How much does a Roadster cost? If you are shopping for >$100K USD sportscars there are a lot of excellent choices with a wide range of features and benefits. And most of the other options won't turn into an expensive, not covered by warranty, brick if the charging circuit is interrupted while you are out of town for an extended period and the battery goes to 0%.
Now explain the practical reason for someone to buy a Volt, Prius or any other mainstream EV. You can't. And that is why the only people buying them are tech nerd early adopters and greens. The price premium voids any advantage of fuel savings over the typical life of the vehicle and they are small crappy vehicles. And those economics are with a huge government subsidy which could not possibly scale to mass production. True cost / benefit is so awful they wouldn't even be able to sell em to Hollywierd celebutards.
Nope it wasn't prerooted. But it was a simple script kiddie friendly package to rage against the cage.. Problem is no fastboot so I can't safely experiment by booting from SD and avoid damaging the onboard flash.
And yes it is fairly spartan, but it was replacing a Moto flip phone with Java ME so it was a step up.:) eBay bargain, couldn't argue with new in the box and delivered for $70. I don't have a data plan and every time I enable WiFi it goes into a frenzy, even with sync and all location services disabled. The second the WiFi indicator goes on Google Play, Google Maps, Google Search, GMail, My Uploads and Bluetooth!!! launch. Soon after every other app seems like it need to phone home, including Facebook and I have never touched it since I have no facebook account. Thinking of using my root powers to simply remove Google Maps since it is useless without data. But it seems wired into a lot of other things so Android may not like it.
Gaddafi had went from crazy enemy to semi-neutral elder tyrant. Under the bus.
Mukarak was a military dictator. No argument from me on that fact. Now I await your notion of an alternative that isn't worse. The current situation was entirely forseeable, in fact if you care to search I said so right here on/. The only positive achievement of the Carter administration is about to go into the ashbin of history. (And Hell, with hindsight I'll even give you that it was a big enough deal to even be worth preempting the premier of Battlestar Galactia for... but I was one pissed off dude at the time.)
Ben Ali has now been replaced with the Muslim Brotherhood. Improvement?
Assad. Ah, note the difference here. We ain't done shit. Because Syria is an actual enemy.
And allow me to add Iran as another datapoint. We could probably have made a difference there had we done something bold and outside the media spotlight. Organized friends in the area to help, as in the Saudi's who are already scared witless at the thought of Ajad with a nuke, the new Iraqi government is terrified of being absorbed into a renewed Persia. Again we see the pattern of enemy == pass.
Pakistan is complex, more a frenemy but far too important to piss off as Obama goes out of his way to do. Afganistan is already preparing to be abandoned to the Taliban.
Russia under Putin is clearly a threat, we appease them. Remember Georgia? I do.
About the only things Obama hasn't done (yet) are throw Taiwan to China or give South Korea to the Norks/China and either of those would be pure political suicide.
Ask yourself, given the practical limitations of the power of the Presidency and his desire to actually be reelected (so he will have more 'flexibility') what would happen if someone (a red diaper baby) who hates the United States and everything it stands for do if somehow elected. How has Obama differed from that? Is there a more reliable model to predict what he will do in a given circumstance?
Oh Hell no. If they are hostile I'd want Capain James Kirk or Captain John "Nuke em all" Sheridan. But since they aren't actually available, and neither is Zombie Reagan, the next best option would be Darth Cheney.
You don't understand. Kadaffy had made a deal with Bushhitler to disband his WMD program (he had a quite advanced one too) for a deal where we WOULDN'T kill him. Sounds like a fair enough deal, even if he has a fair amount blood on his hands, some of it American. A deal being a lot cheaper than a war. So of course Obama threw him under the bus for the Muslim Brotherhood exactly like he threw Mubarak under it. Not an enemy of the US, fear Obama. Enemy of the US, nothing to fear. Except for a few dirty terrorists in unimportant hellholes getting blasted with drones and Seal Teams so he can leak the details and/or have his Hollywood allies make hagiographic movies timed for right around election day.
I suspect the cause of this survey's result is simply too many of the sort of people who would vote for Obama got him confused with Will Smith (Independence Day)... remember his voters do tend to come from the shallow end of the gene pool. I mean, if you are a typical Democrat 'they all look alike anyway'. (Remember, Exalted Cyclops Byrd, Jim Crow, George Wallace, every sheriff with a firehose, et al. were all on the D team.)
I hereby denounce myself in advance, to save everyone else the trouble.
Got root but can't get fastboot to work. It launches some strange screen that requires a battery removal to get off of. And you DO NOT want to remove the battery on this phone, it takes days to recover original battery life as it recalibrates. There are no ready made images for my crappy 'lil phone (Blu Tango, 160M usable RAM for Linux) and without fastboot, a serial console to a bootloader (can't find a header) or something there is little chance I'll get anything newer on this phone. All I'd manage to do is brick the thing while blindly trying things. It shipped with 2.2 and I doubt 3.0+ would be worth trying so that only leaves 2.3 as an upgrade path anyway.
> Those are easy to fix. They have all been fixed on a small scale already, and the solution scales well.
No they haven't. Even you agree with me if you would stop doublethinking for a second and try to think a bit you would see it. But you won't. I write the material below for the benefit of readers who aren't so emotionally invested.
> The problem is that nobody wants to invest the capital to make it work. Everyone expects the government > to pony up a trillion dollars or so for the fix, so any private work done before that is at a loss.
So which is it? Is EV just waiting for somebody to actually build them or are they a trillion or so in R&D and capital expense away? There is a fairly important difference between the two you know. While a Trillion isn't a lot for the current US government (apparently) it is quite a bit in the private sector. It is far more than any one individual or corporation possesses. It is almost certainlu more than the market capitalization of the entire worldwide auto industry.
> raising CAFE to 50 and mandating appropriate standards on electric cars, which would solve the problem in less than a year.
See this? That is you giving the game away. You are all butthurt that evil oil companies are stopping all this wonderful EV tech, that already exists and is perfect, from being able to reach the market. In a world where a lot of people that aren't in the oil industry or the legacy ICE based auto industry would love to capture that market, and get a Nobel Prize for 'saving the earth' as a cherry on top, it is inconceivable that nobody would be marketing an already 'proven' solution anywhere in the world. At some level under your delusional feelings (not thoughts) you realize just how silly you are because you, right up there in B&W, admit it would require the government to tilt the marketplace and render existing designs illegal.
Since existing cars are quite legal (hell, Obama made the US government a major shareholder in GM) and aren't going anywhere it doesn't require a dark conspiracy to understand why nobody is going into volume production on the currently far inferior EV tech. It can't compete. Even with massive government subsidies on R&D and on each unit sold they tend to sit unsold. They make just enough to keep the government busybodies off their back and write off the losses as a cost of doing business and as R&D toward a distant future when the battery tech catches up.
> Meantime, many major car companies have come out with either EVs or plug-in hybrids.
Which tend to sit on lots unsold even with epic subsidies as customers don't buy them in droves. The only people who do buy them are yuppies with more money than common sense, who also tend to buy them as a second or third vehicle so their range problems aren't much of an issue.
> the oil industry could well find itself in Kodak's shoes
The conversion to digital cameras didn't become game changing until digital was better than film in every way, quality cost, convience, etc. EV isn't better in any way than ICE yet so there isn't much uptake beyond the early adopter crowd who are willing to buy the things for green egoboo or simply because it is new and shiny. So yes, put an EV on the market that goes 300 miles on a charge, recharges in less than an hour and is priced (without a subsidy as those will never scale into mass adoption) the same or less than an ICE powered version of the same basic vehicle and the switchover will happen in a few short years.
And your analogy fails anyway because Kodak was a early player in digital photography. They were just too petrified from being dominant for so long they just couldn't adapt fast enough and died. But they did make some good digital products, especially early on. The correct lesson is to realize companies like Exxon and Shell are energy companies. Yes they have a lot of institutional inertia tied to oil and gas but in the end if another source of energy promises to be profitable you can expect them to make a play for that new market and to try to leverage their existing infrastructure, financial resources, etc. to gain a position. But like Kodak they may not succeed, really depends what competencies are required for whatever source proves out as the 'next big thing.' For Kodak there apparently just weren't enough similarities between the chemistry and mechanics of the camera and film world and the computers and software that defines a digital workflow.
Electric cars are a stupid idea. And they will be until we get much better batteries, they must be smaller, lighter, charge faster and be cheaper. That is a lot of miracles that need to happen. If only one of those things had to happen we could probably do a massive research push to get there, but with everything needing to get dramatically better it is a dumb idea to cast all of our future on one dice roll.
Combine with the hard reality we will also require a massive new electrical generating and distribution capacity if electric cars are to be anything but egoboo for a select few wealthy greens subsidized by the taxes of 'wasteful' slobs they despise. And unless you know of a viable 'alternative' energy source that can not only supply current load but the massive new one implied by electrifying transportation all al electric car's battery is is a semi efficient storage medium for electricity generated by fossil fuels.
No, what I get out of this announcement is an oil company is willing to plunk down coin to drill somewhere there is no chance Obama's regulators will ever allow actual production so they are betting on that not being a problem.
> I was watching the RT coverage of OWS last year, in which they hyped it up as the beginning > of the new American Spring, which would sweep the country and take down the institutions of > oppressive American government inside a few weeks.
Oh, so they are about at the MSNBC level of detachment from reality then. Might have to sample em then since I try to keep up with the goings on in the camp of my enemies.
I don't mind biased new sources as long as they don't try to claim they are impartial. Impartial is almost impossible and few even try, but most lie to themselves and think they are. Those are the ones that piss me off. Places like MSNBC, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, AP, BBC. Drudge is right up front with his biases so I like going there. FOX is just a wink, wink, nudge, nudge away from being open about it, they have other problems though like the muckraker tabloid format. Huffpo is blindingly clear about which side they are on too, so I'm okay with that.
> In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control > of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
They are independent but only someone with the exact same biases as they have would pretend they are impartial, balanced or even report all of the news. In their case they really need some force to bring some reality to their work, if not the heavy hand of the government perhaps they should be defunded and exposed to the forces of the marketplace. It is insane to force every Brit to pay the television tax to fund a service they may very well not even use or value.
Same problem over here, where most consumers have figured out the legacy media have no real value but, except for PBS/NPR, they are subject to market forces and are thus going to fail if they continue to ignore the discontent of the customers.
Good grief. No wonder movies look like crap, I thought it was because I live in flyover country and the locals were just misprojected or on old hand me down gear. Wikipedia says 98% of screens are just HD TV systems with bigger screens! Yuck!
Now I know why movies are dead, you really can get exactly the same experience at home.
Doubt it. Sales of LCD TVs dropped for the first time. And average selling price is too low for anyone to be making serious coin. They can put 1920x1080 displays on phones now. Ok, if you stretch the definition of 'phone' to a 5" screen. You know what that all adds up to?
It is time for another upgrade cycle to begin. As always it is a chicken and the egg but most recent movies are already available in 4k since that is what they ship to the local megaplex with a digital projector. BluRay media was designed to scale to 100GB per side and that is probably good enough to roll out a SuperBlu format with. But no 4K, just double to 2160p and permit it to do it at 60Hz in 3D. That way the theatres still have an advantage and there is room for another refresh in another decade. And it is probably a safe bet they could tweak things a little and make it backward compatible to regular BD players. That and a few high profile SuperHD pay per events would kick off the content side of things nicely. Then the sets could begin to make an appearance, first pitched for PC duty along with video since super resolution would be instantly useful for large PC desktops.
And of course it would HAVE to have a whole new audio format along with new connectors so the cable makers could get their rakeoff.
> redhat (aka fedora) has always had a pathetic package mgmt system.
No, rpm is a better system than deb. It had signed packages years before Debian and nice all in one file.srpm/.src.rpm files that build from pristine sources plus patches and a.spec. And rpm specifically forbids (although clueless commerical vendors sometimes ignore it) interactive install/update, absolutely required for mass installs or unattended update. I think you are getting confused over the update systems built atop them. There I would agree that Debian's apt family was better than what Red Hat was shipping until fairly recent versions of Yum and even then I would note that Yum is still a P.I.G. And delta rpms absolutely rock if you aren't sitting on the wire with a local mirror.
> Debian has handled updates and major upgrades flawlessly for decades
Not exactly. It took far longer to update my Mythtv system from Debian 5.0 to 6.0 following the directions at debian.org than I have ever spent doing a single version upgrade on a RH/Fedora system. Admitted that was my first time doing a version update on Debian on a machine I cared about and was taking pains to avoid pooching the system so that probably accounts for some of the extra time. Along with the fact that it was connected to a TV and the console was not easily visible so I was also taking care to keep it available over the network at all times during the process, something I haven't tried yet on RH. Point is neither one does version upgrades 100% hands off.
> (years before RH existed)
Obviously you weren't actually using Linux way backthen or you wouldn't have said something so ignorant. Debian saw first light Aug 1993 and got it's first primitive package system with 0.01 in Jan 1994. It didn't hit 1.x until years later. RH released 1.0 Oct 1994 and got rpm in 1995.
> Debian just restarts the bits that are likely to break if they were not restarted.
Oh please do fight on. I do, even though the cause is lost to any rational analysis. But we lost the war the second we crossed the event horizion of 50% of the country falling into the Taker class.
There were any number of almost as bright lines we have been crossing the last century. Go look at the footage of the more sane pols from the Great Society era who warned we were spending our children and grandchildren's inheritance... they were right. It's all spent. The social security 'trust fund' is just a bunch of IOUs from the government to be paid by the government; meaningless. Things that can't continue, don't. Bailouts just postpone the Doom! and we are so screwed there isn't enough wealth on the planet to bail the West out of the hole it has managed to dig itself into.
Our money has no intrinsic value and since we are now calling it into existence trillions at a time even stupid people are figuring out that it doesn't have any real value. And again, we are so far in that rabbit hole we probably couldn't reverse course even if we wanted to.... and we don't.
And so on.
But we should fight anyway, because if we surrender we certainly lose and in the era of rapid change we live in we just might be able to struggle long enough to make it to a game changer. Because while all the wealth on Earth can't bail us out, if we doubled our wealth we could probably at least buy enough time to do it again. And somewhere along the way we might invent a political game changer and end the century of progressive misrule.
No, preupgrade can handle it. It still requires a reboot into Anaconda but it does its work without any need for interraction and it does it fairly fast.
I was opposed to the merge on historical principle until I read all of the arguments and thought on it a bit.
The change does make sense. Existing practice is a solution to a problem that hasn't really existed for decades. The whole distro now fits into a tiny (by modern standards) partition and we have rescue media now so the importance of always being able to boot / to make repairs doesn't apply anymore. Meanwhile the benefits to nfs mounting of the OS and just generally putting all of the OS proper down that one/usr tree feels right.
It probably should be called/os instead of/usr but that is probably a bridge too far from the changing established practices p.o.v. But imagine a future where we fixed everything to no longer even need the symlinks to the old/bin/sbin/lib, etc. Then I wonder how much trouble it would be to work out sharing/etc and/var between two distros? Then instead of/usr you put Fedora 20 under/fedora-20 along with/debian-wheezy and the initrd sets up the default paths on boot. Suspect it would require too much standardization of things in/etc though for distict distros to even mean anything. Just thinking aloud, trying to get outside the box a bit.
> I would say if a computer can make a descision for itself, such as a web crawler building a serach index then indeed that is speech.
It didn't. A human made the decision when it programmed the computer. Google is perfectly within it's rights to exercise editorial judgement on search listings whether it uses humans to curate the listings like Yahoo! of old or programs rules into a computer. Facebook can't scoop up a bunch of personal info and sell it in violation of privacy laws, thus they can't get away with encoding that decision into software.
Good grief people, this isn't hard. Just like you shouldn't be able to take every single fracking invention from pre 1990 and add "on the Internet" to the patent application and get a brand new one. You can't program a computer to do things you can't do. The only grey area is if it does something unintended while processing inhuman amounts of information, whether you are equally liable as if you manually did it yourself. And again, if you think a little the answer is already there in the law, negligence is fairly well settled.... as whatever you can convince a jury to award damages for.:(
> Are Gentoo/Debian really that intertwined with whatever Fedora maintainers decide?
Not yet. But if GNOME and/or Firefox start requiring the feature other distros have a choice between two bad options. This new Linux only notion that started with systemd is increasingly Fedora only. You can have your distro if you want, if it behaves just like Fedora. One big monolitic blob of alien tech. Want the new udev? It is part of systemd. Want the new GNOME, wait for it to be unusable without udev which requires systemd. And so on.
Negative campaigning works. But not in the way you probably think. To make as generic of an example as possible. Nothing an R says will get a D to come vote for him. But if you can demoralize him enough he just might stay home. And that is exactly half as good as getting them to vote for you. On the other hand positive ads can sway unattached voters who bother to show up and inspire your own team to get out. So you need both.
> Ideally no-one would "go negative",
What a silly notion. If you aren't going to bring up the flaws in character, positions and record of your opponent who will? If you are an R that is, if you are a D you can leave the attacking to the legacy media but even for them it is risky since they might wander off the message you are wanting to hit hard on. And some of that 'negative' stuff truly is legitimate to an election. Admittedly some of it isn't important and hell, half of it isn't even true. But I'm defending the principle more than specific usages.
Good grief, the Stupid coming from Fedora and the GNOMEs is making my head hurt. We managed to update running systems with package management for how long? Leave it to the GNOMEs to fudge things up.... or just have Mac/Windows envy and convince themselves that this isn't a bug, it is a feature!
I'd love to see 90% turnout... assuming they were mostly clueful. But I'd be just as happy with 10% turnout assuming they were almost all clueful. We need to find a way to stop idiots from voting. But I can't think of any that wouldn't be abused by whoever was in power at the time to create an even worse situation.
Not likely. China's economy is built on building cheap crap to export to us. Long before they generate enough wealthy people of their own to consume what they produce we will be too poor to sustain their rise at the current rate. So on the current course everybody is going to lose.
And just about when things might stabilize at a new equilibrium where they come up some and our average drops a bit it all starts again as everyone moves production to Africa and finally drags the Middle East into the 19th Century and uses that part of the world as cheap labor. Only after that does the pool of cheap labor finally dry up... and some idiot will probably have robots perfected by then so we are still screwed.
> I think you need to get your maths right before you place any more demands.
No, he just didn't spell out the rest of the math that anyone who should be posting on a forum such as this should be able to figure out.
Pay a contract programmer $500USD per month and that is your total expense. Add a US based headcount and the salary of $3,000 is only the beginning. You have to provide benefits, pay payroll tax, provide office space and infrastructure, etc. You will of course be paying the cost of oversight/management either way. But do add in the inertia factor. It takes time and effort to scale up and then scale down again as the market changes. Dropping a contract programmer is as simple as saying "Thanks! That is all we need right now, don't call us we will call you."
Yup, that is one problem. The second, more important one was implied in the text but carefully not made explicit. We changed the implied work contract to something that doesn't work. So things simply can't remain the same, the question is how to fix it?
The old work contract implied loyalty in both directions. Up to a point the company would be loyal to their more valuable workers, pensions, bennies and trying really hard to hold onto them in hard economic times. In the other direction employees were expected to have a certain loyalty to the company. In that environment it made sense to think longer term, seeking promising talent and developing it. Now companies aren't loyal to employees and employees aren't loyal to their company. If you assume the employee you hire today and spend a year training up will be gone in three years it doesn't make sense. So if employees are interchangable free agents they are expected to come 'complete' with all required skills. But there isn't a way to get those skills and the system thus fails.
Go reread the part of the article again where it discusses how the IT startups devoured the carefully cultivated talent the old school companies had developed. If you didn't expect them to take the lesson from that beating as "stop paying to train your competitor's workers" then you aren't paying attention. And the startups are running in such a breakneck race to IPO they can't think of training anyone. That problem is worse in IT but applies in pretty much every field. Why spend a lot of time and money training somebody who will get headhunted away as soon as they can check the experience box? But once everyone is expecting someone else to hire the fresh grads and finish training them up the game is over.
We probably can't return to the old 'company man' ways and it isn't even clear we want to. So we can't go back and we can't stay where we are either; so what next?
Slashdot Mirror
> Go drive a Tesla Roadster. It's astonishing.
How much does a Roadster cost? If you are shopping for >$100K USD sportscars there are a lot of excellent choices with a wide range of features and benefits. And most of the other options won't turn into an expensive, not covered by warranty, brick if the charging circuit is interrupted while you are out of town for an extended period and the battery goes to 0%.
Now explain the practical reason for someone to buy a Volt, Prius or any other mainstream EV. You can't. And that is why the only people buying them are tech nerd early adopters and greens. The price premium voids any advantage of fuel savings over the typical life of the vehicle and they are small crappy vehicles. And those economics are with a huge government subsidy which could not possibly scale to mass production. True cost / benefit is so awful they wouldn't even be able to sell em to Hollywierd celebutards.
Nope it wasn't prerooted. But it was a simple script kiddie friendly package to rage against the cage.. Problem is no fastboot so I can't safely experiment by booting from SD and avoid damaging the onboard flash.
And yes it is fairly spartan, but it was replacing a Moto flip phone with Java ME so it was a step up. :) eBay bargain, couldn't argue with new in the box and delivered for $70. I don't have a data plan and every time I enable WiFi it goes into a frenzy, even with sync and all location services disabled. The second the WiFi indicator goes on Google Play, Google Maps, Google Search, GMail, My Uploads and Bluetooth!!! launch. Soon after every other app seems like it need to phone home, including Facebook and I have never touched it since I have no facebook account. Thinking of using my root powers to simply remove Google Maps since it is useless without data. But it seems wired into a lot of other things so Android may not like it.
> Gaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali and Assad
Lets look at those four.
Gaddafi had went from crazy enemy to semi-neutral elder tyrant. Under the bus.
Mukarak was a military dictator. No argument from me on that fact. Now I await your notion of an alternative that isn't worse. The current situation was entirely forseeable, in fact if you care to search I said so right here on /. The only positive achievement of the Carter administration is about to go into the ashbin of history. (And Hell, with hindsight I'll even give you that it was a big enough deal to even be worth preempting the premier of Battlestar Galactia for... but I was one pissed off dude at the time.)
Ben Ali has now been replaced with the Muslim Brotherhood. Improvement?
Assad. Ah, note the difference here. We ain't done shit. Because Syria is an actual enemy.
And allow me to add Iran as another datapoint. We could probably have made a difference there had we done something bold and outside the media spotlight. Organized friends in the area to help, as in the Saudi's who are already scared witless at the thought of Ajad with a nuke, the new Iraqi government is terrified of being absorbed into a renewed Persia. Again we see the pattern of enemy == pass.
Pakistan is complex, more a frenemy but far too important to piss off as Obama goes out of his way to do. Afganistan is already preparing to be abandoned to the Taliban.
Russia under Putin is clearly a threat, we appease them. Remember Georgia? I do.
About the only things Obama hasn't done (yet) are throw Taiwan to China or give South Korea to the Norks/China and either of those would be pure political suicide.
Ask yourself, given the practical limitations of the power of the Presidency and his desire to actually be reelected (so he will have more 'flexibility') what would happen if someone (a red diaper baby) who hates the United States and everything it stands for do if somehow elected. How has Obama differed from that? Is there a more reliable model to predict what he will do in a given circumstance?
> you bet your ass they'd want Romney.
Oh Hell no. If they are hostile I'd want Capain James Kirk or Captain John "Nuke em all" Sheridan. But since they aren't actually available, and neither is Zombie Reagan, the next best option would be Darth Cheney.
> Yeah, like he bowed and kissed ass for Gaddafi.
You don't understand. Kadaffy had made a deal with Bushhitler to disband his WMD program (he had a quite advanced one too) for a deal where we WOULDN'T kill him. Sounds like a fair enough deal, even if he has a fair amount blood on his hands, some of it American. A deal being a lot cheaper than a war. So of course Obama threw him under the bus for the Muslim Brotherhood exactly like he threw Mubarak under it. Not an enemy of the US, fear Obama. Enemy of the US, nothing to fear. Except for a few dirty terrorists in unimportant hellholes getting blasted with drones and Seal Teams so he can leak the details and/or have his Hollywood allies make hagiographic movies timed for right around election day.
I suspect the cause of this survey's result is simply too many of the sort of people who would vote for Obama got him confused with Will Smith (Independence Day)... remember his voters do tend to come from the shallow end of the gene pool. I mean, if you are a typical Democrat 'they all look alike anyway'. (Remember, Exalted Cyclops Byrd, Jim Crow, George Wallace, every sheriff with a firehose, et al. were all on the D team.)
I hereby denounce myself in advance, to save everyone else the trouble.
> Don't complain. Do something about it.
Easy to say, not always easy to do.
> Root it and install Ice Cream Sandwich.
Got root but can't get fastboot to work. It launches some strange screen that requires a battery removal to get off of. And you DO NOT want to remove the battery on this phone, it takes days to recover original battery life as it recalibrates. There are no ready made images for my crappy 'lil phone (Blu Tango, 160M usable RAM for Linux) and without fastboot, a serial console to a bootloader (can't find a header) or something there is little chance I'll get anything newer on this phone. All I'd manage to do is brick the thing while blindly trying things. It shipped with 2.2 and I doubt 3.0+ would be worth trying so that only leaves 2.3 as an upgrade path anyway.
> Those are easy to fix. They have all been fixed on a small scale already, and the solution scales well.
No they haven't. Even you agree with me if you would stop doublethinking for a second and try to think a bit you would see it. But you won't. I write the material below for the benefit of readers who aren't so emotionally invested.
> The problem is that nobody wants to invest the capital to make it work. Everyone expects the government
> to pony up a trillion dollars or so for the fix, so any private work done before that is at a loss.
So which is it? Is EV just waiting for somebody to actually build them or are they a trillion or so in R&D and capital expense away? There is a fairly important difference between the two you know. While a Trillion isn't a lot for the current US government (apparently) it is quite a bit in the private sector. It is far more than any one individual or corporation possesses. It is almost certainlu more than the market capitalization of the entire worldwide auto industry.
> raising CAFE to 50 and mandating appropriate standards on electric cars, which would solve the problem in less than a year.
See this? That is you giving the game away. You are all butthurt that evil oil companies are stopping all this wonderful EV tech, that already exists and is perfect, from being able to reach the market. In a world where a lot of people that aren't in the oil industry or the legacy ICE based auto industry would love to capture that market, and get a Nobel Prize for 'saving the earth' as a cherry on top, it is inconceivable that nobody would be marketing an already 'proven' solution anywhere in the world. At some level under your delusional feelings (not thoughts) you realize just how silly you are because you, right up there in B&W, admit it would require the government to tilt the marketplace and render existing designs illegal.
Since existing cars are quite legal (hell, Obama made the US government a major shareholder in GM) and aren't going anywhere it doesn't require a dark conspiracy to understand why nobody is going into volume production on the currently far inferior EV tech. It can't compete. Even with massive government subsidies on R&D and on each unit sold they tend to sit unsold. They make just enough to keep the government busybodies off their back and write off the losses as a cost of doing business and as R&D toward a distant future when the battery tech catches up.
> Meantime, many major car companies have come out with either EVs or plug-in hybrids.
Which tend to sit on lots unsold even with epic subsidies as customers don't buy them in droves. The only people who do buy them are yuppies with more money than common sense, who also tend to buy them as a second or third vehicle so their range problems aren't much of an issue.
> the oil industry could well find itself in Kodak's shoes
The conversion to digital cameras didn't become game changing until digital was better than film in every way, quality cost, convience, etc. EV isn't better in any way than ICE yet so there isn't much uptake beyond the early adopter crowd who are willing to buy the things for green egoboo or simply because it is new and shiny. So yes, put an EV on the market that goes 300 miles on a charge, recharges in less than an hour and is priced (without a subsidy as those will never scale into mass adoption) the same or less than an ICE powered version of the same basic vehicle and the switchover will happen in a few short years.
And your analogy fails anyway because Kodak was a early player in digital photography. They were just too petrified from being dominant for so long they just couldn't adapt fast enough and died. But they did make some good digital products, especially early on. The correct lesson is to realize companies like Exxon and Shell are energy companies. Yes they have a lot of institutional inertia tied to oil and gas but in the end if another source of energy promises to be profitable you can expect them to make a play for that new market and to try to leverage their existing infrastructure, financial resources, etc. to gain a position. But like Kodak they may not succeed, really depends what competencies are required for whatever source proves out as the 'next big thing.' For Kodak there apparently just weren't enough similarities between the chemistry and mechanics of the camera and film world and the computers and software that defines a digital workflow.
Electric cars are a stupid idea. And they will be until we get much better batteries, they must be smaller, lighter, charge faster and be cheaper. That is a lot of miracles that need to happen. If only one of those things had to happen we could probably do a massive research push to get there, but with everything needing to get dramatically better it is a dumb idea to cast all of our future on one dice roll.
Combine with the hard reality we will also require a massive new electrical generating and distribution capacity if electric cars are to be anything but egoboo for a select few wealthy greens subsidized by the taxes of 'wasteful' slobs they despise. And unless you know of a viable 'alternative' energy source that can not only supply current load but the massive new one implied by electrifying transportation all al electric car's battery is is a semi efficient storage medium for electricity generated by fossil fuels.
No, what I get out of this announcement is an oil company is willing to plunk down coin to drill somewhere there is no chance Obama's regulators will ever allow actual production so they are betting on that not being a problem.
> I was watching the RT coverage of OWS last year, in which they hyped it up as the beginning
> of the new American Spring, which would sweep the country and take down the institutions of
> oppressive American government inside a few weeks.
Oh, so they are about at the MSNBC level of detachment from reality then. Might have to sample em then since I try to keep up with the goings on in the camp of my enemies.
I don't mind biased new sources as long as they don't try to claim they are impartial. Impartial is almost impossible and few even try, but most lie to themselves and think they are. Those are the ones that piss me off. Places like MSNBC, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, AP, BBC. Drudge is right up front with his biases so I like going there. FOX is just a wink, wink, nudge, nudge away from being open about it, they have other problems though like the muckraker tabloid format. Huffpo is blindingly clear about which side they are on too, so I'm okay with that.
> In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control
> of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
They are independent but only someone with the exact same biases as they have would pretend they are impartial, balanced or even report all of the news. In their case they really need some force to bring some reality to their work, if not the heavy hand of the government perhaps they should be defunded and exposed to the forces of the marketplace. It is insane to force every Brit to pay the television tax to fund a service they may very well not even use or value.
Same problem over here, where most consumers have figured out the legacy media have no real value but, except for PBS/NPR, they are subject to market forces and are thus going to fail if they continue to ignore the discontent of the customers.
Good grief. No wonder movies look like crap, I thought it was because I live in flyover country and the locals were just misprojected or on old hand me down gear. Wikipedia says 98% of screens are just HD TV systems with bigger screens! Yuck!
Now I know why movies are dead, you really can get exactly the same experience at home.
> The 'move' to 4k will be GLACIAL.
Doubt it. Sales of LCD TVs dropped for the first time. And average selling price is too low for anyone to be making serious coin. They can put 1920x1080 displays on phones now. Ok, if you stretch the definition of 'phone' to a 5" screen. You know what that all adds up to?
It is time for another upgrade cycle to begin. As always it is a chicken and the egg but most recent movies are already available in 4k since that is what they ship to the local megaplex with a digital projector. BluRay media was designed to scale to 100GB per side and that is probably good enough to roll out a SuperBlu format with. But no 4K, just double to 2160p and permit it to do it at 60Hz in 3D. That way the theatres still have an advantage and there is room for another refresh in another decade. And it is probably a safe bet they could tweak things a little and make it backward compatible to regular BD players. That and a few high profile SuperHD pay per events would kick off the content side of things nicely. Then the sets could begin to make an appearance, first pitched for PC duty along with video since super resolution would be instantly useful for large PC desktops.
And of course it would HAVE to have a whole new audio format along with new connectors so the cable makers could get their rakeoff.
> redhat (aka fedora) has always had a pathetic package mgmt system.
No, rpm is a better system than deb. It had signed packages years before Debian and nice all in one file .srpm/.src.rpm files that build from pristine sources plus patches and a .spec. And rpm specifically forbids (although clueless commerical vendors sometimes ignore it) interactive install/update, absolutely required for mass installs or unattended update. I think you are getting confused over the update systems built atop them. There I would agree that Debian's apt family was better than what Red Hat was shipping until fairly recent versions of Yum and even then I would note that Yum is still a P.I.G. And delta rpms absolutely rock if you aren't sitting on the wire with a local mirror.
> Debian has handled updates and major upgrades flawlessly for decades
Not exactly. It took far longer to update my Mythtv system from Debian 5.0 to 6.0 following the directions at debian.org than I have ever spent doing a single version upgrade on a RH/Fedora system. Admitted that was my first time doing a version update on Debian on a machine I cared about and was taking pains to avoid pooching the system so that probably accounts for some of the extra time. Along with the fact that it was connected to a TV and the console was not easily visible so I was also taking care to keep it available over the network at all times during the process, something I haven't tried yet on RH. Point is neither one does version upgrades 100% hands off.
> (years before RH existed)
Obviously you weren't actually using Linux way backthen or you wouldn't have said something so ignorant. Debian saw first light Aug 1993 and got it's first primitive package system with 0.01 in Jan 1994. It didn't hit 1.x until years later. RH released 1.0 Oct 1994 and got rpm in 1995.
> Debian just restarts the bits that are likely to break if they were not restarted.
Like RH up until this idiotic new notion.
Oh please do fight on. I do, even though the cause is lost to any rational analysis. But we lost the war the second we crossed the event horizion of 50% of the country falling into the Taker class.
There were any number of almost as bright lines we have been crossing the last century. Go look at the footage of the more sane pols from the Great Society era who warned we were spending our children and grandchildren's inheritance... they were right. It's all spent. The social security 'trust fund' is just a bunch of IOUs from the government to be paid by the government; meaningless. Things that can't continue, don't. Bailouts just postpone the Doom! and we are so screwed there isn't enough wealth on the planet to bail the West out of the hole it has managed to dig itself into.
Our money has no intrinsic value and since we are now calling it into existence trillions at a time even stupid people are figuring out that it doesn't have any real value. And again, we are so far in that rabbit hole we probably couldn't reverse course even if we wanted to.... and we don't.
And so on.
But we should fight anyway, because if we surrender we certainly lose and in the era of rapid change we live in we just might be able to struggle long enough to make it to a game changer. Because while all the wealth on Earth can't bail us out, if we doubled our wealth we could probably at least buy enough time to do it again. And somewhere along the way we might invent a political game changer and end the century of progressive misrule.
No, preupgrade can handle it. It still requires a reboot into Anaconda but it does its work without any need for interraction and it does it fairly fast.
I was opposed to the merge on historical principle until I read all of the arguments and thought on it a bit.
The change does make sense. Existing practice is a solution to a problem that hasn't really existed for decades. The whole distro now fits into a tiny (by modern standards) partition and we have rescue media now so the importance of always being able to boot / to make repairs doesn't apply anymore. Meanwhile the benefits to nfs mounting of the OS and just generally putting all of the OS proper down that one /usr tree feels right.
It probably should be called /os instead of /usr but that is probably a bridge too far from the changing established practices p.o.v. But imagine a future where we fixed everything to no longer even need the symlinks to the old /bin /sbin /lib, etc. Then I wonder how much trouble it would be to work out sharing /etc and /var between two distros? Then instead of /usr you put Fedora 20 under /fedora-20 along with /debian-wheezy and the initrd sets up the default paths on boot. Suspect it would require too much standardization of things in /etc though for distict distros to even mean anything. Just thinking aloud, trying to get outside the box a bit.
> if you exclude idiots from voting then they are not fairly represented.
And this is a problem how? Democracy is a stupid idea, which is why we here in America were given a Republic. If we could keep it.... we failed.
> I would say if a computer can make a descision for itself, such as a web crawler building a serach index then indeed that is speech.
It didn't. A human made the decision when it programmed the computer. Google is perfectly within it's rights to exercise editorial judgement on search listings whether it uses humans to curate the listings like Yahoo! of old or programs rules into a computer. Facebook can't scoop up a bunch of personal info and sell it in violation of privacy laws, thus they can't get away with encoding that decision into software.
Good grief people, this isn't hard. Just like you shouldn't be able to take every single fracking invention from pre 1990 and add "on the Internet" to the patent application and get a brand new one. You can't program a computer to do things you can't do. The only grey area is if it does something unintended while processing inhuman amounts of information, whether you are equally liable as if you manually did it yourself. And again, if you think a little the answer is already there in the law, negligence is fairly well settled.... as whatever you can convince a jury to award damages for. :(
> Are Gentoo/Debian really that intertwined with whatever Fedora maintainers decide?
Not yet. But if GNOME and/or Firefox start requiring the feature other distros have a choice between two bad options. This new Linux only notion that started with systemd is increasingly Fedora only. You can have your distro if you want, if it behaves just like Fedora. One big monolitic blob of alien tech. Want the new udev? It is part of systemd. Want the new GNOME, wait for it to be unusable without udev which requires systemd. And so on.
Negative campaigning works. But not in the way you probably think. To make as generic of an example as possible. Nothing an R says will get a D to come vote for him. But if you can demoralize him enough he just might stay home. And that is exactly half as good as getting them to vote for you. On the other hand positive ads can sway unattached voters who bother to show up and inspire your own team to get out. So you need both.
> Ideally no-one would "go negative",
What a silly notion. If you aren't going to bring up the flaws in character, positions and record of your opponent who will? If you are an R that is, if you are a D you can leave the attacking to the legacy media but even for them it is risky since they might wander off the message you are wanting to hit hard on. And some of that 'negative' stuff truly is legitimate to an election. Admittedly some of it isn't important and hell, half of it isn't even true. But I'm defending the principle more than specific usages.
Good grief, the Stupid coming from Fedora and the GNOMEs is making my head hurt. We managed to update running systems with package management for how long? Leave it to the GNOMEs to fudge things up.... or just have Mac/Windows envy and convince themselves that this isn't a bug, it is a feature!
Preach!
I'd love to see 90% turnout... assuming they were mostly clueful. But I'd be just as happy with 10% turnout assuming they were almost all clueful. We need to find a way to stop idiots from voting. But I can't think of any that wouldn't be abused by whoever was in power at the time to create an even worse situation.
Not likely. China's economy is built on building cheap crap to export to us. Long before they generate enough wealthy people of their own to consume what they produce we will be too poor to sustain their rise at the current rate. So on the current course everybody is going to lose.
And just about when things might stabilize at a new equilibrium where they come up some and our average drops a bit it all starts again as everyone moves production to Africa and finally drags the Middle East into the 19th Century and uses that part of the world as cheap labor. Only after that does the pool of cheap labor finally dry up... and some idiot will probably have robots perfected by then so we are still screwed.
> I think you need to get your maths right before you place any more demands.
No, he just didn't spell out the rest of the math that anyone who should be posting on a forum such as this should be able to figure out.
Pay a contract programmer $500USD per month and that is your total expense. Add a US based headcount and the salary of $3,000 is only the beginning. You have to provide benefits, pay payroll tax, provide office space and infrastructure, etc. You will of course be paying the cost of oversight/management either way. But do add in the inertia factor. It takes time and effort to scale up and then scale down again as the market changes. Dropping a contract programmer is as simple as saying "Thanks! That is all we need right now, don't call us we will call you."
Yup, that is one problem. The second, more important one was implied in the text but carefully not made explicit. We changed the implied work contract to something that doesn't work. So things simply can't remain the same, the question is how to fix it?
The old work contract implied loyalty in both directions. Up to a point the company would be loyal to their more valuable workers, pensions, bennies and trying really hard to hold onto them in hard economic times. In the other direction employees were expected to have a certain loyalty to the company. In that environment it made sense to think longer term, seeking promising talent and developing it. Now companies aren't loyal to employees and employees aren't loyal to their company. If you assume the employee you hire today and spend a year training up will be gone in three years it doesn't make sense. So if employees are interchangable free agents they are expected to come 'complete' with all required skills. But there isn't a way to get those skills and the system thus fails.
Go reread the part of the article again where it discusses how the IT startups devoured the carefully cultivated talent the old school companies had developed. If you didn't expect them to take the lesson from that beating as "stop paying to train your competitor's workers" then you aren't paying attention. And the startups are running in such a breakneck race to IPO they can't think of training anyone. That problem is worse in IT but applies in pretty much every field. Why spend a lot of time and money training somebody who will get headhunted away as soon as they can check the experience box? But once everyone is expecting someone else to hire the fresh grads and finish training them up the game is over.
We probably can't return to the old 'company man' ways and it isn't even clear we want to. So we can't go back and we can't stay where we are either; so what next?