Of course you want to know what consumes even more resources than a pet? A child. And I seriously doubt anyone is going to consider THAT before having one.
Sorry to double-reply.
A rational person would consider as many factors as possible before making a choice such as having a child. It's perfectly OK to decide that the rewards of parenthood outweigh the costs (time, money, environmental impact, and many more factors). But throwing away data without even considering it? That's just dumb.
It's just same asshole who doesn't own a pet and doesn't think anyone else should either trying to guilt people into not getting a pet.
Regardless of this "asshole"'s motivations, it provides some data to potential pet owners, that they can use how they wish.
Of course you want to know what consumes even more resources than a pet? A child. And I seriously doubt anyone is going to consider THAT before having one.
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume.. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
I had a friend at school who's parents ran a smallholding. While dining on pork from Eilonwy the pig, they reflected on the pig's sweet nature while she was alive. I think it's quite a healthy attitude to meat, and one which most of us are sadly divorced from.
That said, I imagine wild rabbits are quite a different eating proposition to a fluffy pet bunny.
Hey - I live at the end of a short section of road that leads to a gate onto fields and our last 30m 'round the bend' doesn't even have a street light and at harvest/sowing time we have farm vehicles dropping mud all over the road so can I have a discount!?
if your average cat/dog lives 10 - 15 years, then over the same period a car is going to go through what, at least 5 tyre changes? How many parts are going to have to be replaced? What about the environmental impact of scrapping the old parts? specifically, what about the environmental impact of disposing of tyres? What about averaging in the disposal cost of cars that get written off in accidents in this time? A car that's written off early leads to increased waste, a dog dies early leads to relatively decreased waste.
Well, you can chase extra complexities a long way. Plus there's some synergy between the two things. How many otherwise unnecessary car journeys did you make to buy pet food? How far out of the way do you go on the way to the airport, to drop off the dog at the kennels? Would you even need a car if it weren't for the dog? Do you have a larger car because of the dog?
I think it's better to just take away from this - whether it's more than a car, less than a car, or about the same, a pet consumes a *lot* of resources, and if that matters to you, you should bear it in mind before getting a pet.
Similarly, people get pets without thinking about the long term financial costs. It's good to remind people of that, so they don't make the same mistake, resulting in abandoned or neglected pets.
1) Force me to walk them everyday ensuring that I am outside doing something. 2) A jogging partner making my jog not so boring. 3) A watchdog (not guard dog) who keeps an eye on things. 4) Fire alert in case something is burning and they will make sure we get to safety.
I don't think it's constructive to list the benefits of having a dog, since if you go down that route, you also need to list the benefits of having a car. The study merely compares the resource usage of a dog vs a car. Not the cost/benefit of each, which would be much more difficult to calculate in aggregate, since "benefit" is such a nebulous thing.
At the end of the day, all you can do is decide how much environmental impact matters to you (for some, not at all); get some idea of the environmental impact of various lifestyle choices, and factor that into how you live your life.
I personally wouldn't get a dog, because the monetary costs, the extra responsibility, and the disruption it would cause to my other pleasures (e.g. travel) outweigh the benefits as I perceive them. This extra information about environmental impact is just another factor.
For you, the benefits outweigh the costs, and that's fine.
If your meat comes from sheep that have eaten on a hill-side then your point is valid.
I'm from Wales where a great deal of the land is taken up by sheep grazing meadows for sheep. Although it's a form of agriculture that goes back many centuries, I'm pretty sure that an awful lot of that land used to be densely wooded. It's the precursor to the rampant deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere.
Because I'm quite sure the tuna catfood my cat got this morning contained no tuna heads, fins or arseholes.
Sarcasm noted, and I was merely repeating the article. Your canned pet food did have to go through an energy intensive canning process, haulage through the supply chain (including the extra weight of the can), etc.
Isn't VAT the solution to this? A tax at the point of consumer sale. Hence if you give away the service, you don't pay the tax.
If it's felt that broadband should raise more tax, then they could set a higher rate of VAT for such services -- although I don't see why that ought to be the case.
It's almost a truism that every human has a carbon footprint. That every animal does too isn't much of a leap.
Me, when I'm challenged about my admittedly extravagant number of international flights, I point out the ways I offset it. Very low car usage. No kids. No pets.
If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources.
There's an article based on this book in the current New Scientist magazine, and indeed one of the suggestions for lowering the impact of pet ownership was to feed them leftovers instead of canned pet food. It also suggests fish heads from the fishmonger, instead of premium cat food.
Being it "niche" doesn't preclude it from being in the repos: usually if it is license-compatible and there's at least one person willing to take the effort to package it, it will be accepted. Even if the packager is not a Debian developer, it will go with the support of the mentors list.
I think the absence of "one person willing to take the effort to package it" is the problem. Especially if that effort involves seeking support from a mentor's list. Add to that the fact that it's an effort to be repeated for several distros.
The Apple/NeXT.app approach is fairly different to RPM/DEB package files.
If you could execute the.deb or the.rpm directly (i.e. double click firefox.rpm, or type./firefox.rpm, and have Firefox launch instantly), that would be more similar.
If you were aiming for this, on Linux, from scratch, you'd:
- assign some sort of filesystem attribute that says "this is a directory that contains an application"
- have a standard layout for where the executable is expected to reside within that directory.
- application knows to find resources in paths relative to the app directory
- package this as an iso or a tar.gz
- to install, untar anywhere. Nothing else to it.
- or, more like OSX, mount the ISO, run directly from the ISO, or copy the directory anywhere.
- execute the directory.
I agree that fat binaries are not appropriate for applications in the distribution's archive. And I agree that the first port of call for any user should be apt-get / up2date / etc.
However there are many kinds of app that might not get into the distro archive, for all kinds or reasons. Maybe it's of really niche interest, maybe it's too new, maybe the distro-maintainer just interested in it. Or maybe it's proprietary. Some people are willing to compromise on freedom.
The last application I had trouble installing on Linux, due to glibc versioning problems, was a profiler for WebMethods Integration Server. Something like that is never going to get into the APT repository.
Black books - Channel 4 League of gentlemen - BBC Spaced - Channel 4 Jam - Channel 4 (I think) Little Britain - BBC. Deteriorated badly after 1st series.
I was under the impression it's mostly about making me go to microsoft.com to use an online word processor or spreadsheet, instead of having the programs stored locally.
Very much not the focus.
Although I use Google Docs by preference nowadays -- no installation, easy collaboration, equally accessible from home, work, internet cafe etc. What they have remotely that I don't have locally is redundant storage.
Yeah, we could do away with all kinds of pesky specific descriptions, if we just call everything that touches the internet "internet-based computing". I mean, what idiot coined the tedious and unnecessary buzzword "World Wide Web"?
WWW refers to something specific on the internet; namely that web pages can link to each other even if on another server.
I know. And likewise, cloud computing refers to something specific on the internet.
If you put up a web server and I browse it, that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.
Why isn't it? What if the web server has a web-based mortgage application being served on it? Why isn't that cloud computer? After all, its "doing some processing for me."
Because that web server isn't benefiting from the fault tolerance or the instant scalability (both up and down), that being in a cloud provides.
If your "web server" is actually a massively parallel server farm, spread across multiple datacentres worldwide, which splits the POVray rendering job across multiple nodes such that it completes in a fraction of the time and can tolerate individual nodes rebooting or dying altogether -- THAT would be cloud computing.
How is that any different than distributed computing? Oh, because you added "spread across multiple data centers." Please.
Sure, it *is* distributed computing (and if it isn't, it's not cloud computing, in my book). Distributed computing + SOA = cloud computing, I guess (although I hate the SOA buzzword as much as you seem to hate "cloud")
Likewise Amazon S3 is cloud computing rather than just remote storage, because the data you store is smeared (mirrored; cached) across multiple nodes so that node failure is routed around, and reads are fast for clients all over the world.
But I thought it had to be doing some processing for me, not just storing stuff? Please, make up your mind. Why throw "smeared" into the mix when you already have the necessary words? Oh right... to make it "cloud compatible."
Storage is processing. In this case the process is to store the data on at least two nodes, send you an acknowledgement, then in the background propogate it to more nodes. I just used the word "smeared" (not part of the standard cloud buzzword collection as fat as I knew) because I thought it might help people understand.
Why send data to a server to process over a slow link when I could get the result faster by processing that data locally? That's the question he's asking.
And who is suggesting an application in which you do that?
All the cloud services being offered or suggested offer something on the remote side that you're likely not to have locally. Whether it's massive processing power and access to data (Google search); fast, highly specialised processing power (this Nvidia project); highly redundant cheap storage (Amazon S3); and so on.
I've given two examples of how, even with a fairly fast local processor and a super-slow connection, it would be worth sending a job to a remote server - jobs where the input and output are both small, but the processing in between is heavy and/or further external data is accessed.
These people aren't affected by the ISP caps you mention -- because cloud computing isn't what you think it is.
OTOH, I do think that service aimed at end-users will become popular. Things along the Google Docs model and, yes, the OnLive model. They will drive demand for faster ISP services with higher caps, or no caps at all. And for wireless ISPs with broad coverage.
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Humans and dogs originally got together because there was a mutual benefit. That benefit hasn't existed for a very long time.
I agree with everything else you said, but from observing dog owners there's still a mutual benefit. The dog makes the owner happy.
Of course you want to know what consumes even more resources than a pet? A child. And I seriously doubt anyone is going to consider THAT before having one.
Sorry to double-reply.
A rational person would consider as many factors as possible before making a choice such as having a child. It's perfectly OK to decide that the rewards of parenthood outweigh the costs (time, money, environmental impact, and many more factors). But throwing away data without even considering it? That's just dumb.
It's just same asshole who doesn't own a pet and doesn't think anyone else should either trying to guilt people into not getting a pet.
Regardless of this "asshole"'s motivations, it provides some data to potential pet owners, that they can use how they wish.
Of course you want to know what consumes even more resources than a pet? A child. And I seriously doubt anyone is going to consider THAT before having one.
It's one of the reasons I'm not having one.
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
I had a friend at school who's parents ran a smallholding. While dining on pork from Eilonwy the pig, they reflected on the pig's sweet nature while she was alive. I think it's quite a healthy attitude to meat, and one which most of us are sadly divorced from.
That said, I imagine wild rabbits are quite a different eating proposition to a fluffy pet bunny.
Hey - I live at the end of a short section of road that leads to a gate onto fields and our last 30m 'round the bend' doesn't even have a street light and at harvest/sowing time we have farm vehicles dropping mud all over the road so can I have a discount!?
You qualify for a Rustic Charm Surcharge.
if your average cat/dog lives 10 - 15 years, then over the same period a car is going to go through what, at least 5 tyre changes? How many parts are going to have to be replaced? What about the environmental impact of scrapping the old parts? specifically, what about the environmental impact of disposing of tyres? What about averaging in the disposal cost of cars that get written off in accidents in this time? A car that's written off early leads to increased waste, a dog dies early leads to relatively decreased waste.
Well, you can chase extra complexities a long way. Plus there's some synergy between the two things. How many otherwise unnecessary car journeys did you make to buy pet food? How far out of the way do you go on the way to the airport, to drop off the dog at the kennels? Would you even need a car if it weren't for the dog? Do you have a larger car because of the dog?
I think it's better to just take away from this - whether it's more than a car, less than a car, or about the same, a pet consumes a *lot* of resources, and if that matters to you, you should bear it in mind before getting a pet.
Similarly, people get pets without thinking about the long term financial costs. It's good to remind people of that, so they don't make the same mistake, resulting in abandoned or neglected pets.
So what does these dogs do for me?
1) Force me to walk them everyday ensuring that I am outside doing something.
2) A jogging partner making my jog not so boring.
3) A watchdog (not guard dog) who keeps an eye on things.
4) Fire alert in case something is burning and they will make sure we get to safety.
I don't think it's constructive to list the benefits of having a dog, since if you go down that route, you also need to list the benefits of having a car. The study merely compares the resource usage of a dog vs a car. Not the cost/benefit of each, which would be much more difficult to calculate in aggregate, since "benefit" is such a nebulous thing.
At the end of the day, all you can do is decide how much environmental impact matters to you (for some, not at all); get some idea of the environmental impact of various lifestyle choices, and factor that into how you live your life.
I personally wouldn't get a dog, because the monetary costs, the extra responsibility, and the disruption it would cause to my other pleasures (e.g. travel) outweigh the benefits as I perceive them. This extra information about environmental impact is just another factor.
For you, the benefits outweigh the costs, and that's fine.
If your meat comes from sheep that have eaten on a hill-side then your point is valid.
I'm from Wales where a great deal of the land is taken up by sheep grazing meadows for sheep. Although it's a form of agriculture that goes back many centuries, I'm pretty sure that an awful lot of that land used to be densely wooded. It's the precursor to the rampant deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere.
Eating nothing but rabbit will give you protein poisoning.
Combine it with vegetables and other meat, and you'll be fine.
Because I'm quite sure the tuna catfood my cat got this morning contained no tuna heads, fins or arseholes.
Sarcasm noted, and I was merely repeating the article. Your canned pet food did have to go through an energy intensive canning process, haulage through the supply chain (including the extra weight of the can), etc.
Isn't VAT the solution to this?
A tax at the point of consumer sale. Hence if you give away the service, you don't pay the tax.
If it's felt that broadband should raise more tax, then they could set a higher rate of VAT for such services -- although I don't see why that ought to be the case.
Unfortunately for you, you're vastly outnumbered.
It's almost a truism that every human has a carbon footprint. That every animal does too isn't much of a leap.
Me, when I'm challenged about my admittedly extravagant number of international flights, I point out the ways I offset it. Very low car usage. No kids. No pets.
Or, people who are genuinely bemused that anyone would want such a thing, and are grasping for explanations.
(Me, I've reconciled myself to the realisation that not everyone has the same tastes as I do)
If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources.
There's an article based on this book in the current New Scientist magazine, and indeed one of the suggestions for lowering the impact of pet ownership was to feed them leftovers instead of canned pet food. It also suggests fish heads from the fishmonger, instead of premium cat food.
Being it "niche" doesn't preclude it from being in the repos: usually if it is license-compatible and there's at least one person willing to take the effort to package it, it will be accepted. Even if the packager is not a Debian developer, it will go with the support of the mentors list.
I think the absence of "one person willing to take the effort to package it" is the problem. Especially if that effort involves seeking support from a mentor's list. Add to that the fact that it's an effort to be repeated for several distros.
The Apple/NeXT .app approach is fairly different to RPM/DEB package files.
If you could execute the .deb or the .rpm directly (i.e. double click firefox.rpm, or type ./firefox.rpm, and have Firefox launch instantly), that would be more similar.
If you were aiming for this, on Linux, from scratch, you'd:
- assign some sort of filesystem attribute that says "this is a directory that contains an application"
- have a standard layout for where the executable is expected to reside within that directory.
- application knows to find resources in paths relative to the app directory
- package this as an iso or a tar.gz
- to install, untar anywhere. Nothing else to it.
- or, more like OSX, mount the ISO, run directly from the ISO, or copy the directory anywhere.
- execute the directory.
I agree that fat binaries are not appropriate for applications in the distribution's archive. And I agree that the first port of call for any user should be apt-get / up2date / etc.
However there are many kinds of app that might not get into the distro archive, for all kinds or reasons. Maybe it's of really niche interest, maybe it's too new, maybe the distro-maintainer just interested in it. Or maybe it's proprietary. Some people are willing to compromise on freedom.
The last application I had trouble installing on Linux, due to glibc versioning problems, was a profiler for WebMethods Integration Server. Something like that is never going to get into the APT repository.
You call it "state run", then go on to explain how it is not state run.
The state gives it authority to collect a license fee, on condition that they abide by their charter. And there the relationship with the state ends.
Black books - Channel 4
League of gentlemen - BBC
Spaced - Channel 4
Jam - Channel 4 (I think)
Little Britain - BBC. Deteriorated badly after 1st series.
I was under the impression it's mostly about making me go to microsoft.com to use an online word processor or spreadsheet, instead of having the programs stored locally.
Very much not the focus.
Although I use Google Docs by preference nowadays -- no installation, easy collaboration, equally accessible from home, work, internet cafe etc. What they have remotely that I don't have locally is redundant storage.
Search I'll grant you.. it'd be hard to index the web with only my computer. But is that really cloud? Doesn't seem to fit the bill.
Search is absolutely the archetypal cloud application. If you don't think search is cloud, you've misunderstood what cloud is.
Yeah, we could do away with all kinds of pesky specific descriptions, if we just call everything that touches the internet "internet-based computing". I mean, what idiot coined the tedious and unnecessary buzzword "World Wide Web"?
WWW refers to something specific on the internet; namely that web pages can link to each other even if on another server.
I know. And likewise, cloud computing refers to something specific on the internet.
If you put up a web server and I browse it, that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.
Why isn't it? What if the web server has a web-based mortgage application being served on it? Why isn't that cloud computer? After all, its "doing some processing for me."
Because that web server isn't benefiting from the fault tolerance or the instant scalability (both up and down), that being in a cloud provides.
If your "web server" is actually a massively parallel server farm, spread across multiple datacentres worldwide, which splits the POVray rendering job across multiple nodes such that it completes in a fraction of the time and can tolerate individual nodes rebooting or dying altogether -- THAT would be cloud computing.
How is that any different than distributed computing? Oh, because you added "spread across multiple data centers." Please.
Sure, it *is* distributed computing (and if it isn't, it's not cloud computing, in my book). Distributed computing + SOA = cloud computing, I guess (although I hate the SOA buzzword as much as you seem to hate "cloud")
Likewise Amazon S3 is cloud computing rather than just remote storage, because the data you store is smeared (mirrored; cached) across multiple nodes so that node failure is routed around, and reads are fast for clients all over the world.
But I thought it had to be doing some processing for me, not just storing stuff? Please, make up your mind. Why throw "smeared" into the mix when you already have the necessary words? Oh right... to make it "cloud compatible."
Storage is processing. In this case the process is to store the data on at least two nodes, send you an acknowledgement, then in the background propogate it to more nodes. I just used the word "smeared" (not part of the standard cloud buzzword collection as fat as I knew) because I thought it might help people understand.
Why send data to a server to process over a slow link when I could get the result faster by processing that data locally? That's the question he's asking.
And who is suggesting an application in which you do that?
All the cloud services being offered or suggested offer something on the remote side that you're likely not to have locally. Whether it's massive processing power and access to data (Google search); fast, highly specialised processing power (this Nvidia project); highly redundant cheap storage (Amazon S3); and so on.
I've given two examples of how, even with a fairly fast local processor and a super-slow connection, it would be worth sending a job to a remote server - jobs where the input and output are both small, but the processing in between is heavy and/or further external data is accessed.
The thing that bus me about this 'cloud computing" nonsense is we already had a perfectly good and well established term for this-thin clients.
That would be an excellent point, if only cloud computing and thin-client were related in anything but the most tangential of ways.
But they're not, so it isn't.
5 years from now this will be just another dotbomb buzzword chucked in the trashcan of history
Meanwhile, people are actually using cloud services right now, and they're saving money.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
These people aren't affected by the ISP caps you mention -- because cloud computing isn't what you think it is.
OTOH, I do think that service aimed at end-users will become popular. Things along the Google Docs model and, yes, the OnLive model. They will drive demand for faster ISP services with higher caps, or no caps at all. And for wireless ISPs with broad coverage.