However, if I were given the opportunity to enjoy these benefits in a country where I have religion in common with everyone else, I'd go. And I really, don't see how you consider this to be "interesting" rather than obvious.
No, I actually find it interesting because of how honest it is! Everybody wants to live with their compatriots. That's why many neighborhoods or parts of town end up being majority Lesbian or Gay, White or Black, Hispanic or Chinese, etc. People naturally self segregate. It's just not often to hear people actually say that in a straightforward way.
They are both Ba'athists despite their rivalry. Ba'athism cannot even be described as a "significant minority" in either Iraq or Syria. My history is just fine, thank you very much.
But it was when they came to power. The Baath movement (Arab nationalism) was probably the dominant political movement across much of the Middle East during the middle part of the 20th century. Not now no. Today the dominant movement is political Islam.
I don't particularly agree with your assessment of the CIA picking Ghaddafi ("presumably" I noticed you said), and if they did, they picked terribly badly since he was so anti-Western.
[citation needed]. Also, this [wikipedia.org] and this [wordpress.com] kinda ruins your "Muslims hate Jews" narrative.
Read what you linked! Here are some massacres/expulsions/forced conversions of Jews off the top of my head (a few links included, you can research the rest if you don't believe me). A colleague of mine in graduate school was coming up with a complete list of such assaults. I'm not sure if his article was ever published. Ottoman history is my particular area of knowledge, but I've included some other particularly famous incidents from elsewhere.
627 AD, Muhammad slaughters (beheading many of them--a practice you claim is forbidden in Islam) Jews in Medina and expels the rest. See also at least two other Jewish tribes that Muhammad extirpated. The first of the Rashidun, Umar, expels all Jews from the Arabian peninsula (~650?). Even today, there are no Jews allowed in Saudi Arabia. Granada, 1066. Jewish quarter massacred. ~1200, the Almoravid dynasty expels Jews and Christians from parts of Moorish Spain and North Africa. 1656, Jews expelled from Isfahan and forced to convert (or die). 1660, Safed (Israel, Ottoman Empire), Jews massacred. About this same time there was a Jewish leader (forget his name, sorry) --and his followers -- who were forced to convert en masse to Islam. They're still called Donme today Turkey, and it's a common slanders against politicians that they are secret Jews. 1678, Yemeni Jews expelled. 1840, Damascus, Jews tortured, forced to convert.
These are just a few of the more egregious. There is not a single century in which I could not find Jews massacred, forced to convert, being expelled from their homes, and having their synagogues and homes destroyed.
I was raised in a Muslim family, but never had the religion forced upon me. I explored other religions freely, went to a Uniting Church school and had lengthy conversations with out pastor. I also spent time learning about the Buddhist faith. Islam for me is as active a choice as any other aspect of my lifestyle. Don't go making assumptions on my behalf, it's borderline insulting.
Anybody who is raised religious as a child had the religion forced on them. Think, if you were raised in a Christian household, do you think you would convert to Islam? if you were raised in a Jewish household would you convert to Islam? Of course not. Minus a tiny percentage of converts (by choice or forced), most people do not switch faiths.
I made exactly two assumptions about you. I assumed, from what you said, that you were Muslim, and I assumed that you were raised Muslim in a Western (probably US/Canada) country. I actually made a third assumption, based on your seeming ignorance and confusion of Arab ideologies and affairs, that you're desi (also Naz).
I'm not making up a "false white-washed" history of Islam. I'm using documented facts and verified historical accounts to counter claims made that are simply not true.
Remeber in my post I bolded one part and said if you chose to respond to only one part of my post to respond to that. Well, it's EXTREMELY telling that you chose to skip over that part. I will repeat it for you.
Tolerance and acceptance--please point out the great historical Muslim philosophers, preachers, and leaders who have preached tolerance and acceptance. Perhaps Akbar in Mughal India? Perhaps some specific syncretic Sufi sects that preached a kind of universalism. Anybody else? Seriously, if you honestly believe that Islam as a religion emphasizes tolerance and acceptance, what's the evidence for your statement? You won't find it in the Qur'an or Hadith.
ALL of those things are explicitly forbidden in our faith. Without question, or exception. This is why we all call BS when those groups claim to do what they do in the name of Islam. They are doing it in the name of furth
Muslims would love to bugger off to a Muslim country.... Leave our countries alone, and we'll go back there faster than you can say "They hate are freedums".
This is a really fascinating statement. The usual claim by apologists is that Muslims integrate extremely well and become loyal to their new countries, just like any other group of immigrants. But, as a Muslim raised in a Western country (USA?) yourself, you're telling me you would love to leave a non-Muslim country to return to a Muslim dominated area? Interesting.
Except that Muslim countries are ruled by tinpot dictators who are all financed by external powers looking to expend their sphere of influence. Saddam, Ghaddafi, Assad, Mobarek, Sisi... all products of foreign powers. That's even true of the groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, right. Your knowledge of history is extremely weak to make these claims. Saddam and Assad arose as heads of POPULAR movements. Is Sisi worse than the Ikhwan and their religious excesses (did you notice how well Christians were doing in Egypt under Ikhwan rule?). What role did the West play in Ghaddafi's rise?
Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.
Citation? Has "Fox News" really said that?
Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident
Look, in general I am a defender of Islam. I don't believe that Islam requires aggression any more than Christianity requires crusades. If you want to look for genocide, forced conversion, and slavery, you need look no further than Christian Europe. However, I don't really find your statement above to be accurate either.
Historically, in territories controlled by Muslim polities, religious minorities have not fared particularly well. Jewish massacres in particular have happened like clockwork across Islamdom. Religious minorities were often forced to wear special identifying clothes. Christians were not allowed to build churches or even ring bells, historically (and in the present day in many areas). In every Islamic state that I know of--from Spain to India--religious minorities had few (if any) legal rights and were required to pay large taxes. If this sounds a lot like how the Nazis treated minorities, you would be correct. The Nazis of course were European Christians, so don't take this as a defense of Christianity.
Whether you're talking about the non-Muslim slaves of the Ottoman Empire (and the conversion of so many churches into Mosques--most notably the Hagia Sophia / Aya Sofya), the jihads against the "kafirs" of Kafiristan in Afghanistan (Kafiristan means land of the infidels, today pleasingly renamed to Nuristan, the land of enlightenment, after their forced conversion in the 19th century), or any number of similar clashes, it's very hard to make the case as Islam as a positive force for religious minorities. It's also incredibly ironic that you mention the Zoroastrians--who you insultingly call "fire worshippers"--as an example of Islam's tolerance. The Zoroastrians, one of the oldest religious on the planet, have probably fared worse than any other minority group under Islamic rule.
The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.
Ridiculous assertions. You are correct when you state there is plenty of foreign interference in the Middle East and foreign interference has almost certainly been a negative for the vast majority of residents of the Middle East. However, the House of Saud rose as a fanatical fundamentalist regime aligned with Wahhabism. It rose with popular support. Today might be a different question, but I see no great satisfaction coming out of Sunni Saudi Arabia (barring the Shia minority areas). Assad and Saddam--Assad remains popular amongst his people, and his father--like Saddam--arose out of a period of Arab nationalism, secularism, and socialism. This is the Baathist movement (one of the main founders of which was a Christian, incidentally). Baathism was perhaps the dominant and most popular ideology across much of the Middle East for much of the 20th century.
You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.
A ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims? You must be talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakis
Even if an unprecedentedly huge 5% of the population were actually informed on the issues and voted for a candidate who'd actually make things better (or die trying), it wouldn't make enough of a difference in the election to tip the scales.
Is there evidence that informed voters (or more widely, an informed electorate) produces better outcomes? In other words, informed people can pick terrible politicians and vice versa. Is there any data to suggest that informed voters pick better candidates who perform better?
It's going to take something like the Chinese colonizing Mars and extracting all its natural resources before a Soviet-style space race shocks the US out of its disinterest in science.
Don't you know, America would be foolish to worry about home-grown talent. We will just import all of our talent from the rest of the world, allowing our lazyass native-born children to become rich off of the hard work of others!
This was one of the only good things to come out of the Cold War -- look how many state university systems were built up in the 60s and 70s and how much research got funded without griping about the cost
In all seriousness, do you think there is any correlation between these two things? The government starts spending massive amounts of money on research funding and corporate funding for research dries up. Look at the timeframes involved. Chicken or egg?
I didn't mean the community college thing to be derogatory at all--from what I've seen of computer science classes at community colleges, they do tend to have more of a practical or programming focus than the college programs I'm familiar with. Experiences may vary!
I spoke to a computer science professor about 2–3 years ago who said he had noticed a curious thing over the last few years. The students in his classes didn't seem interested--or even willing to--in solving programming problems. They just expected to be able to come in, download this framework and that framework, find a solution to a tricky problem on Stackoverflow (or wherever), and maybe write some really rudimentary code to just glue the bits together. Many of the "old " assignments--implement three different sorting algorithms and compare their properties just seemed totally archaic to his students--why would you ever want to actually write a sorting algorithm? After all, somebody out there has already done it better, and that's nothing you would ever need to do as real programmer.
The professor was somewhat alarmed by this, but not totally in disaster mode, because it was probably true that MOST of his students would never need to write a sorting algorithm. Most of his students would never need to implement an algorithm that draws a circle, etc. But still--this was computer science--not community college.
The writer here seems to fall squarely into this class of learner. Honestly, the first thing this article made me think of was that awful Barbie learns programming book where Barbie gets some other people to write the code for a program she designed, thereby becoming a real computer programmer. Maybe the book wasn't that far off the mark after all...
If you watch the last 20 minutes or so of the BAFUG video, Jordan Hubbard talks about launchd. I don't believe that boot time comes up a single time as a reason for making the switch.
I had an old DEC Alpha that I ran for a few months. It was being scrapped by my school and I was able to get it right before it was going in the dumpster. That thing must have 100+ lbs. Unfortunately, the power supply have up the ghost in just a few months, so I didn't get to play with it too much.
Sorting config.sys was not alphabetical, and also was one of the things that become obsolete with win95. You sorted it by memory consumption so you never had programs using more than 640kbytes of memory at any time. The simplest algorithms just sorted it so they started the largest first so they were also over first, but there were more complicated programs for automatically sorting and packaging config.sys.
My post was talking about OS/2, which had an entirely different config.sys. I doubt there has ever been a DOS config.sys with 60 lines! Also, it's been a long time, but IIRC, with later versions of DOS, the first line in config.sys was usually himem.sys. Loading himem.sys enabled extended memory, and was followed by DOS=HIGH (or DOS=HIGH,UMB, etc.). You could also then load device drivers with DEVICEHIGH instead of DEVICE lines.
I don't particularly remember needing to sort DOS's config.sys, other than--at times--figuring out what you wanted to load (mscdex, etc) and what you didn't.
Since it was part of the DOS operating system, it was rendered obsolete by win95 which hads it own drivers so you could just remove everything except what was needed to launch windows from config.sys.
IIRC, Win95 did have a config.sys, though you didn't really need to mess with it often. in the win95 days, people did still boot to DOS fairly regularly for some older DOS programs that wouldn't work in windows, so you generally did want to have a functional DOS boot environment.
Hah, that sounds very much like my own experience.
For one Christmas the family got a brand new 486 dx33mhz with 16mb ram--the best computer any of my friends had, AND it included a CDROM. The first game on CD I had was a collection of Wing Commander 2 with expansions and speech packs. The 1x CDROM was too slow to effectively play the game, so I would xcopy the directories to the hard disk when I wanted to play. The only problem was I didn't have enough space to have wing commander (30mb!!) and anything else installed, so I deleted Win3.1 every single time I wanted to play wing commander, and then reinstalled windows when I was done.
Over the next few years I got a Cyrix, got into overclocking, got into OS/2 Warp (downloaded 20 floppy disk images from an IBM BBS at one point to do a software update!), was briefly into Linux and then got into FreeBSD some time in the FreeBSD 4.x revision cycle. Now I mostly use a Mac laptop, but I still run FreeBSD on my work server and an OpenBSD firewall.
OS/2 was great. I was always amazed at how it could run windows programs faster than Windows!
The other thing I always remember is that if you sorted the config.sys file (which, IIRC, was something like 60+ lines long) so the drivers loaded in alphabetical order, you could literally shave minutes off of your boot time.
One of my earliest Internet experiences, post-BBSes, was on Delphi using some OS/2 software called ODN--Offline Delphi Newsreader.
I used to repair macs, so I know what they are like inside, at least for the generations up to the switch to amd64.
So that would be pre-2006? You're not exactly talking recent history, then...
Thermally, they were often badly engineered - there were exceptions like the G5 tower, but the exceptions were often idiosyncratic in other annoying ways (eg. the G5 tower could only take 2 disks in a huge tower, had something that wasn't quite a DVI port, and used oddball 15A power cable). We used to adapt standard PC components to fix the macs, so that they wouldn't be back in the shop again in a year or so. Sometimes I felt that engineering issues got ignored in favour of aesthetics.
Seems to me you're conflating several issues. Apples hve long been optimized for acoustics over temperature. That is, they figured most people wanted quieter systems more than cooler systems. I think they're probably right. The second issue is that Apple used to use a lot more proprietary tech than they do now. You're talking about computers that are over 10 years old, however.
Such a libertarian OS. And look at how popular it is today!
I assume you mean "libertarian" simply as a general pejorative? Interesting, since FreeBSD has long had a very formalized governing structure, elections, etc. I'm not honestly not sure what you would describe as libertarian about FreeBSD other than the fact that they -- like Linux -- are open source. FreeBSD is doing quite well today. It's certainly not as widely used as Linux, but from what I can tell it's growing and more than self-sustaining.
That's really interesting. When I was in highschool our school had a Netware network. We had a computer lab for physics and computer science that had no Internet access, but the teacher let me bring in my own computer (some kind of very early 486) that I installed RedHat Linux--I think 4--on and ran a NAT and http server for about 40-50 computers. That was really cool (and I really wonder if any school around would let a student have that kind of access to a school network now).
A friend of mine at school was from Taiwan and introduced me to FreeBSD that same year. Apparently--at least in the 90s--FreeBSD was big in Taiwan and used heavily in the BBS scene there.
I switched my own computers to FreeBSD not long after, and haven't really looked back. My experience at the time was that FreeBSD was MUCH easier to deal with. The system file layouts were far more consistent, man pages were excellent, and the FreeBSD handbook remains very helpful to this day. I've never understood the criticism that FreeBSD was "harder" than Linux, as that has not been my experience at all--at least since 1997 or so.
BSD fans will tell you that this is a feature, and then five minutes later bitch about something they don't have because BSD is less popular
I've read many of the FreeBSD dev lists for about 15 years now, and I can't say I have ever seen this. Strawman?
More power to them for doing this. As I haven't had time to read the article, are they publishing their design as open source?
Or apparently the summary itself (RTFS? RTFB -- blurb?): "It cost about US$10,000 to develop, and has been released as an open source model for anyone to use."
To be fair, I myself haven't RTFA, but I did do a really good partial skim of the summary.
The labor is extremely powerful in factories. One simple personal anecdote, a worker was drilling holes in the wind tunnel model for me to mount the sensors. Did a 9.9 mm hole, and had mounted the 10mm reamer bit in the machine. He had one hole to finish when the siren sounded for tea time, he walked off! I was standing by him and asked him to just finish the last hole, (move the handle once down like in a slot machine, that was all that was pending) he was upset by that request, and refused to finish that job for three weeks. No other worker would touch the machine, other drilling jobs were piling up. I was a very fresh rookie at that time. I did not even had the perception to understand he was waiting for me to apologize for the affront. I would have readily done it if I had known it. No one clued me in on it too. They were all having fun watching me running from pillar to post to get the model to the four-foot tunnel. No one dared to order a worker to finish the job.
There are other stories of workers deliberately opening the autoclave some 24 hours into the cycle, corrupting the tempering process of all the pieces inside. They were aircraft parts, all of them had to be scrapped. Loss of almost a million rupees. A foreman was injured in a shop floor. Ambulance could not reach the location. They had a battery truck. But the workers would not let it be used to transport the guy. Why? foremen belong to the "management"! It is that bad there.
Very interesting stories. My father's family worked in factories in Ohio/West Virginia/Kentucky area for several generations, and they were all union. He has very similar stories about people sabotaging the line, crashing a lift to cause an incident to get a break, etc. There's no doubt unions have done a ton of good, but that type of action just doesn't sit well for most Americans.
From my own experience, about 20 years ago I was setting up an exhibit at a tradeshow in New York. Most of the exhibitors were big companies who paid for union labor to put together their displays. I was a one person operation and had one tiny booth in a large hall with one table covered by a tablecloth. All I had to do was drape the tablecloth and set up my flyers and inventory--nothing elaborate. The table I had ordered from the convention service was at an angle near the entrance to the booth. I started to move the table towards the back of the booth--about six feet total--and you would have thought I was starting a nuclear war. Several of the union staff ran over yelling that I wasn't allowed to move anything and I had to wait for an authorized laborer to move the table for me. I had to wait over two hours until the floor boss had someone come over and move my table five feet. Like you, I had no idea what I had done and was baffled by the response. I could have been out of there in ten minutes if I had flipped them some cash...
Having gone to many tradeshows across the country since then, the convention handling unions have been greatly reduced over the last 20 years.
I had three of the 40w TW Cree bulbs crap out with flickering and eventually dying. I contacted Cree support, took a photo of the packaging, and they, no questions asked, fedexed me three new bulbs. I didn't have to send the old ones back. Worth a shot.
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However, if I were given the opportunity to enjoy these benefits in a country where I have religion in common with everyone else, I'd go. And I really, don't see how you consider this to be "interesting" rather than obvious.
No, I actually find it interesting because of how honest it is! Everybody wants to live with their compatriots. That's why many neighborhoods or parts of town end up being majority Lesbian or Gay, White or Black, Hispanic or Chinese, etc. People naturally self segregate. It's just not often to hear people actually say that in a straightforward way.
They are both Ba'athists despite their rivalry. Ba'athism cannot even be described as a "significant minority" in either Iraq or Syria. My history is just fine, thank you very much.
But it was when they came to power. The Baath movement (Arab nationalism) was probably the dominant political movement across much of the Middle East during the middle part of the 20th century. Not now no. Today the dominant movement is political Islam.
I don't particularly agree with your assessment of the CIA picking Ghaddafi ("presumably" I noticed you said), and if they did, they picked terribly badly since he was so anti-Western.
[citation needed]. Also, this [wikipedia.org] and this [wordpress.com] kinda ruins your "Muslims hate Jews" narrative.
Read what you linked! Here are some massacres/expulsions/forced conversions of Jews off the top of my head (a few links included, you can research the rest if you don't believe me). A colleague of mine in graduate school was coming up with a complete list of such assaults. I'm not sure if his article was ever published. Ottoman history is my particular area of knowledge, but I've included some other particularly famous incidents from elsewhere.
627 AD, Muhammad slaughters (beheading many of them--a practice you claim is forbidden in Islam) Jews in Medina and expels the rest. See also at least two other Jewish tribes that Muhammad extirpated.
The first of the Rashidun, Umar, expels all Jews from the Arabian peninsula (~650?). Even today, there are no Jews allowed in Saudi Arabia.
Granada, 1066. Jewish quarter massacred.
~1200, the Almoravid dynasty expels Jews and Christians from parts of Moorish Spain and North Africa.
1656, Jews expelled from Isfahan and forced to convert (or die).
1660, Safed (Israel, Ottoman Empire), Jews massacred.
About this same time there was a Jewish leader (forget his name, sorry) --and his followers -- who were forced to convert en masse to Islam. They're still called Donme today Turkey, and it's a common slanders against politicians that they are secret Jews.
1678, Yemeni Jews expelled.
1840, Damascus, Jews tortured, forced to convert.
These are just a few of the more egregious. There is not a single century in which I could not find Jews massacred, forced to convert, being expelled from their homes, and having their synagogues and homes destroyed.
I was raised in a Muslim family, but never had the religion forced upon me. I explored other religions freely, went to a Uniting Church school and had lengthy conversations with out pastor. I also spent time learning about the Buddhist faith. Islam for me is as active a choice as any other aspect of my lifestyle. Don't go making assumptions on my behalf, it's borderline insulting.
Anybody who is raised religious as a child had the religion forced on them. Think, if you were raised in a Christian household, do you think you would convert to Islam? if you were raised in a Jewish household would you convert to Islam? Of course not. Minus a tiny percentage of converts (by choice or forced), most people do not switch faiths.
I made exactly two assumptions about you. I assumed, from what you said, that you were Muslim, and I assumed that you were raised Muslim in a Western (probably US/Canada) country. I actually made a third assumption, based on your seeming ignorance and confusion of Arab ideologies and affairs, that you're desi (also Naz).
I'm not making up a "false white-washed" history of Islam. I'm using documented facts and verified historical accounts to counter claims made that are simply not true.
Remeber in my post I bolded one part and said if you chose to respond to only one part of my post to respond to that. Well, it's EXTREMELY telling that you chose to skip over that part. I will repeat it for you.
Tolerance and acceptance--please point out the great historical Muslim philosophers, preachers, and leaders who have preached tolerance and acceptance. Perhaps Akbar in Mughal India? Perhaps some specific syncretic Sufi sects that preached a kind of universalism. Anybody else? Seriously, if you honestly believe that Islam as a religion emphasizes tolerance and acceptance, what's the evidence for your statement? You won't find it in the Qur'an or Hadith.
ALL of those things are explicitly forbidden in our faith. Without question, or exception. This is why we all call BS when those groups claim to do what they do in the name of Islam. They are doing it in the name of furth
Muslims would love to bugger off to a Muslim country. ...
Leave our countries alone, and we'll go back there faster than you can say "They hate are freedums".
This is a really fascinating statement. The usual claim by apologists is that Muslims integrate extremely well and become loyal to their new countries, just like any other group of immigrants. But, as a Muslim raised in a Western country (USA?) yourself, you're telling me you would love to leave a non-Muslim country to return to a Muslim dominated area? Interesting.
Except that Muslim countries are ruled by tinpot dictators who are all financed by external powers looking to expend their sphere of influence. Saddam, Ghaddafi, Assad, Mobarek, Sisi... all products of foreign powers. That's even true of the groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, right. Your knowledge of history is extremely weak to make these claims. Saddam and Assad arose as heads of POPULAR movements. Is Sisi worse than the Ikhwan and their religious excesses (did you notice how well Christians were doing in Egypt under Ikhwan rule?). What role did the West play in Ghaddafi's rise?
Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.
Citation? Has "Fox News" really said that?
Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident
Look, in general I am a defender of Islam. I don't believe that Islam requires aggression any more than Christianity requires crusades. If you want to look for genocide, forced conversion, and slavery, you need look no further than Christian Europe. However, I don't really find your statement above to be accurate either.
Historically, in territories controlled by Muslim polities, religious minorities have not fared particularly well. Jewish massacres in particular have happened like clockwork across Islamdom. Religious minorities were often forced to wear special identifying clothes. Christians were not allowed to build churches or even ring bells, historically (and in the present day in many areas). In every Islamic state that I know of--from Spain to India--religious minorities had few (if any) legal rights and were required to pay large taxes. If this sounds a lot like how the Nazis treated minorities, you would be correct. The Nazis of course were European Christians, so don't take this as a defense of Christianity.
Whether you're talking about the non-Muslim slaves of the Ottoman Empire (and the conversion of so many churches into Mosques--most notably the Hagia Sophia / Aya Sofya), the jihads against the "kafirs" of Kafiristan in Afghanistan (Kafiristan means land of the infidels, today pleasingly renamed to Nuristan, the land of enlightenment, after their forced conversion in the 19th century), or any number of similar clashes, it's very hard to make the case as Islam as a positive force for religious minorities. It's also incredibly ironic that you mention the Zoroastrians--who you insultingly call "fire worshippers"--as an example of Islam's tolerance. The Zoroastrians, one of the oldest religious on the planet, have probably fared worse than any other minority group under Islamic rule.
The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.
Ridiculous assertions. You are correct when you state there is plenty of foreign interference in the Middle East and foreign interference has almost certainly been a negative for the vast majority of residents of the Middle East. However, the House of Saud rose as a fanatical fundamentalist regime aligned with Wahhabism. It rose with popular support. Today might be a different question, but I see no great satisfaction coming out of Sunni Saudi Arabia (barring the Shia minority areas). Assad and Saddam--Assad remains popular amongst his people, and his father--like Saddam--arose out of a period of Arab nationalism, secularism, and socialism. This is the Baathist movement (one of the main founders of which was a Christian, incidentally). Baathism was perhaps the dominant and most popular ideology across much of the Middle East for much of the 20th century.
You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.
A ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims? You must be talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakis
Naw, this is a classic PEBKAC error (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair).
Even if an unprecedentedly huge 5% of the population were actually informed on the issues and voted for a candidate who'd actually make things better (or die trying), it wouldn't make enough of a difference in the election to tip the scales.
Is there evidence that informed voters (or more widely, an informed electorate) produces better outcomes? In other words, informed people can pick terrible politicians and vice versa. Is there any data to suggest that informed voters pick better candidates who perform better?
It's going to take something like the Chinese colonizing Mars and extracting all its natural resources before a Soviet-style space race shocks the US out of its disinterest in science.
Don't you know, America would be foolish to worry about home-grown talent. We will just import all of our talent from the rest of the world, allowing our lazyass native-born children to become rich off of the hard work of others!
This was one of the only good things to come out of the Cold War -- look how many state university systems were built up in the 60s and 70s and how much research got funded without griping about the cost
In all seriousness, do you think there is any correlation between these two things? The government starts spending massive amounts of money on research funding and corporate funding for research dries up. Look at the timeframes involved. Chicken or egg?
And yes, it's trying to take on software packaging, as well.
FreeBSD user (and Mac OSX) here, so I've only followed the systemd meltdown from the periphery. Is that really true about systemd and packaging?
I didn't mean the community college thing to be derogatory at all--from what I've seen of computer science classes at community colleges, they do tend to have more of a practical or programming focus than the college programs I'm familiar with. Experiences may vary!
I spoke to a computer science professor about 2–3 years ago who said he had noticed a curious thing over the last few years. The students in his classes didn't seem interested--or even willing to--in solving programming problems. They just expected to be able to come in, download this framework and that framework, find a solution to a tricky problem on Stackoverflow (or wherever), and maybe write some really rudimentary code to just glue the bits together. Many of the "old " assignments--implement three different sorting algorithms and compare their properties just seemed totally archaic to his students--why would you ever want to actually write a sorting algorithm? After all, somebody out there has already done it better, and that's nothing you would ever need to do as real programmer.
The professor was somewhat alarmed by this, but not totally in disaster mode, because it was probably true that MOST of his students would never need to write a sorting algorithm. Most of his students would never need to implement an algorithm that draws a circle, etc. But still--this was computer science--not community college.
The writer here seems to fall squarely into this class of learner. Honestly, the first thing this article made me think of was that awful Barbie learns programming book where Barbie gets some other people to write the code for a program she designed, thereby becoming a real computer programmer. Maybe the book wasn't that far off the mark after all...
If you watch the last 20 minutes or so of the BAFUG video, Jordan Hubbard talks about launchd. I don't believe that boot time comes up a single time as a reason for making the switch.
I had an old DEC Alpha that I ran for a few months. It was being scrapped by my school and I was able to get it right before it was going in the dumpster. That thing must have 100+ lbs. Unfortunately, the power supply have up the ghost in just a few months, so I didn't get to play with it too much.
Sorting config.sys was not alphabetical, and also was one of the things that become obsolete with win95. You sorted it by memory consumption so you never had programs using more than 640kbytes of memory at any time. The simplest algorithms just sorted it so they started the largest first so they were also over first, but there were more complicated programs for automatically sorting and packaging config.sys.
My post was talking about OS/2, which had an entirely different config.sys. I doubt there has ever been a DOS config.sys with 60 lines! Also, it's been a long time, but IIRC, with later versions of DOS, the first line in config.sys was usually himem.sys. Loading himem.sys enabled extended memory, and was followed by DOS=HIGH (or DOS=HIGH,UMB, etc.). You could also then load device drivers with DEVICEHIGH instead of DEVICE lines.
I don't particularly remember needing to sort DOS's config.sys, other than--at times--figuring out what you wanted to load (mscdex, etc) and what you didn't.
Since it was part of the DOS operating system, it was rendered obsolete by win95 which hads it own drivers so you could just remove everything except what was needed to launch windows from config.sys.
IIRC, Win95 did have a config.sys, though you didn't really need to mess with it often. in the win95 days, people did still boot to DOS fairly regularly for some older DOS programs that wouldn't work in windows, so you generally did want to have a functional DOS boot environment.
Hah, that sounds very much like my own experience.
For one Christmas the family got a brand new 486 dx33mhz with 16mb ram--the best computer any of my friends had, AND it included a CDROM. The first game on CD I had was a collection of Wing Commander 2 with expansions and speech packs. The 1x CDROM was too slow to effectively play the game, so I would xcopy the directories to the hard disk when I wanted to play. The only problem was I didn't have enough space to have wing commander (30mb!!) and anything else installed, so I deleted Win3.1 every single time I wanted to play wing commander, and then reinstalled windows when I was done.
Over the next few years I got a Cyrix, got into overclocking, got into OS/2 Warp (downloaded 20 floppy disk images from an IBM BBS at one point to do a software update!), was briefly into Linux and then got into FreeBSD some time in the FreeBSD 4.x revision cycle. Now I mostly use a Mac laptop, but I still run FreeBSD on my work server and an OpenBSD firewall.
OS/2 was great. I was always amazed at how it could run windows programs faster than Windows!
The other thing I always remember is that if you sorted the config.sys file (which, IIRC, was something like 60+ lines long) so the drivers loaded in alphabetical order, you could literally shave minutes off of your boot time.
One of my earliest Internet experiences, post-BBSes, was on Delphi using some OS/2 software called ODN--Offline Delphi Newsreader.
Good memories!
I installed NT4 server on a 486dx 33mhz with 16mb ram, and the thing ran pretty darn well!
I used to repair macs, so I know what they are like inside, at least for the generations up to the switch to amd64.
So that would be pre-2006? You're not exactly talking recent history, then...
Thermally, they were often badly engineered - there were exceptions like the G5 tower, but the exceptions were often idiosyncratic in other annoying ways (eg. the G5 tower could only take 2 disks in a huge tower, had something that wasn't quite a DVI port, and used oddball 15A power cable). We used to adapt standard PC components to fix the macs, so that they wouldn't be back in the shop again in a year or so. Sometimes I felt that engineering issues got ignored in favour of aesthetics.
Seems to me you're conflating several issues. Apples hve long been optimized for acoustics over temperature. That is, they figured most people wanted quieter systems more than cooler systems. I think they're probably right. The second issue is that Apple used to use a lot more proprietary tech than they do now. You're talking about computers that are over 10 years old, however.
You send in your phone and in 6-8 weeks you get it back.
Well, you clearly never owned an Apple product. Their customer support is one of the best things about Apple...
Such a libertarian OS. And look at how popular it is today!
I assume you mean "libertarian" simply as a general pejorative? Interesting, since FreeBSD has long had a very formalized governing structure, elections, etc. I'm not honestly not sure what you would describe as libertarian about FreeBSD other than the fact that they -- like Linux -- are open source. FreeBSD is doing quite well today. It's certainly not as widely used as Linux, but from what I can tell it's growing and more than self-sustaining.
That's really interesting. When I was in highschool our school had a Netware network. We had a computer lab for physics and computer science that had no Internet access, but the teacher let me bring in my own computer (some kind of very early 486) that I installed RedHat Linux--I think 4--on and ran a NAT and http server for about 40-50 computers. That was really cool (and I really wonder if any school around would let a student have that kind of access to a school network now).
A friend of mine at school was from Taiwan and introduced me to FreeBSD that same year. Apparently--at least in the 90s--FreeBSD was big in Taiwan and used heavily in the BBS scene there.
I switched my own computers to FreeBSD not long after, and haven't really looked back. My experience at the time was that FreeBSD was MUCH easier to deal with. The system file layouts were far more consistent, man pages were excellent, and the FreeBSD handbook remains very helpful to this day. I've never understood the criticism that FreeBSD was "harder" than Linux, as that has not been my experience at all--at least since 1997 or so.
BSD fans will tell you that this is a feature, and then five minutes later bitch about something they don't have because BSD is less popular
I've read many of the FreeBSD dev lists for about 15 years now, and I can't say I have ever seen this. Strawman?
Can you just mash enter (and type a username and password, perhaps) and get an installed system?
I've never used PC-BSD, but the stock FreeBSD installer is pretty close to that.
More power to them for doing this. As I haven't had time to read the article, are they publishing their design as open source?
Or apparently the summary itself (RTFS? RTFB -- blurb?): "It cost about US$10,000 to develop, and has been released as an open source model for anyone to use."
To be fair, I myself haven't RTFA, but I did do a really good partial skim of the summary.
Seems pretty simple to me. They "prioritize[] marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort."
In other words, you're (or the people you're talking about) privileged, so fuck off.
The labor is extremely powerful in factories. One simple personal anecdote, a worker was drilling holes in the wind tunnel model for me to mount the sensors. Did a 9.9 mm hole, and had mounted the 10mm reamer bit in the machine. He had one hole to finish when the siren sounded for tea time, he walked off! I was standing by him and asked him to just finish the last hole, (move the handle once down like in a slot machine, that was all that was pending) he was upset by that request, and refused to finish that job for three weeks. No other worker would touch the machine, other drilling jobs were piling up. I was a very fresh rookie at that time. I did not even had the perception to understand he was waiting for me to apologize for the affront. I would have readily done it if I had known it. No one clued me in on it too. They were all having fun watching me running from pillar to post to get the model to the four-foot tunnel. No one dared to order a worker to finish the job.
There are other stories of workers deliberately opening the autoclave some 24 hours into the cycle, corrupting the tempering process of all the pieces inside. They were aircraft parts, all of them had to be scrapped. Loss of almost a million rupees. A foreman was injured in a shop floor. Ambulance could not reach the location. They had a battery truck. But the workers would not let it be used to transport the guy. Why? foremen belong to the "management"! It is that bad there.
Very interesting stories. My father's family worked in factories in Ohio/West Virginia/Kentucky area for several generations, and they were all union. He has very similar stories about people sabotaging the line, crashing a lift to cause an incident to get a break, etc. There's no doubt unions have done a ton of good, but that type of action just doesn't sit well for most Americans.
From my own experience, about 20 years ago I was setting up an exhibit at a tradeshow in New York. Most of the exhibitors were big companies who paid for union labor to put together their displays. I was a one person operation and had one tiny booth in a large hall with one table covered by a tablecloth. All I had to do was drape the tablecloth and set up my flyers and inventory--nothing elaborate. The table I had ordered from the convention service was at an angle near the entrance to the booth. I started to move the table towards the back of the booth--about six feet total--and you would have thought I was starting a nuclear war. Several of the union staff ran over yelling that I wasn't allowed to move anything and I had to wait for an authorized laborer to move the table for me. I had to wait over two hours until the floor boss had someone come over and move my table five feet. Like you, I had no idea what I had done and was baffled by the response. I could have been out of there in ten minutes if I had flipped them some cash...
Having gone to many tradeshows across the country since then, the convention handling unions have been greatly reduced over the last 20 years.
I had three of the 40w TW Cree bulbs crap out with flickering and eventually dying. I contacted Cree support, took a photo of the packaging, and they, no questions asked, fedexed me three new bulbs. I didn't have to send the old ones back. Worth a shot.