Oh yeah, thats that "time and a half" thing I use to get before I was salaried.
I've been salaried so long now, I stopped lamenting paid overtime ages ago. Unfortunately, this means my wife's already meager paycheck is gonna get leaner.
Without the Electoral College a few things would happen.
1. The Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Idaho, Rhode Island, Maine, D.C., Alaska and Delaware would never see a candidate campaign in their state. They would be completely irrelevant. Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.
2. Every ticket would have a Texan, Californian, or New Yorker on the ticket. Politicians from the aforementioned states would be completely ignored. And before anyone nitpicks this one, historically candidates very rarely lose their home state.
Wyoming accounts for roughly 0.1% of the nation's total population, yet it makes up 0.5% of the Electoral College. California accounts for roughly 15% of the nation's total population, but only 10% of the Electoral College. It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.
Well Slackware was my first distro, only I could never get it working with my Voodoo Rush video card, I was a noob and couldn't handle Slack, so I tried RH. I spent the next couple of years getting use to the way RH did things as well as Gnome. I tried Debian during that period and the install was a royal pain, but I loved apt-get. I tried Debian again some years later and found I could handle it much better, but didn't like how old some of the stuff in the stable branch was, so I upgraded to Woody, only once again I found I wasn't nearly competent enough to maintain a cutting edge Debian machine. I flirted with Mandrake a number of times, but never quite cared for their default configs and when I was done tweaking, it always just looked like a RH machine in the end, so why not just run RH.
Basically, I stuck with Red Hat because I knew it well and I was too lazy to bother learning the finer points of another distro. So when times got tough with distroX, I just went crying home to momma. I know, not very brave of me, but ultimately I just wanted to be able to do the things I wanted to do and not really care which flavor of the same operating system I was using. That's why I'm using SuSE now. It likes my hardware better than any other distro without any tweaking, looks good and I spend more time doing stuff with my computer instead of doing stuff to my computer.
huh? I'm not advocating putting 2.6 on RHEL, I'm simply stating that Oracle and IBM do not support ANY distro running 2.6. It is not a supported kernel by either of those two vendors therefore nobody will be using 2.6 for either of those two enterprise products.
OK, well I can't argue with you there. I was utterly unimpressed with RH9 and being a fellow Athlon64 user can definitely advise against RH on AMD64 for the near future.
RH9 + AMD64 + Vanilla 2.6 Kernel = Recipe for Disaster. You're lucky you didn't lose a limb or something.:)
SuSE 9 worked much better, I'd definitely give it a try.
Furthermore, Oracle and IBM will not support their RDBMS's on the 2.6 kernel. Therefore, RH customers running either Oracle or DB2 on RHEL3 will not be moving to 2.6 until Oracle and IBM give it the green light for their products.
I can't fathom how so many people fail to grasp...
a.) Red Hat isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before.
b.) Its still open source, so if you don't like it don't use it.
c.) Red Hat is doing the right thing for their customers.
Except for the fact that 2.6 (unless you mean Solaris 2.6) is not a "proven" codebase. Backporting is inherently a much safer practice than moving an entire operating system to a new kernel for the simple fact that the "old" kernel has been used and abused for the last couple of years.
Red Hat isn't doing what they are doing for the benefit of the Linux community, they are doing this for the benefit of their customers. Consider this; Solaris 8, despite being released a couple of years ago is just now starting to gain widespread acceptance as a "Stable" operating system for use by many corporations for critical systems. Solaris 9 is largely considered too new for critical systems at some of the world's largest financial institutions. In large corporate datacenters, products under 2 years old are rarely considered "stable". Ask a Fortune 500 CTO whether or not you can apply a kernel patch to the Oracle Financials server or upgrade it to a whole new kernel to get a much needed feature and see what response you get. As a result, the only way Red Hat can bring some of these features to their customers is through backporting.
Of course he is. I really don't think he even cares about the practice. He's just trying to drum up more business for SuSE and take some away from Red Hat. Nothing more than capitalism at work.
I always favored Red Hat over all other distros for a very long time. I tried Debian, Slackware, and Mandrake, but always found myself back with Red Hat. Not to long ago, I upgraded to an AMD64 CPU and heard that SuSE 9 for AMD64 was the best for that platform and gave it a shot. I liked it so much that I went with SuSE on my other systems. Recently, our company FINALLY started to replace some Sun systems with Linux machines and RH Enterprise was the chosen distro. So far, I am very satisfied with RH EL and see nothing wrong with backporting features.
Its not like they're closing the source to the kernel and preventing others from either removing them or copying them. In my opinion this is a non-story.
I've never had a problem with a vanilla kernel on a RH system without any tweaking. Granted, I haven't done it in a while, but it has always worked the 30+ times I have. I'm sure that there are problems for some setups, I don't doubt you in that, but to imply it can't be done or isn't easy isn't quite accurate either.
I couldn't agree more. I've actually invested a lot of money in making my systems quieter. On both of my workstations, I replaced the loud sleeve bearing fans with quieter ball bearing fans from Vantec. I then bought "Silent" (aka Quieter, but still pretty loud) Power Supplies, and a great little CPU cooler from Zalman that really is extremely quiet. To take it a step further, I made a simple fan speed controller so I could turn them down when I wasn't working the machines very hard. It was a lot of work, but its significantly quieter in my home office.
Next on my list of things to fix is my network switch, which sounds like a propjet on takeoff. The thing has three really loud fans that I can hear clearly from the next room.
I think time will show (barring any major gaffes) that AMD made the right move. First and foremost, the Athlon XP appeared to be reaching the end of its run. Cranking up the speed of the processor didn't really seem to yield comparable performance gains. In the early days the performance ratings on the XP line were a little iffy, but they were close enough that most people didn't really care. With the XP 3000, and 3200 though those ratings were dubious at best. The speed ratings ratings for the Athlon 64, however, are pretty accurate, even understated in some areas.
I recently upgraded my principle system and at the time, I was determined that the P4 2.8HT CPU was going to be the chip the machine was built around. It clearly trounced the Athlon XP 2800 in all tests for about $100 more. I was about to order when the AMD Atlhon 64 3000+ was released. It outperformed the Intel chip in most areas, was 64 bit, backwards compatible, and only $20 more. In my opinion, and Anandtech and Tom's Hardware agree, the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck CPU out there.
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - $158 AMD Athlon XP 3200+ - $194
Looking at these benchmarks here and on the following page here. You can see, with the exception of pure media encoding, the Athlon 64's perform better. The margin is slim in some areas, and quite large in others. All this and the chips are a little cheaper.
In my opinion, the XP line was dead. It had gone as far as it was going to go. I think AMD knew that the 3000 and 3200 were more like the 2850 and 2900 and they weren't going to get any more mileage out of the design. I definitely think AMD made the right call putting all their eggs in the Opteron/Athlon 64 basket.
"I don't know that pencil mark is outside the line." *stops peering through magnifying glass* "I think its safe to assume that we cannot determine the voter's intent."
If the "tamper proof" tape is what I think it is, that would only show if someone broke the seal. If this happens, does that mean all votes on that machine are thrown out as unreliable? That sure creates the possibility of someone, not liking how pre-election polls are showing their favored candidate, intentionally breaking the seal to throw a wrench as it were into the election. I must be missing something there.....
Well it wouldn't necessarily affect the final results, unless the machines were labeled "Republican", "Democrat", and "Nader Voters". Of course, it would still make a major mess, probably not have a reliable paper trail for hand counting, and in general cause another "Florida" all over again.
agreed. i do think that the rudeness with which things can be done in the US is of an altogether different quality, though.
I'm not going to dispute that one. We have a tendency to be a little to impatient and short with everything we do.
uhm, not sure. wouldn't you agree that there's quite a lot of things you'd rather not speak out in public? not exactly for fear of being prosecuted by your government, but that happens, too (cf. anti war protesters and the likes).
9/11 has certainly made it a little more difficult, but in general I still think its a little easier. I'm not an expert on speech issues in other nations, but from what I have observed in France, Germany, England and Canada there are a few more limits than in the US. Sure, I would consider the differences to be very minor, but I can't think of a nation less restrictive on speech issues than the US.
well, that seems to be a widespread disease all over the planet - still i'd admit that some of your fellow citizens really do seem to lead the table;)
Well, to give us some credit we've got a lot of people to get a consensus out of on a lot of issues. It usually takes something particularly heinous to get Americans all riled up. 9/11 being a case in point.
Well, I've definitely done that while working on the defense side of the table. You tend to distrust your clients, but every once in a while they come across pretty convincing. Then 6 months in you not only realize that your client was lying, but they've done a bunch of other things to make your job impossible, unfulfilling, and distasteful. That's why I moved on.
I rarely blame law enforcement for taking extensive measures, trying to bend the rules. Its their job to do that. What I really became disgusted with were judges that routinely threw the Bill of Rights out the window OR the gutless wonders absolutely terrified of being overturned. Its their job to keep law enforcement under control; to balance the rights of the individual versus the greater good. There are a great many out there that are not doing their job.
You know of all the things we export to other nations: McDonald's, David Hasselhoff, and obnoxious tourists, we should have sent you the Federal Communications Commission, The US Patent Office, and Carrot Top.
And if the warrant related to some imminent terrorist action
I consider an imminent terrorsit action to be a hundred magnitudes higher than the investigation of the actions of some script kiddie. Now, maybe the script kiddie was part of some nefarious Al Qaeda plot, but I'm perfectly comfortable playing the odds that its some pimple-faced slashdot reading geek h4xx0r getting his jollies off DDoS'ing SCO.
you'd better be prepared to get them what they need NOW
OK, so the men in the dark sunglasses ask for information that may or may not reside in over a terabyte of data most likely stored on DLT tape and quite possibly moved to some off-site data storage company like Iron Mountain. The problem is the FBI doesn't know exactly which file and from which date they want the data from. It could take a while to find the data in question. So then somebody decides that it would be quicker to seize the machines, transport them to FBI labs, hook them all back up, re-IP them, find your way around a box you didn't set up and retrieve the data in question.
Otherwise, your attempt to paint me as a bleeding heart civil liberties nut was pretty good.
I read every single one, fine thank you. The article too.
Maybe we are only getting half the story, and maybe we are getting all of it. The difference is that I am relying on the information I do have and you are relying on information that _must_ exist, but have no proof of because you can't believe that this kind of thing would happen otherwise.
I believe it is entirely possible that the FBI acted in such a manner because they felt that CIT was either stalling or even destroying evidence. I can only assume that they presented this theory to a judge, backed it up with some evidence and got the warrant. However, all of that is speculation.
I worked in the legal system on both sides of the coin as a paralegal before I saw the light and switched to IT. I can only go on my personal experience when I say that this could indeed be the whole story. I have personally seen judges rubber stamp warrants with zero evidence and I have seen judges refuse to sign warrants with all kinds of evidence. I have seen law enforcement officials embellish and even fabricate evidence for the purpose of getting a warrant and I've seen law enforcement officials vehemently defend a defendant's rights.
My point in the previous post, may have been a little incendiary, but the point is DO NOT discount the story simply because you think there MUST be more to it, when it could simply be all there is to it.
Every European government's law enforcement agencies have the same horror stories. Correction, every government's law enforcement agencies have the same horror stories. The principle difference is in America its a lot easier for people to shine a light on these activities. Of course most of my fellow citizens are suffering from terminal apathy, so little ever gets done about it.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, now I'm confused the numbers seem a little wonky to me. $12/hr is $480/wk and thats a far cry from $100K/yr.
On another note, I love this quote...
"Few, if any," workers will lose overtime eligibility, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said.
Wow! That's some overhaul!
Oh yeah, thats that "time and a half" thing I use to get before I was salaried.
I've been salaried so long now, I stopped lamenting paid overtime ages ago. Unfortunately, this means my wife's already meager paycheck is gonna get leaner.
Great.
Actually, you're way off base here. The electoral college actually levels the playing field between the states.
Electoral College Votes by State
Population by State
Without the Electoral College a few things would happen.
1. The Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Idaho, Rhode Island, Maine, D.C., Alaska and Delaware would never see a candidate campaign in their state. They would be completely irrelevant. Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.
2. Every ticket would have a Texan, Californian, or New Yorker on the ticket. Politicians from the aforementioned states would be completely ignored. And before anyone nitpicks this one, historically candidates very rarely lose their home state.
Wyoming accounts for roughly 0.1% of the nation's total population, yet it makes up 0.5% of the Electoral College. California accounts for roughly 15% of the nation's total population, but only 10% of the Electoral College. It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.
+10 Funny, +10 Insightful wouldn't do this justice.
Well Slackware was my first distro, only I could never get it working with my Voodoo Rush video card, I was a noob and couldn't handle Slack, so I tried RH. I spent the next couple of years getting use to the way RH did things as well as Gnome. I tried Debian during that period and the install was a royal pain, but I loved apt-get. I tried Debian again some years later and found I could handle it much better, but didn't like how old some of the stuff in the stable branch was, so I upgraded to Woody, only once again I found I wasn't nearly competent enough to maintain a cutting edge Debian machine. I flirted with Mandrake a number of times, but never quite cared for their default configs and when I was done tweaking, it always just looked like a RH machine in the end, so why not just run RH.
Basically, I stuck with Red Hat because I knew it well and I was too lazy to bother learning the finer points of another distro. So when times got tough with distroX, I just went crying home to momma. I know, not very brave of me, but ultimately I just wanted to be able to do the things I wanted to do and not really care which flavor of the same operating system I was using. That's why I'm using SuSE now. It likes my hardware better than any other distro without any tweaking, looks good and I spend more time doing stuff with my computer instead of doing stuff to my computer.
huh? I'm not advocating putting 2.6 on RHEL, I'm simply stating that Oracle and IBM do not support ANY distro running 2.6. It is not a supported kernel by either of those two vendors therefore nobody will be using 2.6 for either of those two enterprise products.
Not true.
Oracle happily supports our 8i and 9i databases on AS3.
OK, well I can't argue with you there. I was utterly unimpressed with RH9 and being a fellow Athlon64 user can definitely advise against RH on AMD64 for the near future.
:)
RH9 + AMD64 + Vanilla 2.6 Kernel = Recipe for Disaster. You're lucky you didn't lose a limb or something.
SuSE 9 worked much better, I'd definitely give it a try.
Furthermore, Oracle and IBM will not support their RDBMS's on the 2.6 kernel. Therefore, RH customers running either Oracle or DB2 on RHEL3 will not be moving to 2.6 until Oracle and IBM give it the green light for their products.
I can't fathom how so many people fail to grasp...
a.) Red Hat isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before.
b.) Its still open source, so if you don't like it don't use it.
c.) Red Hat is doing the right thing for their customers.
Except for the fact that 2.6 (unless you mean Solaris 2.6) is not a "proven" codebase. Backporting is inherently a much safer practice than moving an entire operating system to a new kernel for the simple fact that the "old" kernel has been used and abused for the last couple of years.
Red Hat isn't doing what they are doing for the benefit of the Linux community, they are doing this for the benefit of their customers. Consider this; Solaris 8, despite being released a couple of years ago is just now starting to gain widespread acceptance as a "Stable" operating system for use by many corporations for critical systems. Solaris 9 is largely considered too new for critical systems at some of the world's largest financial institutions. In large corporate datacenters, products under 2 years old are rarely considered "stable". Ask a Fortune 500 CTO whether or not you can apply a kernel patch to the Oracle Financials server or upgrade it to a whole new kernel to get a much needed feature and see what response you get. As a result, the only way Red Hat can bring some of these features to their customers is through backporting.
Of course he is. I really don't think he even cares about the practice. He's just trying to drum up more business for SuSE and take some away from Red Hat. Nothing more than capitalism at work.
Move along, nothing to see here.
I always favored Red Hat over all other distros for a very long time. I tried Debian, Slackware, and Mandrake, but always found myself back with Red Hat. Not to long ago, I upgraded to an AMD64 CPU and heard that SuSE 9 for AMD64 was the best for that platform and gave it a shot. I liked it so much that I went with SuSE on my other systems. Recently, our company FINALLY started to replace some Sun systems with Linux machines and RH Enterprise was the chosen distro. So far, I am very satisfied with RH EL and see nothing wrong with backporting features.
Its not like they're closing the source to the kernel and preventing others from either removing them or copying them. In my opinion this is a non-story.
I've never had a problem with a vanilla kernel on a RH system without any tweaking. Granted, I haven't done it in a while, but it has always worked the 30+ times I have. I'm sure that there are problems for some setups, I don't doubt you in that, but to imply it can't be done or isn't easy isn't quite accurate either.
I couldn't agree more. I've actually invested a lot of money in making my systems quieter. On both of my workstations, I replaced the loud sleeve bearing fans with quieter ball bearing fans from Vantec. I then bought "Silent" (aka Quieter, but still pretty loud) Power Supplies, and a great little CPU cooler from Zalman that really is extremely quiet. To take it a step further, I made a simple fan speed controller so I could turn them down when I wasn't working the machines very hard. It was a lot of work, but its significantly quieter in my home office.
Next on my list of things to fix is my network switch, which sounds like a propjet on takeoff. The thing has three really loud fans that I can hear clearly from the next room.
I really hope this guys idea takes off.
I think time will show (barring any major gaffes) that AMD made the right move. First and foremost, the Athlon XP appeared to be reaching the end of its run. Cranking up the speed of the processor didn't really seem to yield comparable performance gains. In the early days the performance ratings on the XP line were a little iffy, but they were close enough that most people didn't really care. With the XP 3000, and 3200 though those ratings were dubious at best. The speed ratings ratings for the Athlon 64, however, are pretty accurate, even understated in some areas.
I recently upgraded my principle system and at the time, I was determined that the P4 2.8HT CPU was going to be the chip the machine was built around. It clearly trounced the Athlon XP 2800 in all tests for about $100 more. I was about to order when the AMD Atlhon 64 3000+ was released. It outperformed the Intel chip in most areas, was 64 bit, backwards compatible, and only $20 more. In my opinion, and Anandtech and Tom's Hardware agree, the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck CPU out there.
Pricewatch's Lowest Prices are...
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ - $205
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ - $251
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ - $401
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 (800) - $209
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 (800) - $273
Intel Pentium 4 3.4 (800) - $420
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - $158
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ - $194
Looking at these benchmarks here and on the following page here. You can see, with the exception of pure media encoding, the Athlon 64's perform better. The margin is slim in some areas, and quite large in others. All this and the chips are a little cheaper.
In my opinion, the XP line was dead. It had gone as far as it was going to go. I think AMD knew that the 3000 and 3200 were more like the 2850 and 2900 and they weren't going to get any more mileage out of the design. I definitely think AMD made the right call putting all their eggs in the Opteron/Athlon 64 basket.
"I don't know that pencil mark is outside the line." *stops peering through magnifying glass* "I think its safe to assume that we cannot determine the voter's intent."
For some inexplicable reason I didn't think of that.
;) I bet somebody brought that up in a meeting somewhere.
Well the simple solutiong is tamper tape on top of tamper tape.
If the "tamper proof" tape is what I think it is, that would only show if someone broke the seal. If this happens, does that mean all votes on that machine are thrown out as unreliable? That sure creates the possibility of someone, not liking how pre-election polls are showing their favored candidate, intentionally breaking the seal to throw a wrench as it were into the election. I must be missing something there.....
Well it wouldn't necessarily affect the final results, unless the machines were labeled "Republican", "Democrat", and "Nader Voters". Of course, it would still make a major mess, probably not have a reliable paper trail for hand counting, and in general cause another "Florida" all over again.
This is even funnier if you imagine Lewis Black saying it.
agreed. i do think that the rudeness with which things can be done in the US is of an altogether different quality, though.
;)
I'm not going to dispute that one. We have a tendency to be a little to impatient and short with everything we do.
uhm, not sure. wouldn't you agree that there's quite a lot of things you'd rather not speak out in public? not exactly for fear of being prosecuted by your government, but that happens, too (cf. anti war protesters and the likes).
9/11 has certainly made it a little more difficult, but in general I still think its a little easier. I'm not an expert on speech issues in other nations, but from what I have observed in France, Germany, England and Canada there are a few more limits than in the US. Sure, I would consider the differences to be very minor, but I can't think of a nation less restrictive on speech issues than the US.
well, that seems to be a widespread disease all over the planet - still i'd admit that some of your fellow citizens really do seem to lead the table
Well, to give us some credit we've got a lot of people to get a consensus out of on a lot of issues. It usually takes something particularly heinous to get Americans all riled up. 9/11 being a case in point.
Well, I've definitely done that while working on the defense side of the table. You tend to distrust your clients, but every once in a while they come across pretty convincing. Then 6 months in you not only realize that your client was lying, but they've done a bunch of other things to make your job impossible, unfulfilling, and distasteful. That's why I moved on.
I rarely blame law enforcement for taking extensive measures, trying to bend the rules. Its their job to do that. What I really became disgusted with were judges that routinely threw the Bill of Rights out the window OR the gutless wonders absolutely terrified of being overturned. Its their job to keep law enforcement under control; to balance the rights of the individual versus the greater good. There are a great many out there that are not doing their job.
You know of all the things we export to other nations: McDonald's, David Hasselhoff, and obnoxious tourists, we should have sent you the Federal Communications Commission, The US Patent Office, and Carrot Top.
And if the warrant related to some imminent terrorist action
I consider an imminent terrorsit action to be a hundred magnitudes higher than the investigation of the actions of some script kiddie. Now, maybe the script kiddie was part of some nefarious Al Qaeda plot, but I'm perfectly comfortable playing the odds that its some pimple-faced slashdot reading geek h4xx0r getting his jollies off DDoS'ing SCO.
you'd better be prepared to get them what they need NOW
OK, so the men in the dark sunglasses ask for information that may or may not reside in over a terabyte of data most likely stored on DLT tape and quite possibly moved to some off-site data storage company like Iron Mountain. The problem is the FBI doesn't know exactly which file and from which date they want the data from. It could take a while to find the data in question. So then somebody decides that it would be quicker to seize the machines, transport them to FBI labs, hook them all back up, re-IP them, find your way around a box you didn't set up and retrieve the data in question.
Otherwise, your attempt to paint me as a bleeding heart civil liberties nut was pretty good.
I read every single one, fine thank you. The article too.
Maybe we are only getting half the story, and maybe we are getting all of it. The difference is that I am relying on the information I do have and you are relying on information that _must_ exist, but have no proof of because you can't believe that this kind of thing would happen otherwise.
I believe it is entirely possible that the FBI acted in such a manner because they felt that CIT was either stalling or even destroying evidence. I can only assume that they presented this theory to a judge, backed it up with some evidence and got the warrant. However, all of that is speculation.
I worked in the legal system on both sides of the coin as a paralegal before I saw the light and switched to IT. I can only go on my personal experience when I say that this could indeed be the whole story. I have personally seen judges rubber stamp warrants with zero evidence and I have seen judges refuse to sign warrants with all kinds of evidence. I have seen law enforcement officials embellish and even fabricate evidence for the purpose of getting a warrant and I've seen law enforcement officials vehemently defend a defendant's rights.
My point in the previous post, may have been a little incendiary, but the point is DO NOT discount the story simply because you think there MUST be more to it, when it could simply be all there is to it.
Every European government's law enforcement agencies have the same horror stories. Correction, every government's law enforcement agencies have the same horror stories. The principle difference is in America its a lot easier for people to shine a light on these activities. Of course most of my fellow citizens are suffering from terminal apathy, so little ever gets done about it.