w..w.w.w.w.w.wait a minute! You're telling me that all these so called "free-software" used to be a "linux-guru"... people who i have been listening to the last 5 years tell me about how they use iPhones and iMacs and iPoopie burgers because they just "work" were just trying to justify their..... what do you call that thing when you say one thing and the first chance you get do another???? oh yeah.. hypocrisy... that's the word... by telling me that they could do anything they wanted on their iPoopie thing. It is no problem for us they said. Oh yeah, as long as you use the proper and accepted spoons to stir your kool-aid. You mean you HAVE to use safari???.
Oh, I got it now, your "free" only means "free beer"
And you were a FOSS guy/girl? leech is more like it...
I lived in a behaviorist community for 3 years. We had a concensus decision making process. I left because, after 2 years of preparation and work on my part to put together a reasonable way to bring in money to support the basic functions of the community without sending people to outside jobs, the community body politic had change, resulting in people who hadn't been part of the original decision that sent me on to the process. At no time did anyone question what I was doing, even though I kept everyone updated on progress. In the end it was just voted down by a small minority who wanted to become an organic, agrarian commune without the behaviorist roots we had been founded on. I left, and a number of other , in fact so did most of the community, leaving the farm and the group destroyed. It is still there as an agricultural coop, but I don't go visit.
It makes people laugh when I say it, but i quit voting for 15 years because, even though i had voted from age 18 to 40 something, i had never ever voted for anyone in any position who won.
So I quit. I am going to give this world another chance, but don't have a lot of hope. It is truly contrarian to my obviously superior and more correct understanding of who we need in politics. Just look at how bad things have gotten, just because no one really agrees with me, and i am obviously always correct.
looking at your post and the one that follows (mr. Opposite) i have to agree that the proprioceptive practice makes more sense to me assuming that the practitioner is practiced at writing. I grew up writing really poorly, but writing nonetheless so i found that the physical connection between writing (and the mental processing of transferring into my "own words") made a stronger mental impression than just listening.
But YMMV simply because the modern world does not necessarily encourage the practice of writing. My 9 year old does not have dedicated writing classes in school in the same way I did back in the 60s. His handwriting is crap and the teacher doesn't seem too stressed about it. I had a grade on handwriting up through 6th grade. So, even though my handwriting is crap too, I have that proprioceptive connection built in and do retain more through writing.
Final note. I deliberately avoid taking notes at meetings, I don't want to waste what little available memory space remaining in my feeble old brain on bullshite.
sorry but that is not their profit-making structure. RedHat makes money as a service provider, the software they prepare is prepared to make their service provision more profitable, so they are focused on stability and consistancy and all the things that you see as being the result of what you propose. I won't argue about why it is not happening, but I seem to remember that their were similar proposals many years ago about the YUM/Yast/Apt-get/etc. divisions being a detriment to development, and the result was just another fuss banquet. There seem to have been some reasons at the time, probably are now too, i dunno.
Wait a freakin minute. I realized decades ago that I am too weak to handle the emotional manipulation used in movies, TV programs and advertisements, so I quit everything. Just bought a TV again last December and still use it very little, mostly when I am ironing (yes I notice that no one seems to do that any more either) for a half an hour or so in an evening. I appreciate that Hulu plus has few commercials, and they are stupid enough to be humorous rather than serious to me.
Anyway, I admit that I can't handle the games they play to manipulate my emotions, does that make me a fool, a tool or some other weak minded character? Does this make you superior to me because you don't realize how deeply embedded in the fabric of the media the emotional tools have become and that you might be getting played without recognizing it?
I, honestly, think that people who have grown up with TV and movies available 24/7 do have better filters than I do (I grew up in Europe in the 50s --no TV-- and then had severe restrictions on it when we returned to the US in the 60s) for the crap things they do to manipulate viewer emotions, but how much are those filters holding out the manipulation and how much are they just hiding it from you? I don't know. My kids think i am just weird, probably right....(wanders off mumbling quietly to himself)...
Well, brand fixation is not adequate to situation unless it includes the marketing genius of the Jobs juggernaut. The iPad was sold based on the existing market of "cool kids" that everyone had been sold to want to be like. As was usual for the Jj, they succeeded wonderously because it is their forte. Now, what has anyone put on the table to combat that strength on its own terms, and who can meet them on that turf. It appears to me that the only company that is trying to do that is Samsung (remember the ad with the Apple "creatives" waiting in line and seeing a Samsung phone?) and guess who Apple is trying to annihilate in court right now.?
While I have zero use for Apple products, they are something I have recommended to vapid and vacuous students who ask what computer they should buy. Students who just want to have a bauble that they can use to do school projects and play with photos to post on FB and look like a cool kid. Its what their parents money is for after all. When those kids started showing up in class with iPads, the only thing I saw them used for was games. Today, their parents have one and they use it to read books and surf to their limited number of websites they use. All of that would work with a kindle or a nook, but they are not for cool kids (yes, their parents have been sold on the idea that they too can be cool and kids) so they shell out for an iPad.
Finally, as with all marketing, in the end it will lose its luster and people will turn away. Not because Saint Stephen is gone, but because the jizzum is gone. That's just how marketing is. Samsung might be the next one to catch the wave of pop, but just ask Mark Z in a few years how ephemeral that marketing flush can be.
I agree, but from experience. I've been teaching overseas and the number of Americans/Brits/Ozzies/ kiwis etc who show up to teach in cut-off shorts, t-shirts and cigarettes hanging out of their mouth was really bothering me. I had planned on dressing in jeans and polo or equivalent, but ended up trying to dress to a higher standard than my (country where I was teaching) colleagues. They usually dressed "professionally", in clean, neat business clothes sans tie but sometimes with sports coat. Dressing like a slob does send a bad message about your professionalism and attention to detail.
It worked, too. I never left a job without regret on the part of my colleagues and supervisors.
no the chinese prices are relatively real. Actually, the price for a Chinese hot water solar panel is 1/4 the price of a US made panel. Installation is also bolt on/ plug in easy. The greatest difference is the style of design, they do the quick cheap and easy way (using copper strips running down the panel and carrying the heat back up into the hot water tank where the water stays and grabs the heat from the strips. It is NOT the most efficient, but it works and has less chance of leak or damage problems on installation.) Thinking that the Chinese would need to raise prices to make a profit is wrong. They use classic scale of production and sales to make money.
the concrete question is a good one. I had a friend in Thailand that explained that the concrete companies there used charcoal from rainforest trees (about as unsustainable a product as you can think of) to burn their limestone and make cement. They did it this way in order to maintain clean air standards for their industry. The charcola industry is in Burma, Laos and Cambodia who don't have clean air standards. Corporations and their shananigans again!
My little brother does some coding for them (he's in Durham and does chip design for qualcomm) but, a few years ago i wrote to Jesse.... forget his last name, he was one of the honchos for the live distro at the time and has moved on up since then.... and suggested that they set a time of day for the live iso release so that people in the rest of the world would know when it was available for download. He wrote back the next day saying thanks and the change was on the website a few days later. They've been doing it ever since (10:00AM Eastern time).
They have a bunch of ways to get involved with them from bugzappers to ambassadors to working your way up the dev ranks. It is a hierachy, but a meritocracy as well. Changing their leadership on a regular basis keeps them nimble as well, something that I can see through the changes in the product and its focus from version to version.
yeah, when somebody sent me a friend request back in the early aughties sometime i responded and signed in which gave me an account. never went back, bad vibes. Never missed it, used to be sick of the "contact us on facebook" stuf and was sad that old friends used it as their only source for communication, it cut them off from me and others. Oh well, i said.
now I'm a terrorist? a nostalgist is more like it.
Exactly, I was taught that each discipline required a different "way of thinking" and that the job of the student was to master all these different ways. When you drop out one as important as math you are crippling people and returning to the middle ages.
On a historical note: The British secretary of the navy for King James and his successor (I think, I don't do the UK history too good), Samual Pepys, explains in his diary (in project gutenberg, a fantastic read BTW) that first he began to drink coffee instead of wine, which helped him stay sober enough to pay attention to the world. When he achieved sobriety during the morning he decided to learn how to multiply because he thought he should be able to do what a navigator did.
A graduate of Oxford (or Cambridge, i forget the history stuff, remember?) he could read greek and latin but couldn't do simple math. Neither could the rest of the "educated class" that were running the country.
Mathematics was a tool for the middle class of the times.
The why that you can't remember has to do with their decision to focus on the enterprise space with the (at that time newly) name RHEL. Before that they were RHL without the enterprise. When that happened (actually in the process of that happening) users freaked because a large number were desktop users who didn't want the slowed down version (no matter how solid and stable) but wanted to stay "bleeding edge". Thus the birth of Fedora Core, now Fedora Linux. You can get fedora for free, and get security update for 2.5 years (i think) on each version.
Disclaimer: I am a Red Hat investor and a fedora fanboy.
I'm using a Verizon FIOS account on a 15/5 plan (el cheapo) with one TV four or 5 computers (one hooked to the TV so that I get internet browsing on the screen because Vizio VIA doesn't offer it yet without buying a new TV) and, frankly, there are no problems. BUT we are not average users. My wife watches a couple of shows that she follows for a year or more. My son and I the same, the wife and sone share a couple as well. The TV is on maybe two hours a day, we catch the world cup or the eufa occasionally, but we are not average users, not the kind that turns on the TV in the morning to catch some shite and have noise in the house to drown out the noise of the Aircon.
So, our algebra is: 54.55 for internet+ 7.95 for HULU + 6.95 for netflix. that is compared to 85.00 for cable+internet assuming that we wouldn't also need netflix or hulu on top (and we probably wouldn't) it is still cheaper. Case closed.
you are a fool young puppy. Proper use, as defined by the manufacturers of DDT caused massive damage to the ecosystem. Again a personal example. My dad bought 160 acres of land in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. Miles from Hopewell by the way. When he bought it the previous owner was trying to resurrect the apple orchard features that it had before. My dad thought we could sell it to a developer who was building a ski resort but he was a few miles too far away and he had to hold it. The DDT used there and on the surrounding farms had completely decimated the bird population. The hawks, crows falcons mjays orioles cardinals sparrows nuthatches and ALL the birds were gone. It was eerie, walking for hours in the forest without any birds chirping or singing. Camping in the meadow by the stream and not a single bird. That was 1966. the DDT dead time Jump forward to 1996. I was living in the house that my dad and I built up there in the early 70s and walking around one morning when, for the first time in my life I heard birds there. Today, 15 years later the bird population has finally rebounded. That was the destruction of DDT. Believe it, it is the truth.
You have been suckered in by the chemical companies and their political arm that, using the same tactics as the NRA (well, honestly the tactic has worked: say what you want people to believe, insist that it is true, call the other sides names, grab enough attention to gain attention on the daily news, especially the corporate owned news like FOX, build followers who want to appear to have a "new" more rational argument, you have just bought credibility with having any real logical, rational or scientific support: look at the evolution/ creationism debate, the climate change debate and many others) has used for years are trying to justify the widespread use of whatever the fuck they want to sell you. I have lived in Asia where they sold the DDT factories after it was banned in the US. It is an environmental disaster. Saved people from malaria, yeah right. Instead we have SARS and bird and swine flu. The new malarias that are growing on the Cambodia/ Thai border DESPITE the widespread use of DTT? oh yeah, you have the facts in hand, man.
If you have the cred for this, as u claim, are you talking to the fedora/redhat people? they are not fools. If your idea has value they have the room. I f you can work in a flat structure where your idea will morph and change in a natural way that can solve problems that arise-- in other words if you can work well with others (and it sounds like you can) then go to people who know their stuff. And maybe something good will come out of it.
in 1994 i left the construction business for two reasons: 1-- the quality of materials was dropping and the industry response to the problem was "you bought it, now it's your problem". It had become more and more difficult to find wood that was properly kiln dried, tile that was reliably cooked so that it would break straight (use a saw, not a cutter) etc. ( i just don't want to bitch about it any more, ya know what I mean?)
2-- the people in the business who were any good were getting out, or dying. My Rockmason was 76 years old and working with a replaced hip (Cecil Worsham, that was a real rockmason, not one of the trendy types you find now, he and his dad helped build the walls and bridges on the skyline drive and the blueridge parkway in the blueridge mountains of virginia), my brickmason was in his 70's as well ("y'know boys, when I was your age I could do it all night, now it takes me all night to do it!") My plasterer was one of the last true master plasterers (He had worked on major government buildings around the mall, museums, the mint, he couldn't even remember them all "these nowadays boys just don't want to work anymore. They are happy with good-enough, i can't abide no good-enough"). I had a few finish carpenters who might not have drunk themselves to death yet, and my old lead carpenter who could sink a nail with two strokes using any hammer, any side (even the claws) is still working, sometimes. But they are a dying breed.
Another story: my first partner had an uncle/ cousin maybe who had been an instrument maker for the Apollo program. Yeah, he MADE the instruments by hand that they took to the moon and back. When he retired he was able to devote his time to his hobby. Filling his basement with a complete train system using hobby gauge (HO) trains, track and accouterments that he made from scratch. Not just some stinkin' paper-mache mountains, he made the effin' trains himself, and all the parts that went into them. Think about it. That is what we have lost, and it is a major loss. Sure, I am teaching my kids to do some simple stuff, but where are the role models like these men? When I was building my ham radio set in the 60s there were lots of crusty old guys around to help and turn to, they are gone now.
Actually, this generation of middle-class folks in the south (except for northern implants--more on that below) is probably close to California cool and accepting. Now working class and the poor (especially those who came down looking for jobs in the southern factories that predated outsourcing off-shore) are another beast entirely.
The problem has always been the manipulation of the uneducated by the politcal elites. The elites don't really care about color or gender as long as they get the political power they crave (and the wealth that comes with it). They do care about that power though, that they do.
Now, the north has spawned some really nasty racist, bigoted nastiness recently. It is the northerners that move to the south that happily join the KKK and keep that poor pitiful wreck of the confederacy alive. They assume that they are "joining up" with the southern culture, when in fact most of the south has moved on. While there are many poor blacks in the south still, the majority are educated middle-class wage-earners who would be called "oreos" in the northern ghettos (where you find the greatest race disparity today).
Remember Oprah Winfrey is a southern black woman and Clarence Thomas is a southern black man. They are powerful symbols of the south. I have many black black friends, one in particular is, to my mind, my closest friend. Yes, I am "lily white", but that is the nature of the new south, your old ideas are just that.
Alright, I grew up next to Hopewell, Virginia: "The Chemical Capital of the South" whre you could find not just Monsanto, but DuPont, Allied Chemical and many others. These were the plants that were, before regulation, producing DDT and Dioxin and well as many other deadly (and still dangerous in the waters of the James River today) chemical processing by-products.
What did the local citizens say about the pollution in the air (which could leave you with raw and bleeding lungs) and water (Bailey's Creek was so polluted that the water was black, nothing grew for 100 feet on each bank, and it emptied into the James River)? Let me quote what they said to my parents when they complained and moved out of the town: "We don't talk about it, that is our paycheck you smell, so just shut up."
That is a fact, not an assertion unproven. The results of the damage done by the chemical plants before the clean air and water acts are proven. The results of the federal Superfund clean up have turned Bailey's Creek into something more like real water and scrubbed the banks clean. Green things now grow there. The dioxin is still in the James River, it will be generations before it is all gone, but at least more is not going in. Because of regulations, regulators and enforcement personnel the damage done in a decade has been alleviated.
I have to agree.... with both of you! Yes Americans gladly take their cash to pay for useless services that they don't need because an advertisement has told them they should. Marketing is a powerful tool that drivesa these purchases. Many, many people have expensive , say $50 a month data and phone and text plans for their phones and barely use10% of it. Others Pay for the cheapest plan and then screw the pooch by going over and paying extra expensive charges for just a few minutes or Megs.
On the other side, there are thoughtful and careful people who hold tight to their cash and don't overbuy, who are careful about what they choose and what they can afford. They live thoughtfully and carefully and try to maximise the value of their income.
That is the reality of people, some are silly fools, some are thoughtful and careful fools. Since we all agree to live in the world we should expect these differences and they don't really need to be remarked upon.
not news, I have a student from Vietnam who has jailbroken his iPhone and added an app that lets him download any app for free and run them without any charge. Half the class has iPhones and he is hooking them all up, it'll be all over campus in days when the fall kids arrive.
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w..w.w.w.w.w.wait a minute! You're telling me that all these so called "free-software" used to be a "linux-guru" ... people who i have been listening to the last 5 years tell me about how they use iPhones and iMacs and iPoopie burgers because they just "work" were just trying to justify their ..... what do you call that thing when you say one thing and the first chance you get do another???? oh yeah.. hypocrisy... that's the word... by telling me that they could do anything they wanted on their iPoopie thing. It is no problem for us they said. Oh yeah, as long as you use the proper and accepted spoons to stir your kool-aid. You mean you HAVE to use safari???.
Oh, I got it now, your "free" only means "free beer"
And you were a FOSS guy/girl?
leech is more like it...
(wanders off mumbling to himself)
I lived in a behaviorist community for 3 years. We had a concensus decision making process. I left because, after 2 years of preparation and work on my part to put together a reasonable way to bring in money to support the basic functions of the community without sending people to outside jobs, the community body politic had change, resulting in people who hadn't been part of the original decision that sent me on to the process.
At no time did anyone question what I was doing, even though I kept everyone updated on progress. In the end it was just voted down by a small minority who wanted to become an organic, agrarian commune without the behaviorist roots we had been founded on.
I left, and a number of other , in fact so did most of the community, leaving the farm and the group destroyed. It is still there as an agricultural coop, but I don't go visit.
It makes people laugh when I say it, but i quit voting for 15 years because, even though i had voted from age 18 to 40 something, i had never ever voted for anyone in any position who won.
So I quit. I am going to give this world another chance, but don't have a lot of hope. It is truly contrarian to my obviously superior and more correct understanding of who we need in politics. Just look at how bad things have gotten, just because no one really agrees with me, and i am obviously always correct.
looking at your post and the one that follows (mr. Opposite) i have to agree that the proprioceptive practice makes more sense to me assuming that the practitioner is practiced at writing. I grew up writing really poorly, but writing nonetheless so i found that the physical connection between writing (and the mental processing of transferring into my "own words") made a stronger mental impression than just listening.
But YMMV simply because the modern world does not necessarily encourage the practice of writing. My 9 year old does not have dedicated writing classes in school in the same way I did back in the 60s. His handwriting is crap and the teacher doesn't seem too stressed about it. I had a grade on handwriting up through 6th grade. So, even though my handwriting is crap too, I have that proprioceptive connection built in and do retain more through writing.
Final note. I deliberately avoid taking notes at meetings, I don't want to waste what little available memory space remaining in my feeble old brain on bullshite.
sorry but that is not their profit-making structure. RedHat makes money as a service provider, the software they prepare is prepared to make their service provision more profitable, so they are focused on stability and consistancy and all the things that you see as being the result of what you propose. I won't argue about why it is not happening, but I seem to remember that their were similar proposals many years ago about the YUM/Yast/Apt-get/etc. divisions being a detriment to development, and the result was just another fuss banquet. There seem to have been some reasons at the time, probably are now too, i dunno.
references? just because american companies could not make a profit at their prices does not mean that they are losing money. Think about it.
Wait a freakin minute. I realized decades ago that I am too weak to handle the emotional manipulation used in movies, TV programs and advertisements, so I quit everything. Just bought a TV again last December and still use it very little, mostly when I am ironing (yes I notice that no one seems to do that any more either) for a half an hour or so in an evening. I appreciate that Hulu plus has few commercials, and they are stupid enough to be humorous rather than serious to me.
Anyway, I admit that I can't handle the games they play to manipulate my emotions, does that make me a fool, a tool or some other weak minded character? Does this make you superior to me because you don't realize how deeply embedded in the fabric of the media the emotional tools have become and that you might be getting played without recognizing it?
I, honestly, think that people who have grown up with TV and movies available 24/7 do have better filters than I do (I grew up in Europe in the 50s --no TV-- and then had severe restrictions on it when we returned to the US in the 60s) for the crap things they do to manipulate viewer emotions, but how much are those filters holding out the manipulation and how much are they just hiding it from you? I don't know. My kids think i am just weird, probably right....(wanders off mumbling quietly to himself)...
Well, brand fixation is not adequate to situation unless it includes the marketing genius of the Jobs juggernaut. The iPad was sold based on the existing market of "cool kids" that everyone had been sold to want to be like. As was usual for the Jj, they succeeded wonderously because it is their forte. Now, what has anyone put on the table to combat that strength on its own terms, and who can meet them on that turf. It appears to me that the only company that is trying to do that is Samsung (remember the ad with the Apple "creatives" waiting in line and seeing a Samsung phone?) and guess who Apple is trying to annihilate in court right now.?
While I have zero use for Apple products, they are something I have recommended to vapid and vacuous students who ask what computer they should buy. Students who just want to have a bauble that they can use to do school projects and play with photos to post on FB and look like a cool kid. Its what their parents money is for after all. When those kids started showing up in class with iPads, the only thing I saw them used for was games. Today, their parents have one and they use it to read books and surf to their limited number of websites they use. All of that would work with a kindle or a nook, but they are not for cool kids (yes, their parents have been sold on the idea that they too can be cool and kids) so they shell out for an iPad.
Finally, as with all marketing, in the end it will lose its luster and people will turn away. Not because Saint Stephen is gone, but because the jizzum is gone. That's just how marketing is. Samsung might be the next one to catch the wave of pop, but just ask Mark Z in a few years how ephemeral that marketing flush can be.
smarmy, i couldn't sit through all three
I agree, but from experience. I've been teaching overseas and the number of Americans/Brits/Ozzies/ kiwis etc who show up to teach in cut-off shorts, t-shirts and cigarettes hanging out of their mouth was really bothering me. I had planned on dressing in jeans and polo or equivalent, but ended up trying to dress to a higher standard than my (country where I was teaching) colleagues. They usually dressed "professionally", in clean, neat business clothes sans tie but sometimes with sports coat. Dressing like a slob does send a bad message about your professionalism and attention to detail.
It worked, too. I never left a job without regret on the part of my colleagues and supervisors.
no the chinese prices are relatively real. Actually, the price for a Chinese hot water solar panel is 1/4 the price of a US made panel. Installation is also bolt on/ plug in easy. The greatest difference is the style of design, they do the quick cheap and easy way (using copper strips running down the panel and carrying the heat back up into the hot water tank where the water stays and grabs the heat from the strips. It is NOT the most efficient, but it works and has less chance of leak or damage problems on installation.) Thinking that the Chinese would need to raise prices to make a profit is wrong. They use classic scale of production and sales to make money.
the concrete question is a good one. I had a friend in Thailand that explained that the concrete companies there used charcoal from rainforest trees (about as unsustainable a product as you can think of) to burn their limestone and make cement. They did it this way in order to maintain clean air standards for their industry. The charcola industry is in Burma, Laos and Cambodia who don't have clean air standards. Corporations and their shananigans again!
two words: prior art
My little brother does some coding for them (he's in Durham and does chip design for qualcomm) but, a few years ago i wrote to Jesse.... forget his last name, he was one of the honchos for the live distro at the time and has moved on up since then.... and suggested that they set a time of day for the live iso release so that people in the rest of the world would know when it was available for download. He wrote back the next day saying thanks and the change was on the website a few days later. They've been doing it ever since (10:00AM Eastern time).
They have a bunch of ways to get involved with them from bugzappers to ambassadors to working your way up the dev ranks. It is a hierachy, but a meritocracy as well. Changing their leadership on a regular basis keeps them nimble as well, something that I can see through the changes in the product and its focus from version to version.
but I am a fanboy, so keep the salt handy
yeah, when somebody sent me a friend request back in the early aughties sometime i responded and signed in which gave me an account. never went back, bad vibes. Never missed it, used to be sick of the "contact us on facebook" stuf and was sad that old friends used it as their only source for communication, it cut them off from me and others. Oh well, i said.
now I'm a terrorist? a nostalgist is more like it.
Exactly, I was taught that each discipline required a different "way of thinking" and that the job of the student was to master all these different ways. When you drop out one as important as math you are crippling people and returning to the middle ages.
On a historical note: The British secretary of the navy for King James and his successor (I think, I don't do the UK history too good), Samual Pepys, explains in his diary (in project gutenberg, a fantastic read BTW) that first he began to drink coffee instead of wine, which helped him stay sober enough to pay attention to the world. When he achieved sobriety during the morning he decided to learn how to multiply because he thought he should be able to do what a navigator did.
A graduate of Oxford (or Cambridge, i forget the history stuff, remember?) he could read greek and latin but couldn't do simple math. Neither could the rest of the "educated class" that were running the country.
Mathematics was a tool for the middle class of the times.
The why that you can't remember has to do with their decision to focus on the enterprise space with the (at that time newly) name RHEL. Before that they were RHL without the enterprise. When that happened (actually in the process of that happening) users freaked because a large number were desktop users who didn't want the slowed down version (no matter how solid and stable) but wanted to stay "bleeding edge". Thus the birth of Fedora Core, now Fedora Linux. You can get fedora for free, and get security update for 2.5 years (i think) on each version.
Disclaimer: I am a Red Hat investor and a fedora fanboy.
I'm using a Verizon FIOS account on a 15/5 plan (el cheapo) with one TV four or 5 computers (one hooked to the TV so that I get internet browsing on the screen because Vizio VIA doesn't offer it yet without buying a new TV) and, frankly, there are no problems. BUT we are not average users. My wife watches a couple of shows that she follows for a year or more. My son and I the same, the wife and sone share a couple as well. The TV is on maybe two hours a day, we catch the world cup or the eufa occasionally, but we are not average users, not the kind that turns on the TV in the morning to catch some shite and have noise in the house to drown out the noise of the Aircon.
So, our algebra is: 54.55 for internet+ 7.95 for HULU + 6.95 for netflix. that is compared to 85.00 for cable+internet assuming that we wouldn't also need netflix or hulu on top (and we probably wouldn't) it is still cheaper. Case closed.
but only for us
you are a fool young puppy. Proper use, as defined by the manufacturers of DDT caused massive damage to the ecosystem. Again a personal example. My dad bought 160 acres of land in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. Miles from Hopewell by the way. When he bought it the previous owner was trying to resurrect the apple orchard features that it had before. My dad thought we could sell it to a developer who was building a ski resort but he was a few miles too far away and he had to hold it. The DDT used there and on the surrounding farms had completely decimated the bird population. The hawks, crows falcons mjays orioles cardinals sparrows nuthatches and ALL the birds were gone. It was eerie, walking for hours in the forest without any birds chirping or singing. Camping in the meadow by the stream and not a single bird.
That was 1966. the DDT dead time
Jump forward to 1996. I was living in the house that my dad and I built up there in the early 70s and walking around one morning when, for the first time in my life I heard birds there. Today, 15 years later the bird population has finally rebounded. That was the destruction of DDT. Believe it, it is the truth.
You have been suckered in by the chemical companies and their political arm that, using the same tactics as the NRA (well, honestly the tactic has worked: say what you want people to believe, insist that it is true, call the other sides names, grab enough attention to gain attention on the daily news, especially the corporate owned news like FOX, build followers who want to appear to have a "new" more rational argument, you have just bought credibility with having any real logical, rational or scientific support: look at the evolution/ creationism debate, the climate change debate and many others) has used for years are trying to justify the widespread use of whatever the fuck they want to sell you. I have lived in Asia where they sold the DDT factories after it was banned in the US. It is an environmental disaster. Saved people from malaria, yeah right. Instead we have SARS and bird and swine flu. The new malarias that are growing on the Cambodia/ Thai border DESPITE the widespread use of DTT? oh yeah, you have the facts in hand, man.
If you have the cred for this, as u claim, are you talking to the fedora/redhat people? they are not fools. If your idea has value they have the room. I f you can work in a flat structure where your idea will morph and change in a natural way that can solve problems that arise-- in other words if you can work well with others (and it sounds like you can) then go to people who know their stuff. And maybe something good will come out of it.
in 1994 i left the construction business for two reasons:
1-- the quality of materials was dropping and the industry response to the problem was "you bought it, now it's your problem". It had become more and more difficult to find wood that was properly kiln dried, tile that was reliably cooked so that it would break straight (use a saw, not a cutter) etc. ( i just don't want to bitch about it any more, ya know what I mean?)
2-- the people in the business who were any good were getting out, or dying. My Rockmason was 76 years old and working with a replaced hip (Cecil Worsham, that was a real rockmason, not one of the trendy types you find now, he and his dad helped build the walls and bridges on the skyline drive and the blueridge parkway in the blueridge mountains of virginia), my brickmason was in his 70's as well ("y'know boys, when I was your age I could do it all night, now it takes me all night to do it!") My plasterer was one of the last true master plasterers (He had worked on major government buildings around the mall, museums, the mint, he couldn't even remember them all "these nowadays boys just don't want to work anymore. They are happy with good-enough, i can't abide no good-enough"). I had a few finish carpenters who might not have drunk themselves to death yet, and my old lead carpenter who could sink a nail with two strokes using any hammer, any side (even the claws) is still working, sometimes. But they are a dying breed.
Another story: my first partner had an uncle/ cousin maybe who had been an instrument maker for the Apollo program. Yeah, he MADE the instruments by hand that they took to the moon and back. When he retired he was able to devote his time to his hobby. Filling his basement with a complete train system using hobby gauge (HO) trains, track and accouterments that he made from scratch. Not just some stinkin' paper-mache mountains, he made the effin' trains himself, and all the parts that went into them. Think about it. That is what we have lost, and it is a major loss. Sure, I am teaching my kids to do some simple stuff, but where are the role models like these men? When I was building my ham radio set in the 60s there were lots of crusty old guys around to help and turn to, they are gone now.
Actually, this generation of middle-class folks in the south (except for northern implants--more on that below) is probably close to California cool and accepting. Now working class and the poor (especially those who came down looking for jobs in the southern factories that predated outsourcing off-shore) are another beast entirely.
The problem has always been the manipulation of the uneducated by the politcal elites. The elites don't really care about color or gender as long as they get the political power they crave (and the wealth that comes with it). They do care about that power though, that they do.
Now, the north has spawned some really nasty racist, bigoted nastiness recently. It is the northerners that move to the south that happily join the KKK and keep that poor pitiful wreck of the confederacy alive. They assume that they are "joining up" with the southern culture, when in fact most of the south has moved on. While there are many poor blacks in the south still, the majority are educated middle-class wage-earners who would be called "oreos" in the northern ghettos (where you find the greatest race disparity today).
Remember Oprah Winfrey is a southern black woman and Clarence Thomas is a southern black man. They are powerful symbols of the south. I have many black black friends, one in particular is, to my mind, my closest friend. Yes, I am "lily white", but that is the nature of the new south, your old ideas are just that.
Alright, I grew up next to Hopewell, Virginia: "The Chemical Capital of the South" whre you could find not just Monsanto, but DuPont, Allied Chemical and many others. These were the plants that were, before regulation, producing DDT and Dioxin and well as many other deadly (and still dangerous in the waters of the James River today) chemical processing by-products.
What did the local citizens say about the pollution in the air (which could leave you with raw and bleeding lungs) and water (Bailey's Creek was so polluted that the water was black, nothing grew for 100 feet on each bank, and it emptied into the James River)? Let me quote what they said to my parents when they complained and moved out of the town: "We don't talk about it, that is our paycheck you smell, so just shut up."
That is a fact, not an assertion unproven. The results of the damage done by the chemical plants before the clean air and water acts are proven. The results of the federal Superfund clean up have turned Bailey's Creek into something more like real water and scrubbed the banks clean. Green things now grow there. The dioxin is still in the James River, it will be generations before it is all gone, but at least more is not going in. Because of regulations, regulators and enforcement personnel the damage done in a decade has been alleviated.
For me, that is case closed.
I have to agree.... with both of you!
Yes Americans gladly take their cash to pay for useless services that they don't need because an advertisement has told them they should. Marketing is a powerful tool that drivesa these purchases. Many, many people have expensive , say $50 a month data and phone and text plans for their phones and barely use10% of it. Others Pay for the cheapest plan and then screw the pooch by going over and paying extra expensive charges for just a few minutes or Megs.
On the other side, there are thoughtful and careful people who hold tight to their cash and don't overbuy, who are careful about what they choose and what they can afford. They live thoughtfully and carefully and try to maximise the value of their income.
That is the reality of people, some are silly fools, some are thoughtful and careful fools. Since we all agree to live in the world we should expect these differences and they don't really need to be remarked upon.
not news,
I have a student from Vietnam who has jailbroken his iPhone and added an app that lets him download any app for free and run them without any charge. Half the class has iPhones and he is hooking them all up, it'll be all over campus in days when the fall kids arrive.