AD *works*. It's easy. It integrates seamlessly with Windows. The management tools are good, and easy to use.
Like ALL Microsoft products and technologies... Active Directory is pretty easy to get into a minimally working state if you like all the defaults. And isn't too difficult to get it to do some of the lowest-common-denominator simple tasks that everybody wants, like single sign-on, roaming profiles, and a few policy restrictions.
AD isn't really "easy" unless your time is worthless, and you don't mind insane problems cropping up. You're going to be browsing around context menus, sub-sub-sub-sub options with utterly insane names and absolutely no comprehensible scheme, to find the one option you want to toggle.
God help you if you want some slight variation of how Microsoft thinks it should work, because you've just gone from "easy" to "practically impossible" and are going to be delving into the darkest realms of the registry, and deeply hidden configuration menus and files.
I know plenty of companies who think Windows servers are easy, and work well... Plenty of them have hired me to get them to stop "working" the way they do.
Whatever time and money you think you've saved by going with Windows servers goes out the window the first time you try to copy a very big file to a Windows Share, only to have it fail at 2GBs... Yes, Windows quietly decides your gigabit LAN is a dial-up link, and decides to go for the slow, high-delay, 2GB filesize limit variation of SMB. Samba never does.
The current LDAP/Kerberos/Samba situation is a fucking MESS. It's unusable in a production environment. It's hard to manage. It doesn't have GROUP POLICIES, for Christ's sake.
I have no idea what you are talking about. You can manage group policies on a Samba server with some of Microsoft's own management tools (ie. from a Windows workstation that logs-on to the domain).
And once you've got Samba setup, it will silently work, exactly how you configure it to do so, forever. A Windows server will require CONSTANT attention, as weird one-off bugs continually spring up, performance suddenly drops dramatically one day, and slowly starts recovering over the next week, but never quite gets back where it was. Never mind the standard Windows practice of quietly disabling/corrupting one driver or another for no particular reason. And did I mention the utterly useless error messages, and logs with lots of useless information and NONE of the HELPFUL information you could possibly use.
THAT is why people are locked into MS products. They simply work better than the alternatives in many cases, especially on a corporate LAN.
No. They just sound better when you're reading the spec sheet, and trying to get a basic server minimally working...
The fact that Windows is popular with numerous companies is actually a sad commentary on corporations, who go for the quick way to save a buck, and ignore the vast amount Microsoft costs them over time.
It's getting to the point where the only solution is going to be dumping data to more HDDs
What's wrong with that? Data storage is data storage...
Just because tape is the old man, that once upon a time was the end-all solution for backing up everything, doesn't mean there's really any benefit to it, today.
Tape backups are more of a legacy system that just kept on being used and minimally improved as technology progressed. The writing has been on the wall for well over a decade.
Reading at top speed, it would take almost 7 hours to pull all the data off this drive,
Yes, but that makes it increasingly likely that only a fraction of the data on the disk actually changes between backups. And with the increasing througput, incremental backups are quite fast, as is an rsync...
I don't have the time to refute you point by point, so I'll give you the short version:
The codecs from the early 90s were nearly perfectly developed. MPEG-2 (and MPEG-1)video and audio come startlingly close to the theoretical limits of perceptually-perfect lossy coding.
Work on extremely high-quality lossless codecs has completely and totally stopped. MPEG-2 is THE standard, and there's no reason it shouldn't remain so until we have a radical breakthrough in our understanding of human audio/visual perception.
All codec development since then has focused on low-bitrate encoding... Something that, while it won't ever look identical to the original, does look similar enough that you won't notice without direct comparison, and all the encoding artifacts are subtle and non-obvious. It is only here than any codec claims to be significantly superior to MPEG-2, for audio or video.
And there is no man-hour multiplying factor in all the different MPEG-2 codecs developed. If I decide to write an MPEG-2 encoder, it's not going to do me a damn bit of good that thousands of others have done the same over the years. Open source MPEG codecs like Xvid and FFmpeg quickly developed into quite respectable codecs, and all the small improvements over the years have only resulted in very minor gains.
Theora has had innumerable man-years of development work done on it, an it still is what it is. Before Xiph got a hold of it, On2 was hacking away at it as their VP3 codec, and they continue to develop their VP7 codec, so there's been plenty of work going on in that direction. Theora, like any other open source encoder, has the potential for minor tweaks and improvements here and there, but it's never going to compete with a good MPEG-4 ASP implementation (ala FFmpeg or Xvid), let alone H.264/MPEG AVC. And frankly, I'd say that, at the pace Theora development has been going, we'll be through the next two generations of lossy video codecs before the Xiph.org team gets Theora competitive, today. They are several years behind their own, already slow, projections. I don't think a few bucks from Mozilla is going to make a notable difference. Xiph seems to be a big bureaucracy, where just a couple dedicated and skilled codec developers are needed, instead.
And the use of Theora is not free. MPEG-2 decoding is extremely fast on modern CPUs. A 300MHz system can play DVDs. With Theora, the CPU requirements are exceptionally high for similar bitrates and quality levels, and for all the wasted CPU time encoding and decoding, you get worse quality.
You're welcome to ignore me if you wish, but I've got to ask... What ARE the benefits of Speex?
In all my tests, I haven't found it to sound any better than, eg. toolame (MP2) at identical bitrates and sample rates. Of course, MP2 has been used at those datarates for telecommunications for a decade and a half now.
Similiarly, HE-AAC substantially outperforms Speex, and most everything else, at very low bitrates, hence its inclusion in the 3G standard.
Why is Speex getting hyped, what are it's strong suits that I haven't noticed?
Re:Batteries of any kind don't work well in the co
on
Progress On Electric Cars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Even lead acid batteries struggle in the cold.
No, they don't.
Your only experience with lead-acid batteries is trying to start your car in the morning... yet you consider yourself an expert, and feel qualified to make baseless assertions.
Lead-acid batteries are used in UPSes in open-air telcom buildings, even in the coldest areas.
The fact that cars have trouble starting in the cold is only half due to battery voltages falling in the cold weather... The thickening of oil, and shrinking of cylinders has just as much to do with it. And even then, if you had a battery twice as large, you'd never even notice. It's just that the cheapest (therefore, smallest) battery that will work is used in cars, so you don't have much of a margin to work with in adverse conditions.
An electric car won't have anything like the duty cycle of current car batteries. They will draw relatively small amounts of power when you start moving, and continue the draw as you continue to move. Since the draw is only 1/1000th of the battery capacity, no matter how low the temperature, they will allow the vehicle to operate.
And once the vehicle is in operation, the continual discharge of the batteries will generate a substantial amount of heat, internally. The sheer mass of the lead-acid batteries will keep the normally generated heat from easily escaping, provided they aren't mounted externally, directly in normal airflow.
Getting RID of the heat generated is the real problem with batteries, and that's a manageable issue as well.
XScale was likely chopped because it was growing up to threaten the desktop market.
Bull. XScale withered on the vine because, when Intel seized the StrongARM architecture from DEC, they took it in the same direction as the Pentium 4... They ramped up clock speed, with very little performance to show for it, and at the expensive of extremely high power consumption (for an embedded chip).
But hey, they got big numbers for their marketing department, and just assumed embedded system designers were just a stupid as the average Joe buying a PC. The strategy didn't work, no other manufacturer was able to push the performance envelope of ARM CPUs up to modern performance, and even companies with many years of legacy on StrongARM/XBurt jumped ship to MIPS, PowerPC, etc., as soon as they reasonably could.
There is no conspiracy to it. ARM has as much chance of replacing x86 as does MIPS, PowerPC, SuperH, etc., and Intel doesn't have any control over the development of those. They would have been better served to corner the ARM market (and MIPS, and PowerPC) if that was, in fact, the issue. Instead, they bowed out, and left a vacuum for other developers to step into.
There is a significant niche for the Geode between the Atom (too hot, too power hungry) and things like the Dragon Ball and mips (not enough power).
You're wrong in a couple of ways.
There is no "Geode". GX and NX are completely different products. The former is very low power but with very low performance. The latter is rather high performance, but competes (well) against VIA's MiniITX CPUs and, really, any lower-power line of x86 CPUs like Intel's ULVs, and AMD's own mobile products.
I assume you are referring to the GX, refering to low power, however, Geode GXs certainly don't outperform MIPS. Superscalar versions of MIPS perform extremely well. The 2nd and 3rd generations of the Chinese "Loongson" CPU (Dragon chip) in particular do quite well, clock well over 1GHz these days, and still operate at very low power levels (4 watts). http://jcste.ict.ac.cn/paper/hww_071.pdf Variations of previous generation MIPS/Dragon chips are available dirt cheap from Chinese suppliers at respectable speeds, with added SIMD instructions for multimedia, under brands like XBurst.
And MIPS isn't the only option for high performance in embedded systems. PowerPC chips own the high-performance embedded space right now, and Geode chips haven't been making a lot of headway against them. Freescale even offers dual-core PowerPC chips clocked near 1.5GHz.
I was impressed with Geode some years ago, but now it looks pretty old and mediocre... fitting-in just about nowhere. Not common enough to be a viable competitor to VIA or Intel, and not modern enough to really compete on performance per watt, even with their own mobile CPUs (underclocked). Whatever the reasons, Geodes simply aren't catching on... anywhere.
One of my biggest beefs with ext3 in the data center is the required fsck periodically.
The Ext guys need to take a lesson from UFS2 (FreeBSD 5.0, circa 2003) and perform the fsck in the background, at low priority, while the system is up and fully functional.
I hear Btrfs is going to eventually get similar capabilities, so maybe the answer is to just keep waiting.
Linux will NEVER be a viable home user desktop replacement until you can go to Wal-Mart and buy software for it.
That's a bit like saying electricity will never be viable for home owners until you can go to the general store and buy a wagon load of electrons for it...
You're applying an antiquated model to the modern world.
When you need to make PDFs on Linux, you don't need to drive to WalMart to buy software to do it. The fact that you need to do so for Windows is a limitation, NOT a benefit.
1: Multimedia. There are so many back-ends to choose from, each with problems of their own. The associated front-ends are even worse both in functionality and bloat.
MPlayer plays everything, everywhere, always. It has great keyboard control built-in. SMPlayer (as the GUI front-end to MPlayer) is rather full-featured, but small.
2: Polish. It seams that by default, Linux distros are less polished by default. In fact, I can say they are ugly by default. This does not help.
Only Apple thinks the looks of the OS matters. Windows is as ugly as it gets. People buy flowers based on looks, not software.
3: Bloat. KDE is wonderful but suffers from bloat. GNOME is kind of OK, but it's interface looks ancient and lacks the functionality of modern systems.
The bloated desktop environments are bloated...? I'm shocked!
And the 500 other window managers? They work great. Blackbox, XFce, Afterstep, etc. They all work great.
It's not just the president... That's simply the only one people's attention spans are long enough to watch. How about the hundreds of other elected officials voted in and out every few years?
It's not like you're writing a new constitution or moving to a fairer form of democracy though.
The constitution is a rather short document. It has been changed and amended several times. It's simply been several years since anyone has seen any possible ways to improve it, including making it more fair.
That would be a real revolution and, I feel, would only come about with great loss of life.
That simply proves you are unable to see the forest from the trees...
A revolution in a healthy democracy is utterly redundant. Once you're able to assemble a large enough group dedicated to any kind of uprising, you have more political power than you need instead affect democratic change...
If you think our current democracy is unfair, I expect, instead, that you're upset that the will of the majority is, in fact, being obeyed, and your (minority) views are not.
Whether you love or hate the GPL, it's the reason that so many contributed so much so fast so early in Linux's development.
Not true in the slightest. The GPL wasn't even on the radar. People were contributing before Linus chose to use the GPL, and there was no magical jump in contributors when he made the change.
It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.
If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD. It's a mere fluke of fate that Linux took off first, and gained critical mass quickly.
Yes, Sun CAN be blamed for BSD... Bill Joy in particular. Just look it up.
And yes, Sun CAN be blamed for failing miserably to notice that x86 hardware was quickly catching up in features, while staying vastly lower in price. What kind of a company are you if you don't notice your competitor selling cheap knock-offs is quickly matching your own products at a fraction of the price?
Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc
NFS was a long time ago. OpenOffice was bloated from the start, and continues to suffer through complete lack of direction. It's almost a shame OpenOffice came out when it did, and by and large hobbled the development of the vastly lighter-weight Office apps. AbiWord & Gnumeric, KOffice, etc. Java was vastly overdue and almost completely reverse engineered before Sun finally released something. Sun most certainly didn't give us GNOME. In fact it was much better all-around before Sun adopted it, though that may be coincidental.
I imagine in the future we will end up with a revolution and lots of people will die, that's typically what happens when the ruler is doing something the majority of the populace doesn't agree with.
We have a revolution every 4 years. Very few people need die in the process.
The ruler of yesterday is the ruler no longer. What would be the point of a revolution today, when most of the ones who wronged you are gone, and have no more power than you?
There are plenty of knowledgeable sales people out there. Unfortunately, attitudes like yours make it okay to hire only minimum wage slaves that know nothing. In which case, they are COMPLETELY unnecessary baggage, filling space, raising prices, and annoying customers. They should be eliminated, in favor of the Costco model, where the only employees are cashiers and forklift operators.
Sadly, they've only gone halfway, firing those who do know something about their products (but expect decent wages for their effort), and keeping idiots on.
There are plenty of exceptions. I know several retailers with knowledgeable sales staff. For the big-box chains, I'd say Sears is the best (or perhaps least-awful) in most regards.
Hundreds of studies have proven that they do. Sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "NO, NO, NO" is not a valid argument. Where's the evidences that supports your argument? It's all about the truthiness, right?
Those living in the liberal state will go first.
Not at all. Plenty of "conservative" states are having serious budget problems. California is struggling only because of the lingering effects of an absolutely horrible Governor.
And there really isn't such thing as a conservative state. They ALL take as much federal money as they can get. They just happen to have populations small enough that they don't need to take much more from the locals to get the basics done. Alaska is simply an extreme example.
I generally know what I want or can read the back of the package
I want service people who know more about the products than what's printed on the back...
Nothing technical. Just the kinds of thinks you'd know if ever having used it, briefly.
How do YOU shop for portable CD players? Battery life varies by more than an order of magnitude, and quickly overshadows the sale price of the unit. And manufactures don't dare list it on the back of the package.
If you say you check online, I'll have to ask why you go into the store after that, rather than also checking prices online, and buying from a cheaper supplier.
You assume there are several otherwise very good states out there which just happen to be too liberal. In fact, they're only better than the rest BECAUSE they are liberal. Those entitlements have been shown to create far more wealth than they cost, and generally make the place better for everyone.
Attempting to find a good state, that doesn't spend as much, is like trying to find a way to swim, without getting wet...
Sure you can (and I do) buy many things online but obviously you can't get anything same-day
Places other than Best Buy that you can get anything same-day:
Target, K-Mart, Sears, Wal-Mart, Frys.
and bulky items such as TVs or appliances aren't always practical (I can't imagine trying to return a defective TV by freight).
Sears beats the hell out of Best Buy for TVs and appliances, both on price and on quality, every single time I've looked. TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners, etc. And in the appliance space, you've got the behemoths: Home Depot & Lowes et al., in adition to the above listed companies.
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Like ALL Microsoft products and technologies... Active Directory is pretty easy to get into a minimally working state if you like all the defaults. And isn't too difficult to get it to do some of the lowest-common-denominator simple tasks that everybody wants, like single sign-on, roaming profiles, and a few policy restrictions.
AD isn't really "easy" unless your time is worthless, and you don't mind insane problems cropping up. You're going to be browsing around context menus, sub-sub-sub-sub options with utterly insane names and absolutely no comprehensible scheme, to find the one option you want to toggle.
God help you if you want some slight variation of how Microsoft thinks it should work, because you've just gone from "easy" to "practically impossible" and are going to be delving into the darkest realms of the registry, and deeply hidden configuration menus and files.
I know plenty of companies who think Windows servers are easy, and work well... Plenty of them have hired me to get them to stop "working" the way they do.
Whatever time and money you think you've saved by going with Windows servers goes out the window the first time you try to copy a very big file to a Windows Share, only to have it fail at 2GBs... Yes, Windows quietly decides your gigabit LAN is a dial-up link, and decides to go for the slow, high-delay, 2GB filesize limit variation of SMB. Samba never does.
I have no idea what you are talking about. You can manage group policies on a Samba server with some of Microsoft's own management tools (ie. from a Windows workstation that logs-on to the domain).
And once you've got Samba setup, it will silently work, exactly how you configure it to do so, forever. A Windows server will require CONSTANT attention, as weird one-off bugs continually spring up, performance suddenly drops dramatically one day, and slowly starts recovering over the next week, but never quite gets back where it was. Never mind the standard Windows practice of quietly disabling/corrupting one driver or another for no particular reason. And did I mention the utterly useless error messages, and logs with lots of useless information and NONE of the HELPFUL information you could possibly use.
No. They just sound better when you're reading the spec sheet, and trying to get a basic server minimally working...
The fact that Windows is popular with numerous companies is actually a sad commentary on corporations, who go for the quick way to save a buck, and ignore the vast amount Microsoft costs them over time.
Algorithmic delay for AAC-LC is just a 20ms, and MP2 is just 35 ms.
Meanwhile, codecs built for VoIP are well in excess of that. G.723.1 for instance has minimum delay of 37.5 ms.
One-way delays below 120ms are said to be excellent by most, assuming decent echo cancellation.
What's wrong with that? Data storage is data storage...
Just because tape is the old man, that once upon a time was the end-all solution for backing up everything, doesn't mean there's really any benefit to it, today.
Tape backups are more of a legacy system that just kept on being used and minimally improved as technology progressed. The writing has been on the wall for well over a decade.
Yes, but that makes it increasingly likely that only a fraction of the data on the disk actually changes between backups. And with the increasing througput, incremental backups are quite fast, as is an rsync...
No you aren't. Fortunately, I am.
I don't have the time to refute you point by point, so I'll give you the short version:
The codecs from the early 90s were nearly perfectly developed. MPEG-2 (and MPEG-1)video and audio come startlingly close to the theoretical limits of perceptually-perfect lossy coding.
Work on extremely high-quality lossless codecs has completely and totally stopped. MPEG-2 is THE standard, and there's no reason it shouldn't remain so until we have a radical breakthrough in our understanding of human audio/visual perception.
All codec development since then has focused on low-bitrate encoding... Something that, while it won't ever look identical to the original, does look similar enough that you won't notice without direct comparison, and all the encoding artifacts are subtle and non-obvious. It is only here than any codec claims to be significantly superior to MPEG-2, for audio or video.
And there is no man-hour multiplying factor in all the different MPEG-2 codecs developed. If I decide to write an MPEG-2 encoder, it's not going to do me a damn bit of good that thousands of others have done the same over the years. Open source MPEG codecs like Xvid and FFmpeg quickly developed into quite respectable codecs, and all the small improvements over the years have only resulted in very minor gains.
Theora has had innumerable man-years of development work done on it, an it still is what it is. Before Xiph got a hold of it, On2 was hacking away at it as their VP3 codec, and they continue to develop their VP7 codec, so there's been plenty of work going on in that direction. Theora, like any other open source encoder, has the potential for minor tweaks and improvements here and there, but it's never going to compete with a good MPEG-4 ASP implementation (ala FFmpeg or Xvid), let alone H.264/MPEG AVC. And frankly, I'd say that, at the pace Theora development has been going, we'll be through the next two generations of lossy video codecs before the Xiph.org team gets Theora competitive, today. They are several years behind their own, already slow, projections. I don't think a few bucks from Mozilla is going to make a notable difference. Xiph seems to be a big bureaucracy, where just a couple dedicated and skilled codec developers are needed, instead.
And the use of Theora is not free. MPEG-2 decoding is extremely fast on modern CPUs. A 300MHz system can play DVDs. With Theora, the CPU requirements are exceptionally high for similar bitrates and quality levels, and for all the wasted CPU time encoding and decoding, you get worse quality.
You're welcome to ignore me if you wish, but I've got to ask... What ARE the benefits of Speex?
In all my tests, I haven't found it to sound any better than, eg. toolame (MP2) at identical bitrates and sample rates. Of course, MP2 has been used at those datarates for telecommunications for a decade and a half now.
Similiarly, HE-AAC substantially outperforms Speex, and most everything else, at very low bitrates, hence its inclusion in the 3G standard.
Why is Speex getting hyped, what are it's strong suits that I haven't noticed?
No, they don't.
Your only experience with lead-acid batteries is trying to start your car in the morning... yet you consider yourself an expert, and feel qualified to make baseless assertions.
Lead-acid batteries are used in UPSes in open-air telcom buildings, even in the coldest areas.
The fact that cars have trouble starting in the cold is only half due to battery voltages falling in the cold weather... The thickening of oil, and shrinking of cylinders has just as much to do with it. And even then, if you had a battery twice as large, you'd never even notice. It's just that the cheapest (therefore, smallest) battery that will work is used in cars, so you don't have much of a margin to work with in adverse conditions.
An electric car won't have anything like the duty cycle of current car batteries. They will draw relatively small amounts of power when you start moving, and continue the draw as you continue to move. Since the draw is only 1/1000th of the battery capacity, no matter how low the temperature, they will allow the vehicle to operate.
And once the vehicle is in operation, the continual discharge of the batteries will generate a substantial amount of heat, internally. The sheer mass of the lead-acid batteries will keep the normally generated heat from easily escaping, provided they aren't mounted externally, directly in normal airflow.
Getting RID of the heat generated is the real problem with batteries, and that's a manageable issue as well.
Bull. XScale withered on the vine because, when Intel seized the StrongARM architecture from DEC, they took it in the same direction as the Pentium 4... They ramped up clock speed, with very little performance to show for it, and at the expensive of extremely high power consumption (for an embedded chip).
But hey, they got big numbers for their marketing department, and just assumed embedded system designers were just a stupid as the average Joe buying a PC. The strategy didn't work, no other manufacturer was able to push the performance envelope of ARM CPUs up to modern performance, and even companies with many years of legacy on StrongARM/XBurt jumped ship to MIPS, PowerPC, etc., as soon as they reasonably could.
There is no conspiracy to it. ARM has as much chance of replacing x86 as does MIPS, PowerPC, SuperH, etc., and Intel doesn't have any control over the development of those. They would have been better served to corner the ARM market (and MIPS, and PowerPC) if that was, in fact, the issue. Instead, they bowed out, and left a vacuum for other developers to step into.
You're wrong in a couple of ways.
There is no "Geode". GX and NX are completely different products. The former is very low power but with very low performance. The latter is rather high performance, but competes (well) against VIA's MiniITX CPUs and, really, any lower-power line of x86 CPUs like Intel's ULVs, and AMD's own mobile products.
I assume you are referring to the GX, refering to low power, however, Geode GXs certainly don't outperform MIPS. Superscalar versions of MIPS perform extremely well. The 2nd and 3rd generations of the Chinese "Loongson" CPU (Dragon chip) in particular do quite well, clock well over 1GHz these days, and still operate at very low power levels (4 watts). http://jcste.ict.ac.cn/paper/hww_071.pdf Variations of previous generation MIPS/Dragon chips are available dirt cheap from Chinese suppliers at respectable speeds, with added SIMD instructions for multimedia, under brands like XBurst.
And MIPS isn't the only option for high performance in embedded systems. PowerPC chips own the high-performance embedded space right now, and Geode chips haven't been making a lot of headway against them. Freescale even offers dual-core PowerPC chips clocked near 1.5GHz.
I was impressed with Geode some years ago, but now it looks pretty old and mediocre... fitting-in just about nowhere. Not common enough to be a viable competitor to VIA or Intel, and not modern enough to really compete on performance per watt, even with their own mobile CPUs (underclocked). Whatever the reasons, Geodes simply aren't catching on... anywhere.
It has already been done... It's called Citizendium.
The Ext guys need to take a lesson from UFS2 (FreeBSD 5.0, circa 2003) and perform the fsck in the background, at low priority, while the system is up and fully functional.
I hear Btrfs is going to eventually get similar capabilities, so maybe the answer is to just keep waiting.
That's a bit like saying electricity will never be viable for home owners until you can go to the general store and buy a wagon load of electrons for it...
You're applying an antiquated model to the modern world.
When you need to make PDFs on Linux, you don't need to drive to WalMart to buy software to do it. The fact that you need to do so for Windows is a limitation, NOT a benefit.
MPlayer plays everything, everywhere, always. It has great keyboard control built-in. SMPlayer (as the GUI front-end to MPlayer) is rather full-featured, but small.
Only Apple thinks the looks of the OS matters. Windows is as ugly as it gets. People buy flowers based on looks, not software.
The bloated desktop environments are bloated...? I'm shocked!
And the 500 other window managers? They work great. Blackbox, XFce, Afterstep, etc. They all work great.
It's not just the president... That's simply the only one people's attention spans are long enough to watch. How about the hundreds of other elected officials voted in and out every few years?
The constitution is a rather short document. It has been changed and amended several times. It's simply been several years since anyone has seen any possible ways to improve it, including making it more fair.
That simply proves you are unable to see the forest from the trees...
A revolution in a healthy democracy is utterly redundant. Once you're able to assemble a large enough group dedicated to any kind of uprising, you have more political power than you need instead affect democratic change...
If you think our current democracy is unfair, I expect, instead, that you're upset that the will of the majority is, in fact, being obeyed, and your (minority) views are not.
Not true in the slightest. The GPL wasn't even on the radar. People were contributing before Linus chose to use the GPL, and there was no magical jump in contributors when he made the change.
If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD. It's a mere fluke of fate that Linux took off first, and gained critical mass quickly.
Yes, Sun CAN be blamed for BSD... Bill Joy in particular. Just look it up.
And yes, Sun CAN be blamed for failing miserably to notice that x86 hardware was quickly catching up in features, while staying vastly lower in price. What kind of a company are you if you don't notice your competitor selling cheap knock-offs is quickly matching your own products at a fraction of the price?
NFS was a long time ago.
OpenOffice was bloated from the start, and continues to suffer through complete lack of direction. It's almost a shame OpenOffice came out when it did, and by and large hobbled the development of the vastly lighter-weight Office apps. AbiWord & Gnumeric, KOffice, etc.
Java was vastly overdue and almost completely reverse engineered before Sun finally released something.
Sun most certainly didn't give us GNOME. In fact it was much better all-around before Sun adopted it, though that may be coincidental.
We have a revolution every 4 years. Very few people need die in the process.
The ruler of yesterday is the ruler no longer. What would be the point of a revolution today, when most of the ones who wronged you are gone, and have no more power than you?
There are plenty of knowledgeable sales people out there. Unfortunately, attitudes like yours make it okay to hire only minimum wage slaves that know nothing. In which case, they are COMPLETELY unnecessary baggage, filling space, raising prices, and annoying customers. They should be eliminated, in favor of the Costco model, where the only employees are cashiers and forklift operators.
Sadly, they've only gone halfway, firing those who do know something about their products (but expect decent wages for their effort), and keeping idiots on.
There are plenty of exceptions. I know several retailers with knowledgeable sales staff. For the big-box chains, I'd say Sears is the best (or perhaps least-awful) in most regards.
Hundreds of studies have proven that they do. Sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "NO, NO, NO" is not a valid argument. Where's the evidences that supports your argument? It's all about the truthiness, right?
Not at all. Plenty of "conservative" states are having serious budget problems. California is struggling only because of the lingering effects of an absolutely horrible Governor.
And there really isn't such thing as a conservative state. They ALL take as much federal money as they can get. They just happen to have populations small enough that they don't need to take much more from the locals to get the basics done. Alaska is simply an extreme example.
I want service people who know more about the products than what's printed on the back...
Nothing technical. Just the kinds of thinks you'd know if ever having used it, briefly.
How do YOU shop for portable CD players? Battery life varies by more than an order of magnitude, and quickly overshadows the sale price of the unit. And manufactures don't dare list it on the back of the package.
If you say you check online, I'll have to ask why you go into the store after that, rather than also checking prices online, and buying from a cheaper supplier.
You assume there are several otherwise very good states out there which just happen to be too liberal. In fact, they're only better than the rest BECAUSE they are liberal. Those entitlements have been shown to create far more wealth than they cost, and generally make the place better for everyone.
Attempting to find a good state, that doesn't spend as much, is like trying to find a way to swim, without getting wet...
Evolution.
If the Universe refuses to follow Albert Frickin' Einstein's conceptions of how it should work, what chance do you think you've got?
Sorry Al, God throws dice all the time...
Places other than Best Buy that you can get anything same-day:
Target, K-Mart, Sears, Wal-Mart, Frys.
Sears beats the hell out of Best Buy for TVs and appliances, both on price and on quality, every single time I've looked. TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners, etc. And in the appliance space, you've got the behemoths: Home Depot & Lowes et al., in adition to the above listed companies.