1) Most universities determine the grade in the class by how well you do in relation to your classmates, not by a fixed percentage of correct answers. If you only get 30% right in a test, and you answered the most questions correctly, you get an A. (Unless the professor has a different policy and the tenure to enforce it.) If your classmates are pumping out functionally correct programs on paper, and you aren't, you should not get an A because you "tried" hard to learn the class material, or can regurgitate theory but cannot code for your life.
The tragic reality is that in many competitive majors, you end up being responsible for a ridiculous amount of knowlege in a class, some of which would be more appropriate in an advanced class. This is deliberate; to ensure the people who can regurgitate the most get A's, and the also-rans arbitrarily get B's, C's, etc. "Separate the pre-meds from the med-techs." You should always strive to absorb the most amount of knowlege, but if you can't outperform enough of your other classmates, it means you should be looking for another field of study (and thus career) where you can perform better in relation to your peers. Everyone was not meant to be a programmer or a computer specialist.
2) On a final exam, the professor should not be using as a program question something that would require 500 lines of code. But asking to implement a data structure in code, or a basic algorithm, like a heap sort, should be perfectly reasonable task to be completed in a set time. The professor takes off points in syntax, and your other classmates can code on paper with less errors than you, whallah, they have a greater mastery of the course material than you. They should get the higher grade. An aside: if you can't code in your head under pressure, you have no business picking a career in the computer industry.
3) If you were truly a bright and mature student worthy of a higher grade than your classmates, and you were aware that you have a deficiency with programming on paper, you would PREPARE for the challenge you know you will confront at exam time, not whine that it is unfair. This can easily be done by writing every programming assignment on paper before implementing it in an IDE. Yeah it takes inordinate amounts of time, and yeah, you won't have a reference book in the exam room, but practice makes perfect.
When I went to college, IDE's did not exist. The line editor we used to input code on the mainframe made edlin a pleasurable experience by comparison. It was faster to write programs on paper, and that's what many people did, including your professor. Did this generation wallow in self-pity and not participate in the computer revolution because we had to write our program exams on paper? (And before you get bent out of shape by the presentation of my context, please re-read (3).)
I could blather on forever about exceptional cases, post-primary education, etc. but it can be boiled down to the final clue:
4) Life is unfair, college is a subset of life, and a bachelors degree does not mean the possessor mastered an academic subject. Grow up, make the difficult decisions, do better, and please not let this diatribe be a waste of our time.
Have no fear, the X.2 API is bein sorted out. People are holding off on porting the HURD to L4 until the L4 X.2 API is finalized. My guess is that porting will begin this Summer.
That is wonderful news! I was under the impression L4 had languished or had been abandoned. (Don't understand the continued MACH development, unless they don't think L4 will be ready for a while.) Wow, this almost makes Hurd viable. We could see a good implementation of Hurd in two years.
As for the u-kernel being written in C++, the comment I made was more of a *wow*, rather than an indictment of L4. In the right hands, C++ can be just as space and performance efficient as C. From a pure performance standpoint, you'd rather have the u-kernel in assembler. But if the performance hit in C++ is as low as 15% compared to an assembler version, I'd have to say it would be well worth it. The IPC/SMP abstractions are such that it would be much more clearly expressed in C++ than assembler. And like you said, routines can always be re-coded in assembler if needed.
NeXTStep, OpenStep, MacOS X run on a u-kernel based on MACH. They do not run on the publicly available MACH kernel. And if you haven't noticed, OS X hardly runs like greased lightning either (except to a Mac evangelist).
Let me bum you out some more. Check out the L4 pages on implementations.
There are 2-4 implementations of L4 that are geared towards the x86 family. The assembler one is implemented by someone who appears to have lost interest in it. The other implementations are in C++!
I can't find it anymore, but there was a page buried there that mentioned that L4 requiring some redesign to better support SMP (I think). I'm guessing part of the reason why HURD doesn't flat out switch to L4 is that L4's interface is still a moving target.
MACH is an old and flawed u-kernel implementation. Until HURD ports itself to a better one, HURD will always be slower than Linux and a more bug ridden OS. u-kernel OS implementations have proven to work with products like QNX, but HURD can only embarrass u-kernel advocates with its current foundation.
Its more annoying when advocates bitch and moan that "Linux is a 40 yr old design". So is about everything that is sucessful on the market. Do these guys really expects us to drop what works to what cannot work well in its current state? As is, HURD is an embarrassment to O/S purists. Its the "portable" O/S that can't even work well on ONE hardware architecture!
Its sad that HURD lacks interested, talented programmers, but its strategic stewardship is its downfall. Or the difference between a Torvalds and an RMS. I don't think HURD announcements deserve to be put on the front page of/. until HURD has addressed its u-kernel situation.
If the title was "US to build Moon base", 90% of the discussions would be related to technical issues, and similar things.
This is/. . Get real. Programming discussions aren't even 90% about technical issues.
When the title is "China to build Moon base", 90% of the discussions are related to 'communists', 'stealing technology', 'human rights'.
What's sad is any idiot who would actually think that you empirically verified that 90% of the responses of this topic were about "communists", "stealing technology", or "human rights". It really kills your credibility when you manufacture percentages to underline your points.
Re:perhaps that's their advantage over the US
on
China Plans Moonbase
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· Score: 2
But more on topic, I seriously doubt that the goal is to mine the moon. The resources up there would cost way too much to properly exploit and send back to the Earth when there are still plenty of resources here to exploit.
Other than a theoretical waypoint for space exploration (or military installation), mining would be the only value a moonbase would have. Everyone says its too expensive the same way scientist said it was impossible to fly; too focused on current technologies and paradigms.
Its possible to have a robotically run mining operation. This nukes all the costs of sending and maintaining humans. Solar energy is practical in space, and nobody cares about nuclear waste in space. Instead of trying to use rockets to send back the payload, it could be accomplished by sending packaged ore by an alternate delivery system, like a railgun. The package would only need an automated chute. The most expensive part would probably be the collection area (probably at sea). And of course, the occasional human(s) that would need to be sent for maintenance that couldn't be accomplished by the robots. (What people don't see is that will be the entre for humans into space. A commercial motivation to colonize space, with humans as a cost-efficient or integral function to the enterprise.)
The only thing left needed would be a world resolution to not exploit mining resources on earth; the world gets an environmental lift. Of course, that is not economically efficient, but neither is preventing whaling or trying to prevent global warming.
Well, those pork projects that you're complaining about usually aren't too useless. Shockingly, new highways and bridges provide real, tangible benefits to a lot of people. They create LOTS of jobs, and they tend to make life easier for the people who use them.
They create jobs for construction workers and they are out of job as soon as the highway/bridge is completed. Highways do not create jobs any more than the government is an economical way of creating jobs. Right now there are highways in the US that have been built where the traffic is near zero, because they do not connect economic sectors in a timely manner, or have residents along the highway that directly benefit from it. They are the equivalent of WEP jobs that take taxpayers' money away from the economy to benefit politicians and a couple lucky localities.
Re:It was done with 1960s technology once...
on
China Plans Moonbase
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· Score: 2
And what would be DONE at a moon base to JUSTIFY the investment??? Why would Bill Gates want to lose 40 billion dollars to say "I put men on the moon"?
The '60 was a different era in history. The US was ridiculously wealthy in comparison to other nations, could PISS AWAY money on a space program, and had the nationalistic will to do it, much like the Egyptians had 3000-4000 years ago to build pyramids. So life isn't going to resemble Star Trek, Space 1999, etc. any time soon. That's life. Deal with it, kid.
There are two crippling factors that prevent humans moving forward into space. 1) The lack of a commercial motivation to do so. 2) This horrible dependency on the US gov't to implement pipedreams. NASA/JPL and their ilk conspire and screw up anything that could move us forward. The Space Shuttle, while quite an engineering feat, is an utter failure in its purpose; to economically send payloads into space. All that money sunk into the Shuttle could have been used for practical ventures to move us into space.
The key to moving to space is to focus on finding a commercial motivation. The only 3 things I would like to see from the US gov't would be research to make cheaper space delivery systems, a commitment to move non-military satellite launches to privately owned launch companies, and a program in robotics to go to the moon, do surveying, and setup a prototype, self-sufficient robotic mining operation. Once you have those 3 things, we'll have a reason to move to space.
Yes, if you can pile up enough money in front of a corporation, you will eventually own them. Its all about who owns 51% of the shares. Corporations where the founders hold the "controlling" shares may be invulnerable to takeover, but anyplace else, its fair game. The board of directors do not "own" the company. They can only make the buyout process more costly. Usually, the price/value is too high to make it worthwhile to do a takeover.
The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news
That makes absolutely no sense.
Read the article, not the/. blurb! Love never made any such statment in the article. Timothy botched the recap. The closest statement that I can pick out which may correspond to what Sanpitch was trying to summarize was:
Ransom Love: I hate to take a negative and entirely make it into a positive, but in reality some of it is just the ongoing work of streamlining the business, and, frankly, we're making tremendous progress there.
Translation: "I really hate sounding like I'm full of s**t, but one of my responsibilities as CEO is to put a positive spin on "screwing the pooch". So I'm going to put the blame the negative quarter on restructuring and streamlining, and we did such a tremendous job, it can only get better from this point."
(Rant: I submit a wonderful article on how IIS grew market share at the height of the "Code Red" contagion, and it gets rejected. Meanwhile, drivel from the CEO of a non-player in the Linux world is given the front page. *rrrrrr*)
What do you do when *all* the candidates are getting bribed?
Start your own political party. Try to see if you can get the judicial system to chase the down the lawbreakers. And then some people would recommend more radical action when problems cannot be redressed through the current system.
There's always a choice. Vote for the politician that is unbribed. Look at Ventura in Minnesota. He may not be the most desirable of candidate, but if voters took their job seriously, they'd boot out the incumbent, whether democan or republicrat.
Please now realize that nothing you wrote actually refutes what I stated.
Large corporations spend a lot of time lobbying politicians
Money that is spent to communicate to the politician how they want the legislation to read and/or be enacted. After all, they spent all that money to convince the sheep to elect the corporation's manservant, they should at least be able to tell the politician how the company wants them to vote.
and making campaign donations.
Which generally can only be used to convince the sheep to reelect the politician.
I don't think this is done for benevolent reasons. These donations are likely considered an investment, and naturally the corporations expect a return on this investment.
Duh, O King of the Obvious. But it doesn't change the fact that The Rich cannot buy votes to elect their representatives, they can only use it to convince the sheep to elect whom the Rich want to represent them. Think to your Hollings example. Why isn't the CBDTPA on the floor right now? Its because enough politicians have gotten the message from their constituents to kill the bill.
Think. If I don't like the way my representative votes, I can vote for his/her opponent. The corporation can't do that. His campaign contributions can't do that. No amount of TV commercials can do that. My point is: don't blame the rich, blame the voter. If problems in government are not corrected, its because the voters have not booted out the losers who has been working for the corporations instead of the voters. If you tell your representatives how they should vote, and you vote for a polician based on thorough review of his record, consider yourself absolved from the governmental mess that is this country.
You do actually have more power over the government than Microsoft or any large corporation. You have to power to vote your representative out of office, which those companies don't. Rich people can't actually buy votes; they can only spend large amounts of money to convince voters to elect people who will work for big business over the voter's interest. The real problem is that the majority of voters in this country are a bunch of idiots that do not make the effort to find out what is going on, and make their government run the way they wish. On one hand, negative campaign ads were a ridiculous waste of money if targeted to voters like myself. I would never let myself be influenced by what a TV commercial said to determine who I should keep in office. But there are enough retards with voting rights that apparently will let the TV and radio tell them who they should elect. I saw the Clinton/Lewinsky witchhunt as nothing more than rich Republicans trying to subvert the democratic process because they had the money and influence.
Corporations do not buy elections, they spend money to "fool" us into voting for people that will work for the corporations.
Linux doesn't even do SMP that well. You will get better SMP performance from an XP or Win2K box. That's partly what convinced me not to bother getting a dual Athlon PC. Hopefully, Linux 2.6 may deliver a stable NUMA implementation and efficient pthread performance.
solaris for x86 is good for those who are teaching themselves solaris and dont want to spend god knows how much for an overpriced sun box. Kinda nice to throw it on your test box, teach yourself solaris, and be able to get an admin job that way.
Get real, its certainly not good for that. No MSCE is going to be able to competently administer a Solaris workgroup by piddling around with Solaris for x86. Most applications (that mean anything) are not available on the x86 port. While I'm sure a couple of intrepid souls have gotten the foot into the door that way, its about as relevant as getting that admin job from piddling on linux boxes.
The selling point of x86 Solaris is compatibility of the interface. Instead of paying $1.5-3K USD for a solaris workstation for your non-programmers, you can recycle a commercially prevalent (Compaq, Dell) PC and use it as the desktop to whatever UNIX applications you want to run. This product made a lot more sense when workstations were going for $5K, but its not really the case today. But you can get by on a linux client anyway
I think the "Secret Six" need their heads examined. Solaris for x86 may be a cute toy, but standardization of interface certainly isn't a motivation for Sun to bleed programmer salaries to maintain x86 Solaris 9. Not unless there was a sustainable market of anti-Linux commercial purchasers. (Even then, if customers were anal enough about their interface to pay money for an x86 license, they would probably be anal enough to buy a Sun workstation.)
In fact, when Sun shifted over to their Solaris OS, it was quite unstable on the server level (SparcCenter 2000). I was a UNIX sysadmin when they started rolling in the hardware. Picture having hardware shipped before they had an OS ready to run on it. I think Solaris 2.1 was the first release, Solaris 2.2 distribution only lasted 6 months, and it never really got stable until Solaris 2.3 (when the kernel patch exceeded level 40-50. And there were many, many revisions afterwards.)
I saw stills of some of these . . . a guy riding a six-legged beastie (thark?). Kind of stylish and simple, not the lurid Frazetta type art that people seem to envision when ERB stories are mentioned.
It would have to have that lurid Franzetta look in order to really catch the filmgoer's eye! Anything less exotic or lurid would make this movie an intense snoozefest. In fact, I wouldn't want a hint of modernism in this film. It'll be hard to get a suspension of belief considering that Mars is a barren, freezing, poorly lit planet; the movie would have to go for a surreal fantasy landscape.
As I see it, I'd like Sam Raimi producing, and possibly Kevin Smith writing the screenplay. Bruce Campbell would have been killer for the role 10 years ago, but he may be a little long in the tooth now. It would need a record breaking budget to do the CGI justice.
Some reason, I see the Foundation trilogy as a TV mini-series. The key problems would be casting and screenwriting. You can limp around the special effects (but not Warlords of Mars). Another cool idea would be sci-fi series around I Robot/Elijah Bailey.
The "variety pack is roughly $20 USD. Another must buy is a pack of chemical heaters. They look like a plastic bag with flat, metal brillo pad. Stick in the the MRE, put in a little water, and boy does that package get hot! Shipping costs are bundled into the price of each item, and the company puts a 20% discount on the final price. They end up costing slightly more than a TV dinner, and they taste about as good as one. They don't need refrigeration and are great for extended camping trips.
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1) Most universities determine the grade in the class by how well you do in relation to your classmates, not by a fixed percentage of correct answers. If you only get 30% right in a test, and you answered the most questions correctly, you get an A. (Unless the professor has a different policy and the tenure to enforce it.) If your classmates are pumping out functionally correct programs on paper, and you aren't, you should not get an A because you "tried" hard to learn the class material, or can regurgitate theory but cannot code for your life.
The tragic reality is that in many competitive majors, you end up being responsible for a ridiculous amount of knowlege in a class, some of which would be more appropriate in an advanced class. This is deliberate; to ensure the people who can regurgitate the most get A's, and the also-rans arbitrarily get B's, C's, etc. "Separate the pre-meds from the med-techs." You should always strive to absorb the most amount of knowlege, but if you can't outperform enough of your other classmates, it means you should be looking for another field of study (and thus career) where you can perform better in relation to your peers. Everyone was not meant to be a programmer or a computer specialist.
2) On a final exam, the professor should not be using as a program question something that would require 500 lines of code. But asking to implement a data structure in code, or a basic algorithm, like a heap sort, should be perfectly reasonable task to be completed in a set time. The professor takes off points in syntax, and your other classmates can code on paper with less errors than you, whallah, they have a greater mastery of the course material than you. They should get the higher grade. An aside: if you can't code in your head under pressure, you have no business picking a career in the computer industry.
3) If you were truly a bright and mature student worthy of a higher grade than your classmates, and you were aware that you have a deficiency with programming on paper, you would PREPARE for the challenge you know you will confront at exam time, not whine that it is unfair. This can easily be done by writing every programming assignment on paper before implementing it in an IDE. Yeah it takes inordinate amounts of time, and yeah, you won't have a reference book in the exam room, but practice makes perfect.
When I went to college, IDE's did not exist. The line editor we used to input code on the mainframe made edlin a pleasurable experience by comparison. It was faster to write programs on paper, and that's what many people did, including your professor. Did this generation wallow in self-pity and not participate in the computer revolution because we had to write our program exams on paper? (And before you get bent out of shape by the presentation of my context, please re-read (3).)
I could blather on forever about exceptional cases, post-primary education, etc. but it can be boiled down to the final clue:
4) Life is unfair, college is a subset of life, and a bachelors degree does not mean the possessor mastered an academic subject. Grow up, make the difficult decisions, do better, and please not let this diatribe be a waste of our time.
Have no fear, the X.2 API is bein sorted out. People are holding off on porting the HURD to L4 until the L4 X.2 API is finalized. My guess is that porting will begin this Summer.
That is wonderful news! I was under the impression L4 had languished or had been abandoned. (Don't understand the continued MACH development, unless they don't think L4 will be ready for a while.) Wow, this almost makes Hurd viable. We could see a good implementation of Hurd in two years.
As for the u-kernel being written in C++, the comment I made was more of a *wow*, rather than an indictment of L4. In the right hands, C++ can be just as space and performance efficient as C. From a pure performance standpoint, you'd rather have the u-kernel in assembler. But if the performance hit in C++ is as low as 15% compared to an assembler version, I'd have to say it would be well worth it. The IPC/SMP abstractions are such that it would be much more clearly expressed in C++ than assembler. And like you said, routines can always be re-coded in assembler if needed.
NeXTStep, OpenStep, MacOS X run on a u-kernel based on MACH. They do not run on the publicly available MACH kernel. And if you haven't noticed, OS X hardly runs like greased lightning either (except to a Mac evangelist).
Let me bum you out some more. Check out the L4 pages on implementations.
There are 2-4 implementations of L4 that are geared towards the x86 family. The assembler one is implemented by someone who appears to have lost interest in it. The other implementations are in C++!
I can't find it anymore, but there was a page buried there that mentioned that L4 requiring some redesign to better support SMP (I think). I'm guessing part of the reason why HURD doesn't flat out switch to L4 is that L4's interface is still a moving target.
MACH is an old and flawed u-kernel implementation. Until HURD ports itself to a better one, HURD will always be slower than Linux and a more bug ridden OS. u-kernel OS implementations have proven to work with products like QNX, but HURD can only embarrass u-kernel advocates with its current foundation.
Its more annoying when advocates bitch and moan that "Linux is a 40 yr old design". So is about everything that is sucessful on the market. Do these guys really expects us to drop what works to what cannot work well in its current state? As is, HURD is an embarrassment to O/S purists. Its the "portable" O/S that can't even work well on ONE hardware architecture!
Its sad that HURD lacks interested, talented programmers, but its strategic stewardship is its downfall. Or the difference between a Torvalds and an RMS. I don't think HURD announcements deserve to be put on the front page of
If the title was "US to build Moon base", 90% of the discussions would be related to technical issues, and similar things.
/. . Get real. Programming discussions aren't even 90% about technical issues.
This is
When the title is "China to build Moon base", 90% of the discussions are related to 'communists', 'stealing technology', 'human rights'.
What's sad is any idiot who would actually think that you empirically verified that 90% of the responses of this topic were about "communists", "stealing technology", or "human rights". It really kills your credibility when you manufacture percentages to underline your points.
But more on topic, I seriously doubt that the goal is to mine the moon. The resources up there would cost way too much to properly exploit and send back to the Earth when there are still plenty of resources here to exploit.
Other than a theoretical waypoint for space exploration (or military installation), mining would be the only value a moonbase would have. Everyone says its too expensive the same way scientist said it was impossible to fly; too focused on current technologies and paradigms.
Its possible to have a robotically run mining operation. This nukes all the costs of sending and maintaining humans. Solar energy is practical in space, and nobody cares about nuclear waste in space. Instead of trying to use rockets to send back the payload, it could be accomplished by sending packaged ore by an alternate delivery system, like a railgun. The package would only need an automated chute. The most expensive part would probably be the collection area (probably at sea). And of course, the occasional human(s) that would need to be sent for maintenance that couldn't be accomplished by the robots. (What people don't see is that will be the entre for humans into space. A commercial motivation to colonize space, with humans as a cost-efficient or integral function to the enterprise.)
The only thing left needed would be a world resolution to not exploit mining resources on earth; the world gets an environmental lift. Of course, that is not economically efficient, but neither is preventing whaling or trying to prevent global warming.
Actually, its a secret US/British organization, probably run by Americans. The Brits merely did the documentary.
Well, those pork projects that you're complaining about usually aren't too useless. Shockingly, new highways and bridges provide real, tangible benefits to a lot of people. They create LOTS of jobs, and they tend to make life easier for the people who use them.
They create jobs for construction workers and they are out of job as soon as the highway/bridge is completed. Highways do not create jobs any more than the government is an economical way of creating jobs. Right now there are highways in the US that have been built where the traffic is near zero, because they do not connect economic sectors in a timely manner, or have residents along the highway that directly benefit from it. They are the equivalent of WEP jobs that take taxpayers' money away from the economy to benefit politicians and a couple lucky localities.
And what would be DONE at a moon base to JUSTIFY the investment??? Why would Bill Gates want to lose 40 billion dollars to say "I put men on the moon"?
The '60 was a different era in history. The US was ridiculously wealthy in comparison to other nations, could PISS AWAY money on a space program, and had the nationalistic will to do it, much like the Egyptians had 3000-4000 years ago to build pyramids.
So life isn't going to resemble Star Trek, Space 1999, etc. any time soon. That's life. Deal with it, kid.
There are two crippling factors that prevent humans moving forward into space. 1) The lack of a commercial motivation to do so. 2) This horrible dependency on the US gov't to implement pipedreams. NASA/JPL and their ilk conspire and screw up anything that could move us forward. The Space Shuttle, while quite an engineering feat, is an utter failure in its purpose; to economically send payloads into space. All that money sunk into the Shuttle could have been used for practical ventures to move us into space.
The key to moving to space is to focus on finding a commercial motivation. The only 3 things I would like to see from the US gov't would be research to make cheaper space delivery systems, a commitment to move non-military satellite launches to privately owned launch companies, and a program in robotics to go to the moon, do surveying, and setup a prototype, self-sufficient robotic mining operation. Once you have those 3 things, we'll have a reason to move to space.
According to John Ashcroft, yes! "They should be very careful about what they say..."
Yes, if you can pile up enough money in front of a corporation, you will eventually own them. Its all about who owns 51% of the shares. Corporations where the founders hold the "controlling" shares may be invulnerable to takeover, but anyplace else, its fair game. The board of directors do not "own" the company. They can only make the buyout process more costly.
Usually, the price/value is too high to make it worthwhile to do a takeover.
Wow, reminds me of this apropos joke...
The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news
That makes absolutely no sense.
Read the article, not the /. blurb! Love never made any such statment in the article. Timothy botched the recap. The closest statement that I can pick out which may correspond to what Sanpitch was trying to summarize was:
Ransom Love: I hate to take a negative and entirely make it into a positive, but in reality some of it is just the ongoing work of streamlining the business, and, frankly, we're making tremendous progress there.
Translation: "I really hate sounding like I'm full of s**t, but one of my responsibilities as CEO is to put a positive spin on "screwing the pooch". So I'm going to put the blame the negative quarter on restructuring and streamlining, and we did such a tremendous job, it can only get better from this point."
(Rant: I submit a wonderful article on how IIS grew market share at the height of the "Code Red" contagion, and it gets rejected. Meanwhile, drivel from the CEO of a non-player in the Linux world is given the front page. *rrrrrr*)
What do you do when *all* the candidates are getting bribed?
Start your own political party. Try to see if you can get the judicial system to chase the down the lawbreakers. And then some people would recommend more radical action when problems cannot be redressed through the current system.
There's always a choice. Vote for the politician that is unbribed. Look at Ventura in Minnesota. He may not be the most desirable of candidate, but if voters took their job seriously, they'd boot out the incumbent, whether democan or republicrat.
Not quite.
Please now realize that nothing you wrote actually refutes what I stated.
Large corporations spend a lot of time lobbying politicians
Money that is spent to communicate to the politician how they want the legislation to read and/or be enacted. After all, they spent all that money to convince the sheep to elect the corporation's manservant, they should at least be able to tell the politician how the company wants them to vote.
and making campaign donations.
Which generally can only be used to convince the sheep to reelect the politician.
I don't think this is done for benevolent reasons. These donations are likely considered an investment, and naturally the corporations expect a return on this investment.
Duh, O King of the Obvious. But it doesn't change the fact that The Rich cannot buy votes to elect their representatives, they can only use it to convince the sheep to elect whom the Rich want to represent them. Think to your Hollings example. Why isn't the CBDTPA on the floor right now? Its because enough politicians have gotten the message from their constituents to kill the bill.
Think. If I don't like the way my representative votes, I can vote for his/her opponent. The corporation can't do that. His campaign contributions can't do that. No amount of TV commercials can do that. My point is: don't blame the rich, blame the voter. If problems in government are not corrected, its because the voters have not booted out the losers who has been working for the corporations instead of the voters. If you tell your representatives how they should vote, and you vote for a polician based on thorough review of his record, consider yourself absolved from the governmental mess that is this country.
You do actually have more power over the government than Microsoft or any large corporation. You have to power to vote your representative out of office, which those companies don't. Rich people can't actually buy votes; they can only spend large amounts of money to convince voters to elect people who will work for big business over the voter's interest.
The real problem is that the majority of voters in this country are a bunch of idiots that do not make the effort to find out what is going on, and make their government run the way they wish. On one hand, negative campaign ads were a ridiculous waste of money if targeted to voters like myself.
I would never let myself be influenced by what a TV commercial said to determine who I should keep in office. But there are enough retards with voting rights that apparently will let the TV and radio tell them who they should elect. I saw the Clinton/Lewinsky witchhunt as nothing more than rich Republicans trying to subvert the democratic process because they had the money and influence.
Corporations do not buy elections, they spend money to "fool" us into voting for people that will work for the corporations.
Linux doesn't even do SMP that well. You will get better SMP performance from an XP or Win2K box. That's partly what convinced me not to bother getting a dual Athlon PC. Hopefully, Linux 2.6 may deliver a stable NUMA implementation and efficient pthread performance.
solaris for x86 is good for those who are teaching themselves solaris and dont want to spend god knows how much for an overpriced sun box. Kinda nice to throw it on your test box, teach yourself solaris, and be able to get an admin job that way.
Get real, its certainly not good for that. No MSCE is going to be able to competently administer a Solaris workgroup by piddling around with Solaris for x86. Most applications (that mean anything) are not available on the x86 port. While I'm sure a couple of intrepid souls have gotten the foot into the door that way, its about as relevant as getting that admin job from piddling on linux boxes.
The selling point of x86 Solaris is compatibility of the interface. Instead of paying $1.5-3K USD for a solaris workstation for your non-programmers, you can recycle a commercially prevalent (Compaq, Dell) PC and use it as the desktop to whatever UNIX applications you want to run. This product made a lot more sense when workstations were going for $5K, but its not really the case today. But you can get by on a linux client anyway
I think the "Secret Six" need their heads examined. Solaris for x86 may be a cute toy, but standardization of interface certainly isn't a motivation for Sun to bleed programmer salaries to maintain x86 Solaris 9. Not unless there was a sustainable market of anti-Linux commercial purchasers. (Even then, if customers were anal enough about their interface to pay money for an x86 license, they would probably be anal enough to buy a Sun workstation.)
In fact, when Sun shifted over to their Solaris OS, it was quite unstable on the server level (SparcCenter 2000). I was a UNIX sysadmin when they started rolling in the hardware. Picture having hardware shipped before they had an OS ready to run on it. I think Solaris 2.1 was the first release, Solaris 2.2 distribution only lasted 6 months, and it never really got stable until Solaris 2.3 (when the kernel patch exceeded level 40-50. And there were many, many revisions afterwards.)
I saw stills of some of these . . . a guy riding a six-legged beastie (thark?). Kind of stylish and simple, not the lurid Frazetta type art that people seem to envision when ERB stories are mentioned.
It would have to have that lurid Franzetta look in order to really catch the filmgoer's eye! Anything less exotic or lurid would make this movie an intense snoozefest. In fact, I wouldn't want a hint of modernism in this film. It'll be hard to get a suspension of belief considering that Mars is a barren, freezing, poorly lit planet; the movie would have to go for a surreal fantasy landscape.
As I see it, I'd like Sam Raimi producing, and possibly Kevin Smith writing the screenplay. Bruce Campbell would have been killer for the role 10 years ago, but he may be a little long in the tooth now. It would need a record breaking budget to do the CGI justice.
Some reason, I see the Foundation trilogy as a TV mini-series. The key problems would be casting and screenwriting. You can limp around the special effects (but not Warlords of Mars).
Another cool idea would be sci-fi series around I Robot/Elijah Bailey.
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The "variety pack is roughly $20 USD. Another must buy is a pack of chemical heaters. They look like a plastic bag with flat, metal brillo pad. Stick in the the MRE, put in a little water, and boy does that package get hot! Shipping costs are bundled into the price of each item, and the company puts a 20% discount on the final price. They end up costing slightly more than a TV dinner, and they taste about as good as one. They don't need refrigeration and are great for extended camping trips.