The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as they are injurious to others. -Thomas Jefferson
That is the difference.
Governments exist to prohibit actions which are injurious. Religions exist to proscribe actions which are beneficial.
Both are necessary parts of a healthy society, yet they serve different purposes. The reason for this separation is that governments have the power to enforce their policies, through physical violence, against the will of the individual. Religion does not.
Religion is voluntary. Government is not.
To effect the highest level of individual freedom, it is as important that governments have the power of force as it is that religions do not. History has shown that both religions that act with the power of government, and governments that dictate with the expansive ethical mandate of religion, quickly become vehicles of tyranny and oppressors of freedom that effectively resist overthrow.
Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.
Secular Humanism, while not a religion in the traditional sense, is a system of belief that proscribes ethical behaviour. Some say it has permeated our society, and infiltrated our government under the radar of most people's typical view of what constitutes a religion. Yet it is a religion, in the sense of the Constitution, nonetheless.
The key to this distinction is understanding the Jefferson quote above, along with the basic rights of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". You have a right to Liberty, and to pursue those things which bring you Happiness. You are free from government-imposed restrictions or duties beyond those which restrict and punish actions which are injurious to others. Governments may not legislate morality. You are free to follow your own set of moral guidelines, as a religion, or none at all. "Good behaviour", in the form of religion, cannot be foisted upon you just as you may not foist your religion upon others.
It is unfortunate that such reasonable tenets of our original government have been so badly eroded as to nearly the point of unrecognizability.
Well, I didn't really define it. I just repeated it. But I assume it has the general meaning you would expect. A "monolithic" operating system is highly integrated, with irreplaceable components. A "modular" OS would be more flexible, have multiple, interchangeable options for major components. In a "modular" OS, components can be removed without causing adverse effects, yet the lack of standards can make setup and use more difficult. A "monolithic" OS has many standard components higher up the application stack, which have numerous cross-requirements, such that, for instance, removing a spellchecker might cause your e-mail client to fail.
"Monolithic" operating systems are usually easy to setup, impossible to upgrade, and can be supported by a small group of programmers apart from the environment in which they are used, along with relatively incapable administrators willing to perform mindless, repetitive tasks, perfect for a commercial OS. "Modular" systems are more difficult to setup initially, easier to upgrade (especially incrementally), and require (and enable) a more cohesive inteface between those who create the OS and those who use it, perfect for capable sysadmins, and Open Source Software.
A good example of each would be something like Debian versus something like OSX. Debian, as a "modular" OS, packages almost every OSS program out there, yet sets very few defaults. OSX, on the other hand, comes out-of-the-box with a full set of default programs and relatively little support for integration of 3rd party applications. Or you can think something like Windows 3.1 with 3rd party browsers, versus Windows 95 with Internet Explorer, or, in a more general sense, KDE versus a lightweight DE like blackbox.
What specific features contribute to a "modular" OS? I'd like to say things like robust, version and upgrade-aware package management. Obviously, a compiler and development tools and the ability of admins to modify the OS, which are lacking in proprietary commercial software, limited in some commercial Linux distributions (such as Linspire), and difficult or discouraged in others, such as Fedora. Or, lacking source availability, a robust community of interoperable, 3rd party software, and a generally application-neutral OS design. All of these requirements, to a certain extent, also necessitate a long development and support lifecycle.
But, in reality, those things are just symptoms of a much deeper cause. The actual, driving force behind modular operating systems is the concept of the "programmer-admin". A "programmer-admin", while perhaps not a full time programmer, is at least capable of diagnosing complex problems and submitting patches and valuable bug reports to upstream sources. Consequently, the "programmer-admin" doesn't spend much time further up the application stack, such as tasks like helping users write reports and general end-user training. The main task of the "programmer-admin" is to maintain and incrementally improve the functionality of the OS. As such, she must be capable of playing an integral role in the development process. Depending on the size of the userbase and IT staff, the "programmer-admin" may even specialize on a specific part of the OS, or ignore userland applications entirely.
However, this study, and many "enterprises", expressly forbid admins from programming. Using commercial, "monolithic" operating systems, most sysadmins are too busy trying to integrate 3rd party components and performing upgrades to be able to make real contributions to an OS, which will most likely render any improvements worthless at the next upgrade. The result is that admins perform a variety of incidental tasks, from minor upgrades to purchasing to user training, mostly nothing special or requiring extensive skills or ability, instead of truly beneficial, long-lasting work. Unless the client is large enough to garner special attention from the OS vendor, the OS is written by programmers who have little contact with end-users, and important functiona
So, the admins were free to use any tools they wanted, and this was supposed to be a test of Linux, yet you dictated components, (proprietary, binary-only components that you refuse to disclose, and that apparently weren't even supported on the Linux OS used,) based on market share. And Linux failed because, in order to comply with these requirements, your genuis admins performed a glibc upgrade that broke the system???
Because you are a sheep-person. ESR tends to be a bit, umm, over-the-top. Dumb animals interpret passionate communication as a threat.
Dr. Thompson, however, communicates in a calm, soothing manner. He exudes compassion and empathy. This communication style places you at ease, and lowers your natural adversion to foreign objects and ideas. By communicating in a manner that lowers your stress level, he enables your higher functions (what little there seem to be) a chance to absorb his ideas.
So, at a basic level, whenever you see something that you don't quite understand, which, for you, could be a lot of things, you try to interpret it based on the manner of communication, rather than what was actually communicated. This post, for instance, tends to cast you in a rather dim light. You will interpret it as threatening. If, on the other hand, I had written something like "I understand your concern," or "I see what you're asking," instead of "you are a sheep-person," you would have taken the time to understand what it is I'm saying.
[At best, your study seems to show that the GNU/Linux distribution you selected was not particularly good at this task. But why does that show that the ``monolithic" style of Windows is better per se than the ``modular" style of GNU/Linux distributions?]
That pretty much sums up the entire study. This isn't really a test of Windows versus Linux, but a test of "modular" operating systems versus "monolithic" operating systems. And, unfortunately, the study didn't even do a good job of testing that.
Linux happens to include several distributions, some more "monolithic" than "modular". Unsuprisingly, the "monolithic" versions are usually those used by "enterprises", such as RedHat and SuSE. The "modular" operating systems, such as Debian, are almost universally ignored by businesses, though you will find IT personnel swear by them. There are Linux distributions that adhere to the Unix philosophy, and there are those that try to emulate Windows and Apple in the name of "ease of use". Hell, even some of SCO's products are more "modular" than commercial Linux distributions.
By requiring "enterprise" sysadmins and a Linux distro that is geared towards "enterprises", the study preselected a Linux competitor with which Windows can easily compete: admins (probably used to using Windows) using Linux distros that attempt to emulate Microsoft's "monolithic" operating system. By virtue of the fact that Microsoft has been building "monolithic" operating systems for at least a decade longer than any of these Linux companies even existed, that the vast majority of Linux components are designed to be used instead in a "modular" fashion, and that most "enterprises" wouldn't know proper system administration from their own asses, anyone can see that this test is designed to fail.
I've spent the last one and a half years doing this exact same study. Guess what I found? You can't treat "monolithic" operating systems, RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Windows, as though they were "modular". Though doing so is easier with Linux, it's not recommended, and distro makers such as RedHat explicitly warn against doing so. Any IT guy learns this lesson about six months into his career. You either find a truly "modular" OS, such as Debian, or a good Unix, or you very carefully buy products made only by Microsoft or by companies joined at the hip with Microsoft. That is, if you choose modularity, you choose Unix. If you choose out-of-the-box integration, you choose Apple or try to navigate the Microsoft "ecosystem", and you pay monopoly rents for doing so. The people who choose RedHat and SuSE, and expect it to be Windows at this stage, are kidding themselves.
The real headline should be: "Linux admins tasked with using Linux in the same retarded-ass way as Windows, fail." Which should be no suprise.
But the important thing to take out of this is that it is neither technical necessity nor user requirements that make operating systems less "modular", and thus less flexible, less powerful, and ultimately less valuable. It is the commercial requirements of the operating system manufacturers themselves. It is the fact that the OS is commercial that makes it difficult to upgrade, impossible to integrate, and expensive to maintain. The evolution of commercial Linux distributions towards the "monolithic" model of Microsoft, and the concomitant decline in their quality, has proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. At most, this study only serves to highlight what any competent Linux admin already knew.
NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres)
...
to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles.
...
That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
Growing enough biodiesel to provide all of our transportation needs on less than 3% of our cropland sounds like the holy grail of energy independence.
1 acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 55 bushels of beans. That same acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 250 bushels of corn.
And regardless, comparing number of bushels is completely misleading. Oil processing from soy is basically just extraction. Ethanol production from corn is much more complex, and more energy-intensive. Believe me, the net energy balance of corn ethanol is around 140%, much less than that of biodiesel.
Not to mention that you need to cart around those hydrocarbons in a vehicle, generally, whereas electricity can be transported at significantly less cost (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of dollars).
What are you talking about? How do you propose to transport *electricity* at less cost than hydrocarbons? Batteries?
As for efficiency, it means almost nothing next to actual cost. Play around with this spreadsheet for a while if you don't believe me. It compares the cost of storing electricity from wind generators, in lead acid batteries versus converting (through "inefficient" processes) to either hydrogen or methanol, and back to electricity by burning in an internal combustion engine and generator. The "inefficiency" of all those conversions is made up for by simply using more wind generators to produce more electricity. See which one is cheaper.
It's happening, though you have to start with more fundamental processes and work your way up. Basically if you can make hydrogen and carbon monoxide, you can make anything.
how much energy from fertilizer does it take to make this biodiesel?
Not much. Biodiesel is made from soybeans, or rapeseed, both of which have relatively light fertilizer requirements.
You'll find studies that say otherwise, from Pimental et al., but he analyzes biofuels as they are produced today, not as they could be most economically produced without fossil fuels. His argument is typically that subsidies are a waste of resources. And though he sometimes likes to expand that argument to say biofuels will always be a waste of time, he's wrong. The problem is not that biofuels are inherently inefficient, it's that the production methods in use today are optimized for high fertilizer use, becuase that's most economical at the moment.
From other studies, the net energy balance of biodiesel is usually something like 300%, which is twice that of ethanol from corn.
I thought of that too. But, in this instance, is it really important?
Think of when a person would use a browser remotely over an X session. Isn't it more important to have a usable browser on the local machine than to have quick access to a browser via X11?
And if they do run a remote browser, for something like LTSP, aren't they going to be using a local network, with relatively a fast connection anyways?
So really you're talking about people who access a browser, remotely via X11, over a slow connection. Who does that?
While I'd prefer a solution that can be tuned to specific usages, ie. fat client, thin client, and standalone, isn't tuning for standalone really the best overall option?
I'm right now running a copy of Opera on a system that's intentionally limited to 64 megs of RAM. It's working beautifully.
I'm testing out browsers for use on some old machines as web kiosks. Basically, my choices are:
Konqueror - includes all of KDE (ugh)
Konqueror embedded - lacks maintenance
Firefox - seems to be slow and has issues when run without a window manager
Dillo - has website layout problems
and, Opera - seems to be the best choice
These machines (P1), and lots of machines like them, pretty much max out at about 64 megs of RAM. I could probably find more RAM, but it'd be costly, and there are usually hardware compatibility problems.
Although I'm leaning towards Opera at the moment, I was using Konqueror for a while. Linux does a great job of swapping, and Konqueror is quite snappy, so even with low memory it's a viable option. But, with all the libraries that Konqueror requires, 64 megs is kind of pushing it.
And there is a decided trend in hardware towards less memory and faster processors. It's not uncommon to find Pentium III's with only 128 megs of RAM. Unfortunately, many open source programs are written without limited memory requirements in mind.
It's kind of humbling to think that, as few as five years ago, a Pentium I with 64 megs of RAM would run an entire OS and web browser without so much as touching swap space. Today, you have to use apps designed for embedded machines to run in 64 megs of RAM, and you're lucky if you can run more than one app at a time.
From my testing, Firefox is barely outside the range of viable options for a machine with 64 megs of RAM. But as with any performance tuning, there are probably trade-offs. And having lots of options is usually the best strategy. But I think these improvements suggested for Firefox would be beneficial in almost any scenario. Avoiding I/O seems to be the best strategy on any system newer than, say, a Pentium I, when web browsing. So uncompressing images on the fly in exchange for less memory usage would doubtlessly be a good trade-off.
Would there be a United States without King George III? The US and many other Democratic Republics are modeled from the Parliamentary system.
If there was a Boston Tea Party of sorts and people threw away the British government we would rely on the Colonists to lead the way. I wonder if advancements would equal or match those from the UK?
What a ridiculous interpretation...
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
"Intellectual property" is nothing but government-granted monopoly. Without a sovereign punishing those who copy your ideas, your "IP" isn't worth shit.
This is completely different from real property, which can actually be defended by its owner. "Intellectual" property, however, is completely dependent on an all-powerful government entity and obtrusive laws for enforcement. And, even then, a large percentage of people just completely ignore IP anyways, and get away with it.
I'd say the best way to prove the absurdity of these "property" owners whining is to start taking away the ridiculous laws that government enforces on behalf of intellectual property, and see what happens.
Why is this so difficult for employers to comprehend?
If you're paying someone to do a complex job (hint: if it costs $1 million to replace them, it's a complex job), and they die/quit/retire, find a smart person to replace them. Don't find two dipshits to replace them. Don't give Suzy the secretary a $2 raise to do their job (unless Suzy the secretary really is a smart person, in which case, why weren't you paying Suzy more to begin with?)
I've seen it happen over and over again. Smart person runs entire company single-handedly. Smart person quits/dies. Company panics. Company spends ungodly sum of money to completely redesign whatever it is the smart person was doing. New system ends up missing functionality and costing the company loss of productivity.
Every time, something tells me that if this person was smart enough to do everything they were doing, there was probably a reason for it. That's not to say they can't be replaced, just that they probably can't be replaced with any random dipshit, or any random piece of off-the-shelf software.
So, if you're a manager/owner, and you find yourself in this situation: when smart person quits, put an ad in the paper, hire a headhunter, find someone with an IQ of 130 to replace them. Pay them 20% more than you were paying the previous person. Don't worry about whether the new person has experience doing exactly what the previous person did. Don't worry about redesigning anything. If something needs to be changed, the new smart person will be perfectly capable of changing it.
One of these could heat an entire neighborhood. District heating could become a major new market in populous areas of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if Google could pull that off.
started making some kind of strangely huge and complicated "communicator" that crashed every ten minutes.
I can't remember using Netscape 3.0, but I used 4.0 quite a bit on a Windows 98 machine, and Netscape was far more stable than Internet Explorer. I could literally use it for hours at a time, with multiple windows open. I tried using IE more than a few times, and multiple browser windows caused IE (really the entire OS) to choke after a while. If you compare the integrated components of IE, memory usage wasn't even that much more for the Netscape suite.
Anyways, if you look at the graph of usage you'll see that, while the Netscape suite was released in '96, Netscape share didn't really begin to plummet until '98, when Microsoft integrated IE 5.0 into Windows.
Did you purchase that UID or something? How did you get such a low number and be so out of it?
Europe uses quite a bit of Linux. They were asleep during the "computer revolution" (really the pee-cee revolution) because, instead of tax codes that promote ass-in-seat employment and corporate welfare, they have an extensive system of social welfare.
Instead of paying people to pile into their SUVs and drive across town on ill-gotten oil in order to sit on their fat asses doing nothing and collect their dole, developed European countries reward their citizens for *not* wasting natural resources, time, and their health doing worthless paperwork.
Europe doesn't need people to click on widgets all day long. Mindless tasks are performed by capable, purpose-built software, not by dimwits using Windows. You know, like the way things used to be done here in the US before somebody put Bill & Co. in charge.
They don't have a "computer industry" because the "computer industry" in the US is basically a waste of time, recreating the same software every few years with a new language, new widget set, and new OS. By ignoring Windows, Europe can come out ahead of the US in what really matters, not in worthless metrics of how much money changed hands.
Just because the system has a little switch that says "violate privacy", and that switch is currently "off", doesn't mean there is no need for concern. History has shown that governments will abuse any power they are granted.
In some way or another, we're all paying for these "useful services" that just happen to also be useful for tracking us like animals.
Would you help your neighbor build a nuclear weapon, as long as he promises not to detonate it? What if he forcibly extracted money from you in order to build a nuclear weapon, telling you it is for your own good. Would you be at all suspicious?
Don't you think there are more useful things your government could be doing than building systems like these? How do you expect to be able to use your car at all when the oil runs out? Is it really better to force terrorists to use mass transit instead of roadways?
It's already a stated objective of both the US and the UK governments to reduce the number of people eligible to use the roads. Do you honestly believe the point of this system is to help everyone use the roads more efficiently, or to prevent people from using the roads at all?
So we have customers who don't want the less-integrated version
Hold your horses, there. Nobody said that.
The fact is that people want as much as they can get for as little cost possible. People want a media player. Unfortunately, at the moment, Windows Media Player is the best they can get, so they want it. Integration has little to do with it. It's cost/benefit. And more importantly, it's cost/benefit right now.
The problem with antitrust remedies is that, in the computer industry, they come years too late. Netscape was a smoldering shell by the time MS was let off the hook in its US antitrust case. Real is damn close. Five years ago, I was installing RealPlayer on desktops and disabling WMP. Today, I'd have to be mad to do so. I haven't seen a website that required RealPlayer in ages.
Right now, I'd like to have a "less integrated" version of Windows, without Internet Explorer. That's because, right now, there's a viable competitor: Firefox. It took years for Firefox to emerge as a viable competitor to IE, and that was with help from the remains of Netscape.
The fact that Windows Media Player is the only viable option right now is not a condemnation of the usefulness of this antitrust case, but an affirmation of it's basic premise: that, left unchecked, MS will use its monopoly position to decimate otherwise viable competitors. In the time it took to prosecute this case, Microsoft has already taken the market to the point that nobody cares enough to want an unbundled version.
Had MS been forced to unbundle Media Player years ago, there would already be viable media player competitors from which to choose. As it is, there are not. Condemning the unbundling of a virtual monopoly after, what, six months, is completely pointless. It will take years for the effects of this remedy to be felt.
Slashdot Mirror
-Thomas Jefferson
That is the difference.
Governments exist to prohibit actions which are injurious. Religions exist to proscribe actions which are beneficial.
Both are necessary parts of a healthy society, yet they serve different purposes. The reason for this separation is that governments have the power to enforce their policies, through physical violence, against the will of the individual. Religion does not.
Religion is voluntary. Government is not.
To effect the highest level of individual freedom, it is as important that governments have the power of force as it is that religions do not. History has shown that both religions that act with the power of government, and governments that dictate with the expansive ethical mandate of religion, quickly become vehicles of tyranny and oppressors of freedom that effectively resist overthrow.
The Supreme Court recognized this distinction in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins (367 U.S. 488):
Secular Humanism, while not a religion in the traditional sense, is a system of belief that proscribes ethical behaviour. Some say it has permeated our society, and infiltrated our government under the radar of most people's typical view of what constitutes a religion. Yet it is a religion, in the sense of the Constitution, nonetheless.
The key to this distinction is understanding the Jefferson quote above, along with the basic rights of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". You have a right to Liberty, and to pursue those things which bring you Happiness. You are free from government-imposed restrictions or duties beyond those which restrict and punish actions which are injurious to others. Governments may not legislate morality. You are free to follow your own set of moral guidelines, as a religion, or none at all. "Good behaviour", in the form of religion, cannot be foisted upon you just as you may not foist your religion upon others.
It is unfortunate that such reasonable tenets of our original government have been so badly eroded as to nearly the point of unrecognizability.
they're meant to die in war.
Well, I didn't really define it. I just repeated it. But I assume it has the general meaning you would expect. A "monolithic" operating system is highly integrated, with irreplaceable components. A "modular" OS would be more flexible, have multiple, interchangeable options for major components. In a "modular" OS, components can be removed without causing adverse effects, yet the lack of standards can make setup and use more difficult. A "monolithic" OS has many standard components higher up the application stack, which have numerous cross-requirements, such that, for instance, removing a spellchecker might cause your e-mail client to fail.
"Monolithic" operating systems are usually easy to setup, impossible to upgrade, and can be supported by a small group of programmers apart from the environment in which they are used, along with relatively incapable administrators willing to perform mindless, repetitive tasks, perfect for a commercial OS. "Modular" systems are more difficult to setup initially, easier to upgrade (especially incrementally), and require (and enable) a more cohesive inteface between those who create the OS and those who use it, perfect for capable sysadmins, and Open Source Software.
A good example of each would be something like Debian versus something like OSX. Debian, as a "modular" OS, packages almost every OSS program out there, yet sets very few defaults. OSX, on the other hand, comes out-of-the-box with a full set of default programs and relatively little support for integration of 3rd party applications. Or you can think something like Windows 3.1 with 3rd party browsers, versus Windows 95 with Internet Explorer, or, in a more general sense, KDE versus a lightweight DE like blackbox.
What specific features contribute to a "modular" OS? I'd like to say things like robust, version and upgrade-aware package management. Obviously, a compiler and development tools and the ability of admins to modify the OS, which are lacking in proprietary commercial software, limited in some commercial Linux distributions (such as Linspire), and difficult or discouraged in others, such as Fedora. Or, lacking source availability, a robust community of interoperable, 3rd party software, and a generally application-neutral OS design. All of these requirements, to a certain extent, also necessitate a long development and support lifecycle.
But, in reality, those things are just symptoms of a much deeper cause. The actual, driving force behind modular operating systems is the concept of the "programmer-admin". A "programmer-admin", while perhaps not a full time programmer, is at least capable of diagnosing complex problems and submitting patches and valuable bug reports to upstream sources. Consequently, the "programmer-admin" doesn't spend much time further up the application stack, such as tasks like helping users write reports and general end-user training. The main task of the "programmer-admin" is to maintain and incrementally improve the functionality of the OS. As such, she must be capable of playing an integral role in the development process. Depending on the size of the userbase and IT staff, the "programmer-admin" may even specialize on a specific part of the OS, or ignore userland applications entirely.
However, this study, and many "enterprises", expressly forbid admins from programming. Using commercial, "monolithic" operating systems, most sysadmins are too busy trying to integrate 3rd party components and performing upgrades to be able to make real contributions to an OS, which will most likely render any improvements worthless at the next upgrade. The result is that admins perform a variety of incidental tasks, from minor upgrades to purchasing to user training, mostly nothing special or requiring extensive skills or ability, instead of truly beneficial, long-lasting work. Unless the client is large enough to garner special attention from the OS vendor, the OS is written by programmers who have little contact with end-users, and important functiona
So, the admins were free to use any tools they wanted, and this was supposed to be a test of Linux, yet you dictated components, (proprietary, binary-only components that you refuse to disclose, and that apparently weren't even supported on the Linux OS used,) based on market share. And Linux failed because, in order to comply with these requirements, your genuis admins performed a glibc upgrade that broke the system???
Why am I supposed to take this seriously again?
Because you are a sheep-person. ESR tends to be a bit, umm, over-the-top. Dumb animals interpret passionate communication as a threat.
Dr. Thompson, however, communicates in a calm, soothing manner. He exudes compassion and empathy. This communication style places you at ease, and lowers your natural adversion to foreign objects and ideas. By communicating in a manner that lowers your stress level, he enables your higher functions (what little there seem to be) a chance to absorb his ideas.
So, at a basic level, whenever you see something that you don't quite understand, which, for you, could be a lot of things, you try to interpret it based on the manner of communication, rather than what was actually communicated. This post, for instance, tends to cast you in a rather dim light. You will interpret it as threatening. If, on the other hand, I had written something like "I understand your concern," or "I see what you're asking," instead of "you are a sheep-person," you would have taken the time to understand what it is I'm saying.
They upgraded glibc? On SuSE? These "admins" aren't qualified to administer their home computers, let alone anything important.
[At best, your study seems to show that the GNU/Linux distribution you selected was not particularly good at this task. But why does that show that the ``monolithic" style of Windows is better per se than the ``modular" style of GNU/Linux distributions?]
That pretty much sums up the entire study. This isn't really a test of Windows versus Linux, but a test of "modular" operating systems versus "monolithic" operating systems. And, unfortunately, the study didn't even do a good job of testing that.
Linux happens to include several distributions, some more "monolithic" than "modular". Unsuprisingly, the "monolithic" versions are usually those used by "enterprises", such as RedHat and SuSE. The "modular" operating systems, such as Debian, are almost universally ignored by businesses, though you will find IT personnel swear by them. There are Linux distributions that adhere to the Unix philosophy, and there are those that try to emulate Windows and Apple in the name of "ease of use". Hell, even some of SCO's products are more "modular" than commercial Linux distributions.
By requiring "enterprise" sysadmins and a Linux distro that is geared towards "enterprises", the study preselected a Linux competitor with which Windows can easily compete: admins (probably used to using Windows) using Linux distros that attempt to emulate Microsoft's "monolithic" operating system. By virtue of the fact that Microsoft has been building "monolithic" operating systems for at least a decade longer than any of these Linux companies even existed, that the vast majority of Linux components are designed to be used instead in a "modular" fashion, and that most "enterprises" wouldn't know proper system administration from their own asses, anyone can see that this test is designed to fail.
I've spent the last one and a half years doing this exact same study. Guess what I found? You can't treat "monolithic" operating systems, RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Windows, as though they were "modular". Though doing so is easier with Linux, it's not recommended, and distro makers such as RedHat explicitly warn against doing so. Any IT guy learns this lesson about six months into his career. You either find a truly "modular" OS, such as Debian, or a good Unix, or you very carefully buy products made only by Microsoft or by companies joined at the hip with Microsoft. That is, if you choose modularity, you choose Unix. If you choose out-of-the-box integration, you choose Apple or try to navigate the Microsoft "ecosystem", and you pay monopoly rents for doing so. The people who choose RedHat and SuSE, and expect it to be Windows at this stage, are kidding themselves.
The real headline should be: "Linux admins tasked with using Linux in the same retarded-ass way as Windows, fail." Which should be no suprise.
But the important thing to take out of this is that it is neither technical necessity nor user requirements that make operating systems less "modular", and thus less flexible, less powerful, and ultimately less valuable. It is the commercial requirements of the operating system manufacturers themselves. It is the fact that the OS is commercial that makes it difficult to upgrade, impossible to integrate, and expensive to maintain. The evolution of commercial Linux distributions towards the "monolithic" model of Microsoft, and the concomitant decline in their quality, has proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. At most, this study only serves to highlight what any competent Linux admin already knew.
Forget about improvements to catalysts. This is the real breakthrough.
Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae:
Growing enough biodiesel to provide all of our transportation needs on less than 3% of our cropland sounds like the holy grail of energy independence.
1 acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 55 bushels of beans. That same acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 250 bushels of corn.
Those figures sound like they're based on fertilizer use. Fertilizer production is highly dependent upon oil. That's where most of the energy use comes from in studies that include it. Pimental, for instance, says planting, growing and harvesting that much (1 acre) corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels . That figure is clearly not just based on tractor use alone.
And regardless, comparing number of bushels is completely misleading. Oil processing from soy is basically just extraction. Ethanol production from corn is much more complex, and more energy-intensive. Believe me, the net energy balance of corn ethanol is around 140%, much less than that of biodiesel.
Not to mention that you need to cart around those hydrocarbons in a vehicle, generally, whereas electricity can be transported at significantly less cost (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of dollars).
What are you talking about? How do you propose to transport *electricity* at less cost than hydrocarbons? Batteries?
As for efficiency, it means almost nothing next to actual cost. Play around with this spreadsheet for a while if you don't believe me. It compares the cost of storing electricity from wind generators, in lead acid batteries versus converting (through "inefficient" processes) to either hydrogen or methanol, and back to electricity by burning in an internal combustion engine and generator. The "inefficiency" of all those conversions is made up for by simply using more wind generators to produce more electricity. See which one is cheaper.
It's happening, though you have to start with more fundamental processes and work your way up. Basically if you can make hydrogen and carbon monoxide, you can make anything.
how much energy from fertilizer does it take to make this biodiesel?
Not much. Biodiesel is made from soybeans, or rapeseed, both of which have relatively light fertilizer requirements.
You'll find studies that say otherwise, from Pimental et al., but he analyzes biofuels as they are produced today, not as they could be most economically produced without fossil fuels. His argument is typically that subsidies are a waste of resources. And though he sometimes likes to expand that argument to say biofuels will always be a waste of time, he's wrong. The problem is not that biofuels are inherently inefficient, it's that the production methods in use today are optimized for high fertilizer use, becuase that's most economical at the moment.
From other studies, the net energy balance of biodiesel is usually something like 300%, which is twice that of ethanol from corn.
And that's why he said "on a $/watt basis."
I thought of that too. But, in this instance, is it really important?
Think of when a person would use a browser remotely over an X session. Isn't it more important to have a usable browser on the local machine than to have quick access to a browser via X11?
And if they do run a remote browser, for something like LTSP, aren't they going to be using a local network, with relatively a fast connection anyways?
So really you're talking about people who access a browser, remotely via X11, over a slow connection. Who does that?
While I'd prefer a solution that can be tuned to specific usages, ie. fat client, thin client, and standalone, isn't tuning for standalone really the best overall option?
I'm testing out browsers for use on some old machines as web kiosks. Basically, my choices are:
These machines (P1), and lots of machines like them, pretty much max out at about 64 megs of RAM. I could probably find more RAM, but it'd be costly, and there are usually hardware compatibility problems.
Although I'm leaning towards Opera at the moment, I was using Konqueror for a while. Linux does a great job of swapping, and Konqueror is quite snappy, so even with low memory it's a viable option. But, with all the libraries that Konqueror requires, 64 megs is kind of pushing it.
And there is a decided trend in hardware towards less memory and faster processors. It's not uncommon to find Pentium III's with only 128 megs of RAM. Unfortunately, many open source programs are written without limited memory requirements in mind.
It's kind of humbling to think that, as few as five years ago, a Pentium I with 64 megs of RAM would run an entire OS and web browser without so much as touching swap space. Today, you have to use apps designed for embedded machines to run in 64 megs of RAM, and you're lucky if you can run more than one app at a time.
From my testing, Firefox is barely outside the range of viable options for a machine with 64 megs of RAM. But as with any performance tuning, there are probably trade-offs. And having lots of options is usually the best strategy. But I think these improvements suggested for Firefox would be beneficial in almost any scenario. Avoiding I/O seems to be the best strategy on any system newer than, say, a Pentium I, when web browsing. So uncompressing images on the fly in exchange for less memory usage would doubtlessly be a good trade-off.
Would there be a United States without King George III?
The US and many other Democratic Republics are modeled from
the Parliamentary system.
If there was a Boston Tea Party of sorts and people threw away the British government we would rely on the Colonists to lead the way. I wonder if advancements would
equal or match those from the UK?
"Intellectual property" is nothing but government-granted monopoly. Without a sovereign punishing those who copy your ideas, your "IP" isn't worth shit.
This is completely different from real property, which can actually be defended by its owner. "Intellectual" property, however, is completely dependent on an all-powerful government entity and obtrusive laws for enforcement. And, even then, a large percentage of people just completely ignore IP anyways, and get away with it.
I'd say the best way to prove the absurdity of these "property" owners whining is to start taking away the ridiculous laws that government enforces on behalf of intellectual property, and see what happens.
Why is this so difficult for employers to comprehend?
If you're paying someone to do a complex job (hint: if it costs $1 million to replace them, it's a complex job), and they die/quit/retire, find a smart person to replace them. Don't find two dipshits to replace them. Don't give Suzy the secretary a $2 raise to do their job (unless Suzy the secretary really is a smart person, in which case, why weren't you paying Suzy more to begin with?)
I've seen it happen over and over again. Smart person runs entire company single-handedly. Smart person quits/dies. Company panics. Company spends ungodly sum of money to completely redesign whatever it is the smart person was doing. New system ends up missing functionality and costing the company loss of productivity.
Every time, something tells me that if this person was smart enough to do everything they were doing, there was probably a reason for it. That's not to say they can't be replaced, just that they probably can't be replaced with any random dipshit, or any random piece of off-the-shelf software.
So, if you're a manager/owner, and you find yourself in this situation: when smart person quits, put an ad in the paper, hire a headhunter, find someone with an IQ of 130 to replace them. Pay them 20% more than you were paying the previous person. Don't worry about whether the new person has experience doing exactly what the previous person did. Don't worry about redesigning anything. If something needs to be changed, the new smart person will be perfectly capable of changing it.
A 40 ft shipping container has a surface area of something more like:
(40 * 8) * 4 + (8 * 8) * 2 ==
1408 sq. ft.
which, for 1 megawatt, is more like 710 watts/ sq. ft.
One of these could heat an entire neighborhood. District heating could become a major new market in populous areas of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if Google could pull that off.
Perhaps they can pair it with the CIA's renewable energy shipping container.
started making some kind of strangely huge and complicated "communicator" that crashed every ten minutes.
I can't remember using Netscape 3.0, but I used 4.0 quite a bit on a Windows 98 machine, and Netscape was far more stable than Internet Explorer. I could literally use it for hours at a time, with multiple windows open. I tried using IE more than a few times, and multiple browser windows caused IE (really the entire OS) to choke after a while. If you compare the integrated components of IE, memory usage wasn't even that much more for the Netscape suite.
Anyways, if you look at the graph of usage you'll see that, while the Netscape suite was released in '96, Netscape share didn't really begin to plummet until '98, when Microsoft integrated IE 5.0 into Windows.
Did you purchase that UID or something? How did you get such a low number and be so out of it?
Europe uses quite a bit of Linux. They were asleep during the "computer revolution" (really the pee-cee revolution) because, instead of tax codes that promote ass-in-seat employment and corporate welfare, they have an extensive system of social welfare.
Instead of paying people to pile into their SUVs and drive across town on ill-gotten oil in order to sit on their fat asses doing nothing and collect their dole, developed European countries reward their citizens for *not* wasting natural resources, time, and their health doing worthless paperwork.
Europe doesn't need people to click on widgets all day long. Mindless tasks are performed by capable, purpose-built software, not by dimwits using Windows. You know, like the way things used to be done here in the US before somebody put Bill & Co. in charge.
They don't have a "computer industry" because the "computer industry" in the US is basically a waste of time, recreating the same software every few years with a new language, new widget set, and new OS. By ignoring Windows, Europe can come out ahead of the US in what really matters, not in worthless metrics of how much money changed hands.
Just because the system has a little switch that says "violate privacy", and that switch is currently "off", doesn't mean there is no need for concern. History has shown that governments will abuse any power they are granted.
In some way or another, we're all paying for these "useful services" that just happen to also be useful for tracking us like animals.
Would you help your neighbor build a nuclear weapon, as long as he promises not to detonate it? What if he forcibly extracted money from you in order to build a nuclear weapon, telling you it is for your own good. Would you be at all suspicious?
Don't you think there are more useful things your government could be doing than building systems like these? How do you expect to be able to use your car at all when the oil runs out? Is it really better to force terrorists to use mass transit instead of roadways?
It's already a stated objective of both the US and the UK governments to reduce the number of people eligible to use the roads. Do you honestly believe the point of this system is to help everyone use the roads more efficiently, or to prevent people from using the roads at all?
So we have customers who don't want the less-integrated version
Hold your horses, there. Nobody said that.
The fact is that people want as much as they can get for as little cost possible. People want a media player. Unfortunately, at the moment, Windows Media Player is the best they can get, so they want it. Integration has little to do with it. It's cost/benefit. And more importantly, it's cost/benefit right now.
The problem with antitrust remedies is that, in the computer industry, they come years too late. Netscape was a smoldering shell by the time MS was let off the hook in its US antitrust case. Real is damn close. Five years ago, I was installing RealPlayer on desktops and disabling WMP. Today, I'd have to be mad to do so. I haven't seen a website that required RealPlayer in ages.
Right now, I'd like to have a "less integrated" version of Windows, without Internet Explorer. That's because, right now, there's a viable competitor: Firefox. It took years for Firefox to emerge as a viable competitor to IE, and that was with help from the remains of Netscape.
The fact that Windows Media Player is the only viable option right now is not a condemnation of the usefulness of this antitrust case, but an affirmation of it's basic premise: that, left unchecked, MS will use its monopoly position to decimate otherwise viable competitors. In the time it took to prosecute this case, Microsoft has already taken the market to the point that nobody cares enough to want an unbundled version.
Had MS been forced to unbundle Media Player years ago, there would already be viable media player competitors from which to choose. As it is, there are not. Condemning the unbundling of a virtual monopoly after, what, six months, is completely pointless. It will take years for the effects of this remedy to be felt.