I'm getting extremely sick of the assumption by marketers that I'm fair game everywhere I go and everything I do. I just recently watched 2 movies in the theatre and was appalled that after paying $8.50 per "adult" - which included my 14 year old sister (funny she's not "adult" enough to vote, drink, drive, etc...) - I had to sit through not only the still frame billboard type ads, but also 2 actual TV-type commercials before the previews and then finally the movie started. An entire 15 minutes of MY time wasted through this crap when I paid to see the MOVIE.
My point, I also would not pay for commercially sponsered radio, whether Satellite, broadcast, digital, Mother Goose, or whatever. If I pay for it - I don't want to see or hear a single advertisement.
The other factor you don't mention which does act as a gun to their head - tentative agreements (or some such term).
Basically, during the "negotiating" phase of a recording contract, the artist/band is taken out to a nice dinner complete with refreshing drinks. The label rep then scratches out on a napkin or small scrap of paper a tentative agreement to sign a contract. This agreement works out to "if we give you this, that, and the-other-thing - you, the artist/band, agree to sign the recording contract. The artist/band is then asked to sign the napkin/scrap paper and the rep will have those "evil lawyer types" write up the contract. All through this the rep is playing best buddy - who would never do anything against the artist/band's best interests.
Then the artist/band sobers up and receives the contract. They go to a lawyer (if at least a bit bright) and review it first. They find all sorts of ugly conditions in it, and tell the rep "no, can't do this". The rep "works" with them, changing a word here or there, but the essence of the contract terms remain unchanged (this is what you refer to as standardized among all labels). The artist/band says "sorry, I/we'll look elsewhere". The rep then pulls out that napkin/scrap paper and says "Sorry, you said if we gave you 'this', 'that', and 'the-other-thing', you'd sign with us. You didn't say we couldn't add conditions to them, just that you required them... and you signed a legally binding agreement.
The game goes around until the artist/band does one of two things. 1) Caves in and signs the deal. 2) Breaks up and doesn't pursue a contract with another label (essentially going out of business).
Most artists/bands at this point will opt for #1 and hope for the best. Often times, after the first record is completed and even if it does well, the artist/band will still break up and disappear once they realize how bad it really is. This is what generates all of those One-Hit-Wonders. They do a single record and file bankruptcy never again to record professionally.
So, you might say there's a bit of a gun held to their head. It's called a binding agreement even though it's just scribbling on a napkin.
You could then sue them under the DMCA for breaking the encryption controls you placed on YOUR Copyrighted material. You're kids singing songs with the same title as the songs they suspect are pirated material are in fact Copyrighted by you, their parent, on their behalf.
I've got a 500MHz Titanium G4 - standard clock speed heats up the corner where the power button and AC connecter is located gets more than "mighty toasty"!
To be completely honest, I don't see how an overclocked Tibook would be usable. The keyboard at that corner would likely melt from the excessive heat. You wouldn't have to worry about the warranty, you'd have to be sure to carry a fire extinguisher along with your notebook!
Fact #1: MacOS X is based on FreeBSD 3.2 wrapped around a Mach microkernel.
Fact #2: FreeBSD does not use a Mach kernel.
Fact #3: The/etc/master.passwd file on a MacOS X system has nothing of value. It's there for legacy needs and has just the normal "shell=/bin/noshell" accounts as well as the disabled root account in it. To get useful information, you have to do a NetInfo dump of whatever class your looking for, in this case the encrypted passwd info.
Fact #4: The unix-like, BSD family, portion that makes up the base of MacOS X is not proprietary - it's called Darwin and is open and downloadable in source form (even ported to Intel). Only the upper level graphics system is closed. It's kinda like running a proprietary X Windows system on top of Linux.
Finally, Fact #5: Although there are some proprietary BSD-based OS's, the majority of the proprietary Unix OS's are based on AT&T->Novell->SCO->The OpenGroup code - not on BSD.
Please investigate your claims before boasting such innaccuracies.
I didn't say it would eliminate it. Of course people who are smart enough will find ways around limitations - whatever they be. It would make it easier to get evidence of the more inept folks that don't pay attention to little details like this. That would be qualified as "helping reduce" - not eliminating, not even in and of itself reducing - merely helping to reduce.
I the poll simply asked "Do you think law enforcement having 'backdoors' in crypto tools would help reduce terrorism?" then of course a majority would say yes. It is true as well - it would help.
However, if the question was asked as "Do you support the government having unlimited backdoors into all crypto tools, even if it meant your ecommerce transactions were more vulnerable to hacking as an unintentional result?" - I HIGHLY doubt we's see 72% saying yes!
Remember where they get that "Terrorist Training"
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
The USofA!
For example, it was the CIA that trained Osama Bin Laden in terrorist techniques in order to fight the then current Bad Guys(tm) - the USSR. The Soviet's were occupying Afghanistan, and the US found a nice wealthy Saudi to train, who in turn used his wealth to recruit and train his followers. They then "liberated" Afghanistan from Soviet occupation - which is why the Taliban allowed him refuge when he allegedly bombed US embassies. He was a US tool to fight Communism. When the Soviets pulled out, he was a hero. Then, like all the others the US created (in Panama, Columbia, Iraq, etc) he turned on the US when it was over and found himself in a position of power and respect (in the Islamic community at least).
The very first thing the government should do - without using any inflamatory language - shut down the CIA's training programs for foreign military leaders/organizations. Stop the training of terroristic techniques to South Americans as part of the "War on Drugs" - we're only creating more and more future Bad Guys!
Fact: Jordan Hubbard did not leave the project - he simply changed employers. He is still the FreeBSD Release Engineer, and still active member of the CORE team.
Fact: FreeBSD-Current (5.x branch) has so many changes that pushing back the switch of Current to Stable does not mean that features from Current won't be MFC'd back to Stable during the course of the year. It just means the whole of it won't.
Assuming this is some sort of "writing on the wall" of FreeBSD's demise is incredibly short-sighted. If you truly have been involved in FreeBSD for 6 years, I would expect you to know better. The 4.x branch was delayed many times due to the amount of changes to various subsystems - some of which were then MFC'd to the then 3.x-Stable branch.
Passing FUD about the GPL beating BSD is just further evidence of your troll.
I read further down that you basically asked "What needs to be done?", and you believe this to be an acceptible question to post. Not being a direct part of the FreeBSD-Hackers discussions, I can perhaps give some advice from a long time user who's done minor work on ports from time to time.
A better approach:
1) Find some piece of hardware that isn't supported, but you think could be useful to more than a couple people worldwide;-)
2) Post the question "Is anyone else working on a driver for [cool piece of hardware]?"
3) Commence work with any answering "I am" to #2 - or on your own, referring to driver-writing documentation included in the source tree.
4) Once working in a stable manner - post "Hey it works! Anyone want to help hammer it and make sure it's up to par?"
5) Gain respect and appreciation for your contribution to FreeBSD.
Simply asking "What needs to be done?" is like asking a star for a specific particle of light!
Will I be forgiven by The Great Programmer? For I have sinned... In my youth, I did codeth in COBOL!! [cries in fetal position] I knew not what I was doing!!!
Sorry, but from my perspective, the association of a file type that is unable to be changed without changing the data is wrong for the simple reason that a file may have more than one type!
Yes, index.html is an HTML formatted file - yet it's also a TEXT file - and it may contain Java/PHP/etc Scripts embedded in it. Do I want to limit a file to only one "Type" when it can be many, depending upon how I choose to use it at a given moment? Of course not!
It's true the older MacOS file type methodology worked well when the Mac was used as a much more limited system. The fact that MacOS X includes Apache is an example of how much more versatile the Mac is today. In order to be more versatile, you have to reduce some things to the LCD. To do otherwise limits the usage of the system and that's exactly why the Mac has remained the cherished possession of so few. To expand market share, Apple needs to expand the uses of the Mac - that means more flexability, and less stringent ties to those technologies (however useful in old-school aspects) that limit that flexability.
It's an entertaining, albeit slightly, tale. However, the author has a few inaccuracies.
He refers to X as an OS, it is not an Operating Sytem - it's a Graphical Environment (and even that's putting it simple).
Also, Windows/386 - which was a full 32-bit version of 2.0 was the first Windows to take advantage of the 80386's features. He states that Windows 3.0 was, although it was actually an enhancement to W/386 that dropped support for the 80286 and relied exclusively on 32-bit mode.
He also skipped right over IBM LanManager, which was the precursor to OS/2.
OK, enough nitpicking... I guess the Ugh and Grub or what-have-you got to me more than I thought.
I don't know about others but all of my website's graphics are in PNG format. They have been for nearly 2 years. Sure, at first some browsers couldn't display them - but I at that time I had text-only alternates. Eventually, the people who complained they couldn't see the graphics did as I suggested and upgraded to a new browser that supported PNG. I don't know of any browser that can't display them now.
There's a big difference between the two terms in my subject. Bundling IE with Windows is not a bad thing, since if it were merely bundled, it could be removed and replaced with an alternative. Co-mingling is what people hate - tying IE to the base OS so that it cannot be removed/replaced it what the whole antitrust battle is about.
The reason their dropping Java is that they were prevented from extending it with propriatary calls and then incorporating it into the OS (as C# is/will be). Since they could co-opt it and control it to tie folks into Windows-only solutions, they're dropping it altogether.
Sure they have a right to do this, but the reasoning for people complaining are not hypocritical.
That means that if the executive(s) of his company came to the US, they could be arrested. The fact is that Adobe pressured his employer to cease sales of their software in the US and his employer complied! At the time of Sklyarov's arrest, no crime was being committed by him nor his employer. Therefore, his arrest is unjust and this is what needs to be explained to people who think otherwise.
Actually, the Internet replaced the previously reigning champ of online information - Compu$erve. Note the "$" instead of an "S". That is what we referred to it as because of the costs associated with it's Forum sections.
In the '80s, this was the method used to get patches and support for most computer-based products (hardware and software). The free section had generic information and the chat rooms. To access the support sections of companies hosting forums there you were charged per-minute for access. Bills could be extremely high if a large patch was needed and you were limited to 1200 baud modem connections.
Then came the Internet, and slowly companies closed their CompuServe forums and directed customers to access their new (and free) website. The fact that 1) access was now free, and 2) people could access the site through highspeed connections at work, school, and eventualy home made the pay-for-access model obsolete.
To now, nearly a decade later, try to reimplement a pay-for-access model on top of that which has been free all along - is destined to fail. The Internet now is too large and diverse to clamp down upon. That's why so many.com's have gone under. They set up, went public, and based their entire business upon a fallacy that they can charge for content on the Internet. Once they went online, they found that too many free alternatives existed online to make any money. Poof! They exhaust IPO capital and disappear.
Personally, I pay for things with lasting value - a book, a CD, an OS or Application's installation media, etc. I don't view this as paying for the contents of that media - I'm paying for the media itself. That's what adds the "lasting" to the value. Internet content is far too dynamic and temporary for me to get anything "lasting" from it's content. Therefore - I see very little value outside what it costs for me to connect via my ISP.
Please check into the details of this project before asking such questions. The pupose is to consolidate the location of platform specific patches and apply them according to whick platform the port is being compiled on. So, on a FreeBSD 4.3 system, a simple "make install" will apply the FreeBSD 4.3 specific patches, compile, and install - even though the Darwin, MacOS X, HP/UX, etc patches are all located in the same place the FreeBSD patches are. This way, I can take the same "port" - makefile, patches, etc - and copy them to my MacOS X machine and do the same simple "make install". Then automagically I have both systems running platform specific builds of the same application with minimal effort.
Fortunately in my situation, I didn't have a wife and kids - so my savings was drawn out quite well. However, if I did have a wife, and even one child, I don't know where it is I could live off of 10-20k. This has nothing to do with "how" I live - I'm pretty frugal as it is - I'm talking housing and transportation costs. It's not as simple as stating "Well get a job flipping burgers!" - there are a lot of obstacles in the way.
As a child, my father screwed up at work and was fired for allegedly giving company bid info to 2 former co-workers who left to start a competing company. The simple fact that he still spoke to 2 guys he had established friendships with at work was all the grounds his employer had to fire him. Getting another job was impossible, since his reputation was harmed so badly. So he and my mother, along with their 5 children, lost their home and other assets in bankrupcy court. We then moved from the nice middle class neighborhood to the ghetto. We got by, survived as you put it, on Welfare as it existed in 1975 and the few part time jobs he and my mother could get with minimal transportation. I was nine at that time - it took 6 years for my father to clear his name in court and return full time to his chosen field. During that time, I myself was nearly shot in the head by some punk who decided a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy didn't belong on "his" bus on the way home from school. The devastating impacts upon my entire family, not to mention the severe depression experienced by my father, is indescribable. That we all "survived" is in a large part due to the timeframe involved - 1975 to 1981. Given the current social climate, I'd seriously doubt we could have handled the same in todays world.
Bottom line - It's not easy to make that kind of drop and emotionally hold together. It's not easy to find affordable housing on such low wages. It's not easy to obtain government assistance if you're not a minority (should have seen what I went through getting financial aid for college - "what do you mean your parents aren't contributing, you're white?" - YES I WAS actually asked that!).
The story all this was posted under was that out of work techies were flooding homeless shelters. That would be the case whether they had a job flipping burgers, or cleaning bed-pans - there is NO available housing in most of the places these people are located. The point I was making was that it is not a simple matter of taking a minimum wage job - that cuts into the time available to run around interviewing for a real replacement. There are many factors involved in each individual case - lumping it all together and calling these unemployed people lazy for not taking shit work is ludicrous.
Sorry, I live in CA and a pizza delivery job would have gotten me at most 12-15k - meanwhile my mortgage was based on an income of 65k - so NO it wouldn't have made a dent.
As for not attempting to find temporary income - Umm... contract work by it's very nature is temporary. I just chose not to waste my time in a minimum wage job rather than meeting daily with recruiters and going on interviews. I must have interviewed for at least 15-20 jobs during that 4 months. I was perfectly qualified for all but a few, and was even the intended hiree for a couple. But lack of movement on the part of the company interviewed at resulted in lots of "we're reevaluating our project plans and resource needs" responses. When I wasn't in an interview, I was preparing for another, or following up on a previous one. This takes quite a bit of time.
Bottom line, a part-time low-wage job may have dragged my savings out a bit more and made things a bit easier, but at the expense of other efforts I had going. Make not mistake, however, it in no way, shape, or form would have sufficiently replaced my needed income levels. THAT is the point I'm making - you cannot expect someone going from 60-80K to drop down to 10-20K and expect them to survive. At least not without losing all they own and... living at a homeless shelter! The entire point of the article
I can't speak for all when I say that it's not only about pride, but about realistic income requirements.
Personally, I left full-time employment and started contract-based jobs back when the Y2K "bug" was an issue. It was steady work until right around the 2K turn. Suddenly I found myself without any contract opportunities because everyone had projects "on-hold" until after the turn. Once 2000 came and nothing blewup/melted down, it took a couple months for things to start moving again. So, I was without work for 4 months. Not too long compared to some, I'm sure, but enough to through me behind in finances towards the end of that stretch. I had saved enough to cover short-term breaks between contracts - but apparantly not enough.
Do you think a burger flipping job would have covered even my mortgage alone? If so - you're smoking something seriously illegal (according to Drug War Inc). I spent most of that time searching for a job meeting my income needs. If I had taken "something", yeah I'd have been working, but I wouldn't have had the time to hunt for a "real job".
Additionall, they used an Intel EtherExpressPro 10/100 card (fxp driver). My understanding from the FreeBSD mailing lists is that this driver is being completely rewritten to eliminate significant performance issues in the FreeBSD 4.x versions. I suspect that even network performance would be noticably different had they used hardware with optimized drivers accross all platforms.
To say an OS's network or disk performance is poor, without considering the drivers used for your hardware, is kinda irresponsible.
It's clear, as your comment shows as well, they did not make any effort to properly tune and configure the overall system for each OS tested.
Ok, since I can't see anyone else pointing out this obvious fallacy, I will.
P2P systems are lacking in once significant regard: If the other "P" you're downloading from signs off, you're done... Transfer Incomplete!
Now, with something like the "old" Napster, this was an acceptable limitation, since there was no "official" and legal method to obtain most songs there. You kinda new the risks of aborted transfers and crap-quality rips and slow peer connections, but since it was free - no complaint.
Why on God's Green Earth(R)(C)(TM)(Patent Pending)(etc) would I PAY some company for the "rights" to the above P2P limitations and difficulties? If I were going to join a subscription service to get RIAA approved downloads - it would most certainly have to be a centralized, mirrored, high-bandwidth, dedicated, reliable repository with high-quality files. This would NOT be a P2P system! Yet all of these articles I read state over and over how such-and-such P2P system is now owned by some RIAA member, or this other RIAA member has announce this-and-that subscription P2P system. ACK! Get real!
Slashdot Mirror
My point, I also would not pay for commercially sponsered radio, whether Satellite, broadcast, digital, Mother Goose, or whatever. If I pay for it - I don't want to see or hear a single advertisement.
Basically, during the "negotiating" phase of a recording contract, the artist/band is taken out to a nice dinner complete with refreshing drinks. The label rep then scratches out on a napkin or small scrap of paper a tentative agreement to sign a contract. This agreement works out to "if we give you this, that, and the-other-thing - you, the artist/band, agree to sign the recording contract. The artist/band is then asked to sign the napkin/scrap paper and the rep will have those "evil lawyer types" write up the contract. All through this the rep is playing best buddy - who would never do anything against the artist/band's best interests.
Then the artist/band sobers up and receives the contract. They go to a lawyer (if at least a bit bright) and review it first. They find all sorts of ugly conditions in it, and tell the rep "no, can't do this". The rep "works" with them, changing a word here or there, but the essence of the contract terms remain unchanged (this is what you refer to as standardized among all labels). The artist/band says "sorry, I/we'll look elsewhere". The rep then pulls out that napkin/scrap paper and says "Sorry, you said if we gave you 'this', 'that', and 'the-other-thing', you'd sign with us. You didn't say we couldn't add conditions to them, just that you required them... and you signed a legally binding agreement.
The game goes around until the artist/band does one of two things. 1) Caves in and signs the deal. 2) Breaks up and doesn't pursue a contract with another label (essentially going out of business).
Most artists/bands at this point will opt for #1 and hope for the best. Often times, after the first record is completed and even if it does well, the artist/band will still break up and disappear once they realize how bad it really is. This is what generates all of those One-Hit-Wonders. They do a single record and file bankruptcy never again to record professionally.
So, you might say there's a bit of a gun held to their head. It's called a binding agreement even though it's just scribbling on a napkin.
You could then sue them under the DMCA for breaking the encryption controls you placed on YOUR Copyrighted material. You're kids singing songs with the same title as the songs they suspect are pirated material are in fact Copyrighted by you, their parent, on their behalf.
To be completely honest, I don't see how an overclocked Tibook would be usable. The keyboard at that corner would likely melt from the excessive heat. You wouldn't have to worry about the warranty, you'd have to be sure to carry a fire extinguisher along with your notebook!
If you're gonna troll - at least be inventive and not absurd!
Fact #2: FreeBSD does not use a Mach kernel.
Fact #3: The
Fact #4: The unix-like, BSD family, portion that makes up the base of MacOS X is not proprietary - it's called Darwin and is open and downloadable in source form (even ported to Intel). Only the upper level graphics system is closed. It's kinda like running a proprietary X Windows system on top of Linux.
Finally, Fact #5: Although there are some proprietary BSD-based OS's, the majority of the proprietary Unix OS's are based on AT&T->Novell->SCO->The OpenGroup code - not on BSD.
Please investigate your claims before boasting such innaccuracies.
However, if the question was asked as "Do you support the government having unlimited backdoors into all crypto tools, even if it meant your ecommerce transactions were more vulnerable to hacking as an unintentional result?" - I HIGHLY doubt we's see 72% saying yes!
For example, it was the CIA that trained Osama Bin Laden in terrorist techniques in order to fight the then current Bad Guys(tm) - the USSR. The Soviet's were occupying Afghanistan, and the US found a nice wealthy Saudi to train, who in turn used his wealth to recruit and train his followers. They then "liberated" Afghanistan from Soviet occupation - which is why the Taliban allowed him refuge when he allegedly bombed US embassies. He was a US tool to fight Communism. When the Soviets pulled out, he was a hero. Then, like all the others the US created (in Panama, Columbia, Iraq, etc) he turned on the US when it was over and found himself in a position of power and respect (in the Islamic community at least).
The very first thing the government should do - without using any inflamatory language - shut down the CIA's training programs for foreign military leaders/organizations. Stop the training of terroristic techniques to South Americans as part of the "War on Drugs" - we're only creating more and more future Bad Guys!
Fact: Jordan Hubbard did not leave the project - he simply changed employers. He is still the FreeBSD Release Engineer, and still active member of the CORE team.
Fact: FreeBSD-Current (5.x branch) has so many changes that pushing back the switch of Current to Stable does not mean that features from Current won't be MFC'd back to Stable during the course of the year. It just means the whole of it won't.
Assuming this is some sort of "writing on the wall" of FreeBSD's demise is incredibly short-sighted. If you truly have been involved in FreeBSD for 6 years, I would expect you to know better. The 4.x branch was delayed many times due to the amount of changes to various subsystems - some of which were then MFC'd to the then 3.x-Stable branch.
Passing FUD about the GPL beating BSD is just further evidence of your troll.
A better approach:
1) Find some piece of hardware that isn't supported, but you think could be useful to more than a couple people worldwide
2) Post the question "Is anyone else working on a driver for [cool piece of hardware]?"
3) Commence work with any answering "I am" to #2 - or on your own, referring to driver-writing documentation included in the source tree.
4) Once working in a stable manner - post "Hey it works! Anyone want to help hammer it and make sure it's up to par?"
5) Gain respect and appreciation for your contribution to FreeBSD.
Simply asking "What needs to be done?" is like asking a star for a specific particle of light!
Yes, index.html is an HTML formatted file - yet it's also a TEXT file - and it may contain Java/PHP/etc Scripts embedded in it. Do I want to limit a file to only one "Type" when it can be many, depending upon how I choose to use it at a given moment? Of course not!
It's true the older MacOS file type methodology worked well when the Mac was used as a much more limited system. The fact that MacOS X includes Apache is an example of how much more versatile the Mac is today. In order to be more versatile, you have to reduce some things to the LCD. To do otherwise limits the usage of the system and that's exactly why the Mac has remained the cherished possession of so few. To expand market share, Apple needs to expand the uses of the Mac - that means more flexability, and less stringent ties to those technologies (however useful in old-school aspects) that limit that flexability.
He refers to X as an OS, it is not an Operating Sytem - it's a Graphical Environment (and even that's putting it simple).
Also, Windows/386 - which was a full 32-bit version of 2.0 was the first Windows to take advantage of the 80386's features. He states that Windows 3.0 was, although it was actually an enhancement to W/386 that dropped support for the 80286 and relied exclusively on 32-bit mode.
He also skipped right over IBM LanManager, which was the precursor to OS/2.
OK, enough nitpicking... I guess the Ugh and Grub or what-have-you got to me more than I thought.
I was speaking more about the site I actually administer here.
Thanks for pointing that out - looks like I need to redo my ISP home page!
The reason their dropping Java is that they were prevented from extending it with propriatary calls and then incorporating it into the OS (as C# is/will be). Since they could co-opt it and control it to tie folks into Windows-only solutions, they're dropping it altogether.
Sure they have a right to do this, but the reasoning for people complaining are not hypocritical.
In the '80s, this was the method used to get patches and support for most computer-based products (hardware and software). The free section had generic information and the chat rooms. To access the support sections of companies hosting forums there you were charged per-minute for access. Bills could be extremely high if a large patch was needed and you were limited to 1200 baud modem connections.
Then came the Internet, and slowly companies closed their CompuServe forums and directed customers to access their new (and free) website. The fact that 1) access was now free, and 2) people could access the site through highspeed connections at work, school, and eventualy home made the pay-for-access model obsolete.
To now, nearly a decade later, try to reimplement a pay-for-access model on top of that which has been free all along - is destined to fail. The Internet now is too large and diverse to clamp down upon. That's why so many .com's have gone under. They set up, went public, and based their entire business upon a fallacy that they can charge for content on the Internet. Once they went online, they found that too many free alternatives existed online to make any money. Poof! They exhaust IPO capital and disappear.
Personally, I pay for things with lasting value - a book, a CD, an OS or Application's installation media, etc. I don't view this as paying for the contents of that media - I'm paying for the media itself. That's what adds the "lasting" to the value. Internet content is far too dynamic and temporary for me to get anything "lasting" from it's content. Therefore - I see very little value outside what it costs for me to connect via my ISP.
As a child, my father screwed up at work and was fired for allegedly giving company bid info to 2 former co-workers who left to start a competing company. The simple fact that he still spoke to 2 guys he had established friendships with at work was all the grounds his employer had to fire him. Getting another job was impossible, since his reputation was harmed so badly. So he and my mother, along with their 5 children, lost their home and other assets in bankrupcy court. We then moved from the nice middle class neighborhood to the ghetto. We got by, survived as you put it, on Welfare as it existed in 1975 and the few part time jobs he and my mother could get with minimal transportation. I was nine at that time - it took 6 years for my father to clear his name in court and return full time to his chosen field. During that time, I myself was nearly shot in the head by some punk who decided a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy didn't belong on "his" bus on the way home from school. The devastating impacts upon my entire family, not to mention the severe depression experienced by my father, is indescribable. That we all "survived" is in a large part due to the timeframe involved - 1975 to 1981. Given the current social climate, I'd seriously doubt we could have handled the same in todays world.
Bottom line - It's not easy to make that kind of drop and emotionally hold together. It's not easy to find affordable housing on such low wages. It's not easy to obtain government assistance if you're not a minority (should have seen what I went through getting financial aid for college - "what do you mean your parents aren't contributing, you're white?" - YES I WAS actually asked that!).
The story all this was posted under was that out of work techies were flooding homeless shelters. That would be the case whether they had a job flipping burgers, or cleaning bed-pans - there is NO available housing in most of the places these people are located. The point I was making was that it is not a simple matter of taking a minimum wage job - that cuts into the time available to run around interviewing for a real replacement. There are many factors involved in each individual case - lumping it all together and calling these unemployed people lazy for not taking shit work is ludicrous.
As for not attempting to find temporary income - Umm... contract work by it's very nature is temporary. I just chose not to waste my time in a minimum wage job rather than meeting daily with recruiters and going on interviews. I must have interviewed for at least 15-20 jobs during that 4 months. I was perfectly qualified for all but a few, and was even the intended hiree for a couple. But lack of movement on the part of the company interviewed at resulted in lots of "we're reevaluating our project plans and resource needs" responses. When I wasn't in an interview, I was preparing for another, or following up on a previous one. This takes quite a bit of time.
Bottom line, a part-time low-wage job may have dragged my savings out a bit more and made things a bit easier, but at the expense of other efforts I had going. Make not mistake, however, it in no way, shape, or form would have sufficiently replaced my needed income levels. THAT is the point I'm making - you cannot expect someone going from 60-80K to drop down to 10-20K and expect them to survive. At least not without losing all they own and... living at a homeless shelter! The entire point of the article
Personally, I left full-time employment and started contract-based jobs back when the Y2K "bug" was an issue. It was steady work until right around the 2K turn. Suddenly I found myself without any contract opportunities because everyone had projects "on-hold" until after the turn. Once 2000 came and nothing blewup/melted down, it took a couple months for things to start moving again. So, I was without work for 4 months. Not too long compared to some, I'm sure, but enough to through me behind in finances towards the end of that stretch. I had saved enough to cover short-term breaks between contracts - but apparantly not enough.
Do you think a burger flipping job would have covered even my mortgage alone? If so - you're smoking something seriously illegal (according to Drug War Inc). I spent most of that time searching for a job meeting my income needs. If I had taken "something", yeah I'd have been working, but I wouldn't have had the time to hunt for a "real job".
To say an OS's network or disk performance is poor, without considering the drivers used for your hardware, is kinda irresponsible.
It's clear, as your comment shows as well, they did not make any effort to properly tune and configure the overall system for each OS tested.
P2P systems are lacking in once significant regard: If the other "P" you're downloading from signs off, you're done... Transfer Incomplete!
Now, with something like the "old" Napster, this was an acceptable limitation, since there was no "official" and legal method to obtain most songs there. You kinda new the risks of aborted transfers and crap-quality rips and slow peer connections, but since it was free - no complaint.
Why on God's Green Earth(R)(C)(TM)(Patent Pending)(etc) would I PAY some company for the "rights" to the above P2P limitations and difficulties? If I were going to join a subscription service to get RIAA approved downloads - it would most certainly have to be a centralized, mirrored, high-bandwidth, dedicated, reliable repository with high-quality files. This would NOT be a P2P system! Yet all of these articles I read state over and over how such-and-such P2P system is now owned by some RIAA member, or this other RIAA member has announce this-and-that subscription P2P system. ACK! Get real!
Oh well, that's my rant for the week~