If FreeBSD 8.1 RELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT are any indication, FreeBSD 9 has a long, long way to go to be the 'home' for much of anything outside of the odd server here and there the base for other projects (pfSense/freeNAS). It certainly is not a 'general purpose' OS - if for no other reason than its woefully lacking (and often unstable) hardware support.
And by 'long way to go' I mean it needs to regress - in stability and commitment to making all the subsystems actually work out the door. The current state of FreeBSD as a project is, well... lacking. I wish it were otherwise, but no.
(They could jump out of 1994 while they're at it and upgrade to a packaging system/package distribution architecture/anything more modern than what they're got while they're at it too, but that's probably too much to ask for.)
If this ever happens, my wildest dreams will have come true. Forget the threesome with now-hideous-and-leathery-old-but-once-hot porn stars from my youth! Not having to deal with any more Solaris or FreeBSD for a 'modern filesystems' would be incredible.
Like I said, not holding my breath (or even breathing heavily!). If it happens it'll happen only at the fringes, and poorly.
* maintain tens if not hundreds if not thousands of proprietary (legacy) applications * maintain the many, many workstations * maintain the fabric for many, many workstations * maintain the servers which provide services, many of which are interconnected and do not cope with modern technologies well. * maintain the storage for all of that * SECURE all of the above * make it as fault tolerant as possible
Shit, I suspect the Cisco contract is probably a good 3rd of that per year alone.
If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.
You seem to be unaware of this, so let me inform you: the vast majority of captured insurgents in Iraq, post-war, have not been Iraqis. The majority have been Iranian and Hezbollah, as well as many from Saudi Arabia and some from Egypt.
The captured ones who have been Iraqis have mostly been of the "they threatened to kill my family" variety. These are not the competent attackers.
So explain to me: why are many of these so-called 'insurgents' from Egypt and Saudi Arabia? US ties with both of these countries have been nothing but beneficial for the countries of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (What those nations do to their people, however, is another story.)
You seem to be casting this conflict outside the bounds of Islamic jihad. Understanding jihad is crucial to understanding the conflict, because they are the same.
"Giving up and leaving" is an option, but it ignores the fact that the war was brought to us (the West) first, and that the pace of the war in the West is increasing.
You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.
Assuming you're talking about the US, where in the world are you talking about? Iraq? Afghanistan?
You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II? Building roads, bridges, schools, water treatment and dispersal systems, etc. - those things are not what someone doing "scorched earth" does. If we were to perpetrate a "scorched earth" response, Kabul would not exist, and neither would Baghdad. There would be no tribal dissent, because word one of the possibility would result in a JDAM being dropped on their villages.
Somehow, there are plenty of Kurdish people over here, of mixed faiths, who do not view the US with hostility and animosity, yet if anyone does in the Arab world, it's them. Strange, how it's the Muslims who are the ones doing all this, sometimes when they've got no social association with the Arab/Muslim world except for their ideology and mosque indoctrination in their home lands of Western Europe.
Furthermore, the response towards Mad Mickey by the attacked party is largely determined by why attacked, as well as the level of organizational and ideological affinity he has with his state/whatever of origin. If Mickey is from Dublin, a part of the IRA, and has strong family/community ties back there, then yeah, war with Ireland to destroy that contingent might just be the appropriate course of action.
The number of men isn't what makes a successful plan work, it's the implementation.
Sure, more men are useful, but with proper planning, you could see tenfold the results from 5 men as you'd get from, say, shooting up a mall.
There's a reason why terrorist organizations have been trying to recruit indigenous people from colleges, and it isn't just to find pasties. It's because intelligent people within a society tend to understand said society better than non-natives, and being young, they're also more likely to see holes in the walls everyone else has come to overlook.
For instance, someone who grew up before the Internet (and not working in IT) isn't likely to see telcom equipment as existential, whereas someone who was born in 1990 would. What happens if telcom infrastructure were interrupted at the same time as another coordinated attack or two, creating a "perfect storm" due to societal expectations, stresses, and the like - prey on the society's reactions, moreso than the people themselves. Sort of like what happened after Columbine: people were much more responsive to so-called telltale signs of a repeat. Make the society destroy itself. (IMO this has been their goal all along. We're talking about (mostly) Arabs, here - they're not stereotyped as being crafty "just because").
The whole "why a terrorist makes an attack" bit? Nonsense, they're not going to see that until they actually look at the causes indepth, because it's quite complicated: Islamic culture in general, homeland despotism/sharia law, perverse gender roles, economic status, and many other things.
I'm sorry, but how much "empathy" can you realistically hold for an enemy which, by preference, targets non-military targets, instead seeming to prefer targets of ideological opportunity which result in the highest shock factor, almost invariably being targeted at civilians?
If I'm having a feeling of "empathy" with those people, would it not be likely that I'd be prone to develop a preference for that kind of attack myself? Would that not identify an ideological affinity?
There's a word for that. It's "traitor", or maybe "murderer" if you go through with it.
Then he's an idiot. Who do you think issues that money? God?
No, it's banks, namely the Fed. It's worth whatever they say it's worth and nothing more (until people find out what a ruse that is and there's a run on banks). It's called currency devaluation, and it happens due to the bank failure crap as well as economic collapse.
Short of hard assets or commodity goods people want, you're SOL in such a situation for long-term recovery.
Good hiding place: an unfinished basement in an older house. Galvanized ducts are common, and are usually not well installed in the older houses. Get a smaller assembly, seal it off with the cash, and mount it to another duct. Voila, "home improvement".
People used to hide things like this outdoors, though it was usually things of value (eg. gold, precious stones and/or metals, guns) and not paper money - though money was often part of the equation. In an urban environment, that's not quite so easy, but there are still ample "open" places which are publicly owned not far from most urban areas as well.
Common places include:
* A spot near a large, older tree, usually under a larger overhanging branch. A nail, hammered into the underside of the branch, would often denote the burial location. (This was, apparently, very common during/after the Civil War). * Under a barn stone threshold or abandoned building's foundation capstone. They were tearing down an old middle school around here about 15 years ago; the thing was made in the 1890s. There was a paper article about some guy who found a bag of gold coins underneath the cornerstone. * Under stonewall fence 'intersections' or field stone piles.
Hell, in a larger city, it shouldn't be too difficult to find $150k in gold. But that in, say, $9k increments. It is not uncommon for a person to buy that much gold in one go, and quite possible at a larger jewelry store or bank branch (at least a European bank branch).
Instead of losing your money at a rate of thousands a day, you've got a good (untraceable) hedge against inflation.
Of course, if he were smart, he'd not have gotten caught.
I hate programmers. They need to stop writing such bloated crap, hogging my cycles and eating my RAM. Sure, it's OK on one system, but when you've got to push that resource use out across 10, 20, 30, or more servers?
That gets expensive, especially with the recent memory cost hike (yikes!) It's infuriating when the only significant change is the library/framework getting upgraded, and then you've got to upgrade a couple dozen clients and/or servers as a result due to poor performance.
I'm only 28, but I'm finding that I'm able to do that "extreme multitasking" less and less as I get older. I've got to take more steps back and look at the big picture to not get lost in the web of projects and tasks, as it is.
I do, however, still have some fairly intense multitasking periods, and they're quite productive. I can't sustain it, but I'm much more productive than I ever used to be in similar sessions - largely due to experience.
Of course, what I call "multitasking" and what the common person calls "multitasking" are two distinctly different things. I'll have close to 12 applications/windows going at a time, though I tend to only focus on 2-3 tasks at a time, due to finding that this is what my brain maxes out at.
At this point in time, we have the computing power to analyze the data being sent over these frequencies for patterns and possible algorithmic permutations which may or may not be encrypted, code data.
The only way they could conceivably be spy signal towers is if the spies have "code books" and specific directions as to when they should listen, with specific (and likely somewhat binary) instructions. IE, they know they've got a dozen possible directives based on previous comms, and know what the communications are supposed to be symbolic for.
There are many different, cheaper methods of doing this, most of which are not over the open airwaves and easily intercepted. One leaked code book and the game is over.
Though, that may very well be why the signal ended and started up again not too long ago: the Russian spies who were caught lost their code books, so the signal had to be reset on a new code book.
If Russia fires nukes at us, Obama will just ignore it for 3 months, make a speech or two about being tough, and play a couple games of bad golf. And then he'll ignore it again.
Ohhhh. You meant the American people. Yeah, they're fucked.
Ace of Spades is a fairly reputable site. "Ace" is pretty good at deconstructions and, while there's lighter material, his criticisms seem to be pretty spot on.
How is this different than people like Ariana Huffington getting paid to show up at events and/or on TV shows?
Besides that, there are very few liberal bloggers "to write home about". The liberal 'blogosphere' isn't exactly ripe with literacy. Instead, they seem to form echo chambers of lower-level competency at places like Huffington Post, Daily KOS, or DU.
As for the people mentioned in TFA, I've never heard about any of them. These are not prominent bloggers, never mind prominent conservative political bloggers. The conservative bloggers out there are on pretty much everyone's shit list.
If this was modded funny, I'd let it go but um, ZFS in FreeBSD has been considered production ready by most for a while now, and officially so since 8.0 was released.
So, what - they decided to compromise stability elsewhere to improve ZFS stability? Because I've certainly seen a decrease in other subsystems, too.
I've had three ZFS/opensolaris kernel module related crashes in FreeBSD in the last month alone - on different hardware and releases. It crashes in scenarios where the "evil" NTFS would not only be OK, but in the even of an actual failure would be recoverable.
What the FreeBSD developers consider "production ready" and what everyone else considers "production ready" are different things. It's one thing to eat your own dog food, but actually listening to what others are experiencing is actually pretty useful.
Besides, isn't the latest buzz phrase "enterprise ready ZFS" for FreeBSD? Not even close: I can give a half dozen use cases where it falls flat (some of which have been commented on elsewhere, but it shouldn't take long to find more examples).
Here's a hint: "production ready" or "enterprise ready" filesystems do not need tuning for basic stability, only for performance above and beyond typical work loads. ext3 is "enterprise ready"; XFS is "enterprise ready"; NTFS is "enterprise ready". ZFS is not, at least on FreeBSD.
Ports are used by at least 4 BSD based releases that I know of, it works, of course, theres also packages too if you don't want to build the apps.
That's a line of complete shit. In building a system it is not uncommon to run into the following scenarios with fairly commonly used packages: * The package does not work with what everyone else uses (eg. apache 2) * The package has some other unmet dependency which is unavailable * Deviating from the default config results in broken dependencies * Available ports commonly have security issues several weeks+ old.
I'm sure I could come up with a couple others, if I cared.
Furthermore, the whole
You do realize there have been 4 releases since 7.1 right? 7.1 was released in Jan 09...
As I was reading this, I had one of our FreeBSD 7.2 machines kernel panic due to a ZFS/opensolaris kernel crash. No, the pool is not approaching full, and yes it is "properly" tuned. This is, unfortunately, hardly an isolated incident, as several ZFS and yes, other non-ZFS FreeBSD machines of ours have stability issues. Several have been converted over to Linux and have ceased having these problems.
+1, pretty much smack-on-the-nose with the "use old techniques".
Even without electric attic fans, there is a lot that can be done for cooling with things like the outdoor trees, good ventilation, and thermal mass. Throw in an attic fan, and heating and cooling an older house is usually not a problem. (I lived in one built in 1918 in NY; it was rarely hot in the summer due to the design.)
Many old farm houses are a perfect example of this: stone walls with faulted ceilings and a couple large windows in the kitchen.
Same thing for winter time: adding thermal mass goes a long way, and things like threshed hay on the roof is significant. Tour a historic US site sometime: the buildings may be smaller, but the walls are freakishly thick! That all adds up to a warm place in the winter and a cool place in the summer.
A modular might be better built than a conventionally built one due to controls, but it's going to be ultimately worse because:
* It's been built on a standardized basis. This basis is based on cutting costs, so there are corners cut for the sake of manufacturing cost efficiency. Undersized floor beams/trusses, or low R factor insulation, for instance. * Moving these modulars is expensive, much more expensive than moving the unassembled components of a house. They're much more economical if you live near the manufacturing facility. * Moving these modulars is difficult, and there are often a substantial number of repairs necessary before they can be considered "habitable".Joints get twisted, and the frame as a whole will get torqued and bounced about on the truck. Insulation comes loose, and square frames become slightly off. The same happens as they place the building. This all adds up, and more often than not you'll end up with a house which is neither square nor particularly sturdy, doors and windows which don't open and shut properly and a floor, walls, and roof which will creak under load.
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If FreeBSD 8.1 RELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT are any indication, FreeBSD 9 has a long, long way to go to be the 'home' for much of anything outside of the odd server here and there the base for other projects (pfSense/freeNAS). It certainly is not a 'general purpose' OS - if for no other reason than its woefully lacking (and often unstable) hardware support.
And by 'long way to go' I mean it needs to regress - in stability and commitment to making all the subsystems actually work out the door. The current state of FreeBSD as a project is, well... lacking. I wish it were otherwise, but no.
(They could jump out of 1994 while they're at it and upgrade to a packaging system/package distribution architecture/anything more modern than what they're got while they're at it too, but that's probably too much to ask for.)
I'm not holding my breath, but god damn...
If this ever happens, my wildest dreams will have come true. Forget the threesome with now-hideous-and-leathery-old-but-once-hot porn stars from my youth! Not having to deal with any more Solaris or FreeBSD for a 'modern filesystems' would be incredible.
Like I said, not holding my breath (or even breathing heavily!). If it happens it'll happen only at the fringes, and poorly.
Are you kidding? THat's a trivial amount to:
* maintain tens if not hundreds if not thousands of proprietary (legacy) applications
* maintain the many, many workstations
* maintain the fabric for many, many workstations
* maintain the servers which provide services, many of which are interconnected and do not cope with modern technologies well.
* maintain the storage for all of that
* SECURE all of the above
* make it as fault tolerant as possible
Shit, I suspect the Cisco contract is probably a good 3rd of that per year alone.
If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.
You seem to be unaware of this, so let me inform you: the vast majority of captured insurgents in Iraq, post-war, have not been Iraqis. The majority have been Iranian and Hezbollah, as well as many from Saudi Arabia and some from Egypt.
The captured ones who have been Iraqis have mostly been of the "they threatened to kill my family" variety. These are not the competent attackers.
So explain to me: why are many of these so-called 'insurgents' from Egypt and Saudi Arabia? US ties with both of these countries have been nothing but beneficial for the countries of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (What those nations do to their people, however, is another story.)
You seem to be casting this conflict outside the bounds of Islamic jihad. Understanding jihad is crucial to understanding the conflict, because they are the same.
"Giving up and leaving" is an option, but it ignores the fact that the war was brought to us (the West) first, and that the pace of the war in the West is increasing.
You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.
Assuming you're talking about the US, where in the world are you talking about? Iraq? Afghanistan?
You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II? Building roads, bridges, schools, water treatment and dispersal systems, etc. - those things are not what someone doing "scorched earth" does. If we were to perpetrate a "scorched earth" response, Kabul would not exist, and neither would Baghdad. There would be no tribal dissent, because word one of the possibility would result in a JDAM being dropped on their villages.
Somehow, there are plenty of Kurdish people over here, of mixed faiths, who do not view the US with hostility and animosity, yet if anyone does in the Arab world, it's them. Strange, how it's the Muslims who are the ones doing all this, sometimes when they've got no social association with the Arab/Muslim world except for their ideology and mosque indoctrination in their home lands of Western Europe.
Furthermore, the response towards Mad Mickey by the attacked party is largely determined by why attacked, as well as the level of organizational and ideological affinity he has with his state/whatever of origin. If Mickey is from Dublin, a part of the IRA, and has strong family/community ties back there, then yeah, war with Ireland to destroy that contingent might just be the appropriate course of action.
The number of men isn't what makes a successful plan work, it's the implementation.
Sure, more men are useful, but with proper planning, you could see tenfold the results from 5 men as you'd get from, say, shooting up a mall.
There's a reason why terrorist organizations have been trying to recruit indigenous people from colleges, and it isn't just to find pasties. It's because intelligent people within a society tend to understand said society better than non-natives, and being young, they're also more likely to see holes in the walls everyone else has come to overlook.
For instance, someone who grew up before the Internet (and not working in IT) isn't likely to see telcom equipment as existential, whereas someone who was born in 1990 would. What happens if telcom infrastructure were interrupted at the same time as another coordinated attack or two, creating a "perfect storm" due to societal expectations, stresses, and the like - prey on the society's reactions, moreso than the people themselves. Sort of like what happened after Columbine: people were much more responsive to so-called telltale signs of a repeat. Make the society destroy itself. (IMO this has been their goal all along. We're talking about (mostly) Arabs, here - they're not stereotyped as being crafty "just because").
The whole "why a terrorist makes an attack" bit? Nonsense, they're not going to see that until they actually look at the causes indepth, because it's quite complicated: Islamic culture in general, homeland despotism/sharia law, perverse gender roles, economic status, and many other things.
I'm sorry, but how much "empathy" can you realistically hold for an enemy which, by preference, targets non-military targets, instead seeming to prefer targets of ideological opportunity which result in the highest shock factor, almost invariably being targeted at civilians?
If I'm having a feeling of "empathy" with those people, would it not be likely that I'd be prone to develop a preference for that kind of attack myself? Would that not identify an ideological affinity?
There's a word for that. It's "traitor", or maybe "murderer" if you go through with it.
For internal software, what you say makes sense.
However, it does not make sense when you're buying vendored shit - granted, fringe market vendor shit.
Then he's an idiot. Who do you think issues that money? God?
No, it's banks, namely the Fed. It's worth whatever they say it's worth and nothing more (until people find out what a ruse that is and there's a run on banks). It's called currency devaluation, and it happens due to the bank failure crap as well as economic collapse.
Short of hard assets or commodity goods people want, you're SOL in such a situation for long-term recovery.
Good hiding place: an unfinished basement in an older house. Galvanized ducts are common, and are usually not well installed in the older houses. Get a smaller assembly, seal it off with the cash, and mount it to another duct. Voila, "home improvement".
People used to hide things like this outdoors, though it was usually things of value (eg. gold, precious stones and/or metals, guns) and not paper money - though money was often part of the equation. In an urban environment, that's not quite so easy, but there are still ample "open" places which are publicly owned not far from most urban areas as well.
Common places include:
* A spot near a large, older tree, usually under a larger overhanging branch. A nail, hammered into the underside of the branch, would often denote the burial location. (This was, apparently, very common during/after the Civil War).
* Under a barn stone threshold or abandoned building's foundation capstone. They were tearing down an old middle school around here about 15 years ago; the thing was made in the 1890s. There was a paper article about some guy who found a bag of gold coins underneath the cornerstone.
* Under stonewall fence 'intersections' or field stone piles.
Hell, in a larger city, it shouldn't be too difficult to find $150k in gold. But that in, say, $9k increments. It is not uncommon for a person to buy that much gold in one go, and quite possible at a larger jewelry store or bank branch (at least a European bank branch).
Instead of losing your money at a rate of thousands a day, you've got a good (untraceable) hedge against inflation.
Of course, if he were smart, he'd not have gotten caught.
As a sysadmin, I agree.
I hate programmers. They need to stop writing such bloated crap, hogging my cycles and eating my RAM. Sure, it's OK on one system, but when you've got to push that resource use out across 10, 20, 30, or more servers?
That gets expensive, especially with the recent memory cost hike (yikes!) It's infuriating when the only significant change is the library/framework getting upgraded, and then you've got to upgrade a couple dozen clients and/or servers as a result due to poor performance.
What happens when you give a million monkeys keyboards, then?
Programming.
Yes; yes it is.
We deal -constantly - with developers who have been granted to one+ of our production sites for political reasons. It's infuriating.
Thankfully we do binary snapshots every night, so it's trivial to restore a developer's fuck up. It just happens so often....
I'm only 28, but I'm finding that I'm able to do that "extreme multitasking" less and less as I get older. I've got to take more steps back and look at the big picture to not get lost in the web of projects and tasks, as it is.
I do, however, still have some fairly intense multitasking periods, and they're quite productive. I can't sustain it, but I'm much more productive than I ever used to be in similar sessions - largely due to experience.
Of course, what I call "multitasking" and what the common person calls "multitasking" are two distinctly different things. I'll have close to 12 applications/windows going at a time, though I tend to only focus on 2-3 tasks at a time, due to finding that this is what my brain maxes out at.
I think it's largely disinformation, honestly.
At this point in time, we have the computing power to analyze the data being sent over these frequencies for patterns and possible algorithmic permutations which may or may not be encrypted, code data.
The only way they could conceivably be spy signal towers is if the spies have "code books" and specific directions as to when they should listen, with specific (and likely somewhat binary) instructions. IE, they know they've got a dozen possible directives based on previous comms, and know what the communications are supposed to be symbolic for.
There are many different, cheaper methods of doing this, most of which are not over the open airwaves and easily intercepted. One leaked code book and the game is over.
Though, that may very well be why the signal ended and started up again not too long ago: the Russian spies who were caught lost their code books, so the signal had to be reset on a new code book.
Nonsense. It's of little concern to America.
If Russia fires nukes at us, Obama will just ignore it for 3 months, make a speech or two about being tough, and play a couple games of bad golf. And then he'll ignore it again.
Ohhhh. You meant the American people. Yeah, they're fucked.
Ace of Spades is a fairly reputable site. "Ace" is pretty good at deconstructions and, while there's lighter material, his criticisms seem to be pretty spot on.
How is this different than people like Ariana Huffington getting paid to show up at events and/or on TV shows?
Besides that, there are very few liberal bloggers "to write home about". The liberal 'blogosphere' isn't exactly ripe with literacy. Instead, they seem to form echo chambers of lower-level competency at places like Huffington Post, Daily KOS, or DU.
As for the people mentioned in TFA, I've never heard about any of them. These are not prominent bloggers, never mind prominent conservative political bloggers. The conservative bloggers out there are on pretty much everyone's shit list.
Oh, good God, where to start....
If this was modded funny, I'd let it go but um, ZFS in FreeBSD has been considered production ready by most for a while now, and officially so since 8.0 was released.
So, what - they decided to compromise stability elsewhere to improve ZFS stability? Because I've certainly seen a decrease in other subsystems, too.
I've had three ZFS/opensolaris kernel module related crashes in FreeBSD in the last month alone - on different hardware and releases. It crashes in scenarios where the "evil" NTFS would not only be OK, but in the even of an actual failure would be recoverable.
What the FreeBSD developers consider "production ready" and what everyone else considers "production ready" are different things. It's one thing to eat your own dog food, but actually listening to what others are experiencing is actually pretty useful.
Besides, isn't the latest buzz phrase "enterprise ready ZFS" for FreeBSD? Not even close: I can give a half dozen use cases where it falls flat (some of which have been commented on elsewhere, but it shouldn't take long to find more examples).
Here's a hint: "production ready" or "enterprise ready" filesystems do not need tuning for basic stability, only for performance above and beyond typical work loads. ext3 is "enterprise ready"; XFS is "enterprise ready"; NTFS is "enterprise ready". ZFS is not, at least on FreeBSD.
Ports are used by at least 4 BSD based releases that I know of, it works, of course, theres also packages too if you don't want to build the apps.
That's a line of complete shit. In building a system it is not uncommon to run into the following scenarios with fairly commonly used packages:
* The package does not work with what everyone else uses (eg. apache 2)
* The package has some other unmet dependency which is unavailable
* Deviating from the default config results in broken dependencies
* Available ports commonly have security issues several weeks+ old.
I'm sure I could come up with a couple others, if I cared.
Furthermore, the whole
You do realize there have been 4 releases since 7.1 right? 7.1 was released in Jan 09 ...
As I was reading this, I had one of our FreeBSD 7.2 machines kernel panic due to a ZFS/opensolaris kernel crash. No, the pool is not approaching full, and yes it is "properly" tuned. This is, unfortunately, hardly an isolated incident, as several ZFS and yes, other non-ZFS FreeBSD machines of ours have stability issues. Several have been converted over to Linux and have ceased having these problems.
And by moved on, do you mean they're working on OpenSOlaris for someone else now, but under a different name? Because that is happening.
Yes. And that was, indeed, an intentional sarcastic back reference on my part.
+1, pretty much smack-on-the-nose with the "use old techniques".
Even without electric attic fans, there is a lot that can be done for cooling with things like the outdoor trees, good ventilation, and thermal mass. Throw in an attic fan, and heating and cooling an older house is usually not a problem. (I lived in one built in 1918 in NY; it was rarely hot in the summer due to the design.)
Many old farm houses are a perfect example of this: stone walls with faulted ceilings and a couple large windows in the kitchen.
Same thing for winter time: adding thermal mass goes a long way, and things like threshed hay on the roof is significant. Tour a historic US site sometime: the buildings may be smaller, but the walls are freakishly thick! That all adds up to a warm place in the winter and a cool place in the summer.
A modular might be better built than a conventionally built one due to controls, but it's going to be ultimately worse because:
* It's been built on a standardized basis. This basis is based on cutting costs, so there are corners cut for the sake of manufacturing cost efficiency. Undersized floor beams/trusses, or low R factor insulation, for instance.
* Moving these modulars is expensive, much more expensive than moving the unassembled components of a house. They're much more economical if you live near the manufacturing facility.
* Moving these modulars is difficult, and there are often a substantial number of repairs necessary before they can be considered "habitable".Joints get twisted, and the frame as a whole will get torqued and bounced about on the truck. Insulation comes loose, and square frames become slightly off. The same happens as they place the building. This all adds up, and more often than not you'll end up with a house which is neither square nor particularly sturdy, doors and windows which don't open and shut properly and a floor, walls, and roof which will creak under load.