The Seniority rules (that are now being abused by some) are a response to large corporations arbitrarily 'laying off' anybody even suspected of being a strong union organizer or supporter and/or refusing to give them a raise for years... etc.
The unions, themselves were a result of bosses stomping on the rights of workers in order to maximize their own profits.
Even if you're not in a union yourself, you're probably benefiting from the literal blood, sweat and tears shed by the early union organizers in order to achieve things like decent wages, safe workplaces and respect for even the basic rights of the average worker.
Then again, if you think that the average union worker is a pig at the trough, consider the upper management who are trying to justify "fair wages" of... uhm. (pulls out calculator) $1400/hour plus housing allowance, car, country club membership and a copious golden parachute should reason be found to fire them.
Of course, at that price, you can always trust the word of of a C{x}O like Ken Lay or Conrad Black -- they wouldn't get that kind of money, if you couldn't trust them, would they?
$5K for 500W seems a bit steep. You might want to look into things like wind generators that can also generate at night. Somebody's idea of a diesel engine converted to run on pure cooking oil sounds like a winner idea. If it can run on either diesel or cooking oil then you have a good variety of fuels that you can use to keep things running.
As many have noted, you'll need batteries for storage -- but, if you're willing to improvise and salvage, there there might be a reasonable supply of dead cars with batteries that you can use at most North American disasters. (with the appropriate infrastructure preparation).
In any case, wind and solar are a bit unpredictable. The last thing you'd want would be a couple of calm, overcast days when you really need that power. At the very least, you're going to need some sort of backup generator for 'emergency emergency' power -- although that might just be a vehicle engine alternator and long jumper cables, depending on just how much power you need for minimal critical operation (most cars can easily generate a couple hundred watts). The long-term generator capability of a vehicle alernator is a good thing to know in an emergency.
If you can put a 'hybred car' in your budget and are willing to risk the warranty on it's electrical system (or can get a development deal with the manufacturer), you might end up with an emergency transport system that doubles as an emergency backup power generator.
Xantrax, among other companies make power inverters that can take 12V (car) or 24V(truck) and turn it into mains (110VAC) level power at anywhere from 100W (plugs into a car's accesory plug and can power a laptop/cell phone, etc). to the Kilowatt range (would need a heavy-duty semi-permanent connection, but you could handle a bunch of desktop power-hog computers).
I guess that I don't have to say that, in terms of minimal power consumption, laptops are probably your best bet. If you're mostly looking at communications capability and light computing (( e.g. keeping a local database of known survivors & victims)), you can use low end (and even used) laptops. Ruggedized might be nice, but I'm guessing that you can find at least one or two intact rooms to put your communication system into (or just a semi-trailer), so a good, rugged storage case for transport of the machines would probably be far more efficient (and you could fit a dozen or so laptops into one mid-sized case).
If you're willing to use Linux instead of Windows/Mac, you can have some (most) of your machines netboot -- which cuts cost and power going to the user hard drives. Knoppix TerminalServer is really good for this sort of application because the OS disk is pre-compressed which saves on bandwidth and caching. If you want to provide local swap, buy a case of 356-512MB USB sticks from a clearance centre. .. samnospam(sic) at bcgreen com for more thoughts.
Solar and wind generators will mean that you can always have at least some functionality even if there is no fuel at all available.. being able to use generators (even if just jury rigged from a vehicle) means that you'll have power generation available even on a calm night. Between the two you should be able to handle all but the most perverse post-disaster situations.
The farther away anything is, the more it is going to differ from what we're seeing now.
6000 light years doesn't even make it halfway to the galaxy core... much less to nearby galaxies (2million light years only gets us to Andromeda -- the nearest major galaxy). For all we know, it was imploded by some master race 1 million years ago, and the creatures who get to watch that explosion will be digging up our fossils and wondering what we had to do with the mass extinction we're in the middle of.
It takes us up to 20 minutes to figure out if a mars probe went 'poof' during it's last maneuver.
Voyager is about 10 light-hours out.
The North Star (one of the brightest stars in the sky until a few years ago), is over 400 light years out.
Basically, just about nothing is close to us in human terms (under relativistic rules). In fact, The Pillars of Creation are about as close as things can get.
-- But also remember that as things get closer, we can see more detail so Jupiter at 4 light hours has way more detail than any thing extrasolar. The stuff in andromeda can only be resolved to a resolution of a few light years.
"... to the extent provided by applicable law".... if you pay for a license you get some kind of protection for your money.
So, how many people do you know of who have successfully sued Microsoft for selling them broken software?
I've pretty much lost track of the number of people who think that AVG Free is faster and more effective than Norton's. -- and, of course we all know that OpenBSD can't hold a candle to Windows for security holes.
Even if you could successfully sue MS for $selling you broken software, if you're looking for security (rather than a scapegoat), you're still better off with the the better software than trying (with varying success) to point the finger at the owners of a more expensive (but less effective) product.
A pretty package doesn't indicate the quality of the product -- only the quality of the packaging -- and sometimes not even that.
Musicians who give loyalty to their fans will get paid back in other ways.. The greatfull dead, for example, treated their fans like old friends were able to fill concert sites until they started dying. Madonna, on the other hand seems to treat her fans like money sponges to be squeezed... If we're lucky, she has another 4-10 years.
As for 'spending too much': When's the last time you spent $10-20 for a $0.20 piece of plastic (read: went to a record store). The silly thing is that DVDs cost more to print, and more to produce but they cost less at the store -- the reason why is that most DVDs only get watch a couple of times, while I'll sometimes pop a CD in the stereo and let it play a dozen times, before I decide to switch it (i.e. music can run in the background, while watching a dvd is more of a foreground task).... Thus it is that people are more willing to pay more for an item that actually costs less to produce (both fixed and per item).
Similarly: a Brazilian bikini costs 10x as much as a full-body bikini that has 10x as much material in it, but women are willing to pay for it. It has bugger all to do with the cost, and more to do with the perceived value.
If enough people are willing to pay $250 to see Madonna, she can either take the money and run or play more shows to satisfy all of her fans. The real answer to that question depends more on how much she loves her fans and playing music than finances -- I mean: it's not like she really needs that extra couple of million dollars. (( then again: neither does Bill Gates )).
The original link does describe SCO requesting arbitration (among other things)
The article that you link to was posted early this morning and gives the details of the arbitration filed in europe. I'm guessing that the second article was posted after this was submitted to slashdot.
It's good to have the second article, but there's no need to insult the slashdot editors (this time).
It's counter-intuitive, but the shell command would be 'nice -19 program' to run it in really nice mode.
To run a program in hog mode, you would go 'nice --19 runmenow'
Thus, his '-19' reference makes complete sense.
-- at least that's how it works for the 'nice' binary, and bash. csh, on the other hand, uses 'nice +19' to be nice and 'nice -19' (as root) to be nasty. -- One of the many things that csh does weird that weaned me off of it. (but let's walk away from bash/csh flame wars, shall we?)
In short : nice doesn't change the total amount of time your processes take
No. In the instant case, the problem was that the system was 'thrashing'. Useful data was being flushed, and it had to be reloaded from disk again and again. That causes the system to chew up extra resources and slows things down. In a case like that, increasing the priority of updatedb would have it get it's work done quickly during low priority times and then get out of the way. (of course, if you're on a server, you probably need to run updatedb weekly if at all.).
The real answer to his problem is to add more memory. I can't believe the number of people who will get a hot CPU and not enough memory, then find out that they're bogged down because of paging. Disk I/O is orders of magnitude slower than memory. The only things you should be paging out is (almost) completely inactive tasks, or the inactive parts of running tasks. If working tasks regularly get paged out, it was time to add RAM a while ago.
I'll almost always suggest to people to add memory before you jack up the CPU. It's usually way more efficient in terms of speeding the system up. 1Gz machine with 1GB of ram is often going to be way more usable than a 2Gz machine with 256MB, but the cost of upgrading your ram is way less than replacing the CPU (and probably the motherboard to boot). (YMMV).
These are things that you cannot live without, in Windows.
It's not that you don't want to live without them, it's that you can't -- unless you unplug your network cable before you boot. Even then, I'm sure you'll find one or two people who will complain that you're still not safe.
MS weenies complaining about Unix/Linux not having network admin support are kinda like the way that they 'complained' back in the '80s that Unix didn't have an IDE.
Unix geeks would cross their eyes, scratch their head and wander away mumbling about "what do you need that Windows crap for anyways?" I mean, Unix is an IDE. Most of the Windows IDEs back then were little more than a limited-environment port of some subset of the standard UNIX development tools.
I've had 'login anywhere' Unix experience since the '80s and cross-platform login support in the early '90's (IBM's AIX was the worst back then for cross-platform admin work).
You know what would be amazing? If we could talk about technology on Slashdot again, and leave Bush out of the conversation.
The $270B could have gone into research (including NASA) and other more useful things.
Instead it's essentially being used to create a bunch of smaller, far less productive holes in the ground -- some filled with bodies; some filled with nothing.
Some geeks are reasonably upset about this -- including some with friends and family members filling some of these expensive holes. I say let them vent, and go on to the next comment.
Shouldn't they study the ecological effects before marring the pristine surface of our neighbor?
They did, and after spending $94M on the ecological study, Halberton Scientific concluded that there would be "a near-zero probability of killing any significant life on the moon".
Couldn't a nice drill be constructed and landed gently to dig down 16 feet?
But it would be 5 times as expensive, and 10 times more likely to fail. NASA can't afford either of those at this time. You also get to point way more instrumentation at the result, and almost the entire technology is already tested with the 'deep impact' probe.
As for 'trashing' the moon, that's rather like saying that a mosquito is trashing my arm -- except that my arm has had far fewer mosquitos.
One suggestion would be to offer a bounty of $2000 for information clearly showing that a 'registrar' is bogus, (with a penalty of $3000 for a false accusation). That fee (plus an 'administrative fee') would be taken out of the down payment that the registrar made, as part of the 'hold harmless' guarantee made by the registrar.
Registrations made by a bogus registrar would be declared null and void. Registrants who used that registrar would be asked to nominate another registrar through which to re-register up to only two domains. (thus penalizing people who used phantom registrars to game the system, but allowing innocent bystanders some hope of justice). Excess registrations would be placed back in the pool for a second 'gold rush'.
So Microsoft is planning to release a patch for this zero-day drive-by attack on April 11.....
Hackers Thank God for Microsoft Marketing Policy.
The policy may be designed to make life easier on sysadmins (or, at least, their managers), but it also makes life easier on hackers. I mean, if I had a zero day exploit, I'd start using it on patch day. That way I'd probably have a full month to exploit it before Microsoft released their scheduled patch.
Scheduled monthly patches are fine for non-critical issues, but when you have zero-day drive-by exploits like this, you've got to have a policy that puts user security ahead of marketing hype.
Waiting until you have a full-fledged epidemic is not the way to secure your user's future.
Slashdot Mirror
The unions, themselves were a result of bosses stomping on the rights of workers in order to maximize their own profits.
Even if you're not in a union yourself, you're probably benefiting from the literal blood, sweat and tears shed by the early union organizers in order to achieve things like decent wages, safe workplaces and respect for even the basic rights of the average worker.
Then again, if you think that the average union worker is a pig at the trough, consider the upper management who are trying to justify "fair wages" of... uhm. (pulls out calculator) $1400/hour plus housing allowance, car, country club membership and a copious golden parachute should reason be found to fire them.
Of course, at that price, you can always trust the word of of a C{x}O like Ken Lay or Conrad Black -- they wouldn't get that kind of money, if you couldn't trust them, would they?
As many have noted, you'll need batteries for storage -- but, if you're willing to improvise and salvage, there there might be a reasonable supply of dead cars with batteries that you can use at most North American disasters. (with the appropriate infrastructure preparation).
In any case, wind and solar are a bit unpredictable. The last thing you'd want would be a couple of calm, overcast days when you really need that power. At the very least, you're going to need some sort of backup generator for 'emergency emergency' power -- although that might just be a vehicle engine alternator and long jumper cables, depending on just how much power you need for minimal critical operation (most cars can easily generate a couple hundred watts). The long-term generator capability of a vehicle alernator is a good thing to know in an emergency.
If you can put a 'hybred car' in your budget and are willing to risk the warranty on it's electrical system (or can get a development deal with the manufacturer), you might end up with an emergency transport system that doubles as an emergency backup power generator.
Xantrax, among other companies make power inverters that can take 12V (car) or 24V(truck) and turn it into mains (110VAC) level power at anywhere from 100W (plugs into a car's accesory plug and can power a laptop/cell phone, etc). to the Kilowatt range (would need a heavy-duty semi-permanent connection, but you could handle a bunch of desktop power-hog computers).
I guess that I don't have to say that, in terms of minimal power consumption, laptops are probably your best bet. If you're mostly looking at communications capability and light computing (( e.g. keeping a local database of known survivors & victims)), you can use low end (and even used) laptops. Ruggedized might be nice, but I'm guessing that you can find at least one or two intact rooms to put your communication system into (or just a semi-trailer), so a good, rugged storage case for transport of the machines would probably be far more efficient (and you could fit a dozen or so laptops into one mid-sized case).
If you're willing to use Linux instead of Windows/Mac, you can have some (most) of your machines netboot -- which cuts cost and power going to the user hard drives. Knoppix TerminalServer is really good for this sort of application because the OS disk is pre-compressed which saves on bandwidth and caching. If you want to provide local swap, buy a case of 356-512MB USB sticks from a clearance centre.
.. samnospam(sic) at bcgreen com for more thoughts.
Solar and wind generators will mean that you can always have at least some functionality even if there is no fuel at all available.. being able to use generators (even if just jury rigged from a vehicle) means that you'll have power generation available even on a calm night. Between the two you should be able to handle all but the most perverse post-disaster situations.
The farther away anything is, the more it is going to differ from what we're seeing now.
6000 light years doesn't even make it halfway to the galaxy core ... much less to nearby galaxies (2million light years only gets us to Andromeda -- the nearest major galaxy). For all we know, it was imploded by some master race 1 million years ago, and the creatures who get to watch that explosion will be digging up our fossils and wondering what we had to do with the mass extinction we're in the middle of.
It takes us up to 20 minutes to figure out if a mars probe went 'poof' during it's last maneuver.
Voyager is about 10 light-hours out.
The North Star (one of the brightest stars in the sky until a few years ago), is over 400 light years out.
Basically, just about nothing is close to us in human terms (under relativistic rules). In fact, The Pillars of Creation are about as close as things can get.
-- But also remember that as things get closer, we can see more detail so Jupiter at 4 light hours has way more detail than any thing extrasolar. The stuff in andromeda can only be resolved to a resolution of a few light years.
It just doesn't always do what you want it to do. For us, this is a good thing(tm).
I've pretty much lost track of the number of people who think that AVG Free is faster and more effective than Norton's. -- and, of course we all know that OpenBSD can't hold a candle to Windows for security holes.
Even if you could successfully sue MS for $selling you broken software, if you're looking for security (rather than a scapegoat), you're still better off with the the better software than trying (with varying success) to point the finger at the owners of a more expensive (but less effective) product.
A pretty package doesn't indicate the quality of the product -- only the quality of the packaging -- and sometimes not even that.
As for 'spending too much': When's the last time you spent $10-20 for a $0.20 piece of plastic (read: went to a record store). The silly thing is that DVDs cost more to print, and more to produce but they cost less at the store -- the reason why is that most DVDs only get watch a couple of times, while I'll sometimes pop a CD in the stereo and let it play a dozen times, before I decide to switch it (i.e. music can run in the background, while watching a dvd is more of a foreground task).... Thus it is that people are more willing to pay more for an item that actually costs less to produce (both fixed and per item).
Similarly: a Brazilian bikini costs 10x as much as a full-body bikini that has 10x as much material in it, but women are willing to pay for it. It has bugger all to do with the cost, and more to do with the perceived value.
If enough people are willing to pay $250 to see Madonna, she can either take the money and run or play more shows to satisfy all of her fans. The real answer to that question depends more on how much she loves her fans and playing music than finances -- I mean: it's not like she really needs that extra couple of million dollars. (( then again: neither does Bill Gates )).
The original link does describe SCO requesting arbitration (among other things) The article that you link to was posted early this morning and gives the details of the arbitration filed in europe. I'm guessing that the second article was posted after this was submitted to slashdot.
It's good to have the second article, but there's no need to insult the slashdot editors (this time).
To run a program in hog mode, you would go 'nice --19 runmenow'
Thus, his '-19' reference makes complete sense.
-- at least that's how it works for the 'nice' binary, and bash. csh, on the other hand, uses 'nice +19' to be nice and 'nice -19' (as root) to be nasty. -- One of the many things that csh does weird that weaned me off of it. (but let's walk away from bash/csh flame wars, shall we?)
No. In the instant case, the problem was that the system was 'thrashing'. Useful data was being flushed, and it had to be reloaded from disk again and again. That causes the system to chew up extra resources and slows things down. In a case like that, increasing the priority of updatedb would have it get it's work done quickly during low priority times and then get out of the way. (of course, if you're on a server, you probably need to run updatedb weekly if at all.).
The real answer to his problem is to add more memory. I can't believe the number of people who will get a hot CPU and not enough memory, then find out that they're bogged down because of paging. Disk I/O is orders of magnitude slower than memory. The only things you should be paging out is (almost) completely inactive tasks, or the inactive parts of running tasks. If working tasks regularly get paged out, it was time to add RAM a while ago.
I'll almost always suggest to people to add memory before you jack up the CPU. It's usually way more efficient in terms of speeding the system up. 1Gz machine with 1GB of ram is often going to be way more usable than a 2Gz machine with 256MB, but the cost of upgrading your ram is way less than replacing the CPU (and probably the motherboard to boot). (YMMV).
Think of it as the inverse of anti-aliasing.
No. George. It started a war with an inflated estimate.
It's not that you don't want to live without them, it's that you can't -- unless you unplug your network cable before you boot. Even then, I'm sure you'll find one or two people who will complain that you're still not safe.
If you haven't used the remaining Windows-only apps yet (like autocad), chances are that you'll never find a use for them.
Unix geeks would cross their eyes, scratch their head and wander away mumbling about "what do you need that Windows crap for anyways?" I mean, Unix is an IDE. Most of the Windows IDEs back then were little more than a limited-environment port of some subset of the standard UNIX development tools.
I've had 'login anywhere' Unix experience since the '80s and cross-platform login support in the early '90's (IBM's AIX was the worst back then for cross-platform admin work).
The $270B could have gone into research (including NASA) and other more useful things.
Instead it's essentially being used to create a bunch of smaller, far less productive holes in the ground -- some filled with bodies; some filled with nothing.
Some geeks are reasonably upset about this -- including some with friends and family members filling some of these expensive holes. I say let them vent, and go on to the next comment.
They did, and after spending $94M on the ecological study, Halberton Scientific concluded that there would be "a near-zero probability of killing any significant life on the moon".
But it would be 5 times as expensive, and 10 times more likely to fail. NASA can't afford either of those at this time. You also get to point way more instrumentation at the result, and almost the entire technology is already tested with the 'deep impact' probe.
As for 'trashing' the moon, that's rather like saying that a mosquito is trashing my arm -- except that my arm has had far fewer mosquitos.
I'd rather send Bin Ladin. As a passenger, In a small pine box with airholes. In the cargo bay.
And putting a law around "Trade Secrets" doesn't make them constitutionally protected.
If the government gives a corporation the 'right' to take away my constitutional rights, that's a government action -- even if by proxy.
Registrations made by a bogus registrar would be declared null and void. Registrants who used that registrar would be asked to nominate another registrar through which to re-register up to only two domains. (thus penalizing people who used phantom registrars to game the system, but allowing innocent bystanders some hope of justice). Excess registrations would be placed back in the pool for a second 'gold rush'.
Most-Expensive isn't an adjective. It's a trademark (at least, it's the name of the domain...) No need to set the price.
Microsoft wouldn't provide certification. Something about the graphics card not being up to spec....
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of <kick> OW!
Hackers Thank God for Microsoft Marketing Policy.
The policy may be designed to make life easier on sysadmins (or, at least, their managers), but it also makes life easier on hackers. I mean, if I had a zero day exploit, I'd start using it on patch day. That way I'd probably have a full month to exploit it before Microsoft released their scheduled patch.
Scheduled monthly patches are fine for non-critical issues, but when you have zero-day drive-by exploits like this, you've got to have a policy that puts user security ahead of marketing hype. Waiting until you have a full-fledged epidemic is not the way to secure your user's future.