80% of the Fortune 500 have deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Source: InformationWeek, July 2012.
I'd call that a little traction. And that's just Red Hat, not including alternatives like SuSe, Oracle, and so forth.
A more telling indication of how well Linux performs in the Enterprise ecosystem is probably the invention of Windows PowerShell. Which is, in large part, a response to the fact that even the most ancient 1990s versions of Linux sported a selection of shells suitable for remote administration and scripting in a way that the comparatively feeble COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE shells do not.
I could be even nastier and point out that the RPM database that's installed on every Red Hat family system (including Fedora and CentOS) has not only a complete inventory of all packages installed on the system, including information that can be used to not only inventory what files are installed where, but checksum information that can be used to trivially scan for possible damage or sabotage and that if Windows has yet added such a feature it happened very, very recently. Or enumerate the various provisioning and monitoring tools available for Linux. But that's just being vicious.
One of the best changes in "design philosophy" that has happened in the past 20 years is that instead of the idea of any product as a fortress that cannot fail, products are designed to expect their components to fail, and to recovery gracefully from it.
This leads to a more flexible and resilient product. It reminds me of the military approach, where every system has at least two backups or alternates.
I think that comes more from the fact that whereas in ancient times, re-IPLing an IBM mainframe was horribly expensive and something to be prevented wherever possible, doing the 3-finger salute on a Windows computer was infinitely cheaper than paying someone to write reliable software. Especially since Windows wasn't.
Regardless of sobriety, if you kill people while in control of a motor vehicle, expect to be considered for charges.
That is certainly not the case if the person who dies was riding a bicycle. Cyclists are killed daily in the USA, with very very few cases being prosecuted at all.
Before you say "certainly", I think I'd like some hard stats. Granted, a lot of local cyclists do things like run stop signs (illegal in this state), turn across traffic with minimal (if any) advance warning and (most damning of all) have the temerity to actually ride on public roadways, but I'm pretty sure we do occasionally prosecute drivers for excessive herd-thinning.
"And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't. Look at Microsoft — who's running Microsoft? (interviewer: Steve Ballmer.) Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well."
Short form: "Nothing succeeds like Success". It's why most Free Markets end up destroying themselves. If even one participant can rise above the common herd, positive feedback mechanisms begin to form whereby the winners get bigger at the expense of the losers and the bigger they get, the harder the task of competing with them becomes. Eventually most, if not all competitors become insignificant or extinct and the driving forces for the winners get replaced with forces unrelated to what originally made them winners.
This. Right now if someone hits and kills a pedestrian, it's called an "accident" and they go free if they're sober - but they go to jail for many years if they had a drink. It doesn't matter that incompetent driving caused the death - the only time a driver is punished appropriately is when they had a drink.
A test for competency would also get a lot of older drivers who cannot drive safely any more off the road.
Two words: "Vehicular Homicide". Doesn't even matter whether the victim(s) are walking, in another car, bicycle, pogo sticks, whatever.
Regardless of sobriety, if you kill people while in control of a motor vehicle, expect to be considered for charges. The degree will vary. If you deliberately gunned the engine and ran over kids at the school crossing, that's premeditated murder and they'll throw the book at you. If you couldn't hit the brakes fast enough when you saw the ball roll into traffic, not so much. But you won't get a free pass. In fact, just driving a car in known unsafe condition can add to the charges.
Conversely, I could argue that "appropriate" punishment for a DUI manslaughter is not what I have seen handed out, but that would be personal bias.
CDs specify a pause before each track. Usually it's 2 seconds (my old player counts down -0:02, -0:01, 0:00, 0:01), but it can be set to zero, in which case there's no gap at all, and the index is just a pointer to a frame to start playback from.
I have a few electronic albums like this.
CDs do not specify a pause at all. The pause you're most likely referring to was that moronic burning software from the late 90s early 2000s that had those default options. A player that imposed such a moronic concept on its CDs would destroy the flow of an album like NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, from 1989, among others. Many CDs are mastered with a "quiet" period of approximately a second or so between songs, matching the pauses between songs on LPs, which were the visible areas (widely spaced grooves) so that a person could drop the needle near the beginning of a particular song of interest. There are also LPs where an entire side appears or sounds as one track - I believe side A of Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Rush's 2112 were 2 samples, but it's been a long time since I broke out any vinyl.
Morton Subotnik did a (vinyl) album titled "Butterflies". In addition to the "butterfly" motif of the sounds on the album in the sonic shape of 2 large "wings" with a narrow "body" between them, the tracks on the vinyl were also "butterfly" shaped, with 2 large bands and a narrow band on each side of the disc. You could see the band pattern very distinctly.
The difference is self interest of the states is no longer represented at the federal level. Even if a few "crazy states" have crazy senators, you would still have representation of the states in congress. If a given state is crazy, they can pretty much only damage themselves.
IF a given state is crazy? We seem to have more than enough crazy states either way.
Phone calls aren't encrypted either - they're probably even a bit easier to intercept as they don't need the post office involved.
They still need a warrant to listen in on, however.
Law enforcement also can't go back to see all my old post cards and listen to my old phone conversations they same way they could view my old emails.
Actually, these days, phone calls are encrypted, digitally transmitted. All the old analog wireless channels are gone now, I think. Or did you mean landline phone calls? The ones that go through that infamous closet in the San Francisco AT&T office?
Doesn't matter. The telephone offices have been required for a long time to allow law enforcement to tap into their channels on demand, regardless of transmission media. In theory, "demand" means some sort of legal authority, but AT&T and Verizon are both famous for rolling over on their backs at the merest hint. Truthfully, I'm not even sure that you can be sure that your phone conversations haven't been archived, considering some of the massive data storage facilities that the US Government has been investing in. Even postcards, for that matter - I've seen mailsorters where the postal materials were in one place and the operators viewed the addresses via remote cameras. Which is only a short step to storing images.
I wish I could be paranoid, but these days I fear they think abuses up faster than I can fantasize them.
The senators are not self endorsed and self elected. People vote for them
There's the problem. Making senators popularly elected instead of by state legislatures turned them into what they are now. They're no longer there to represent their states; now they just want to pander for your vote via special interest campaign donations.
Considering the things that my state's legislators tried to ram into the state constitution last election, I fail to see a clear advantage either way.
So I guess the work rules that said that you had to have one guy on the truck to drive it, and another one on the truck to actually unload the truck and stock the shelves had nothing to do with it? Guess stocking the shelves requires such specialized training we can't expect drivers to figure it out. Or how about the rules that said that if you had cakes and breads going to the same location, you had to send two trucks, one for the cakes and one for the breads? Can't see how that would be an issue, either. How about the Forbes article from February which noted that Hostess had 372 separate collective bargaining agreements and 80 separate health and pension plans. Workers compensation costs for last year averaged out to $2700 for each of its 18K+ employees. Yes- management getting bonuses while the workers take it on the chin is scummy. Working for a struggling company when it is bought by a private-equity firm is almost always bad news. But why don't you look past your knee-jerk "it's the far right" response- there's plenty of blame to go around in this instance, and the unions are one of the prime reasons the Hostess workers no longer have jobs.
Featherbedding is unquestionably one of the most notoriously offensive things about unions.
On the other hand, if you want to see the opposite of featherbedding, look at (non-union) IT shops, where management wants the same person to be the apps developer, the DBA, the sysadmin, the network administrator and desktop support for 500+ users. For $18k annually, and no thought of a pension; if you can't build up an IRA out of your daily salary, then tough.
Maybe, just maybe, the union reached the point where when their bluff was called, they were fed up enough not to fold. Sure, they lost their jobs. But they also let management everywhere know that you cannot ignore a strike with impunity even if you are willing to go nuclear.
We have spent the last 30 years eroding labour (union or otherwise), with "labour" meaning anyone who hasn't been getting routine double-digit annual raises, 6-figure bonuses, more benefits for failure than most get for success, and not excluding "dollar-a-year" salaries but owning luxury cars and homes.
While I hope I never have to work in a union shop myself, at some point, in some way, the 99% have to start seeing a return to prosperity, and a strike is better than a revolution.
It's too early to say, but there's a distinct possibility that the Hostess affair may someday be quoted in the history ebooks as the point where the pendulum began to swing back.
We believe that collecting taxes, any taxes, is a form of protection money, a form of legalized thievery and is morally repugnant. I think you will find that 99% of actual Libertarians agree with me too. I wouldn't really consider a Libertarian who believes in taxes to be a Libertarian at all. Keeping relationships voluntary (voluntarism) is at the very core of the philosophy.
The "protection" racket works because you're buying "protection" against the very people you're paying off. The "civilization" racket works because you're buying protection against other people.
Communism failed because people aren't sufficiently virtuous to work their hardest without material incentives. Capitalism fails because people aren't sufficiently virtuous not to damage their customers and employees. A government-free system fails because even at the neighborhood level there are people who'd rather bypass the whole farce and take directly from you unless you combine with or delegate people to defend you from them. Once you do that, you've gotten into the government business. Even a volunteer fire department requires more than just a bunch of people with buckets. It requires capital equipment investment, ongoing maintenance, and the assurance that everyone won't not show up when needed.
Most of us cannot spare the time from our primary pursuits to fulfill the daily needs of a peacekeeping force. Few of us can afford upwards of $250000 for our very own personal fire engines, for that matter. So in lieu of other means, we pay money. Since people are also not virtuous enough to contribute freely for the common good, we levy an assessment and call it "taxes".
If you live in an area where such amenities exist and don't contribute in some way, you may call yourself a Libertarian, but other people will call you a Parasite.
If you don't want to pay, move somewhere where these benefits aren't available. Do be aware, however, that no matter where you go, someone is almost certainly claiming prior ownership of the place you arrive and is almost certainly investing in the ongoing privilege of keeping people like you from just waltzing in and taking it.
The people who built the pyramids by popular accounts were paid in beer, rather like modern-day construction workers.
The people who designed the pyramids, on the other hand, obviously had some intelligence. And the accumulated knowledge of those who had built less-sophisticated earlier models, such as mastabas.
And Christianity's prevalence was not until this, the most recent time of the two to six millennia decline. Not sure if you're a troll making the same point or serious, but you might be a compelling piece of evidence.
What, that making people from rocks can sometimes result in something less intelligent than rocks?
I would wager that Aristotle *could* comprehend calculus given proper instruction. I mean, he was one of the premier thinkers of his time. Great minds also make mistakes, but still...
Zeno's Paradox is about 98% of what it takes to invent differential calculus. All that remained to be added was limits.
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80% of the Fortune 500 have deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Source: InformationWeek, July 2012.
I'd call that a little traction. And that's just Red Hat, not including alternatives like SuSe, Oracle, and so forth.
A more telling indication of how well Linux performs in the Enterprise ecosystem is probably the invention of Windows PowerShell. Which is, in large part, a response to the fact that even the most ancient 1990s versions of Linux sported a selection of shells suitable for remote administration and scripting in a way that the comparatively feeble COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE shells do not.
I could be even nastier and point out that the RPM database that's installed on every Red Hat family system (including Fedora and CentOS) has not only a complete inventory of all packages installed on the system, including information that can be used to not only inventory what files are installed where, but checksum information that can be used to trivially scan for possible damage or sabotage and that if Windows has yet added such a feature it happened very, very recently. Or enumerate the various provisioning and monitoring tools available for Linux. But that's just being vicious.
One of the best changes in "design philosophy" that has happened in the past 20 years is that instead of the idea of any product as a fortress that cannot fail, products are designed to expect their components to fail, and to recovery gracefully from it.
This leads to a more flexible and resilient product. It reminds me of the military approach, where every system has at least two backups or alternates.
I think that comes more from the fact that whereas in ancient times, re-IPLing an IBM mainframe was horribly expensive and something to be prevented wherever possible, doing the 3-finger salute on a Windows computer was infinitely cheaper than paying someone to write reliable software. Especially since Windows wasn't.
As to the "recover gracefully" part....
The problem is that mopes and dopes got 98% of the votes 3 weeks ago.
You're confusing the mopes and dopes with the bums and scum.
The mopes and dopes did 98% of the voting, thereby electing the bums and scum.
Regardless of sobriety, if you kill people while in control of a motor vehicle, expect to be considered for charges.
That is certainly not the case if the person who dies was riding a bicycle. Cyclists are killed daily in the USA, with very very few cases being prosecuted at all.
Before you say "certainly", I think I'd like some hard stats. Granted, a lot of local cyclists do things like run stop signs (illegal in this state), turn across traffic with minimal (if any) advance warning and (most damning of all) have the temerity to actually ride on public roadways, but I'm pretty sure we do occasionally prosecute drivers for excessive herd-thinning.
Just curious, are you talking about this quote?:
"And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't. Look at Microsoft — who's running Microsoft? (interviewer: Steve Ballmer.) Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well."
Citation: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/sayings/stevejobsquotes.php
Short form: "Nothing succeeds like Success". It's why most Free Markets end up destroying themselves. If even one participant can rise above the common herd, positive feedback mechanisms begin to form whereby the winners get bigger at the expense of the losers and the bigger they get, the harder the task of competing with them becomes. Eventually most, if not all competitors become insignificant or extinct and the driving forces for the winners get replaced with forces unrelated to what originally made them winners.
This. Right now if someone hits and kills a pedestrian, it's called an "accident" and they go free if they're sober - but they go to jail for many years if they had a drink. It doesn't matter that incompetent driving caused the death - the only time a driver is punished appropriately is when they had a drink.
A test for competency would also get a lot of older drivers who cannot drive safely any more off the road.
Two words: "Vehicular Homicide". Doesn't even matter whether the victim(s) are walking, in another car, bicycle, pogo sticks, whatever.
Regardless of sobriety, if you kill people while in control of a motor vehicle, expect to be considered for charges. The degree will vary. If you deliberately gunned the engine and ran over kids at the school crossing, that's premeditated murder and they'll throw the book at you. If you couldn't hit the brakes fast enough when you saw the ball roll into traffic, not so much. But you won't get a free pass. In fact, just driving a car in known unsafe condition can add to the charges.
Conversely, I could argue that "appropriate" punishment for a DUI manslaughter is not what I have seen handed out, but that would be personal bias.
CDs specify a pause before each track. Usually it's 2 seconds (my old player counts down -0:02, -0:01, 0:00, 0:01), but it can be set to zero, in which case there's no gap at all, and the index is just a pointer to a frame to start playback from.
I have a few electronic albums like this.
CDs do not specify a pause at all. The pause you're most likely referring to was that moronic burning software from the late 90s early 2000s that had those default options. A player that imposed such a moronic concept on its CDs would destroy the flow of an album like NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, from 1989, among others. Many CDs are mastered with a "quiet" period of approximately a second or so between songs, matching the pauses between songs on LPs, which were the visible areas (widely spaced grooves) so that a person could drop the needle near the beginning of a particular song of interest. There are also LPs where an entire side appears or sounds as one track - I believe side A of Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Rush's 2112 were 2 samples, but it's been a long time since I broke out any vinyl.
Morton Subotnik did a (vinyl) album titled "Butterflies". In addition to the "butterfly" motif of the sounds on the album in the sonic shape of 2 large "wings" with a narrow "body" between them, the tracks on the vinyl were also "butterfly" shaped, with 2 large bands and a narrow band on each side of the disc. You could see the band pattern very distinctly.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/compromise?s=t
The difference is self interest of the states is no longer represented at the federal level. Even if a few "crazy states" have crazy senators, you would still have representation of the states in congress. If a given state is crazy, they can pretty much only damage themselves.
IF a given state is crazy? We seem to have more than enough crazy states either way.
Phone calls aren't encrypted either - they're probably even a bit easier to intercept as they don't need the post office involved.
They still need a warrant to listen in on, however.
Law enforcement also can't go back to see all my old post cards and listen to my old phone conversations they same way they could view my old emails.
Actually, these days, phone calls are encrypted, digitally transmitted. All the old analog wireless channels are gone now, I think. Or did you mean landline phone calls? The ones that go through that infamous closet in the San Francisco AT&T office?
Doesn't matter. The telephone offices have been required for a long time to allow law enforcement to tap into their channels on demand, regardless of transmission media. In theory, "demand" means some sort of legal authority, but AT&T and Verizon are both famous for rolling over on their backs at the merest hint. Truthfully, I'm not even sure that you can be sure that your phone conversations haven't been archived, considering some of the massive data storage facilities that the US Government has been investing in. Even postcards, for that matter - I've seen mailsorters where the postal materials were in one place and the operators viewed the addresses via remote cameras. Which is only a short step to storing images.
I wish I could be paranoid, but these days I fear they think abuses up faster than I can fantasize them.
They do come from two different countries. Our choice is which country do we want going forward?
Maybe instead of this perennial "which country do we want" nonsense, we should just all try and live together in the country we've actually got?
The senators are not self endorsed and self elected.
People vote for them
There's the problem. Making senators popularly elected instead of by state legislatures turned them into what they are now. They're no longer there to represent their states; now they just want to pander for your vote via special interest campaign donations.
Considering the things that my state's legislators tried to ram into the state constitution last election, I fail to see a clear advantage either way.
You're gonna have to rewrite your national anthem at this rate
Home of the brave - Nope. You have a whole agency called TSA which I assume stands for The Scared Americans
And what with this lot you can hardly be called the land of the free
They're the Terrorists' Surrogate Army.
Because they won and we're now an occupied country. And we even supplied the occupation troops for them.
Only Microsoft calls removing features an upgrade... no, wait, Sony has done that, too.
So did the Gnome 3 people.
So I guess the work rules that said that you had to have one guy on the truck to drive it, and another one on the truck to actually unload the truck and stock the shelves had nothing to do with it? Guess stocking the shelves requires such specialized training we can't expect drivers to figure it out. Or how about the rules that said that if you had cakes and breads going to the same location, you had to send two trucks, one for the cakes and one for the breads? Can't see how that would be an issue, either. How about the Forbes article from February which noted that Hostess had 372 separate collective bargaining agreements and 80 separate health and pension plans. Workers compensation costs for last year averaged out to $2700 for each of its 18K+ employees.
Yes- management getting bonuses while the workers take it on the chin is scummy. Working for a struggling company when it is bought by a private-equity firm is almost always bad news.
But why don't you look past your knee-jerk "it's the far right" response- there's plenty of blame to go around in this instance, and the unions are one of the prime reasons the Hostess workers no longer have jobs.
Featherbedding is unquestionably one of the most notoriously offensive things about unions.
On the other hand, if you want to see the opposite of featherbedding, look at (non-union) IT shops, where management wants the same person to be the apps developer, the DBA, the sysadmin, the network administrator and desktop support for 500+ users. For $18k annually, and no thought of a pension; if you can't build up an IRA out of your daily salary, then tough.
Maybe, just maybe, the union reached the point where when their bluff was called, they were fed up enough not to fold. Sure, they lost their jobs. But they also let management everywhere know that you cannot ignore a strike with impunity even if you are willing to go nuclear.
We have spent the last 30 years eroding labour (union or otherwise), with "labour" meaning anyone who hasn't been getting routine double-digit annual raises, 6-figure bonuses, more benefits for failure than most get for success, and not excluding "dollar-a-year" salaries but owning luxury cars and homes.
While I hope I never have to work in a union shop myself, at some point, in some way, the 99% have to start seeing a return to prosperity, and a strike is better than a revolution.
It's too early to say, but there's a distinct possibility that the Hostess affair may someday be quoted in the history ebooks as the point where the pendulum began to swing back.
We believe that collecting taxes, any taxes, is a form of protection money, a form of legalized thievery and is morally repugnant. I think you will find that 99% of actual Libertarians agree with me too. I wouldn't really consider a Libertarian who believes in taxes to be a Libertarian at all. Keeping relationships voluntary (voluntarism) is at the very core of the philosophy.
The "protection" racket works because you're buying "protection" against the very people you're paying off. The "civilization" racket works because you're buying protection against other people.
Communism failed because people aren't sufficiently virtuous to work their hardest without material incentives. Capitalism fails because people aren't sufficiently virtuous not to damage their customers and employees. A government-free system fails because even at the neighborhood level there are people who'd rather bypass the whole farce and take directly from you unless you combine with or delegate people to defend you from them. Once you do that, you've gotten into the government business. Even a volunteer fire department requires more than just a bunch of people with buckets. It requires capital equipment investment, ongoing maintenance, and the assurance that everyone won't not show up when needed.
Most of us cannot spare the time from our primary pursuits to fulfill the daily needs of a peacekeeping force. Few of us can afford upwards of $250000 for our very own personal fire engines, for that matter. So in lieu of other means, we pay money. Since people are also not virtuous enough to contribute freely for the common good, we levy an assessment and call it "taxes".
If you live in an area where such amenities exist and don't contribute in some way, you may call yourself a Libertarian, but other people will call you a Parasite.
If you don't want to pay, move somewhere where these benefits aren't available. Do be aware, however, that no matter where you go, someone is almost certainly claiming prior ownership of the place you arrive and is almost certainly investing in the ongoing privilege of keeping people like you from just waltzing in and taking it.
"...doubled down"?
Is that the latest trendy phrase over there?
Scott Adams mentioned it today, I thought he was exaggerating. Apparently not.
Yes. You're late to the party.
Translation: It didn't work before, so now we'll do it twice as hard.
I don't want spam, I want pepperoni!
Garbage in, garbage out? :P
Hey! Those were perfectly good rocks!
The people who built the pyramids by popular accounts were paid in beer, rather like modern-day construction workers.
The people who designed the pyramids, on the other hand, obviously had some intelligence. And the accumulated knowledge of those who had built less-sophisticated earlier models, such as mastabas.
He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Neither would anyone in the bible belt.
They're all Lies from the Pit of Hell. There's nothing more that needs to be known.
"That column looks ugly. Now get out your chisels and keep at it until they look RIGHT!"
And Christianity's prevalence was not until this, the most recent time of the two to six millennia decline. Not sure if you're a troll making the same point or serious, but you might be a compelling piece of evidence.
What, that making people from rocks can sometimes result in something less intelligent than rocks?
I would wager that Aristotle *could* comprehend calculus given proper instruction. I mean, he was one of the premier thinkers of his time. Great minds also make mistakes, but still...
Zeno's Paradox is about 98% of what it takes to invent differential calculus. All that remained to be added was limits.
If you don't own land now, go out and buy some. In the end, that's the one thing that robots can't build.*
And then what will you do with it? Build a log cabin and subsistence farm?