiple times. It seems that the particular alloy used in the frame developed stress fractures over time. It didn't appear that corrosion was the problem, it appeared to be just weak spots that might have been overcome with a different alloy, or possibly more metal in those areas. That said - I am not, and never was, a metal worker. If you had the opportunity to talk to one of the mechanics who kept a Cruiseliner running, he might tell you a different story.
What I can tell you is that the mechanics all liked that old Cruiseliner. They had a few trucks that they hated, for various reasons, but they all liked the Cruiseliner because it was relatively easy to work on, and to keep in good repair. Other shops may have reported different opinions.
This is why you maintain relations with former good drivers. Retirees, among others. People who have moved on to other occupations, but might be laid off during the winter months and/or Christmas season. Oddly enough, my employers were always able to bring in known, good drivers when they were needed. People you might call "casual labor", but were dependable. In some instances, those drivers were related to the management and staff. We never had to settle for kids who recently graduated from those jokes known as "driver academies".
Of course, many companies see no need to cultivate good relations with former employees, so those resources wouldn't be available.
Trucks? Far more war material was moved on bicycles than on trucks. Bicycles, backpacks, and those ubiquitous pole things across laborer's shoulders.
That same tactic is working against us in Afghanistan today. Look carefully. An entrenched political machine keeps us on the defensive, while the puppet we support tries to pretend that he is in charge. The only part of the Vietnamese equation that is missing from Afghanistan, is China. Pakistan makes a piss poor imitation of China, but Pakistan does fulfill some of the functions of China in the Vietnam war.
You sound like a young person, with that post. Maybe not though - some older people think in a similar way.
The real reasons we lost in Vietnam?
1. Popular support. We were, after all, the invaders. Few people like the idea of foreign invaders coming into their country, and trying to run things.
2. Foreign support. All those war material coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail were supplied by China. Or routed through China.
3. S. Vietnam Government corruption. Out of every ten dollars value pumped into Vietnam, corruption ate six dollars. Food, weapons, ammo - everything just fell into a vast black hole. And, that corruption helped to defeat us by feeding that popular support, and the foreign support of the North.
That defensiveness you mention? Yeah, it played a part, but it really wasn't a major part. And, the reason for THAT is not exactly what you might think, either. Basically, we agreed to play a defensive game in Vietnam, because we allowed ourselves to be coerced by China. The bombing of Hanoi, for instance. China TOLD US that if we bombed downtown Hanoi, then the Chinese army would come in and kick our asses. Our politicians didn't want to face China, so they caved. China also TOLD US that if we bombed any staging areas on their side of the border, then their army would come in and kick our asses. Again, our politicians believed them. There were numerous, lesser ultimatums issued by the Chinese leadership, most of which our politicians just obeyed. Not all, but most.
It can be argued - convincingly argued if you work hard enough - that we lost the war due to politics. Our own politicians failed to support our troops properly. But, even if you fail to make that argument very convincing, the reasons stated above will suffice.
When once asked what his one wish would be, "Chesty" Puller responded, "I would like to see the face of every Marine I served with one last time."
The streets of Heaven are supposed to be guarded by United States Marines. Maybe the general has seen his Marines again.
You do make a helluva good point. But, we also saw what happened in Vietnam. I'm not old enough to be a Viet Vet, so I base all my thinking on hearsay and history books. But, the Ho Chi Minh trail proved quite effective for the opposition. They moved personnel, vehicles, weapons and equipment, food, and other material pretty freely. Ultimately, we lost that one.
Well, hey - realistically speaking, how many organizations do you think are capable of facing a million man army, which can draft a half billion man army on short notice? Come on, now, there aren't anywhere near a million squids and jarheads in the Department of the Navy.
On the plus side - when they've got our asses surrounded, we don't need to worry to much about target acquisition! "Target rich environments" do have their benefits!
Fewer and fewer cars are capable of hauling a trailer. The wife has a Taurus that we wanted to put a trailer hitch on. Almost no one sells a proper hitch that will fit up properly. When I finally found two sources, the hitch was a class 1 hitch, with a maximum tongue weight of 200 pounds. I could, of course, make my own hitch - but the way liability works these days, I'm not sure I want to mess with it. Better to beg, borrow, or steal a pickup when I really need to move stuff.
Well, I need a truck. I ride a motorcycle most of the time. Rarely, I drive a car. But, sometimes I need a truck. That's when I call my son, and say, "Son, I need your truck tomorrow for a few hours." If he actually has plans that require the use of the truck that day, we just beat each other up, call each other names, and raise a fuss until the wife interferes. Alright, I exaggerate a little. The kid seldom uses his truck, because he likes the 50+ mpg he gets on his own motorcycles. That damned Ford pickup only gets a little over 20 mpg, and neither one of us likes to pay for all that gasoline.
The weight savings were not small.
Gross weight for a class 8 tractor trailer combination on US highways is 80,000 pounds. Guys who had all steel tractors and trailers were sometimes unable to load 43,000 pounds. Most were able to load 45,000 pounds. Just about no one was able to load 47,000 pounds, and still be legal. With my aluminum Mack and aluminum Cobra trailer, I routinely loaded 51,000 pounds, and scaled it legally.
Since I got paid a percentage of what the load grossed, you can see that I was effectively being paid for ten loads, with the same time and effort that other drivers were being paid for nine.
http://www.bigmacktrucks.com/index.php?/topic/830-what-models-were-built-hayward/
Double that 20 years. I drove an aluminum truck way back in 1984, which was already old and nearly worn out when I got it. I never investigated why the aluminum trucks were dropped - it probably had something to do with the company downsizing, and pulling back to Pennsylvania. During such an operation, I suppose a corporation is going to drop those parts of it's business that are perceived as "risky".
Google has plenty of images for those who are curious: https://www.google.com/search?q=mack+cruiseliner+aluminum+frame&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=4YG9UqyAAai52wWf64GIDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=937
Where does hate come in to this equation? When and where did I imply that I hate anyone? Are we speaking the same language?
If you walk out into the street of your home town, and find a pack of wild dogs attacking a child, what do you do? I would destroy the dogs. Not because I hate the dogs, but because the child has more value to society than any number of dogs. Hate? Being filled with hatred of dogs would impede your ability to deal with the threat to the child. Hatred cripples you.
I just want to see the threat that those militant atheists represent to be ended. They have no right to impose their world view on other people. Nor do Christians have a right to impose their world view on other people. It's written into our consitution, and as I've already mentioned, it was written there by a group of men who were mostly Christian.
I understand, very well.
IMHO, executives should all be veterans. The army has a reputation for having the finest motor pool mechanics and drivers in the world. They have a maintenance schedule and an operator's checklist that is pretty amazing. Taking shortcuts can and will cost a man his career. The Navy is similar. Ships are never at "peace" - the ocean is the enemy, if all other enemies have given up. We do our PM's religiously, and gundecking the logs will cost an otherwise good sailor his career. I have no experience with aviation, but aviators certainly face the same risks we do at sea. The Marines, of course, are part of the Department of the Navy, and their discipline is far more rigorous than us mere sailors. PM'ing equipment is just as much a religious experience for them, as it is for us.
We all understand that our lives depend on the condition and the readiness of our tools and equipment.
If executives of companies both large and small had the same sense of dependence on their tools and equipment, their businesses would be so much better - we wouldn't even recognize those businesses.
I worked for Brown and Root before they sold out to Kellog. They ran their business quite like the military does. Cranes, trucks, whatever, all were PM'd to a pretty rigorous schedule. B&R readily wrote equipment off when it became expensive, but they quickly replaced that equipment, then rigorously maintenanced that equipment.
We simply don't see a lot of that today.
The company that I work for now scrimps and cheats on maintenance. Our PM schedule is about half, or maybe less, what the books call for. The attitude that leads to such practices has run the company into the ground. Right now, the company is up for sale, and none of us knows if we will have jobs next month.
So much of management in this country is simply incompetent. All they can see is the very short term return on investment.
Ehhh - I guess the best thing to do is smile. Things are going to get worse.
There really is a simple solution to this hazard. Modify existing building codes to require that a cutoff switch be installed right next to the meter. Those solar panels will simply be routed through a knife-blade disconnect on an exterior wall, accessible by emergency personnel. I can't understand why the disconnect would be located on the roof - your meter isn't on the roof after all. Any home that routes power directly from the solar power panels into the house would then be out of compliance with building codes, and the owners would be liable for modifying their homes to comply.
"When governments unethically and immorally, but legally force the turnover of keys that won't change."
FTFY
I have a better idea. The police forces and security services should do actual police work, instead of eavesdropping on the entire population. Detective work and investigations are labor intensive, but the US constitution demands that such labor be used instead of just spying on everyone.
I'm not so very sure of that. We have seasonal peaks in holiday travel. The airlines manage to move amazing numbers of people during the holidays. What happens to all those aircraft during off-peak seasons, when we can be quite sure they are not full of travelers?
Granted, maintenance schedules can be manipulated to some extent. In the run up to the holidays, aviation techs are probably working overtime to ensure that the entire fleet is in the air during the most critical days. And, those same techs probably work some overtime in the days after the peak, ensuring that any minor work that was delayed for a couple of weeks is made up.
But, it's probably a safe bet that each of the major airlines has a few extra aircraft, that get rotated into and out of active status.
I'm sure that small airlines aren't capable of doing that. If they only own five aircraft, and those aircraft are filled to 80% or more of capacity most of the year, then they don't figure into this equation at all. An airline that operates fifty aircraft may have an extra craft that fills in when necessary. I really don't know where the breaking point would be, from an economic point of view.
Alright, I'll clarify my intent with that post.
Since the name Torvalds became internationally known, people have been bashing Linux as a CLI operating system. 85% and more of the population of earth has refused to understand what happens under the hood. It's safe to say that 75% of earth's population has never opened a terminal to perform maintenance on their system, or to perform tasks like connecting to a remote machine.
Within Linux, there has been a determined drive to provide GUI users with the tools necessary to maintain their systems. Ubuntu has lead that drive in recent years.
In point of fact, Linux has reached the point that administrators of single boxes and small networks can actually do a decent job with minimal use of the terminal. Not a good job, mind you, but a decent job. If those administrators are keeping good, reliable backups, they can totally wreck a system, and restore it, and convince less knowledgable people that they are Linux gurus.
From the point of view of all those unwashed masses, Linux has advanced beyond the CLI.
Hey - when I saw that I might head off a totally meaningless first post from AC, I rushed my post a little. Forgive me. ;^)
Well said. Some of my other posts have indicated that somebody's late Christmas present is of little importance. You have driven that point home with your post.
Yes, I am a Christian. I'm not the imaginary Christian that everyone expects to turn the other cheek though. Distasteful as you might find it, some Christians are willing and able to stand up for themselves.
AC above, for instance, imagines that those militant atheists are standing up for his rights. Little does he understand that it was Christians who saw to it that the freedom of religion was enshrined into our constitution.
ROFLMAO - as a matter of fact, I AM a racist. No one is as good as my race. There is my family, and my wife's family, and our family. Everyone else are outsiders.
Yep, I see what you did there. I say, fekemall!
Ahhhh - BUT - I'm so damned good at my job, that I can get a job anytime at all. I don't have to kiss some fool's ass just because he thinks that working class people should kowtow to him.
Fuck all the managers and assorted crybabies who think they run the world. You should have done a tour in the military. Colonels and generals don't get shit done - it's the NCO or PO who actually makes things happen. The next time you decide that you have some goal to meet, climb down off your pedestal, and talk to the people who are actually going to do the job.
No, I'm not a good little capitalist. I'm the man that the capitalists need to ensure their money isn't just pissed away on meaningless dreams.
Merry Christmas anyway, dipstick.
In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand everything in it--almost:
Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me."
What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective; but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS, perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned.
MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring