But I DO know what I am talking about. Guess you are too new to remember 5.0 (GLIBC) 7.0 (GCC) 8.0 (BLUECURVE, new WM, totally new and mostly borked desktop) or 9.0 (PTHREADS) broke major subsystems in bad ways. Can't offhand remember where 6.0 was broke but do remember war with it too. No, RedHat.0 releases are not broken like Microsoft's.0 releases but that is the wrong standard to judge quality by. That is like judging personal ethics by the "not as amoral as Bill Clinton" standard.
RedHat.0 releases are intended for Open Source developers to work out the issues in major new technologies with. Don't have a problem with that, I always installed those on my home machines and several even got pressed into service at work after the initial burst of errata fixed the more serious flaws.
But the.1 and.2 releases were the ones sane people put on production machines and those are gone. Plus the shortened service life of only one year means that for all practical purposes you had better roll out EACH new version or risk being caught with very little time to deploy the next before the prior falls outside of errata availability. Plus I have better things to do than retrain staff twice per year as Redhat finds a new shiny thing to replace a major chunk of the desktop with.
And the real bitch is that while I would consider buying RHAS for our servers instead of rolling my own, the license is an all or nothing deal for a site. So I choose nothing because of the insane workstation pricing. For an engineer working on a high dollar workstation it might be justifiable. Not sane, but justifiable to a PHB. But I have patron labs and library staff running on hardware that over a five year service life costs less than half what RHEL WS licenses run for that same period. If I were silly enough to suggest it I'd get told to buy educational rate Windows licenses for a tenth the cost.
Yes, RH10 will soon be out. Redhat 10.0 that is. Which is a followup to RedHat 9.0 and 8.0. If you want something to put on your dorm room computer they are great. If you need something stable like the old.2 releases used to be you are SOL. Well you COULD buy RHAS WS for more than buying a fresh copy of Windows XP.... annually. NOT!
I might could be convinced to buy RHAS for our couple of servers but no way in hell am I buying the workstation for machines that cost about what WS runs per seat/year. I have about fifty workstations currently running RedHat and am looking at that looming 12/31/03 drop dead date for errata.
My current project is rebuilding RHAS from the SRPMS. This is legal and will allow me to grab the SRPMS, build and install whenever errata comes out. I'm not the only one working on this idea, LWN had a notice a few weeks ago of a new mailing list and project in this direction.
http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/r he l-rebuild-l.html http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/softw are/unix/linux/rhe l-rebuild.htm
> How about a remote village in Alaska? Not much interest, especially > at a flat rate.
And why do you feel like you not only should be subsidizing Alaskan postage rates but that you feel justified in supporting government force to make me do it too? Different parts of the country have different costs of living. We don't mandate one uniform price for housing, food, or most of the other required items. I live in rural Louisiana and I bet you would kill for my mortage. If I paid more to get shipments from newegg I'd still be ahead of the game. But I'm living in a town still close enough to civilization to get DSL. My boss lives a few miles out of town and will probably be on dialup forever. Is that the phone company's fault that the population density out there is so low a DSLAM would never pay for itself? Should thee and me pay more so the phone company can lose money out there?
Had the fedgov not handed the phone monopoly huge sacks of subsidy checks some godawful remote areas never would have had phones. You would bemoan that lack, I would welcome it. Because those folks WOULD want phone service and without the heavy helping hand of the State they would have had it, albeit at a higher price and probably via wireless. Which means we would have had widescale wireless deployment in the 60's, speeding technological development of wireless tech by decades.
And without deregulation THE cell company would THE phone company because without deregulation nobody else would have been allowed to interconnect with the monopoly's land lines. With deregulation we have a multitude of cell carriers.
> Oh yeah? Look what happened when they deregulated payphones. Price > doubled.
That is the free market. Pay or do without. If enough did without the price would fall. But you are neglecting another large factor in pay phone rates. Volume dropped due to cell phones. Eventually most pay phones will disappear as they can't pay for themselves at any price. Especially since vandalism continues to increase.
But I also remember that ugly period right after deregulation when most pay phones were in the hands of fly by night scam artists. The Free Market can have problems, but that is no reason to run back into the loving arms of Great White Father in Washington.
> I too could put up a UPS box next to my USPS box and spend $3.50 on > every letter I send.
Actually you can't. There are laws against anyone else carrying or delivering a letter. There are many private transactions you aren't free to engage in with your legal tender and this is one of them. Others can deliver a package though and there have been legal battles over the line between letter and package as the USPS fights over their turf. They KNOW what will happen should they ever be forced to compete. That.37 stamp is subsidized by the spammers and bills. Those bulk mailers send them presorted mail that requires little effort to process and pay higher prices than what the open market would charge, so they live in fear of the day that they find a way to get their mail delivered by someone else. Come that day they would have to charge market rates for 1st Class mail and suddenly their rates wouldn't look attractive. Hide and watch what happens in another few years when most bills are done online.
No, I voted for the lesser of evils. Either Al Gore or G.W. Bush was going to be the next President. Al Gore was a menace and GW would at best get little done against the inertia in Congress. Then 9/11 hit and I'm really glad Al Gore wasn't there so I don't feel nearly as bad for voting for Bush. Overnight Bush seemed to grow out his rich preppy kid routine and start acting like an adult and Leader of the Free World. Guess you just can't tell how people will react under pressure. Of course there will be damage control to clean up some of the PATRIOT Act bullcrap, but anyone who doesn't think Gore would have done equally bad if somewhat different crap in that dept doesn't understand the Democrats and their love of Government.
On the other hand Harry Brown not only had zero chance of winning, he doesn't deserve to win. That was the heart of my complaint about the Libertarians, they haven't figured out that running a candidate pledged to plunging the nation into instant chaos not only isn't going to win, he doesn't deserve to. Which is of course why running a Libertarian for president is probably daft in the first place. We need to find a way to take a few lesser offices and prove that we can govern and convince a few more people that our philosophy actually does help them. So that by the time we elect a Libertarian president a Libertarian dominated Congress will have already cleared a lot of the ground ahead of him and restored a great deal of the old Republic and returned us to a government limited by the Constituition.
> What we "KNOW" is that the global average temperature has been > increasing over the last 150 years or so.
Which gets back to my original complaint. We don't KNOW anything of the sort. If you factor out the heat island effect caused by most of the sensors with long histories now being deep in urban areas the question gets muddled. And why that magical 150 years instead of noting that global temp has bounced around a lot during recorded history? Couldn't have been picked to coincide with the start of the Industrial Revolution could it? I mean, just look at the topic we are posting in! Weather forcasting can't reliably predict the weather next week. They can't reliably predict trends on things like hurricanes yet, but I'm supposed to jump up in support of a radical change in the organization of Western Civilization based on one made for decades out? My friend, theology is the only thing that causes otherwise sensible people to behave that irrationally and it appears you have a bad case of Green religion.
The Global Warning crowd is always trotting out another computer model that predicts disaster, but they never seem to agree with one another. So they have no real numbers to back up their position. In the end they fall back on belief and expect us to believe as well, and repent of our SUV wickedness. But "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. - Lazarus Long/RAH"
But 'serious scientists' are practically forbidden to research in any of these directions. Instead they, like you, are expected to begin with the assumption that global temprature IS increasing, and study WHY with the strong implication that human forces are behind it, this being the most productive avenue of research.
That isn't science, it is politics. And anyone who thinks a closeknit community like the scientific one can almost universally hold a preconceived notion like that and still conduct impartial science probably also believes ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN is "Fair and Balanced" with 90+% registered Democrats on their payrolls and FOX is impartial with Roger Ailes at the helm.
> There's a point here, and it's that good scientists (the vast > majority) are trying to determine what the facts are rather than > prove their own preconceptions.
Sorry, but I'm a little too cynical for that. Lemme see, what was that Lazarus Long quote on the subject..... Ah yes Google knows all, "Most 'scientists' are button sorters and bottle washers." Point being it is just a job for most, and if the few political hacks in control of the research grants make it known that they will pay for results that support one side of the argument and will cast you out of the business if you speak out on the other side it is a pretty safe bet which way most will go.
I'm sure you howled over the 'cleansing' of the latest EPA Climate Change report by the Bushies. But politics and environmental science have been joined at the hip for decades, it is just that when Democrats and Greens do it the mainstream press doesn't complain.
> These are people at least as intelligent as the average slashdot > reader
I certainly they are above the average for the/. crowd! But that doesn't mean I will accept shoddy conclusions based on dubious data that appear to be based more on politics and religious belief than science.
> Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory."
Except it isn't a plausible theory. Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care. They just don't, and no amount of hating "big corporations" is going to change that and for you to even be floating it as a theory speaks volumes.
> Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and > kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that > part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired.
True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.
> Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the > discussion, which seems less than rational to me.
If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your.sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle. Difference being that Sharpton knows he is just a novelty candidate while Dean could actually be nominated and that would put him one case of "silver foot in mouth" on Shrub's part from the Oval Office.
In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a fan of the Shrub either. I will still admit in public places that I voted for him, but with the other hand holding my nose. Rather see a Libertarian make a serious run someday but they are stuck in 'going down in a principled stand' mode instead of engaging in the compromise required to get the 50+ percent needed to get a chance to DO something instead of just talk.
> Amtrak runs efficiently, with a very small number of accidents compared > to, say, airlines.
Compare the number of commercial aviation takoffs per year with the number of Amtrack departures. Now compare the failure rate. And lets not even consider the difference in complexity between running a train along nice straight steel rails and putting jetliners up and bringing them safely back down again.
> As far as the USPS goes, figure out a way to handle the exceedingly > high volume of mail that goes through every facility's doors every > day, and I'll tip my hat to you.
I haven't a clue how to do that, but FedEx and UPS would love to have a go at it.... if it weren't illegal. And that my young liberal friend is how the Post Office stays in business with their abysmal service; threaten to put any competitor in jail.
> How can rules regulating how contracts be formed be considered > "deregulation".
When Democrats are in control, their warped views on what a Free Market is gets enshrined into law. And it doesn't help when Republicans can't decide whether they want to be rebadged Democrats or mercantilists instead of Free Market capitalists, but that is the situation they had in CA.
> The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know." > Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.
A temporary failure of a complex system like the American power grid every few decades doesn't sound like a "I don't care" attitude to me. Sounds like imperfect systems built by imperfect humans. The engineers will study this incident and improve the system. And we will discover yet another failure mode after another couple of decades of rapid demand growth. NIMBY attitudes towards building power plants are most likely the largest contributing factor though, since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.
Of course as a Dean supporter, brains and rational thought isn't likely to be your strong suit. Raw emotion, mostly a blind hatred of Shrub, are his draws.
> There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company > is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.
Kid, you are obviously not old enough to remember the bad old days of The Phone Company. Since the big breakup Long distance rates are fast approaching flat rate for everyone everywhere and local service is very affordable if you just say no to all of the optional crap they try to peddle to get their margins up. Hint: Answering machines are $20, voice mail is $5/mo, you do the math.
If you want to see what the loving hand of government does do a business, go look at Amtrack or the Post Office.
> When a power company (or any other company for that matter), has to > become profitable they will cut costs, and when they are cutting costs > the level of service usually falls.
No, the current situation with "deregulated" utilities is it is a Democrat's idea of a free market further corrupted by mercentilist Republicans wanting an assured market and assured profits. You can't deregulate half of a market without bad results. The alternative to cutting cost in a free market is raising prices, but THOSE are still in the hand of government control.
Not sure if a truly free market is possible with current technology of wires to houses only possible though emminent domain land grabs, but we can and should get a lot closer. Leave a government controlled entity with a monopoly on distribution and let the market supply the content at market rates.
> I'd like to offer a more balanced and less ideological reply to this > post. First, my credentials. I'm working on a PhD at UCLA with a focus > on arctic climate and hydrology.
Uh huh. Balance from UCLA? At least you are correct about the ideology, Global Warming at UCLA is more like theology.
> Are you right to say that we should take steps to ameliorate > potential impacts before it's too late?
If we are going to expend enormous resources on a theoretical lets go for meteor deflection. At least we KNOW that will happen someday.
> You don't apply for a grant to fund research denying global warming.
You got that right, and while I'll concede your larger point that you don't usually put in for money to directly study global warming either, $50 says that NOBODY at UCLA has made a grant application in climatology that doesn't include one or more of the following buzzwords: "impact on climate change", "impact on global warming", "effects of human changes to the environment", etc.
It is a very closed club in the science world, and the second somebody starts acting like they question one of the reigning dogmas the words goes around and they get defunded fast. It is truth that scientists don't change their minds, they just die. (Can't recall who first said that.)
> But with so many distros and kernels out there it must make them hard > to do so.
Not at all, if they would pull their heads out of their butts. Release the specs along with an initial driver source file and I'd be more than willing to consider their obligation to the customer fulfilled because the community can take it from there. If a new kernel breaks a driver it is only the company's responsibility to fix it if it is closed source.
Some of us remember when this sort of openness was expected. When you bought a printer the command set, wire protocol and physical interface were fully documented in the manual. Some hardware didn't come with that level of doc but it was AVAULABLE. Look up an old Seagate tech manual. And I can promise you that there isn't anything in the hardware specs for an NVIDIA GeForce that their competitors haven't already reverse engineered. They are just being pricks.
Ya fanboy, get back to me in a year and tell me again how easy XP installs. Or just use any hardware released AFTER XP went golden. XP worked initially because all hardware vendors made sure their stuff was supported. Since the vendors generally don't help with Linux you need to use six-month to one year old kit with a new distro to get an equally smooth install.
No they won't. Putting it into a EULA is worthless, since if the rest of the EULA has no force of law the clause demanding it be resolved under Virginia law is equally worthless. And if they make you actually sign a contract it is valid in all fifty states.
That is easy, since I do not live in Virgina they can write the most vile EULA on a six-pack and I'll just buy it and ignore the EULA because unless the retailer makes me sign a contract the transaction was a SALE and not a LICENSE.
They only have the power you give them. EULAs are naked emperors unless you sign a contract that makes them real. And I won't sign such a contract. If they make EULAs legal I just won't buy products that contain one I can't live with. I'll probably pull anchor and move to a more legally sane country if that day ever comes.
If people can't be bothered to READ a contract before signing it I can't be bothered to care.
I do read that sort of thing and that is why I will only buy from scum like Cisco if I have no other choice. And I usually do.
You can buy sync serial cards on the open market you know.
As for non-transferability, BS. They can probably refuse to sell a service contract on the used equip, perhaps even deny you updates. But "going after" you for possessing/using a piece of used equip would never stand in court. Doctrine of first sale allows copyrighted works to be sold by their rightful owner and EULAs are only valid in Virgina. So unless you have an actual contract with a company that specifically says you can't bring in a used box you are clear, and any such clause probably wouldn't stand in court if you were willing to spend the money to fight it. (i.e. one unit from eBay isn't worth a fight, 1,000 from an acquisition probably is.)
The problem is a hardware limitation. CD drives (AFAIK) don't generate an interrupt when the eject button is pressed. The only choices are to lock the tray even the device is in use (mounted) or to try and cope with the media disappearing without warning.
This is the problem of piggybacking on Microsoft hardware, any feature they don't need won't be present for us to take advantage of.
> You don't need to read a manual to use windows, so why for nix?
Oh bullshit. Just because you don't GET a manual with Windows doesn't mean you don't need one. Don't believe me? Do to your closest bookstore and behold.
Yes installing Linux often ends in some minor tweaking to get it right. Try installing Windows sometime (not using the customized restore disk you got with your Dell) and get back to me. From personal experience doing end user support the crock rate for Windows is close to 50%. I can almost always work it through (find the drivers, twiddle settings, etc) and get somebody's machine back up, but Linux has better odds of 'just working' on a fresh load these days because the distro vendors know they can't depend on preloads.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't know what you are talking about.
.0 releases are not broken like Microsoft's .0 releases but that is the wrong standard to judge quality by. That is like judging personal ethics by the "not as amoral as Bill Clinton" standard.
.0 releases are intended for Open Source developers to work out the issues in major new technologies with. Don't have a problem with that, I always installed those on my home machines and several even got pressed into service at work after the initial burst of errata fixed the more serious flaws.
.1 and .2 releases were the ones sane people put on production machines and those are gone. Plus the shortened service life of only one year means that for all practical purposes you had better roll out EACH new version or risk being caught with very little time to deploy the next before the prior falls outside of errata availability. Plus I have better things to do than retrain staff twice per year as Redhat finds a new shiny thing to replace a major chunk of the desktop with.
But I DO know what I am talking about. Guess you are too new to remember 5.0 (GLIBC) 7.0 (GCC) 8.0 (BLUECURVE, new WM, totally new and mostly borked desktop) or 9.0 (PTHREADS) broke major subsystems in bad ways. Can't offhand remember where 6.0 was broke but do remember war with it too. No, RedHat
RedHat
But the
And the real bitch is that while I would consider buying RHAS for our servers instead of rolling my own, the license is an all or nothing deal for a site. So I choose nothing because of the insane workstation pricing. For an engineer working on a high dollar workstation it might be justifiable. Not sane, but justifiable to a PHB. But I have patron labs and library staff running on hardware that over a five year service life costs less than half what RHEL WS licenses run for that same period. If I were silly enough to suggest it I'd get told to buy educational rate Windows licenses for a tenth the cost.
This was modded Informative?
.2 releases used to be you are SOL. Well you COULD buy RHAS WS for more than buying a fresh copy of Windows XP.... annually. NOT!
r he l-rebuild-l.htmlw are/unix/linux/rhe l-rebuild.htm
Yes, RH10 will soon be out. Redhat 10.0 that is. Which is a followup to RedHat 9.0 and 8.0. If you want something to put on your dorm room computer they are great. If you need something stable like the old
I might could be convinced to buy RHAS for our couple of servers but no way in hell am I buying the workstation for machines that cost about what WS runs per seat/year. I have about fifty workstations currently running RedHat and am looking at that looming 12/31/03 drop dead date for errata.
My current project is rebuilding RHAS from the SRPMS. This is legal and will allow me to grab the SRPMS, build and install whenever errata comes out. I'm not the only one working on this idea, LWN had a notice a few weeks ago of a new mailing list and project in this direction.
http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/
http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/soft
> How about a remote village in Alaska? Not much interest, especially
> at a flat rate.
And why do you feel like you not only should be subsidizing Alaskan postage rates but that you feel justified in supporting government force to make me do it too? Different parts of the country have different costs of living. We don't mandate one uniform price for housing, food, or most of the other required items. I live in rural Louisiana and I bet you would kill for my mortage. If I paid more to get shipments from newegg I'd still be ahead of the game. But I'm living in a town still close enough to civilization to get DSL. My boss lives a few miles out of town and will probably be on dialup forever. Is that the phone company's fault that the population density out there is so low a DSLAM would never pay for itself? Should thee and me pay more so the phone company can lose money out there?
Had the fedgov not handed the phone monopoly huge sacks of subsidy checks some godawful remote areas never would have had phones. You would bemoan that lack, I would welcome it. Because those folks WOULD want phone service and without the heavy helping hand of the State they would have had it, albeit at a higher price and probably via wireless. Which means we would have had widescale wireless deployment in the 60's, speeding technological development of wireless tech by decades.
I'm still on 1.0.1 because every time I have tried upgrading Moz, Nautilus breaks. I had text splattered atop text in places. No excuse for that.
And without deregulation THE cell company would THE phone company because without deregulation nobody else would have been allowed to interconnect with the monopoly's land lines. With deregulation we have a multitude of cell carriers.
> Oh yeah? Look what happened when they deregulated payphones. Price
> doubled.
That is the free market. Pay or do without. If enough did without the price would fall. But you are neglecting another large factor in pay phone rates. Volume dropped due to cell phones. Eventually most pay phones will disappear as they can't pay for themselves at any price. Especially since vandalism continues to increase.
But I also remember that ugly period right after deregulation when most pay phones were in the hands of fly by night scam artists. The Free Market can have problems, but that is no reason to run back into the loving arms of Great White Father in Washington.
> I too could put up a UPS box next to my USPS box and spend $3.50 on
.37 stamp is subsidized by the spammers and bills. Those bulk mailers send them presorted mail that requires little effort to process and pay higher prices than what the open market would charge, so they live in fear of the day that they find a way to get their mail delivered by someone else. Come that day they would have to charge market rates for 1st Class mail and suddenly their rates wouldn't look attractive. Hide and watch what happens in another few years when most bills are done online.
> every letter I send.
Actually you can't. There are laws against anyone else carrying or delivering a letter. There are many private transactions you aren't free to engage in with your legal tender and this is one of them. Others can deliver a package though and there have been legal battles over the line between letter and package as the USPS fights over their turf. They KNOW what will happen should they ever be forced to compete. That
No, I voted for the lesser of evils. Either Al Gore or G.W. Bush was going to be the next President. Al Gore was a menace and GW would at best get little done against the inertia in Congress. Then 9/11 hit and I'm really glad Al Gore wasn't there so I don't feel nearly as bad for voting for Bush. Overnight Bush seemed to grow out his rich preppy kid routine and start acting like an adult and Leader of the Free World. Guess you just can't tell how people will react under pressure. Of course there will be damage control to clean up some of the PATRIOT Act bullcrap, but anyone who doesn't think Gore would have done equally bad if somewhat different crap in that dept doesn't understand the Democrats and their love of Government.
On the other hand Harry Brown not only had zero chance of winning, he doesn't deserve to win. That was the heart of my complaint about the Libertarians, they haven't figured out that running a candidate pledged to plunging the nation into instant chaos not only isn't going to win, he doesn't deserve to. Which is of course why running a Libertarian for president is probably daft in the first place. We need to find a way to take a few lesser offices and prove that we can govern and convince a few more people that our philosophy actually does help them. So that by the time we elect a Libertarian president a Libertarian dominated Congress will have already cleared a lot of the ground ahead of him and restored a great deal of the old Republic and returned us to a government limited by the Constituition.
> What we "KNOW" is that the global average temperature has been
/. crowd! But that doesn't mean I will accept shoddy conclusions based on dubious data that appear to be based more on politics and religious belief than science.
> increasing over the last 150 years or so.
Which gets back to my original complaint. We don't KNOW anything of the sort. If you factor out the heat island effect caused by most of the sensors with long histories now being deep in urban areas the question gets muddled. And why that magical 150 years instead of noting that global temp has bounced around a lot during recorded history? Couldn't have been picked to coincide with the start of the Industrial Revolution could it? I mean, just look at the topic we are posting in! Weather forcasting can't reliably predict the weather next week. They can't reliably predict trends on things like hurricanes yet, but I'm supposed to jump up in support of a radical change in the organization of Western Civilization based on one made for decades out? My friend, theology is the only thing that causes otherwise sensible people to behave that irrationally and it appears you have a bad case of Green religion.
The Global Warning crowd is always trotting out another computer model that predicts disaster, but they never seem to agree with one another. So they have no real numbers to back up their position. In the end they fall back on belief and expect us to believe as well, and repent of our SUV wickedness. But "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. - Lazarus Long/RAH"
But 'serious scientists' are practically forbidden to research in any of these directions. Instead they, like you, are expected to begin with the assumption that global temprature IS increasing, and study WHY with the strong implication that human forces are behind it, this being the most productive avenue of research.
That isn't science, it is politics. And anyone who thinks a closeknit community like the scientific one can almost universally hold a preconceived notion like that and still conduct impartial science probably also believes ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN is "Fair and Balanced" with 90+% registered Democrats on their payrolls and FOX is impartial with Roger Ailes at the helm.
> There's a point here, and it's that good scientists (the vast
> majority) are trying to determine what the facts are rather than
> prove their own preconceptions.
Sorry, but I'm a little too cynical for that. Lemme see, what was that Lazarus Long quote on the subject..... Ah yes Google knows all, "Most 'scientists' are button sorters and bottle washers." Point being it is just a job for most, and if the few political hacks in control of the research grants make it known that they will pay for results that support one side of the argument and will cast you out of the business if you speak out on the other side it is a pretty safe bet which way most will go.
I'm sure you howled over the 'cleansing' of the latest EPA Climate Change report by the Bushies. But politics and environmental science have been joined at the hip for decades, it is just that when Democrats and Greens do it the mainstream press doesn't complain.
> These are people at least as intelligent as the average slashdot
> reader
I certainly they are above the average for the
> Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory."
.sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle. Difference being that Sharpton knows he is just a novelty candidate while Dean could actually be nominated and that would put him one case of "silver foot in mouth" on Shrub's part from the Oval Office.
Except it isn't a plausible theory. Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care. They just don't, and no amount of hating "big corporations" is going to change that and for you to even be floating it as a theory speaks volumes.
> Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and
> kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that
> part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired.
True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.
> Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the
> discussion, which seems less than rational to me.
If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your
In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a fan of the Shrub either. I will still admit in public places that I voted for him, but with the other hand holding my nose. Rather see a Libertarian make a serious run someday but they are stuck in 'going down in a principled stand' mode instead of engaging in the compromise required to get the 50+ percent needed to get a chance to DO something instead of just talk.
> Amtrak runs efficiently, with a very small number of accidents compared
> to, say, airlines.
Compare the number of commercial aviation takoffs per year with the number of Amtrack departures. Now compare the failure rate. And lets not even consider the difference in complexity between running a train along nice straight steel rails and putting jetliners up and bringing them safely back down again.
> As far as the USPS goes, figure out a way to handle the exceedingly
> high volume of mail that goes through every facility's doors every
> day, and I'll tip my hat to you.
I haven't a clue how to do that, but FedEx and UPS would love to have a go at it.... if it weren't illegal. And that my young liberal friend is how the Post Office stays in business with their abysmal service; threaten to put any competitor in jail.
> How can rules regulating how contracts be formed be considered
> "deregulation".
When Democrats are in control, their warped views on what a Free Market is gets enshrined into law. And it doesn't help when Republicans can't decide whether they want to be rebadged Democrats or mercantilists instead of Free Market capitalists, but that is the situation they had in CA.
> The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know."
> Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.
A temporary failure of a complex system like the American power grid every few decades doesn't sound like a "I don't care" attitude to me. Sounds like imperfect systems built by imperfect humans. The engineers will study this incident and improve the system. And we will discover yet another failure mode after another couple of decades of rapid demand growth. NIMBY attitudes towards building power plants are most likely the largest contributing factor though, since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.
Of course as a Dean supporter, brains and rational thought isn't likely to be your strong suit. Raw emotion, mostly a blind hatred of Shrub, are his draws.
> There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company
> is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.
Kid, you are obviously not old enough to remember the bad old days of The Phone Company. Since the big breakup Long distance rates are fast approaching flat rate for everyone everywhere and local service is very affordable if you just say no to all of the optional crap they try to peddle to get their margins up. Hint: Answering machines are $20, voice mail is $5/mo, you do the math.
If you want to see what the loving hand of government does do a business, go look at Amtrack or the Post Office.
> When a power company (or any other company for that matter), has to
> become profitable they will cut costs, and when they are cutting costs
> the level of service usually falls.
No, the current situation with "deregulated" utilities is it is a Democrat's idea of a free market further corrupted by mercentilist Republicans wanting an assured market and assured profits. You can't deregulate half of a market without bad results. The alternative to cutting cost in a free market is raising prices, but THOSE are still in the hand of government control.
Not sure if a truly free market is possible with current technology of wires to houses only possible though emminent domain land grabs, but we can and should get a lot closer. Leave a government controlled entity with a monopoly on distribution and let the market supply the content at market rates.
> I'd like to offer a more balanced and less ideological reply to this
> post. First, my credentials. I'm working on a PhD at UCLA with a focus
> on arctic climate and hydrology.
Uh huh. Balance from UCLA? At least you are correct about the ideology, Global Warming at UCLA is more like theology.
> Are you right to say that we should take steps to ameliorate
> potential impacts before it's too late?
If we are going to expend enormous resources on a theoretical lets go for meteor deflection. At least we KNOW that will happen someday.
> You don't apply for a grant to fund research denying global warming.
You got that right, and while I'll concede your larger point that you don't usually put in for money to directly study global warming either, $50 says that NOBODY at UCLA has made a grant application in climatology that doesn't include one or more of the following buzzwords: "impact on climate change", "impact on global warming", "effects of human changes to the environment", etc.
It is a very closed club in the science world, and the second somebody starts acting like they question one of the reigning dogmas the words goes around and they get defunded fast. It is truth that scientists don't change their minds, they just die. (Can't recall who first said that.)
It is amazing that OSDL can't produce HTML that renders correctly in Mozilla.
> But with so many distros and kernels out there it must make them hard
> to do so.
Not at all, if they would pull their heads out of their butts. Release the specs along with an initial driver source file and I'd be more than willing to consider their obligation to the customer fulfilled because the community can take it from there. If a new kernel breaks a driver it is only the company's responsibility to fix it if it is closed source.
Some of us remember when this sort of openness was expected. When you bought a printer the command set, wire protocol and physical interface were fully documented in the manual. Some hardware didn't come with that level of doc but it was AVAULABLE. Look up an old Seagate tech manual. And I can promise you that there isn't anything in the hardware specs for an NVIDIA GeForce that their competitors haven't already reverse engineered. They are just being pricks.
Ya fanboy, get back to me in a year and tell me again how easy XP installs. Or just use any hardware released AFTER XP went golden. XP worked initially because all hardware vendors made sure their stuff was supported. Since the vendors generally don't help with Linux you need to use six-month to one year old kit with a new distro to get an equally smooth install.
No they won't. Putting it into a EULA is worthless, since if the rest of the EULA has no force of law the clause demanding it be resolved under Virginia law is equally worthless. And if they make you actually sign a contract it is valid in all fifty states.
That is easy, since I do not live in Virgina they can write the most vile EULA on a six-pack and I'll just buy it and ignore the EULA because unless the retailer makes me sign a contract the transaction was a SALE and not a LICENSE.
They only have the power you give them. EULAs are naked emperors unless you sign a contract that makes them real. And I won't sign such a contract. If they make EULAs legal I just won't buy products that contain one I can't live with. I'll probably pull anchor and move to a more legally sane country if that day ever comes.
If people can't be bothered to READ a contract before signing it I can't be bothered to care.
I do read that sort of thing and that is why I will only buy from scum like Cisco if I have no other choice. And I usually do.
You can buy sync serial cards on the open market you know.
As for non-transferability, BS. They can probably refuse to sell a service contract on the used equip, perhaps even deny you updates. But "going after" you for possessing/using a piece of used equip would never stand in court. Doctrine of first sale allows copyrighted works to be sold by their rightful owner and EULAs are only valid in Virgina. So unless you have an actual contract with a company that specifically says you can't bring in a used box you are clear, and any such clause probably wouldn't stand in court if you were willing to spend the money to fight it. (i.e. one unit from eBay isn't worth a fight, 1,000 from an acquisition probably is.)
The problem is a hardware limitation. CD drives (AFAIK) don't generate an interrupt when the eject button is pressed. The only choices are to lock the tray even the device is in use (mounted) or to try and cope with the media disappearing without warning.
This is the problem of piggybacking on Microsoft hardware, any feature they don't need won't be present for us to take advantage of.
The problem is we don't get to design the hardware. The choices with CD drives come down to two bad ones.
1. Don't lock the tray and allow the disc to disappear without any warning.
2. Lock the tray when the device is in use.
We need option 3. Have the eject button send a signal to the system and react accordingly but it just isn't on the table.
> You don't need to read a manual to use windows, so why for nix?
Oh bullshit. Just because you don't GET a manual with Windows doesn't mean you don't need one. Don't believe me? Do to your closest bookstore and behold.
Yes installing Linux often ends in some minor tweaking to get it right. Try installing Windows sometime (not using the customized restore disk you got with your Dell) and get back to me. From personal experience doing end user support the crock rate for Windows is close to 50%. I can almost always work it through (find the drivers, twiddle settings, etc) and get somebody's machine back up, but Linux has better odds of 'just working' on a fresh load these days because the distro vendors know they can't depend on preloads.