Deregulation may work out in the end, but so far what I've seen doesn't impress me very much.
That's because there really hasn't been full deregulation. The government still has their fist up the companies' asses, it's just that you can't see it when the CEO is standing behind a podium.
There should be at least a few people prowd of providing power to their neighbors. If a city, though good fate, happened to have 30-foot tidal swell in their harbor, I would think building a non-polluting tidal power plant would be great for the local economy. The big problem is that no one has the courage to tell the fishermen "tough noogies."
...when they are cutting costs the level of service usually falls.
Only if deregulation leaves them with a monopoly on thier hands, and any highly regulated system cannot be deregulated overnight. Fixing the damage done by regulation is 10 times harder than it was to naively impelment it. Slashdotters, just look at all the shitty software and IT projects you've worked on for great examples of this ("lets adopt framework XYZ...this newgroup posting said it worked well for them...").
The problem faced by the old BR was that it was forced to provide services where they weren't economically viable...
I guess in the USA we would call these things AMTRAK, the airline industry, and subsidized bus systems in small to mediums cities (most cities just don't have the population density of New York or Chicago).
Indeed, what often happens with deregulation is that you get a lot of people who see how they can make a quick buck and who cares what happens down the road.
The free market would tolerate this only for a relatively short amount of time. For example, UNIX thrashed about for some time, but, now, largely without government intervention, computers work together relatively smoothly. The biggest contribution by the federal government to UNIX was standards rather than laws (take, for example, TCP/IP).
As far as companies finally working it out, CDE was born out of the disparate proprietary GUIs, such as Sun's OpenWindows. Now people can gripe about CDE all they want, but it really isn't that bad (I use it every day--it gets the job done).
We also cannot forget non-government standards bodies, such as ISO, ANSI, IEEE, etc.
Given time, companies will do the right thing, because, eventually, they are left no choice. It is only the flash in the pan companies that do something brash and greedy and leave a burning swath behind them (Microsoft will be one of these companies if they don't change dramatically).
The slower it is (and the more they see), the more people remember that war is dumb.
The History Channel had a documentary about one Christmas day during World War One, where the German and Allied soldiers started singing carols and eventually met each other for a one-day Christmas cease fire (they even held soccer matches with eachother). After that day, they had trouble gathering the motivation to kill eachother, and the military leaders basically had to force the war to continue.
Any war relies on de-humanizing the enemy, which is most often a large collection of ordinary people under different circumstances and under the leadership of a psychopath (Adolph Hitler, Osama bin Laden, etc.).
I'm not suggesting that a zygot is deserving of the same moral considerability that we give a baby or an adult, just that your propostion is false.
I guess my prior argument wasn't aiming at this level of detail. The "programming" of the zygote is certainly different, but it is otherwise the same as other cells (cell membrane, stuff floating around inside, etc.).
I think what many people get hung up on is the "potential" of a zygote, that killing a zygote is somehow murdering someone who never existed. A couple who decides to never have children accomplishes the same effect, at this level. A couple who decides to have children and then waits until the third trimester before having second thoughts are two people that have much deeper and more widespread issues to resolve than just deciding over their child's fate, IMO (their relationship itself should have been aborted, but now they are way beyond the point of no return).
I highly doubt that Mother Nature has any philosophy what-so-ever. Lets not get carried away with our personifications:)
I felt this was an appropriate personification, where Nature can be something of a mentor in our quest for moral guidance. If we wonder whether something is "wrong", such as hunting (of animals) or murder (of humans), looking at established natural events can provide answers. If the killing of animals for food were "wrong", then the food chain would not exist as we know it. There isn't significant support in nature for the murder of like-species animals to be "right", unless it is taken in the context of competition for genetic propagation. However, once "civilization" occurs, politics and economics develops, and there are non-murderous ways to advance one's genetic makeup. Civilization should make murder obselete, which is why I can claim humans really are not very civilized, yet.
what is it that draws people to it? Is it 1337ism or what?
After fighting with Windows and Linux, using one of the BSDs can be almost as refreshing as a fresh cold beer right off the tap. All it takes is one look at OpenBSD, and its crisp clean frothy goodness beckons at you with its siren song of objective simplicity.
Why don't people all use Linux or all use BSD?
It suffices to say that there are dramatic, but often subtle, differences between GNU/Linux and BSD. For example, I would suspect that a proponent of BSD would also not be a proponent of RPM-based package management nor of the GNU "cross-platform" configuration managment tools.
If none of this makes sense to you, I suggest working with Windows for a while, then Red Hat Linux, then Slackware Linux, and then one of the BSDs (in that order). If you perceive a sense of progress from one phase to the next, then BSD is for you; if you percieve a regression, then, perhaps, you should stick with Windows.
Re:Why can't it be more like Linux?
on
Absolute OpenBSD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've often wanted to set up a firewall using OpenBSD because it is secure out of box but every time I go and install it, I get frustrated because it is so different from Linux.
Where is the kernel's.config file, where are all the info pages, where is emacs, where are the rc.? directories and so on?
OpenBSD has got to be the simplest OS to configure for network infrastructure among all the OSes I've worked with (Windows, Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD). Firewall? NAT? In OpenBSD, what is that, three configuration files, including/etc/rc.conf, and a couple or three man pages?
Also, OpenBSD's manual pages are second to none. Between the manual pages, the FAQ, and the on-line mailing list archives, almost always is there enough information either for a direct solution or an inferred one. And, usually the inferred solutions are only required for unusual configurations that the user got themselves into (e.g., trying to shoehhorn yet another OS onto a Sun workstation multi-boot config).
I think the best description of the BSD-derived systems out there is that their users tried the other systems first, and, then, choose BSD. The *BSDs are the Apple of the UNIX realm.
Anyone who maintains that a fertilized egg is not a human being doesn't know biology, or is lying.
A fertilized human egg, even one that has developed into a little clump of cells, is not a human being. The cells in the early embryo are not differentated into the various tissues that make up the human body, so, at this stage of the game, squashing the little clump of cells is no different than picking your nose and baking the boogers in the microwave (obviously killing thousands of cells from your nose lining).
After the clump of cells develops further, the issue gradually becomes less black and white. At the point where basic tissue development start occurring, the fetus is not discernible from that of most mammals, and, regardless of DNA, most mammals do not have "inalienable rights". There doesn't seem to be a significant moral problem at this stage. At least, killing the fetus is no different than hunting a deer, and spontaneous first-trimester abortions are very common among women, indicating that Mother Nature shares this philosophy.
When the main part of the brain is developing, and the nervous system is fleshed out, then there is a clear situation of "cruel and unusual punishment" involved regarding abortion. For example, any person that has no moral problems with third-trimester abortions needs to re-think their position.
So, your argument about humans being human from day one can only have a basis in religious faith, which is a fallacy.
We're presently still in an ice age, which was probably caused by the American continents blocking off equatorial sea currents, and the transfer of heat to the colder parts of the globe.
Just give me enough of a warning to sell my house to some sucker before the ice age ends (unlikely to be in my lifetime, anyway). Psst....just keep this between you and me, right?
I ask again, how does this even remotely help MS with the real world where millions of frankenstein-esque computers are run under a variety of environments?
Having some assurances about specific aspects of hardware can prevent whole classes of wild-goose-chase. This makes Microsoft's support efforts easier, when they can say "it is definitely bad ram" rather than "swap out all the RAM modules in turn to see if, perhaps, one of them is bad." It allows problems to be resolved in less time, on average, and with less frustration on the part of the customer.
What would be better would be to find a way to polarize every other column of pixels, so one image is only a fraction of a millimeter offset from the other. On a high DPI display, halving the horizontal resolution wouldn't be that catastrophic...and would be plenty good for wholesome Internet activities that benefit from 3D.
Exactly how does a handful of basic tests prepare MS for the 'real world'?
It captures a non-trival fraction of that 50% of all crashes. A Windows crash dialog could say "Hey, I crashed! Would you like to run a modest battery of hardware tests? (Yes) (No)".
It isn't about doing a hole-for-hole comparison and seeing which pile is higher. It's a matter of comparing a vendor's claims with their delivered goods. Few vendors rank with Microsoft when measured by cunning and deceitfulness.
They have large IT organizations that are perfectly capable of making informed decisions.
Are they? Government bureaucracies are not often highly regarded for their efficiency or sharp decision making abilities. For example, our DMV "upgraded" recently from a modest mainframe-backed system to a new-fangled system with Windows clients. Going to the DMV now takes longer and is much worse than ever before. Microsoft wants people to believe their techology will make everyones problems disappear as if by magic, when, in reality, they are straight-faced liars selling snake oil.
I wish these people would just combine their efforts instead of staying in that NIH (Not Invented Here) mode.
Americans can be stubborn. I guess that's why men in South Carolina still have sex with pigs and goats, because new ideas about women came from North Carolina. Please don't ask me where babies come from in South Carolina, because I just don't know...nor do I want to know.
So logically, adding rubber to asphalt would probably improve the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road, hence decreasing stopping distance and improving cornering.
I belive this phenomenon is the reason why new brake pads need a "break in" phase--to embed the pad material into the nooks and crannies of the metal disc surface. The rationale, I suppose, is that pad-on-pad is better than pad-on metal.
With Windows there are a gazillion vendors of every component you can imagine.
It would have taken only a small team of Microsoft programmers to develop a useful bundle of fundamental hardware tests for their beloved operating system. How hard is it to have the OS test basic functions, like RAM, the PCI bus, the IDE bus, etc.? For Solaris, Sun puts a CD with their VTS software in the box set. Does Microsoft have fewer resources than Sun?
Computers are so comparatively powerful now, we can afford to trade time performance for stability.
Not if you are in the business of using benchmarks against the competition. There will always be business and marketing support for performance but not as readily for stability. Only in the really high end where there are fewer complete idiots, do five-nines machines like Mainframes or big-ass UNIX servers thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
Deregulation may work out in the end, but so far what I've seen doesn't impress me very much.
That's because there really hasn't been full deregulation. The government still has their fist up the companies' asses, it's just that you can't see it when the CEO is standing behind a podium.
The NIMBY crowd prevents this from happening.
There should be at least a few people prowd of providing power to their neighbors. If a city, though good fate, happened to have 30-foot tidal swell in their harbor, I would think building a non-polluting tidal power plant would be great for the local economy. The big problem is that no one has the courage to tell the fishermen "tough noogies."
...when they are cutting costs the level of service usually falls.
Only if deregulation leaves them with a monopoly on thier hands, and any highly regulated system cannot be deregulated overnight. Fixing the damage done by regulation is 10 times harder than it was to naively impelment it. Slashdotters, just look at all the shitty software and IT projects you've worked on for great examples of this ("lets adopt framework XYZ...this newgroup posting said it worked well for them...").
The problem faced by the old BR was that it was forced to provide services where they weren't economically viable...
I guess in the USA we would call these things AMTRAK, the airline industry, and subsidized bus systems in small to mediums cities (most cities just don't have the population density of New York or Chicago).
Indeed, what often happens with deregulation is that you get a lot of people who see how they can make a quick buck and who cares what happens down the road.
The free market would tolerate this only for a relatively short amount of time. For example, UNIX thrashed about for some time, but, now, largely without government intervention, computers work together relatively smoothly. The biggest contribution by the federal government to UNIX was standards rather than laws (take, for example, TCP/IP).
As far as companies finally working it out, CDE was born out of the disparate proprietary GUIs, such as Sun's OpenWindows. Now people can gripe about CDE all they want, but it really isn't that bad (I use it every day--it gets the job done).
We also cannot forget non-government standards bodies, such as ISO, ANSI, IEEE, etc.
Given time, companies will do the right thing, because, eventually, they are left no choice. It is only the flash in the pan companies that do something brash and greedy and leave a burning swath behind them (Microsoft will be one of these companies if they don't change dramatically).
Mod parent up, please. We shouldn't be debating these things without their historical contexts intact.
The slower it is (and the more they see), the more people remember that war is dumb.
The History Channel had a documentary about one Christmas day during World War One, where the German and Allied soldiers started singing carols and eventually met each other for a one-day Christmas cease fire (they even held soccer matches with eachother). After that day, they had trouble gathering the motivation to kill eachother, and the military leaders basically had to force the war to continue.
Any war relies on de-humanizing the enemy, which is most often a large collection of ordinary people under different circumstances and under the leadership of a psychopath (Adolph Hitler, Osama bin Laden, etc.).
One gram of fully charged hafnium isomer could store more energy than 50 kilograms of TNT.
I don't know what to say other than, "Oh fuck."
I'm not suggesting that a zygot is deserving of the same moral considerability that we give a baby or an adult, just that your propostion is false.
I guess my prior argument wasn't aiming at this level of detail. The "programming" of the zygote is certainly different, but it is otherwise the same as other cells (cell membrane, stuff floating around inside, etc.).
I think what many people get hung up on is the "potential" of a zygote, that killing a zygote is somehow murdering someone who never existed. A couple who decides to never have children accomplishes the same effect, at this level. A couple who decides to have children and then waits until the third trimester before having second thoughts are two people that have much deeper and more widespread issues to resolve than just deciding over their child's fate, IMO (their relationship itself should have been aborted, but now they are way beyond the point of no return).
The fertilized egg IS Homo Sapiens.
Only the DNA says this. My daily discarded bladder cells are Homo Sapiens, too, by your argument. Should I regret having flushed them?
I highly doubt that Mother Nature has any philosophy what-so-ever. Lets not get carried away with our personifications :)
I felt this was an appropriate personification, where Nature can be something of a mentor in our quest for moral guidance. If we wonder whether something is "wrong", such as hunting (of animals) or murder (of humans), looking at established natural events can provide answers. If the killing of animals for food were "wrong", then the food chain would not exist as we know it. There isn't significant support in nature for the murder of like-species animals to be "right", unless it is taken in the context of competition for genetic propagation. However, once "civilization" occurs, politics and economics develops, and there are non-murderous ways to advance one's genetic makeup. Civilization should make murder obselete, which is why I can claim humans really are not very civilized, yet.
what is it that draws people to it? Is it 1337ism or what?
After fighting with Windows and Linux, using one of the BSDs can be almost as refreshing as a fresh cold beer right off the tap. All it takes is one look at OpenBSD, and its crisp clean frothy goodness beckons at you with its siren song of objective simplicity.
Why don't people all use Linux or all use BSD?
It suffices to say that there are dramatic, but often subtle, differences between GNU/Linux and BSD. For example, I would suspect that a proponent of BSD would also not be a proponent of RPM-based package management nor of the GNU "cross-platform" configuration managment tools.
If none of this makes sense to you, I suggest working with Windows for a while, then Red Hat Linux, then Slackware Linux, and then one of the BSDs (in that order). If you perceive a sense of progress from one phase to the next, then BSD is for you; if you percieve a regression, then, perhaps, you should stick with Windows.
I've often wanted to set up a firewall using OpenBSD because it is secure out of box but every time I go and install it, I get frustrated because it is so different from Linux.
.config file, where are all the info pages, where is emacs, where are the rc.? directories and so on?
/etc/rc.conf, and a couple or three man pages?
Where is the kernel's
OpenBSD has got to be the simplest OS to configure for network infrastructure among all the OSes I've worked with (Windows, Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD). Firewall? NAT? In OpenBSD, what is that, three configuration files, including
Also, OpenBSD's manual pages are second to none.
Between the manual pages, the FAQ, and the on-line mailing list archives, almost always is there enough information either for a direct solution or an inferred one. And, usually the inferred solutions are only required for unusual configurations that the user got themselves into (e.g., trying to shoehhorn yet another OS onto a Sun workstation multi-boot config).
I think the best description of the BSD-derived systems out there is that their users tried the other systems first, and, then, choose BSD. The *BSDs are the Apple of the UNIX realm.
Sit outside any Wal-Mart and observe the fact that cattle-like humans already exist...
No matter how fat and juicy Wal-Mart customers become, I don't think I could eat one after looking at one.
Anyone who maintains that a fertilized egg is not a human being doesn't know biology, or is lying.
A fertilized human egg, even one that has developed into a little clump of cells, is not a human being. The cells in the early embryo are not differentated into the various tissues that make up the human body, so, at this stage of the game, squashing the little clump of cells is no different than picking your nose and baking the boogers in the microwave (obviously killing thousands of cells from your nose lining).
After the clump of cells develops further, the issue gradually becomes less black and white. At the point where basic tissue development start occurring, the fetus is not discernible from that of most mammals, and, regardless of DNA, most mammals do not have "inalienable rights". There doesn't seem to be a significant moral problem at this stage. At least, killing the fetus is no different than hunting a deer, and spontaneous first-trimester abortions are very common among women, indicating that Mother Nature shares this philosophy.
When the main part of the brain is developing, and the nervous system is fleshed out, then there is a clear situation of "cruel and unusual punishment" involved regarding abortion. For example, any person that has no moral problems with third-trimester abortions needs to re-think their position.
So, your argument about humans being human from day one can only have a basis in religious faith, which is a fallacy.
We're presently still in an ice age, which was probably caused by the American continents blocking off equatorial sea currents, and the transfer of heat to the colder parts of the globe.
Just give me enough of a warning to sell my house to some sucker before the ice age ends (unlikely to be in my lifetime, anyway). Psst....just keep this between you and me, right?
I ask again, how does this even remotely help MS with the real world where millions of frankenstein-esque computers are run under a variety of environments?
Having some assurances about specific aspects of hardware can prevent whole classes of wild-goose-chase. This makes Microsoft's support efforts easier, when they can say "it is definitely bad ram" rather than "swap out all the RAM modules in turn to see if, perhaps, one of them is bad." It allows problems to be resolved in less time, on average, and with less frustration on the part of the customer.
Basically, you're crossing your eyes.
What would be better would be to find a way to polarize every other column of pixels, so one image is only a fraction of a millimeter offset from the other. On a high DPI display, halving the horizontal resolution wouldn't be that catastrophic...and would be plenty good for wholesome Internet activities that benefit from 3D.
does it work with edible underwear, too?
Exactly how does a handful of basic tests prepare MS for the 'real world'?
It captures a non-trival fraction of that 50% of all crashes. A Windows crash dialog could say "Hey, I crashed! Would you like to run a modest battery of hardware tests? (Yes) (No)".
Other systems don't have security holes?
It isn't about doing a hole-for-hole comparison and seeing which pile is higher. It's a matter of comparing a vendor's claims with their delivered goods. Few vendors rank with Microsoft when measured by cunning and deceitfulness.
They have large IT organizations that are perfectly capable of making informed decisions.
Are they? Government bureaucracies are not often highly regarded for their efficiency or sharp decision making abilities. For example, our DMV "upgraded" recently from a modest mainframe-backed system to a new-fangled system with Windows clients. Going to the DMV now takes longer and is much worse than ever before. Microsoft wants people to believe their techology will make everyones problems disappear as if by magic, when, in reality, they are straight-faced liars selling snake oil.
I wish these people would just combine their efforts instead of staying in that NIH (Not Invented Here) mode.
Americans can be stubborn. I guess that's why men in South Carolina still have sex with pigs and goats, because new ideas about women came from North Carolina. Please don't ask me where babies come from in South Carolina, because I just don't know...nor do I want to know.
So logically, adding rubber to asphalt would probably improve the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road, hence decreasing stopping distance and improving cornering.
I belive this phenomenon is the reason why new brake pads need a "break in" phase--to embed the pad material into the nooks and crannies of the metal disc surface. The rationale, I suppose, is that pad-on-pad is better than pad-on metal.
With Windows there are a gazillion vendors of every component you can imagine.
It would have taken only a small team of Microsoft programmers to develop a useful bundle of fundamental hardware tests for their beloved operating system. How hard is it to have the OS test basic functions, like RAM, the PCI bus, the IDE bus, etc.? For Solaris, Sun puts a CD with their VTS software in the box set. Does Microsoft have fewer resources than Sun?
Computers are so comparatively powerful now, we can afford to trade time performance for stability.
Not if you are in the business of using benchmarks against the competition. There will always be business and marketing support for performance but not as readily for stability. Only in the really high end where there are fewer complete idiots, do five-nines machines like Mainframes or big-ass UNIX servers thrive.