"a consistent, well documented, and long-supported API"
Well, let's not go overboard, okay? Every Windows upgrade likes to move things (menus, commands, config options) around for no good reason. The APIs have changed significantly at least three times over the past ten years. Drivers often don't work from version to version. Documentation? Please. It can't hold a candle to the documentation available for Linux and many other OSS projects. Microsoft loves to hide things and use undocumented APIs.
don't understand that. That is why you see such "self centered" behavior among many children, teens, young adults and the groups to which they gravitate.
When I was very young, I thought the idea of the human race becoming extinct was unacceptable. I thought we had to migrate to space so we could ensure the survival of our species. Then I reached a jaded period of my life when I did not care anymore. Now that I have children, I have to care.
Re:Novel's Netware failure is their own fault...
on
Novell's Race Against Time
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
but that just doesn't happen with any other OS on white-box hardware.
I have seen Apache on Linux servers with more than two years of uptime. That was back around the time of the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. I have had Linux servers running for years, and they have only gone down for extended power outages and kernel upgrades.
The kernel upgrades have been basically optional because the vast number (if not all) of the security fixes addressed problems that were not remotely exploitable. Of course, the safe thing to do is apply the fix in case someone breaks in through say Apache then tries to use a rare kernel vulnerability to elevate privileges.
Of course Microsoft and Sun are famous for opposing Linux, but Oracle has actually put a good bit of effort into using and promoting Linux. Cisco is also on public record as being very pleased with their adoption of Linux, and they do a good job of supporting it with their products.
When you get such diverse members of some bogus consortium, you can't exepect every member company to agree with every piece of nonsense released by said consortium.
Curse that George W. Bush for not taking the easy way out! What? Human ingenutiy found a solution to a moral inconvenience? Who would have guessed that someone could use their brain to create a morally acceptable alternative? I will have to rethink this rushing headlong into disaster policy.
"Then again, you do try to make a comparison between five states on one side (totalling 83 electoral votes), and one state (10 votes) plus two counties..."
Uh, Illinois and New Jersey both went to Gore. That is three states. How many electoral votes does that make now?
Illinois and New Jersey are notorious for having corrupt Democratic party machines that commit voting fraud. Wisconsin is certainly looking to be the same. Illinois and West Virginia were reputed to have been delivered to John Kennedy on the back of ballot stuffing. That and years of Democratic party dirty tricks and character assassination are what made Nixon paranoid.
Just because his politics matches your own does not make him insightful. His posting is utter nonsense. For those too young to remember that election, the problems occurred in counties run by the Democratic party. They were responsible for the ballots some considered confusing. They put a sample ballot in the newspaper prior to the election, but no one piped up to complain it was confusing.
On election night, several liberal news shows said the Florida polls were closed and Gore won Florida when the polls in the Florida panhandle (heavily Republican) were open for another hour (Central time). Hearing this "news", many in the pangandle did not turn out to vote or went back home. Despite this, Bush won the initial count in Florida. Gore and the Democrats, incapable of being gracious losers, concocted a big conspiracy story. The Democrats lawyers also proceeded to attempt to block votes coming in from servicemen overseas (heavily Republican). They started recounts that were performed in a ridiculous manner. This despite Florida law being very clear about the conditions of recounts, for which this nonsense did not qualify. An activist Florida Supreme Court rewrote the law to allow it. The Dems had no problem with this. It was taken to the Supreme Court which ruled against them. This was obviously unjust in their eyes.
The Dems were also upset that Florida felons were not allowed to vote, even though this was clearly the state law. I've known since childhood that I would lose my right to vote and own firearms, if convicted of a felony. Approximately 66% of Florida felons are registered Democrats. Approximately 4% are registered Republicans.
If you want to talk about voting problems, how about the college kids in Wisconsin (largely Democrat) who bragged about voting multiple times? How about the New Yorkers (largely Democrat) who are illegally registered to vote in both New York and Florida (approx 5,000 did so)?
Democrats are anti-life (pro-abortion) and anti-death penalty. They believe in killing the innocent and saving the guilty. You really couldn't make this stuff up.
My best Windows experiences have been with Windows 2000. I bought a brand new laptop that came loaded with XP. It hard crashed (i.e. rebooted itself or the screen froze) on average more than one time per day that it was used. Performance also sucked. Eventually I got fed up and "upgraded" to Windows 2000. Very few stability or performance problems after that.
The same laptop ran Mandrake and later SUSE and Gentoo without ever having any stability issue. For me, Windows 2000 was the summit of Microsoft OS and XP was a step backwords. For me, Linux has always been much better than any Windows OS in nearly every way that is important to me. Your mileage may vary, especially for people who "don't know what they're doing".
I love when some teenager working at a burger joint and living in his mother's basement lectures on military strategy and tactics. That's a nice, simplistic case you have made there, as though the number of troops is the only criteria worth considering. What about the type and difficulty of the mission, the composition of our forces, support from allied forces both local and foreign, the size and composition of the opposing force, the terrain, etc.? When National Geographic wants to photograph a leopard in the wild, they send one stealthy photographer, not 10,000.
The force in Afghanistan certainly seems to be appropriate for the mission, and things appear to be generally under control there. In case you were not aware (probably watching CNN), a large percentage of Al Qaeda has been killed or captured. The rest are on the run. Bin Laden is probably in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and there are additional forces hunting him, including Pakistani forces and US CIA. The troops in Afghanistan are meant to secure that country while an orderly government is established.
I don't think Iraq had anything to do with Sept 11, either, but I do know that Hussein had terrorist training camps in his country, he paid the families of suicide bombers, he was harboring known terrorists like Abu Abas, he was making ongoing attacks on US pilots flying over his country, he was interfering with UN mandated inspections, documents have been reovered showing meetings were planned with Al Qaeda, and scads of politicians including Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Putin and many others from many nations believed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them against the US. Most of them just did not have the backbone to do anything about it.
Why don't you just come out and admit that you hate Bush simply because he is a Republican, and the Republicans gave Clinton such a hard time during his presidency.
Oh, and what are my military credentials? I was an officer in the US Marine Corps for six years. I am sure you have played a lot of Command & Conquer: Generals, though.
"So why not invade Saudi Arabia?... North Korea... China"
Your argument is a typical response to the "We should do the humane thing." argument. Your argument uses the same flawed logic that "If a little of something is good, a lot must be great." In contrast, liberals don't believe things should be done, if they are difficult. "We shouldn't do that because someone might die." (Conveniently ignoring that people will die if we don't do that), or "Drug laws are difficult to enforce so we should abolish them." (What about murder and rape laws?)
In response to your question:
1. Despite what you may think about the American people, we prefer diplomacy first. We only took action in Iraq after Hussein invaded Kuwait and then again after he violated 17 UN resolutions, which were not being enforced by the UN. The US made more than an honest effort at diplomatic resolution in both cases. If you believe otherwise, you are deluding yourself, or Michael Moore or John Kerry is deceiving you. We have pursued long-term political and economic programs to influence nations like Saudi Arabia, China and North Korea. At times, we have probably resisted the necessity for war too long, as may have been the case with World War II.
2. We do not have the resources to clean up all of the world's problems in one year, and of course, we have our own problems with which to contend. We can't possibly do it all alone in a short timeframe, and many of our old "allies" have demonstrated they would rather profit from the problems than help correct them.
3. To bring humanitarian efforts to China through military action would result in an inhumane number of deaths. We can do something on an Iraq scale at the moment. We can't force the issue on a China scale, although other methods seem to be slowly working there.
4. As you can see, it is difficult to get the support of the vocal minority to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, let alone pursue humanitarian actions in places like Africa or the Middle East, at least when a Republican President is doing it. For all their empathetic talk, liberals don't care about their neighbors, let alone some ethnic person in a third world country. The only way a liberal would care about a US building being bombed is if he was in it at the time.
"Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori, eh?"
Some people live for themselves. Some people live and die for others. Since liberals believe every degenerate way of life is a valid lifestyle choice, I would not think they would question a life of charity and sacrifice as being "bad".
A coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave only taste death once. ~Julius Ceasar
1. It is not someone else's liberal/communist/socialist, drafted kid who is getting sent off to war. The military is mostly composed of conservatives for many reasons which should be painfully obvious from even your own posting. These conservatives are putting their neck on the line, even if some conservatives stay at home to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc. I spent six years in the US Marine Corps, and I consider myself a conservative, even though I am strongly pro-environment and moderately pro-choice. I am also very empathetic, but like a good parent, I don't think it is best for my kids to sit around whining, making excuses and blaming someone else for everything that happens. I teach my kids to walk, not to be carried their entire life. I also teach my kids to obey the law and be strong for those who are not (i.e. Iraq).
2. It is courageous and selfless to serve and to risk one's neck to protect the US and make Iraq and the rest of the world a better, safer place. The people serving in our military get a modest paycheck and little gratitude for risking their lives to eliminate brutal, genocidal lunatics who threaten world peace. I know liberals would prefer to let Saddam Hussein put Iraqi's through wood chippers, run terrorist training camps, pay for suicide bombers, and pursue WMD programs at his leisure because it is not their personal problem. What do these liberals most vocally complain about? They complain about the money it costs for the US to do this. That money could be spent on their favorite social program. My, how empathetic of them.
By the way, Democrats got the US into World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Both Gulf Wars were handled much better than either the Korean or Vietnam wars. Clinton got us into Bosnia, where we saved Muslims. Quite a few Democrats in Congress voted for both Gulf Wars. Portraying war as a Republican thing demonstrates great ignorance, lack of independent thought or dishonesty, as US Democrats often do.
The draft is a bad idea. We want a volunteer force. It is not the job of the US military to straighten out screw-ups.
and it has been considered a best practice for a looong time. Unfortunately, it requires a little bit of knowledge, comprehension, skill and time, and most computer users will have none of that, hence Windows.
TCO is very real, but most published TCO studies are virtually worthless. The concept of TCO measurement is valid, but most studies make a lot of assumptions that may or may not be relevent to your particular situation. A Microsoft funded TCO comparison, which is narrowly defined to make Windows look better than Linux, may not map well to the environment and requirements of your organization.
"The problem with this is that if you already have a computer you probably don't have much need for the XBox."
Bingo! I already have a PC for PC games, and the mouse and keyboard are better for those games than Xbox controllers. My PC also has a better processor, better graphics, more RAM and, unlike Xbox 2, a large hard drive.
I will not reward Microsoft for creating PC games that won't run on my PC. Why should I spend my hard earned cash on an Xbox? Not for games, anyway. If I got one, it would be for hacking with Linux.
Microsoft does not rest until it destroys its competitors, who then lay off workers. Microsoft can only employ so many people, and of course, it is shipping thousands of those few jobs overseas, particularly to India. Microsoft's monopoly has destroyed jobs.
In contrast, Open Source creates jobs for those who customize and support software in a competitive environment.
Hmmm, sounds like the software market for Mac OS X. Don't get me wrong, I like OS X almost as much as KDE on Linux, and I absolutely love my PowerBook. Some of these little $10 to $50 apps are also pretty cool and useful, like Konfabulator. I just find it amazing/disturbing/appalling that hardly anyone will give you the time of day on a Mac unless you pay them $20. These little apps are much cooler than the shareware I remember on Windows, but there is a much stronger FOSS community on Linux providing just about anything I need.
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"a consistent, well documented, and long-supported API"
Well, let's not go overboard, okay? Every Windows upgrade likes to move things (menus, commands, config options) around for no good reason. The APIs have changed significantly at least three times over the past ten years. Drivers often don't work from version to version. Documentation? Please. It can't hold a candle to the documentation available for Linux and many other OSS projects. Microsoft loves to hide things and use undocumented APIs.
don't understand that. That is why you see such "self centered" behavior among many children, teens, young adults and the groups to which they gravitate.
When I was very young, I thought the idea of the human race becoming extinct was unacceptable. I thought we had to migrate to space so we could ensure the survival of our species. Then I reached a jaded period of my life when I did not care anymore. Now that I have children, I have to care.
April Fools is the bane of all news junkies.
but that just doesn't happen with any other OS on white-box hardware.
I have seen Apache on Linux servers with more than two years of uptime. That was back around the time of the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. I have had Linux servers running for years, and they have only gone down for extended power outages and kernel upgrades.
The kernel upgrades have been basically optional because the vast number (if not all) of the security fixes addressed problems that were not remotely exploitable. Of course, the safe thing to do is apply the fix in case someone breaks in through say Apache then tries to use a rare kernel vulnerability to elevate privileges.
Of course Microsoft and Sun are famous for opposing Linux, but Oracle has actually put a good bit of effort into using and promoting Linux. Cisco is also on public record as being very pleased with their adoption of Linux, and they do a good job of supporting it with their products.
When you get such diverse members of some bogus consortium, you can't exepect every member company to agree with every piece of nonsense released by said consortium.
Curse that George W. Bush for not taking the easy way out! What? Human ingenutiy found a solution to a moral inconvenience? Who would have guessed that someone could use their brain to create a morally acceptable alternative? I will have to rethink this rushing headlong into disaster policy.
tabs, popup blocking, and RSS subscriptions?
Well, you did.
at least the half of the time that he was for the war because of Iraq's WMD.
"Then again, you do try to make a comparison between five states on one side (totalling 83 electoral votes), and one state (10 votes) plus two counties..."
Uh, Illinois and New Jersey both went to Gore. That is three states. How many electoral votes does that make now?
Illinois and New Jersey are notorious for having corrupt Democratic party machines that commit voting fraud. Wisconsin is certainly looking to be the same. Illinois and West Virginia were reputed to have been delivered to John Kennedy on the back of ballot stuffing. That and years of Democratic party dirty tricks and character assassination are what made Nixon paranoid.
Just because his politics matches your own does not make him insightful. His posting is utter nonsense. For those too young to remember that election, the problems occurred in counties run by the Democratic party. They were responsible for the ballots some considered confusing. They put a sample ballot in the newspaper prior to the election, but no one piped up to complain it was confusing.
On election night, several liberal news shows said the Florida polls were closed and Gore won Florida when the polls in the Florida panhandle (heavily Republican) were open for another hour (Central time). Hearing this "news", many in the pangandle did not turn out to vote or went back home. Despite this, Bush won the initial count in Florida. Gore and the Democrats, incapable of being gracious losers, concocted a big conspiracy story. The Democrats lawyers also proceeded to attempt to block votes coming in from servicemen overseas (heavily Republican). They started recounts that were performed in a ridiculous manner. This despite Florida law being very clear about the conditions of recounts, for which this nonsense did not qualify. An activist Florida Supreme Court rewrote the law to allow it. The Dems had no problem with this. It was taken to the Supreme Court which ruled against them. This was obviously unjust in their eyes.
The Dems were also upset that Florida felons were not allowed to vote, even though this was clearly the state law. I've known since childhood that I would lose my right to vote and own firearms, if convicted of a felony. Approximately 66% of Florida felons are registered Democrats. Approximately 4% are registered Republicans.
If you want to talk about voting problems, how about the college kids in Wisconsin (largely Democrat) who bragged about voting multiple times? How about the New Yorkers (largely Democrat) who are illegally registered to vote in both New York and Florida (approx 5,000 did so)?
Democrats are anti-life (pro-abortion) and anti-death penalty. They believe in killing the innocent and saving the guilty. You really couldn't make this stuff up.
Sorry to state the obvious, but that is often necessary in these parts.
My best Windows experiences have been with Windows 2000. I bought a brand new laptop that came loaded with XP. It hard crashed (i.e. rebooted itself or the screen froze) on average more than one time per day that it was used. Performance also sucked. Eventually I got fed up and "upgraded" to Windows 2000. Very few stability or performance problems after that.
The same laptop ran Mandrake and later SUSE and Gentoo without ever having any stability issue. For me, Windows 2000 was the summit of Microsoft OS and XP was a step backwords. For me, Linux has always been much better than any Windows OS in nearly every way that is important to me. Your mileage may vary, especially for people who "don't know what they're doing".
I love when some teenager working at a burger joint and living in his mother's basement lectures on military strategy and tactics. That's a nice, simplistic case you have made there, as though the number of troops is the only criteria worth considering. What about the type and difficulty of the mission, the composition of our forces, support from allied forces both local and foreign, the size and composition of the opposing force, the terrain, etc.? When National Geographic wants to photograph a leopard in the wild, they send one stealthy photographer, not 10,000.
The force in Afghanistan certainly seems to be appropriate for the mission, and things appear to be generally under control there. In case you were not aware (probably watching CNN), a large percentage of Al Qaeda has been killed or captured. The rest are on the run. Bin Laden is probably in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and there are additional forces hunting him, including Pakistani forces and US CIA. The troops in Afghanistan are meant to secure that country while an orderly government is established.
I don't think Iraq had anything to do with Sept 11, either, but I do know that Hussein had terrorist training camps in his country, he paid the families of suicide bombers, he was harboring known terrorists like Abu Abas, he was making ongoing attacks on US pilots flying over his country, he was interfering with UN mandated inspections, documents have been reovered showing meetings were planned with Al Qaeda, and scads of politicians including Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Putin and many others from many nations believed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them against the US. Most of them just did not have the backbone to do anything about it.
Why don't you just come out and admit that you hate Bush simply because he is a Republican, and the Republicans gave Clinton such a hard time during his presidency.
Oh, and what are my military credentials? I was an officer in the US Marine Corps for six years. I am sure you have played a lot of Command & Conquer: Generals, though.
"So why not invade Saudi Arabia?... North Korea ... China"
Your argument is a typical response to the "We should do the humane thing." argument. Your argument uses the same flawed logic that "If a little of something is good, a lot must be great." In contrast, liberals don't believe things should be done, if they are difficult. "We shouldn't do that because someone might die." (Conveniently ignoring that people will die if we don't do that), or "Drug laws are difficult to enforce so we should abolish them." (What about murder and rape laws?)
In response to your question:
1. Despite what you may think about the American people, we prefer diplomacy first. We only took action in Iraq after Hussein invaded Kuwait and then again after he violated 17 UN resolutions, which were not being enforced by the UN. The US made more than an honest effort at diplomatic resolution in both cases. If you believe otherwise, you are deluding yourself, or Michael Moore or John Kerry is deceiving you. We have pursued long-term political and economic programs to influence nations like Saudi Arabia, China and North Korea. At times, we have probably resisted the necessity for war too long, as may have been the case with World War II.
2. We do not have the resources to clean up all of the world's problems in one year, and of course, we have our own problems with which to contend. We can't possibly do it all alone in a short timeframe, and many of our old "allies" have demonstrated they would rather profit from the problems than help correct them.
3. To bring humanitarian efforts to China through military action would result in an inhumane number of deaths. We can do something on an Iraq scale at the moment. We can't force the issue on a China scale, although other methods seem to be slowly working there.
4. As you can see, it is difficult to get the support of the vocal minority to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, let alone pursue humanitarian actions in places like Africa or the Middle East, at least when a Republican President is doing it. For all their empathetic talk, liberals don't care about their neighbors, let alone some ethnic person in a third world country. The only way a liberal would care about a US building being bombed is if he was in it at the time.
"Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori, eh?"
Some people live for themselves. Some people live and die for others. Since liberals believe every degenerate way of life is a valid lifestyle choice, I would not think they would question a life of charity and sacrifice as being "bad".
A coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave only taste death once. ~Julius Ceasar
1. It is not someone else's liberal/communist/socialist, drafted kid who is getting sent off to war. The military is mostly composed of conservatives for many reasons which should be painfully obvious from even your own posting. These conservatives are putting their neck on the line, even if some conservatives stay at home to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc. I spent six years in the US Marine Corps, and I consider myself a conservative, even though I am strongly pro-environment and moderately pro-choice. I am also very empathetic, but like a good parent, I don't think it is best for my kids to sit around whining, making excuses and blaming someone else for everything that happens. I teach my kids to walk, not to be carried their entire life. I also teach my kids to obey the law and be strong for those who are not (i.e. Iraq).
2. It is courageous and selfless to serve and to risk one's neck to protect the US and make Iraq and the rest of the world a better, safer place. The people serving in our military get a modest paycheck and little gratitude for risking their lives to eliminate brutal, genocidal lunatics who threaten world peace. I know liberals would prefer to let Saddam Hussein put Iraqi's through wood chippers, run terrorist training camps, pay for suicide bombers, and pursue WMD programs at his leisure because it is not their personal problem. What do these liberals most vocally complain about? They complain about the money it costs for the US to do this. That money could be spent on their favorite social program. My, how empathetic of them.
By the way, Democrats got the US into World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Both Gulf Wars were handled much better than either the Korean or Vietnam wars. Clinton got us into Bosnia, where we saved Muslims. Quite a few Democrats in Congress voted for both Gulf Wars. Portraying war as a Republican thing demonstrates great ignorance, lack of independent thought or dishonesty, as US Democrats often do.
The draft is a bad idea. We want a volunteer force. It is not the job of the US military to straighten out screw-ups.
or is this just a rehash of an old story?
and it has been considered a best practice for a looong time. Unfortunately, it requires a little bit of knowledge, comprehension, skill and time, and most computer users will have none of that, hence Windows.
TCO is very real, but most published TCO studies are virtually worthless. The concept of TCO measurement is valid, but most studies make a lot of assumptions that may or may not be relevent to your particular situation. A Microsoft funded TCO comparison, which is narrowly defined to make Windows look better than Linux, may not map well to the environment and requirements of your organization.
Hmmm, a lot of pieces seem to be missing.
"The problem with this is that if you already have a computer you probably don't have much need for the XBox."
Bingo! I already have a PC for PC games, and the mouse and keyboard are better for those games than Xbox controllers. My PC also has a better processor, better graphics, more RAM and, unlike Xbox 2, a large hard drive.
I will not reward Microsoft for creating PC games that won't run on my PC. Why should I spend my hard earned cash on an Xbox? Not for games, anyway. If I got one, it would be for hacking with Linux.
are screen and lsof.
Microsoft does not rest until it destroys its competitors, who then lay off workers. Microsoft can only employ so many people, and of course, it is shipping thousands of those few jobs overseas, particularly to India. Microsoft's monopoly has destroyed jobs.
In contrast, Open Source creates jobs for those who customize and support software in a competitive environment.
Hmmm, sounds like the software market for Mac OS X. Don't get me wrong, I like OS X almost as much as KDE on Linux, and I absolutely love my PowerBook. Some of these little $10 to $50 apps are also pretty cool and useful, like Konfabulator. I just find it amazing/disturbing/appalling that hardly anyone will give you the time of day on a Mac unless you pay them $20. These little apps are much cooler than the shareware I remember on Windows, but there is a much stronger FOSS community on Linux providing just about anything I need.