Re:FreeBSD
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think he is saying that FreeBSD is like Gentoo is like one of those old RadioShake "build your own radio" kits. To him, and to many others, an OS is something that works out of the box to perform common tasks. In other words, it's a largely binary-based distro, rather than ports-based.
My God, how clueless can you get and still get modded up to 4? By FreeBSD is a complete OS, he means that kernel + userland software is all BSD, as opposed to GNU/Linux distros (GNU userland + Linux kernel).
No, it is not about semantics. It's about the software installed. For example, the GNU Broken Again Shell is not the default in BSDs.
And let me add something to my own comment that I forgot to say:-) I don't think the requirements in terms of the complexity of operations for Grandma will be the same of a UNIX sysadmin or programmer ever. They delve into a dimension of computer use she will never. And, that's all right, because we contitute different publics. That, IMHO, is why we shouldn't (or won't, for that matter) ever have a GUI monoculture KDE, Windows or GNOME fans always want to push. I will say this, though. Strangely enough, the type of GUI that satisifes the requirements of children using the computer to augment the learning experience is, IMHO, much more similar to what I've described for UNIX hardcore users/developers than for Granny. And why is that? Because, if you use the technology (computers) as an enhancement to your intellectual capacity, just like books, dictionaries, pencils, blackboards are, then you have what Alan Perlis wrote beautifully in the Forward of one of the most beautiful books in Computer Science, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs:
Educators, generals, dieticians, psychologists, and parents program. Armies, students, and some societies are programmed. (...) Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process.
So, the real question is how does the GUI help to make the computer as useful a device as paper-and-pencil? So, it's all about reducing computer illiteracy. It is not only about pretty GUIs. This is Microsoft talk. Microsoft trains people to behave like circus monkeys. It is intrinsic to their model. True innovation in terms of user interfaces is not coming from GNOME, KDE or Microsoft. Look at OpenCroquet Transparency, flipping windows, etc, are very superficial changes.
Now, there's something no one's said. However, the problem with your formulation is that you want to make the whole experience as life-like as possible, which includes make the user physically tired.
So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are?
The thing is that "pipeline data chunks" are a great UNIX invention. The thing that's wrong about them is that they need to be able to accomodate for metadata. Plain text just isn't that good, maybe. There are deep reasons why CLI tasks aren't going away. It's called the algebra of programming languages and the hard theoretical fact that it allows infinite constructions. You can think of Unix streams as generators and as having the same compositionality as higher-order functions in languages such as Haskell. This formulation isn't mine, BTW, it's written in Shriram Krishnamurthi'sbook Anything GUI-oriented to replace that would have to first establish some metadata on widget operations. The visual equivalent of Blissymbolics parsing and Expect. Still, you have a written language, because how would you transmit instruction for GUI operations "by wire"?. Written language is a major acquisition of civilization. So anyone who is readily willing to dismiss Unixspeak/CLI hasn't really put much thought into it. Voice recognition is needed so that we can use our mouths for Unixspeak. Not that would be a cool open-source project. (I've basically repeated myself, but I wanted to throw in a few pointers).
So I take it that you're always delighted when Clippy What the hell is "Clippy"?
Neural nets? You must be kidding, right? Predicting what a human is trying to do is hard enough for other humans, let alone computers.
You don't really understand what I've said, do you? You've probably used a case-based reasoning mechansims in your daily life (e.g., bought books at Amazon). It works fine, as far as I can tell. How hard can it be to store information like: "When Firefox opens, center it at XY position, because that's what he always does" ?
I don't wanna expand on the Mac or Windows fanboy stuff, mainly because I agree. I'd like to comment on the topic: to me GUI innovation relates to how this fits into your cognitive space. On that note, I'll say that I find Ion a GUI that fits right in the UNIXspace. Being unprejudiced, it mixes freely between CLI and GUI. You can switch between shell and graphical applications without having to resort to mouse clicks (and if you use a keyboard, contrary to some misconceptions, you still are using your hands). A discussion here yesterday brought up the issue of the Archy interface, a creation of Jeff Raskins ("The Humane Interface"). I found Ion to resemble Archy to a point. Archy, however, admits some tribute to Emacs. Hardcore unix people know how to fly on Emacs (Vi was developed to work on a 300 baud modem by Bill Joy - people don't get this basic simple fact to this day). The CLI doesn't go away in UNIXspace, because it is a fundamental part of our mind: the little pieces of language that fit together with orthogonality. The algebra of it: Unixspeak. Like any foreign language, you might hate it or love it (eventually, those that hate typing will learn to love once you get to the point of using voice recognition: "cat that file and grep it for July"). Let's see Windows do that [grin]. GUIs also have their mental space. But no GUI can plan ahead or be as compact as a means of expression as languages. Loop a click-action 100 times. Design a language to describe a 30-step complex GUI-clicking instruction. This will be a language. A GUI has widgets. Widgets constitute a very, very small vocabulary. What are the nouns, verbs and adjectives of widgets? So, I guess I'm saying I'm not at all impressed. Even if you say it's very innovative. To me, this bias towards metaphors that seek to emulate physical situations (like the "archives" and "folders", or "My Computer") are nothing but lack of imagination. Sure, cool computer graphics. But I use my computer to work, it's a machine to augment thought, not a toy.
This has got to be the stupidest GUI paradigm ever. We should be moving to GUIs that used the computer to decide how to lay the windows out, even using case-base reasoning and neural networks to learn from our habits. That is to say, it should "decide" for use, intelligently. Instead, this research team aims to imitate the exact mess of leafs of papers and books I have at my desk right now.
found significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. You mean people are actually do not want to live their lives as a code monkey in a cubicle for huge IT corporations ?! Because that's what Bill Gates wants and needs, right? Sun, too. Heck, they even design language so that you can have code monkeys cheap:
Edsger Dijkstra on Java (Trouw, 18 Oct 2000) Interviewer : There is some progress? There are new programming langugages that make everything easier, even ordinary internet users have heard of Java.
Dijkstra : It's embarrassing. Because it is so bad. The only reason Java has been accepted is because it is a product of a company, SUN, that has made enormous advertisement for it. Beautiful programming languages exist, and a good language, like a tool, is just a joy. But industry doesn't want that. Probably because decisions are made by technically incompetent people.
Steven T. Abell on Java (formerly Java Technology evangelist at Netscape) I came to Java from a different world of programming, the Smalltalk world. For people who program in Smalltalk, Java is a 30-year step back.
Alan Kay on Java (OOPSLA '97) Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
Donald Knuth on Java I get secret satisfaction when bad ideas take hold and suck a lot of people in... like Java (Just teasing.)
In fact, Brazil is moving beyond ethanol. Not that it will drop it, but Brazil aims to have a large, diversified, renewable energy matrix.
Biodiesel made from a variety of high-yield vegetable oil sources is the next step.
The country's has a huge agrobusiness, very developed technology-wise, and we have a proven track-record of deploying alternative fuels on a truly massive scale (Brazil has 170,000,000 people - and copulating).
I have heard that converting a fuel-injected engine to ethanol is as simple as altering the programming, but I do not know for sure.
No. Ethanol is highly corrosive for a common engine. The engine needs special adaptations, for instance in the metal alloy of the carburator. The engine was developed in the 70s by the Brazilian prof. Urbano Stumpf. It went through several iterations. Sensors in modern "flex-fuel" engines detect the mixture of ethanol and adapt the injection rate. There's other stuff, but it's not that simple.
Has cold-weather performance improved when running on 100% alcohol?
You're talking about the 80s. In that time, at the peak, 90% of the cars ran on ethanol. They weren't the "flex-fuel" hybrids of today. They were XOR engines. This kind of research is a big thing in Brazil. The technology developed.
Don't forget energy required to plant, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process the corn. (This includes preparing the fields and cleaning up between crops.) Then tack on energy required to handle, store, distribute and dispense the resultant fuel.
Let me ask you something: do you think fabrication of fuel-cell engines is less or more energy-intensive as an industrial process than the whole cycle of, say, producing ethanol from sugar cane? What about the hevay metal that go in the process of making those batteries? Yet, the US seems to be headed that way. It's great for General Motors. Just like when they did everything in their powers to abort Los Angeles' public transportation system. They succeeded. Oil prices are going up and will hit 100 USD/barrel by the end of the year. Suburbia nightmare. Blame all those gaz-guzzlers, the SUVs.
# Ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide levels more than any other oxygenate: by 25-30%, according to the US EPA # Ethanol blends dramatically reduce emissions of hydrocarbons, a major contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer # High-level ethanol blends reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 20% # Ethanol can reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by up to 100% on a full life-cycle basis # High-level ethanol blends can reduce emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) by 30% or more (VOCs are major sources of ground-level ozone formation) # As an octane enhancer, ethanol can cut emissions of cancer-causing benzene and butadiene by more than 50% # Sulphur dioxide and Particulate Matter (PM) emissions are significantly decreased with ethanol.
Question: suppose yours is the president of the most powerful nation in the world, and think of a scenario where oil runs short. Suppose also said president has vested interests in the oil business. Would he:
1- Do everything he can to garantee a renewable source, even though it would threaten his profits in the oil business? 2- Invade another country and colonize it, under whatever cheap excuse he can provide, if said country is oil-rich? 3- Lower trade barriers to countries that already procude the solution. 4- Develop an industry that obviously would change the energy matrix in the long run, e.g., hydrogen-cell, skewing the fact that other countries had already developed and deployed a solution in massive scale.
While alcohol will increase the octane rating (which is a predetonation rating) of the gasoline/alcohol mixture, the alcohol is MUCH less dense and has MUCH less energy output per unit volume than the gasoline.
How the fuck do you know? You think the ethanol they put on vehicles is the same you use on the bathroom?
40% of the millions of cars in Brazil run on ethanol, they're hybrid cars, allowing any mxture from 0-100% of gas and/or ethanol. They yield more engine potency, not less. I would know, I own one.
40% of all cars in Brazil today run on ethanol. In the 80s, it was 90%.
(The percentage went down due to price fluctuations and some wrong political decisions.)
Take it from me, I used to own an ethanol-run chevrolet.
Nowadays, the best thing you can do in Brazil is buy a hybrid car, engineered to run on any mixture of gas/ethanol. This is great because ethanol does not yield CO2. Also, the motor gets more potency (but burns faster - Ok because it's cheaper than gas - thanks to the Iraq War).
What you don't seem to know is that MS Windows is utterly missing the wonderful collection of little tools available on every UNIX platform
What you don't seem to know, is that you get all those little UNIX tools in Windows, including the ones made by Microsoft. http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/p roductinfo/features/default.mspx Now in UNIX nowadays, particularly Linux (BSD guys tend to be more conservative (*)) sometimes there's huge bloat for system configuration: you might need Ruby, Python, Lua, Perl, Scheme, Rexx, Bash, C, C++, and any other language people invent. And in some package managers, dependencies must resolve to a particular version of these languages, even though, for instance, the guy _never_ used generators, but still asked for Python 2.3. It's a big mess sometimes. That's why some want to keep it small and code in C for the most part (e.g., OpenBSD), for better or for worse. OTOH, C sucks.
(*) Even though you even get to see Forth and Modula3 code in FreeBSD, for instance. But they're chosen for a reason, not just "hey, this language is kewl, dude!"
What is Linux? (...) I don't mean that as a silly statement. Look at OS X - Apple has created a very strong image for their product. It's 'sexy' (...)
That's easy. I've been using Linux for a few years and I think i can answer that. Linux is a penguin. It walks kind of funny, and some might consider one 'sexy' if they grew up in a farm in Alaska, although I personally don't. Think of it as a kind of teddy bear.
Using this one can construct an interface based on what humans can do. It has exposed our limits and abilities. What mental models we handle better. Folders and Files?
An interface I feel just fits in the Unixspace is Ion. Because, as you said, the interface must deal with how we work/think/opperate. And how do we work on Unix? We do use CLI. We probably will never stop using the CLI, because it allows us to use a foreign language called Unixspeak.And Ion fits right in that mental space, controlling the space layout. That is, with Ion, you don't have to think where the window will go, or where it is. It deals with those trivial matters for you. I just wishe it had round corners for a 21st-century fox look. I remember, a long time ago reading/looking at Archy, but it's Windows-only. Fuck that. Will never win, because Windows is a land of monopoly. Free Software is the wild frontier...Too bad for the old guy... This CLI thing, BTW, is something I very often think about. Can we really live without it? Should we? The fact is that languages allow for an infinite of constructs, much more compact, and transmissible over the wire than GUIs. So there you have algebra and information theory for you. How can we instruct people to perform 50+ instructions via a GUI? We can't. We must use a phone line, or write a document. Click 50 times. Go crazy. I would much rather have something like Ion, but more advanced, a GUI that really does the space-fitting job for you. However, it should have case-based reasoning built-in, some sort of AI. It learns with your habits. OTOH, I would like to have some sort of CLI/Visual hybrid. But I don't think in terms of the mouse, or any traditional interface. It would be some sort of logography, a language with visual compositionality, like Blissymbolics or what APL achieved in terms of programming languages (an aspect somewhat preserved in Perl operators, in a way). This is because humans use language. When will orality substitute written language? It hasn't happened with radio, TV, or the Web. Probably never will. To assume it would happen would be to assume we would go back to a pre-language era. On that topic regarding visual aids versus pure language abstraction, there was an interesting article this week of which I quote the relevant part:
The common understanding is to use tools when programming in such an environment. Development proceeds not so much in language X as in language X within tool Y. I think Ruby on Rails takes the opposite approach, where the underlying code is as terse as possible using Ruby constructs and metaprogramming
So the author contrasts a language capable of great orthogonality and abstraction versus visual-aids tools like Eclipse, for instance. I believe this is a real experience for people who program in Lisp, Haskell, SML, Ruby, etc. vs the Java, C++. C, C# crowd. I guess my point is that there's too much fixation on merely visual things. And on that note, it sucks. Why a mouse and not a Joystick? How's going wild on the keyboard with Ctrl-X Ctrl-F Meta-X shell on the keyboard not using your hands? I'm not defending the CLI, but I think HUI people are heavily biased towards a culture of stupid visual metaphors. In the 80s, I dreamed of sketchpads and touch screens, because all I had was a Commodore64 and the Apple ][ at school...Never happened. The mouse came along. And Windows. I wanted the whole wide open.
Most office drones that I know and work with seem to have rather simple needs on their business PC. They use Word for documents, Excel for spreadsheets, Outlook for email and IE for surfing the Web.
Then you need to consider giving your resumé a boost so you can get a job that lands you higher up on the food chain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he is saying that FreeBSD is like Gentoo is like one of those old RadioShake "build your own radio" kits. To him, and to many others, an OS is something that works out of the box to perform common tasks. In other words, it's a largely binary-based distro, rather than ports-based.
My God, how clueless can you get and still get modded up to 4?
By FreeBSD is a complete OS, he means that kernel + userland software is all BSD, as opposed to GNU/Linux distros (GNU userland + Linux kernel).
No, it is not about semantics. It's about the software installed. For example, the GNU Broken Again Shell is not the default in BSDs.
Ah, here was the post I was looking for.
Object C, of course, was inspired by Smalltalk.
You're just ignorant, that's all. Had you read what Gosling thought of Smalltalk, you would know.
Google for it, if you're really interested.
I don't think the requirements in terms of the complexity of operations for Grandma will be the same of a UNIX sysadmin or programmer ever. They delve into a dimension of computer use she will never. And, that's all right, because we contitute different publics.
That, IMHO, is why we shouldn't (or won't, for that matter) ever have a GUI monoculture KDE, Windows or GNOME fans always want to push.
I will say this, though. Strangely enough, the type of GUI that satisifes the requirements of children using the computer to augment the learning experience is, IMHO, much more similar to what I've described for UNIX hardcore users/developers than for Granny.
And why is that? Because, if you use the technology (computers) as an enhancement to your intellectual capacity, just like books, dictionaries, pencils, blackboards are, then you have what Alan Perlis wrote beautifully in the Forward of one of the most beautiful books in Computer Science, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs:
So, the real question is how does the GUI help to make the computer as useful a device as paper-and-pencil? So, it's all about reducing computer illiteracy. It is not only about pretty GUIs. This is Microsoft talk. Microsoft trains people to behave like circus monkeys. It is intrinsic to their model.
True innovation in terms of user interfaces is not coming from GNOME, KDE or Microsoft. Look at OpenCroquet
Transparency, flipping windows, etc, are very superficial changes.
Now, there's something no one's said.
However, the problem with your formulation is that you want to make the whole experience as life-like as possible, which includes make the user physically tired.
So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are?
The thing is that "pipeline data chunks" are a great UNIX invention. The thing that's wrong about them is that they need to be able to accomodate for metadata. Plain text just isn't that good, maybe.
There are deep reasons why CLI tasks aren't going away. It's called the algebra of programming languages and the hard theoretical fact that it allows infinite constructions. You can think of Unix streams as generators and as having the same compositionality as higher-order functions in languages such as Haskell. This formulation isn't mine, BTW, it's written in Shriram Krishnamurthi's book
Anything GUI-oriented to replace that would have to first establish some metadata on widget operations. The visual equivalent of Blissymbolics parsing and Expect. Still, you have a written language, because how would you transmit instruction for GUI operations "by wire"?. Written language is a major acquisition of civilization.
So anyone who is readily willing to dismiss Unixspeak/CLI hasn't really put much thought into it. Voice recognition is needed so that we can use our mouths for Unixspeak. Not that would be a cool open-source project. (I've basically repeated myself, but I wanted to throw in a few pointers).
You write that "it's a machine to augment thought". Yes: your kind of thought, not the average users'.
You're entirely right. That's why I was talking about the UNIX cognitive space.
So I take it that you're always delighted when Clippy
What the hell is "Clippy"?
Neural nets? You must be kidding, right? Predicting what a human is trying to do is hard enough for other humans, let alone computers.
You don't really understand what I've said, do you?
You've probably used a case-based reasoning mechansims in your daily life (e.g., bought books at Amazon). It works fine, as far as I can tell. How hard can it be to store information like: "When Firefox opens, center it at XY position, because that's what he always does" ?
I don't wanna expand on the Mac or Windows fanboy stuff, mainly because I agree.
I'd like to comment on the topic: to me GUI innovation relates to how this fits into your cognitive space. On that note, I'll say that I find Ion a GUI that fits right in the UNIXspace. Being unprejudiced, it mixes freely between CLI and GUI. You can switch between shell and graphical applications without having to resort to mouse clicks (and if you use a keyboard, contrary to some misconceptions, you still are using your hands).
A discussion here yesterday brought up the issue of the Archy interface, a creation of Jeff Raskins ("The Humane Interface"). I found Ion to resemble Archy to a point. Archy, however, admits some tribute to Emacs. Hardcore unix people know how to fly on Emacs (Vi was developed to work on a 300 baud modem by Bill Joy - people don't get this basic simple fact to this day).
The CLI doesn't go away in UNIXspace, because it is a fundamental part of our mind: the little pieces of language that fit together with orthogonality. The algebra of it: Unixspeak. Like any foreign language, you might hate it or love it (eventually, those that hate typing will learn to love once you get to the point of using voice recognition: "cat that file and grep it for July"). Let's see Windows do that [grin].
GUIs also have their mental space. But no GUI can plan ahead or be as compact as a means of expression as languages. Loop a click-action 100 times. Design a language to describe a 30-step complex GUI-clicking instruction. This will be a language. A GUI has widgets. Widgets constitute a very, very small vocabulary. What are the nouns, verbs and adjectives of widgets?
So, I guess I'm saying I'm not at all impressed. Even if you say it's very innovative. To me, this bias towards metaphors that seek to emulate physical situations (like the "archives" and "folders", or "My Computer") are nothing but lack of imagination. Sure, cool computer graphics. But I use my computer to work, it's a machine to augment thought, not a toy.
This has got to be the stupidest GUI paradigm ever.
We should be moving to GUIs that used the computer to decide how to lay the windows out, even using case-base reasoning and neural networks to learn from our habits. That is to say, it should "decide" for use, intelligently.
Instead, this research team aims to imitate the exact mess of leafs of papers and books I have at my desk right now.
You mean people are actually do not want to live their lives as a code monkey in a cubicle for huge IT corporations ?! Because that's what Bill Gates wants and needs, right? Sun, too. Heck, they even design language so that you can have code monkeys cheap:
From Why Java is not my Favorite Language
How about some OOP with prototypes with multmethod dispatch for a change?
Let me ask you this? Why not ethanol?
Let me tell you this: Bush is against ethanol, because the guy's an ex-alcoholist
Joke, people. Joke. Oh, b-u-rrr-n, karma, b-u-rn
You bet.
Coolest but underfunded energy research: photosynthesis
And that's when you get "Revenge of the MetaModerator"
Biodiesel made from a variety of high-yield vegetable oil sources is the next step.
The country's has a huge agrobusiness, very developed technology-wise, and we have a proven track-record of deploying alternative fuels on a truly massive scale (Brazil has 170,000,000 people - and copulating).
Brazil Leads Drive to Biodiesel 'Clean Fuel' http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?no=224467&rel_n
BIODIESEL - BRAZIL RESEARCH: SOYBEAN, CASTOR, PALM, SUNFLOWER, PEANUT, AND COTTONSEED OILS, PLUS RECYCLING AND JUNGLE FRUITS http://www.nuclear.com/archive/2004/09/01/20040901 -002.html
Brazil Opens Another Biodiesel Plant; Wants to Be Largest Renewable Fuel Supplier http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/05/brazil_ope ns_an.html
Some people reported some research cars running on certain mixtures of Biodiesel as smelling of French fries. Well, better than gasoline combustion...
I have heard that converting a fuel-injected engine to ethanol is as simple as altering the programming, but I do not know for sure.
No. Ethanol is highly corrosive for a common engine. The engine needs special adaptations, for instance in the metal alloy of the carburator. The engine was developed in the 70s by the Brazilian prof. Urbano Stumpf. It went through several iterations. Sensors in modern "flex-fuel" engines detect the mixture of ethanol and adapt the injection rate. There's other stuff, but it's not that simple.
Has cold-weather performance improved when running on 100% alcohol?
You're talking about the 80s. In that time, at the peak, 90% of the cars ran on ethanol. They weren't the "flex-fuel" hybrids of today. They were XOR engines. This kind of research is a big thing in Brazil. The technology developed.
Don't forget energy required to plant, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process the corn. (This includes preparing the fields and cleaning up between crops.) Then tack on energy required to handle, store, distribute and dispense the resultant fuel.
Let me ask you something: do you think fabrication of fuel-cell engines is less or more energy-intensive as an industrial process than the whole cycle of, say, producing ethanol from sugar cane? What about the hevay metal that go in the process of making those batteries?
Yet, the US seems to be headed that way. It's great for General Motors. Just like when they did everything in their powers to abort Los Angeles' public transportation system. They succeeded. Oil prices are going up and will hit 100 USD/barrel by the end of the year. Suburbia nightmare. Blame all those gaz-guzzlers, the SUVs.
No.
It reduces greenhouse gas emissions:
http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol.html
# Ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide levels more than any other oxygenate: by 25-30%, according to the US EPA
# Ethanol blends dramatically reduce emissions of hydrocarbons, a major contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer
# High-level ethanol blends reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 20%
# Ethanol can reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by up to 100% on a full life-cycle basis
# High-level ethanol blends can reduce emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) by 30% or more (VOCs are major sources of ground-level ozone formation)
# As an octane enhancer, ethanol can cut emissions of cancer-causing benzene and butadiene by more than 50%
# Sulphur dioxide and Particulate Matter (PM) emissions are significantly decreased with ethanol.
Question: suppose yours is the president of the most powerful nation in the world, and think of a scenario where oil runs short. Suppose also said president has vested interests in the oil business. Would he:
1- Do everything he can to garantee a renewable source, even though it would threaten his profits in the oil business?
2- Invade another country and colonize it, under whatever cheap excuse he can provide, if said country is oil-rich?
3- Lower trade barriers to countries that already procude the solution.
4- Develop an industry that obviously would change the energy matrix in the long run, e.g., hydrogen-cell, skewing the fact that other countries had already developed and deployed a solution in massive scale.
Answers?
How the fuck do you know? You think the ethanol they put on vehicles is the same you use on the bathroom?
40% of the millions of cars in Brazil run on ethanol, they're hybrid cars, allowing any mxture from 0-100% of gas and/or ethanol. They yield more engine potency, not less. I would know, I own one.
Homegrown Fuel Supply Helps Brazil Breathe Easy http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ethanol15jun 15,0,3313642.story?track=tothtml
Brazil's ethanol effort helping lead to oil self-sufficiency http://ethanolmarketplace.com/061705_news6.asp
Brazilian drivers love ethanol - Fuel costs half price of gasoline http://www.detnews.com/2004/autosinsider/0408/27/e 03-254552.htm
Brazil embraces ethanol http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2005/06/26/bus iness/doc42bc788738c34906117023.txt
A technical explanation on potency, performance, etc - I leave it to you to Babelfish it. http://www.webmotors.com.br/wmpublicador/Reportage ns.vxlpub?hnid=33796
Shut up. You're being brainwashed. Again. Go vote for Baby Bush.
(The percentage went down due to price fluctuations and some wrong political decisions.)
Take it from me, I used to own an ethanol-run chevrolet.
Nowadays, the best thing you can do in Brazil is buy a hybrid car, engineered to run on any mixture of gas/ethanol. This is great because ethanol does not yield CO2. Also, the motor gets more potency (but burns faster - Ok because it's cheaper than gas - thanks to the Iraq War).
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ethanol15ju
This is obviously something orchestrated by big players. PR. Big Oil. Bush & Buddies, trying to brainwash American public opinion once more.
PS: Don't forget to buy stocks in oil. The barrels are gonna hit $100 by the end of the year, analysts say.
What you don't seem to know is that MS Windows is utterly missing the wonderful collection of little tools available on every UNIX platform
p roductinfo/features/default.mspx
What you don't seem to know, is that you get all those little UNIX tools in Windows, including the ones made by Microsoft.
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/
Now in UNIX nowadays, particularly Linux (BSD guys tend to be more conservative (*)) sometimes there's huge bloat for system configuration: you might need Ruby, Python, Lua, Perl, Scheme, Rexx, Bash, C, C++, and any other language people invent. And in some package managers, dependencies must resolve to a particular version of these languages, even though, for instance, the guy _never_ used generators, but still asked for Python 2.3. It's a big mess sometimes. That's why some want to keep it small and code in C for the most part (e.g., OpenBSD), for better or for worse. OTOH, C sucks.
(*) Even though you even get to see Forth and Modula3 code in FreeBSD, for instance. But they're chosen for a reason, not just "hey, this language is kewl, dude!"
What is Linux? (...) I don't mean that as a silly statement. Look at OS X - Apple has created a very strong image for their product. It's 'sexy' (...)
That's easy. I've been using Linux for a few years and I think i can answer that. Linux is a penguin. It walks kind of funny, and some might consider one 'sexy' if they grew up in a farm in Alaska, although I personally don't. Think of it as a kind of teddy bear.
An interface I feel just fits in the Unixspace is Ion. Because, as you said, the interface must deal with how we work/think/opperate. And how do we work on Unix? We do use CLI. We probably will never stop using the CLI, because it allows us to use a foreign language called Unixspeak.And Ion fits right in that mental space, controlling the space layout. That is, with Ion, you don't have to think where the window will go, or where it is. It deals with those trivial matters for you. I just wishe it had round corners for a 21st-century fox look.
I remember, a long time ago reading/looking at Archy, but it's Windows-only. Fuck that. Will never win, because Windows is a land of monopoly. Free Software is the wild frontier...Too bad for the old guy...
This CLI thing, BTW, is something I very often think about. Can we really live without it? Should we? The fact is that languages allow for an infinite of constructs, much more compact, and transmissible over the wire than GUIs. So there you have algebra and information theory for you. How can we instruct people to perform 50+ instructions via a GUI? We can't. We must use a phone line, or write a document. Click 50 times. Go crazy.
I would much rather have something like Ion, but more advanced, a GUI that really does the space-fitting job for you. However, it should have case-based reasoning built-in, some sort of AI. It learns with your habits.
OTOH, I would like to have some sort of CLI/Visual hybrid. But I don't think in terms of the mouse, or any traditional interface. It would be some sort of logography, a language with visual compositionality, like Blissymbolics or what APL achieved in terms of programming languages (an aspect somewhat preserved in Perl operators, in a way). This is because humans use language. When will orality substitute written language? It hasn't happened with radio, TV, or the Web. Probably never will. To assume it would happen would be to assume we would go back to a pre-language era.
On that topic regarding visual aids versus pure language abstraction, there was an interesting article this week of which I quote the relevant part:
So the author contrasts a language capable of great orthogonality and abstraction versus visual-aids tools like Eclipse, for instance. I believe this is a real experience for people who program in Lisp, Haskell, SML, Ruby, etc. vs the Java, C++. C, C# crowd.
I guess my point is that there's too much fixation on merely visual things. And on that note, it sucks. Why a mouse and not a Joystick? How's going wild on the keyboard with Ctrl-X Ctrl-F Meta-X shell on the keyboard not using your hands? I'm not defending the CLI, but I think HUI people are heavily biased towards a culture of stupid visual metaphors. In the 80s, I dreamed of sketchpads and touch screens, because all I had was a Commodore64 and the Apple ][ at school...Never happened. The mouse came along. And Windows. I wanted the whole wide open.
Most office drones that I know and work with seem to have rather simple needs on their business PC. They use Word for documents, Excel for spreadsheets, Outlook for email and IE for surfing the Web.
Then you need to consider giving your resumé a boost so you can get a job that lands you higher up on the food chain.