I semi-agree. I think it's fine for the gov't to pay for it, and then spin it off to a non-profit co-op. I do agree, however, that there is no place for them competing in the private sector.
That's the worst argument ever. It costs 75 bucks to rent a jet ski for a fricking hour. It costs 30-50 bucks for a nice dinner. And it can cost 26 bucks for a crappy scifi novel, so that is out the window.
If you don't want it, don't buy it. If you want it, don't want to buy it, and download it for free, you're ripping them off.
Don't try to justify it based on value. That has no bearing.
Heh. One of the systems I maintain is an old MPE/iX server. Real P.O.S, and it's from an era so far back that when you ran a job, what it usually output was a print queue file.
This stuff is extremely difficult to explain to people. The system wasn't written to output files...Why would it be? What would users do with them? Their terminals didn't even have disk drives! It's only real output went to a printer!
So now, people say things like, "Well can you give me this in excel?" and we say things like, "Well, I can put it in excel, but it's going to look like a text file pasted into an excel document..." And they just don't get it. Talk to programmers:
Me: "Yea, I was running a billing job today, and it crashed" Them: "Did you re-run it?" Me: "Sure, after I restored the database from a backup tape." Them: "...Da wha?"
Or alternately: "Sure, but I had to manually edit the source code so it would pick up from where it left off, rather than starting over from scratch."
It's just not the modern world. All our modern servers waste cycles all day long, but we're wedded to our goddamn legacy crap, and it takes vast amounts of time to do the same stuff.
It goes both ways. I had a creative labs soundcard once where you had to have the original install disk to get the driver for the card...This was a while ago. I'd gotten it from someone else, so no disk, so no sound card.
Ended up installing linux on the machine, and lo and behold, the card worked perfectly, without any intervention on my part.
So yea, it does go both ways. But, as with all things of this nature, people will forgive that crap with Windows because they're used to it, but the difficulty is magnified with Linux because it's different (and, also, because drivers aren't always as easy to install...The first time you have to teach someone how to update X and how to configure SELinux so that you can patch in a driver...Well, you can see the point of people who say Linux is hard to use).
For me, it's 100% about native software. Anythign that runs native in Linux (or even stuff that's compiled to work well with WINE) I'll run it in Linux, just to help show there is a market out there.
When the government built the interstate highway system, and caused this massive wave of investment in transport, and allowed for people to easily reach wholly new markets for their goods, etc, etc, that was good for capitalism.
Pure capitalism is poor at breaking new ground in areas with significant NRE. That's a problem with infrastructure. It's a good place for the government to step in.
Oh come on, that's not even remotely fair. "It's not Linux's fault you have bad hardware?" Isn't Ubuntu's big selling point that it just works? God knows it's not the zune-esque color scheme.
Go to any forum, and someone will tell you how to get the driver for your hardware, or how to hack up/configure the driver you have so it works better. That is the problem most people have with Linux: you have to haggle with it to make it work the way you want it to.
I've been using Linux for about a decade now, and we've made strides. But people say the same stupid shit now that they said then. If it works, they say it's because of the amazing quality, and if it doesn't work, then it's because you made a mistake somewhere.
Let's just go ahead and acknowledge that Linux driver support is one of the things that we will need to get better about before we're "Ready for the Desktop(tm)." Better than we used to be is a start, but that's it.
Because you can't make tobacco into rope or paper.
Honestly, there is no good reason. Drug law is by nature arbitrary, since "drug" is an imprecise term. At some point it was decided that cannabis is a drug whose production and distribution should be banned, and so it has remained.
As someone who maintains COBOL driven legacy systems, I disagree. Why teach that stuff in college? Those jobs are much more rare than other programming gigs, and they tend to be held by lifers (I inhereted mine when 2 people hit retirement age, and the third decided she didn't want to do it alone). If you DO get one of those jobs, the learning code for the obscure hand-coded systems is going to be vastly higher than the language.
COBOL isn't that hard to pick up. Maintaining legacy crap code is the same whether it's VB or COBOL or RPG, and the vast vast majority of your headaches will come from environmental quirks (old school databases with fixed width data, packed binary decimal numbers that no one uses anymore, etc).
The biggest problem with COBOL in the modern world is that its designed in reverse. It treats CPU cycles and RAM like they're the most precious things on earth, so a program will make live changes as it goes along (to conserve RAM and minimize disk IO), and is designed to fail in a dirty state (in the middle of everything, so you can't re-run it) on the chance that it'll preserve cycles. It's a real maintenance headache.
There was a case about 5 years ago...I think it was Verizon then, fighting a Chicago(?) suburb that was trying to get fiber-to-the-door paid for through tax bonds. They called everyone in town and asked them how they felt about their tax money going to provide child pornography.
There was a more recent one in Louisiana where Cox and Bellsouth (now AT&T) called around and said that the town would start rationing TV if they owned the lines.
It's real shady crap. It's usually done politically. The biggest political one I can think of was the Republicans accusing John McCain of having an illegitimate black baby in a push poll in South Carolina in '04 (And yes, amusingly, they had to do an information campaign there in '08 to convince people that had been a lie).
To me its just another component to fail, and touchscreens have enough problems already. Is it cool enough to really rate the extra maintenance? Just get used to no buttons.
That's crap. He might have lost the primary, but it's really unlikely he'd have lost the state. He hasn't had serious competition in decades. He won in '04 by double digits, and that's running against a democrat.
This move will basically sew up all the moderates, all the people who automatically vote for the same people, and all the democrats too. Penn would have to have some sort of massive conservative shift, which is pretty unlikely since they've been trending democrat lately.
Might want to check his actual political beliefs. He's more moderate than the democratic rep in my home district. Right of center sure, but it's more center than right.
Eh. Specter is an old school reagan-ish republican. He's pro-choice, pro-environment, and pro-immigration. He's crossed party lines repeatedly over the last few years: he was 1 of three senate republicans to vote for the big stimulus package.
The stimulus vote pissed off the republican leadership, with Steele going so far as to threaten not to contribute to his campaign fund. He's had republican challengers in the primaries for the last 2(?) primaries.
I think they did a good job of making him feel unwanted, and frankly, they can suck it up.
It's not a scare at all. It's only "more difficult" on Windows because Windows "admin" privileges are worthless...System permissions are higher.
This is one of the reasons why Windows viruses have historically been more annoying: they actually run at a level that's higher than the highest user level.
Saying "admin or root" permissions completely misses the point. Root is it. That's the highest level. Kill any process, control any device, install any code, read any file, everything. As many people have pointed out, once you have root you're done. There is no higher exploit than that.
Holy crap that sucks. When I went to school we had unlimited bandwidth on a T3 line. Of course, that was long enough ago that the bandwidth was primarily being absorbed by online gaming and actual work, rather than file sharing.
Even there, the admins were cool as hell, and they had in-house servers for some of the popular FPS games, so the speed was obscene.
Well, in my personal experience, it was one alcoholic female with a mere one abusive husband, dragging one severely fucked up kid around like a ping pong ball. Forgive me for speaking from experience, you politically correct twit.
That's where monopoly busting laws come in. That's what they were designed for...To keep capitalism from eating itself.
Anyway, most people can't switch providers right now, since they're locked in with local monopolies, or they don't want to buy new equipment to switch between DSL and Cable...Give them more than one option where they don't have to switch their hardware, and that number will go WAY up.
Personally I am a proud member of the 4%. I am the anti-customer: I switch every 3 months without fail. When the other company calls and offers me a sweet introductory deal I take it, and then 3 months later, I take the next one.
It's to the point where I leave all the hardware plugged in, and just switch "live" interfaces on my firewall...AT&T fucks with me, goodbye eth1, hello eth2. Cox fucks with me, goodbye eth2, hello eth1. What's wrong with that picture? I'm like a woman with two abusive husbands! I hate this shit!
I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea on principle, however TWC was clearly trying to restructure their internet market to protect their cable tv business. A dollar a gig is laughable.
Any sort of tiered pricing would have to accurately reflect cost and network usage...Being charged the same for peak and non-peak is ridiculous, as we've already established that all their costs are about meeting the peak.
Geeks being geeks, off peak usage is where the bulk of our traffic will already end up...Mom and pop will be in bed at 9:00 when the raids and the massive porn downloads begin.
Well, upload is a niche market (though I admit, I'd love to be able to get at least a megabit...Even half a megabit would be nice).
I think the whole lesson to be learned from TFA can be summed up with the following quote: "Why (is the 160mbit commection offered) so cheap? JCom faces more competition from other Internet providers than companies in the United States do."
We talk a good line about capitalism, but we don't walk the walk. Competition would change the whole game.
In the '80s my department used 16 or 17 bales a day (1 bale = 10 reams = 5000 pages). Now, even though the reports have continued to proliferate, we use 1.
Hell, in the '80s, a lot of systems didn't have a way to transfer digital files. I mean floppys? No way. Those files were created on the computer, but if you wanted to look at 'em, you had to print them out.
Paper use did indeed decrease. Plain text reports are compiled into pdfs and excel files...The reports just aren't printed anymore.
It's a good thing too. Paper costs have gone through the roof.
In Trek, the replicators removed the need for things like "food" and "shelter"...Those could be created at need for zero cost, so everyone had enough to eat, minimal luxury items, decent place to live, etc.
Right now, we still need to get those things. They're still a scarce resource. And there are people who make music and games and software who depend on their products producing some revenue...Which becomes impossible if everyone replicates that product without giving back to the creator.
Whatever. It looked okay, but it played like crap. I had rubberbanding from day one on a machine that had better than the "recommended" (as opposed to "minimum") stats. I certainly would have liked to play it, but I'm not going to tolerate that sort of lag in a game that I was playing in single player mode (and this is with the latest patches as of like 2 months ago).
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I semi-agree. I think it's fine for the gov't to pay for it, and then spin it off to a non-profit co-op. I do agree, however, that there is no place for them competing in the private sector.
That's the worst argument ever. It costs 75 bucks to rent a jet ski for a fricking hour. It costs 30-50 bucks for a nice dinner. And it can cost 26 bucks for a crappy scifi novel, so that is out the window.
If you don't want it, don't buy it. If you want it, don't want to buy it, and download it for free, you're ripping them off.
Don't try to justify it based on value. That has no bearing.
Heh. One of the systems I maintain is an old MPE/iX server. Real P.O.S, and it's from an era so far back that when you ran a job, what it usually output was a print queue file.
This stuff is extremely difficult to explain to people. The system wasn't written to output files...Why would it be? What would users do with them? Their terminals didn't even have disk drives! It's only real output went to a printer!
So now, people say things like, "Well can you give me this in excel?" and we say things like, "Well, I can put it in excel, but it's going to look like a text file pasted into an excel document..." And they just don't get it. Talk to programmers:
Me: "Yea, I was running a billing job today, and it crashed"
Them: "Did you re-run it?"
Me: "Sure, after I restored the database from a backup tape."
Them: "...Da wha?"
Or alternately: "Sure, but I had to manually edit the source code so it would pick up from where it left off, rather than starting over from scratch."
It's just not the modern world. All our modern servers waste cycles all day long, but we're wedded to our goddamn legacy crap, and it takes vast amounts of time to do the same stuff.
It goes both ways. I had a creative labs soundcard once where you had to have the original install disk to get the driver for the card...This was a while ago. I'd gotten it from someone else, so no disk, so no sound card.
Ended up installing linux on the machine, and lo and behold, the card worked perfectly, without any intervention on my part.
So yea, it does go both ways. But, as with all things of this nature, people will forgive that crap with Windows because they're used to it, but the difficulty is magnified with Linux because it's different (and, also, because drivers aren't always as easy to install...The first time you have to teach someone how to update X and how to configure SELinux so that you can patch in a driver...Well, you can see the point of people who say Linux is hard to use).
For me, it's 100% about native software. Anythign that runs native in Linux (or even stuff that's compiled to work well with WINE) I'll run it in Linux, just to help show there is a market out there.
When the government built the interstate highway system, and caused this massive wave of investment in transport, and allowed for people to easily reach wholly new markets for their goods, etc, etc, that was good for capitalism.
Pure capitalism is poor at breaking new ground in areas with significant NRE. That's a problem with infrastructure. It's a good place for the government to step in.
Oh come on, that's not even remotely fair. "It's not Linux's fault you have bad hardware?" Isn't Ubuntu's big selling point that it just works? God knows it's not the zune-esque color scheme.
Go to any forum, and someone will tell you how to get the driver for your hardware, or how to hack up/configure the driver you have so it works better. That is the problem most people have with Linux: you have to haggle with it to make it work the way you want it to.
I've been using Linux for about a decade now, and we've made strides. But people say the same stupid shit now that they said then. If it works, they say it's because of the amazing quality, and if it doesn't work, then it's because you made a mistake somewhere.
Let's just go ahead and acknowledge that Linux driver support is one of the things that we will need to get better about before we're "Ready for the Desktop(tm)." Better than we used to be is a start, but that's it.
Because you can't make tobacco into rope or paper.
Honestly, there is no good reason. Drug law is by nature arbitrary, since "drug" is an imprecise term. At some point it was decided that cannabis is a drug whose production and distribution should be banned, and so it has remained.
Learning curve...
Coffee's sitting right in front of me, but it's too hot to drink...
As someone who maintains COBOL driven legacy systems, I disagree. Why teach that stuff in college? Those jobs are much more rare than other programming gigs, and they tend to be held by lifers (I inhereted mine when 2 people hit retirement age, and the third decided she didn't want to do it alone). If you DO get one of those jobs, the learning code for the obscure hand-coded systems is going to be vastly higher than the language.
COBOL isn't that hard to pick up. Maintaining legacy crap code is the same whether it's VB or COBOL or RPG, and the vast vast majority of your headaches will come from environmental quirks (old school databases with fixed width data, packed binary decimal numbers that no one uses anymore, etc).
The biggest problem with COBOL in the modern world is that its designed in reverse. It treats CPU cycles and RAM like they're the most precious things on earth, so a program will make live changes as it goes along (to conserve RAM and minimize disk IO), and is designed to fail in a dirty state (in the middle of everything, so you can't re-run it) on the chance that it'll preserve cycles. It's a real maintenance headache.
There is a difference between a relatively low-maintenance thing like a touch screen, and a little air pump. Those pumps fail all the time.
There was a case about 5 years ago...I think it was Verizon then, fighting a Chicago(?) suburb that was trying to get fiber-to-the-door paid for through tax bonds. They called everyone in town and asked them how they felt about their tax money going to provide child pornography.
There was a more recent one in Louisiana where Cox and Bellsouth (now AT&T) called around and said that the town would start rationing TV if they owned the lines.
It's real shady crap. It's usually done politically. The biggest political one I can think of was the Republicans accusing John McCain of having an illegitimate black baby in a push poll in South Carolina in '04 (And yes, amusingly, they had to do an information campaign there in '08 to convince people that had been a lie).
To me its just another component to fail, and touchscreens have enough problems already. Is it cool enough to really rate the extra maintenance? Just get used to no buttons.
People like you are everything that's wrong with politics in this country.
You don't know a damn thing about him other than that he doesn't always vote with the groupthink.
That's crap. He might have lost the primary, but it's really unlikely he'd have lost the state. He hasn't had serious competition in decades. He won in '04 by double digits, and that's running against a democrat.
This move will basically sew up all the moderates, all the people who automatically vote for the same people, and all the democrats too. Penn would have to have some sort of massive conservative shift, which is pretty unlikely since they've been trending democrat lately.
Might want to check his actual political beliefs. He's more moderate than the democratic rep in my home district. Right of center sure, but it's more center than right.
It's not a big stretch.
Eh. Specter is an old school reagan-ish republican. He's pro-choice, pro-environment, and pro-immigration. He's crossed party lines repeatedly over the last few years: he was 1 of three senate republicans to vote for the big stimulus package.
The stimulus vote pissed off the republican leadership, with Steele going so far as to threaten not to contribute to his campaign fund. He's had republican challengers in the primaries for the last 2(?) primaries.
I think they did a good job of making him feel unwanted, and frankly, they can suck it up.
It's not a scare at all. It's only "more difficult" on Windows because Windows "admin" privileges are worthless...System permissions are higher.
This is one of the reasons why Windows viruses have historically been more annoying: they actually run at a level that's higher than the highest user level.
Saying "admin or root" permissions completely misses the point. Root is it. That's the highest level. Kill any process, control any device, install any code, read any file, everything. As many people have pointed out, once you have root you're done. There is no higher exploit than that.
Holy crap that sucks. When I went to school we had unlimited bandwidth on a T3 line. Of course, that was long enough ago that the bandwidth was primarily being absorbed by online gaming and actual work, rather than file sharing.
Even there, the admins were cool as hell, and they had in-house servers for some of the popular FPS games, so the speed was obscene.
Well, in my personal experience, it was one alcoholic female with a mere one abusive husband, dragging one severely fucked up kid around like a ping pong ball. Forgive me for speaking from experience, you politically correct twit.
That's where monopoly busting laws come in. That's what they were designed for...To keep capitalism from eating itself.
Anyway, most people can't switch providers right now, since they're locked in with local monopolies, or they don't want to buy new equipment to switch between DSL and Cable...Give them more than one option where they don't have to switch their hardware, and that number will go WAY up.
Personally I am a proud member of the 4%. I am the anti-customer: I switch every 3 months without fail. When the other company calls and offers me a sweet introductory deal I take it, and then 3 months later, I take the next one.
It's to the point where I leave all the hardware plugged in, and just switch "live" interfaces on my firewall...AT&T fucks with me, goodbye eth1, hello eth2. Cox fucks with me, goodbye eth2, hello eth1. What's wrong with that picture? I'm like a woman with two abusive husbands! I hate this shit!
I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea on principle, however TWC was clearly trying to restructure their internet market to protect their cable tv business. A dollar a gig is laughable.
Any sort of tiered pricing would have to accurately reflect cost and network usage...Being charged the same for peak and non-peak is ridiculous, as we've already established that all their costs are about meeting the peak.
Geeks being geeks, off peak usage is where the bulk of our traffic will already end up...Mom and pop will be in bed at 9:00 when the raids and the massive porn downloads begin.
Well, upload is a niche market (though I admit, I'd love to be able to get at least a megabit...Even half a megabit would be nice).
I think the whole lesson to be learned from TFA can be summed up with the following quote: "Why (is the 160mbit commection offered) so cheap? JCom faces more competition from other Internet providers than companies in the United States do."
We talk a good line about capitalism, but we don't walk the walk. Competition would change the whole game.
In the '80s my department used 16 or 17 bales a day (1 bale = 10 reams = 5000 pages). Now, even though the reports have continued to proliferate, we use 1.
Hell, in the '80s, a lot of systems didn't have a way to transfer digital files. I mean floppys? No way. Those files were created on the computer, but if you wanted to look at 'em, you had to print them out.
Paper use did indeed decrease. Plain text reports are compiled into pdfs and excel files...The reports just aren't printed anymore.
It's a good thing too. Paper costs have gone through the roof.
In Trek, the replicators removed the need for things like "food" and "shelter"...Those could be created at need for zero cost, so everyone had enough to eat, minimal luxury items, decent place to live, etc.
Right now, we still need to get those things. They're still a scarce resource. And there are people who make music and games and software who depend on their products producing some revenue...Which becomes impossible if everyone replicates that product without giving back to the creator.
Whatever. It looked okay, but it played like crap. I had rubberbanding from day one on a machine that had better than the "recommended" (as opposed to "minimum") stats. I certainly would have liked to play it, but I'm not going to tolerate that sort of lag in a game that I was playing in single player mode (and this is with the latest patches as of like 2 months ago).