if you double the distance then the energy is spread on a surface that is 4 time as large, which means energy density goes down by factor for. that means 10*log(1/4)/log(10) a reduction of about 6db (6.0206 to be eccact). so if you want to double the range of your link then you need an antenna that is 6db better. the guys in the example wanted to go from 5miles to 21 miles which is about 4 times. that means 12db better antenna. or a 6db better antenna on both ends (as the gain of the antenna is both for sending and reception...) so no need for a scientific calculator..... also good to know: 1db makes 12% in distance. so be carefull when crafting your cables.. lg mond.
tells you in your local time when that event will happen... (well evntually it is 1 second off if the first date terminates not in the same second as the second... lg mond.
i wonder if these SATA kabels could be used as a cheap highspeed network for boxes in a cluster. eventuelly they could not be directly connected via a crossover kable but a small adapter in between that simulates a small harddriver to both (or more ends) could be used for fast internconnection. IPoverSATA anyone?
well..depending on your users needs and how much you want to spend for servers you would setup dump X terminals (old PC's are easy to convert into remote boot/nfs-root/readonly filesystem/X terminals). you would need one application server with lots of RAM and CPU power for about 20 to 200 users.. depending on their needs... the Xterms basically need no maintenance once setup.. then you have about 100 application servers.. basically those can be remote amin'ed.. they could share most of their files and setup on a common NFS server. or if it is in a remote location you would mirror most of the basic setup.. basically: a hand full of good admins can run that place including a few dump Xterminal replace technicans in case of broken hardware..
well 10fold increase in 6 years. if we look at moor's law then memory will increase 16fold at this time. so as long as moore's law holds then we are save. also: the cpu load does not increase much with larger rouging table. after all it is just a lookup in a hash table. but: what is more of a problem is increasing bandwith. so router have to work faster to do more routing decessions/sec as bandwith goes up.. i think the rate is something like 118 % per year. that would mean an increase of 2400 fold in 10 years.. now of course the traffic is shared amoung more systems and not all concentrated but still here is more of a challange in router performance then with the size of the routing table.
..would fit onto a single floppy.. and have all the rest from the net. usually everywhere i go there is a fast intenet connection. fast enough to download a the debian installation. so all i need is a good network install. my ideal install floppy set would be just one floppy. kernel. network drivers vor every card. everything else (scsi driver modules etc...etc...etc.. ) should be downloaded from the net. today i need the 5 floppy set. (there is a 3 floppy set but it does not have much network card drivers...so it is useless) but with an install disk that has just kernel, network drivers and a wget one could bild a ntework install disk on a single floppy driver....
a 2M ppl city. good xDSL (we provide it since about 5 years now). the only downside is the political situation where an extrem right wing government is in power now. (OTOH the extrem right is not much worse then e.g. the republican party in the u.s.).
i think most people will agree that the final goal has to be to get rid of non-free software. the question is how to get there best.
i use debian for a while not and i like it because it is simply the best distribution form a technical side and because it is most free. i also installed it for about 5 new uses who get along with it quite fine.
but they could not live without netscape and a lot of other things from non-free yet. (and there is not a replacement for every non-free thing yet. e.g: the gimp-nonfree to load/save GIF. there can not be a free version since the patent problem. but when people can not load/save GIF then gimp is mostly useles to them. and there are lots of other things like that.
so i think it should be decided on a case by case if to remove a packet or not. so in the long run we will be able to get rid of non-free but not completly today. if non-free is removed today then debian would be useless to about 80 or 90% of people. people who are not able to compile software themself since they are no programmers. so this uses only have the choice to use a complelty comercial distributin like suse or redhat or to use m$ windows. all in all it does not help the cause of free software much.
maybe debian developers could vote once every year which packets are allowed to be included in the non-free section. also i would suggest to add even more warnings that these packets are non free and where the problem is and that they might be removed from the diestributin in future versions. and maybe an email address of who is to blame (e.g. unisys in the GIF case) etc.. but we can not remove those packets yet.
you have obviously been brainwashed by capitalist media. it is not true that government owned (which is really: owend by the public) companies are so bad. sure there are examples where they are bad but there examples where they are extremly good. just as with comercial companies. of course government owned companies should operate in a way to provit their owner (all of us) and this is not always the same as making money (think of railway company.. cheap public transport benefits all of us). The ability of individuals to build great personal wealth is what fuels new businesses but this ability has to be limited to a sane level. right now the wealth of the 3 richest men in the world is more the the GNP/year of the 48 most poor countries (with about 600mil ppl). things do not have to be that insane. with wealth and power distributed like this we are not any better then dark middle ages with feudal system. think about it.
the only possible way to get there is if politics change the rules of the game. (change law, tax law,..) and for the politics to change the voters would have to want them to do that. because the corporations (the capital) is not interested in change (at least not those corporations which are successfull in the current system.). now the fundamental problem ist that in some political systems the capital has already too much influence. e.g. with lobying and most important: the $$$ companys controls mass media used to indoctrinate people. furthermore in the usa to have a chance to get elected one already needs big money for the campain.. (payed by the capital). so it might be the case that we are already on a one way road and can not change the course of our society anymore. still we should not give up and at least fight the capitalism as much as possible. (where the goal is not to destroy capitalism but to limit it and transform it to something more socialy just, to something easier democraticaly controlabe and something more ecological). measurements to do so would be:
extremly progressiv tax for the super rich and big corporations to limit their influence. while on the other hand helping small startup companies.
helping small and independent media.
make political party financialy independent from corporate money (pay them from taxes)
help independent science (pay from taxes instead corporate money)
free and uncensored internet.
helping critical NGO/NPO organisations.
etc...
in short: just avoid anything that a right wing party wants. so we see in odrder to have a chance to leave the dangeros one way road we have to fight against capitalism a lot. of course you will not hear that in your mass media. thus it is necessary to spread this knowledge via grass root paths like the internet...
But damn, that takes a staff of 200 people to manage the security/connectivity/accounts/space and other duties just for the cluster. that would mean: 1 person per 200 nodes. does not sound that much to me.
The Power bill has to be outrageous! are you sure that a few Sun's would have much less power consumption / per MIPS?
The Cabling/switching/routing mess has to be totally unmanageable i do not think it has to be a mess. after all most of the boxes will have an identical setup. just connected 16 of them to a switch and then interconnect those in groups again , etc.. i guess it can (and probably is) done in a clean and structured way.
What happens when you reach a buck in the hardware or have to patch the system or replace a kernel because of a hack that came about? It is costly and hellish to work on 4-6,000 pcs first i do not think that most of the boxes are directly connected to the net, most of them proably are backend search engine that deliver their results to frontend maschines.. furthermore if the setup ist done smart (and i assume it is) then you e.g. would boot identical boxes via ethernet and NFS-root and then the thing downloads latest software from a central server..etc.. so changeing software on all nodes would not be much work. only change it on a single maschine...
I would have thought it to be wiser to setup Sun E10000's or something like that.. having 4 32 proc e 100000's in a cluster is a hell of alot easier to manage and cheaper. all if 4 of these are enough.. but i do not think that 4 are enough.. someone above wrote that one proably needs more then one sparc CPU to replace one high end pentium. but even if it is 1:1 then you need 125 of your 32proc box's. with lots of floor space and cooling as well. maybe less maintenace but more expensive one..
speaking for the ISP who provids DSL lines for 5years here in vienna. it works like this: we rent the leased line (bare copper) from the austrian telekom and operate the DSL on top. the customers pays directly the bare line and aditional fee to the ISP for the international traffic. when a line is down we inform the telekom who owns the line. but in principle the customer (since he has the number of the line and he pays for it) can directly call the telekom as well.
so i would suggest you try to get the contact information for the owner of the line as well and find out your line number. then you can directly call the owener of the line to fix it.... you just should make sure that it is really a problem with the line. but you see on your DSL when the physical link is broken. after contacting the primary provider and ask if the other end is OK then the physical line can be the only problem.. greetings mond.
there is a lot going on in the linux telephony world. a good source for information is linuxtelephony.org.
i was implementing a VoIP solution for a company a few weeks ago where linux based kiosk terminals where euquiped with phones that should be able to make VoIP calls to a central callcenter including video. i looked at the existing software. H323 seems to be the way of the futurere and there are already H323 based solutions on the way. openh323.org. even thought they where not stable enought for my needs yet. but at least the demo appication (voxialla) was able to interoperate with the M$ netmeeting shit. video transmition with H263 codec (for low bandwith) is also on the way. for my solution i decided to use quicknet telephony cards (it greatly enhances the telphony experience if you have a real phone connected to your computer which can also ring and is independent of the sound card). those have a DSP on board which does voice compression accourding to the most important standads. it has a GPL'ed kernel driver. (the only downside is the DSP code itself is not open but that is not that much of a problem).
i decided to just adopt the demo code that came with the quicknet cards for my appolication since it was more stable then the H323 things. (it is easy since the compression is already done on the card). for the video thing i used a parallel netscape server push with 1 picture every 3 or 4 sekunds 160x120 (about 2k Byte) in size). greetings mond.
Elimination of most of the government and its laws is hardly conservative. the "government" is still elected by the people (at least it should be.. and of course there is the $$$ capitalism in the usa that bribes any political party that is eligable) but government that shout (at least in principle) be selected by the people is the only way to fight against evil capitalism. so elimination of the government is definitly conservative. it is ultra conservativ. it is fascist. i do know. we had a fascist (nazi) government here around 1940. we do have an ultra right wing government now. greetings from vienna, austria. mond.
ok. let's assume that you have 600 000 ppl working for you who need some software product A and it costs you only $10 per seat and year.(where of course most software will cost you some aditional $100 because it only runs on operating system A-doze and an additional $100 on average for necessary hardware upgrade etc..) but let us assume just $10 for product A. that gives 6 mill$.
for this much money you can pay a dozen of full time programmes who write you a custom application that does what you want. (maybe hiring the programmes of the shareware product you like) if you open soucre that application you are not dependent on them and get additonal people working for you for free! plus: an organisation which is fianced by public taxes should give something back to the people for their money after all..
i am not an expert on kerberos. all i did was installing the debian package of kerberos4 once and look a bit in the doku. while not sending cleartext passwords over the wire, what i did not like was that it was open to "man in the middle attacks" in some situations. is kerberos 5 better in this area? also it did not enclude any encryption shut authentication. when i have to replace my applications and deamons i want encryption too or else it does not seem worth the trouble in most cases... is encryption part of V5?
what i would like to see is
something like kerberos to be able to have cnetralized authentication but it should not be weaker then SSH (that is not open to man in the middle attacks)
integratated encryption. probably extending ssh and or ssl
flexible and secure ways to deal with cross realm authentication and secure and easy ways to have several backup authentication servers..
does anyone know how good this is handled in kerberos 5? greetings from vienna, austria.
yes..joe is nice. i use it for any edition under linux for 4 years now.. wordstar compatible keyboard layout (even thought it can emulate pico (jpico or emacs jmacs). it is small fast reliable and has good formating rules when edition emails (line breaking in > > > quoted paragraphs etc etc..) no color no syntax highlighting thought..
mond.
we use safty belts and bicycle helmets...
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 4
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10 years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew (at least the techies amoung us) that major problems where not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow. still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't think it is fair to ridicule the people who made preparations..
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10 years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew that major problems where not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow. still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't thing it is fair to ridicule the people who made preparations..
i do not want binary only drivers and the petition does not sound a bit like that would be a valid option. i can not support that part of the petition. they people should add a checkbox where people can state that they will never buy hardware that has only "binary only" drivers..
the word "freedom" is portably the most abused word ever spoken. freedom is something that most people think about positively. so every spin doctor and every regime however restrictive and evil will try to define the word "freedom" in a away that suits their needs.
some commonly agreed definition of freedom is that personal freedom ends there where the freedom of the other person begins. that means i am allowed to do anything i want as long is i do not hurt the freedom of others to do what they want.
i would say that this is come kind of common denominator to what freedom should mean. fully using this kind of freedom is not an ethical thing to do. one does only need to care for his own pleasure.
good people will not go to the bounds of this definition of freedom. they will help their neighbour. that is they will give up something to make other peoples live more happy. that means they make good use of their freedom.
a definition that goes further (in this case closer definition) takes into account that freedom means choice. choice to do something. where the beggar on the street would have in principle the right to eat at an expensive restaurant he does not really have that choice because he has not enough money to do so maybe he has not even enough money to eat at all. so his only choice is to starve. that is not very much of "freedom".
this is where the concept of "society" comes into the game. no single person stole any money from that beggar and left him in that position where he has no freedom. still our society collaborately took away his freedom somehow. this is why we (well at least some of us) agree that the majority of people should limit their freedom a little (e.g. poor one at least have enough freedom to live). how do we maximize the total amount of freedom. it depends on how we measure it. does it increase the total freedom if we are giving some super rich person the freedom to buy 3 yachts instead of 1? or is does it increase the total amount of freedom more if we give 50 people the freedom to live and eat?
so i am not sure why you are so upset about the fact that someone here questioned the "freedom to make money". that freedom is a freedom but i do not think it is the most important freedom. making money at the cost of other peoples freedom? at the cost of polluting environment? at the cost of free speech?
anyway. i used perl a lot but i guess i will use my freedom to switch to python instead. i do not like the attitude of certain perl developers.
on the one hand i am not surprised: the flash crap has the image of being only a tool for stupid corporations that have no idea of what the internet is all about. pretty flash animations without content. just the opposite of what the web was meant to be. so i can see how desperately the macromedia people are searching for something that is young and kewl.
on the other hand i am realey disappointed that the southpark people are selling their souls for big $$$. this is prostitution.
Slashdot Mirror
if you double the distance then the energy is spread on a surface that is 4 time as large, which means energy density goes down by factor for. that means 10*log(1/4)/log(10) a reduction of about 6db (6.0206 to be eccact). so if you want to double the range of your link then you need an antenna that is 6db better. the guys in the example wanted to go from 5miles to 21 miles which is about 4 times. that means 12db better antenna. or a 6db better antenna on both ends (as the gain of the antenna is both for sending and reception...) so no need for a scientific calculator..... also good to know: 1db makes 12% in distance. so be carefull when crafting your cables.. lg mond.
date -d "$((987654321 - $(date +%s))) sec"
tells you in your local time when that event will happen... (well evntually it is 1 second off if the first date terminates not in the same second as the second... lg mond.
i wonder if these SATA kabels could be used as a cheap highspeed network for boxes in a cluster. eventuelly they could not be directly connected via a crossover kable but a small adapter in between that simulates a small harddriver to both (or more ends) could be used for fast internconnection. IPoverSATA anyone?
well..depending on your users needs and how much you want to spend for servers you would setup dump X terminals (old PC's are easy to convert into remote boot/nfs-root/readonly filesystem/X terminals). you would need one application server with lots of RAM and CPU power for about 20 to 200 users.. depending on their needs... the Xterms basically need no maintenance once setup.. then you have about 100 application servers.. basically those can be remote amin'ed.. they could share most of their files and setup on a common NFS server. or if it is in a remote location you would mirror most of the basic setup.. basically: a hand full of good admins can run that place including a few dump Xterminal replace technicans in case of broken hardware..
well 10fold increase in 6 years. if we look at moor's law then memory will increase 16fold at this time. so as long as moore's law holds then we are save. also: the cpu load does not increase much with larger rouging table. after all it is just a lookup in a hash table. but: what is more of a problem is increasing bandwith. so router have to work faster to do more routing decessions/sec as bandwith goes up.. i think the rate is something like 118 % per year. that would mean an increase of 2400 fold in 10 years.. now of course the traffic is shared amoung more systems and not all concentrated but still here is more of a challange in router performance then with the size of the routing table.
..would fit onto a single floppy.. and have all the rest from the net. usually everywhere i go there is a fast intenet connection. fast enough to download a the debian installation. so all i need is a good network install. my ideal install floppy set would be just one floppy. kernel. network drivers vor every card. everything else (scsi driver modules etc...etc...etc.. ) should be downloaded from the net. today i need the 5 floppy set. (there is a 3 floppy set but it does not have much network card drivers...so it is useless) but with an install disk that has just kernel, network drivers and a wget one could bild a ntework install disk on a single floppy driver....
...if linus would have studied in a corporate run university where everything that counts is making money?
the scale in the sql test was time needed. so the bigest bar for solaris there means that it was slowest....
a 2M ppl city. good xDSL (we provide it since about 5 years now). the only downside is the political situation where an extrem right wing government is in power now. (OTOH the extrem right is not much worse then e.g. the republican party in the u.s.).
greetings from vienna.
mond.
i use debian for a while not and i like it because it is simply the best distribution form a technical side and because it is most free. i also installed it for about 5 new uses who get along with it quite fine.
but they could not live without netscape and a lot of other things from non-free yet. (and there is not a replacement for every non-free thing yet. e.g: the gimp-nonfree to load/save GIF. there can not be a free version since the patent problem. but when people can not load/save GIF then gimp is mostly useles to them. and there are lots of other things like that.
so i think it should be decided on a case by case if to remove a packet or not. so in the long run we will be able to get rid of non-free but not completly today. if non-free is removed today then debian would be useless to about 80 or 90% of people. people who are not able to compile software themself since they are no programmers. so this uses only have the choice to use a complelty comercial distributin like suse or redhat or to use m$ windows. all in all it does not help the cause of free software much.
maybe debian developers could vote once every year which packets are allowed to be included in the non-free section. also i would suggest to add even more warnings that these packets are non free and where the problem is and that they might be removed from the diestributin in future versions. and maybe an email address of who is to blame (e.g. unisys in the GIF case) etc.. but we can not remove those packets yet.
greetings from vienna
mond.
The ability of individuals to build great personal wealth is what fuels new businesses but this ability has to be limited to a sane level. right now the wealth of the 3 richest men in the world is more the the GNP/year of the 48 most poor countries (with about 600mil ppl). things do not have to be that insane. with wealth and power distributed like this we are not any better then dark middle ages with feudal system. think about it.
mond.
because the corporations (the capital) is not interested in change (at least not those corporations which are successfull in the current system.). now the fundamental problem ist that in some political systems the capital has already too much influence. e.g. with lobying and most important: the $$$ companys controls mass media used to indoctrinate people. furthermore in the usa to have a chance to get elected one already needs big money for the campain.. (payed by the capital).
so it might be the case that we are already on a one way road and can not change the course of our society anymore. still we should not give up and at least fight the capitalism as much as possible. (where the goal is not to destroy capitalism but to limit it and transform it to something more socialy just, to something easier democraticaly controlabe and something more ecological).
measurements to do so would be:
- extremly progressiv tax for the super rich and big corporations to limit their influence. while on the other hand helping small startup companies.
- helping small and independent media.
- make political party financialy independent from corporate money (pay them from taxes)
- help independent science (pay from taxes instead corporate money)
- free and uncensored internet.
- helping critical NGO/NPO organisations.
- etc...
in short: just avoid anything that a right wing party wants. so we see in odrder to have a chance to leave the dangeros one way road we have to fight against capitalism a lot. of course you will not hear that in your mass media. thus it is necessary to spread this knowledge via grass root paths like the internet...greetings from vienna, austria.
mond
so i would suggest you try to get the contact information for the owner of the line as well and find out your line number. then you can directly call the owener of the line to fix it.... you just should make sure that it is really a problem with the line. but you see on your DSL when the physical link is broken. after contacting the primary provider and ask if the other end is OK then the physical line can be the only problem.. greetings mond.
i was implementing a VoIP solution for a company a few weeks ago where linux based kiosk terminals where euquiped with phones that should be able to make VoIP calls to a central callcenter including video. i looked at the existing software. H323 seems to be the way of the futurere and there are already H323 based solutions on the way. openh323.org. even thought they where not stable enought for my needs yet. but at least the demo appication (voxialla) was able to interoperate with the M$ netmeeting shit. video transmition with H263 codec (for low bandwith) is also on the way. for my solution i decided to use quicknet telephony cards (it greatly enhances the telphony experience if you have a real phone connected to your computer which can also ring and is independent of the sound card). those have a DSP on board which does voice compression accourding to the most important standads. it has a GPL'ed kernel driver. (the only downside is the DSP code itself is not open but that is not that much of a problem).
i decided to just adopt the demo code that came with the quicknet cards for my appolication since it was more stable then the H323 things. (it is easy since the compression is already done on the card). for the video thing i used a parallel netscape server push with 1 picture every 3 or 4 sekunds 160x120 (about 2k Byte) in size). greetings mond.
Elimination of most of the government and its laws is hardly conservative. the "government" is still elected by the people (at least it should be.. and of course there is the $$$ capitalism in the usa that bribes any political party that is eligable) but government that shout (at least in principle) be selected by the people is the only way to fight against evil capitalism. so elimination of the government is definitly conservative. it is ultra conservativ. it is fascist. i do know. we had a fascist (nazi) government here around 1940. we do have an ultra right wing government now. greetings from vienna, austria. mond.
for this much money you can pay a dozen of full time programmes who write you a custom application that does what you want. (maybe hiring the programmes of the shareware product you like) if you open soucre that application you are not dependent on them and get additonal people working for you for free! plus: an organisation which is fianced by public taxes should give something back to the people for their money after all..
mond.
why do these ppl use that ra shit instead of mp3?????
what i would like to see is
does anyone know how good this is handled in kerberos 5?
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond
yes..joe is nice. i use it for any edition under linux for 4 years now.. wordstar compatible keyboard layout (even thought it can emulate pico (jpico or emacs jmacs). it is small fast reliable and has good formating rules when edition emails (line breaking in > > > quoted paragraphs etc etc..) no color no syntax highlighting thought..
mond.
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by
clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it
would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations
just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in
case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the
supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will
be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made
preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts
in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not
need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if
you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10
years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and
the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew (at least the techies amoung us) that major problems where
not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major
problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the
chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow.
still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not
check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is
said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and
what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power
plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not
prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are
not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this
causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino
stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing
much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then
all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't think it is fair to ridicule the people who made
preparations..
gretings from vienna, austria.
mond.
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by
clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it
would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations
just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in
case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the
supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will
be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made
preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts
in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not
need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if
you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10
years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and
the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew that major problems where
not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major
problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the
chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow.
still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not
check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is
said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and
what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power
plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not
prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are
not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this
causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino
stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing
much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then
all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't thing it is fair to ridicule the people who made
preparations..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
i do not want binary only drivers and the petition does not sound a bit like that would be a valid option. i can not support that part of the petition. they people should add a checkbox where people can state that they will never buy hardware that has only "binary only" drivers..
mond.
the word "freedom" is portably the most abused word ever spoken. freedom
is something that most people think about positively. so every spin doctor
and every regime however restrictive and evil will try to define the word
"freedom" in a away that suits their needs.
some commonly agreed definition of freedom is that personal freedom ends
there where the freedom of the other person begins. that means i am allowed
to do anything i want as long is i do not hurt the freedom of others to do
what they want.
i would say that this is come kind of common denominator to what freedom
should mean. fully using this kind of freedom is not an ethical thing to do.
one does only need to care for his own pleasure.
good people will not go to the bounds of this definition of freedom. they
will help their neighbour. that is they will give up something to make other
peoples live more happy. that means they make good use of their freedom.
a definition that goes further (in this case closer definition) takes into
account that freedom means choice. choice to do something. where the beggar
on the street would have in principle the right to eat at an expensive
restaurant he does not really have that choice because he has not enough
money to do so maybe he has not even enough money to eat at all. so his only
choice is to starve. that is not very much of "freedom".
this is where the concept of "society" comes into the game. no single
person stole any money from that beggar and left him in that position where
he has no freedom. still our society collaborately took away his freedom
somehow. this is why we (well at least some of us) agree that the majority
of people should limit their freedom a little (e.g. poor one at least have
enough freedom to live). how do we maximize the total amount of freedom. it
depends on how we measure it. does it increase the total freedom if we are
giving some super rich person the freedom to buy 3 yachts instead of 1? or
is does it increase the total amount of freedom more if we give 50 people
the freedom to live and eat?
so i am not sure why you are so upset about the fact that someone here
questioned the "freedom to make money". that freedom is a freedom but i do
not think it is the most important freedom. making money at the cost of
other peoples freedom? at the cost of polluting environment? at the cost of
free speech?
anyway. i used perl a lot but i guess i will use my freedom to switch to
python instead. i do not like the attitude of certain perl developers.
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
on the one hand i am not surprised: the flash crap has the image of being
only a tool for stupid corporations that have no idea of what the internet is
all about. pretty flash animations without content. just the opposite of what
the web was meant to be. so i can see how desperately the macromedia people
are searching for something that is young and kewl.
on the other hand i am realey disappointed that the southpark people are
selling their souls for big $$$. this is prostitution.