You seem to have confused performance with cpu utilization. Performance is the result of responsiveness of ALL the hardware. On a webserver that means how fast a page loads when I punch in the ip. It doesn't matter that the act requires almost no cpu. Memory management, network performance, disk throughput, etc all factor together to get 'performance'. A microkernel means an OVERALL decrease of 30%. There is also more to the world than fortune 500's (they are the least significant parties in my opinion) there are database servers, web servers, processing clusters, home systems, small business systems, file servers, print servers, etc.
None of those systems will be fast enough until there is no noticable delay between any request and its completion. Since we aren't there yet, systems couldn't really be anymore reliable than the current macrokernel systems that only go down due to hardware failures and planned maintainence, and microkernels offer only theoretical benefits in areas that aren't a problem now. I'll keep voting Macrokernel.
"An even better question is why the fuck are you browsing the web with an account that has permissions to install software?"
My experience has been that a privaledge escalation is the norm when browsing the web with IE. Although it is worth mentioning that Microsoft ships windows configured to create ONLY an administrative account by default and is by taking that action recommending ALL users to use that account. Microsoft is responsible for all the flaws in windows and microsoft software and is therefore responsible for all the spyware that is installed via a browser in the first place. They are also responsible for those aforementioned priv escalations since those are flaws as well. They are responsible for the consequences of running with admin privs since that is their recommended configuration for their software.
On linux I have browsed the web as root before. For the first 6 months using linux on my HOME system I did so. I didn't see any spyware or virus problems. Why? Because I wasn't using a Microsoft program to browse the web. Like I said, you can see almost this result on a windows box if you use firefox to browse the web just like you would on linux.
I'm just the opposite. I want my desktop machine to snap and obey me instantly. I couldn't care less about a 'slick' appearance. I am only interested in how it performs.
Andy says there is a 30% performance hit going with a microkernel over a macrokernel. The better question is, would you be willing to accept a 30% performance increase if it meant your mac was 'only' as reliable as your linux box?
If the answer is yes, you (like most of us) have found out that in practice the tradeoff isn't worthwhile for theoretical benefits.
The better question is how are we going to prevent Microsoft from further perpetuating the myth that the problems with spyware and viruses rest with the user instead of the flawed applications they ship that allow flaws to install themselves via the browser.
Test it, load up SP2 and browse a few porn sites with IE using the default settings.
"Tanenbaum's research is correct, in that a Microkernel architecture is more secure, easier to maintain, and just all around better."
No they have a serious problem that takes them from being 'all around better' to being 'a poor selection'. You yourself name it. And, even the greater reliability and security are only theoretical.
"What was the key problem with these kernels? Performance."
You got it. Previously in one of his public statements on this topic Tanenbaum said that the THIRTY PERCENT performance loss was an acceptable tradeoff. Of course this is not true! Now, when the greatest advocate of this architecture is willing to call it a 30% performance loss then I'll wager that to be a conservative estimate and most would NOT find a 30% performance loss in trade for theoretical benefits to resolve things that aren't really a problem now in practical macrokernel implementations (kernel maintainence is pretty streamlined, kernel vulnerabilities are incredibly low, and the linux kernel is damn reliable).
A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female. Personally I fail to see what difference it makes if there are equal numbers of males and females in any given field. Males and females are different creatures with different inclinations, different hormones, and different subcultures. It hardly matters if there are millions of female programmers or 5 and the same is true of gamers or any other hobby/career.
"guys learning that they have to act all macho and aggressive and be obsessive about Real Man stuff, like football or cars."
It isn't a good idea to mix those things. Football and cars are entirely about culture. Aggressive behavior is hormone and instinct at work. The interaction between males to establish dominance is part of our instinct. Humans are animals after all, and all the rationalization we cloak our actions in does not change that the real motives are just as base as those of any other animal. That includes chasing skirts and polygomy so if you find a male who is PC and dedicated he either has a hormone imbalance or has you fooled.;)
"So they interviewed among others one guy who was obviously smart enough to realize it, and admitted that he's happily married and loves his wife, but... he just had to get a mistress or the other men would think he's impotent or something."
What does loving your wife have to do with having a mistress? That almost implies some sort of relationship between love and sex. I love my wife with all my heart. The reason I don't sleep around isn't because I love my wife and wouldn't want to, I would love to have lots of anonymous sex. The reason I don't sleep around is because it would hurt my wife if she found out.
"- for that matter, guys learning that they must be obsessive about thin women with huge breasts. (A biological improbability. Within the normal parameter of a human, someone with extremely few body fat will also have less fat in that area, i.e., small breasts.)"
This is a myth. WOMEN idolize stick figure girls with little boy figures and breast implants. That is why you find those figures modeling clothes in WOMENS magazines. If you look at a mens magazine you will see women who are fit with curves and yes large breasts too. Unfortunately when you show a woman this distinction all they see are women with large breasts and they ignore the other aspects that make those females attractive. No, overweight is not attractive. That has nothing to do with culture, it has to do with instinct as well. Women who are neither overweight nor underweight and have large mammories are the best selection for child bearing. Please don't point out olden times in Europe where men chased after large women, the society that did so also chased after little boys.
"E.g., the Greeks and Romans liked _small_ breasts. Look at the greek statues, they're A cup or so. The Romans went one step further. They are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but what they really invented was a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to _hide_ them. They really liked their women as flat as an ironing board."
Again, those are both cultures in which rampant homosexuality and child molestation were practiced. This means they were cultures where hormone imbalance was the norm and spread and can't be compared with healthy behavior in balanced hetrosexual males. I'm not homophobic by any means and would leave each man to his own, but most homosexuals have a hormone imbalance that is the root of the behavior. The same is true of some lesbians.
If you look at images of ideal beauty throughout history they haven't changed a great deal. If you bring a group of men from various cultures and show them the same group of women most of the men will pick the same females as choice. The choice will be healthy females with curvey but firm bodies.
Most of the other arguments are those played again and again to make girls feel okay about the fact that they all can't be the ideal of beauty. Being overweight is not okay for either male or female and has killed more people than starvation. There is nothing wrong with being a less than perfect example of physical beauty and there is no reason to try to change the definition.
"Don't let your employeer determine your rights. If they are upset, tough shit. They are probably in a position to fix the problems which lead to your job search."
That works during a dotcom boom but right now techs are a dime a dozen. It doesn't matter if you have 20 years experience and all of it is with the exact toolset they want you to work with on nearly identical problems. It doesn't matter if you have all the right buzzwords on your resume. It doesn't matter if with that experience you have a perfect work ethic, take a salary, and work 120 hrs a week. There are 12 more people with the same credentials that have resumes on file already. That is IT right now. The employers have all the cards and they know it.
Why do you think your average IT pro with 6-7yrs experience is working for under 40k/year with crap benefits if any? That's why everybody is looking for another job in the first place!
ok so we have gone from employers searching for existing employees on job sites to see if they are looking elsewhere to employers happening to stumble upon an existing employees resume?
How is this redudant, it is directly to the point and nobody else said it first. I would have posted the same thing if it hadn't been here. You can always explain to employers when contacted why you did what you did.
After all, almost every employer will respect it if you don't want your current employer contacted and it is understood why you wouldn't want that.
"$99 for a laser printer is not "stretching it." You can find a $99 laser printer from Dell here. You can find similar deals elsewhere if you look around on the web."
I didn't say "a" laser printer, I said a "decent" laser printer. 17 years ago laser printers were considered heavy industrial grade machines and a laser printer from 17 years ago is not comparable to a cheap home edition printer (any printer you are likely to get from Dell), it must be compared with a similar heavy duty industrial grade machine. $500 is what a small volume laser will cost today when purchased from a mainstream retail outlet, suitable for a small law office or similar sized business. As for resolution and print speed, they have 'inflated' from where they were yesterday and must be adjusted accordingly. Ask an insurance company if they replace a 5 year old computer that was top of the line when purchased with a machine of the same specs. Of course not, they replace it with a top of the line computer.
"Indeed, I just looked up the prices, and $50/gig was a bit off (it's more like $85). However the $50/meg was not an inflation-adjusted figure so a fair comparison would be 75 Y2006 dollars per meg 17 years ago, versus 85 Y2006 dollars per gig now. That's nearly a factor of 1,000, before we take into account changes in RAM speed."
17 years ago 1 or 2mb ram was top of the line, today 4gig of ram is top of the line. Using your figures of $85/gig (it would be more for memory of reliable quality and speed from a respectable manufacturer)4 gig of ram would be $340 dollars. Purchasing a top of the line quantity of memory today then costs about 7 times what it did 17 years ago. Not to mention the fact that modern chips fail (although not as often as other components in a modern pc), failure was pretty rare in old chips.
"Technological advancements don't "occur all over the global in a variety of economies." They overwhelmingly occur in a few limited areas of the globe (Japan, U.S., Europe, Taiwan, & Hong Kong) where one kind of economy predominates. Those advances have not occured in (say) Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, Iran, or socialist India of the 1960's. Although some advances are now occuring in China, that's because they've abandoned their prior economic system and are adopting the successful one."
Actually yes, they invent things everywhere not just in large industrial nations. They invented things in feudal japan and they invent things in China, they even invent things in Tibet. This is similar to the flawed argument claiming that patents drive technology. Technology has progressed at a steady rate for the last 500 years, the progression accelerates but it does so at a steady rate that is most likely caused by increasing availability of information and the body of technology that one can build on increasing. Also, you may want to note that Europe does not have the same type of economy that the U.S. does.
"I hope you don't intend that remark seriously, because it's clearly false. Technology doesn't progress at a predictable rate, and the rate of progress is vastly different depending on market type. For example, technology has progressed much faster in Japan than in North Korea, and much faster in Silicon Valley than in Havana."
It certainly does. You are just looking at the wrong scale. On a global scale technology has proceeded at a predictable rate over long periods of time. The growth is exponential before of the aforementioned reasons but steady. The only thing that has halted the progression of technology is the dark age when the catholic church ruled the civilized world, and even then the far east continued to progress.
"Slave labor is not employed in chipmaking. Even the few fabs owned by Intel that operate in the 3rd world don't use slaves. I realize your use of the word "slave" was probably intended as an extreme exaggeration (the same way people say "Parking Nazis" in reference to garage employees), but still..."
While technically not slaves any use of labor that is less
"First off, Mac users... are self-selected because they tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer"
My experience is just the opposite. Macs are typically chosen for two reasons. Either the user needs an extremely simple computer that can be operated without knowing anything about technology. Or the user works with multimedia and believes the Mac is a more powerful platform. Neither class of user knows much about technology.
In my experience there are extremely few Mac users who know what is inside the box , how it works, and how you fix it if it breaks. There are few who understand OS internals and how data is written on the drive, organized in memory, how filesystems work, etc. To most Mac users knowing about technology means knowing how to browse the web, knowing how to use an advanced app like photoshop, knowing a few cmd shortcuts, and/or believing they 'get' the unquestioned superiority of the Mac.
Macs are nice, they have ups and downs like anything else, but MacOS hides the details of the system so effectively that becoming a power user on that platform has no relation to knowledge of the technology that powers it. The same is true of the controlled hardware used in a Mac.
The average pc user who listens to the computer guy mumbling while fixing his machine will understand more about technology than an 'advanced' mac user. Not through any failing of the Mac user, but because the technology he is using does not lend itself to a need to understand that technology.
Please, lets put this myth of tech literate mac users to bed unless you are referring to already informed Unix guys who moved to OSX AFTER learning about technology.
That would still keep the big parties in power. Instead of a vote for Nader, you would have to vote for Nader and Kerry resulting in a Kerry victory instead of only pushing up Kerrys numbers if Nader has already lost.
Don't mistake advances in technology with advances in a free market economy. That $1000 laser printer of yesterday lasted for 10 years. The $99 printer you purchase today (and that is really stretching it for a laser printer btw, you'll pay $79 for a bottom of the line hp inkjet, a decent laser is about $500 today) will last 2 years, tops. Those are the results of the market economy, technology advances in all economies and is completely independent of economic system.
The quality of manufacturing is a direct result of the market where people demand prices that are lower while stockholders demand earnings that are higher. Both parties demand that there be no point where the price and profit are right and stop moving. This results in cheap crap manufacturered by slave laborers in 3rd world countries and manufacturered out of the absolute cheapest materials and components that can be found and don't explode during the warranty period at too high a rate.
"17 yrs ago, the standard price for RAM was $50/meg and now it's $50/gig--a difference of 1000x"
Again your numbers are a bit skewed, the price for ram today is double that. This again is an issue of confusing advances in technology with advances in the free market economy. While it is true that slave labor is employeed in making chips, the process is almost 100% automated due to manufacturing process improvements that have nothing to do with the market economy.
Unless you suggest that the market should be given credit for advancements in technology, despite the fact that these occur all over the globe in a variety of economies and that technology progresses at a reasonably predictable rate regardless of market type.
"Furthermore, here's another figure to add to your collection. Nearly 50% of the taxes in the US are paid by the top 10% of the wage earners."
Since the top 10% make over 90% of the wealth, shouldn't they be paying 90% of the taxes? The taxes should be distributed by wealth, not numbers of people. There is nothing wrong with someone with a one billion/year income paying as much in taxes as 50,000 people making 20k/year. Or for one 100,000/year income invidual paying as much as 5 20k/year. That's right, the average joe income of 20k is sitting in Microsofts cash reserves 1.5 million times over.
You are right about social security, but social security is not what we are discussing. Social security is a retirement program. As for taxes, if you were just above the poverty line (defined by the no tax line) that would still put at an income well under 20k. At that level of income I highly doubt you paid more than 2000 after refund. At 30k as single white male with no dependants I paid far less than that after refund.
a) Has seen declining prices and increasing quality.
How about the food and electronics you pointed to? Food has not really gotten cheap, in fact food is fscking expensive. Electronics certainly aren't cheap either. Although they are less expensive than they were previously, they are also cheap crap compared to what was produced previously. Where there aren't quality problems from price slashing in production there are quality problems intentionally designed in to assure repeat business. A computer that is 50% the price a comparable machine cost last year is great, a computer that will last for 1/3 the length of time but is 50% less than the otherwise comparable machine cost last year is a price INCREASE.
Want a comparison? Compare an HP Laserjet 3 to an HP Laserjet 4100. Every laserjet 3 I know of was removed due to upgrades not failure. Every Laserjet 4100 I know of was removed because you had to replace the fusers every few months.
No it's not. Everyone who can afford healthcare would move where human life was not considered valuable. Thus dodging the need to contribute something back to society (god forbid the wealthy be slightly less wealthy on paper while enjoying the exact same standard of living).
This could work in a nation where there was a large distribution of wealth. But in the United States the top 1% have more wealth than everyone else combined. Almost all the wealth in the nation rests with the top 20%
We could go really crazy, in addition to specifying your order of preference; you also get anti-votes. With anti-votes you can assign negative preference to candidates. That way I can choose a minority candidate, not give preference to a candidate I don't want. And can still give a negative blast to the candidate I especially don't want.
Then when I walk away from the poll I don't have to worry about having the actions of a political candidate I didn't vote for on my conscience. Because you ARE personally responsible for the actions of the candidate you voted in even when they aren't as advertised. There is nothing wrong with a none of the above vote.
The amendment would have to make it through the two party congress and two party led states. So much for that idea. Is there anyway to bypass the current entrenched government and fix it? Oh yeah revolution. People lost their balls and don't do that anymore. It wouldn't be PC.
We don't have a free market but not for the reasons you say (or not only, you may have a point even if it a clear republican spin).
The reason we don't have a free market anymore is become a small number of corporations have grown to dominate each area of the market. This includes all segments of healthcare. These entities used to compete, now they collaborate in many areas and compete in others. They do this to maximize profits. This occurs in healthcare, artificially inflating prices at every step of the game. Overflated prices are charged for drugs because all of the drug companies have agreed it is in their best interests to inflate prices. Medical supplies and equipment fall in the same category. Healthcare is a vital resource; ALL the major supply companies feel that way and therefore they charge what they can extort (it is either pay them or die after all). Charges for education and medical school are again extraordinarily overflated because the students have a high earning potential. Again all the schools agree this should be the case and therefore don't compete in an area that could affect profits. Doctors and hospitals are then left with the burden of all these inflations and expenses, even a portion of the drug inflation. Do they eat them and let them reduce their 300k+ annual salaries? Of course not, they pass them directly to the consumer, so that no matter what you pay, they still get their 300k+! Doctors are not blameless in all this, like some would make out. A union composed of individuals in the top 10% income bracket because they aren't making enough money is a ridiculous concept. Except in OUR free market. In our free market, doctors uniting and price fixing because competition between them was starting to reduce prices is a pretty typical move. As I mentioned before, it happened with all the other industries, why not the docs too?
The only ones with an interest in reducing these expences are the insurance companies and the consumer. Insurance companies actually reduce the costs for the consumer because even doctors who move to cash schemes have to compete with their deductibles. Of course the insurance companies have their own union, in it they decide that they will univerally not accept pre-existing conditions or pay for experimental drugs and so forth. Insurance companies hardly have the consumers interests in mind either, the competition is merely a side effect of their existance.
Insurance (aside from self insurance), as a rule is a form of gambling. Paying an insurance company for anything is tossing your money away. You might get lucky and win a hand but you are playing the house and the odds are in their favor. That is why you have a point. You also have a point because these insurance companies are catering their terms to appeal to employers instead of to the people who are actually going to be getting the insurance.
Copyleft Nazi: "You should replace MS Office with our suite." MS Office User: "But it doesn't do all the things I want to do." Copyleft Nazi: "Well, you shouldn't be wanting to do them then!""
Refer back to 10,000 comments pointing out that you have already lost a conversation the first time you call someone a nazi or hitler.
Your right, I fundementally stand by my argument that MS Office nor any other suite should allow secretaries to change file associations on the file server.
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You seem to have confused performance with cpu utilization. Performance is the result of responsiveness of ALL the hardware. On a webserver that means how fast a page loads when I punch in the ip. It doesn't matter that the act requires almost no cpu. Memory management, network performance, disk throughput, etc all factor together to get 'performance'. A microkernel means an OVERALL decrease of 30%. There is also more to the world than fortune 500's (they are the least significant parties in my opinion) there are database servers, web servers, processing clusters, home systems, small business systems, file servers, print servers, etc.
None of those systems will be fast enough until there is no noticable delay between any request and its completion. Since we aren't there yet, systems couldn't really be anymore reliable than the current macrokernel systems that only go down due to hardware failures and planned maintainence, and microkernels offer only theoretical benefits in areas that aren't a problem now. I'll keep voting Macrokernel.
"An even better question is why the fuck are you browsing the web with an account that has permissions to install software?"
My experience has been that a privaledge escalation is the norm when browsing the web with IE. Although it is worth mentioning that Microsoft ships windows configured to create ONLY an administrative account by default and is by taking that action recommending ALL users to use that account. Microsoft is responsible for all the flaws in windows and microsoft software and is therefore responsible for all the spyware that is installed via a browser in the first place. They are also responsible for those aforementioned priv escalations since those are flaws as well. They are responsible for the consequences of running with admin privs since that is their recommended configuration for their software.
On linux I have browsed the web as root before. For the first 6 months using linux on my HOME system I did so. I didn't see any spyware or virus problems. Why? Because I wasn't using a Microsoft program to browse the web. Like I said, you can see almost this result on a windows box if you use firefox to browse the web just like you would on linux.
I'm just the opposite. I want my desktop machine to snap and obey me instantly. I couldn't care less about a 'slick' appearance. I am only interested in how it performs.
Andy says there is a 30% performance hit going with a microkernel over a macrokernel. The better question is, would you be willing to accept a 30% performance increase if it meant your mac was 'only' as reliable as your linux box?
If the answer is yes, you (like most of us) have found out that in practice the tradeoff isn't worthwhile for theoretical benefits.
The better question is how are we going to prevent Microsoft from further perpetuating the myth that the problems with spyware and viruses rest with the user instead of the flawed applications they ship that allow flaws to install themselves via the browser.
Test it, load up SP2 and browse a few porn sites with IE using the default settings.
"Tanenbaum's research is correct, in that a Microkernel architecture is more secure, easier to maintain, and just all around better."
No they have a serious problem that takes them from being 'all around better' to being 'a poor selection'. You yourself name it. And, even the greater reliability and security are only theoretical.
"What was the key problem with these kernels? Performance."
You got it. Previously in one of his public statements on this topic Tanenbaum said that the THIRTY PERCENT performance loss was an acceptable tradeoff. Of course this is not true! Now, when the greatest advocate of this architecture is willing to call it a 30% performance loss then I'll wager that to be a conservative estimate and most would NOT find a 30% performance loss in trade for theoretical benefits to resolve things that aren't really a problem now in practical macrokernel implementations (kernel maintainence is pretty streamlined, kernel vulnerabilities are incredibly low, and the linux kernel is damn reliable).
Roughly the same way that any mans wife would feel if she found out the same thing? It's a guy thing, not a me thing.
Not to mention how many 'crimes' are really just things that those preachers have labeled 'immoral'.
A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female. Personally I fail to see what difference it makes if there are equal numbers of males and females in any given field. Males and females are different creatures with different inclinations, different hormones, and different subcultures. It hardly matters if there are millions of female programmers or 5 and the same is true of gamers or any other hobby/career.
;)
"guys learning that they have to act all macho and aggressive and be obsessive about Real Man stuff, like football or cars."
It isn't a good idea to mix those things. Football and cars are entirely about culture. Aggressive behavior is hormone and instinct at work. The interaction between males to establish dominance is part of our instinct. Humans are animals after all, and all the rationalization we cloak our actions in does not change that the real motives are just as base as those of any other animal. That includes chasing skirts and polygomy so if you find a male who is PC and dedicated he either has a hormone imbalance or has you fooled.
"So they interviewed among others one guy who was obviously smart enough to realize it, and admitted that he's happily married and loves his wife, but... he just had to get a mistress or the other men would think he's impotent or something."
What does loving your wife have to do with having a mistress? That almost implies some sort of relationship between love and sex. I love my wife with all my heart. The reason I don't sleep around isn't because I love my wife and wouldn't want to, I would love to have lots of anonymous sex. The reason I don't sleep around is because it would hurt my wife if she found out.
"- for that matter, guys learning that they must be obsessive about thin women with huge breasts. (A biological improbability. Within the normal parameter of a human, someone with extremely few body fat will also have less fat in that area, i.e., small breasts.)"
This is a myth. WOMEN idolize stick figure girls with little boy figures and breast implants. That is why you find those figures modeling clothes in WOMENS magazines. If you look at a mens magazine you will see women who are fit with curves and yes large breasts too. Unfortunately when you show a woman this distinction all they see are women with large breasts and they ignore the other aspects that make those females attractive. No, overweight is not attractive. That has nothing to do with culture, it has to do with instinct as well. Women who are neither overweight nor underweight and have large mammories are the best selection for child bearing. Please don't point out olden times in Europe where men chased after large women, the society that did so also chased after little boys.
"E.g., the Greeks and Romans liked _small_ breasts. Look at the greek statues, they're A cup or so. The Romans went one step further. They are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but what they really invented was a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to _hide_ them. They really liked their women as flat as an ironing board."
Again, those are both cultures in which rampant homosexuality and child molestation were practiced. This means they were cultures where hormone imbalance was the norm and spread and can't be compared with healthy behavior in balanced hetrosexual males. I'm not homophobic by any means and would leave each man to his own, but most homosexuals have a hormone imbalance that is the root of the behavior. The same is true of some lesbians.
If you look at images of ideal beauty throughout history they haven't changed a great deal. If you bring a group of men from various cultures and show them the same group of women most of the men will pick the same females as choice. The choice will be healthy females with curvey but firm bodies.
Most of the other arguments are those played again and again to make girls feel okay about the fact that they all can't be the ideal of beauty. Being overweight is not okay for either male or female and has killed more people than starvation. There is nothing wrong with being a less than perfect example of physical beauty and there is no reason to try to change the definition.
"Don't let your employeer determine your rights. If they are upset, tough shit. They are probably in a position to fix the problems which lead to your job search."
That works during a dotcom boom but right now techs are a dime a dozen. It doesn't matter if you have 20 years experience and all of it is with the exact toolset they want you to work with on nearly identical problems. It doesn't matter if you have all the right buzzwords on your resume. It doesn't matter if with that experience you have a perfect work ethic, take a salary, and work 120 hrs a week. There are 12 more people with the same credentials that have resumes on file already. That is IT right now. The employers have all the cards and they know it.
Why do you think your average IT pro with 6-7yrs experience is working for under 40k/year with crap benefits if any? That's why everybody is looking for another job in the first place!
ok so we have gone from employers searching for existing employees on job sites to see if they are looking elsewhere to employers happening to stumble upon an existing employees resume?
How is this redudant, it is directly to the point and nobody else said it first. I would have posted the same thing if it hadn't been here. You can always explain to employers when contacted why you did what you did.
After all, almost every employer will respect it if you don't want your current employer contacted and it is understood why you wouldn't want that.
That is a reason not to use windows, not a reason to not use a pc ;)
"$99 for a laser printer is not "stretching it." You can find a $99 laser printer from Dell here. You can find similar deals elsewhere if you look around on the web."
I didn't say "a" laser printer, I said a "decent" laser printer. 17 years ago laser printers were considered heavy industrial grade machines and a laser printer from 17 years ago is not comparable to a cheap home edition printer (any printer you are likely to get from Dell), it must be compared with a similar heavy duty industrial grade machine. $500 is what a small volume laser will cost today when purchased from a mainstream retail outlet, suitable for a small law office or similar sized business. As for resolution and print speed, they have 'inflated' from where they were yesterday and must be adjusted accordingly. Ask an insurance company if they replace a 5 year old computer that was top of the line when purchased with a machine of the same specs. Of course not, they replace it with a top of the line computer.
"Indeed, I just looked up the prices, and $50/gig was a bit off (it's more like $85). However the $50/meg was not an inflation-adjusted figure so a fair comparison would be 75 Y2006 dollars per meg 17 years ago, versus 85 Y2006 dollars per gig now. That's nearly a factor of 1,000, before we take into account changes in RAM speed."
17 years ago 1 or 2mb ram was top of the line, today 4gig of ram is top of the line. Using your figures of $85/gig (it would be more for memory of reliable quality and speed from a respectable manufacturer)4 gig of ram would be $340 dollars. Purchasing a top of the line quantity of memory today then costs about 7 times what it did 17 years ago. Not to mention the fact that modern chips fail (although not as often as other components in a modern pc), failure was pretty rare in old chips.
"Technological advancements don't "occur all over the global in a variety of economies." They overwhelmingly occur in a few limited areas of the globe (Japan, U.S., Europe, Taiwan, & Hong Kong) where one kind of economy predominates. Those advances have not occured in (say) Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, Iran, or socialist India of the 1960's. Although some advances are now occuring in China, that's because they've abandoned their prior economic system and are adopting the successful one."
Actually yes, they invent things everywhere not just in large industrial nations. They invented things in feudal japan and they invent things in China, they even invent things in Tibet. This is similar to the flawed argument claiming that patents drive technology. Technology has progressed at a steady rate for the last 500 years, the progression accelerates but it does so at a steady rate that is most likely caused by increasing availability of information and the body of technology that one can build on increasing. Also, you may want to note that Europe does not have the same type of economy that the U.S. does.
"I hope you don't intend that remark seriously, because it's clearly false. Technology doesn't progress at a predictable rate, and the rate of progress is vastly different depending on market type. For example, technology has progressed much faster in Japan than in North Korea, and much faster in Silicon Valley than in Havana."
It certainly does. You are just looking at the wrong scale. On a global scale technology has proceeded at a predictable rate over long periods of time. The growth is exponential before of the aforementioned reasons but steady. The only thing that has halted the progression of technology is the dark age when the catholic church ruled the civilized world, and even then the far east continued to progress.
"Slave labor is not employed in chipmaking. Even the few fabs owned by Intel that operate in the 3rd world don't use slaves. I realize your use of the word "slave" was probably intended as an extreme exaggeration (the same way people say "Parking Nazis" in reference to garage employees), but still..."
While technically not slaves any use of labor that is less
"First off, Mac users... are self-selected because they tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer"
My experience is just the opposite. Macs are typically chosen for two reasons. Either the user needs an extremely simple computer that can be operated without knowing anything about technology. Or the user works with multimedia and believes the Mac is a more powerful platform. Neither class of user knows much about technology.
In my experience there are extremely few Mac users who know what is inside the box , how it works, and how you fix it if it breaks. There are few who understand OS internals and how data is written on the drive, organized in memory, how filesystems work, etc. To most Mac users knowing about technology means knowing how to browse the web, knowing how to use an advanced app like photoshop, knowing a few cmd shortcuts, and/or believing they 'get' the unquestioned superiority of the Mac.
Macs are nice, they have ups and downs like anything else, but MacOS hides the details of the system so effectively that becoming a power user on that platform has no relation to knowledge of the technology that powers it. The same is true of the controlled hardware used in a Mac.
The average pc user who listens to the computer guy mumbling while fixing his machine will understand more about technology than an 'advanced' mac user. Not through any failing of the Mac user, but because the technology he is using does not lend itself to a need to understand that technology.
Please, lets put this myth of tech literate mac users to bed unless you are referring to already informed Unix guys who moved to OSX AFTER learning about technology.
That would still keep the big parties in power. Instead of a vote for Nader, you would have to vote for Nader and Kerry resulting in a Kerry victory instead of only pushing up Kerrys numbers if Nader has already lost.
lol thankyou for buying the line of bs and propogranda spouted by the biggest players in one of the largest industries in the world.
Don't mistake advances in technology with advances in a free market economy. That $1000 laser printer of yesterday lasted for 10 years. The $99 printer you purchase today (and that is really stretching it for a laser printer btw, you'll pay $79 for a bottom of the line hp inkjet, a decent laser is about $500 today) will last 2 years, tops. Those are the results of the market economy, technology advances in all economies and is completely independent of economic system.
The quality of manufacturing is a direct result of the market where people demand prices that are lower while stockholders demand earnings that are higher. Both parties demand that there be no point where the price and profit are right and stop moving. This results in cheap crap manufacturered by slave laborers in 3rd world countries and manufacturered out of the absolute cheapest materials and components that can be found and don't explode during the warranty period at too high a rate.
"17 yrs ago, the standard price for RAM was $50/meg and now it's $50/gig--a difference of 1000x"
Again your numbers are a bit skewed, the price for ram today is double that. This again is an issue of confusing advances in technology with advances in the free market economy. While it is true that slave labor is employeed in making chips, the process is almost 100% automated due to manufacturing process improvements that have nothing to do with the market economy.
Unless you suggest that the market should be given credit for advancements in technology, despite the fact that these occur all over the globe in a variety of economies and that technology progresses at a reasonably predictable rate regardless of market type.
"Furthermore, here's another figure to add to your collection. Nearly 50% of the taxes in the US are paid by the top 10% of the wage earners."
Since the top 10% make over 90% of the wealth, shouldn't they be paying 90% of the taxes? The taxes should be distributed by wealth, not numbers of people. There is nothing wrong with someone with a one billion/year income paying as much in taxes as 50,000 people making 20k/year. Or for one 100,000/year income invidual paying as much as 5 20k/year. That's right, the average joe income of 20k is sitting in Microsofts cash reserves 1.5 million times over.
You are right about social security, but social security is not what we are discussing. Social security is a retirement program. As for taxes, if you were just above the poverty line (defined by the no tax line) that would still put at an income well under 20k. At that level of income I highly doubt you paid more than 2000 after refund. At 30k as single white male with no dependants I paid far less than that after refund.
a) Has seen declining prices and increasing quality.
How about the food and electronics you pointed to? Food has not really gotten cheap, in fact food is fscking expensive. Electronics certainly aren't cheap either. Although they are less expensive than they were previously, they are also cheap crap compared to what was produced previously. Where there aren't quality problems from price slashing in production there are quality problems intentionally designed in to assure repeat business. A computer that is 50% the price a comparable machine cost last year is great, a computer that will last for 1/3 the length of time but is 50% less than the otherwise comparable machine cost last year is a price INCREASE.
Want a comparison? Compare an HP Laserjet 3 to an HP Laserjet 4100. Every laserjet 3 I know of was removed due to upgrades not failure. Every Laserjet 4100 I know of was removed because you had to replace the fusers every few months.
No it's not. Everyone who can afford healthcare would move where human life was not considered valuable. Thus dodging the need to contribute something back to society (god forbid the wealthy be slightly less wealthy on paper while enjoying the exact same standard of living).
This could work in a nation where there was a large distribution of wealth. But in the United States the top 1% have more wealth than everyone else combined. Almost all the wealth in the nation rests with the top 20%
We could go really crazy, in addition to specifying your order of preference; you also get anti-votes. With anti-votes you can assign negative preference to candidates. That way I can choose a minority candidate, not give preference to a candidate I don't want. And can still give a negative blast to the candidate I especially don't want.
Then when I walk away from the poll I don't have to worry about having the actions of a political candidate I didn't vote for on my conscience. Because you ARE personally responsible for the actions of the candidate you voted in even when they aren't as advertised. There is nothing wrong with a none of the above vote.
The amendment would have to make it through the two party congress and two party led states. So much for that idea. Is there anyway to bypass the current entrenched government and fix it? Oh yeah revolution. People lost their balls and don't do that anymore. It wouldn't be PC.
We don't have a free market but not for the reasons you say (or not only, you may have a point even if it a clear republican spin).
The reason we don't have a free market anymore is become a small number of corporations have grown to dominate each area of the market. This includes all segments of healthcare. These entities used to compete, now they collaborate in many areas and compete in others. They do this to maximize profits. This occurs in healthcare, artificially inflating prices at every step of the game. Overflated prices are charged for drugs because all of the drug companies have agreed it is in their best interests to inflate prices. Medical supplies and equipment fall in the same category. Healthcare is a vital resource; ALL the major supply companies feel that way and therefore they charge what they can extort (it is either pay them or die after all). Charges for education and medical school are again extraordinarily overflated because the students have a high earning potential. Again all the schools agree this should be the case and therefore don't compete in an area that could affect profits. Doctors and hospitals are then left with the burden of all these inflations and expenses, even a portion of the drug inflation. Do they eat them and let them reduce their 300k+ annual salaries? Of course not, they pass them directly to the consumer, so that no matter what you pay, they still get their 300k+! Doctors are not blameless in all this, like some would make out. A union composed of individuals in the top 10% income bracket because they aren't making enough money is a ridiculous concept. Except in OUR free market. In our free market, doctors uniting and price fixing because competition between them was starting to reduce prices is a pretty typical move. As I mentioned before, it happened with all the other industries, why not the docs too?
The only ones with an interest in reducing these expences are the insurance companies and the consumer. Insurance companies actually reduce the costs for the consumer because even doctors who move to cash schemes have to compete with their deductibles. Of course the insurance companies have their own union, in it they decide that they will univerally not accept pre-existing conditions or pay for experimental drugs and so forth. Insurance companies hardly have the consumers interests in mind either, the competition is merely a side effect of their existance.
Insurance (aside from self insurance), as a rule is a form of gambling. Paying an insurance company for anything is tossing your money away. You might get lucky and win a hand but you are playing the house and the odds are in their favor. That is why you have a point. You also have a point because these insurance companies are catering their terms to appeal to employers instead of to the people who are actually going to be getting the insurance.
"Puuuuurfect logic.
Copyleft Nazi: "You should replace MS Office with our suite."
MS Office User: "But it doesn't do all the things I want to do."
Copyleft Nazi: "Well, you shouldn't be wanting to do them then!""
Refer back to 10,000 comments pointing out that you have already lost a conversation the first time you call someone a nazi or hitler.
Your right, I fundementally stand by my argument that MS Office nor any other suite should allow secretaries to change file associations on the file server.