Well, actually the netbook makers such as Asus are trying to move towards ARM-based machines with Linux so that they can reach much lower price points.
And much longer battery life. Power efficiency with ARM is a lot better than on x86.
When do they start suing the Intel Corporation or Acer (one of whom had coined the term IIRC)...
Ding! That's the sound of your head ringing after being struck by a cluebat.
The whole point is that Psion coined, and trademarked, the term several years ago. Neither Intel nor Acer coined the term, despite what the bogus article summary says.
In fact I even own one of the Psion netbooks. It's actually not particularly old; maybe four years. I have older machines that are still in active use. If the Linux support for this one were in mainline, I'd use it more.
That's why multiple sources are the best. Whenever sources disagree, the more reliable sources are trusted over less reliable sources.
Not really. They don't like primary sources in regards to current Technology, for one example... where the hierarchy tends to go (1) specifications are the primary sources; (2) comments from people involved in the specification development are secondary sources, and may have some biases but may also provide useful explanation that's not immediately clear; (3) trade rags publish articles written by people who aren't competent to participate directly, and these are tertiary sources. Wikipedia strongly prefers tertiary sources, which in these cases are the least reliable. Write an article based on primary sources, and it gets flagged as needing references. But hey, there may not be any... and if there are, there's no way they're as reliable as the primary sources.
That's almost the same point as in the article by Jaron Lanier. He's the primary source about himself. The fact that an article about him is more about a myth than about the real Jaron... indicates a problem.
ARM Cortex A8 system on chip, sporting up to four Cortex cores...
Shouldn't that be four Cortext A9 chips, on the grounds that A9 has SMP support but not A8?
That said... the reason the ARM market is so big is that it goes after a lower power market,
with cell phones and other battery powered gadgets being the canonical example. That market
has not yet felt a real need for SMP. So even if such an NVidia chip gets off the ground, it's
unclear how much it would sell.
The first widely available ARM Cortex chips are TI's OMAP3 family... as seen in the
Beagleboard and, possibly more relevant in this
context, the open source Pandora gaming thingie. NVidia? Haven't really heard of them in these contexts,
though maybe it's just their usual closed-source mindset.
Not as free as they were before they pointed out an uncomfortable truth. Clearchannel pretty much booted them off most country radio stations.
and the public was free to react
More like, Clearchannel was free to react. Large portions of the public were fully supportive of that truth... but their voices were all but drowned out by ClearChannel whipping up a little fascism on the Dixie Chicks.
The reason for this is, IMHO, large parts of Linux tend to be "trial and errored" into existence, rather than "specified, designed and implemented".
Try instead: you *see* more of the trial-and-error on Linux. All operating systems rely on that to various degrees; their problems can't be specified in enough detail to allow a pure "waterfall" design/implementation process. The hardware keeps evolving, as do its applications; nothing stays still. In fact, that waterfall model has been widely discredited for years now, in large segments of the software industry. It's unworkable unless requirements are knowable a couple years in advance, and completely stable.
The project management issue is more or less when to allow interface changes to appear. You can argue about the policies Linux uses there, sure... but frankly, delaying them for years and then merging lots of them into one mega-disaster release is a policy that I'm glad to see abandoned. Incremental change, as adopted by Linux and many open source projects, is much more effective.
Also, look at who complains about the lack of a binary interface. Not open source developers at all. Only folk who want to leverage community efforts without following community rules. Why should they have any say in this, at all? The folk who are actively moving the system forward have no problem working within those constraints.
Why does hardware need to be so non standard and proprietary requiring its own drivers?
Since different markets have different requirements. In most cases, innovation requires new
hardware interfaces. And there are substantial engineering
costs involved in conforming to a standard, including more testing than is otherwise needed.
Take for example USB1, all USB controllers from many different manufacturers work with
generic UHCI or OHCI drivers. USB2 is even better, since all controllers support EHCI.
UHCI is found only on PC hardware. OHCI is pretty widespread, true, but many newer chips aim to
come out with high speed host support and that's only full speed.
EHCI is found mostly on systems with PCI, though there are
a few non-PCI versions. Non-PC hardware has quite a variety of other standards... optimized for
things like lower power, less chip area, OTG support, and ease of implementing as a discrete non-PCI chip.
If you have standards in hardware then the issue of drivers goes away... Your OS can
provide drivers for the standard hardware
But then you also prevent hardware level innovations of many interesting types. Have you ever
participated in standards development by the way? All vendors doing so are careful to avoid letting
their competitors get too much of an advantage. It's hardly ever a case of adoptiong or developing
a technically optimal solution.
And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.
That would screw up searches based on those direct quotations. Example: AP article says mouthpiece spouts propaganda, someone covers that as The latest example is this from AP: mouthpiece spouts propaganda Notice how this directly conflicts with fact, fact, fact, but also directly contradicts what mouthpiece said last week and would, if true, break not just another promise made to the voters but laws L1, L2, and L3.
In fact, maybe that's part of the goal here... making it harder to find criticism associated with so-called news, and harder for third-party fact checkers (or spin detectors) to be effective.
Having traveled in some tropical countries, one of the things I most remember about their fruits are the sheer NUMBER of different banana varieties. No monoculture. Your average roadside stand would have half a dozen varieties, and the one a mile down the road would have a few more. Tomorrow the mix would be different. And most of them would taste a lot better than the crap that's so widely available elsewhere!
I for one will welcome our new polycultural bananalords.
the license between ARM and Sun for Java technology is based on the Sun commercial license
That confirms that Sun's fingers are in the deal. And the story you got from ARM is not different from what I got from them; in both cases, ARM says it's out of their hands. (Which I happen to think was an apallingly dumb thing for ARM to do, but there were a lot of apallingly dumb things being done with Java in those days.) And when I've asked Sun folk about it, they haven't denied ARM's story.
It's greed plain and simple. I wasn't asking them for a Sun JVM, just hardware specs to apply to a small free JVM.
If some of those hardware specs are controlled by a license from Sun, then ARM's hands are tied unless/until Sun says they can provide them under the usual royalty-free terms applying to all of the non-security system software specs. Of course, since neither of us participated in those licensing discussions (right?) we can only presume that ARM's story is truthful, and in fact Sun does hold them by the short'n'curlies. That presumption may not be correct though; it could have been a business deal structured to get money to both partners.
No matter what the deal actually is, though, if Sun is really opening up Java, the Jazelle stuff should be a part of it. Agreed, I have an Nokia 770 (and various other ARM926ejs systems) that I'd like to have had running Java. You can probably assume that Nokia didn't think Java was valuable enough to pay for the privilege of using Jazelle.
I still want to know when the ARM hardware support for Java will have public specs: Jazelle, as found on ARMv5TEJ and ARM6 cores. The ARM926ej-s cores (ARMv5tej) are some of the most widely used ones. ARM6 is found in Nokia N800 series. Until Jazelle specs become available, none of those chips can leverage the hardware support for Java using a GPL'd JVM. They have to buy a JVM from somewhere else. This affects the JVM used with Android, for one example. It increases the runtime footprint of JVMs on embedded hardware... to the degree that using Java isn't necessarily practical.
And what does this have to do with Sun, you ask? When I ask ARM why they don't make the Jazelle specs public, they say it's because Sun required them to be closed, so that can't change until Sun OKs it.
Of course, I've kind of lost interest in Java, myself; I don't work in areas it matters any more. If Sun hadn't been mismanaging it, I might not have moved away from such areas. Oh well; that's just more water under the bridge.
Their press announcement arrived before any content, sigh.
The PR says the website will start with: drivers, technical documentation, source code, and information regarding the VIA CN700, CX700/M, CN896 and the new VIA VX800 chipsets. It'd be good to see docs on their more widely used chipsets, like vt8235 and vt8237... detailed ones, including errata. I mean, currently they piss off almost everyone who uses their chipsets, so why would anyone want to buy NEW hardware with VIA chips if it's not even clear the current stuff can be made to work well?
It's a nice idea, years overdue. But even at that, pre-announced.
The documentation you're talking about is about how things are designed to work, not how they're implemented... we had the former documented already... This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk*, etc.
We have a failure to communicate here. There is no reasonable sense in which disk formats are not part of "how things are designed to work". If you didn't have that documented already, you didn't even have adequate internal documentation! If Microsoft's design methodology thinks otherwise, that's one source of this huge problem.
The classic buzzphrase for interface specifications is Formats and Protocols, since those are the root of all interoperability. Good design practices may well start from formats and protocols; at least, those are always managed carefully as versioned external interfaces to the next product version, to other vendors' products, and so on.
Also PMBus, which standardizes much more of the relevant stuff.
For the record, SMBus maxes out at 100 Kbit/sec. PMBus allows 400 Kbit/sec, as does I2C. Neither of them is really intended to be a multi-master bus, except in the very limited sense that they define a way to send notifications from slave to master. (Though the alternative SMBALERT# mechanism seems much simpler... I think the "notification" thingie was designed to prevent a simple migration path from I2C, and promote fancier Intel southbridge or LPC chips.)
... linking to another site that describes a web page, instead of just linking to the page itself.
Strange. That's essentially the policy WikiPedia has... if you put up a good article using only primary sources you'll get dinged because This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Maybe for disciplines like history that makes sense. But it's a phenomenally stupid policy for technology, where secondary and tertiary sources are both rare and, more often than not, written by people who don't understand the subject matter well enough to describe the subject correctly. (Else they'd be in the industry and close enough to be ruled out as a Wiki-acceptable source...) Or else by people who have some axe to grind and don't mind spreading misinformation.
Stupidity is growing, it appears. The right wing "assault on truth" appears in way too many places...
HPET isn't essential for the tickless kernel, not at all. I run tickless on several machines which don't have HPET.
I wouldn't swear that their test system was a system with working HPET, for example.
What HPET is nice for is Higher Precision timer interrupts; what do you think the "HP" stands for?
CONFIG_NO_HZ (tickless kernel) option isn't available in 64-bit kernels yet
It was checked into the 2.6.24 GIT tree last week, and I built a generic K8 kernel with NO_HZ.
I booted it, and PowerTop says that laptop is getting about 50 timer ticks per second now
(vs 260/second before). FWIW that's with Feisty...
The biggest problem there is the audio mixer, which causes more most of those ticks.
That's userspace code, which Ubuntu can and should be power-tuning.
It's not like PowerTop isn't available, or anything like that!
So what's the DigiKey part number?
So I can buy a few (or a thousand, or whatever). I just entered "SPARC" in
their database, and got "No records match your search criteria."
If I can't buy it from major distributors, it's not "commodity" silicon.
Well-trained union worker gets paid 100,000 USD a year.
That's a darn well paid union worker. Last statistics I saw showed *MAYBE* half that much; outside of tech industries, lots of managers don't even make that much. Are you making these numbers up out of your hat?
But to say that the only reason for offshoring is subsidies is just ridiculous.
Ah, I see. You can't read. I absolutely did not say that subsidies are the only reason for offshoring. Or even that if every subsidy were removed, there'd never be a reason to offshore things. (Or move them back onshore...) But they're a huge part of why many more jobs have moved to other countries than a free market would move. Subsidies are quite pervasive; there are all kinds of direct and indirect subsidies.
My point there was just that the labor market is extremely non-free, and is tilted in favor of the corporate manager class to an extreme degree. You haven't disagreed with that; you've just made up strawman figures to support the arguments of those managers. You know, the ones who, if they can join "the club", can get salaries in seven to ten digits, rather than just five digits, despite not making the same kind of contributions to the bottom line as the hundreds or thousands of full time workers (union or otherwise) their salaries could otherwise pay...
This is ludicrous. It's a public location, there is no expectation of privacy.
And that's on top of the assumption of these... "pigs" is fair, here... that they should be immune to citizen oversight. There's no way that *SEVEN* *EXTRA* *COPS* were needed to arrest him.
Personally, I have much more experience with corporations doing that. Are you sure that's not a typo?
I know someone who left here to go work in a union shop. He ended up coming back because the idiot who couldn't do shit and has a whopping year's seniority can't be fired (even though he is useless) so an idiot who doesn't do shit makes more than he was going to, ever.
Yep, reminds me much of... every frickin' corporate job. The "can't be fired" comes from managers protecting their sycophants (or family, or co-conspirators, etc), and the people who actually do the work are not the one who get rewarded for having done it. (With rare exceptions.)
It's also because unions are often famously controlled by organized crime.
Whereas white collar criminals, like the ones running Enron and so forth, are part of a different kind of organized crime framework, one not directly linked to people likely to be indicted and/or sent to jail. They're too rich you know (<cough>Paris Hilton</cough>), or too well connected (<cough>Scooter Libby</cough>), or work for some corrupt government, or can pay more for better lawyers, or... you do know that large chunks of the investment money in the world come from laundered money, including the money controlling most any corporation, right? I think you must be living in some other decade. We could only wish that current corporations were as clean of corruption as current unions (after decades of FBI investigations, at the behest of management which was allowed to hide its own crimes).
Try this reality kool-aid for a change... you'll start noticing how much of what you've been told is propaganda in support of the corporate powers-that-be.
That's one of the models spread by corporatists. For a more accurate one, see below...
They got better contracts and better benefits, which raised the price of the goods and services produced by union shops.
Raised prices to better match social costs, right. As one would expect of a free market: one which takes account of all costs, rather than externalizing them. Of course, there's also a strong point to be made that such costs should be raised for all shops, not just union shops. Consider the health insurance fiasco. One reason it's so pathetic in the US is that it's paid by corporations as part of contracts, either union or white collar, rather than as part of the basic social contract with every citizen. In the US costs are concentrated, not spread out, and they're subject to extremly short sighted penny pinching. (Classic example being that preventative medicine is rarely covered, while surgery and medicines that can cost tends or hundreds of times as much.) That is, costs are needlessly magnified... not the fault of the healthcare beneficiaries, but of the payment framework chosen by the corporations.
Laws of the free market then shifted business away from union shops to offshore and non-union shops.
... See, there you buy into something that's provably false. If it were a free market, you would have the government enforcing labor laws, and you would most emphatically not have corporate subsidies to shift production overseas. Absent those subsidies, there's not so much reason to move things offshore. What we have is not a "free market" but a managed market, and the management policies have for several decades now been anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-citizen.
Unions then resorted to some questionable tactics to "fight to keep what they have" from heavy lobbying and lawmaking to outright extortion and violence.
Lobbying? Nowhere near the scale of the corporate bribery that rules in Washington DC. But lobbying in its own right is not questionable; just the kind that buys policy and dis-empowers fundamental stakeholders. (Like, oh, workers; voters that don't want to be in a war; people not running oil companies; etc.) Outright extortion and violence? Common union-busting tactics from the corporations inside the US, and in other countries where those corporations go to great lengths to avoid letting the citizens benefit from their own natural resources, including labor.
See there? It's easy. Just remember that the unions have been the victims over the past many decades while corporatist (i.e. fascist) government policies have ruled, and that those tactics you abhor have predominantly been practiced against those unions, rather than by them. Remember also that the corporation-owned papers have dis-incentives to report honestly on any labor issue, and the the reason unions exist is because those business owners have a very long history of mistreating their workers. Same is true of corporate-funded economics studies... most of them have biases against workers and in favor of management, in part because they pretend that things like quality of life have no value (and thus count many things as positive that are instead extremely negative).
Then you'll stop automatically distrusting unions, and stop automatically trusting the corporations which demonize them. In recent decades, the true stories have been told more often by unions than corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
In various places, truth is not an absolute defense against libel.
One of those places, it seems, is Massachussetts. Perhaps there's a common heritage in English law.
And much longer battery life. Power efficiency with ARM is a lot better than on x86.
Ding! That's the sound of your head ringing after being struck by a cluebat.
The whole point is that Psion coined, and trademarked, the term several years ago. Neither Intel nor Acer coined the term, despite what the bogus article summary says.
In fact I even own one of the Psion netbooks. It's actually not particularly old; maybe four years. I have older machines that are still in active use. If the Linux support for this one were in mainline, I'd use it more.
Not really. They don't like primary sources in regards to current Technology, for one example ... where the hierarchy tends to go (1) specifications are the primary sources; (2) comments from people involved in the specification development are secondary sources, and may have some biases but may also provide useful explanation that's not immediately clear; (3) trade rags publish articles written by people who aren't competent to participate directly, and these are tertiary sources. Wikipedia strongly prefers tertiary sources, which in these cases are the least reliable. Write an article based on primary sources, and it gets flagged as needing references. But hey, there may not be any ... and if there are, there's no way they're as reliable as the primary sources.
That's almost the same point as in the article by Jaron Lanier. He's the primary source about himself. The fact that an article about him is more about a myth than about the real Jaron ... indicates a problem.
At some level you could claim this is an illustration of the need for domain-specific ontologies ... a notion which Wikpedia doesn't currently endorse. It's one-size-fits-all, and they use a methodology better suited towards history than technology. Moreover, a method that's not well geared towards good history ... since it puts tertiary sources on a pedestal that is entirely inappropriate for current topics.
Shouldn't that be four Cortext A9 chips, on the grounds that A9 has SMP support but not A8?
That said ... the reason the ARM market is so big is that it goes after a lower power market,
with cell phones and other battery powered gadgets being the canonical example. That market
has not yet felt a real need for SMP. So even if such an NVidia chip gets off the ground, it's
unclear how much it would sell.
The first widely available ARM Cortex chips are TI's OMAP3 family ... as seen in the
Beagleboard and, possibly more relevant in this
context, the open source Pandora gaming thingie. NVidia? Haven't really heard of them in these contexts,
though maybe it's just their usual closed-source mindset.
Not as free as they were before they pointed out an uncomfortable truth. Clearchannel pretty much booted them off most country radio stations.
More like, Clearchannel was free to react. Large portions of the public were fully supportive of that truth ... but their voices were all but drowned out by ClearChannel whipping up a little fascism on the Dixie Chicks.
Try instead: you *see* more of the trial-and-error on Linux. All operating systems rely on that to various degrees; their problems can't be specified in enough detail to allow a pure "waterfall" design/implementation process. The hardware keeps evolving, as do its applications; nothing stays still. In fact, that waterfall model has been widely discredited for years now, in large segments of the software industry. It's unworkable unless requirements are knowable a couple years in advance, and completely stable.
The project management issue is more or less when to allow interface changes to appear. You can argue about the policies Linux uses there, sure ... but frankly, delaying them for years and then merging lots of them into one mega-disaster release is a policy that I'm glad to see abandoned. Incremental change, as adopted by Linux and many open source projects, is much more effective.
Also, look at who complains about the lack of a binary interface. Not open source developers at all. Only folk who want to leverage community efforts without following community rules. Why should they have any say in this, at all? The folk who are actively moving the system forward have no problem working within those constraints.
Since different markets have different requirements. In most cases, innovation requires new hardware interfaces. And there are substantial engineering costs involved in conforming to a standard, including more testing than is otherwise needed.
UHCI is found only on PC hardware. OHCI is pretty widespread, true, but many newer chips aim to come out with high speed host support and that's only full speed. EHCI is found mostly on systems with PCI, though there are a few non-PCI versions. Non-PC hardware has quite a variety of other standards ... optimized for
things like lower power, less chip area, OTG support, and ease of implementing as a discrete non-PCI chip.
But then you also prevent hardware level innovations of many interesting types. Have you ever participated in standards development by the way? All vendors doing so are careful to avoid letting their competitors get too much of an advantage. It's hardly ever a case of adoptiong or developing a technically optimal solution.
That would screw up searches based on those direct quotations. Example: AP article says mouthpiece spouts propaganda, someone covers that as The latest example is this from AP: mouthpiece spouts propaganda Notice how this directly conflicts with fact, fact, fact, but also directly contradicts what mouthpiece said last week and would, if true, break not just another promise made to the voters but laws L1, L2, and L3.
In fact, maybe that's part of the goal here ... making it harder to find criticism associated with so-called news, and harder for third-party fact checkers (or spin detectors) to be effective.
Having traveled in some tropical countries, one of the things I most remember about their fruits are the sheer NUMBER of different banana varieties. No monoculture. Your average roadside stand would have half a dozen varieties, and the one a mile down the road would have a few more. Tomorrow the mix would be different. And most of them would taste a lot better than the crap that's so widely available elsewhere!
I for one will welcome our new polycultural bananalords.
That confirms that Sun's fingers are in the deal. And the story you got from ARM is not different from what I got from them; in both cases, ARM says it's out of their hands. (Which I happen to think was an apallingly dumb thing for ARM to do, but there were a lot of apallingly dumb things being done with Java in those days.) And when I've asked Sun folk about it, they haven't denied ARM's story.
If some of those hardware specs are controlled by a license from Sun, then ARM's hands are tied unless/until Sun says they can provide them under the usual royalty-free terms applying to all of the non-security system software specs. Of course, since neither of us participated in those licensing discussions (right?) we can only presume that ARM's story is truthful, and in fact Sun does hold them by the short'n'curlies. That presumption may not be correct though; it could have been a business deal structured to get money to both partners.
No matter what the deal actually is, though, if Sun is really opening up Java, the Jazelle stuff should be a part of it. Agreed, I have an Nokia 770 (and various other ARM926ejs systems) that I'd like to have had running Java. You can probably assume that Nokia didn't think Java was valuable enough to pay for the privilege of using Jazelle.
I still want to know when the ARM hardware support for Java will have public specs: Jazelle, as found on ARMv5TEJ and ARM6 cores. The ARM926ej-s cores (ARMv5tej) are some of the most widely used ones. ARM6 is found in Nokia N800 series. Until Jazelle specs become available, none of those chips can leverage the hardware support for Java using a GPL'd JVM. They have to buy a JVM from somewhere else. This affects the JVM used with Android, for one example. It increases the runtime footprint of JVMs on embedded hardware ... to the degree that using Java isn't necessarily practical.
And what does this have to do with Sun, you ask? When I ask ARM why they don't make the Jazelle specs public, they say it's because Sun required them to be closed, so that can't change until Sun OKs it.
Of course, I've kind of lost interest in Java, myself; I don't work in areas it matters any more. If Sun hadn't been mismanaging it, I might not have moved away from such areas. Oh well; that's just more water under the bridge.
Their press announcement arrived before any content, sigh.
The PR says the website will start with: drivers, technical documentation, source code, and information regarding the VIA CN700, CX700/M, CN896 and the new VIA VX800 chipsets. It'd be good to see docs on their more widely used chipsets, like vt8235 and vt8237 ... detailed ones, including errata. I mean, currently they piss off almost everyone who uses their chipsets, so why would anyone want to buy NEW hardware with VIA chips if it's not even clear the current stuff can be made to work well?
It's a nice idea, years overdue. But even at that, pre-announced.
We have a failure to communicate here. There is no reasonable sense in which disk formats are not part of "how things are designed to work". If you didn't have that documented already, you didn't even have adequate internal documentation! If Microsoft's design methodology thinks otherwise, that's one source of this huge problem.
The classic buzzphrase for interface specifications is Formats and Protocols, since those are the root of all interoperability. Good design practices may well start from formats and protocols; at least, those are always managed carefully as versioned external interfaces to the next product version, to other vendors' products, and so on.
More than just talk wouldn't happen to include support for a Qualcomm ARM11 chipset, would it??
Also PMBus, which standardizes much more of the relevant stuff.
For the record, SMBus maxes out at 100 Kbit/sec. PMBus allows 400 Kbit/sec, as does I2C. Neither of them is really intended to be a multi-master bus, except in the very limited sense that they define a way to send notifications from slave to master. (Though the alternative SMBALERT# mechanism seems much simpler... I think the "notification" thingie was designed to prevent a simple migration path from I2C, and promote fancier Intel southbridge or LPC chips.)
Strange. That's essentially the policy WikiPedia has ... if you put up a good article using only primary sources you'll get dinged because This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Maybe for disciplines like history that makes sense. But it's a phenomenally stupid policy for technology, where secondary and tertiary sources are both rare and, more often than not, written by people who don't understand the subject matter well enough to describe the subject correctly. (Else they'd be in the industry and close enough to be ruled out as a Wiki-acceptable source ...) Or else by people who have some axe to grind and don't mind spreading misinformation.
Stupidity is growing, it appears. The right wing "assault on truth" appears in way too many places...
HPET isn't essential for the tickless kernel, not at all. I run tickless on several machines which don't have HPET. I wouldn't swear that their test system was a system with working HPET, for example.
What HPET is nice for is Higher Precision timer interrupts; what do you think the "HP" stands for?
It was checked into the 2.6.24 GIT tree last week, and I built a generic K8 kernel with NO_HZ. I booted it, and PowerTop says that laptop is getting about 50 timer ticks per second now (vs 260/second before). FWIW that's with Feisty ...
The biggest problem there is the audio mixer, which causes more most of those ticks. That's userspace code, which Ubuntu can and should be power-tuning. It's not like PowerTop isn't available, or anything like that!
More like: Why hasn't the Ubuntu team turned off more of that crap by default?
So what's the DigiKey part number? So I can buy a few (or a thousand, or whatever). I just entered "SPARC" in their database, and got "No records match your search criteria."
If I can't buy it from major distributors, it's not "commodity" silicon.
That's a darn well paid union worker. Last statistics I saw showed *MAYBE* half that much; outside of tech industries, lots of managers don't even make that much. Are you making these numbers up out of your hat?
Ah, I see. You can't read. I absolutely did not say that subsidies are the only reason for offshoring. Or even that if every subsidy were removed, there'd never be a reason to offshore things. (Or move them back onshore...) But they're a huge part of why many more jobs have moved to other countries than a free market would move. Subsidies are quite pervasive; there are all kinds of direct and indirect subsidies.
My point there was just that the labor market is extremely non-free, and is tilted in favor of the corporate manager class to an extreme degree. You haven't disagreed with that; you've just made up strawman figures to support the arguments of those managers. You know, the ones who, if they can join "the club", can get salaries in seven to ten digits, rather than just five digits, despite not making the same kind of contributions to the bottom line as the hundreds or thousands of full time workers (union or otherwise) their salaries could otherwise pay...
This is ludicrous. It's a public location, there is no expectation of privacy.
And that's on top of the assumption of these ... "pigs" is fair, here ... that they should be immune to citizen oversight. There's no way that *SEVEN* *EXTRA* *COPS* were needed to arrest him.
Personally, I have much more experience with corporations doing that. Are you sure that's not a typo?
Yep, reminds me much of ... every frickin' corporate job. The "can't be fired" comes from managers protecting their sycophants (or family, or co-conspirators, etc), and the people who actually do the work are not the one who get rewarded for having done it. (With rare exceptions.)
Whereas white collar criminals, like the ones running Enron and so forth, are part of a different kind of organized crime framework, one not directly linked to people likely to be indicted and/or sent to jail. They're too rich you know (<cough>Paris Hilton</cough>), or too well connected (<cough>Scooter Libby</cough>), or work for some corrupt government, or can pay more for better lawyers, or ... you do know that large chunks of the investment money in the world come from laundered money, including the money controlling most any corporation, right? I think you must be living in some other decade. We could only wish that current corporations were as clean of corruption as current unions (after decades of FBI investigations, at the behest of management which was allowed to hide its own crimes).
Try this reality kool-aid for a change... you'll start noticing how much of what you've been told is propaganda in support of the corporate powers-that-be.
That's one of the models spread by corporatists. For a more accurate one, see below ...
Raised prices to better match social costs, right. As one would expect of a free market: one which takes account of all costs, rather than externalizing them. Of course, there's also a strong point to be made that such costs should be raised for all shops, not just union shops. Consider the health insurance fiasco. One reason it's so pathetic in the US is that it's paid by corporations as part of contracts, either union or white collar, rather than as part of the basic social contract with every citizen. In the US costs are concentrated, not spread out, and they're subject to extremly short sighted penny pinching. (Classic example being that preventative medicine is rarely covered, while surgery and medicines that can cost tends or hundreds of times as much.) That is, costs are needlessly magnified ... not the fault of the healthcare beneficiaries, but of the payment framework chosen by the corporations.
... See, there you buy into something that's provably false. If it were a free market, you would have the government enforcing labor laws, and you would most emphatically not have corporate subsidies to shift production overseas. Absent those subsidies, there's not so much reason to move things offshore. What we have is not a "free market" but a managed market, and the management policies have for several decades now been anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-citizen.
Lobbying? Nowhere near the scale of the corporate bribery that rules in Washington DC. But lobbying in its own right is not questionable; just the kind that buys policy and dis-empowers fundamental stakeholders. (Like, oh, workers; voters that don't want to be in a war; people not running oil companies; etc.) Outright extortion and violence? Common union-busting tactics from the corporations inside the US, and in other countries where those corporations go to great lengths to avoid letting the citizens benefit from their own natural resources, including labor.
See there? It's easy. Just remember that the unions have been the victims over the past many decades while corporatist (i.e. fascist) government policies have ruled, and that those tactics you abhor have predominantly been practiced against those unions, rather than by them. Remember also that the corporation-owned papers have dis-incentives to report honestly on any labor issue, and the the reason unions exist is because those business owners have a very long history of mistreating their workers. Same is true of corporate-funded economics studies ... most of them have biases against workers and in favor of management, in part because they pretend that things like quality of life have no value (and thus count many things as positive that are instead extremely negative).
Then you'll stop automatically distrusting unions, and stop automatically trusting the corporations which demonize them. In recent decades, the true stories have been told more often by unions than corporations.