To be fair to Microsoft, they're trying to move away from the harddrive concept so your photos will go in some virtual photo album named "My Pictures". Only the sys admin will know where they are really stored.
Thats really true. Windows XP works nice with the concept of removing where files are really stored from the user's mind. File selection dialog in Windows XP show "My Documents", "Shared Documents", "My Pictures", etc really well. So much so I am surprised how adept my family members are at using them and managing them and getting them into a working situation. Before file management was a real pain for them, because the concept of where stuff went - drives letters etc - was really hard to swallow.
Its a nice touch.. something worth copying a little more directly.
But you believe that the spam would magically start to "slowly die". I call bullshit.
And aren't you petulant you little bugger?
Spammers want to make money. With everyone using Bayesian filters, no spam would get through, and therefore, spammers would make no money. They would naturally move on to other illicit activites to create profit.
The spammers would inevitable realize that orders had fallen from an already miniscule rate to 99.999 less than that already miniscule rate. This would cause most spammers to give up.
Being so rabidly intolerant of such a worldview as to outright reject anyone who holds it seems rather myopic.
It is myopic. That's the point. I want a leader who understands that somethings, some actions, and some people act in an evil manner.
A person who cannot recognize evil is unqualified to lead a girl scout troup, let alone a country, let alone a powerful country.
Without a concept of evil anything can be justified, rationalized, and ignored. Without the idea of good and evil no system that is just can be devised.
Er, you do realize that is *post-bonus* profit. They could be giving out millions to their execs, in a very corrupt manner, and it wouldn't show there.
Nope, it's not. You should look into how profits/losses are reported. Only the first $1M in executive compensation is counted before P/L. Everything above and beyond is figured against profit or for losses. So if they pay $100M to exec's the first $1M just shows a regular salary expense and $99M comes off the profit line.
1. Do you think it's OK to attack another country except for reasons of self-defence.
Yes.
2. Do you think it's OK for someone to torture their people?
Yes.
3. Why do you think the USA attacked Iraq?
Because Bush is intellectually lazy and felt like doing something.
My point was, up until then, the USA was quite happy to support Saddam while he was torturing his people.
Of course. The USA has always supported such foreign powers. I have no idea why you pretend to be shocked about this. Read A People's History of the United States. It's been going on since before the country was a country. It's how things work. It's not even specific to one nation. Politics, economics, religion - they all come into play and influence foriegn policy. And moreover I can't think of any time when any US President claimed otherwise (or even a senator, or a congressperson). A whole host of things come into play when deciding foreign policy. Iraq was an ally because Iran was a bigger threat at the time. Saddaam was a shrewd operator who the US knew could be plied into conformance and used to further US goals. It's the same reason the US sided with the Afghan's in the 70's and 80's, it's the same reason we got involved in Vietnam, it's the same reason Russia is fighting Chechnia etc etc.
Why are you acting so surprised? Do you think this is new? Invented in the last 36 months?
As for the oil thing, it's not about the price but the control. The USA can (as former Saudi Ambassador James E. Akins would put it) "take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell". No more OPEC dictating terms and no more does the US have to worry about not offending the Saudis in order to get supplies.
Well, I tell you what, that shows you have no idea of scale.
The US uses 19,761,000 barrels a day of petrol. About 1,519,000 comes from Saudia Arabia. However, an additional 3,000,000 million barrels a day are provided from other OPEC nations, bringing the amount of oil imported from OPEC to about 4,500,000 barrels. It is estimated that at peak sustainable levels Iraq can produce 2,500,000 barrels a day for export.
As you can see, the US, even with a puppet regime fully using Iraq's oil fields to maximum benefit and taking 100% of tha fuel for export cannot meet the demand that OPEC fills.
This of course means that the US must continue to deal with OPEC regardless of what happens in Iraq. Especially since petrol use will continue to rise.
Now, back to what I was saying. The US would have been better off to take the $300B that they spent to conquer Iraq and instead pocket that. Re-certify Iraq free of weapons, lift sanctions, and let them produce the 2,000,000 barrels a day they were producing before the first gulf war. This would flood the market and force oil prices down. Additionally it would marginalize Saudia Arabia equally well compared to what will happen now (ie, cut down the amount of money sent there as their relative share of oil revenues paid to OPEC would decrease).
Of course, that didnt happen. Why? Because the US's primary motivation was not to get Iraq's oil. "Getting" their oil hasn't been a priority, because, as I have shown, no matter what the US does they will have to deal with OPEC. They control too much oil to be ignored even if the US took over Iraq, Canada, and Russia.
Anyways, maybe you can figure it out someday. You'd love to attribute some type of malice to Bush. It'd be really easy too. But when you look past the rhetoric and the effigies and the protest signs and look into the realities of the world you come to the same conclusion as most other Americans. It's not that complicated. Had the goal of America/Bush been to "steal Iraq's oil" things would have gone drastically different. Saddaam would still be in charge and Iraqs sanctions would have been lifted. End of story.
After a few months of 99.999% of spams not getting through you wouldnt keep getting 400 spams a day. For a while the number would increase.. and then slowly die out as one by one spammers target someother way to steal money.
When it starts looking like he's going to attack Kuwait in a massive oil grab, then he becomes the enemy.
Of course, because that's an act of agression against a foreign power!
See, you should see how it breaks down. There are dictators who kill thier own people, and dictators who kill foreign people.
I am not arguing that past US policies or US policy in general is coherent.
But let's be clear, Bush has taken a fair harder line on Mugabe than Clinton did, by far. Additionally, the precious UN has done nothing about Mugabe. Nothing. On top of that, thanks to Somilia, the US has no friends in the area and no credibility. So let's not get all uppity.
And as for your theory about oil, it shows what a dunce you are. If you pulled out a pencil and paper you'd realize that it'd be much cheaper and more reliable over the long-term to clear Sadaam of all charges, call him reformed, and allow him to sell oil on the world market again. If Bush/Rumsfeld just wanted that oil that tactic would have had it done in record time.
Only the truly deluded believe that Bush had Iraq invaded for the purpose of an oil grab...
Your media might not report it, Tony Blair is way out of line on public opinion. Most of us think Bush is a liar and a crook.
That's not entirely true. Some numbers:
43% of Britons welcome the Bushes trip.
36% said they would rather not have him visit.
But regardless, majority/minority opinion is useless here. Blair's position all along has been that his Iraq decision may well be unpopular but it is in fact the right thing to do both in terms of humanitarianly and politically. Public opinion oscillates, but right and wrong in his view are more important. Having a Prime Minister who varies his views and policies based on the latest overnight tracking poll would not be very happy sight. The best recourse is to make Blair reget his decision by backing his ouster. But even his poll numbers are rebounding. At one point 70% of Britons disfavoured him, but now thats coming back to his normal levels. Last check it was hovering around the 51-52%. It dropped from 61% from just a few weeks ago.
Second, your inference about Halliburton and Iraq:
Out of $87B+ about $500M have been/will be inked in contracts toward Halliburton. Thats not quite one-half of one percent. They are about a $10B company, have a ~1% profit margin (in line with their competitors). On its face in terms of dollars it doesn't seem to be vastly corrupt. Details dont point that way either. The arrangement they have with the government is indentical to deals they had 1992 and 1999 when the army was in Balkans. They competed this time with 3 other US companies for contracts. Last time it was nearly a dozen. The cap for the contract was much higher, but since the work was providing support services and equipment for oil well repair in Iraq (and since there was minimal damage to wells compared to what was thought - $7B was the limit, $500M was spent) it seems interesting to suggest foul play.
Halliburton is a huge company - 83,000 employees, with lots of oil expertise. Do you think its weird that such a company would win a contract supporting oil-well repair in an oil rich country? It hardly seems a leap, especially since they've been doing work like this under contract for the Army for a very, very, very long time and under many different administrations ranging from Carter, to Reagan, to Bush, to Clinton and now Bush again.
So I guess you should be more explicit. What exactly are you saying about Halliburton? Seems like a lot of inference and very little substance.
Finally, about Mugabe. Bush has imposed sanctions on Mugabe, something that Clinton never did. Bush's representatives in the UN have pushed for more pressure to be put on him. Again, the UN is essentially useless, but regardless, the effort is there. Fundamentally Mugabe doesn't draw a lot of attention because his rule is weak compared to other dictators, his control over the country not nearly as strong as other dictators often possess, and he has never taken aggressive action against a neighbor - invasions, bombings, etc. Additionally, he is barely pursuing anything except a naked power grab let alone larger plans of weaponization. So whats your point there?
Maybe instead of relying on innuendo to do the job, you could acutally say something concrete.
Ahh.. the Senator from Ohio and a real live supporter.
You know, I could almost think about looking at him seriously.. until..
I heard him on the air on Talk of the Nation last week.
After a few minutes of his typical stuff, the host asks him point blank: Do you believe in Evil?
He literally hemmed and hawed for a bit, and decided that some people have different world views, and those different world views need understanding and insight to recognize and value properly.
But his essential answer can then only be left at no.
I hope you dont support this guy for President, because at the end of the day, no matter who you want to win, it shouldn't be someone who fundamentally refuses to acknowlegde the presense of evil in the world. Evil people, evil actions, evil intentions, evil results. Evil exisits, and living in the real world dictates that you acknowledge it, accept it, and deal with it.
Incidentally, it won't get broadcast much, but Bush is in the UK, and most of us think he's a scumbag, even though our Prime Minister would like you to think otherwise, and that marches against Bush are being suppressed.
Suppression? You've been reading IndyMedia for too long. Suppression is Tiananmen Square 1989.
Any legal or procedural roadblocks that have been thrown at protest organizers can hardly be termed "suppression".
A large majority of software sold in terms of dollar spent anually for business use goes in the form of vertical market software (or software to enable the software).
I have had bad experiences with Oracle, and none with BEA.
The type of support contracts though that are useful are the oens where you have a person's name who you call for help (or at least a line to a group of people) - no queues per se, no voice menus, etc. People whose job it is to *help you*, not "man the phones".
Chances are there isnt an organization for the software you are talking about, but there is support like that in the vertical market software industry - as I mentioned my wife works for such a place. As a support specialist she handles only high-level calls (no "where is the any key" style question). She has contacts with the software vendor (the company she works for is a VAR), and direct lines as needed to various technical resources. She is the contact person for about 50-75 sites directly, and part of the group that handles about 150 clients.
This type of support is expensive - about $5k a year is the average rate her customers get charged for the pleasure.
This is the type of contact I'd envison from Sun. I've worked with IBM's people before, and it was like this. The mainframe had a technican, as well a backup He knew the ins, outs, the hardware, the software, the configuration left right and every which way. A real expert. And when we had a problem we got his number and called him for help.
It sounds like for you guys the support offered just wasn't there. When you are shopping for contracts, ask good questions. Don't take the first package they offer. Make sure you ask if they have a direct line service. Make sure you ask if they have a well-defined escalation procedure in place. Ask if you have access to developers, manual writers, etc if needed. And get them in the contract.
so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
No, no. Sun and IBM have people - or would have people - on staff that know the code in and out, as if they wrote it. On top of that they likely will have modified it and keep daily track of changes, conversation, and the whole status of the package. IBM already has these people - people who contribute to the kernel, keep up on general development issues, etc. Sun did last I knew.
which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this
No, you may not. But China the government may. I am sure Chineese end-users wont be calling SUN for help configuring printing under KDE. What a contract would do is give IT people, developers, integrators, planners, etc access to the experts at SUN that someone downloading an ISO from a website won't. When they have a new feature request they have will a process for getting that to SUN. When there are scalability problems, or bug reports, or memory leaks or whatever goes wrong with Linux desktop software (and there is a lot, trust me) they have a contact to help the IT and support people onsite to get a resolution worked out. When they need help getting a package to work with a local characterset, or a driver ported to the right language, or a patch put into wider distribution, they have direct, accountable, verifiable resouces.
The community based approach works good for most things and many cases. It is not the be end all, even for end-user support. Frankly, any organization planning for thousands and thousands of seats who does not standardize against a single platform, a single vendor, and a single point of responsibility is living in a dream world of unhearlded proportions. Managing thousnads of identical systems will be hard enough. Managing thousands of variations on the Linux distro managed by disparate IT staffs, with no central point of responsibility while still managing thousands and thousands (millions?) of active seats is untenable.
Large scale IT is about efficency, coherency, and policy. The people involved in this deal are seaking that. Posting a message on a public forum that amounts to "help me.. ?" isn't a efficent, it's not coherent, and its not good policy.
I suggest you re-think your position. If you want we can chat about whats involved in managing 2500 desktop systems. You will have a big appreciation for how IT works in a larger sense. I can also put you in touch with a friend who is on a team of planners who manage 45,000 desktop systems spread out over 15 nations. Finally, I have an acquaintance who can talk to you about whats involved in managing 8000 servers.
The bottom line is that, even if you DON'T believe me, I would wager that 90% or more of all non-tech companies (ie, not HP, IBM, etc) who have significant computer needs have a contract with a top-level vendor. Whether that vendor is Dell, HP, MS, IBM is besides the point. And the OS is besides the point.
In a large scale environment you must have true experts on your side to deal with systems issues. There is no other way. There are two ways to get them: hire them in house, or hire them through contract with another organization. China choose the latter. Hiring or building inhouse talent would likely have been way, way more expensive.
It wouldn't be the end-users in China contacting Sun. It would be developers and IT people in China contacting Sun in aggregate form. Giving support on how to integrate this or that, on how to add this or that, etc. Much higher level. Again, this isn't going to be a front-line 800 service.
On top of all that, I am speaking more in general terms.
employer is definitely not that you are able to fire people
The right of free association is unalienable. It is one of the whole points of being human. Individuals can make and break associations between themselves and other groups at will. For good reasons, for bad reasons, for the right reasons, for the wrong reasons, etc. It is not to be questioned. A private business owner should and mostly does have the right to associate with whomever he or she wishes. On the other hand, public companies have a responsibility to the public and must therefore be more circumspect with how they hire and fire.
WTF! What other ways of support do you suggest.
I suggest that you call your support contact at your software vendor. Lots of software is sold this way. That person is an *expert* in the package you purchased. He or she knows the details of your setup, of your hardware, and of your network. They have remote access most likely. They are knowledgeable, well trained, and have sufficent time and energy to dedicate to you. This is very often how software is sold. I know you probably think "Free free free" is the best there is, was, and ever will be, but its not always! For commodity stuff yeah, chances are lots of people have the same problems as you. But in complex environments it is likely there won't be an analog to your environment. A support person will have to synthesize an answer from diverse information sources.
Oh, geez I'm on hold, fuck this shit, I'll type in a few words in Google and find my answer
See, here is what you miss. That $30 software package you buy at Staples has crap for support. 99% of people who call need to find the anykey. Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or software, from a serious vendor, your support contract is a little different. My wife works for a software company with 150 clients. They have direct line access to their support person. They have test setups to replicate client networks. They have remote access, and they are available within 10 minutes. You don't wait on hold, they call you.
Or, I'll write to a mailing list, which is basically the same thing, since most Google hits will be from mailing list archives.
Which is all great, if you have a few days or a week to wait. Again, comoddity stuff - "how I authenticate users against the same user list for two different Linux servers???" - fine. When the question is "I am experiencing unusally high latency between two of my servers and reduced bandwidth throughput. I've checked the obvious, but am thinking that my MTU settings are incorrectly configured. What do you think?" a mailing list probably isn't going to help.
Jesus what do you think Windows users have been doing for years, even in the "enterprise" environment.
Windows is hardly enterprise. And real enterprises that do use Windows have Premiere support contracts, which work as a I described with a real live person assigned to you and a real live support group who knows how your network operates.
It is much more efficient to find someone else who had the same problem and documented the solution.
Someday you will realize there is more to IT than dealing with a few lame x86 Windows boxes and a few toy Linux boxes. Someday you will realize that for commodity software and commodity hardware and simple problems Linux is a great way to go. Do-it yourself gung-ho kick-ass OSS attitude will get you far. But it won't get you a server room that goes 3 years without downtime - scheduled or otherwise. What places like Sun, IBM, and to a lesser degree MS can provide is a person, with a name, whose home phone number, cellphone number, and direct work line are written down in your rolodex. They can provide you assurance that the latest bleeding edge patch to come along isn't going to cut your performance by 50% or break backward compatability.
I hope you can take a second and really think about what these places offer. I am not on the clock now. But rest assured. I could take an axe to my server room, and reps. from the various vendors would be here onsite in the middle of the night within 45 minutes. Our disaster recovery company would automatically fail over the broken equipment to their backups located offsite. And my users would be grousing that they lost 5 minutes of productivity.
Stick to Google whne you can, and then get back to me when you discover what the rest of the IT world does.
Whats the phone number for thouse hundreds of thousands of experience users again?
What was it? Ohh, right, you are at their mercy for an answer. And god forbid if you don't format it right, or show deference, or put in a monty python reference you will end up flamed and banned from the list.
If you have a decent contract with Sun, IBM, or hell even Microsoft you have a person who you call with problems. A person. He liases with the appropriate people - inside and outside the company. People who know the code. People who wrote the code, or reveiwed the code, or modified the code. The people who packaged it or defined, or decided to include it.
"Hundreds of thousands of experienced users" will not be able to provide the same level of familiarity with a specific subset of code than 50 professionals working in three 8 hr shifts 24 hrs a day 365 days a year.
Asking a mailing list is fine for your typical small-business server running SAMBA, DNS, DHCP, and qmail.
For most everything else, its a really, really lame way to get support.
Either don't use their bandwidth/computers/etc. or get a formal statement that says that you are allowed to do so up to a certain amount.
No, I wont, because I dont deserve a formal arrangement. Formally, i have no need/right to use their stuff for personal use.
Of course they can fire me at any time. That's the point of being and employer.
and may make it look less like the employer owns the employee, which is the impression the U.S. legal system gives me
No, the US legal system gives the impression that the employeer owns the computers, the lines, the equipment, the routers, the networks, the bandwidth, and your time.
The Netherlands policy is stupid, if that is in fact what the policy is. The company owns everything involed but you. You as an employee have a computer to do work related stuff presumably, or maybe just because they dont know better. I workl with a PC all day, and you know what? I use it for all manner of non-work related stuff. But I do not presume that it is my right. We have an arrangement of sorts - informal - I'll do my work and when I am done or have down time or am waiting on something to finish I read Slashdot, and my other daily sites. But it is not my right. It's their hardware, software, bandwidth, and stuff.
The greedy have already subverted capitalism
True, but it hasnt been damanged beyond function. Specifically, the functions of Enron-esque types do not impair the ability of everyone to have fiscal and social mobility. The problem with previous anti-capitalist systems (and present ones) is that in order to preserve an elite class a necessary subservance is imposed on the vast majority of people.
In US-style capitalist nations - essentially just the US and a few satellite economies - there is a vast amount of social mobility. The US continues to enable people to advance themselves economically. There are 2.1 million millionaires in the United States, and this number grows about 2%-3% each year on average.
Under a socialist system - any of them - the ruling/elite class is so drastically small and non-mobile that there is no chance of upward mobility. In the USSR there were so few people priveledged enough right through the 80's that most roads had just a single "center" lane with wide allies for pedestrian traffic. The people with cars all had drivers. The elite class was so small and controlled such a large share of resources that it was binary: you were either powerful or a peasant.
but I'm certain capitalism is not the optimal way to distribute society's increasing wealth
Capitalism does distribute wealth optimally in every case, but it is the best known way to distribute wealth. It in effect creates a pyramid. In most countries of the world - European, Latin American (especially Mexico), and to a lesser degree most of Asia the wealthy are all "family money". Clearly this exisits in the US, but there easily as many "new money" socialites as "old money" socialites.
r understood about capitalists is if human nature is so bad that socialism would never work, how can you support a system that lets the worst of humanity run amok
Its the principle of the hand of self-interest. You see things like Enron going on, and you think - huh, what corruption and greed. The thing of it is that Enron is a perfect example of how the system self-corrects itself. Enron was a company built on fraud and deception. It is fairly clear it was never profitable. It survived by bilking people out of investment money and pumping up prices. In a corrupt economy like in the USSR or China this organization would never have been shown to be corrupt, and would have been propped up as solvent. In our system, stockholders and employees took a hit, and the rest of economy kept moving. A defective unit does not tear up the whole socio-economic structure of the nation. It was painful but not toxic. In closed countries a failure of this magnitude could have collapsed an entire government. Yet, in the US, it was a news-piece and a sob-story for improperly invested stockholders and nothing more. A personal tradedgy, but not a country-ending event.
Enron failed because of its greed, and now, its gone. New organizations have bought its assets and operate them efficently and at a profit. The greed (worst of human nature) caused the organization to fail, and the system expelled the bad seed. Things took a hit, but again, kept moving.
And this how capitialism works. Human nature dictates that the strongest person gets the stuff. Yet I dont come and bonk you on the head when you arent looking, take your wallet, raid your food closet, and rape your girlfriend. If I did I'd be looking over my shoulder for the cops or someone bigger than me. My own self-interest in not getting bonked over the head keeps me from bonking you over the head.
In a socialist country it is hard to get people to work hard. In France they setup a system of really nice benfits for government workers. The result was that more and more people wanted to work for the government, and now working for them is a ticket to a nice pension, a fairly easy work career, and job security. Now though, it has a reac
A lot of people here seem to assume that mainframe means it was purchased in the 70s and hasn't been upgraded since. The only places I've seen that to be true are in universities and non-profits.
Your perception is lacking, in my opinion.
Many have software (COBOL usually) that was originated in the 70's, and that ties them to mainframe hardware. If not for that crucial link, they'd never be anywhere near mainframe hardware. In the 1970's thats what there was - Big Iron. Now, there is a lot more for the low-end and medium-end stuff. If you have upgraded the hardware just to keep current (ie, not running on 30-yr old electronics) but not touched the software what MS has to offer might make sense. They are selling to those people who are running transactions that could be completed by a typical Wintel server in a few hours. These people use Mainframes because they are locked in to the legacy mainframe model.
MS is clearly not targetting the true Mainframe user. Those places that need mainframes - great, good on them. I dont think MS has any shot at that nor do they really want it. They want those people using mainframes that have less IO, less capacity, and less power than a late 1990's Pentium desktop PC. Those places can easily go out and buy a mid-range Dell server for about $10k, load it up with disks and RAM, and run this stuff from MS and live happily ever after - and probably save money as well.
That's the real bottom line here. If you need thousands of transactions a second you want a mainframe. If you want five nines or better, get a mainframe.
Where I am from there are dozens of places locally that have mainframes but really have no business with them. Supermarket chains of 50 stores with an 80's system. Local bank chains from the 70's running a water cooled IBM system to process a few thousand transactions a day. There is no credible technological reason these people aren't running a cluster of Linux PCs, Solaris boxes, or even a Windows farm. The only roadblock is the software.
They run primarily banking and insurance transactional systems.
Umm.. no.. 75% of data processed in the world is not by banks and insurance transactional systems. By GDP it's probably 10%, but maybe by real volume a better guess would be 20%.
A lot of mainframes are not reliable, are not for really important stuff, and are mostly junk. Many mainframes are around because that was the only option there was when you needed computing power.
Keep your critical high I/O stuff on mainframes. Other stuff can be moved to failover friendly x86 or Sun hardware and savings will be huge.
The thing is you assume that all these places use tapes on a nightly basis when a good number have migrated to other storage mediums.. tapes are not everything..
A lot of mainframes can be replaced with a low-end PC running Linux or even Windows without any noticeable loss of performance.
I've seen $500k a year mainframes (leased, of course) replaced with a pair of $10k IBM x86 servers. Setup with failover in mind one PC could be yanked out and the other taking over the load in a fraction of a second without notice to users.
Saving your boss $480k a year will get you a lot of praise. I know the guy who did it. Look at it this way: they could afford to pay some $50k a year to babysit those two RH servers, buy new hardware each year to do preventive maintenance on, and still have an extra $400k a year saved. Multiply that over a decade, and you're talking the difference between profit and loss, good stock or bad stock.
A lot of mainframes are needed. A lot are required. But most are not.
I've written programs that do trillions of operations and then run some numbers against them. In case of some weird hardware failure or human error the code is run on three machines at the same time (the program takes a few days to run). What you are saying is that along the way the x86 hardware will incorrectly compute data and return bunk results? As a programmer (though not a low-level type), I'd expect that this would have come to my attention by now. Can you provide some examples or documentation? Of course there was the now famous Pentium flaw, but otherwise, what is defect rate on x86 operations?
This is interesting to me but smacks of inaccuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair to Microsoft, they're trying to move away from the harddrive concept so your photos will go in some virtual photo album named "My Pictures". Only the sys admin will know where they are really stored.
Thats really true. Windows XP works nice with the concept of removing where files are really stored from the user's mind. File selection dialog in Windows XP show "My Documents", "Shared Documents", "My Pictures", etc really well. So much so I am surprised how adept my family members are at using them and managing them and getting them into a working situation. Before file management was a real pain for them, because the concept of where stuff went - drives letters etc - was really hard to swallow.
Its a nice touch.. something worth copying a little more directly.
But you believe that the spam would magically start to "slowly die". I call bullshit.
And aren't you petulant you little bugger?
Spammers want to make money. With everyone using Bayesian filters, no spam would get through, and therefore, spammers would make no money. They would naturally move on to other illicit activites to create profit.
The spammers would inevitable realize that orders had fallen from an already miniscule rate to 99.999 less than that already miniscule rate. This would cause most spammers to give up.
Follow now or is it still bullshit?
Being so rabidly intolerant of such a worldview as to outright reject anyone who holds it seems rather myopic.
It is myopic. That's the point. I want a leader who understands that somethings, some actions, and some people act in an evil manner.
A person who cannot recognize evil is unqualified to lead a girl scout troup, let alone a country, let alone a powerful country.
Without a concept of evil anything can be justified, rationalized, and ignored. Without the idea of good and evil no system that is just can be devised.
Er, you do realize that is *post-bonus* profit. They could be giving out millions to their execs, in a very corrupt manner, and it wouldn't show there.
Nope, it's not. You should look into how profits/losses are reported. Only the first $1M in executive compensation is counted before P/L. Everything above and beyond is figured against profit or for losses. So if they pay $100M to exec's the first $1M just shows a regular salary expense and $99M comes off the profit line.
1. Do you think it's OK to attack another country except for reasons of self-defence.
Yes.
2. Do you think it's OK for someone to torture their people?
Yes.
3. Why do you think the USA attacked Iraq?
Because Bush is intellectually lazy and felt like doing something.
My point was, up until then, the USA was quite happy to support Saddam while he was torturing his people.
Of course. The USA has always supported such foreign powers. I have no idea why you pretend to be shocked about this. Read A People's History of the United States. It's been going on since before the country was a country. It's how things work. It's not even specific to one nation. Politics, economics, religion - they all come into play and influence foriegn policy. And moreover I can't think of any time when any US President claimed otherwise (or even a senator, or a congressperson). A whole host of things come into play when deciding foreign policy. Iraq was an ally because Iran was a bigger threat at the time. Saddaam was a shrewd operator who the US knew could be plied into conformance and used to further US goals. It's the same reason the US sided with the Afghan's in the 70's and 80's, it's the same reason we got involved in Vietnam, it's the same reason Russia is fighting Chechnia etc etc.
Why are you acting so surprised? Do you think this is new? Invented in the last 36 months?
As for the oil thing, it's not about the price but the control. The USA can (as former Saudi Ambassador James E. Akins would put it) "take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell". No more OPEC dictating terms and no more does the US have to worry about not offending the Saudis in order to get supplies.
Well, I tell you what, that shows you have no idea of scale.
The US uses 19,761,000 barrels a day of petrol. About 1,519,000 comes from Saudia Arabia. However, an additional 3,000,000 million barrels a day are provided from other OPEC nations, bringing the amount of oil imported from OPEC to about 4,500,000 barrels. It is estimated that at peak sustainable levels Iraq can produce 2,500,000 barrels a day for export.
As you can see, the US, even with a puppet regime fully using Iraq's oil fields to maximum benefit and taking 100% of tha fuel for export cannot meet the demand that OPEC fills.
This of course means that the US must continue to deal with OPEC regardless of what happens in Iraq. Especially since petrol use will continue to rise.
Now, back to what I was saying. The US would have been better off to take the $300B that they spent to conquer Iraq and instead pocket that. Re-certify Iraq free of weapons, lift sanctions, and let them produce the 2,000,000 barrels a day they were producing before the first gulf war. This would flood the market and force oil prices down. Additionally it would marginalize Saudia Arabia equally well compared to what will happen now (ie, cut down the amount of money sent there as their relative share of oil revenues paid to OPEC would decrease).
Of course, that didnt happen. Why? Because the US's primary motivation was not to get Iraq's oil. "Getting" their oil hasn't been a priority, because, as I have shown, no matter what the US does they will have to deal with OPEC. They control too much oil to be ignored even if the US took over Iraq, Canada, and Russia.
Anyways, maybe you can figure it out someday. You'd love to attribute some type of malice to Bush. It'd be really easy too. But when you look past the rhetoric and the effigies and the protest signs and look into the realities of the world you come to the same conclusion as most other Americans. It's not that complicated. Had the goal of America/Bush been to "steal Iraq's oil" things would have gone drastically different. Saddaam would still be in charge and Iraqs sanctions would have been lifted. End of story.
After a few months of 99.999% of spams not getting through you wouldnt keep getting 400 spams a day. For a while the number would increase.. and then slowly die out as one by one spammers target someother way to steal money.
So... who's bad?
It doesnt matter who.. it matters that he thinks the answer to that question is "no one".
When it starts looking like he's going to attack Kuwait in a massive oil grab, then he becomes the enemy.
Of course, because that's an act of agression against a foreign power!
See, you should see how it breaks down. There are dictators who kill thier own people, and dictators who kill foreign people.
I am not arguing that past US policies or US policy in general is coherent.
But let's be clear, Bush has taken a fair harder line on Mugabe than Clinton did, by far. Additionally, the precious UN has done nothing about Mugabe. Nothing. On top of that, thanks to Somilia, the US has no friends in the area and no credibility. So let's not get all uppity.
And as for your theory about oil, it shows what a dunce you are. If you pulled out a pencil and paper you'd realize that it'd be much cheaper and more reliable over the long-term to clear Sadaam of all charges, call him reformed, and allow him to sell oil on the world market again. If Bush/Rumsfeld just wanted that oil that tactic would have had it done in record time.
Only the truly deluded believe that Bush had Iraq invaded for the purpose of an oil grab...
Your media might not report it, Tony Blair is way out of line on public opinion. Most of us think Bush is a liar and a crook.
That's not entirely true. Some numbers:
43% of Britons welcome the Bushes trip.
36% said they would rather not have him visit.
But regardless, majority/minority opinion is useless here. Blair's position all along has been that his Iraq decision may well be unpopular but it is in fact the right thing to do both in terms of humanitarianly and politically. Public opinion oscillates, but right and wrong in his view are more important. Having a Prime Minister who varies his views and policies based on the latest overnight tracking poll would not be very happy sight. The best recourse is to make Blair reget his decision by backing his ouster. But even his poll numbers are rebounding. At one point 70% of Britons disfavoured him, but now thats coming back to his normal levels. Last check it was hovering around the 51-52%. It dropped from 61% from just a few weeks ago.
Second, your inference about Halliburton and Iraq:
Out of $87B+ about $500M have been/will be inked in contracts toward Halliburton. Thats not quite one-half of one percent. They are about a $10B company, have a ~1% profit margin (in line with their competitors). On its face in terms of dollars it doesn't seem to be vastly corrupt. Details dont point that way either. The arrangement they have with the government is indentical to deals they had 1992 and 1999 when the army was in Balkans. They competed this time with 3 other US companies for contracts. Last time it was nearly a dozen. The cap for the contract was much higher, but since the work was providing support services and equipment for oil well repair in Iraq (and since there was minimal damage to wells compared to what was thought - $7B was the limit, $500M was spent) it seems interesting to suggest foul play.
Halliburton is a huge company - 83,000 employees, with lots of oil expertise. Do you think its weird that such a company would win a contract supporting oil-well repair in an oil rich country? It hardly seems a leap, especially since they've been doing work like this under contract for the Army for a very, very, very long time and under many different administrations ranging from Carter, to Reagan, to Bush, to Clinton and now Bush again.
The BBC has this good bit about it, for more information
So I guess you should be more explicit. What exactly are you saying about Halliburton? Seems like a lot of inference and very little substance.
Finally, about Mugabe. Bush has imposed sanctions on Mugabe, something that Clinton never did. Bush's representatives in the UN have pushed for more pressure to be put on him. Again, the UN is essentially useless, but regardless, the effort is there. Fundamentally Mugabe doesn't draw a lot of attention because his rule is weak compared to other dictators, his control over the country not nearly as strong as other dictators often possess, and he has never taken aggressive action against a neighbor - invasions, bombings, etc. Additionally, he is barely pursuing anything except a naked power grab let alone larger plans of weaponization. So whats your point there?
Maybe instead of relying on innuendo to do the job, you could acutally say something concrete.
Ahh.. the Senator from Ohio and a real live supporter.
You know, I could almost think about looking at him seriously.. until..
I heard him on the air on Talk of the Nation last week.
After a few minutes of his typical stuff, the host asks him point blank: Do you believe in Evil?
He literally hemmed and hawed for a bit, and decided that some people have different world views, and those different world views need understanding and insight to recognize and value properly.
But his essential answer can then only be left at no.
Listen to it on NPR.
I hope you dont support this guy for President, because at the end of the day, no matter who you want to win, it shouldn't be someone who fundamentally refuses to acknowlegde the presense of evil in the world. Evil people, evil actions, evil intentions, evil results. Evil exisits, and living in the real world dictates that you acknowledge it, accept it, and deal with it.
Incidentally, it won't get broadcast much, but Bush is in the UK, and most of us think he's a scumbag, even though our Prime Minister would like you to think otherwise, and that marches against Bush are being suppressed.
Suppression? You've been reading IndyMedia for too long. Suppression is Tiananmen Square 1989.
Any legal or procedural roadblocks that have been thrown at protest organizers can hardly be termed "suppression".
A large majority of software sold in terms of dollar spent anually for business use goes in the form of vertical market software (or software to enable the software).
I have had bad experiences with Oracle, and none with BEA.
The type of support contracts though that are useful are the oens where you have a person's name who you call for help (or at least a line to a group of people) - no queues per se, no voice menus, etc. People whose job it is to *help you*, not "man the phones".
Chances are there isnt an organization for the software you are talking about, but there is support like that in the vertical market software industry - as I mentioned my wife works for such a place. As a support specialist she handles only high-level calls (no "where is the any key" style question). She has contacts with the software vendor (the company she works for is a VAR), and direct lines as needed to various technical resources. She is the contact person for about 50-75 sites directly, and part of the group that handles about 150 clients.
This type of support is expensive - about $5k a year is the average rate her customers get charged for the pleasure.
This is the type of contact I'd envison from Sun. I've worked with IBM's people before, and it was like this. The mainframe had a technican, as well a backup He knew the ins, outs, the hardware, the software, the configuration left right and every which way. A real expert. And when we had a problem we got his number and called him for help.
It sounds like for you guys the support offered just wasn't there. When you are shopping for contracts, ask good questions. Don't take the first package they offer. Make sure you ask if they have a direct line service. Make sure you ask if they have a well-defined escalation procedure in place. Ask if you have access to developers, manual writers, etc if needed. And get them in the contract.
so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
No, no. Sun and IBM have people - or would have people - on staff that know the code in and out, as if they wrote it. On top of that they likely will have modified it and keep daily track of changes, conversation, and the whole status of the package. IBM already has these people - people who contribute to the kernel, keep up on general development issues, etc. Sun did last I knew.
which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this
No, you may not. But China the government may. I am sure Chineese end-users wont be calling SUN for help configuring printing under KDE. What a contract would do is give IT people, developers, integrators, planners, etc access to the experts at SUN that someone downloading an ISO from a website won't. When they have a new feature request they have will a process for getting that to SUN. When there are scalability problems, or bug reports, or memory leaks or whatever goes wrong with Linux desktop software (and there is a lot, trust me) they have a contact to help the IT and support people onsite to get a resolution worked out. When they need help getting a package to work with a local characterset, or a driver ported to the right language, or a patch put into wider distribution, they have direct, accountable, verifiable resouces.
The community based approach works good for most things and many cases. It is not the be end all, even for end-user support. Frankly, any organization planning for thousands and thousands of seats who does not standardize against a single platform, a single vendor, and a single point of responsibility is living in a dream world of unhearlded proportions. Managing thousnads of identical systems will be hard enough. Managing thousands of variations on the Linux distro managed by disparate IT staffs, with no central point of responsibility while still managing thousands and thousands (millions?) of active seats is untenable.
Large scale IT is about efficency, coherency, and policy. The people involved in this deal are seaking that. Posting a message on a public forum that amounts to "help me.. ?" isn't a efficent, it's not coherent, and its not good policy.
I suggest you re-think your position. If you want we can chat about whats involved in managing 2500 desktop systems. You will have a big appreciation for how IT works in a larger sense. I can also put you in touch with a friend who is on a team of planners who manage 45,000 desktop systems spread out over 15 nations. Finally, I have an acquaintance who can talk to you about whats involved in managing 8000 servers.
The bottom line is that, even if you DON'T believe me, I would wager that 90% or more of all non-tech companies (ie, not HP, IBM, etc) who have significant computer needs have a contract with a top-level vendor. Whether that vendor is Dell, HP, MS, IBM is besides the point. And the OS is besides the point.
In a large scale environment you must have true experts on your side to deal with systems issues. There is no other way. There are two ways to get them: hire them in house, or hire them through contract with another organization. China choose the latter. Hiring or building inhouse talent would likely have been way, way more expensive.
It wouldn't be the end-users in China contacting Sun. It would be developers and IT people in China contacting Sun in aggregate form. Giving support on how to integrate this or that, on how to add this or that, etc. Much higher level. Again, this isn't going to be a front-line 800 service.
On top of all that, I am speaking more in general terms.
employer is definitely not that you are able to fire people
The right of free association is unalienable. It is one of the whole points of being human. Individuals can make and break associations between themselves and other groups at will. For good reasons, for bad reasons, for the right reasons, for the wrong reasons, etc. It is not to be questioned. A private business owner should and mostly does have the right to associate with whomever he or she wishes. On the other hand, public companies have a responsibility to the public and must therefore be more circumspect with how they hire and fire.
WTF! What other ways of support do you suggest.
I suggest that you call your support contact at your software vendor. Lots of software is sold this way. That person is an *expert* in the package you purchased. He or she knows the details of your setup, of your hardware, and of your network. They have remote access most likely. They are knowledgeable, well trained, and have sufficent time and energy to dedicate to you. This is very often how software is sold. I know you probably think "Free free free" is the best there is, was, and ever will be, but its not always! For commodity stuff yeah, chances are lots of people have the same problems as you. But in complex environments it is likely there won't be an analog to your environment. A support person will have to synthesize an answer from diverse information sources.
Oh, geez I'm on hold, fuck this shit, I'll type in a few words in Google and find my answer
See, here is what you miss. That $30 software package you buy at Staples has crap for support. 99% of people who call need to find the anykey. Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or software, from a serious vendor, your support contract is a little different. My wife works for a software company with 150 clients. They have direct line access to their support person. They have test setups to replicate client networks. They have remote access, and they are available within 10 minutes. You don't wait on hold, they call you.
Or, I'll write to a mailing list, which is basically the same thing, since most Google hits will be from mailing list archives.
Which is all great, if you have a few days or a week to wait. Again, comoddity stuff - "how I authenticate users against the same user list for two different Linux servers???" - fine. When the question is "I am experiencing unusally high latency between two of my servers and reduced bandwidth throughput. I've checked the obvious, but am thinking that my MTU settings are incorrectly configured. What do you think?" a mailing list probably isn't going to help.
Jesus what do you think Windows users have been doing for years, even in the "enterprise" environment.
Windows is hardly enterprise. And real enterprises that do use Windows have Premiere support contracts, which work as a I described with a real live person assigned to you and a real live support group who knows how your network operates.
It is much more efficient to find someone else who had the same problem and documented the solution.
Someday you will realize there is more to IT than dealing with a few lame x86 Windows boxes and a few toy Linux boxes. Someday you will realize that for commodity software and commodity hardware and simple problems Linux is a great way to go. Do-it yourself gung-ho kick-ass OSS attitude will get you far. But it won't get you a server room that goes 3 years without downtime - scheduled or otherwise. What places like Sun, IBM, and to a lesser degree MS can provide is a person, with a name, whose home phone number, cellphone number, and direct work line are written down in your rolodex. They can provide you assurance that the latest bleeding edge patch to come along isn't going to cut your performance by 50% or break backward compatability.
I hope you can take a second and really think about what these places offer. I am not on the clock now. But rest assured. I could take an axe to my server room, and reps. from the various vendors would be here onsite in the middle of the night within 45 minutes. Our disaster recovery company would automatically fail over the broken equipment to their backups located offsite. And my users would be grousing that they lost 5 minutes of productivity.
Stick to Google whne you can, and then get back to me when you discover what the rest of the IT world does.
Whats the phone number for thouse hundreds of thousands of experience users again?
What was it? Ohh, right, you are at their mercy for an answer. And god forbid if you don't format it right, or show deference, or put in a monty python reference you will end up flamed and banned from the list.
If you have a decent contract with Sun, IBM, or hell even Microsoft you have a person who you call with problems. A person. He liases with the appropriate people - inside and outside the company. People who know the code. People who wrote the code, or reveiwed the code, or modified the code. The people who packaged it or defined, or decided to include it.
"Hundreds of thousands of experienced users" will not be able to provide the same level of familiarity with a specific subset of code than 50 professionals working in three 8 hr shifts 24 hrs a day 365 days a year.
Asking a mailing list is fine for your typical small-business server running SAMBA, DNS, DHCP, and qmail.
For most everything else, its a really, really lame way to get support.
Either don't use their bandwidth/computers/etc. or get a formal statement that says that you are allowed to do so up to a certain amount.
No, I wont, because I dont deserve a formal arrangement. Formally, i have no need/right to use their stuff for personal use.
Of course they can fire me at any time. That's the point of being and employer.
and may make it look less like the employer owns the employee, which is the impression the U.S. legal system gives me
No, the US legal system gives the impression that the employeer owns the computers, the lines, the equipment, the routers, the networks, the bandwidth, and your time.
The Netherlands policy is stupid, if that is in fact what the policy is. The company owns everything involed but you. You as an employee have a computer to do work related stuff presumably, or maybe just because they dont know better. I workl with a PC all day, and you know what? I use it for all manner of non-work related stuff. But I do not presume that it is my right. We have an arrangement of sorts - informal - I'll do my work and when I am done or have down time or am waiting on something to finish I read Slashdot, and my other daily sites. But it is not my right. It's their hardware, software, bandwidth, and stuff.
The greedy have already subverted capitalism
True, but it hasnt been damanged beyond function. Specifically, the functions of Enron-esque types do not impair the ability of everyone to have fiscal and social mobility. The problem with previous anti-capitalist systems (and present ones) is that in order to preserve an elite class a necessary subservance is imposed on the vast majority of people.
In US-style capitalist nations - essentially just the US and a few satellite economies - there is a vast amount of social mobility. The US continues to enable people to advance themselves economically. There are 2.1 million millionaires in the United States, and this number grows about 2%-3% each year on average.
Under a socialist system - any of them - the ruling/elite class is so drastically small and non-mobile that there is no chance of upward mobility. In the USSR there were so few people priveledged enough right through the 80's that most roads had just a single "center" lane with wide allies for pedestrian traffic. The people with cars all had drivers. The elite class was so small and controlled such a large share of resources that it was binary: you were either powerful or a peasant.
but I'm certain capitalism is not the optimal way to distribute society's increasing wealth
Capitalism does distribute wealth optimally in every case, but it is the best known way to distribute wealth. It in effect creates a pyramid. In most countries of the world - European, Latin American (especially Mexico), and to a lesser degree most of Asia the wealthy are all "family money". Clearly this exisits in the US, but there easily as many "new money" socialites as "old money" socialites.
r understood about capitalists is if human nature is so bad that socialism would never work, how can you support a system that lets the worst of humanity run amok
Its the principle of the hand of self-interest. You see things like Enron going on, and you think - huh, what corruption and greed. The thing of it is that Enron is a perfect example of how the system self-corrects itself. Enron was a company built on fraud and deception. It is fairly clear it was never profitable. It survived by bilking people out of investment money and pumping up prices. In a corrupt economy like in the USSR or China this organization would never have been shown to be corrupt, and would have been propped up as solvent. In our system, stockholders and employees took a hit, and the rest of economy kept moving. A defective unit does not tear up the whole socio-economic structure of the nation. It was painful but not toxic. In closed countries a failure of this magnitude could have collapsed an entire government. Yet, in the US, it was a news-piece and a sob-story for improperly invested stockholders and nothing more. A personal tradedgy, but not a country-ending event.
Enron failed because of its greed, and now, its gone. New organizations have bought its assets and operate them efficently and at a profit. The greed (worst of human nature) caused the organization to fail, and the system expelled the bad seed. Things took a hit, but again, kept moving.
And this how capitialism works. Human nature dictates that the strongest person gets the stuff. Yet I dont come and bonk you on the head when you arent looking, take your wallet, raid your food closet, and rape your girlfriend. If I did I'd be looking over my shoulder for the cops or someone bigger than me. My own self-interest in not getting bonked over the head keeps me from bonking you over the head.
In a socialist country it is hard to get people to work hard. In France they setup a system of really nice benfits for government workers. The result was that more and more people wanted to work for the government, and now working for them is a ticket to a nice pension, a fairly easy work career, and job security. Now though, it has a reac
Session state is maintained typically, and specifically, via a shared database table, which is hosted on a fairly redudant clusterd setup.
A lot of people here seem to assume that mainframe means it was purchased in the 70s and hasn't been upgraded since. The only places I've seen that to be true are in universities and non-profits.
Your perception is lacking, in my opinion.
Many have software (COBOL usually) that was originated in the 70's, and that ties them to mainframe hardware. If not for that crucial link, they'd never be anywhere near mainframe hardware. In the 1970's thats what there was - Big Iron. Now, there is a lot more for the low-end and medium-end stuff. If you have upgraded the hardware just to keep current (ie, not running on 30-yr old electronics) but not touched the software what MS has to offer might make sense. They are selling to those people who are running transactions that could be completed by a typical Wintel server in a few hours. These people use Mainframes because they are locked in to the legacy mainframe model.
MS is clearly not targetting the true Mainframe user. Those places that need mainframes - great, good on them. I dont think MS has any shot at that nor do they really want it. They want those people using mainframes that have less IO, less capacity, and less power than a late 1990's Pentium desktop PC. Those places can easily go out and buy a mid-range Dell server for about $10k, load it up with disks and RAM, and run this stuff from MS and live happily ever after - and probably save money as well.
That's the real bottom line here. If you need thousands of transactions a second you want a mainframe. If you want five nines or better, get a mainframe.
Where I am from there are dozens of places locally that have mainframes but really have no business with them. Supermarket chains of 50 stores with an 80's system. Local bank chains from the 70's running a water cooled IBM system to process a few thousand transactions a day. There is no credible technological reason these people aren't running a cluster of Linux PCs, Solaris boxes, or even a Windows farm. The only roadblock is the software.
They run primarily banking and insurance transactional systems.
Umm.. no.. 75% of data processed in the world is not by banks and insurance transactional systems. By GDP it's probably 10%, but maybe by real volume a better guess would be 20%.
A lot of mainframes are not reliable, are not for really important stuff, and are mostly junk. Many mainframes are around because that was the only option there was when you needed computing power.
Keep your critical high I/O stuff on mainframes. Other stuff can be moved to failover friendly x86 or Sun hardware and savings will be huge.
The thing is you assume that all these places use tapes on a nightly basis when a good number have migrated to other storage mediums.. tapes are not everything..
A lot of mainframes can be replaced with a low-end PC running Linux or even Windows without any noticeable loss of performance.
I've seen $500k a year mainframes (leased, of course) replaced with a pair of $10k IBM x86 servers. Setup with failover in mind one PC could be yanked out and the other taking over the load in a fraction of a second without notice to users.
Saving your boss $480k a year will get you a lot of praise. I know the guy who did it. Look at it this way: they could afford to pay some $50k a year to babysit those two RH servers, buy new hardware each year to do preventive maintenance on, and still have an extra $400k a year saved. Multiply that over a decade, and you're talking the difference between profit and loss, good stock or bad stock.
A lot of mainframes are needed. A lot are required. But most are not.
I guess I don't follow...
I've written programs that do trillions of operations and then run some numbers against them. In case of some weird hardware failure or human error the code is run on three machines at the same time (the program takes a few days to run). What you are saying is that along the way the x86 hardware will incorrectly compute data and return bunk results? As a programmer (though not a low-level type), I'd expect that this would have come to my attention by now. Can you provide some examples or documentation? Of course there was the now famous Pentium flaw, but otherwise, what is defect rate on x86 operations?
This is interesting to me but smacks of inaccuracy.