Teachers are not educated people. Cf. my last few posts on this thread. Teachers tend to be the dumbest of the flock. Therefore (A) and (B) have nothing to do with each other.
Let me tell you how the political lines typically divde:
Low-income people (typically uneducated) tend to be liberal, because it is that orientation that gets them more tax dollars and an easier life.
Ultra-rich non-businessmen tend to be liberal because they have money to throw at social programs. Throwing money around helps ease any guilty conscience and promote ego. However, it should be noted that ultra-rich people have the resources to hide their money from government programs in a legal manner, and so this liberalism is really double-talk... the rich keep as much money as they can.
Upper-middle-class highly-educated people ($100k-$500k, where my family lies) tend to be conservative, because it is we who are hurt most by social programs. A rich man can afford to pay high taxes and still live as a rich man... a famiy making $50k doesn't pay high taxes... but a family making $100k pays high taxes and doesn't have a lot of money left over to throw around. Plus, no government money comes our way, because we are deemed too "rich" for such programs. Hence it is our class that is painfully robbed; the rich don't feel a thing.
Academics of any sort tend to be liberal, for reasons unknown. I would imagine that this is because, in theory, a truly communistic society will work well (although it can never be implemented in real life), or because with things like tenure, professors are used to an environment with a very limited class system.
Ultra-rich businessmen tend to be conservative, because the government interferes with the world of business.
This leaves the middle. How do they divide? I have no idea, but I venture to say it is approximately evenly divided.
You're wrong. MJ got paid what he did because he made the Bulls richer than their wildest dreams. True, all players' salaries increased because of unions--that is what unions try to do. My point is that MJ made enormously more money than any NBA player had ever seen, current or past. If his money came from a union, it would have been an amount similar to other players.
The Bulls paid Jordan so much because they knew that without him, ticket sales would approach zero and the United Center would go empty. Keeping Jordan happy was important not because it kept the union from getting pissed off, but because if Jordan got pissed and left, the Bulls went back to the poorhouse. I forget the figures, but I'm certain Jordan increased the value of the Bulls franchise more than tenfold.
This is also why the Bulls put up with Pippen and Jackson for so long. It is well known that Jackson and Pippen had severe disagreements with Bulls management. Hell, the Bulls hired a replacement coach without bothering to tell Jackson. But Jordan told the Bulls to fuck off, that he'd walk if Jackson didn't coach. So what happened? Jackson's replacement got some phony title like "VP of Basketball Operations" and Jackson remained coach.
Jordan wasn't treated like a king because unions made it so. Jordan was treated like a king because the Bulls wanted Jordan to stay happy. No matter what they paid him, he was worth more in terms of ticket and merchandise revenue. Plus, you can't forget the prestige factor... how cool would it be to say you've got the best player in the NBA?
The error was not a grammatical or spelling mistake, however. Nor was it the product of poor teachers... as I said, I learned very little in high school.
The problem was that I was studying (or rather worrying) about an exam I had to take the next morning, covering such things as Lebesgue integration and Fourier series.
Compound the fact that I am not held accountable for anything I say here, and what you have is a classic case of talking out of my ass... I put very little thought into posting on slashdot.
Take it from me... when you're concerned about whether a function is integrable if its generating function has a limit, the significance of "caliber vs. caliper" goes to zero very rapidly.
I assure you, if I had to think about the things I post on slashdot, I would never submit anything. The reason I post things is to vent, not to spout streams of wisdom.
But thanks for the correction... the distinction has been noted, and would have been noted before posting time if the forum were more serious.
Well... that's much better than the math teacher's approximation, which was only good to three significant digits. This one is good to six.
Anyway, what do you expect? I forget the name of the book, but Thomas Sowell (a really smart professor-type from Yale) writes about secondary-school educators (and below) being absolutely the most stupid group of college-attending individuals. He's got test scores to prove it. I personally didn't learn much in high school that wasn't self-taught, and I had my fair share of bouts with moronic teachers.
What you have to remember is that teaching is a low-paying profession. The job is easy, because (especially in elementary school) you can say anything and little children will believe it. There is no drive for excellence when the customer can't recognize it.
Not to mention that teaching is a union-controlled industry, and as we've consistently seen in the past, unionized workers aren't of the highest caliper. Just think about it; unions are formed to protect employees from oppressive employers, poor working conditions and low wages, right? But a highly-skilled, competent worker is too valuable to be treated like shit, so he doesn't need a union to secure his job. Quite frankly, unions are only good for forcing people to hire idiots at overpriced wages. They're rather irresponsible about it, too... halting companies' functions by striking. If I ever own a unionized business, and they strike, I'm firing every last one of them and hiring a whole new crew. I don't care how much it costs; it's about principle here.
Need a good example of excellence without unions? Look at Michael Jordan, forced member of the NBA Players' Union. He was the highest-paid athlete in the NBA (of any sport?), because he was such an outstanding player. Hell, he was THE reason I followed basketball from 1986-1998. You think his salary was so high because the union made it so? Not a chance. If the union were responsible, every player would make as much as Jordan. Jordan was paid so much because he was the basketball god, plain and simple.
Compounding the teacher problem is the fact that it's so damn hard to fire a lousy one, it would be easier just to shut up and keep paying them. In effect, the unions have created a form of tenure, an absolute perversion of its university cousin.
I remember one time, in sixth grade, my fresh-out-of-school science teacher telling the class that humans had 54 chromosomes. "46," I said. We argued for, oh, 15 minutes, until he conceded, appending a "whatever" to his admission of error. A 24-year-old kid passing of a 12-year-old kid as full of shit, when DAMNIT, I was right. That year was a good year... I got in many arguments with that guy. After the year was over, and I'm not kidding, he gave up science for sixth graders and taught third grade. There was that one time I slammed his door so hard in protest, people down the hall looked at me funny. I got sent to the Principal's Office (TM) for that one, but it was worth it. In the end, I won the argument (over the grade on a test) and got an "A". Heh. Fuck you, Mr. Lauer!
The economy may be built on computers, but rest assured social record-keeping is not. For important documents, and permanent information, paper copies are still much preferred over their electronic cousins.
Think about the last time you read a novel on your laptop, instead of picking up the book. And the last contract you signed? It wasn't on those digital pads you find at Best Buy for signing receipts. Paper is still king, and it will be for years. It never gets obsolete, and it lasts just as long as anything else we have.
I just saw on TechTV, Robot Sumo Wrestling. These are actual robots, constructed from the ground up to push the opponent out of a ring.
The sample robot I saw is the current American champion, it runs on assembler code, which is placed on the machine via an RJ-45 port (I'm not sure if it's ethernet or an RS-232 adapter).
The robots are so powerful, a full-sized man could not push the American champion out of the ring (this was Martin Sargent, a bit skinny, but still a full-sized man). This is achieved (at least in this particular robot) through the use of a vacuum pump, which sucks the robot to smooth flooring. When it needs to move, it rolls along on rubber treads.
I watched Battlebots once, but couldn't stand it. Part of it was the general pointlessness, and part of it was the fact that I couldn't stop thinking of WCW/WWF wrestling.
What we really need is a telecast of the Robot Sumo Wrestling.
Recently I came across the GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS QuickBASIC games from the DOS days. I used to play those as a boy, and had great fun with such simple games.
When I tried to run them under yabasic and pbasic, two BASIC interpreters for UNIX. Lo and behold, I was greeted with incompatibilities. Not in the mode for porting these old games, I tabled them, until I came across Microsoft VisualBASIC 5 Control Creation Edition. I tried to run them, and was again greeted with incompatibilities.
yabasic and pbasic didn't surprise me. Microsoft has long been known for their "embrace and extend" strategy, so I didn't expect old QuickBASIC programs to work with these UNIX interpreters.
However, I was quite shocked and disappointed that VB 5 wouldn't run these. It seems that in addition to embrace and extend, Microsoft has developed an "obsolete and cripple" strategy for moving old apps of the market.
What is Microsoft's response to my anger and disappointment that they have taken a language which has been around longer than Microsoft's flagship product, and mutilated it so I can't run my boyhood games? Do they really think that this sort of behavior is even acceptable?
It is my belief (many share this belief) that the only reason Microsoft dominates the market is because the general computing public is too stupid to reject them.
Maybe I'm a throwback, but I don't get my coffee fromt the latest trendy coffee bar, and it certainly doesn't cost $5. If I get coffee at a restaurant at all, it's more like $0.70.
However, the vast majority of my coffee is consumed in-home, from a can, making it more like $0.10 or less to produce. That's 150 cups, which makes half a year... quite a bit more than a few.
I'm not saying it's worth it; I have no idea. However, being cheap, the only Linuxes I'd use are Slackware or Debian, and these are absolutely free. Right now, however, my flavor of the month is FreeBSD, which comes free also.
I just find it ridiculous that they would call $15 "a few cups of coffee."
I think you are missing the point. With tanks available to hold separated hydrogen and oxygen, the conversion from water to gas can happen slowly.
To effectively power an automobile, one needs to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy rapidly. This is done by exploding hydrogen in a combustion chamber.
Of course decomposing water takes energy. But the process can be drawn out, and the results can be stored in tanks until they are required. One could rely on battery power, or solar power. It would even be possible to plug your car into a wall socket to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. This would probably be the easiest, most reliable, and second most economic option.
In addition, if you like, the car can be converted into a generator when it rolls downhill, decomposing water when it is not being forcefully driven.
The point of this is to eliminate the need for hydrogen fill stations, and excessive stores of explosive hydrogen kept in public places. It also makes fuel readily and cheaply available. It is not necessary to have a dense fill station infrastructure to make the hydrogen-powered car economically feasable, and I'm sure the water coming out of a garden hose is cheaper than the hydrogen at the Munich fill station.
Am I stupid? Of course not. I'm not proposing perpetual motion here. I simply expected any half-intelligent creature to understand that another energy source would be readily available to decompose water.
While certified mail with receipt is the only way to be sure somebody handled your mail, it is no guarantee the Congressman ever saw it, or that it was even read.
In America, anybody can sign anybody's signature as long as the person signing is doing so with the full knowledge and consent of the signature owner.
As Congressmen are quite busy, or would like you to think they are, it is almost certain that every Congressman has designated an signing agent.
Most likely, said agent simply runs the document through the signature machine, so that it is a perfect match... you won't be able to tell who signed for your mail.
I've always found the following two methods work perfectly for getting your Congressman's attention:
Send a courier who refuses to leave the Congressman's office until the Congressman himself has received and read your letter, and then crafted a response.
In a similar vein, go to your neighborhood mob hangout and get some knee-breakers to act as the courier in number 1.
BMW, and other manufacturers, need to investigate the possibility of creating hydrogen from water in the vehicle, not at the filling station or earlier.
I'd definitely buy a car that can be refueled by dragging the hose around the side of the house and sticking it into a tank. It gives new meaning to the term, "Free car wash with every fill up!"
Imagine the savings. What is water, a few cents per gallon in cities? In rural areas, it's absolutely free, because people have wells dug for them. Suddenly my monthly autmobile-related bills drop dramatically.
Furthermore, since water is nonvolatile, it could be stored in every feasible spot--in the door cavities, in the engine compartment, in a regular tank, in the roof. All one would need is a small pure-hydrogen tank, and the water-hydrogen conversion could be done in the last few stages of the energy consumption chain.
217 miles isn't a bad range at all for these cars... my '98 Contour gets 280-320 miles per fill up. This is much better than the 60 mile range the EV-1 sports, and with hydrogen refueling stations where every gas station used to be (assuming my ideas above don't come to fruition), America could survive with cars that get 220 miles per tank.
I'd like to see this succeed... it would make cheap, clean transportation available to the masses, and there are no real crippling problems that other technologies bring.
Funny you call Windows a "toy GUI shell" or something like that, and then go on to give a.EXE example. Furthermore, you give a filename that uses spaces, which are a bitch to type with quotes or escape sequences. A sure sign you depend on Windows and its graphical shell.
This makes it odd that you would knock it, unless you are just trying to fit in with the slashdot crowd. hrm...
Nice subject there, eh? I could write for some big-deal news source like MSNBC with catchy title like that.
Anyway. I'm as excited about MacOS X as I am about Windows XP, which is to say, not at all.
Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel. Wow, look at Aqua. Wow, I can run Apache and Squid on a Mac now. Good for Apple.
But I don't care. I've got my FreeBSD box, and I'm not about to dump it for a proprietary solution like MacOS, especially since they've completely rearranged and gutted the standard FreeBSD system.
People say things like, "Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX? My grandmother doesn't even use a computer. And you know what? She couldn't be happier.
Computers aren't nearly as pervasive in today's society as geeks like to think. I'm a network admin and a semi-professional programmer, so my life is based on computers. I'm not the average person, though. The average person doesn't need UNIX, and many people don't even need computers.
Society may run on computers, but individuals don't need to. Giving everybody UNIX (even if it's MacOS) isn't the solution to all our problems, and it won't change the lives of everybody you give it to.
In fact, giving people access to things like Apache can be a bad thing. There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?
Actually, academics have created 100GHz transistors out of GaAs. 10GHz isn't that great compared to these ultra-fast ones
However, the distinction may be that this is the fastest corporate-built transistor, and it might be the first semi-integrable one. I don't know the details of either development.
Maybe this is using Si? I forget the frequency limit of silicon, but this may be the fastest silicon transistor ever built.
Jesus Fucking Christ, the source tree is 150M large. I left it building overnight, running under time(1), and when I woke up, I found out that it took 58 minutes to build. 58 minutes! That's just a hair shorter than it takes to build my base FreeBSD system from scratch! I thought Mozilla was supposted to be a browser, for Christ's sake!
So after balking at the exceptionally long build time, I ran du to find out just how large this pile of shit is... with object files, binaries, and source (remember, 150M), the tree was 1.4G. That's very close to the the size of my/usr...
Not to mention the fact that it still doesn't render pages right, it takes a while to render widgets, and it crashes.
The team ought to focus on making a lean, fast, quality browser... every time I try to build this thing, it gets bigger... and for what?
Funny, I thought I left Windows to escape that horrible GUI they forced me to work with, among other things.
Like I once saw in an article, "GUI" to me means for xterms and netscape open. This is how I work best, fast and furious. It is easier to type commands and read textual output than it is to spend time controlling windows with a mouse, and it is far easier to control windows with a mouse than with a keyboard.
Not to mention the fact that my two-floppy firewall is now impossible, since I need to have X on there in order to run ipchains or ipfw.
The world does not always need to be about fancy pictures shining at us; we aren't little babies who are attracted to anything that moves and shimmers. Some information, like the output of tar, is best left to characters.
Furthermore, we'd need a standard graphics system for displaying this stuff, and a standard widget set, and all that good stuff.
If you want to select files to delete from pictures, get a graphical filemanager. If you want to see how many lines scroll by in a given time period while running tail (not very useful, if you ask me), write a program to count this and display it in the upper line of characters. It's all open source, you can modify tail itself, if you like.
Binding us to GUIs is a foolish idea. They are often cumbersome and resource-heavy. Let's not go the way of Windows; we can all see the shit it's become.
I'd keep a copy of Qt around if this happens. I just hope it runs on FreeBSD, I'm not going back to linux just so I can talk to my workstation.
Now I will need to design a Qt-based WM which supports dual-focus, so that I can have keyboard focus on one window, and voice focus on another... Then I can talk while I type and get work done twice as fast.
Oh, yeah, Windows has dragon, like some other poster said, but it isn't integrated.
I use mbox for no special reason. It's the default for sendmail, exim, postfix, procmail, and all that good stuff. In fact, I don't know what SMTP server defaults to maildir.
That's about the only reason, but let me tell you why I stick with mbox, instead of switching to maildir.
Clean trees. Remember, every time you run updatedb (or locate.updatedb if you come from FreeBSD), it's looking for files. The more messages you have, the more files it's got to hunt down. That means time and size. Keeping clean directory trees is generally a good thing, it helps keep things where they belong.
Inodes. Many people keep thousands upon thousands of messages. This means thousands upon thousands of files. Multiply this by a few horde-happy users, and you're quickly running out of inodes in your/var filesystem. Then you start getting horrible messages like "Could not create/var/tmp/tmp.file". Not a good thing.
Cluster waste. Don't get clusterfucked! Remember, each file needs to fill a cluster, no matter how big the file is. Thousands of files can waste significant amounts of diskspace.
The only disadvantage I see is filesystem damage. If you trash your filesystem, it is easy to wipe out a lifetime of messages by ruining your mail file. Maildir reduces the damage to (potentially) only a few messages. However, I think this is insignificant.
They have a 90% market share in the desktop market, so they can coerce users into the transition.
Without themselves as a competitor, there is nobody to Embrace and Extend.NET to death.
They aren't releasing it for all platforms, so Sun can't come up with a competing product.
They can buy up anyone with big enough balls to try to compete.
For the most part, their followers tend to think that whatever Microsoft says is a great idea, so they can release dumb shit like.NET and get enough people to buy into it as the Second Coming.
Hrm, well, they're fucking MICROSOFT, for Christ's sake. They've got more money than God, and when they want something to happen, it does.
All these factors point to one sure thing:.NET, no matter how lousy, is going to become the next service standard, and Java is going to flounder. All hail the Microsoft Megalith, they will be setting commonplace computing trends for years to come, and even longer if they control access to your subscription to Office2010.
They mention in the article that Torvalds's word on when to release kernels is an important one to distribution makers. While certainly true, I think they miss the reason why.
The example in the article is RedHat, who is the only company that opted to offer a distribution based on a test kernel. But now that Torvalds has released 2.4.0, companies all over are planning to deploy distributions based on 2.4.0. They think that 2.4.0 was the first release that Linus was comfortable calling stable.
However, anybody who's run a 2.4.0-test kernel will know differently. I ran test kernels from test8 to test12, and then used 2.4.0 for awhile. It comes as no surprise that 2.4.0 is trivially different than test12... no more different than test8 is from test9. The reason Linus released 2.4.0, as you can tell from his announcement, is that he got tired of people griping at him, and he didn't think the test base would increase at all.
Companies were holding back, not because a test kernel is inferior, but because Linux newcomers would be scared off by a test kernel. It's simply a matter of PR. Maybe Linus isn't the all-knowing Linux God that the article makes him out to be? Think on that for awhile... he's only a man.
I don't know if Linus is killing Linux, though. It's a fine operating system, as far as I'm concerned. However, if you look at something like FreeBSD, you find more mature code, with a more unified direction. If might not be a bad idea to have a set of core maintainers, responsible for the kernel AND the base system. It might produce better code.
Of course, that's what FreeBSD is for, isn't it? Linux has its own niche. Let Linus do what he will, it's his kernel.
Well, OpenSSH and OpenSSL are under the BSD licesnse, I believe... so you shouldn't have a problem.
You can do what you want with BSD-licensed programs, so long as you credit the original author in the manner described in the license. Closed source or not, you just need to make a copyright notice available. Read it carefully to make sure you are in full compliance. But certainly, you can use it in closed-source software.
GNU-GPL code, on the other hand, is a different issue. Being a complete asshole, RMS will probably track you down and cut your penis off if you include GPL'ed code in a closed-source project. I think the only way out of this unpleasant situation would be to make the GPL'ed portions of code available separately, with source available.
Maybe now it becomes clear that RMS is a hypocrite... He professes the greatness and necessity of free software, and then he proceeds to restrict it with his own license.
This is one reason, albeit a minor one, that I switched to FreeBSD. Better license, better code (more stable, longer USB support), and the ability to run Linux binaries.
PS -- Sorry if you're a woman, making that penis comment. If you are a woman, he'll probably take your left breast instead.
You all try to explain why it's okay that Linus allowed ReiserFS into the 2.4.1-pre series, and whether or not he violated his own submission policy. I'll tell you why it doesn't matter one way or the other:
IT'S LINUS'S FUCKING KERNEL. One of the best perks of building your own operating system kernel is the ability to set policy as you see fit. If he sets a no-submission policy, and then allows Hans Reiser's patches into the kernel, his policy is now to only allow Hans Reiser to submit patches. It may change tomorrow. Why you gripe about his conformance to his own policy is beyond me. You shouldn't care what Linus does with his kernel, it's his; you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
Oh, and to back up another correspondent in this thread, indeed, Linus did announce plans to include ReiserFS in 2.4.1 long ago, in an online interview. Or maybe it was print. But I saw it. In fact, everybody has been saying ReiserFS would make it into 2.4.1 for a long time.
PS -- No doubt, in an attempt to attack me, someone will tell me it should be "Linus'" instead of "Linus's"... but no, the apostrophe-s belongs there. If you disagree, I urge you to consult the fabulous writing handbook Elements of Style by White. At least, I think it's White... but the title is certainly correct.
No... you can't sue because you bought a DVD player that won't play CD-R discs.
The only possible way you could sue Sony, would be if they told you it is possible to read CD-Rs, and it is not.
It's not an infringement on rights if you submit to it voluntarily. And since you weren't buying that model DVD player at gunpoint, you voluntarily submitted to suspend your right to play CD-Rs.
Even if you weren't aware that it won't play CD-Rs, that's irrelevant... The law doesn't protect you from being a stupid consumer.
The law is not here to make life convenient or perfect. And I vehemently object to anybody who stands up and says the law should compel corporations to include features in products simple for convenience of consumers.
FreeBSD is their "reference platform." When OSX was designed, the layout and system semantics where taken from FreeBSD. In this sense, OSX is "based" on FreeBSD, but there is no other link between FreeBSD and OSX.
As the other responder suggested, OSX is based (in the traditional sense of building on top of) the Mach kernel, and takes a lot of things from NeXTSTEP.
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Teachers are not educated people. Cf. my last few posts on this thread. Teachers tend to be the dumbest of the flock. Therefore (A) and (B) have nothing to do with each other.
Let me tell you how the political lines typically divde:
A new year calls for a new signature.
You're wrong. MJ got paid what he did because he made the Bulls richer than their wildest dreams. True, all players' salaries increased because of unions--that is what unions try to do. My point is that MJ made enormously more money than any NBA player had ever seen, current or past. If his money came from a union, it would have been an amount similar to other players.
The Bulls paid Jordan so much because they knew that without him, ticket sales would approach zero and the United Center would go empty. Keeping Jordan happy was important not because it kept the union from getting pissed off, but because if Jordan got pissed and left, the Bulls went back to the poorhouse. I forget the figures, but I'm certain Jordan increased the value of the Bulls franchise more than tenfold.
This is also why the Bulls put up with Pippen and Jackson for so long. It is well known that Jackson and Pippen had severe disagreements with Bulls management. Hell, the Bulls hired a replacement coach without bothering to tell Jackson. But Jordan told the Bulls to fuck off, that he'd walk if Jackson didn't coach. So what happened? Jackson's replacement got some phony title like "VP of Basketball Operations" and Jackson remained coach.
Jordan wasn't treated like a king because unions made it so. Jordan was treated like a king because the Bulls wanted Jordan to stay happy. No matter what they paid him, he was worth more in terms of ticket and merchandise revenue. Plus, you can't forget the prestige factor... how cool would it be to say you've got the best player in the NBA?
A new year calls for a new signature.
Good point, it is indeed "caliber."
The error was not a grammatical or spelling mistake, however. Nor was it the product of poor teachers... as I said, I learned very little in high school.
The problem was that I was studying (or rather worrying) about an exam I had to take the next morning, covering such things as Lebesgue integration and Fourier series.
Compound the fact that I am not held accountable for anything I say here, and what you have is a classic case of talking out of my ass... I put very little thought into posting on slashdot.
Take it from me... when you're concerned about whether a function is integrable if its generating function has a limit, the significance of "caliber vs. caliper" goes to zero very rapidly.
I assure you, if I had to think about the things I post on slashdot, I would never submit anything. The reason I post things is to vent, not to spout streams of wisdom.
But thanks for the correction... the distinction has been noted, and would have been noted before posting time if the forum were more serious.
A new year calls for a new signature.
Well... that's much better than the math teacher's approximation, which was only good to three significant digits. This one is good to six.
Anyway, what do you expect? I forget the name of the book, but Thomas Sowell (a really smart professor-type from Yale) writes about secondary-school educators (and below) being absolutely the most stupid group of college-attending individuals. He's got test scores to prove it. I personally didn't learn much in high school that wasn't self-taught, and I had my fair share of bouts with moronic teachers.
What you have to remember is that teaching is a low-paying profession. The job is easy, because (especially in elementary school) you can say anything and little children will believe it. There is no drive for excellence when the customer can't recognize it.
Not to mention that teaching is a union-controlled industry, and as we've consistently seen in the past, unionized workers aren't of the highest caliper. Just think about it; unions are formed to protect employees from oppressive employers, poor working conditions and low wages, right? But a highly-skilled, competent worker is too valuable to be treated like shit, so he doesn't need a union to secure his job. Quite frankly, unions are only good for forcing people to hire idiots at overpriced wages. They're rather irresponsible about it, too... halting companies' functions by striking. If I ever own a unionized business, and they strike, I'm firing every last one of them and hiring a whole new crew. I don't care how much it costs; it's about principle here.
Need a good example of excellence without unions? Look at Michael Jordan, forced member of the NBA Players' Union. He was the highest-paid athlete in the NBA (of any sport?), because he was such an outstanding player. Hell, he was THE reason I followed basketball from 1986-1998. You think his salary was so high because the union made it so? Not a chance. If the union were responsible, every player would make as much as Jordan. Jordan was paid so much because he was the basketball god, plain and simple.
Compounding the teacher problem is the fact that it's so damn hard to fire a lousy one, it would be easier just to shut up and keep paying them. In effect, the unions have created a form of tenure, an absolute perversion of its university cousin.
I remember one time, in sixth grade, my fresh-out-of-school science teacher telling the class that humans had 54 chromosomes. "46," I said. We argued for, oh, 15 minutes, until he conceded, appending a "whatever" to his admission of error. A 24-year-old kid passing of a 12-year-old kid as full of shit, when DAMNIT, I was right. That year was a good year... I got in many arguments with that guy. After the year was over, and I'm not kidding, he gave up science for sixth graders and taught third grade. There was that one time I slammed his door so hard in protest, people down the hall looked at me funny. I got sent to the Principal's Office (TM) for that one, but it was worth it. In the end, I won the argument (over the grade on a test) and got an "A". Heh. Fuck you, Mr. Lauer!
A new year calls for a new signature.
The economy may be built on computers, but rest assured social record-keeping is not. For important documents, and permanent information, paper copies are still much preferred over their electronic cousins.
Think about the last time you read a novel on your laptop, instead of picking up the book. And the last contract you signed? It wasn't on those digital pads you find at Best Buy for signing receipts. Paper is still king, and it will be for years. It never gets obsolete, and it lasts just as long as anything else we have.
A new year calls for a new signature.
I just saw on TechTV, Robot Sumo Wrestling. These are actual robots, constructed from the ground up to push the opponent out of a ring.
The sample robot I saw is the current American champion, it runs on assembler code, which is placed on the machine via an RJ-45 port (I'm not sure if it's ethernet or an RS-232 adapter).
The robots are so powerful, a full-sized man could not push the American champion out of the ring (this was Martin Sargent, a bit skinny, but still a full-sized man). This is achieved (at least in this particular robot) through the use of a vacuum pump, which sucks the robot to smooth flooring. When it needs to move, it rolls along on rubber treads.
I watched Battlebots once, but couldn't stand it. Part of it was the general pointlessness, and part of it was the fact that I couldn't stop thinking of WCW/WWF wrestling.
What we really need is a telecast of the Robot Sumo Wrestling.
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Recently I came across the GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS QuickBASIC games from the DOS days. I used to play those as a boy, and had great fun with such simple games.
When I tried to run them under yabasic and pbasic, two BASIC interpreters for UNIX. Lo and behold, I was greeted with incompatibilities. Not in the mode for porting these old games, I tabled them, until I came across Microsoft VisualBASIC 5 Control Creation Edition. I tried to run them, and was again greeted with incompatibilities.
yabasic and pbasic didn't surprise me. Microsoft has long been known for their "embrace and extend" strategy, so I didn't expect old QuickBASIC programs to work with these UNIX interpreters.
However, I was quite shocked and disappointed that VB 5 wouldn't run these. It seems that in addition to embrace and extend, Microsoft has developed an "obsolete and cripple" strategy for moving old apps of the market.
What is Microsoft's response to my anger and disappointment that they have taken a language which has been around longer than Microsoft's flagship product, and mutilated it so I can't run my boyhood games? Do they really think that this sort of behavior is even acceptable?
It is my belief (many share this belief) that the only reason Microsoft dominates the market is because the general computing public is too stupid to reject them.
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Maybe I'm a throwback, but I don't get my coffee fromt the latest trendy coffee bar, and it certainly doesn't cost $5. If I get coffee at a restaurant at all, it's more like $0.70.
However, the vast majority of my coffee is consumed in-home, from a can, making it more like $0.10 or less to produce. That's 150 cups, which makes half a year... quite a bit more than a few.
I'm not saying it's worth it; I have no idea. However, being cheap, the only Linuxes I'd use are Slackware or Debian, and these are absolutely free. Right now, however, my flavor of the month is FreeBSD, which comes free also.
I just find it ridiculous that they would call $15 "a few cups of coffee."
A new year calls for a new signature.
I think you are missing the point. With tanks available to hold separated hydrogen and oxygen, the conversion from water to gas can happen slowly.
To effectively power an automobile, one needs to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy rapidly. This is done by exploding hydrogen in a combustion chamber.
Of course decomposing water takes energy. But the process can be drawn out, and the results can be stored in tanks until they are required. One could rely on battery power, or solar power. It would even be possible to plug your car into a wall socket to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. This would probably be the easiest, most reliable, and second most economic option.
In addition, if you like, the car can be converted into a generator when it rolls downhill, decomposing water when it is not being forcefully driven.
The point of this is to eliminate the need for hydrogen fill stations, and excessive stores of explosive hydrogen kept in public places. It also makes fuel readily and cheaply available. It is not necessary to have a dense fill station infrastructure to make the hydrogen-powered car economically feasable, and I'm sure the water coming out of a garden hose is cheaper than the hydrogen at the Munich fill station.
Am I stupid? Of course not. I'm not proposing perpetual motion here. I simply expected any half-intelligent creature to understand that another energy source would be readily available to decompose water.
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While certified mail with receipt is the only way to be sure somebody handled your mail, it is no guarantee the Congressman ever saw it, or that it was even read.
In America, anybody can sign anybody's signature as long as the person signing is doing so with the full knowledge and consent of the signature owner.
As Congressmen are quite busy, or would like you to think they are, it is almost certain that every Congressman has designated an signing agent.
Most likely, said agent simply runs the document through the signature machine, so that it is a perfect match... you won't be able to tell who signed for your mail.
I've always found the following two methods work perfectly for getting your Congressman's attention:
A new year calls for a new signature.
BMW, and other manufacturers, need to investigate the possibility of creating hydrogen from water in the vehicle, not at the filling station or earlier.
I'd definitely buy a car that can be refueled by dragging the hose around the side of the house and sticking it into a tank. It gives new meaning to the term, "Free car wash with every fill up!"
Imagine the savings. What is water, a few cents per gallon in cities? In rural areas, it's absolutely free, because people have wells dug for them. Suddenly my monthly autmobile-related bills drop dramatically.
Furthermore, since water is nonvolatile, it could be stored in every feasible spot--in the door cavities, in the engine compartment, in a regular tank, in the roof. All one would need is a small pure-hydrogen tank, and the water-hydrogen conversion could be done in the last few stages of the energy consumption chain.
217 miles isn't a bad range at all for these cars... my '98 Contour gets 280-320 miles per fill up. This is much better than the 60 mile range the EV-1 sports, and with hydrogen refueling stations where every gas station used to be (assuming my ideas above don't come to fruition), America could survive with cars that get 220 miles per tank.
I'd like to see this succeed... it would make cheap, clean transportation available to the masses, and there are no real crippling problems that other technologies bring.
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Funny you call Windows a "toy GUI shell" or something like that, and then go on to give a .EXE example. Furthermore, you give a filename that uses spaces, which are a bitch to type with quotes or escape sequences. A sure sign you depend on Windows and its graphical shell.
This makes it odd that you would knock it, unless you are just trying to fit in with the slashdot crowd. hrm...
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Nice subject there, eh? I could write for some big-deal news source like MSNBC with catchy title like that.
Anyway. I'm as excited about MacOS X as I am about Windows XP, which is to say, not at all.
Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel. Wow, look at Aqua. Wow, I can run Apache and Squid on a Mac now. Good for Apple.
But I don't care. I've got my FreeBSD box, and I'm not about to dump it for a proprietary solution like MacOS, especially since they've completely rearranged and gutted the standard FreeBSD system.
People say things like, "Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX? My grandmother doesn't even use a computer. And you know what? She couldn't be happier.
Computers aren't nearly as pervasive in today's society as geeks like to think. I'm a network admin and a semi-professional programmer, so my life is based on computers. I'm not the average person, though. The average person doesn't need UNIX, and many people don't even need computers.
Society may run on computers, but individuals don't need to. Giving everybody UNIX (even if it's MacOS) isn't the solution to all our problems, and it won't change the lives of everybody you give it to.
In fact, giving people access to things like Apache can be a bad thing. There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?
A new year calls for a new signature.
Actually, academics have created 100GHz transistors out of GaAs. 10GHz isn't that great compared to these ultra-fast ones
However, the distinction may be that this is the fastest corporate-built transistor, and it might be the first semi-integrable one. I don't know the details of either development.
Maybe this is using Si? I forget the frequency limit of silicon, but this may be the fastest silicon transistor ever built.
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Jesus Fucking Christ, the source tree is 150M large. I left it building overnight, running under time(1), and when I woke up, I found out that it took 58 minutes to build. 58 minutes! That's just a hair shorter than it takes to build my base FreeBSD system from scratch! I thought Mozilla was supposted to be a browser, for Christ's sake!
So after balking at the exceptionally long build time, I ran du to find out just how large this pile of shit is... with object files, binaries, and source (remember, 150M), the tree was 1.4G. That's very close to the the size of my /usr...
Not to mention the fact that it still doesn't render pages right, it takes a while to render widgets, and it crashes.
The team ought to focus on making a lean, fast, quality browser... every time I try to build this thing, it gets bigger... and for what?
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Funny, I thought I left Windows to escape that horrible GUI they forced me to work with, among other things.
Like I once saw in an article, "GUI" to me means for xterms and netscape open. This is how I work best, fast and furious. It is easier to type commands and read textual output than it is to spend time controlling windows with a mouse, and it is far easier to control windows with a mouse than with a keyboard.
Not to mention the fact that my two-floppy firewall is now impossible, since I need to have X on there in order to run ipchains or ipfw.
The world does not always need to be about fancy pictures shining at us; we aren't little babies who are attracted to anything that moves and shimmers. Some information, like the output of tar, is best left to characters.
Furthermore, we'd need a standard graphics system for displaying this stuff, and a standard widget set, and all that good stuff.
If you want to select files to delete from pictures, get a graphical filemanager. If you want to see how many lines scroll by in a given time period while running tail (not very useful, if you ask me), write a program to count this and display it in the upper line of characters. It's all open source, you can modify tail itself, if you like.
Binding us to GUIs is a foolish idea. They are often cumbersome and resource-heavy. Let's not go the way of Windows; we can all see the shit it's become.
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I'd keep a copy of Qt around if this happens. I just hope it runs on FreeBSD, I'm not going back to linux just so I can talk to my workstation.
Now I will need to design a Qt-based WM which supports dual-focus, so that I can have keyboard focus on one window, and voice focus on another... Then I can talk while I type and get work done twice as fast.
Oh, yeah, Windows has dragon, like some other poster said, but it isn't integrated.
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I use mbox for no special reason. It's the default for sendmail, exim, postfix, procmail, and all that good stuff. In fact, I don't know what SMTP server defaults to maildir.
That's about the only reason, but let me tell you why I stick with mbox, instead of switching to maildir.
Clean trees. Remember, every time you run updatedb (or locate.updatedb if you come from FreeBSD), it's looking for files. The more messages you have, the more files it's got to hunt down. That means time and size. Keeping clean directory trees is generally a good thing, it helps keep things where they belong.
Inodes. Many people keep thousands upon thousands of messages. This means thousands upon thousands of files. Multiply this by a few horde-happy users, and you're quickly running out of inodes in your /var filesystem. Then you start getting horrible messages like "Could not create /var/tmp/tmp.file". Not a good thing.
Cluster waste. Don't get clusterfucked! Remember, each file needs to fill a cluster, no matter how big the file is. Thousands of files can waste significant amounts of diskspace.
The only disadvantage I see is filesystem damage. If you trash your filesystem, it is easy to wipe out a lifetime of messages by ruining your mail file. Maildir reduces the damage to (potentially) only a few messages. However, I think this is insignificant.
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Well, let's think about that one.
All these factors point to one sure thing: .NET, no matter how lousy, is going to become the next service standard, and Java is going to flounder. All hail the Microsoft Megalith, they will be setting commonplace computing trends for years to come, and even longer if they control access to your subscription to Office2010.
Jump ship now, while you still have a chance.
A new year calls for a new signature.
They mention in the article that Torvalds's word on when to release kernels is an important one to distribution makers. While certainly true, I think they miss the reason why.
The example in the article is RedHat, who is the only company that opted to offer a distribution based on a test kernel. But now that Torvalds has released 2.4.0, companies all over are planning to deploy distributions based on 2.4.0. They think that 2.4.0 was the first release that Linus was comfortable calling stable.
However, anybody who's run a 2.4.0-test kernel will know differently. I ran test kernels from test8 to test12, and then used 2.4.0 for awhile. It comes as no surprise that 2.4.0 is trivially different than test12... no more different than test8 is from test9. The reason Linus released 2.4.0, as you can tell from his announcement, is that he got tired of people griping at him, and he didn't think the test base would increase at all.
Companies were holding back, not because a test kernel is inferior, but because Linux newcomers would be scared off by a test kernel. It's simply a matter of PR. Maybe Linus isn't the all-knowing Linux God that the article makes him out to be? Think on that for awhile... he's only a man.
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Some might argue that you ARE killing Slashdot.
I don't know if Linus is killing Linux, though. It's a fine operating system, as far as I'm concerned. However, if you look at something like FreeBSD, you find more mature code, with a more unified direction. If might not be a bad idea to have a set of core maintainers, responsible for the kernel AND the base system. It might produce better code.
Of course, that's what FreeBSD is for, isn't it? Linux has its own niche. Let Linus do what he will, it's his kernel.
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Well, OpenSSH and OpenSSL are under the BSD licesnse, I believe... so you shouldn't have a problem.
You can do what you want with BSD-licensed programs, so long as you credit the original author in the manner described in the license. Closed source or not, you just need to make a copyright notice available. Read it carefully to make sure you are in full compliance. But certainly, you can use it in closed-source software.
GNU-GPL code, on the other hand, is a different issue. Being a complete asshole, RMS will probably track you down and cut your penis off if you include GPL'ed code in a closed-source project. I think the only way out of this unpleasant situation would be to make the GPL'ed portions of code available separately, with source available.
Maybe now it becomes clear that RMS is a hypocrite... He professes the greatness and necessity of free software, and then he proceeds to restrict it with his own license.
This is one reason, albeit a minor one, that I switched to FreeBSD. Better license, better code (more stable, longer USB support), and the ability to run Linux binaries.
PS -- Sorry if you're a woman, making that penis comment. If you are a woman, he'll probably take your left breast instead.
A new year calls for a new signature.
You all try to explain why it's okay that Linus allowed ReiserFS into the 2.4.1-pre series, and whether or not he violated his own submission policy. I'll tell you why it doesn't matter one way or the other:
IT'S LINUS'S FUCKING KERNEL. One of the best perks of building your own operating system kernel is the ability to set policy as you see fit. If he sets a no-submission policy, and then allows Hans Reiser's patches into the kernel, his policy is now to only allow Hans Reiser to submit patches. It may change tomorrow. Why you gripe about his conformance to his own policy is beyond me. You shouldn't care what Linus does with his kernel, it's his; you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
Oh, and to back up another correspondent in this thread, indeed, Linus did announce plans to include ReiserFS in 2.4.1 long ago, in an online interview. Or maybe it was print. But I saw it. In fact, everybody has been saying ReiserFS would make it into 2.4.1 for a long time.
PS -- No doubt, in an attempt to attack me, someone will tell me it should be "Linus'" instead of "Linus's"... but no, the apostrophe-s belongs there. If you disagree, I urge you to consult the fabulous writing handbook Elements of Style by White. At least, I think it's White... but the title is certainly correct.
A new year calls for a new signature.
No... you can't sue because you bought a DVD player that won't play CD-R discs.
The only possible way you could sue Sony, would be if they told you it is possible to read CD-Rs, and it is not.
It's not an infringement on rights if you submit to it voluntarily. And since you weren't buying that model DVD player at gunpoint, you voluntarily submitted to suspend your right to play CD-Rs.
Even if you weren't aware that it won't play CD-Rs, that's irrelevant... The law doesn't protect you from being a stupid consumer.
The law is not here to make life convenient or perfect. And I vehemently object to anybody who stands up and says the law should compel corporations to include features in products simple for convenience of consumers.
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FreeBSD is their "reference platform." When OSX was designed, the layout and system semantics where taken from FreeBSD. In this sense, OSX is "based" on FreeBSD, but there is no other link between FreeBSD and OSX.
As the other responder suggested, OSX is based (in the traditional sense of building on top of) the Mach kernel, and takes a lot of things from NeXTSTEP.
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