I know I'm living in fantasy land, but I would love to see it changed to where before any vote on new legislation, all the senators or representatives are given a 10 question DMV style quiz on the bill's language. And only those that pass get to vote.
Heck, I'd like to see all voters have to pass a 10-question quiz before they were allowed to step into a voting booth and choose those politicians. I don't even care what the quiz was on, pull 10 questions from the back of any random 4th grade Social Studies book and you'd probably stymie at least 60% of the voters in some districts. Or let the people who write the "Jaywalking" bit on the Tonight Show write them.
The problem is that there are just too many stupid people walking around and breathing, and many of them are in government.
No, you're only allowed to write spyware if you can afford to buy enough legislators to make it legal.
Of course, then it's not "spyware" anymore.
The applications of this are quite large: I could imagine Microsoft partnering with the MPAA and silently deleting all un-DRMed movies off of your hard drive (since possession of an un-DRMed DVD rip is prima facie evidence of a DMCA violation, since making one requires circumventing CSS); or in the future, if a certain album is only distributed in DRMed formats, they could delete any "unauthorized" un-DRMed files.
Or they could just have the clickwrap license for Windows specify that you weren't allowed to run any software that's not signed by Microsoft or an approved vendor, and silently delete or disable all unsigned code. Look at the trajectory of current developments: that's not more than a few years away; not right around the corner necessarily, but really it's not all that hard to imagine: complete code-signing, enforced by a TPM module and remote scans for unapproved code, could be sold to the unwary as a good way to have a "no maintainance" PC. No spyware, no unapproved games or chat programs, no worries about getting sued by the RIAA because your kid installed some P2P program. There would always be a way to run unapproved applications, but it would cost more, and wouldn't come preinstalled on most people's PCs. ("If you need to run unsigned applications, upgrade to Windows Ultimate Developer Edition, only $299.95! Includes one personal code-signing certificate, good for one Windows Computing Device only.")
The best way to sell people a limitation is to advertise it as a feature. Especially one that relieves them of the burden of thinking about something; that's always an easy sell.
What you just said is exactly true, however it's not the complete extent of what's allowed. There's nothing in the bill that limits what Microsoft (or Norton, or whomever) can detect and delete from your computer, provided that it's illegal. The excuse is to allow them to delete spyware, but it just as easily allows them to do you the "service" of removing any unlicensed software you have on your computer.
The intent of a law and what it actually allows are often totally separate things.
Recall that Next had the Nextstation, until it was no longer profitable or had any good marketshare and then they released NextOS for X86 PC systems. If Apple cannot get more marketshare and the Mac series is not profitable, they might just release to the X86 PC systems anyway.
This assumes that their hardware sales aren't profitable. I think that's incorrect. Their hardware sales are quite profitable -- if anything, they've become more of a hardware company lately than they ever used to be.
And we tried the whole clone business, it didn't increase marketshare. All it did was cannibalize existing Mac business by moving Apple buyers over to Power Computing/Daystar/Motorola boxes instead. Maybe if you did it today you'd pull in a few PC users because the hardware would be cheaper than it was during the first clone experiment (since it would be commodity x86 and not CHRP), but really, Apple's own hardware is a good deal price-wise right now.
I don't think that making an off-brand Mac that undercuts Apple's price by $50 is really going to woo that many PC users. There have been lots of analyses that show Apple's hardware to be very competitively priced with big-name PC manufacturers for what you're getting; I don't think price is what's keeping most people from switching, and that's all you'd get out of a cloning agreement.
All cloning would do is take current business -- which is enough to keep Apple in business and give them enough cashflow to innovate -- and spread it among a bunch of companies so thinly that they'd be hard pressed to stay in business. All they'd be able to do is cut prices lower and lower, until they fell behind in terms of innovation and the market abandoned them.
I don't get your point. You deride Jobs for being only a "salesman," however his success proves that he is a salesman of rather exceptional caliber. If he was just average, then there would not be any way for him to have succeeded as well (and as regularly) as he has been able. Apple, NeXT, Pixar, Apple again -- that's a pretty remarkable track record. Salesman, engineer, guru, call him whatever you want, his results speak for themselves.
As for the comparisons to MacArthur; well, there are a lot worse people to be compared to. I'm not sure if you meant that to be derisive or not, but if you did, I take it you've never been to Japan.
It might use much power but it could still be more efficient than throwing it out.
Not just throwing it out, but throwing it out and manufacturing a new machine. I suspect that the energy that goes into making a new Mini-ATX machine would probably run an old P3 for quite a while; pretty much everything in a computer, from the chips to the metal in the power supply to the plastic in the case, is highly energy-intensive to produce.
It's just like cars: if you're going to buy a new car anyway, then by all means buy an efficient one. But it doesn't make any sense to throw away your car and go out and buy a freshly-made one that gets better gas mileage, from a standpoint of energy conservation. You could have run the old vehicle for quite a while on the initial energy investment required to make a new one. Not to mention that in the time you're continuing to drive the old car, new ones will get more and more efficient.
There is surely a point where it makes sense to scrap a machine in favor of a newly-built one that is more efficient, but I've never seen any convincing evidence that computers that are only a few years old fall into this category. I can see why it might be time to power down your CDC 7600 or PDP-10, or some other system that's just orders of magnitude more wasteful than modern technology, but we're talking about PCs that are only a few years old here.
Agreed, I've been on Freecycle for a while and it's a great way to both get rid of extra stuff you have around (working stuff, that is) and sometimes get something neat for free.
Really the only downside to it is that it uses Yahoo Groups, which I am not a huge fan of, to run its mailinglist, but aside from this I think it's a good concept, well executed.
From where I'm sitting--in the U.S.--it seems like what I'd call a "degrees of separation" problem. As you get further and further away from the voters, a government necessarily becomes less accountable. So it would seem to be pretty clearly preferable to have important decisions being made by people that you actually voted for, and not people appointed by people you voted for, because in the latter case the accountability is indirect. Appointed decisionmakers have no direct loyalty to the people, only to the official that gave them their job. And if you go down another layer, so perhaps you have decisions being made by people who are appointed by people who are elected by people who are elected by the people, it just becomes that much less transparent.
Over here in the States, some of the worst and most controversial decisions come from appointed members of goverment offices; I'm thinking of you, FCC. (There are a lot of other issues at work here too, like them being the virtual pawns of large corporations, but that's for another time.) As a private citizen, it's very hard for me to influence the direction of the FCC, because the Commissioner isn't elected, he's appointed. Granted, I get to elect the person who appoints him, but that appointment is such a small part of the appointing politician's duties that it's rarely a campaign issue. Furthermore, by electing (in effect) a whole lot of people at once, it forces me to make a lot of compromises: politician x is going to appoint a rat for FCC Commissioner, but I like him aside from that; politician y is going to appoint a good guy for the FCC, but is otherwise abhorrent -- am I really going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and vote for y? Certainly not.
At any rate, I was just giving this example because I think it shows that just because someone in power is appointed or elected by other people who have a mandate from the people, doesn't necessarily mean that they're accountable to the people. (In fact, it almost always means the opposite.) In designing a government, we have to make certain tradeoffs; sometimes we allow certain posts to be filled by appointment because it's just not worth electing them. But when those posts become significantly powerful, one really has to consider whether it's a good idea to fill them in that way.
Seems like this would just lead to a lot of tax evasion, unless the deposit/tax collected was very small. Maybe the transportation costs in Norway outweigh the benefit, but here in the U.S., it seems like it would hand a lot of business to shady mail-order houses that just don't pay the tax. If you tried to implement that here in the States, people would just buy stuff off of eBay or from tiny storefront-less operations via PriceWatch; nearly impossible to keep track of, they're here one day, gone the next. The brick and mortar stores are already screaming because they get hit for sales tax while this is easily avoided by mail-ordering out of state, I can only imagine the opposition you'd have to an additional non-trivial levy that they were supposed to collect.
It wouldn't; methinks he was just hoisting the old petard in an effort to win some karma by trashing the US, Bush in particular. It's quite a popular past-time, really.
Factual correctness and logic often takes a backseat to an argument's ability to blame America in general and G.W. Bush in particular, in case you haven't noticed.
Well said. I think that Linux has a reputation--arguably undeserved, perhaps--of being hard to set up and difficult to maintain. When a small business needs to get a server, it's very easy to get them to buy Windows because Linux has a perceived learning curve; there's a feeling that if you have Linux servers, you need to have a full-time sysadmin, while a Windows file/print/email server can be run by someone for whom it's not their primary job.
While I take factual issue with this, it's an attitude I've heard being repeated from various small-business owners. I've literally heard people complaining about how much they're paying for Windows server licenses, asked them why they didn't do Linux, and gotten the response "oh, that's too complicated." These aren't totally stupid people, either; they think that Linux is an enterprise/datacenter product and not so much a small/medium size business one.
I think there's a definite market for a Linux-based small office server, something that's easy to set up, deploy and maintain, and which doesn't require a lot of knowledge of Linux as an OS to keep running. I.e., everything should be accessible through GUI tools, lots of hand-holding through setup, use of Windows terminology, big color manuals with lots of pictures, well supported, etc.
While I wouldn't probably buy such a product, I know of people who would, and perhaps Xandros is the company to make it.
Have you ever looked at Plan 9? (Its official page is here, but frankly the Wikipedia article is better.)
I think it was basically what you are envisioning -- a ground-up reconstruction of UNIX, with an emphasis on networking and the distributed multiuser environment, developed and backed by a large corporation with deep pockets and substantial R&D resources. It doesn't have a Linux binary compatibility layer, although it seems like you could probably build one if you really wanted to and were running it on a standard x86 architecture. From what I've read, the majority of Plan 9 installations were on big server iron, so I don't think such a thing was made.
Well, "countries of Europe" includes a lot of Eastern Europe, including Serbia/Albania/Kosovo, which we arguably "invaded" in 1996-98 after bombing the Serbs for a while, but it didn't play well on TV and it was scaled back; it never had the chance to become anything like Iraq. If you look at public opposition to that campaign once civilians started dying, versus the current Iraq War, public goodwill lasted far longer in the current conflict than it did in Kosovo. (E.g., after several high-profile mistargeting incidents it went downhill in a hurry, the shift in opinion regarding the current action happened mostly as a result of American casualties and perceived lack of an exit strategy.)
Actually that conflict is interesting for several reasons, not least because the US decided to involve itself at all, even though the scale of the atrocities committed (which was the motive for acting, allegedly -- although Madeline Albright did once let slip the now-infamous "What's the use of having the world's best military when you don't get to use them?" line) were miniscule on the scale of those committed in Africa which the world frequently turned a blind eye to. Why choose to act in Eastern Europe and not in East Africa? Of course we can always blame geopolitical concerns, the "tinderbox effect," ad infinitum, but it's naive not to consider how much more supportable a military intervention is, when the people you're going to 'save' or 'liberate' look like the voters' sons and daughters.
Consider the current reaction to the Bush Administration's change in rhetoric over the reasons for going to war (the shift from WMDs and terrorism to freedom and democracy). It's widely accepted that the American public would not have accepted this excuse as a casus belli in the beginning, but liberation (and the prevention of massacres and refugees) were used effectively to sell the Kosovo campaign to the American public less than a decade earlier, at least initially. Admittedly, both groups (Iraqis and Kosovars) are predominantly Muslims, but the latter are Caucasians. While it would be a gross oversimplification to say that this racial difference was the only reason why the rhetoric was different, it would be foolish to discount it completely.
People tend to empathize most closely with other people who look the same as them. The majority of America is white/Caucasian. Therefore it's not a huge logical leap from there to the conclusion that the American public is likely to empathize most closely with 'victims' who are also white. You can draw similar parallels with dominant religions.
I'm not saying that anyone in the Pentagon is sitting around literally saying or thinking "let's find ourselves some darkies to hunt," but that on a near-subliminal level, you can generally predict the reactions of the US citizenry based on the perceived similarity of the victims of a particular conflict to an 'average American.'
Because it's a fairly obscure Latvian distribution nobody has heard of? Or at least I hadn't, until you mentioned it and I Googled it. I'm not an embedded systems programmer, but I've been following the Linux "scene" for a while and it's a new one on me.
That said, it seems fairly neat. I tend to wonder though whether the Slackware package management system (which I assume it uses, being built on Slackware) is really as easy to use and appropriate for novice users than an arguably more idiotproof system like apt. I assume that these $100 laptops, if they get built like a regular laptop (which I don't believe is a good design for them, I think it would be better to have bootable program cartridges like a PSP), will need to have a way of adding more software without getting involved in dependency hell. I don't mean to start a holy war, but at least in my experience, it's been the Debian/apt system that avoids this most gracefully.
Very well said. If you ever feel like running for office, I'd probably vote for you. (Assuming that you were running on the sort of platform that you just outlined.) I would rather elect someone who promised to do virtually nothing that wasn't exhaustively researched and debated, than someone with any sort of "just do something" mentality.
In my opinion, it is this sort of mindset -- "I don't know what to do, but I'm sure as hell going to do something!" -- that has led to some of the worst of our laws, and also feeds into the public's perception that the solution to every problem is legislative.
Actually I think the reason why we go to war every decade or so has a lot more to do with the American public's desire for it than any demand by the defense contractors. True, they get some benefit from it, but the last few wars that the U.S. has entered into have been done with widespread public support.
I would argue that at the core of the American body politic's psyche there is a core of subconscious uneasiness and malaise, which is fed by the deep-rooted fear that as a nation we are becoming powerless, or at least less powerful. Therefore, every few years it becomes necessary to demonstrate -- less to the rest of the world than to ourselves -- that we are still the Alpha Country. And we do this, in the tradition of any insecure adolescent, by finding someone who is generally disliked and kicking the living shit out of them. It is preferable if the people getting the shit kicked out of them are non-white and non-Christian, since a very large percentage of America, although they may read the NY Times and listen to NPR on the drive in to work, value such lives much less than they do blonde-haired and blue-eyed European derivatives. (Because as diverse as we like to think we are as a country, the US is somewhere between 75-80% white, depending on whose statistics you believe, and people dislike seeing people who look like themselves getting killed on TV.)
In other posts I have said that I think that the closest historical parallel to the current war is the Spanish-American war of 1898. I will not rehash my entire argument here, but suffice it to say that the root causes of both conflicts lie outside the traditional domain of geopolitics: both were heavily dependent on public opinion, which was brilliantly used by a great number of independent actors working for their own gain. But at the heart of it all you have the American public, who as a group are not nearly as adverse to the idea of employing violence for its own sake than many individuals would claim they themselves believe.
Oh, yes, so the Clinton Administration was just purchasing some vast computer system, capable of datamining gobs of internet traffic... and you don't think they were planning on using it as a wide net?
Wake up -- blaming this on anyone one administration, and certainly on any one person, is ridiculously shortsighted. Go ahead and blame it on Bush; the people that actually engineered this sort of policy, wherever they are in the NSA or various other government offices, will probably sell him down the river easily enough. Executives come and go every four or eight years, the attitudes that enable a project like this, even the raw technology itself, takes longer than that to put together.
If you give in to the temptation to blame Bush, along with all the other sheeple over at Daily Kos, you're really ignoring the majority of the problem. It's akin to seeing an iceberg in front of your ship, and sawing off the part you can see above the water and then saying the problem is gone. No it's not, all you did was get rid of the very thing that allowed you to see the problem. The thing that's going to kill you is still lurking below the water. (Ignoring the rather obvious fact that a proportionally equal amount of the iceberg would come back up out of the water as soon as you cut the top off.)
If you build a system that's capable of monitoring everyone's email, it's naive to think that it'll never be used. So the real problem here is that this system was constructed in such a way that it could be used indiscriminately, and to find an answer to why that happened, people have to be willing to look further back into the past than just G.W. Bush, something I'm not sure they're prepared to do. It's too easy and too satisfying to use something like this as political hay, rather than as the wake-up call it ought to be of how systemically out-of-control the government is, and has been for some time.
The behavior of our current and less-than-beloved President is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.
$110 for a 2.1 speaker system is not expensive. That's not even midrange. I'm not trying to be obnoxious here, but a good set of headphones will set you back more than that.
That said, the cellphone-interference problem doesn't seem to be related to the type of speakers in use; there are other people in the thread using what I would consider to be high-end equipment and they're still experiencing problems.
FYIW, I don't get this problem in my home system, I only get it in my car. I'll try leaving my GSM phone on top of one of my speakers though and see if it happens, just to check -- normally my phone is on top of the source equipment and it doesn't do a thing, and some of them are feeding unbalanced lines so I'd expect that's where the problem would occur.
Humm...but getting them in one place at one time would be tough. So it would be better to do it via a newspaper or something. But that's so 20th century. If only there was some kind of web site, dedicated to tech issues, where anyone who wanted to could come in and post an opinion, for everyone else to read....
Doesn't matter, in this situation. The power they're using is free, if they really are going to use a vegetable-oil generator. (Assumedly they are getting the vegetable oil donated, so the cost of the energy in is zero.)
I suppose you could argue that this still contributes to global warming or carbon desequestration or something, but that's taking things a bit far. Plus the carbon in the vegetable oil is eventually going to be released anyway.
If you're getting the energy from a source like that, which is both free in terms of cost and in terms of fossil fuel consumption, then it really doesn't matter how inefficient the computers are. The total fossil fuel consumed to run the whole operation is 0W.
What would be a legitimate question is what's the opportunity cost of the time of everyone involved -- is it really worthwhile to put together a vegetable oil generator to run this thing, when instead they could use the same generator to power some building's air conditioner someplace and reduce fossil fuel consumption. That's a much tougher question, and difficult to factor out because the people giving their time and use of their equipment are volunteers and not a fungible good.
It would seem from the ParallelKnoppix that the preferred way to build a cluster is by network booting them. It's possible to boot each node from a Live CD but the author of the tutorial at least doesn't seem very enthused about the idea.
So it would seem that if you were going to troll for donations, your minimum spec would be something that either had a bootable NIC in it, or was capable of accepting one that you'd be able to acquire easily (i.e., has PCI slots, no old ISA garbage).
If it was me trying to build a cluster in a real hurry, I'd think the best thing to do would be to take etherbootable PCs and put them in the cluster, and take everything that wouldn't boot and rip them apart for spares. Doesn't seem like it would be worth the time to screw around with old/unsupported hardware, or building custom boot images.
I think Windows became the standard home OS because it was the standard business OS, and it became that because of the partnership between IBM and MS. A lot of people who had the money to buy PCs when they were new (and far more expensive than they are now, relatively) went out and bought Compaq clones of the machines they were familiar with at the office.
If what you say is true, than the Apple II would have become the enterprise standard microcomputer, because it was practically the standard-issue home computer in the early 80s. But companies bought IBM, MS-DOS based PCs by the bushel-basket, and once the clones came out this had a trickle-down effect to the home market that pushed out Apple. (There was also the issue of pricing.)
I think you'd have to rewrite a lot of history if your hypothesis of the home market driving the enterprise one was correct. I think it's generally almost always the other way around, although I suppose you could argue that this might change in the future.
Seriously. Ubuntu is pretty much a support-it-yourself distribution. Not only is there virtually no (at least that I've seen) enterprise software that's certified to run on it, but you can't purchase as a product with support like you can with RedHat or Suse. I suppose you can get support options from Canonical separately, but I think that's going to be a tough sell to management, since they don't seem to be bundled very well. It's just not a very "corporate friendly" distro.
RedHat, on the other hand, has two different server products, each of which are spelled out for the types of workloads they're designed for. They have a "top of the line" one that they tout is good for CRM/datacenter/ERP/database stuff, and a cheaper one that aims for mail/file/print/web servers. Each one has three different levels of support. You could easily argue that the variations in product lineup (ES versus AS) is mostly marketingspeak, and I might agree with you, but it's the kind of marketingspeak that sells.
If you're looking for a distro to set up as your new print server, RedHat has matrices that basically tell you exactly what to get. If you go to Ubuntu's site... well, I can just imagine some of my bosses staring at "Linux for human beings" and wondering what the hell that's supposed to mean.
I'm not trying to bash Ubuntu here, it's a good distro (I run Kubuntu on my Linux machine at home), but I think comparing it to RHEL as the GP is doing, is just trying to force it into a market that its not aimed at.
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I know I'm living in fantasy land, but I would love to see it changed to where before any vote on new legislation, all the senators or representatives are given a 10 question DMV style quiz on the bill's language. And only those that pass get to vote.
Heck, I'd like to see all voters have to pass a 10-question quiz before they were allowed to step into a voting booth and choose those politicians. I don't even care what the quiz was on, pull 10 questions from the back of any random 4th grade Social Studies book and you'd probably stymie at least 60% of the voters in some districts. Or let the people who write the "Jaywalking" bit on the Tonight Show write them.
The problem is that there are just too many stupid people walking around and breathing, and many of them are in government.
No, you're only allowed to write spyware if you can afford to buy enough legislators to make it legal.
Of course, then it's not "spyware" anymore.
The applications of this are quite large: I could imagine Microsoft partnering with the MPAA and silently deleting all un-DRMed movies off of your hard drive (since possession of an un-DRMed DVD rip is prima facie evidence of a DMCA violation, since making one requires circumventing CSS); or in the future, if a certain album is only distributed in DRMed formats, they could delete any "unauthorized" un-DRMed files.
Or they could just have the clickwrap license for Windows specify that you weren't allowed to run any software that's not signed by Microsoft or an approved vendor, and silently delete or disable all unsigned code. Look at the trajectory of current developments: that's not more than a few years away; not right around the corner necessarily, but really it's not all that hard to imagine: complete code-signing, enforced by a TPM module and remote scans for unapproved code, could be sold to the unwary as a good way to have a "no maintainance" PC. No spyware, no unapproved games or chat programs, no worries about getting sued by the RIAA because your kid installed some P2P program. There would always be a way to run unapproved applications, but it would cost more, and wouldn't come preinstalled on most people's PCs. ("If you need to run unsigned applications, upgrade to Windows Ultimate Developer Edition, only $299.95! Includes one personal code-signing certificate, good for one Windows Computing Device only.")
The best way to sell people a limitation is to advertise it as a feature. Especially one that relieves them of the burden of thinking about something; that's always an easy sell.
What you just said is exactly true, however it's not the complete extent of what's allowed. There's nothing in the bill that limits what Microsoft (or Norton, or whomever) can detect and delete from your computer, provided that it's illegal. The excuse is to allow them to delete spyware, but it just as easily allows them to do you the "service" of removing any unlicensed software you have on your computer.
The intent of a law and what it actually allows are often totally separate things.
Recall that Next had the Nextstation, until it was no longer profitable or had any good marketshare and then they released NextOS for X86 PC systems. If Apple cannot get more marketshare and the Mac series is not profitable, they might just release to the X86 PC systems anyway.
This assumes that their hardware sales aren't profitable. I think that's incorrect. Their hardware sales are quite profitable -- if anything, they've become more of a hardware company lately than they ever used to be.
And we tried the whole clone business, it didn't increase marketshare. All it did was cannibalize existing Mac business by moving Apple buyers over to Power Computing/Daystar/Motorola boxes instead. Maybe if you did it today you'd pull in a few PC users because the hardware would be cheaper than it was during the first clone experiment (since it would be commodity x86 and not CHRP), but really, Apple's own hardware is a good deal price-wise right now.
I don't think that making an off-brand Mac that undercuts Apple's price by $50 is really going to woo that many PC users. There have been lots of analyses that show Apple's hardware to be very competitively priced with big-name PC manufacturers for what you're getting; I don't think price is what's keeping most people from switching, and that's all you'd get out of a cloning agreement.
All cloning would do is take current business -- which is enough to keep Apple in business and give them enough cashflow to innovate -- and spread it among a bunch of companies so thinly that they'd be hard pressed to stay in business. All they'd be able to do is cut prices lower and lower, until they fell behind in terms of innovation and the market abandoned them.
Pray tell, which one is the "death hook?"
I have a while brick one, the one with the flip-out prongs that you can wind the cord around, and it's worked fine for several years.
I like the prase 'death hook' though. It has a certain ring to it. I don't know what it is, but I want one.
I don't get your point. You deride Jobs for being only a "salesman," however his success proves that he is a salesman of rather exceptional caliber. If he was just average, then there would not be any way for him to have succeeded as well (and as regularly) as he has been able. Apple, NeXT, Pixar, Apple again -- that's a pretty remarkable track record. Salesman, engineer, guru, call him whatever you want, his results speak for themselves.
As for the comparisons to MacArthur; well, there are a lot worse people to be compared to. I'm not sure if you meant that to be derisive or not, but if you did, I take it you've never been to Japan.
It might use much power but it could still be more efficient than throwing it out.
Not just throwing it out, but throwing it out and manufacturing a new machine. I suspect that the energy that goes into making a new Mini-ATX machine would probably run an old P3 for quite a while; pretty much everything in a computer, from the chips to the metal in the power supply to the plastic in the case, is highly energy-intensive to produce.
It's just like cars: if you're going to buy a new car anyway, then by all means buy an efficient one. But it doesn't make any sense to throw away your car and go out and buy a freshly-made one that gets better gas mileage, from a standpoint of energy conservation. You could have run the old vehicle for quite a while on the initial energy investment required to make a new one. Not to mention that in the time you're continuing to drive the old car, new ones will get more and more efficient.
There is surely a point where it makes sense to scrap a machine in favor of a newly-built one that is more efficient, but I've never seen any convincing evidence that computers that are only a few years old fall into this category. I can see why it might be time to power down your CDC 7600 or PDP-10, or some other system that's just orders of magnitude more wasteful than modern technology, but we're talking about PCs that are only a few years old here.
Agreed, I've been on Freecycle for a while and it's a great way to both get rid of extra stuff you have around (working stuff, that is) and sometimes get something neat for free.
Really the only downside to it is that it uses Yahoo Groups, which I am not a huge fan of, to run its mailinglist, but aside from this I think it's a good concept, well executed.
From where I'm sitting--in the U.S.--it seems like what I'd call a "degrees of separation" problem. As you get further and further away from the voters, a government necessarily becomes less accountable. So it would seem to be pretty clearly preferable to have important decisions being made by people that you actually voted for, and not people appointed by people you voted for, because in the latter case the accountability is indirect. Appointed decisionmakers have no direct loyalty to the people, only to the official that gave them their job. And if you go down another layer, so perhaps you have decisions being made by people who are appointed by people who are elected by people who are elected by the people, it just becomes that much less transparent.
Over here in the States, some of the worst and most controversial decisions come from appointed members of goverment offices; I'm thinking of you, FCC. (There are a lot of other issues at work here too, like them being the virtual pawns of large corporations, but that's for another time.) As a private citizen, it's very hard for me to influence the direction of the FCC, because the Commissioner isn't elected, he's appointed. Granted, I get to elect the person who appoints him, but that appointment is such a small part of the appointing politician's duties that it's rarely a campaign issue. Furthermore, by electing (in effect) a whole lot of people at once, it forces me to make a lot of compromises: politician x is going to appoint a rat for FCC Commissioner, but I like him aside from that; politician y is going to appoint a good guy for the FCC, but is otherwise abhorrent -- am I really going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and vote for y? Certainly not.
At any rate, I was just giving this example because I think it shows that just because someone in power is appointed or elected by other people who have a mandate from the people, doesn't necessarily mean that they're accountable to the people. (In fact, it almost always means the opposite.) In designing a government, we have to make certain tradeoffs; sometimes we allow certain posts to be filled by appointment because it's just not worth electing them. But when those posts become significantly powerful, one really has to consider whether it's a good idea to fill them in that way.
Seems like this would just lead to a lot of tax evasion, unless the deposit/tax collected was very small. Maybe the transportation costs in Norway outweigh the benefit, but here in the U.S., it seems like it would hand a lot of business to shady mail-order houses that just don't pay the tax. If you tried to implement that here in the States, people would just buy stuff off of eBay or from tiny storefront-less operations via PriceWatch; nearly impossible to keep track of, they're here one day, gone the next. The brick and mortar stores are already screaming because they get hit for sales tax while this is easily avoided by mail-ordering out of state, I can only imagine the opposition you'd have to an additional non-trivial levy that they were supposed to collect.
It wouldn't; methinks he was just hoisting the old petard in an effort to win some karma by trashing the US, Bush in particular. It's quite a popular past-time, really.
Factual correctness and logic often takes a backseat to an argument's ability to blame America in general and G.W. Bush in particular, in case you haven't noticed.
Well said. I think that Linux has a reputation--arguably undeserved, perhaps--of being hard to set up and difficult to maintain. When a small business needs to get a server, it's very easy to get them to buy Windows because Linux has a perceived learning curve; there's a feeling that if you have Linux servers, you need to have a full-time sysadmin, while a Windows file/print/email server can be run by someone for whom it's not their primary job.
While I take factual issue with this, it's an attitude I've heard being repeated from various small-business owners. I've literally heard people complaining about how much they're paying for Windows server licenses, asked them why they didn't do Linux, and gotten the response "oh, that's too complicated." These aren't totally stupid people, either; they think that Linux is an enterprise/datacenter product and not so much a small/medium size business one.
I think there's a definite market for a Linux-based small office server, something that's easy to set up, deploy and maintain, and which doesn't require a lot of knowledge of Linux as an OS to keep running. I.e., everything should be accessible through GUI tools, lots of hand-holding through setup, use of Windows terminology, big color manuals with lots of pictures, well supported, etc.
While I wouldn't probably buy such a product, I know of people who would, and perhaps Xandros is the company to make it.
Have you ever looked at Plan 9? (Its official page is here, but frankly the Wikipedia article is better.)
I think it was basically what you are envisioning -- a ground-up reconstruction of UNIX, with an emphasis on networking and the distributed multiuser environment, developed and backed by a large corporation with deep pockets and substantial R&D resources. It doesn't have a Linux binary compatibility layer, although it seems like you could probably build one if you really wanted to and were running it on a standard x86 architecture. From what I've read, the majority of Plan 9 installations were on big server iron, so I don't think such a thing was made.
Well, "countries of Europe" includes a lot of Eastern Europe, including Serbia/Albania/Kosovo, which we arguably "invaded" in 1996-98 after bombing the Serbs for a while, but it didn't play well on TV and it was scaled back; it never had the chance to become anything like Iraq. If you look at public opposition to that campaign once civilians started dying, versus the current Iraq War, public goodwill lasted far longer in the current conflict than it did in Kosovo. (E.g., after several high-profile mistargeting incidents it went downhill in a hurry, the shift in opinion regarding the current action happened mostly as a result of American casualties and perceived lack of an exit strategy.)
Actually that conflict is interesting for several reasons, not least because the US decided to involve itself at all, even though the scale of the atrocities committed (which was the motive for acting, allegedly -- although Madeline Albright did once let slip the now-infamous "What's the use of having the world's best military when you don't get to use them?" line) were miniscule on the scale of those committed in Africa which the world frequently turned a blind eye to. Why choose to act in Eastern Europe and not in East Africa? Of course we can always blame geopolitical concerns, the "tinderbox effect," ad infinitum, but it's naive not to consider how much more supportable a military intervention is, when the people you're going to 'save' or 'liberate' look like the voters' sons and daughters.
Consider the current reaction to the Bush Administration's change in rhetoric over the reasons for going to war (the shift from WMDs and terrorism to freedom and democracy). It's widely accepted that the American public would not have accepted this excuse as a casus belli in the beginning, but liberation (and the prevention of massacres and refugees) were used effectively to sell the Kosovo campaign to the American public less than a decade earlier, at least initially. Admittedly, both groups (Iraqis and Kosovars) are predominantly Muslims, but the latter are Caucasians. While it would be a gross oversimplification to say that this racial difference was the only reason why the rhetoric was different, it would be foolish to discount it completely.
People tend to empathize most closely with other people who look the same as them. The majority of America is white/Caucasian. Therefore it's not a huge logical leap from there to the conclusion that the American public is likely to empathize most closely with 'victims' who are also white. You can draw similar parallels with dominant religions.
I'm not saying that anyone in the Pentagon is sitting around literally saying or thinking "let's find ourselves some darkies to hunt," but that on a near-subliminal level, you can generally predict the reactions of the US citizenry based on the perceived similarity of the victims of a particular conflict to an 'average American.'
Because it's a fairly obscure Latvian distribution nobody has heard of? Or at least I hadn't, until you mentioned it and I Googled it. I'm not an embedded systems programmer, but I've been following the Linux "scene" for a while and it's a new one on me.
That said, it seems fairly neat. I tend to wonder though whether the Slackware package management system (which I assume it uses, being built on Slackware) is really as easy to use and appropriate for novice users than an arguably more idiotproof system like apt. I assume that these $100 laptops, if they get built like a regular laptop (which I don't believe is a good design for them, I think it would be better to have bootable program cartridges like a PSP), will need to have a way of adding more software without getting involved in dependency hell. I don't mean to start a holy war, but at least in my experience, it's been the Debian/apt system that avoids this most gracefully.
Very well said. If you ever feel like running for office, I'd probably vote for you. (Assuming that you were running on the sort of platform that you just outlined.) I would rather elect someone who promised to do virtually nothing that wasn't exhaustively researched and debated, than someone with any sort of "just do something" mentality.
In my opinion, it is this sort of mindset -- "I don't know what to do, but I'm sure as hell going to do something!" -- that has led to some of the worst of our laws, and also feeds into the public's perception that the solution to every problem is legislative.
Actually I think the reason why we go to war every decade or so has a lot more to do with the American public's desire for it than any demand by the defense contractors. True, they get some benefit from it, but the last few wars that the U.S. has entered into have been done with widespread public support.
I would argue that at the core of the American body politic's psyche there is a core of subconscious uneasiness and malaise, which is fed by the deep-rooted fear that as a nation we are becoming powerless, or at least less powerful. Therefore, every few years it becomes necessary to demonstrate -- less to the rest of the world than to ourselves -- that we are still the Alpha Country. And we do this, in the tradition of any insecure adolescent, by finding someone who is generally disliked and kicking the living shit out of them. It is preferable if the people getting the shit kicked out of them are non-white and non-Christian, since a very large percentage of America, although they may read the NY Times and listen to NPR on the drive in to work, value such lives much less than they do blonde-haired and blue-eyed European derivatives. (Because as diverse as we like to think we are as a country, the US is somewhere between 75-80% white, depending on whose statistics you believe, and people dislike seeing people who look like themselves getting killed on TV.)
In other posts I have said that I think that the closest historical parallel to the current war is the Spanish-American war of 1898. I will not rehash my entire argument here, but suffice it to say that the root causes of both conflicts lie outside the traditional domain of geopolitics: both were heavily dependent on public opinion, which was brilliantly used by a great number of independent actors working for their own gain. But at the heart of it all you have the American public, who as a group are not nearly as adverse to the idea of employing violence for its own sake than many individuals would claim they themselves believe.
Oh, yes, so the Clinton Administration was just purchasing some vast computer system, capable of datamining gobs of internet traffic ... and you don't think they were planning on using it as a wide net?
Wake up -- blaming this on anyone one administration, and certainly on any one person, is ridiculously shortsighted. Go ahead and blame it on Bush; the people that actually engineered this sort of policy, wherever they are in the NSA or various other government offices, will probably sell him down the river easily enough. Executives come and go every four or eight years, the attitudes that enable a project like this, even the raw technology itself, takes longer than that to put together.
If you give in to the temptation to blame Bush, along with all the other sheeple over at Daily Kos, you're really ignoring the majority of the problem. It's akin to seeing an iceberg in front of your ship, and sawing off the part you can see above the water and then saying the problem is gone. No it's not, all you did was get rid of the very thing that allowed you to see the problem. The thing that's going to kill you is still lurking below the water. (Ignoring the rather obvious fact that a proportionally equal amount of the iceberg would come back up out of the water as soon as you cut the top off.)
If you build a system that's capable of monitoring everyone's email, it's naive to think that it'll never be used. So the real problem here is that this system was constructed in such a way that it could be used indiscriminately, and to find an answer to why that happened, people have to be willing to look further back into the past than just G.W. Bush, something I'm not sure they're prepared to do. It's too easy and too satisfying to use something like this as political hay, rather than as the wake-up call it ought to be of how systemically out-of-control the government is, and has been for some time.
The behavior of our current and less-than-beloved President is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.
$110 for a 2.1 speaker system is not expensive. That's not even midrange. I'm not trying to be obnoxious here, but a good set of headphones will set you back more than that.
That said, the cellphone-interference problem doesn't seem to be related to the type of speakers in use; there are other people in the thread using what I would consider to be high-end equipment and they're still experiencing problems.
FYIW, I don't get this problem in my home system, I only get it in my car. I'll try leaving my GSM phone on top of one of my speakers though and see if it happens, just to check -- normally my phone is on top of the source equipment and it doesn't do a thing, and some of them are feeding unbalanced lines so I'd expect that's where the problem would occur.
Humm...but getting them in one place at one time would be tough. So it would be better to do it via a newspaper or something. But that's so 20th century. If only there was some kind of web site, dedicated to tech issues, where anyone who wanted to could come in and post an opinion, for everyone else to read....
Pity it hasn't been invented yet.
Doesn't matter, in this situation. The power they're using is free, if they really are going to use a vegetable-oil generator. (Assumedly they are getting the vegetable oil donated, so the cost of the energy in is zero.)
I suppose you could argue that this still contributes to global warming or carbon desequestration or something, but that's taking things a bit far. Plus the carbon in the vegetable oil is eventually going to be released anyway.
If you're getting the energy from a source like that, which is both free in terms of cost and in terms of fossil fuel consumption, then it really doesn't matter how inefficient the computers are. The total fossil fuel consumed to run the whole operation is 0W.
What would be a legitimate question is what's the opportunity cost of the time of everyone involved -- is it really worthwhile to put together a vegetable oil generator to run this thing, when instead they could use the same generator to power some building's air conditioner someplace and reduce fossil fuel consumption. That's a much tougher question, and difficult to factor out because the people giving their time and use of their equipment are volunteers and not a fungible good.
It would seem from the ParallelKnoppix that the preferred way to build a cluster is by network booting them. It's possible to boot each node from a Live CD but the author of the tutorial at least doesn't seem very enthused about the idea.
So it would seem that if you were going to troll for donations, your minimum spec would be something that either had a bootable NIC in it, or was capable of accepting one that you'd be able to acquire easily (i.e., has PCI slots, no old ISA garbage).
If it was me trying to build a cluster in a real hurry, I'd think the best thing to do would be to take etherbootable PCs and put them in the cluster, and take everything that wouldn't boot and rip them apart for spares. Doesn't seem like it would be worth the time to screw around with old/unsupported hardware, or building custom boot images.
I'm not sure I agree with you there.
I think Windows became the standard home OS because it was the standard business OS, and it became that because of the partnership between IBM and MS. A lot of people who had the money to buy PCs when they were new (and far more expensive than they are now, relatively) went out and bought Compaq clones of the machines they were familiar with at the office.
If what you say is true, than the Apple II would have become the enterprise standard microcomputer, because it was practically the standard-issue home computer in the early 80s. But companies bought IBM, MS-DOS based PCs by the bushel-basket, and once the clones came out this had a trickle-down effect to the home market that pushed out Apple. (There was also the issue of pricing.)
I think you'd have to rewrite a lot of history if your hypothesis of the home market driving the enterprise one was correct. I think it's generally almost always the other way around, although I suppose you could argue that this might change in the future.
Seriously. Ubuntu is pretty much a support-it-yourself distribution. Not only is there virtually no (at least that I've seen) enterprise software that's certified to run on it, but you can't purchase as a product with support like you can with RedHat or Suse. I suppose you can get support options from Canonical separately, but I think that's going to be a tough sell to management, since they don't seem to be bundled very well. It's just not a very "corporate friendly" distro.
... well, I can just imagine some of my bosses staring at "Linux for human beings" and wondering what the hell that's supposed to mean.
RedHat, on the other hand, has two different server products, each of which are spelled out for the types of workloads they're designed for. They have a "top of the line" one that they tout is good for CRM/datacenter/ERP/database stuff, and a cheaper one that aims for mail/file/print/web servers. Each one has three different levels of support. You could easily argue that the variations in product lineup (ES versus AS) is mostly marketingspeak, and I might agree with you, but it's the kind of marketingspeak that sells.
If you're looking for a distro to set up as your new print server, RedHat has matrices that basically tell you exactly what to get. If you go to Ubuntu's site
I'm not trying to bash Ubuntu here, it's a good distro (I run Kubuntu on my Linux machine at home), but I think comparing it to RHEL as the GP is doing, is just trying to force it into a market that its not aimed at.
Call it a Freudian slip...
One way or the other, they're going to be RedHat's bitch.