<quote="Woz">We needn't think of ourselves as bad just because we were the lucky ones to have the oil blip</quote>
We're not bad because we're the lucky ones to have oil; at least sensible people don't think that. The belief that it's "bad" is the woolly thinking of the loony fringes, and the consequences of dumbing down the debate/education to fit into the mass-market delivery system of the media.
What is "bad" is the near-total disregard we've had of the side effects, and the near-absence of planning for the inevitable time when our "luck" runs out.
The faith that technology, out of the blue and without having to put in the hard yards of understanding and research now (or, better still, back then), will magically pop up with a solution to the side-effects and problems verges on the mystical. It's the technologically semi-literate equivalent to believing in a benevolent sky-beard...
Also why doesnt Open Office.org sue Microsoft for trademark infringement or something...
Well, firstly it's Office Open XML, not Open Office XML.
Secondly I seem to recall that the reason the open office suite is called OpenOffice.org (or OO.o), and not just OpenOffice, is because someone else (MS?) already owned the OpenOffice name / trademark...
And why should he care? He's the originator and technical lead of a project, albeit one with his name firmly attached to it. He shouldn't care about anything Microsoft says or does, except maybe if/when they present evidence of 'his' kernel infringing on Microsoft's patents or copyright.
Linux vendors, on the other hand... they might have reason to care about the FUD.
It's an easy promise to make because virtually nobody bothers to go back to the store to claim their refund.
Well, that's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
They take advantage of your greed, because you want it now! They set up an artificial situation to exploit your ignorance of upcoming sales. And they rely on your apathy to avoid having to fulfill their promises.
And we not only allow creatures like this to exist, but actually encourage them through law and expectation to prosper in this sort of parasitic behaviour?
If they were a bacteria or virus we'd be doing our damnedest to kill them. But they make money, so that's OK...
On the other hand, we in Australia can still say "fuck" and see uncensored boobies on free-to-air broadcast TV. Admittedly, a breakfast radio DJ was taken to task for calling our Prime Minister a "pig-rooter" on air a couple of years ago, but all he had to do afterwards was apologise for it.
And, IIRC, it only generated 1 complaint to the radio station. I wonder who that was from?
oh, wait, the Austrailian gov't confiscated everyone's guns in a "think of the children" ploy.
I'm sure this 'fact' will come as a surprise to the local gun club, whose rifle & pistol ranges are in a suburban area 5 minutes drive from a major shopping mall and less than that from 2 suburban schools.
(Actually, I think there's a legal brothel even closer than that, but I'm not 100% certain...)
The fact is, in Australia almost anybody who has a reasonable excuse can get a gun licence (unless there's a fairly good reason not to give you one e.g. history of violent crime, etc). Farmer? No problem. Want to join the local gun club? No problem. Want to go on a weekend of pig shooting with your drunken mates? Just sign here...
A shooter's licence for a rifle takes about 14 days for processing and background checks. A pistol licence can take a little longer; the slowest I know of is about 30 days. Concealed carry permits are possible to get, but much harder - you need a real reason and, no, "because I'm afraid someone else might be carrying a gun" is not a real reason, it's irrational fear.
(Note: "Because I want to feel like a big man" is not a valid reason either...)
It takes about 14 days to get a shooters licence for a rifle; longer for a pistol licence. I know one person with a licence to carry; that took nearly a month to process, but he already had a pistol licence.
Now, I can see that if you want to nip down to the local gunsmith and buy something suitable for a bit of ad-hoc "political expression" then a few weeks may be a bit of an inconvenience. But, on the other hand, it gives plenty of time for you to do some proper planning...
Note: I grew up with guns; my grandfather and uncle were championship-winning shooters; as a teenager I worked at the local rifle range. I have no problems with guns at all - except that I believe that anyone who "wants" one - rather than "needs" one, or even "has a reason to have one" - should be automatically excluded from owning one.
What you've quoted was the old election promise, from 1 or 2 elections ago. As well as dropping the trial, the filter software deal was later watered down to become "ISPs are encouraged to offer web-filtering software to customers at a reduced price" (which turned out to be "somewhere between $RRP and actual retail sale price").
The current one - as far as can be told from the announcements, which are as slippery as a bucketful of grass snakes in a lard factory - is ISP-based filtering. The idea is, as a "concerned parent", you'll be able to choose between an unfiltered feed or the "no sex please, we're Christian" version.
Note that this has also been a feature of the Opposition party's platform for quite a while now.
Not so much of the "little sparks"; yes there are relays still inside that sort of gear, but they're reed relays with the contacts sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere.
What you do find, however, is cct breakers and contactors on the main power feed & internal distribution. But the usual explosive trigger is the sparks from the cells themselves as they self-destruct...
We used to get 1 or 2 incidents like this a year in Aus, mostly in the far north. The SLA batteries used here don't take kindly to temps above ~ 35C (easily found inside cabinets even in colder areas) - battery life is dramatically reduced, and the usual failure mode is thermal runaway causing internal shorts &/or case splitting. The end result was usually just acid vapour destroying everything inside the cabinet. Occasionally, as I said, we'd get one that went boom.
It certainly wasn't unusual for the batteries to to from "visually OK, passes all discharge / internal impedance test" to "case on the verge of rupture" in as little as 1 month. We usually checked them every 3 months, and that was considered by both the manufacturers and my superiors as "excessive".
Having said that, what freakin' idiot decided Li-Pol cells were a good idea in that sort of environment! The things are barely stable at room temperature, requiring very careful feeding and care of charge / discharge rates even then (which is why every single consumer-use Li-Ion/Pol battery sold has a charge controller & thermal monitor cct built-in to the battery itself). Essentially, from a non-technical POV, Li-Ion & Li-Pol cells are little containers of metallic fire that will self-destruct at the slightest provocation. I certainly can't imagine any really safe way of using them in a online / continuous float application like that...
(Ex-telco senior switching, CAN, and battery maintenance tech.)
A lot more changed from 1950-2000 than did from 1750-1800. A *LOT* more.
That's plenty arguable. The last half of the 18th century saw the real start of the Industrial Revolution - quite a paradigm shift from the earlier unmechanised semi-feudal agricultural-and-craftwork primary and secondary production economy beforehand, to the start of a large-scale mechanised industrial secondary and tertiary production economy with a rapidly-expanding moneyed and leisure class.
What did the 1950's-2000 bring us? The basis of computer theory was developed before that; a lot of the concepts date from the 1850's-1930. Miniaturisation? The pace quickened, yes, but it was just an extension of a process started in the latter half of the Industrial Revolution. Efficiency? A process again kicked off by the Industrial Revolution. Nuclear power? I'll give you that, with a qualified "maybe"; the physical understanding was pretty much in place prior to WWII. Social change? Again, an extension and implementation of concepts developed in the late 1800's; concepts developed to try to understand and deal with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
Space travel? Puh-lease... Semi-practical concepts were developed in the late 1800's; the technology was catching up by the late 1930's, and by that time the physics was all in place.
Telephones were developed in the late 1800's; radio was commercialised in the early 1900's; the basic concepts of TV in the 1930's (although practical implementation had to await the development of faster, more stable electronic mechanisms in the '40s).
Really, if you look at it objectively, nothing much happened in the 1950-2000 period except things got smaller, faster, and more efficient...
... craps untracked files all over the user's system... makes [no] effort to interoperate with Ubuntu's package manager... could leave the system unbootable
allowing web pages to be displayed consistently on different computers.
Except that the whole point of using a simplified SGML (HTML) on the WWW was to separate content from presentation - a fact maybe forgotten, but even more important now what with the spread of WWW content to different classes of devices (TV, mobiles, handhelds, etc).
Specific fonts (or, correctly, "typefaces" - a given font is a particular incarnation of a typeface, including size, so Comic Sans 10pt is a different font to Comic Sans 12pt) shouldn't be necessary - families of typefaces maybe, if you're trying to achieve a particular style, but not fonts or even necessarily typefaces.
Trying to nail presentation of a presentation language down to specific fonts or typefaces is about as sensible as demanding your viewer's browser window be 800x600. If you absolutely can't live without your web-based masterpiece being presented in point-perfect font specifivity, present it as a.gif or.pdf...
... since in most cases all anyone has to do is transport themselves from point A to point B, we should all be content with a Chevy Aveo5. Or... we should all be quite content covering our genitalia with used burlap sacks, because... in the end you're just covering your junk, right?
Although I'm not the OP, yup, I'd agree with that (although I'd draw the line at burlap sacks, because I'd scare the horses).
What should quality, comfort, style or utility possibly have to do with anything?
Oh, it should have something to do with it, if a need for it is there - just not everything.
Look, bs, you're just a person who doesn't mind living life surrounded by inferiority.
The problem is that a lot of your alleged "inferiority" is not of a necessary practical type, it's manufactured inferiority. Sure, some may need the biggest, latest, fastest, top-of-the-line whatever to perform a particular task - but, if you're grounded in reality you can step back and see that, for any given case, the vast majority don't.
Of course, it's easy to see that for "everybody else", and much harder to see it for "you";-)
To pick an easy and obvious one, take SUVs and 4WDs. Yup, heard all the reasons why people "need" one - to carry a family of 5, to cart timber and sheet back from Home Depot, etc, etc. Problem is, that's all justification - not a reason, good or otherwise.
On TV the other night there was a family who's mother justified a 4WD (Land Cruiser, in this case) to carry her, a teenaged son, two toddlers, and shopping. Crap - something the size of a Camry, or even a Corolla, is perfectly adequate for that. Likewise, the Home Depot excuse. I have no idea what they charge for delivery (or even if they deliver!), but let's say $50 for an average weekend's load of lumber, sheet, garden products, and bits and pieces. Even if you were do do that 52 weekends a year, it's still cheaper than buying and running a 4WD!. Hell, it's probably cheaper to hire a 4WD and trailer every weekend of the year...
Or take computers. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not paying a premium for good quality and pleasing aesthetics is worthwhile (I happen to believe in some cases it is, hence I own 2 Macs...), the truth of the matter is for by far the vast majority of people, a basic 3 generation-old computer is more than adequate. In fact, I'm typing this on my main desktop machine, a 800MHz G4 eMac (the other is the latest MacBook). Sure, specialised users may require 'better' hardware - but the real number of those users is far smaller than the number who think they are...
No, I'm not advocating some Maoist 'one size fits all' blue boilersuit of a car, computer, clothes, whatever. But I do know that a large percentage - and some studies I've seen put the percentage as high as 90%~95% - of all consumer purchases are unnecessarily overblown. Which means that only maybe 5%~10% of consumer purchases are of a truly logically justifiable and necessary nature. Even if you triple that number to 15%~30% to account for the human need for personalisation and "bling", that's still a lot of time, money, energy, and resources wasted...
Urgh! Looks like an ugly version of a Gnome-ified WindowMaker/GNUstep. Granted, with GNUstep the underpinnings should be sufficiently NeXT / OS X like - but the 'G' part of the 'GUI' is fugly as sin and hardly Mac-like (with the exception of the 'taskbar at the top'), which doesn't bode well for the 'UI' part of the equation.
(Note to developers: you should actually use and think about the UI you're trying to emulate. Even broad concepts, like level of menu depth and placement of functions/actions appropriate to their complexity, can make all the difference in the world. Not that Apple themselves aren't adverse to ignoring their own guidelines on these matters when it suits them...)
That's not quite true. John Howard has balls; black, shrivelled, and old, he takes them out of a small wooden box he keeps on the mantlepiece of Kirribilli House and waves them in your face when he needs a national emergency to prop up his election chances.
What?! And displace good home-grown Aussie talent like Jane Campion, Sam Neill, Russell Crowe, Rebecca Gibney, Bruno Lawrence, John Clarke, Guy Pearce, etc?
Not to mention our greats of the sporting world - Karmichael Hunt, Trent Croad, Willie Mason, et al; or musical stars like Neil Finn, Marc Hunter, Jenny Morris, Kevin Borich, etc.
(You can have Joh Bjelke-Petersen back. We've finished with him...)
Odd thing is, I vaguely remember a case - maybe 20 years ago now - brought against a broadcaster (TVNZ? Though it may have even been the old Television One / TV2 days) for breaching the old rule.
If I'm remembering correctly, the broadcaster was able to prove in court that what they broadcast was a true and accurate representation of a particular debate in parliament, and the case was quietly dropped...
Notice, though, that the police didn't order him to stop selling baseball bats. Their suggestion was basically that, if the shopkeeper felt the bats were destined for use on heads rather than baseballs, he should probably stop selling them - something I'm sure the shopkeeper had already worked out for himself, and was just looking for a little reassurance of (while giving a heads-up, as it were, to the police).
Besides, I'd rather a cricket bat. A couple of inches shorter, yeah, but about 40% heaver - and it has both a flat and a sharp side, so you have a choice between stopping power or pure damage. And, if all else fails, you can play cricket with it...
Just for the interest, the Swiss Guards of the Vatican are all highly trained in firearms and, since the 1981 assasination attempt, many are issued with firearms (particularly when on protection duty overseas).
As far as they seemed to be concerned, the purposes of private firearms were: 1)To defend one's life, property, privacy etc from other individuals 2)So that the common population could serve as a militia in the event of war against a foreign power 3)To ensure a degree of sovereignty for the common man to prevent the government from becoming oppressive 4)When all else fails, to give the common man the basic tools for revolt, so that an oppressive regime can be replaced, by force if necessary.
I'm not USian, so I could well be missing something, but from my understanding there's nothing in the constitution or other evidence of the time to support your points 3 & 4. Sure, the ambiguity of your 4th Amendment has been co-opted to support those interpretations by others since then, but...
The American constitution is actually quite a well-written and precise document, despite being written in layman's language of the time. Just because language changes, and people's interpretations change, doesn't mean that their intentions have changed.
Hence my.sig - with the emphasis on "well-regulated"...
I would also add that he gave his mobile phone SIM card to someone who turned out to be a terrorist.
I'm sure you really meant to say "over a year ago, just before leaving England, he gave his prepaid SIM card with unused credits to his second cousin - who was picked up by police following the Glasgow bombing, but later released without charge.
The SIM card in question was found in his cousin's house."
On the other hand, there's me: never went to Uni, but spent 20+ years in a middle / upper-middle income specialised trade job. Got made redundant at 39, got a payout worth several years income, and decided to go to Uni - studying biology / microbiology / earth science.
Am I doing it for the chance to increase my earning power? Hell no - I'm under no illusions as to what B-degree graduates earn in that field (hint: it ain't much...). And I'm also under no illusions that employers will want a 40+ year old with a fresh degree and no experience in the field.
Nope, it's a subject that I've always been interested in and enjoyed learning about, and a chance (however small) to enhance the common good (think how almost everything is turning to the bio-sciences for inspirations or solutions). I'm doing it for the brain food...
(Unless your goal is to make kids resent books as a source of long, boring, completely pointless crap, don't assign them Madame Bovary. I promise you that high school students will not appreciate it on any level.)
I couldn't be bothered reading it for my book report, and rented the movie of "Madame Ovary" instead.
Honestly though, for the average user running SMB mounts over a 100bps LAN, the CPU matters fuck-all. Having an AMD X2 3800+ or Intel Core2Duo in your server gets you dicksize bragging rights, a lighter wallet, and not much else.
I used to run a minimal linux installation - and later OpenBSD - on an old P100 as a home server, and with decent NICs the bottleneck was always either the theoretical LAN speed or SMB. I now run an OpenBSD Samba server on a 600MHz VIA Samuel 2 Mini-ITX system, and that's only so I could put it in a smaller quieter box. With a couple of clients pulling XviD video real-time off an external USB2 drive, I rarely see the load avg get above 0.3.
For reference, and for info: I've just finished rebuilding my OpenBSD firewall here, which boots off a 512M CF card attached to a CF->IDE adaptor & has 512M of RAM. It's been running like this for... oh, 3 years now?... with a fresh new install of OpenBSD every 12 months or so.
The slackers way of doing it:
Get your OpenBSD install CD
Install a basic OpenBSD setup - no games/X/comp sets - to CF
Copy/var to somewhere like/proto/var. If you're really brave, copy/etc to/proto/etc as well.
mkdir/proto/dev, and "MAKEDEV all" in there.
Edit/etc/fstab to mount / ro, and swap mount/proto/var,/proto/dev/, &/proto/etc over the original/var,/dev, and/etc to mfs (ramdisk)
Reboot
You probably want to link/tmp to/var/tmp as well. Do that now.
Install rsync, edit/etc/rc.shutdown to rsync your/var (&/etc) filesystems back to/proto/var (&/proto/etc), and add a cron job to do this daily.
Enjoy your new CF-booting OpenBSD install!
Note: this is the slackers way - a better way to do it is to use the flashdist or similar build scripts, but that requires a build machine. This way is, I reiterate, is for slackers who can't be bothered doing that;-)
It can be fine-tuned - for example, you don't really need all of/etc or/dev in mfs, though there can be a few things in there that require write-access. Still, with RAM cheap, it's just as easy to mount it all that way. One day, if I run out of RAM, I might change things a bit.
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What is "bad" is the near-total disregard we've had of the side effects, and the near-absence of planning for the inevitable time when our "luck" runs out.
The faith that technology, out of the blue and without having to put in the hard yards of understanding and research now (or, better still, back then ), will magically pop up with a solution to the side-effects and problems verges on the mystical. It's the technologically semi-literate equivalent to believing in a benevolent sky-beard...
Secondly I seem to recall that the reason the open office suite is called OpenOffice.org (or OO.o), and not just OpenOffice, is because someone else (MS?) already owned the OpenOffice name / trademark...
And why should he care? He's the originator and technical lead of a project, albeit one with his name firmly attached to it. He shouldn't care about anything Microsoft says or does, except maybe if/when they present evidence of 'his' kernel infringing on Microsoft's patents or copyright.
Linux vendors, on the other hand... they might have reason to care about the FUD.
They take advantage of your greed, because you want it now! They set up an artificial situation to exploit your ignorance of upcoming sales. And they rely on your apathy to avoid having to fulfill their promises.
And we not only allow creatures like this to exist, but actually encourage them through law and expectation to prosper in this sort of parasitic behaviour?
If they were a bacteria or virus we'd be doing our damnedest to kill them. But they make money, so that's OK...
On the other hand, we in Australia can still say "fuck" and see uncensored boobies on free-to-air broadcast TV. Admittedly, a breakfast radio DJ was taken to task for calling our Prime Minister a "pig-rooter" on air a couple of years ago, but all he had to do afterwards was apologise for it.
And, IIRC, it only generated 1 complaint to the radio station. I wonder who that was from?
(Actually, I think there's a legal brothel even closer than that, but I'm not 100% certain...)
The fact is, in Australia almost anybody who has a reasonable excuse can get a gun licence (unless there's a fairly good reason not to give you one e.g. history of violent crime, etc). Farmer? No problem. Want to join the local gun club? No problem. Want to go on a weekend of pig shooting with your drunken mates? Just sign here...
A shooter's licence for a rifle takes about 14 days for processing and background checks. A pistol licence can take a little longer; the slowest I know of is about 30 days. Concealed carry permits are possible to get, but much harder - you need a real reason and, no, "because I'm afraid someone else might be carrying a gun" is not a real reason, it's irrational fear.
(Note: "Because I want to feel like a big man" is not a valid reason either...)
It takes about 14 days to get a shooters licence for a rifle; longer for a pistol licence. I know one person with a licence to carry; that took nearly a month to process, but he already had a pistol licence.
Now, I can see that if you want to nip down to the local gunsmith and buy something suitable for a bit of ad-hoc "political expression" then a few weeks may be a bit of an inconvenience. But, on the other hand, it gives plenty of time for you to do some proper planning...
Note: I grew up with guns; my grandfather and uncle were championship-winning shooters; as a teenager I worked at the local rifle range. I have no problems with guns at all - except that I believe that anyone who "wants" one - rather than "needs" one, or even "has a reason to have one" - should be automatically excluded from owning one.
Where's the "-1, Wrong" mod option?
What you've quoted was the old election promise, from 1 or 2 elections ago. As well as dropping the trial, the filter software deal was later watered down to become "ISPs are encouraged to offer web-filtering software to customers at a reduced price" (which turned out to be "somewhere between $RRP and actual retail sale price").
The current one - as far as can be told from the announcements, which are as slippery as a bucketful of grass snakes in a lard factory - is ISP-based filtering. The idea is, as a "concerned parent", you'll be able to choose between an unfiltered feed or the "no sex please, we're Christian" version.
Note that this has also been a feature of the Opposition party's platform for quite a while now.
Not so much of the "little sparks"; yes there are relays still inside that sort of gear, but they're reed relays with the contacts sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere.
What you do find, however, is cct breakers and contactors on the main power feed & internal distribution. But the usual explosive trigger is the sparks from the cells themselves as they self-destruct...
We used to get 1 or 2 incidents like this a year in Aus, mostly in the far north. The SLA batteries used here don't take kindly to temps above ~ 35C (easily found inside cabinets even in colder areas) - battery life is dramatically reduced, and the usual failure mode is thermal runaway causing internal shorts &/or case splitting. The end result was usually just acid vapour destroying everything inside the cabinet. Occasionally, as I said, we'd get one that went boom.
It certainly wasn't unusual for the batteries to to from "visually OK, passes all discharge / internal impedance test" to "case on the verge of rupture" in as little as 1 month. We usually checked them every 3 months, and that was considered by both the manufacturers and my superiors as "excessive".
Having said that, what freakin' idiot decided Li-Pol cells were a good idea in that sort of environment! The things are barely stable at room temperature, requiring very careful feeding and care of charge / discharge rates even then (which is why every single consumer-use Li-Ion/Pol battery sold has a charge controller & thermal monitor cct built-in to the battery itself). Essentially, from a non-technical POV, Li-Ion & Li-Pol cells are little containers of metallic fire that will self-destruct at the slightest provocation. I certainly can't imagine any really safe way of using them in a online / continuous float application like that...
(Ex-telco senior switching, CAN, and battery maintenance tech.)
What did the 1950's-2000 bring us? The basis of computer theory was developed before that; a lot of the concepts date from the 1850's-1930. Miniaturisation? The pace quickened, yes, but it was just an extension of a process started in the latter half of the Industrial Revolution. Efficiency? A process again kicked off by the Industrial Revolution. Nuclear power? I'll give you that, with a qualified "maybe"; the physical understanding was pretty much in place prior to WWII. Social change? Again, an extension and implementation of concepts developed in the late 1800's; concepts developed to try to understand and deal with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
Space travel? Puh-lease... Semi-practical concepts were developed in the late 1800's; the technology was catching up by the late 1930's, and by that time the physics was all in place.
Telephones were developed in the late 1800's; radio was commercialised in the early 1900's; the basic concepts of TV in the 1930's (although practical implementation had to await the development of faster, more stable electronic mechanisms in the '40s).
Really, if you look at it objectively, nothing much happened in the 1950-2000 period except things got smaller, faster, and more efficient...
Specific fonts (or, correctly, "typefaces" - a given font is a particular incarnation of a typeface, including size, so Comic Sans 10pt is a different font to Comic Sans 12pt) shouldn't be necessary - families of typefaces maybe, if you're trying to achieve a particular style, but not fonts or even necessarily typefaces.
Trying to nail presentation of a presentation language down to specific fonts or typefaces is about as sensible as demanding your viewer's browser window be 800x600. If you absolutely can't live without your web-based masterpiece being presented in point-perfect font specifivity, present it as a
Of course, it's easy to see that for "everybody else", and much harder to see it for "you"
To pick an easy and obvious one, take SUVs and 4WDs. Yup, heard all the reasons why people "need" one - to carry a family of 5, to cart timber and sheet back from Home Depot, etc, etc. Problem is, that's all justification - not a reason, good or otherwise.
On TV the other night there was a family who's mother justified a 4WD (Land Cruiser, in this case) to carry her, a teenaged son, two toddlers, and shopping. Crap - something the size of a Camry, or even a Corolla, is perfectly adequate for that. Likewise, the Home Depot excuse. I have no idea what they charge for delivery (or even if they deliver!), but let's say $50 for an average weekend's load of lumber, sheet, garden products, and bits and pieces. Even if you were do do that 52 weekends a year, it's still cheaper than buying and running a 4WD!. Hell, it's probably cheaper to hire a 4WD and trailer every weekend of the year...
Or take computers. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not paying a premium for good quality and pleasing aesthetics is worthwhile (I happen to believe in some cases it is, hence I own 2 Macs...), the truth of the matter is for by far the vast majority of people, a basic 3 generation-old computer is more than adequate. In fact, I'm typing this on my main desktop machine, a 800MHz G4 eMac (the other is the latest MacBook). Sure, specialised users may require 'better' hardware - but the real number of those users is far smaller than the number who think they are...
No, I'm not advocating some Maoist 'one size fits all' blue boilersuit of a car, computer, clothes, whatever. But I do know that a large percentage - and some studies I've seen put the percentage as high as 90%~95% - of all consumer purchases are unnecessarily overblown. Which means that only maybe 5%~10% of consumer purchases are of a truly logically justifiable and necessary nature. Even if you triple that number to 15%~30% to account for the human need for personalisation and "bling", that's still a lot of time, money, energy, and resources wasted...
You've got it all wrong.
It's so they can hide the mini-bar from the kids...
Urgh! Looks like an ugly version of a Gnome-ified WindowMaker/GNUstep. Granted, with GNUstep the underpinnings should be sufficiently NeXT / OS X like - but the 'G' part of the 'GUI' is fugly as sin and hardly Mac-like (with the exception of the 'taskbar at the top'), which doesn't bode well for the 'UI' part of the equation.
(Note to developers: you should actually use and think about the UI you're trying to emulate. Even broad concepts, like level of menu depth and placement of functions/actions appropriate to their complexity, can make all the difference in the world. Not that Apple themselves aren't adverse to ignoring their own guidelines on these matters when it suits them...)
That's not quite true. John Howard has balls; black, shrivelled, and old, he takes them out of a small wooden box he keeps on the mantlepiece of Kirribilli House and waves them in your face when he needs a national emergency to prop up his election chances.
You're thinking of Kevin Rudd...
What?! And displace good home-grown Aussie talent like Jane Campion, Sam Neill, Russell Crowe, Rebecca Gibney, Bruno Lawrence, John Clarke, Guy Pearce, etc?
Not to mention our greats of the sporting world - Karmichael Hunt, Trent Croad, Willie Mason, et al; or musical stars like Neil Finn, Marc Hunter, Jenny Morris, Kevin Borich, etc.
(You can have Joh Bjelke-Petersen back. We've finished with him...)
Odd thing is, I vaguely remember a case - maybe 20 years ago now - brought against a broadcaster (TVNZ? Though it may have even been the old Television One / TV2 days) for breaching the old rule.
If I'm remembering correctly, the broadcaster was able to prove in court that what they broadcast was a true and accurate representation of a particular debate in parliament, and the case was quietly dropped...
Notice, though, that the police didn't order him to stop selling baseball bats. Their suggestion was basically that, if the shopkeeper felt the bats were destined for use on heads rather than baseballs, he should probably stop selling them - something I'm sure the shopkeeper had already worked out for himself, and was just looking for a little reassurance of (while giving a heads-up, as it were, to the police).
Besides, I'd rather a cricket bat. A couple of inches shorter, yeah, but about 40% heaver - and it has both a flat and a sharp side, so you have a choice between stopping power or pure damage. And, if all else fails, you can play cricket with it...
The American constitution is actually quite a well-written and precise document, despite being written in layman's language of the time. Just because language changes, and people's interpretations change, doesn't mean that their intentions have changed.
Hence my
The SIM card in question was found in his cousin's house."
On the other hand, there's me: never went to Uni, but spent 20+ years in a middle / upper-middle income specialised trade job. Got made redundant at 39, got a payout worth several years income, and decided to go to Uni - studying biology / microbiology / earth science.
Am I doing it for the chance to increase my earning power? Hell no - I'm under no illusions as to what B-degree graduates earn in that field (hint: it ain't much...). And I'm also under no illusions that employers will want a 40+ year old with a fresh degree and no experience in the field.
Nope, it's a subject that I've always been interested in and enjoyed learning about, and a chance (however small) to enhance the common good (think how almost everything is turning to the bio-sciences for inspirations or solutions). I'm doing it for the brain food...
Boy, was that a mistake...
Honestly though, for the average user running SMB mounts over a 100bps LAN, the CPU matters fuck-all. Having an AMD X2 3800+ or Intel Core2Duo in your server gets you dicksize bragging rights, a lighter wallet, and not much else.
I used to run a minimal linux installation - and later OpenBSD - on an old P100 as a home server, and with decent NICs the bottleneck was always either the theoretical LAN speed or SMB. I now run an OpenBSD Samba server on a 600MHz VIA Samuel 2 Mini-ITX system, and that's only so I could put it in a smaller quieter box. With a couple of clients pulling XviD video real-time off an external USB2 drive, I rarely see the load avg get above 0.3.
The slackers way of doing it:
- Get your OpenBSD install CD
- Install a basic OpenBSD setup - no games/X/comp sets - to CF
- Copy
/var to somewhere like /proto/var. If you're really brave, copy /etc to /proto/etc as well. - mkdir
/proto/dev, and "MAKEDEV all" in there. - Edit
/etc/fstab to mount / ro, and swap mount /proto/var, /proto/dev/, & /proto/etc over the original /var, /dev, and /etc to mfs (ramdisk) - Reboot
- You probably want to link
/tmp to /var/tmp as well. Do that now. - Install rsync, edit
/etc/rc.shutdown to rsync your /var (& /etc) filesystems back to /proto/var (& /proto/etc), and add a cron job to do this daily. - Enjoy your new CF-booting OpenBSD install!
Note: this is the slackers way - a better way to do it is to use the flashdist or similar build scripts, but that requires a build machine. This way is, I reiterate, is for slackers who can't be bothered doing thatIt can be fine-tuned - for example, you don't really need all of