Look at it this way. There is an island with 3 guys. Each one has its job as they try to survive. The Asian's job is to catch the fish and bring it home. The European's job is to spend just an hour finding bait and consuming the fish, the American's job is to eat the fish.
That is how the world economy is functioning right now. America does not produce. THey only consume and give away their wealth to Asia while charging for it. In time the Asian will say fuck this. I will just get my own boat and eat my own fish.
Consumption is fine if it is equally matched with production. But it is not anymore. The only reason we are not broke now is because of artificial debt. Those who produce will get rich. Unless America produces which would require us to work for less and if we pay back our debt and raise interest rates the cost of living will go down substantially and deflation can give us the affordability required.
That link I did with Peter Schiff correctly predicted the housing crunch and the great recession back in 2003! He looked at debt and production and consumption relationships. Not thing exotic. He is predicting now a bigger crash is yet to come. He mentioned New Zealand has an excellent debt to assets ratio and would be a great place to buy bonds.
Compared to Greece, the saving grace of American debt is that it is denominated in paper backed by nothing that the nation can print.
To hyperinflate will be no fun, for people with savings, and people trying to buy goods (what country will sell to you if your money is getting drastically worth less all the time), but we are not quite Greece.... America has an option, for lack of a better term, to reboot for no initial cost, other than building up it's credit from scratch again.
You post mentions the problem.
Check out what happened to the Weimar when the Germans did this? Hmmm look at the price of gold? Chart look somewhat familiar?
THe end result was riots, economic collapse, defaults, runs on the bank, and Hitler! Why did Germany do this? To pay back its debt. Sound familiar again?
The fiscal cliff is not a debate of paying for a new budget. It is a debate whether to pay your existing bill! When you raise the ceiling you say "Mr. Investor I wont pay you!" I will charge you again to pay for the other charge instead. The investor says ok, America is rich and will eventually pay me back so it is ok... I guess.
What happens is after 130% to 150% debt to GDP is you have a debt so fucking big that you can take every dollar from every man, woman, and child and still owe money! Something has to give and all it takes is for someone to say "Uncle Sam. Your debt is no good. I want out!"
Then everyone freaks out and other bankers refuse and there is no money to pay people back yet cover interest. That is what happened in Greece.
If Bernanke is retarded and signs point to this he will simply print more money to pay it back. Then you have hyperinflation and the banks wont accept them as payments as they wont be worthy anything. Children burned money for fire in Germany as it was cheaper than the wood costs. No one will want to do business and oil will be traded in another currency such as Gold or Yen.
Then the party is over and America is a 3rd world nation or just a poor one like Greece. This is a very serious threat that no one sees and scares the hell out of me. I am not a gold bug as I do not have as much to save as I would like in case anyone is wondering. Japan will probably go next.
This my slashdot friends is why America is poorer and in decline. It is why your wages have remained stagnant yet you do not feel as rich as your parents. It is why health insurance and rent goes up year after year despite stagnant wages. Zero interest rates, free money, and deregulation are creating an environment of rising prices.
... and 10 years ago Vietnam was near the rock bottom.
China too was crap at 56th percent as well 20 years ago. Look at it now? Vietnam is growing rapidly because of cheap labor, infrastructure, and its close location to China. As cost accountants find ways to cut costs from the greedy CHinese who are demanding $1.60 an hour a Vietnamese man will do it for $.65 an hour!
That adds up and helps boast the share price for these companies as it can be easily shipped to China next.
My Canadian and Australian friends get paid more and have a much better standard than here. IT wages (just 1 example) have not risen at all in 10 years. In Australia you can net 6 figures like it is 1999 again after only 10 years! I see people with 10 years here who make maybe 65k. They can get homes that are more affordable too.
In Canada you can make up to a huge $40,000 salary fresh out of college! States? Here is your headphone set for your call center job. The pay is $10/hr or $17k a year! I do not know anyone who makes as low as Americans if you do not have experience not to mention the college costs are 1/8th of here so you do not have to live at home with Mommy and Daddy with $900 a month student loans while you work as a doorman at BestBuy to pay for it.... and they do not have to pay healthcare costs which save another $500 a month too on top of that. The US is crap man unless you are a middle manager to CEO. Everyone else is fighting for scraps it seems since 2002.
I am right now about to take a new job that pays more than my 2000 did. About damn time and yet sad after 12 years. For the average Joe we are certainly in decline and poorer as inflation that is not counted as health care costs, gas, food, mortgage, rent, auto insurance, and other things have gone up a very LARGE margin in 12 years.
The US has been in decline for awhile since its peak in the 1990s. GDP of China is almost equal to the US TODAY! Once this happens, where bond investors decide the US is no good on its commitment to pay it back ala Greece the decline will surge down FAR similiar to Greece, Spain, and Portugal.
Until Americans are willing to work for less like their asia counterparts and be a creditor nation rather than a debtor nation the slide will continue. FYI the UK was the #1 super power in the 18th and 19th centuries. The depression of 1873 and debt similiar to American style trading today, brought it down where in 2012 they never fully recovered.
The US will join the UK unless it pays its debt and people work for less. 2016 is where CHina will overtake the US. India too I would imagine will overtake it a few years after that and perhaps Vietnam in the next decade?
Go use it rather than hold on to your beliefs? Go under help about FF and update and give it a try for 10 minutes and tell me if it is now much better?
I submitted a story last july with Firefox 13 gets benchmarked here. You can do a search and look it up? I wouldn't touch before last summer but if you have Chrome Firefox is certainly an alternative again. It is prone to bad releases every now and then. Also the quality of the code is up now too so the old update jokes are invalid.
Look at the popularity of XP? Something insane like 300,000,000 still are using it today! with these machines that probably only have 512- 1 gb of ram ram usage is performance. XP swaps like a mofo too so less hard drive thrashing by less memory usage will help on such ancient platforms.
On mine and probably your machine yeah we have 8 gigs so who the fuck cares. But on these the companies and users see no reason to upgrade and Firefox 3.6 and 4 were getting near unusable after 2 or 3 tabs. Maybe after 2014 when XP is eol that number will change, but joe six packs will still use XP for moany more years to come sadly and as IE 8 stops working on more and more sites with jquery and google dropping they will switch to FF.
I will also add the comments about replacing a perfectly good working infrastructure with freeware that is untested is also spoken as someone who has never had to loose $200,000 an hour of downtime!
I am not bashing SAMBA as it works great on Macs and Linux PCs for connecting to a Windows network. But people act like that and SQL are something you can pickup and replace and move on.
Even opensource software which is much better as they do not have a financial interest in vendor lockin mean steps and changes from moving to mysql to Postgresql as an example.
Somersault:Remember that perfectly good working Windows infrastructure we installed that we are still paying off? Where you will lose your job if I dare sneeze near them let alone touch or change anything, and any downtime will cost the company hundreds of thousands an hour?
Boss: Yeah
Somersault: I have a brilliant idea! I was at this site called slashdot and want to make a statement about proprietary software while saving mere thousands of dollars while changing our mission critical million dollar infrastructure...
Boss:Uh, what?!
Somersault:You see! Microsoft SUX. We are slaves to this proprietary environment that has served us fine and works perfectly and want to use this freeware called SAMBA 4, which well should do what we already have. Think about the thousands saved and I we could be all so cool and the CEO will think WOW, what brilliant IT guys we have who swear by using only free software and not what works already that is well supported, documented, and tested!! It has to be soooo much better because it is not made by Microsoft and...
Boss:Somersault! I am having a bad day as it is shouldn't you be doing something right now? No I do not mean reading slashdot either! Pffft kids today. Oh and go get me a cup of coffee while you are at it? Finish your work and I will sign your internship papers so you can get your first IT job when you get your degree?
To prove I am not a troll, I will say AD is atrocious! The real risk is anything that changes the scheme permanently changes AD itself. THe only remedy is to use ASDI edit which most respected IT professionals will rough you up in the parking lott for doing so. It also is why the companies pay $150 an hour to pay someone to install Exchange or Sharepoint. A botched installation will adversely impact everything company wide!
That my friend is why you do not touch these things! The price is worth every penny to the money making enterprise. A small business under 20 employees does need AD as a simple server on a share will work fine. The owner can tell the user how to use it on the first day. Samba is not perfect and people who have tried to use it university environments report issues like corruption, all of the sudden passowrds not being accepted, and other glitches that the $1200 server version of Windows just keeps on working.
SAMBA is great for linux and Mac computers connecting to an enterprise network. But to replace a server or DC?! oh FUCK NO.
Firefox is no longer the bloated piece of crap it once was while Chrome was new. It uses the least amount of ram of any browser. It no longer requires 4 gigs of ram and a quad core like version 4. Plugins no longer break with the latest release either between versions. Chrome has gotten buggy and much slower in comparison. In 2011 Chrome would the only browser besides old IE that could run on 5 year old hardware. Now firefox runs as fast as 2.0 on these systems.
I have seen many XP SP 2 machines get Windows rot too when I contracted with a hospital so they could run their IE 6 apps. The best practice was to re-image. Any install is always fatest fresh and with +500 patches it will slow down as half the time the code is doing workarounds to prevent itself from getting infected. The age is showing.
XP 2 is not actively supported anymore and if you have such machines in production then you are asking for trouble unless they are sealed off in a DMZ with no internet access. I believe in 2010 support was dropped but I could be wrong. I do not know anyone who asks me to support it anymore. Such machines which run machinery NEVER GET TOUCHED once in productionl.
SOmething complex with lots of dependencies are just going to cause problems as who the hell knows what.config files will change and crap being spewed all over the file system.
The official ports patch everything and it has to pass the FreeBSD QA and integrates with it well into the system..deb files are similiar
FreeBSD... actually BSD is very newsworthy as it holds an integral part of computer history. Like other important pieces of history such as VMS, IBM 360, and other gone technologies BSD will be part of it that we owe a gratitude for.
We have the internet thanks to it. TCP/IP v. 4 came to be on BSD Unix 4.2 in the early 1980s. It is so bizaare how Linux overtook it and shocking as it took 10 years before Linux became a somewhat decent server OS that can play with the big boys from a toy. FreeBSD was already there. BSD was opensource before GNU was even around and had an academic following before linux was twinkle in Linuses eye.
In the 1990s I have heard of BSDI to run BBS and a few webservers. But not Linux. That was years later
FreeBSD was very popular 10 years ago. In my opinion those were its golden days.
BSD Unix golden days were 4.2 - 4.4 where TCP/IP was developed back in the early 1980s and Sun's Gossling worked on the kernel. Its freeBSD counterpart golden days were 4.0 - 4.12 before it went to shit and Linux/Ubuntu took over.
10 years ago FreeBSD was ahead of Linux and it drove me nuts to see slashdot down all the time (not so common now) as Linux couldn't scale for more than 2 cpus and crashed or halted when it had a shitload of network connections. FreeBSD could run smoothly on that old 486 just fine for thousands of connections!
FreeBSD was more user friendly (4.x and earlier) as you could go to/usr/ports/examples/cvsup and/etc and edit.sh files to do all sorts of crazy things like check your main update servers at 3am every night and sync to the ports... just uncomment this line! FYI I last used it in 2004/2005 so I might have got that directory wrong. Linux.RC scripts are more like programs iwth if/else code than.ini files:-(
You can't really hack them as they are programs. Not things to turn on and off as easily.
Unix geeks used Linux and FreeBSD and if you bought it at any college bookstore it had a nice manual too which is my favorite unix book. It discusses how to use emacs and vi and other things much better than the crappy linux manpages. Infact, FreeBSD has/etc/share/doc with much more detailed things and its man pages were more detailed. Example man/etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.
FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.
Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors. Linux has a journaling file system now. It can do async i/o and other things that only FreeBSD could as FreeBSD became bloated and buggy. Rest in peace.
Consumers may not understand technical terms. THey do understand performance and seeing oly 4 gigs of ram and not 8 that they paid for.
The reason XP slows down is XP does not include a registry defragger. Windows 7 will run it every so often if you hear a sudden surge in disk usage and go control alt delete and then clock resource monitor and you see HBSstorehive or something similiar running. Installing a lot of newer software will trigger it to go on. In 2012 I would not be surprised if most if 50% of the CPU time is spent crunching if/else statements to work around security holes and virii infections. Each patch means Windows XP does more and more things to workaround its internals to cover one virus or trojan exploit. XP has what +400 updates from 2001?
Windows 7 slows a little bit too if you boot off a fresh 2009 install when you update the +180 updates.
XP is a dog on my system because: -SATA has no command que support -Is optimized for Pnetium IIIs - Swap file pages like a mofo even if plenty of ram is available - Poor SMP performance - Crappy version of IE - Poor networking - No 64 bit support - Kernel and service impersonation (HUGE SECURITY RISK) - No DEP on all services - No ASLR - No exception handling security as VC+10 runtime is not supported - Drivers can crash system much easier - No driver rootkit protection at boot - No tunderbolt support -No USB 3 support - No UEFI Support - No touchscreen support
I could go on and on. If you install XP on a modern system the hard drive will bottleneck and spin like mad as it can't multitask as an ancient UDMA IDE can. That old pentium IV in the corner will perform i/o better sadly. That and the paging algorithm will make the situation worse. If you were lucky and found a corporate system Dell or HP might include a special SATA driver that can support command queing as MS disabled this to make Vista look faster. Threading is more limited as it is designed for 1-2 CPUs as well and Windows 7 heavily utilizes the threading for i/o operations. If it were not demand from corporations the hardware would not even run it today. Infact, I read posts here where IT is running VS to reverse engineer Windows 7 drivers and wasting a week of labor trying to hack these drivers and create.ini files just to run XP!! It is getting rediculous. The costs involved that were hidden could be saved just upgrading their ancient app so they could upgrade to Windows 7 instead. The bean counters say they are saving money without realizing $3,000 in labor is going out the door just trying to boot the fuckers with XP that management is not seeing. Only hmm IT is fucking up again not delivering my new pc what are they doing?!
Windows 7 has - Homegroup - Supperior security - Aero Peak - Instant search - HTML 5 support - basic touch - saved searches - restore points now with shadow data to undo deletions - Registry defragger - Sharing between users with public and private folders in the my documents settings - Better support for modern hardware - Speed improvements due to it being compilied to support better CPUs (more registers and SSE3 etc). - Better graphics - Sleep support and power efficiency
A regular user who is not technical will notice a few things immediately. He might be a little irritated at change at first. But the the instant search where you type acme sales 2009 and then enter to open a particular spreadsheet out of hundreds is sweet! No suspend but sleep is nice as well as the power savings and they are enabled by default. He or she will also notice the aero peak which is nice when you have +10 things opened. With IE 9 you can just hover the mouse over it and see a graphical preview of all your tabs. Jumplists are included as well if you do not want to type the name of the website or thing you are looking for in office with instant search. Infact, I have not used the all programs -> and browse for my app in a long time with the start
I am fascinated by XP loyalists as I reply to them a lot in slashdot as I try to understand the psychology a little bit. I am not attacking you. Just pointing out that consumers drive economics and things are not as simple as they seem. People listen to the market and the corps just follow demand dictated by the invisible hand in economic terms. If someone takes the moral high ground then someone else will fullfil that role instead. Economics 101. People love their big hulking SUVS and trucks and showing off how much money they make to people less fortunate.
As a consumer (back to operating systems) I do not want XP. It is 11 years old, insecure, slow on modern hardware, and has issues with drivers. For the record I shared some of the psychology of users like yourself when Vista came out and I wiped a new laptop with XP temporary. However, I realized it is dated and felt I was cheating myself and my customers if I wanted to stay in I.T. if I didn't know it. I then discovered instant search and I was hooked. The ribbon was annoying too but my professor in business school showed me what you could do and i loved typing in "acme sales 2009" and my word and excel documents showed up! Albiet didn't like its performance. I had an older desktop donated to someone return with XP on it in 2009 which was just 3 years old. It felt quite dated to use it on such a system I had a high regard too.
Anyway when Windows 7 came out I was happy and thought everyone but corporations would switch within the next year or 2 due to the great recession which is understandable to a certain extent. People on slashdot thought it was the best hting and everyone would upgrade within 6 months and were shocked the corps and some users like yourself shunned it. My response was "gee lets get rid of that IE 6 app that cost $500,000 during the great recession that makes them $700,000 a year and already have for unproven software that brings no value to the shareholders". Got mixed moderation for that but as stories came in slashdotters learned it was IE holding Windows 7 back.
Consumers voted with their wallets with XP during Vista. ANd Windows 7 a year and a half after XP! XP lost due to demand after Windows 7. No one seeks it. People who use already have it. Not pay more money for it again and actively seek it. At least 95% of them do.
Windows 8 is flying off the shelf as OEMs can not get enough touch screen devices in the store to sell. So consumers do demand METRO. Just not on a traditional laptop or desktop. The market speaks and the market also shows slower Windows 7 growth as well for conservative types and offices who are finally ditching XP and upgrading their equipment and software. So there is demand for both right now as I agree Windows 7 is better for non touch computers. THe market did punish MS quite well during Vista and we will see with Windows 8 as the cell phone market has razor thin to no margins on software. Maybe Windows 9/blue when it comes out next year will fix some of this? Yes Windows will have an annual release and the corps are going to loooove that... smirk
Amen. But these kinds of people assume everyone else must be as equally self-serving as themselves, so they can't accept that someone might be motivated by something other than money.
I notice the same people who slam environmental scientists as money grabbers have no problem listening to Exxon funded studies showing the opposite. I sense bias and listening to Fox News, Rush, and Hannity. 10s of millions of people listen to these shows and believe it.
A someone who used to live in Alaska I can tell you the summers are wetter and cooler even if the winters are milder. Cold wet rains hurt food production in Alberta. You might have more hot summer days where that never occured decades ago but the cold rains that normally would be spread further south hurt as much as the shorter growing season in the past.
I am assuming your are British by your post. But in the States the change can be far more drastic and different as we have semi arid and arid climates in the central and western sections. Go google the "Dustbowls"? They almost destroyed the US agriculture in the 1930s as the dust storms swamped crops for thousands of miles.
Land is leased and owned by investors with 30 year leases. It is changing so quickly you can't just switch crops. In a dry region you could grow corn in a wet year but wheat is a better bet. Now if it is semi arid a dry spell will mean a desert year and it is gone. These land owners are 100,000s in debt and many retirement accounts are invested in land flipping in these areas. If wheat can not be produced everyone losses. I used to live in Alaska and the opposite problem is happening. Winter wheats you think would grow better in milder winters and longer frost free season.
The problem is your English summers are now farther north. We got maybe 1 good summer of 20 - 25C temperatures for several weeks and weeks and weeks of cold rain that would rot wheat fields. It is getting progressively worse where even potatoes are molding and getting fungus infections from the non stop summer rains. Who cares if the winters are milder as -20C warms to -7C. You can't grow anything in either case. The cooler summers really hurt and is annoying for Alaskas who endured a tough winter and just get 10C rain for 6 weeks straight in their brief summer off of winter.
There's just no chance that the people with money who pay the people with guns will be able to see beyond their lust for more power and more money. This means things will go to hell with large amounts of certainty.
If there were profit in saving the world [from those who put us there] then they would be interested in saving the world. They have no interest in that. They might entertain the notion if they were guaranteed to come out on top and in control once the crisis was averted, of course, because this is all about giving up power and control.
I am an army of one. I cannot make a difference. But if I saw an army of many marching down the street, I would be inclined to join.
And beyond this, the denial is STILL out there being preached. First they said "it's not real!" Then they said "it's not our fault! It's nature!" Yet in any of this none are willing to make changes or do anything about it. But I don't blame the businesses entirely. It reminds me of the economy of slavery.
There was a town near New Orleans which abolished slavery before Lincoln did. The surrounding areas, of course, did not. Before long, local business could not compete with outside business. This town was forced into allowing slavery once again. Lincoln was successful because it was a unilateral decision. Individuals cannot make an effective change. Small groups cannot make an effective change. It takes unilateral change in order to work.
So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.
So you see, the kind of change we require is simply impossible without world war. And that kind of war is simply not going to happen.
And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.
Ok. Lets put your money where your mouth is? Are you willing to walk or bike 15 to 20 miles to work each day both ways without your car? Are you willing to go out of your way to buy food that is grown local to your area rather than going to a mega Walmart or grocer where it is shipped in on gas guzzling trucks? Are you willing to pay 20% more for any product you buy that is made in America or Canada and does not use a guzzling cargo ship which makes as much CO2 as 50 million cars a year! (Yes i heard it is that much)
Then you are the problem. The greedy companies are just listening to their customers. Not being assholes. Unless you and every man, woman, and child are willing to take these drastic steps you are part of the problem. And even my solutions still generated CO2. Just a much smaller amount but still. Unless you are willing to say goodbye to your car forget it.
Now if you own a truck or SUV then I would be dying laughing.
Also it is funny to mention but Obama didn't bankrupt GM. He decided to let them go through bankruptacy court FIRST. Keep in mind if GM could pay back 100 cents for every dollar then it would not be insolvent would it?
That is the whole point of a bankruptacy. So the bankers can sell what little assets that is left with a judge as a mediator. So the judge looked for a seller and Uncle Barack was the buyer. The terms were.26 for every 1.00 or he walked. But but but.. that is wrong!?
Well then show me who is dumb enough on Earth to purchase the company at that price? That was the higher bidder and if Obama didn't do it and paid 1.00 for every 1.00 the republicans would be screaming IMPEACHMENT... THEFT and would be accused of overpaying. It is hypocritical and you can't win either way in such a scenario. Private companies do this all the time. Look at AMD? The reason AMD can't find a buyer? They are waiting for bankruptacy court first so they do not have to pay the debt.
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Look at it this way. There is an island with 3 guys. Each one has its job as they try to survive. The Asian's job is to catch the fish and bring it home. The European's job is to spend just an hour finding bait and consuming the fish, the American's job is to eat the fish.
That is how the world economy is functioning right now. America does not produce. THey only consume and give away their wealth to Asia while charging for it. In time the Asian will say fuck this. I will just get my own boat and eat my own fish.
Consumption is fine if it is equally matched with production. But it is not anymore. The only reason we are not broke now is because of artificial debt. Those who produce will get rich. Unless America produces which would require us to work for less and if we pay back our debt and raise interest rates the cost of living will go down substantially and deflation can give us the affordability required.
That link I did with Peter Schiff correctly predicted the housing crunch and the great recession back in 2003! He looked at debt and production and consumption relationships. Not thing exotic. He is predicting now a bigger crash is yet to come. He mentioned New Zealand has an excellent debt to assets ratio and would be a great place to buy bonds.
I saw 11 trillion GDP for China just yesterday. I will correct myself if I am wrong as that is how I came to the conclusion in a few more years.
Compared to Greece, the saving grace of American debt is that it is denominated in paper backed by nothing that the nation can print.
To hyperinflate will be no fun, for people with savings, and people trying to buy goods (what country will sell to you if your money is getting drastically worth less all the time), but we are not quite Greece.... America has an option, for lack of a better term, to reboot for no initial cost, other than building up it's credit from scratch again.
You post mentions the problem.
Check out what happened to the Weimar when the Germans did this? Hmmm look at the price of gold? Chart look somewhat familiar?
THe end result was riots, economic collapse, defaults, runs on the bank, and Hitler! Why did Germany do this? To pay back its debt. Sound familiar again?
The fiscal cliff is not a debate of paying for a new budget. It is a debate whether to pay your existing bill! When you raise the ceiling you say "Mr. Investor I wont pay you!" I will charge you again to pay for the other charge instead. The investor says ok, America is rich and will eventually pay me back so it is ok ... I guess.
What happens is after 130% to 150% debt to GDP is you have a debt so fucking big that you can take every dollar from every man, woman, and child and still owe money! Something has to give and all it takes is for someone to say "Uncle Sam. Your debt is no good. I want out!"
Then everyone freaks out and other bankers refuse and there is no money to pay people back yet cover interest. That is what happened in Greece.
If Bernanke is retarded and signs point to this he will simply print more money to pay it back. Then you have hyperinflation and the banks wont accept them as payments as they wont be worthy anything. Children burned money for fire in Germany as it was cheaper than the wood costs. No one will want to do business and oil will be traded in another currency such as Gold or Yen.
Then the party is over and America is a 3rd world nation or just a poor one like Greece. This is a very serious threat that no one sees and scares the hell out of me. I am not a gold bug as I do not have as much to save as I would like in case anyone is wondering. Japan will probably go next.
This my slashdot friends is why America is poorer and in decline. It is why your wages have remained stagnant yet you do not feel as rich as your parents. It is why health insurance and rent goes up year after year despite stagnant wages. Zero interest rates, free money, and deregulation are creating an environment of rising prices.
... and 10 years ago Vietnam was near the rock bottom.
China too was crap at 56th percent as well 20 years ago. Look at it now? Vietnam is growing rapidly because of cheap labor, infrastructure, and its close location to China. As cost accountants find ways to cut costs from the greedy CHinese who are demanding $1.60 an hour a Vietnamese man will do it for $.65 an hour!
That adds up and helps boast the share price for these companies as it can be easily shipped to China next.
My Canadian and Australian friends get paid more and have a much better standard than here. IT wages (just 1 example) have not risen at all in 10 years. In Australia you can net 6 figures like it is 1999 again after only 10 years! I see people with 10 years here who make maybe 65k. They can get homes that are more affordable too.
In Canada you can make up to a huge $40,000 salary fresh out of college! States? Here is your headphone set for your call center job. The pay is $10/hr or $17k a year! I do not know anyone who makes as low as Americans if you do not have experience not to mention the college costs are 1/8th of here so you do not have to live at home with Mommy and Daddy with $900 a month student loans while you work as a doorman at BestBuy to pay for it. ... and they do not have to pay healthcare costs which save another $500 a month too on top of that. The US is crap man unless you are a middle manager to CEO. Everyone else is fighting for scraps it seems since 2002.
I am right now about to take a new job that pays more than my 2000 did. About damn time and yet sad after 12 years. For the average Joe we are certainly in decline and poorer as inflation that is not counted as health care costs, gas, food, mortgage, rent, auto insurance, and other things have gone up a very LARGE margin in 12 years.
The US has been in decline for awhile since its peak in the 1990s. GDP of China is almost equal to the US TODAY! Once this happens, where bond investors decide the US is no good on its commitment to pay it back ala Greece the decline will surge down FAR similiar to Greece, Spain, and Portugal.
Until Americans are willing to work for less like their asia counterparts and be a creditor nation rather than a debtor nation the slide will continue. FYI the UK was the #1 super power in the 18th and 19th centuries. The depression of 1873 and debt similiar to American style trading today, brought it down where in 2012 they never fully recovered.
The US will join the UK unless it pays its debt and people work for less. 2016 is where CHina will overtake the US. India too I would imagine will overtake it a few years after that and perhaps Vietnam in the next decade?
Go use it rather than hold on to your beliefs? Go under help about FF and update and give it a try for 10 minutes and tell me if it is now much better?
I submitted a story last july with Firefox 13 gets benchmarked here. You can do a search and look it up? I wouldn't touch before last summer but if you have Chrome Firefox is certainly an alternative again. It is prone to bad releases every now and then. Also the quality of the code is up now too so the old update jokes are invalid.
There are many old machines out there.
Look at the popularity of XP? Something insane like 300,000,000 still are using it today! with these machines that probably only have 512- 1 gb of ram ram usage is performance. XP swaps like a mofo too so less hard drive thrashing by less memory usage will help on such ancient platforms.
On mine and probably your machine yeah we have 8 gigs so who the fuck cares. But on these the companies and users see no reason to upgrade and Firefox 3.6 and 4 were getting near unusable after 2 or 3 tabs. Maybe after 2014 when XP is eol that number will change, but joe six packs will still use XP for moany more years to come sadly and as IE 8 stops working on more and more sites with jquery and google dropping they will switch to FF.
I will also add the comments about replacing a perfectly good working infrastructure with freeware that is untested is also spoken as someone who has never had to loose $200,000 an hour of downtime!
I am not bashing SAMBA as it works great on Macs and Linux PCs for connecting to a Windows network. But people act like that and SQL are something you can pickup and replace and move on.
Even opensource software which is much better as they do not have a financial interest in vendor lockin mean steps and changes from moving to mysql to Postgresql as an example.
I can see it all right now
Somersault: Hey, boss!
Boss: Yeah
Somersault:Remember that perfectly good working Windows infrastructure we installed that we are still paying off? Where you will lose your job if I dare sneeze near them let alone touch or change anything, and any downtime will cost the company hundreds of thousands an hour?
Boss: Yeah
Somersault: I have a brilliant idea! I was at this site called slashdot and want to make a statement about proprietary software while saving mere thousands of dollars while changing our mission critical million dollar infrastructure ...
Boss:Uh, what?!
Somersault:You see! Microsoft SUX. We are slaves to this proprietary environment that has served us fine and works perfectly and want to use this freeware called SAMBA 4, which well should do what we already have. Think about the thousands saved and I we could be all so cool and the CEO will think WOW, what brilliant IT guys we have who swear by using only free software and not what works already that is well supported, documented, and tested!! It has to be soooo much better because it is not made by Microsoft and ...
Boss:Somersault! I am having a bad day as it is shouldn't you be doing something right now? No I do not mean reading slashdot either! Pffft kids today. Oh and go get me a cup of coffee while you are at it? Finish your work and I will sign your internship papers so you can get your first IT job when you get your degree?
To prove I am not a troll, I will say AD is atrocious! The real risk is anything that changes the scheme permanently changes AD itself. THe only remedy is to use ASDI edit which most respected IT professionals will rough you up in the parking lott for doing so. It also is why the companies pay $150 an hour to pay someone to install Exchange or Sharepoint. A botched installation will adversely impact everything company wide!
That my friend is why you do not touch these things! The price is worth every penny to the money making enterprise. A small business under 20 employees does need AD as a simple server on a share will work fine. The owner can tell the user how to use it on the first day. Samba is not perfect and people who have tried to use it university environments report issues like corruption, all of the sudden passowrds not being accepted, and other glitches that the $1200 server version of Windows just keeps on working.
SAMBA is great for linux and Mac computers connecting to an enterprise network. But to replace a server or DC?! oh FUCK NO.
Firefox is no longer the bloated piece of crap it once was while Chrome was new. It uses the least amount of ram of any browser. It no longer requires 4 gigs of ram and a quad core like version 4. Plugins no longer break with the latest release either between versions. Chrome has gotten buggy and much slower in comparison. In 2011 Chrome would the only browser besides old IE that could run on 5 year old hardware. Now firefox runs as fast as 2.0 on these systems.
I have seen many XP SP 2 machines get Windows rot too when I contracted with a hospital so they could run their IE 6 apps. The best practice was to re-image. Any install is always fatest fresh and with +500 patches it will slow down as half the time the code is doing workarounds to prevent itself from getting infected. The age is showing.
XP 2 is not actively supported anymore and if you have such machines in production then you are asking for trouble unless they are sealed off in a DMZ with no internet access. I believe in 2010 support was dropped but I could be wrong. I do not know anyone who asks me to support it anymore. Such machines which run machinery NEVER GET TOUCHED once in productionl.
I have never seen until about a week ago.
I am surprised it was never linked here. Or maybe I never saw it?
Nothing wrong at all with this man
I never recommend compiling from source in 2012!
SOmething complex with lots of dependencies are just going to cause problems as who the hell knows what .config files will change and crap being spewed all over the file system.
The official ports patch everything and it has to pass the FreeBSD QA and integrates with it well into the system. .deb files are similiar
FreeBSD... actually BSD is very newsworthy as it holds an integral part of computer history. Like other important pieces of history such as VMS, IBM 360, and other gone technologies BSD will be part of it that we owe a gratitude for.
We have the internet thanks to it. TCP/IP v. 4 came to be on BSD Unix 4.2 in the early 1980s. It is so bizaare how Linux overtook it and shocking as it took 10 years before Linux became a somewhat decent server OS that can play with the big boys from a toy. FreeBSD was already there. BSD was opensource before GNU was even around and had an academic following before linux was twinkle in Linuses eye.
In the 1990s I have heard of BSDI to run BBS and a few webservers. But not Linux. That was years later
FreeBSD was very popular 10 years ago. In my opinion those were its golden days.
BSD Unix golden days were 4.2 - 4.4 where TCP/IP was developed back in the early 1980s and Sun's Gossling worked on the kernel. Its freeBSD counterpart golden days were 4.0 - 4.12 before it went to shit and Linux/Ubuntu took over.
10 years ago FreeBSD was ahead of Linux and it drove me nuts to see slashdot down all the time (not so common now) as Linux couldn't scale for more than 2 cpus and crashed or halted when it had a shitload of network connections. FreeBSD could run smoothly on that old 486 just fine for thousands of connections!
FreeBSD was more user friendly (4.x and earlier) as you could go to /usr/ports/examples/cvsup and /etc and edit .sh files to do all sorts of crazy things like check your main update servers at 3am every night and sync to the ports ... just uncomment this line! FYI I last used it in 2004/2005 so I might have got that directory wrong. Linux .RC scripts are more like programs iwth if/else code than .ini files :-(
You can't really hack them as they are programs. Not things to turn on and off as easily.
Unix geeks used Linux and FreeBSD and if you bought it at any college bookstore it had a nice manual too which is my favorite unix book. It discusses how to use emacs and vi and other things much better than the crappy linux manpages. Infact, FreeBSD has /etc/share/doc with much more detailed things and its man pages were more detailed. Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.
FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.
Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors. Linux has a journaling file system now. It can do async i/o and other things that only FreeBSD could as FreeBSD became bloated and buggy. Rest in peace.
Consumers may not understand technical terms. THey do understand performance and seeing oly 4 gigs of ram and not 8 that they paid for.
The reason XP slows down is XP does not include a registry defragger. Windows 7 will run it every so often if you hear a sudden surge in disk usage and go control alt delete and then clock resource monitor and you see HBSstorehive or something similiar running. Installing a lot of newer software will trigger it to go on. In 2012 I would not be surprised if most if 50% of the CPU time is spent crunching if/else statements to work around security holes and virii infections. Each patch means Windows XP does more and more things to workaround its internals to cover one virus or trojan exploit. XP has what +400 updates from 2001?
Windows 7 slows a little bit too if you boot off a fresh 2009 install when you update the +180 updates.
XP is a dog on my system because:
-SATA has no command que support
-Is optimized for Pnetium IIIs
- Swap file pages like a mofo even if plenty of ram is available
- Poor SMP performance
- Crappy version of IE
- Poor networking
- No 64 bit support
- Kernel and service impersonation (HUGE SECURITY RISK)
- No DEP on all services
- No ASLR
- No exception handling security as VC+10 runtime is not supported
- Drivers can crash system much easier
- No driver rootkit protection at boot
- No tunderbolt support
-No USB 3 support
- No UEFI Support
- No touchscreen support
I could go on and on. If you install XP on a modern system the hard drive will bottleneck and spin like mad as it can't multitask as an ancient UDMA IDE can. That old pentium IV in the corner will perform i/o better sadly. That and the paging algorithm will make the situation worse. If you were lucky and found a corporate system Dell or HP might include a special SATA driver that can support command queing as MS disabled this to make Vista look faster. Threading is more limited as it is designed for 1-2 CPUs as well and Windows 7 heavily utilizes the threading for i/o operations. If it were not demand from corporations the hardware would not even run it today. Infact, I read posts here where IT is running VS to reverse engineer Windows 7 drivers and wasting a week of labor trying to hack these drivers and create .ini files just to run XP!! It is getting rediculous. The costs involved that were hidden could be saved just upgrading their ancient app so they could upgrade to Windows 7 instead. The bean counters say they are saving money without realizing $3,000 in labor is going out the door just trying to boot the fuckers with XP that management is not seeing. Only hmm IT is fucking up again not delivering my new pc what are they doing?!
Windows 7 has
- Homegroup
- Supperior security
- Aero Peak
- Instant search
- HTML 5 support
- basic touch
- saved searches
- restore points now with shadow data to undo deletions
- Registry defragger
- Sharing between users with public and private folders in the my documents settings
- Better support for modern hardware
- Speed improvements due to it being compilied to support better CPUs (more registers and SSE3 etc).
- Better graphics
- Sleep support and power efficiency
A regular user who is not technical will notice a few things immediately. He might be a little irritated at change at first. But the the instant search where you type acme sales 2009 and then enter to open a particular spreadsheet out of hundreds is sweet! No suspend but sleep is nice as well as the power savings and they are enabled by default. He or she will also notice the aero peak which is nice when you have +10 things opened. With IE 9 you can just hover the mouse over it and see a graphical preview of all your tabs. Jumplists are included as well if you do not want to type the name of the website or thing you are looking for in office with instant search. Infact, I have not used the all programs -> and browse for my app in a long time with the start
I am fascinated by XP loyalists as I reply to them a lot in slashdot as I try to understand the psychology a little bit. I am not attacking you. Just pointing out that consumers drive economics and things are not as simple as they seem. People listen to the market and the corps just follow demand dictated by the invisible hand in economic terms. If someone takes the moral high ground then someone else will fullfil that role instead. Economics 101. People love their big hulking SUVS and trucks and showing off how much money they make to people less fortunate.
As a consumer (back to operating systems) I do not want XP. It is 11 years old, insecure, slow on modern hardware, and has issues with drivers. For the record I shared some of the psychology of users like yourself when Vista came out and I wiped a new laptop with XP temporary. However, I realized it is dated and felt I was cheating myself and my customers if I wanted to stay in I.T. if I didn't know it. I then discovered instant search and I was hooked. The ribbon was annoying too but my professor in business school showed me what you could do and i loved typing in "acme sales 2009" and my word and excel documents showed up! Albiet didn't like its performance. I had an older desktop donated to someone return with XP on it in 2009 which was just 3 years old. It felt quite dated to use it on such a system I had a high regard too.
Anyway when Windows 7 came out I was happy and thought everyone but corporations would switch within the next year or 2 due to the great recession which is understandable to a certain extent. People on slashdot thought it was the best hting and everyone would upgrade within 6 months and were shocked the corps and some users like yourself shunned it. My response was "gee lets get rid of that IE 6 app that cost $500,000 during the great recession that makes them $700,000 a year and already have for unproven software that brings no value to the shareholders". Got mixed moderation for that but as stories came in slashdotters learned it was IE holding Windows 7 back.
Consumers voted with their wallets with XP during Vista. ANd Windows 7 a year and a half after XP! XP lost due to demand after Windows 7. No one seeks it. People who use already have it. Not pay more money for it again and actively seek it. At least 95% of them do.
Windows 8 is flying off the shelf as OEMs can not get enough touch screen devices in the store to sell. So consumers do demand METRO. Just not on a traditional laptop or desktop. The market speaks and the market also shows slower Windows 7 growth as well for conservative types and offices who are finally ditching XP and upgrading their equipment and software. So there is demand for both right now as I agree Windows 7 is better for non touch computers. THe market did punish MS quite well during Vista and we will see with Windows 8 as the cell phone market has razor thin to no margins on software. Maybe Windows 9/blue when it comes out next year will fix some of this? Yes Windows will have an annual release and the corps are going to loooove that ... smirk
Amen. But these kinds of people assume everyone else must be as equally self-serving as themselves, so they can't accept that someone might be motivated by something other than money.
I notice the same people who slam environmental scientists as money grabbers have no problem listening to Exxon funded studies showing the opposite. I sense bias and listening to Fox News, Rush, and Hannity. 10s of millions of people listen to these shows and believe it.
A someone who used to live in Alaska I can tell you the summers are wetter and cooler even if the winters are milder. Cold wet rains hurt food production in Alberta. You might have more hot summer days where that never occured decades ago but the cold rains that normally would be spread further south hurt as much as the shorter growing season in the past.
I am assuming your are British by your post. But in the States the change can be far more drastic and different as we have semi arid and arid climates in the central and western sections. Go google the "Dustbowls"? They almost destroyed the US agriculture in the 1930s as the dust storms swamped crops for thousands of miles.
Land is leased and owned by investors with 30 year leases. It is changing so quickly you can't just switch crops. In a dry region you could grow corn in a wet year but wheat is a better bet. Now if it is semi arid a dry spell will mean a desert year and it is gone. These land owners are 100,000s in debt and many retirement accounts are invested in land flipping in these areas. If wheat can not be produced everyone losses. I used to live in Alaska and the opposite problem is happening. Winter wheats you think would grow better in milder winters and longer frost free season.
The problem is your English summers are now farther north. We got maybe 1 good summer of 20 - 25C temperatures for several weeks and weeks and weeks of cold rain that would rot wheat fields. It is getting progressively worse where even potatoes are molding and getting fungus infections from the non stop summer rains. Who cares if the winters are milder as -20C warms to -7C. You can't grow anything in either case. The cooler summers really hurt and is annoying for Alaskas who endured a tough winter and just get 10C rain for 6 weeks straight in their brief summer off of winter.
There's just no chance that the people with money who pay the people with guns will be able to see beyond their lust for more power and more money. This means things will go to hell with large amounts of certainty.
If there were profit in saving the world [from those who put us there] then they would be interested in saving the world. They have no interest in that. They might entertain the notion if they were guaranteed to come out on top and in control once the crisis was averted, of course, because this is all about giving up power and control.
I am an army of one. I cannot make a difference. But if I saw an army of many marching down the street, I would be inclined to join.
And beyond this, the denial is STILL out there being preached. First they said "it's not real!" Then they said "it's not our fault! It's nature!" Yet in any of this none are willing to make changes or do anything about it. But I don't blame the businesses entirely. It reminds me of the economy of slavery.
There was a town near New Orleans which abolished slavery before Lincoln did. The surrounding areas, of course, did not. Before long, local business could not compete with outside business. This town was forced into allowing slavery once again. Lincoln was successful because it was a unilateral decision. Individuals cannot make an effective change. Small groups cannot make an effective change. It takes unilateral change in order to work.
So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.
So you see, the kind of change we require is simply impossible without world war. And that kind of war is simply not going to happen.
And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.
Ok. Lets put your money where your mouth is? Are you willing to walk or bike 15 to 20 miles to work each day both ways without your car? Are you willing to go out of your way to buy food that is grown local to your area rather than going to a mega Walmart or grocer where it is shipped in on gas guzzling trucks? Are you willing to pay 20% more for any product you buy that is made in America or Canada and does not use a guzzling cargo ship which makes as much CO2 as 50 million cars a year! (Yes i heard it is that much)
Then you are the problem. The greedy companies are just listening to their customers. Not being assholes. Unless you and every man, woman, and child are willing to take these drastic steps you are part of the problem. And even my solutions still generated CO2. Just a much smaller amount but still. Unless you are willing to say goodbye to your car forget it.
Now if you own a truck or SUV then I would be dying laughing.
That wouldn't happen to be Ptarmigan elementry would it :-)
Also it is funny to mention but Obama didn't bankrupt GM. He decided to let them go through bankruptacy court FIRST. Keep in mind if GM could pay back 100 cents for every dollar then it would not be insolvent would it?
That is the whole point of a bankruptacy. So the bankers can sell what little assets that is left with a judge as a mediator. So the judge looked for a seller and Uncle Barack was the buyer. The terms were .26 for every 1.00 or he walked. But but but .. that is wrong!?
Well then show me who is dumb enough on Earth to purchase the company at that price? That was the higher bidder and if Obama didn't do it and paid 1.00 for every 1.00 the republicans would be screaming IMPEACHMENT ... THEFT and would be accused of overpaying. It is hypocritical and you can't win either way in such a scenario. Private companies do this all the time. Look at AMD? The reason AMD can't find a buyer? They are waiting for bankruptacy court first so they do not have to pay the debt.