I'll preface this by saying that I've never used a BSD as a desktop OS, although I've used it pretty extensively through a remote shell. What OS to go with really depends on what your goals are. If you want to ditch Windows as a desktop OS, but maintain most of the same stuff you're doing, particularly including games, you're probably going to want to go with Linux. If your ultimate aim is server administration... pick whatever you want. I wouldn't even bother putting a GUI on it. In fact it'll be a more educational experience if you set the whole thing up headlessly anyway.
Personally I did the latter before I did the former; I set up some old machines as home fileservers and firewalls, stuck in closets and stuff, before I attempted to do an open-source desktop machine. Mostly I think this is because I was really cheap but always had a few old P100s or 133s lying around. I found the hardware support on esoteric old junk to be better with Linux, although there are some pretty impressive turnkey firewall systems based on BSD that you can just put in the CD-Rom drive and reboot, and viola -- instant firewall. (I can't remember the name of any of them at the moment, I played with them for a while and was pretty impressed though.)
I've only given what I thought was a fair shot to a Linux desktop fairly recently. I didn't take the jump completely, but bought a new machine and a KVM switch and go back and forth between it and my Mac. So far I've used Ubuntu, but disliked Gnome and installed the Kubuntu packages (KDE+dependencies). For all the complaints that I sometimes have of it, it's remarkably good. Definitely useable; however at least my personal installation has a lot of quirks, and to me that's not a good thing. I'd have to say though that it's not a bad way to get started, and so far I haven't found anything that's screamed to me that it would be a better option. (Although if anyone does know of a Debian+KDE distro that's stable, well documented, and polished, I'm in the market.)
I would just caution anyone to moderate your expectations, I think my key problem throughout all of my experiments with Kubuntu is that I'm basically A/Bing that system against my Mac, and the difference in maturity and general "spit and polish" shows.
No, but they can give you significant benefits/bonuses for not being unhealthy. I've worked at several companies that have had programs rewarding employees who didn't smoke, or who exercised regularly. There is the question of enforcement -- how do you keep people from cheating -- which I never really got an answer to, but it was pretty cool to recieve a hundred bucks or so, just because I didn't smoke. (And if I had smoked, I could have gotten the same thing for quitting, plus subidized treatment.)
It would be interesting if these things became common, to the point of making up a large percentage of your salary. If you're fit, eat right, exercise four times a week, and don't smoke or do drugs, your salary is one thing; if you're a fat, lazy bastard, watch a few thousand dollars in bonuses disappear.
I wonder what the social implications of such a system would be. (I have this perverse mental image of a lot of fat people starting a riot, then having heart attacks...)
Human resources are a company's most valuable asset in some industries. "Brain-based" businesses, where the whole business is nothing but an office building, some computers and furniture, and a whole bunch of people, are pretty aware that if they're not recruiting and retaining good people, they're one foot in the grave.
However, Wal-Mart really is just using its employees as warm bodies. In fact, not even for that. Really they just do things that haven't been automated yet, at least not in a cost-effective way. It's still cheaper to hire a 19-year-old with a strong back to stock bigscreens on a shelf than it is to build a robot to do the same job.
The reason that the health and welfare of their employees doesn't really matter to Wal-Mart is because there is perceived to be a near-infinite supply of them waiting outside the glass doors, ready to take up the helm if anyone gets too ill or starts demanding a higher salary. And this is quite probably true, especially when you consider that Wal-Mart has shown in the past that its not adverse to hiring illegals.
Your salary, in a properly working economy, will never exceed your perceived cost of replacement. When your job can be done by anyone with 2/5ths of a brain and the normal human complement of arms and legs, in short, a lowest-common-denominator job, you shouldn't expect to live anything better than a lowest-common-denominator life. If you want to be paid more, find some way to raise your perceived replacement cost. But it's naieve to assume that anyone is going to pay their employees more than it would cost to recruit and train a new person to do their job; anything less would be irrational, and corporations are notoriously un-irrational.
I'm not sure this is a fair argument though. The reason privately purchased healthcare costs so much is that it's essentially a "boutique" item. Very few people ever need to purchase it themselves, because they get it through their employer, thus the competition isn't there.
If nearly everyone were out shopping around for their own insurance, it would be more like auto insurance is right now -- rife with compeitition on everything from raw price, to less tangible benefits like 24/7 roadside assistance and local offices. There are companies you can go to if you want nothing but a proof of insurance card for your glove compartment, and companies you can go to if you want total hand-holding throughout the process, and a person that you can call pretty much anytime. (And this is in a market that's really not very open at all -- it's hugely burdened with regulation and licensing, and varies widely from state to state.)
The health insurance market would be even bigger than auto insurance, and the compeition would be fiercer. While now you have a bunch of basically identical companies (is Kaiser really any different from a consumer standpoint than Aetna?), if there was more competition they'd be falling over each other trying to differentiate their products. You'd have plans and companies catering to the young single worker who just wants something basic -- the 'cover me if I get hit by a truck' type plan -- to people with families who want to use their local doctor, get full preventative care, etc.
Rather than catering to the consumer, right now the health insurance companies' "customers" are really the big corporations that they sell group policies to. Because they have basically the same goals in mind -- get the cheapest policy possible without inciting a riot among the drones -- it's no wonder that health insurance has all started to seem identical, at least compared to what it would be like if people could actually pick what they wanted.
Actually, what you're saying is, in fact, probably true. If your goal was to insure everyone in the country at the lowest rate possible, then the most efficient way to do it would be to only have one giant insurance company, and one risk pool.
However this ignores several things. First, and what I think is most important, is by eliminating all competition in the insurance industry, you would remove any impetus to become more efficient. Such a company would probably become hideously bloated and turn into a giant cash sink, employ many times the number of people it actually needed to operate, and would be beholden to basically nobody. Since there wouldn't be any alternatives for customers to switch to, their level of service could also deteriorate to rock-bottom.
The argument you're making is the classic argument for centralization in an economy. "Hey, everyone wants to have a car -- why don't we just make one really big car factory? It'll be really efficient." True, but not everyone wants the same car, and even if they did, eliminating the competition in the marketplace to build better cars would probably over time eliminate the advantage of centralization.
I think your comments are well taken. I just wanted to clarify my point about OSS developers. You are correct that the great majority of them probably are not interested in how well Linux does (although I would argue that perhaps they should be, since I think most people who use OSS benefit indirectly by its popularity/use, even though it may not be direct or obvious); I suppose rather than generalizing out to "OSS developers" I should have made it more specific to 'OSS developers who want to make that their main source of income.' Obviously there are a lot of people writing code that are perfectly content to keep it as a hobby, and I respect both their attitude and the work that they do. However if someone's goal was to get paid to either create free software, or make money from some sort of ancillary service (consulting/installation/support, etc.) that would allow them to bankroll development activities, I think they'd be well advised to consider their personal image as part of the 'total package' they're selling.
You're still thinking in terms of the band (or painter, artist, whatever) deriving their income from selling copies of the work. This is not what I'm suggesting. I'm talking about something that's a lot closer to patronage than it is to selling content. People will give money to artists in order to keep them producing new stuff, if they like the artist and value their work. That is where artists and other creative types will support themselves, not off of sales of the finished product. So rather than paying $12 for a CD today, and (hopefully) have that money split between the distributor and the creator, you would pay two separate people: you'd pay for the content to be delivered to you, which would probably cost next-to-nothing, because competition would make much profiteering here difficult, and then you would pay the artist directly, if you wanted to see them continue in business. Nobody would make you do the latter, and artists who couldn't maintain a fanbase that was interested in supporting them would go bankrupt.
Would something like this allow for the number of people in the music industry, particularly the middlemen, that exist now? No, certainly not. It would result in exactly as many artists creating new work as the market was interested in subsidizing through voluntary contributions.
I never used to dress up for anything. Well, weddings and funerals, but only if I really liked the people involved, and sometimes not even then. I never really thought about it.
The latest job I'm working at came with a big pay bump and a significant dress code. I don't think I ever saw it in writing, but it's just clear: you don't come into the office without a long-sleeve collared shirt and dress pants, and some sort of shoes that have seen the business end of a horsehair brush and some Kiwi.
Anyway, I found since I started working there that when I'm 'dressed for work' and go out into the world, the level of service and attention I receive is pretty significantly different from what I was used to. In fact I've tested it a few times; gone to the same restaurant a few times wearing work clothes, then gone a few times in a pair of cargos and a t-shirt, just to see what happens. People are politer, service is faster, I get called "sir" a lot more...it's not a huge difference, but it's noticeable.
Unlike your skin color -- which I don't believe in judging people by, as they have no control over it -- you choose what you put on every morning. You can choose to look like pretty much anything you want (within the bounds of the clothing you can afford); and other people are going to judge you based on that implicit choice. When I see someone who looks like a slob, I don't feel bad judging them, because they chose to look that way. If you roll out of bed, put on the first articles of clothing that you find on your floor, and go with it, that's fine -- but don't say you weren't warned when your glass doesn't get refilled at a restaurant as fast as the guy in a suit's does. You knew, or should have known, what you were getting into when you decided to go out like that.
My experiences are probably region-specific; the treatment I might have gotten in Southern California might have been different (I don't know, never having been there and having little interest in going -- too hot for my taste). But in an area filled with white-collar corporate and government types, and businesses that cater to them, if you want to be taken seriously it's pretty obvious how you want to present yourself.
Having been on both sides of the issue now, I think there's a lot to be said to matching your dress and other aspects of your personal image (hair, accessories, etc.) to the impression you want to create. And on the corporate level, I think it's pretty fair to want to create dress codes that match the kind of business and team you want to build. And if you're selling something -- as a whole lot of OSS developers effectively are, whether they realize it or not -- to matching your appearance to your client or intended buyer.
Its basic economics, the act of creating a new product is always going to cost more than copying an exisiting product. If you allow anyone to copy exisiting products at will you create a force in the market that makes creating new products LESS profitable than copying them.
I think this assumes that there will always be a demand for the copied product. Which I really doubt is true -- if some band releases a song, and it's immediately picked up and copied everywhere, there will be a high initial demand for it, and then that demand will taper off, and over time it will diminish towards zero. (Well, or towards some constant, perhaps.) But over time people are going to become dissatisfied with the content that's out there.
There will always be a demand for artists to create new content because people will always want something new. Your "basic economics" is fundamentally flawed if it does not take that into account. Although I doubt it would allow musicians to keep up the mega-tours and ultra-rich lifestyles that (a very few of them) maintain now, I think that groups which had a sufficient fan interest would probably be kept in business by voluntary contributions given by people who simply want to encourage them to continue producing music. Obviously, being a professional musician might suddenly become less of a lucrative profession than it is now, but it would end up being in line with the market's demand for new content.
Effectively, such a model would separate the "demand for creation of new content" from the "demand for creation of copies of existing content." Once something is created, it can be copied ad infinium without any benefit to the creator, but the act of creation has already been accomplished, and under such a system would already have been paid for by benefactors who wanted the work created.
I think you are correct in saying that far fewer people actually care about the creation of new works than care about possessing copies of already-created ones, but to say that there is no demand for newly-created works is incorrect. Over time, people will desire new things to listen to, look at, and watch, and they will pay people to make them, even if they are not able to then take that work and profit by monopolizing the distribution of it.
If you have any 'simple laws' that can quickly and accurately simulate even thousands of neurons all working in parallel,
Wouldn't this effectively be psychology?
Psychology seems to be to the study of individual neurons what meteorology and weather prediction is to the study of gases and molecular chemical interactions.
Humm, next time I'm looking for a project I'll have to give installing WindowMaker a shot.
I knew that KDE wasn't exactly renowned for being lightweight or speedy, but I'm glad to hear somebody else agree that the hardware I'm running it on shouldn't be that underpowered for it, because I didn't think so either. I'm willing to cut it a little slack too because it's KDE 3.5.0, so hopefully it will improve in time, but I was still stunned by the lack of performance. (Konqueror also SIGSEVs repeatably when I try to use the "File Image View" on my home directory, and I can't figure out why...one of many quirks that system seems to have developed.)
I would consider using Gnome, but the lack of a screen-top, context-sensitive menubar is a deal-breaker for me. Is using the full-blown KDE window manager the only way to get this? Linux window managers are relatively new in my life; the majority of my Linux use in the past has been through shell sessions, this is really my first attempt at giving it (what I thought was) a fair shot as a desktop system. If I can get a desktop that has a top-of-screen menubar, without the load of KDE, I'm really not wed to it in any way.
Uh... I'm not necessarily agreeing with the GP, but I think if you want to make claims like that, you're going to have to back them up.
I've lived in a lot of small towns, and have universally found them to be decidedly more pleasant places to live than in the major* city I live in now -- which is significantly more polluted and has higher crime than where I used to live. The only reason I'm here, along with quite a few other people, are because it's where the jobs are. I haven't lived in any small town that had anywhere near the type of social, environmental, and criminal problems that this place does. Granted, they were all very low-population-density, high-income towns, but that's part of the reason people want to live there.
That said, I have run into people who honestly do enjoy urban living, and respect that it does have some advantages (public transportation chief among them I think, followed by social and cultural events, nightlife, etc.).
Actually someone further up in the thread allegedly found that this idiot's published salary is in excess of $60k a year, which puts him above what I know many entry-level IT people are making in the private sector these days -- people who are quite definitely brighter than the Town Manager in question.
I lived in a town once that had a Council+Manager form of government; it's not a bad idea on paper. You have an elected council that makes all the political and policy decisions, and then a paid Town Manager who implements them. The problem is that if the Council doesn't keep a tight reign on the Manager, it can become fairly easy for them to exceed their mandate and begin to actually govern, rather than just manage. It's pretty easy to do favors for people when you have a lot of day-to-day operational control and little oversight (as is often the case when the town council only meets a few times a month and their agenda is filled months in advance), and eventually you can end up with the Manager pretty much controlling the Council and making themselves impossible to fire without overwhelming negative public opinion and outrage.
Up until about 4 weeks ago I was using a 400MHz "Sawtooth" G4 with 768MB RAM and the stock 32MB video card as my main machine, running 10.4 with all the latest updates, new version of iLife, etc. I really didn't think it was that bad, and in fact when I upgraded to my new machine (a dual 2GHz G5), I was actually surprised that the UI "speed feel" didn't change all that much. Opening applications and windows are noticeably faster, but the difference wasn't as dramatically night and day as some previous upgrades I've made. This is not a criticism of the new machine as much as I think it's a credit to how well OS X performs on older hardware, at undemanding tasks. Sure, that machine was an absolute horror if you wanted to transcode a few hours of MPEG-2 video (might as well just let it run overnight), but for day-to-day stuff it really wasn't bad. I think in some ways, OS X gets a bad rap for being a resource hog. There are definitely parts of it that are (Dashboard, etc.) but in general I don't think it is.
I have a Kubuntu system running on an HP workstation (Pentium 4 Prescott, 512MB RAM, NVidia NVS 200 Quadro), which if K/Ubunutu's reputation for running on older hardware was as good as people say it is, ought to fly. (In fact this was why I bought this machine in the first place -- I thought it ought to be smoking, for the very basic level of stuff I wanted to do with it.) However, I can bog the system down by dragging a large selection rectangle on the KDE desktop: it takes probably 3 or more seconds for the selection box to catch up with the cursor going from one corner of the screen to the other, and XOrg's processor utilization goes up into the 95-98% range. I was shocked the first time I did this. Is this a big deal? No, not really -- but it sure makes the machine feel slow. I accept that the Mac/PC thing isn't a scientific comparison because the hardware is different, but really I think the advantage ought to go to the PC here (3.2GHz P4 with a 64MB display card, versus a 400MHz Mac with an ancient 32MB one?), and it comes out feeling worse.
Anyway, I just wanted to agree with you; the seemingly accepted wisdom that Mac OS X is inferior to a Linux desktop on older hardware is something I have yet to see a whole lot of evidence for. One of these days maybe I'll load Kubuntu-PPC (or Ubuntu -- perhaps KDE is the problem) onto my iBook and see how it fares, but as of right now I'd say there are a lot of valid reasons to use a Linux desktop, but UI responsiveness isn't one of them.
A website that depicts people in a sexual manner for the clear purpose of sexual excitement of the viewer.
By all means, please make that the definition. Especially with the phrase "clear purpose" in there. I'm not even a sleazeball lawyer, and I could think of half a dozen ways to put some quasi-pornographic stuff that would make your hair uncurl fit through that definition. How about "training films"? Maybe some totally academic "instructional videos"? How about lingerie ads -- for very revealing/sexy lingerie? Advertisements for bondage equipment? (The photos themselves aren't designed to be gratifying, they're just demonstrating the product!) How about a site that goes around and compiles the sexiest, totally legitimate, non-nude photos?
People are going to get sexually excited by looking at the Sears catalog, if that's all they have access to. If you say 'swimsuits are okay,' you'll have people poring over the swimsuit photos, looking for the model with the most erect nipples or the most obvious cameltoe.
Any rule as vague as the one you propose is open to miles of interpretation. Who do you want to judge questions when they come up? You want to put together an International Decency Tribunal? Hell, we can barely get the major countries of the world to sit down at the same table and say that nuclear weapons are quite possibly a not-so-great idea; you expect to get some acceptable consensus between the Representative from Pakistan and the Representative from the Netherlands on whether a woman in a bikini in a cold room is obscene?
I think the only people who think such a scheme is workable are the ones who think that their own system of morals, values, and social mores are universal, or even universally understandable -- and that is a very naive assumption.
Although,/. should technically be blocked as a discussion site.
Says who?
My company doesn't actively discourage online discussion (or blogging, even, although I don't partake), although I think it's fairly safe to assume that viewing porn would probably get me a security escort out of the building.
I'm just pointing this out as one very minor example of a bigger point, namely that the distinctions you seem to be supporting are highly subjective. What one person or organization considers "safe" may be completely unacceptable to another group. Who exactly are you going to let define the standards? The Christian Coalition? The MPAA? The World Wrestling Federation? How about the "Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice"? I'm sure they have some theories on the matter of appropriateness that they'd be happy to share.
You likened your proposed regulatory structure to that used for movies, however a casual glance at IMDB reveals that there is little in the way of international consensus about the age-appropriateness of many subjects: there are films that are rated NC-17 in the US but 13 or 14 in some European countries, but I'd be willing to bet the possession of which are probably serious crimes in some places elsewhere in the world. Are they "safe"?
The only way you'd ever be able to come close to what you're proposing would be to put the "safe" domain under the country-code TLDs in the domain hierarchy -- so that there would be.safe.us and.safe.sa, containing totally different whitelists. Even then I'm not sure that there would be even a national consensus on where to draw the line; is "safe" equal to PG-13? R? NC-17? Or does it have to be totally "G rated"? Wherever you draw the line, there are going to be people who feel it's way too restrictive, and others who feel it's far too lenient.
Not to mention, as other people pointed out, the vast issues it raises over "grey area" material. If anything with a picture of a naked breast is "unsafe," you've probably just inadvertently blocked a lot of breast-cancer prevention sites. Who's going to accept liability for that sort of inability to access information?
The reason nobody seriously considers a "universal whitelist" is because the practical problems with doing it would be so great, they would exceed the benefit -- which is not having to do what people do right now, which is come up with their own whitelist for their network, if they're really concerned. Add to that the fact that there are a lot of people who don't think that having totally unrestricted access to information, and I can't see it happening.
The role you're thinking about for the Navy has also changed. Their is much less of a demand for huge "blue water" flotillas, and much more of a demand for smaller, lower-draft vessels to support shore operations.
The big carriers are nice, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that (at least in the USN) that they're going anywhere, anytime soon. The new destroyers are aimed at "littoral dominance," that is supporting ground troops and amphibious operations in coastal waters, in areas where you just can't take a carrier or a submarine. Right now we have to do most of that sort of warfare (patrolling near shores) with aircraft, and that gets expensive and impractical if you want to maintain a continuous presence.
The idea of the new destroyers is that they would allow us to maintain a presence and establish a platform for operations (e.g., special ops divers, artillery bombardment) in areas where right now we're limited to a temporary presence.
Nobody is really suggesting that we roll out a new round of Iowa-classes, as cool as I think the idea of 16" dia. naval gunnery is (find me an aircraft that can lay down 243,600 lbs. of ordnance every five minutes onto a target, near continuously).
Odd that you got modded 'troll,' since I think your question is anything but.
I've been wondering the same thing. There are quite a few Linux backup products out there, ranging from the more full-featured network backup systems like Amanda and Bacula to shell scripts (some of which are damned impressive by themselves). I've become aware of all the different options because I just bought a DDS tape autoloader for backing up my home network, and choosing one can be pretty daunting. (And I only have a handful of clients to back up.)
I think there is a definite need to sort out or at least get a central place where people can read about the pros and cons of various strategies, that alone would take a lot of the "black art" feeling out of network backups.
(By the way that web interface for Bacula seems pretty neat. Nice work.)
What exactly makes this engine new? Is it a whole new concept design?
Kind of. A regular jet engine has a lot of moving parts -- a compressor and turbine, at the very least -- and a lot of bearings which are prone to failure if they're not maintained every few thousand hours, they don't really like getting full of dust and crap, and they're expensive to make go really fast. The ramjets (and scramjets, supersonic version of same) are a way to essentially make a jet engine without any moving parts. The fluid is "rammed" through an inlet and against constrictions which compress it against itself, and produce the necessary temperatures and oxygen densities to burn the fuel and produce thrust.
The problem with them based on what I've seen is sort of a bootstrapping one; they don't work until they're moving through the air (or air is moving through them) at a several hundred miles an hour (or in the case of scramjets, supersonically?). So getting them going is quite a trick, you need some other form of propulsion basically to get the aircraft up to speed before you can fire them.
However for missiles they're perfect, since those are generally moving pretty quickly by the time their engines kick in anyway (because they've been launched from an aircraft, or from a ship/submarine/land vehicle with rocket assist). I think the application would be making cruise missiles that fly much faster than current turbofan-powered ones do, but maintain the range and payload/weight characteristics.
Might as well go out with a bang ... or a hole.
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New Jet Engine Tested
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· Score: 4, Funny
If you're going to be hitting the ground at any speed greater than a few feet per second, you might as well make it Mach 7. Not like it's going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference anyway, and the crater will be a lot more impressive.
Although I see your point, it does stand to reason that any organization with more than 2 people, must have a "number two" at all times, so if you kill "the number two man," another person instantly gets the dubious honor.
So in theory you ought to be able to kill Al Qaeda 'Number Twos' forever, or at least until there aren't any left to get promoted.
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I'll preface this by saying that I've never used a BSD as a desktop OS, although I've used it pretty extensively through a remote shell. What OS to go with really depends on what your goals are. If you want to ditch Windows as a desktop OS, but maintain most of the same stuff you're doing, particularly including games, you're probably going to want to go with Linux. If your ultimate aim is server administration ... pick whatever you want. I wouldn't even bother putting a GUI on it. In fact it'll be a more educational experience if you set the whole thing up headlessly anyway.
Personally I did the latter before I did the former; I set up some old machines as home fileservers and firewalls, stuck in closets and stuff, before I attempted to do an open-source desktop machine. Mostly I think this is because I was really cheap but always had a few old P100s or 133s lying around. I found the hardware support on esoteric old junk to be better with Linux, although there are some pretty impressive turnkey firewall systems based on BSD that you can just put in the CD-Rom drive and reboot, and viola -- instant firewall. (I can't remember the name of any of them at the moment, I played with them for a while and was pretty impressed though.)
I've only given what I thought was a fair shot to a Linux desktop fairly recently. I didn't take the jump completely, but bought a new machine and a KVM switch and go back and forth between it and my Mac. So far I've used Ubuntu, but disliked Gnome and installed the Kubuntu packages (KDE+dependencies). For all the complaints that I sometimes have of it, it's remarkably good. Definitely useable; however at least my personal installation has a lot of quirks, and to me that's not a good thing. I'd have to say though that it's not a bad way to get started, and so far I haven't found anything that's screamed to me that it would be a better option. (Although if anyone does know of a Debian+KDE distro that's stable, well documented, and polished, I'm in the market.)
I would just caution anyone to moderate your expectations, I think my key problem throughout all of my experiments with Kubuntu is that I'm basically A/Bing that system against my Mac, and the difference in maturity and general "spit and polish" shows.
I've got a better one to send his way.
You know he deserves it.
No, but they can give you significant benefits/bonuses for not being unhealthy. I've worked at several companies that have had programs rewarding employees who didn't smoke, or who exercised regularly. There is the question of enforcement -- how do you keep people from cheating -- which I never really got an answer to, but it was pretty cool to recieve a hundred bucks or so, just because I didn't smoke. (And if I had smoked, I could have gotten the same thing for quitting, plus subidized treatment.)
It would be interesting if these things became common, to the point of making up a large percentage of your salary. If you're fit, eat right, exercise four times a week, and don't smoke or do drugs, your salary is one thing; if you're a fat, lazy bastard, watch a few thousand dollars in bonuses disappear.
I wonder what the social implications of such a system would be. (I have this perverse mental image of a lot of fat people starting a riot, then having heart attacks...)
Human resources are a company's most valuable asset in some industries. "Brain-based" businesses, where the whole business is nothing but an office building, some computers and furniture, and a whole bunch of people, are pretty aware that if they're not recruiting and retaining good people, they're one foot in the grave.
However, Wal-Mart really is just using its employees as warm bodies. In fact, not even for that. Really they just do things that haven't been automated yet, at least not in a cost-effective way. It's still cheaper to hire a 19-year-old with a strong back to stock bigscreens on a shelf than it is to build a robot to do the same job.
The reason that the health and welfare of their employees doesn't really matter to Wal-Mart is because there is perceived to be a near-infinite supply of them waiting outside the glass doors, ready to take up the helm if anyone gets too ill or starts demanding a higher salary. And this is quite probably true, especially when you consider that Wal-Mart has shown in the past that its not adverse to hiring illegals.
Your salary, in a properly working economy, will never exceed your perceived cost of replacement. When your job can be done by anyone with 2/5ths of a brain and the normal human complement of arms and legs, in short, a lowest-common-denominator job, you shouldn't expect to live anything better than a lowest-common-denominator life. If you want to be paid more, find some way to raise your perceived replacement cost. But it's naieve to assume that anyone is going to pay their employees more than it would cost to recruit and train a new person to do their job; anything less would be irrational, and corporations are notoriously un-irrational.
I'm not sure this is a fair argument though. The reason privately purchased healthcare costs so much is that it's essentially a "boutique" item. Very few people ever need to purchase it themselves, because they get it through their employer, thus the competition isn't there.
If nearly everyone were out shopping around for their own insurance, it would be more like auto insurance is right now -- rife with compeitition on everything from raw price, to less tangible benefits like 24/7 roadside assistance and local offices. There are companies you can go to if you want nothing but a proof of insurance card for your glove compartment, and companies you can go to if you want total hand-holding throughout the process, and a person that you can call pretty much anytime. (And this is in a market that's really not very open at all -- it's hugely burdened with regulation and licensing, and varies widely from state to state.)
The health insurance market would be even bigger than auto insurance, and the compeition would be fiercer. While now you have a bunch of basically identical companies (is Kaiser really any different from a consumer standpoint than Aetna?), if there was more competition they'd be falling over each other trying to differentiate their products. You'd have plans and companies catering to the young single worker who just wants something basic -- the 'cover me if I get hit by a truck' type plan -- to people with families who want to use their local doctor, get full preventative care, etc.
Rather than catering to the consumer, right now the health insurance companies' "customers" are really the big corporations that they sell group policies to. Because they have basically the same goals in mind -- get the cheapest policy possible without inciting a riot among the drones -- it's no wonder that health insurance has all started to seem identical, at least compared to what it would be like if people could actually pick what they wanted.
Actually, what you're saying is, in fact, probably true. If your goal was to insure everyone in the country at the lowest rate possible, then the most efficient way to do it would be to only have one giant insurance company, and one risk pool.
However this ignores several things. First, and what I think is most important, is by eliminating all competition in the insurance industry, you would remove any impetus to become more efficient. Such a company would probably become hideously bloated and turn into a giant cash sink, employ many times the number of people it actually needed to operate, and would be beholden to basically nobody. Since there wouldn't be any alternatives for customers to switch to, their level of service could also deteriorate to rock-bottom.
The argument you're making is the classic argument for centralization in an economy. "Hey, everyone wants to have a car -- why don't we just make one really big car factory? It'll be really efficient." True, but not everyone wants the same car, and even if they did, eliminating the competition in the marketplace to build better cars would probably over time eliminate the advantage of centralization.
I think your comments are well taken. I just wanted to clarify my point about OSS developers. You are correct that the great majority of them probably are not interested in how well Linux does (although I would argue that perhaps they should be, since I think most people who use OSS benefit indirectly by its popularity/use, even though it may not be direct or obvious); I suppose rather than generalizing out to "OSS developers" I should have made it more specific to 'OSS developers who want to make that their main source of income.' Obviously there are a lot of people writing code that are perfectly content to keep it as a hobby, and I respect both their attitude and the work that they do. However if someone's goal was to get paid to either create free software, or make money from some sort of ancillary service (consulting/installation/support, etc.) that would allow them to bankroll development activities, I think they'd be well advised to consider their personal image as part of the 'total package' they're selling.
The part he understands, and the part that you do not, is the part that's not written in the letters, but the part that's written into the human soul.
Wait, my soul came with a license?
Damn this clickwrap...I knew I should have read that agreement a little more closely.
You're still thinking in terms of the band (or painter, artist, whatever) deriving their income from selling copies of the work. This is not what I'm suggesting. I'm talking about something that's a lot closer to patronage than it is to selling content. People will give money to artists in order to keep them producing new stuff, if they like the artist and value their work. That is where artists and other creative types will support themselves, not off of sales of the finished product. So rather than paying $12 for a CD today, and (hopefully) have that money split between the distributor and the creator, you would pay two separate people: you'd pay for the content to be delivered to you, which would probably cost next-to-nothing, because competition would make much profiteering here difficult, and then you would pay the artist directly, if you wanted to see them continue in business. Nobody would make you do the latter, and artists who couldn't maintain a fanbase that was interested in supporting them would go bankrupt.
Would something like this allow for the number of people in the music industry, particularly the middlemen, that exist now? No, certainly not. It would result in exactly as many artists creating new work as the market was interested in subsidizing through voluntary contributions.
Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with you here.
I never used to dress up for anything. Well, weddings and funerals, but only if I really liked the people involved, and sometimes not even then. I never really thought about it.
The latest job I'm working at came with a big pay bump and a significant dress code. I don't think I ever saw it in writing, but it's just clear: you don't come into the office without a long-sleeve collared shirt and dress pants, and some sort of shoes that have seen the business end of a horsehair brush and some Kiwi.
Anyway, I found since I started working there that when I'm 'dressed for work' and go out into the world, the level of service and attention I receive is pretty significantly different from what I was used to. In fact I've tested it a few times; gone to the same restaurant a few times wearing work clothes, then gone a few times in a pair of cargos and a t-shirt, just to see what happens. People are politer, service is faster, I get called "sir" a lot more...it's not a huge difference, but it's noticeable.
Unlike your skin color -- which I don't believe in judging people by, as they have no control over it -- you choose what you put on every morning. You can choose to look like pretty much anything you want (within the bounds of the clothing you can afford); and other people are going to judge you based on that implicit choice. When I see someone who looks like a slob, I don't feel bad judging them, because they chose to look that way. If you roll out of bed, put on the first articles of clothing that you find on your floor, and go with it, that's fine -- but don't say you weren't warned when your glass doesn't get refilled at a restaurant as fast as the guy in a suit's does. You knew, or should have known, what you were getting into when you decided to go out like that.
My experiences are probably region-specific; the treatment I might have gotten in Southern California might have been different (I don't know, never having been there and having little interest in going -- too hot for my taste). But in an area filled with white-collar corporate and government types, and businesses that cater to them, if you want to be taken seriously it's pretty obvious how you want to present yourself.
Having been on both sides of the issue now, I think there's a lot to be said to matching your dress and other aspects of your personal image (hair, accessories, etc.) to the impression you want to create. And on the corporate level, I think it's pretty fair to want to create dress codes that match the kind of business and team you want to build. And if you're selling something -- as a whole lot of OSS developers effectively are, whether they realize it or not -- to matching your appearance to your client or intended buyer.
Its basic economics, the act of creating a new product is always going to cost more than copying an exisiting product. If you allow anyone to copy exisiting products at will you create a force in the market that makes creating new products LESS profitable than copying them.
I think this assumes that there will always be a demand for the copied product. Which I really doubt is true -- if some band releases a song, and it's immediately picked up and copied everywhere, there will be a high initial demand for it, and then that demand will taper off, and over time it will diminish towards zero. (Well, or towards some constant, perhaps.) But over time people are going to become dissatisfied with the content that's out there.
There will always be a demand for artists to create new content because people will always want something new. Your "basic economics" is fundamentally flawed if it does not take that into account. Although I doubt it would allow musicians to keep up the mega-tours and ultra-rich lifestyles that (a very few of them) maintain now, I think that groups which had a sufficient fan interest would probably be kept in business by voluntary contributions given by people who simply want to encourage them to continue producing music. Obviously, being a professional musician might suddenly become less of a lucrative profession than it is now, but it would end up being in line with the market's demand for new content.
Effectively, such a model would separate the "demand for creation of new content" from the "demand for creation of copies of existing content." Once something is created, it can be copied ad infinium without any benefit to the creator, but the act of creation has already been accomplished, and under such a system would already have been paid for by benefactors who wanted the work created.
I think you are correct in saying that far fewer people actually care about the creation of new works than care about possessing copies of already-created ones, but to say that there is no demand for newly-created works is incorrect. Over time, people will desire new things to listen to, look at, and watch, and they will pay people to make them, even if they are not able to then take that work and profit by monopolizing the distribution of it.
If you have any 'simple laws' that can quickly and accurately simulate even thousands of neurons all working in parallel,
Wouldn't this effectively be psychology?
Psychology seems to be to the study of individual neurons what meteorology and weather prediction is to the study of gases and molecular chemical interactions.
Humm, next time I'm looking for a project I'll have to give installing WindowMaker a shot.
I knew that KDE wasn't exactly renowned for being lightweight or speedy, but I'm glad to hear somebody else agree that the hardware I'm running it on shouldn't be that underpowered for it, because I didn't think so either. I'm willing to cut it a little slack too because it's KDE 3.5.0, so hopefully it will improve in time, but I was still stunned by the lack of performance. (Konqueror also SIGSEVs repeatably when I try to use the "File Image View" on my home directory, and I can't figure out why...one of many quirks that system seems to have developed.)
I would consider using Gnome, but the lack of a screen-top, context-sensitive menubar is a deal-breaker for me. Is using the full-blown KDE window manager the only way to get this? Linux window managers are relatively new in my life; the majority of my Linux use in the past has been through shell sessions, this is really my first attempt at giving it (what I thought was) a fair shot as a desktop system. If I can get a desktop that has a top-of-screen menubar, without the load of KDE, I'm really not wed to it in any way.
Uh ... I'm not necessarily agreeing with the GP, but I think if you want to make claims like that, you're going to have to back them up.
I've lived in a lot of small towns, and have universally found them to be decidedly more pleasant places to live than in the major* city I live in now -- which is significantly more polluted and has higher crime than where I used to live. The only reason I'm here, along with quite a few other people, are because it's where the jobs are. I haven't lived in any small town that had anywhere near the type of social, environmental, and criminal problems that this place does. Granted, they were all very low-population-density, high-income towns, but that's part of the reason people want to live there.
That said, I have run into people who honestly do enjoy urban living, and respect that it does have some advantages (public transportation chief among them I think, followed by social and cultural events, nightlife, etc.).
* = City in this case is Washington, DC, which despite not being a "major" city in terms of population, does manage to be the 2003 murder capitol, member of the top-20 most polluted cities, and city with the third-worst traffic in the nation.
I think this is the kind of person you get when you put out a want ad that specifies "Must have 20+ years of Windows XP administration experience."
Actually someone further up in the thread allegedly found that this idiot's published salary is in excess of $60k a year, which puts him above what I know many entry-level IT people are making in the private sector these days -- people who are quite definitely brighter than the Town Manager in question.
I lived in a town once that had a Council+Manager form of government; it's not a bad idea on paper. You have an elected council that makes all the political and policy decisions, and then a paid Town Manager who implements them. The problem is that if the Council doesn't keep a tight reign on the Manager, it can become fairly easy for them to exceed their mandate and begin to actually govern, rather than just manage. It's pretty easy to do favors for people when you have a lot of day-to-day operational control and little oversight (as is often the case when the town council only meets a few times a month and their agenda is filled months in advance), and eventually you can end up with the Manager pretty much controlling the Council and making themselves impossible to fire without overwhelming negative public opinion and outrage.
Up until about 4 weeks ago I was using a 400MHz "Sawtooth" G4 with 768MB RAM and the stock 32MB video card as my main machine, running 10.4 with all the latest updates, new version of iLife, etc. I really didn't think it was that bad, and in fact when I upgraded to my new machine (a dual 2GHz G5), I was actually surprised that the UI "speed feel" didn't change all that much. Opening applications and windows are noticeably faster, but the difference wasn't as dramatically night and day as some previous upgrades I've made. This is not a criticism of the new machine as much as I think it's a credit to how well OS X performs on older hardware, at undemanding tasks. Sure, that machine was an absolute horror if you wanted to transcode a few hours of MPEG-2 video (might as well just let it run overnight), but for day-to-day stuff it really wasn't bad. I think in some ways, OS X gets a bad rap for being a resource hog. There are definitely parts of it that are (Dashboard, etc.) but in general I don't think it is.
I have a Kubuntu system running on an HP workstation (Pentium 4 Prescott, 512MB RAM, NVidia NVS 200 Quadro), which if K/Ubunutu's reputation for running on older hardware was as good as people say it is, ought to fly. (In fact this was why I bought this machine in the first place -- I thought it ought to be smoking, for the very basic level of stuff I wanted to do with it.) However, I can bog the system down by dragging a large selection rectangle on the KDE desktop: it takes probably 3 or more seconds for the selection box to catch up with the cursor going from one corner of the screen to the other, and XOrg's processor utilization goes up into the 95-98% range. I was shocked the first time I did this. Is this a big deal? No, not really -- but it sure makes the machine feel slow. I accept that the Mac/PC thing isn't a scientific comparison because the hardware is different, but really I think the advantage ought to go to the PC here (3.2GHz P4 with a 64MB display card, versus a 400MHz Mac with an ancient 32MB one?), and it comes out feeling worse.
Anyway, I just wanted to agree with you; the seemingly accepted wisdom that Mac OS X is inferior to a Linux desktop on older hardware is something I have yet to see a whole lot of evidence for. One of these days maybe I'll load Kubuntu-PPC (or Ubuntu -- perhaps KDE is the problem) onto my iBook and see how it fares, but as of right now I'd say there are a lot of valid reasons to use a Linux desktop, but UI responsiveness isn't one of them.
A website that depicts people in a sexual manner for the clear purpose of sexual excitement of the viewer.
By all means, please make that the definition. Especially with the phrase "clear purpose" in there. I'm not even a sleazeball lawyer, and I could think of half a dozen ways to put some quasi-pornographic stuff that would make your hair uncurl fit through that definition. How about "training films"? Maybe some totally academic "instructional videos"? How about lingerie ads -- for very revealing/sexy lingerie? Advertisements for bondage equipment? (The photos themselves aren't designed to be gratifying, they're just demonstrating the product!) How about a site that goes around and compiles the sexiest, totally legitimate, non-nude photos?
People are going to get sexually excited by looking at the Sears catalog, if that's all they have access to. If you say 'swimsuits are okay,' you'll have people poring over the swimsuit photos, looking for the model with the most erect nipples or the most obvious cameltoe.
Any rule as vague as the one you propose is open to miles of interpretation. Who do you want to judge questions when they come up? You want to put together an International Decency Tribunal? Hell, we can barely get the major countries of the world to sit down at the same table and say that nuclear weapons are quite possibly a not-so-great idea; you expect to get some acceptable consensus between the Representative from Pakistan and the Representative from the Netherlands on whether a woman in a bikini in a cold room is obscene?
I think the only people who think such a scheme is workable are the ones who think that their own system of morals, values, and social mores are universal, or even universally understandable -- and that is a very naive assumption.
Although, /. should technically be blocked as a discussion site.
.safe.us and .safe.sa, containing totally different whitelists. Even then I'm not sure that there would be even a national consensus on where to draw the line; is "safe" equal to PG-13? R? NC-17? Or does it have to be totally "G rated"? Wherever you draw the line, there are going to be people who feel it's way too restrictive, and others who feel it's far too lenient.
Says who?
My company doesn't actively discourage online discussion (or blogging, even, although I don't partake), although I think it's fairly safe to assume that viewing porn would probably get me a security escort out of the building.
I'm just pointing this out as one very minor example of a bigger point, namely that the distinctions you seem to be supporting are highly subjective. What one person or organization considers "safe" may be completely unacceptable to another group. Who exactly are you going to let define the standards? The Christian Coalition? The MPAA? The World Wrestling Federation? How about the "Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice"? I'm sure they have some theories on the matter of appropriateness that they'd be happy to share.
You likened your proposed regulatory structure to that used for movies, however a casual glance at IMDB reveals that there is little in the way of international consensus about the age-appropriateness of many subjects: there are films that are rated NC-17 in the US but 13 or 14 in some European countries, but I'd be willing to bet the possession of which are probably serious crimes in some places elsewhere in the world. Are they "safe"?
The only way you'd ever be able to come close to what you're proposing would be to put the "safe" domain under the country-code TLDs in the domain hierarchy -- so that there would be
Not to mention, as other people pointed out, the vast issues it raises over "grey area" material. If anything with a picture of a naked breast is "unsafe," you've probably just inadvertently blocked a lot of breast-cancer prevention sites. Who's going to accept liability for that sort of inability to access information?
The reason nobody seriously considers a "universal whitelist" is because the practical problems with doing it would be so great, they would exceed the benefit -- which is not having to do what people do right now, which is come up with their own whitelist for their network, if they're really concerned. Add to that the fact that there are a lot of people who don't think that having totally unrestricted access to information, and I can't see it happening.
Actually "XXX" was (and still is, I believe) the symbol of the city of Amsterdam ...
Truly, they have cemented an enviable reputation in history.
The role you're thinking about for the Navy has also changed. Their is much less of a demand for huge "blue water" flotillas, and much more of a demand for smaller, lower-draft vessels to support shore operations.
The big carriers are nice, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that (at least in the USN) that they're going anywhere, anytime soon. The new destroyers are aimed at "littoral dominance," that is supporting ground troops and amphibious operations in coastal waters, in areas where you just can't take a carrier or a submarine. Right now we have to do most of that sort of warfare (patrolling near shores) with aircraft, and that gets expensive and impractical if you want to maintain a continuous presence.
The idea of the new destroyers is that they would allow us to maintain a presence and establish a platform for operations (e.g., special ops divers, artillery bombardment) in areas where right now we're limited to a temporary presence.
Nobody is really suggesting that we roll out a new round of Iowa-classes, as cool as I think the idea of 16" dia. naval gunnery is (find me an aircraft that can lay down 243,600 lbs. of ordnance every five minutes onto a target, near continuously).
Odd that you got modded 'troll,' since I think your question is anything but.
I've been wondering the same thing. There are quite a few Linux backup products out there, ranging from the more full-featured network backup systems like Amanda and Bacula to shell scripts (some of which are damned impressive by themselves). I've become aware of all the different options because I just bought a DDS tape autoloader for backing up my home network, and choosing one can be pretty daunting. (And I only have a handful of clients to back up.)
I think there is a definite need to sort out or at least get a central place where people can read about the pros and cons of various strategies, that alone would take a lot of the "black art" feeling out of network backups.
(By the way that web interface for Bacula seems pretty neat. Nice work.)
What exactly makes this engine new? Is it a whole new concept design?
Kind of. A regular jet engine has a lot of moving parts -- a compressor and turbine, at the very least -- and a lot of bearings which are prone to failure if they're not maintained every few thousand hours, they don't really like getting full of dust and crap, and they're expensive to make go really fast. The ramjets (and scramjets, supersonic version of same) are a way to essentially make a jet engine without any moving parts. The fluid is "rammed" through an inlet and against constrictions which compress it against itself, and produce the necessary temperatures and oxygen densities to burn the fuel and produce thrust.
The problem with them based on what I've seen is sort of a bootstrapping one; they don't work until they're moving through the air (or air is moving through them) at a several hundred miles an hour (or in the case of scramjets, supersonically?). So getting them going is quite a trick, you need some other form of propulsion basically to get the aircraft up to speed before you can fire them.
However for missiles they're perfect, since those are generally moving pretty quickly by the time their engines kick in anyway (because they've been launched from an aircraft, or from a ship/submarine/land vehicle with rocket assist). I think the application would be making cruise missiles that fly much faster than current turbofan-powered ones do, but maintain the range and payload/weight characteristics.
If you're going to be hitting the ground at any speed greater than a few feet per second, you might as well make it Mach 7. Not like it's going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference anyway, and the crater will be a lot more impressive.
Although I see your point, it does stand to reason that any organization with more than 2 people, must have a "number two" at all times, so if you kill "the number two man," another person instantly gets the dubious honor.
So in theory you ought to be able to kill Al Qaeda 'Number Twos' forever, or at least until there aren't any left to get promoted.