You forget too quickly - RedHat and/or SuSE aren't going to keep the top slot - especially when world+dog has access to the source code (see also CentOS v. RHEL).
Companies use what works, and often that changes over time. Most *nix-centric shops I've worked in (and currently are in) use a wide variety of variants. The only one I beleive could be called even halfway standardized used mostly RHEL along with FreeBSD and Solaris.
Currently (at what could very easily be called an Enterprise Level) I see and maintain machinery bearing Ubuntu (and kubuntu), Debian (old-school - a couple of Sarge boxes), CentOS, RHEL AS 3/4, SuSE SLES, OpenSuSE, Gentoo, Fedora Core 3/4/5/6/7, RH Linux 9.0, VMWare ESX, Mac OSX (yes, it's a *nix), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris 7/8/9, a couple of Busybox-lashed ARM-kernel-based distros, and, well - whatever else the developers want and need. Some of it has been around forever, some of it is brand spanking new, and the rest showed up in this or that year... It takes a bit of time to maintain and eyeball them, but it's not too rough of a job thanks to common protocols and sensible scripting. I'm just glad they ditched the HP-UX boxes a couple of years ago.
They do boil down to roughly 5 major flavors of Linux, 3 BSD flavors, Solaris, and of course the ARM dev stuff... but let's see you (or someone else) turn 'em all into a botnet with a single bit of malware.
Not saying it's impossible, but it damned sure wouldn't be easy. Which is kind of my point.
Yeah, because we'd all have forgotten that we could substitute precious metals (or even promissory notes) for goods.
Kinda off-tangent, but anyone else remember reading in (most) nuclear-war type novels about how gold and silver were rejected as money because odds were very good that it was "hot"?
One would think that people would tend to recoil from dirty paper (let's face it, money is just that) and even coins during a pandemic in much the same way. After all, them germs can get into the tiniest of cracks and crevices on the coins, and paper...? Fuggedaboutit.
At least with a Credit/Debit card reader you know that the germs aren't going to piggyback on the electrons that make and confirm the transfer, y'know?
Personally, I think all this hype over a massive flu pandemic is nothing more than fear mongering and massive stupidity. Having drills for a flu outbreak? WTF? They hae been touting this crap for the last 2 years... and nothing.
Just because the Discovery Channel and Fox News loves to hype it up doesn't mean that it shouldn't be looked at seriously.
We do after all live in a world with lots of people who have lots of means to spread lots of bugs around in very short order.
Presenteeism is a major problem in the US. People come to work when they are sick and at worst, contagious, instead of staying home because they don't have any sick days or they cannot afford to miss a day of work, or worse yet, get fired if they don't come in.
Agreed - but then, a lot of times (esp. where I work) employees can simply work from home and phone in to meetings (and email, and VPN) when they're sick.
If people could be more focused on getting better to be more productive, instead of worry about their job security if they call in sick, "that report just has to get done" or "the office can't function without me" attitude and coming into the workplace coughing and hacking on everyone and everything and making everyone else sick.
It's kind of a catch-22. That same work ethic is what got us all to where we are today, progress-wise. OTOH, I agree that coming in anyway and spreading the 'love' isn't exactly very productive at all - or even logical.
But then, if you work hourly and you've got bills that need paid / mouths to feed/ what-have-you, how else are you going to do it? (yes, I know - save up for it; only use sick days when you have to; etc etc... but that's not really sufficient in all cases or situations, no?)
reserves of potable water would likely falter (and in places like, oh, Phoenix - fail entirely) due to now un-manned and un-maintained water treatment plants, which means you're stuck with either boiling what you can find, catch as much rain as is possible (outside of the US Pacific Northwest? Good Luck with that one), or hoping for the best when you draw it out of the well/stream/whatever.
no problem - because there would be few to no oil refinery capabilities, which means that gas and plastics, etc. will be even rarer and more expensive than they are now.
food will be short due to two reasons: one has to do with growing it (only a low two-digit percentage of a first world nation even does farming, and they rely on expensive and technological means to do it. The other is getting that food from point A (the farm) to point B (you) - without it getting contaminated with the pandemic nasty OR the current nasties that occupy unprocessed food now (salmonella, ptomaine, stuff like that).
yep - the forests will do just fine. Now how are you going to get those far-off trees to your house to help heat the place... at least until 10/20/30 years from now when the closer ones finally start growing large enough to put to use?
Oh please, if everyone used linux then the spyware/malware/virus gremlins would simply write all their software for linux. You know it, I know it, and virus authors know it. They wouldn't sit around continuing to write windows viruses wondering why no one was getting infected.
Perhaps, but it would damned sure thin the malware herd a bit. The script kiddies would quickly realize that it isn't so easy to build a botnet out of 48 different distros of Linux, each often reacting to a given flaw in different ways, and some simply ignoring the flaw altogether?
Sure, Linux (or more accurately, its apps) has a fair share of flaws that a stupid user could help the script kiddies exploit (*cough*PHP*cough*), but they're far harder to exploit overall, are anything but homogeneous, and thus the damage would be far more contained.
I mean, seriously - it would take a long time before the script kiddies could assemble botnets of, say, 1/2 the magnitude that they do now with Windows. It would at least give us good guys enough of a break to come up with something more effective in keeping such incidents perfectly rare.
My brother found his system was spiking, making some game play impossible. Turns out it was Beagle periodically running, wasting disk and CPU. He uninstalled the POS and everything was great afterwards.
I agree, I see no point in apps like Beagle.
Just as a voice of support, my workstation install scripts are rigged is to "kill -9 beagled" and "yum -y remove" the little bastard.
My devs happily use locate, whereis, or even find if they want to hunt something down on the box. Beagle is IMHO a waste in a corporate environment... I need to build a quickie GUI lashed to locate, with a cron-rigged updatedb - it would do the same job without all the I/O-sucking index action.
True, but any product competing against an existing popular product has an uphill battle. It's the way the market works.
Just one thing: "default" doesn't always mean "popular", and taking advantage of ignorance instead of merit in order to dominate in a given market (even a niche one like "desktop search") isn't exactly what one would call complying with anti-trust monitoring.
When the wealth redistribution costs to a country outweigh the cost of installing solar panels on every rooftop, then there will be change in that country. The same holds true for making more efficient cars or mass transit or wind farms, they will only ever be "the norm" when they cost less than just burning more fossil fuels. That Kyoto-carbon-tax is helping to push that day a little closer.
Would that not be self-defeating theft?
An example: Here in Oregon, we have a punitive tax measure on the ballot - an initiative to tax the unholy hell out of tobacco and use the dough to fund health care for kids... problem is, first off there's already taxes taken that fund such a program, and second, if everyone stopped smoking (or even if the numbers dropped appreciably on in-state consumption and population), those kids' parents are still going to demand free medicine and doctor visits... but how does it get paid for by then?
Same story in this case - states will sack energy companies for money, claiming that these companies pollute too much. Energy companies respond by leaving the aforementioned states and selling power from cross-border (see also California's perennial "rolling blackouts" for a good idea of what that will look like). States not only lose the punitive dough they initially got, they also lose corporate tax revenues and jobs by the bucketload, from companies that decided to simply HQ themselves and their power plants away from the tax-happy New England governments. Someone else gets all that growth. Wanna tax any company that sells you energy if they're out-of-state? Fine... but the costs will be directly transferred to your states' per-kWH price. Your own citizens end up eating the costs, and if you don't like it? Buy a great big generator and lots of gasoline kiddo, because they don't have to sell you power.
All you'll have left are the (by then incredibly overloaded) hydro plants, since they are obviously not transportable. Think they'll keep their prices low with such demands? Probably not.
Seriously - the US had a chance to do something with the thing in a serious way, but we literally pissed away 35+ YEARS of that opportunity (at least since Apollo 17 returned).
If others want a shot at it, I say go for it - at least someone is reaching upwards and towards getting humanity out of its cradle. More power to 'em if they can help establish a peaceful and vigorous plan in motion to reach that goal.
I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched. I'd like to think that we'd have people living and working full-time on the Moon sometime before I die of old age...
...can you bend the critter (or at least build it as a wrap-around type screen), without optical distortion (or at least some sort of compensation against it by a GPU)? It would add one hell of a dimension to gaming, simulators, immersion-type entertainment, things like that.
I realize it's probably possible to do when building it, but it takes a pretty (relatively) hefty chunk of time to do anisotropic conversions of flat images (e.g. when creating image-based lighting maps for CG artwork raytracing and such), but if that could be fixed, a semi-spherical screen with the focal point being a person's head would be hella nice.
(of course, they'd still have to add about 15.9-something million colors in capability and perhaps a tighter resolution to it as well, but still... looks like it could go to some interesting places if they actually get it working).
The only people who have ever cared about what they run on their desktops is A) Geeks and/or B) Fanboys.
YMMV, but I have noticed that people tend to care what's on their desktop after being root-kitted, crashed, or so bogged down with registry corruption that it takes up to 30+ minutes just to boot.
And of course, they show that they care when you mention an alternative and they reply with: "but I have $$$ worth of software that only runs on Windows!"
Mac is like a Toyota. A good, solid vehicle. Dependable and long lasting. Just don't expect to do any internal work on it like my dad used to do when I was a kid.
I like the others you've presented, but the quoted line above ain't quite correct. "Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal" + "sudo su -" gives me everything I need to be a happy BSD-style *nix sysadmin on a Mac, thanks much. Toss in X11, Fink, the free OSX SDK, and a whole host of other goodies, and you get all the *nix love you'll ever need.
Macs would be more like the Jeep - you can do whatever the hell you want to it and it refuses to break in most cases, and it still has a style that appeals to most folks. Just that the body design (down to the seven-slit grille) is as proprietary as hell, and vigorously guarded by the manufacturer.
Venus is permanently covered in cloud and has the highest albedo in the solar system. I wonder how that's working out for them... oh, that's right, it's hotter than Mercury.
Cough up these studies, please.
Eh? Venus has a much, much, much thicker atmosphere that's almost pure CO2, clouds made of sulfuric acid, and a surface that periodically erupts into huge masses of magma (no tectonic plates... it has to vent all that internal heat somehow).
By contrast, you have a planet (Earth) with a Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere, regular heat venting via tectonics (and vulcanism), and mostly water vapor clouds with a much lighter air pressure overall.
Methinks the albedo is the only thing keeping Venus from becoming even hotter than it is (Mercury gets a pass because it's airless and smaller - a lot smaller. Oh, and with no air, there's no heat retention, nor heat convection, etc etc etc).
Cripes - forget apples and oranges - this is an apples and granite countertops argument.
Comcast isn't a "common carrier". Also, their cable, their rules, don't like it, ditch Comcast. Now, IANAL, but maybe your argument would apply to DSL, being over the phone lines and all.
I'd love to. Problem is, my only other two choices for broadband out here are by two other equally evil, greedy, deceptive, and totalitarian corporate entities: Verizon (who has a nasty habit of ripping out all your copper when you get FIOS) and Qwest (Google for "Qwest UTOPIA" and see what you get).
Comcast is simply the lesser of three evils where I'm at. A pity, too... I used to use Sprint Wireless Broadband when I lived in Utah, and they were friggin' awesome (sure, I had a bit of lag in FPS gaming, but the bandwidth was guaranteed, all mine, and no one gave a damn how much I used a month).
Not a real fan of the Daily Show (what? I rarely watch the damned TV as it is), but I like that larger companies are at least beginning to make a serious effort (and not just post 380-by-tiny-as-hell resolution clips, then call 'em episodes).
I just wonder what, say, DirecTV and (to a lesser extent due to bundled broadband) Cable TV operators will do once enough people start ditching their video TV subscriptions, or at least curtailing them to a sizeable extent (I realize this is quite a long ways off, but still, I can see more than a couple of operators getting nervous about it).
The problem was caused by the record labels themselves.
Anytime you have something that people want, and you do not give them a legitimate market to get it, a black market will develop.
While your opening sentence is correct, and something I agree with, the reason you presented is IMHO not quite it.
IMHO (and little else), the reason folks download music for free isn't due to any 'black market'.
No, people think little of downloading music because they get music for free anyway in other formats. They get it for free by taping it straight off the radio, and have done so for decades. They get it for free off of the zillion "Music Choice" (or similar) television channels that come with even the most basic of cable packages, siphoning off the tunes as they pass through the aux inputs in their stereo kits. They get it for free by copying it off of a friend's tape, then CD. The early DVD's included (and still include) music sound tracks. I can pick from millions of streaming radio sites online and listen to my heart's content... for free.
In short, you can get music for free damned near everywhere and record it onto tape or CD, so most folks think: "what's so bad about getting it for free off the computer?"
Most people have no idea that they pay the RIAA a vig on each blank cassette or CD they bought, so there's no logical connection there. You pay money to get a good archival-grade pristine copy of a song on tape or CD... or you pay to see the band live. You certainly don't pay to merely listen to the thing, according to most people.
When Napster showed up, it was, to the majority of humanity, just another route to listen to music, to grab tunes that they simply could not find anymore, and to get up a ready collection to burn to CD - so you didn't have to listen to those damned commercials and the brainless "Morning Zoo!" DJ blather on your way to work in the morning.
While the RIAA thinks (and legally so) that music is a commodity that can be charged for, down to a per-listen basis, the rest of humanity didn't know that, and upon discovery, doesn't agree with the concept. While iTunes has done a lot to make inroads, the DRM is still a bit of an obstacle (more an inconvenience than obstacle, really), etc.
Thing is, now that people have gotten a taste of the free goods, you think that they want to go back to a world of over-priced CD's, shit bands promoted by fiat, DRM-locked music files, "American Idol" rejects, 60/70's-era Wrinkle Rockers wanting to squeeze every last dime out of the public before they die, etc. etc etc.? Hell no! They'd rather go out there, pick what they really want, and get it in a format they can basically do whatever they want to with.
Some of us (myself included) decided that independent DRM-free music was worth searching for (mostly to stay out of court and still get good tunes). It was an eye-opening, mind-blowing world out there. At least in one opinion, the RIAA can kiss my ass if they think I'll ever even intentionally listen to any of their affiliates' music again. Forget purchasing - I simply do not want their constant barrage of new and mainstream-beige shit polluting my ears, my music collection, or my hard drive.
It'll take some time before the public at large realizes that yes there are legal and unlocked (and fairly priced!) music out there. I think that in the long run, they will.
/P
Re:Maybe you should have done a FUCKING search of
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RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Could be worse... but thankfully WebTV died a well-deserved death a very long time ago.
PuTTY. Yes I know Ubuntu comes with SSH, but for being a techie and somewhat new to Linux I had a hell of a time getting even something so simple as PuTTY installed without the aid of a packet manager.
Umm, why would you need it?
Pop open a terminal and type "ssh myusername@machine.domain" and 99 times of 100, it's all you'll ever need.
As a bonus you can copy stuff over SSH that way too - "scp filename me@machine.domain: "
Man... unless you got some funky weird juju going on in PuTTY settings, that's just lazy... I have scores of developers I support who happily use ssh, minicom, and loads of other CLI proggies in Linux without a hitch or complaint. It's worth noting that most of these guys have a hard time with anything more complex OS-wise than figuring out how much RAM they have on a machine:?
True indeed... but at around $10,000/kilo just to get it into orbit, I wouldn't exactly call it "cost effective". If it weren't for that constant 1g pull keeping it all down here and the expense of getting it up there, we could just take as much as we wanted with us. Problem is, if we're going to get folks into space permanently, 'living off the land' is much cheaper and far more feasible than simply dragging along every last thing we could use.
Obtaining water in meaningful quantities from asteroids/comets is nearly as infeasible as obtaining it from Saturn.
Not necessarily; I mentioned dead comets for a reason. While the reference lists them as being mostly rocky (as most of their more volatile contents would have out-gassed), I suspect that they contain more than enough water to make them worthwhile as mining targets. Active comets contain a whole lot more, and can probably be safely mined by automated robotic equipment once the comet gets far enough out from the Sun to dampen the out-gassing. Some asteroids could easily be comets that simply have stable orbits, far enough out from the Sun* to not erupt and evaporate, with a nice heavy coating of dust to keep things insulated.
*Note: not "Kuiper Belt" distance (though at that distance they would be very plentiful)... more like "Mars" distance, where quite a few can likely be found.
Thing is, we really don't know because we really haven't looked all that deeply into them yet.
Either way, I suspect that water will be the new "gold" if/when we get up there...
Between the gravity well of each repsective Moon (and the big Saturnian one as well) and the hard radiation coming off of Saturn, you'll likely spend as much energy getting it out as it could provide.
Now if they could score a lot of water off of asteroids and other ultra-low-gravity objects, we'd be golden, esp. the theories floating about concerning "dead comets", which IIRC are almost all water ice.
That's where IMHO we need to be throwing exploration money; to get the low-hanging fruit first.
And Exchange requires Active Directory, which requires a domain driven by Windows Server rather than Samba, so even if you weren't planning to before, you may as well authenticate other systems through that.
Not all that impossible to do - your auth can come through AD's LDAP connector, and if rest can be done like Evolution does... take scrapes off of the OWA service on Exchange.
Everyone makes it sound like Echange and AD are these magic thingies that no one will ever plug into. While I'll never claim it to be perfectly easy (and MSFT does their damndest to insure that), it certainly isn't impossible.
I've always wondered why people were 'taught' Office. It sounds so ridiculous. Or maybe you do some fancy stuff, because in school our questions were like, "What is the shortcut key for Italics?"
The classes I'd seen (I had taught CompSci, not Buisiness) were more for the 'trade-school' type courses, where it serves to help, say, suddenly divorced and/or single mothers... It gives them enough basic and intermediate office app skills to land an entry-level position in a typical office. It's also helpful to budding accountants, entry-level managers, receptionists, HR types... positions where you have to use the thing on a daily basis for anything beyond writing a letter, memo, or a simple spreadsheet.
(Hell, I remember the old MSFT "MOUS" certification for Office... it was (IMHO) hilarious to see it being taken even halfway seriously by school management).
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Companies use what works, and often that changes over time. Most *nix-centric shops I've worked in (and currently are in) use a wide variety of variants. The only one I beleive could be called even halfway standardized used mostly RHEL along with FreeBSD and Solaris.
Currently (at what could very easily be called an Enterprise Level) I see and maintain machinery bearing Ubuntu (and kubuntu), Debian (old-school - a couple of Sarge boxes), CentOS, RHEL AS 3/4, SuSE SLES, OpenSuSE, Gentoo, Fedora Core 3/4/5/6/7, RH Linux 9.0, VMWare ESX, Mac OSX (yes, it's a *nix), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris 7/8/9, a couple of Busybox-lashed ARM-kernel-based distros, and, well - whatever else the developers want and need. Some of it has been around forever, some of it is brand spanking new, and the rest showed up in this or that year... It takes a bit of time to maintain and eyeball them, but it's not too rough of a job thanks to common protocols and sensible scripting. I'm just glad they ditched the HP-UX boxes a couple of years ago.
They do boil down to roughly 5 major flavors of Linux, 3 BSD flavors, Solaris, and of course the ARM dev stuff... but let's see you (or someone else) turn 'em all into a botnet with a single bit of malware.
Not saying it's impossible, but it damned sure wouldn't be easy. Which is kind of my point.
Kinda off-tangent, but anyone else remember reading in (most) nuclear-war type novels about how gold and silver were rejected as money because odds were very good that it was "hot"?
One would think that people would tend to recoil from dirty paper (let's face it, money is just that) and even coins during a pandemic in much the same way. After all, them germs can get into the tiniest of cracks and crevices on the coins, and paper...? Fuggedaboutit.
At least with a Credit/Debit card reader you know that the germs aren't going to piggyback on the electrons that make and confirm the transfer, y'know?
Just because the Discovery Channel and Fox News loves to hype it up doesn't mean that it shouldn't be looked at seriously.
We do after all live in a world with lots of people who have lots of means to spread lots of bugs around in very short order.
Presenteeism is a major problem in the US. People come to work when they are sick and at worst, contagious, instead of staying home because they don't have any sick days or they cannot afford to miss a day of work, or worse yet, get fired if they don't come in.Agreed - but then, a lot of times (esp. where I work) employees can simply work from home and phone in to meetings (and email, and VPN) when they're sick.
If people could be more focused on getting better to be more productive, instead of worry about their job security if they call in sick, "that report just has to get done" or "the office can't function without me" attitude and coming into the workplace coughing and hacking on everyone and everything and making everyone else sick.It's kind of a catch-22. That same work ethic is what got us all to where we are today, progress-wise. OTOH, I agree that coming in anyway and spreading the 'love' isn't exactly very productive at all - or even logical.
But then, if you work hourly and you've got bills that need paid / mouths to feed/ what-have-you, how else are you going to do it? (yes, I know - save up for it; only use sick days when you have to; etc etc... but that's not really sufficient in all cases or situations, no?)
I'd prefer to keep technology around, thanks.
But yes, you are absolutely correct otherwise.
Perhaps, but it would damned sure thin the malware herd a bit. The script kiddies would quickly realize that it isn't so easy to build a botnet out of 48 different distros of Linux, each often reacting to a given flaw in different ways, and some simply ignoring the flaw altogether?
Sure, Linux (or more accurately, its apps) has a fair share of flaws that a stupid user could help the script kiddies exploit (*cough*PHP*cough*), but they're far harder to exploit overall, are anything but homogeneous, and thus the damage would be far more contained.
I mean, seriously - it would take a long time before the script kiddies could assemble botnets of, say, 1/2 the magnitude that they do now with Windows. It would at least give us good guys enough of a break to come up with something more effective in keeping such incidents perfectly rare.
I agree, I see no point in apps like Beagle.
Just as a voice of support, my workstation install scripts are rigged is to "kill -9 beagled" and "yum -y remove" the little bastard.
My devs happily use locate, whereis, or even find if they want to hunt something down on the box. Beagle is IMHO a waste in a corporate environment... I need to build a quickie GUI lashed to locate, with a cron-rigged updatedb - it would do the same job without all the I/O-sucking index action.
Just one thing: "default" doesn't always mean "popular", and taking advantage of ignorance instead of merit in order to dominate in a given market (even a niche one like "desktop search") isn't exactly what one would call complying with anti-trust monitoring.
Would that not be self-defeating theft?
An example: Here in Oregon, we have a punitive tax measure on the ballot - an initiative to tax the unholy hell out of tobacco and use the dough to fund health care for kids... problem is, first off there's already taxes taken that fund such a program, and second, if everyone stopped smoking (or even if the numbers dropped appreciably on in-state consumption and population), those kids' parents are still going to demand free medicine and doctor visits... but how does it get paid for by then?
Same story in this case - states will sack energy companies for money, claiming that these companies pollute too much. Energy companies respond by leaving the aforementioned states and selling power from cross-border (see also California's perennial "rolling blackouts" for a good idea of what that will look like). States not only lose the punitive dough they initially got, they also lose corporate tax revenues and jobs by the bucketload, from companies that decided to simply HQ themselves and their power plants away from the tax-happy New England governments. Someone else gets all that growth. Wanna tax any company that sells you energy if they're out-of-state? Fine... but the costs will be directly transferred to your states' per-kWH price. Your own citizens end up eating the costs, and if you don't like it? Buy a great big generator and lots of gasoline kiddo, because they don't have to sell you power.
All you'll have left are the (by then incredibly overloaded) hydro plants, since they are obviously not transportable. Think they'll keep their prices low with such demands? Probably not.
If others want a shot at it, I say go for it - at least someone is reaching upwards and towards getting humanity out of its cradle. More power to 'em if they can help establish a peaceful and vigorous plan in motion to reach that goal.
I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched. I'd like to think that we'd have people living and working full-time on the Moon sometime before I die of old age...
How did you think his friends, family, etc got their copies of XP, 2k, 98, and all that in the first place?
I realize it's probably possible to do when building it, but it takes a pretty (relatively) hefty chunk of time to do anisotropic conversions of flat images (e.g. when creating image-based lighting maps for CG artwork raytracing and such), but if that could be fixed, a semi-spherical screen with the focal point being a person's head would be hella nice.
(of course, they'd still have to add about 15.9-something million colors in capability and perhaps a tighter resolution to it as well, but still... looks like it could go to some interesting places if they actually get it working).
YMMV, but I have noticed that people tend to care what's on their desktop after being root-kitted, crashed, or so bogged down with registry corruption that it takes up to 30+ minutes just to boot.
And of course, they show that they care when you mention an alternative and they reply with: "but I have $$$ worth of software that only runs on Windows!"
Funny, that.
I like the others you've presented, but the quoted line above ain't quite correct. "Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal" + "sudo su -" gives me everything I need to be a happy BSD-style *nix sysadmin on a Mac, thanks much. Toss in X11, Fink, the free OSX SDK, and a whole host of other goodies, and you get all the *nix love you'll ever need.
Macs would be more like the Jeep - you can do whatever the hell you want to it and it refuses to break in most cases, and it still has a style that appeals to most folks. Just that the body design (down to the seven-slit grille) is as proprietary as hell, and vigorously guarded by the manufacturer.
Cough up these studies, please.
Eh? Venus has a much, much, much thicker atmosphere that's almost pure CO2, clouds made of sulfuric acid, and a surface that periodically erupts into huge masses of magma (no tectonic plates... it has to vent all that internal heat somehow).
By contrast, you have a planet (Earth) with a Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere, regular heat venting via tectonics (and vulcanism), and mostly water vapor clouds with a much lighter air pressure overall.
Methinks the albedo is the only thing keeping Venus from becoming even hotter than it is (Mercury gets a pass because it's airless and smaller - a lot smaller. Oh, and with no air, there's no heat retention, nor heat convection, etc etc etc).
Cripes - forget apples and oranges - this is an apples and granite countertops argument.
I'd love to. Problem is, my only other two choices for broadband out here are by two other equally evil, greedy, deceptive, and totalitarian corporate entities: Verizon (who has a nasty habit of ripping out all your copper when you get FIOS) and Qwest (Google for "Qwest UTOPIA" and see what you get).
Comcast is simply the lesser of three evils where I'm at. A pity, too... I used to use Sprint Wireless Broadband when I lived in Utah, and they were friggin' awesome (sure, I had a bit of lag in FPS gaming, but the bandwidth was guaranteed, all mine, and no one gave a damn how much I used a month).
I just wonder what, say, DirecTV and (to a lesser extent due to bundled broadband) Cable TV operators will do once enough people start ditching their video TV subscriptions, or at least curtailing them to a sizeable extent (I realize this is quite a long ways off, but still, I can see more than a couple of operators getting nervous about it).
Anytime you have something that people want, and you do not give them a legitimate market to get it, a black market will develop.
While your opening sentence is correct, and something I agree with, the reason you presented is IMHO not quite it.
IMHO (and little else), the reason folks download music for free isn't due to any 'black market'.
No, people think little of downloading music because they get music for free anyway in other formats. They get it for free by taping it straight off the radio, and have done so for decades. They get it for free off of the zillion "Music Choice" (or similar) television channels that come with even the most basic of cable packages, siphoning off the tunes as they pass through the aux inputs in their stereo kits. They get it for free by copying it off of a friend's tape, then CD. The early DVD's included (and still include) music sound tracks. I can pick from millions of streaming radio sites online and listen to my heart's content... for free.
In short, you can get music for free damned near everywhere and record it onto tape or CD, so most folks think: "what's so bad about getting it for free off the computer?"
Most people have no idea that they pay the RIAA a vig on each blank cassette or CD they bought, so there's no logical connection there. You pay money to get a good archival-grade pristine copy of a song on tape or CD... or you pay to see the band live. You certainly don't pay to merely listen to the thing, according to most people.
When Napster showed up, it was, to the majority of humanity, just another route to listen to music, to grab tunes that they simply could not find anymore, and to get up a ready collection to burn to CD - so you didn't have to listen to those damned commercials and the brainless "Morning Zoo!" DJ blather on your way to work in the morning.
While the RIAA thinks (and legally so) that music is a commodity that can be charged for, down to a per-listen basis, the rest of humanity didn't know that, and upon discovery, doesn't agree with the concept. While iTunes has done a lot to make inroads, the DRM is still a bit of an obstacle (more an inconvenience than obstacle, really), etc.
Thing is, now that people have gotten a taste of the free goods, you think that they want to go back to a world of over-priced CD's, shit bands promoted by fiat, DRM-locked music files, "American Idol" rejects, 60/70's-era Wrinkle Rockers wanting to squeeze every last dime out of the public before they die, etc. etc etc.? Hell no! They'd rather go out there, pick what they really want, and get it in a format they can basically do whatever they want to with.
Some of us (myself included) decided that independent DRM-free music was worth searching for (mostly to stay out of court and still get good tunes). It was an eye-opening, mind-blowing world out there. At least in one opinion, the RIAA can kiss my ass if they think I'll ever even intentionally listen to any of their affiliates' music again. Forget purchasing - I simply do not want their constant barrage of new and mainstream-beige shit polluting my ears, my music collection, or my hard drive.
It'll take some time before the public at large realizes that yes there are legal and unlocked (and fairly priced!) music out there. I think that in the long run, they will.
Umm, why would you need it?
Pop open a terminal and type "ssh myusername@machine.domain" and 99 times of 100, it's all you'll ever need.
As a bonus you can copy stuff over SSH that way too - "scp filename me@machine.domain: "
Man... unless you got some funky weird juju going on in PuTTY settings, that's just lazy... I have scores of developers I support who happily use ssh, minicom, and loads of other CLI proggies in Linux without a hitch or complaint. It's worth noting that most of these guys have a hard time with anything more complex OS-wise than figuring out how much RAM they have on a machine :?
True indeed... but at around $10,000/kilo just to get it into orbit, I wouldn't exactly call it "cost effective". If it weren't for that constant 1g pull keeping it all down here and the expense of getting it up there, we could just take as much as we wanted with us. Problem is, if we're going to get folks into space permanently, 'living off the land' is much cheaper and far more feasible than simply dragging along every last thing we could use.
Obtaining water in meaningful quantities from asteroids/comets is nearly as infeasible as obtaining it from Saturn.Not necessarily; I mentioned dead comets for a reason. While the reference lists them as being mostly rocky (as most of their more volatile contents would have out-gassed), I suspect that they contain more than enough water to make them worthwhile as mining targets. Active comets contain a whole lot more, and can probably be safely mined by automated robotic equipment once the comet gets far enough out from the Sun to dampen the out-gassing. Some asteroids could easily be comets that simply have stable orbits, far enough out from the Sun* to not erupt and evaporate, with a nice heavy coating of dust to keep things insulated.
*Note: not "Kuiper Belt" distance (though at that distance they would be very plentiful)... more like "Mars" distance, where quite a few can likely be found.
Thing is, we really don't know because we really haven't looked all that deeply into them yet.
Either way, I suspect that water will be the new "gold" if/when we get up there...
Now if they could score a lot of water off of asteroids and other ultra-low-gravity objects, we'd be golden, esp. the theories floating about concerning "dead comets", which IIRC are almost all water ice.
That's where IMHO we need to be throwing exploration money; to get the low-hanging fruit first.
Not all that impossible to do - your auth can come through AD's LDAP connector, and if rest can be done like Evolution does... take scrapes off of the OWA service on Exchange.
Everyone makes it sound like Echange and AD are these magic thingies that no one will ever plug into. While I'll never claim it to be perfectly easy (and MSFT does their damndest to insure that), it certainly isn't impossible.
The classes I'd seen (I had taught CompSci, not Buisiness) were more for the 'trade-school' type courses, where it serves to help, say, suddenly divorced and/or single mothers... It gives them enough basic and intermediate office app skills to land an entry-level position in a typical office. It's also helpful to budding accountants, entry-level managers, receptionists, HR types... positions where you have to use the thing on a daily basis for anything beyond writing a letter, memo, or a simple spreadsheet.
(Hell, I remember the old MSFT "MOUS" certification for Office... it was (IMHO) hilarious to see it being taken even halfway seriously by school management).
Unfortunately, so do many of the political news articles outside of the op-ed section of these respective papers...