..if you are not willing to come even a little bit forward (like, accepting DRM or closed binaries) don't cry about it when companies don't want to support it.
Alternative formulation: "if you are not willing to be dragged even a little bit backward (like, giving up on free open source software) don't cry about it when companies that hate and fear FOSS don't want to support you."
I don't think Wikipedia is unreliable in the same way that Debka or the Weekly World News is unreliable (certainly some of its articles are, but most are not). I think the problem with using Wikipedia as a cite is that it's inherently malleable.
I can provide a perfectly correct link to some massively cross-referenceed supporting document on wikipedia, and tomorrow that same link might point to a picture of Homer Simpson picking his nose. There's no way to be sure.
Windows server isn't reliable? Can you give example of how it isn't?
I don't think the problem is actually windows, but reliability of windows server applications is a real problem, at least everywhere I've worked.
Big windows application servers (which run brand-name apps that some pointy-haired boss insists are vitally necessary to the business but everyone else considers time-wasting nonsense) usually have to be rebooted on a schedule in order to compensate for memory leaks. The problem applications are always closed-source so you cannot fix them.
If you find an enterprise windows app that supports thousands of users and doesn't require regular OS reboots, consider it a "best of class" piece of software!
I don't know any high quality sysadmins that want more point'n'click high-bandwidth GUI features on their servers, and less reliance on low-bandwidth SSH console commands.
I mean, I'm willing to hypothesize that they are out there, sure, but I'm also willing to postulate the existence of flying monkeys for the sake of discussion. I don't expect to ever meet one.
Sadly in the US, where free markets have given way to corporate socialism, i.e. fascism, getting the job done, has more to do with making friends in D.C., than with providing a good product or service at a good price.
Well, yes, that's hard to deny. Your best defense is to buy local, and not everyone can do that (especially when giant corporations can use government agencies to criminalize products from traditional cottage and farm industries, like raw milk.)
But giving government agencies more power is not the way to fix a problem caused by government agencies having too much power.
Perhaps, but problems "caused by government agencies having too much power" can't be fixed by handing over power to entities even less responsible and even less motivated to fix the problems, and subjecting them to even less public oversight.
The cause of our problems is not representative government, and institution of a plutocracy, oligarchy or corporate aristocracy would be at best "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" - and could be a lot worse.
Private companies that want to continue to make a profit will make sure they get the job done. Political appointees, on the other hand, will keep their jobs if they fail, and most likely turn the failure into an increased budget, so next time they can fail on a more spectacular level.
Anti-virus companies have a very strong built-in incentive to never actually put an end to malware, because that would put them out of business.
Politicians have a built-in incentive to permanently eradicate malware, because the politician who did that would then certainly be either appointed or elected to a more powerful, more profitable post.
Not true. Most "Right-Wingers" are fine with alternative energies as long as they make sense. Taking away cheap corn to feed people to put into your tank is stupid. Doing it when it is very expensive is worse. Using taxpayer money to subsidize the effort is something that the retarded can tell you is a really bad idea.
Riddle me this then! Why did a "right wing" US administration create corn ethanol subsidies despite fervent opposition from every credible "green" organization on the planet? Are you saying Bush, Rove and Cheney are "left wing"? 'Cause I ain't buyin' that corn...
I personally have participated in a letter-writing campaign opposing corn ethanol, and while it's true I was the only Republican I know that was involved, I can tell you that corn ethanol isn't a right/left issue or even a green/brown issue - it's a corporate pork issue, politicians from both parties favoring corporate short-term profit over long-term societal benefits.
As oil becomes more expensive and alternatives mature and become less expensive move in the market will take place.
There's several big problems with that.
One is that oil is used for more than just fuel - it's an extremely important resource for lubrication, for example, and largely recyclable in that application. Since the market has been historically distorted to favor the exhaustion of oil resources, you've got the same problem you pointed out with corn ethanol; the US government's continuous intervention to keep oil prices artificially low has always been a really bad idea. Every US administration since Jimmy Carter has interfered with the oil market to prevent $10 a gallon gas, and that's why the free market has not already solved our oil addiction.
Trying to force the move by use of Government is a horrible idea.
That's not really true. Certainly corn ethanol subsidies (and farm subsidies in general, for any purpose other than national self-sufficiency) are a bad idea. You're absolutely right in that one specific context! But only government intervention (or civil war) can deal with the twin problems of corporate cost externalization and regulatory capture.
As long as any organization is free to socialize costs and privatize profits, the major corporations will be driven by darwinian market forces to impose the cost of burning carcinogens and depleting critical resources on the bodies of the powerless. A properly structured capitalist market uses regulation to level the playing ground by imposing strict and fair standards on all players in a marketplace - for example, by making it illegal for me to secretly put addictive drugs in my food products, and by making it illegal for me to keep illegal Mexican immigrants as virtual slaves in meat-packing plants.
The problem is not that our government imposes regulations, it's that our government is catastrophically corrupt, at nearly every level. During the last presidential campaign both major candidates rushed back to Washington to reward banks for failing to do business profitably, and to exempt telephone companies from prosecution for federal crimes. The problem is corruption and while the Obama adminstration is clearly smarter than the Bush administration, it doesn't seem to be any less corrupt.
When I was a teenager working for my best friend's dad, we painted asphalt shingles white with a paint brush. I'm sure you could do it with a thick-nap roller, a spray gun, or just by dumping out the can. It's not as hard as you imagine; just be careful your feet don't rub all the gravel off older shingles that have seen too much sun.
Of course, that was in the 1970s, long before Reagan, when conservation was still a conservative value.
If I call the police they will lock up (and possibly beat up) and deport a bunch of hard-working poor people who are doing nothing but trying to provide for their families. I refuse to be a part of that evil; thanks anyway.
The employers will take no harm, and they will have another dozen illegal Mexicans doing yardwork and another Guatemalan nanny looking after their kids within the week. It's cheaper for them to exploit illegals and pay any fines they might incur than to pay real wages.
Actually, it's pretty novel. No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories. Doing this with Time Machine was a pretty neat trick. Any directories that haven't been modified are just hard links to the previous version. Directories that have been modified contain hard links to files in the previous version.
Naw, I disagree. We've been doing all that at work since late 2005. I keep planning to set up a WRT54G implementation with a big USB disk at home, but somehow I never get around to it... the beer won't drink itself, you know!
Time machine is a trivial elaboration on Rubel & Schulz, and nothing special to linux geeks, although it is obviously da bomb for mac users who haven't yet transcended "point and grunt".
My own implementation requires adding a line to a flat ascii config file in order to add a new host, so GUI users are unlikely to find it attractive.
Your post was very informative and interesting; thanks for taking the time to write it up.
I'm wondering about this part, though:
* Authentication and authorization and encryption is automatic (no need to exchange SSL keys).
If you are saying you can use powershell to execute commands on any windows box without any setup or configuration of authentication and authorization by that box's owner, that does not sound desirable at all! And it would be a big surprise, too, since I spend hundreds of hours every year maintaining MS-Windows domain authentication and authorization infrastructures.;)
Again, thanks for the info! I'll try to put it to good use.
I just want to point out that anybody with any taste at all loves fried chicken and watermelon. I mean, that is good food. If you don't like at least one of the two, you're defective.
I wonder why government has anything to do with marriage at all?
Because property rights are regulated and enforced by government, and inheritance is a form of property re-allocation, and family structures that determine legal inheritance are largely built through marriage.
This is actually pretty necessary as things stand today, because our ruling classes retain political and economic power through inheritance, not merit. Try to change it, any you might end up with a horse's head in your bed.
I think you'll find that "locking up" people who enter the country illegally is a pretty consistent reaction by any functioning state.
I would've argued that states that unnecessarily restrict immigration are not "functioning" states.
Here in the USA I see a dozen illegals every single day, mowing the rich people's lawns, tending the rich people's children, painting the rich people's houses... and none of them are being "locked up".
So, by either definition, the USA is not a "functioning state" at this point. Clearly both our definitions are overly simplistic... the USA is severely dysfunctional in many ways, yet still robustly functional in many others.
If you are thinking lack of SSH, PowerShell has a much more elegant and hassle-free way to remotely execute scripts, commands, functions and even remote jobs and events.
Clearly I need to know more about powershell, since I haven't found anything remotely like that in it. Can you toss me a few links or some examples?
Using SSH, I can execute massive, intricate processes that interoperate across multiple hosts running multiple operating systems with perfect forward security, and I can do this right from my head on the CLI without touching a text editor. I've never seen anything like SSH's remote capabilities in Powershell.
But like I said, I'm pretty ignorant where PS is concerned - a situation I'd like to remediate!
There's a disconnect on the word 'current'. For many people, 'current' means 'recent' and not just 'still working'.
For Microsoft and any other tech company releasing an OS, 'current' can be read to mean 'available right this very moment from IBM as a mass market product'.
So 'current' does not include any item you bought before the announcement that is no longer shipping - that would be 'in the past'.
Less obviously, 'current' also does not include 'niche' products like low-powered factory automation computers, phones, mp3 players, or embedded systems, or 'off-brand' products (such as anything made by Apple).
Anyone whose job involves being paid by grants know this
You're quite wrong, and all the people around me who are paid by grants agree.
A research scientist can make ten times as much money if s/he can make a potentially valid claim that pollution isn't hurting the environment. That's been true ever since Reagan took office, OK?
Politicians pay for what they want to hear, polluters pay (even more!) for what they want to hear, but nobody else wants to pay squat for research that makes no new claims or discoveries.
And yes, I have spent years working in an academic research institution funded by both private and public grants. My spouse and many of my friends still do; half our family income is based on grants.
What you are saying is simply not true. There is far, far more money available to scientists willing to deny so-called "global warming" (which is merely one symptom of excessive pollution, really) than to scientists who are not.
As my friend the historian once told me, "I can't make name for myself by saying Tacitus's histories are just fine, but I can get grants and book deals by claiming he dressed in women's underwear". In real life, you simply don't get grants by knuckling under to some other person's ideas. You get grants by challenging conventional wisdom, and proposing a means of validating your challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternative formulation: "if you are not willing to be dragged even a little bit backward (like, giving up on free open source software) don't cry about it when companies that hate and fear FOSS don't want to support you."
I like the alternate form better.
I don't think Wikipedia is unreliable in the same way that Debka or the Weekly World News is unreliable (certainly some of its articles are, but most are not). I think the problem with using Wikipedia as a cite is that it's inherently malleable.
I can provide a perfectly correct link to some massively cross-referenceed supporting document on wikipedia, and tomorrow that same link might point to a picture of Homer Simpson picking his nose. There's no way to be sure.
I don't think the problem is actually windows, but reliability of windows server applications is a real problem, at least everywhere I've worked.
Big windows application servers (which run brand-name apps that some pointy-haired boss insists are vitally necessary to the business but everyone else considers time-wasting nonsense) usually have to be rebooted on a schedule in order to compensate for memory leaks. The problem applications are always closed-source so you cannot fix them.
If you find an enterprise windows app that supports thousands of users and doesn't require regular OS reboots, consider it a "best of class" piece of software!
The various solar power projects need technical people.
http://www.google.com/search?q=solar+power+volunteer+africa
I don't know any high quality sysadmins that want more point'n'click high-bandwidth GUI features on their servers, and less reliance on low-bandwidth SSH console commands.
I mean, I'm willing to hypothesize that they are out there, sure, but I'm also willing to postulate the existence of flying monkeys for the sake of discussion. I don't expect to ever meet one.
I wish there was a "+1 Understands Scientific Method" moderation I could give you for expressing that attitude.
Well, yes, that's hard to deny. Your best defense is to buy local, and not everyone can do that (especially when giant corporations can use government agencies to criminalize products from traditional cottage and farm industries, like raw milk.)
Perhaps, but problems "caused by government agencies having too much power" can't be fixed by handing over power to entities even less responsible and even less motivated to fix the problems, and subjecting them to even less public oversight.
The cause of our problems is not representative government, and institution of a plutocracy, oligarchy or corporate aristocracy would be at best "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" - and could be a lot worse.
Anti-virus companies have a very strong built-in incentive to never actually put an end to malware, because that would put them out of business.
Politicians have a built-in incentive to permanently eradicate malware, because the politician who did that would then certainly be either appointed or elected to a more powerful, more profitable post.
It seemed like a good idea to mention that a certain amount of setup and maintenance was being glossed over.
Riddle me this then! Why did a "right wing" US administration create corn ethanol subsidies despite fervent opposition from every credible "green" organization on the planet? Are you saying Bush, Rove and Cheney are "left wing"? 'Cause I ain't buyin' that corn...
I personally have participated in a letter-writing campaign opposing corn ethanol, and while it's true I was the only Republican I know that was involved, I can tell you that corn ethanol isn't a right/left issue or even a green/brown issue - it's a corporate pork issue, politicians from both parties favoring corporate short-term profit over long-term societal benefits.
There's several big problems with that.
One is that oil is used for more than just fuel - it's an extremely important resource for lubrication, for example, and largely recyclable in that application. Since the market has been historically distorted to favor the exhaustion of oil resources, you've got the same problem you pointed out with corn ethanol; the US government's continuous intervention to keep oil prices artificially low has always been a really bad idea. Every US administration since Jimmy Carter has interfered with the oil market to prevent $10 a gallon gas, and that's why the free market has not already solved our oil addiction.
That's not really true. Certainly corn ethanol subsidies (and farm subsidies in general, for any purpose other than national self-sufficiency) are a bad idea. You're absolutely right in that one specific context! But only government intervention (or civil war) can deal with the twin problems of corporate cost externalization and regulatory capture.
As long as any organization is free to socialize costs and privatize profits, the major corporations will be driven by darwinian market forces to impose the cost of burning carcinogens and depleting critical resources on the bodies of the powerless. A properly structured capitalist market uses regulation to level the playing ground by imposing strict and fair standards on all players in a marketplace - for example, by making it illegal for me to secretly put addictive drugs in my food products, and by making it illegal for me to keep illegal Mexican immigrants as virtual slaves in meat-packing plants.
The problem is not that our government imposes regulations, it's that our government is catastrophically corrupt, at nearly every level. During the last presidential campaign both major candidates rushed back to Washington to reward banks for failing to do business profitably, and to exempt telephone companies from prosecution for federal crimes. The problem is corruption and while the Obama adminstration is clearly smarter than the Bush administration, it doesn't seem to be any less corrupt.
When I was a teenager working for my best friend's dad, we painted asphalt shingles white with a paint brush. I'm sure you could do it with a thick-nap roller, a spray gun, or just by dumping out the can. It's not as hard as you imagine; just be careful your feet don't rub all the gravel off older shingles that have seen too much sun.
Of course, that was in the 1970s, long before Reagan, when conservation was still a conservative value.
The elected representatives in my area could certainly be described as "two faced stone tools".
If I call the police they will lock up (and possibly beat up) and deport a bunch of hard-working poor people who are doing nothing but trying to provide for their families. I refuse to be a part of that evil; thanks anyway.
The employers will take no harm, and they will have another dozen illegal Mexicans doing yardwork and another Guatemalan nanny looking after their kids within the week. It's cheaper for them to exploit illegals and pay any fines they might incur than to pay real wages.
Did you read my link THAT FAST? You read way faster than me!
Yes, yes, no, yes, no, possibly.
Naw, I disagree. We've been doing all that at work since late 2005. I keep planning to set up a WRT54G implementation with a big USB disk at home, but somehow I never get around to it... the beer won't drink itself, you know!
Time machine is a trivial elaboration on Rubel & Schulz, and nothing special to linux geeks, although it is obviously da bomb for mac users who haven't yet transcended "point and grunt".
My own implementation requires adding a line to a flat ascii config file in order to add a new host, so GUI users are unlikely to find it attractive.
Your post was very informative and interesting; thanks for taking the time to write it up.
I'm wondering about this part, though:
If you are saying you can use powershell to execute commands on any windows box without any setup or configuration of authentication and authorization by that box's owner, that does not sound desirable at all! And it would be a big surprise, too, since I spend hundreds of hours every year maintaining MS-Windows domain authentication and authorization infrastructures. ;)
Again, thanks for the info! I'll try to put it to good use.
Price?
I just want to point out that anybody with any taste at all loves fried chicken and watermelon. I mean, that is good food. If you don't like at least one of the two, you're defective.
Because property rights are regulated and enforced by government, and inheritance is a form of property re-allocation, and family structures that determine legal inheritance are largely built through marriage.
This is actually pretty necessary as things stand today, because our ruling classes retain political and economic power through inheritance, not merit. Try to change it, any you might end up with a horse's head in your bed.
I would've argued that states that unnecessarily restrict immigration are not "functioning" states.
Here in the USA I see a dozen illegals every single day, mowing the rich people's lawns, tending the rich people's children, painting the rich people's houses... and none of them are being "locked up".
So, by either definition, the USA is not a "functioning state" at this point. Clearly both our definitions are overly simplistic... the USA is severely dysfunctional in many ways, yet still robustly functional in many others.
http://www.microsoft.com/
Clearly I need to know more about powershell, since I haven't found anything remotely like that in it. Can you toss me a few links or some examples?
Using SSH, I can execute massive, intricate processes that interoperate across multiple hosts running multiple operating systems with perfect forward security, and I can do this right from my head on the CLI without touching a text editor. I've never seen anything like SSH's remote capabilities in Powershell.
But like I said, I'm pretty ignorant where PS is concerned - a situation I'd like to remediate!
For Microsoft and any other tech company releasing an OS, 'current' can be read to mean 'available right this very moment from IBM as a mass market product'.
So 'current' does not include any item you bought before the announcement that is no longer shipping - that would be 'in the past'.
Less obviously, 'current' also does not include 'niche' products like low-powered factory automation computers, phones, mp3 players, or embedded systems, or 'off-brand' products (such as anything made by Apple).
You're quite wrong, and all the people around me who are paid by grants agree.
A research scientist can make ten times as much money if s/he can make a potentially valid claim that pollution isn't hurting the environment. That's been true ever since Reagan took office, OK?
Politicians pay for what they want to hear, polluters pay (even more!) for what they want to hear, but nobody else wants to pay squat for research that makes no new claims or discoveries.
And yes, I have spent years working in an academic research institution funded by both private and public grants. My spouse and many of my friends still do; half our family income is based on grants.
What you are saying is simply not true. There is far, far more money available to scientists willing to deny so-called "global warming" (which is merely one symptom of excessive pollution, really) than to scientists who are not.
As my friend the historian once told me, "I can't make name for myself by saying Tacitus's histories are just fine, but I can get grants and book deals by claiming he dressed in women's underwear". In real life, you simply don't get grants by knuckling under to some other person's ideas. You get grants by challenging conventional wisdom, and proposing a means of validating your challenge.