Nonsense, the Soviet Union was dependent on Western handouts pretty much from the start. First the bankers financed the revolution, then investors were lured in by Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy), then Stalin got huge military aid during the war and after the war, they constantly needed grain imports to keep their population from starving. (And that in a country that was the traditional food-exporter in the 19th century.)
In the 1980s, Poland and East Germany were only kept afloat by massive Western loans. Also despite their glorious education system, they constantly needed Westernn engineers to get anything done (my father was several times in Bukarest and Moscow during the "cold war" like thousands of engineers from Western Europe).
There were two factors that kept the system going for 70 years: Western help and huge natural ressources (which of course were also traded with the West).
To call that a "cold war" is just nonsense, btw. You don't trade with your enemy during a war. You don't give loans to an enemy during a war.
Nonsense, the same (even worse) fracturing of the x86/AMD64-hardware platform hasn't prevented it from dominating the desktop.
The article actually makes good points: Too short support periods, missing applications and drivers. These are in my opinion the only major problems that Linux has.
And some mysterious computer-models without tangible predictions is not science either. If you can predict the climate, publish your predictions for each and every weather station so we can compare predicted values to actual values. (Oh, and yes, I do know the difference between weather and climate.) But no, we get some hazy predictions for something in 100 years, yet nothing for next year. - This is like a Nostradamus-book that I once stumbled upon, it was great at predicting the past, made no predictions about the immediate future and only made some predictions for something very, very far away in the future. That is not science.
Moronic arguments about weather vs. climate are not science. Yes, I do know that weather is unpredictable like the bubbles in boiling water - yet I can predict the temperature in the cattle when I know the imputs. And I can predict the temperature for the next seconds better than for the next hours. Yet for "climate models", for some mysterious reason, they claim to predict the temperature in 100 years, but cannot predict it for the next 3 years, because "that's weather". Complete nonsense. This shows that "climate models" are not much more than a modernized version of vodoo-mumbo-jumbo. I will give a climate model credit when it can predict the mean temperature for NEXT YEAR for all weather stations on all continents with significantly better accuracy than the "same as this year"-prediction. But of course that would not be alarmist enough. If you cannot beat the most simple possible prediction (that the temperature is the same next year) then your climate model is absolutely worthless.
Reusing that famous "hockey-stick" diagram forever is also not science. Why do most temperature graphs stop at the early 2000's? Because there was almost no warming since then, that's why.
Idiotic doomsday scenarios are also not science. In history, the warm periods were also the better periods for humans. This "end of the world" - "waterworld" - "runaway" nonsense is completely overblown. When the earth gets warmer, it also radiates more into space during the night, therefore more CO2 may indeed lead to some warmer years, but not to some "runaway" effect. BTW, oil production is at it's peak and will no longer significantly rise, therefore CO2-production will also level off and begin to fall in a few decades.
Black hooded stranger, wandering around in the rain, peeking into houses = it's a free country, he did nothing illegal, anybody suspecting anything is an evil racist.
Non-black man, getting out of his car in his own neighborhood = he's a racist, heck he caused this fight, he's a racist, the black kid was only defending himself by bashing his head in, he's a racist.
If a black man is questioned by an evil racist, he is fully entitled to bash his head in. The evil racist left his car, which as we have seen right here on slashdot is a provocation - and racist.
If an evil racist is beaten by a black, well of course the evil racist is not allowed to defend himself, because that would be even more racist.
Since you are an evil racist, I answer your question: If you are beaten by another evil racist, shoot him. Otherwise, calm down, think of something nice and wait for help to arrive.
Maybe the Jews should have done in Israel what the Turks have done in Northern Cyprus?
I see no human rights organization complaining about Northern Cyprus...
So yeah, in a way they really are doing a bad job, just ask the Turks about how to do a good genocide. Oh, by the way, it's not just the Greeks, they did the same thing with the Armenians a couple of decades earlier. I don't see any of the bleeding-hearts complaining about that either.
There has not been a new web-technology that I really need for the last 5 years, possibly longer. Please, fix the bugs first, don't break the extension-API and let the extension-programmers create all the bells and whistles. There is no reason to break compatibility more often than - say - every 5 years or maybe even longer.
I really appreciate what the FSF has done in the past (gcc, glibc, etc.) but it's getting old. They are like some old guy who did something great 20 years ago and now insists that everybody should constantly thank him for it - in perpetuity.
What has the FSF done in the last 10 years? All the important projects from the last years (KDE, Open/Libreoffice, Mozilla, Linux) have nothing to do with GNU.
The label "GNU/Linux" was OK in the mid-90s, but not anymore.
I know it's hard to believe after 12 years of Bushes, but the GOP used to be a party of small government, non-interventionism and individual rights.
When Clinton reduced social spending while the Bush before and after him increased it - who do you vote for when you are against big government?
So as far as I am concerned, it is either Ron Paul or a big-government-pro-war-bread-and-circuses president. It does not matter whether his name will be Obama, Romney or Gingrich.
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
One would think that with all that IPv6-propaganda, that such IPv6-only (please remember the "only"-part here) services would be all over the airwaves.
Surely you can name a couple of those?
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Your naivety seems to be as large as those of the IPv6-designers.
People are not as stupid as you may believe. They will not just take an IPv6 address and leave out 99% of their customers and wait years/decades until IPv6 happens. No, they will in some way get an IPv4 address, even if (gasp, oh noes) that involves paying some modest fee (which will be probably still be lower than what a domain costs today) or they will work around the problem using NAT. No matter how ugly it's going to be, after some time the bugs are ironed out and it will work (unlike IPv6, which even Google can get to work on all their services).
So you are fully correct when you say that many people are "going to start having problems", but unfortunately IPv6 is not a solution to the problems, because shutting out 99% of users is not a solution, period.
In other words, even the ugliest NAT-workaround is BETTER than IPv6, because IPv6 is only for less than 1% of users.
Yes, in real life IPv4 is better, because it does what you want (reach all users), while IPv6 is worse because even though it may be architecturally cleaner it is useless for real-world services.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
Virgin Media needs millions of internal IP-addresses in a single company-wide network that must not be segmented? What for?
My guess is that the IP-department (which often breed the typical we-must-upgrade-everything-to-the-latest-verstion-number nerds) have convinced the pointy-haired-bosses there that they absolutely must have IPv6 if only to have something to do.
I've worked for an international company with branches in Europe, Africa and China - the larger a company is, the more it resembles a Dilbert-cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet it spun out of control.
Huh? I guess you meant "and yet it made many people rich exactly as planned."
The whole reason we have a government is to give taxpayer money to well-connected friends of politicians.
Nonsense, the Soviet Union was dependent on Western handouts pretty much from the start. First the bankers financed the revolution, then investors were lured in by Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy), then Stalin got huge military aid during the war and after the war, they constantly needed grain imports to keep their population from starving. (And that in a country that was the traditional food-exporter in the 19th century.)
In the 1980s, Poland and East Germany were only kept afloat by massive Western loans. Also despite their glorious education system, they constantly needed Westernn engineers to get anything done (my father was several times in Bukarest and Moscow during the "cold war" like thousands of engineers from Western Europe).
There were two factors that kept the system going for 70 years: Western help and huge natural ressources (which of course were also traded with the West).
To call that a "cold war" is just nonsense, btw. You don't trade with your enemy during a war. You don't give loans to an enemy during a war.
Nonsense, the same (even worse) fracturing of the x86/AMD64-hardware platform hasn't prevented it from dominating the desktop.
The article actually makes good points: Too short support periods, missing applications and drivers. These are in my opinion the only major problems that Linux has.
No, it's not science.
Talking about "concensus" and taking polls among "scientists" is not science.
Telling people to have faith in global warming despite lacking evidence is not science.
Smearing everybody who disagrees is not science.
And some mysterious computer-models without tangible predictions is not science either. If you can predict the climate, publish your predictions for each and every weather station so we can compare predicted values to actual values. (Oh, and yes, I do know the difference between weather and climate.) But no, we get some hazy predictions for something in 100 years, yet nothing for next year. - This is like a Nostradamus-book that I once stumbled upon, it was great at predicting the past, made no predictions about the immediate future and only made some predictions for something very, very far away in the future. That is not science.
Moronic arguments about weather vs. climate are not science. Yes, I do know that weather is unpredictable like the bubbles in boiling water - yet I can predict the temperature in the cattle when I know the imputs. And I can predict the temperature for the next seconds better than for the next hours. Yet for "climate models", for some mysterious reason, they claim to predict the temperature in 100 years, but cannot predict it for the next 3 years, because "that's weather". Complete nonsense. This shows that "climate models" are not much more than a modernized version of vodoo-mumbo-jumbo. I will give a climate model credit when it can predict the mean temperature for NEXT YEAR for all weather stations on all continents with significantly better accuracy than the "same as this year"-prediction. But of course that would not be alarmist enough. If you cannot beat the most simple possible prediction (that the temperature is the same next year) then your climate model is absolutely worthless.
Reusing that famous "hockey-stick" diagram forever is also not science. Why do most temperature graphs stop at the early 2000's? Because there was almost no warming since then, that's why.
Idiotic doomsday scenarios are also not science. In history, the warm periods were also the better periods for humans. This "end of the world" - "waterworld" - "runaway" nonsense is completely overblown. When the earth gets warmer, it also radiates more into space during the night, therefore more CO2 may indeed lead to some warmer years, but not to some "runaway" effect. BTW, oil production is at it's peak and will no longer significantly rise, therefore CO2-production will also level off and begin to fall in a few decades.
Most mass-murderers and serial killers are gay.
The ethnicity of the two parties is irrelevant.
Not for Obama. He posthumously adopted Martin already because he likes his looks.
Wrong, he got out of his car in his own neighborhood. Only evil racists do that.
So to sum up:
Black hooded stranger, wandering around in the rain, peeking into houses = it's a free country, he did nothing illegal, anybody suspecting anything is an evil racist.
Non-black man, getting out of his car in his own neighborhood = he's a racist, heck he caused this fight, he's a racist, the black kid was only defending himself by bashing his head in, he's a racist.
This depends on the situation.
If a black man is questioned by an evil racist, he is fully entitled to bash his head in. The evil racist left his car, which as we have seen right here on slashdot is a provocation - and racist.
If an evil racist is beaten by a black, well of course the evil racist is not allowed to defend himself, because that would be even more racist.
Since you are an evil racist, I answer your question: If you are beaten by another evil racist, shoot him. Otherwise, calm down, think of something nice and wait for help to arrive.
I guess the emphasis is on the "not shove unwanted changes down the users thoughts"-part.
Only a miniscule minority may truely need the new features, but they don't hurt the other, existing users.
Maybe the Jews should have done in Israel what the Turks have done in Northern Cyprus?
I see no human rights organization complaining about Northern Cyprus...
So yeah, in a way they really are doing a bad job, just ask the Turks about how to do a good genocide. Oh, by the way, it's not just the Greeks, they did the same thing with the Armenians a couple of decades earlier. I don't see any of the bleeding-hearts complaining about that either.
Cost is a part of technical superiority. If something is way too expensive, it cannot be "technical superior".
I prefer people who know history to people with "visions" any day of the week.
Given the fact that pretty much everything is "racist" today, I have to chuckle every time when I read that word.
Yeah, as if we had anything resembling democracy. There are Republicans tampering with voting machines and Democrats getting elected by dead people and any reform is blocked because the party that is losing by the reform just blocks it.
I guess it is an idiocracy, because people are too stupid to realize how they get fooled.
There is a good article about why upgrading a webbrowser is pointless.
There has not been a new web-technology that I really need for the last 5 years, possibly longer. Please, fix the bugs first, don't break the extension-API and let the extension-programmers create all the bells and whistles. There is no reason to break compatibility more often than - say - every 5 years or maybe even longer.
Exactly.
I really appreciate what the FSF has done in the past (gcc, glibc, etc.) but it's getting old. They are like some old guy who did something great 20 years ago and now insists that everybody should constantly thank him for it - in perpetuity.
What has the FSF done in the last 10 years? All the important projects from the last years (KDE, Open/Libreoffice, Mozilla, Linux) have nothing to do with GNU.
The label "GNU/Linux" was OK in the mid-90s, but not anymore.
... but it might get you killed in others.
Namecalling cannot change the fact that all those welfare-programs have only increased social stratification.
You may now say: "What a preposterous thing to say, without those welfare programs it would be even worse"
Not so. Government expenses go to private interests. Obama wants to give a couple of billion to some friends and Romney surely wants to wants to pay back Goldman Sachs for years of support (and in fact, Obama was also supported by Goldman Sachs - wow, only a "fucking retarded loonie" could possibly think that maybe all those millions are not going to starving babies?)
The bigger the government, the richer types like Romney, Soros or Bernanke will get.
You believe every scare-story that some NYT-columnist tells you, right?
I have to pick the candidate that I think will do the best job all around.
Yeah, that's why representative democracy does not work while direct democracy does.
The problem is just that the Democrats have more or less taken over the GOP and Ron Paul is the only real Republican left.
I know it's hard to believe after 12 years of Bushes, but the GOP used to be a party of small government, non-interventionism and individual rights.
When Clinton reduced social spending while the Bush before and after him increased it - who do you vote for when you are against big government?
So as far as I am concerned, it is either Ron Paul or a big-government-pro-war-bread-and-circuses president. It does not matter whether his name will be Obama, Romney or Gingrich.
Wait a minute - wasn't Obama supposed to fix all that? What about all these "Jesus was also a community-organizer" - stuff?
How is it possible that Obama's America becomes very much similar to the governments that Obama supports abroad?
Why does Obama start more wars all around the world than Bush, yet nobody seems to care?
Oh, and by the way, any moron who still believes that it's all the fault of R/D and that D/R would fix it: R+D are merely circus factions, both Romney and Obama are deep in the pocket of the banks, just like Bush was. And the media will do everything to prevent Ron Paul from winning.
Sorry, should of course be the "IT-department", not "IP-department"...
There are no IPv6-ONLY services
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
One would think that with all that IPv6-propaganda, that such IPv6-only (please remember the "only"-part here) services would be all over the airwaves.
Surely you can name a couple of those?
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Your naivety seems to be as large as those of the IPv6-designers.
People are not as stupid as you may believe. They will not just take an IPv6 address and leave out 99% of their customers and wait years/decades until IPv6 happens. No, they will in some way get an IPv4 address, even if (gasp, oh noes) that involves paying some modest fee (which will be probably still be lower than what a domain costs today) or they will work around the problem using NAT. No matter how ugly it's going to be, after some time the bugs are ironed out and it will work (unlike IPv6, which even Google can get to work on all their services).
So you are fully correct when you say that many people are "going to start having problems", but unfortunately IPv6 is not a solution to the problems, because shutting out 99% of users is not a solution, period.
In other words, even the ugliest NAT-workaround is BETTER than IPv6, because IPv6 is only for less than 1% of users.
Yes, in real life IPv4 is better, because it does what you want (reach all users), while IPv6 is worse because even though it may be architecturally cleaner it is useless for real-world services.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
Virgin Media needs millions of internal IP-addresses in a single company-wide network that must not be segmented? What for?
My guess is that the IP-department (which often breed the typical we-must-upgrade-everything-to-the-latest-verstion-number nerds) have convinced the pointy-haired-bosses there that they absolutely must have IPv6 if only to have something to do.
I've worked for an international company with branches in Europe, Africa and China - the larger a company is, the more it resembles a Dilbert-cartoon.