The post I replied to indicated that there were some kind of problems with the current approach. I don't know what Linux uses now but I did read the link talking about having an SQL lookup and hardware detection deamons and all this complicated crap just to solve problems that appear to be solved in BSD.
So, either Linux and BSD are the same and the post I replied to is making up that there are hardware issues. Or they are different enough that Linux's method doesn't work. Pardon me for treating the poster I replied to as having a valid issue.
How does the hardware detection work under Open/NetBSD
Simply. The default kernal includes all the drivers. When a piece of hardware is installed, for non-hot-swapable hardware, it will automatically be recognized at the next boot and just work. For hot-swapable hardware, a deamon is running that gets kicked whenever new hardware is attached (e.g. a USB storage device) and runs a user supplied script for that device.
The reason this is even a problem in Linux is that the vendors prefer to use loadable device drivers (which provide no benefits to a production system) for everything.
Can it be ported to Linux eaisly? Can it eaisly talk to the user via GUI?
Should be able to port it easy enough, and yeah, just have your script call a Tk program or something for the GUI.
Ok so you agreed to the EULA (e.g. contract) that comes with XP, but then M$ changes the EULA on the updates?
Well, IANAL, what you can do depends on where you are. Many states have clauses in contract law that prevent this sort of thing (do consideration by both parties). In some states EULAs aren't even valid. Furthermore some of the clauses of the EULA arn't enforceable because Federal Law (copyright) trumps State (contract). If you really want to know, get a laywer and find out.
Unless they've changed it, there is a pop-up the first time you turn your computer on that display's the EULA and requires you to agree. If you don't they have to refund you for Windows. Some guy got the full price of Windows refunded to him after a small claims suit a few years back under the laws the GP and up are talking about. I think/. even linked it.
All of the hardware detection problems are solved simply in other existing systems (Open/NetBSD). Why does everyone want a new, complicated solution to a problem that already been solved by someone else?
Actually that's where the fuel cell idea came from. Electric cars worked great and solved lots of problems but the batteries were the major stumbling block. After some thought everyone realized that there was a type of battery that solved this problem, a fuel-cell (where the chemical reagents are passed through a catalytic material instead of manufactured in).
IMHO while all of this is great, overcomming the problems inherent in this type of electrical design is more expensive then the value society will get out. Investing in cleaner diesel fuel, and dieselectric engines for cars (they use them for trains alread) would have solved 90% of the problems with automobiles without a major shift.
If he had WMDs, why would he not use then against the US troops?
Just a guess: the same reason he didn't use them on the Israelis, whatever it was? Maybe he didn't want to justify the US invasion. The use of WMD would have been really stupid on his part and bought him nothing. If he had them, he did the smart thing and didn't use them.
My theory: he had production capability but was not stockpilling weapons because it would be too hard to hide them. His plan was probably to outlast the inspections and the sanctions and then restart production.
Your VX example is flawed. VX is inherently unstable, it can't be stockpilled. It must be mixed post-launch by special equipment in the rocket. The principle components are generally harmless materials. The UK found such equipment and such materials in close proximity. That not counting is just semantics.
Your claim that Saddam was nuts and messed up is also silly. It looks to me like he's getting the last laugh right about now. Either way on the WMD question he fooled every intellegence agency in the world, either on his capabilities and stockpiles or on their location. He also seems to have drawn the US into a very dangerous guerilla war that is slowy draining the US resolve and almost caused a premature pullout.
The real problem is not that we went to war, but how Bush justified it. There were plenty of perfectly valid, reasonable, well founded reasons for getting rid of the SoB, that's why so many people from both sides supported it. The other problem is that Bush and his team seemed to have made a few diplomatic miscalculations on how to proceed. There miscalcuations are almost comical as Henry Kissinger wrote and editorial in the run up to the war advising the president of certain dangers and how to prevent them. Everyone of the recomendations that Bush ignored has caused him problems. The real questiong going forward is why Bush failed to prevent problems he had been warned about by someone in his own party.
In every case the US was acting in the interests of it's citizens. How is that wrong? What your comment shows is that the rest of the world doesn't understand the geopolitical realities here.
Veto's on behalf of Israel -- for some strange reason the rest of the world seems to hate Jews. The Israeli's have a right to be there and have a right to have their country recognized. Doing so represented the national intersts of the United States. The situation in that region is as bad as it is primarily because of European greed and anti-semitism. Our European "allies" were slowing driving the region into the welcoming arms of the Soviets. The US prevented that from happening by picking a militarilly strong ally it could rely on.
ICC -- the US believes in due process protections for the accused as well as certain other things we consider essential to our rights and freedoms. We have no interest in forfeiting our Sovernty to an organization with no accountability or transparency who's controlling organization is dominated by anti-American sentiment. When Clinton signed it he stated publicly that he agreed to the principle but not this implementation and recommended that his successor not accept the treaty in it's current form. We want to negoticate and get our concerns addressed. The Europeans are unwilling to, that's not our fault. I also find it really funny that your cited Human Rights Watch, the organization that classifies many Palistinian terrorists as Freedom fighters and has had serveral members prosecuted for aiding and abeting terrorists.
Genocide Conspiricy theory -- The US didn't do anything about Cambodia because the country didn't have the political will to get Americans killed in the name of do-gooding with no national interest at stake. While we feel the pain of what the people over there have been through, it's not our job to go around and fix ever single problem on the planet. In fact, most of our European friends have told us we do it too much. As for acknowledgeing them once they were in power, we didn't have any better alternative. Ignoring them would have been stupid and prevented any political solution, and, as I stated earlier, a military solution just wasn't an option.
The UN was founded on the Wilsonian idea that all the evils in the world are caused by unrepresentative government, that everyone will just naturally get along if we all sit down and talk about our differences, and that the best way to make that happen is to promote democratic instituations around the world -- essentially a redo League of Nations but with US membership.
Wilson's ideas were dated when he stole them and promoted them as his own and they are certainly dated now.
The UN is a remnant of Wilsonian idealism, a rediculous idea (that was a restatement of even earlier, equally banal, ideas) when it was proposed and an irrelevent idea now.
Depends on what they do when they get here. If they start fixing shit they broke and help us organize a new government that we set up. Sure I might give them the benefit of the doubt, esspecially if nut jobs were blowing up children to get rid of them.
OTOH, if they installed a "civilain administrator" who instead of focusing on helping us set up a goverment and getting the country rebuilt actually tried to run a government himself and screwed around with IP laws and monetary policy, yeah, I'd probably find it hard to beleive that they were here for our benefit.
Point being: Bush caved to political pressure and instead of repeating the strategy we had in Afganistan, he tried something different and in retrospect stupid.
Some of those foreign fighters were already there. Our airplanes were providing air cover and "protecting" them from Sadam. They were trying to set up a radical Islamic nation then and, SURPRISE, they still want to now!
First, he's talking about a professional society, like Eta Kappa Nu (The Electrical Engineering Professional Honor Society), not about a Social Fraternity.
Secondly, please don't use "frat", many Fraternity men tend to find it offensive. It implies a group like you see in Animal House, which despite public opinion is the minority of Social Fraternities. You wouldn't shorten "Country" to "cunt" would you?
As for why you would want to join a fraternity, well it depends. At some major Engineering Schools over a third of the campus is in a Greek Social organization. Different organizations tend to offer different things. The basic idea of a fraternity is that a diverse group of guys gets together and pools their cash and their tallents to generally make college life easier and hopefully supplement your education so that you are more likely to succeed latter in life.
Going Greek was the best decision I ever made. I strongly encourage everyone who is in college to look into it. If none of the organizations on campus fit what you want, get some guys and start your own.
Your analogy is poor. The woman being raped presumably tried to take action to prevent the rape and did not. These employees can take action to prevent being abused - they can get another job.
The reason work quality is so poor in software and IT in general is because there's too damn many people who want to do it. They are willing to work for cheep and tollerate bad conditions to get the job. In turn the glut of willing people encouraged a glut of bad managers which only makes situations worse. If putting a hot game that sold well was more difficult (because developers were in short supply and could charge a high price, because good project managers were scarce, etc.) the situation would be better. The best sollution is for everyone unhappy with the working conditions to leave the industry and get a better job. That forces the employer to either hire people who'll be happy (everyone wins) or improve the situation (short term the employer takes a hit, long term everyone wins)
Short term that's the idea, but long term unions calcify the relations between the employer and labor. This calcification prevents major improvments, limits worker flexibility, and tends to reduce job satisfaction. End the end this hurts the employer and then the employee. See the UAW and the Teamsters for examples. These problems are the reason the modern trend is toward professional societies.
> So when you do get freetime, you can actually spend it relaxing.
You are neglecting that I choose to work that long because I enjoy it. I found the work relaxing and fulfilling. That's the point of my post above. If people arn't finding these things in their job (no matter how short the hours) it's not worth working there. I'd much rather work for 60-80 hours and enjoy it then work for 40hrs and be missrable.
> Life is too short for one to spend that much time at work
I'd say that life it too short to spend it on things I don't find enjoyable and rewarding.
> There is never that amount of work to be done on a regular basis
Sure there is. Either we can hire someone else to do the work part time (because it's not enough to make another shift, and pay full benefits; this means we'll get part time quality out of it too) or I can work a little longer.
Thing is, the US is backwards in securing workers' rights
I take the opposite stand that trying to secure rights via the government, unions, and other organizations results in a net average that's worse off. There is only so much money in the ecomony for labor. Artificially restricting what can be bought with that money only serves to reduce the number of jobs available and raise the cost of goods. Furthermore by removing many competative elements from the job market you create a situation, prominant in most of Europe and parts of America, where there are hordes of bad managers who can't effectively organize labor to save their souls. These bad managers make the work enviroment worse overall not better. There have been studies that examined this trend. In the US for example, the amount of state control over the job market correlelates very well with unemployment levels and job satisfaction levels.
I've had jobs that have required 70-80 hours of work in a week regularly (because there was that much work to be done). Jobs like these are hard and if you arn't cut out for them you get burned out and tired, but they pay well, and provide chanllenge and exitement so on the all I enjoyed them.
> 98 degree heat (inside) because they don't turn on the air conditioning on the weekends
Surely the people doing this realize that the laws of thermodynamics coupled with the inefficiencies of modern cooling systems means that in most cases you'll loose money by doing this.
I think it would be a little spoiled to expect 40hr work weeks for every job. Many "common laborers" work 50-60 hrs a week regularly (with a six day a week work schedule). High level managers and owners of a business often put in 100 or more hours in a week. Some people don't even get "normal" hours and have to work night shifts, or as in the case of truckers, salesmen, pilots, and other traveling positions, the work for long streches with brief breaks in between to catch up with their family.
Ideas like 40hr work weeks, and work-life "balance" are not as common as you might think and tend to exist only in big urban areas with large union presences. In most parts of the world the idea goes: I have my job, I'll show do my work until my job is done and then I'll go home.
All of that said, every one of the jobs I listed above makes it clear from the beginning what you are in for and they pay or provide benefits commensurate with the time and effort put in. The owners and managers of those businesses also generally treat their employees with dignity and respect, none of which do I feel EA is doing.
In my exerience IT and software companies tend to be poorly managed to properly take advantage of the tallent and education of people they have hired. Often the educational/experience requirements for a job are far too high for what needs doing. Other times the policies, procedures, and attitudes at a company prevent employees from accomplishing anything meaningful. A valid comparison would be hiring an engineer to do a technician's job. This has resulted in low pay, and poor work conditions. With proper management these games could get designed and coded on time without massive overtime.
Re:You want Slackware.
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
I'm going to second that. Slack is my all around favorite distro (I use Debian on occasion for certain things). IMNSHO, it's also the best documented of the distros.
However, lately I've been using OpenBSD more and more (I started using it for a secure server, then a packet shaping router, etc). It's a little more daunting to install then Slackware but it's even better documented.
Pick one or the other, they'll both help you learn the ropes of unix far better then any book.
You'd be surprised how easy it is even for very experienced programmers to accidentally code in an off by one error. While I don't have any research data to back me up, I'd say that in sheer number of errors such loop mistakes are the majority. However in terms of time and money spend on finding and fixing it (which is what I'd say is the real question), I wouldn't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
So, either Linux and BSD are the same and the post I replied to is making up that there are hardware issues. Or they are different enough that Linux's method doesn't work. Pardon me for treating the poster I replied to as having a valid issue.
Wow, that's very insightful. Thanks.
Simply. The default kernal includes all the drivers. When a piece of hardware is installed, for non-hot-swapable hardware, it will automatically be recognized at the next boot and just work. For hot-swapable hardware, a deamon is running that gets kicked whenever new hardware is attached (e.g. a USB storage device) and runs a user supplied script for that device.
The reason this is even a problem in Linux is that the vendors prefer to use loadable device drivers (which provide no benefits to a production system) for everything. Can it be ported to Linux eaisly? Can it eaisly talk to the user via GUI?
Should be able to port it easy enough, and yeah, just have your script call a Tk program or something for the GUI.
Well, IANAL, what you can do depends on where you are. Many states have clauses in contract law that prevent this sort of thing (do consideration by both parties). In some states EULAs aren't even valid. Furthermore some of the clauses of the EULA arn't enforceable because Federal Law (copyright) trumps State (contract). If you really want to know, get a laywer and find out.
Unless they've changed it, there is a pop-up the first time you turn your computer on that display's the EULA and requires you to agree. If you don't they have to refund you for Windows. Some guy got the full price of Windows refunded to him after a small claims suit a few years back under the laws the GP and up are talking about. I think /. even linked it.
All of the hardware detection problems are solved simply in other existing systems (Open/NetBSD). Why does everyone want a new, complicated solution to a problem that already been solved by someone else?
IMHO while all of this is great, overcomming the problems inherent in this type of electrical design is more expensive then the value society will get out. Investing in cleaner diesel fuel, and dieselectric engines for cars (they use them for trains alread) would have solved 90% of the problems with automobiles without a major shift.
It's not really needed though. The BSDs all support systrace.
Just a guess: the same reason he didn't use them on the Israelis, whatever it was? Maybe he didn't want to justify the US invasion. The use of WMD would have been really stupid on his part and bought him nothing. If he had them, he did the smart thing and didn't use them.
My theory: he had production capability but was not stockpilling weapons because it would be too hard to hide them. His plan was probably to outlast the inspections and the sanctions and then restart production.
Your VX example is flawed. VX is inherently unstable, it can't be stockpilled. It must be mixed post-launch by special equipment in the rocket. The principle components are generally harmless materials. The UK found such equipment and such materials in close proximity. That not counting is just semantics.
Your claim that Saddam was nuts and messed up is also silly. It looks to me like he's getting the last laugh right about now. Either way on the WMD question he fooled every intellegence agency in the world, either on his capabilities and stockpiles or on their location. He also seems to have drawn the US into a very dangerous guerilla war that is slowy draining the US resolve and almost caused a premature pullout.
The real problem is not that we went to war, but how Bush justified it. There were plenty of perfectly valid, reasonable, well founded reasons for getting rid of the SoB, that's why so many people from both sides supported it. The other problem is that Bush and his team seemed to have made a few diplomatic miscalculations on how to proceed. There miscalcuations are almost comical as Henry Kissinger wrote and editorial in the run up to the war advising the president of certain dangers and how to prevent them. Everyone of the recomendations that Bush ignored has caused him problems. The real questiong going forward is why Bush failed to prevent problems he had been warned about by someone in his own party.
Veto's on behalf of Israel -- for some strange reason the rest of the world seems to hate Jews. The Israeli's have a right to be there and have a right to have their country recognized. Doing so represented the national intersts of the United States. The situation in that region is as bad as it is primarily because of European greed and anti-semitism. Our European "allies" were slowing driving the region into the welcoming arms of the Soviets. The US prevented that from happening by picking a militarilly strong ally it could rely on.
ICC -- the US believes in due process protections for the accused as well as certain other things we consider essential to our rights and freedoms. We have no interest in forfeiting our Sovernty to an organization with no accountability or transparency who's controlling organization is dominated by anti-American sentiment. When Clinton signed it he stated publicly that he agreed to the principle but not this implementation and recommended that his successor not accept the treaty in it's current form. We want to negoticate and get our concerns addressed. The Europeans are unwilling to, that's not our fault. I also find it really funny that your cited Human Rights Watch, the organization that classifies many Palistinian terrorists as Freedom fighters and has had serveral members prosecuted for aiding and abeting terrorists.
Genocide Conspiricy theory -- The US didn't do anything about Cambodia because the country didn't have the political will to get Americans killed in the name of do-gooding with no national interest at stake. While we feel the pain of what the people over there have been through, it's not our job to go around and fix ever single problem on the planet. In fact, most of our European friends have told us we do it too much. As for acknowledgeing them once they were in power, we didn't have any better alternative. Ignoring them would have been stupid and prevented any political solution, and, as I stated earlier, a military solution just wasn't an option.
Wilson's ideas were dated when he stole them and promoted them as his own and they are certainly dated now.
The UN is a remnant of Wilsonian idealism, a rediculous idea (that was a restatement of even earlier, equally banal, ideas) when it was proposed and an irrelevent idea now.
OTOH, if they installed a "civilain administrator" who instead of focusing on helping us set up a goverment and getting the country rebuilt actually tried to run a government himself and screwed around with IP laws and monetary policy, yeah, I'd probably find it hard to beleive that they were here for our benefit.
Point being: Bush caved to political pressure and instead of repeating the strategy we had in Afganistan, he tried something different and in retrospect stupid.
Some of those foreign fighters were already there. Our airplanes were providing air cover and "protecting" them from Sadam. They were trying to set up a radical Islamic nation then and, SURPRISE, they still want to now!
Ditto
First, he's talking about a professional society, like Eta Kappa Nu (The Electrical Engineering Professional Honor Society), not about a Social Fraternity.
Secondly, please don't use "frat", many Fraternity men tend to find it offensive. It implies a group like you see in Animal House, which despite public opinion is the minority of Social Fraternities. You wouldn't shorten "Country" to "cunt" would you?
As for why you would want to join a fraternity, well it depends. At some major Engineering Schools over a third of the campus is in a Greek Social organization. Different organizations tend to offer different things. The basic idea of a fraternity is that a diverse group of guys gets together and pools their cash and their tallents to generally make college life easier and hopefully supplement your education so that you are more likely to succeed latter in life.
Going Greek was the best decision I ever made. I strongly encourage everyone who is in college to look into it. If none of the organizations on campus fit what you want, get some guys and start your own.
That's why you quit. Life is too short to put up with other people's stupid shit. Just don't do it.
The reason work quality is so poor in software and IT in general is because there's too damn many people who want to do it. They are willing to work for cheep and tollerate bad conditions to get the job. In turn the glut of willing people encouraged a glut of bad managers which only makes situations worse. If putting a hot game that sold well was more difficult (because developers were in short supply and could charge a high price, because good project managers were scarce, etc.) the situation would be better. The best sollution is for everyone unhappy with the working conditions to leave the industry and get a better job. That forces the employer to either hire people who'll be happy (everyone wins) or improve the situation (short term the employer takes a hit, long term everyone wins)
Short term that's the idea, but long term unions calcify the relations between the employer and labor. This calcification prevents major improvments, limits worker flexibility, and tends to reduce job satisfaction. End the end this hurts the employer and then the employee. See the UAW and the Teamsters for examples. These problems are the reason the modern trend is toward professional societies.
You are neglecting that I choose to work that long because I enjoy it. I found the work relaxing and fulfilling. That's the point of my post above. If people arn't finding these things in their job (no matter how short the hours) it's not worth working there. I'd much rather work for 60-80 hours and enjoy it then work for 40hrs and be missrable.
> Life is too short for one to spend that much time at work
I'd say that life it too short to spend it on things I don't find enjoyable and rewarding.
> There is never that amount of work to be done on a regular basis
Sure there is. Either we can hire someone else to do the work part time (because it's not enough to make another shift, and pay full benefits; this means we'll get part time quality out of it too) or I can work a little longer.
I take the opposite stand that trying to secure rights via the government, unions, and other organizations results in a net average that's worse off. There is only so much money in the ecomony for labor. Artificially restricting what can be bought with that money only serves to reduce the number of jobs available and raise the cost of goods. Furthermore by removing many competative elements from the job market you create a situation, prominant in most of Europe and parts of America, where there are hordes of bad managers who can't effectively organize labor to save their souls. These bad managers make the work enviroment worse overall not better. There have been studies that examined this trend. In the US for example, the amount of state control over the job market correlelates very well with unemployment levels and job satisfaction levels.
I've had jobs that have required 70-80 hours of work in a week regularly (because there was that much work to be done). Jobs like these are hard and if you arn't cut out for them you get burned out and tired, but they pay well, and provide chanllenge and exitement so on the all I enjoyed them.
Surely the people doing this realize that the laws of thermodynamics coupled with the inefficiencies of modern cooling systems means that in most cases you'll loose money by doing this.
Ideas like 40hr work weeks, and work-life "balance" are not as common as you might think and tend to exist only in big urban areas with large union presences. In most parts of the world the idea goes: I have my job, I'll show do my work until my job is done and then I'll go home.
All of that said, every one of the jobs I listed above makes it clear from the beginning what you are in for and they pay or provide benefits commensurate with the time and effort put in. The owners and managers of those businesses also generally treat their employees with dignity and respect, none of which do I feel EA is doing.
In my exerience IT and software companies tend to be poorly managed to properly take advantage of the tallent and education of people they have hired. Often the educational/experience requirements for a job are far too high for what needs doing. Other times the policies, procedures, and attitudes at a company prevent employees from accomplishing anything meaningful. A valid comparison would be hiring an engineer to do a technician's job. This has resulted in low pay, and poor work conditions. With proper management these games could get designed and coded on time without massive overtime.
However, lately I've been using OpenBSD more and more (I started using it for a secure server, then a packet shaping router, etc). It's a little more daunting to install then Slackware but it's even better documented.
Pick one or the other, they'll both help you learn the ropes of unix far better then any book.
You'd be surprised how easy it is even for very experienced programmers to accidentally code in an off by one error. While I don't have any research data to back me up, I'd say that in sheer number of errors such loop mistakes are the majority. However in terms of time and money spend on finding and fixing it (which is what I'd say is the real question), I wouldn't think so.