The process to do this is intentionally difficult, and should be even more difficult than what it is. Microsoft has put the pricing of Small Business Server at a point where a small business can actually afford to own a server. By having others take advantage of lowered pricing for all their server needs really defeats the purpose, and cheats the little guy out of software that he couldn't otherwise afford.
But from what I understand, Microsoft is considering a license violation when a user sets up the SBS as a regular workstation. The regular workstation version of windows is cheaper. It's dumb to use SBS when you could use a workstation version, but why oh why should MS bother with it?
it doesn't much matter if the CO2 we produce is absorbed by natural processes in 100 years if we're not around to see it. Even if we were to transition to your theoretical zero-carbon emitting energy source by 2015 (a very short time-frame given the stage of development of zero-carbon energy as well as our reliance on fossil fuels in every aspect of our economy), the American breadbasket will dry up and blow away, much like what is happening in Australia right now, long before a natural correction of the carbon cycle.
Great line of thought. Discussing is a lot better than waving large numbers or just plain accusing people.
I have one problem with your scenario. Isn't it way too pessimistic? You are effectively stating that if we cut CO2 production to zero in ten years, we are still doomed. Environmentalists everywhere are fighting for reduction in CO2 production, not total cutout. We will never ever have zero CO2 production in ten years. If what you say is true, then we're already doomed aren't we?
We've already burned enough oil to change the world dramatically, we have yet to see the full effects of 380 ppm CO2, and I believe it is going to get really ugly in many if not all places around the world within 20 years.
After your last post, I think I should back up my number that earth will recover within a century. It's quite simple, really: Based on the rates published by realclimate.org, now we produce about twice the CO2 that is recycled by Nature. We've been doing this since the early XX century/late XIX. Assuming a linear growth in CO2 production during the last, say 150 years, if we switch fuel source during the next 50 years, the total time we've industrially produced CO2 is 200 years. The total volume of excess CO2 produced should be naturally absorbed in 100 years, as can be easily proved by observation of the area of the two graphs (CO2 production and CO2 absorption).
I'm purposedly ignoring that for a long time since the industrial revolution, we've produced no CO2 excess at all...
Not much science out there to back up your perspective.
How come? What I have done is exactly science. Developing a theory, or a model, based on past data. Nothing in the past data counterproves my theory, so it is scientifically sane.
As for my background, I'm an engineer. Why I am propagating my ideas? It's what people do. They come up with ideas. Some of them might defy your view of the universe. Deal with it...
If you wish to counter my theory, attack the base numbers, don't make trollish vague assertions that "this is not science".
You seem to be arguing that it doesn't matter that we put as much CO2 into the air as we do, that the 6 or 9 digit CO2 emissions figure is consistent with the planet's scale, so we shouldn't be concerned about it.
That's exactly it. Whenever we strongly reduce CO2 production, the earth will recover its regular levels within a century.
What sort of change will it take for you to be afraid?
In a short answer: none. We have much much larger problems at hand. Oil is already past the Hubbert Peak. This will force us to find an alternative source, and all current alternatives have zero CO2 emissions. While it sounds ridiculously simple, this time around we were plain lucky. There weren't enough fossil fuel reserves for us to destroy the earth.
Note that I'm not ignoring coal. Although there is lots of coal, the emergence of cheaper energy alternatives should render coal economically inefficient. My personal bet for the energy of the future is Nuclear Fusion, which should be available in no more than fifty years.
Environmentalists would do a lot better to concentrate their efforts into preventing a nuclear war. G.W. Bush with its Iraq invasion while allowing North Korea to do what it pleases is doing its best to launch WWIII.
You assume that there is an overall increase in the number of trees worldwide.
No I don't. It's not important how many trees are there worldwide. It's important how many trees are growing. A stable grown up tree fixates only enough carbon to repair itself. A growing tree fixates a lot more carbon. This implies that we need to have six million new growing trees any given year. The paper industry probably already covers that number.
Dead trees don't release their carbon into the atmosphere, so I need not account for that CO2. It does go into the environment, but is mostly inserted into the food chain (bacteria, fungus, various animals).
Burnt trees do release CO2, but that is already accounted for. My country had a huge fire in last year's summer, and that has affected our quota in international CO2 production agreements.
Anyhow, my point is that the HUGE number that environmentalists wage about worldwide CO2 production is really within a planetary scale. Events that affect the whole planet have huge numbers by their very nature, so people should not be scared by six or nine digit figures. It's possible to do fearmongering based on science, and extremists do so everyday.
Information: That is an excellent point, except there is one problem....the tree you plant uses sunlight as the energy source to fix the c02. The plants that are now shaded by the tree are not not recieving that same amount of sunlight, thus fix less c02 themselves. The net c02 fixation actually can go down when you plant a tree. Also, trees can actually emit more carbon than they intake during some phases of their life.
This does not affect my calculation. My base number was the plant mass. Wood is mostly carbon and water, so I assume the dry weight of the tree is mostly carbon (extracted from the atmosphere).
This is especially true in light of the fact that humans pump some 6 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
This isn't fearmongering, this is science.
It's fearmonguering disguised as science, as the quote of 6 billion tons (woo, large number) clearly shows. 6 billion tons is not a large number on the scale we are talking about. Backhand calculations: Assume a growing tree captures 100kg of carbon per year for ten years (a dry weight of 1ton is small for a tree). To absorb all the CO2 we pump, we'd need 6E9/100/10=6e6 new trees per year. Six million new trees on the planet per year is peanuts. New growths without human intervention probably cover that already.
What is reprehensible is you willfully misunderstanding the patented invention. No one is patenting verb conjugation. Microsoft patented a way of getting a machine to take a verb (conjugated or not) and then list all conjugated forms of the verb. Obviously you know nothing about information retrieval, and natural language processing, or you wouldn't be so cavalier with your rightous indignation. (Oh what am I saying, one can't be anything but cavalier with rightous indignation,)
You realize patents have to be non-obvious, right?
If I remember my elementary school correctly, verbs are either irregular or regular. If irregular, conjugating means looking up the verb form, by tense/person pair, in a lookup table. If the verb is regular, it's a lookup by tense, then adding a suffix dependent on the person. This suffix is itself looked up in a table common to all regular verbs.
The real knowledge behind this is in the verb classification and lookup tables, documented for centuries now. The patent could only cover the lookup process. Can you explain where is the lookup process non-obvious? All I can see there is a simple hash search.
You see, this is the part that really torques me off about the hardcore Linux user. They assume the average user is willing to put up with the quirks, the kernel recompiles, the beta (or alpha!) drivers, and the hacked-support-for-my-Sony-special-widget issues. You just don't get it, do you? The user doesn't care why it won't work, he only cares that it doesn't work. You shifting the blame to the hardware maker is completely irrelevant to him because, at the end of the day, his hardware works fine with Windows but stumbles or won't work at all with Linux.
This discussion has been hashed so many times here it's making readers sick. Linux is not commercial, does not need or aim for a market monopoly. It needs only a large enough user base that its growth and development remain positive. Further, the best user base is composed by people who can and do contribute back to the code base. Regular users are a bonus. If the system is not good enough for them, by all means stick with what works.
The desktop market isn't moving where you think it's moving, i.e. towards Linux. Not gonna happen.
Hmm. The Lenovo backstep that led to re-supporting Linux on their laptops must be read as a sign. Moreover, you shouldn't bet your suppositions on Sony's market awareness. I would not be so sure the market is not moving.
The last time I installed Ubuntsu on my Vaio Type U, suspend to RAM did not work at all.
Sony's problem. There are no specs for their hardware. You should have gone with a friendlier manufacturer. I own a Thinkpad, and suspend to ram/disk works flawlessly under Gentoo.
Re:Modularizable filesystem
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
Ext2 and its descendants have been less ambitious and thus considerably more robust.
Ext2 yes. It's a workhorse, with limitations but extremely robust. Its descendants, no. I've lost one partition to ext3 when I first tried it out -- yes, it was unstable -- and one a year after when journaling failed and fsck then ate my data. On the other side, I've been using Reiserfs ever since SuSE began setting it as the default (longer than I remember). I've yet to see a data failure on reiser.
Aah, a public transport advocate. I don't know where you live, so I can't make the calculations for you, but here are mine:
Commute time door-to-door using automobile: 15min
Daily commute: 30km
Auto gas consumption: 8l/100km
Monthly gas consumption in commute: 30km*20days*.08=48l/month
Gas cost: 1.32/l
Monthly costs telecommuting by car: 63
Commute time door-to-door using subway: 45min
Monthly subway pass price: 27
My solution? Car pooling. When a two person pool is head-to-head costwise and beats transport times 300%, public transportation must be called overpriced. And if we pooled three people, we'd make a profit.
They're generally seen as very reliable cars. Not Toyota or Honda quality, but very good nevertheless. I own an Audi A3 (basically a rebranded Golf with better interiors), reaching now 200 000km and running real fine with no events besides normal maintenance except for a clutch spring failure at 85 000km.
Actually I repeatedly said MySQL. I only use MSSQL at work. You can use MySQL in a commercial/enterprise environment. I understand the difference.
You said, and I quote:
SQL scales well, is easy to install/administer, and learning MySQL is fairly interoperable with learning MSSQL
along with some other barbarities. SQL doesn't scale. SQL is the Structured Query Language, used by almost every relational database in active use today.
If you can point me to actual real-world comparisons of the same content running through the two databases, and why PostgreSQL is better, I'd find that info useful. However, simply stating that Slashdot doesn't use SQL doesn't really explain why SQL is bad.
You can't imagine how your text sounds ridiculous by referring to MS SQL Server as "SQL". A comparison of the two databases won't ever show that SQL is bad because SQL is a language and because it is used by both databases.
Responding to your comment: Microsoft is the one prohibiting their licensees from benchmarking their database against others. They must have something to hide.
Legal restrictions aren't definitive, only death is. Legal restrictions are negotiable, which is what my post was about: Had Nvidia the correct boost, and they would deal with what's limiting them from releasing drivers.
/etc is a huge mess across different distributions. The X config can be found in/etc... or in/etc/X11... or in/usr/local/X11... or wherever. It's even worse for other apps as they can have half of their settings somewhere in/home, whilst the rest are scattered all over the system. Sorry, but as long as there isn't a unified system of storing all system and application settings and configuration in ONE place, across ALL major Linux distribution, it's broken.
Simply untrue. Every distro following FHS -- SuSE, RedHat, Gentoo among many many others -- follow the same conventions as to where everything is stored. Not only configurations, but libraries, cluster-wide configs, machine-specific configs, everything.
I am sorry, this isn't 1990 anymore. A user expects his system to be configurable by nice, friendly, intuitive and easy-to-use GUI apps that come with a nice in-built help section. It's what 95% of the world use, it's what 95% of the world expects.
Two points:
Linux users also expect the system to be configurable by scripting and configurable over text connections. This is the primary interface for configuration. Add all the GUIs you wish (there are a lot of good ones already), but never ever make them the primary interface for system configuration.
I'm not sure linux is for 95% of the world. I'd be happy with a distribution of 10% for each, over MacOS, Windows, linux and whatever OS you may think of. Variety is great. If you like clicking through configurations of dozens of machines, by all means stick with windows.
So I guess you haven't worked on a large-scale project involving 50+ developers and containing millions lines of code, huh? Hint: there are quite a lot of reasons why so many programmers DEMAND the latest and greatest release of Visual Studio. It *IS* a great tool.
VS is a great tool, but there are very large projects running outside windowsland, and developers aren't weeping for VS. I'd wager the larger ones, developed in the banking/mainframe world easily reach the thousand developer mark.
You wonder why Linux has such shitty support? Your attitude and the attitude of the devs... this isn't 1998 anymore,
I wonder what you mean by "this isn't '98 anymore". If you mean that linux should attract a large userbase and take over the desktop and dethrone windows, I call bullshit on it. What I really like on linux is the stability, the scalability and the configurability. I'd never trade one of those for more driver support. I have to screen hardware purchases to guarantee they work on linux? Easy job, and tough luck for the hardware vendors that don't open their drivers (yes, I haven't owned an nVidia in ten years). I couldn't care less about how many windows desktops are out there.
Any chance we'll see laptops being sold with cards based on these chips already installed any time soon? Didn't think so. So we either have to rip out the card and spend an extra $50 on a different one (do they still have those idiotic BIOS whitelists?) or live with ndiswrapper and only 70% of the card's functionality.
Just vote with your wallet. Intel Pro Wireless cards are supported by Intel's open source drivers. They work 100% under linux, and there are tons of laptops with those cards on.
Not going to happen? All it takes is for a competitor -- say, ATI -- to get loads of good press because of fast, open source drivers. Linux zealots are extremely vocal, and a lot of people commending a vendor can easily create an Apple-like aura. I bet nVidia would get their lawyers working on the deals to release the source in a minutem, instead of sitting their asses...
Slashdot Mirror
Great line of thought. Discussing is a lot better than waving large numbers or just plain accusing people.
I have one problem with your scenario. Isn't it way too pessimistic? You are effectively stating that if we cut CO2 production to zero in ten years, we are still doomed. Environmentalists everywhere are fighting for reduction in CO2 production, not total cutout. We will never ever have zero CO2 production in ten years. If what you say is true, then we're already doomed aren't we?
After your last post, I think I should back up my number that earth will recover within a century. It's quite simple, really: Based on the rates published by realclimate.org, now we produce about twice the CO2 that is recycled by Nature. We've been doing this since the early XX century/late XIX. Assuming a linear growth in CO2 production during the last, say 150 years, if we switch fuel source during the next 50 years, the total time we've industrially produced CO2 is 200 years. The total volume of excess CO2 produced should be naturally absorbed in 100 years, as can be easily proved by observation of the area of the two graphs (CO2 production and CO2 absorption).
I'm purposedly ignoring that for a long time since the industrial revolution, we've produced no CO2 excess at all...
How come? What I have done is exactly science. Developing a theory, or a model, based on past data. Nothing in the past data counterproves my theory, so it is scientifically sane.
As for my background, I'm an engineer. Why I am propagating my ideas? It's what people do. They come up with ideas. Some of them might defy your view of the universe. Deal with it...
If you wish to counter my theory, attack the base numbers, don't make trollish vague assertions that "this is not science".
That's exactly it. Whenever we strongly reduce CO2 production, the earth will recover its regular levels within a century.
In a short answer: none. We have much much larger problems at hand. Oil is already past the Hubbert Peak. This will force us to find an alternative source, and all current alternatives have zero CO2 emissions. While it sounds ridiculously simple, this time around we were plain lucky. There weren't enough fossil fuel reserves for us to destroy the earth.
Note that I'm not ignoring coal. Although there is lots of coal, the emergence of cheaper energy alternatives should render coal economically inefficient. My personal bet for the energy of the future is Nuclear Fusion, which should be available in no more than fifty years.
Environmentalists would do a lot better to concentrate their efforts into preventing a nuclear war. G.W. Bush with its Iraq invasion while allowing North Korea to do what it pleases is doing its best to launch WWIII.
Dead trees don't release their carbon into the atmosphere, so I need not account for that CO2. It does go into the environment, but is mostly inserted into the food chain (bacteria, fungus, various animals).
Burnt trees do release CO2, but that is already accounted for. My country had a huge fire in last year's summer, and that has affected our quota in international CO2 production agreements.
Anyhow, my point is that the HUGE number that environmentalists wage about worldwide CO2 production is really within a planetary scale. Events that affect the whole planet have huge numbers by their very nature, so people should not be scared by six or nine digit figures. It's possible to do fearmongering based on science, and extremists do so everyday.
It should provide you with a large teaspoon of self-evaluation.
Price and costs are in euros. /. ate the symbol.
- Commute time door-to-door using automobile: 15min
- Daily commute: 30km
- Auto gas consumption: 8l/100km
- Monthly gas consumption in commute: 30km*20days*.08=48l/month
- Gas cost: 1.32/l
- Monthly costs telecommuting by car: 63
- Commute time door-to-door using subway: 45min
- Monthly subway pass price: 27
My solution? Car pooling. When a two person pool is head-to-head costwise and beats transport times 300%, public transportation must be called overpriced. And if we pooled three people, we'd make a profit.They're generally seen as very reliable cars. Not Toyota or Honda quality, but very good nevertheless. I own an Audi A3 (basically a rebranded Golf with better interiors), reaching now 200 000km and running real fine with no events besides normal maintenance except for a clutch spring failure at 85 000km.
You can't imagine how your text sounds ridiculous by referring to MS SQL Server as "SQL". A comparison of the two databases won't ever show that SQL is bad because SQL is a language and because it is used by both databases.
Responding to your comment: Microsoft is the one prohibiting their licensees from benchmarking their database against others. They must have something to hide.
Legal restrictions aren't definitive, only death is. Legal restrictions are negotiable, which is what my post was about: Had Nvidia the correct boost, and they would deal with what's limiting them from releasing drivers.
- Linux users also expect the system to be configurable by scripting and configurable over text connections. This is the primary interface for configuration. Add all the GUIs you wish (there are a lot of good ones already), but never ever make them the primary interface for system configuration.
- I'm not sure linux is for 95% of the world. I'd be happy with a distribution of 10% for each, over MacOS, Windows, linux and whatever OS you may think of. Variety is great. If you like clicking through configurations of dozens of machines, by all means stick with windows.
VS is a great tool, but there are very large projects running outside windowsland, and developers aren't weeping for VS. I'd wager the larger ones, developed in the banking/mainframe world easily reach the thousand developer mark.Not going to happen? All it takes is for a competitor -- say, ATI -- to get loads of good press because of fast, open source drivers. Linux zealots are extremely vocal, and a lot of people commending a vendor can easily create an Apple-like aura. I bet nVidia would get their lawyers working on the deals to release the source in a minutem, instead of sitting their asses...