For pretty much everything I need to search for, Google's results have gotten progressively worse over the past couple years. I saw a huge degradation in the quality of results when they switched to their 'new engine' a couple months back: absolute terms/quoted strings (such as what I might find in a system log) have useless results requiring deep wading and a good deal of luck to find, for instance. (Either my search terms are a lot more vague and uncommon than they were 2 years ago - doubtful - or the search mechanisms suck more.)
Honestly, it appears that Google has stopped giving a damn about the actual search engine functionality. They're more interested in the ad placement "quality" and actually getting the highest paid results at the top. As a result, searching for something like an error, review, or performance metrics on hardware might result in the first couple pages being product placement. Not cool!
Saying Bing is better than Google now is more a commentary on Google's regression than it is any inherent capability that Bing might have. The Google of 3+ years ago was much better; Bing brings nothing to the table.
Honestly, I'm thinking of switching from Google outright to something that actually acknowledges my quotes (and finds the results, like Google used to) and various "search markup" syntax. I just haven't had the time/inclination to look for one that does the job, yet.
For 80%+ of all searches, I'm sure either Bing or Google are sufficient and similar. It's that 20% (or less) of technical, specific, or culturally/financially unprofitable topics which are difficult to find results on.
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)":
The best implementation of this I can think of is Deus Ex, though the plot is somewhat hourglass shaped (lots of options, reduced to a few, which instantly present you with a couple endgame scenarios). You can reach the same decision point almost regardless of what you do throughout the game; however, the story is certainly different with a subsequent playthrough on a different path, and the endgame scenarios are all still available when you reach that point (IIRC - some may be eliminated for you if you pick the evil path). IMO, it's much like real life in many regards, but still 'open ended' enough that it's entertaining.
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome. The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
A game I very much like for multiplayer does this (Borderlands): you can jump from great heights and survive, with only minor damage to your shields - normally. However, if there is a 'gap' (say, from a higher level to a lower level, such as a cliff) in a map, which you can visually determine is jumpable (in some scenarios), it is quite possible you will make your head explode by inadvertently leaving the
This is somewhat frustrating, because it costs roughly 10% (I think) of your accumulated cash to re-spawn. The last couple times it was over 100k units (accumulated at 100-200 at a time, mostly).
Traditionally, I've avoided things like this by being compulsively thorough (every box opened, every corner explored methodically, compulsively checking the map, etc.). This game, however, I've taken a more laid back appraoch and have played it primarily while drunk, so that hasn't been such the case.
Is Microsoft actually arguing for a real, actual standard in the face of two 'open source' centric companies, which are pushing their "own thing"? This is hard to fathom, particularly since there is fairly wide adoption of H.264 already - transitioning to 'standard' HTML5 H264 for many sites won't be as difficult, because the media encoding is already being done as such already for (say) flash.
If I had a hundred thousand acres of land where I kept my 10 cattle, I'd prefer to have just one gate into the property instead of one every mile or so. It'd be harder for people to steal my cows that way, and I could more easily maintain the gate.
Doctors insist on funny things, like not having to sit in a lab to read charts, and being able to sit at home in their easy chair and work after 8 hours on the floor instead of staying through dinner at the hospital.
Then there are remote facilities which need to have access to that radiology data - say, a parent hospital. So it's got to be shipped to them somehow.
How many people would be killed (or have been killed) by having rural clinics and hospitals shut down due to facility census not being high enough to justify the cost of implementing the regulations?
Think: farm accidents, remote vehicle accidents, heart attacks, strokes, etc. - you know, all those emergencies which need prompt care, but which can not be performed when "nearest town with healthcare" is an hour away.
(I can't believe I made that argument, because I really hate the healthcare systems as they exist today. Fact remains that basic services are getting shutdown simply because the facility can't justify the expensive ones, any longer.)
Scenario: regulation goes through. Hospital must instigate changes, but does not meet the size requirements to receive federal funding to meet said requirements.
Result: hospital has to stop offering said service due to the added costs of the infrastructure. Due to regulation and head count, they're unable to break even (due to bureaucrats in DC not imagining some place in rural Kentucky has the census in a year what a large hospital has in a day in Washington).
End result: critical stuff has to be flown hours away to be taken care of and there are higher casualties from things which should be trivial to fix, with modern technologies and techniques (if attended to quickly).
So healthcare quality goes down regardless, to top it off.
You have no idea how many different medical "compliance" things there are. It's bullshit, honestly, because it's constantly changing.
HIPPA is just one of many things hospitals (and all healthcare, really) have to deal with. A huge part of regulation in healthcare revolves around billing systems, patient care, practice management, and the like.
As soon as an organization gets one 'gee wiz' multimillion dollar IT project completed to comply with these regulations - so they can, in fact, bill Medicaid or Medicare, or actually get paid by insurance companies - there's another regulation almost due to be implemented. Many places (smaller hospitals) are playing catch-up and miss many months of promised compensation from the government (because they're still required to accept the government's IOU, even if they can't cash it).
And then, sometimes, there's not a thing a small hospital can do about it. Being small, they find out late (not paying attention, not enough people to have their ears to the ground, etc.) about an impending deadline. (It happens.) They can't get gov't money to implement these projects unless they apply by a certain time, or it's out, or due to the size of the facility they're not going to get enough to actually purchase anything that will meet the requirements (and income won't make up the slack).
To top it off, most of this software is utter shit. Seriously: it makes the VBA-only developers of the late 90s look downright skillful.
The small hospital in the town I grew up in went under from all this. The hospital building itself was made of massive stonework and ancient - having served as a hospital for almost 200 years and a military stockade prior to that. The hospital itself, however, was just too small: they couldn't pull in enough of the right people to stay ahead of governmental paperwork, and didn't have the staff to find out what was up.
MS, being the dinosaur that it is, doesn't yet realise its day is over.
Yeah, right. And in 2012, we're going to have a political revival in the US, with uh, a flying monkey elected to the White House who speaks Greek, Russian, and three dialects of Mandrin.
So, simple question: what is the desktop alternative to Windows?
Wrong - whatever your answer was. There is no alternative, simply because there is nothing which can be simply migrated to. Windows is the single clear migration path from Windows.
How about alternatives for:
* Sharepoint (which has been getting deployed new since - at least? - 2003) * Network AD infrastructure. Don't tell me or : can they be extended at the schema level by Exchange and a million other products out there which do so, and "just work"? * Legacy desktop applications. WINE might do one or two decently, but then they're out in the cold if they need some sort of special interconnect/compatibility: few people use "just Word" or "just MS Office" - they use it with something else.
There will be years and years of support behind these products. People are still moving to them. Microsoft is still a very profitable company with their current product portfolio, and there are nontrivial improvements over their previous generation in the works as we speak.
The USB issue (7.3, 8.0, 8.1, probably CURRENT, etc.) can be reproduced on the following hardware with a variety of USB flash and rotational media:
* Supermicro boards (Intel controllers) * Old hardware with Intel boards (eg. Celeron P4s) * AMD Athlon 64 boards with Nvidia controllers * AMD Phenom II boards with ATI controllers * Possibly a couple others
The Intel Ethernet issue is present in FreeBSD, not the hardware - as evidenced by other hardware not having the issue, and other systems playing fine with the same hardware (for very extended periods of time), including earlier FreeBSD releases.
I remember doing just that - beating the pants off friends and their Intel 233Mhz machines with my same-clocked K6-2 - even with a worse graphics card, I got higher FPS in games like Quake. Windows operation was visibly better and more responsive, as well. AMD had the edge in this department all the way up to the current, Nehalem based Intel systems, IMO. Unless I'm doing server wrok, I'll take an AMD Athlon64 CPU over a 5200 Xeon or similar.
Now, if only Dell and HP,etc. would start making AMD based systems which were not 'entry grade'. You know, the shitty cheap systems with few upgrade options, no redundant PSUs, etc.
I'd suspect the AMD/ATI chipsets of not being as good, but I'm not really sure what the root cause is.
Yet that means nothing. Enterprises use some really ass-backwards shit. When you've got the staff to maintain your own branches independently, track down obscure bugs, and avoid/circumvent/fix the worst of them, that's one thing.
If "enterprise grade storage" had half the problems that FreeBSD has, we'd all be attacking each other with pointy sticks right now due to data loss catapulting us back to the dark ages.
Don't worry: there are other, similarly destructive bugs out there. My current favorite is the Intel Ethernet driver bug which causes the machine to hang, sometimes unable to POST directly after a reboot. Second on the list is the new USB stack, which has some severe issues making USB storage all but unusable as a boot medium (since 8.0 and 7.3), and imposes other mass storage unreliabilities. And of course, there's ports itself...
This is why FreeBSD is not 'enterprise'
on
FreeBSD Running On PS3
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
This is a prime example of why FreeBSD is not 'enterprise ready' - their approach is 100% hobbyist project. Anyone trusting a hardware driver implementation or subsystem on FreeBSD is out of their mind: "it works for me" is about as far as testing ever seems to go. Regression, load, etc. testing? Pfft.
A PS3, running a kernel and sitting idle, is not 'running the OS stable'. Sorry.
There's a slightly blurry line about some things in contrib vs ports; occasionally, things are moved to ports or moved from ports to contrib, and the code for contrib usually isn't edited that much, to facilitate updates. It could be argued that that code should go in ports and there should be "mandatory ports" rather than contrib.
And sometimes they're both. And neither! See: kerberos support. Try to find the supported version!
(IE, FreeBSD has an ancient version of heimdal; ports is similarly outdated and problematic, but conflicts with the freebsd version. Yet, it's entirely possible to have them both installed alongside each other. Short of digging into see how the running binaries are linked, you're not going to be sure what code versions you're running.)
I'm glad the FreeBSD people themselves don't argue "FreeBSD's unified releases are more secure" - but it would appear that the vast majority of users, do.
This is wholly - as in, absolutely, completely - unimpressive. If I could be de-impressed, I would be.
It's been over 20 years since the 'original' record was set, and it's only now being broken? What the fuck have we been spending gobs of "government" money on green energy for, if this record is only now being broken?
And it's not even "the" record. It's the "electric" vehicle record! How is that even significant, when electric vehicles are trying to compete against traditional ICE vehicles? It's like being the tallest kid on the short bus.
Saying Mrs. Palin is indirectly responsible for this is like saying that news organizations are culpable for murders because they put gun logos in their 'crime/murder/etc.' related articles.
No, this runs much, much deeper than that.
Hell, castigating Palin sounds roughly as reasonable as saying that it was a Democrat ploy to put heat on Palin, to eliminate her from running for President in 2012. And that makes perfect sense.
The media often casts shooters (or criminals in general) who are "hispanic" (from South/Central America) as "white" if there is the potential for a race-war inciting event.
Hell, they do it in general as a token gesture for political correctness. They have for decades. Many, many times I've seen "white male" does this or that, only to find out later that it was a Latino associated with a gang, or someone of mixed white/black ancestry.
Though, honestly, this has nothing to do with race, though. It's 110% culture - just as a "white American" today would be castigated and denigrated as a dirty dago or wop, or an Irish-American as a mick or paddy, today we're looking 180 degrees the other way, culturally. We're so afraid to "go there" that we're being racist be occlusion.
It doesn't really matter, politically, whether she is dead or not. Her vote will, symbolically, go to the party's goals one way or another. (See: Tom Daschle's/Tim Johnson's SD seat for historical precedence.)
My prayers do go out to her family and friends, though. This sucks.
Technically speaking, their role in killing people is exactly the reason for the 2nd Amendment. The amendment's purpose isn't to ensure the ability to hunt, it's to ensure the ability to engage in acts of war.
Hopefully not! It's to prevent (or delay) such an eventuality through the deterrence of force. "Do as I say, or else!"
Ultimately, the 2nd Amendment is there to preserve "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are other, normally more immediate dangers to these goals, not inclusively:
* predatory animals eating your livestock * pestilent animals eating your crops * predatory humans threatening immediate harm
What do you propose these people do about vermin and the other animals threatening their livelihood? They can:
1) Continue to do as they have done for the better part of a century, and shoot and trap the offending animals (deer eating their crops, rodents digging up their fields, etc.) 2) Do as the government does when these animals get out of hand, and poison the ground on which they live. The animals will die the painful death of dehydration, over-hydration, or slow nervous system shutdown. Scavengers (or prey animals, before the victims die of the poisons) eat these diseased animals, suffering similar fates. These poisons are also introduced to the soil which ultimately make their way into the ground waters, ultimately...
Personally, I'd like to be shot - that is, assuming the alternative is to be bludgeoned, stabbed, skewered, sliced, or otherwise mutilated. I'm much less likely to end up severely mutilated from the event, and my chances of survival are somewhat better as well - assuming I'm not dead right there from a cranial perforation (or similar).
I'd only assume someone attacking me would appreciate a similar consideration. Don't ban guns - it's cruel to home invaders and other violent criminals. It puts them at a severe workplace disadvantage.
If I recall correctly, the following are also true:
* Most gun-owning Americans have multiple guns. I know people with 20 or more. Surely, this would somewhat skewer your 'ratio of death' ? (Does this mean that Americans with multiple guns are more violent? It would be a necessary requisite for your comparison to mean fuckall.) * Every citizen is (or was, until this past July) conscripted in Sweden; every military serviceman has a full-automatic weapon in their home for said service. (Surely, the evil black rifle would jump out and, due to its fully automatic nature, just start shooting people?)
Semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons generally have only one intended use, and that is to kill people (usually at short or medium range). Sprayfire weapons (MAC-10, Uzi and the like) are no good for ANYTHING except trying to injure or kill a crowd.
You watch too many movies. Seriously - go outside, go to a firing range, SOMETHING. Just no more Ronin or NBK. Let's just get this out of the way: guns are, indeed, very useful for killing other people. (This is all the more true if they "spray" bullets, as you so technically described later in your post.)
That's what the "spray" in spray-fire stands for. The spray is powered by the recoil of 1000 rounds per minute powering out of the barrel of a snub-nosed weapon with little in the way of stabilization.
This reads like the technical jargon on, oh, Star Trek: TOS or when they start talking about guns on CSI. (IE: it's complete bullshit.) Seriously - you should consider a screenwriting career. They like this kind of inaccurate, jib bullshit.
Semi-automatic handguns are similarly useless for any legitimate use. Well, handguns in general are useless.
Which is precisely why police departments issue them to their officers for the safety and protection of their officers! Right? Or is this one of those trick questions?
You do realize that this shooting could've been accomplished with three 100-year-old Colt revolvers, right? Not exactly difficult to hit that many people in a crowded area, I imagine - somewhat like shooting a wall. (He didn't even - apparently - hit his intended target!)
Hunting weapons don't need to be semi-automatic or fully automatic for any hunting (I think Cthulhu hunting doesn't count, as that is in imaginaryland)
I suppose you live in imaginaryland, then, because fully automatic weapons have never been legal (in the US) for hunting, as far as I know. They haven't been legal to manufacture for 40-odd years, at this point, and were never all that common.
Semi-automatic weapons, on the other hand, are quite useful for hunting. I take it you've no concept of how birds (say, pheasants) tend to "group together", and it is not uncommon to see a single flush of 4-6 birds in a day. The semi-automatic weapons we have today are simply a linear engineering progression over the double-barreled guns used to acquire multiple birds over 130 years ago in a similar fashion (this is, of course, assuming that a person hits their target with every pull of the trigger.) The same applies to hunting pretty much any other animal: they're social creatures. They go in packs, herds, and so on: having multiple quick shots available is useful for the harvesting of multiple game animals. (At the very least, dispatching the same animal quickly, when the first shot was not as clean as you'd have liked, is useful for the humane treatment of the creature.)
So, does that fill in the lines enough?
I get it. You want to ban guns outright, or at least limit them to single-shot shotguns for birds, or something like that. I have an alternative proposition for you: if we cut off the hands of every living person at the age of 12, we will drastically cut down on the number of stabbings, shootings, and vehicular homicides. Just think of the savings in life!
Nobody said it had to be scientifically proven for its veracity to hold. We have observed, as a society, that increased legal (lawful, as to not mean "highly regulated and licensed") firearm ownership has resulted in decreased violent crime rates, despite historic precedence which suggests that, in similar economic situations, what our society would be rife with violence. (1920s prohibition; 1970s). Surely, you aren't implying this to be false, are you? What is different now, other than legal firearm ownership and (almost) universally allowed concealed carry, has changed to allow for such a socially observed fact?
The inverse has been anything but proven. We have no instance of decreasing firearm ownership (or eliminating it outright) resulting in less violence. (In fact, we have the inverse - Britain saw a huge increase in violence as firearms were banned, for instance. There are many similar instances, most more disastrous. Thirty minutes googling the history of gun control should tell you this - if not conclusively, then at least substantiatively enough that you will pause and reconsider.)
In a world where circumstantial societal mores and means are a bit part of determination, such a thing as "is this good for a society?" must be disproven, not its negative proven in affirmation, before banning something through regulation makes any sort of sense. Too much ill has become humanity through such wanton application of diktat.
Slashdot Mirror
For pretty much everything I need to search for, Google's results have gotten progressively worse over the past couple years. I saw a huge degradation in the quality of results when they switched to their 'new engine' a couple months back: absolute terms/quoted strings (such as what I might find in a system log) have useless results requiring deep wading and a good deal of luck to find, for instance. (Either my search terms are a lot more vague and uncommon than they were 2 years ago - doubtful - or the search mechanisms suck more.)
Honestly, it appears that Google has stopped giving a damn about the actual search engine functionality. They're more interested in the ad placement "quality" and actually getting the highest paid results at the top. As a result, searching for something like an error, review, or performance metrics on hardware might result in the first couple pages being product placement. Not cool!
Saying Bing is better than Google now is more a commentary on Google's regression than it is any inherent capability that Bing might have. The Google of 3+ years ago was much better; Bing brings nothing to the table.
Honestly, I'm thinking of switching from Google outright to something that actually acknowledges my quotes (and finds the results, like Google used to) and various "search markup" syntax. I just haven't had the time/inclination to look for one that does the job, yet.
For 80%+ of all searches, I'm sure either Bing or Google are sufficient and similar. It's that 20% (or less) of technical, specific, or culturally/financially unprofitable topics which are difficult to find results on.
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)":
The best implementation of this I can think of is Deus Ex, though the plot is somewhat hourglass shaped (lots of options, reduced to a few, which instantly present you with a couple endgame scenarios). You can reach the same decision point almost regardless of what you do throughout the game; however, the story is certainly different with a subsequent playthrough on a different path, and the endgame scenarios are all still available when you reach that point (IIRC - some may be eliminated for you if you pick the evil path). IMO, it's much like real life in many regards, but still 'open ended' enough that it's entertaining.
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome. The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
A game I very much like for multiplayer does this (Borderlands): you can jump from great heights and survive, with only minor damage to your shields - normally. However, if there is a 'gap' (say, from a higher level to a lower level, such as a cliff) in a map, which you can visually determine is jumpable (in some scenarios), it is quite possible you will make your head explode by inadvertently leaving the
This is somewhat frustrating, because it costs roughly 10% (I think) of your accumulated cash to re-spawn. The last couple times it was over 100k units (accumulated at 100-200 at a time, mostly).
Traditionally, I've avoided things like this by being compulsively thorough (every box opened, every corner explored methodically, compulsively checking the map, etc.). This game, however, I've taken a more laid back appraoch and have played it primarily while drunk, so that hasn't been such the case.
Wow, I can't believe it.
Is Microsoft actually arguing for a real, actual standard in the face of two 'open source' centric companies, which are pushing their "own thing"? This is hard to fathom, particularly since there is fairly wide adoption of H.264 already - transitioning to 'standard' HTML5 H264 for many sites won't be as difficult, because the media encoding is already being done as such already for (say) flash.
What am I missing?
If I had a hundred thousand acres of land where I kept my 10 cattle, I'd prefer to have just one gate into the property instead of one every mile or so. It'd be harder for people to steal my cows that way, and I could more easily maintain the gate.
Doctors insist on funny things, like not having to sit in a lab to read charts, and being able to sit at home in their easy chair and work after 8 hours on the floor instead of staying through dinner at the hospital.
Then there are remote facilities which need to have access to that radiology data - say, a parent hospital. So it's got to be shipped to them somehow.
How many people would be killed (or have been killed) by having rural clinics and hospitals shut down due to facility census not being high enough to justify the cost of implementing the regulations?
Think: farm accidents, remote vehicle accidents, heart attacks, strokes, etc. - you know, all those emergencies which need prompt care, but which can not be performed when "nearest town with healthcare" is an hour away.
(I can't believe I made that argument, because I really hate the healthcare systems as they exist today. Fact remains that basic services are getting shutdown simply because the facility can't justify the expensive ones, any longer.)
I've seen it happen.
Scenario: regulation goes through. Hospital must instigate changes, but does not meet the size requirements to receive federal funding to meet said requirements.
Result: hospital has to stop offering said service due to the added costs of the infrastructure. Due to regulation and head count, they're unable to break even (due to bureaucrats in DC not imagining some place in rural Kentucky has the census in a year what a large hospital has in a day in Washington).
End result: critical stuff has to be flown hours away to be taken care of and there are higher casualties from things which should be trivial to fix, with modern technologies and techniques (if attended to quickly).
So healthcare quality goes down regardless, to top it off.
You have no idea how many different medical "compliance" things there are. It's bullshit, honestly, because it's constantly changing.
HIPPA is just one of many things hospitals (and all healthcare, really) have to deal with. A huge part of regulation in healthcare revolves around billing systems, patient care, practice management, and the like.
As soon as an organization gets one 'gee wiz' multimillion dollar IT project completed to comply with these regulations - so they can, in fact, bill Medicaid or Medicare, or actually get paid by insurance companies - there's another regulation almost due to be implemented. Many places (smaller hospitals) are playing catch-up and miss many months of promised compensation from the government (because they're still required to accept the government's IOU, even if they can't cash it).
And then, sometimes, there's not a thing a small hospital can do about it. Being small, they find out late (not paying attention, not enough people to have their ears to the ground, etc.) about an impending deadline. (It happens.) They can't get gov't money to implement these projects unless they apply by a certain time, or it's out, or due to the size of the facility they're not going to get enough to actually purchase anything that will meet the requirements (and income won't make up the slack).
To top it off, most of this software is utter shit. Seriously: it makes the VBA-only developers of the late 90s look downright skillful.
The small hospital in the town I grew up in went under from all this. The hospital building itself was made of massive stonework and ancient - having served as a hospital for almost 200 years and a military stockade prior to that. The hospital itself, however, was just too small: they couldn't pull in enough of the right people to stay ahead of governmental paperwork, and didn't have the staff to find out what was up.
MS, being the dinosaur that it is, doesn't yet realise its day is over.
Yeah, right. And in 2012, we're going to have a political revival in the US, with uh, a flying monkey elected to the White House who speaks Greek, Russian, and three dialects of Mandrin.
So, simple question: what is the desktop alternative to Windows?
Wrong - whatever your answer was. There is no alternative, simply because there is nothing which can be simply migrated to. Windows is the single clear migration path from Windows.
How about alternatives for:
* Sharepoint (which has been getting deployed new since - at least? - 2003)
* Network AD infrastructure. Don't tell me or : can they be extended at the schema level by Exchange and a million other products out there which do so, and "just work"?
* Legacy desktop applications. WINE might do one or two decently, but then they're out in the cold if they need some sort of special interconnect/compatibility: few people use "just Word" or "just MS Office" - they use it with something else.
There will be years and years of support behind these products. People are still moving to them. Microsoft is still a very profitable company with their current product portfolio, and there are nontrivial improvements over their previous generation in the works as we speak.
The USB issue (7.3, 8.0, 8.1, probably CURRENT, etc.) can be reproduced on the following hardware with a variety of USB flash and rotational media:
* Supermicro boards (Intel controllers)
* Old hardware with Intel boards (eg. Celeron P4s)
* AMD Athlon 64 boards with Nvidia controllers
* AMD Phenom II boards with ATI controllers
* Possibly a couple others
The Intel Ethernet issue is present in FreeBSD, not the hardware - as evidenced by other hardware not having the issue, and other systems playing fine with the same hardware (for very extended periods of time), including earlier FreeBSD releases.
Yes, the K6/2 was an incredible system.
I remember doing just that - beating the pants off friends and their Intel 233Mhz machines with my same-clocked K6-2 - even with a worse graphics card, I got higher FPS in games like Quake. Windows operation was visibly better and more responsive, as well. AMD had the edge in this department all the way up to the current, Nehalem based Intel systems, IMO. Unless I'm doing server wrok, I'll take an AMD Athlon64 CPU over a 5200 Xeon or similar.
I agree with you.
Now, if only Dell and HP,etc. would start making AMD based systems which were not 'entry grade'. You know, the shitty cheap systems with few upgrade options, no redundant PSUs, etc.
I'd suspect the AMD/ATI chipsets of not being as good, but I'm not really sure what the root cause is.
Yet that means nothing. Enterprises use some really ass-backwards shit. When you've got the staff to maintain your own branches independently, track down obscure bugs, and avoid/circumvent/fix the worst of them, that's one thing.
If "enterprise grade storage" had half the problems that FreeBSD has, we'd all be attacking each other with pointy sticks right now due to data loss catapulting us back to the dark ages.
Don't worry: there are other, similarly destructive bugs out there. My current favorite is the Intel Ethernet driver bug which causes the machine to hang, sometimes unable to POST directly after a reboot. Second on the list is the new USB stack, which has some severe issues making USB storage all but unusable as a boot medium (since 8.0 and 7.3), and imposes other mass storage unreliabilities. And of course, there's ports itself...
This is a prime example of why FreeBSD is not 'enterprise ready' - their approach is 100% hobbyist project. Anyone trusting a hardware driver implementation or subsystem on FreeBSD is out of their mind: "it works for me" is about as far as testing ever seems to go. Regression, load, etc. testing? Pfft.
A PS3, running a kernel and sitting idle, is not 'running the OS stable'. Sorry.
There's a slightly blurry line about some things in contrib vs ports; occasionally, things are moved to ports or moved from ports to contrib, and the code for contrib usually isn't edited that much, to facilitate updates. It could be argued that that code should go in ports and there should be "mandatory ports" rather than contrib.
And sometimes they're both. And neither! See: kerberos support. Try to find the supported version!
(IE, FreeBSD has an ancient version of heimdal; ports is similarly outdated and problematic, but conflicts with the freebsd version. Yet, it's entirely possible to have them both installed alongside each other. Short of digging into see how the running binaries are linked, you're not going to be sure what code versions you're running.)
I'm glad the FreeBSD people themselves don't argue "FreeBSD's unified releases are more secure" - but it would appear that the vast majority of users, do.
This is wholly - as in, absolutely, completely - unimpressive. If I could be de-impressed, I would be.
It's been over 20 years since the 'original' record was set, and it's only now being broken? What the fuck have we been spending gobs of "government" money on green energy for, if this record is only now being broken?
And it's not even "the" record. It's the "electric" vehicle record! How is that even significant, when electric vehicles are trying to compete against traditional ICE vehicles? It's like being the tallest kid on the short bus.
Please. That's silly.
Saying Mrs. Palin is indirectly responsible for this is like saying that news organizations are culpable for murders because they put gun logos in their 'crime/murder/etc.' related articles.
No, this runs much, much deeper than that.
Hell, castigating Palin sounds roughly as reasonable as saying that it was a Democrat ploy to put heat on Palin, to eliminate her from running for President in 2012. And that makes perfect sense.
The media often casts shooters (or criminals in general) who are "hispanic" (from South/Central America) as "white" if there is the potential for a race-war inciting event.
Hell, they do it in general as a token gesture for political correctness. They have for decades. Many, many times I've seen "white male" does this or that, only to find out later that it was a Latino associated with a gang, or someone of mixed white/black ancestry.
Though, honestly, this has nothing to do with race, though. It's 110% culture - just as a "white American" today would be castigated and denigrated as a dirty dago or wop, or an Irish-American as a mick or paddy, today we're looking 180 degrees the other way, culturally. We're so afraid to "go there" that we're being racist be occlusion.
It doesn't really matter, politically, whether she is dead or not. Her vote will, symbolically, go to the party's goals one way or another. (See: Tom Daschle's/Tim Johnson's SD seat for historical precedence.)
My prayers do go out to her family and friends, though. This sucks.
Technically speaking, their role in killing people is exactly the reason for the 2nd Amendment. The amendment's purpose isn't to ensure the ability to hunt, it's to ensure the ability to engage in acts of war.
Hopefully not! It's to prevent (or delay) such an eventuality through the deterrence of force. "Do as I say, or else!"
Ultimately, the 2nd Amendment is there to preserve "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are other, normally more immediate dangers to these goals, not inclusively:
* predatory animals eating your livestock
* pestilent animals eating your crops
* predatory humans threatening immediate harm
There are also ranchers and farmers.
What do you propose these people do about vermin and the other animals threatening their livelihood? They can:
1) Continue to do as they have done for the better part of a century, and shoot and trap the offending animals (deer eating their crops, rodents digging up their fields, etc.)
2) Do as the government does when these animals get out of hand, and poison the ground on which they live. The animals will die the painful death of dehydration, over-hydration, or slow nervous system shutdown. Scavengers (or prey animals, before the victims die of the poisons) eat these diseased animals, suffering similar fates. These poisons are also introduced to the soil which ultimately make their way into the ground waters, ultimately...
Yeah, I like option #1, personally.
Here here!
Personally, I'd like to be shot - that is, assuming the alternative is to be bludgeoned, stabbed, skewered, sliced, or otherwise mutilated. I'm much less likely to end up severely mutilated from the event, and my chances of survival are somewhat better as well - assuming I'm not dead right there from a cranial perforation (or similar).
I'd only assume someone attacking me would appreciate a similar consideration. Don't ban guns - it's cruel to home invaders and other violent criminals. It puts them at a severe workplace disadvantage.
If I recall correctly, the following are also true:
* Most gun-owning Americans have multiple guns. I know people with 20 or more. Surely, this would somewhat skewer your 'ratio of death' ? (Does this mean that Americans with multiple guns are more violent? It would be a necessary requisite for your comparison to mean fuckall.)
* Every citizen is (or was, until this past July) conscripted in Sweden; every military serviceman has a full-automatic weapon in their home for said service. (Surely, the evil black rifle would jump out and, due to its fully automatic nature, just start shooting people?)
Semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons generally have only one intended use, and that is to kill people (usually at short or medium range). Sprayfire weapons (MAC-10, Uzi and the like) are no good for ANYTHING except trying to injure or kill a crowd.
You watch too many movies. Seriously - go outside, go to a firing range, SOMETHING. Just no more Ronin or NBK. Let's just get this out of the way: guns are, indeed, very useful for killing other people. (This is all the more true if they "spray" bullets, as you so technically described later in your post.)
That's what the "spray" in spray-fire stands for. The spray is powered by the recoil of 1000 rounds per minute powering out of the barrel of a snub-nosed weapon with little in the way of stabilization.
This reads like the technical jargon on, oh, Star Trek: TOS or when they start talking about guns on CSI. (IE: it's complete bullshit.) Seriously - you should consider a screenwriting career. They like this kind of inaccurate, jib bullshit.
Semi-automatic handguns are similarly useless for any legitimate use. Well, handguns in general are useless.
Which is precisely why police departments issue them to their officers for the safety and protection of their officers! Right? Or is this one of those trick questions?
You do realize that this shooting could've been accomplished with three 100-year-old Colt revolvers, right? Not exactly difficult to hit that many people in a crowded area, I imagine - somewhat like shooting a wall. (He didn't even - apparently - hit his intended target!)
Hunting weapons don't need to be semi-automatic or fully automatic for any hunting (I think Cthulhu hunting doesn't count, as that is in imaginaryland)
I suppose you live in imaginaryland, then, because fully automatic weapons have never been legal (in the US) for hunting, as far as I know. They haven't been legal to manufacture for 40-odd years, at this point, and were never all that common.
Semi-automatic weapons, on the other hand, are quite useful for hunting. I take it you've no concept of how birds (say, pheasants) tend to "group together", and it is not uncommon to see a single flush of 4-6 birds in a day. The semi-automatic weapons we have today are simply a linear engineering progression over the double-barreled guns used to acquire multiple birds over 130 years ago in a similar fashion (this is, of course, assuming that a person hits their target with every pull of the trigger.) The same applies to hunting pretty much any other animal: they're social creatures. They go in packs, herds, and so on: having multiple quick shots available is useful for the harvesting of multiple game animals. (At the very least, dispatching the same animal quickly, when the first shot was not as clean as you'd have liked, is useful for the humane treatment of the creature.)
So, does that fill in the lines enough?
I get it. You want to ban guns outright, or at least limit them to single-shot shotguns for birds, or something like that. I have an alternative proposition for you: if we cut off the hands of every living person at the age of 12, we will drastically cut down on the number of stabbings, shootings, and vehicular homicides. Just think of the savings in life!
Nobody said it had to be scientifically proven for its veracity to hold. We have observed, as a society, that increased legal (lawful, as to not mean "highly regulated and licensed") firearm ownership has resulted in decreased violent crime rates, despite historic precedence which suggests that, in similar economic situations, what our society would be rife with violence. (1920s prohibition; 1970s). Surely, you aren't implying this to be false, are you? What is different now, other than legal firearm ownership and (almost) universally allowed concealed carry, has changed to allow for such a socially observed fact?
The inverse has been anything but proven. We have no instance of decreasing firearm ownership (or eliminating it outright) resulting in less violence. (In fact, we have the inverse - Britain saw a huge increase in violence as firearms were banned, for instance. There are many similar instances, most more disastrous. Thirty minutes googling the history of gun control should tell you this - if not conclusively, then at least substantiatively enough that you will pause and reconsider.)
In a world where circumstantial societal mores and means are a bit part of determination, such a thing as "is this good for a society?" must be disproven, not its negative proven in affirmation, before banning something through regulation makes any sort of sense. Too much ill has become humanity through such wanton application of diktat.