Re:The only thing that helps is taxes
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
Taxes are just a slower method of destroying people's stuff. The end result is inevitable: a civil war. Hope that's
what you had in mind.
Taxes is what pays for your public school, and your national defence, and the roads that you use.
And if your vehicle is guzzling to much gas, taxes would pay for your clean air. So, when will you start your civil war? When you're out of money, or when your kids are choking to death.
Re:The only thing that helps is taxes
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 3
Ever think to question why people are buying these vehicles - especially when the sticker is $10K+ over a
midsized auto, the fuel costs are 50% to 100% more, and insurance isn't any cheaper? If these values proposed
are so critical, why aren't we all driving Metros?
Of course I've thought of that, otherwise I wouldn't bother mention taxes. Family incomes are so high that current price of SUVs and gas is not a deterrent. By adding taxes on top of that, people would think twice before they signed up for an S.U.V. Gas prices in U.S are shamefully low compared to people's income. When someone drives 50 miles each way for their commute, alone, in a 3 ton truck, something is not right.
The only thing that helps is taxes
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 3
These attacks may generate some publicity and public debate, but it's really not making a big difference for the environment.
These actions are justifyable from a moral standpoint. When the established government is commiting crimes, the only way to respond to that is overthrowing the government (something that could take 100's of years through democracy, and even then it's not guarenteed success. If lets say the green party got the next president, I find it very likely that the armed forces in cohort with the corporations would arrange a coup d'etat.)
The other way is civil disobedience. That's how the civil rights movement won in the 60's. Now, 40 years after, I am sure most people agree that the civil rights movement did the right thing. If they had obeyed the government, U.S would still have been an apartheid state.
Getting rid of the SUV's could be done really easily: Introduce extra taxes for vehicles with bas gas milage. And on top of that, have taxes on gasoline. We know from experience that increasing the proce of gas will steer consumers towards more efficient cars. That's how the U.S. car industry almost died in the 70s and 80s. Many countries have extreme gas taxation. The consumers complain, but it works. Fewer cars are on the road, and the cars are smaller. The only way to speak to consumers, is through the wallet.
Unfortunately there is absolutely NO political will to get these taxes in place. I'd alomst be tempted to have U.N. collect these taxes, because the environmental damages are not constrained to the habitat of the perpetrators. If you want to play environmental pig, you have to pay the price.
I managed a data center for a large R&D lab -
about 600 servers, mostly HP's
HP servers consume more power than other machines,
and a lot(if not most) of that is to power the fans. If you've looked inside for example a D-class,you'll see some non-impressive hardware, but the fans are impressively big and solid. Same goes for all the HP servers. They all seem to have fans able to handle twice the size of each server..
Sun on the other hand, seem to swing too much the other way. Sun servers are equipped with the minimum amount of cooling, and if not given enough external help, and plenty space they'll shut down all the time. It's funny though, how they always name their server something-Fire
Ditto. My first Linux was a Slackware, too.
A co-worker did the gruntwork of downloading the floppy images, and after he was don with them, I borrowed the floppies and installed slackware on my 486DX 66, with a turbo button. I think I had a 340 MB hard drive, and I used 140 for Win3.1 and 200 for Linux. Those were the days.
Isn't everyone at superbowl trying to get their mug on TV. There's the celebrities who are not sure what sport is being played, there's the overly dressed up fans, (I doubt the police has many green or orange faced suspects in their database anyways) stepping on each others heads, carrying posters with messages to mom. They're not watching the game. They're hoping for the game to watch them.
In fact, these people would be more than happy to drop the football players, and have the field populated with TV cameras aimed at the audience.
So the Superbowl is not going to be the most controversial place to do video surveillance.
I'm more worried about what private persons are doing these days. spycams are so tiny, and can be mounted anywhere. There are perverts setting up shop in bathrooms and showers. Then there are the nosy ones. Hotel security installed spycams in the employee locker rooms. Recently in Boston, a landlord was arrested, after the tennants discovered that he'd been videotaping everything they did in their apartment for years.
I guess the safest thing is to always imagine there might be someone watching. So never do anything you wouldn't want anybody to see.
So what? There was alo Oracle and the NC. Sun tried to launch java machines. Those things never took off, but those kinds of things will always reappear when the market gets it. I am sure many ridiculed Apple for the Newton after it flopped. Now you have a whole industry selling similar devices. The newton was just a bit early, and people didn't know that they needed it.
I could imagine one perfectly good use for cheap X terminals, and that's where money and computers are scarce. You could equip a complete computer lab in a 3.d world high school. Spend money on a fast, decent server, and set up obsolete HW as xterminals. Instead of the lab having 3-4 machines and kids getting one hour of use per week, it now has 20 machines, and the kids get 5 hours per week.
And now they're nothing. It's nice to see that some things works out for the best.
But imagine how easily things could have gone very wrong. Imagine that Rambus was the giant in the industry, and the other manufacturers were small.
In that case, Rambus would have won the lawsuits, or maybe settled. And there would be a company with Microsoft style monopoly.
You'd be paying $300 bucks for your 128 MB instead of $30.
Java enterprise beans, Linux, BSD, and the unlimited supply of strong development environments on free platforms is what makes Microsoft scared.
The developer community loves this free stuff.
The ability to play with new languages, tweak software, and learn new stuff is what attracts developers.
Microsoft knows that the developes of today will be the CTOs and IT managers of tomorrow. The linux crowd of today will one day have the power to decide what goes on Joe Schmoe's desktop at work, what mail servers, databases, and web servers to use. Microsoft is scared to death about what'll happen 10 years down the road, so they've started the battle today before it's too late.
They desperately need to lure new developers into their fold.
Microsoft knows this, and is doing everything to scare future developers away from free software,
and pretending to offer the same freedoms on their platform. It's pure propaganda of course, but as you know: propaganda works, it's been proven many times, and in large scale.
... and Oracle are the only organizations I know of that provide this kind of help
Oracle? I have many times tried to get useful support from Oracle. Out of maybe 20 "experts", 3 or 4 was worth listening to. Some were plainly unqualified, and the less they knew, the more arrogant they were. Others were sales people masquerading as technical people. Some were just body parts sticking out of a suit.
You must clearly have had no contact whatsoever with Oracle, or you must be working for them.
Supported. Mod it up, or I'll boycott Slashdot for a week. (who am I kidding?) It's funny. It's well written. It rhymes. It's got relevant links. It's not all that offtopic. The mother article has no topic, but is a loose collections of bits and pieces. Flamebait? The only war going on is a moderator pissing contest. Even if it had been a duplicate (i don't know that it is), it's a worthy song, and deserves printing.
You've been reading "The hacker's dictionary" too much. Hacking is not a new english word, and is not uniquely used to describe a high level of skill with computers or stuff. You can have a clever "hack". In the british TV series about the defense lawyer Rumpole, he describes himself as an "Old Bailey Hack". A lawyer, or rather someone dabbling with law.
A computer hacker is just someone dabbling with a computer. A persistant hacker dabbles a lot and produces something.
I'd say someone dabbling with bits of hardware to do something it was not supposed to do qualifies as a hack. Didn't exactly cure the cancer, but it's a nifty little hack.
Just to back up my claim that radio is cheap technology, here's a link to
PoW built radios
There was a much smaller model built by Norwegian WWII POW's that used the prisoner's teeth (while still in the mouth of course) as part of the radio, but I can not find a link to that. But it really exists in a museum.
"We think wireless will remain slightly more
expensive because you're talking about radios, and radios are expensive," says Scherf.
Radios are expensive? It's been around forever, and they're dirt cheap. During second world war people made radios using a crystal, and some wiring to their amalgam fillings. What a tosser.
Think about this for a second: One of the suggested killer apps for this useless lan technology is supposed to be internet radio. That's right: They want you to get special networking hardware, buy an internet radio and plug it into an electric outlet. The state of the art networks at the moment are 2 mbps, in practice giving 6-700 kbps. Your radio, at 128 kbps, which I think is minimum for decent sound, would consume
20% of the house bandwidth. Does not compute. There's a reason people use the spoon and not the knife when eating soup.
Other applications was to have appliances talk to each other, for example your dvd player and your tv. If they went with wireless, you could instead do most of the stuff through your remote control.
Most over the posters seemed awed by having internet over the powergrid. If they read the article, it's about home networking using the power lines in the house.
Communication over powergrids exists, but the bandwidth is very low, and it is mostly used for signalling for power grid operation. You could get an internet connection that way, but you wouldn't want to call it broadband.
My rules of thumb whewn buying for linux is
1) Get something cheap
2) get something old
Most of the new funky stuff does not work, because the manufacturers are building everything for the windows market. The older and cheaper stuff is, the better it works IMO, because the brave pioneers have had more time hacking on device drivers.
Look at network cards. Those 3com cards costs a leg and a half, and it can be right out messy to get them working. On the other hand, you can get NE2000 clones for 10 bucks or less. NE2000 clones don't even implement the ethernet specs properly, but because they're so cheap and widely used, they work like a charm for linux.
Same with video and sound cards. New stuff in general sucks. Don't get it unless you're planning on writing the device drivers yourself.
I much prefer linux to other operating systems, and I am a really big cheapskate. I don't cry if I can't get my hands on the latest 5 dimensional video cards, and quadrophonic sound monsters. New stuff is for suckers.
Open Source fanatics will never come to terms with the corporate software
environment and the corporat software people will never come to terms with giving away there "property" for free.
There are more corporations out there than just Microsoft. The goal of open software is not to kill Microsoft. The corporation I work for uses open source software almost exclusively. Not because we have anything against closed source, or unwilling to pay for licenses, but because the open software we are using is good enough for what we're doing. There's so much good stuff out there. More than once have we had the benefit of tweaking the source to do exactly what we want. More than once have we run into bugs, and immediately found a patch.
Microsoft can do business any way they want (and so far they're getting away with it too), but they are in no position to tell other corporations how to run their business. Not everybody's business model can depend on conning QDOS from some guy for $50K and go off and make a trillion on it. Some companies expect to have to make an effort to make their buck.
The only problem is when the lines cross, and the computer is the artist, and you're just someone pushing the buttons. But even in a case like that, it still can be art.
Art is a very subjective thing. When people try to discuss what art is, they can never agree what qualifies. SOme people will disagree because they don't like a particular kind of art, it's ugly, or it didn't seem to require much skill.
My definition is: "If the artist says it is art, it's art". Kurt Vonnegut had a somewhat stricter definition in one of his books, but I can't remember what it was, but it had something to do with putting your ass on the line.
Or in this case, what would Linus Torvalds say?
And RMS for that matter.
The really funny part is that they're calling their distribution OpenLinux.
And if they get away with it (I say just let them, they'll only lose market share) we now have the final proof that GPL is not a viral license. Eat that Mr. Bill and Mr. Mundie! Got any convincing arguments left?
Eric Cartman will kick their ass. Heck, even Mr. Garrison could kick their ass.
I am sure all have noticed that long-haul is virtually free now. You can get long distance for less than 5 cpm, and even international long distance is dirt cheap. (As long as you stay away from fraudulent companies like AT&T, SPRINT &
MCI, that is)
It used to be that the long distance part of my phone bill was at least 5 times as much as the local part. Now it is less. It costs me more to call 20 miles up the road than costs to call Europe, and for a call to europe, the RBOC gets a handsome cut of the charge. While the LD companies have built bandwidth and cut prices, the RBOCs have increased their prices, and given nothing back.
It's a bloody shame that's what it is. And I bet it's illegal too, only the FCC does not have the will to do anything. They're perfectly happy and in bed with Darth Vader.
Give me a break, Compaq fronted the Alpha architecture for a good three years, even when it was obvious that it was more or less dead. How many of their Alpha systems did you buy during that time? Thats what I thought.
No we won't give you a break, cause you're flat out wrong. Silently burying and fronting are different verbs. A few months after the aquisition, I went to compaq's site to grab some specs on their alpha servers, and it was almost impossible to find. Even when I got to the right place, the pages were littered with promotions for PC storage and desktop systems. It's obvious that they intended to bury the Alpha without much ado.
I know they've still done excellent engineering, coming up with a very powerful NUMA architecture,
but that has happened in spite of Compaq's official line, not because of "fronting"
Compaq bought DEC for their value as solution provider; their hoards of NT consultants. They never knew what to do with the Alpha.(Or rather, they knew what to do with it, and now they're doing it)
I have a hint for you: The army is trying to promote peace!!! If we have the best weapons, no one will attack us. If they do,
the war will be quick and they will be dead with minimal losses on our side. How is that wrong?
Nothing wrong with that, as long as the Department of Defense focuses on defense. However, most of the resources seem to go towards making better weapons for offense. Coastal forts, anti-air defense, domestic air force, and a reserve-based army, navy patrols, sub patrols, border patrols should go a long way towards defending U.S. All those blitz wars in foreign countries has nothing to do with defense.
Obviously the mindset of military professionals has not changed at all, Glasnost, post-cold war, or whatever.
When I was in the (mandatory) army (not US), we
were learnt about nuclear warfare, and were equipped with gas masks, some special clay to use for uniforn cleaning, and even a special 'atom-brush', to sweep atomic downfall off the uniform. The uniform had a seamless flaps over the pockets, so-called atom-flaps. We knew that if someone dropped a nuclear bomb, we'd be screwed anyways.
All those old useless gadgets are no different from what the hawks are planning for future recruits. It is supposed to give them a false sense of security as they are being fed to the cannons. A soldier with his legs blown off won't have much need for automatic band-aid.
Gotta give them some credit for their openness. The brain implant idea might cause a little trouble for their recruiting, or maybe they can cut a deal with the prison system.
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Taxes is what pays for your public school, and your national defence, and the roads that you use. And if your vehicle is guzzling to much gas, taxes would pay for your clean air. So, when will you start your civil war? When you're out of money, or when your kids are choking to death.
Of course I've thought of that, otherwise I wouldn't bother mention taxes. Family incomes are so high that current price of SUVs and gas is not a deterrent. By adding taxes on top of that, people would think twice before they signed up for an S.U.V. Gas prices in U.S are shamefully low compared to people's income. When someone drives 50 miles each way for their commute, alone, in a 3 ton truck, something is not right.
These actions are justifyable from a moral standpoint. When the established government is commiting crimes, the only way to respond to that is overthrowing the government (something that could take 100's of years through democracy, and even then it's not guarenteed success. If lets say the green party got the next president, I find it very likely that the armed forces in cohort with the corporations would arrange a coup d'etat.)
The other way is civil disobedience. That's how the civil rights movement won in the 60's. Now, 40 years after, I am sure most people agree that the civil rights movement did the right thing. If they had obeyed the government, U.S would still have been an apartheid state.
Getting rid of the SUV's could be done really easily: Introduce extra taxes for vehicles with bas gas milage. And on top of that, have taxes on gasoline. We know from experience that increasing the proce of gas will steer consumers towards more efficient cars. That's how the U.S. car industry almost died in the 70s and 80s. Many countries have extreme gas taxation. The consumers complain, but it works. Fewer cars are on the road, and the cars are smaller. The only way to speak to consumers, is through the wallet.
Unfortunately there is absolutely NO political will to get these taxes in place. I'd alomst be tempted to have U.N. collect these taxes, because the environmental damages are not constrained to the habitat of the perpetrators. If you want to play environmental pig, you have to pay the price.
HP servers consume more power than other machines, and a lot(if not most) of that is to power the fans. If you've looked inside for example a D-class,you'll see some non-impressive hardware, but the fans are impressively big and solid. Same goes for all the HP servers. They all seem to have fans able to handle twice the size of each server..
Sun on the other hand, seem to swing too much the other way. Sun servers are equipped with the minimum amount of cooling, and if not given enough external help, and plenty space they'll shut down all the time. It's funny though, how they always name their server something-Fire
Ditto. My first Linux was a Slackware, too. A co-worker did the gruntwork of downloading the floppy images, and after he was don with them, I borrowed the floppies and installed slackware on my 486DX 66, with a turbo button. I think I had a 340 MB hard drive, and I used 140 for Win3.1 and 200 for Linux. Those were the days.
In fact, these people would be more than happy to drop the football players, and have the field populated with TV cameras aimed at the audience.
So the Superbowl is not going to be the most controversial place to do video surveillance.
I'm more worried about what private persons are doing these days. spycams are so tiny, and can be mounted anywhere. There are perverts setting up shop in bathrooms and showers. Then there are the nosy ones. Hotel security installed spycams in the employee locker rooms. Recently in Boston, a landlord was arrested, after the tennants discovered that he'd been videotaping everything they did in their apartment for years.
I guess the safest thing is to always imagine there might be someone watching. So never do anything you wouldn't want anybody to see.
csh considered harmful? Is this a reincarnation of the C-shell, but now we can run it everywhere? Good Ole' Bill Joy will be happy.
OK, I'll admit I didn't read the article, and I bet it has nothing to do with the infameous csh, but I'd thought I'd mention it anyways.
I could imagine one perfectly good use for cheap X terminals, and that's where money and computers are scarce. You could equip a complete computer lab in a 3.d world high school. Spend money on a fast, decent server, and set up obsolete HW as xterminals. Instead of the lab having 3-4 machines and kids getting one hour of use per week, it now has 20 machines, and the kids get 5 hours per week.
But imagine how easily things could have gone very wrong. Imagine that Rambus was the giant in the industry, and the other manufacturers were small. In that case, Rambus would have won the lawsuits, or maybe settled. And there would be a company with Microsoft style monopoly.
You'd be paying $300 bucks for your 128 MB instead of $30.
Java enterprise beans, Linux, BSD, and the unlimited supply of strong development environments on free platforms is what makes Microsoft scared.
The developer community loves this free stuff. The ability to play with new languages, tweak software, and learn new stuff is what attracts developers. Microsoft knows that the developes of today will be the CTOs and IT managers of tomorrow. The linux crowd of today will one day have the power to decide what goes on Joe Schmoe's desktop at work, what mail servers, databases, and web servers to use. Microsoft is scared to death about what'll happen 10 years down the road, so they've started the battle today before it's too late.
They desperately need to lure new developers into their fold.
Microsoft knows this, and is doing everything to scare future developers away from free software, and pretending to offer the same freedoms on their platform. It's pure propaganda of course, but as you know: propaganda works, it's been proven many times, and in large scale.
Oracle? I have many times tried to get useful support from Oracle. Out of maybe 20 "experts", 3 or 4 was worth listening to. Some were plainly unqualified, and the less they knew, the more arrogant they were. Others were sales people masquerading as technical people. Some were just body parts sticking out of a suit.
You must clearly have had no contact whatsoever with Oracle, or you must be working for them.
Gross.
You've been reading "The hacker's dictionary" too much. Hacking is not a new english word, and is not uniquely used to describe a high level of skill with computers or stuff. You can have a clever "hack". In the british TV series about the defense lawyer Rumpole, he describes himself as an "Old Bailey Hack". A lawyer, or rather someone dabbling with law.
A computer hacker is just someone dabbling with a computer. A persistant hacker dabbles a lot and produces something.
I'd say someone dabbling with bits of hardware to do something it was not supposed to do qualifies as a hack. Didn't exactly cure the cancer, but it's a nifty little hack.
There was a much smaller model built by Norwegian WWII POW's that used the prisoner's teeth (while still in the mouth of course) as part of the radio, but I can not find a link to that. But it really exists in a museum.
Radios are expensive? It's been around forever, and they're dirt cheap. During second world war people made radios using a crystal, and some wiring to their amalgam fillings. What a tosser.
Think about this for a second: One of the suggested killer apps for this useless lan technology is supposed to be internet radio. That's right: They want you to get special networking hardware, buy an internet radio and plug it into an electric outlet. The state of the art networks at the moment are 2 mbps, in practice giving 6-700 kbps. Your radio, at 128 kbps, which I think is minimum for decent sound, would consume 20% of the house bandwidth. Does not compute. There's a reason people use the spoon and not the knife when eating soup.
Other applications was to have appliances talk to each other, for example your dvd player and your tv. If they went with wireless, you could instead do most of the stuff through your remote control.
Most over the posters seemed awed by having internet over the powergrid. If they read the article, it's about home networking using the power lines in the house.
Communication over powergrids exists, but the bandwidth is very low, and it is mostly used for signalling for power grid operation. You could get an internet connection that way, but you wouldn't want to call it broadband.
1) Get something cheap
2) get something old
Most of the new funky stuff does not work, because the manufacturers are building everything for the windows market. The older and cheaper stuff is, the better it works IMO, because the brave pioneers have had more time hacking on device drivers.
Look at network cards. Those 3com cards costs a leg and a half, and it can be right out messy to get them working. On the other hand, you can get NE2000 clones for 10 bucks or less. NE2000 clones don't even implement the ethernet specs properly, but because they're so cheap and widely used, they work like a charm for linux.
Same with video and sound cards. New stuff in general sucks. Don't get it unless you're planning on writing the device drivers yourself.
I much prefer linux to other operating systems, and I am a really big cheapskate. I don't cry if I can't get my hands on the latest 5 dimensional video cards, and quadrophonic sound monsters. New stuff is for suckers.
There are more corporations out there than just Microsoft. The goal of open software is not to kill Microsoft. The corporation I work for uses open source software almost exclusively. Not because we have anything against closed source, or unwilling to pay for licenses, but because the open software we are using is good enough for what we're doing. There's so much good stuff out there. More than once have we had the benefit of tweaking the source to do exactly what we want. More than once have we run into bugs, and immediately found a patch.
Microsoft can do business any way they want (and so far they're getting away with it too), but they are in no position to tell other corporations how to run their business. Not everybody's business model can depend on conning QDOS from some guy for $50K and go off and make a trillion on it. Some companies expect to have to make an effort to make their buck.
Wear black, and behave like an artiste.
The only problem is when the lines cross, and the computer is the artist, and you're just someone pushing the buttons. But even in a case like that, it still can be art.
Art is a very subjective thing. When people try to discuss what art is, they can never agree what qualifies. SOme people will disagree because they don't like a particular kind of art, it's ugly, or it didn't seem to require much skill. My definition is: "If the artist says it is art, it's art". Kurt Vonnegut had a somewhat stricter definition in one of his books, but I can't remember what it was, but it had something to do with putting your ass on the line.
And RMS for that matter.
The really funny part is that they're calling their distribution OpenLinux.
And if they get away with it (I say just let them, they'll only lose market share) we now have the final proof that GPL is not a viral license. Eat that Mr. Bill and Mr. Mundie! Got any convincing arguments left?
Eric Cartman will kick their ass. Heck, even Mr. Garrison could kick their ass.
I am sure all have noticed that long-haul is virtually free now. You can get long distance for less than 5 cpm, and even international long distance is dirt cheap. (As long as you stay away from fraudulent companies like AT&T, SPRINT & MCI, that is)
It used to be that the long distance part of my phone bill was at least 5 times as much as the local part. Now it is less. It costs me more to call 20 miles up the road than costs to call Europe, and for a call to europe, the RBOC gets a handsome cut of the charge. While the LD companies have built bandwidth and cut prices, the RBOCs have increased their prices, and given nothing back.
It's a bloody shame that's what it is. And I bet it's illegal too, only the FCC does not have the will to do anything. They're perfectly happy and in bed with Darth Vader.
No we won't give you a break, cause you're flat out wrong. Silently burying and fronting are different verbs. A few months after the aquisition, I went to compaq's site to grab some specs on their alpha servers, and it was almost impossible to find. Even when I got to the right place, the pages were littered with promotions for PC storage and desktop systems. It's obvious that they intended to bury the Alpha without much ado.
I know they've still done excellent engineering, coming up with a very powerful NUMA architecture, but that has happened in spite of Compaq's official line, not because of "fronting"
Compaq bought DEC for their value as solution provider; their hoards of NT consultants. They never knew what to do with the Alpha.(Or rather, they knew what to do with it, and now they're doing it)
Nothing wrong with that, as long as the Department of Defense focuses on defense. However, most of the resources seem to go towards making better weapons for offense. Coastal forts, anti-air defense, domestic air force, and a reserve-based army, navy patrols, sub patrols, border patrols should go a long way towards defending U.S. All those blitz wars in foreign countries has nothing to do with defense.
All those old useless gadgets are no different from what the hawks are planning for future recruits. It is supposed to give them a false sense of security as they are being fed to the cannons. A soldier with his legs blown off won't have much need for automatic band-aid.
Gotta give them some credit for their openness. The brain implant idea might cause a little trouble for their recruiting, or maybe they can cut a deal with the prison system.