This has actually happened. The US overthrew the democratically elected gov't in Guatemala in the 40's to save the United Fruit Company. They installed a puppet dictator. So much for the crap about spreading democracy...
I was a GM dealership automotive technician for many years and I worked my way through college in an independent garage for 4 years. I can tell you that the problems with cars manufacutered by the Big Three had nothing to do with technology and everything due to the fact that the bean counters seemed to be in control of the engineering department. The Japanese imports had to conform to the same emissions standards as their American counterparts yet suffered none of the reliability problems. For instance, the materials used in the American cars were absolutely inferior. After about 2-3 years the old barrel-type coolant sensor connector on a GM car would crumble in your hands. My wife's 1988 Celica's coolant sensor connector, and for that matter the vacuum hoses, radiator hoses, and many other platic parts that are subject to strain and engine heat are still original equipment and in seemingly good condition after 188,000 Mi. The American counterparts would all tend to be brittle and/or broken at this age and mileage. Another example is gasket design and material. The Japanese had gone to rubber/neoprene type gaskets for things like valve/cam covers where the US cars were still using cheap cork or RTV compound. For that matter the Japanese cam covers (of course the Japs had OHC engines that were also much more advanced than the rewarmed 1950's and 1960's OHV relics that GM was using) themselves were molded aluminum as opposed to the cheap American stamped steel valve covers that would bend as you tried to pry loose the leaking RTV (Actually, I got really good at sealing these things, but it is an art). These problems also were present in the fuel systems, the electronics, the ignition systems, etc. So really this has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with underengineering and putting profit above product quality.
How about MS hired Ralph Reed (former head of the Christian Coalition) as a "lobbyist" when Bush was running for president. Ralph Reed also just so happened to be one of Bush's campaign managers. One week after MS hired Reed, Bush began pontificating how awful it was that this great company was being harassed by the Justice Dept. This is yet more policy bought and paid for by big business.
"...only large private corporations can produce innovation..."
Just in case you are not being sarcastic (and there are quite a few people who believe this sort of thing), how do you figure? You don't think innovation happens at places like NIST, CERN, LANL, NASA, etc. as well as in research universities? Check out all the Nobel Laureates here:
http://www.nobel.se
I think you'll notice most of them are from universities and gov't labs. And I just got back from a trip from Germany/Switzerland/Austria. I can positively tell you the public transit in the US by and large blows donkey balls compared to that of any of those 3 countries.
I've been using 64bit RedHat on Alpha for many years now. It is rock solid stable. And the Compaq Tru64 compilers are excellent and make the platform even more attractive. I don't know what you did wrong, but its been working for me and doing severe service as a number cruncher for years with no trouble. Bollocks indeed.
Not at all. You can install directly from FTP, NFS, HTTP, a hard drive, etc. and it is very simple. And why would anyone want to compile the kernel on a 486? Just compile it somewhere else for the desired architecture or just get a binary kernel.
I agree with you right now, but Linux client machines may become more attractive as MS starts putting the WPA in all their software and also each iteration of their OS/Office suite seems to instantly obscelete the lowest echelon of usable hardware. For instance, I had a P233 that ran WinNT just fine. 2000 made it run like a dog for some reason. Couple this with the current economic conditions and perhaps more people will look into solutions such as this if they have to pay for XP licences + new hardware to run it. Of course, I still think most would junk the level of hardware that this guy is talking about.
"I do not take the path of least resistance, but if my son want to find out why a curve balls curves I don't won't pop-ups depicted adult themes. what do you think the results will be for the search criteria "curves ball" will be?"
I just tried sticking "curve balls" and "curve ball" in google and there was zero porn at least on the first page. Some search engines do have a family filter anyway. I think you typically really have to go looking for porn to find it.
"I think it's safe to say that most people on Slashdot are not only competent enough to apply patches, but interested enough in computers (for work or a hobby or whatever) to actually do it".
And also lazy enough to write scripts to push all the patches automatically to all the servers so we can have time to sit around and get paid to read slashdot.
"Fallout from one missle would be much better than fallout from 100 missles for the people in areas not hit."
This makes me wonder about what precisely happens to the missle that has been intercepted. One wonders what happens to the fissible materials in the bomb. Plutonium is some pretty nasty stuff and I don't know how much better off we'd be with hundreds to thousands of kilograms of plutonium dust released in the upper atmosphere.
One other issue is this thing only addresses ICBM's. Saddam is stockpiling Sony ps2's for what? If I were a betting person, I'd go with cruise missles which the NMD does not address. Previous posters have already mentioned the type of scenario where some miscreant puts a nuke in a shipping container and steams it into New York harbor and then detonates it. I know if I was bent on nuking the U.S., a missle is the last thing I'd use.
Anyway, who says OS developers can't get paid for their work? I am currently supplementing my income by helping to write an online teaching tool funded by my university and it will be GPL'ed when it is finished. I think this can benefit a lot of schools that do not have the money to pay for a propietary solution and would just have to do without.
Yes they are awesome. Actually my uncle works for DEC [Compaq] on their Fortran compilers. Maybe I can talk him into porting it to x86 (not likely though).
This is not quite true. Matter can occasionally escape from a black hole because the uncertainty principle will allow faster than light speeds for very short periods of time ( dt*dE <= hbar/2 ). I don't know what Hawking radiation is, but maybe this is what you're talking about.
The problem with Matlab is that it is slow for any sufficiently complex program. We sometimes use it to prototype our fluid algorithms. I remember an SPH 1D shocktube we were writing took 2 orders of magnitude longer to run than the F90 version. It was rather painful. I think you should check out F90/F95 as it is a far cry from F77. Coding with F90 is a pleasure.
I agree that this is a stupid analogy. How can one jiggle a doorknob if you do not know a door is there in the first place? A better analogy would be walking down the street and looking at the house and noting where it has doors, windows, etc. Jiggling the doorknob is hitting it with Nessus or wuftpd-god.c or whatnot. If you are connected to the internet and you do not want your ports scanned, then close the ones you don't need and/or firewall them off from public access. More responsibilty needs to be burdened on the admins to secure their machines. When some moron takes a RedHat or NT disk and does a default install without tightening the system then sticks it on a fat pipe they endanger everyone on the net. These are the drunk drivers of the net. The ideal situation is that it should not matter if someone does a port scan if you've secured your boxes correctly.
Try maintaining a few labs full of windows boxes and then see if you feel this way. It is rare that a day goes by that one of these things does not self-destruct. Anyway, it has been my experience that Windows is only "user friendly" until something unexpected occurs. Then it is a black box and leaves you in the dark. And in general, I find Linux much easier to use and maintain. What is supposedly "easy" is simply a matter of experience. Maybe it is just that the *nix philosophy that suits me. As far as hardware support goes, I agree that one must be careful to choose compatible hardware, but this situation gets easier by the day.
I'd say if you divided the number of glaring Linux bugs by the number of glaring Windows bugs you'd have a number that is much less than one. So the above is only a relative approximation. I am the one sysadmins for the physics dept. at my university and I must support several OS's. Windows is by far the most problematic and requires a disproportionate amount of our time when compared to the other OS's.
This may be true. I agree that IE is better. So where do I get the Linux version? Oh, I've got to run Windows? Well I think I'd rather keep the glaring bugs in the web browser rather than in the OS...
Slashdot Mirror
This has actually happened. The US overthrew the democratically elected gov't in Guatemala in the 40's to save the United Fruit Company. They installed a puppet dictator. So much for the crap about spreading democracy...
e .h tml
http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v9/9.06/7genocid
I was a GM dealership automotive technician for many years and I worked my way through college in an independent garage for 4 years. I can tell you that the problems with cars manufacutered by the Big Three had nothing to do with technology and everything due to the fact that the bean counters seemed to be in control of the engineering department. The Japanese imports had to conform to the same emissions standards as their American counterparts yet suffered none of the reliability problems. For instance, the materials used in the American cars were absolutely inferior. After about 2-3 years the old barrel-type coolant sensor connector on a GM car would crumble in your hands. My wife's 1988 Celica's coolant sensor connector, and for that matter the vacuum hoses, radiator hoses, and many other platic parts that are subject to strain and engine heat are still original equipment and in seemingly good condition after 188,000 Mi. The American counterparts would all tend to be brittle and/or broken at this age and mileage. Another example is gasket design and material. The Japanese had gone to rubber/neoprene type gaskets for things like valve/cam covers where the US cars were still using cheap cork or RTV compound. For that matter the Japanese cam covers (of course the Japs had OHC engines that were also much more advanced than the rewarmed 1950's and 1960's OHV relics that GM was using) themselves were molded aluminum as opposed to the cheap American stamped steel valve covers that would bend as you tried to pry loose the leaking RTV (Actually, I got really good at sealing these things, but it is an art). These problems also were present in the fuel systems, the electronics, the ignition systems, etc. So really this has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with underengineering and putting profit above product quality.
I heard This actually happened. Supposedly one of MS's windows update servers was infected w/ Code Red.
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/20545.h
How about MS hired Ralph Reed (former head of the Christian Coalition) as a "lobbyist" when Bush was running for president. Ralph Reed also just so happened to be one of Bush's campaign managers. One week after MS hired Reed, Bush began pontificating how awful it was that this great company was being harassed by the Justice Dept. This is yet more policy bought and paid for by big business.
"...only large private corporations can produce innovation..."
Just in case you are not being sarcastic (and there are quite a few people who believe this sort of thing), how do you figure? You don't think innovation happens at places like NIST, CERN, LANL, NASA, etc. as well as in research universities? Check out all the Nobel Laureates here:
http://www.nobel.se
I think you'll notice most of them are from universities and gov't labs. And I just got back from a trip from Germany/Switzerland/Austria. I can positively tell you the public transit in the US by and large blows donkey balls compared to that of any of those 3 countries.
I've been using 64bit RedHat on Alpha for many years now. It is rock solid stable. And the Compaq Tru64 compilers are excellent and make the platform even more attractive. I don't know what you did wrong, but its been working for me and doing severe service as a number cruncher for years with no trouble. Bollocks indeed.
Not at all. You can install directly from FTP, NFS, HTTP, a hard drive, etc. and it is very simple. And why would anyone want to compile the kernel on a 486? Just compile it somewhere else for the desired architecture or just get a binary kernel.
And I guess that would make you a masochist?
So they could use WindowMaker. That thing runs great on a P166.
I agree with you right now, but Linux client machines may become more attractive as MS starts putting the WPA in all their software and also each iteration of their OS/Office suite seems to instantly obscelete the lowest echelon of usable hardware. For instance, I had a P233 that ran WinNT just fine. 2000 made it run like a dog for some reason. Couple this with the current economic conditions and perhaps more people will look into solutions such as this if they have to pay for XP licences + new hardware to run it. Of course, I still think most would junk the level of hardware that this guy is talking about.
OK, but I do not want to pay for any stupid missle defense system.
"I do not take the path of least resistance, but if my son want to find out why a curve balls curves I don't won't pop-ups depicted adult themes. what do you think the results will be for the search criteria "curves ball" will be?"
I just tried sticking "curve balls" and "curve ball" in google and there was zero porn at least on the first page. Some search engines do have a family filter anyway. I think you typically really have to go looking for porn to find it.
"I think it's safe to say that most people on Slashdot are not only competent enough to apply patches, but interested enough in computers (for work or a hobby or whatever) to actually do it".
And also lazy enough to write scripts to push all the patches automatically to all the servers so we can have time to sit around and get paid to read slashdot.
"Fallout from one missle would be much better than fallout from 100 missles for the people in areas not hit."
This makes me wonder about what precisely happens to the missle that has been intercepted. One wonders what happens to the fissible materials in the bomb. Plutonium is some pretty nasty stuff and I don't know how much better off we'd be with hundreds to thousands of kilograms of plutonium dust released in the upper atmosphere.
One other issue is this thing only addresses ICBM's. Saddam is stockpiling Sony ps2's for what? If I were a betting person, I'd go with cruise missles which the NMD does not address. Previous posters have already mentioned the type of scenario where some miscreant puts a nuke in a shipping container and steams it into New York harbor and then detonates it. I know if I was bent on nuking the U.S., a missle is the last thing I'd use.
Anyway, who says OS developers can't get paid for their work? I am currently supplementing my income by helping to write an online teaching tool funded by my university and it will be GPL'ed when it is finished. I think this can benefit a lot of schools that do not have the money to pay for a propietary solution and would just have to do without.
Yes they are awesome. Actually my uncle works for DEC [Compaq] on their Fortran compilers. Maybe I can talk him into porting it to x86 (not likely though).
This is not quite true. Matter can occasionally escape from a black hole because the uncertainty principle will allow faster than light speeds for very short periods of time ( dt*dE <= hbar/2 ). I don't know what Hawking radiation is, but maybe this is what you're talking about.
Yep. It was me who was confused. Thanks.
The problem with Matlab is that it is slow for any sufficiently complex program. We sometimes use it to prototype our fluid algorithms. I remember an SPH 1D shocktube we were writing took 2 orders of magnitude longer to run than the F90 version. It was rather painful. I think you should check out F90/F95 as it is a far cry from F77. Coding with F90 is a pleasure.
Also Compaq has their TRU64 compilers for Linux/Alpha which are excellent.
> For example, Java tends to pass things by reference.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Java always passes by value.
I agree that this is a stupid analogy. How can one jiggle a doorknob if you do not know a door is there in the first place? A better analogy would be walking down the street and looking at the house and noting where it has doors, windows, etc. Jiggling the doorknob is hitting it with Nessus or wuftpd-god.c or whatnot. If you are connected to the internet and you do not want your ports scanned, then close the ones you don't need and/or firewall them off from public access. More responsibilty needs to be burdened on the admins to secure their machines. When some moron takes a RedHat or NT disk and does a default install without tightening the system then sticks it on a fat pipe they endanger everyone on the net. These are the drunk drivers of the net. The ideal situation is that it should not matter if someone does a port scan if you've secured your boxes correctly.
Try maintaining a few labs full of windows boxes and then see if you feel this way. It is rare that a day goes by that one of these things does not self-destruct. Anyway, it has been my experience that Windows is only "user friendly" until something unexpected occurs. Then it is a black box and leaves you in the dark. And in general, I find Linux much easier to use and maintain. What is supposedly "easy" is simply a matter of experience. Maybe it is just that the *nix philosophy that suits me. As far as hardware support goes, I agree that one must be careful to choose compatible hardware, but this situation gets easier by the day.
I'd say if you divided the number of glaring Linux bugs by the number of glaring Windows bugs you'd have a number that is much less than one. So the above is only a relative approximation. I am the one sysadmins for the physics dept. at my university and I must support several OS's. Windows is by far the most problematic and requires a disproportionate amount of our time when compared to the other OS's.
This may be true. I agree that IE is better. So where do I get the Linux version? Oh, I've got to run Windows? Well I think I'd rather keep the glaring bugs in the web browser rather than in the OS...