You don't even know the half of it. I bought a Ati Rage Fury Maxx. Works wine in 98, but in 2k or Me, it sucks cycles all the time. Can even get it to work in linux. And from ati, no new drives and they said they would be out with 2k. What a joke!
Microsoft includes drivers for my Rage Pro on the Windows 2000 CD. Unfortunately, they don't support the advanced features of the All-in-Wonder card, so I have to run the ATI drivers.
This is about the only time any rational, intelligent person will ever utter these words, with not a hint of sarcasm: How I long for the stability of Microsoft software. But it's true.
Coming to the protest?
Bring your unsupported or crash-prone ATI video cards, fly to Toronto.
Watch for a forest green 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck, with a large gas barbecue in the back, driving slowly through the arrivals level at the terminal.
Hop in, we'll go to Markham, call the media, and cook a few video cards in ATI's parking lot, as a protest to their software quality.
That's why I can't see any HTML email. Oh sure, you could just ignore everyone that uses it, sorta like buying a Beta VCR and ignoring all those movies that come out on VHS.
Bah.
I use Pine on my Linux boxen and Eudora on my Windows boxen.
My main (and favorite) VCR is a Sony SL-HF500 Beta Hi-Fi.
I rent the new movies on DVD. If I like 'em, I toss a new cassette into the Beta, and hit record. ('Course, they're for personal use only, they may get two viewings before they hit the bulk-eraser.)
Cool thing about Beta, to liken it to e-mail clients, is that it's immune to video virii like Macrovision.
Any e-mail that comes to you with X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 or similar in the headers, gets relayed to/dev/null.
Soon, the Windows proles will realize that sending to you is fruitless and will eventually go away.
Okay, fine, it's not practical, but it would still be fun to do.
Or, you could use Outlook's many vulnerabilities to break into your boss's computer and change his Windows startup tune to this in order to prove the point.
He doesn't use Outcast any more. I consider that to be a victory.
ATI All-In-Wonder Pro
This card is an oldie but goodie. Perhaps you could simply get this as a pci card and supplement your primary agp card/display (if you need 3d power for games, or have some badass big monitor). The tv support is excellent in linux through gatos. The card is also has excellent 2d. I use it in my dorm room as my only tv and only display adapter (I do not play games).
I have 2 of these. Perhaps someone would want to trade them for TV tuner cards where the Windows 2000 drivers and TV applications aren't in permanent beta?
Both PCI Rage Pro, both with 8 megs RAM, both with great hardware but ATI's typically abysmal software.
And, unfortunately, I need to run these in Windows.
Radeon's don't offer support for anything but windows, and if you do run one on windows the software is laughably bad.
Yeah, this is off-topic, but it's valid to the discussion.
I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro. (Rage Pro, as opposed to the Rage 128 Pro.)
It's in my main machine, which, I'm sorry guys, runs Windows. I need Windows for work more than anything else.
Under Windows 95B, the TV application would occasionally crash. It was one of my more unstable applications on an otherwise very stable Windows box.
Under Windows 2000, the drivers and TV application are still in Beta. No information posted to their website since October 16th. Currently, the TV application sucks back 25% or so of my CPU and then causes a variety of crashes ranging from total lockups to spontaneous system reboots. I've never seen a GPF or other message out of this thing: it just stops.
For one thing, it proves that Windows 2000 is about as uncrashable as the Titanic was unsinkable.
Fine, it's in beta. I expect it to crash occasionally. But this behavior is coming from several beta releases into the process, and there's been no word from ATI about when they're going to resolve this.
So, as if we didn't already know that Windows could be broken, as one who is stuck with either a $300 paperweight or a computer that crashes more frequently than a kernel development workstation, I will never buy another ATI product again.
I bought 53 computers last month. Every last one of them was specified with a variety of non-ATI video cards.
ATI's Toronto-area world headquarters are just 20 minutes down the street from my house. Does anyone want to join with me, call the press, and have a video card bonfire in their parking lot, to protest the apparently complete ineptitude of the programmers that they hire?
You can't just hook up a bunch of 56k modems to a computer to provide V.90 access. A V.90 modem can only do 33.6k to another V.90. To go beyond that, one end has to be a digital line (ie. a T-1+).
Yeah, good point. I've never actually set up a dialup server, so it didn't cross my mind.
[grin] I think the more daunting challenge might be actually getting four serial ports to work in the same machine...
[shudders while remembering connecting an INFAX airport flight information display system running on a PC to a bunch of DEC VAX.]
At work I've got a Windows NT Server I slapped together from parts left over from a workstation that was too decrepid for use as a workstation. It's got a number of handicaps working against it, including:
486 DX/2 - 50 Mhz processor
Only 32 MB of DRAM
BIOS patch drivers running in real mode
Runs a Telnet server, DNS, and web server
Goofy BIOS/Video card combination that dies after a warm boot
Windows NT 4.0 Server
That *is* impressive with all those handicaps. Oops, especially with that last one. [grin]
Yeah, I've got a friend who has a small ISP up in Maine, and he was running the whole damned thing off 486s and Windows NT Server. Except for the uptime-limiting Windows-esque reboots, it was stable.
Then, when Microsoft came a-knockin' to do a software audit, they screwed him.
I'd propose that, in a business situation, you really have to keep away from the pirated software, and the overheads involved in making sure that you have that license handy for the copy of Windows NT Server on that machine may negate the savings of using an OS that you just had kicking around (and therefore didn't have to purchase again).
Even with that stability, I'll stick with my Linux. Aside from BIND (!), it's secure and stable. I'm running DNS, web (Apache), SMTP (sendmail), POP, telnet, Windows file and printer sharing (SAMBA), DHCP, NAT gateway to my LAN, and PPPoE to connect to my DSL provider. And the damned thing (a Pentium 100) still spends most of its CPU cycles on SETI@Home.
This would rule it out as a candidate for real use, right? Wrong! It NEVER dies, (it can't, won't reboot except for a power cycle). I take it down for the odd service pack, otherwise it's always there.
[grin] Yeah, I know. I hate those. That's the kind of computer that you simply can't throw out, even though it's of marginal usefulness.
I've got a great 486 motherboard. Sure, it's only VLB, but it's a 486DX4-100 with a load of cache RAM soldered to the board. It's stable, it's fast (for a 486!), and I have a VESA video, IO and network card for it. And it's narrow.
And despite all those good things, it's also got a really annoying problem: the CMOS memory doesn't stay. So, I tried connecting an external battery. No better. I tried desoldering the CMOS battery from the board and replacing it, figuring that the battery external battery connections were bad. Still didn't work. Something is obviously fried. So, every time I have a power failure (not very often), I have to manually intervene, tell it that it the size of the hard disk attached to it, etc. Pain in the ass, but it's too good a board otherwise. You know what I mean - I've got a nice Socket-7 board kicking around; it's clockable to 233MHz and will take an MMX processor. It's got PCI slots, integrated I/O, much nicer board by specs than that 486. And yet, for anything mission critical, I'd still take that 486 any day.
That Socket-7 board feels like it's got static damage, but I'll be damned if I know how. I bought it new, unsealed the factory box, and have always used a wrist strap, static baggies and a good anti-stat workmat underneath it. The 486, on the other hand, came from a crappy clone builder, where you know they carried it across a carpet on a dry winter day.
It's currently at 42 Days, it was past 150 when I took thinks down because I tweaked IP addresses for our network. (Yeah... NT needs to be reboot to work right... it's not perfect).
No, but that *is* impressive.
My alltime uptime record for Windows is 66 days for Windows 95B. Of course, that's only possible when you're running Windows 95 under laboratory conditions, and only then with the 49.7 day crash memory leak bug fixed.
The point is that NT is stable, you just have to treat it like a server instead of a workstation.
"...a digital interface for a group of dial-up lines, internal routing, internal mail handling, authentication, and any other needed support for 8+ simultaneous users. Web page hosting is not considered necessary. Basically just e-mail and browsing.... What distro and hardware would make this as cheap and fast as needed?"
Okay. I worked for a division of Litton, until we got "divested" to my General Manager.
Now, Pat's a good guy, but he's cheap. He was going to be perfectly happy without his own domain and everything, and with a 56k dial-up connection to the Internet. (We have 17 users on the LAN I administer. We make and sell a variety of very weird and specialized stuff. We *need* connectivity, for communicating with both customers and suppliers.)
And yet, our homepage was going to be "http://www.whateverisp.com/~companyname". It was a joke.
Did I mention that Pat is clueless?
So, I called an ISP. Had PPPoE-based DSL installed. We've got two static IPs. Stole the fastest spare computer we had kicking around (an old Compaq Deskpro Pentium 100 from under the old receptionist's desk), stuffed two cheap Realtek-based PCI ethernet cards into it, and took it home with me.
At home that night, I threw Red Hat 6.2 onto it. Got the Roaring Penguin PPPoE solution, which installed absolutely painlessly. Set up DNS, Apache, sendmail, user accounts, password-protected SAMBA for our internal LAN (so that one of the engineers can change specs and stuff on our webpage without a hassle).
I brought the machine back in to the office the next day, plugged it into our LAN, configured it as our office DHCP server, set up ipchains to serve as our NAT firewall and gateway to the Internet. Plugged in the Northern Telecom DSL modem, typed "adsl-start", and we were up and running!
Essentially, an Internet Service Provider in a box. The biggest difference with what you'd want to do is that you need dial-in services. A bunch of modems (remember, Winmodems don't work under Linux!), plugged into a bunch of 486s, could probably serve your needs easily and inexpensively. Without getting into expensive terminal server solutions or multi-serial cards, a legacy PC will support 4 serial devices, and that's only if you can get the IRQ sharing to work. Worst case traffic on each machine will be 4 modem @ 56k each. No sweat. Just plug in as many 486s configured like that as you need. Your limiting factor is likely to be the speed of your connection to the Internet; even so, when all your modems are in use, it's unlikely that all your users will be downloading MP3s at the same time, etc.
My system's current uptime is 77 days. Aside from going in and upgrading BIND on Monday (security upgrade), the system is pretty maintenance-free. Our e-mail service is quick and reliable. Our webpage doesn't get more than 50-60 different visitors a day, so the Pentium 100 doesn't even break a sweat. And Linux is so efficient at the NAT services that our 17 users, many of them on Pentium IIIs and stuff, max out the speed of our DSL, not the old Compaq.
My boss can't believe this thing, but it's true.
Oh, and to avoid a distro war, I chose Red Hat Linux over Debian, Caldera, SuSE, or even FreeBSD because I know RH Linux better, and getting this thing up and running quickly was of the essence.
Can these features all be contained in one box?
Well, you could do everything that I've done in one box. In fact, everything here runs in the one box. Instead of putting in the second network card, since your clients aren't on a LAN like mine, you could use the free slots for the 4 modems you'd be able to shoehorn into that thing. Or the multi-port serial card (make sure that it has Linux drivers available before buying it!). I don't think that running a PPP dialup server would require much more CPU horsepower than what I'm doing.
HOWEVER, I do want you to think about something. If all your services are provided by one machine, you're at risk.
Just this past week, a vulnerability was found in BIND (Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon). BIND is a DNS server, responsible for turning "www.whatever.com" into an IP address.
Since, for example, my mail server and my DNS server are on the same machine, if a cracker breaks into BIND and gets root access on my box, he's also got root access on my mailserver.
Which means that he can read the contents of/var/spool/mail/private_stuff. And he can even post it to alt.sex.fetish.hamster.duct-tape. Or he can sell it to our competition.
The best thing is to have a firewall machine - could be a 386, as long as you can install a highly secure operating system on it - with two network cards and nothing else installed but the bare minimum. A 386 can easily saturate 10base-T ethernet, even loaded down with (ugh!) Windows 95. So, as long as your operating system of choice will run on the system, it really doesn't have to be too spectacular. Money is not needed to buy servers when most of the time companies have to pay to get get rid of this sort of hardware.
Make the firewall machine redirect all port 80 requests to your dedicated webserver. Make the firewall machine redirect all port 25 to the dedicated SMTP server. All domain requests to the DNS server. Etc. This way, if someone roots your webserver, they just have your webserver. If someone roots your firewall, they just have your firewall. If they've got your firewall but they want your mailserver, they'll have to use your firewall machine to break into your webserver.
The point here is that if someone wants in badly enough, they'll get in. Security is just about obstacles, and stratifying the machines is another obstacle.
Plug your PPP server(s) into the DMZ's hub, set up the firewall to perform NAT for those machines, set up the PPP server(s) to use the firewall machine as a gateway, and you're off to the races. Your users will have two measures of isolation from the hax0rs and evil users on the 'Net, and your server farm will be out of harm's way.
Now, if all this is so great, why don't I have this in the office?
Did I mention that Pat is clueless?
He's also too cheap to let me spend the time to actually set up a DMZ with a couple of the old 486s we have kicking around the office.
Having said that, I still sleep pretty well at night. One Linux box running all these functions, but with ipchains set up to only be open on the needed ports, frequently backed up by an administrator who watches the security websites, is still far more secure than almost any Windoze server running IIS and all the associated crap with it. Hell, it's not too far off to say that I portscan my server far more often than I get portscanned.
Oh, and yeah, I'd give the name of the domain here, and you could check out the server. But given that there are elements to the Slashdot audience who are very capable of breaking into just about anything, and I really don't want to attract their attention to my company's server, I won't.
[sigh] I note that you've been moderated down as Flamebait. Apparently, someone is moderating based on emotion, not rational discussion, again.
And so've I. Despite the fact that my point was rational, intelligent, on topic and clearly posted.
Yup, we've got some wonderfully intelligent moderators these days.
It's okay. I'll just go back to the home page, hit refresh until I get moderator access (it'll only take two or three times), and then I'll fix the stupid moderation going on (in other discussions, of course).
Read the moderator guidelines, you cheese-eating dweebs.
I remember one episode, he got a big oil/grease/dirt/etc stain on his tie. The very next episode it was obvious that it was the very same tie, it was tied up so much shorter so the stain would be under/in the knot.. Hilarious.. the end of the tie only reached mid-chest..
And every episode since...
It seems to me that (until the American episodes stupidly ditched him) the tie was always tied ridiculously.
Damn it.
Last night, I watched an episode that was on TLC a few weeks ago, and that I hadn't had time to watch until now: Hovercraft.
This morning, before leaving for work, I found myself rummaging around the garage, looking for an old horizontal crankshaft Briggs and Stratton engine and a couple of furnace blowers that I have kicking around.
Tonight, I guess I'll put aluminum wire into the MIG welder and throw together a lightweight frame...
Most security leaks are a direct consequence of using languages like C. People claim it is possible to program safely in C, however, incidents like this prove them wrong.
[sigh] I note that you've been moderated down as Flamebait. Apparently, someone is moderating based on emotion, not rational discussion, again.
Years ago, I used to be a very fluent assembly language programmer. I haven't done it in years, and I kind of lost interest in programming when I saw that the higher-level languages were taking over.
For anything that has to be rock-solid-stable and predictable, like core operating system components and security, relying on higher-level programming where your code is being mangled by a compiler and linked to potentially faulty libraries, scares the hell out of me.
Look at Windows 9x as a perfect example of why this is a problem. You install a new application. It swaps all the DLLs for its own versions. Because the DLLs are changed, anything which had a dependency on those DLLs will be affected.
What will happen?
Well, to quote Ren Hoek from the legendary History Eraser Button episode, "Maybe something bad, maybe something good. We just don't know."
Eudora has caused a fatal exception error in CTL3D.DLL
For security, the vulnerabilities are even more subtle, and I believe that they're unavoidable.
The only way to ensure that you have complete control over what is actually running is to write it all yourself. Assembled from mneumonics, not compiled from a high-level code. All your own subroutines, written in your hand, not packaged libraries and other cop-outs.
High level programming languages are great for community college programming students. But I think the 'Net would be a lot more secure if we kept them out of our operating system core components.
And yes, writing in lower level languages can take a very long time. And, during development, some of the crashes are absolutely spectacular. But if you think about how much a bug that crashes an operating system like Windows 2000 costs to productivity worldwide - especially in an economy where every hiccup of a webserver slams NASDAQ into the guardrail like a Honda Civic being edged off the road by a Plymouth TrailDuster - spending a little more time to avoid the ambiguity of compilers and linked libraries is well worthwhile.
But do you really think linux losers spend their time trying to find buffer overflows in software? Nah, they spend their time downloading exploits written by others, writing WinAMP skins (or whatever it is called on linux), and playing quake.
I like what the Linux losers seem to do best. They write stuff. Stuff that lets me do kewl things that impress my boss and save my IT budgets for grander things.
Like really blowing away the MCSE idiots at the office by setting up and running a domain server, web server with caching proxy, mail server, SAMBA printer server, DHCP server and NAT firewall - with an uptime that blows away the best that they've done so far with Windows 2000 - for the 17 user LAN in a division of a Fortune 500 company - for under $200.
Fine, our website only gets about 50-60 distinct hits/day. But, the server processes about 300 e-mails a day, including large AutoCAD DXF attachments. The printer attached to it is always running. And we've saturated our T1 a few times now, though the server's NAT.
Yup. <$200. Old but tough-as-nails Compaq Pentium 100 with 48 megs of mismatched SIMMs kicking around - free. 4.3 gig Maxtor IDE hard disk drive - left over from an upgrade. Operating system and ISP-on-a-disk - Red Hat 6.2, free download, $0.50 blank CD-R, ~$0.12 for bandwidth. Couple of el-cheapo PCI network cards with gold "MADE IN TAIWAN, R.O.C." stickers on them? ~$30. Time to set it up? A few hours of my time, ~$150.
Stats? Check 'em out yourself. I've cut out lines that I didn't deem necessary to judging the performance of this server.
[lwade@www/]$ cat/proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium 75 - 200
cpu MHz : 99.717487
bogomips : 39.73
[lwade@www/]$ top
The nice CPU usage there is represented entirely by SETI@Home's UNIX/Linux client. If not for that, the little old Compaq wouldn't have much to do with most of its CPU cycles.
I think that the people who contribute to, and are the most ardent advocates of an operating system with that capability, can't possibly be accurately described as losers.
When you can do that with Windows (any version), with that kind of uptime, on a Pentium 100, lemme know.
I would be prepared to pay for Napster, but in return I would like a defined QoS.
You will always end up finding that the *only* live version of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Atlanta, in greater than 64kbps (ugh), and that isn't truncated before the last bar finishes its EL34 plate-melting feedback wail, is gonna be coming from the fastest 28.8k connection from a user on a Zimbabwean ISP, where the backbone connection is accomplished with a k56Flex modem on a noisy dial-up line.
And you, with your bidirectional cable, DSL or better, sitting there in front of an Internet connection where you're used to access that's almost as fast as reading stuff off your hard disk, will *still* have to sit there. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, sitting on your hands so that you don't move the mouse and somehow cause Windows to crash, you will each packet to safely make it down the rickety telephone lines from a 486SX-33 running on a portable generator in Africa, all the way across the Atlantic, and finally through all the myriad of hops to your machine.
You lose a packet somewhere along the way. You see the transfer rate drop to 0.00. It stays there for a second, then resumes its blistering fast 0.08kbps. Great. Only 7 more hours of this hell to go through, afraid to touch your computer or any others sharing your Internet connection, lest the fragile connection get broken.
And, of course, it does.
Just as the anodes in the output stages of Jimi's Marshall stacks start to droop and short against the grids, the neighbor of the super-rich guy in the village picks up the telephone. The click on the party line is the click that is heard half a world away: Transfer Error!
Don't you mean his one tie? I don't know why, but for some reason it really annoys me that the hosts of the show never wear anything different from episode to episode..
I'm sure the costume department had several identical ties, just in case he somehow gets it caught in a naked fanbelt and survives.
How the hell is the Russian National Anthem offtopic when we're talking about socialist government policies?
Read the thread; this springs from some uninformed commie suggesting that Junkyard Wars (or, Scrapheap Challenge in the UK) is a TV show produced by a not-for-profit TV system.
Imbeciles. Besides, I *still* have more karma than you, notice that I post at +2.
Now, if I had been in charge of the show, I would have expected them to make the engines, too... A little bit of powerdered aluminium would not have been hard to dig up... finding magnesium might have been difficult, I wonder what else they could have used?
Remember, in the hovercraft episode, they found jet engine nacelles. That's a hell of a junkyard. And, uhhh, I don't think I'd try welding to those (though they did), if you know what I mean.
Lots of mid-80s Volvos have magnesium rims.
Even so, you could do a thermite with just powdered rust and powdered aluminum. In the 1800s, it was how large welding was done.
Ahh, I see. The only way to get good, television is to force all of us dolts to cough up a little extra tax money and let the truly enlightened (i.e. the creators of the world-famous and universally-loved USPO, IRS, INS,...) and let them decide what we should watch. What a fantastic idea. If only it had been tried before! (cough, cough Communism cough).
Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labor and valorous deed.
[Or, the old way:
Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us,
Inspire us to labor and valorous deed!]
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
In the vict'ry of Communism's deathless ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!
Get out the scissors and the Pravda. It's time to make next week's toilet paper.
How about the automotive CEO's that make 60-70+ million a year? Now that is wage inflation, at least the guy making pistons is producing something.
I think $60-$70 million is a little more than what the CEOs get paid.
Now, as for what the CEO does. He organizes the company, provides a vision and an outlook, and helps to ensure that the shareholders get a good return on their investment.
The guy who machines brake pistons does something that can be taught with ten minutes training.
If you lose your CEO, you'll have to use $$ to lure one away from another company.
If you lose your brake piston machinist, you can train any McDonalds counter-schlep to do it in under ten minutes.
I fail to understand how you can equate the CEO with such unskilled labor and suggest that any wage parity is warranted. That's sheer idiocy.
The automobile has its purpose, commuting isn't it.
When the alternative is riding on public transit with unionized hotel chambermaids and other smelly dregs of society, yeah, the car's purpose very much is commuting. And if my government won't allow me to drive to work, then my quality of life is impaired. I will then take my talents and skills and move somewhere that allows me some standard of living for my hard work.
Canada is a capitalist economy, I do know that for sure.
To the same extent that France is capitalist. Sure. Any further to the left, and the national passtime of hockey will be replaced by shredding copies of Pravda for toilet paper.
I'm not sure how much your capitalists rely on the government though.
Northern Telecom gets over $100 million in government subsidies every year. Canada has a population of approximately 1/10th of the US tax base from which to draw those subsidies.
You probably have a more represntive government, which allows such things as nationalized medical care.
I'd rather have the option of paying money and geting health care where I don't have to sit three hours in a waiting room with a chatty homeless heroin addict as I wait for a strepped throat prescription.
Here in the US...
Wanna do something illegal?
Here's a suggestion. You seem disenfranchised with the US. I'm disenfranchised with Canada. You want something more left, I want something more right. I'm 6'4", 185 lbs, brown hair and eyes, 26 years old, no criminal record. If you've got similar stats, we can pull an ID swap. How's that?
You'd be able to vote for the Socialist Workers Party next Canadian election, and I'd be able to vote Libertarian next American election.
If you were, you would be more likely to know that most unions are run by the mob. (Posting anonymously because I don't want to be buried under Giants Stadium)
No, they don't do that anymore. Too messy.
Now, they take you to a Jersey wrecking yard, toss you into the trunk of a toasted Caprice Classic, and then you get to ride through a Newell shredder.Ouch.
That's the leading Hoffa disappearance theory, too, BTW. If you've never seen a car shredder, lemme tell you, there'd be nothing left. These things can shred forged nodular iron crankshafts.
I disagree. The reason your car doesn't explode is because it's engineered that way. I am honstly awestruck when my auto mechanic friend pulls parts out of a vehicle to repair and they are in such a state of disrepair that you have to shake your head... I mean if your CV joints go, they usually cripple the vehicle instead of locking up and causing an accident. If your tie rods go... well then you're fucked but usually these things are built such that when a piece dies, it dies gracefully. I would hate to think what vehicles designed by web programmers would do.
For sure! It's all about quality of design. Quality of construction is important, but the design should have sufficient tolerance for errors in the construction that nothing really bad happens.
As an example of construction errors, a long held legend among Toyota dealership mechanics is that approximately 40,000 Camrys left the plants in 1987, missing a right front speaker.
A speaker is a little harder to miss than a tiny little C-clip that retains the active ingredients in your brake master cylinder! And Toyota has, unquestionably, some of the best assembly quality in the industry. (Note that they're not unionized, either, and yet Toyota employees are better paid than many union factories.)
Actually, the fun thing about Toyota is that they pay their staff a small minimum. And then the assembly line workers get generous bonuses based on the quality of their work. The net effect is that everyone is paid what they're worth, because your pay is inversely proportional to your defect rate.
Sadly, UAW is very much against this sort of practise. I think that's telling.
If a job requires a level of skill then pay for it. Don't pay the twitt stamping out metal pieces $28/hr to watch a machine work and take the product and put it on a shelf for post-processing. That is promoting mediocrity.
For sure! And remember, most of the people in these manufacturing jobs *are* mediocre. They're there because they were too lazy or unmotivated to go to school, or to learn about something like computers on their own. And therefore, when you give them a union, they become mediocre with an attitude.
...machining brake pistons... $35/hr+ - for minimum wage work!I don't know. Can you build a car?
Of course. I've built several of them. There's most of a 1974 Plymouth Valiant in thousands of individual Zip-Lock baggies in my living room at the moment. The clerk at Wal-Mart asked me if I was dealing drugs because I buy so many baggies.
Building a car isn't easy, and anyone with sufficient knowledge of all the parts of a car that they can relatively successfully assemble one, will be paid more than minimum wage as a simple law of supply and demand.
As for machining brake pistons, as an example, it's very easy. With ten minutes of training, anyone could do it. It makes mopping floors look like ir would need a PhD. I would suggest that $35/hr for such a job is rather excessive.
I should ask, what does it take to have a good life in Toronto? What is the cost of living? How many hours would it take to earn at mininum wage to pay for an house? Apartment? Food? Bills?
A lot. But you obviously don't know anything about supply and demand.
Let's say that affordable housing for minimum wage brainiacs is a two hour commute away.
If Taco Bell can't get people to mop the floors in downtown Toronto because all their minimum wage employee base is, by virtue of real estate costs, too far away from work, then Taco Bell is going to have to pay more money. Either to entice people who can live in the more expensive parts of the city to work there, or to offset the high costs of the commute.
I think unions have a way to go to improve their image and their fuctions in a high-tech world, but they fought the good fight back in the 1800s for everyone to which I'm grateful.
Great! Yeah, the 1800s were a time with no labor laws. The industrial revolution was in its infancy, and as society shifted from an agrigarian existance to an industrial workforce, yeah, unions had their place.
But today? Nah. If you don't like your job, get another one. Can't find a better job? Read a book, then try again.
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You don't even know the half of it. I bought a Ati Rage Fury Maxx. Works wine in 98, but in 2k or Me, it sucks cycles all the time. Can even get it to work in linux. And from ati, no new drives and they said they would be out with 2k. What a joke!
Microsoft includes drivers for my Rage Pro on the Windows 2000 CD. Unfortunately, they don't support the advanced features of the All-in-Wonder card, so I have to run the ATI drivers.
This is about the only time any rational, intelligent person will ever utter these words, with not a hint of sarcasm: How I long for the stability of Microsoft software. But it's true.
Coming to the protest?
Bring your unsupported or crash-prone ATI video cards, fly to Toronto.
Watch for a forest green 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck, with a large gas barbecue in the back, driving slowly through the arrivals level at the terminal.
Hop in, we'll go to Markham, call the media, and cook a few video cards in ATI's parking lot, as a protest to their software quality.
For this reason, it is my belief that gay men are far better suited for long term space exploration,
Are you kidding? The Madonna CDs alone would make the launch weight prohibitive!
That's why I can't see any HTML email. Oh sure, you could just ignore everyone that uses it, sorta like buying a Beta VCR and ignoring all those movies that come out on VHS.
Bah.
I use Pine on my Linux boxen and Eudora on my Windows boxen.
My main (and favorite) VCR is a Sony SL-HF500 Beta Hi-Fi.
I rent the new movies on DVD. If I like 'em, I toss a new cassette into the Beta, and hit record. ('Course, they're for personal use only, they may get two viewings before they hit the bulk-eraser.)
Cool thing about Beta, to liken it to e-mail clients, is that it's immune to video virii like Macrovision.
Here's a simple fix. Edit sendmail.cf.
Make a filter:
Any e-mail that comes to you with X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 or similar in the headers, gets relayed to /dev/null.
Soon, the Windows proles will realize that sending to you is fruitless and will eventually go away.
Okay, fine, it's not practical, but it would still be fun to do.
Or, you could use Outlook's many vulnerabilities to break into your boss's computer and change his Windows startup tune to this in order to prove the point.
He doesn't use Outcast any more. I consider that to be a victory.
ATI All-In-Wonder Pro This card is an oldie but goodie. Perhaps you could simply get this as a pci card and supplement your primary agp card/display (if you need 3d power for games, or have some badass big monitor). The tv support is excellent in linux through gatos. The card is also has excellent 2d. I use it in my dorm room as my only tv and only display adapter (I do not play games).
I have 2 of these. Perhaps someone would want to trade them for TV tuner cards where the Windows 2000 drivers and TV applications aren't in permanent beta?
Both PCI Rage Pro, both with 8 megs RAM, both with great hardware but ATI's typically abysmal software.
And, unfortunately, I need to run these in Windows.
Radeon's don't offer support for anything but windows, and if you do run one on windows the software is laughably bad.
Yeah, this is off-topic, but it's valid to the discussion.
I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro. (Rage Pro, as opposed to the Rage 128 Pro.)
It's in my main machine, which, I'm sorry guys, runs Windows. I need Windows for work more than anything else.
Under Windows 95B, the TV application would occasionally crash. It was one of my more unstable applications on an otherwise very stable Windows box.
Under Windows 2000, the drivers and TV application are still in Beta. No information posted to their website since October 16th. Currently, the TV application sucks back 25% or so of my CPU and then causes a variety of crashes ranging from total lockups to spontaneous system reboots. I've never seen a GPF or other message out of this thing: it just stops.
For one thing, it proves that Windows 2000 is about as uncrashable as the Titanic was unsinkable.
Fine, it's in beta. I expect it to crash occasionally. But this behavior is coming from several beta releases into the process, and there's been no word from ATI about when they're going to resolve this.
So, as if we didn't already know that Windows could be broken, as one who is stuck with either a $300 paperweight or a computer that crashes more frequently than a kernel development workstation, I will never buy another ATI product again.
I bought 53 computers last month. Every last one of them was specified with a variety of non-ATI video cards.
ATI's Toronto-area world headquarters are just 20 minutes down the street from my house. Does anyone want to join with me, call the press, and have a video card bonfire in their parking lot, to protest the apparently complete ineptitude of the programmers that they hire?
You can't just hook up a bunch of 56k modems to a computer to provide V.90 access. A V.90 modem can only do 33.6k to another V.90. To go beyond that, one end has to be a digital line (ie. a T-1+).
Yeah, good point. I've never actually set up a dialup server, so it didn't cross my mind.
[grin] I think the more daunting challenge might be actually getting four serial ports to work in the same machine...
[shudders while remembering connecting an INFAX airport flight information display system running on a PC to a bunch of DEC VAX.]
At work I've got a Windows NT Server I slapped together from parts left over from a workstation that was too decrepid for use as a workstation. It's got a number of handicaps working against it, including:
486 DX/2 - 50 Mhz processor
Only 32 MB of DRAM
BIOS patch drivers running in real mode
Runs a Telnet server, DNS, and web server
Goofy BIOS/Video card combination that dies after a warm boot
Windows NT 4.0 Server
That *is* impressive with all those handicaps. Oops, especially with that last one. [grin]
Yeah, I've got a friend who has a small ISP up in Maine, and he was running the whole damned thing off 486s and Windows NT Server. Except for the uptime-limiting Windows-esque reboots, it was stable.
Then, when Microsoft came a-knockin' to do a software audit, they screwed him.
I'd propose that, in a business situation, you really have to keep away from the pirated software, and the overheads involved in making sure that you have that license handy for the copy of Windows NT Server on that machine may negate the savings of using an OS that you just had kicking around (and therefore didn't have to purchase again).
Even with that stability, I'll stick with my Linux. Aside from BIND (!), it's secure and stable. I'm running DNS, web (Apache), SMTP (sendmail), POP, telnet, Windows file and printer sharing (SAMBA), DHCP, NAT gateway to my LAN, and PPPoE to connect to my DSL provider. And the damned thing (a Pentium 100) still spends most of its CPU cycles on SETI@Home.
This would rule it out as a candidate for real use, right? Wrong! It NEVER dies, (it can't, won't reboot except for a power cycle). I take it down for the odd service pack, otherwise it's always there.[grin] Yeah, I know. I hate those. That's the kind of computer that you simply can't throw out, even though it's of marginal usefulness.
I've got a great 486 motherboard. Sure, it's only VLB, but it's a 486DX4-100 with a load of cache RAM soldered to the board. It's stable, it's fast (for a 486!), and I have a VESA video, IO and network card for it. And it's narrow.
And despite all those good things, it's also got a really annoying problem: the CMOS memory doesn't stay. So, I tried connecting an external battery. No better. I tried desoldering the CMOS battery from the board and replacing it, figuring that the battery external battery connections were bad. Still didn't work. Something is obviously fried. So, every time I have a power failure (not very often), I have to manually intervene, tell it that it the size of the hard disk attached to it, etc. Pain in the ass, but it's too good a board otherwise. You know what I mean - I've got a nice Socket-7 board kicking around; it's clockable to 233MHz and will take an MMX processor. It's got PCI slots, integrated I/O, much nicer board by specs than that 486. And yet, for anything mission critical, I'd still take that 486 any day.
That Socket-7 board feels like it's got static damage, but I'll be damned if I know how. I bought it new, unsealed the factory box, and have always used a wrist strap, static baggies and a good anti-stat workmat underneath it. The 486, on the other hand, came from a crappy clone builder, where you know they carried it across a carpet on a dry winter day.
It's currently at 42 Days, it was past 150 when I took thinks down because I tweaked IP addresses for our network. (Yeah... NT needs to be reboot to work right... it's not perfect).No, but that *is* impressive.
My alltime uptime record for Windows is 66 days for Windows 95B. Of course, that's only possible when you're running Windows 95 under laboratory conditions, and only then with the 49.7 day crash memory leak bug fixed.
The point is that NT is stable, you just have to treat it like a server instead of a workstation.Servers don't waste resources on GUIs.
"...a digital interface for a group of dial-up lines, internal routing, internal mail handling, authentication, and any other needed support for 8+ simultaneous users. Web page hosting is not considered necessary. Basically just e-mail and browsing.
Okay. I worked for a division of Litton, until we got "divested" to my General Manager.
Now, Pat's a good guy, but he's cheap. He was going to be perfectly happy without his own domain and everything, and with a 56k dial-up connection to the Internet. (We have 17 users on the LAN I administer. We make and sell a variety of very weird and specialized stuff. We *need* connectivity, for communicating with both customers and suppliers.)
And yet, our homepage was going to be "http://www.whateverisp.com/~companyname". It was a joke.
Did I mention that Pat is clueless?
So, I called an ISP. Had PPPoE-based DSL installed. We've got two static IPs. Stole the fastest spare computer we had kicking around (an old Compaq Deskpro Pentium 100 from under the old receptionist's desk), stuffed two cheap Realtek-based PCI ethernet cards into it, and took it home with me.
At home that night, I threw Red Hat 6.2 onto it. Got the Roaring Penguin PPPoE solution, which installed absolutely painlessly. Set up DNS, Apache, sendmail, user accounts, password-protected SAMBA for our internal LAN (so that one of the engineers can change specs and stuff on our webpage without a hassle).
I brought the machine back in to the office the next day, plugged it into our LAN, configured it as our office DHCP server, set up ipchains to serve as our NAT firewall and gateway to the Internet. Plugged in the Northern Telecom DSL modem, typed "adsl-start", and we were up and running!
Essentially, an Internet Service Provider in a box. The biggest difference with what you'd want to do is that you need dial-in services. A bunch of modems (remember, Winmodems don't work under Linux!), plugged into a bunch of 486s, could probably serve your needs easily and inexpensively. Without getting into expensive terminal server solutions or multi-serial cards, a legacy PC will support 4 serial devices, and that's only if you can get the IRQ sharing to work. Worst case traffic on each machine will be 4 modem @ 56k each. No sweat. Just plug in as many 486s configured like that as you need. Your limiting factor is likely to be the speed of your connection to the Internet; even so, when all your modems are in use, it's unlikely that all your users will be downloading MP3s at the same time, etc.
My system's current uptime is 77 days. Aside from going in and upgrading BIND on Monday (security upgrade), the system is pretty maintenance-free. Our e-mail service is quick and reliable. Our webpage doesn't get more than 50-60 different visitors a day, so the Pentium 100 doesn't even break a sweat. And Linux is so efficient at the NAT services that our 17 users, many of them on Pentium IIIs and stuff, max out the speed of our DSL, not the old Compaq.
My boss can't believe this thing, but it's true.
Oh, and to avoid a distro war, I chose Red Hat Linux over Debian, Caldera, SuSE, or even FreeBSD because I know RH Linux better, and getting this thing up and running quickly was of the essence.
Can these features all be contained in one box?Well, you could do everything that I've done in one box. In fact, everything here runs in the one box. Instead of putting in the second network card, since your clients aren't on a LAN like mine, you could use the free slots for the 4 modems you'd be able to shoehorn into that thing. Or the multi-port serial card (make sure that it has Linux drivers available before buying it!). I don't think that running a PPP dialup server would require much more CPU horsepower than what I'm doing.
HOWEVER, I do want you to think about something. If all your services are provided by one machine, you're at risk.
Just this past week, a vulnerability was found in BIND (Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon). BIND is a DNS server, responsible for turning "www.whatever.com" into an IP address.
Since, for example, my mail server and my DNS server are on the same machine, if a cracker breaks into BIND and gets root access on my box, he's also got root access on my mailserver.
Which means that he can read the contents of /var/spool/mail/private_stuff. And he can even post it to alt.sex.fetish.hamster.duct-tape. Or he can sell it to our competition.
The best thing is to have a firewall machine - could be a 386, as long as you can install a highly secure operating system on it - with two network cards and nothing else installed but the bare minimum. A 386 can easily saturate 10base-T ethernet, even loaded down with (ugh!) Windows 95. So, as long as your operating system of choice will run on the system, it really doesn't have to be too spectacular. Money is not needed to buy servers when most of the time companies have to pay to get get rid of this sort of hardware.
Make the firewall machine redirect all port 80 requests to your dedicated webserver. Make the firewall machine redirect all port 25 to the dedicated SMTP server. All domain requests to the DNS server. Etc. This way, if someone roots your webserver, they just have your webserver. If someone roots your firewall, they just have your firewall. If they've got your firewall but they want your mailserver, they'll have to use your firewall machine to break into your webserver.
The point here is that if someone wants in badly enough, they'll get in. Security is just about obstacles, and stratifying the machines is another obstacle.
Plug your PPP server(s) into the DMZ's hub, set up the firewall to perform NAT for those machines, set up the PPP server(s) to use the firewall machine as a gateway, and you're off to the races. Your users will have two measures of isolation from the hax0rs and evil users on the 'Net, and your server farm will be out of harm's way.
Now, if all this is so great, why don't I have this in the office?
Did I mention that Pat is clueless?
He's also too cheap to let me spend the time to actually set up a DMZ with a couple of the old 486s we have kicking around the office.
Having said that, I still sleep pretty well at night. One Linux box running all these functions, but with ipchains set up to only be open on the needed ports, frequently backed up by an administrator who watches the security websites, is still far more secure than almost any Windoze server running IIS and all the associated crap with it. Hell, it's not too far off to say that I portscan my server far more often than I get portscanned.
Oh, and yeah, I'd give the name of the domain here, and you could check out the server. But given that there are elements to the Slashdot audience who are very capable of breaking into just about anything, and I really don't want to attract their attention to my company's server, I won't.
[sigh] I note that you've been moderated down as Flamebait. Apparently, someone is moderating based on emotion, not rational discussion, again.
And so've I. Despite the fact that my point was rational, intelligent, on topic and clearly posted.
Yup, we've got some wonderfully intelligent moderators these days.
It's okay. I'll just go back to the home page, hit refresh until I get moderator access (it'll only take two or three times), and then I'll fix the stupid moderation going on (in other discussions, of course).
Read the moderator guidelines, you cheese-eating dweebs.
I remember one episode, he got a big oil/grease/dirt/etc stain on his tie. The very next episode it was obvious that it was the very same tie, it was tied up so much shorter so the stain would be under/in the knot.. Hilarious.. the end of the tie only reached mid-chest..
And every episode since...
It seems to me that (until the American episodes stupidly ditched him) the tie was always tied ridiculously.
Damn it.
Last night, I watched an episode that was on TLC a few weeks ago, and that I hadn't had time to watch until now: Hovercraft.
This morning, before leaving for work, I found myself rummaging around the garage, looking for an old horizontal crankshaft Briggs and Stratton engine and a couple of furnace blowers that I have kicking around.
Tonight, I guess I'll put aluminum wire into the MIG welder and throw together a lightweight frame...
Most security leaks are a direct consequence of using languages like C. People claim it is possible to program safely in C, however, incidents like this prove them wrong.
[sigh] I note that you've been moderated down as Flamebait. Apparently, someone is moderating based on emotion, not rational discussion, again.
Years ago, I used to be a very fluent assembly language programmer. I haven't done it in years, and I kind of lost interest in programming when I saw that the higher-level languages were taking over.
For anything that has to be rock-solid-stable and predictable, like core operating system components and security, relying on higher-level programming where your code is being mangled by a compiler and linked to potentially faulty libraries, scares the hell out of me.
Look at Windows 9x as a perfect example of why this is a problem. You install a new application. It swaps all the DLLs for its own versions. Because the DLLs are changed, anything which had a dependency on those DLLs will be affected.
What will happen?
Well, to quote Ren Hoek from the legendary History Eraser Button episode, "Maybe something bad, maybe something good. We just don't know."
Eudora has caused a fatal exception error in CTL3D.DLLFor security, the vulnerabilities are even more subtle, and I believe that they're unavoidable.
The only way to ensure that you have complete control over what is actually running is to write it all yourself. Assembled from mneumonics, not compiled from a high-level code. All your own subroutines, written in your hand, not packaged libraries and other cop-outs.
High level programming languages are great for community college programming students. But I think the 'Net would be a lot more secure if we kept them out of our operating system core components.
And yes, writing in lower level languages can take a very long time. And, during development, some of the crashes are absolutely spectacular. But if you think about how much a bug that crashes an operating system like Windows 2000 costs to productivity worldwide - especially in an economy where every hiccup of a webserver slams NASDAQ into the guardrail like a Honda Civic being edged off the road by a Plymouth TrailDuster - spending a little more time to avoid the ambiguity of compilers and linked libraries is well worthwhile.
But do you really think linux losers spend their time trying to find buffer overflows in software? Nah, they spend their time downloading exploits written by others, writing WinAMP skins (or whatever it is called on linux), and playing quake.
I like what the Linux losers seem to do best. They write stuff. Stuff that lets me do kewl things that impress my boss and save my IT budgets for grander things.
Like really blowing away the MCSE idiots at the office by setting up and running a domain server, web server with caching proxy, mail server, SAMBA printer server, DHCP server and NAT firewall - with an uptime that blows away the best that they've done so far with Windows 2000 - for the 17 user LAN in a division of a Fortune 500 company - for under $200.
Fine, our website only gets about 50-60 distinct hits/day. But, the server processes about 300 e-mails a day, including large AutoCAD DXF attachments. The printer attached to it is always running. And we've saturated our T1 a few times now, though the server's NAT.
Yup. <$200. Old but tough-as-nails Compaq Pentium 100 with 48 megs of mismatched SIMMs kicking around - free. 4.3 gig Maxtor IDE hard disk drive - left over from an upgrade. Operating system and ISP-on-a-disk - Red Hat 6.2, free download, $0.50 blank CD-R, ~$0.12 for bandwidth. Couple of el-cheapo PCI network cards with gold "MADE IN TAIWAN, R.O.C." stickers on them? ~$30. Time to set it up? A few hours of my time, ~$150.
Stats? Check 'em out yourself. I've cut out lines that I didn't deem necessary to judging the performance of this server.
[lwade@wwwprocessor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium 75 - 200
cpu MHz : 99.717487
bogomips : 39.73
[lwade@www
1:37pm up 75 days, 19:29, 1 user, load average: 1.04, 1.05, 1.01
52 processes: 50 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.1% user, 2.1% system, 96.6% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 46848K av, 45524K used, 1324K free, 6212K shrd, 1588K buff
Swap: 153176K av, 15632K used, 137544K free 19232K cached
The nice CPU usage there is represented entirely by SETI@Home's UNIX/Linux client. If not for that, the little old Compaq wouldn't have much to do with most of its CPU cycles.
I think that the people who contribute to, and are the most ardent advocates of an operating system with that capability, can't possibly be accurately described as losers.
When you can do that with Windows (any version), with that kind of uptime, on a Pentium 100, lemme know.
I would be prepared to pay for Napster, but in return I would like a defined QoS.
You will always end up finding that the *only* live version of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Atlanta, in greater than 64kbps (ugh), and that isn't truncated before the last bar finishes its EL34 plate-melting feedback wail, is gonna be coming from the fastest 28.8k connection from a user on a Zimbabwean ISP, where the backbone connection is accomplished with a k56Flex modem on a noisy dial-up line.
And you, with your bidirectional cable, DSL or better, sitting there in front of an Internet connection where you're used to access that's almost as fast as reading stuff off your hard disk, will *still* have to sit there. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, sitting on your hands so that you don't move the mouse and somehow cause Windows to crash, you will each packet to safely make it down the rickety telephone lines from a 486SX-33 running on a portable generator in Africa, all the way across the Atlantic, and finally through all the myriad of hops to your machine.
You lose a packet somewhere along the way. You see the transfer rate drop to 0.00. It stays there for a second, then resumes its blistering fast 0.08kbps. Great. Only 7 more hours of this hell to go through, afraid to touch your computer or any others sharing your Internet connection, lest the fragile connection get broken.
And, of course, it does.
Just as the anodes in the output stages of Jimi's Marshall stacks start to droop and short against the grids, the neighbor of the super-rich guy in the village picks up the telephone. The click on the party line is the click that is heard half a world away: Transfer Error!
Napster is over.
Don't you mean his one tie? I don't know why, but for some reason it really annoys me that the hosts of the show never wear anything different from episode to episode..
I'm sure the costume department had several identical ties, just in case he somehow gets it caught in a naked fanbelt and survives.
Nationalized TV? (Score:1, Offtopic)
How the hell is the Russian National Anthem offtopic when we're talking about socialist government policies?
Read the thread; this springs from some uninformed commie suggesting that Junkyard Wars (or, Scrapheap Challenge in the UK) is a TV show produced by a not-for-profit TV system.
Imbeciles. Besides, I *still* have more karma than you, notice that I post at +2.
And the old host was hilarious. He'd look at a teams work, crack a joke and laugh hysterically. It was great.
I agree. And I loved his ties.
Now, if I had been in charge of the show, I would have expected them to make the engines, too... A little bit of powerdered aluminium would not have been hard to dig up... finding magnesium might have been difficult, I wonder what else they could have used?
Remember, in the hovercraft episode, they found jet engine nacelles. That's a hell of a junkyard. And, uhhh, I don't think I'd try welding to those (though they did), if you know what I mean.
Lots of mid-80s Volvos have magnesium rims.
Even so, you could do a thermite with just powdered rust and powdered aluminum. In the 1800s, it was how large welding was done.
Ahh, I see. The only way to get good, television is to force all of us dolts to cough up a little extra tax money and let the truly enlightened (i.e. the creators of the world-famous and universally-loved USPO, IRS, INS,
Soviet National Anthem translated into English. This is the official CPSU version.
Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labor and valorous deed.
[Or, the old way:
Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us,
Inspire us to labor and valorous deed!]
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
In the vict'ry of Communism's deathless ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!
Get out the scissors and the Pravda. It's time to make next week's toilet paper.
I can see it now, someone builds a computer with a full AI to control their machine out of old car parts.
Ah, yes. A Beowulf cluster of fuel injection ECMs.
Labour law falls under provincial jurisdiction. The difficulties in organising vary greatly from province to province.
True.
And while there are many things I don't like about Mike Harris, his stance on unions is one of the reasons I helped to re-elect him.
How about the automotive CEO's that make 60-70+ million a year? Now that is wage inflation, at least the guy making pistons is producing something.
I think $60-$70 million is a little more than what the CEOs get paid.
Now, as for what the CEO does. He organizes the company, provides a vision and an outlook, and helps to ensure that the shareholders get a good return on their investment.
The guy who machines brake pistons does something that can be taught with ten minutes training.
If you lose your CEO, you'll have to use $$ to lure one away from another company.
If you lose your brake piston machinist, you can train any McDonalds counter-schlep to do it in under ten minutes.
I fail to understand how you can equate the CEO with such unskilled labor and suggest that any wage parity is warranted. That's sheer idiocy.
The automobile has its purpose, commuting isn't it.When the alternative is riding on public transit with unionized hotel chambermaids and other smelly dregs of society, yeah, the car's purpose very much is commuting. And if my government won't allow me to drive to work, then my quality of life is impaired. I will then take my talents and skills and move somewhere that allows me some standard of living for my hard work.
Canada is a capitalist economy, I do know that for sure.To the same extent that France is capitalist. Sure. Any further to the left, and the national passtime of hockey will be replaced by shredding copies of Pravda for toilet paper.
I'm not sure how much your capitalists rely on the government though.Northern Telecom gets over $100 million in government subsidies every year. Canada has a population of approximately 1/10th of the US tax base from which to draw those subsidies.
You probably have a more represntive government, which allows such things as nationalized medical care.I'd rather have the option of paying money and geting health care where I don't have to sit three hours in a waiting room with a chatty homeless heroin addict as I wait for a strepped throat prescription.
Here in the US...Wanna do something illegal?
Here's a suggestion. You seem disenfranchised with the US. I'm disenfranchised with Canada. You want something more left, I want something more right. I'm 6'4", 185 lbs, brown hair and eyes, 26 years old, no criminal record. If you've got similar stats, we can pull an ID swap. How's that?
You'd be able to vote for the Socialist Workers Party next Canadian election, and I'd be able to vote Libertarian next American election.
The scary part is, I'm only halfway kidding.
If you were, you would be more likely to know that most unions are run by the mob.
(Posting anonymously because I don't want to be buried under Giants Stadium)
No, they don't do that anymore. Too messy.
Now, they take you to a Jersey wrecking yard, toss you into the trunk of a toasted Caprice Classic, and then you get to ride through a Newell shredder.Ouch.
That's the leading Hoffa disappearance theory, too, BTW. If you've never seen a car shredder, lemme tell you, there'd be nothing left. These things can shred forged nodular iron crankshafts.
I disagree. The reason your car doesn't explode is because it's engineered that way. I am honstly awestruck when my auto mechanic friend pulls parts out of a vehicle to repair and they are in such a state of disrepair that you have to shake your head... I mean if your CV joints go, they usually cripple the vehicle instead of locking up and causing an accident. If your tie rods go... well then you're fucked but usually these things are built such that when a piece dies, it dies gracefully. I would hate to think what vehicles designed by web programmers would do.
For sure! It's all about quality of design. Quality of construction is important, but the design should have sufficient tolerance for errors in the construction that nothing really bad happens.
As an example of construction errors, a long held legend among Toyota dealership mechanics is that approximately 40,000 Camrys left the plants in 1987, missing a right front speaker.
A speaker is a little harder to miss than a tiny little C-clip that retains the active ingredients in your brake master cylinder! And Toyota has, unquestionably, some of the best assembly quality in the industry. (Note that they're not unionized, either, and yet Toyota employees are better paid than many union factories.)
Actually, the fun thing about Toyota is that they pay their staff a small minimum. And then the assembly line workers get generous bonuses based on the quality of their work. The net effect is that everyone is paid what they're worth, because your pay is inversely proportional to your defect rate.
Sadly, UAW is very much against this sort of practise. I think that's telling.
If a job requires a level of skill then pay for it. Don't pay the twitt stamping out metal pieces $28/hr to watch a machine work and take the product and put it on a shelf for post-processing. That is promoting mediocrity.For sure! And remember, most of the people in these manufacturing jobs *are* mediocre. They're there because they were too lazy or unmotivated to go to school, or to learn about something like computers on their own. And therefore, when you give them a union, they become mediocre with an attitude.
Of course. I've built several of them. There's most of a 1974 Plymouth Valiant in thousands of individual Zip-Lock baggies in my living room at the moment. The clerk at Wal-Mart asked me if I was dealing drugs because I buy so many baggies.
Building a car isn't easy, and anyone with sufficient knowledge of all the parts of a car that they can relatively successfully assemble one, will be paid more than minimum wage as a simple law of supply and demand.
As for machining brake pistons, as an example, it's very easy. With ten minutes of training, anyone could do it. It makes mopping floors look like ir would need a PhD. I would suggest that $35/hr for such a job is rather excessive.
I should ask, what does it take to have a good life in Toronto? What is the cost of living? How many hours would it take to earn at mininum wage to pay for an house? Apartment? Food? Bills?A lot. But you obviously don't know anything about supply and demand.
Let's say that affordable housing for minimum wage brainiacs is a two hour commute away.
If Taco Bell can't get people to mop the floors in downtown Toronto because all their minimum wage employee base is, by virtue of real estate costs, too far away from work, then Taco Bell is going to have to pay more money. Either to entice people who can live in the more expensive parts of the city to work there, or to offset the high costs of the commute.
I think unions have a way to go to improve their image and their fuctions in a high-tech world, but they fought the good fight back in the 1800s for everyone to which I'm grateful.Great! Yeah, the 1800s were a time with no labor laws. The industrial revolution was in its infancy, and as society shifted from an agrigarian existance to an industrial workforce, yeah, unions had their place.
But today? Nah. If you don't like your job, get another one. Can't find a better job? Read a book, then try again.