...comes from cows. No, really. There are millions of cows in India, and observant Hindus consider it sacrilege to harm them. So they mostly die from old age, and there are no religious issues connected with recycling their remains. And it turns out that their bones, being extremely brittle, make excellent charcoal.
I found this out from a newspaper story a few years back. It was in the news because a British water company was using cow charcoal in its filters. Local vegetarians were not pleased.
For taking an inane pseudostory as proof of something.
It's a bit difficult to see how anybody could make a profit off mandatory vaccination of health workers. There's an extreme shortage of N1H1 vaccine, so any that actually gets made is going to be sold and used. This is just lame conspiracy mongering, the kind that mentally challenged right-wing pundits come up with on a daily basis.
Your analogy doesn't work. If you want to compete with an existing grocery store, you just open a new store across the street. CLECs don't have this option. They don't have this huge network of copper and fiber that the ILECs own (whose building was financed by landline phone customers), and building their own is prohibitive.
Let's try to modify your analogy so it makes more sense. That requires some fantasy. Suppose that gracery stores were very tightly regulated, so that only one store was allowed in any given community. (Which is exactly how AT&T and a few regional independents operated in the old days.) This monopoly situation works because the government tells the grocery stores how much they can charge.
Then we decide to deregulate the grocery store and let the marketplace set prices. But for some reason you can't build new stores (hyperexpensive force fields needed to keep the food fresh) so just lifting regulation actually makes things worse, since each store is still a monopoly and can charge what it wants. If you don't force the stores to rent out space to their competitors, there are no competitors.
Contorted as it is, there's still a problem with my fantasy analogy: groceries occupy physical space. Bandwidth does not. An ILEC can accomodate any number of CLECs just by giving them a place to plug in.
When the ILECs first started offering data service over regular phone lines (remember ISDN?) they charged ridiculous rates because they had no competition. Which is why ISDN never cuaght on in the U.S. A pity, since now we're stuck with a kludgy digital-analog hybrid that does an end run around the ISDN tarrifs.)
Where I come from "I have trouble believing" expresses skepticism about assertions that conflict with strongly-held beliefs. I suppose that shows how culturally deprived I am. I gather that it's conventional on radio talk shows and cable news programs for pundits to use "I have trouble believing" and "I'm betting that" as shorthand for "I'm totally ignorant on the subject but here's my opinion." Alas, I have no patience for these venues. Forgive me with failing to keep up with popular culture.
It was somebody else who claimed that vaccines are low-margin products — I honestly have no opinion one way or the other. I just saw a really stupid argument that they can't be, and shot it down. You can keep telling me that it's pining for the fjords, but I think I got a nice clean shot and it's really, truly dead.
So you stare at the tube for 30 minutes, and that qualifies you to talk about the economics of drug production?
I'll give you points for knowing what economy of scale is (most Slashdotters don't seem to), but your understanding of the concept is very poor. It is not a law of nature that manufacturing cost is inversely proportional to the units produced. Any process faces limits past which it can't scale up cheaply.
In the case of flu vaccine, the bottleneck is eggs: they have to inoculate millions of fertilized eggs in order to grow the antibodies. These are not your standard store eggs, they're laid by specially bred chickens under controlled conditions. The inoculated eggs are incubated for about a month, again under controlled conditions. (There was a big shortage a few years ago when one big drug company lost certification on their factory over concerns that they weren't doing enough to prevent contamination.)
Even if the manufacturing process were cheap, there's R&D, clinical trials, distribution....
Not the best source, but it sure beats wild guesses.
Dude, extrapolating from vague information you got while watching TV to a moral certainty about costs is the very definition of "wild guess".
Hand to imagine the CM getting any more ticked of than they already are. We've seem them throw total conniptions over the kind of mustard he puts on his hamburger. They don't need any fancy awards to achieve apoplexy.
You have a private definition of OS that you find satisfying, but that nobody else uses. I could waste a lot of time trying to demonstrate the problems with your definition, but since nobody but you uses it, there's no reason I should care.
There are many definitions of "Operating System". (Though yours has to be one of the most convoluted and weird.) But when people say "Linux" or "Unix" they generally mean the whole ball of wax. In this context, it makes sense to use that definition.
Especially when you're comparing these OS with GNU. Remember, "GNU" stands for "GNU's Not Unix". RMS didn't set out to create a bunch of libraries. His goal was to create a "free" Unix clone, unencumbered by AT&T's expensive and restrictive licensing terms.
There's a religious tone to your answer. It assumes the question was: "does it run the Linux [kernel]?" But outside the RMS fan club, "Linux" is the name of the OS, not the kernel. So the guy was really asking "does it run the Linux [operating system]?" Hence the "funny" upmods.
It just occurred to me, that if you're going to quibble about the synechdoche usage of "Linux", then GNU/Linux is even worse, because that term implies that that one OS somehow completely incorporates the other. But you couldn't really incorporate the GNU operating system in anything, because the stupid thing still isn't done yet. (After 25 years! [Insert Duke Nukem or Harlan Ellison joke here]) What's included in Linux is not GNU, but the libraries and utilities that were originally meant to be part of GNU. So really, it should be "Unix-like OS with Linux kernel, GNU excerpts, and some other stuff", or UOWLKGEASOS for short.
But your post does answer one important real-world question, one that isn't answered on the KFreeBSD site: what's the darn thing for? I guess the answer is, "So you can run both BSD and Linux (GNU/Linux? UOWLKGEASOS?) binaries on a single system."
Except I still don't see the point. Is there any software for one system that's never been ported to the other?
Yes, but if you're routinely playing with 5GB movie files, you probably have a fast disk drive.
Besides, there's more to "speed" than peak throughput. I know digital movie wonks who use firewire because (they claim) USB 2.0 isn't as fast for sustained throughput.
"Dumb pipe" is a nice simple concept, that feels "right", but is a lot harder to impose in practice than it is in theory. As Obama learned with he went from being a critic of the Executive Branch to being the head of it. That's why he's taken almost as much flack from his liberal base as from the birthies.
I'm sorry, what does the Apple III have to do with anything? It was just another proprietary architecture, one of many.
Bill Gates is the richest man ever because of MS-DOS. Collective hindsight says he was very clever to get IBM to make it the cheapest option for the PC. But that neglects a simple fact: MS-DOS wasn't his first choice. He wanted CP/M, but couldn't get Kildall to sign the NDAs IBM wanted before they would bring him on board. When that happened, he hurriedly bought the rights to Seattle DOS in order to keep his deal with IBM from falling apart.
Gates gets credit for prescience because people assume he knew that the PC would become the basis for today's commodity systems. But that was never in IBM's game plan. On the contrary, they did everything they could to keep the architecture proprietary. What they didn't count on was their competitors ability to clone the technology without crossing any of IBM's legal barriers.
Gates didn't buy into this unexpected future. He bought into IBM's game plan, which called for a series of proprietary systems that would dominate the desktop marketplace the same way their previous products had been a virtual monopoly for more than 3 decades. If things had gone as planned, Bill Gates would be just another rich geek, and computers would still cost you a month's salary.
Who would you recommend it to? Even if it's a superior OS, the things that make it superior (good APIs, robust multitasking, etc.) don't matter to most users. What they want to know is what good apps run on it. You don't need to test it to know that there won't be a lot.
No harm in playing with it for fun and self-education. But don't make any plans based on it becomming widely used.
Poor choice of words on my part. My point was that common OSs, whatever their faults, meet most people's needs, and they have zeroincentive for try new ones. Without users, developers have no incentive to code for the new platform, and manufacturers have no incentive to bundle and support it.
Before you go picking at my logic, look at history. Why did the original Be OS fail? It couldn't find enough users to develop critical mass, which is defined as a self-sustaining ecosystem of users and developers.
Frustrating? You betcha. Ever since commodity systems appeared 25 years ago, I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.
The result has been a quarter century of really bad OSs. Which sucks, but it's no use pretending that the economic forces that cause this have suddenly gone away.
Right, there's no technical reason. But there's a reason: most people aren't nerds. They don't want to fiddle with a bunch of OSs. They want somebody to sell them a computer that Just Works.
IBM tried to keep OS/2 alive by dual-booting it with Windows. Nobody used this feature.
And what "niche" did Be OS fill? Is there some kind of user who's been staying away from computers for 8 years?
One thing hasn't changed: no sane manufacturer will install an OS that doesn't already have a critical mass of users and developers. A lot of good OSs have been unable to get past that problem. An OS that's as poorly supported as this one (8 years to alpha!) hasn't a prayer.
Slashdot Mirror
...comes from cows. No, really. There are millions of cows in India, and observant Hindus consider it sacrilege to harm them. So they mostly die from old age, and there are no religious issues connected with recycling their remains. And it turns out that their bones, being extremely brittle, make excellent charcoal.
I found this out from a newspaper story a few years back. It was in the news because a British water company was using cow charcoal in its filters. Local vegetarians were not pleased.
And the Sun is powered by what? Burning tires?
For taking an inane pseudostory as proof of something.
It's a bit difficult to see how anybody could make a profit off mandatory vaccination of health workers. There's an extreme shortage of N1H1 vaccine, so any that actually gets made is going to be sold and used. This is just lame conspiracy mongering, the kind that mentally challenged right-wing pundits come up with on a daily basis.
Which is why it's a dumb analogy.
Your analogy doesn't work. If you want to compete with an existing grocery store, you just open a new store across the street. CLECs don't have this option. They don't have this huge network of copper and fiber that the ILECs own (whose building was financed by landline phone customers), and building their own is prohibitive.
Let's try to modify your analogy so it makes more sense. That requires some fantasy. Suppose that gracery stores were very tightly regulated, so that only one store was allowed in any given community. (Which is exactly how AT&T and a few regional independents operated in the old days.) This monopoly situation works because the government tells the grocery stores how much they can charge.
Then we decide to deregulate the grocery store and let the marketplace set prices. But for some reason you can't build new stores (hyperexpensive force fields needed to keep the food fresh) so just lifting regulation actually makes things worse, since each store is still a monopoly and can charge what it wants. If you don't force the stores to rent out space to their competitors, there are no competitors.
Contorted as it is, there's still a problem with my fantasy analogy: groceries occupy physical space. Bandwidth does not. An ILEC can accomodate any number of CLECs just by giving them a place to plug in.
When the ILECs first started offering data service over regular phone lines (remember ISDN?) they charged ridiculous rates because they had no competition. Which is why ISDN never cuaght on in the U.S. A pity, since now we're stuck with a kludgy digital-analog hybrid that does an end run around the ISDN tarrifs.)
Where I come from "I have trouble believing" expresses skepticism about assertions that conflict with strongly-held beliefs. I suppose that shows how culturally deprived I am. I gather that it's conventional on radio talk shows and cable news programs for pundits to use "I have trouble believing" and "I'm betting that" as shorthand for "I'm totally ignorant on the subject but here's my opinion." Alas, I have no patience for these venues. Forgive me with failing to keep up with popular culture.
It was somebody else who claimed that vaccines are low-margin products — I honestly have no opinion one way or the other. I just saw a really stupid argument that they can't be, and shot it down. You can keep telling me that it's pining for the fjords, but I think I got a nice clean shot and it's really, truly dead.
So you stare at the tube for 30 minutes, and that qualifies you to talk about the economics of drug production?
I'll give you points for knowing what economy of scale is (most Slashdotters don't seem to), but your understanding of the concept is very poor. It is not a law of nature that manufacturing cost is inversely proportional to the units produced. Any process faces limits past which it can't scale up cheaply.
In the case of flu vaccine, the bottleneck is eggs: they have to inoculate millions of fertilized eggs in order to grow the antibodies. These are not your standard store eggs, they're laid by specially bred chickens under controlled conditions. The inoculated eggs are incubated for about a month, again under controlled conditions. (There was a big shortage a few years ago when one big drug company lost certification on their factory over concerns that they weren't doing enough to prevent contamination.)
Even if the manufacturing process were cheap, there's R&D, clinical trials, distribution....
Not the best source, but it sure beats wild guesses.
Dude, extrapolating from vague information you got while watching TV to a moral certainty about costs is the very definition of "wild guess".
You've seen how vaccines are produced? How? Does your next-door neighbor have a magic vaccine machine in his garage?
You're an ignorant fool. 50 cents wouldn't even cover the cost of packaging.
Hand to imagine the CM getting any more ticked of than they already are. We've seem them throw total conniptions over the kind of mustard he puts on his hamburger. They don't need any fancy awards to achieve apoplexy.
Uh, no. That definition bears no resemblance to yours.
You have a private definition of OS that you find satisfying, but that nobody else uses. I could waste a lot of time trying to demonstrate the problems with your definition, but since nobody but you uses it, there's no reason I should care.
There are many definitions of "Operating System". (Though yours has to be one of the most convoluted and weird.) But when people say "Linux" or "Unix" they generally mean the whole ball of wax. In this context, it makes sense to use that definition.
Especially when you're comparing these OS with GNU. Remember, "GNU" stands for "GNU's Not Unix". RMS didn't set out to create a bunch of libraries. His goal was to create a "free" Unix clone, unencumbered by AT&T's expensive and restrictive licensing terms.
There's a religious tone to your answer. It assumes the question was: "does it run the Linux [kernel]?" But outside the RMS fan club, "Linux" is the name of the OS, not the kernel. So the guy was really asking "does it run the Linux [operating system]?" Hence the "funny" upmods.
It just occurred to me, that if you're going to quibble about the synechdoche usage of "Linux", then GNU/Linux is even worse, because that term implies that that one OS somehow completely incorporates the other. But you couldn't really incorporate the GNU operating system in anything, because the stupid thing still isn't done yet. (After 25 years! [Insert Duke Nukem or Harlan Ellison joke here]) What's included in Linux is not GNU, but the libraries and utilities that were originally meant to be part of GNU. So really, it should be "Unix-like OS with Linux kernel, GNU excerpts, and some other stuff", or UOWLKGEASOS for short.
But your post does answer one important real-world question, one that isn't answered on the KFreeBSD site: what's the darn thing for? I guess the answer is, "So you can run both BSD and Linux (GNU/Linux? UOWLKGEASOS?) binaries on a single system."
Except I still don't see the point. Is there any software for one system that's never been ported to the other?
...but Randy, how about something on the front page of juicedpenguin.com that indicates what the site is for?
The word "claim" expresses my own lack of expertise, not skepticism.
I'm pretty sure that Hawaii is the national span capitol.
Yes, but if you're routinely playing with 5GB movie files, you probably have a fast disk drive.
Besides, there's more to "speed" than peak throughput. I know digital movie wonks who use firewire because (they claim) USB 2.0 isn't as fast for sustained throughput.
"Dumb pipe" is a nice simple concept, that feels "right", but is a lot harder to impose in practice than it is in theory. As Obama learned with he went from being a critic of the Executive Branch to being the head of it. That's why he's taken almost as much flack from his liberal base as from the birthies.
I would have written "for DSi/iPlayer."
I'm sorry, what does the Apple III have to do with anything? It was just another proprietary architecture, one of many.
Bill Gates is the richest man ever because of MS-DOS. Collective hindsight says he was very clever to get IBM to make it the cheapest option for the PC. But that neglects a simple fact: MS-DOS wasn't his first choice. He wanted CP/M, but couldn't get Kildall to sign the NDAs IBM wanted before they would bring him on board. When that happened, he hurriedly bought the rights to Seattle DOS in order to keep his deal with IBM from falling apart.
Gates gets credit for prescience because people assume he knew that the PC would become the basis for today's commodity systems. But that was never in IBM's game plan. On the contrary, they did everything they could to keep the architecture proprietary. What they didn't count on was their competitors ability to clone the technology without crossing any of IBM's legal barriers.
Gates didn't buy into this unexpected future. He bought into IBM's game plan, which called for a series of proprietary systems that would dominate the desktop marketplace the same way their previous products had been a virtual monopoly for more than 3 decades. If things had gone as planned, Bill Gates would be just another rich geek, and computers would still cost you a month's salary.
Who would you recommend it to? Even if it's a superior OS, the things that make it superior (good APIs, robust multitasking, etc.) don't matter to most users. What they want to know is what good apps run on it. You don't need to test it to know that there won't be a lot.
No harm in playing with it for fun and self-education. But don't make any plans based on it becomming widely used.
Poor choice of words on my part. My point was that common OSs, whatever their faults, meet most people's needs, and they have zeroincentive for try new ones. Without users, developers have no incentive to code for the new platform, and manufacturers have no incentive to bundle and support it.
Before you go picking at my logic, look at history. Why did the original Be OS fail? It couldn't find enough users to develop critical mass, which is defined as a self-sustaining ecosystem of users and developers.
Frustrating? You betcha. Ever since commodity systems appeared 25 years ago, I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.
The result has been a quarter century of really bad OSs. Which sucks, but it's no use pretending that the economic forces that cause this have suddenly gone away.
Right, there's no technical reason. But there's a reason: most people aren't nerds. They don't want to fiddle with a bunch of OSs. They want somebody to sell them a computer that Just Works.
IBM tried to keep OS/2 alive by dual-booting it with Windows. Nobody used this feature.
And what "niche" did Be OS fill? Is there some kind of user who's been staying away from computers for 8 years?
One thing hasn't changed: no sane manufacturer will install an OS that doesn't already have a critical mass of users and developers. A lot of good OSs have been unable to get past that problem. An OS that's as poorly supported as this one (8 years to alpha!) hasn't a prayer.
Sun employees are not allowed to use Powerpoint.
At the risk of having my self-righteous geek club card revoked: Right you are.