Second, how do you predict the future other than extrapolating a trend? You can't depend on some miraculous technology that hasn't been developed.
Except of course, they have been developed. Dozens of them. Solar Power, Wind Power, Wave Power, Thermal Gradient Power, Geo Thermal Power, ethanol, biodeisel, algae deisel, kinetic effeciency (super cars), lighting effeciency (compact flourescents), air conditioning efficiency (see Lee Eng Lock's SuperSymmetry in Singapore for the world's most effecient AC), manufacturing efficiency, farming effeciency and so on and on and on.
The problem is that lazy westerners are always expecting some "magic bullet", meaning they don't have to think too much, work too much or change too much. I mean, for christ's sake, Americans would rather murder a couple of hundred thousand third world brown people and send their economy into massive war-based deficit than change the type of car they drive, the refrigerator they buy, or even the light-bulbs in their house.
I am not a "peak oil" believer, however I think that the idea of peak oil may be usefull in forcing social change in arrogant westerners who have all the resources available to them to create a world that is technologically advanced AND energy efficient.
Ahhhh! Then they are illegal combatants, and are not afforded the rights of the sea!
So instead of keeling them or making them walk the plank, we can lock them up indefinitely with objective of obtaining Pirate intelligence for the War On Piracy.
But is this really so different from self-proclaimed college-drop-out "Linux gurus" who whip together sucky and insecure "solutions" in MySQL and PHP using the "powerful open Enterprise OSS LAMP-stack" ? You can write good as well as bad code both on Linux and Windows, and there are more than enough examples for both on both platforms.
Not to detract from you main point that you can write crap code anywhere...
I think that the difficulty in reaching a point where you can actually code in Linux is so great that the lazy tend to drop off early, like a type of natural selection, where 'gene pool' of linux programmers is biased towards the patient, persistent and practical.
We aren't killing the ones that such up most of the CO2. The main CO2 uptake is via plankton, which precipitate CO2 as carbonates on the sea floor.
Errp. Wrong answer. We are killing the oceans as we speak. We are depleting them of biodiversity (reducing nutrient density) and poisoning them with industrial waste.
The problem is that we are now dumping far, far more CO2 into the atmosphere from industrial processes than from volcanoes, coal seams etc. Not just a little more, but orders of magnitude more.
Can you give a citation for that figure. I can believe double, but not an order of magnitude more. I am happy to be proved wrong, but would need scientfic data to back it up.
It has always been understood that global warming is complex.
No, it hasn't. There is even now wide spread thinking that it's simple.
However it is not a good idea to mess about seriously with any of the factors that influence climate.
Damn, we better plug those volcanoes then! Until recently they put more CO2 into the atmosphere than we did.
It is potentially damaging to dump large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere no matter how complex things are.
How do you know this? Every living organism on this planet that uses photosynthesis (such as plankton and trees) inhales or absorbs CO2. Maybe if we stopped killing those organisms, then they would suck up the CO2 like good uns?
In a way, it is worse because we know it is complex - so the long term effects can't be easily predicted.
It's not worse at all. It's exactly the same. The earth (for some reason) maintains a dynamic equilibrium. By putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, other systems will respond to that, and change the weather in ways we can't really predict on a micro scale, but have some idea of what will happen on the macro scale.
Not dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is definitely within our control.
Er.. no it isn't. I think you mean from so-called 'fossil' fuels. Well, heres a surprise. There were oil fires before we started putting the stuff in automobiles. There are coal seams that have been burning for at least thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Volcanoes spew CO2 by the ton, and all of the non=photosynthetic organisms are breathing the stuff into the atmosphere as you read this. Perhaps if you stop breathing, my childrens future is assured?
CO2 is a non-issue. A red herring to get the Greens chasing the wrong path. The greatest threat to us humans comes from lack of oxygen and poisonning, something the Powers That Be want to continue doing with impunity. So lets get the hippies riled up about Carbon Dioxide so that they forget that Rachel Carson ever existed.
Maybe you should just consider better purchasing decisions?
Ummm.. I'm perfectly happy with the hardware I purchased. What part of that needs to be better. Oh... you mean I should just accept whatever hardware works with my operating system, rather than buy the hardware I want.
It's not impossible to find a large number of those devices which do work with Linux.
I don't want a large number of devices. I want specific devices. I want the device that has the right features at the right price at the time I want to purchase it. Is that so difficult to understand?
So how does this prove that you can give me 10 out of 10 in plug and play hardware? Oh, that's right, it doesn't. So you are trying to cover a lie by blaming me for 'bad purchasing decisions'.
I hope you buy the right size underwear.
I hope that one day your rudeness will not exceed your stupidity.
I can give them 10 out of 10 with fewer bugs and a more socially responsible business model. Who should be receiving the benefit of massive government contracts? Me, or MS?
Is this on a Mac?
So far I have four pieces of hardware that have no drivers for Linux (I currently am evaluating Knoppix).
I agree with your general premise, however I disagree that Microsoft has a natural monopoly. In fact I would say that Microsoft's monopoly is un-natural.
You are correct that in natural monopolies that the employees tend to engage in medieaval behaviours, and given the monopoly status, such behaviour does not dramatically affect the business of the monopoly in question.
But Microsods have an un-natural monopoly, and this kind of behaviour offers specific opportunities to it's competitors;
1) The assets of a software company are in the brains of the people working there. Unlike a natural monopoly (in which one cannot move the roads or the telegraph poles easily), labour has mobility. Disaffected programmers jump ship, going to other software companies in the process.
2) Security issues can only be 'spun' so often before consumers start to wise up. Building well tested, robust software changes Microsoft's business model (in which it copies other companies ideas and releases them faster). Changing your business model requires a culture that is flexible, not bureaucratic. As it is, MS are now stuck in 'never deliver' land.
3) The web (or http protocol) is still moving towards being a 'platform' from which applications are launched. In this space Microsoft has many competitors, some of whom are moving much faster than a medieaval behomoth.
Don't for a second delude yourself into thinking that in this respect IT is "special" and that "it doesn't happen to us".
I can't enjoy this delusion for even 1 second????;)
It will give you a valid drive (like x:) to which you can cd to. Not the most painless approach, but it works, for some definitions of "works".
Yes, but then I need to use a drive letter, rather than the server name. I can go WindowsKey->Run->\\app011\\c$ and it will pop up a explorer window, but try going >cd \\app011\\c$ in cmd, and you get that cute little message.
I guess Windows guys are just not command line focused. That's OK, but I thought it made for an amusing sig. Guess I was wrong;)
being ex CA and a current IBM employee I can assure you that both are about as beuracatic an org as they come. Anything you have heard to the contrary is bullshit.
Forgive my incredulity, but hard as I try, I find it difficult to believe that a person unable to spell bureaucratic would be employed at CA or IBM.
However, I seem to recall IBM being on the eve of destruction in the late eighties, and were able to restructure their business in such a way that they changed both their revenue and cost base in the course of 5-8 years. This would imply to me that there is still an ability within the culture to be flexible and innovative. As for CA, I have no doubt you are correct.
yep no beuracatic org ever survives in IT. That is why oracle, apple, IBM, SAP, CA et al all went broke years ago.
You seem to be implying that these companies have not undergone a (or many) radical change to their culture since their inception. I can't speak for SAP or CA, but I would say that your implication is dead wrong for both IBM and Apple.
Do you have a tale to the contrary, or was your post just a quip?
Most of the guy's complaints could come straight from a Dilbert cartoon. Seems to me like someone hasn't worked for a large bureaucratic organisation before.
On the other hand, the computer business is not an environment in which bureaucracies survive for very long. At least, not without radical change.
Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for.
I've already moderated this conversation, but this really made me laugh.
It is like when Windows98 allowed multiple audio streams to be processed and play simultaneously. Not a single review even noticed this, but yet it was a big step ahead in consumer OSes.
When I got Win98, my Mac had already been playing multiple audio streams for 6 years!
And as another poster pointed out, it wasn't even a feature of Win98, it was a feature of the soundblaster cards at the time.
I'm all for defending out favourite OS, but it really helps if you know what you are talking about.
Good catch, thats what happens when my dyslectic typing slips through unnoticed.:) We could go on like this all day, but it would be cruel to pick on a dyslexic.
...but I would imagine that even if everyone stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, what's already out there is already out there.
Incorrect! Or partially anyway. In addition to things that produce carbon dioxide (cars, volcanos, mammals, power stations, etc) there are also things that consume it (plants, plankton, ????).
Additionally, these CO2 consuming things are capable (under the right conditions) of absorbing large amounts of CO2 very quickly, especially if they are assisted in their CO2-consuming-endeavours by humans.
The question here is not whether or not the Earth is becoming warmer. Because the earth has been a lot warmer in times gone past, with little ill-effect. The real question is are we changing the weather?
Even in the 21st century, we humans are still at the mercy of the weather. From crop yields, to droughts, to the destruction wreaked by hurricanes, tornados and cyclones, the weather is a force that is still largely beyond our control. Not because we don't know how to influence weather, we do. But because of the energy (or materials) required to make even one tiny little change.
How we are changing the weather is a subject that very few scientists want to broach. It is a taboo topic. Because our "civilisation" is so utterly inured to the practices that affect weather patterns. So it is easier then to claim that all of our problems are due to "greenhouse emissions", because we all know that white people are NEVER going to voluntarily give up their cars or 27 kitchen appliances, and no one has to do anything about it.
You will hear excellent audio on any existing Mac and that should also be the case on the x86 Apple boxes. Apple designs the hardware and software together as a SYSTEM, just like your DVD player, digital TV and any other modern digital electronic device purchased from a reputable brand manufacturer.
Well yes, I suppose so. However the context of the thread was how supporting every Bat-Gai brand of hardware (like the PC and yes, winders does) is not something that Apple wants to do for precisely the reason that so much of it is designed with the sole objective of making it as cheap to mgfr as possible.
We switched the onboard audio off and put in Soundblasters, and it was fine.
Amen to that. It's hard to buy a motherboard without onboard audio these days, and the very first thing I do when I get a new mobo is go to the BIOS settings to turn the damn thing off and install anyone of a number of soundblasters I'v got hanging around in boxes.
Onboard audio just sucks. Plain and simple. Maybe it's me, but I've never heard a good one, and they nearly all have that wonderful high pitched tone that is so responsive to user actions (and the CD, even when reading data).
Slashdot Mirror
Best. Post. Ever.
Second, how do you predict the future other than extrapolating a trend? You can't depend on some miraculous technology that hasn't been developed.
Except of course, they have been developed. Dozens of them. Solar Power, Wind Power, Wave Power, Thermal Gradient Power, Geo Thermal Power, ethanol, biodeisel, algae deisel, kinetic effeciency (super cars), lighting effeciency (compact flourescents), air conditioning efficiency (see Lee Eng Lock's SuperSymmetry in Singapore for the world's most effecient AC), manufacturing efficiency, farming effeciency and so on and on and on.
The problem is that lazy westerners are always expecting some "magic bullet", meaning they don't have to think too much, work too much or change too much. I mean, for christ's sake, Americans would rather murder a couple of hundred thousand third world brown people and send their economy into massive war-based deficit than change the type of car they drive, the refrigerator they buy, or even the light-bulbs in their house.
I am not a "peak oil" believer, however I think that the idea of peak oil may be usefull in forcing social change in arrogant westerners who have all the resources available to them to create a world that is technologically advanced AND energy efficient.
But they're not wearing full pirate regalia!
Ahhhh! Then they are illegal combatants, and are not afforded the rights of the sea!
So instead of keeling them or making them walk the plank, we can lock them up indefinitely with objective of obtaining Pirate intelligence for the War On Piracy.
Shit! Where have I been? Someone promoted you to GOD while I wasn't looking
No
Then go fuck yourself cunt.
I love it when a (code) plan comes together! (lights cigar)
But is this really so different from self-proclaimed college-drop-out "Linux gurus" who whip together sucky and insecure "solutions" in MySQL and PHP using the "powerful open Enterprise OSS LAMP-stack" ? You can write good as well as bad code both on Linux and Windows, and there are more than enough examples for both on both platforms.
...
Not to detract from you main point that you can write crap code anywhere
I think that the difficulty in reaching a point where you can actually code in Linux is so great that the lazy tend to drop off early, like a type of natural selection, where 'gene pool' of linux programmers is biased towards the patient, persistent and practical.
We aren't killing the ones that such up most of the CO2. The main CO2 uptake is via plankton, which precipitate CO2 as carbonates on the sea floor.
Errp. Wrong answer. We are killing the oceans as we speak. We are depleting them of biodiversity (reducing nutrient density) and poisoning them with industrial waste.
The problem is that we are now dumping far, far more CO2 into the atmosphere from industrial processes than from volcanoes, coal seams etc. Not just a little more, but orders of magnitude more.
Can you give a citation for that figure. I can believe double, but not an order of magnitude more. I am happy to be proved wrong, but would need scientfic data to back it up.
It has always been understood that global warming is complex.
.. no it isn't. I think you mean from so-called 'fossil' fuels. Well, heres a surprise. There were oil fires before we started putting the stuff in automobiles. There are coal seams that have been burning for at least thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Volcanoes spew CO2 by the ton, and all of the non=photosynthetic organisms are breathing the stuff into the atmosphere as you read this. Perhaps if you stop breathing, my childrens future is assured?
No, it hasn't. There is even now wide spread thinking that it's simple.
However it is not a good idea to mess about seriously with any of the factors that influence climate.
Damn, we better plug those volcanoes then! Until recently they put more CO2 into the atmosphere than we did.
It is potentially damaging to dump large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere no matter how complex things are.
How do you know this? Every living organism on this planet that uses photosynthesis (such as plankton and trees) inhales or absorbs CO2. Maybe if we stopped killing those organisms, then they would suck up the CO2 like good uns?
In a way, it is worse because we know it is complex - so the long term effects can't be easily predicted.
It's not worse at all. It's exactly the same. The earth (for some reason) maintains a dynamic equilibrium. By putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, other systems will respond to that, and change the weather in ways we can't really predict on a micro scale, but have some idea of what will happen on the macro scale.
Not dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is definitely within our control.
Er
CO2 is a non-issue. A red herring to get the Greens chasing the wrong path. The greatest threat to us humans comes from lack of oxygen and poisonning, something the Powers That Be want to continue doing with impunity. So lets get the hippies riled up about Carbon Dioxide so that they forget that Rachel Carson ever existed.
Maybe you should just consider better purchasing decisions?
.. I'm perfectly happy with the hardware I purchased. What part of that needs to be better. Oh ... you mean I should just accept whatever hardware works with my operating system, rather than buy the hardware I want.
Ummm
It's not impossible to find a large number of those devices which do work with Linux.
I don't want a large number of devices. I want specific devices. I want the device that has the right features at the right price at the time I want to purchase it. Is that so difficult to understand?
So how does this prove that you can give me 10 out of 10 in plug and play hardware? Oh, that's right, it doesn't. So you are trying to cover a lie by blaming me for 'bad purchasing decisions'.
I hope you buy the right size underwear.
I hope that one day your rudeness will not exceed your stupidity.
I can give them 10 out of 10 with fewer bugs and a more socially responsible business model. Who should be receiving the benefit of massive government contracts? Me, or MS?
Is this on a Mac?
So far I have four pieces of hardware that have no drivers for Linux (I currently am evaluating Knoppix).
> Lexmark LaserPrinter.
> BenQ LightScribe DVD-RW.
> Canon Scanner.
> Canon Digital Camera.
I'm at work, so I don't know the model numbers off the top of my head (although I should, I wasted too much of my life looking for damn drivers).
So tell me again, what OS gives me 10 out of 10 plug and play hardware? Oh yeah. That would be Windows, right?
Honestly, making false statements really does NOT help the cause of Linux or Open Source.
because a text command is scarey.
Phew! Because for a minute there I thought that Microsoft sold 6 million copies of DOS.
Ya, dat Google loves open source.
That's why every piece of software they make only runs on WinXP.
Bah.
crazed rabbits
>>That's why I never leave home without my Holy Handgrenade.
Look at the bones !
autopr0n is like, down and stuff
Yeah, whats up with that?
I agree with your general premise, however I disagree that Microsoft has a natural monopoly. In fact I would say that Microsoft's monopoly is un-natural.
;)
You are correct that in natural monopolies that the employees tend to engage in medieaval behaviours, and given the monopoly status, such behaviour does not dramatically affect the business of the monopoly in question.
But Microsods have an un-natural monopoly, and this kind of behaviour offers specific opportunities to it's competitors;
1) The assets of a software company are in the brains of the people working there. Unlike a natural monopoly (in which one cannot move the roads or the telegraph poles easily), labour has mobility. Disaffected programmers jump ship, going to other software companies in the process.
2) Security issues can only be 'spun' so often before consumers start to wise up. Building well tested, robust software changes Microsoft's business model (in which it copies other companies ideas and releases them faster). Changing your business model requires a culture that is flexible, not bureaucratic. As it is, MS are now stuck in 'never deliver' land.
3) The web (or http protocol) is still moving towards being a 'platform' from which applications are launched. In this space Microsoft has many competitors, some of whom are moving much faster than a medieaval behomoth.
Don't for a second delude yourself into thinking that in this respect IT is "special" and that "it doesn't happen to us".
I can't enjoy this delusion for even 1 second????
It will give you a valid drive (like x:) to which you can cd to. Not the most painless approach, but it works, for some definitions of "works".
;)
Yes, but then I need to use a drive letter, rather than the server name. I can go WindowsKey->Run->\\app011\\c$ and it will pop up a explorer window, but try going >cd \\app011\\c$ in cmd, and you get that cute little message.
I guess Windows guys are just not command line focused. That's OK, but I thought it made for an amusing sig. Guess I was wrong
being ex CA and a current IBM employee I can assure you that both are about as beuracatic an org as they come. Anything you have heard to the contrary is bullshit.
Forgive my incredulity, but hard as I try, I find it difficult to believe that a person unable to spell bureaucratic would be employed at CA or IBM.
However, I seem to recall IBM being on the eve of destruction in the late eighties, and were able to restructure their business in such a way that they changed both their revenue and cost base in the course of 5-8 years. This would imply to me that there is still an ability within the culture to be flexible and innovative. As for CA, I have no doubt you are correct.
yep no beuracatic org ever survives in IT. That is why oracle, apple, IBM, SAP, CA et al all went broke years ago.
You seem to be implying that these companies have not undergone a (or many) radical change to their culture since their inception. I can't speak for SAP or CA, but I would say that your implication is dead wrong for both IBM and Apple.
Do you have a tale to the contrary, or was your post just a quip?
Most of the guy's complaints could come straight from a Dilbert cartoon. Seems to me like someone hasn't worked for a large bureaucratic organisation before.
On the other hand, the computer business is not an environment in which bureaucracies survive for very long. At least, not without radical change.
Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for.
I've already moderated this conversation, but this really made me laugh.
It is like when Windows98 allowed multiple audio streams to be processed and play simultaneously. Not a single review even noticed this, but yet it was a big step ahead in consumer OSes.
When I got Win98, my Mac had already been playing multiple audio streams for 6 years!
And as another poster pointed out, it wasn't even a feature of Win98, it was a feature of the soundblaster cards at the time.
I'm all for defending out favourite OS, but it really helps if you know what you are talking about.
Good catch, thats what happens when my dyslectic typing slips through unnoticed. :) We could go on like this all day, but it would be cruel to pick on a dyslexic.
...but I would imagine that even if everyone stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, what's already out there is already out there.
Incorrect! Or partially anyway. In addition to things that produce carbon dioxide (cars, volcanos, mammals, power stations, etc) there are also things that consume it (plants, plankton, ????).
Additionally, these CO2 consuming things are capable (under the right conditions) of absorbing large amounts of CO2 very quickly, especially if they are assisted in their CO2-consuming-endeavours by humans.
The question here is not whether or not the Earth is becoming warmer. Because the earth has been a lot warmer in times gone past, with little ill-effect. The real question is are we changing the weather?
Even in the 21st century, we humans are still at the mercy of the weather. From crop yields, to droughts, to the destruction wreaked by hurricanes, tornados and cyclones, the weather is a force that is still largely beyond our control. Not because we don't know how to influence weather, we do. But because of the energy (or materials) required to make even one tiny little change.
How we are changing the weather is a subject that very few scientists want to broach. It is a taboo topic. Because our "civilisation" is so utterly inured to the practices that affect weather patterns. So it is easier then to claim that all of our problems are due to "greenhouse emissions", because we all know that white people are NEVER going to voluntarily give up their cars or 27 kitchen appliances, and no one has to do anything about it.
You will hear excellent audio on any existing Mac and that should also be the case on the x86 Apple boxes. Apple designs the hardware and software together as a SYSTEM, just like your DVD player, digital TV and any other modern digital electronic device purchased from a reputable brand manufacturer.
Well yes, I suppose so. However the context of the thread was how supporting every Bat-Gai brand of hardware (like the PC and yes, winders does) is not something that Apple wants to do for precisely the reason that so much of it is designed with the sole objective of making it as cheap to mgfr as possible.
We switched the onboard audio off and put in Soundblasters, and it was fine.
Amen to that. It's hard to buy a motherboard without onboard audio these days, and the very first thing I do when I get a new mobo is go to the BIOS settings to turn the damn thing off and install anyone of a number of soundblasters I'v got hanging around in boxes.
Onboard audio just sucks. Plain and simple. Maybe it's me, but I've never heard a good one, and they nearly all have that wonderful high pitched tone that is so responsive to user actions (and the CD, even when reading data).
Cool (I think ... hmmmmm ..... I don't have my tin foil hat on today ... perhaps I should be more paranoid about signing into Google)