The constitution was purposefully designed to be interpretted and you know this. But here's something:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
You'll notice, right before the bit about the Blessings of Liberty (which are part of the theoretical basis of libertarian politics), a line about the promotion of general welfare. I'm not saying one supercedes the other...but if you're going to promote general welfare WHILE maintaining liberty, the best way to do that is rule as the majority wishes without squelching the rights of the minority.
But I don't think "liberals" have much to worry about from any opponent who refers to their politics as a "mental disease."
Fuck off, you ivory tower libertarian shithead. It is the government's job to do whatever the majority wants without harming the minority. If the majority wants government censure of companies that use outsourcing as a way to make a quick buck, then the government should do that. Stop dreaming teary eyed about the wonders of the free market and look at how things actually are.
In the real world, competition is not the solution to social issues and volunteers are not as reliable as paid employees. Who's accountable when volunteers screw up?
In the real world, government incentives have always been the most effective method of improving social, enviornmental and labor issues. In fact, it can be argued that labor would have never improved from the state it was in at the turn of the last century were it not for government intervention.
In the real world, every industry that has been regulated has performed in record numbers during regulation, and many have fallen apart during deregulation.
Why are you so scared of a system that has worked? In the US, you can run a monopolistic business and make some 40 billion per year. Is that enough potential economic well being for you?
I call foul. Take New York as an example, there are several different stadards for students. Almost all students have to get a Regents diploma, which is actually quite tough (last year something like 70% of students failed one particular Regents exam) but students with learning disabilities can graduate with a special needs or school level diploma.
It's hardly fair to ask these kids to take calculus and write essays or remember obscure historic facts. So instead they learn specific life skills. And that's what that diploma certifies -- that they can do SOMETHING. NY employers know what this means.
Furthermore, you can graduate with an honors diploma, which says that you passed all the regents course, took a certain number of honors level classes, put in some community service time, and performed a massive research project.
Of course! Because random slashdot posters ALWAYS know better than Sun does! Obviously, it's as easy as PDQing the RDS and there's no associated support costs or hidden problems, and Sun is just lying!
Fuck off, man. Just because YOU can do X doesn't mean it's easy, doesn't mean it's consistant, doesn't mean it's reliable and doesn't mean it's supportable.
There is no compelling reason in this day and age for anyone who makes their money off of selling hardware, support, services, and additional software to maintain their own kernel and core OS components, when Linux exists, besides the investment that they would be throwing away.
Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!"
If Sun moves to Linux, it'll be a nearly Sun-specific distribution with Sun hackers doing maintenance, etc. So the only difference between it and Solaris would be that Solaris they can charge for.
Why lose the revenue stream just so some Linux hackers can cull your best ideas?
Yes, let's think on how an operating system that is available for free with thousands of free programs might attract some really cheap people.
Not that this is entirely a bad thing -- it certainly helps improve the viability of Linux on older systems. But when "Information needs to be free" is suffixed by "because I don't feel I need to pay for it," there's a problem.
Word. I use Linux because it didn't fucking cost me anything. I don't use it because it turns me into a superhero, sticking it to the man, because it doesn't do that. I guarantee you Novell, IBM and the other Linux fans in the business world don't use it because it's the operating system equivalent of a leather jacket.
And of course every UNIX software package is available for all of these because they are practically identical.
Re:"The computer you want always costs $5000".
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Oh, he probably just bought it on ebay.
Re:Thin and Light??
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is just you. 6.5 is really fucking light for a laptop. It weighs less than a 2 liter bottle of soda, for chrissakes.
If 6.5 lbs is too heavy for you, methinks you need to bust your ass to the gym.
Re:My laptop is running Windows
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not to mention hundreds of dollars cheaper and about 10 pounds lighter.
Seriously, folks, the Powerbook I just bought looked major expensive until I tried finding a PC laptop that was roughly the same size and weight with a pleasant look. The closest competetors were from voodoopc ($500 more expensive) and the Acer Ferrari (same price, but I've heard iffy reports on the quality).
There's something nice about a machine that has a big enough screen for p-shop and gaming, runs (relatively) cool for 4 hours and you can hold with one hand.
Well, this is a valid argument. But it's also the thrust of the problem many people have with Linux and OSS in general.
You're cloning other people's programs. Somebody put a lot of time and effort in designing this thing, and you're just taking what they've carefully designed and making your program work like that. It's cloning. In some cases, it's damn near thievery -- Linspire's iPhoto rip off comes to mind. And we're to wonder why software patents are so desired by commercial vendors?
Now, everybody talks about how innovative F/OSS can be. But when a team REALLY innovates, really makes something new instead of borrowing incrementally from different sources, they're told that they should just COPY the photoshop interface?
I hate the GIMP because it's buggy and it crashes and script fu sucks. But I like their interface. I like what they're trying to do. I'd love to see them freeze new features, polish up the interface they've already got and put some damn exception handling in there.
I like MDI, for some things. Basically, MDI interfaces BECOME your desktop...which, if you're working on the same program all day, is kind of what you want.
Now, if every utility started using MDI, it would be bad. But for my IDE, for my SQL work, heck even for my graphics, I LIKE having MDI. When I switch tasks, I immediately get all my windows for that task right back where I can see them.
Quark's biggest problem has always been its shitty user interface. And now that they've farmed ALL new development out to India, it's not going to get any better. Good riddance, I say. Quark the company were complete assholes when I dealt with them, acting like their file format was something amazing we'd want to spend tens of thousands of dollars for classes on. I didn't have the heart to tell the guy that I'd already figured out everything I needed to know about the damn thing, and I just needed the rights to it. Of course, when they mentioned that we wouldn't be allowed to do ANYTHING with the files unless a copy of Quark was open on the computer, we found a different approach to the problem.
Actually, about the only thing I REALLY like about the gimp is the way that it maintains a menu for its subwindows, leaving no qualms as to WHICH image you're running that lens flare on. I also like that you can perform color and flip operations by layer -- PS, AFAIK, forces you to perform them on the entire image.
Of course, the rest of GIMP is usable, but kind of crap. And let's not get into bullshit like script fu. Besides the retarded name -- a name that nearly everybody, even people who LIKE the app, scoff at as being an unbearably dumb name for what it is -- The Gimp opens up a new script fu window and instance separate from the rest of the program. And if GTK+2 crashes (which it likely will) while you're working, you lose each of those scriptfu windows...but the program stays in memory! After an evening of mucking around with The Gimp and doing fairly well, aside from occasionally clicking wrong and having the whole program crash on me (exception handling, assholes, I use it in my code and I'm a *SHITTY* programmer) instantly, I discovered that I had over 80 instances of script fu in memory.
That's garbage. It's sloppy, it's obnoxious...and it turns me off to using the program in the future. Honestly, I'd heard good things about the gimp 2.0, and so I gave up my two year boycott to try again. It came so close...the toolkit is much nicer than i remember and the UI is arranged very nice...but dealing with these stupid bugs and possibly losing an hour's work due to unpredictable UI crashes means I'm back to using Irfanview for simple edits and photoshop for everything else.
BTW, if you're on windows and need to resize a couple images or perform simple operations like mosaic fitlers or format changes or even simple C&P operations, Irfanview is a godsend that keeps getting better and better. And it doesn't crash while listing your fonts. And it doesn't suddenly throw up a command line error window when you're doing simple things like filling with a gradient, a window that, when you close it, closes the rest of the program without asking if you want to save.
Spoony baby, how many das Megabytes do you think there are?
(the answer, believe it or not, is three, at least when I was in college. since then I think the other two have chosen different nicknames, due to me being such a karma whore and because i bought dasmegabyte.org).
Few things about cache: I always set it to twice the physical ram. Windows seems to like that. And the last thing you want is some hardly used memory hog eating up the physical memory when it could sit silently on disk.
Second: you mentioned using the same value for Initial and for Max, but you didn't mention why. Here's why: using the same value allows you to lock the size of the page file, meaning Windows never tries to allocate more disk space to it. You can then defragment the drive and optimize where this file sits on the disk to improve performance significantly.
I think it's funny how some Linux users seem to think less than less than a month of uptime is no uptime at all, while most Windows users consider going a week without shutting down to be a long time.
I find that the challenge of extending my Windows 2000 uptime (26 days as of yesterday) to impress my Linux friends sometimes causes me to keep my system up too long. My machine was moving slow as hell over the past two weeks, despite the fact that my processor time was under 20%. Come to find out it's using 800 meg out of 512 with only 300 listed in processes. Meaning that I had 500 meg worth of leaked memory clogging my page file, a page file on the same drive as all the file operations I was performing. A quick reboot and it was much snappier.
Oh, and before you cajole me about how Windows always gets leaks, you should know that memory leaks are a big pet peeve of mine. I once uninstalled a beautiful $300 capture card because the drivers leaked memory. I traced the leak back to GTK+ 2 for Windows. The Gimp kept crashing on me whenever I'd load a certain font and GTK+ 2 wasn't reporting the memory it was using back to the stack. Not dissing the Gimp or GTK's developers -- after all, the GTK+ toolkit is finally nice enough to hook me on this fine program -- but I can't use a program that bloats up my ram like that. My kingdom for some exception handling! This computer is slow enough as it is!
Incidentally, most of the recent security updates for Windows haven't required a reboot lately. I've installed the last 3 or 4 with no reboot needed. Microsoft seems to be making a real effort to avoid reboots whenever possible, which is to be lauded -- I remember when you could expect to be forced to reboot any time you'd install a program. Which is something I wish that Apple would do...iTune 4.5 didn't NEED a reboot, but it asked for one anyway. The whole "reboot just to be sure" think is silly.
It's a shame your mp3 player can't play AAC files.
Does your blender make spaghetti?
Does your TV get good radio reception?
How well does your car work underwater?
The zero effort I put in to running iTunes was really worth the free songs. I mean, how can you claim that iTunes -- a program that, if you use it the way it was designed to be used, will never give you trouble -- is "more effort than it's worth," when you run fucking Linux? If you think a program that "just works" is more of a headache than an operating system that demands that you edit configuration files and compile every program that you might want to use, you have got some serious time management issues.
Slashdot Mirror
The constitution was purposefully designed to be interpretted and you know this. But here's something:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
You'll notice, right before the bit about the Blessings of Liberty (which are part of the theoretical basis of libertarian politics), a line about the promotion of general welfare. I'm not saying one supercedes the other...but if you're going to promote general welfare WHILE maintaining liberty, the best way to do that is rule as the majority wishes without squelching the rights of the minority.
But I don't think "liberals" have much to worry about from any opponent who refers to their politics as a "mental disease."
Fuck off, you ivory tower libertarian shithead. It is the government's job to do whatever the majority wants without harming the minority. If the majority wants government censure of companies that use outsourcing as a way to make a quick buck, then the government should do that. Stop dreaming teary eyed about the wonders of the free market and look at how things actually are.
In the real world, competition is not the solution to social issues and volunteers are not as reliable as paid employees. Who's accountable when volunteers screw up?
In the real world, government incentives have always been the most effective method of improving social, enviornmental and labor issues. In fact, it can be argued that labor would have never improved from the state it was in at the turn of the last century were it not for government intervention.
In the real world, every industry that has been regulated has performed in record numbers during regulation, and many have fallen apart during deregulation.
Why are you so scared of a system that has worked? In the US, you can run a monopolistic business and make some 40 billion per year. Is that enough potential economic well being for you?
I call foul. Take New York as an example, there are several different stadards for students. Almost all students have to get a Regents diploma, which is actually quite tough (last year something like 70% of students failed one particular Regents exam) but students with learning disabilities can graduate with a special needs or school level diploma.
It's hardly fair to ask these kids to take calculus and write essays or remember obscure historic facts. So instead they learn specific life skills. And that's what that diploma certifies -- that they can do SOMETHING. NY employers know what this means.
Furthermore, you can graduate with an honors diploma, which says that you passed all the regents course, took a certain number of honors level classes, put in some community service time, and performed a massive research project.
Well, they make Dr. Pepper RIGHT in New York.
Of course! Because random slashdot posters ALWAYS know better than Sun does! Obviously, it's as easy as PDQing the RDS and there's no associated support costs or hidden problems, and Sun is just lying!
Fuck off, man. Just because YOU can do X doesn't mean it's easy, doesn't mean it's consistant, doesn't mean it's reliable and doesn't mean it's supportable.
There is no compelling reason in this day and age for anyone who makes their money off of selling hardware, support, services, and additional software to maintain their own kernel and core OS components, when Linux exists, besides the investment that they would be throwing away.
Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!"
If Sun moves to Linux, it'll be a nearly Sun-specific distribution with Sun hackers doing maintenance, etc. So the only difference between it and Solaris would be that Solaris they can charge for.
Why lose the revenue stream just so some Linux hackers can cull your best ideas?
He'd have to change the name, because Solaris Is Unix.
Yes, let's think on how an operating system that is available for free with thousands of free programs might attract some really cheap people.
Not that this is entirely a bad thing -- it certainly helps improve the viability of Linux on older systems. But when "Information needs to be free" is suffixed by "because I don't feel I need to pay for it," there's a problem.
Word. I use Linux because it didn't fucking cost me anything. I don't use it because it turns me into a superhero, sticking it to the man, because it doesn't do that. I guarantee you Novell, IBM and the other Linux fans in the business world don't use it because it's the operating system equivalent of a leather jacket.
And of course every UNIX software package is available for all of these because they are practically identical.
Oh, he probably just bought it on ebay.
It is just you. 6.5 is really fucking light for a laptop. It weighs less than a 2 liter bottle of soda, for chrissakes.
If 6.5 lbs is too heavy for you, methinks you need to bust your ass to the gym.
Not to mention hundreds of dollars cheaper and about 10 pounds lighter.
Seriously, folks, the Powerbook I just bought looked major expensive until I tried finding a PC laptop that was roughly the same size and weight with a pleasant look. The closest competetors were from voodoopc ($500 more expensive) and the Acer Ferrari (same price, but I've heard iffy reports on the quality).
There's something nice about a machine that has a big enough screen for p-shop and gaming, runs (relatively) cool for 4 hours and you can hold with one hand.
Oh, I use Windows. It came with my PC and does everything Linux does, only without hassles, so I'm sticking with it.
Well, with naught but the occasional hassle. GTK+ crashing like Ernie Devlin is one of them.
If this were fark, the story would be accompanied by a poor photo manipulation of Chewbacca, Charlie Murphy and the Olsen Twins.
Also, if it were fark, I would not be reading it, because I am not a fucking retard. NSFW *lol*.
Well, this is a valid argument. But it's also the thrust of the problem many people have with Linux and OSS in general.
You're cloning other people's programs. Somebody put a lot of time and effort in designing this thing, and you're just taking what they've carefully designed and making your program work like that. It's cloning. In some cases, it's damn near thievery -- Linspire's iPhoto rip off comes to mind. And we're to wonder why software patents are so desired by commercial vendors?
Now, everybody talks about how innovative F/OSS can be. But when a team REALLY innovates, really makes something new instead of borrowing incrementally from different sources, they're told that they should just COPY the photoshop interface?
I hate the GIMP because it's buggy and it crashes and script fu sucks. But I like their interface. I like what they're trying to do. I'd love to see them freeze new features, polish up the interface they've already got and put some damn exception handling in there.
I like MDI, for some things. Basically, MDI interfaces BECOME your desktop...which, if you're working on the same program all day, is kind of what you want.
Now, if every utility started using MDI, it would be bad. But for my IDE, for my SQL work, heck even for my graphics, I LIKE having MDI. When I switch tasks, I immediately get all my windows for that task right back where I can see them.
Quark's biggest problem has always been its shitty user interface. And now that they've farmed ALL new development out to India, it's not going to get any better. Good riddance, I say. Quark the company were complete assholes when I dealt with them, acting like their file format was something amazing we'd want to spend tens of thousands of dollars for classes on. I didn't have the heart to tell the guy that I'd already figured out everything I needed to know about the damn thing, and I just needed the rights to it. Of course, when they mentioned that we wouldn't be allowed to do ANYTHING with the files unless a copy of Quark was open on the computer, we found a different approach to the problem.
Actually, about the only thing I REALLY like about the gimp is the way that it maintains a menu for its subwindows, leaving no qualms as to WHICH image you're running that lens flare on. I also like that you can perform color and flip operations by layer -- PS, AFAIK, forces you to perform them on the entire image.
Of course, the rest of GIMP is usable, but kind of crap. And let's not get into bullshit like script fu. Besides the retarded name -- a name that nearly everybody, even people who LIKE the app, scoff at as being an unbearably dumb name for what it is -- The Gimp opens up a new script fu window and instance separate from the rest of the program. And if GTK+2 crashes (which it likely will) while you're working, you lose each of those scriptfu windows...but the program stays in memory! After an evening of mucking around with The Gimp and doing fairly well, aside from occasionally clicking wrong and having the whole program crash on me (exception handling, assholes, I use it in my code and I'm a *SHITTY* programmer) instantly, I discovered that I had over 80 instances of script fu in memory.
That's garbage. It's sloppy, it's obnoxious...and it turns me off to using the program in the future. Honestly, I'd heard good things about the gimp 2.0, and so I gave up my two year boycott to try again. It came so close...the toolkit is much nicer than i remember and the UI is arranged very nice...but dealing with these stupid bugs and possibly losing an hour's work due to unpredictable UI crashes means I'm back to using Irfanview for simple edits and photoshop for everything else.
BTW, if you're on windows and need to resize a couple images or perform simple operations like mosaic fitlers or format changes or even simple C&P operations, Irfanview is a godsend that keeps getting better and better. And it doesn't crash while listing your fonts. And it doesn't suddenly throw up a command line error window when you're doing simple things like filling with a gradient, a window that, when you close it, closes the rest of the program without asking if you want to save.
Spoony baby, how many das Megabytes do you think there are?
(the answer, believe it or not, is three, at least when I was in college. since then I think the other two have chosen different nicknames, due to me being such a karma whore and because i bought dasmegabyte.org).
I believe there was a meme; the time had come for swappiness, and so swappiness was had!
And here, I thought swappiness was a warm gun.
Few things about cache: I always set it to twice the physical ram. Windows seems to like that. And the last thing you want is some hardly used memory hog eating up the physical memory when it could sit silently on disk.
Second: you mentioned using the same value for Initial and for Max, but you didn't mention why. Here's why: using the same value allows you to lock the size of the page file, meaning Windows never tries to allocate more disk space to it. You can then defragment the drive and optimize where this file sits on the disk to improve performance significantly.
I think it's funny how some Linux users seem to think less than less than a month of uptime is no uptime at all, while most Windows users consider going a week without shutting down to be a long time.
I find that the challenge of extending my Windows 2000 uptime (26 days as of yesterday) to impress my Linux friends sometimes causes me to keep my system up too long. My machine was moving slow as hell over the past two weeks, despite the fact that my processor time was under 20%. Come to find out it's using 800 meg out of 512 with only 300 listed in processes. Meaning that I had 500 meg worth of leaked memory clogging my page file, a page file on the same drive as all the file operations I was performing. A quick reboot and it was much snappier.
Oh, and before you cajole me about how Windows always gets leaks, you should know that memory leaks are a big pet peeve of mine. I once uninstalled a beautiful $300 capture card because the drivers leaked memory. I traced the leak back to GTK+ 2 for Windows. The Gimp kept crashing on me whenever I'd load a certain font and GTK+ 2 wasn't reporting the memory it was using back to the stack. Not dissing the Gimp or GTK's developers -- after all, the GTK+ toolkit is finally nice enough to hook me on this fine program -- but I can't use a program that bloats up my ram like that. My kingdom for some exception handling! This computer is slow enough as it is!
Incidentally, most of the recent security updates for Windows haven't required a reboot lately. I've installed the last 3 or 4 with no reboot needed. Microsoft seems to be making a real effort to avoid reboots whenever possible, which is to be lauded -- I remember when you could expect to be forced to reboot any time you'd install a program. Which is something I wish that Apple would do...iTune 4.5 didn't NEED a reboot, but it asked for one anyway. The whole "reboot just to be sure" think is silly.
It's a shame your mp3 player can't play AAC files.
Does your blender make spaghetti?
Does your TV get good radio reception?
How well does your car work underwater?
The zero effort I put in to running iTunes was really worth the free songs. I mean, how can you claim that iTunes -- a program that, if you use it the way it was designed to be used, will never give you trouble -- is "more effort than it's worth," when you run fucking Linux? If you think a program that "just works" is more of a headache than an operating system that demands that you edit configuration files and compile every program that you might want to use, you have got some serious time management issues.