You don't suppose they could be cherry picking their data, and only presenting studies that support their agenda, do you?
Sure they could. Now you, as a concerned citizen, have the entire Internet at your disposal to find all the data you can to disprove their assertion. They've published all their sources, all their data, their collection methodologies...everything is open for you to critique at will. Please, find fault with what they say. Repeat their surveys and see if you get different results. Document it to the same rigid standards, and then publish it for the entire world to review and comment upon just like they did. Peer review and experiment repeatability are the hallmarks of factual science, not inflamed opinion. If you doubt their conclusion, prove them wrong and then tell the world.
If you can do the above, you might convince some people that what you say has merit. Until then, you're not making much of a case at all. You're just waving your hands in the air at something you don't want to acknowledge because it conflicts with your worldview.
The problem with world politics in general is that most people are socially liberal but fiscally conservative. The fault of this arrangement comes up when someone has to pay for all those lofty social programs liberals come up with.
That's when the decide to sock it to social conservatives, who by some magical arrangement of hard work, wise investment, delayed-gratification savings, and so forth seem to make excellent targets for "soak the rich" politicians and their class warfare rhetoric.
Liberals love it because it allows them to continue to indulge in their liberal fun-making without any consequences...consequences their conservative "friends" have to pay in order to provide the funds (through confiscatory tax rates on high-income achievers) which allow the liberals their social programs. It's like kids who never leave home because, hey, having Mom and Dad pay for the house, the utilities, the food, and so on is so much nicer than having to get a job and, like, you know, having to develop some responsibility. That's just so uncool.
If the world was filled with liberals, there'd be nobody out there making enough money to fund the stuff liberals love to be liberal about.
If we weren't around, who exactly do you think would be taking over the rest of the free world, and how?
Gee, perhaps Nazi Germany? Nah, the U.S. (with allied help) took care of that threat.
How about Imperial Japan? Nope, the U.S. took them out of the picture.
Perhaps Soviet aggression? Sorry, the U.S. stared them down and won the Cold War.
Yes, you're obviously right, there are no major threats to the world anymore. The U.S. has rid the world of them, so we should just exit the world stage and let the world get back to doing what it was doing before we got involved in world affairs...which was, of course, starting two World Wars, giving rise to genocidal fascist regimes, giving rise to genocidal communist regimes, and so forth. The cycle begins anew, and then, oddly enough, the world will suddenly want the U.S. to step in, fix things (with our blood, our technology, and our money), and then to just go away like some kind of needed-but-despised guard dog.
Care to connect the dots? Warning! It could lead to an uncomfortable (for you, not me) conclusion that your worldview is ridiculously flawed.
Then Sweden does it differently than we do over here. Over here, unless the employee is egregious in their offenses (i.e. doesn't show up for work, tries to murder a co-worker, etc.), it's amazingly difficult to fire them.
Now, what you may not be considering is the following example:
1. The company sets a minimum productivity target for every union employee. Since the union is involved in negotiating these targets, they make very sure anybody who can fog up a mirror can hit the minimum without any notable effort.
2. You have two employees. One does the absolute minimum he/she can get away with, shows up only a few seconds before the time clock starts, watches the clock all day, takes the maximum number of breaks for the maximum amount of time each, and vanishes immediately when the end of the work day chimes. The other worker shows up early, works through breaks, and stays late if needed.
3. Now, can I fire the first guy and promote the second guy? Probably not. The rules say the first guy -- even though he's far less productive than the second guy -- is hitting his targets, therefore he isn't technically doing anything wrong. The second guy, however, is massively outperforming him. The business would be far better off with two of the second guy and none of the first guy, but good luck with that idea.
4. Worse, I might not be able to pay the second guy more money since pay is tied to seniority. In fact, if the first guy is senior, he will make more money than the second guy given equivalent titles and duties despite the fact that he's much less productive. How in the name of hell does that make any sense? And think about how that affects employee morale and initiative when you know you get paid and promoted the same whether you're a slacker or a superstar. Not much incentive there, is it?
This is how unions work in the U.S. Well, it's how influential unions work in the U.S. Think of the UAW, or ALPA, or the teacher's unions. They get their way pretty much all the time.
McCain will use it of course as a "too many people do not know this, and am going to 'play that card'", but it should be seen as nothing more than a boon for the oil companies, and a whole bunch of 1%, in 10 years (up to 15, depending on the difficulty of permit granting and construction location). Gosh, you're so right. I mean, if we'd only done ten years ago what McCain is proposing we do now then perhaps the current crisis wouldn't be as bad as it is. The problem is, folks like you say "this won't do anything to fix the problem right now, so let's not do it," conveniently forgetting that now eventually leads to later.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy estimates the U.S. has roughly 21 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves (source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html). These data are current as of 2006. It's very likely this is a conservative estimate, as higher oil prices make otherwise-unprofitable reserves profitable to extract. Yet we're only producing 5 million barrels a day and completely unable to measurably increase production with existing fields. Why do you think that is? Here's a hint: environmentalists have made damn sure this country can't open a well or refinery without months -- sometimes years -- of red tape and lawsuits. Now we're reaping the "benefits" of such actions and folks are pissed gas costs what it does. Nuclear and clean coal are in similar doldrums for similar reasons.
You've apparently never tried to fire an incompetent, lazy, arrogant union member who's got seniority. Remember, seniority has nothing to do with how well you do your job. It has everything to do with how long you've been able to avoid being fired. In the meantime, you're prevented from hiring someone who might be competent, hardworking, and pleasant because you only have so many slots for employees. And you can't easily promote a good employee with no seniority over a bad employee with seniority. The system is stacked to protect the bad apples while giving no reward to the good ones.
This is not to say all unions are bad or that all union employees are bad. Most are hardworking people who go the extra mile for rude, obnoxious, ignorant passengers who are trying to heap the world's sorrows on whatever airline employee they can find. But there are enough bad apples in the mix to at least make unions a part of the problem.
I fly every week, sometimes multiple trips per week and I mostly agree with you.
However... 1. Flight delays are horrendous
Chalk this one up to the FAA. Airlines are allocated X number of slots for takeoffs and landings daily, yet they frequently schedule 20%-60% more flights than are humanly possible given those slots. In cities where weather is a problem (that's you, O'Hare), this just results in complete stupidity. And the problem is compounded because a late takeoff means a late landing, which snowballs into affecting the landing slots of other flights.
So, the airlines are to blame, but only because the FAA isn't enforcing a reasonable policy on slots.
2. Charging for checked baggage makes the already abused carry-on baggage situation worse Your luggage is weight and space, just like you are. You're paying more to fly you from point A to point B because of fuel costs. What makes your luggage so special that it should be immune to the same factor? Tradition?
As for delayed baggage, that's frequently the fault of the airport more than the airline, as well as being something that's out of their control. I live in Atlanta, and Hartfield-Jackson is one of the longs waits for baggage after deplaning (~30-45 mins, usually). The problem is not enough baggage personnel vs. the amount of baggage. The solution? Hire more baggage handlers. The reason they're not doing it? Because that would cost more, which would increase fees to passengers, which are already griping about costs. You get what you pay for.
3. Lack of coordination and insufficient staff at the gates make boarding disorganized Which could be solved by hiring more gate personnel. Why aren't they doing it? See the above on baggage personnel. If ya wants it, ya gots to pay for it, bub.
4. Airlines are always slow to update flight times. http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp gives you a good idea of what may happen to you, but then you need to find out whether your plane is coming from (or through) a troubled airport. Define "slow." I usually find out my flights status within 10-15 minutes of it changing.
5. Congestion at LGA, ORD, EWR, JFK and I'm sure many others is constant and should be dealt with. See item #1.
6. Policies that encourage planes to "push back" only to have you wait for an hour+ on the tarmac are detrimental.
See item #1.
Who's at fault here?
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Your accusation of daily air rage, irate terminal passengers, and diverted flight does not correlate with reality. Do these incidents happen? Absolutely. Do they happen with the frequency you suggest? Not even close.
Further, you seem to place the blame for the above incidents on the airlines alone. As others in this thread have pointed out, comparing 21st-century air travel with the 1950's is absurd. Flying back then was a novelty only enjoyed by those with means. Today, any beer-swilling, uncouth, unwashed, uneducated thug can hop on a plane for what would've been pennies on the inflation-adjusted dollar. This is one reason why I pay for my own upgrades to business class while on business travel. The folks you sit with in business class tend to be (but not always are) polite, educated, and considerate. The legroom and free drinks are just perks compared to not having to deal with someone's advanced case of body odor and lack of manners.
As for baggage handling issues, that's as much the fault of the airport as it is the airline. Of course, what do you expect when the whole darn thing is run by unions? Incompetent, lazy workers are difficult to fire. Hardworking, intelligent ones have to wait in line to get promoted due to union seniority rules.
Another thing: what ever happened to requiring the passenger to be something above the level of a dolt when it comes to carryon baggage and airport security screening? How hard is it to read the damned signs saying "take out your laptops and toiletry items" and "take off your shoes, jackets, and blazers"? Security screeners aren't terribly polite, I'll hand you that, but then again they have to deal with the idiots who march right up to the metal detector wearing shoes, a pound of metal jewelry, and leaving their laptop and/or liquids in their baggage.
Last, consider what you're getting for your dollar. Fuel costs are murdering the airlines right now, yet ticket costs have not kept pace. What do you think that shortfall comes out of?
Airlines are businesses. They must make a profit or go out of business. If customers are so darned unhappy with what they're getting for their money, they're free to try other modes of transportation (bus! Fun!) or go try and start their own airline that does things they way they want them done -- and then go bankrupt.
Yeah, I can't think of any common desktop app that does extensive decompression, image scaling and SSL.
Don't be an ass. First off, image scaling fits into the "digital content" category I mentioned. Second, SSL acceleration is hardly a "desktop" app requirement. There's no desktop in existence (that I am aware of) that chugs due to SSL overhead. Servers, on the other hand, can benefit, but again that's hardly a common app for most users. Compression/decompression may be a good fit for 64-bit, but again it all depends upon the app being structured to require it.
And if you think 64-bit is something that'll make your SSH session faster or better, you're smoking some serious crack. You'd have to be running a pretty pathetic desktop to have it get hamstrung doing SSH encryption/decryption and on-the-fly compression/decompression.
Or if the application can benefit from having more than a small handful of registers, which plenty can. True, but this is something that's not trivial to retrofit onto an application. A strict recompile of 32-bit to 64-bit is more in line with what the OP was commenting on. To really get the most out of those extra registers requires work.
How in hell did this get marked as troll? Most servers are PCs and most PCs can't do over 3GB RAM without 64 bit support. Some can get to 4 but that's about it. And let's not forget that many instructions take the same amount of time whether they deal with 32 bit data or 64 bit data. By using 64 bit words, THOSE instructions will do TWICE as much work at a time. Just recompiling for 64 bit and running in the 64 bit mode often gains 10-15% improvement in performance by virtue of being able to shovel bytes faster (and not having to use register renaming, probably):P
You're saying the right things but for the wrong reasons. To wit:
- Most PC's can't handle above 4GB of RAM (not 3GB) because of limitations of the x86 architecture. Intel created Physical Address Extension (PAE) technology to extend this up to (I believe) 8GB, but it's a kludgy patch on an ancient architecture. x64 technology bypasses both of these limits and gives you access to (theoretically) 16 exabytes of RAM. Both Intel and AMD support less than this, but they still support far more than a terabyte of RAM.
- Some 32-bit operating systems for x86 architectures have difficulty supporting more than 3GB of RAM, particularly Windows. This is due to how the OS segments memory for applications versus the OS itself. 64-bit Windows (XP64, 2003 x64, Vista x64) has no such limitation.
- The idea that 64-bit is always faster than 32-bit is a fallacy. 64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with. Outside of the scientific, simulation, and digital content creation community, such usage is exceedingly rare. In fact, 64-bit can be slower than 32-bit due to how the CPU caches data. 64-bit values take up more room in the cache than 32-bit. If the values don't need to be 64-bit, you're wasting cache space. Worst-case scenario is you've effectively halved the cache size, and that can cause major performance loss.
- The biggest benefit of x64 (for the masses) is the removal of the 4GB RAM barrier. Since most systems use extra RAM as a disk cache, this can bring substantial performance gains for disk-constrained applications like huge databases. In this sense, 64-bit does improve performance, but not necessarily because the application is using 64-bit code. Although a 32-bit program would be constrained to using 4GB or less, the OS could have far more at its disposal, improving overall system performance.
California's environmental legislation is a small fraction of what is needed not only to reach environmental sustainability but also to provide basic minimum standards of health.
And here's where I must part company with you. The regulations you are lauding have been responsible for a near-complete cessation of the generation capacity growth in California, which then led to the state being a large importer of power from neighboring states and/or utilities. Much as American's dependence on foreign oil keeps our gas prices volatile, thus it is with California and electricity.
California's "power crisis" would go away if more generating capacity were brought on line. However, new plants have to run a gamut of legal hurdles the likes of which have never before been seen in all of industrialized America, not to mention the inevitable NIMBY's out there who want the juice (at rock-bottom pricing, no less!) but don't want a physical plant within 1,000 miles of them. Existing plants sometimes run at less than full capacity because, as I alluded earlier, regulations can cause the plant to operate at a net loss. If it costs X to generate the power and you can't sell it for at least X, there are only two possibilities:
1. There is a surplus of capacity, depressing demand, or 2. There is some external, non-market force artificially inflating the cost of generating the power, artificially restricting the sale price of the power, or (as is the case in CA) both.
I think we both know it's not #1.
Note that I'm not anti-environmental. Clean air is something everyone wants, even the "evil, money grubbing opportunists." But there must be a rational balance between preserving the environment and preserving a reasonable amount of "comfort items" such as those things that run on electricity. I feel California has gone much too far in one direction and it's paying the price for its extremism.
I live in Georgia, where we have a water crisis. The city has been growing for years, yet its water infrastructure has not. Each succeeding politician has procrastinated on solving the problem because of its projected cost. The result of this is now a problem that will cost far more than it would have 20 years ago and take much longer to fix. In the meantime, we have severe statewide water restrictions and our recreational lakes -- which are man-made reservoirs -- have water levels so low you can walk across the "lake" and not get wet above your waist. Boat docks sit on dry land 100 yards from the waterline. The crisis is entirely of our own making.
The picture they show of this at NASA.gov shows what would be frozen liquid water but we know that it wouldn't have been deposited there as a liquid unless it came from a different planet and was deposited there by a landing craft after the trench was dug. And you know this...how? And I suppose you have perfect evidence that water doesn't exist locked in the subsurface soil of Mars because...?
Gosh, I'm sorry, you must be right. It's all a massive conspiracy set up by NASA. They carted half a liter of water millions of kilometers from Earth so they could stage this whole thing. They're just covering up evidence of alien visitation. Or it's the military-industrial complex. Or it's a vast right-wing conspiracy. Or all of the above. Black helicopters are on their way to your house now to black bag you for knowing too much. Enjoy your brief stay in a secret CIA prison.
How does the ice exist this close to the surface?
on
Water Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 1
Pardon my hideous ignorance on the subject, but I'm wondering why the ice was present in solid form in the first place if it so easily sublimated? Surely the lander didn't dig all that far into the Martian soil when it struck ice. I'm just flabbergasted that the ice could exist so close to the surface without sublimating purely from solar warming of the soil. Perhaps somebody can comment on this and clear it up.
BTW, I'm not disputing the findings at all; the evidence is conclusive they've found water ice on Mars. I'm just curious about the processes involved that would allow the ice to exist close enough to the surface that the lander could get at it, yet far enough away from solar heating to exist at all.
The simple truth is that there is more power than we currently need, and shortages are being artificially constructed in order to raise the price of power. I agree the shortages are artificially constructed, but you're wrong about the reasoning behind it. The shortages aren't about "rais[ing] the price of power," they're about being able to sell power without selling it at a loss. California deregulated their power industry only somewhat. The result was utilities being forced to sell power to consumers at a regulated rate while being forced to buy (or generate) power at wholesale rates. The wholesale rates went up, but the utilities were not allowed to pass that cost onto their customers. Add in a generous mix of obscene environmental regulation (of which California is a leading propagator) and you have a situation where utilities have generating capacity sitting idle because every watt it produces is sold at a loss.
If you buy a widget for X dollars and are forced to sell it for X-Y dollars where Y is some positive number, you're forced into a losing situation. Utilities cannot operate at a loss without going bankrupt. So, even if there is a power "surplus," the fact that it can't be sold for more than the cost to obtain it makes it moot. If you want to blame someone, blame the idiot politicians who can't understand the concept of free market supply and demand. Capitalism is not at fault here. Capitalism would fix the situation, but the politicians are too eager to foist the wonders of (what amounts to) a Planned Economy on the ignorant public. They should check with the Soviet Union and see how well that worked out for 'em.
Excuse me? We lose only 5% of our electricity in transmission in the USA, and it could be even lower if we just stepped the voltage up further. I'd like to see your source for this claim. Although I'm no electrician, I've worked for a company that did electrical utility service work. The loss figures I've heard are a bit higher for long-distance transmission. Perhaps you're only considering short-range?
Regardless, the OP's argument is still correct: geothermal hot spots are far away from populated areas, which means greater transmission losses are unavoidable. Higher voltage would ameliorate this, but if it were that easy (and cost-effective) to do, why aren't we doing it already with non-geothermal power sources? I suspect there's a reason in there somewhere that is detrimental to your argument.
The sad thing is that I can point at a ridge that has constant 25 MPH wind, and which has no wind turbines on it. No doubt it's been labeled as "off limits" by somebody who doesn't wish to have a wind farm off their back porch. Environmentalism is fine so long as it affects somebody else, I guess.
Ideally, I'd like to put up enough solar panels and wind turbines to power my house, charge my car, and sell back to the utilities. What's stopping you, then? Unless you live in a neighborhood with covenants restricting such devices, you have all the freedom in the world to do exactly what you suggest. The technology exists. The products exist. What's stopping you?
Ahh...perhaps it's that little thing called "cost?" Independence from the power grid really sounds like a neat idea until you consider how much it costs to do it. Sort of like electric cars, which sound neat until you consider the cost to acquire one versus the utility and flexibility you can extract from it vis-as-vis a gasoline-powered vehicle of similar cost.
I'm not trying to be a downer on such ideas, though. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of so many of the wealthy "treehuggers" out there who have the means to do something about their energy consumption yet continue to shuttle around in limos, private jets, and occupy 15,000 sq. ft. mansions with an energy consumption the size of a small town. Environmentalism seems great to folks until you ask them to put their money where their mouth is.
Neither the defense nor the prosecution want stupid jurors - it makes the job of putting forward their arguments harder, not easier.
Having recently gone through the jury selection process (I wasn't picked), I can say that although they don't want stupid people, they do seem to want ignorant ones. Both the prosecutor and the defense pretty much axed anybody who expressed any knowledge of the law, typical judicial conventions, or Constitutional knowledge. It seemed that if you could name the top ten finalists on American Idol but couldn't name your congressman, governor, or senator, you were just what they wanted. Sheep. Mindless, thoughtless, easily-led sheep.
not quite, any router that can be crashed by bad packets is buggy, i don't see the need for routers to be designed to anticipate other bad behavior, such as dumping 110 V AC down all 8 pins Well, duh! Routers shouldn't typically be designed to withstand a point blank 12-gauge shotgun blast either, but that's not the point of the post.
Routers should be designed to gracefully handle anything that comes down the wire that resembles an Ethernet frame, regardless of the content of that frame. You're arguing Layer 1 issues when the rest of us are discussing Layer 2/3 (or above) issues.
It's a cardinal rule of programming that you should always assume any input is complete and utter malicious garbage, designed specifically to destroy your precious code. Or it least it was when I was in college a few decades ago.
I thought that was the point of standards? The router conforms to acceptable network standards. The OS is meant to conform as well. MS releases a new patch, it makes the OS start sending packets outside the standard. Perhaps you should stop and consider that it's the router that's unable to handle an obscure -- yet standards-compliant -- packet being sent by XP SP3? For evidence, I would put forth that no other router we yet know of has any problems whatsoever with SP3. Further, I'd posit that any router that can be crashed via a packet from any wired or wireless client is defective.
You have no proof at all that SP3 is sending invalid packets. You have merely assumed that, while giving the router manufacturer a complete pass on its own "dodgy" firmware. After all, if it was a Windows-based router that was crashing after you upgraded to Fedora Core 9, would you blame Fedora? Or would you instead gripe that Microsoft made a faulty router? I don't have to guess to hard to figure out which way/. would write that article. Hint: Fedora wouldn't get the blame.
Perhaps you should put your bias down next time and analyze the situation objectively before rendering a conclusion that is so obviously flawed.
Since there are practically no pretty girls in any development or IT job known to humanity, I can only conclude that you have been on an unapproved wandering outside the confines of your work cubicle.
Someone from security will be there momentarily to re-implement your restraints. In the meantime, get back to work you lecherous slob!
Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!
There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.
Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.
Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:
CASE Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B) This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.
Motherboard Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207 I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.
Now, lets factor in the new video card to actually use numerous GUI features in Vista Business Edition... oh - but that needs a new motherboard as the one that came in that HP or whatever PC only came with PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express (or ancient AGP on a crappy MSI board).......blah blah blah...
OK, now it is definitely a small fortune.
OK, now you've gone completely off the deep end in an attempt to make your point.
First off, no one is forcing anybody to put Vista -- a currently-released OS -- on such a hideously old PC as what you're describing. The OS has recommended minimum specs. If your system doesn't meet those requirements, you can (a) continue use XP, (b) pay to upgrade your hardware, or (c) go with an alternative OS. I'll also note the Aero Glass is not a requirement for Vista. You can run it with the basic GUI the same as XP or Win2K if you like. Other than some pretty translucency effects -- stuff that would similarly work either slowly or not at all under high-end Linux GUI -- it doesn't affect the OS at all. You either (a) were ignorant of that fact or (b) purposefully ignored it because it damages your argument.
Second, now that we've established you don't need a new graphics card, your requirement of a new PSU also evaporates. For that matter, you can still buy AGP and PCI video cards. Newegg has an AGP Radeon 2600XT -- which supports DX10 and will run Aero Glass -- which requires no extra power connector for only $149. You'd have to go back eight to ten years to find a motherboard with no AGP slots. Your argument takes another hit.
Third, you further base your premise that you need a new motherboard, and that for some reason it doesn't come with IDE ports on it. I don't know what strange parallel dimension you inhabit, but you have to look hard -- really hard -- to find a modern motherboard that lacks IDE ports. This, of course, assumes you need a new mobo in the first place to run Vista, and it's already been established this is not a requirement. You'd have no difficulty using your old IDE hard drive, so your argument again takes a hit.
Fourth, you mention you need more RAM. Finally, you make a point that's somewhat valid. Vista is quite a RAM hog. XP machines that ran fine with 1GB will be sluggish under Vista. However, you can buy two 2GB sticks (4GB total) of DDR2 for $65 from Newegg. Require DDR instead? Given that it's not used anymore, it'll cost you a bit more: $120 for four 1GB sticks from Newegg. I won't get into SDRAM; if your PC is that old, upgrading is your only practical option if you want to run any modern OS with a high-res, accelerated GUI. So, worst case for RAM is you're spending $120. If this is a small fortune then you need to get a job instead of depending upon your parents for allowance money.
Fifth, you claim you need to antivirus/antispyware. So long as your software isn't more than a couple of years old, this is unlikely. However, if it is older, you probably need to upgrade anyway to protect against new types of threats that the old software didn't address. As an aside, most antivirus/antispyware vendors sell you yearly subscriptions that include upgrades, so this is a moot point if you have current software...which you should if you have any sense.
Last, and perhaps the most nebulous of your "points," is the assertion that people pay for these things with a credit card, and the interest associated with paying it off over three years ruins the amortization figures. Like many of your other above ideas, this is absurd. If you take three years to pay off a $279 operation system purchase, you either have no financial sense or no financial means. In either case, you're better off using a free PC in the public library if you're that strapped for cash. However, I doubt you -- or an
Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it.
You know, I thought the same thing about the cost of Windows (or any other piece of large, complex commercial software out there) until I sat down and did the math. What I found was surprising.
Let's assume you buy the fairly-standard Windows Vista Business Edition. Newegg lists it for $279, assuming you get the full retail version and not an OEM or upgrade version. Now let's assume you use it for three years. XP users have waited five years, but MS claims they'll never go that long again between upgrades. Time will tell if MS can actually do it, but I digress.
Three years is 1,095 days (assuming no leap years). That means the amortized cost of that Vista buy is right around $0.26, or a tad more than a quarter a day. Most people probably spend more than that on coffee. Unless you work at home (or are unemployed, or walk/ride a bike), you definitely spend several times that amount on either gas for your car or a subway/bus fare every day. If you have the typical $39/month DSL Internet feed, you're paying five times as much per day for that feed compared to the cost of Vista. Depending upon what kind of PC you have and what power costs are like in your area, your daily Slashdot surfing probably costs you more in electricity than Vista does.
Now, you can say that things like Fedora Core are free and thus have no amortized costs, and you'd be right. But to say that Windows costs a "small fortune" is utter absurdity. When considered over the course of a typical Windows OS lifespan, it's probably one of the smallest computer-related costs you'll incur. Even if you throw in Office 2007 Professional ($389 at Newegg), the cost per day only goes up to $0.61 per day. You can't even buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for that. A small fortune? I don't think so.
You are right. I missed the "and" joining the clauses.
Still, the sentence remains an example of bad writing style. A more readable -- and proper -- way of putting it would've been:
"Lawyers figuring that they could make a lot of money found a weak, struggling Linux company, bought rights to other products and a name from another company, and tried to claim infringement. They were specifically looking for a quick settlement from companies like IBM and Novell. Unfortunately for them, the companies that they targetted had invested enough in Linux and had cojones enough that they fought back."
I also would've removed the three uses of "that" and corrected the spelling of "targeted." However, I left them in to show how the sentence could've been improved with nothing more than punctuation.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't suppose they could be cherry picking their data, and only presenting studies that support their agenda, do you?
Sure they could. Now you, as a concerned citizen, have the entire Internet at your disposal to find all the data you can to disprove their assertion. They've published all their sources, all their data, their collection methodologies...everything is open for you to critique at will. Please, find fault with what they say. Repeat their surveys and see if you get different results. Document it to the same rigid standards, and then publish it for the entire world to review and comment upon just like they did. Peer review and experiment repeatability are the hallmarks of factual science, not inflamed opinion. If you doubt their conclusion, prove them wrong and then tell the world.
If you can do the above, you might convince some people that what you say has merit. Until then, you're not making much of a case at all. You're just waving your hands in the air at something you don't want to acknowledge because it conflicts with your worldview.
The problem with world politics in general is that most people are socially liberal but fiscally conservative. The fault of this arrangement comes up when someone has to pay for all those lofty social programs liberals come up with.
That's when the decide to sock it to social conservatives, who by some magical arrangement of hard work, wise investment, delayed-gratification savings, and so forth seem to make excellent targets for "soak the rich" politicians and their class warfare rhetoric.
Liberals love it because it allows them to continue to indulge in their liberal fun-making without any consequences...consequences their conservative "friends" have to pay in order to provide the funds (through confiscatory tax rates on high-income achievers) which allow the liberals their social programs. It's like kids who never leave home because, hey, having Mom and Dad pay for the house, the utilities, the food, and so on is so much nicer than having to get a job and, like, you know, having to develop some responsibility. That's just so uncool.
If the world was filled with liberals, there'd be nobody out there making enough money to fund the stuff liberals love to be liberal about.
If we weren't around, who exactly do you think would be taking over the rest of the free world, and how?
Gee, perhaps Nazi Germany? Nah, the U.S. (with allied help) took care of that threat.
How about Imperial Japan? Nope, the U.S. took them out of the picture.
Perhaps Soviet aggression? Sorry, the U.S. stared them down and won the Cold War.
Yes, you're obviously right, there are no major threats to the world anymore. The U.S. has rid the world of them, so we should just exit the world stage and let the world get back to doing what it was doing before we got involved in world affairs...which was, of course, starting two World Wars, giving rise to genocidal fascist regimes, giving rise to genocidal communist regimes, and so forth. The cycle begins anew, and then, oddly enough, the world will suddenly want the U.S. to step in, fix things (with our blood, our technology, and our money), and then to just go away like some kind of needed-but-despised guard dog.
Care to connect the dots? Warning! It could lead to an uncomfortable (for you, not me) conclusion that your worldview is ridiculously flawed.
Then Sweden does it differently than we do over here. Over here, unless the employee is egregious in their offenses (i.e. doesn't show up for work, tries to murder a co-worker, etc.), it's amazingly difficult to fire them.
Now, what you may not be considering is the following example:
1. The company sets a minimum productivity target for every union employee. Since the union is involved in negotiating these targets, they make very sure anybody who can fog up a mirror can hit the minimum without any notable effort.
2. You have two employees. One does the absolute minimum he/she can get away with, shows up only a few seconds before the time clock starts, watches the clock all day, takes the maximum number of breaks for the maximum amount of time each, and vanishes immediately when the end of the work day chimes. The other worker shows up early, works through breaks, and stays late if needed.
3. Now, can I fire the first guy and promote the second guy? Probably not. The rules say the first guy -- even though he's far less productive than the second guy -- is hitting his targets, therefore he isn't technically doing anything wrong. The second guy, however, is massively outperforming him. The business would be far better off with two of the second guy and none of the first guy, but good luck with that idea.
4. Worse, I might not be able to pay the second guy more money since pay is tied to seniority. In fact, if the first guy is senior, he will make more money than the second guy given equivalent titles and duties despite the fact that he's much less productive. How in the name of hell does that make any sense? And think about how that affects employee morale and initiative when you know you get paid and promoted the same whether you're a slacker or a superstar. Not much incentive there, is it?
This is how unions work in the U.S. Well, it's how influential unions work in the U.S. Think of the UAW, or ALPA, or the teacher's unions. They get their way pretty much all the time.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy estimates the U.S. has roughly 21 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves (source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html). These data are current as of 2006. It's very likely this is a conservative estimate, as higher oil prices make otherwise-unprofitable reserves profitable to extract. Yet we're only producing 5 million barrels a day and completely unable to measurably increase production with existing fields. Why do you think that is? Here's a hint: environmentalists have made damn sure this country can't open a well or refinery without months -- sometimes years -- of red tape and lawsuits. Now we're reaping the "benefits" of such actions and folks are pissed gas costs what it does. Nuclear and clean coal are in similar doldrums for similar reasons.
It's called cause and effect. Look it up.
You've apparently never tried to fire an incompetent, lazy, arrogant union member who's got seniority. Remember, seniority has nothing to do with how well you do your job. It has everything to do with how long you've been able to avoid being fired. In the meantime, you're prevented from hiring someone who might be competent, hardworking, and pleasant because you only have so many slots for employees. And you can't easily promote a good employee with no seniority over a bad employee with seniority. The system is stacked to protect the bad apples while giving no reward to the good ones.
This is not to say all unions are bad or that all union employees are bad. Most are hardworking people who go the extra mile for rude, obnoxious, ignorant passengers who are trying to heap the world's sorrows on whatever airline employee they can find. But there are enough bad apples in the mix to at least make unions a part of the problem.
I fly every week, sometimes multiple trips per week and I mostly agree with you.
However ...
Chalk this one up to the FAA. Airlines are allocated X number of slots for takeoffs and landings daily, yet they frequently schedule 20%-60% more flights than are humanly possible given those slots. In cities where weather is a problem (that's you, O'Hare), this just results in complete stupidity. And the problem is compounded because a late takeoff means a late landing, which snowballs into affecting the landing slots of other flights.1. Flight delays are horrendous
So, the airlines are to blame, but only because the FAA isn't enforcing a reasonable policy on slots.
2. Charging for checked baggage makes the already abused carry-on baggage situation worse Your luggage is weight and space, just like you are. You're paying more to fly you from point A to point B because of fuel costs. What makes your luggage so special that it should be immune to the same factor? Tradition?As for delayed baggage, that's frequently the fault of the airport more than the airline, as well as being something that's out of their control. I live in Atlanta, and Hartfield-Jackson is one of the longs waits for baggage after deplaning (~30-45 mins, usually). The problem is not enough baggage personnel vs. the amount of baggage. The solution? Hire more baggage handlers. The reason they're not doing it? Because that would cost more, which would increase fees to passengers, which are already griping about costs. You get what you pay for.
3. Lack of coordination and insufficient staff at the gates make boarding disorganized Which could be solved by hiring more gate personnel. Why aren't they doing it? See the above on baggage personnel. If ya wants it, ya gots to pay for it, bub. 4. Airlines are always slow to update flight times. http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp gives you a good idea of what may happen to you, but then you need to find out whether your plane is coming from (or through) a troubled airport. Define "slow." I usually find out my flights status within 10-15 minutes of it changing. 5. Congestion at LGA, ORD, EWR, JFK and I'm sure many others is constant and should be dealt with. See item #1. 6. Policies that encourage planes to "push back" only to have you wait for an hour+ on the tarmac are detrimental.
See item #1.Your accusation of daily air rage, irate terminal passengers, and diverted flight does not correlate with reality. Do these incidents happen? Absolutely. Do they happen with the frequency you suggest? Not even close.
Further, you seem to place the blame for the above incidents on the airlines alone. As others in this thread have pointed out, comparing 21st-century air travel with the 1950's is absurd. Flying back then was a novelty only enjoyed by those with means. Today, any beer-swilling, uncouth, unwashed, uneducated thug can hop on a plane for what would've been pennies on the inflation-adjusted dollar. This is one reason why I pay for my own upgrades to business class while on business travel. The folks you sit with in business class tend to be (but not always are) polite, educated, and considerate. The legroom and free drinks are just perks compared to not having to deal with someone's advanced case of body odor and lack of manners.
As for baggage handling issues, that's as much the fault of the airport as it is the airline. Of course, what do you expect when the whole darn thing is run by unions? Incompetent, lazy workers are difficult to fire. Hardworking, intelligent ones have to wait in line to get promoted due to union seniority rules.
Another thing: what ever happened to requiring the passenger to be something above the level of a dolt when it comes to carryon baggage and airport security screening? How hard is it to read the damned signs saying "take out your laptops and toiletry items" and "take off your shoes, jackets, and blazers"? Security screeners aren't terribly polite, I'll hand you that, but then again they have to deal with the idiots who march right up to the metal detector wearing shoes, a pound of metal jewelry, and leaving their laptop and/or liquids in their baggage.
Last, consider what you're getting for your dollar. Fuel costs are murdering the airlines right now, yet ticket costs have not kept pace. What do you think that shortfall comes out of?
Airlines are businesses. They must make a profit or go out of business. If customers are so darned unhappy with what they're getting for their money, they're free to try other modes of transportation (bus! Fun!) or go try and start their own airline that does things they way they want them done -- and then go bankrupt.
Don't be an ass. First off, image scaling fits into the "digital content" category I mentioned. Second, SSL acceleration is hardly a "desktop" app requirement. There's no desktop in existence (that I am aware of) that chugs due to SSL overhead. Servers, on the other hand, can benefit, but again that's hardly a common app for most users. Compression/decompression may be a good fit for 64-bit, but again it all depends upon the app being structured to require it.
And if you think 64-bit is something that'll make your SSH session faster or better, you're smoking some serious crack. You'd have to be running a pretty pathetic desktop to have it get hamstrung doing SSH encryption/decryption and on-the-fly compression/decompression.
Or if the application can benefit from having more than a small handful of registers, which plenty can. True, but this is something that's not trivial to retrofit onto an application. A strict recompile of 32-bit to 64-bit is more in line with what the OP was commenting on. To really get the most out of those extra registers requires work.
You're saying the right things but for the wrong reasons. To wit:
- Most PC's can't handle above 4GB of RAM (not 3GB) because of limitations of the x86 architecture. Intel created Physical Address Extension (PAE) technology to extend this up to (I believe) 8GB, but it's a kludgy patch on an ancient architecture. x64 technology bypasses both of these limits and gives you access to (theoretically) 16 exabytes of RAM. Both Intel and AMD support less than this, but they still support far more than a terabyte of RAM.
- Some 32-bit operating systems for x86 architectures have difficulty supporting more than 3GB of RAM, particularly Windows. This is due to how the OS segments memory for applications versus the OS itself. 64-bit Windows (XP64, 2003 x64, Vista x64) has no such limitation.
- The idea that 64-bit is always faster than 32-bit is a fallacy. 64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with. Outside of the scientific, simulation, and digital content creation community, such usage is exceedingly rare. In fact, 64-bit can be slower than 32-bit due to how the CPU caches data. 64-bit values take up more room in the cache than 32-bit. If the values don't need to be 64-bit, you're wasting cache space. Worst-case scenario is you've effectively halved the cache size, and that can cause major performance loss.
- The biggest benefit of x64 (for the masses) is the removal of the 4GB RAM barrier. Since most systems use extra RAM as a disk cache, this can bring substantial performance gains for disk-constrained applications like huge databases. In this sense, 64-bit does improve performance, but not necessarily because the application is using 64-bit code. Although a 32-bit program would be constrained to using 4GB or less, the OS could have far more at its disposal, improving overall system performance.
And here's where I must part company with you. The regulations you are lauding have been responsible for a near-complete cessation of the generation capacity growth in California, which then led to the state being a large importer of power from neighboring states and/or utilities. Much as American's dependence on foreign oil keeps our gas prices volatile, thus it is with California and electricity.
California's "power crisis" would go away if more generating capacity were brought on line. However, new plants have to run a gamut of legal hurdles the likes of which have never before been seen in all of industrialized America, not to mention the inevitable NIMBY's out there who want the juice (at rock-bottom pricing, no less!) but don't want a physical plant within 1,000 miles of them. Existing plants sometimes run at less than full capacity because, as I alluded earlier, regulations can cause the plant to operate at a net loss. If it costs X to generate the power and you can't sell it for at least X, there are only two possibilities:
1. There is a surplus of capacity, depressing demand, or
2. There is some external, non-market force artificially inflating the cost of generating the power, artificially restricting the sale price of the power, or (as is the case in CA) both.
I think we both know it's not #1.
Note that I'm not anti-environmental. Clean air is something everyone wants, even the "evil, money grubbing opportunists." But there must be a rational balance between preserving the environment and preserving a reasonable amount of "comfort items" such as those things that run on electricity. I feel California has gone much too far in one direction and it's paying the price for its extremism.
I live in Georgia, where we have a water crisis. The city has been growing for years, yet its water infrastructure has not. Each succeeding politician has procrastinated on solving the problem because of its projected cost. The result of this is now a problem that will cost far more than it would have 20 years ago and take much longer to fix. In the meantime, we have severe statewide water restrictions and our recreational lakes -- which are man-made reservoirs -- have water levels so low you can walk across the "lake" and not get wet above your waist. Boat docks sit on dry land 100 yards from the waterline. The crisis is entirely of our own making.
Gosh, I'm sorry, you must be right. It's all a massive conspiracy set up by NASA. They carted half a liter of water millions of kilometers from Earth so they could stage this whole thing. They're just covering up evidence of alien visitation. Or it's the military-industrial complex. Or it's a vast right-wing conspiracy. Or all of the above. Black helicopters are on their way to your house now to black bag you for knowing too much. Enjoy your brief stay in a secret CIA prison.
Pardon my hideous ignorance on the subject, but I'm wondering why the ice was present in solid form in the first place if it so easily sublimated? Surely the lander didn't dig all that far into the Martian soil when it struck ice. I'm just flabbergasted that the ice could exist so close to the surface without sublimating purely from solar warming of the soil. Perhaps somebody can comment on this and clear it up.
BTW, I'm not disputing the findings at all; the evidence is conclusive they've found water ice on Mars. I'm just curious about the processes involved that would allow the ice to exist close enough to the surface that the lander could get at it, yet far enough away from solar heating to exist at all.
The simple truth is that there is more power than we currently need, and shortages are being artificially constructed in order to raise the price of power. I agree the shortages are artificially constructed, but you're wrong about the reasoning behind it. The shortages aren't about "rais[ing] the price of power," they're about being able to sell power without selling it at a loss. California deregulated their power industry only somewhat. The result was utilities being forced to sell power to consumers at a regulated rate while being forced to buy (or generate) power at wholesale rates. The wholesale rates went up, but the utilities were not allowed to pass that cost onto their customers. Add in a generous mix of obscene environmental regulation (of which California is a leading propagator) and you have a situation where utilities have generating capacity sitting idle because every watt it produces is sold at a loss.
If you buy a widget for X dollars and are forced to sell it for X-Y dollars where Y is some positive number, you're forced into a losing situation. Utilities cannot operate at a loss without going bankrupt. So, even if there is a power "surplus," the fact that it can't be sold for more than the cost to obtain it makes it moot. If you want to blame someone, blame the idiot politicians who can't understand the concept of free market supply and demand. Capitalism is not at fault here. Capitalism would fix the situation, but the politicians are too eager to foist the wonders of (what amounts to) a Planned Economy on the ignorant public. They should check with the Soviet Union and see how well that worked out for 'em.
Excuse me? We lose only 5% of our electricity in transmission in the USA, and it could be even lower if we just stepped the voltage up further. I'd like to see your source for this claim. Although I'm no electrician, I've worked for a company that did electrical utility service work. The loss figures I've heard are a bit higher for long-distance transmission. Perhaps you're only considering short-range?
Regardless, the OP's argument is still correct: geothermal hot spots are far away from populated areas, which means greater transmission losses are unavoidable. Higher voltage would ameliorate this, but if it were that easy (and cost-effective) to do, why aren't we doing it already with non-geothermal power sources? I suspect there's a reason in there somewhere that is detrimental to your argument.
The sad thing is that I can point at a ridge that has constant 25 MPH wind, and which has no wind turbines on it. No doubt it's been labeled as "off limits" by somebody who doesn't wish to have a wind farm off their back porch. Environmentalism is fine so long as it affects somebody else, I guess.
Ideally, I'd like to put up enough solar panels and wind turbines to power my house, charge my car, and sell back to the utilities. What's stopping you, then? Unless you live in a neighborhood with covenants restricting such devices, you have all the freedom in the world to do exactly what you suggest. The technology exists. The products exist. What's stopping you?
Ahh...perhaps it's that little thing called "cost?" Independence from the power grid really sounds like a neat idea until you consider how much it costs to do it. Sort of like electric cars, which sound neat until you consider the cost to acquire one versus the utility and flexibility you can extract from it vis-as-vis a gasoline-powered vehicle of similar cost.
I'm not trying to be a downer on such ideas, though. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of so many of the wealthy "treehuggers" out there who have the means to do something about their energy consumption yet continue to shuttle around in limos, private jets, and occupy 15,000 sq. ft. mansions with an energy consumption the size of a small town. Environmentalism seems great to folks until you ask them to put their money where their mouth is.
Neither the defense nor the prosecution want stupid jurors - it makes the job of putting forward their arguments harder, not easier.
Having recently gone through the jury selection process (I wasn't picked), I can say that although they don't want stupid people, they do seem to want ignorant ones. Both the prosecutor and the defense pretty much axed anybody who expressed any knowledge of the law, typical judicial conventions, or Constitutional knowledge. It seemed that if you could name the top ten finalists on American Idol but couldn't name your congressman, governor, or senator, you were just what they wanted. Sheep. Mindless, thoughtless, easily-led sheep.
not quite, any router that can be crashed by bad packets is buggy, i don't see the need for routers to be designed to anticipate other bad behavior, such as dumping 110 V AC down all 8 pins Well, duh! Routers shouldn't typically be designed to withstand a point blank 12-gauge shotgun blast either, but that's not the point of the post.
Routers should be designed to gracefully handle anything that comes down the wire that resembles an Ethernet frame, regardless of the content of that frame. You're arguing Layer 1 issues when the rest of us are discussing Layer 2/3 (or above) issues.
It's a cardinal rule of programming that you should always assume any input is complete and utter malicious garbage, designed specifically to destroy your precious code. Or it least it was when I was in college a few decades ago.
I thought that was the point of standards? The router conforms to acceptable network standards. The OS is meant to conform as well. MS releases a new patch, it makes the OS start sending packets outside the standard. Perhaps you should stop and consider that it's the router that's unable to handle an obscure -- yet standards-compliant -- packet being sent by XP SP3? For evidence, I would put forth that no other router we yet know of has any problems whatsoever with SP3. Further, I'd posit that any router that can be crashed via a packet from any wired or wireless client is defective.
/. would write that article. Hint: Fedora wouldn't get the blame.
You have no proof at all that SP3 is sending invalid packets. You have merely assumed that, while giving the router manufacturer a complete pass on its own "dodgy" firmware. After all, if it was a Windows-based router that was crashing after you upgraded to Fedora Core 9, would you blame Fedora? Or would you instead gripe that Microsoft made a faulty router? I don't have to guess to hard to figure out which way
Perhaps you should put your bias down next time and analyze the situation objectively before rendering a conclusion that is so obviously flawed.
Since there are practically no pretty girls in any development or IT job known to humanity, I can only conclude that you have been on an unapproved wandering outside the confines of your work cubicle.
Someone from security will be there momentarily to re-implement your restraints. In the meantime, get back to work you lecherous slob!
Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!
There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.
Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.
Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:
CASE
Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B)
This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.
Motherboard
Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207
I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.
Good luck!
Now, lets factor in the new video card to actually use numerous GUI features in Vista Business Edition... oh - but that needs a new motherboard as the one that came in that HP or whatever PC only came with PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express (or ancient AGP on a crappy MSI board).... ...blah blah blah...
OK, now it is definitely a small fortune.
OK, now you've gone completely off the deep end in an attempt to make your point.
First off, no one is forcing anybody to put Vista -- a currently-released OS -- on such a hideously old PC as what you're describing. The OS has recommended minimum specs. If your system doesn't meet those requirements, you can (a) continue use XP, (b) pay to upgrade your hardware, or (c) go with an alternative OS. I'll also note the Aero Glass is not a requirement for Vista. You can run it with the basic GUI the same as XP or Win2K if you like. Other than some pretty translucency effects -- stuff that would similarly work either slowly or not at all under high-end Linux GUI -- it doesn't affect the OS at all. You either (a) were ignorant of that fact or (b) purposefully ignored it because it damages your argument.
Second, now that we've established you don't need a new graphics card, your requirement of a new PSU also evaporates. For that matter, you can still buy AGP and PCI video cards. Newegg has an AGP Radeon 2600XT -- which supports DX10 and will run Aero Glass -- which requires no extra power connector for only $149. You'd have to go back eight to ten years to find a motherboard with no AGP slots. Your argument takes another hit.
Third, you further base your premise that you need a new motherboard, and that for some reason it doesn't come with IDE ports on it. I don't know what strange parallel dimension you inhabit, but you have to look hard -- really hard -- to find a modern motherboard that lacks IDE ports. This, of course, assumes you need a new mobo in the first place to run Vista, and it's already been established this is not a requirement. You'd have no difficulty using your old IDE hard drive, so your argument again takes a hit.
Fourth, you mention you need more RAM. Finally, you make a point that's somewhat valid. Vista is quite a RAM hog. XP machines that ran fine with 1GB will be sluggish under Vista. However, you can buy two 2GB sticks (4GB total) of DDR2 for $65 from Newegg. Require DDR instead? Given that it's not used anymore, it'll cost you a bit more: $120 for four 1GB sticks from Newegg. I won't get into SDRAM; if your PC is that old, upgrading is your only practical option if you want to run any modern OS with a high-res, accelerated GUI. So, worst case for RAM is you're spending $120. If this is a small fortune then you need to get a job instead of depending upon your parents for allowance money.
Fifth, you claim you need to antivirus/antispyware. So long as your software isn't more than a couple of years old, this is unlikely. However, if it is older, you probably need to upgrade anyway to protect against new types of threats that the old software didn't address. As an aside, most antivirus/antispyware vendors sell you yearly subscriptions that include upgrades, so this is a moot point if you have current software...which you should if you have any sense.
Last, and perhaps the most nebulous of your "points," is the assertion that people pay for these things with a credit card, and the interest associated with paying it off over three years ruins the amortization figures. Like many of your other above ideas, this is absurd. If you take three years to pay off a $279 operation system purchase, you either have no financial sense or no financial means. In either case, you're better off using a free PC in the public library if you're that strapped for cash. However, I doubt you -- or an
Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it.
You know, I thought the same thing about the cost of Windows (or any other piece of large, complex commercial software out there) until I sat down and did the math. What I found was surprising.
Let's assume you buy the fairly-standard Windows Vista Business Edition. Newegg lists it for $279, assuming you get the full retail version and not an OEM or upgrade version. Now let's assume you use it for three years. XP users have waited five years, but MS claims they'll never go that long again between upgrades. Time will tell if MS can actually do it, but I digress.
Three years is 1,095 days (assuming no leap years). That means the amortized cost of that Vista buy is right around $0.26, or a tad more than a quarter a day. Most people probably spend more than that on coffee. Unless you work at home (or are unemployed, or walk/ride a bike), you definitely spend several times that amount on either gas for your car or a subway/bus fare every day. If you have the typical $39/month DSL Internet feed, you're paying five times as much per day for that feed compared to the cost of Vista. Depending upon what kind of PC you have and what power costs are like in your area, your daily Slashdot surfing probably costs you more in electricity than Vista does.
Now, you can say that things like Fedora Core are free and thus have no amortized costs, and you'd be right. But to say that Windows costs a "small fortune" is utter absurdity. When considered over the course of a typical Windows OS lifespan, it's probably one of the smallest computer-related costs you'll incur. Even if you throw in Office 2007 Professional ($389 at Newegg), the cost per day only goes up to $0.61 per day. You can't even buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for that. A small fortune? I don't think so.
You are right. I missed the "and" joining the clauses.
Still, the sentence remains an example of bad writing style. A more readable -- and proper -- way of putting it would've been:
"Lawyers figuring that they could make a lot of money found a weak, struggling Linux company, bought rights to other products and a name from another company, and tried to claim infringement. They were specifically looking for a quick settlement from companies like IBM and Novell. Unfortunately for them, the companies that they targetted had invested enough in Linux and had cojones enough that they fought back."
I also would've removed the three uses of "that" and corrected the spelling of "targeted." However, I left them in to show how the sentence could've been improved with nothing more than punctuation.