Terminal, Mail, Apple Mail, Apple Terminal, so on. Mail.app is no more descriptive than Mail -- they are the exact same thing -- it is like writing "Mail program" and without specifying Apple it could be Joe's Mail.app for all anyone knows. The only reason you know Mail.app refers to Apple Mail is because you know it already!
As for grep, no. Variations are GNU grep, SysV grep, so on. Those actually mean something. Never, and I literally mean never before reading your message (and I've been talking about grep for twenty years!), would it cross my mind to refer to it as "the grep binary" in conversation unless the conversation were about compiling grep. If I recompiled it and needed to differentiate it, I would name the binary something descriptive, like, maybe egrep or fgrep or farging_grep. Not to mention that calling Apple Mail Mail.app is akin to calling grep grep.0755.
As for.app -- really, did you come up with that yourself? No, more like joining the bandwagon. No problem with that, more power to you. But I just wonder why the hell the bandwagon started, and I *really* wish that Apple hadn't gone Windows on us and brought mandatory file extensions to the OS just to placate the feeble. If standard Unices can get by without.app or.exe, why did Apple have to regress? Oh well. What is done is done.
In general, people who don't appreciate a little jabbing are dorks.
What the hell is with Mac people (probably just OS X people too) and.app? It was bad enough when Apple adopted file extensions in OS X. Now people write things like terminal.app. I have never referred to MS Word on Windows as winword.exe (except when telling people how to start it quickly). So bizarre. As for best terminal ever -- I do like that it is light and simple. With Expose, tabs are sort of pointless (I will not open anywhere the number of Terminal windows as I would Firefox tabs, what's the point). My favorites are simple xterms, putty, and on the Mac Terminal. Does the job, nothing more, nothing less.
My Powerbook had some issues, nothing critical. I waited until near the end of my AppleCare warranty, and called Apple. The next morning there was a box waiting outside my door. I boxed the laptop up, called DHL for pickup. The next morning it was at Apple's repair center. It was fixed that same day, and shipped out. They replaced the top case because it was scratched up, the bezel around the screen and the latch because it didn't latch so well any longer, the wifi internal antenna and cabling because of some reception issues, and a few other cosmetic things. I had it back the morning after that. So total time out of my hands, less than 48 hours. The laptop now looks like brand-new after three years of constant use and hauling around.
I don't know how Dell's support would "far exceed" my experience. In my business experience, I'd say the opposite. I deal with small businesses all the time, and most of them with Dells have experienced Dell's service because things keep breaking. Sure, Dell handles the repairs quickly, sending out some local knuckle-draggers to swap parts or shipping the parts ASAP, but they still have the problems that needed repair in the first place. Nature of using super-cheap components selling cut-throat commodity PCs. Apple doesn't play that game. I'm seeing A LOT more interest on the part of small businesses in getting Apple computers. I think Apple has a bright future in that market.
Back in the late 90s, I worked on a data warehouse project. We tried Oracle, and had an Oracle tuning expert work with us. However, we couldn't get the performance we needed. We wound up developing a custom "database" system, where data was extracted from the source databases (billing, CDRs, etc.) and de-normalized into several large tables in parallel. The de-normalization performed global transformations and corrections. Those tables were then loaded into shared memory (64bit HP multi-CPU system with a huge amount of RAM for those days, 32GB IIRC), indices were built, and a highly optimized algorithm (over time it kept getting tighter and smaller) was used to join the data based on various criteria using standard, left, right and some hybrid methods. The join algorithm operated on pointers to tables of pointers. Initially, developers used a PERL script to pre-process simple pseudo-SQL into C code/macros, that would be linked to their report application. As the project grew, I developed a SQL-derived language that was run through a cross-compiler to generate the C code and macros to link to applications. That language supported joins, views, temporary tables, and some other useful features that enabled developers to work quickly in implementing report requests. The system was very fast for our purposes, performing fraud analysis and sales trends analysis nightly. In parallel to that analysis on a different server, the de-normalized data was also exported to a Redbrick database so users could perform desktop reporting over historical data. I was the overall technical architect for system, and the developer of the joining system and the SQL-like language and compiling/development tools. I'm sure that today though there are data warehouse specific tools that would eliminate most of that.
I never did get the hang of shell-environment editors, like emacs or vi (or even the DOS edit.com). So even though I"ve tried unix scripting, I just never got comfortable with it.
This is such a funny statement for me, the contrast -- I've never gotten the hang of developing code using GUI tools. I last did that with Turbo C back in the 80s. My model is I just open multiple windows, ssh to the development server (or start remote xterms), and run vi. However, GUI debuggers are useful. I have however started playing with Xcode on the Mac. I haven't been able to find vi keybindings though. Annoying.
In an ideal world, that would be great. But in that ideal world, there would also be a need for some way to get the facilities operator to do research into improving what they do provide, and to encourage investment in new infrastructure (building out FTTD to replace copper, for instance). I suppose as a regulated industry, a panel of technical experts and public monitors could function as a board providing direction... but this is pie in the sky nowadays. The FCC has decided that competition should be provided in three ways: incumbent telco, incumbent cable, and wireless non-incumbents. No more compelling line-sharing, except legacy copper for now.
A friend of mine is a rather small CLEC servicing smaller towns and rural areas. He is laying fiber to the door. He is getting money from the feds, out of that that rural buildout fund, at low interest financed over 30 years.
Do you have some money, or can you get some partners? Become a CLEC and compete. I believe that there is still lots of opportunity in the underserved areas, as the big ILECs have no interest in providing more than minimal services for them.
what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes?
Just a guess, but I believe that you use the diskdumputils package to set up dumping to disk when the system crashes.
# man diskdumpctl NAME
diskdumpctl - diskdump controller
SYNOPSIS
diskdumpctl [ -u ] device
diskdumpctl -V
DESCRIPTION
diskdumpctl is a program to register or unregister a dump partition with the system. The device argument must be either a
block device file or a partition device. If the -u option is specified, the device is unregistered. If the -V option is
specified, diskdumpctl version information is shown. diskdumpctl returns 1 if it fails due to an error. Otherwise it returns
0.
OPTIONS
-u Unregister the device.
-V Show version information and exit.
FILES/proc/diskdump
For kernel-2.4, the/proc filesystem file through which dump partitions are registered with the system./sys/devices/.../dump
For kernel-2.6, the/sys filesystem file through which dump partitions are registered with the system.
I believe you were thinking of the government formed by the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution of the United States was written to expand the power of the central government, and created a system of shared sovereignty, where the federal government is sovereign in its realm, and the states in theirs. The granting of the power of unlimited taxation to the federal government is the root of all this. Power follows money. The federal Congress was granted the sole power to coin/print money, to maintain a standing army and navy, to regulate commerce AMONG the states and foreign nations, to negotiate with foreign powers, and so on. It was quite obviously intended to have full sovereign powers over most activities that did not occur wholly within the borders of a single states.
One of the many issues, I believe, that led to our current sorry state of affairs, where the federal government believes that it holds all sovereign powers, is the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is largely a positive document when it comes to federal power: it specifies what the federal government CAN do, not what it CANNOT do. The Bill of Rights however is a negative document, in that it states what the federal government must not do. The 9th and 10th amendments were intended to reinforce the positive nature of the Constitution, but they failed in the test of time. If we had a purely positive document creating federal powers, there wouldn't be the disconnect, and there wouldn't be clauses in the Bill of Rights that courts could use to justify expansive federal power. That was precisely a fear of some opponents of the Bill of Rights. Then the Civil War was largely a test of whether the southern agricultural Jeffersonian views in drafting the constitution or the northern industrial Hamiltonian views were supreme. The north won. The 14th amendment was passed. The Hamiltonian view of a strong central government providing a uniform nation took hold. In the 20th century, it came to a head.
In '37, the Supreme Court was nearly eviscerated for standing up to to the President and Congress and ruling against vast expansions of federal power that we today take for granted. It wasn't until the 90s that the Rehnquist court began to once again stand up to federal power, asserting that there are indeed constitutional limitations on the scope of Congressional authority. These arguments are often incorrectly labeled as "state's rights." The Court continues to whittle away at the powers seized by the Congress, but whittle it will only do. The negative connotation to the Constitution provided by the Bill of Rights and a century of jurisprudence will never be reversed, and the presumption of legislative correctness will long stand.
Your observation re: Bush and Katrina is precisely the symptom you say it is. The people expect to have one capital G Government (THE Government) to take care of all problems. They don't see the advantage of 51 sovereign governments. Leftists don't like it because it requires them to travel to 51 legislative bodies to get their agendas enacted. Business and its right-wing allies don't like it for the same reason. See the recent FCC rulemaking. I find it SO amusing that the left derides attempts to devolve legislative authority back to the states away from the federal government when it impacts their agenda, yet they decry the FCC rule as robbing local governments of power. And the right doth protest in the opposite direction. Oh the irony.
How about Amanda? I've deployed it in many organizations for years. Just reconfigured one installation from DAT to a virtual tape (disk) config on a RAID array of SATA drives, with archival secondary writing to DLT tapes. That installation backs up about 20 servers.
Depends on who you talk to. I work with a team of 12 Windows engineers who find disparagements of the OS like that to be not only laughable, but a little sad. We'll all tell you the same thing: we chose this OS as our primary base because we didn't want to work so hard. We hate being called in the middle of the night because something went down or got hacked. The Unix guys are not so lucky. They actually take the week off when they're on call they get called so often. Us, one call a week is excessive when on call. And, more often than not it's because some supportie dialed the wrong group. When a distributed app goes down, 999 times out of a 1000 it was the Unix side...unless the Windows box was running on a Dell, of course.:)
Ahem... a Windows engineer? I guess that's not so bad actually, locomotives have engineers who operate them. Regarding your Unix admins, if they have boxes going down often, then they are incompetent, pure and simple. If they have services going down often, ditto. I've worked in high availability environments such as banking and finance, and a well administered cluster of Unix boxes in a well architected network is highly stable, nearly as stable as the 99.99999% uptime mainframes (on which some places merge the best of both worlds, running Linux in LPARs). I will grant Microsoft something though, they've un-fucked-up their fuck-ups to Cutler's originally very good OS enough now that it is also quite stable again, if well administered. You can even reliably run multiple tasks per box now! But in most high availability environments, Windows still serves as front-end to the Unix or mainframe back-end, if Windows has a place at all.
Hell, I've worked with Linux boxes in public facing ISP environments that, even hacked and rootkitted and serving as IRC war-bots, stay up and serving mail, web pages, and all their other services just fine.
You're talking about wanting an internet that's not shaped by profit. Guess what: It's gone and it's never coming back. It's been gone since, at least, 1995. And you know what else? That's a good thing.
Since '90/91, when ARPAnet was supplanted by NSFnet and the global TCP/IP network we call the Internet (capital I, there is only one, and that is its name) permitted unlimited commercial interconnections. I helped start an ISP back in '93, there was profit in the 'net then.
As for the anti-free software bit -- there are lots of major free software applications that work. Your argument is specious, as it appears to be based on the concept that if money is moving from one pocket to another, then the software is not free. I beg to differ. I don't pay a cent for the vast majority of the software needed to make a server operate. I can take it and use it and sell my services using it, and not pay a cent to anyone. That is objectively free. The mechanism that makes it free for my use is rather irrelevant.
But otherwise, you are spot-on, and who-ever is moderating you Troll is an idiot. Or a raving leftist. Same difference.
The law is supposed to be definite and defined for that reason: so that people know what is legal and illegal, and we don't pay for a bunch of lawsuits that just waste everyone's time and money.
That comment is pretty funny. The law is supposed... You are doing the same thing that your "future lawyers" did. The law is what the law is, and it is not definite and defined, except for the most simple. The more important law is, the more grey it becomes.
The law does not exist until it is applied. There are different laws for different people, effectively, because the law is applied differently by human beings who perceive the law differently for different reasons. You and somebody else doing the exact same allegedly illegal thing in the exact same circumstances could very easily receive entirely opposed outcomes. The law exists when it is applied to a particular specific allegation by a court. Until then, it is contemplative. The concept that one is innocent until proven guilty is literal, because there is no mechanism in our society to determine guilt or innocence other than a court of law. Just because you know O.J. killed Nicole does not mean that he was guilty of murder. He wasn't.
And this is exactly how our system should work. The alternative to a legal system with this uncertainty is worse. Those future lawyers, in our system, have a chance with the force of their legal argument to make "it should be" become "it is" in the the particular applications of the law in which they will participate.
Where does the federal Constitution delegate the sole power to interpret itself? Answer: nowhere. The doctrines we use are the result of convention, not the Constitution. It was once considered fine doctrine that the President is under no obligation to execute a law he finds to be unconstitutional (much like our soldiers and illegal/unconstitutional orders). One doctrine in sway for many years was the presumption of legislative correctness: a court presumes that the Congress is correct in its actions. That doctrine is what permitted the Congress to "interpret" the Constitution to greatly expand its powers in the 20th century. These "simplest" concepts that you seem to believe you understand are not so simple. Show me where in the United States Constitution the Congress is granted the power to forbid your growing a tomato in a pot on your back porch for your own consumption.
The concept of supreme judicial review as we know it is not enshrined in the Constitution. It was seized by the Supremes in Marbury v. Madison. You may have heard of it. None other than good old Jefferson strongly opposed the concept. He has a famous quote on it. In part: "To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." Sounds like something FDR would have uttered. Nine old men indeed.
People of your ilk think you know what is legal, what is illegal, what is unconstitutional and is not, in particular regarding Bush. However, our legal system is not so clear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too: you cannot have a legal system with its vaunted flexibility, permitting the vast vast expansion of federal power with NO amendments granting additional substantive Congressional authority, without also being prepared to give up notions of knowing with certainty that what is legal on Monday will be so on Friday, and vice versa. Rights based on penumbras discerned by robed wizards...
Regarding Bush and your quip above: W is pushing a Hamiltonian style expansion of executive power. He certainly isn't shy about it. You may disagree. You may agree. We all have opinions. But to confidently state that his actions are "illegal" is, well, simplistic. A President attempting to alter the understanding of his constitutional authority is not something to which you apply the same logic of illegal/legal as you do to a parking ticket. We may have a written constitution, but that is only the half of it, if that. Some of what he is pushing is in turns political, foundational and doctrinal -- things that get sorted out in the arena of politics and later by the Supremes if they don't punt it. The boundaries of authority that separate the branches of our federal government are not static. They wax and wane. Much like the boundaries between the sovereign states and the feds, though in that game one side mainly waxed until the Rehnquist Court grew a pair and got back in the game.
So if you think that a position held by the Department of Justice, one that will be filed as a brief with the Supremes, and one that may well be argued by the Solicitor General, holds no value because of your super grade in high school history and your political bent... well, I suggest that you do some more studying.
Just because the Bush administration ignored the Constitution and broke the law does not change the fact that it IS the job of the courts to issue warrants for wiretaps. Just because wiretapping is so easy that the President authorizes it without a warrant does not make that authorization legal.
Yet, just because you believe it is illegal does not make it so.
The 4th amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No where does it mention a court. It does mention the concept of reasonableness. And courts, in review (note: review), have been known to decide that particular searches are reasonable even without a warrant.
Our federal system is, famously, flexible and grey. That is what has permitted it to grow into what it is today with very little substantive change to the Constitution. Rather than demand a black and white legal framework, we have accepted, essentially, a mixture of a statutory and common law constitution. We have accepted that there is a constant give and take between the branches, and that the powers of those branches ebb and wane and change over time. See Marbury v. Madison. One cannot have one's cake and eat it too. One cannot have a federal constitution that permits a federal minimum wage based upon the Commerce Clause, something clearly not supported by a purely textual or intent-examining interpretation, that sanctions a government with tremendously broader powers than ever envisioned by its authors, yet also demand that the clauses pertaining to, say, searches be unyielding to flexibility. In particular since the text of the 4th amendment is clearly open to interpretation in terms of what constitutes reasonableness.
You will surely argue that the president has violated some statute. Perhaps he has. Yet whether that was illegal per se is open to question in our legal system. The powers of the president are not solely derived from congressional act. Bush is a believer in a Hamiltonian strong executive, and that is the doctrine he pursues as he attempts to reshape the office. There is nothing wrong with that doctrine, other than being contrary to the politics of critics, so long as he abides by legal decisions restraining his actions, which he has. Whether he can reasonably claim that his actions in this wiretapping program are authorized from his constitutional powers, unrestrained by statute, is a valid question, and is being decided via judicial review. That is the way it works, and it is working. You may have an opinion on whether his actions were legal, constitutional, or not. Whether or not that is actually the case however has yet to be decided.
I traveled throughout Europe this summer, and Australia and New Zealand in '99. I'm sure I am just too accustomed to my American money, but while the Monopoly money was entertaining, I also found it annoying. Way too many coins in the Euro-zone and England. The pound coin in England is cool. The multiple colors weren't bad for notes, but the varying sizes were irritating. Not due to any problem innate with the bills, but due to habit.
I'm accustomed to just flipping through bills, lined up neatly, and knowing the denomination from the corner, which is in the exact same place on each bill. Of course you need to be a bit anal about putting the bills in the wallet in the same orientation. But with bills of various sizes, unless you order them in your wallet from small to large or vice versa (granted, something which also anal people overseas probably do), there are issues.
First, as you flip through, you can miss some of the tiny bills. Second, the corners are all in different places, making it far less easy to identify the bills quickly -- also granted that if you grew up with that system, you likely can very quickly identify the bills by some other characteristic. The point being, though, that a change to a European style of currency here would meet great popular resistance, making it HIGHLY unlikely to being implemented.
Oh, and a funny story. At dinner one night in Sydney we were debating just this subject. This Australian girl talked about how advanced their new plastic money is, and said you can't rip it -- then she proceeded to demonstrate and ripped a bill right in half.
Regarding doing things the old way, I believe that one factor in that is that Americans are less open to making wholesale changes by fiat. As a people, we don't mind change when it happens due to market forces, but change by legislative design doesn't go over well, unless there is very broad consent. So while in Europe lots of things appear to change because of legal mandate without terribly much fuss, similar attempts here get hung up by political or legal challenges. Our political system is largely like what you Europeans consider "unstable" coalition governments, like what Germany apparently has right now. In such a government, difficult/controversial agendas are quite difficult to advance. While apparently in Europe having such a government is considered undesirable, in the US we tend to like our government institutionally divided and thus restrained. I see the recent election not just as a repudition of Bush due to dismay over Iraq, but as a reaction to a unified federal government under one party and the excesses that accompany that, regardless of party.
I also use QuickBooks, and I also subscribe to the payroll service, the most basic one. However, that is just because I have better things to do with my time than do the very simple calculations required for tax compliance. I still do my own deposits via the Federal EFTPS system and the state online systems. I send in my own little quarterly coupons and quarterly fed 941 returns.
For a small business, manually calculating it would take a little research the first time, and from then on it would be trivial every other week to manage for a handful of employees. I used to do it. It isn't rocket science. Calculate percentages, track and stop at yearly limits. Keep totals, enter liabilities into the appropriate account in accounting software. Make your tax deposits. File your forms. People managed this just fine before QuickBooks. It was quite viable. They used those ruled double entry accounting notepads ("the books") they sell at the office supply stores, not to mention the payroll management worksheets they sell. Using an accounting software package to replace the notepads is quite an improvement. If somebody wants to save a couple hundred $$ a year and do their own payroll, it certainly isn't difficult.
My Coolpix 990 got stolen -- insurance wanted to replace it with a $150 POS. We conference called Nikon, who agreed that the nearest Nikon makes to the 990 now is the D50. So, insurance bought me a D50.
Problem is, the inexpensive Nikon DSLRs will not meter through the manual AIS glass. So to use my manual lenses, I have to guesstimate metering. Not that huge of an issue, but still an issue.
There must be some little deprivation room at the MS campus with flashing lights to program them. This is standard MS speak where they claim that "the customer wants" something, because of all the "customers asking us" for it, that is inherently anti-customer and clearly what no rational customer really wants. The cup runneths over with examples.
The GPL license section in question is apparently designed to prevent distribution of GPL software by an entity that has reason to believe that the software is encumbered.
Let's say that Novell signs an agreement with Microsoft that Novell may distribute Samba and Microsoft will not sue Novell or Novell's customers should find that Samba contains patented Microsoft technology. Now, read this clause: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
So later Microsoft DOES sue, say, Red Hat over distribution of Samba. It could be argued that at that moment, Novell must immediately stop distributing Samba, as Novell has an agreement with Microsoft that protects it and its customers, but not ALL entities (including Red Hat) that receive Samba from Novell and then redistribute it. Novell effectively has a license (an agreement to not sue for infringement) from Microsoft, and presumably Microsoft will not permit Novell to share that license with everybody, including Novell's distribution competitors.
You wouldn't expect my Windows XP Pro license to cover your machine's installation, so why would a Mandriva customer expect a RedHat or Novell indemnification to cover their license risks?
What does the Microsoft Windows license have to do with the GPL? The purpose of the GPL is to free software, the opposite of the purpose of the Microsoft Windows license.
The GPL states what it states, your Windows XP Pro license notwithstanding. If the above scenario is an accurate interpretation of the GPL, as I believe it is, then indeed the GPL does expect that if you receive a license/agreement/indemnification for the use of GPL software, you MAY NOT REDISTRIBUTE it, unless you can provide the same license/agreement/indemnification to everybody who receives the software, whether from you or from anybody who got it from you.
This is both accurate and inaccurate. Yes, housing has gone "upscale" to where everything is advertised as LUXURY. However, consider that in many markets, there is nothing *but* "luxury" housing available. One simply cannot purchase a new home in many markets that does not have the upscale, allegedly price-increasing amenities. The baseline has changed, but it is still the baseline, and one must compare baseline to baseline.
Another comment: my father was a custom spec home/townhome builder until I was in my early 20s, and I was involved with many facets of the process, from helping him with making blueprints, to clearing the plot, to framing, to planting flowers and watering the lawn while the house was for sale. My father sold homes that were moderately priced. He didn't make a huge profit margin. But he did employ good trim carpenters (one of my primary indicators of quality) and other good subcontractors. Looking at new homes today, very expensive homes, is sobering. The quality is simply not there in the way that it was, and builder profit margins are higher. To get reasonable quality today, you have to pay through the nose. Or, buy an older home. Which is what I'm doing.
Oh, another comment: our home was burglarized recently, and among a few other things they stole my old Nikon digicam and my old Sony miniDV camcorder. At first I wasn't so pissed, as my insurance will buy me a new one, not just pay me $150 in depreciated value. But I've been looking at new camcorders, and they are CRAP. Even the $1500 ones are CRAP compared to my stolen ($1500 in 1999) camcorder. They may have higher specs internally, but the user interface, the external features, so on -- CRAP. I'm going to buy my old camcorder again, on ebay. Probably the same for the digicam -- all the modern Coolpix cameras are now amateur point and shoot crap.
Decimation was an extreme punishment meted out well before the professionalization of the legions under Marius and Sulla. It was rare, and it was used primarily for cowardice -- when a legion ran rather than fought. Roman legions prior to professinalization (Google the Marian reforms) were comprised of citizens, those able to vote. The Roman census broke the citizens up into ranks (the centuries) by wealth -- soldiers were expected to provide their own weaponry and armor, and thus were assigned to units whose weaponry they could afford. They ranged from those expected only to bring slingshots to the Equestrian order, those who could provide a horse -- though some were granted the honor of a "public horse." Serving in the army when called by a consul/general levying for war was the core duty of the citizen. Most soliders were farmers eager to return to their land. Slaves and poor/landless Romans were ineligible to serve. Non-citizens only served in the auxilaries provided by the allies -- those Italian cities/kingdoms allied to Rome, often by force.
More pointedly, and something largely forgotten today, the United States is a federation of SOVEREIGN states -- the federal government is a creation of the people acting through their states. Americans vote for federal representatives as citizens of states first and foremost: Congress by districts that are contained within states, the shape of which decided by state legislatures (though sometimes vetted by federal courts), and the President via electors that represent a state's voters. The elections, while authorized by the federal constitution, are governed by state legislatures. (Note: that is an important legal distinction given Bush v. Gore. The Supremes ruled, correctly IMO, that as federal elections are authorized by the federal constitution, conferring power directly to state legislatures, original review must be via federal courts, not state.)
These states agreed to vest particular portions of sovereignty in the federal government through a written agreement: the United States Constitution. One interesting facet of the federal constitution that many don't reflect upon is the amendment process: STATES have the final word on the shape of the federal constitution. Not Congress.
While the people at large have basically forgotten these facts, and the Congress and President run rampant over them, the courts do from time to time surprise people and enforce the consequences of our nature of government, much to the dismay of those who would have us forget that the federal government is not THE Government.
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Terminal, Mail, Apple Mail, Apple Terminal, so on. Mail.app is no more descriptive than Mail -- they are the exact same thing -- it is like writing "Mail program" and without specifying Apple it could be Joe's Mail.app for all anyone knows. The only reason you know Mail.app refers to Apple Mail is because you know it already!
.app -- really, did you come up with that yourself? No, more like joining the bandwagon. No problem with that, more power to you. But I just wonder why the hell the bandwagon started, and I *really* wish that Apple hadn't gone Windows on us and brought mandatory file extensions to the OS just to placate the feeble. If standard Unices can get by without .app or .exe, why did Apple have to regress? Oh well. What is done is done.
As for grep, no. Variations are GNU grep, SysV grep, so on. Those actually mean something. Never, and I literally mean never before reading your message (and I've been talking about grep for twenty years!), would it cross my mind to refer to it as "the grep binary" in conversation unless the conversation were about compiling grep. If I recompiled it and needed to differentiate it, I would name the binary something descriptive, like, maybe egrep or fgrep or farging_grep. Not to mention that calling Apple Mail Mail.app is akin to calling grep grep.0755.
As for
In general, people who don't appreciate a little jabbing are dorks.
Larry
What the hell is with Mac people (probably just OS X people too) and .app? It was bad enough when Apple adopted file extensions in OS X. Now people write things like terminal.app. I have never referred to MS Word on Windows as winword.exe (except when telling people how to start it quickly). So bizarre. As for best terminal ever -- I do like that it is light and simple. With Expose, tabs are sort of pointless (I will not open anywhere the number of Terminal windows as I would Firefox tabs, what's the point). My favorites are simple xterms, putty, and on the Mac Terminal. Does the job, nothing more, nothing less.
Larry
My Powerbook had some issues, nothing critical. I waited until near the end of my AppleCare warranty, and called Apple. The next morning there was a box waiting outside my door. I boxed the laptop up, called DHL for pickup. The next morning it was at Apple's repair center. It was fixed that same day, and shipped out. They replaced the top case because it was scratched up, the bezel around the screen and the latch because it didn't latch so well any longer, the wifi internal antenna and cabling because of some reception issues, and a few other cosmetic things. I had it back the morning after that. So total time out of my hands, less than 48 hours. The laptop now looks like brand-new after three years of constant use and hauling around.
I don't know how Dell's support would "far exceed" my experience. In my business experience, I'd say the opposite. I deal with small businesses all the time, and most of them with Dells have experienced Dell's service because things keep breaking. Sure, Dell handles the repairs quickly, sending out some local knuckle-draggers to swap parts or shipping the parts ASAP, but they still have the problems that needed repair in the first place. Nature of using super-cheap components selling cut-throat commodity PCs. Apple doesn't play that game. I'm seeing A LOT more interest on the part of small businesses in getting Apple computers. I think Apple has a bright future in that market.
Larry
Back in the late 90s, I worked on a data warehouse project. We tried Oracle, and had an Oracle tuning expert work with us. However, we couldn't get the performance we needed. We wound up developing a custom "database" system, where data was extracted from the source databases (billing, CDRs, etc.) and de-normalized into several large tables in parallel. The de-normalization performed global transformations and corrections. Those tables were then loaded into shared memory (64bit HP multi-CPU system with a huge amount of RAM for those days, 32GB IIRC), indices were built, and a highly optimized algorithm (over time it kept getting tighter and smaller) was used to join the data based on various criteria using standard, left, right and some hybrid methods. The join algorithm operated on pointers to tables of pointers. Initially, developers used a PERL script to pre-process simple pseudo-SQL into C code/macros, that would be linked to their report application. As the project grew, I developed a SQL-derived language that was run through a cross-compiler to generate the C code and macros to link to applications. That language supported joins, views, temporary tables, and some other useful features that enabled developers to work quickly in implementing report requests. The system was very fast for our purposes, performing fraud analysis and sales trends analysis nightly. In parallel to that analysis on a different server, the de-normalized data was also exported to a Redbrick database so users could perform desktop reporting over historical data. I was the overall technical architect for system, and the developer of the joining system and the SQL-like language and compiling/development tools. I'm sure that today though there are data warehouse specific tools that would eliminate most of that.
Larry
I never did get the hang of shell-environment editors, like emacs or vi (or even the DOS edit.com). So even though I"ve tried unix scripting, I just never got comfortable with it.
This is such a funny statement for me, the contrast -- I've never gotten the hang of developing code using GUI tools. I last did that with Turbo C back in the 80s. My model is I just open multiple windows, ssh to the development server (or start remote xterms), and run vi. However, GUI debuggers are useful. I have however started playing with Xcode on the Mac. I haven't been able to find vi keybindings though. Annoying.
Larry
Uh, mining? What would you mine in the vacuum of space at LEO or Lagrange points?
NOTE: no it does not, and no it should not.
In an ideal world, that would be great. But in that ideal world, there would also be a need for some way to get the facilities operator to do research into improving what they do provide, and to encourage investment in new infrastructure (building out FTTD to replace copper, for instance). I suppose as a regulated industry, a panel of technical experts and public monitors could function as a board providing direction... but this is pie in the sky nowadays. The FCC has decided that competition should be provided in three ways: incumbent telco, incumbent cable, and wireless non-incumbents. No more compelling line-sharing, except legacy copper for now.
Larry
A friend of mine is a rather small CLEC servicing smaller towns and rural areas. He is laying fiber to the door. He is getting money from the feds, out of that that rural buildout fund, at low interest financed over 30 years.
Do you have some money, or can you get some partners? Become a CLEC and compete. I believe that there is still lots of opportunity in the underserved areas, as the big ILECs have no interest in providing more than minimal services for them.
Larry
what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes?
/proc/diskdump /proc filesystem file through which dump partitions are registered with the system. /sys/devices/.../dump /sys filesystem file through which dump partitions are registered with the system.
Just a guess, but I believe that you use the diskdumputils package to set up dumping to disk when the system crashes.
# man diskdumpctl
NAME
diskdumpctl - diskdump controller
SYNOPSIS
diskdumpctl [ -u ] device
diskdumpctl -V
DESCRIPTION
diskdumpctl is a program to register or unregister a dump partition with the system. The device argument must be either a
block device file or a partition device. If the -u option is specified, the device is unregistered. If the -V option is
specified, diskdumpctl version information is shown. diskdumpctl returns 1 if it fails due to an error. Otherwise it returns
0.
OPTIONS
-u Unregister the device.
-V Show version information and exit.
FILES
For kernel-2.4, the
For kernel-2.6, the
SEE ALSO
diskdumpfmt(8), savecore(8)
I believe you were thinking of the government formed by the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution of the United States was written to expand the power of the central government, and created a system of shared sovereignty, where the federal government is sovereign in its realm, and the states in theirs. The granting of the power of unlimited taxation to the federal government is the root of all this. Power follows money. The federal Congress was granted the sole power to coin/print money, to maintain a standing army and navy, to regulate commerce AMONG the states and foreign nations, to negotiate with foreign powers, and so on. It was quite obviously intended to have full sovereign powers over most activities that did not occur wholly within the borders of a single states.
One of the many issues, I believe, that led to our current sorry state of affairs, where the federal government believes that it holds all sovereign powers, is the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is largely a positive document when it comes to federal power: it specifies what the federal government CAN do, not what it CANNOT do. The Bill of Rights however is a negative document, in that it states what the federal government must not do. The 9th and 10th amendments were intended to reinforce the positive nature of the Constitution, but they failed in the test of time. If we had a purely positive document creating federal powers, there wouldn't be the disconnect, and there wouldn't be clauses in the Bill of Rights that courts could use to justify expansive federal power. That was precisely a fear of some opponents of the Bill of Rights. Then the Civil War was largely a test of whether the southern agricultural Jeffersonian views in drafting the constitution or the northern industrial Hamiltonian views were supreme. The north won. The 14th amendment was passed. The Hamiltonian view of a strong central government providing a uniform nation took hold. In the 20th century, it came to a head.
In '37, the Supreme Court was nearly eviscerated for standing up to to the President and Congress and ruling against vast expansions of federal power that we today take for granted. It wasn't until the 90s that the Rehnquist court began to once again stand up to federal power, asserting that there are indeed constitutional limitations on the scope of Congressional authority. These arguments are often incorrectly labeled as "state's rights." The Court continues to whittle away at the powers seized by the Congress, but whittle it will only do. The negative connotation to the Constitution provided by the Bill of Rights and a century of jurisprudence will never be reversed, and the presumption of legislative correctness will long stand.
Your observation re: Bush and Katrina is precisely the symptom you say it is. The people expect to have one capital G Government (THE Government) to take care of all problems. They don't see the advantage of 51 sovereign governments. Leftists don't like it because it requires them to travel to 51 legislative bodies to get their agendas enacted. Business and its right-wing allies don't like it for the same reason. See the recent FCC rulemaking. I find it SO amusing that the left derides attempts to devolve legislative authority back to the states away from the federal government when it impacts their agenda, yet they decry the FCC rule as robbing local governments of power. And the right doth protest in the opposite direction. Oh the irony.
Larry
How about Amanda? I've deployed it in many organizations for years. Just reconfigured one installation from DAT to a virtual tape (disk) config on a RAID array of SATA drives, with archival secondary writing to DLT tapes. That installation backs up about 20 servers.
Larry
Depends on who you talk to. I work with a team of 12 Windows engineers who find disparagements of the OS like that to be not only laughable, but a little sad. We'll all tell you the same thing: we chose this OS as our primary base because we didn't want to work so hard. We hate being called in the middle of the night because something went down or got hacked. The Unix guys are not so lucky. They actually take the week off when they're on call they get called so often. Us, one call a week is excessive when on call. And, more often than not it's because some supportie dialed the wrong group. When a distributed app goes down, 999 times out of a 1000 it was the Unix side...unless the Windows box was running on a Dell, of course. :)
Ahem... a Windows engineer? I guess that's not so bad actually, locomotives have engineers who operate them. Regarding your Unix admins, if they have boxes going down often, then they are incompetent, pure and simple. If they have services going down often, ditto. I've worked in high availability environments such as banking and finance, and a well administered cluster of Unix boxes in a well architected network is highly stable, nearly as stable as the 99.99999% uptime mainframes (on which some places merge the best of both worlds, running Linux in LPARs). I will grant Microsoft something though, they've un-fucked-up their fuck-ups to Cutler's originally very good OS enough now that it is also quite stable again, if well administered. You can even reliably run multiple tasks per box now! But in most high availability environments, Windows still serves as front-end to the Unix or mainframe back-end, if Windows has a place at all.
Hell, I've worked with Linux boxes in public facing ISP environments that, even hacked and rootkitted and serving as IRC war-bots, stay up and serving mail, web pages, and all their other services just fine.
Larry
You're talking about wanting an internet that's not shaped by profit. Guess what: It's gone and it's never coming back. It's been gone since, at least, 1995. And you know what else? That's a good thing.
Since '90/91, when ARPAnet was supplanted by NSFnet and the global TCP/IP network we call the Internet (capital I, there is only one, and that is its name) permitted unlimited commercial interconnections. I helped start an ISP back in '93, there was profit in the 'net then.
As for the anti-free software bit -- there are lots of major free software applications that work. Your argument is specious, as it appears to be based on the concept that if money is moving from one pocket to another, then the software is not free. I beg to differ. I don't pay a cent for the vast majority of the software needed to make a server operate. I can take it and use it and sell my services using it, and not pay a cent to anyone. That is objectively free. The mechanism that makes it free for my use is rather irrelevant.
But otherwise, you are spot-on, and who-ever is moderating you Troll is an idiot. Or a raving leftist. Same difference.
Larry
The law is supposed to be definite and defined for that reason: so that people know what is legal and illegal, and we don't pay for a bunch of lawsuits that just waste everyone's time and money.
That comment is pretty funny. The law is supposed... You are doing the same thing that your "future lawyers" did. The law is what the law is, and it is not definite and defined, except for the most simple. The more important law is, the more grey it becomes.
The law does not exist until it is applied. There are different laws for different people, effectively, because the law is applied differently by human beings who perceive the law differently for different reasons. You and somebody else doing the exact same allegedly illegal thing in the exact same circumstances could very easily receive entirely opposed outcomes. The law exists when it is applied to a particular specific allegation by a court. Until then, it is contemplative. The concept that one is innocent until proven guilty is literal, because there is no mechanism in our society to determine guilt or innocence other than a court of law. Just because you know O.J. killed Nicole does not mean that he was guilty of murder. He wasn't.
And this is exactly how our system should work. The alternative to a legal system with this uncertainty is worse. Those future lawyers, in our system, have a chance with the force of their legal argument to make "it should be" become "it is" in the the particular applications of the law in which they will participate.
Larry
Where does the federal Constitution delegate the sole power to interpret itself? Answer: nowhere. The doctrines we use are the result of convention, not the Constitution. It was once considered fine doctrine that the President is under no obligation to execute a law he finds to be unconstitutional (much like our soldiers and illegal/unconstitutional orders). One doctrine in sway for many years was the presumption of legislative correctness: a court presumes that the Congress is correct in its actions. That doctrine is what permitted the Congress to "interpret" the Constitution to greatly expand its powers in the 20th century. These "simplest" concepts that you seem to believe you understand are not so simple. Show me where in the United States Constitution the Congress is granted the power to forbid your growing a tomato in a pot on your back porch for your own consumption.
The concept of supreme judicial review as we know it is not enshrined in the Constitution. It was seized by the Supremes in Marbury v. Madison. You may have heard of it. None other than good old Jefferson strongly opposed the concept. He has a famous quote on it. In part: "To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." Sounds like something FDR would have uttered. Nine old men indeed.
People of your ilk think you know what is legal, what is illegal, what is unconstitutional and is not, in particular regarding Bush. However, our legal system is not so clear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too: you cannot have a legal system with its vaunted flexibility, permitting the vast vast expansion of federal power with NO amendments granting additional substantive Congressional authority, without also being prepared to give up notions of knowing with certainty that what is legal on Monday will be so on Friday, and vice versa. Rights based on penumbras discerned by robed wizards...
Regarding Bush and your quip above: W is pushing a Hamiltonian style expansion of executive power. He certainly isn't shy about it. You may disagree. You may agree. We all have opinions. But to confidently state that his actions are "illegal" is, well, simplistic. A President attempting to alter the understanding of his constitutional authority is not something to which you apply the same logic of illegal/legal as you do to a parking ticket. We may have a written constitution, but that is only the half of it, if that. Some of what he is pushing is in turns political, foundational and doctrinal -- things that get sorted out in the arena of politics and later by the Supremes if they don't punt it. The boundaries of authority that separate the branches of our federal government are not static. They wax and wane. Much like the boundaries between the sovereign states and the feds, though in that game one side mainly waxed until the Rehnquist Court grew a pair and got back in the game.
So if you think that a position held by the Department of Justice, one that will be filed as a brief with the Supremes, and one that may well be argued by the Solicitor General, holds no value because of your super grade in high school history and your political bent... well, I suggest that you do some more studying.
Larry
Just because the Bush administration ignored the Constitution and broke the law does not change the fact that it IS the job of the courts to issue warrants for wiretaps. Just because wiretapping is so easy that the President authorizes it without a warrant does not make that authorization legal.
Yet, just because you believe it is illegal does not make it so.
The 4th amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No where does it mention a court. It does mention the concept of reasonableness. And courts, in review (note: review), have been known to decide that particular searches are reasonable even without a warrant.
Our federal system is, famously, flexible and grey. That is what has permitted it to grow into what it is today with very little substantive change to the Constitution. Rather than demand a black and white legal framework, we have accepted, essentially, a mixture of a statutory and common law constitution. We have accepted that there is a constant give and take between the branches, and that the powers of those branches ebb and wane and change over time. See Marbury v. Madison. One cannot have one's cake and eat it too. One cannot have a federal constitution that permits a federal minimum wage based upon the Commerce Clause, something clearly not supported by a purely textual or intent-examining interpretation, that sanctions a government with tremendously broader powers than ever envisioned by its authors, yet also demand that the clauses pertaining to, say, searches be unyielding to flexibility. In particular since the text of the 4th amendment is clearly open to interpretation in terms of what constitutes reasonableness.
You will surely argue that the president has violated some statute. Perhaps he has. Yet whether that was illegal per se is open to question in our legal system. The powers of the president are not solely derived from congressional act. Bush is a believer in a Hamiltonian strong executive, and that is the doctrine he pursues as he attempts to reshape the office. There is nothing wrong with that doctrine, other than being contrary to the politics of critics, so long as he abides by legal decisions restraining his actions, which he has. Whether he can reasonably claim that his actions in this wiretapping program are authorized from his constitutional powers, unrestrained by statute, is a valid question, and is being decided via judicial review. That is the way it works, and it is working. You may have an opinion on whether his actions were legal, constitutional, or not. Whether or not that is actually the case however has yet to be decided.
Larry
I traveled throughout Europe this summer, and Australia and New Zealand in '99. I'm sure I am just too accustomed to my American money, but while the Monopoly money was entertaining, I also found it annoying. Way too many coins in the Euro-zone and England. The pound coin in England is cool. The multiple colors weren't bad for notes, but the varying sizes were irritating. Not due to any problem innate with the bills, but due to habit.
I'm accustomed to just flipping through bills, lined up neatly, and knowing the denomination from the corner, which is in the exact same place on each bill. Of course you need to be a bit anal about putting the bills in the wallet in the same orientation. But with bills of various sizes, unless you order them in your wallet from small to large or vice versa (granted, something which also anal people overseas probably do), there are issues.
First, as you flip through, you can miss some of the tiny bills. Second, the corners are all in different places, making it far less easy to identify the bills quickly -- also granted that if you grew up with that system, you likely can very quickly identify the bills by some other characteristic. The point being, though, that a change to a European style of currency here would meet great popular resistance, making it HIGHLY unlikely to being implemented.
Oh, and a funny story. At dinner one night in Sydney we were debating just this subject. This Australian girl talked about how advanced their new plastic money is, and said you can't rip it -- then she proceeded to demonstrate and ripped a bill right in half.
Regarding doing things the old way, I believe that one factor in that is that Americans are less open to making wholesale changes by fiat. As a people, we don't mind change when it happens due to market forces, but change by legislative design doesn't go over well, unless there is very broad consent. So while in Europe lots of things appear to change because of legal mandate without terribly much fuss, similar attempts here get hung up by political or legal challenges. Our political system is largely like what you Europeans consider "unstable" coalition governments, like what Germany apparently has right now. In such a government, difficult/controversial agendas are quite difficult to advance. While apparently in Europe having such a government is considered undesirable, in the US we tend to like our government institutionally divided and thus restrained. I see the recent election not just as a repudition of Bush due to dismay over Iraq, but as a reaction to a unified federal government under one party and the excesses that accompany that, regardless of party.
Larry
Ooooh, the scary payroll problem.
I also use QuickBooks, and I also subscribe to the payroll service, the most basic one. However, that is just because I have better things to do with my time than do the very simple calculations required for tax compliance. I still do my own deposits via the Federal EFTPS system and the state online systems. I send in my own little quarterly coupons and quarterly fed 941 returns.
For a small business, manually calculating it would take a little research the first time, and from then on it would be trivial every other week to manage for a handful of employees. I used to do it. It isn't rocket science. Calculate percentages, track and stop at yearly limits. Keep totals, enter liabilities into the appropriate account in accounting software. Make your tax deposits. File your forms. People managed this just fine before QuickBooks. It was quite viable. They used those ruled double entry accounting notepads ("the books") they sell at the office supply stores, not to mention the payroll management worksheets they sell. Using an accounting software package to replace the notepads is quite an improvement. If somebody wants to save a couple hundred $$ a year and do their own payroll, it certainly isn't difficult.
Larry
My Coolpix 990 got stolen -- insurance wanted to replace it with a $150 POS. We conference called Nikon, who agreed that the nearest Nikon makes to the 990 now is the D50. So, insurance bought me a D50.
Problem is, the inexpensive Nikon DSLRs will not meter through the manual AIS glass. So to use my manual lenses, I have to guesstimate metering. Not that huge of an issue, but still an issue.
Larry
There must be some little deprivation room at the MS campus with flashing lights to program them. This is standard MS speak where they claim that "the customer wants" something, because of all the "customers asking us" for it, that is inherently anti-customer and clearly what no rational customer really wants. The cup runneths over with examples.
Larry
The GPL license section in question is apparently designed to prevent distribution of GPL software by an entity that has reason to believe that the software is encumbered.
Let's say that Novell signs an agreement with Microsoft that Novell may distribute Samba and Microsoft will not sue Novell or Novell's customers should find that Samba contains patented Microsoft technology. Now, read this clause: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
So later Microsoft DOES sue, say, Red Hat over distribution of Samba. It could be argued that at that moment, Novell must immediately stop distributing Samba, as Novell has an agreement with Microsoft that protects it and its customers, but not ALL entities (including Red Hat) that receive Samba from Novell and then redistribute it. Novell effectively has a license (an agreement to not sue for infringement) from Microsoft, and presumably Microsoft will not permit Novell to share that license with everybody, including Novell's distribution competitors.
You wouldn't expect my Windows XP Pro license to cover your machine's installation, so why would a Mandriva customer expect a RedHat or Novell indemnification to cover their license risks?
What does the Microsoft Windows license have to do with the GPL? The purpose of the GPL is to free software, the opposite of the purpose of the Microsoft Windows license.
The GPL states what it states, your Windows XP Pro license notwithstanding. If the above scenario is an accurate interpretation of the GPL, as I believe it is, then indeed the GPL does expect that if you receive a license/agreement/indemnification for the use of GPL software, you MAY NOT REDISTRIBUTE it, unless you can provide the same license/agreement/indemnification to everybody who receives the software, whether from you or from anybody who got it from you.
Larry
This is both accurate and inaccurate. Yes, housing has gone "upscale" to where everything is advertised as LUXURY. However, consider that in many markets, there is nothing *but* "luxury" housing available. One simply cannot purchase a new home in many markets that does not have the upscale, allegedly price-increasing amenities. The baseline has changed, but it is still the baseline, and one must compare baseline to baseline.
Another comment: my father was a custom spec home/townhome builder until I was in my early 20s, and I was involved with many facets of the process, from helping him with making blueprints, to clearing the plot, to framing, to planting flowers and watering the lawn while the house was for sale. My father sold homes that were moderately priced. He didn't make a huge profit margin. But he did employ good trim carpenters (one of my primary indicators of quality) and other good subcontractors. Looking at new homes today, very expensive homes, is sobering. The quality is simply not there in the way that it was, and builder profit margins are higher. To get reasonable quality today, you have to pay through the nose. Or, buy an older home. Which is what I'm doing.
Oh, another comment: our home was burglarized recently, and among a few other things they stole my old Nikon digicam and my old Sony miniDV camcorder. At first I wasn't so pissed, as my insurance will buy me a new one, not just pay me $150 in depreciated value. But I've been looking at new camcorders, and they are CRAP. Even the $1500 ones are CRAP compared to my stolen ($1500 in 1999) camcorder. They may have higher specs internally, but the user interface, the external features, so on -- CRAP. I'm going to buy my old camcorder again, on ebay. Probably the same for the digicam -- all the modern Coolpix cameras are now amateur point and shoot crap.
Larry
Decimation was an extreme punishment meted out well before the professionalization of the legions under Marius and Sulla. It was rare, and it was used primarily for cowardice -- when a legion ran rather than fought. Roman legions prior to professinalization (Google the Marian reforms) were comprised of citizens, those able to vote. The Roman census broke the citizens up into ranks (the centuries) by wealth -- soldiers were expected to provide their own weaponry and armor, and thus were assigned to units whose weaponry they could afford. They ranged from those expected only to bring slingshots to the Equestrian order, those who could provide a horse -- though some were granted the honor of a "public horse." Serving in the army when called by a consul/general levying for war was the core duty of the citizen. Most soliders were farmers eager to return to their land. Slaves and poor/landless Romans were ineligible to serve. Non-citizens only served in the auxilaries provided by the allies -- those Italian cities/kingdoms allied to Rome, often by force.
Larry
More pointedly, and something largely forgotten today, the United States is a federation of SOVEREIGN states -- the federal government is a creation of the people acting through their states. Americans vote for federal representatives as citizens of states first and foremost: Congress by districts that are contained within states, the shape of which decided by state legislatures (though sometimes vetted by federal courts), and the President via electors that represent a state's voters. The elections, while authorized by the federal constitution, are governed by state legislatures. (Note: that is an important legal distinction given Bush v. Gore. The Supremes ruled, correctly IMO, that as federal elections are authorized by the federal constitution, conferring power directly to state legislatures, original review must be via federal courts, not state.)
These states agreed to vest particular portions of sovereignty in the federal government through a written agreement: the United States Constitution. One interesting facet of the federal constitution that many don't reflect upon is the amendment process: STATES have the final word on the shape of the federal constitution. Not Congress.
While the people at large have basically forgotten these facts, and the Congress and President run rampant over them, the courts do from time to time surprise people and enforce the consequences of our nature of government, much to the dismay of those who would have us forget that the federal government is not THE Government.
Larry