I mean, you're basically getting a national ID card based on a rider. Shouldn't you all be lobbying your senator and congressperson to have this nonsense stopped?
Lets be clear, the reason you have two large general (authoritarian) parties is the electoral system makes it inevitable.
As the centrist party gains votes and support, the others lose votes/support and the electoral system you have in place at the moment would become unstable, it's happening in the UK at the moment, the government being formed by a minority party, 36% of the vote. It becomes very clear to everyone then that electoral reform becomes a pressing requirement.
If you get the electoral reform right (and this is key) you'll end up with a more european form of democracy. Their electoral systems make large parties unnecessary and they tend to split out into their factions. It also means that the various parties often have to form coalitions to form a government. It makes authoritarian government far far more difficult.
If you read the article (did you?), he's right. Karate, Kung Fu, Jujitsu etc etc techniques don't just work like magic. The idea that you can go to any self defense classes, martial arts classes, "real" fighting classes for a few months or even a few years and learn to defend yourself or fight is a false idea and misses the point.
It's simply the application of force. Someone who knows "The real shit" is just a person who's practiced regularly for a long, long time to the point that the application of force is damned near automatic. It's like changing gear in a stick shift, you don't think, you don't look, you just do it. That can't be taught, it has to be practiced.
The way to do it is to start a centrist party. A party which believes in liberalism but with a dash of social justice thrown in, after all for every right there is a corresponding responsibility[1]. It'll take support from both the left and the right.
[1] Something the founding fathers seem to have forgotten, where's the bill of responsibilities?
The problem is that splitting an RDB out over 10 sub $500 machines *isn't* simple and isn't necessarily going to increase your performance, it is quite likely to reduce it.
It's a server network card and on a server, I/O is king, the CPU spends much of it's time waiting around for disk, then waiting around for the network. That isn't to say you can just grab all the CPU time to process ethernet packets, because you want the CPU available to run the application.
These types of cards are just as important today as they have ever been.
There's a good case for making use of large ethernet packets, e.g. 9k instead of 1.5k. Huge numbers of small packets do have a significant effect on systems. I have benchmarks which show a doubling or tripling of throughput and significant reduction in CPU overhead on some cards by changing the packet size.
You do have to make sure all the machines on that particular LAN are using the same packet size and you're not routing the packets on to the general network, you'll see horrible performance problems if you do. So there's a case for a private backbone between high performance servers, used for inter server NFS, database queries, network backups etc.
In the USA, UK or Canada for that matter, the vast majority of voters do not elect the politicians, their votes don't matter.
Like the USA and UK, Canada uses a first past the post electoral system. More like the UK than US there are 3 significant parties (4 in Quebec) and the governing Liberal party received only 37% of the votes. In the UK, the governing Labour party received only 36% of the votes.
With first past the post electoral systems you get what are called safe seats, constituencies which constantly return the same party, even with relatively small percentages of the vote (well below 50%).
Anyway. The majority (the 60%+ who didn't vote for the government) simply don't matter and are basically not represented.
Pass. I was looking for support costs. Productivity is outwith the scope of what I was consulting on though it wouldn't surprise me even a little if productivity was higher on a mainframe as well.
However, in terms of support costs the general moral is:-
1: Mainframe. 2: A few Minis. 3: Some micros. 4: Lots of clients/ some servers. 5: Lots of peer 2 peer.
The increases in failures are geometric as are man hours and costs. In terms of usability, capital costs, flexibility, maintenance costs, support costs etc I'd be aiming somewhere between 2 and 3... X-terms, SunRay, WTS, Winterms, Citrix etc.
You could if you fancy get out a stats package, your Remedy database and work out the real failure probabilities for your network. It really is predictable for any given combination of hardware, software and is the difference between engineering and guesswork. The helpdesk systems should really be doing this stuff already.
You can actually work out the statistics of supporting a network of machines. It's a pain to do manually but the binomial probability can be calculated for any particular configuration of machines, applications etc. Your issue management system could do it using real probabilities if you're categorising your support calls adequately. Most aren't remotely that sophisticated though because most IT managers are not remotely that sophisticated.
Once you have the probabilites you can work out how many hours you're going to have to spend supporting the environment, and therefore how many people you'll need and how much it'll cost you. Oddly enough, support now costs more than most hardware and software costs combined.
Turns out. A machine on every desk is about the worst possible configuration, it's particularly bad in peer to peer mode. Replacing peer to peer with client/server is orders of magnitude better but still crap compared to the best. Guess what the best configuration for reducing support headaches is? Mainframe. Or at least, minimising the numbers of systems minimises the support costs.
This is important because, I.T. is now seen as a (necessary) business cost to be minimised and not much more and that is a direct result of the machine on every desk architecture we all use.
If you work in I.T. and would rather be seen as a business service which adds value to the business than simply as a business cost to be minimised (read as outsourced) you might want to take a long hard look at the network architecture of the systems you're using.
"They are, after all, an almost 100% efficient heater."
Electricity has to be generated. Most generation plant is around 35% -> 40%, CCGT around 60%.
Electricity is an extremely inefficient way of providing heat. In houses heated or cooled with electricity the most efficient thing you could do is rip out the heating and air conditioning and replace it with district heating and district cooling.
They may well be using simple rule based filtering today, but if the developers are remotely motivated they'll end up with something like Bayesian filtering built into the system. Then it becomes extremely difficult to create workarounds.
Linux doesn't want to do anything. It just is. How zen is that?
The very nature of the market means that Linux will replace nearly all of the commercial operating systems, including the desktop. What you see as the balkanisation of Linux is simply the natural evolution into niches, a bit like the evolution of small furry rodents into every mammalian life form we see today.
I stopped reading newspapers, magazines a while ago because they were all basically full of shit when reporting on subjects I'm informed about. I came to the conclusion that if they were full of shit on stuff I know about they are probably full of shit on everything, and I'm not paying money for advertising and shit.
So it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if you were correct.
I no longer consider anything written by journalists to be any more than complete fiction and find them to be completely discredited as a profession. It must be galling for the few who do have principles and are knowledgeable about the subjects they report on.
Legally. In fact, you could call them laws. That's why transportation hasn't advanced hugely. Break them and you're in a whole universe of trouble.
The real killer is Newtons Law of Universal Gravitation. If only they'd repeal that one. Not that any of the guy's other laws help either, he really f*cked up from the word go with his first law.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, you're basically getting a national ID card based on a rider. Shouldn't you all be lobbying your senator and congressperson to have this nonsense stopped?
Lets be clear, the reason you have two large general (authoritarian) parties is the electoral system makes it inevitable.
As the centrist party gains votes and support, the others lose votes/support and the electoral system you have in place at the moment would become unstable, it's happening in the UK at the moment, the government being formed by a minority party, 36% of the vote. It becomes very clear to everyone then that electoral reform becomes a pressing requirement.
If you get the electoral reform right (and this is key) you'll end up with a more european form of democracy. Their electoral systems make large parties unnecessary and they tend to split out into their factions. It also means that the various parties often have to form coalitions to form a government. It makes authoritarian government far far more difficult.
If you read the article (did you?), he's right. Karate, Kung Fu, Jujitsu etc etc techniques don't just work like magic. The idea that you can go to any self defense classes, martial arts classes, "real" fighting classes for a few months or even a few years and learn to defend yourself or fight is a false idea and misses the point.
It's simply the application of force. Someone who knows "The real shit" is just a person who's practiced regularly for a long, long time to the point that the application of force is damned near automatic. It's like changing gear in a stick shift, you don't think, you don't look, you just do it. That can't be taught, it has to be practiced.
Excellent site BTW, bookmarked.
At the recent general election. Yup, that's right, the government in power is supported by only 36% of the population.
Hold the government accountable. There's a laugh.
The way to do it is to start a centrist party. A party which believes in liberalism but with a dash of social justice thrown in, after all for every right there is a corresponding responsibility[1]. It'll take support from both the left and the right.
[1] Something the founding fathers seem to have forgotten, where's the bill of responsibilities?
Oracle, Sybase, Informix, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc.
The problem is that splitting an RDB out over 10 sub $500 machines *isn't* simple and isn't necessarily going to increase your performance, it is quite likely to reduce it.
It's a server network card and on a server, I/O is king, the CPU spends much of it's time waiting around for disk, then waiting around for the network. That isn't to say you can just grab all the CPU time to process ethernet packets, because you want the CPU available to run the application.
These types of cards are just as important today as they have ever been.
There's a good case for making use of large ethernet packets, e.g. 9k instead of 1.5k. Huge numbers of small packets do have a significant effect on systems. I have benchmarks which show a doubling or tripling of throughput and significant reduction in CPU overhead on some cards by changing the packet size.
You do have to make sure all the machines on that particular LAN are using the same packet size and you're not routing the packets on to the general network, you'll see horrible performance problems if you do. So there's a case for a private backbone between high performance servers, used for inter server NFS, database queries, network backups etc.
In the USA, UK or Canada for that matter, the vast majority of voters do not elect the politicians, their votes don't matter.
Like the USA and UK, Canada uses a first past the post electoral system. More like the UK than US there are 3 significant parties (4 in Quebec) and the governing Liberal party received only 37% of the votes. In the UK, the governing Labour party received only 36% of the votes.
With first past the post electoral systems you get what are called safe seats, constituencies which constantly return the same party, even with relatively small percentages of the vote (well below 50%).
Anyway. The majority (the 60%+ who didn't vote for the government) simply don't matter and are basically not represented.
Pass. I was looking for support costs. Productivity is outwith the scope of what I was consulting on though it wouldn't surprise me even a little if productivity was higher on a mainframe as well.
However, in terms of support costs the general moral is:-
1: Mainframe.
2: A few Minis.
3: Some micros.
4: Lots of clients/ some servers.
5: Lots of peer 2 peer.
The increases in failures are geometric as are man hours and costs. In terms of usability, capital costs, flexibility, maintenance costs, support costs etc I'd be aiming somewhere between 2 and 3... X-terms, SunRay, WTS, Winterms, Citrix etc.
You could if you fancy get out a stats package, your Remedy database and work out the real failure probabilities for your network. It really is predictable for any given combination of hardware, software and is the difference between engineering and guesswork. The helpdesk systems should really be doing this stuff already.
You can actually work out the statistics of supporting a network of machines. It's a pain to do manually but the binomial probability can be calculated for any particular configuration of machines, applications etc. Your issue management system could do it using real probabilities if you're categorising your support calls adequately. Most aren't remotely that sophisticated though because most IT managers are not remotely that sophisticated.
Once you have the probabilites you can work out how many hours you're going to have to spend supporting the environment, and therefore how many people you'll need and how much it'll cost you. Oddly enough, support now costs more than most hardware and software costs combined.
Turns out. A machine on every desk is about the worst possible configuration, it's particularly bad in peer to peer mode. Replacing peer to peer with client/server is orders of magnitude better but still crap compared to the best. Guess what the best configuration for reducing support headaches is? Mainframe. Or at least, minimising the numbers of systems minimises the support costs.
This is important because, I.T. is now seen as a (necessary) business cost to be minimised and not much more and that is a direct result of the machine on every desk architecture we all use.
If you work in I.T. and would rather be seen as a business service which adds value to the business than simply as a business cost to be minimised (read as outsourced) you might want to take a long hard look at the network architecture of the systems you're using.
On your desktop PC.
It is still not a PC operating system. Absolutely nothing has changed.
This is a non issue.
You may be looking at PC prices from several years ago.
$550 and $299 would be competitive.
On average.
"They are, after all, an almost 100% efficient heater."
Electricity has to be generated. Most generation plant is around 35% -> 40%, CCGT around 60%.
Electricity is an extremely inefficient way of providing heat. In houses heated or cooled with electricity the most efficient thing you could do is rip out the heating and air conditioning and replace it with district heating and district cooling.
And get someone else to do the job.
They may well be using simple rule based filtering today, but if the developers are remotely motivated they'll end up with something like Bayesian filtering built into the system. Then it becomes extremely difficult to create workarounds.
Say the states levied all of the taxation and alloted some of the cash to run the federal administration.
It isn't news, and why democracy can suck so badly sometimes.
Photo printers.
? jumpid=ex_hphqglobal_wwcorp2H05sem/printing
i nters/Direct_Photo/index.asp
c t_Listing_Inkjets_Photo.htm
HP:
http://h10030.www1.hp.com/you/uk/en/printers.html
(Now, isn't that a *stupid* URL?)
Canon:
http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Pr
Epson:
http://www.epson.co.uk/products/product_hub/Produ
etc etc.
Women in Lycra!
I mean, come one! Jeri Lynn Ryan! It's so obvious now that you point it out.
You should have spilled your extra large extra ice coke onto his lap. Works like a charm.
Went to see it. Wood *everywhere*, and I'm not talking about the seats.
Produce some good high quality films with decent acting and people will flock.
The very nature of the market means that Linux will replace nearly all of the commercial operating systems, including the desktop. What you see as the balkanisation of Linux is simply the natural evolution into niches, a bit like the evolution of small furry rodents into every mammalian life form we see today.
Just interested to know.
I stopped reading newspapers, magazines a while ago because they were all basically full of shit when reporting on subjects I'm informed about. I came to the conclusion that if they were full of shit on stuff I know about they are probably full of shit on everything, and I'm not paying money for advertising and shit.
So it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if you were correct.
I no longer consider anything written by journalists to be any more than complete fiction and find them to be completely discredited as a profession. It must be galling for the few who do have principles and are knowledgeable about the subjects they report on.
Legally. In fact, you could call them laws. That's why transportation hasn't advanced hugely. Break them and you're in a whole universe of trouble.
The real killer is Newtons Law of Universal Gravitation. If only they'd repeal that one. Not that any of the guy's other laws help either, he really f*cked up from the word go with his first law.