Nader has actual opinions and convictions. You may not feel the same way on every issue, but at least you know he has the good of the country in mind.
Yes, I agree. I think Nader does have strong convictions and the good of the country in mind. However, I think he's also a thinly veiled socialist who would destroy my way of life, my freedom, and my prosperity. His ideas for the good of the country will have the same effect they have had everywhere else: death, poverty, and slavery. It's good to be principled. It's more important to be right. That's why I'm voting for Browne. He's both.
Regardless who gets elected, it'll still be legal to kill your baby, illegal to teach about God in the schools, all the while it'll be ok to teach the kids how to
screw & even hand out condoms to them.
Wrong. Go back and do your research. Harry Browne supports letting your state and local officials make all of those decisions independently from the federal government. In other words, you, not past supreme court justices or the president or congress, will be free to choose what you want to be legal and illegal in your state.
You'll still be used by Big Business everywhere as a profit margin
I'm not really sure what this to do with who is in office. If you feel one or more corporations is screwing you over, stop doing business with them.
What is property?..... Property is theft.
In many states, there are socialist and/or communist candidates for some offices. Do your research and vote for them. Failing that, Ralph Nader makes a pretty good communist in a pinch.
In sweden, I believe it is possible to vote blank. Choosing "e) none of the above" is a way of expressing dipleasure with the process.
You can do this in Nevada as well. Unfortunately it doesn't have the real effect it does in Sweden, but I would say that none of the above winning 50% of the vote would be a serious issue of interest to many. What I would really like is for none of the above winning to mean that the office goes unfilled. That is, if the voters didn't find any of the candidates acceptable, that none of them would get the job. The thing is, though, it's very likely that one of the 7 candidates on the ballot (in the case of the presidential election) is close to your views. So there's seldom a reason to vote none of the above if you've researched the candidates beforehand. This doesn't necessarily apply to local offices, though; often candidates run unopposed, and that's where none of the above really comes into play. Unfortunately most states don't have that option.
most people all
over the world have never even touched a computer, never mind owned one, because everyday needs take priority
What a concept. Things that actually matter being given priority over having the next mobile portable wireless e-commerce-enabled global pocket-sized buzzword-integrating dot-com-partner-program-patented iGadget. If not for the despotism, lack of natural resources, and CIA interventions, the third world nations would have passed us up long ago while we were too busy hyping the latest useless product to even take notice.
IBM claimed there was a need for about 10 computers in the world. I've come to realize that they were right. What IBM forgot to take into account is the number of products you can sell to people who don't need them. In the case of the hype-saturated computer industry, that number is huge and constitutes essentially 100% of the business.
As long as there are stupid people, the peecee industry will continue to roll. Ain't no end in sight from where I stand.
all scientists do not agree that we are causing global warming
I don't know how to break this to you, but, well, this is true. What Nader means when he says that all scientists agree that we cause global warming is that all government-paid scientists agree that we cause global warming. The reality is anything but clear. I'm sorry you've been deluded into believing that the voices of science are unanimous. They are not. It's fine to believe whatever you want about pollution, global warming/cooling, or anything else. But claiming that all others share your view is ludicrous.
the
United States should not be a leader in cleaning up the environment.
We shouldn't. The US should be a leader in cleaning up its own environment, and doing the best we possibly can not to cause damage to other nations. That does not mean we should spend trillions of Americans' dollars cleaning up Fuckistan just because the people there can't seem to be bothered to care for their own country. Be a leader, yes. But it should be leadership by example, not by force or intervention. And I strongly suspect that your (and Nader's) ideas as to exactly how to go about making and keeping our land, water, and air in good condition differ a great deal from mine (hint: if yours include legislation, or don't use the word "stewardship," we differ). But that's another matter.
I am voting Browne, despite all the loud-mouthed socialist bastard Nader fans both on/. and at my school.
There is no reason for this type of language. I don't think much of Nader, nor his platform, but we should keep the debate civil. Is Nader a socialist? I'd say so. Are his supporters? Quite possibly. Are they loud-mouthed? I should hope so! But there's just no reason to call them bastards. With all the bad policy they advocate, I'm sure you can find something better than individuals to attack.
but everyone on the ballot who has a chance of winning has already been bought by the Nikes and
others.
Everyone on the ballot has a chance of winning. If individuals don't vote for the candidate they actually like, then it's their own fault.
Publicly-funded campaigns are not the answer. Instead, I would suggest an end to all campaign contribution limits - with a single condition: all donations must be anonymous. The implementation of such a scheme is left as an exercise for the reader; there are a number of ways it might be done. But this would allow unlimited aboveboard support for your candidate(s) of choice, an end to the soft-money morass, protect free speech rights, and disallow the form of corruption we see today.
Browne isn't against accepting gobs of soft-money just like
everyone else on the hill.
Of course not. But he is against government funding for campaigns, and in a startlinglt anti-hypocritical move, has declined to accept such funds.
I believe that Nader believes that his ideas are best for the public interest. Unfortunately I don't myself believe that his ideas, if implemented, would improve my standard of living, or even hold it constant.
And business should be favored above all?
Of course not. How about a government that just does its Constitutional job and doesn't favor anyone?
Business which, by its very definition, places profit above people?
I'm extremely happy that business places profit above people. That way, any time a business gets out of control, I can rein it in very easily by denying it its profits - by refusing to do business with it. I fear do-gooders more than anyone else, be they in the government or in business, because they really believe that fucking me over is the right thing to do, and it should, indeed MUST, be done. For the good of the children.
Business has an extremely
important role in this society, but the pendulum of power has swung too far in its favor.
On this I agree 100%. Government and business have gotten way too cozy. If the government would stop toadying up to big business for campaign contributions, and individuals would reassert their right to choose business partners - and the responsibilities that come with that right - then perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess.
It's people like Nader who have made the world as safe for people as it is...
I can't agree with that. Issues of product safety are decided on economics. If the consumers believe that the added costs of safe products are worth the additional safety, then the safe products will sell. If they do not, and instead government intervention occurs, the safe products will not sell and a black market for unsafe, inexpensive products will arise. Even, however, if I did agree that Nader and his ilk make my life safer, I would note that the Constitution does not include any reference to a government responsibility to do so. Furthermore, I will not trade my liberty for safety. It's time for that classic quotation, "He who values security over liberty deserves neither security nor liberty."
I think I'm voting this way, if
more to encourage real progressive politics than anything else...
I'm pleased to see at least that you are sufficiently intelligent and independent to vote your conscience. I'm hopeful that you'll someday be convinced by my arguments and those of others to vote for a better candidate.
lack of the defence pact with Taiwan will mean that all of your motherboards will be produced in People Republic of China
I have no difficulty believing that Bush (and maybe Gore) would gladly send American men and women to die for the Taiwanese. I have great difficulty believing that the United States would survive a full-fledged open war with the PRC. The PRC has the world's largest air force, the largest number of potential soldiers, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and the political will to fight. Even in the Vietnam era, when the PRC was much weaker than it now is, the US feared a war with them. The parallels with Vietnam are strong, and political opposition would hinder any such war effort. After the first million Americans die, there would be irresistable pressure to sign away Taiwan and thank the Gods of war that we kept our own soil.
Defense of Taiwan sounds nice, good standing up against evil and all that, but I assure you that if such a pact is ever tested, it will fall apart. And the more quickly it does so, the fewer Americans will die. There is absolutely no way that any US politician will be able to fight the PRC unless the US itself is attacked without provocation. Since we know we aren't going to defend Taiwan against serious aggression, there's no reason we should promise to do so - all it does is antagonize the PRC and others. The US fucked up in this region in mid-century. We are partially responsible for the current situation. Let's not make it worse with more misdirected intervention. We should apologise for our earlier mistakes, recognise the ROC as in independent nation (not to make a statement, but simply because it is), and cancel all defense agreements, secret or open, with the ROC.
The PRC will have a democratic government when its citizens decide they want one. No sooner. If you feel strongly that the PRC is sufficiently evil to justify the deaths of Americans in war, then you are welcome to go to Taiwan and enlist. If you feel that economic pressure will somehow hurry the PRC toward a form of government you find superior, you are welcome to refuse to do business with Chinese companies. But to insist that other American citizens share your ideals at the expense of their own lives is folly. And I will gladly shoot you dead before I fight for a foreign nation on your behalf.
Of course it is. And neither of the individuals you can watch on network TV support the Constitution, public safety, integrity, or the freedom of the Internet or of anything else. Both of those candidates stand for continued increase in the size and scope the federal government, and the corresponding decrease in liberty and increase in taxation.
What to do? Well, I'm voting for a candidate who supports my right to buy whatever games I want, play then whenever I want, send or receive any form of communication via the Internet or any other medium without being intercepted by government agents, rent or buy any film I want, and do all of this without paying any federal income or sales taxes. Sound good? If so, then check out Harry Browne. He's on the ballot in all 50 states and - I'm not 100% sure, but - hold your breath - I think he's actually read the Constitution at some point in time!
If you don't want your Net to be taxed (Gore) or censored (Bush), vote for the candidate who actually supports your views, not just the lesser evil of the two drones you may have watched last night. Blatant plug? Sure. Offtopic? No damn way. If you vote for Gore, you're saying that you support higher taxes (and censorship - Lieberman, anyone?). If you vote for Bush, you're saying that you support censorship (and higher taxes - come on, do you really see this guy resisting money coming his way?). Well...do you?
I really don't see the importance of this. We've already seen, repeatedly, that web-based mail isn't even secure from 12-year-old script kiddies. There's nothing less secure than web-based mail - most of them use cleartext passwords, cleartext everything. Their backends are weakly protected and the frontends are buggy and unreliable. If you expect any kind of security - be it from sniffing or from backend intrusion - from web-based mail, you're a complete fucking idiot and should have your computers taken away.
You want security, use GPG-encrypted mail through SSL tunnels on both the SMTP and IMAP sides on a mail server you own on bandwidth you pay for. And make damn sure your machines are physically and electronically protected, are running Unix, are behind a firewall, and are well-maintained. If you need more security than that, I'd suggest something involving code names, lasers, high-frequency burst transmissions, and guys wearing trench coats milling around in a fog-bound park.
Needless to say, both parties aren't
going to support it!
The real enemy here is the "two-party system." First of all, in the US, political parties don't really even exist. Second, there are many, many more than merely two of them, and most are much friendlier to the interests of sanity than the Demoblicans and Republicrats. Stop buying into the idea that there are only two parties, or that party affiliation even matters. Bottom line: the two largest political parties are identical and have only one mission: to maintain and increase their own power. You can't count on either of their loyalty, either to your business or the interests of general justice and rationality. The instant some big special interest drops a million for some idiotic proposal, they'll both pull an about-face in the interests of money and power.
Value your freedom? Vote against the two major parties.
I'm inclined to agree. But what they've probably found is that everyone hates the U5/10 and that it's still more expensive than other low-end hardware. I strongly suspect that the QA procedures for the 5/10 have snuck into the real machine division and have cost Sun dearly. It would be advantageous for Sun to relegate the making of shitty machines to a completely separate division and focus on getting back on track with their real computers.
Of course, they won't really do that; there's too much money in the shitty machine market. In the end, Sun's entire product line will be shit and they'll be competing with Compaq instead of IBM and SGI. In the end, sparc will die, Sun will lose the mid-range and high-end markets, and McNealy will finally get his ass shitcanned. Cobalt? Money wasted...
This move is obviously part of the Sun overall strategy.
Of course. That strategy being the desperate effort to convince people that solaris is a viable OS. A strategy that stands about as much chance as Microsoft's to do the same for windows 2000. Namely, the only people who are going to believe it are people whose jobs are on the line - people who've already bought into the hype and will get canned when they finally admit that they made a mistake.
It makes sense for them to try and run everything of theirs from this platform.
It does and it doesn't. While it's cheaper and easier to support only one OS, that's most likely not what their customers want, and it almost certainly isn't what new customers would want.
Announcing this OS move is also obviously a publicity stunt designed to try and put forth their own Solaris as a superior OS to Linux.
Remember, like Oracle and Microsoft, Sun has a major superiority complex.
Yep. No surprises there. We know that Sun's top management thinks solaris is good. That's mainly because they're suits and know nothing about technology. Solaris sells, so it must be good. QED.
In porting Solaris to another platform they are improving the overall portability of the OS, making it a more attractive OS.
This argument is wrong for one of two reasons; pick one: (1) Cobalt has lately been using x86 cpus, not MIPS. Yes, that's dumb. But solaris already runs on x86, has for years. Yes, a few minor changes might be in order to support quirks, but the bulk of the work is done. (2) If portability is an important attraction, then you'd think they'd stay with Linux, which runs on more platforms than any other OS except NetBSD.
Look...Sun used to be a great company. Their hardware was IMO the best in the world until about 1998. SunOS was a fine BSD-based OS. But starting right about the time they started marketing solaris as a cure for world hunger, their entire product line went into the shitter. Java. Defective machines. An OS slower than glacial flow. The US-3 released 2 whole years behind the original schedule. The Star Division acquisition, millions paid for a company with no worthwhile product. The list goes on. Fact: Sun's management has gotten way too full of itself. McNealy wants to paint himself as a flamboyant, hip, rebellious CEO and join the highest ranks with Gates and Ellison. Well, he has. He joins them as an elite CEO whose company makes inferior, overpriced products and prefers acquisitions and strong-arm tactics to competition and customer satisfaction. Solaris is complete shit, Sun's hardware is years behind the competition's, QA is suffering, and Cobalt is headed for the same future that Star Division has come to.
what would an ideal
installer consist of, anyhow? Give examples
Very simple: a development platform (compiler, assembler, linker, headers, make), tar, gzip, and bash. If you must, include a script that chooses packages, decompresses them, builds, and installs. Keep it simple, keep it source. No mystery patches, no binaries. It should also offer to rebuild itself from either its own sources or other sources of your choosing. Think of the BSD ports system if that helps make it clearer.
I don't necessarily think that the foreign workers are any worse. I just think that, on average, they aren't any better. It is true that US education sucks, though, so you may well have a point. In any case, I think it should be left to management to decide who is qualified, rather than the government. Kill the welfare state and open the borders; the lazy will have no incentive to enter, and competent foreign professionals would not need special visas to work here for as long as their employers desire.
The shortage is a straw man. The reality is that there exists a glut of "IT" workers in this country, H1B visas or not. The real problems that employers are having are 1) Lack of good workers, and 2) Unreasonable expectations forced upon them by stockholders. Most programmer-type workers are grossly incompetent and many would not even be employed if not for the current hype in this particular industry and the ease of acquiring ostensibly adequate credentials. A bachelor's degree in computer science is a surefire ticket to 60 grand or better in the valley. Employers can't be picky about how that degree was obtained or whether the candidate is actually qualified. The stockholders are either thinking IPO or desperately trying to prop up post-IPO share prices. That hurries the release schedules and forces employers to take anyone they can get; the current state of the economy - qualified employees are difficult to find in any industry - and the shyster nature of programmers in general make picky managers into ex-managers.
I would find it difficult to believe that these foreign workers are any better at their jobs than American workers. Many if not most are incompetent, and language and cultural problems may make it more difficult for them to work with the rest of the team.
Whether these problems exist or are relevant, however, is not for the government to decide. It's for the clients of the giant software houses to decide. They can send a strong message that the products are crap by not buying them. Then the management can decide for themselves whether or not hiring more workers - foreign or not - will increase profits, and act accordingly.
Me, I see a market for about 25% as many tech workers as we have today. Employers could reduce their personnel problems by 1) using less technology; most jobs are better performed without it anyway, and there is strong evidence that computers don't increase productivity for most jobs; 2) using better tools; it's no surprise that supporting microsoft and other inferior products consumes the bulk of any tech worker's time; 3) using more selective hiring processes; 10 good people are infinitely better than 100 lousy ones; 4) in the case of software houses, scrapping obsolete products, streamlining their offerings, and rewriting or discontinuing unmaintainable code bases.
More workers? I don't think they're needed. Smarter management, yes. Better workers, yes. Higher quality education, yes. But, as Fred Brooks would love to remind us, throwing more workers - many poorly educated and inexperienced - at a problem only makes it worse.
I think you're mistaken. The goats only work in solving SCSI-related problems. For general swerver-related trouble you need a virgin. You may have to check your local preschool to find one though.
Amen to that! Anyone still using an 8-bit display needs to upgrade. Period. If you use 8-bit Indexed displays you are probably used to looking at everything dithered anyway, so what's the real difference if a web page doesn't look as good? I'd be much happier if designers would assume that either a) I have a 24/32 bit direct color display on a 1280x1024 screen or better, or b) I'm blind and/or using a text-only browser and want the ALT tags and such instead. Designing for an 8-bit indexed display is just foolish and subjects the rest of us to ugliness. Much like the "designed for 800x600" anachronisms that give us tiny text on the left side and a thrice-repeated sidebar background. The era of the 14-inch monitor running 640x480x8 is long gone; let's make the most of the improved technology!
That said, I don't believe most good web pages will use more than 3 or 4 colors anyway. The only situation I can really see this mattering for is things like photographs and artwork. Pages that are too complicated are ugly anyway.
However, things Win2K has that Linux really should have include having to press control alt delete to log on (it stops people putting fake
logon screens)
No, it doesn't. Under Linux C-A-del has no special meaning. While the kernel understands and traps the key sequence, there's no requirement that init do anything special with it. Most distros set it up to do orderly shutdown, but you could just as easily set it to run/bin/true instead. Not to mention the fact that X takes complete control of the keyboard and can trap out any key sequence you want, including that one. Plus, that only applies to console logins anyway - sure enough, the only type that a standard install of windoze supports, but not at all the only means that Unix supports. So while you could add this feature fairly easily, it isn't really very useful.
and the hibernate function.
Linux already supports power management (on peecees anyway) through APM and in 2.4 through ACPI. It works about as well as it does under the microsoft environments, which is to say it depends greatly on what specific hardware you have. Most power management schemes today don't seem to work very well, regardless of OS. And of course, Unix systems are meant to be left on 100% of the time. There just isn't a lot of use for power management in a non-laptop environment. I would suggest, though, that the Lookout! problem you note is most certainly an OS bug - applications should not be affected by power management. If the OS blows it, it should affect all processes, not just one.
Better not tell the guys doing KDE and Gnome that a single centralized place to do administration is a bad idea. Administrators looking after 30,000 desktops
can't work any other way. It's not a flawed architecture - it's the ONLY scalable model to move us forward from the each system is an island in the sea of
machines.
Firstly, I should point out that KDE and gnome are both giant leaps in the wrong direction, dead away from what has made Unix so durable. But that's not really the key issue here.
No one person actually supports 30k desktop systems. Only a small handful of the largest magacorporations even have that many computers. And they have huge teams, managing small chunks of those systems, usually in geographically diverse locations. So it's not like there's a giant warehouse somewhere filled bottom to top with desktop computers all run by one caffeine-filled sysadmin. Please. This job is challenging, but it's not that bad.
There's a difference between having a centralised method of maintaining systems and having a centralised place on each machine where every instance of every application wants to write each user's settings. If the gnome and/or kde people are doing that, then I'm genuinely shocked at their bad judgment and lack of common sense. Systems like kickstart, jumpstart, and roboinst make installation of systems easy. Systems like cron jobs, automated log filters, and global site-specific default configurations make managing systems scalable. But systems like the registry make scalability a pipe dream.
I don't buy this. If it were true they wouldn't bother with products like Terminal Server. In fact I am dead certain they recognize that sysadmins are very expensive and good ones are hard to find. Therefore, centralised administration facilities. You already have to have an OS on the clients, of some kind. While non-Microsoft ones are an option, most people go with a dos-based system. So they get their licensing fees there. If that's not enough, they could just require that every client have a windoze license.
Nope, it's not intentional. They really just don't understand how a multiuser system is supposed to work. Which is bizarre, given that there's 40 years worth of experience to examine. Sounds to me like a case of extreme pride and "not invented here" syndrome.
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Yes, I agree. I think Nader does have strong convictions and the good of the country in mind. However, I think he's also a thinly veiled socialist who would destroy my way of life, my freedom, and my prosperity. His ideas for the good of the country will have the same effect they have had everywhere else: death, poverty, and slavery. It's good to be principled. It's more important to be right. That's why I'm voting for Browne. He's both.
Wrong. Go back and do your research. Harry Browne supports letting your state and local officials make all of those decisions independently from the federal government. In other words, you, not past supreme court justices or the president or congress, will be free to choose what you want to be legal and illegal in your state.
You'll still be used by Big Business everywhere as a profit margin
I'm not really sure what this to do with who is in office. If you feel one or more corporations is screwing you over, stop doing business with them.
What is property? ..... Property is theft.
In many states, there are socialist and/or communist candidates for some offices. Do your research and vote for them. Failing that, Ralph Nader makes a pretty good communist in a pinch.
You can do this in Nevada as well. Unfortunately it doesn't have the real effect it does in Sweden, but I would say that none of the above winning 50% of the vote would be a serious issue of interest to many. What I would really like is for none of the above winning to mean that the office goes unfilled. That is, if the voters didn't find any of the candidates acceptable, that none of them would get the job. The thing is, though, it's very likely that one of the 7 candidates on the ballot (in the case of the presidential election) is close to your views. So there's seldom a reason to vote none of the above if you've researched the candidates beforehand. This doesn't necessarily apply to local offices, though; often candidates run unopposed, and that's where none of the above really comes into play. Unfortunately most states don't have that option.
You're assuming I own this computer...
What a concept. Things that actually matter being given priority over having the next mobile portable wireless e-commerce-enabled global pocket-sized buzzword-integrating dot-com-partner-program-patented iGadget. If not for the despotism, lack of natural resources, and CIA interventions, the third world nations would have passed us up long ago while we were too busy hyping the latest useless product to even take notice.
IBM claimed there was a need for about 10 computers in the world. I've come to realize that they were right. What IBM forgot to take into account is the number of products you can sell to people who don't need them. In the case of the hype-saturated computer industry, that number is huge and constitutes essentially 100% of the business.
As long as there are stupid people, the peecee industry will continue to roll. Ain't no end in sight from where I stand.
I don't know how to break this to you, but, well, this is true. What Nader means when he says that all scientists agree that we cause global warming is that all government-paid scientists agree that we cause global warming. The reality is anything but clear. I'm sorry you've been deluded into believing that the voices of science are unanimous. They are not. It's fine to believe whatever you want about pollution, global warming/cooling, or anything else. But claiming that all others share your view is ludicrous.
the United States should not be a leader in cleaning up the environment.
We shouldn't. The US should be a leader in cleaning up its own environment, and doing the best we possibly can not to cause damage to other nations. That does not mean we should spend trillions of Americans' dollars cleaning up Fuckistan just because the people there can't seem to be bothered to care for their own country. Be a leader, yes. But it should be leadership by example, not by force or intervention. And I strongly suspect that your (and Nader's) ideas as to exactly how to go about making and keeping our land, water, and air in good condition differ a great deal from mine (hint: if yours include legislation, or don't use the word "stewardship," we differ). But that's another matter.
There is no reason for this type of language. I don't think much of Nader, nor his platform, but we should keep the debate civil. Is Nader a socialist? I'd say so. Are his supporters? Quite possibly. Are they loud-mouthed? I should hope so! But there's just no reason to call them bastards. With all the bad policy they advocate, I'm sure you can find something better than individuals to attack.
Everyone on the ballot has a chance of winning. If individuals don't vote for the candidate they actually like, then it's their own fault.
Publicly-funded campaigns are not the answer. Instead, I would suggest an end to all campaign contribution limits - with a single condition: all donations must be anonymous. The implementation of such a scheme is left as an exercise for the reader; there are a number of ways it might be done. But this would allow unlimited aboveboard support for your candidate(s) of choice, an end to the soft-money morass, protect free speech rights, and disallow the form of corruption we see today.
Browne isn't against accepting gobs of soft-money just like everyone else on the hill.
Of course not. But he is against government funding for campaigns, and in a startlinglt anti-hypocritical move, has declined to accept such funds.
And business should be favored above all?
Of course not. How about a government that just does its Constitutional job and doesn't favor anyone?
Business which, by its very definition, places profit above people?
I'm extremely happy that business places profit above people. That way, any time a business gets out of control, I can rein it in very easily by denying it its profits - by refusing to do business with it. I fear do-gooders more than anyone else, be they in the government or in business, because they really believe that fucking me over is the right thing to do, and it should, indeed MUST, be done. For the good of the children.
Business has an extremely important role in this society, but the pendulum of power has swung too far in its favor.
On this I agree 100%. Government and business have gotten way too cozy. If the government would stop toadying up to big business for campaign contributions, and individuals would reassert their right to choose business partners - and the responsibilities that come with that right - then perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess.
It's people like Nader who have made the world as safe for people as it is...
I can't agree with that. Issues of product safety are decided on economics. If the consumers believe that the added costs of safe products are worth the additional safety, then the safe products will sell. If they do not, and instead government intervention occurs, the safe products will not sell and a black market for unsafe, inexpensive products will arise. Even, however, if I did agree that Nader and his ilk make my life safer, I would note that the Constitution does not include any reference to a government responsibility to do so. Furthermore, I will not trade my liberty for safety. It's time for that classic quotation, "He who values security over liberty deserves neither security nor liberty."
I think I'm voting this way, if more to encourage real progressive politics than anything else...
I'm pleased to see at least that you are sufficiently intelligent and independent to vote your conscience. I'm hopeful that you'll someday be convinced by my arguments and those of others to vote for a better candidate.
Well, quite frankly, we have failed to prove them wrong. If they spew hogwash, and we vote for them anyway, aren't we idiots?
When will an engineer / computer science guy get elected president, rather than these marketing / legal / pointy-haired types?
When we vote for them, and not a moment sooner.
If you want common sense, I suggest you check out Harry Browne and the Libertarian Party. And, of course, vote your conscience, not your fears.
I have no difficulty believing that Bush (and maybe Gore) would gladly send American men and women to die for the Taiwanese. I have great difficulty believing that the United States would survive a full-fledged open war with the PRC. The PRC has the world's largest air force, the largest number of potential soldiers, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and the political will to fight. Even in the Vietnam era, when the PRC was much weaker than it now is, the US feared a war with them. The parallels with Vietnam are strong, and political opposition would hinder any such war effort. After the first million Americans die, there would be irresistable pressure to sign away Taiwan and thank the Gods of war that we kept our own soil.
Defense of Taiwan sounds nice, good standing up against evil and all that, but I assure you that if such a pact is ever tested, it will fall apart. And the more quickly it does so, the fewer Americans will die. There is absolutely no way that any US politician will be able to fight the PRC unless the US itself is attacked without provocation. Since we know we aren't going to defend Taiwan against serious aggression, there's no reason we should promise to do so - all it does is antagonize the PRC and others. The US fucked up in this region in mid-century. We are partially responsible for the current situation. Let's not make it worse with more misdirected intervention. We should apologise for our earlier mistakes, recognise the ROC as in independent nation (not to make a statement, but simply because it is), and cancel all defense agreements, secret or open, with the ROC.
The PRC will have a democratic government when its citizens decide they want one. No sooner. If you feel strongly that the PRC is sufficiently evil to justify the deaths of Americans in war, then you are welcome to go to Taiwan and enlist. If you feel that economic pressure will somehow hurry the PRC toward a form of government you find superior, you are welcome to refuse to do business with Chinese companies. But to insist that other American citizens share your ideals at the expense of their own lives is folly. And I will gladly shoot you dead before I fight for a foreign nation on your behalf.
What to do? Well, I'm voting for a candidate who supports my right to buy whatever games I want, play then whenever I want, send or receive any form of communication via the Internet or any other medium without being intercepted by government agents, rent or buy any film I want, and do all of this without paying any federal income or sales taxes. Sound good? If so, then check out Harry Browne. He's on the ballot in all 50 states and - I'm not 100% sure, but - hold your breath - I think he's actually read the Constitution at some point in time!
If you don't want your Net to be taxed (Gore) or censored (Bush), vote for the candidate who actually supports your views, not just the lesser evil of the two drones you may have watched last night. Blatant plug? Sure. Offtopic? No damn way. If you vote for Gore, you're saying that you support higher taxes (and censorship - Lieberman, anyone?). If you vote for Bush, you're saying that you support censorship (and higher taxes - come on, do you really see this guy resisting money coming his way?). Well...do you?
You want security, use GPG-encrypted mail through SSL tunnels on both the SMTP and IMAP sides on a mail server you own on bandwidth you pay for. And make damn sure your machines are physically and electronically protected, are running Unix, are behind a firewall, and are well-maintained. If you need more security than that, I'd suggest something involving code names, lasers, high-frequency burst transmissions, and guys wearing trench coats milling around in a fog-bound park.
The real enemy here is the "two-party system." First of all, in the US, political parties don't really even exist. Second, there are many, many more than merely two of them, and most are much friendlier to the interests of sanity than the Demoblicans and Republicrats. Stop buying into the idea that there are only two parties, or that party affiliation even matters. Bottom line: the two largest political parties are identical and have only one mission: to maintain and increase their own power. You can't count on either of their loyalty, either to your business or the interests of general justice and rationality. The instant some big special interest drops a million for some idiotic proposal, they'll both pull an about-face in the interests of money and power.
Value your freedom? Vote against the two major parties.
Of course, they won't really do that; there's too much money in the shitty machine market. In the end, Sun's entire product line will be shit and they'll be competing with Compaq instead of IBM and SGI. In the end, sparc will die, Sun will lose the mid-range and high-end markets, and McNealy will finally get his ass shitcanned. Cobalt? Money wasted...
Of course. That strategy being the desperate effort to convince people that solaris is a viable OS. A strategy that stands about as much chance as Microsoft's to do the same for windows 2000. Namely, the only people who are going to believe it are people whose jobs are on the line - people who've already bought into the hype and will get canned when they finally admit that they made a mistake.
It makes sense for them to try and run everything of theirs from this platform.
It does and it doesn't. While it's cheaper and easier to support only one OS, that's most likely not what their customers want, and it almost certainly isn't what new customers would want.
Announcing this OS move is also obviously a publicity stunt designed to try and put forth their own Solaris as a superior OS to Linux. Remember, like Oracle and Microsoft, Sun has a major superiority complex.
Yep. No surprises there. We know that Sun's top management thinks solaris is good. That's mainly because they're suits and know nothing about technology. Solaris sells, so it must be good. QED.
In porting Solaris to another platform they are improving the overall portability of the OS, making it a more attractive OS.
This argument is wrong for one of two reasons; pick one: (1) Cobalt has lately been using x86 cpus, not MIPS. Yes, that's dumb. But solaris already runs on x86, has for years. Yes, a few minor changes might be in order to support quirks, but the bulk of the work is done. (2) If portability is an important attraction, then you'd think they'd stay with Linux, which runs on more platforms than any other OS except NetBSD.
Look...Sun used to be a great company. Their hardware was IMO the best in the world until about 1998. SunOS was a fine BSD-based OS. But starting right about the time they started marketing solaris as a cure for world hunger, their entire product line went into the shitter. Java. Defective machines. An OS slower than glacial flow. The US-3 released 2 whole years behind the original schedule. The Star Division acquisition, millions paid for a company with no worthwhile product. The list goes on. Fact: Sun's management has gotten way too full of itself. McNealy wants to paint himself as a flamboyant, hip, rebellious CEO and join the highest ranks with Gates and Ellison. Well, he has. He joins them as an elite CEO whose company makes inferior, overpriced products and prefers acquisitions and strong-arm tactics to competition and customer satisfaction. Solaris is complete shit, Sun's hardware is years behind the competition's, QA is suffering, and Cobalt is headed for the same future that Star Division has come to.
You heard it here first: Sun is fucked.
Very simple: a development platform (compiler, assembler, linker, headers, make), tar, gzip, and bash. If you must, include a script that chooses packages, decompresses them, builds, and installs. Keep it simple, keep it source. No mystery patches, no binaries. It should also offer to rebuild itself from either its own sources or other sources of your choosing. Think of the BSD ports system if that helps make it clearer.
I don't necessarily think that the foreign workers are any worse. I just think that, on average, they aren't any better. It is true that US education sucks, though, so you may well have a point. In any case, I think it should be left to management to decide who is qualified, rather than the government. Kill the welfare state and open the borders; the lazy will have no incentive to enter, and competent foreign professionals would not need special visas to work here for as long as their employers desire.
I would find it difficult to believe that these foreign workers are any better at their jobs than American workers. Many if not most are incompetent, and language and cultural problems may make it more difficult for them to work with the rest of the team.
Whether these problems exist or are relevant, however, is not for the government to decide. It's for the clients of the giant software houses to decide. They can send a strong message that the products are crap by not buying them. Then the management can decide for themselves whether or not hiring more workers - foreign or not - will increase profits, and act accordingly.
Me, I see a market for about 25% as many tech workers as we have today. Employers could reduce their personnel problems by 1) using less technology; most jobs are better performed without it anyway, and there is strong evidence that computers don't increase productivity for most jobs; 2) using better tools; it's no surprise that supporting microsoft and other inferior products consumes the bulk of any tech worker's time; 3) using more selective hiring processes; 10 good people are infinitely better than 100 lousy ones; 4) in the case of software houses, scrapping obsolete products, streamlining their offerings, and rewriting or discontinuing unmaintainable code bases.
More workers? I don't think they're needed. Smarter management, yes. Better workers, yes. Higher quality education, yes. But, as Fred Brooks would love to remind us, throwing more workers - many poorly educated and inexperienced - at a problem only makes it worse.
I think you're mistaken. The goats only work in solving SCSI-related problems. For general swerver-related trouble you need a virgin. You may have to check your local preschool to find one though.
That said, I don't believe most good web pages will use more than 3 or 4 colors anyway. The only situation I can really see this mattering for is things like photographs and artwork. Pages that are too complicated are ugly anyway.
I agree, NFS is great.
No, it doesn't. Under Linux C-A-del has no special meaning. While the kernel understands and traps the key sequence, there's no requirement that init do anything special with it. Most distros set it up to do orderly shutdown, but you could just as easily set it to run /bin/true instead. Not to mention the fact that X takes complete control of the keyboard and can trap out any key sequence you want, including that one. Plus, that only applies to console logins anyway - sure enough, the only type that a standard install of windoze supports, but not at all the only means that Unix supports. So while you could add this feature fairly easily, it isn't really very useful.
and the hibernate function.
Linux already supports power management (on peecees anyway) through APM and in 2.4 through ACPI. It works about as well as it does under the microsoft environments, which is to say it depends greatly on what specific hardware you have. Most power management schemes today don't seem to work very well, regardless of OS. And of course, Unix systems are meant to be left on 100% of the time. There just isn't a lot of use for power management in a non-laptop environment. I would suggest, though, that the Lookout! problem you note is most certainly an OS bug - applications should not be affected by power management. If the OS blows it, it should affect all processes, not just one.
Firstly, I should point out that KDE and gnome are both giant leaps in the wrong direction, dead away from what has made Unix so durable. But that's not really the key issue here.
No one person actually supports 30k desktop systems. Only a small handful of the largest magacorporations even have that many computers. And they have huge teams, managing small chunks of those systems, usually in geographically diverse locations. So it's not like there's a giant warehouse somewhere filled bottom to top with desktop computers all run by one caffeine-filled sysadmin. Please. This job is challenging, but it's not that bad.
There's a difference between having a centralised method of maintaining systems and having a centralised place on each machine where every instance of every application wants to write each user's settings. If the gnome and/or kde people are doing that, then I'm genuinely shocked at their bad judgment and lack of common sense. Systems like kickstart, jumpstart, and roboinst make installation of systems easy. Systems like cron jobs, automated log filters, and global site-specific default configurations make managing systems scalable. But systems like the registry make scalability a pipe dream.
Nope, it's not intentional. They really just don't understand how a multiuser system is supposed to work. Which is bizarre, given that there's 40 years worth of experience to examine. Sounds to me like a case of extreme pride and "not invented here" syndrome.