First, Blagojavic is a democrat. You should have some facts before posting.
He's also an idiot. And what he's doing is conservative bullshit.
I live in Illinois, and generally we've had a lot of Republican govenors. We may be solidly a blue state (thank goodness) but Republicans have held the govenorship more often than not in the last half of this century.
Our last govenor, a possibly (unconvicted) corrupt wangler of campaign contributions and also a Republican, was the best govenor we've had in my lifetime. He went against his constituancy, his party muck-a-mucks, and the powerful industry of criminal justice in Illinois to free or at least stay the executions of everyone on death row here.
(Yes the justice system is an industry -- jailing people costs the government a lot of money, and that money goes in peoples' pockets. It generates jobs, it generates political careers (how many govenors start out as state's attorney?), and in the Chicago police force, it's generated a powerful, corrupt union which encourages its members to vote as a block. Oh, and that industry also frames people.)
Now that's a good govenor. One with convictions. Though in a year or so, he may have one more... I'd vote for him again in a SECOND.
We need jobs and education in this state. Instead, we have a spineless, not very clever democrat who's worried about the republic vote outside of Chicago.
The answer's "No, you won't get a job." Not in the business world via resumes and interviews and such.
You have a choice. You can
1. do what the old-boys network has always done -- hit up a friend for a contact where you'll be GIVEN a job (not hard, really, depending on who you know), and from there you can learn and get a job elsewhere, as you'll now have experience.
or
2. get a job in school. Learn furiously. Meet lots of people much smarter than you (that builds your old-boy network) and get a long resume of real, applied skills rather than a bunch of stuff you learned in class and forgot.
The eye-strain issue you'll see with LCDs is the backlight. The strobe rate on the electrolumiescent panel used as a backlight can be pretty slow, like a flouescent light.
If you don't have a backlight on your LCD, you'll probably have a lot less eye problems, but then, you probably won't be able to see it either.
Spinright and other ideas are clearly the way to go, but your disk died because of activity on it (most likely) and more activity with further compromise it.
So:
1. Try all these good ideas suggested here on a different ZIP disk. One which isn't important.
2. Don't proceed with the same drive if you cannot get anything off any ZIP disk with your drive. Find another one. But only do that if the first one is completely screwed, as writing on a disk with multiple drives (for some floppy technologies, not sure about ZIP) is a great way to destroy a disk.
3. Get your dd first: One BIG dd off the whole thing, so you have something to fall back on later, should your work blow up, and the disk turn to cabbage. Not sure of the dd command? Work it out on a DIFFERENT DISK (see #1), so you're not grinding on this disk a bunch of times. Just read it once for the dd, then run spinrite and that stuff to try to do the job right.
Plowing through the dd will be unpleasant, you're only getting it as a last ditch, but get it FIRST.
I flip back and forth on this. A smaller number of people to bribe (or, as another poster pointed out, to swap votes with, and make deals with) means graft, and petty politics.
And clearly, CLEARLY, that's bad.
But what the electoral college was set up to do is to protect us from the beast. That is, the people, for 70% of the people, my fellow slashdotters, are unlike us. They are poorly educated, non-rational... folks, they're stupid, and they hold out fates in their hands. I know, that's anti-democratic. But when a race is based on the will of the people, by pure numbers, candidates have to worry about how people perceive them on an emotional level, not on how they stand on issues. Kerry kept saying "I have a plan" because if he said what it was, it would confuse the electorate.
So we have to elect someone sight unseen, essentially, because we cannot be told what a rational person needs to be told, and that because 70% of us aren't rational.
So the electoral college means electing a local big-wig who goes to the convention. Any surity that that person will be rational? No. Any surity that that person will be more likely to be rational than the man in the street. YES.
A system which allows 20 candidates to be in serious contention, and which required a 2/3 majority to elect (very parlimentary, essentially) would be much better for third party candidates. But electors could very well be party hacks. And we might have stalemate.
But the electoral college would have public votes. Electors would be held responsible for a shitty president by the people in their ward. We could burn their house down, or stone them if they chose for personal gain, or certainly never elect them to the College again.
So again, I go back and forth. But I'll tell you something, we need change, here, whether it's the Electoral College or something else.
Howsabout this: We reduce the power of the president. Why are we at war in Iraq? Do you remember a declaration of war (only congress has the power to do so)? If you do, you're halucinating. Imprisonment without lawyers for years? Anyone who can do that has too much power.
Slow down a little there. What you're talking about is trashing systems which weigh districts differently, not trashing the Electoral College. The Electoral College is simply one, maniacly absurd method of doing that.
You can accomplish what you're talking about in any number of ways. Why stick with a bad one?
For instance, you know when the Electoral College was set up, you were voting for people to go to the College. When you cast your vote a couple of days ago, you were not (traditionally) voting for Bush or Kerry, you were voting for Fred Something to go to the College and vote for Bush or Kerry for you. Electors names used to be on the ballots in Illinois (my state) -- they're not anymore.
Think about this: Why break into 50 states for elections? If it's winner take all in the states, why not break the country into 3 zones. Make it winner take all in those. Or just 1 zone. Whoops, wait, that would just be a popular election. Wouldn't it make sense to break into smaller zones, not larger? In what way does having all of California in one zone make sense? This would allow more resolution to aid rural areas, not less.
The College needs an overhaul. Rural and urban centers need a balance method. These are not mutually exclusive.
And (as you point out) doing a FANTASTIC job of waterproofing it when the heat (especially if you turn the thing off, now and then) will go up and down, causing materials to expand and contract.
As for melting, I don't think that's a concern so much -- if it melts, you've FAILED to provide a system which draws away enough heat. Bags should handle 150 degrees, and we don't want the chips getting any hotter than that, if we want to call it a success.
"The joke is that we all know the dude's going to lose this election."
Um, NO. There's been a collosal amount of vote fraud ALREADY. Democrats and suspected democrats (blacks, essentially) are being stricken off roles at a good clip.
Yes, there are armies of lawyers ready to litigate once the election is over, in case George steals it, but with the supreme court set the way it is, once stolen, it will REMAIN STOLEN.
Don't be so complacent, my friend. This could go either way, and you should be damn sure to nag all your non-bush-supporting friends to be sure to vote, as their votes will be counting for some unspecified number of republican votes, where such number is tangibly (but let's hope only slightly) less than ONE.
The whole tubes and pumps and such water cooling stuff does seem overly complicated.
I wanted to just mount the PC on a fishtank and put the heatsink in with the fish, but I worried about cooking the fish. So, no fish in the tank...
Heatpipes don't seem to be sold in arbitrailly long lengths -- I don't think I could go three feet to the top of the fishtank, then down to the bottom with consumer packages.
Has anyone ever seen someone try bagging the whole computer and immersing the bag? If you vacuum out most of the air is the water to bag to chip (and drive, I suppose) contact good enough to cool the CPU, GPU, Drives, etc.?
I don't know whether consumers will want this. Consumers want games and speed.
But I, as a corporate guy, want one of these (with a processor and memory configuration good enough for open office) on every desk in our office. I want to standardize on Linux or a BSD derivitive, open office, and centralize administration.
That's been tried in the past, of course, with java stations, for instance, but the applications were never there, and the machines we REALLY slow, and they were priced too high. We're finally getting to a place where a practically disposable machine can be able to run everything we want.
Lowish power (yeah, a faster box would consume a lot more power than this), less desk space, less bickering about new machines, less worries about stuff the employees install, spyware, and security. Less spent upfront on machines, less spent on desktop support.
Obviously the machine I want isn't this machine. But it's getting close. And when a company decides to go this route, the company would be 30, or a 100, or a few thousand at a time.
No, the founding fathers did not design this. They mentioned it in the constitution, but didn't flesh it out.
What's generally agreed is that the founders intended the college to allow the local hicks to vote for a local smart guy. Then that smart guy was to assemble with the other smart guys and pick a (or some) candidate(s) to submit to congress.
This is screwed in a couple of ways. One, we now have communications systems which allow the populace to be (in theory) 100% smart guys.
Two, the local smart guys are declared from the beginning who they're voting for, so they have no debate, no rational discussion, etc. It's the masses making the descision.
So you're making a straw man argument. And it's bogus.
Just like the friggin' electoral college.
At least, just in the name of removing some hypocrisy, remove the ELECTORS from the system. If we have to have winner take all, why are we voting for an individual to send to the convention, to rubber stamp the pre-established candidate?!?!?? Take about a whip boot on a car...
And if we have to have an elector for historical reasons, why can't we force them to wear funny hats?
I can't leave this alone having seen the denigrating reply you got by anonymous coward.
Of course you are completely right.
People who never open up machines think "servers" are fundementally different from desktops. I think it's a little frightening to see a lot of those people responding on a technical board.
Don't get me wrong -- some are different. When you spend $10k on a Compaq server, you can expect it to crash Window 2000 less than a desktop will. Compaq screws around with hardware and drivers and makes things more reliable. But when you buy one of these things, you're saddled with a nonstandard motherboard, case, etc, and you'll spend another $10k to replace the whole thing in 2 years, because you can't upgrade. You'll keep the server after you replace it, of course, and you'll use it somewhere else until it grows cobwebs -- after all, it's reliable, and YOU SPENT SO MUCH ON IT.
(Remember, the usual pattern is buy a server, run something on it, outgrow the server, buy a NEW server to run it on, and place the first server in a less-demanding role. It's at THAT time that you upgrade the first server, not when the application is running on the box.)
Your basic $3000 server has the same stuff in it that a good desktop has, and less. It will be less complicated. It will have a simple (rack-mounted, one hopes) case which can move air through more predictably and smoothly. It will (again, you hope, there are no standards, here) have more air flow than the desktop. It might have a mesh filter to keep some dust out. It might not have video (that's rare, now, though), or sound (again -- getting rare). It will probably have an older, well supported, LOWER PERFORMANCE motherboard/chipset (that's a GOOD THING). If you're lucky, it will have been burned in (run for a day or so under unpleasant conditions).
But these are all tendencies, not rules. Anyone good can take a bunch of desktop parts, buy a nice case, heatsinks and some fans, and make a reliable server and do it for cheap.
That said, if you're running a fundementally unreliable operating system (ie. Windows) it often makes a LOT more sense to buy a Compaq or Dell server where they've solved lots of hardware-based crashing problems. You spend that $10k and you get 10 times less crashes.
And then there's politics. If you buy a $10k server to run apache for an intranet with 30 people and it goes down (inconceivable, and wouldn't have if you'd built the thing yourself), there might be no little or no blowback on you. You did the right thing. You bought this great server.
On the other hand, if they don't give you a budget, and you have to cobble together a machine to run the app on and the box goes down (or there's a software glitch), management will look at that box and say "Of course it failed. We need a server!" Depending on management's self-delusion about the money situation, you'll get chewed out or supported for doing the best you could, but told that it's time to buy a server.
I have $10k boxes that crash every other week. They're running Windows 2000, Oracle, have raid 5 disk arrays with hardware controllers and support a few (not many) users. I have cheaper boxes running the same stuff which crash TWICE a week.
I have old miniITX boards which were too slow to continue as desktops. We put them in $150 1U cases. One's running Linux and handling mail and external web for the whole company. It's never been down. Ever.
Choose your box based on what you need. Choose your hardware based on reliablity (and THEN performance). Check your politics first.
Then buy a machine or parts as appropriate, and forget the word "server" -- a word that's only useful to marketing departments.
But does the stuff most of us would want to do with it -- specifically video compression and decompression -- use dual-processor systems well?
I know the VIA boards last time I saw a review (I think it was a year and a half ago, in the 1 Ghz incarnation) didn't QUITE have the umph necessary to play video without dropping any frames.
Is a dual configuration really going to change that, or do we need more speed on the single processor?
Or for that matter, is the real bottleneck memory, io, etc?
Yes, but that's in large part because of the stock market. Insurance companies don't make a profit on insurance. They make a small, acceptable loss on it, a fraction of a percent, if things are going well.
They invest the capital they get and that's where they make their money.
They lost a huge amount of money on the stock market bubble, and the losses they take on the insurance now look larger -- it's a bigger percent in relation to their capital.
That's not saying that malpractice claims aren't up. Just that they don't explain the incredible jump in malpractice insurance costs. The size of that jump is because of the stock market.
I first heard this from a statistician at the University of Chicago, and later got confirmation from some folks who worked in insurance.
The main problem I have with the situation is that we hear a great deal about tort reform
"because malpractice suits are spiraling out of control!"
when a truthful explanation would be
"because malpractice suits are up, and we lost a LOT on the stock market!"
The damage of these memos was not to CBS, or to the Globe or to Bush but to the STORY. The story was well researched, includes a lot of interviews, (including, now, to the secretary who says "I didn't type those. But I typed ones that said about the same thing.") and military records.
The Globe (and CBS) showed pretty darn conclusively that Bush reneged, was AWOL, that it was covered up/excused, and that he's lying and/or stonewalling when he says different and at the same time, he and his proxies are attacking Kerry's war record.
But these documents... They get shown to be forgeries and we forget (POOF!) the whole, real, well-rounded story. If these documents weren't plants, then Karl Rove couldn't have hoped for a better lucky break.
You dangle a shiny toy in front of the American public and it immediately forgets that its sippy-cup exists.
Sure there is slander/libel. They're both defamation, as you nicely put it yourself.
I said that if they distribute material (presumably print) then it might be actionable as libel.
However, I didn't go into the slander aspect. They are almost certainly guilty of it -- within their organization. They need to communicate with each other about what they plan to do. However, I don't know whether someone defaming you to their coworkers is profitably actionable. You could sue, but presumably the coworkers would be closed-lipped, so you're not losing face to many or to relevant people.
Since you seem to know what slander and libel are (good for you!) maybe you know what the criteria for assessing damages is?
But doesn't purchasing cheaper call-center or programming services from abroad reduce input costs for various industries, delivering a net benefit to the economy? Not necessarily, Mr. Samuelson replied. To put things in simplified terms, he explained in the interview, "being able to purchase groceries 20 percent cheaper at Wal-Mart does not necessarily make up for the wage losses."
Embedded in the quote is part of the problem about this discussion. There are many of us who care about the person saving 20% or losing his/her wage. But then there are some of us who only care about Wal-Mart.
For the thinker who cares about the person, this requires equations, thinking, balance, logic, etc. For the thinker (and I use the term loosely) who cares only about corporate interests, this is (at least in the short term) EASY.
And so it's all the harder for someone thinking about the cost/benefit, since that thinker has to wade through a lot of complete bullshit spewed by the corporate lackeys (of which we have a lot in government, these days).
I should be more clear -- I use Evolution. But all the drones in the office use Windows desktops and Outlook.
Outlook bonds with Exchange (which we also use -- a slightly older version which works poorly with Evolution's calendaring) so that we cannot leave Outlook, and therefore cannot leave Windows. If we can get a work-alike for Exchange, we can slowly move people into a hetrogeneous (or even completely non-Windows) evironment.
We COULD upgrade our Exchange to allow Evolution to be more of a replacement for Outlook than it is, but that means spending money on a service, and our uppers would, after that, be unwilling to let us scrap it.
The optimal path would be to replace the Exchange server with something that plays well with Outlook, then migrate our people to Linux desktop, where those people don't need Windows speghettified apps.
Before spending any time on this guy (as a corporate head, anyhow) I need to know how well it works with outlook. To wit: I need to know that the company users won't know the difference -- that they won't have a clue that anything has changed.
If that's the case, I'd be a bug on the ass of my LAN manager to convert us immediately, and he'd probably jump at it.
If it's legal to violate the copyright laws of your own country by simply going to another country to do it, what's to stop people from setting up a P2P system where (a) server(s) sit in a country which doesn't respect US copyrights?
You send a request for Return of the Jedi to the server, and close the connection. The server sees your request, makes a copy of Return of the Jedi for you, then sends it to you. It's not a violation of the law there to send it to you.
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border, then this ludicrous server example should be legal, too.
I was horrified when they took it off, immediately after 9/11/2001. Dissent ends when things get bad? HUH? That's when we need it most.
And I actually liked George Bush. Not that inarticulate imposter they had playing him on the news, but the real one I saw every week on his show. That real George Bush was an OK guy. The fake one on the news was both uninteresting and... well, scarey.
I felt much better about our leadership when That's My Bush was on.
That's excatly what I want -- no or bad xforms support on IE. No, really. I want things which make IE go away on the intranet.
I'll use it as a lever to get IE out the door here. I've already got the powers that be interested, and now I need compelling arguments. If I can develop stuff faster/better under Mozilla and then get the company to ditch IE (they're close anyhow) that's a slam dunk.
The Internet will follow, because after that happens a bunch of times, Microsoft will get frightened, and IE will support xforms. But I (and people like me) will have already let the horses out of the barn.
The reason I used mysql instead of postgres, last time I made that choice (6+ years ago) was because of the speed. Windows support didn't matter at all, only the blinding speed of MySql compared to old Postgres (http://mysql.matrix.com.br/information/benchmarks.html). My understanding is the Postgres has gotten much faster: Are there more recent benchmarks around?
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He's also an idiot. And what he's doing is conservative bullshit.
I live in Illinois, and generally we've had a lot of Republican govenors. We may be solidly a blue state (thank goodness) but Republicans have held the govenorship more often than not in the last half of this century.
Our last govenor, a possibly (unconvicted) corrupt wangler of campaign contributions and also a Republican, was the best govenor we've had in my lifetime. He went against his constituancy, his party muck-a-mucks, and the powerful industry of criminal justice in Illinois to free or at least stay the executions of everyone on death row here.
(Yes the justice system is an industry -- jailing people costs the government a lot of money, and that money goes in peoples' pockets. It generates jobs, it generates political careers (how many govenors start out as state's attorney?), and in the Chicago police force, it's generated a powerful, corrupt union which encourages its members to vote as a block. Oh, and that industry also frames people.)
Now that's a good govenor. One with convictions. Though in a year or so, he may have one more... I'd vote for him again in a SECOND.
We need jobs and education in this state. Instead, we have a spineless, not very clever democrat who's worried about the republic vote outside of Chicago.
I'm a Democrat. Blagojavic is a worm.
The answer's "No, you won't get a job." Not in the business world via resumes and interviews and such.
You have a choice. You can
1. do what the old-boys network has always done -- hit up a friend for a contact where you'll be GIVEN a job (not hard, really, depending on who you know), and from there you can learn and get a job elsewhere, as you'll now have experience.
or
2. get a job in school. Learn furiously. Meet lots of people much smarter than you (that builds your old-boy network) and get a long resume of real, applied skills rather than a bunch of stuff you learned in class and forgot.
I recommend doing both.
The eye-strain issue you'll see with LCDs is the backlight. The strobe rate on the electrolumiescent panel used as a backlight can be pretty slow, like a flouescent light.
If you don't have a backlight on your LCD, you'll probably have a lot less eye problems, but then, you probably won't be able to see it either.
It'd be nice if those panels were flicker free...
Spinright and other ideas are clearly the way to go, but your disk died because of activity on it (most likely) and more activity with further compromise it.
So:
1. Try all these good ideas suggested here on a different ZIP disk. One which isn't important.
2. Don't proceed with the same drive if you cannot get anything off any ZIP disk with your drive. Find another one. But only do that if the first one is completely screwed, as writing on a disk with multiple drives (for some floppy technologies, not sure about ZIP) is a great way to destroy a disk.
3. Get your dd first: One BIG dd off the whole thing, so you have something to fall back on later, should your work blow up, and the disk turn to cabbage. Not sure of the dd command? Work it out on a DIFFERENT DISK (see #1), so you're not grinding on this disk a bunch of times. Just read it once for the dd, then run spinrite and that stuff to try to do the job right.
Plowing through the dd will be unpleasant, you're only getting it as a last ditch, but get it FIRST.
Allow me to stick my neck out.
I flip back and forth on this. A smaller number of people to bribe (or, as another poster pointed out, to swap votes with, and make deals with) means graft, and petty politics.
And clearly, CLEARLY, that's bad.
But what the electoral college was set up to do is to protect us from the beast. That is, the people, for 70% of the people, my fellow slashdotters, are unlike us. They are poorly educated, non-rational... folks, they're stupid, and they hold out fates in their hands. I know, that's anti-democratic. But when a race is based on the will of the people, by pure numbers, candidates have to worry about how people perceive them on an emotional level, not on how they stand on issues. Kerry kept saying "I have a plan" because if he said what it was, it would confuse the electorate.
So we have to elect someone sight unseen, essentially, because we cannot be told what a rational person needs to be told, and that because 70% of us aren't rational.
So the electoral college means electing a local big-wig who goes to the convention. Any surity that that person will be rational? No. Any surity that that person will be more likely to be rational than the man in the street. YES.
A system which allows 20 candidates to be in serious contention, and which required a 2/3 majority to elect (very parlimentary, essentially) would be much better for third party candidates. But electors could very well be party hacks. And we might have stalemate.
But the electoral college would have public votes. Electors would be held responsible for a shitty president by the people in their ward. We could burn their house down, or stone them if they chose for personal gain, or certainly never elect them to the College again.
So again, I go back and forth. But I'll tell you something, we need change, here, whether it's the Electoral College or something else.
Howsabout this: We reduce the power of the president. Why are we at war in Iraq? Do you remember a declaration of war (only congress has the power to do so)? If you do, you're halucinating. Imprisonment without lawyers for years? Anyone who can do that has too much power.
This link is to an opinion piece referring to a unfindable article.
Does anyone have a REAL article talking about this? Something with dates, numbers, that sort of thing?
Slow down a little there. What you're talking about is trashing systems which weigh districts differently, not trashing the Electoral College. The Electoral College is simply one, maniacly absurd method of doing that.
You can accomplish what you're talking about in any number of ways. Why stick with a bad one?
For instance, you know when the Electoral College was set up, you were voting for people to go to the College. When you cast your vote a couple of days ago, you were not (traditionally) voting for Bush or Kerry, you were voting for Fred Something to go to the College and vote for Bush or Kerry for you. Electors names used to be on the ballots in Illinois (my state) -- they're not anymore.
Think about this: Why break into 50 states for elections? If it's winner take all in the states, why not break the country into 3 zones. Make it winner take all in those. Or just 1 zone. Whoops, wait, that would just be a popular election. Wouldn't it make sense to break into smaller zones, not larger? In what way does having all of California in one zone make sense? This would allow more resolution to aid rural areas, not less.
The College needs an overhaul. Rural and urban centers need a balance method. These are not mutually exclusive.
And (as you point out) doing a FANTASTIC job of waterproofing it when the heat (especially if you turn the thing off, now and then) will go up and down, causing materials to expand and contract.
As for melting, I don't think that's a concern so much -- if it melts, you've FAILED to provide a system which draws away enough heat. Bags should handle 150 degrees, and we don't want the chips getting any hotter than that, if we want to call it a success.
"The joke is that we all know the dude's going to lose this election."
Um, NO. There's been a collosal amount of vote fraud ALREADY. Democrats and suspected democrats (blacks, essentially) are being stricken off roles at a good clip.
Yes, there are armies of lawyers ready to litigate once the election is over, in case George steals it, but with the supreme court set the way it is, once stolen, it will REMAIN STOLEN.
Don't be so complacent, my friend. This could go either way, and you should be damn sure to nag all your non-bush-supporting friends to be sure to vote, as their votes will be counting for some unspecified number of republican votes, where such number is tangibly (but let's hope only slightly) less than ONE.
The whole tubes and pumps and such water cooling stuff does seem overly complicated.
I wanted to just mount the PC on a fishtank and put the heatsink in with the fish, but I worried about cooking the fish. So, no fish in the tank...
Heatpipes don't seem to be sold in arbitrailly long lengths -- I don't think I could go three feet to the top of the fishtank, then down to the bottom with consumer packages.
Has anyone ever seen someone try bagging the whole computer and immersing the bag? If you vacuum out most of the air is the water to bag to chip (and drive, I suppose) contact good enough to cool the CPU, GPU, Drives, etc.?
I don't know whether consumers will want this. Consumers want games and speed.
But I, as a corporate guy, want one of these (with a processor and memory configuration good enough for open office) on every desk in our office. I want to standardize on Linux or a BSD derivitive, open office, and centralize administration.
That's been tried in the past, of course, with java stations, for instance, but the applications were never there, and the machines we REALLY slow, and they were priced too high. We're finally getting to a place where a practically disposable machine can be able to run everything we want.
Lowish power (yeah, a faster box would consume a lot more power than this), less desk space, less bickering about new machines, less worries about stuff the employees install, spyware, and security. Less spent upfront on machines, less spent on desktop support.
Obviously the machine I want isn't this machine. But it's getting close. And when a company decides to go this route, the company would be 30, or a 100, or a few thousand at a time.
No, the founding fathers did not design this. They mentioned it in the constitution, but didn't flesh it out.
What's generally agreed is that the founders intended the college to allow the local hicks to vote for a local smart guy. Then that smart guy was to assemble with the other smart guys and pick a (or some) candidate(s) to submit to congress.
This is screwed in a couple of ways. One, we now have communications systems which allow the populace to be (in theory) 100% smart guys.
Two, the local smart guys are declared from the beginning who they're voting for, so they have no debate, no rational discussion, etc. It's the masses making the descision.
So you're making a straw man argument. And it's bogus.
Just like the friggin' electoral college.
At least, just in the name of removing some hypocrisy, remove the ELECTORS from the system. If we have to have winner take all, why are we voting for an individual to send to the convention, to rubber stamp the pre-established candidate?!?!?? Take about a whip boot on a car...
And if we have to have an elector for historical reasons, why can't we force them to wear funny hats?
I can't leave this alone having seen the denigrating reply you got by anonymous coward.
Of course you are completely right.
People who never open up machines think "servers" are fundementally different from desktops. I think it's a little frightening to see a lot of those people responding on a technical board.
Don't get me wrong -- some are different. When you spend $10k on a Compaq server, you can expect it to crash Window 2000 less than a desktop will. Compaq screws around with hardware and drivers and makes things more reliable. But when you buy one of these things, you're saddled with a nonstandard motherboard, case, etc, and you'll spend another $10k to replace the whole thing in 2 years, because you can't upgrade. You'll keep the server after you replace it, of course, and you'll use it somewhere else until it grows cobwebs -- after all, it's reliable, and YOU SPENT SO MUCH ON IT.
(Remember, the usual pattern is buy a server, run something on it, outgrow the server, buy a NEW server to run it on, and place the first server in a less-demanding role. It's at THAT time that you upgrade the first server, not when the application is running on the box.)
Your basic $3000 server has the same stuff in it that a good desktop has, and less. It will be less complicated. It will have a simple (rack-mounted, one hopes) case which can move air through more predictably and smoothly. It will (again, you hope, there are no standards, here) have more air flow than the desktop. It might have a mesh filter to keep some dust out. It might not have video (that's rare, now, though), or sound (again -- getting rare). It will probably have an older, well supported, LOWER PERFORMANCE motherboard/chipset (that's a GOOD THING). If you're lucky, it will have been burned in (run for a day or so under unpleasant conditions).
But these are all tendencies, not rules. Anyone good can take a bunch of desktop parts, buy a nice case, heatsinks and some fans, and make a reliable server and do it for cheap.
That said, if you're running a fundementally unreliable operating system (ie. Windows) it often makes a LOT more sense to buy a Compaq or Dell server where they've solved lots of hardware-based crashing problems. You spend that $10k and you get 10 times less crashes.
And then there's politics. If you buy a $10k server to run apache for an intranet with 30 people and it goes down (inconceivable, and wouldn't have if you'd built the thing yourself), there might be no little or no blowback on you. You did the right thing. You bought this great server.
On the other hand, if they don't give you a budget, and you have to cobble together a machine to run the app on and the box goes down (or there's a software glitch), management will look at that box and say "Of course it failed. We need a server!" Depending on management's self-delusion about the money situation, you'll get chewed out or supported for doing the best you could, but told that it's time to buy a server.
I have $10k boxes that crash every other week. They're running Windows 2000, Oracle, have raid 5 disk arrays with hardware controllers and support a few (not many) users. I have cheaper boxes running the same stuff which crash TWICE a week.
I have old miniITX boards which were too slow to continue as desktops. We put them in $150 1U cases. One's running Linux and handling mail and external web for the whole company. It's never been down. Ever.
Choose your box based on what you need. Choose your hardware based on reliablity (and THEN performance). Check your politics first.
Then buy a machine or parts as appropriate, and forget the word "server" -- a word that's only useful to marketing departments.
But does the stuff most of us would want to do with it -- specifically video compression and decompression -- use dual-processor systems well?
I know the VIA boards last time I saw a review (I think it was a year and a half ago, in the 1 Ghz incarnation) didn't QUITE have the umph necessary to play video without dropping any frames.
Is a dual configuration really going to change that, or do we need more speed on the single processor?
Or for that matter, is the real bottleneck memory, io, etc?
Yes, but that's in large part because of the stock market. Insurance companies don't make a profit on insurance. They make a small, acceptable loss on it, a fraction of a percent, if things are going well.
They invest the capital they get and that's where they make their money.
They lost a huge amount of money on the stock market bubble, and the losses they take on the insurance now look larger -- it's a bigger percent in relation to their capital.
That's not saying that malpractice claims aren't up. Just that they don't explain the incredible jump in malpractice insurance costs. The size of that jump is because of the stock market.
I first heard this from a statistician at the University of Chicago, and later got confirmation from some folks who worked in insurance.
The main problem I have with the situation is that we hear a great deal about tort reform
"because malpractice suits are spiraling out of control!"
when a truthful explanation would be
"because malpractice suits are up, and we lost a LOT on the stock market!"
See http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush /national_guard/
The Globe (and CBS) showed pretty darn conclusively that Bush reneged, was AWOL, that it was covered up/excused, and that he's lying and/or stonewalling when he says different and at the same time, he and his proxies are attacking Kerry's war record.
But these documents... They get shown to be forgeries and we forget (POOF!) the whole, real, well-rounded story. If these documents weren't plants, then Karl Rove couldn't have hoped for a better lucky break.
You dangle a shiny toy in front of the American public and it immediately forgets that its sippy-cup exists.
Sure there is slander/libel. They're both defamation, as you nicely put it yourself.
I said that if they distribute material (presumably print) then it might be actionable as libel.
However, I didn't go into the slander aspect. They are almost certainly guilty of it -- within their organization. They need to communicate with each other about what they plan to do. However, I don't know whether someone defaming you to their coworkers is profitably actionable. You could sue, but presumably the coworkers would be closed-lipped, so you're not losing face to many or to relevant people.
Since you seem to know what slander and libel are (good for you!) maybe you know what the criteria for assessing damages is?
Embedded in the quote is part of the problem about this discussion. There are many of us who care about the person saving 20% or losing his/her wage. But then there are some of us who only care about Wal-Mart.
For the thinker who cares about the person, this requires equations, thinking, balance, logic, etc. For the thinker (and I use the term loosely) who cares only about corporate interests, this is (at least in the short term) EASY.
And so it's all the harder for someone thinking about the cost/benefit, since that thinker has to wade through a lot of complete bullshit spewed by the corporate lackeys (of which we have a lot in government, these days).
Seems not like perjury, but rather slander/libel.
I guess the question is, "do they distribute infomation claiming you're guilty of something to folks other than you?"
If so, it might be actionable as libel.
I should be more clear -- I use Evolution. But all the drones in the office use Windows desktops and Outlook.
Outlook bonds with Exchange (which we also use -- a slightly older version which works poorly with Evolution's calendaring) so that we cannot leave Outlook, and therefore cannot leave Windows. If we can get a work-alike for Exchange, we can slowly move people into a hetrogeneous (or even completely non-Windows) evironment.
We COULD upgrade our Exchange to allow Evolution to be more of a replacement for Outlook than it is, but that means spending money on a service, and our uppers would, after that, be unwilling to let us scrap it.
The optimal path would be to replace the Exchange server with something that plays well with Outlook, then migrate our people to Linux desktop, where those people don't need Windows speghettified apps.
Before spending any time on this guy (as a corporate head, anyhow) I need to know how well it works with outlook. To wit: I need to know that the company users won't know the difference -- that they won't have a clue that anything has changed.
If that's the case, I'd be a bug on the ass of my LAN manager to convert us immediately, and he'd probably jump at it.
You send a request for Return of the Jedi to the server, and close the connection. The server sees your request, makes a copy of Return of the Jedi for you, then sends it to you. It's not a violation of the law there to send it to you.
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border, then this ludicrous server example should be legal, too.
I was horrified when they took it off, immediately after 9/11/2001. Dissent ends when things get bad? HUH? That's when we need it most.
And I actually liked George Bush. Not that inarticulate imposter they had playing him on the news, but the real one I saw every week on his show. That real George Bush was an OK guy. The fake one on the news was both uninteresting and... well, scarey.
I felt much better about our leadership when That's My Bush was on.
That's excatly what I want -- no or bad xforms support on IE. No, really. I want things which make IE go away on the intranet.
I'll use it as a lever to get IE out the door here. I've already got the powers that be interested, and now I need compelling arguments. If I can develop stuff faster/better under Mozilla and then get the company to ditch IE (they're close anyhow) that's a slam dunk.
The Internet will follow, because after that happens a bunch of times, Microsoft will get frightened, and IE will support xforms. But I (and people like me) will have already let the horses out of the barn.
The reason I used mysql instead of postgres, last time I made that choice (6+ years ago) was because of the speed. Windows support didn't matter at all, only the blinding speed of MySql compared to old Postgres (http://mysql.matrix.com.br/information/benchmarks .html). My understanding is the Postgres has gotten much faster: Are there more recent benchmarks around?