Strangely enough the lack of a paper trail was not one of the problems with my the system in St-Laurent. When I voted I marked my candidates then placed my ballot into a folder. After that one of the electoral officers took my folder and fed my ballot into a scanner before placing my ballot into a box.
The problem is that North american telcos are lazy. The ISP I work for is rolling out 24mb adsl2+ in Montreal. The local telco is sitting at 3mb and they don't care even though they are losing customers to the local cable co who provides much faster service.
This has already been proven to be completely untrue. If I hire my own programmer that programmer has to start from scratch (can't use OSS code) and duplicate thousands of hours of work already done or that programmer needs to spend a large amount of time synching with the lastest release of whatever software is being used as a base so it doesn't get left behind. It's actually much easier to hire a single developer to work officially on the project and then everyone benefits.
Many companies hire OSS deveopers to improve performance and add features critical to their buisness. A large number of Linux kernel developers are actually payed to work full time on the kernel. IBM is a notable example, so are adaptech, SGI, namesys, SuSE and Redhat. For companies that can't afford a full dev they often donate to OSDL instead.
Agreed. Even a good tech will get a cable wrong sometimes and often a cable tester will show up a marginal cable as ok. I've often fixed intermittant problems by ripping out all custom cables and putting in factory premade. Extra cable can be tied nicely and put out of the way.
If you honestly need a long custom cable than do it properly with wall mount jacks. This is both more reliable and easier to label.
Perhaps GoDaddy is blocking them not out of pure censorship, but because this scandal has revealed that one of the domains they manage doesn't have correct WHOIS information, which many registrars require in the TOS?
GoDaddy has a record of "shoot first ask questions later" when it comes to whois details. A previous employer used to have his domains shut down several times a year because the whois info pointed to the Dominican Republic and Godaddy just couldn't get their heads around the fact that the address was legit even if it looked strange. He eventually moved everything to a new registar to fix it.
Think about it: do kiddie porn and terrorism really affect more people in the world than say, domestic violence, or alcohol abuse, or even theft? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than lack of food, lack of sanitary water, low wages, or disease? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than hurricanes and tsunamis? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than war, cluster bombs, or unexploded mines?
This is a pointless arguement. The fact that we can't fix everything does not mean that we shouldn't make life better for those that we can. Just because we can't make life better for someone in some other part of the world does not mean that our part of the world shouldn't be kept as clean as possible. I expect the police of my country to arrest people who trade pictures of children being raped just as I expect them to investigate reported cases of domestic abuse or theft.
TOR is a prime example of idiots ruining a good idea. Instead of being used for free speech it gets used for anonymous forum spamming, untraceable bot attacks and DoS. It needs to just die.
Some of the analysis is wrong too. They conclude that a Linux monopoly is the most benficial result and that a windows/Linux duopoly won't benifit the market but history shows us thats wrong. Just think how much microsoft has improved windows since Linux started to be seen as a threat. Windows is now much more stable (don't laugh just try running NT4 sometime)than it used to be and they actually seem to be making the OS more secure.
Competition has also been good for Linux. Windows has forced the Linux world to be more user friendly, to install better and to become more flexable about Unix tradition and build a better system.
My desktop, laptop and servers all run Linux but I'm not so sure I would want to see a Linux monopoly. Monopolies cause complacancy and I would not want to miss out on the next advance in computing because a bunch of programemrs got lazy thinking there was no one to compete with.
The debian folks are being far too nice about this. I don't for the life of me understand why this guy has been tollerated for so long. He is a major reason why CD burning is more of a pain than it should be in Linux.
While CDRtools may be free the DVD writing tools from the same author are not. There is also the problem of CDRtools author pendantically sticking to his SCSI interface library and refusing to use any kernel interface other than the IDE-SCSI kernel interface because the other interfaces don't support CPU access or flatbed scanners (I'm not kidding) even though CDRtools is the only real user of that library. He is so stuck on the (0,0,0) interface format what when someone pointed out that device names work he imediatly announced he would add code to remove that ability. He has also been known to add strange delay loops and refuses to remove uneeded/obsolete warnings when interfacing with Linux.
"inscrutable error code" ? What are you using? A browser from 5 years ago?
My firefox presents me a helpfull explanation page and more importantly leaves the URL there for me to correct. Redirecting me would annoy me in the same way the old browser 404 page did by removing what I typed and making me type it in again from scratch.
But were the 2048 way systems running at different clock speeds? Or rather were the processors in each node running at different clock speeds? Last time I saw someone on linux-kernel mismatch processors it brought all sorts of interesting issues out.
I'm going to guess not very well at first. With all 4 cores having the abillity to run at different clocks speeds I doubt this qualifies as SMP anymore.
Most SMP code is tested on CPUs of equal clock speeds so odds are this is going to bring out all sorts of fun race conditions in Vista, Linux and *BSD and I'm personally not so sure I'm going to touch this until the resulting dust settles.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea.. it looks like a good one but this will take time for the software to mature.
Except that the difference in bytesize is not the only differnece between x86 and x86_64. X86_64 also fixes the register starvation issues that have plagued x86 since the XT days. Less register swapping often means more efficianct use of the rest of the CPU.
One of the largest drains on IT school budgets is the cost of licenses. From the article it appears they are focused not on "wow we use Linux" but we can put laptops in the hand of the students for substantially reduced cost.
A much less predictable cost is license management. Back in 2002 Microsoft came up with a new lisensing scheme that would have billed each school on a per machine basis whether it ran Microsoft software or not. Carrot: lower cost. Stick: a threat to demand an audit right around final exam time wich would have forced the schools to put everything else on the back burner and dedicate resources toward counting licenses and determining what machines ran what software. Anyone suppose those TCO studdies include the cost of an audit?
It's more a case of "Not Invented Here" symdrome than AMD not being willing to license hypertransport. AMD spun Hypertransport into it's own consortium so Intel would have had no problem getting on board if they had wanted to.
Home also doesn't let you change ownership of files either as well as a few other absolutely critical things that home doesn't do. Try it sometime: delete a user in Home then try to recover their files. Home is only usefull if you run everything as administrator wich is exactly what I wish people wouldn't do.
The only thing worse than XP Home is XP Family Edition.
If Linux was never started then the HURD would certainly be much better by now.
Actually the HURD kernel has been "almost done" since before the Linux kernel was even started so it's failure has nothing at all to do with having to compete for resources with the Linux kernel.
Don't need to be friends for that. The early warning system in the arctic that was supposed to be watching for incomming attacks from the USSR used tubes.. from the USSR. And that was at the height of the cold war.
This just isn't true..
Places who treat their workers badly tend to have a high employee churn and that costs the buisness dearly in the long run especially if it's technical staff who keep leaving. It also costs them in reputation with other buisnesses becuase they usually try to screw them too.
You on the other hand have a reputation to maintain and I can tell you a good reputation is worth gold when it comes to finding new work.
Take me for example.. I have a former employer who owes me about $20K right about now. I could have been a jerk about it.. shut down all his servers, sabatoged his buisness but I didn't. Turns out that benefited me in the long run since my current employer talked to a supplier of my former boss and got a glowing report back. That job may have sucked but this job is finally a place that treats me properly and gives me work I enjoy doing.
It's easy for an enginner to design something that looks brilliant on paper but fails to take on scienfitic factors (human error, costs) into account. Prior to my getting my first sysadmin I worked for my father who is a Civil Enginneer as a general survey assisten go fer etc. I can tell you that these sort of mistake were very common and we had regulairly send plans pack to the PEng who signed off on them for correction.
I should also note that it's not just Engineers with that problem. The instructions for my inhailor were explained to me as follows: "You need to puff as you breathe in but after you start breathing in not at the beginning of the breath then hold your breath for 15 seconds for the medication to work properly" I'm supposed to do this while I can't get a full breath? Thanks doc.
I think anyone who wants to be a professional anything where lives depend on them getting things right should spend 6 months working help desk. At least then they would have an accurate view of the human condition.
The trouble is you can't ban something people want to do.
I used to be in favor of banning certain forms of alcohol until I saw the result. Regular alcohol is too expensive? Rice wine (for cooking, very salty and very bad for you in large quanitites) can't get that? drugs.. can't get those? ARESOL PAINT (causes brain damage). The ban only affects people who wouldn't have had a problem with it anyways and in each case the ban caused a move to something so much worse.
Same goes for gambling.. ban poker? friendly poker with friends or sports betting. Ban small bets? Organised crime has something you can use. Personally? I'd rather be $20k in the hole with my bank than $5k to organised crime.
Addictions need feeding at all cost. Trying to stop the outlet of the addiction is like trying to stop yourself from being stabbed in the chest by grabing the blade with your bare hands. You need to reach for the wrist. In this case you need to deal with the CAUSE of the addiction. Counsiling, better facilities for people with mental illness etc. These people need to learn to deal with their lives without needing a distraction.
Are you saying that someone can come in, put down their money, play, and then demand it back when they lose?
People do this online all the time. Banks hate casinos almost as much as they hate porn so chargebacks are almost automatic. Just keep in mind that you will never be able to play there again and some casinos keep a rougue player list.
On an amusing note a few years back I worked for a creditcard processor that refunded a woman's money because she said her card had been stolen. Her next question (with her bank rep in on the 3 way call) "but what about the money I won?"
Got that one.. this nice girl calls me and asks if I can help her fix her laptop since she spilled water on it. After a bit of talking I stop and ask her how long ago it happened.
"5 minutes ago"
Further questioning brings out the fact that shes attempting to type on a still wet laptop. Managed to tell her to unplug, remove power and battery and leave it on it's side for the rest of the weekend. Barely managed to hang up my cell before falling over lauging.
I worked for a much smaller hosting company a few years ago during the great Cisco core router crash that took out most of the tier1 isps. (worldcom, GT etc). One of our customers calls in and says he understands that we are down but we absolutely must change the "server not found" message that comes up to something more friendly.
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Strangely enough the lack of a paper trail was not one of the problems with my the system in St-Laurent. When I voted I marked my candidates then placed my ballot into a folder. After that one of the electoral officers took my folder and fed my ballot into a scanner before placing my ballot into a box.
Instant paper trail.
The problem is that North american telcos are lazy. The ISP I work for is rolling out 24mb adsl2+ in Montreal. The local telco is sitting at 3mb and they don't care even though they are losing customers to the local cable co who provides much faster service.
A kneeboard is a board you ride with your knees while being pulled behind a boat. Some helpfull instructions.
This has already been proven to be completely untrue. If I hire my own programmer that programmer has to start from scratch (can't use OSS code) and duplicate thousands of hours of work already done or that programmer needs to spend a large amount of time synching with the lastest release of whatever software is being used as a base so it doesn't get left behind. It's actually much easier to hire a single developer to work officially on the project and then everyone benefits.
Many companies hire OSS deveopers to improve performance and add features critical to their buisness. A large number of Linux kernel developers are actually payed to work full time on the kernel. IBM is a notable example, so are adaptech, SGI, namesys, SuSE and Redhat. For companies that can't afford a full dev they often donate to OSDL instead.
Agreed. Even a good tech will get a cable wrong sometimes and often a cable tester will show up a marginal cable as ok. I've often fixed intermittant problems by ripping out all custom cables and putting in factory premade. Extra cable can be tied nicely and put out of the way. If you honestly need a long custom cable than do it properly with wall mount jacks. This is both more reliable and easier to label.
Perhaps GoDaddy is blocking them not out of pure censorship, but because this scandal has revealed that one of the domains they manage doesn't have correct WHOIS information, which many registrars require in the TOS?
GoDaddy has a record of "shoot first ask questions later" when it comes to whois details. A previous employer used to have his domains shut down several times a year because the whois info pointed to the Dominican Republic and Godaddy just couldn't get their heads around the fact that the address was legit even if it looked strange. He eventually moved everything to a new registar to fix it.
So your probably exactly right.
Think about it: do kiddie porn and terrorism really affect more people in the world than say, domestic violence, or alcohol abuse, or even theft? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than lack of food, lack of sanitary water, low wages, or disease? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than hurricanes and tsunamis? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than war, cluster bombs, or unexploded mines?
This is a pointless arguement. The fact that we can't fix everything does not mean that we shouldn't make life better for those that we can. Just because we can't make life better for someone in some other part of the world does not mean that our part of the world shouldn't be kept as clean as possible. I expect the police of my country to arrest people who trade pictures of children being raped just as I expect them to investigate reported cases of domestic abuse or theft.
TOR is a prime example of idiots ruining a good idea. Instead of being used for free speech it gets used for anonymous forum spamming, untraceable bot attacks and DoS. It needs to just die.
Some of the analysis is wrong too. They conclude that a Linux monopoly is the most benficial result and that a windows/Linux duopoly won't benifit the market but history shows us thats wrong. Just think how much microsoft has improved windows since Linux started to be seen as a threat. Windows is now much more stable (don't laugh just try running NT4 sometime)than it used to be and they actually seem to be making the OS more secure.
Competition has also been good for Linux. Windows has forced the Linux world to be more user friendly, to install better and to become more flexable about Unix tradition and build a better system.
My desktop, laptop and servers all run Linux but I'm not so sure I would want to see a Linux monopoly. Monopolies cause complacancy and I would not want to miss out on the next advance in computing because a bunch of programemrs got lazy thinking there was no one to compete with.
The debian folks are being far too nice about this. I don't for the life of me understand why this guy has been tollerated for so long. He is a major reason why CD burning is more of a pain than it should be in Linux. While CDRtools may be free the DVD writing tools from the same author are not. There is also the problem of CDRtools author pendantically sticking to his SCSI interface library and refusing to use any kernel interface other than the IDE-SCSI kernel interface because the other interfaces don't support CPU access or flatbed scanners (I'm not kidding) even though CDRtools is the only real user of that library. He is so stuck on the (0,0,0) interface format what when someone pointed out that device names work he imediatly announced he would add code to remove that ability. He has also been known to add strange delay loops and refuses to remove uneeded/obsolete warnings when interfacing with Linux.
"inscrutable error code" ? What are you using? A browser from 5 years ago?
My firefox presents me a helpfull explanation page and more importantly leaves the URL there for me to correct. Redirecting me would annoy me in the same way the old browser 404 page did by removing what I typed and making me type it in again from scratch.
But were the 2048 way systems running at different clock speeds? Or rather were the processors in each node running at different clock speeds? Last time I saw someone on linux-kernel mismatch processors it brought all sorts of interesting issues out.
I'm going to guess not very well at first. With all 4 cores having the abillity to run at different clocks speeds I doubt this qualifies as SMP anymore.
Most SMP code is tested on CPUs of equal clock speeds so odds are this is going to bring out all sorts of fun race conditions in Vista, Linux and *BSD and I'm personally not so sure I'm going to touch this until the resulting dust settles.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea.. it looks like a good one but this will take time for the software to mature.
Except that the difference in bytesize is not the only differnece between x86 and x86_64. X86_64 also fixes the register starvation issues that have plagued x86 since the XT days. Less register swapping often means more efficianct use of the rest of the CPU.
One of the largest drains on IT school budgets is the cost of licenses. From the article it appears they are focused not on "wow we use Linux" but we can put laptops in the hand of the students for substantially reduced cost.
A much less predictable cost is license management. Back in 2002 Microsoft came up with a new lisensing scheme that would have billed each school on a per machine basis whether it ran Microsoft software or not. Carrot: lower cost. Stick: a threat to demand an audit right around final exam time wich would have forced the schools to put everything else on the back burner and dedicate resources toward counting licenses and determining what machines ran what software. Anyone suppose those TCO studdies include the cost of an audit?
It's more a case of "Not Invented Here" symdrome than AMD not being willing to license hypertransport. AMD spun Hypertransport into it's own consortium so Intel would have had no problem getting on board if they had wanted to.
Home also doesn't let you change ownership of files either as well as a few other absolutely critical things that home doesn't do. Try it sometime: delete a user in Home then try to recover their files. Home is only usefull if you run everything as administrator wich is exactly what I wish people wouldn't do.
The only thing worse than XP Home is XP Family Edition.
If Linux was never started then the HURD would certainly be much better by now.
Actually the HURD kernel has been "almost done" since before the Linux kernel was even started so it's failure has nothing at all to do with having to compete for resources with the Linux kernel.
Don't need to be friends for that. The early warning system in the arctic that was supposed to be watching for incomming attacks from the USSR used tubes.. from the USSR. And that was at the height of the cold war.
This just isn't true.. Places who treat their workers badly tend to have a high employee churn and that costs the buisness dearly in the long run especially if it's technical staff who keep leaving. It also costs them in reputation with other buisnesses becuase they usually try to screw them too. You on the other hand have a reputation to maintain and I can tell you a good reputation is worth gold when it comes to finding new work. Take me for example.. I have a former employer who owes me about $20K right about now. I could have been a jerk about it.. shut down all his servers, sabatoged his buisness but I didn't. Turns out that benefited me in the long run since my current employer talked to a supplier of my former boss and got a glowing report back. That job may have sucked but this job is finally a place that treats me properly and gives me work I enjoy doing.
It's easy for an enginner to design something that looks brilliant on paper but fails to take on scienfitic factors (human error, costs) into account. Prior to my getting my first sysadmin I worked for my father who is a Civil Enginneer as a general survey assisten go fer etc. I can tell you that these sort of mistake were very common and we had regulairly send plans pack to the PEng who signed off on them for correction.
I should also note that it's not just Engineers with that problem. The instructions for my inhailor were explained to me as follows: "You need to puff as you breathe in but after you start breathing in not at the beginning of the breath then hold your breath for 15 seconds for the medication to work properly" I'm supposed to do this while I can't get a full breath? Thanks doc.
I think anyone who wants to be a professional anything where lives depend on them getting things right should spend 6 months working help desk. At least then they would have an accurate view of the human condition.
Hey microsoft it's the year 2000 calling.. they want their buisness plan back.
Seriously. Wasn't exactly this done already? How can they patent this?
The trouble is you can't ban something people want to do.
I used to be in favor of banning certain forms of alcohol until I saw the result. Regular alcohol is too expensive? Rice wine (for cooking, very salty and very bad for you in large quanitites) can't get that? drugs.. can't get those? ARESOL PAINT (causes brain damage). The ban only affects people who wouldn't have had a problem with it anyways and in each case the ban caused a move to something so much worse.
Same goes for gambling.. ban poker? friendly poker with friends or sports betting. Ban small bets? Organised crime has something you can use. Personally? I'd rather be $20k in the hole with my bank than $5k to organised crime.
Addictions need feeding at all cost. Trying to stop the outlet of the addiction is like trying to stop yourself from being stabbed in the chest by grabing the blade with your bare hands. You need to reach for the wrist. In this case you need to deal with the CAUSE of the addiction. Counsiling, better facilities for people with mental illness etc. These people need to learn to deal with their lives without needing a distraction.
People do this online all the time. Banks hate casinos almost as much as they hate porn so chargebacks are almost automatic. Just keep in mind that you will never be able to play there again and some casinos keep a rougue player list.
On an amusing note a few years back I worked for a creditcard processor that refunded a woman's money because she said her card had been stolen. Her next question (with her bank rep in on the 3 way call) "but what about the money I won?"
Got that one.. this nice girl calls me and asks if I can help her fix her laptop since she spilled water on it. After a bit of talking I stop and ask her how long ago it happened.
"5 minutes ago"
Further questioning brings out the fact that shes attempting to type on a still wet laptop. Managed to tell her to unplug, remove power and battery and leave it on it's side for the rest of the weekend. Barely managed to hang up my cell before falling over lauging.
I worked for a much smaller hosting company a few years ago during the great Cisco core router crash that took out most of the tier1 isps. (worldcom, GT etc). One of our customers calls in and says he understands that we are down but we absolutely must change the "server not found" message that comes up to something more friendly.