Doing that doesn't tell anyone that you care about the environment, but buying a Prius does. According to the New York Times, 57% of Prius buyers cited "Makes a statement about me" as the reason they purchased the car.
Actually, that's one of the reasons that it has sold so well. The distinctively "ugly" look of the car shouts I care about the environment, and that's what the hybrid buyers are really after. It's all about the smug sense of self satisfaction that can only be achieved by letting everyone else know how smart and forward thinking you are.
The worst part of the whole think is that they've actually got a decent OS in there somewhere. I've been running Server 2008 and it's much faster than Vista, even with Aero enabled. Benchmarks right around where XP did, but does much more. They should drop Vista and start pushing Server out.
My point was that the "greenies" don't understand the market realities. People aren't going to stop using energy all together, and they aren't going to switch to impractically expensive green power when there are literally mountains of dirt cheap coal available. By opposing clean, safe nuclear power, coal power was essentially forced.
The difference between what you're describing, and what conservatives (myself included) "scoff" at, like global warming caused exclusively by CO2, is that the things that you are describing are tangible, and putting measures in place to deal with them will have an actual, justifiable impact. My problem with environmentalists is that I find them almost completely ineffectual.
For example, in my state environmentalists pushed through legislation that would require new gas cans to resist evaporation. At first glance, this may seem like a good idea, gasoline is expensive and I don't want to lose any of it. The cans accomplish this by having a self-sealing spout and no secondary venting holes. The problem is that because there is no exterior venting, when the can is initially raised and the spout pressed open, the air and fuel attempt to rush past each other causing fuel to shoot everywhere. Since I use my can in a marine application, this causes many ounces of fuel to spill directly in the water. I'm not sure how much fuel was evaporating from the can before, and I'm not an environmental scientist, but I would be willing to bet that the evaporation is a hell of a lot better for the environment than dumping half a quart of fuel directly into the river. I'm sure there are some environmentalists somewhere that are balls deep in an orgy of self-satisfaction over the whole mess, while I had to have a "non-environmentally friendly" banned can shipped to a friend out of state, who in turn shipped it to me, solving my problem.
I tend to view environmentalists the same way I view the people on my homeowners association. They're not necessarily bad people, they're just looking for a way to feel important, and environmentalism happens to be their outlet. I just wish that the movement possessed and ounce of foresight. If they had, we'd probably have a lot more clean, efficient, cheap nuclear plants online today.
It's probably worth mentioning that quite a bit of that opposition was coming from environmentalists who apparently don't have a firm grasp on reality.
And what about states where hydro isn't viable but there are vast quantities of cheap coal. Life exists outside of San Fransisco after all. If environmentalists weren't so opposed to nuclear power, there's a pretty good shot many of those plants would be offline.
And those people are called Liberal Democrats, which is why there isn't a ton of/. uproar over it. Take a look at the Family Entertainment Protection Act, sponsored by democrats Clinton, Lieberman, Johnson, and Bayh. After all, it takes a village to raise a child right? Isn't this what you all want?
Must have been a design decision. Subs, even manned subs, have been to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep. It's about 11km down IIRC, and life exists at the bottom. There aren't any subs that can dive to that depth today though.
Chances are it's considerably easier and less expensive to build a sub that doesn't dive as deep. Plus, if what you want to study is only under 6km of water, it doesn't make much sense to design for anything else.
That's easy, it's polished Debian. Debian Stable is absolutely wonderful for server environments. Security support tends to last years, most everything "just works", packages are thoroughly tested, and apt cures dependency hell, but packages aren't always very recent. Ubuntu essentially was taking Debian's unstable branch, stabilizing it, and releasing it every six months to act as a desktop OS. It's kind of a best of both worlds situation, up to date and stable packages.
I maintain that the single largest advantage that a Linux desktop has over a Windows desktop is package management. With synaptic (and apt) you can easily and quickly search for and install software. This is the killer app. Ubuntu does, imho, more right than any other desktop linux has before, although I still think there's a bit more work to do to be ready for prime time.
Take a look at this guy, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/a-mighty-wind.html. In a single interview Pickens manages to call Clinton dishonest and John Kerry a "fucking liar", and he doesn't have any problems finding investors.
Some people are more interested in what you do than what you say, and would prefer to deal with someone that says what they mean. It's kind of like corporate social responsibility, it's a great feel good measure but when it comes down to it, it's a bad investment. Catering to fringe groups just doesn't pay.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the government has absolutely no business passing laws to ban things that aren't dangerous, simply because they may annoy someone. This situation is ridiculous. It starts with smoking in bars, then cell phones, what's next? This isn't an issue that requires legislation. And I can think of a perfectly good reason to make a call, to let the person picking you up know that your flight is delayed.
I am tired of the erosion of personal freedoms by the democrats on the grounds that something may offend or annoy someone. This is, at best, a slippery slope. Do you ever do something that could potentially annoy someone else?
In that case it should be much easier to criticize Apple. It seems Sun is open sourcing things as quickly as they can deal with the legal ramifications, Apple is nothing like that.
I've been reading the Sun ceo's blog lately, and it seems like every post talks about open source at some point or another.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?
I'm tired of reading this rant. I once bid several cents per e-mail to send out thousands of e-mails a month for a government organization. Ridiculous, right? Anybody can run sendmail in a colo for $100 a month. What the actual term of the agreement doesn't say, is that the e-mails were to be sent from an application we were to develop with features unique to the organization, and the e-mail addresses were to be collected using a marketing website and software package that we were to construct, maintain, and promote. We also had to provide two dedicated T1s, four dedicated servers, a load balancer, as well as design and produce all the print marketing materials to promote the new service. All of these things were included in the contract, but we were only paid per e-mail sent. Things aren't always as they appear at first glance.
In the case of the bolt, it's not an ordinary bolt. Normal bolts are never individually tested, a single bolt from the lot is taken and destructively tested. In the case of the expensive DD bolts, they are generally one of a kind, limited production, bolts designed for one purpose. In addition, they are generally non-destructively tested, which means that they are each individually subjected to the forces that they are rated for, and then examined. This is expensive.
As far as "cost plus" goes, how else do you suggest doing it? Whenever I bid a contract I estimate cost, then add profit and that is the price. In the case of the e-mail contract I described above, I calculated the cost then decided on a fair profit. After that, I made best case, worst case, and average case estimates for e-mail volume. I ended up basing the per e-mail bid on the worst case number of messages sent. In other words, the bid price was ((cost + [slightly less than fair] profit) / worst case estimate). As it turned out, we never got close to the worst case, we were always between average and best case, so the profit was good. Had it been a "cost plus" contract, it probably would have been less expensive for the government overall, however, the risk would have been theirs, not mine (if our software was ineffective or underused, we could have potentially lost money).
Cost plus is most often used when something has to be built that is either difficult or impossible to estimate. If I were to ask you to build something that nobody has ever built before, and intended to have you sign a contract saying that you would construct it for that price, you'd probably greatly overestimate the actual cost, because you would have to make sure you don't end up too far in the red. The costs are evaluated and approved by an oversight group (like government engineers), so they can make sure project costs are really necessary. In addition, the records are audited and unnecessary cost is often disallowed. Cost plus isn't perfect, but it's less expensive in the long run then having the contractors make guesstimates then inflate them to deal with the risk and uncertainty.
In the long run, the single most disingenuous thing I've seen in government contract is the blatant racism and sexism. Females and minorities are given preferential treatment because of their race or gender. Depending on the contract, their price proposals are also evaluated differently as well, often getting a 5% discount. In other words, a $100k bid placed by a MBE will be read as $95k when compared to other bids. The process is not only unfair and discriminatory, but can result in less qualified firms winning contracts on the basis of quotas. I was told by a colleague once that a bid of theirs was rejected, although they were both the low and most responsible bidder, because the contracting agency wanted to meet their quota.
Who am I to tell you though, you've got it all figured out. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, start a company, and win some contracts. All you've got to do is demonstrate that you can do the work, and bid low.
Your argument is laughable. I get the feeling you don't understand what racism actually is, since this clearly isn't it. Something is worth what people are willing to pay for it, so that is what companies charge. With your plan, it wouldn't be possible for companies to subsidize their product in developing countries. Do you hate people that live in countries less affluent then your own?
Except it's definitely not fake since Gates himself said he routinely writes internal messages like that, and it was entered as evidence in a recent court case. As far as not sounding like his usual style, of course it doesn't.
It was probably written as quickly as possible, and never edited. It doesn't make sense for the CEO to spend time editing when they can get the thoughts out faster and get on to the next big thing.
That's part of the problem. You don't actually learn anything through memorization. I always hated history in school, although I would often read about it in my free time. The difference was when I was reading myself I was learning about why people did the things that they did, whereas in school I was engaging in the bulk memorization of time-lines and events, which was worthless. It's kind of like the people that will memorize the core library methods of a programming language, but can't code very well. It's not portable and doesn't do a whole lot for you.
If memorization were de-emphasized in education perhaps the ability to quickly research subjects to form thoughts and opinions on them would be seen as something valuable. Isn't that what learning, and being smart, are all about?
This reminds me of a story from my youth. A teacher assigned our class a collection of assignments, and whenever we turned something in, she would sign off on the a form she gave each of us to keep, if the work was acceptable and we received credit for it. At the end of the semester, she would collect the forms, total the results, and that would be the grade for that portion of the class.
A friend of mine didn't have enough signatures to pass the class at the end of the semester, so we collected sheets from a few people, and scanned quite a few of the teachers signatures. We then got rid of all the extra stuff, and copied and pasted the signatures onto a blank 8.5" x 11" document, and made some test prints to get the exact placement right. When the time came, we ran his original form sheet through the printer, and printed the new signatures where they would have appeared on the document. It was extremely difficult to tell which signatures were real, and which were printed on, on the final document, even knowing that some were forgeries. The results were essentially perfect, the teacher never noticed, and we never got caught.
This occurred over 10 years ago now, and I haven't helped anybody cheat on anything since. Perhaps relying on signatures to authenticate documents isn't such a good idea anymore, now that they can be so easily duplicated.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'd say the cause was more directly a result of failed ballast tank equipment. It would have happened eventually with or without the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing that doesn't tell anyone that you care about the environment, but buying a Prius does. According to the New York Times, 57% of Prius buyers cited "Makes a statement about me" as the reason they purchased the car.
The government isn't moving anyone, nature is. If they want to stay, that's fine, but not on my dime.
Actually, that's one of the reasons that it has sold so well. The distinctively "ugly" look of the car shouts I care about the environment, and that's what the hybrid buyers are really after. It's all about the smug sense of self satisfaction that can only be achieved by letting everyone else know how smart and forward thinking you are.
You don't seem to understand what a cache actually is.
The worst part of the whole think is that they've actually got a decent OS in there somewhere. I've been running Server 2008 and it's much faster than Vista, even with Aero enabled. Benchmarks right around where XP did, but does much more. They should drop Vista and start pushing Server out.
My point was that the "greenies" don't understand the market realities. People aren't going to stop using energy all together, and they aren't going to switch to impractically expensive green power when there are literally mountains of dirt cheap coal available. By opposing clean, safe nuclear power, coal power was essentially forced.
The difference between what you're describing, and what conservatives (myself included) "scoff" at, like global warming caused exclusively by CO2, is that the things that you are describing are tangible, and putting measures in place to deal with them will have an actual, justifiable impact. My problem with environmentalists is that I find them almost completely ineffectual.
For example, in my state environmentalists pushed through legislation that would require new gas cans to resist evaporation. At first glance, this may seem like a good idea, gasoline is expensive and I don't want to lose any of it. The cans accomplish this by having a self-sealing spout and no secondary venting holes. The problem is that because there is no exterior venting, when the can is initially raised and the spout pressed open, the air and fuel attempt to rush past each other causing fuel to shoot everywhere. Since I use my can in a marine application, this causes many ounces of fuel to spill directly in the water. I'm not sure how much fuel was evaporating from the can before, and I'm not an environmental scientist, but I would be willing to bet that the evaporation is a hell of a lot better for the environment than dumping half a quart of fuel directly into the river. I'm sure there are some environmentalists somewhere that are balls deep in an orgy of self-satisfaction over the whole mess, while I had to have a "non-environmentally friendly" banned can shipped to a friend out of state, who in turn shipped it to me, solving my problem.
I tend to view environmentalists the same way I view the people on my homeowners association. They're not necessarily bad people, they're just looking for a way to feel important, and environmentalism happens to be their outlet. I just wish that the movement possessed and ounce of foresight. If they had, we'd probably have a lot more clean, efficient, cheap nuclear plants online today.
It's probably worth mentioning that quite a bit of that opposition was coming from environmentalists who apparently don't have a firm grasp on reality.
And what about states where hydro isn't viable but there are vast quantities of cheap coal. Life exists outside of San Fransisco after all. If environmentalists weren't so opposed to nuclear power, there's a pretty good shot many of those plants would be offline.
And those people are called Liberal Democrats, which is why there isn't a ton of /. uproar over it. Take a look at the Family Entertainment Protection Act, sponsored by democrats Clinton, Lieberman, Johnson, and Bayh. After all, it takes a village to raise a child right? Isn't this what you all want?
Must have been a design decision. Subs, even manned subs, have been to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep. It's about 11km down IIRC, and life exists at the bottom. There aren't any subs that can dive to that depth today though.
Chances are it's considerably easier and less expensive to build a sub that doesn't dive as deep. Plus, if what you want to study is only under 6km of water, it doesn't make much sense to design for anything else.
Perhaps you should move to the places that are thirsting for precipitation so that you can cry them a river.
That's easy, it's polished Debian. Debian Stable is absolutely wonderful for server environments. Security support tends to last years, most everything "just works", packages are thoroughly tested, and apt cures dependency hell, but packages aren't always very recent. Ubuntu essentially was taking Debian's unstable branch, stabilizing it, and releasing it every six months to act as a desktop OS. It's kind of a best of both worlds situation, up to date and stable packages.
I maintain that the single largest advantage that a Linux desktop has over a Windows desktop is package management. With synaptic (and apt) you can easily and quickly search for and install software. This is the killer app. Ubuntu does, imho, more right than any other desktop linux has before, although I still think there's a bit more work to do to be ready for prime time.
Take a look at this guy, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/a-mighty-wind.html. In a single interview Pickens manages to call Clinton dishonest and John Kerry a "fucking liar", and he doesn't have any problems finding investors.
Some people are more interested in what you do than what you say, and would prefer to deal with someone that says what they mean. It's kind of like corporate social responsibility, it's a great feel good measure but when it comes down to it, it's a bad investment. Catering to fringe groups just doesn't pay.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the government has absolutely no business passing laws to ban things that aren't dangerous, simply because they may annoy someone. This situation is ridiculous. It starts with smoking in bars, then cell phones, what's next? This isn't an issue that requires legislation. And I can think of a perfectly good reason to make a call, to let the person picking you up know that your flight is delayed.
I am tired of the erosion of personal freedoms by the democrats on the grounds that something may offend or annoy someone. This is, at best, a slippery slope. Do you ever do something that could potentially annoy someone else?
In that case it should be much easier to criticize Apple. It seems Sun is open sourcing things as quickly as they can deal with the legal ramifications, Apple is nothing like that.
I've been reading the Sun ceo's blog lately, and it seems like every post talks about open source at some point or another.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?
I'm tired of reading this rant. I once bid several cents per e-mail to send out thousands of e-mails a month for a government organization. Ridiculous, right? Anybody can run sendmail in a colo for $100 a month. What the actual term of the agreement doesn't say, is that the e-mails were to be sent from an application we were to develop with features unique to the organization, and the e-mail addresses were to be collected using a marketing website and software package that we were to construct, maintain, and promote. We also had to provide two dedicated T1s, four dedicated servers, a load balancer, as well as design and produce all the print marketing materials to promote the new service. All of these things were included in the contract, but we were only paid per e-mail sent. Things aren't always as they appear at first glance.
In the case of the bolt, it's not an ordinary bolt. Normal bolts are never individually tested, a single bolt from the lot is taken and destructively tested. In the case of the expensive DD bolts, they are generally one of a kind, limited production, bolts designed for one purpose. In addition, they are generally non-destructively tested, which means that they are each individually subjected to the forces that they are rated for, and then examined. This is expensive.
As far as "cost plus" goes, how else do you suggest doing it? Whenever I bid a contract I estimate cost, then add profit and that is the price. In the case of the e-mail contract I described above, I calculated the cost then decided on a fair profit. After that, I made best case, worst case, and average case estimates for e-mail volume. I ended up basing the per e-mail bid on the worst case number of messages sent. In other words, the bid price was ((cost + [slightly less than fair] profit) / worst case estimate). As it turned out, we never got close to the worst case, we were always between average and best case, so the profit was good. Had it been a "cost plus" contract, it probably would have been less expensive for the government overall, however, the risk would have been theirs, not mine (if our software was ineffective or underused, we could have potentially lost money).
Cost plus is most often used when something has to be built that is either difficult or impossible to estimate. If I were to ask you to build something that nobody has ever built before, and intended to have you sign a contract saying that you would construct it for that price, you'd probably greatly overestimate the actual cost, because you would have to make sure you don't end up too far in the red. The costs are evaluated and approved by an oversight group (like government engineers), so they can make sure project costs are really necessary. In addition, the records are audited and unnecessary cost is often disallowed. Cost plus isn't perfect, but it's less expensive in the long run then having the contractors make guesstimates then inflate them to deal with the risk and uncertainty.
In the long run, the single most disingenuous thing I've seen in government contract is the blatant racism and sexism. Females and minorities are given preferential treatment because of their race or gender. Depending on the contract, their price proposals are also evaluated differently as well, often getting a 5% discount. In other words, a $100k bid placed by a MBE will be read as $95k when compared to other bids. The process is not only unfair and discriminatory, but can result in less qualified firms winning contracts on the basis of quotas. I was told by a colleague once that a bid of theirs was rejected, although they were both the low and most responsible bidder, because the contracting agency wanted to meet their quota.
Who am I to tell you though, you've got it all figured out. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, start a company, and win some contracts. All you've got to do is demonstrate that you can do the work, and bid low.
Your argument is laughable. I get the feeling you don't understand what racism actually is, since this clearly isn't it. Something is worth what people are willing to pay for it, so that is what companies charge. With your plan, it wouldn't be possible for companies to subsidize their product in developing countries. Do you hate people that live in countries less affluent then your own?
Because discrimination is still quite alright in the United States so long as it's directed at white males.
Sounds to me like we're almost to October 1, 1993.
Except it's definitely not fake since Gates himself said he routinely writes internal messages like that, and it was entered as evidence in a recent court case. As far as not sounding like his usual style, of course it doesn't.
It was probably written as quickly as possible, and never edited. It doesn't make sense for the CEO to spend time editing when they can get the thoughts out faster and get on to the next big thing.
That's part of the problem. You don't actually learn anything through memorization. I always hated history in school, although I would often read about it in my free time. The difference was when I was reading myself I was learning about why people did the things that they did, whereas in school I was engaging in the bulk memorization of time-lines and events, which was worthless. It's kind of like the people that will memorize the core library methods of a programming language, but can't code very well. It's not portable and doesn't do a whole lot for you.
If memorization were de-emphasized in education perhaps the ability to quickly research subjects to form thoughts and opinions on them would be seen as something valuable. Isn't that what learning, and being smart, are all about?
This reminds me of a story from my youth. A teacher assigned our class a collection of assignments, and whenever we turned something in, she would sign off on the a form she gave each of us to keep, if the work was acceptable and we received credit for it. At the end of the semester, she would collect the forms, total the results, and that would be the grade for that portion of the class.
A friend of mine didn't have enough signatures to pass the class at the end of the semester, so we collected sheets from a few people, and scanned quite a few of the teachers signatures. We then got rid of all the extra stuff, and copied and pasted the signatures onto a blank 8.5" x 11" document, and made some test prints to get the exact placement right. When the time came, we ran his original form sheet through the printer, and printed the new signatures where they would have appeared on the document. It was extremely difficult to tell which signatures were real, and which were printed on, on the final document, even knowing that some were forgeries. The results were essentially perfect, the teacher never noticed, and we never got caught.
This occurred over 10 years ago now, and I haven't helped anybody cheat on anything since. Perhaps relying on signatures to authenticate documents isn't such a good idea anymore, now that they can be so easily duplicated.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'd say the cause was more directly a result of failed ballast tank equipment. It would have happened eventually with or without the law.