umm, the ponzi guy was an INVESTOR in the scheme. A scammee not a scammer.
I know of at least 3 bankers who have committed suicide recently, mostly from those banks whose funds have tanked. It's almost like the twenties.
There's an interesting post about that, which also points out that there wasn't a lot of bankers who committed suicide after the crash in 1929. Looks like that's a bit of an urban legend.
Linux firmware is bigger than VxWorks one. When Linksys cut off memory and flash, they had to go VxWorks.
I can't honestly believe that it costs that much extra for 8MB of flash compared to 2MB of flash. You can run DD-WRT on there, but it requires jumping through some hoops first. Plus, it makes it more difficult to install any optware packages, etc.
You can't effectively legislate morality, as we demonstrated with Prohibition.
Is prohibition really a moral issue? I drank a glass of egg nog with rum tonight -- am I an immoral person? I can understand morals like "don't kill people and take their stuff", but how is drinking a glass of rum laced egg nog immoral? Or smoking a joint? Or doing heroin?
I know that egg nog has a lot of fat and sugar, so it isn't exactly a health drink. Smoking pot is bad for your lungs and doing heroin is bad for the heart, but as long as a person isn't driving around endangering other people after doing any of these, where is the actual immorality?
I agree with you. I don't think that drinking is immoral, but then again, I don't believe that gay marriage is a "moral" issue either. There's a subset of people who believe that a fair amount of the things which bring pleasure to people in any way are sinful and shouldn't be allowed. Those are the people who are trying to legislate their "morality." There's an interesting article from a few years back called "Tyrany of Legislating Morality" which covered this.
That's because we don't attack the root causes of the abuse, nor do we draw a line of distinction about which of us are more genetically or adaptively susceptible to them.
Prisons aren't the answer. Rehab helps. Good jobs help.
True.
You can't make meth and blow safe. Legalizing them condemns to death and abyss, many people that need protection.
And you're assuming that those same people wouldn't just go the "legal" route and opt instead for drugs like oxycontin or vicodin? I've had friends who have been both heroin and oxycontin addicts, and the only difference is that oxycontin is legal to possess if some doctor put his name on your scrip.
We even had a doctor in town whom everyone had nicknamed "Doctor Feelgood", since he basically prescribes any sort of painkiller to just about anyone with no questions asked. From what I can gather, it's an economic thing for him... Drug dealers are drug dealers, whether they deal from the back of a van or from behind a desk.
People who want to get high are going to do so whether or not you want them to. You can't effectively legislate morality, as we demonstrated with Prohibition.
Did you even read your own link? GP called labor the "biggest anchor" on the big 3. Your link shows exactly that: hourly labor cost for Big 3: $70+/hr... for Japanese companies in the US: less than $50/hr! Frankly, that is an amazing difference.
Now you may or may not find that palatable, but you should be agreeing with the GP. Labor costs are a real issue here.
GP didn't refer to labor costs as "the biggest anchor". GP called *unions* the biggest anchor.
My point was that their actual *salary* was relatively low (28$/hour on average), but that labor costs could have been made manageable by socializing the portions of the costs which pushed the "labor costs" up to about 70$ an hour. If they don't have to worry about benefits and pension, it becomes far more palatable for the companies to pay their workers a fair wage.
Since I don't see us doing any experiments in single payer health care, I'd assume that the unions are going to be necessary to ensure that workers get compensated fairly for the work they perform. UAW tried to set up something beneficial with car manufacturers in the 70s to handle health benefits, etc, but it apparently didn't pan out.
Answer: government regulations dictating design of everything right down to the armrests, not to mention buttloads of useless safety gear (are cars *really* safer now than 10 years ago?).
The union contracts are the single biggest anchor on the Big Three.
That's right. Let's make sure that the people who actually *make* the vehicles don't get compensated for making them. I'm sure the management class are the only people actually producing anything of worth.
Workers at the big 3 are getting about 28$/hour plus pension and benefits. Want to help them out? Move them to a single payer healthcare system and socialize their pensions...
I do agree that the big 3 should have to file bankruptcy like every other business, but not because of unions, and definitely not for the explicit purposes of extracting money which would otherwise be used to pay unionized workers.
I would have been really happy to see any of the financial giants who came to Washington begging on their hands and knees for some government green actually have to justify their loans or give some sort of, you know, *plan*. Automakers get to jump through hoops to explain their lousy business plans and practices, but banks and other financial firms get a pass.
First off, Yes: when i said JAVA i ment JS.
I wont trash any language, because i havent used most of them, and they all have their purpose.
The point I was getting at is people seemed to want more and more out of a web app, and its comes to a point where you cannot make a stable web app, without "duct-tape".
These app that we make are highly server dependent. Not only do they require security (which JS doesnt help, since the code is client side) they require operations that are cobbled together so they run in a browser.
Stuff like point-click-drag-drop are a client side operation. And doing something as simple as clicking a button, requires a postback, a run through the page life cycle, and the sent back to the client in a way that isnt reliable, or effiencient.
The normal event model used by pretty much every windowing system in use now has some sort of callback initiated from the button press, which executes code. Other than the serialization/deserialization of the request and the HTTP transport, you're not looking at much of a difference in terms of process.
And if you're talking client/server, HTTP is a pretty nice stateless protocol. Any client/server application is going to have to communicate between the client and server, which can potentially result in issues stemming from loss of data, so I'm not sure how this is worse in a "web 2.0" app than it would be in a traditional client/server app communicating via some sort of RPC.
I was using C# and VB as examples because thats what i am paid to program in. (believe me when i say i feel stupid using them). But there are better ways of doing things. Just because it can be done one way, doesnt mean its a very lgical method. So, pictures and text fine.. web based. but when your want basically a full blown Application on your web browser, why not just use an GUI API and any language you see fit, and do it right.
Because of a few simple things. First is portability... if you use a toolkit or compiler, the chances are that your code will run on most machines remotely if the browser was put out in the last few years. Second is simplicity of deployment... if you don't want to have to deploy a whole toolkit or assume a universally homogeneous deployment base (which is less and less likely given the proliferations of different OSes and versions of those OSes), you're going to have to rely on something like a web-based application to allow it to be used by the widest possible audience.
Another thing: you can write a OS based App in one language, how many languages does it take to create a web app? (xhtml, css(i know not a lnaguage, but you get what i mean) JS/AJAX, T-SQL or pl/SQL(RDBMS), C# VB Python php CGI whatever).. It takes a lot of knowledge and time and bugs to make something like that work.
Then again, maybe im in the wrong field, maybe i should be doing OS devel instead of Web based applications...
Perhaps. If you like sticking with VB and C#, core operating system development probably wouldn't be your strong suit. If you want to stick with rich client applications and avoid the entire client/server architecture and its set of problems, go right ahead. For those people who need to write client/server apps which require a wide audience, web-based applications (especially rich ones with javascript/dhtml) are very useful.
Parent has a good point. I work for a software company that Develops GIS (geopgraphical Information Software). and all of our clients want theor programs to be web based. this means VB or C# with AJAX/JAVA.
How does that follow? I don't see how web-based applications (or, judging from the context, the services which run these applications) have to be VB or C#. There are a number of other choices, be it scripted languages like Perl, Python, Ruby or PHP, or compiled languages like Java, C++ or C. Also, you said "AJAX/JAVA"... I would assume you're referring to JavaScript, which isn't the same as java.
Writing web-based applications isn't intrinsically tied to one particular language or set of particular languages. It only requires being able to read the HTTP headers that it is given and responding in a certain way. Most languages have toolkits which allow this. I'd go so far as to say that VB and C# would be *poor* choices for that sort of thing. Servlets or JSP with Java is a pretty easy way of going about it, and you get your choice of server (Jetty, Tomcat, J2EE server like jboss, etc).
In the end, it's more about the toolkit, not the language, and your choices seem to lean towards vendor lockin (since VB and C# more or less run on one platform, discounting Mono implementations) instead of something a bit more OS-agnostic.
I know i cant be that old school, but why cant people use C++ and and GUI APIs?
Perhaps not C++ GUI APIs, but things like GWT use very similar APIs to classic GUI toolkits, so it is indeed possible to do this in that sort of way to cut down on the slope of that learning curve.
Depends what you're doing. For example, database servers virtualize poorly, but most other applications will run just fine that way. Everything besides your database machine could probably run as Xen paravirtualized servers on one or two machines.
That has the advantage of not producing as much heat and draws less power, which is an advantage unless you own some sort of stock in your local power utility.
Producing such things in flash is much easier, doing it in dhtml/ajax is a lot more work, not least of all because of how far msie is behind other browsers when it comes to these things, also the performance is seriously lacking (again, primarily in microsoft's antiquated browser)...
Unless you use something like GWT to ease the pain of developing cross-browser DHTML/JS applications. There's even a WYSIWYG editor for it.
Is it just me, or does it just seem that if you need a 64-bit address space for your web browser, you're doing something totally wrong
I think the point is (at least on a 64 bit architecture) that running a single 32 bit program on your system means that you need another set of 32 bit libraries to support it... Better to run a system with a homogeneous architecture.
Then you have the US offer gardasil to girls for free, and parents refuse to give it because it's a "License to have sex".
It's not as bad as some think, but it is bad, and sometimes you have to wonder about the people when they refuse free immunisations.
Apparently you're new here. I've heard somewhere that 10% of people in America believe that we didn't land on the moon, so is it a surprise that people think immunizations are a bad thing?
Probably the same crowd that has been pushing abstinence only education as a solution for teen pregnancy.
Let me ask fuckwit, how many slaves owned homes, cars, and had 401k's?
The concept of "wage slaves", where workers made just enough money to survive, meant that they could afford housing and transportation (more or less to and from work), but not ever afford to leave. The comparison with actual slaves is wrong, I'll agree with that much.
God damn you made a ridiculous attempt to support your world view.
Not that 401k plans aren't kind of like college as well -- you're placing a bet with your discretionary money that you'll get a net gain out of it. Right now that "benefit" isn't looking so hot...
Regardless of your disagreement with the poster's argument using "slaves" as a comparison, it's a pretty well known fact that there is a horrible gulf between executive pay and workers' pay in America which isn't echoed elsewhere in the world.
It's time the whiners and sour grapers get off their high horse and acknowledge that rich people, for the most part, are rich because they are just smart and work harder than the rest.
I call bullshit on that argument. I have plenty of friends who work 10-12 hour days for ridiculously low pay doing jobs like construction and maintenance. You can't accuse them of not working hard enough, yet society places far more worth on other jobs, so they receive low wages.
CEOs and other executives can only have their ridiculous salaries because they make their money off the backs of other people. The wage gap between worker and executive has been increasing steadily in America since the end of WWII.
And what social responsibility. Just because someone was able to get a bunch of people to work for them in exchange for a pay check society gets to suck off their teat??? Wow... that's some reward for being successful, seeing all that money put to such good use by the government.
Yeah, I'm sure that holds water. Society are the people who are earning peanuts to earn these executives their money. If executives were willing to pay their workers reasonable wages and not accept gigantic salaries, this wouldn't be an issue, but as it is now, corporations for the most part underpay their regular workers.
And bitching about government inefficiency doesn't hold water in most cases. Medicare is more efficient than private insurance, it just isn't very well funded. Honestly, I think military expenses are, for the most part, a huge waste of money outside of actual defense (instead of offensives in other countries), but I'll take the bad of blowing money on stupid conflicts for the ability to allow healthcare for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it.
Then you had the whole "Fannie/Freddie" thing. The media never reported that John McCain cosponsored a bill [govtrack.us] that would have prevented it over two years ago. Here is a McCain quote from May 25, 2006 that the media did not report:
Not to nitpick, but Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were not the root causes of this... (at least according to Alan Greenspan and company). Whether you like them or not, DailyKos did a decent job of debunking that as well.
Anyways, I imaged the drive and blew out the XP install to install ubuntu... other than losing the wifi switch function it's 100% and I found an article in ubuntu forums that talks about how to make that switch function again...
Also try powertop... I was able to get about 4 to 4.5 hours of battery life out of the T60 I was using for work, and pretty close to that with the T61.
You're assuming significant numbers of Vista installations are in use in business. This appears not to be the case.
That's also true. My company has a number of Windows laptops, and we own a number of Vista licenses, yet not a single one of the machines actually has Vista installed. Not sure who decided to buy the bulk licenses...
Microsoft has definitely been pushing Vista pretty hard as a replacement for XP, but like most of their other "upgrades", it requires more horsepower for very little improvement.
The last new machine I bought was my Thinkpad, which came with some variant of Vista on it. I never booted it with Vista, but rather installed Ubuntu over it and never looked back.
I haven't had any problems with the machine, and definitely haven't missed having some Windows variant on there. I think as people stop equating "PC = Windows", they'll realize that they don't really need it. Most people I know use their machines for word processing, email, web "surfing" and sometimes instant messaging... none of which require Microsoft *anything*.
In the end, if you like Vista, use Vista, if you like Linux, use Linux. Just don't assume that everyone *has* to use one or the other.
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... and show the film as an audio/visual aid to film students. Of course, that was because Gilliam didn't like his film being cut to ribbons, and not due to legal entanglements with another studio.
umm, the ponzi guy was an INVESTOR in the scheme. A scammee not a scammer.
I know of at least 3 bankers who have committed suicide recently, mostly from those banks whose funds have tanked. It's almost like the twenties.
There's an interesting post about that, which also points out that there wasn't a lot of bankers who committed suicide after the crash in 1929. Looks like that's a bit of an urban legend.
Linux firmware is bigger than VxWorks one. When Linksys cut off memory and flash, they had to go VxWorks.
I can't honestly believe that it costs that much extra for 8MB of flash compared to 2MB of flash. You can run DD-WRT on there, but it requires jumping through some hoops first. Plus, it makes it more difficult to install any optware packages, etc.
Is prohibition really a moral issue? I drank a glass of egg nog with rum tonight -- am I an immoral person? I can understand morals like "don't kill people and take their stuff", but how is drinking a glass of rum laced egg nog immoral? Or smoking a joint? Or doing heroin? I know that egg nog has a lot of fat and sugar, so it isn't exactly a health drink. Smoking pot is bad for your lungs and doing heroin is bad for the heart, but as long as a person isn't driving around endangering other people after doing any of these, where is the actual immorality?
I agree with you. I don't think that drinking is immoral, but then again, I don't believe that gay marriage is a "moral" issue either. There's a subset of people who believe that a fair amount of the things which bring pleasure to people in any way are sinful and shouldn't be allowed. Those are the people who are trying to legislate their "morality." There's an interesting article from a few years back called "Tyrany of Legislating Morality" which covered this.
Of course not.
That's because we don't attack the root causes of the abuse, nor do we draw a line of distinction about which of us are more genetically or adaptively susceptible to them.
Prisons aren't the answer. Rehab helps. Good jobs help.
True.
You can't make meth and blow safe. Legalizing them condemns to death and abyss, many people that need protection.
And you're assuming that those same people wouldn't just go the "legal" route and opt instead for drugs like oxycontin or vicodin? I've had friends who have been both heroin and oxycontin addicts, and the only difference is that oxycontin is legal to possess if some doctor put his name on your scrip.
We even had a doctor in town whom everyone had nicknamed "Doctor Feelgood", since he basically prescribes any sort of painkiller to just about anyone with no questions asked. From what I can gather, it's an economic thing for him... Drug dealers are drug dealers, whether they deal from the back of a van or from behind a desk.
People who want to get high are going to do so whether or not you want them to. You can't effectively legislate morality, as we demonstrated with Prohibition.
The only program for most businesses that's missing is a full featured and multi-user accounting package like Quickbooks.
Have you seen Openbravo? It has pretty full featured ERP and POS packages, and is written in nice cross-platform Java.
EWeek also has an interesting write up with more technical details.
And for the terminally lazy, here's the link.
Did you even read your own link? GP called labor the "biggest anchor" on the big 3. Your link shows exactly that: hourly labor cost for Big 3: $70+/hr... for Japanese companies in the US: less than $50/hr! Frankly, that is an amazing difference.
Now you may or may not find that palatable, but you should be agreeing with the GP. Labor costs are a real issue here.
GP didn't refer to labor costs as "the biggest anchor". GP called *unions* the biggest anchor.
My point was that their actual *salary* was relatively low (28$/hour on average), but that labor costs could have been made manageable by socializing the portions of the costs which pushed the "labor costs" up to about 70$ an hour. If they don't have to worry about benefits and pension, it becomes far more palatable for the companies to pay their workers a fair wage.
Since I don't see us doing any experiments in single payer health care, I'd assume that the unions are going to be necessary to ensure that workers get compensated fairly for the work they perform. UAW tried to set up something beneficial with car manufacturers in the 70s to handle health benefits, etc, but it apparently didn't pan out.
Answer: government regulations dictating design of everything right down to the armrests, not to mention buttloads of useless safety gear (are cars *really* safer now than 10 years ago?).
Viewpoint to the contrary : http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081126_005507.html
The union contracts are the single biggest anchor on the Big Three.
That's right. Let's make sure that the people who actually *make* the vehicles don't get compensated for making them. I'm sure the management class are the only people actually producing anything of worth.
Workers at the big 3 are getting about 28$/hour plus pension and benefits. Want to help them out? Move them to a single payer healthcare system and socialize their pensions...
I do agree that the big 3 should have to file bankruptcy like every other business, but not because of unions, and definitely not for the explicit purposes of extracting money which would otherwise be used to pay unionized workers.
Unions are all about collective bargaining. Do you really think that automakers would pay operators a living wage if UAW wasn't involved? I'm happy that they're finally suggesting limits on executive compensation. Chumps like Wagoner haven't exactly been adding value to their employers.
I would have been really happy to see any of the financial giants who came to Washington begging on their hands and knees for some government green actually have to justify their loans or give some sort of, you know, *plan*. Automakers get to jump through hoops to explain their lousy business plans and practices, but banks and other financial firms get a pass.
First off, Yes: when i said JAVA i ment JS. I wont trash any language, because i havent used most of them, and they all have their purpose. The point I was getting at is people seemed to want more and more out of a web app, and its comes to a point where you cannot make a stable web app, without "duct-tape". These app that we make are highly server dependent. Not only do they require security (which JS doesnt help, since the code is client side) they require operations that are cobbled together so they run in a browser. Stuff like point-click-drag-drop are a client side operation. And doing something as simple as clicking a button, requires a postback, a run through the page life cycle, and the sent back to the client in a way that isnt reliable, or effiencient.
The normal event model used by pretty much every windowing system in use now has some sort of callback initiated from the button press, which executes code. Other than the serialization/deserialization of the request and the HTTP transport, you're not looking at much of a difference in terms of process.
And if you're talking client/server, HTTP is a pretty nice stateless protocol. Any client/server application is going to have to communicate between the client and server, which can potentially result in issues stemming from loss of data, so I'm not sure how this is worse in a "web 2.0" app than it would be in a traditional client/server app communicating via some sort of RPC.
I was using C# and VB as examples because thats what i am paid to program in. (believe me when i say i feel stupid using them). But there are better ways of doing things. Just because it can be done one way, doesnt mean its a very lgical method. So, pictures and text fine .. web based. but when your want basically a full blown Application on your web browser, why not just use an GUI API and any language you see fit, and do it right.
Because of a few simple things. First is portability... if you use a toolkit or compiler, the chances are that your code will run on most machines remotely if the browser was put out in the last few years. Second is simplicity of deployment... if you don't want to have to deploy a whole toolkit or assume a universally homogeneous deployment base (which is less and less likely given the proliferations of different OSes and versions of those OSes), you're going to have to rely on something like a web-based application to allow it to be used by the widest possible audience.
Another thing: you can write a OS based App in one language, how many languages does it take to create a web app? (xhtml, css(i know not a lnaguage, but you get what i mean) JS/AJAX, T-SQL or pl/SQL(RDBMS), C# VB Python php CGI whatever) .. It takes a lot of knowledge and time and bugs to make something like that work.
Then again, maybe im in the wrong field, maybe i should be doing OS devel instead of Web based applications ...
Perhaps. If you like sticking with VB and C#, core operating system development probably wouldn't be your strong suit. If you want to stick with rich client applications and avoid the entire client/server architecture and its set of problems, go right ahead. For those people who need to write client/server apps which require a wide audience, web-based applications (especially rich ones with javascript/dhtml) are very useful.
Parent has a good point. I work for a software company that Develops GIS (geopgraphical Information Software). and all of our clients want theor programs to be web based. this means VB or C# with AJAX/JAVA.
How does that follow? I don't see how web-based applications (or, judging from the context, the services which run these applications) have to be VB or C#. There are a number of other choices, be it scripted languages like Perl, Python, Ruby or PHP, or compiled languages like Java, C++ or C. Also, you said "AJAX/JAVA"... I would assume you're referring to JavaScript, which isn't the same as java.
Writing web-based applications isn't intrinsically tied to one particular language or set of particular languages. It only requires being able to read the HTTP headers that it is given and responding in a certain way. Most languages have toolkits which allow this. I'd go so far as to say that VB and C# would be *poor* choices for that sort of thing. Servlets or JSP with Java is a pretty easy way of going about it, and you get your choice of server (Jetty, Tomcat, J2EE server like jboss, etc).
In the end, it's more about the toolkit, not the language, and your choices seem to lean towards vendor lockin (since VB and C# more or less run on one platform, discounting Mono implementations) instead of something a bit more OS-agnostic.
I know i cant be that old school, but why cant people use C++ and and GUI APIs?
Perhaps not C++ GUI APIs, but things like GWT use very similar APIs to classic GUI toolkits, so it is indeed possible to do this in that sort of way to cut down on the slope of that learning curve.
Coral cache link: http://jamus.dannz.net.nz.nyud.net/technology/laptophometheatre.htm
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dune or its wind traps yet.
Or that no one has mentioned another story on slashdot about extracting water from wind, even if the other one used a windmill to do so.
Depends what you're doing. For example, database servers virtualize poorly, but most other applications will run just fine that way. Everything besides your database machine could probably run as Xen paravirtualized servers on one or two machines.
That has the advantage of not producing as much heat and draws less power, which is an advantage unless you own some sort of stock in your local power utility.
Producing such things in flash is much easier, doing it in dhtml/ajax is a lot more work, not least of all because of how far msie is behind other browsers when it comes to these things, also the performance is seriously lacking (again, primarily in microsoft's antiquated browser)...
Unless you use something like GWT to ease the pain of developing cross-browser DHTML/JS applications. There's even a WYSIWYG editor for it.
Is it just me, or does it just seem that if you need a 64-bit address space for your web browser, you're doing something totally wrong
I think the point is (at least on a 64 bit architecture) that running a single 32 bit program on your system means that you need another set of 32 bit libraries to support it... Better to run a system with a homogeneous architecture.
Direct download: http://download.macromedia.com.nyud.net/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
Then you have the US offer gardasil to girls for free, and parents refuse to give it because it's a "License to have sex".
It's not as bad as some think, but it is bad, and sometimes you have to wonder about the people when they refuse free immunisations.
Apparently you're new here. I've heard somewhere that 10% of people in America believe that we didn't land on the moon, so is it a surprise that people think immunizations are a bad thing?
Probably the same crowd that has been pushing abstinence only education as a solution for teen pregnancy.
I stopped reading when you made the massively stupid comparison between salaries today and "feeding slaves" or "feeding cattle".
It's amazing to see someone so jealous of the wealthy that such an idiotic comparison makes sense.
A more apt comparison would be the "company store".
Let me ask fuckwit, how many slaves owned homes, cars, and had 401k's?
The concept of "wage slaves", where workers made just enough money to survive, meant that they could afford housing and transportation (more or less to and from work), but not ever afford to leave. The comparison with actual slaves is wrong, I'll agree with that much.
God damn you made a ridiculous attempt to support your world view.
Not that 401k plans aren't kind of like college as well -- you're placing a bet with your discretionary money that you'll get a net gain out of it. Right now that "benefit" isn't looking so hot ...
Regardless of your disagreement with the poster's argument using "slaves" as a comparison, it's a pretty well known fact that there is a horrible gulf between executive pay and workers' pay in America which isn't echoed elsewhere in the world.
It's time the whiners and sour grapers get off their high horse and acknowledge that rich people, for the most part, are rich because they are just smart and work harder than the rest.
I call bullshit on that argument. I have plenty of friends who work 10-12 hour days for ridiculously low pay doing jobs like construction and maintenance. You can't accuse them of not working hard enough, yet society places far more worth on other jobs, so they receive low wages.
CEOs and other executives can only have their ridiculous salaries because they make their money off the backs of other people. The wage gap between worker and executive has been increasing steadily in America since the end of WWII.
And what social responsibility. Just because someone was able to get a bunch of people to work for them in exchange for a pay check society gets to suck off their teat??? Wow ... that's some reward for being successful, seeing all that money put to such good use by the government.
Yeah, I'm sure that holds water. Society are the people who are earning peanuts to earn these executives their money. If executives were willing to pay their workers reasonable wages and not accept gigantic salaries, this wouldn't be an issue, but as it is now, corporations for the most part underpay their regular workers.
And bitching about government inefficiency doesn't hold water in most cases. Medicare is more efficient than private insurance, it just isn't very well funded. Honestly, I think military expenses are, for the most part, a huge waste of money outside of actual defense (instead of offensives in other countries), but I'll take the bad of blowing money on stupid conflicts for the ability to allow healthcare for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it.
Not to nitpick, but Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were not the root causes of this... (at least according to Alan Greenspan and company). Whether you like them or not, DailyKos did a decent job of debunking that as well.
Also try powertop... I was able to get about 4 to 4.5 hours of battery life out of the T60 I was using for work, and pretty close to that with the T61.
That's also true. My company has a number of Windows laptops, and we own a number of Vista licenses, yet not a single one of the machines actually has Vista installed. Not sure who decided to buy the bulk licenses ...
Microsoft has definitely been pushing Vista pretty hard as a replacement for XP, but like most of their other "upgrades", it requires more horsepower for very little improvement.
I'll second that.
The last new machine I bought was my Thinkpad, which came with some variant of Vista on it. I never booted it with Vista, but rather installed Ubuntu over it and never looked back.
I haven't had any problems with the machine, and definitely haven't missed having some Windows variant on there. I think as people stop equating "PC = Windows", they'll realize that they don't really need it. Most people I know use their machines for word processing, email, web "surfing" and sometimes instant messaging... none of which require Microsoft *anything*.
In the end, if you like Vista, use Vista, if you like Linux, use Linux. Just don't assume that everyone *has* to use one or the other.