Obviously you didn't check the website either or you'd know that the site doesn't indicate whether the plane was a 772 or 773, only that it was a 777, of which there are several different types. Other places on the net, including the news sites, say it was a 777-236ER, which is definitely a 772.
In case people are confused by people talking about a BA772 or a 773, these are standard designations. a Boeing 777-200 is referred to as a 772, the 777-300 is a 773, etc. Other common ones you'll find are things like 742 and 744 which designate 747-200s and 747-400s, respectively. Airbus planes also have similar designations.
I believe it was a 772. Take this with a grain of salt, but wikipedia says it was a 777-236ER. Further wikipedia claims that "As of August 2006, a total of 60 Boeing 777-300 aircraft are in airline service with All Nippon Airways (7), Cathay Pacific (12), Emirates Airline (12), Japan Airlines (7), Korean Air (4), Singapore Airlines (12) and Thai Airways International (6)." British Air is not even listed there. The other news reports seem to back it up. Of course whether it was a 772 or 773 doesn't particularly matter; a flaw in one would be present on the other. You're welcome to react to this crash anyway you'd like, though.
As for the number of 777s in service, that's between 600-700, according to reports on Sky news. Another report said that Boeing reports they have around 300 pending orders for 777s over the next few years. A remarkably safe and capable plane. And this accident investigation will likely only make them safer.
A comment on airliners.net's forums is very appropriate for us slashdotters I think:
A BA 772 landed short of the runway. Initially, speculation was entirely wild, ranging from random double engine failure to fuel contamination to one engine being actually working. Some witnesses said the plane came in high and fast, others said low and slow, others mixed the two together; all agree it was nose-high. A few helpful posters who actually knew something contributed. Some posters asked why the tires were brown...after the plane had skidded through a wet, grassy area on collapsed landing gear. A few posters got into pedantic discussions on various features of the 772 or its operational history as compared to the 340. Others took great pains to demonstrate to the world their lack of basic knowledge of unpowered flight. Few seemed familiar with the notion that fan blades windmill even when no power is applied to the engine. Most all were engaged in a game of nerdy one-upmanship in which they vigorously tried to validate their lofty views of themselves based on their aeronautical knowledge. In sum, we know about as much now as we did when the plane went down: the plane turned onto final, engines did not respond to power inputs, plane landed short of runway, slides deployed, people all survived, plane almost certainly a W/O. Shockingly, neither BA nor Boeing has decided to keep the 15-year-old speculation artists abreast of the situation.
As it happens I have been looking at the X61. It's a very impressive little machine, which a keyboard that, I'm sorry, leaves the chicklet keyboard in the dust. The price is incredible too. Not much more than a MacBook. The only minus for me (besides having to abandon OS X--do I really want to deal with Linux on a laptop?) is the lack of a touchpad.
If I'm willing to give up on my 12", I can choose between a MacBook and a Thinkpad T61 14" (same physical size as the macbook). Interesting options anyway.
Looks like they read slashdot. Their "Contact Us" page is already edited now to remove the text copied from Symantec. Now the page doesn't say much of anything at all. No phone numbers, no addresses. Just a bare e-mail address. Hard to believe how scam artists can operate out in the open these days.
The problem is that there is nothing in the MacBook Pro line for people like that poster, or me. I want something smaller than a 15", that's durable and made of aluminum. A 12" MacBook Pro would be ideal. I don't want the chicklet keyboard of the MacBook, and I don't want a white plastic computer.
If this MacBook Air had a replaceable battery, and an ethernet port, it would be close to what I need, even though the chicklet keyboard just doesn't work out well for me.
You had better believe there's a difference between transmitting energy wirelessly vs on a wire. The reason is that a wire simply transmits the energy end to end; the energy is essentially limited to the physical space of the wire. So some minor losses happen due to resistance, etc. But to transmit the power wirelessly means you have to radiate it in all directions. The amount of energy required to do wireless power transfer over a certain distance is basically governed (upper bound) by the inverse-square law. So to transmit wirelessly takes an enormous amount of power that goes up inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Focusing the transmission can reduce the effects of the inverse-square law, but it will never ever approach the efficiency of a direct transmission wire. Wireless energy transmission seems like a tremendous waste. Mere transmission efficiencies could never exceed a very small number, to say nothing of all the carbon needed to generate the energy in the first place. The best bet is to make batteries as efficient as possible.
That entire line of reasoning on their part is really silly. If I had extremely sensitive data that was vital to my own well-being or interests, I would merely transmit it ahead of me to the site where I needed it and not bother to carry it with me in my laptop. Alternatively, leave the encrypted data at home and simply fetch it from a job site. Already I back all of my important documents and data to a site outside the country I reside in.
Seems to me they want to treat information the same way as they treat tangible goods. The problem with that is, among other things, that the internet makes border control of such goods really really ineffective and stupid.
Just one more thing that makes me wonder how much longer the United States can be relevant in the world.
I agree with you on all points, except for using the theory of the Big Bang as a demonstration of some kind of creation from nothing. Big bang theory postulates that what was before the big bang was lots of matter that compressed together. Most big bang scientists would view it as a cyclic thing. Big bang, expansion, contraction, big bang, expansion, etc.
As for the image of Moses and learning his tensors, I say why not?!:)
I think that you point out a very strong weakness in the position of the Christian right-wing, particularly protestants as they exist in America. That doesn't mean that Religion itself must always be abandoned to partake of Science, though. Maybe for this group. But in the end, if science demonstrates something conclusively, then a religious belief has to be compatible with it, or else the religion must not be true.
The problem is that many Christians believe in Creation ex nihilo, which is something that Science has essentially disproved for hundreds of years. Even Newton himself put forth some basic laws that state matter can not be created nor destroyed. Well it turns out that Creation ex nihilo is not really a biblical concept. It was simply a medieval explanation of the Bible's simple words about the creation of the earth. That doesn't mean the Bible is completely wrong, it just means that someone interpreted it wrong along the way. All of these so-called contradictions, then, can still be reconciled. If the Creation was an organization of matter, through whatever process, then the Bible words are still true.
As for the Garden of Eden, the Bible really only says that it existed. The specifics of how and chronology are not mentioned.
Regardless of whether evolution occurred or not, the concept of original sin remains the same. Although I am Christian, and think that "original sin" in orthodox Christianity is completely bunk. Sex did not cause the fall of man. But whatever the case, I fail to see how evolution influences the story of the fall.
Furthermore, whether or not evolution occurred is also irrelevant to the Christian idea of the need of a redeemer.
Many believers look into the cosmos and see what's out there (or in here) as evidence of God's handiwork, and evidence of his existence. Others look out and see not God at all. The problem with anyone on either side setting to prove the non-existence or existence of God is that God is not out there in the cosmos. One could travel the length and breadth of the universe and not find him. While others sit close to home and find him as they consider the whys of their own metaphysical existence.
If you experience deja vu I guess. In seriousness, though, if some law of physics could be broken, but not always reliably, I suppose. Of course that presupposes that we understand said laws of physics.
I don't think it particularly matters if we are in some kind of metaphysical simulation or not. If there is some sort of uber virtual reality, the simulation, and thus simulator, would have to be so large and so complex that it would also itself be reality. On a smaller scale, if you want to simulate every single aspect of a system (and I do mean *everything* about it), then you've pretty much created the system itself again, albeit in some sort of equivalent way. Supposing such a simulation existed, and it was in some sort of computer, for argument's sake, and being in a computer it allowed reality of size x to be modeled in a much smaller, finite space, then if you run multiple realities in parallel, that's pretty much the equivalent of the multiple universe theory. So as far as we're concerned it's the exact same thing!
Additionally, reality being some kind of "VR" begs all kinds of questions. Like how was the VR created (it's existence as a simulation implies it was created). What is the "reality" that the simulator resides in? If the VR was created, how was it created? Does this imply some sort of intelligence at work here? The only possible interesting thing that could come about if reality is some sort of simulation is whether or not there are glitches in the simulation. Everything else, if it ran perfectly, is irrelevant because the simulation would be indistinguishable from any form of reality.
Reasons due appear to have been given. But the TSA statement itself has absolutely nothing about *why* this rule would be imposed. The AP article does say that this is because of concern over fires from short-circuiting batteries in the hold. Legitimate concerns to be sure. Still, though.
The article also implies that these rules will affect shipping of lithium battery packs by manufacturers. I predict this is going to drive the price of batteries way up.
To my knowledge, the only known case of a battery fire on an airplane was from a bad pack that was *in* a laptop, not bouncing around in luggage in the hold.
That's funny. I regularly order lithium polymer batteries from Hong Kong that are air-mailed to me. That's right. A lithium cell (a bunch of cells, actually) checked into the hold of some airplane, most often a freighter, but often as cargo on regular flights. At this point I just want a single, rational explanation of why. But of course we won't get even that. Flying is getting to be quite a joke these days.
The oped peice refers to religious faith as "belief without evidence." I believe this definition to be false. Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence." Rather they wrote what they considered to be personal evidence, with the hopes that readers of their words would likewise seek for their own personal evidence. Of course this area is, in the eyes of many, frought with difficulties. So certainly Dr. Davies can claim that these people have no evidence, but that doesn't make it true or untrue.
American forces bases all across Europe ban firefox too in their base libraries and schools. Mainly because it won't listen to the locked-down windows settings for proxies and stuff. Additionally, firefox, with a plugin, ties directly into the Tor network, so it's deemed a security risk.
So for situations where stupid policies reign, maybe this interesting little project would be of help: the mozzie plugin for IE. This plugin embeds the gecko rendering engine into IE. http://mozzie.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page . In theory this should give one standards-compliant rendering, and the security of the gecko engine, within the framework of IE. Of course, depending on how it plugs into IE it won't protect you from IE url exploits.
Do you have any proof of this? I'm interested in your reasoning. I can think of a few objections, such as the assumed need for a supply of electricity to make the brakes work, which I has been addressed by those proposing such systems.
On an only distantly related note, electric brakes are set to dramatically increase the safety and reduce the stopping distance for trains. Currently the airbrake system takes many seconds to deploy and react down the length of the train, whereas electric can cause the braking to begin at the same time on each car.
The answer is simple. And you will likely not believe it. The reason is that there simply is no demand for it. People, on the whole, are demanding that cars have lots of horsepower, lots of acceleration. They don't want little wimpy cars. All of the major US auto makers (Ford and GM at the moment; Chrysler is not a US automaker anymore) have made little gutless, high-mileage cars, and they can't sell enough of them to even pay for the R&D costs of developing them. So despite the outcry on slashdot, as a whole people just don't want what the government is seeing fit to mandate. In Europe and Asia, cars are smaller and much more efficient. The people there don't seem to want bigger, more powerful vehicles. So those companies are producing cars with higher mileage and doing just fine. Sadly here in the US we're the ones responsible for what GM and Ford are. And forcing through regulation rather than trying to change the attitudes of consumers, will just end up in the end killing Ford and GM and eliminating 10s of thousands of jobs from our own economy.
Oh and electric cars? No demand on the scale that would break even the costs. It wasn't GM that killed the electric car back in the 90s (whenever that was). It was a combination of very immature technology and total and utter consumer apathy. GM lost a lot of money on that little venture. They couldn't actually sell the cars because to do so would have been a huge loss for them, so they just leased them. And when the car was deemed "finished," GM brought them all back and destroyed them. Because the cost to GM of leaving them with the few people that wanted them would have been far too high in terms of GM's maintenance obligations.
Ironically, it's these large, gas guzzling SUVs that stand to benefit the most from hybrid technology. They are already large enough to easily replace the transmission with the hybrid module. Then in city driving an SUV should actually get close to 30 MPG, and have the perceived increase in acceleration (perceived power) that people think they want.
In short, it's all of us who keep the auto industry back. Computer-controlled, constantly variable transmissions for optimal engine efficiency? Nope, it feels too unnatural and the acceleration feels poor, even though it's actually better: put in artificial shift points so I can feel my body pushing back into the seat as I accelerate in spurts. Electrically-controlled breaks? No way! what happens when a wire is cut? Too dangerous! More efficient vehicles? Oh yeah, as long as I can accelerate off the light to 25 MPH in 1 second flat! Oh, and I might need to go 90 MPH on the freeway too. Oh, and I want to be able to drive 500 miles on on tank of gas. But it's so wrong that it costs me $130 to fill up my tank every day. Someone needs to do something.
Glad to see the moderators correctly marking your post as funny. On a serious note, though, this "prominent North American Enterprice Linux vendor" doesn't own the copyright on most of the software they distribute to begin with. Both they and CentOS properly attribute the copyright owners. And despite the removal of trademarks (done at this "prominent North American Enterprice Linux" vendor's request), they do still attribute copyright to RedHat on programs and scripts that RH created.
I think many of your comments were valid some time ago, but I don't currently notice the same problems in linux these days. I haven't edited an xorg.conf or XF86Config file in *years*. 99% of the time it just works. This is opposed to 100% of the time on OS X, seeing as OS X always runs on Apple hardware that's 100% supported.
Last time I needed to use vnc server, it was as simple as enabling Remote Desktop in system preferences. Entered a password and it just worked. My screen was shareable over vnc. Now running vnc server as a dedicated X server (I also do that frequently) is another matter, but that has nothing to do with Linux.
So there is no technical reason for Linux to not be as good or better than OS X in every way, including eye candy, ease of use, etc. But all things come at a cost. The Linux community only has a finite amount of resources, much less than MS can bring to bear. But it's amazing what has happened so far. I'm excited for the future. Although I'm not an evangelist and I don't really care if other people want to use Linux or not. It does what I want, so I use it, and try to support the community as best I can.
The problem isn't so much that PDFs don't print correctly, at least for us. The problem is they often don't print at all. Particularly on HP printers. The lights come on and blink for a bit, the screen says it's receiving data. But then the lights just go out and the job disappears. Sometimes the job will just print pages of raw postscript. Sometimes we get ghostscript interpreter errors. From the printer itself. HP doesn't want to pay licensing fees to Adobe for their engine, so HP printers all use ghostscript under the hood to render postscript. And ghostscript often chokes on PDFs and the PS produced by pdfs. On our Xerox printers, we rarely had a problem. Of course they embed adobe's engine. We have tons of problems with our Sharp units though. PDFs often print at a rate of 2 pages per minute. This is very odd since Sharp definitely uses Adobe's patented rendering engine.
Seems like in many cases Jobs' slapping down companies who leak is doing a real disservice to everyone, including Apple customers and Jobs himself. To cancel or delay a product like the tablet Mac would just be stupid as it would only hurt apple. Sometimes this Jobs reality distortion field that Jobs himself lives in and Apple affectionados tend to live in is really bizarre.
One of the things that makes CentOS a clear winner is that because it is a completely compatible recompilation of RH, going from a test CentOS install to a fully supported RH entitlement is very easy. Thus I install CentOS initially on all my servers initially and then when I put them into production, I convert them to RHEL and buy an entitlement for them. Some of my less important servers remain CentOS. One of the main reasons for converting my servers to RHEL is that I can watch over them all, in terms of patches and security eratta, from the RHN.
In other cases, I can convert a RHEL box to CentOS, then build the replacement server with its entitlement, allowing me to keep the original server in production for a few weeks or months while the new server is ramped up.
So if anything CentOS actually increases RH usage because it is so easy to, at any time, buy entitlements from RH, convert the CentOS machines, and get whatever level of support you deem necessary at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you didn't check the website either or you'd know that the site doesn't indicate whether the plane was a 772 or 773, only that it was a 777, of which there are several different types. Other places on the net, including the news sites, say it was a 777-236ER, which is definitely a 772.
In case people are confused by people talking about a BA772 or a 773, these are standard designations. a Boeing 777-200 is referred to as a 772, the 777-300 is a 773, etc. Other common ones you'll find are things like 742 and 744 which designate 747-200s and 747-400s, respectively. Airbus planes also have similar designations.
I believe it was a 772. Take this with a grain of salt, but wikipedia says it was a 777-236ER. Further wikipedia claims that "As of August 2006, a total of 60 Boeing 777-300 aircraft are in airline service with All Nippon Airways (7), Cathay Pacific (12), Emirates Airline (12), Japan Airlines (7), Korean Air (4), Singapore Airlines (12) and Thai Airways International (6)." British Air is not even listed there. The other news reports seem to back it up. Of course whether it was a 772 or 773 doesn't particularly matter; a flaw in one would be present on the other. You're welcome to react to this crash anyway you'd like, though.
The wikipedia entry on the crash is pretty lucid and has all the latest actual facts as they are known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_BA38
As for the number of 777s in service, that's between 600-700, according to reports on Sky news. Another report said that Boeing reports they have around 300 pending orders for 777s over the next few years. A remarkably safe and capable plane. And this accident investigation will likely only make them safer.
As it happens I have been looking at the X61. It's a very impressive little machine, which a keyboard that, I'm sorry, leaves the chicklet keyboard in the dust. The price is incredible too. Not much more than a MacBook. The only minus for me (besides having to abandon OS X--do I really want to deal with Linux on a laptop?) is the lack of a touchpad.
If I'm willing to give up on my 12", I can choose between a MacBook and a Thinkpad T61 14" (same physical size as the macbook). Interesting options anyway.
Looks like they read slashdot. Their "Contact Us" page is already edited now to remove the text copied from Symantec. Now the page doesn't say much of anything at all. No phone numbers, no addresses. Just a bare e-mail address. Hard to believe how scam artists can operate out in the open these days.
The problem is that there is nothing in the MacBook Pro line for people like that poster, or me. I want something smaller than a 15", that's durable and made of aluminum. A 12" MacBook Pro would be ideal. I don't want the chicklet keyboard of the MacBook, and I don't want a white plastic computer.
If this MacBook Air had a replaceable battery, and an ethernet port, it would be close to what I need, even though the chicklet keyboard just doesn't work out well for me.
You had better believe there's a difference between transmitting energy wirelessly vs on a wire. The reason is that a wire simply transmits the energy end to end; the energy is essentially limited to the physical space of the wire. So some minor losses happen due to resistance, etc. But to transmit the power wirelessly means you have to radiate it in all directions. The amount of energy required to do wireless power transfer over a certain distance is basically governed (upper bound) by the inverse-square law. So to transmit wirelessly takes an enormous amount of power that goes up inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Focusing the transmission can reduce the effects of the inverse-square law, but it will never ever approach the efficiency of a direct transmission wire. Wireless energy transmission seems like a tremendous waste. Mere transmission efficiencies could never exceed a very small number, to say nothing of all the carbon needed to generate the energy in the first place. The best bet is to make batteries as efficient as possible.
That entire line of reasoning on their part is really silly. If I had extremely sensitive data that was vital to my own well-being or interests, I would merely transmit it ahead of me to the site where I needed it and not bother to carry it with me in my laptop. Alternatively, leave the encrypted data at home and simply fetch it from a job site. Already I back all of my important documents and data to a site outside the country I reside in.
Seems to me they want to treat information the same way as they treat tangible goods. The problem with that is, among other things, that the internet makes border control of such goods really really ineffective and stupid.
Just one more thing that makes me wonder how much longer the United States can be relevant in the world.
I agree with you on all points, except for using the theory of the Big Bang as a demonstration of some kind of creation from nothing. Big bang theory postulates that what was before the big bang was lots of matter that compressed together. Most big bang scientists would view it as a cyclic thing. Big bang, expansion, contraction, big bang, expansion, etc.
:)
As for the image of Moses and learning his tensors, I say why not?!
I think that you point out a very strong weakness in the position of the Christian right-wing, particularly protestants as they exist in America. That doesn't mean that Religion itself must always be abandoned to partake of Science, though. Maybe for this group. But in the end, if science demonstrates something conclusively, then a religious belief has to be compatible with it, or else the religion must not be true.
The problem is that many Christians believe in Creation ex nihilo, which is something that Science has essentially disproved for hundreds of years. Even Newton himself put forth some basic laws that state matter can not be created nor destroyed. Well it turns out that Creation ex nihilo is not really a biblical concept. It was simply a medieval explanation of the Bible's simple words about the creation of the earth. That doesn't mean the Bible is completely wrong, it just means that someone interpreted it wrong along the way. All of these so-called contradictions, then, can still be reconciled. If the Creation was an organization of matter, through whatever process, then the Bible words are still true.
As for the Garden of Eden, the Bible really only says that it existed. The specifics of how and chronology are not mentioned.
Regardless of whether evolution occurred or not, the concept of original sin remains the same. Although I am Christian, and think that "original sin" in orthodox Christianity is completely bunk. Sex did not cause the fall of man. But whatever the case, I fail to see how evolution influences the story of the fall.
Furthermore, whether or not evolution occurred is also irrelevant to the Christian idea of the need of a redeemer.
Many believers look into the cosmos and see what's out there (or in here) as evidence of God's handiwork, and evidence of his existence. Others look out and see not God at all. The problem with anyone on either side setting to prove the non-existence or existence of God is that God is not out there in the cosmos. One could travel the length and breadth of the universe and not find him. While others sit close to home and find him as they consider the whys of their own metaphysical existence.
If you experience deja vu I guess. In seriousness, though, if some law of physics could be broken, but not always reliably, I suppose. Of course that presupposes that we understand said laws of physics.
I don't think it particularly matters if we are in some kind of metaphysical simulation or not. If there is some sort of uber virtual reality, the simulation, and thus simulator, would have to be so large and so complex that it would also itself be reality. On a smaller scale, if you want to simulate every single aspect of a system (and I do mean *everything* about it), then you've pretty much created the system itself again, albeit in some sort of equivalent way. Supposing such a simulation existed, and it was in some sort of computer, for argument's sake, and being in a computer it allowed reality of size x to be modeled in a much smaller, finite space, then if you run multiple realities in parallel, that's pretty much the equivalent of the multiple universe theory. So as far as we're concerned it's the exact same thing!
Additionally, reality being some kind of "VR" begs all kinds of questions. Like how was the VR created (it's existence as a simulation implies it was created). What is the "reality" that the simulator resides in? If the VR was created, how was it created? Does this imply some sort of intelligence at work here? The only possible interesting thing that could come about if reality is some sort of simulation is whether or not there are glitches in the simulation. Everything else, if it ran perfectly, is irrelevant because the simulation would be indistinguishable from any form of reality.
Reasons due appear to have been given. But the TSA statement itself has absolutely nothing about *why* this rule would be imposed. The AP article does say that this is because of concern over fires from short-circuiting batteries in the hold. Legitimate concerns to be sure. Still, though.
The article also implies that these rules will affect shipping of lithium battery packs by manufacturers. I predict this is going to drive the price of batteries way up.
To my knowledge, the only known case of a battery fire on an airplane was from a bad pack that was *in* a laptop, not bouncing around in luggage in the hold.
Time to get a better power source, I guess.
That's funny. I regularly order lithium polymer batteries from Hong Kong that are air-mailed to me. That's right. A lithium cell (a bunch of cells, actually) checked into the hold of some airplane, most often a freighter, but often as cargo on regular flights. At this point I just want a single, rational explanation of why. But of course we won't get even that. Flying is getting to be quite a joke these days.
The oped peice refers to religious faith as "belief without evidence." I believe this definition to be false. Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence." Rather they wrote what they considered to be personal evidence, with the hopes that readers of their words would likewise seek for their own personal evidence. Of course this area is, in the eyes of many, frought with difficulties. So certainly Dr. Davies can claim that these people have no evidence, but that doesn't make it true or untrue.
American forces bases all across Europe ban firefox too in their base libraries and schools. Mainly because it won't listen to the locked-down windows settings for proxies and stuff. Additionally, firefox, with a plugin, ties directly into the Tor network, so it's deemed a security risk.
So for situations where stupid policies reign, maybe this interesting little project would be of help: the mozzie plugin for IE. This plugin embeds the gecko rendering engine into IE. http://mozzie.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page . In theory this should give one standards-compliant rendering, and the security of the gecko engine, within the framework of IE. Of course, depending on how it plugs into IE it won't protect you from IE url exploits.
Do you have any proof of this? I'm interested in your reasoning. I can think of a few objections, such as the assumed need for a supply of electricity to make the brakes work, which I has been addressed by those proposing such systems.
On an only distantly related note, electric brakes are set to dramatically increase the safety and reduce the stopping distance for trains. Currently the airbrake system takes many seconds to deploy and react down the length of the train, whereas electric can cause the braking to begin at the same time on each car.
I guess I'm behind. I hadn't known that the deal had gone through. It's back in American hands again, then.
The answer is simple. And you will likely not believe it. The reason is that there simply is no demand for it. People, on the whole, are demanding that cars have lots of horsepower, lots of acceleration. They don't want little wimpy cars. All of the major US auto makers (Ford and GM at the moment; Chrysler is not a US automaker anymore) have made little gutless, high-mileage cars, and they can't sell enough of them to even pay for the R&D costs of developing them. So despite the outcry on slashdot, as a whole people just don't want what the government is seeing fit to mandate. In Europe and Asia, cars are smaller and much more efficient. The people there don't seem to want bigger, more powerful vehicles. So those companies are producing cars with higher mileage and doing just fine. Sadly here in the US we're the ones responsible for what GM and Ford are. And forcing through regulation rather than trying to change the attitudes of consumers, will just end up in the end killing Ford and GM and eliminating 10s of thousands of jobs from our own economy.
Oh and electric cars? No demand on the scale that would break even the costs. It wasn't GM that killed the electric car back in the 90s (whenever that was). It was a combination of very immature technology and total and utter consumer apathy. GM lost a lot of money on that little venture. They couldn't actually sell the cars because to do so would have been a huge loss for them, so they just leased them. And when the car was deemed "finished," GM brought them all back and destroyed them. Because the cost to GM of leaving them with the few people that wanted them would have been far too high in terms of GM's maintenance obligations.
Ironically, it's these large, gas guzzling SUVs that stand to benefit the most from hybrid technology. They are already large enough to easily replace the transmission with the hybrid module. Then in city driving an SUV should actually get close to 30 MPG, and have the perceived increase in acceleration (perceived power) that people think they want.
In short, it's all of us who keep the auto industry back. Computer-controlled, constantly variable transmissions for optimal engine efficiency? Nope, it feels too unnatural and the acceleration feels poor, even though it's actually better: put in artificial shift points so I can feel my body pushing back into the seat as I accelerate in spurts. Electrically-controlled breaks? No way! what happens when a wire is cut? Too dangerous! More efficient vehicles? Oh yeah, as long as I can accelerate off the light to 25 MPH in 1 second flat! Oh, and I might need to go 90 MPH on the freeway too. Oh, and I want to be able to drive 500 miles on on tank of gas. But it's so wrong that it costs me $130 to fill up my tank every day. Someone needs to do something.
Glad to see the moderators correctly marking your post as funny. On a serious note, though, this "prominent North American Enterprice Linux vendor" doesn't own the copyright on most of the software they distribute to begin with. Both they and CentOS properly attribute the copyright owners. And despite the removal of trademarks (done at this "prominent North American Enterprice Linux" vendor's request), they do still attribute copyright to RedHat on programs and scripts that RH created.
I think many of your comments were valid some time ago, but I don't currently notice the same problems in linux these days. I haven't edited an xorg.conf or XF86Config file in *years*. 99% of the time it just works. This is opposed to 100% of the time on OS X, seeing as OS X always runs on Apple hardware that's 100% supported.
Last time I needed to use vnc server, it was as simple as enabling Remote Desktop in system preferences. Entered a password and it just worked. My screen was shareable over vnc. Now running vnc server as a dedicated X server (I also do that frequently) is another matter, but that has nothing to do with Linux.
So there is no technical reason for Linux to not be as good or better than OS X in every way, including eye candy, ease of use, etc. But all things come at a cost. The Linux community only has a finite amount of resources, much less than MS can bring to bear. But it's amazing what has happened so far. I'm excited for the future. Although I'm not an evangelist and I don't really care if other people want to use Linux or not. It does what I want, so I use it, and try to support the community as best I can.
The problem isn't so much that PDFs don't print correctly, at least for us. The problem is they often don't print at all. Particularly on HP printers. The lights come on and blink for a bit, the screen says it's receiving data. But then the lights just go out and the job disappears. Sometimes the job will just print pages of raw postscript. Sometimes we get ghostscript interpreter errors. From the printer itself. HP doesn't want to pay licensing fees to Adobe for their engine, so HP printers all use ghostscript under the hood to render postscript. And ghostscript often chokes on PDFs and the PS produced by pdfs. On our Xerox printers, we rarely had a problem. Of course they embed adobe's engine. We have tons of problems with our Sharp units though. PDFs often print at a rate of 2 pages per minute. This is very odd since Sharp definitely uses Adobe's patented rendering engine.
So yes. PDFs often cause problems.
Seems like in many cases Jobs' slapping down companies who leak is doing a real disservice to everyone, including Apple customers and Jobs himself. To cancel or delay a product like the tablet Mac would just be stupid as it would only hurt apple. Sometimes this Jobs reality distortion field that Jobs himself lives in and Apple affectionados tend to live in is really bizarre.
One of the things that makes CentOS a clear winner is that because it is a completely compatible recompilation of RH, going from a test CentOS install to a fully supported RH entitlement is very easy. Thus I install CentOS initially on all my servers initially and then when I put them into production, I convert them to RHEL and buy an entitlement for them. Some of my less important servers remain CentOS. One of the main reasons for converting my servers to RHEL is that I can watch over them all, in terms of patches and security eratta, from the RHN.
In other cases, I can convert a RHEL box to CentOS, then build the replacement server with its entitlement, allowing me to keep the original server in production for a few weeks or months while the new server is ramped up.
So if anything CentOS actually increases RH usage because it is so easy to, at any time, buy entitlements from RH, convert the CentOS machines, and get whatever level of support you deem necessary at the time.