> So learn about who you're making snide comments about, and show some respect.
Yea he has done great things. Doesn't make him the final authority on anything. He is still another blind man trying to describe the elephant. He is a math weenie so he sees everything in those terms. The linguists see everything in their terms, thus tend to become LISP weenies when they get exposed to computers. Then you get the OO weenies trying to model everything as objects anbd beliving equally fervently that any other approach is a heresy.
The problem is they are all both right and wrong. Each describes part of the problem space while ignoring everything else. And the whole issue is really fudged up when we consider that so much of what we now call 'software development' isn't anything of the sort. Half of it is just UI design which is more human factors and graphic design than programming. Most of the rest is getting the design specification right. The actual coding is usually more a case of grabbing existing libraries for the sort of algorithms Dijkstra is usually talking about and slathering enough buzzword compliant crap (these days it usually enough to mention middleware, Java and XML several times) on to make the PHBs happy. And of course forget the documentation because whatever happens any documentation that does accidentally happen will be useless and obsolete before 1.0 and will never get updated.
> Useful assembly language (i.e. beyond the concepts) that you learn in first > year will be useful four years later when you hit the job market?
Yes. Because 90% of learning assembly isn't learning the opcodes of one cpu it is the way of thinking on such a small level. I taught myself 6809 assembly years and years ago. A couple of years later I picked up 6502 with little effort. Didn't do any assembly for a long time but this year I learned AVR assembly without a problem because I knew that 90% that doesn't change. I have looked at x86 a few times but haven't yet needed to actually learn it. Yes it is much more complex but it doesn't look all that alien.
More important though, knowing assembly means I really understand concepts like pointers in languages like C. I really understand the idea that a character is just a number and a string is an array of them. I know why C terminates a string with a \0 and why that isn't always the best idea.
News flash, whatever specific language skills you learn in school isn't likely to be a sellable skill a decade later. C excepted. But if you learn to program assembly it will help you understand what is actually going on in a computer and that knowledge will help you with everything else.
It isn't too late to learn. Buy your self an AVR trainer board and learn to program assembler. 6809, 68000, 6502 or Z80 would also be good first places to start but you can't find ready to use hardware as easy. And the AVR makes a good first step into embedded which helps you to understand hardware issues better, it's why I started playing with it. You can get started with an AVR for $20USD if you are really frugal and still have a parallel printer port on one of your PCs.
>..about half the content of web sites being Flash-based animated..
Yes it does suck. Until you get a clue and install flashblock into FF. It speeds up the whole Internet experience and can selectively punch holes for sites where the Flash is useful. I even put in on our public lab machines to save bandwidth. It was worth the time to explain it.
> Simply put, these networks were never provisioned for this much usage, and I'll be surprised if there aren't massive growing pains along the way.
The Internet was designed for video. Multicast would be the perfect way to allow dumping video into everyone's Tivo. Too bad the ISP are dead set against the notion of anybody but them doing it.
> And if I suck 100gb of crap off usenet in a month it's no different than 100gb of BT crap in terms of network stress.
That wasn't true until quite recently when most ISPs dropped most of UseNet. Traffic to and from one of your ISPs servers puts far less load on the Internet than throwing traffic around the world on BT. So what did the ISPs do? Dropped most of Usenet under political pressure. So screw em.
> Because the fact that it's already based on an open source UNIX isn't good enough for some people...
Because the one Apple ships is crippled. If it can't run your applications it isn't much use now is it? And an iPhone can't run any applications that His Steveness doesn't like so it should be expected that that situation will be rectified. Trying to fix the origional OS to remove the evil bits is a pointless game of cat and mouse so the obvious solution is to keep the (to some people at least) nice hardware and put fully functional software on. Android is an obvious choice if community compiled so as to avoid Google's own evil bits.
> However, it is more likely than not that by the time they succeed, a new version will come out, and we will be back to square one.
Yup, this is the situation rockbox finds itself in. No currently shipping hardware can run rockbox. And few of the existing ports ever get finished before the devs apparently lose interest in old obsolete hardware and begin porting to the new shiny. The lesson to be learned from this is simple. Unless you just get off on porting don't bother with closed hardware. So if you want Linux on your phone buy a phone that ships that way. And forget the gPhone apparently since it still doesn't appear to be fully jailbroken.
Assuming their 62 tonnes per year figure is actually correct (almost certainly optimistic) and their published pricetag gets spread over a twenty year service life of the equipment and the 3.15 to one conversion between a barrel of oil and tonnes of CO2 emissions and it doesn't make much sense unless you assume oil will average close to 200 euros per barrel over those years. Vary it a up bit to account for maintaince costs or down a bit if you assume a longer service life without major repairs.
And that is the problem with every 'green' project I have ever seen real numbers on. They aren't green, they are dumb. And don't even start in on bringing the cost down because that never happens. As soon as an 'alternative' source of energy begins to get practical the greens decide it isn't green anymore. They love alternatives that allow them to appear superiour and scarf up grant money but never support a new source of energy when it starts looking like it might actually, ya know, supply energy. Hydro is now evil. As commercial wind farms are being developed the chorus of complaint is already tuning up. There are even protests over geothermal! Protests are already underway over large scale solar installations. None of which makes sense until you understand that to a green, people are the problem and any solution that doesn't involve dismantling the industrial base that allows such an 'unnatural' population to be killed off by famine isn't going to satisfy the environmental movement. So forget appeasing them by finding some magic green energy source that will allow us to continue on our present course, they ain't buying the whole premise of Civilization itself.
The solution has been staring us in the face for almost half a century but for political reasons it is out of bounds. We must ignore the bleatings of the self hating greens and secure ourselves enough energy to carry us over until we finally perfect fusion. We must stop handing over huge sacks of cash to people who want nothing more than to kill every last one of us. We need to build nukes like our lives depended on it. Because they do. It wont just be our lifestyle that gets crimped when we start running out of energy, we can't sustain anywhere the number of people on this planet without abundant energy.
> As in, full of Middle-Easterners. Do you really want those people armed?
Ok, you are trying to make a funny and all that but I'm gonna play along. Dude, they are already armed with a fully loaded oil tanker. Just how much more damage are they going to do with a couple of AKs and perhaps a rocket launcher or three? A hundred million dollars worth of crude oil is enough to do a heck of a lot of damage to a port. Plus they could opt to just sink the damned thing in an inconvienient spot.
So unless we are going to forbid ships with 'ragheads' in the crew we just have to hope that the people who own that quarter billion worth of tanker and cargo have enough on the line to avoid hiring a crew of terrorists. The worry would be a gang of these pirates being terrorists and instead of holding a tanker hostage quietly throwing the origional crew overboard and then continuing it's voyage and blowing it up/sinking it at an oil terminal here or in the middle east.
> How would a US port feel about a foreign ship pulling in when a dozen civilians > with grenade launchers are strolling around on deck? The Coast Guard would go ape.
As an NRA member I'm not afraid of arms or people wielding them, so long as they are the right people bearing them for the right reasons and shooting them at the right (or would that be wrong?) people. So no, I would have no problem with a $150M tanker laden with $100M in crude being armed. Seems rather sane to me. If we are trusting the crew not to use the far more dangerous tanker itself as a weapon I see no reason to begrudge them a couple of rocket launchers to defend themselves from pirates. No, they can't carry them off the ship and they should be expected to have the decency to stow them away once they are safely in US waters. If I can't have a rocket launcher why should they get to have all the fun.:)
This story just goes to show ya what pansies we have allowed ourselves to become. Can you imagine pirate infested waters under Ronald Reagan's six hundred ship navy? People might accuse America of trying to police the world, but dang it back when we really did it the world was a safer place... as it was when the British Navy ruled the seas. Pirates had short life expectancies.
> So, by Taco's use of the word "our," wouldn't this mean that he considers > himself one of the terrorist class of people?
No it just means he is a 'tard who can't distinguish Kos talking points from reality. Really hoping some of the BDS craziness dies down when Bush retires to Crawford. But it won't. No American talking on the phone to another end point in the USA was ever tapped without a proper warrant. But that doesn't stop the ignorant from believing Big Brother is stalking em. For that I blame the media and the higher ups in the Kostard movement who DO know better and prefer to keep a lie alive for purely political reasons. Calling to impeach Bush & Cheney for tapping calls to suspicious numbers overseas doesn't sound so wrong to the average person on the street; "Bush was conducting warrantless wiretaps!!!!" sounds so much more sinister so that is what they all say.
No, the craziness is only going to get kicked up another notch come Jan 20. Not only will the less stable elements on my side return to their behaviour when Clinton was in office the Kostards will be in full denial mode in a couple of months and ready to lash out at anything that moves, followed a few months later by angry as hell when we are still in Iraq, Gitmo isn't closed and Iran gets pounded by Israel as The One wisely decides to do absolutely nothing. Oh, and I'll give ya even money that come 2010 the Bush tax cuts get extended out a few more years to keep the negative impact out of the 2012 elections.
Not saying The One won't live up to his promo material on other fronts and give us some Change to Socialism we can all believe in. He IS a third generation Communist after all. He is just smart enough to know that the Long March Through The Instituitions is a far more reliable way to destroy America than attempting a Revolution. It's why he is dangerous, he ain't an idiot. We lived through Carter, that is proof enough we can survive a well meaning 'progressive' fool, even one that is a sanctiomious twit.
> But if it was Sarah Palin you can bet your ass it owuld be front page news.
Duh. The media has an unwholsome obsession with Gov. Palin. But note that the privacy violation in her case was a bit more extreme. The son of a Democratic elected official broke into her mail account AND posted the contents (not just the headers or to/from traffic data) on the Internet.
> That sentence was incomprehensible. Take your meds, son.
It wasn't THAT bad, but yea that post was made under the influence of grandchildren swarming about. Notice you didn't care to dispute the basic point though. Democratic elected officials, who damned sure should know better, turned a mere plumber's life upside down because he dared question The One in public. And to date I have heard of exactly ONE person being suspended for thirty days. This Verizon employee was fired for looking at call detail records and with no evidence of them being posted on the Internet or leaked to the media.
Do I think the Verizon guy was overly punished? No. That sort of thing can't be condoned in a civilized society. The Ohio officials who dug into the plumber were under punished. As will be the kid who broke into Gov. Palin's private Yahoo! mail account. That's my problem, the obvious double standard.
> Can we expect anyone who followed a warrantless wiretap from the Bush administration to also be fired then?
There is a bit of a difference between doing something as a law enforcement action approved from the top vs. some asshole poking around for fun.
Consider also that had the same idiot poked around in a Republican's records this story probably wouldn't have even hit the wires. Hell, the turned that plumber's official records upside down looking to discredit him for daring to question the Messiah and there has been one suspesion (30 days) so far. And he isn't even a public official.
And no Cmdr Taco, the 'warrantless wiretaps' didn't "I mean, they violated our privacy as well." Those were taps on calls with a probable terrorist on one end and at least one end[1] outside the US. So unless YOU were dialing people you probably shouldn't have been your privacy was not violated. We have ALWAYS allowed our intelligence agencies to wiretap and snoop postal mail during wartime, which is what were were in then and still are for that matter.
[1] Some of the calls just passed through US control and both endpoints were in foreign countries.
Heh! Guess this isn't the Change you thought you were getting. And this isn't even the scummiest bit in Holder's record from back in the Clinton years.
Not quite time to start yelling "I told ya so!" but I'm getting ready.
> Actually, they do have an issue with it, and they're very embarrassed about getting suckered by the perps.
No. Unless they are total tards they didn't need bloggers to tell them those photos were retouched. They were embarrassed they got CAUGHT. Big difference.
And while yes, in a more perfect world they probably should have found the time to get the general in for a proper publicity photo; there is after all a war on so they did what they had to do. The original was a pretty poor photo and the redone pic isn't any different than what they could have shot with a few hours to do it. This isn't a case of lying with a doctored photo.
> Why can't the competitors to apple just sit down and devise a common > method for syncing the device to a media player?
Oh they could. Now go get Ford to put it on one of their cars instead of an iPod dock. And there is the problem. Anybody with a brain could see that standardizing on a dock that Apple was quite explict in their intentions to keep closed was stupid. But iPod mania was irresistable and once one or two car makers installed the damned thing the war was over.
Nobody really though there was a future in that direction. Why do ya think they wanted Uncle Sugar to fund it? Plenty of cash sloshing around in any promising line of research yet embryonic stem cell researchers were telling us they were toast unless they could find a government teat to latch onto. Told me everything I needed to know.
> Reducing our oil consumption means reducing our trade deficit, which would pretty much immediately improve our economy.
So would increasing domestic supply. Do the math dude. We import 70% of our current usage. If we cut our consumption in half we will still be importing oil, probably from our enemies, unless we also increase domestic supply. It is highly improbable we could cut our oil consumption below current production capacity before we brought new supplies online if we permitted the operations today. It is even more unlikely the rest of the world would cut their consumption in that timeframe. So if we follow my advice the worst case scenario is at some point we become an oil exporting country and recapture some of the wealth we have been sending out.
> You're an idiot.
Uh huh. I'm just so dazzled by your brilliance.
> We aren't about to run out of oil just yet. Putting our money into drilling will just > put off the day when we have to find other sources of energy.
Exactly. We aren't running out of oil. We might be getting close to peak oil though and that will crush our economy almost as bad. So for economic reasons, national security reasons and (dubious) environmental reasons we need to be planning a phased migration away from oil. But in ten years those cars rolling off lots today are going to need fuel. So ok Mr. Genius, you decide: Import or Drill.
> Very few environmentalists oppose safe nuclear and alternative energies.
So that isn't why the founder of Greenpeace was written out of the environmental movement? No the vast majority of enviros oppose nuke power. Most do like 'alternative' energy as long as it is a matter of them doing small scale pilot projects, scarfing up grant money and doing press releases to show that they are such high minded superior people. Let one get near production and suddenly problems abound. In the end people are the problem as far as enviros are concerned and any solution that won't eliminate 90% of Homo Sapiens isn't a 'real' solution.
> Better diversified than completely dependent on uranium, though.
Why? We have more than enough of the stuff inside our own borders to carry us more than a century with fuel recycling. If we get fifty or so years out and still can't get fusion working we might have to start hedging our bets but that isn't a likely scenario. No currently proposed alternative energy gets within an order of magnitude of the price per kwh possible with an aggressive deployment of nukes.
I know a lot of people are now romantically attached to various 'green' programs but it is time to be rational. The economy is in the shitter and going down hard. We MIGHT be able to muster the resources to drill some wells and start on the nukes. We probably don't have the resources to do those things and also waste a trillion or two on feel good solar and wind programs that will never survive in the marketplace without subsidies.
> Do you have a better option besides natural gas for the transportation sector?
I love the stuff even though it probably won't be worth the trouble of reworking the consumer infrastructure for it. But fleets should be converted over to it. Every city bus system should be on it, school systems should be pushed to get at least 75% of their busses on it. Leave a few on gas to make longer road trips and convert the rest. When we drill ANWR we should be shipping out both the oil and the gas.
> Any rational person should be supporting nuclear power. Even if we adopt wind...
The point is once we accept the atom we can forget pouring billions and billions into the other alternative energy projects because they are all farting in the wind. Nuke plants are the only answer if we plan to not only convert our existing electric load but also eventually power our entire transportation system on electricity. We don't have to hope we can develop some magic green tech, we already have it. What we lack is teh will to stand up to the enviros and tell them "NO. We will not dismantle Western Industrial Civilization to shut you bastards up." And believe me, nothing less will ever satisify their demands.
> Well, if you want to see nuclear energy adopted the Government is going to have > to do something to encourage a bigger investment in it.
Yup, but mostly just stop doing things that get in the way. But to get em built in the ten years I proposed I admit the government would probably be involved in a very proactive way. But that is doing things we know how to do and the goverment can actually do a big public works project with some success. What it can't do is figure out what comes next. They ain't that smart and nobody else is. That is where the magic of the invisible hand comes in.
> When folks see the Dell,HP Gateway,etc label on their machine they expect > it to work like every Dell,Gateway,HP etc that they have ever owned.
Which would be a good reason to prequalify your customer before you ring up the sale. If I were selling Linux on a branded PC like that (I assume these are old off lease machines or something?) I'd make sure they understood their options. Have some good point of sale material posted and be ready to answer questions. That they can take Linux with the pros and cons I mentioned in the previous post clearly spelled out or get Windows XP at an additional charge.
> And if I go Whitebox and build the whole damned thing from scratch anyway,then why > would I bother putting Linux on it? I can make more profit with a copy of WinXP Home.
Of course you can make more profit that way.... if you make the sale. Linux allows you the option to do exactly the same thing Dell is doing with their netbook. Offer a low advertised sticker price and sell Windows as an upsale option. Some customers will indeed either need Windows (specific software) or believe they do (comfort of the familiar) enough to pay the extra fee. For those Linux was a bait & switch loss leader and you don't care because you got em into your store instead of Best Buy. Some will take a chance to either save some coin or because they have reinstalled Windows to get rid of a virus one time too many or whatever reason.
As a small screwdriver shop (that is the impression I get from your posts) generally flying under the radar you would have a third grey option available to you. You could offer to let em change their mind. Tell em to take the Linux load home and give it a try and if they change their mind they can bring it back within the first X days, pay the difference (plus perhaps a small bench fee) and get Windows loaded. Add leverage to the low price to get em to close by offering them a safe way to change their mind. Work it right (you DO have your Windows imaging down to a science where you could do it while they wait, right?) and if they do come back you come out ahead of where you would have been selling it with Windows outright plus you get back in your store where you have an opportunity to sell again.
> What do you suppose would happen if we invested that money into domestic > energy sources like wind and natural gas?
We are about to find out. You won't like the answer I suspect.
> Job creation and economic growth perhaps?
Probably not. Not much chance of getting energy at a lower price per unit out of any of this 'alterantive energy' stuff anytime soon. Otherise it wouldn't be 'alternative.' Besides, the second something looks like it might get practical the usual suspects align against it. Hyrdo? NO! Geothermal? Already got protesters firing up over that. Wind? NIMBY! Kills birds, and so on.
> This is a national security issue in addition to being an environmental one.
Agree 100%, which is why I don't think this is a good time to gamble on what might be when the solution is so simple a caveman could do it and requires no hoping.
Step One: DRILL EVERYTHING that looks like it has a reasonable chance of profitable production. We have to have energy in the short term and handing money to our enemies is insane. Short term we need petro fuels. Ten years from now cars being sold today are going to be on our roads and they will need fuel.
Step Two: Execute the enviromentalists for treason if it takes it but blow out the obstacles to safe nuke plants. Build hundreds of pebble bed and other safe designs. Not in twenty to fifty years, in ten. Build like we were going to war. Or better analogy, build like we did when we were trying to beat the Russians to the moon. Ramp up the transmission system to handle the extra load. Do recycle the spent fuel, again shoot the bastards if they won't stop protesting. This IS a national security crisis and we need to start acting like it.
Step Three: Now that electricity is cheap and falling in price the government must DO NOTHING. Don't attempt to pick the winners and losers, let the market figure out whether using the cheap power to make hydrogen is the right path or whether better batteries for plug in electrics are the way to go. Perhaps it is something we haven't thought of yet that will be the most practical in the end. Make electricity cheap enough and the invisible hand will point the way.
Step Four: Now that we have at least a couple of hundred years before the Uranium supplies start running low we can move on to solving the problem once and for all by dumping R&D into fusion. When that runs out, hell that will just have to be somebody else's probem.
> You see,this is why I gave up on selling Linux Pcs in my shop.
Sounds like you shouldn't be in sales and marketing. Apple has thrived for decades in a world where 'everything' is built and sold for Windows. Their customers don't have a problem realizing that unless a product says on the box that it works with a Mac that it probably doesn't. They understand that if they tried to return a Mac to the store months after purchase because a piece o' crap Walmart special winprinter didn't work they would get laughed at.
Apparently you do give em their money back, perhaps becuse you realize it WAS your fault. You didn't make it clear that they were NOT buying a Windows PC, that like the Mac they were buying 'something different.' That Linux has advantages, lower cost, higher realibility and immunity to malware and vast amounts of software either preloaded or a click/download away yet it also has a few disadvantages, like a smaller subset of supported hardware (but larger than Apple for example) and that it generally doesn't run Windows or Mac software.
> Go to BestCircutMartDepot and. > 1. Buy an all in one printer.
I assume you mean multi-function? Yea, everything on the shelves works with Windows. But that doesn't stop Apple now does it. Same thing here, If there ain't a penguin on the box check the Internet before hooking it up. We do need easier ways to do that checking.
2. Buy a webcam.
This situation is quickly changing. Many do work these days. And yet again, see above.
3. Buy a Game.
Again, why do people who buy Macs have no problem with the concept that Windows software doesn't run. I know Mac people, they aren't noted for coming from the clueful side of the bell curve for the most part. Average to slightly below is typical. And we have Wine/Crossover/Transgaming/etc to partially offset the problem. Beyond that, both Linux and current Mac folk having the option to dual boot if that is easier than just buying a Playstation.
4. Buy Tax Software.
Online.
Longterm, once we get the penguin beyond critical mass those cheap printers and webcams, etc. WILL have penguins onb the box. Mass marketed consumer electronics is low margin and sensitive to returns, get a critical mass of Linux installs and if some return the printer instead of the eeePC they manufacturers will change quick. Short term the people selling Linux preloads need to see the problem as an opportunity to sell accessories known to work with what they are preloading.
> All they ask, unlike some, is DON'T put my name on it. Is that so bad?
Which is why it is important that we give them EXACTLY what they demand. Iceweasel. If every distribution did it they would suddenly realize that what they thought they wanted wasn't what they actually wanted. Only then can the discussion of a more reasonable trademark policy begin. As a general rule, it is only when you make stupidity painful that people change.
> Well, you better erase that Linux distro off your hard drive if you'll only use software that doesn't use trademarked names.
It is a matter of how the trademark is licensed. I can rebuild everything in a typical Linux distro and redistribute it. Yes the Debian or Fedora trademarks are an exception but there is an easy method provided to deal with that because modification and redistribution is encouraged. And note how the whole respin scene IS being brought into the fold in both projects and the trademark issues are being dealt with. The single exception is Firefox. Rebuild the unmodified sources and you have a package that can't be redistributed without entering into a legal agreement with Moz Corp. See the difference?
Rebuild, modify an rebuild, do whatever you want within reason and you can still redistribute the Linux kernel package and still cann it "Linux", you can even use the mods with the Penguin on the boot screen.
Rebuild Samba and you can redistribute it. Add some patch ya got from the Internet (perhaps a security patch) and yup, you can still redistribute it and even call it Samba.
Just rebuild Firefox and you can't call it Firefox anymore. All binary copies of Firefox must originate from a source under contractual control of Moz Corp. Not Free.
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> So learn about who you're making snide comments about, and show some respect.
Yea he has done great things. Doesn't make him the final authority on anything. He is still another blind man trying to describe the elephant. He is a math weenie so he sees everything in those terms. The linguists see everything in their terms, thus tend to become LISP weenies when they get exposed to computers. Then you get the OO weenies trying to model everything as objects anbd beliving equally fervently that any other approach is a heresy.
The problem is they are all both right and wrong. Each describes part of the problem space while ignoring everything else. And the whole issue is really fudged up when we consider that so much of what we now call 'software development' isn't anything of the sort. Half of it is just UI design which is more human factors and graphic design than programming. Most of the rest is getting the design specification right. The actual coding is usually more a case of grabbing existing libraries for the sort of algorithms Dijkstra is usually talking about and slathering enough buzzword compliant crap (these days it usually enough to mention middleware, Java and XML several times) on to make the PHBs happy. And of course forget the documentation because whatever happens any documentation that does accidentally happen will be useless and obsolete before 1.0 and will never get updated.
> Useful assembly language (i.e. beyond the concepts) that you learn in first
> year will be useful four years later when you hit the job market?
Yes. Because 90% of learning assembly isn't learning the opcodes of one cpu it is the way of thinking on such a small level. I taught myself 6809 assembly years and years ago. A couple of years later I picked up 6502 with little effort. Didn't do any assembly for a long time but this year I learned AVR assembly without a problem because I knew that 90% that doesn't change. I have looked at x86 a few times but haven't yet needed to actually learn it. Yes it is much more complex but it doesn't look all that alien.
More important though, knowing assembly means I really understand concepts like pointers in languages like C. I really understand the idea that a character is just a number and a string is an array of them. I know why C terminates a string with a \0 and why that isn't always the best idea.
News flash, whatever specific language skills you learn in school isn't likely to be a sellable skill a decade later. C excepted. But if you learn to program assembly it will help you understand what is actually going on in a computer and that knowledge will help you with everything else.
It isn't too late to learn. Buy your self an AVR trainer board and learn to program assembler. 6809, 68000, 6502 or Z80 would also be good first places to start but you can't find ready to use hardware as easy. And the AVR makes a good first step into embedded which helps you to understand hardware issues better, it's why I started playing with it. You can get started with an AVR for $20USD if you are really frugal and still have a parallel printer port on one of your PCs.
> ..about half the content of web sites being Flash-based animated..
Yes it does suck. Until you get a clue and install flashblock into FF. It speeds up the whole Internet experience and can selectively punch holes for sites where the Flash is useful. I even put in on our public lab machines to save bandwidth. It was worth the time to explain it.
> Simply put, these networks were never provisioned for this much usage, and I'll be surprised if there aren't massive growing pains along the way.
The Internet was designed for video. Multicast would be the perfect way to allow dumping video into everyone's Tivo. Too bad the ISP are dead set against the notion of anybody but them doing it.
> And if I suck 100gb of crap off usenet in a month it's no different than 100gb of BT crap in terms of network stress.
That wasn't true until quite recently when most ISPs dropped most of UseNet. Traffic to and from one of your ISPs servers puts far less load on the Internet than throwing traffic around the world on BT. So what did the ISPs do? Dropped most of Usenet under political pressure. So screw em.
> Because the fact that it's already based on an open source UNIX isn't good enough for some people...
Because the one Apple ships is crippled. If it can't run your applications it isn't much use now is it? And an iPhone can't run any applications that His Steveness doesn't like so it should be expected that that situation will be rectified. Trying to fix the origional OS to remove the evil bits is a pointless game of cat and mouse so the obvious solution is to keep the (to some people at least) nice hardware and put fully functional software on. Android is an obvious choice if community compiled so as to avoid Google's own evil bits.
> However, it is more likely than not that by the time they succeed, a new version will come out, and we will be back to square one.
Yup, this is the situation rockbox finds itself in. No currently shipping hardware can run rockbox. And few of the existing ports ever get finished before the devs apparently lose interest in old obsolete hardware and begin porting to the new shiny. The lesson to be learned from this is simple. Unless you just get off on porting don't bother with closed hardware. So if you want Linux on your phone buy a phone that ships that way. And forget the gPhone apparently since it still doesn't appear to be fully jailbroken.
Assuming their 62 tonnes per year figure is actually correct (almost certainly optimistic) and their published pricetag gets spread over a twenty year service life of the equipment and the 3.15 to one conversion between a barrel of oil and tonnes of CO2 emissions and it doesn't make much sense unless you assume oil will average close to 200 euros per barrel over those years. Vary it a up bit to account for maintaince costs or down a bit if you assume a longer service life without major repairs.
And that is the problem with every 'green' project I have ever seen real numbers on. They aren't green, they are dumb. And don't even start in on bringing the cost down because that never happens. As soon as an 'alternative' source of energy begins to get practical the greens decide it isn't green anymore. They love alternatives that allow them to appear superiour and scarf up grant money but never support a new source of energy when it starts looking like it might actually, ya know, supply energy. Hydro is now evil. As commercial wind farms are being developed the chorus of complaint is already tuning up. There are even protests over geothermal! Protests are already underway over large scale solar installations. None of which makes sense until you understand that to a green, people are the problem and any solution that doesn't involve dismantling the industrial base that allows such an 'unnatural' population to be killed off by famine isn't going to satisfy the environmental movement. So forget appeasing them by finding some magic green energy source that will allow us to continue on our present course, they ain't buying the whole premise of Civilization itself.
The solution has been staring us in the face for almost half a century but for political reasons it is out of bounds. We must ignore the bleatings of the self hating greens and secure ourselves enough energy to carry us over until we finally perfect fusion. We must stop handing over huge sacks of cash to people who want nothing more than to kill every last one of us. We need to build nukes like our lives depended on it. Because they do. It wont just be our lifestyle that gets crimped when we start running out of energy, we can't sustain anywhere the number of people on this planet without abundant energy.
> As in, full of Middle-Easterners. Do you really want those people armed?
Ok, you are trying to make a funny and all that but I'm gonna play along. Dude, they are already armed with a fully loaded oil tanker. Just how much more damage are they going to do with a couple of AKs and perhaps a rocket launcher or three? A hundred million dollars worth of crude oil is enough to do a heck of a lot of damage to a port. Plus they could opt to just sink the damned thing in an inconvienient spot.
So unless we are going to forbid ships with 'ragheads' in the crew we just have to hope that the people who own that quarter billion worth of tanker and cargo have enough on the line to avoid hiring a crew of terrorists. The worry would be a gang of these pirates being terrorists and instead of holding a tanker hostage quietly throwing the origional crew overboard and then continuing it's voyage and blowing it up/sinking it at an oil terminal here or in the middle east.
> How would a US port feel about a foreign ship pulling in when a dozen civilians
> with grenade launchers are strolling around on deck? The Coast Guard would go ape.
As an NRA member I'm not afraid of arms or people wielding them, so long as they are the right people bearing them for the right reasons and shooting them at the right (or would that be wrong?) people. So no, I would have no problem with a $150M tanker laden with $100M in crude being armed. Seems rather sane to me. If we are trusting the crew not to use the far more dangerous tanker itself as a weapon I see no reason to begrudge them a couple of rocket launchers to defend themselves from pirates. No, they can't carry them off the ship and they should be expected to have the decency to stow them away once they are safely in US waters. If I can't have a rocket launcher why should they get to have all the fun. :)
This story just goes to show ya what pansies we have allowed ourselves to become. Can you imagine pirate infested waters under Ronald Reagan's six hundred ship navy? People might accuse America of trying to police the world, but dang it back when we really did it the world was a safer place... as it was when the British Navy ruled the seas. Pirates had short life expectancies.
> So, by Taco's use of the word "our," wouldn't this mean that he considers
> himself one of the terrorist class of people?
No it just means he is a 'tard who can't distinguish Kos talking points from reality. Really hoping some of the BDS craziness dies down when Bush retires to Crawford. But it won't. No American talking on the phone to another end point in the USA was ever tapped without a proper warrant. But that doesn't stop the ignorant from believing Big Brother is stalking em. For that I blame the media and the higher ups in the Kostard movement who DO know better and prefer to keep a lie alive for purely political reasons. Calling to impeach Bush & Cheney for tapping calls to suspicious numbers overseas doesn't sound so wrong to the average person on the street; "Bush was conducting warrantless wiretaps!!!!" sounds so much more sinister so that is what they all say.
No, the craziness is only going to get kicked up another notch come Jan 20. Not only will the less stable elements on my side return to their behaviour when Clinton was in office the Kostards will be in full denial mode in a couple of months and ready to lash out at anything that moves, followed a few months later by angry as hell when we are still in Iraq, Gitmo isn't closed and Iran gets pounded by Israel as The One wisely decides to do absolutely nothing. Oh, and I'll give ya even money that come 2010 the Bush tax cuts get extended out a few more years to keep the negative impact out of the 2012 elections.
Not saying The One won't live up to his promo material on other fronts and give us some Change to Socialism we can all believe in. He IS a third generation Communist after all. He is just smart enough to know that the Long March Through The Instituitions is a far more reliable way to destroy America than attempting a Revolution. It's why he is dangerous, he ain't an idiot. We lived through Carter, that is proof enough we can survive a well meaning 'progressive' fool, even one that is a sanctiomious twit.
> But if it was Sarah Palin you can bet your ass it owuld be front page news.
Duh. The media has an unwholsome obsession with Gov. Palin. But note that the privacy violation in her case was a bit more extreme. The son of a Democratic elected official broke into her mail account AND posted the contents (not just the headers or to/from traffic data) on the Internet.
> That sentence was incomprehensible. Take your meds, son.
It wasn't THAT bad, but yea that post was made under the influence of grandchildren swarming about. Notice you didn't care to dispute the basic point though. Democratic elected officials, who damned sure should know better, turned a mere plumber's life upside down because he dared question The One in public. And to date I have heard of exactly ONE person being suspended for thirty days. This Verizon employee was fired for looking at call detail records and with no evidence of them being posted on the Internet or leaked to the media.
Do I think the Verizon guy was overly punished? No. That sort of thing can't be condoned in a civilized society. The Ohio officials who dug into the plumber were under punished. As will be the kid who broke into Gov. Palin's private Yahoo! mail account. That's my problem, the obvious double standard.
> Can we expect anyone who followed a warrantless wiretap from the Bush administration to also be fired then?
There is a bit of a difference between doing something as a law enforcement action approved from the top vs. some asshole poking around for fun.
Consider also that had the same idiot poked around in a Republican's records this story probably wouldn't have even hit the wires. Hell, the turned that plumber's official records upside down looking to discredit him for daring to question the Messiah and there has been one suspesion (30 days) so far. And he isn't even a public official.
And no Cmdr Taco, the 'warrantless wiretaps' didn't "I mean, they violated our privacy as well." Those were taps on calls with a probable terrorist on one end and at least one end[1] outside the US. So unless YOU were dialing people you probably shouldn't have been your privacy was not violated. We have ALWAYS allowed our intelligence agencies to wiretap and snoop postal mail during wartime, which is what were were in then and still are for that matter.
[1] Some of the calls just passed through US control and both endpoints were in foreign countries.
> Obama, do not appoint this man!!
Heh! Guess this isn't the Change you thought you were getting. And this isn't even the scummiest bit in Holder's record from back in the Clinton years.
Not quite time to start yelling "I told ya so!" but I'm getting ready.
> Actually, they do have an issue with it, and they're very embarrassed about getting suckered by the perps.
No. Unless they are total tards they didn't need bloggers to tell them those photos were retouched. They were embarrassed they got CAUGHT. Big difference.
And while yes, in a more perfect world they probably should have found the time to get the general in for a proper publicity photo; there is after all a war on so they did what they had to do. The original was a pretty poor photo and the redone pic isn't any different than what they could have shot with a few hours to do it. This isn't a case of lying with a doctored photo.
> Why can't the competitors to apple just sit down and devise a common
> method for syncing the device to a media player?
Oh they could. Now go get Ford to put it on one of their cars instead of an iPod dock. And there is the problem. Anybody with a brain could see that standardizing on a dock that Apple was quite explict in their intentions to keep closed was stupid. But iPod mania was irresistable and once one or two car makers installed the damned thing the war was over.
> No trials with embryonic.
Nobody really though there was a future in that direction. Why do ya think they wanted Uncle Sugar to fund it? Plenty of cash sloshing around in any promising line of research yet embryonic stem cell researchers were telling us they were toast unless they could find a government teat to latch onto. Told me everything I needed to know.
> Reducing our oil consumption means reducing our trade deficit, which would pretty much immediately improve our economy.
So would increasing domestic supply. Do the math dude. We import 70% of our current usage. If we cut our consumption in half we will still be importing oil, probably from our enemies, unless we also increase domestic supply. It is highly improbable we could cut our oil consumption below current production capacity before we brought new supplies online if we permitted the operations today. It is even more unlikely the rest of the world would cut their consumption in that timeframe. So if we follow my advice the worst case scenario is at some point we become an oil exporting country and recapture some of the wealth we have been sending out.
> You're an idiot.
Uh huh. I'm just so dazzled by your brilliance.
> We aren't about to run out of oil just yet. Putting our money into drilling will just
> put off the day when we have to find other sources of energy.
Exactly. We aren't running out of oil. We might be getting close to peak oil though and that will crush our economy almost as bad. So for economic reasons, national security reasons and (dubious) environmental reasons we need to be planning a phased migration away from oil. But in ten years those cars rolling off lots today are going to need fuel. So ok Mr. Genius, you decide: Import or Drill.
> Very few environmentalists oppose safe nuclear and alternative energies.
So that isn't why the founder of Greenpeace was written out of the environmental movement? No the vast majority of enviros oppose nuke power. Most do like 'alternative' energy as long as it is a matter of them doing small scale pilot projects, scarfing up grant money and doing press releases to show that they are such high minded superior people. Let one get near production and suddenly problems abound. In the end people are the problem as far as enviros are concerned and any solution that won't eliminate 90% of Homo Sapiens isn't a 'real' solution.
> Better diversified than completely dependent on uranium, though.
Why? We have more than enough of the stuff inside our own borders to carry us more than a century with fuel recycling. If we get fifty or so years out and still can't get fusion working we might have to start hedging our bets but that isn't a likely scenario. No currently proposed alternative energy gets within an order of magnitude of the price per kwh possible with an aggressive deployment of nukes.
I know a lot of people are now romantically attached to various 'green' programs but it is time to be rational. The economy is in the shitter and going down hard. We MIGHT be able to muster the resources to drill some wells and start on the nukes. We probably don't have the resources to do those things and also waste a trillion or two on feel good solar and wind programs that will never survive in the marketplace without subsidies.
> Do you have a better option besides natural gas for the transportation sector?
I love the stuff even though it probably won't be worth the trouble of reworking the consumer infrastructure for it. But fleets should be converted over to it. Every city bus system should be on it, school systems should be pushed to get at least 75% of their busses on it. Leave a few on gas to make longer road trips and convert the rest. When we drill ANWR we should be shipping out both the oil and the gas.
> Any rational person should be supporting nuclear power. Even if we adopt wind...
The point is once we accept the atom we can forget pouring billions and billions into the other alternative energy projects because they are all farting in the wind. Nuke plants are the only answer if we plan to not only convert our existing electric load but also eventually power our entire transportation system on electricity. We don't have to hope we can develop some magic green tech, we already have it. What we lack is teh will to stand up to the enviros and tell them "NO. We will not dismantle Western Industrial Civilization to shut you bastards up." And believe me, nothing less will ever satisify their demands.
> Well, if you want to see nuclear energy adopted the Government is going to have
> to do something to encourage a bigger investment in it.
Yup, but mostly just stop doing things that get in the way. But to get em built in the ten years I proposed I admit the government would probably be involved in a very proactive way. But that is doing things we know how to do and the goverment can actually do a big public works project with some success. What it can't do is figure out what comes next. They ain't that smart and nobody else is. That is where the magic of the invisible hand comes in.
> When folks see the Dell,HP Gateway,etc label on their machine they expect
> it to work like every Dell,Gateway,HP etc that they have ever owned.
Which would be a good reason to prequalify your customer before you ring up the sale. If I were selling Linux on a branded PC like that (I assume these are old off lease machines or something?) I'd make sure they understood their options. Have some good point of sale material posted and be ready to answer questions. That they can take Linux with the pros and cons I mentioned in the previous post clearly spelled out or get Windows XP at an additional charge.
> And if I go Whitebox and build the whole damned thing from scratch anyway,then why
> would I bother putting Linux on it? I can make more profit with a copy of WinXP Home.
Of course you can make more profit that way.... if you make the sale. Linux allows you the option to do exactly the same thing Dell is doing with their netbook. Offer a low advertised sticker price and sell Windows as an upsale option. Some customers will indeed either need Windows (specific software) or believe they do (comfort of the familiar) enough to pay the extra fee. For those Linux was a bait & switch loss leader and you don't care because you got em into your store instead of Best Buy. Some will take a chance to either save some coin or because they have reinstalled Windows to get rid of a virus one time too many or whatever reason.
As a small screwdriver shop (that is the impression I get from your posts) generally flying under the radar you would have a third grey option available to you. You could offer to let em change their mind. Tell em to take the Linux load home and give it a try and if they change their mind they can bring it back within the first X days, pay the difference (plus perhaps a small bench fee) and get Windows loaded. Add leverage to the low price to get em to close by offering them a safe way to change their mind. Work it right (you DO have your Windows imaging down to a science where you could do it while they wait, right?) and if they do come back you come out ahead of where you would have been selling it with Windows outright plus you get back in your store where you have an opportunity to sell again.
> What do you suppose would happen if we invested that money into domestic
> energy sources like wind and natural gas?
We are about to find out. You won't like the answer I suspect.
> Job creation and economic growth perhaps?
Probably not. Not much chance of getting energy at a lower price per unit out of any of this 'alterantive energy' stuff anytime soon. Otherise it wouldn't be 'alternative.' Besides, the second something looks like it might get practical the usual suspects align against it. Hyrdo? NO! Geothermal? Already got protesters firing up over that. Wind? NIMBY! Kills birds, and so on.
> This is a national security issue in addition to being an environmental one.
Agree 100%, which is why I don't think this is a good time to gamble on what might be when the solution is so simple a caveman could do it and requires no hoping.
Step One: DRILL EVERYTHING that looks like it has a reasonable chance of profitable production. We have to have energy in the short term and handing money to our enemies is insane. Short term we need petro fuels. Ten years from now cars being sold today are going to be on our roads and they will need fuel.
Step Two: Execute the enviromentalists for treason if it takes it but blow out the obstacles to safe nuke plants. Build hundreds of pebble bed and other safe designs. Not in twenty to fifty years, in ten. Build like we were going to war. Or better analogy, build like we did when we were trying to beat the Russians to the moon. Ramp up the transmission system to handle the extra load. Do recycle the spent fuel, again shoot the bastards if they won't stop protesting. This IS a national security crisis and we need to start acting like it.
Step Three: Now that electricity is cheap and falling in price the government must DO NOTHING. Don't attempt to pick the winners and losers, let the market figure out whether using the cheap power to make hydrogen is the right path or whether better batteries for plug in electrics are the way to go. Perhaps it is something we haven't thought of yet that will be the most practical in the end. Make electricity cheap enough and the invisible hand will point the way.
Step Four: Now that we have at least a couple of hundred years before the Uranium supplies start running low we can move on to solving the problem once and for all by dumping R&D into fusion. When that runs out, hell that will just have to be somebody else's probem.
> You see,this is why I gave up on selling Linux Pcs in my shop.
Sounds like you shouldn't be in sales and marketing. Apple has thrived for decades in a world where 'everything' is built and sold for Windows. Their customers don't have a problem realizing that unless a product says on the box that it works with a Mac that it probably doesn't. They understand that if they tried to return a Mac to the store months after purchase because a piece o' crap Walmart special winprinter didn't work they would get laughed at.
Apparently you do give em their money back, perhaps becuse you realize it WAS your fault. You didn't make it clear that they were NOT buying a Windows PC, that like the Mac they were buying 'something different.' That Linux has advantages, lower cost, higher realibility and immunity to malware and vast amounts of software either preloaded or a click/download away yet it also has a few disadvantages, like a smaller subset of supported hardware (but larger than Apple for example) and that it generally doesn't run Windows or Mac software.
> Go to BestCircutMartDepot and.
> 1. Buy an all in one printer.
I assume you mean multi-function? Yea, everything on the shelves works with Windows. But that doesn't stop Apple now does it. Same thing here, If there ain't a penguin on the box check the Internet before hooking it up. We do need easier ways to do that checking.
2. Buy a webcam.
This situation is quickly changing. Many do work these days. And yet again, see above.
3. Buy a Game.
Again, why do people who buy Macs have no problem with the concept that Windows software doesn't run. I know Mac people, they aren't noted for coming from the clueful side of the bell curve for the most part. Average to slightly below is typical. And we have Wine/Crossover/Transgaming/etc to partially offset the problem. Beyond that, both Linux and current Mac folk having the option to dual boot if that is easier than just buying a Playstation.
4. Buy Tax Software.
Online.
Longterm, once we get the penguin beyond critical mass those cheap printers and webcams, etc. WILL have penguins onb the box. Mass marketed consumer electronics is low margin and sensitive to returns, get a critical mass of Linux installs and if some return the printer instead of the eeePC they manufacturers will change quick. Short term the people selling Linux preloads need to see the problem as an opportunity to sell accessories known to work with what they are preloading.
> All they ask, unlike some, is DON'T put my name on it. Is that so bad?
Which is why it is important that we give them EXACTLY what they demand. Iceweasel. If every distribution did it they would suddenly realize that what they thought they wanted wasn't what they actually wanted. Only then can the discussion of a more reasonable trademark policy begin. As a general rule, it is only when you make stupidity painful that people change.
> Well, you better erase that Linux distro off your hard drive if you'll only use software that doesn't use trademarked names.
It is a matter of how the trademark is licensed. I can rebuild everything in a typical Linux distro and redistribute it. Yes the Debian or Fedora trademarks are an exception but there is an easy method provided to deal with that because modification and redistribution is encouraged. And note how the whole respin scene IS being brought into the fold in both projects and the trademark issues are being dealt with. The single exception is Firefox. Rebuild the unmodified sources and you have a package that can't be redistributed without entering into a legal agreement with Moz Corp. See the difference?
Rebuild, modify an rebuild, do whatever you want within reason and you can still redistribute the Linux kernel package and still cann it "Linux", you can even use the mods with the Penguin on the boot screen.
Rebuild Samba and you can redistribute it. Add some patch ya got from the Internet (perhaps a security patch) and yup, you can still redistribute it and even call it Samba.
Just rebuild Firefox and you can't call it Firefox anymore. All binary copies of Firefox must originate from a source under contractual control of Moz Corp. Not Free.