WiFi was never intended to allow people to cover huge areas--there simply isn't the bandwidth allocation for it. It gets even worse when a small number of access points are used to cover a large area. If all police departments started doing this, you'd probably not be able to use WiFi for anything else anymore, or your WiFi nodes would interfere with police operations.
Let's hope that this will cause the US government to release much larger chunks of spectrum for WiFi-like use, some regulated and some unregulated. And some bands should really be reserved for private use only--no businesses or government entities should be allowed to touch such parts of the spectrum for any purpose.
then a new core team will appear. In fact, we already have one: XOuvert.
Actually, XOuvert and whatever else might succeed the XFree86 core team is in roughly the same situation as XFree86 was with respect to MIT X11 when they got started.
Let's just be clear: X11 is here to stay no matter what because it's a protocol standard, not any particular implementation. And the XFree86 codebase already has at least one new group of maintainers, and I wouldn't be surprised if it found another. Both X11 and XFree86 are so widely used, successful, and important that any other outcome is inconceivable.
I think we really need a new X server, dedicated to desktop use. It looks like the RENDER model is going to be the primary graphics model these days and applications expect both multithreading and lots of bitmap storage from the X server.
Yet, the existing X server originated out of a code base that highly optimized the traditional X11 graphics model and assumed a completely different mix of clients and applications. That means that a lot of complexity in the existing server is devoted to optimizing things few people still care about.
A new implementation could replace that code with simple, generic implementations and focus on making the stuff that everybody uses these days efficient.
It may also be worth using C++ for such a new X server. That's not because C++ is "object oriented", but because C++ standardizes a number of facilities that big software systems need, like exceptions and resource cleanup, but for which C has no single standard.
Actually, at the same time, it might also be good to create a second, minimal X server from scratch that is aimed at handhelds and machines with very limited resources. Some existing work on such servers is based on XFree86, but I suspect one might be able to cut things down to an X server that gets by with 100-200k of code and data with careful coding and choice of features.
When someone calls you long-distance on a US cell phone, the caller pays for their portion of the call (their local connection and long distance charges) and you pay for the local portion of your connection (the wireless portion, no long distance charges).
So, while the phone companies get paid two chunks of money from two people (and while I'm sure they overcharge), those chunks of money are for different services.
You ever try to find a drive-through at an organic restaurant when you are running late for work or only have 20 minutes to grab lunch? How easy are they to find when you are on an interstate highway that's running through a rural area?
Well, as Republicans are so fond of pointing out: you have to take responsibility for your own actions.
If you are late for work, it's because you got up late. If you only have 20 minutes for lunch, you could pack lunch at home and bring it with you.
McDonalds is a known quantity. People know what they serve, know what the food costs, and obviously find it palatable.
Yes, and McDonalds is cheap and predictable because they use industrial food preparation throughout, including raising the cattle.
Find me a nationwide chain of organic restaurants that have drive-throughs, impeccable standards of cleanliness, internal food safety inspectors, good tasting food, and reasonable prices and I'm a convert.
Easy: cook at home and take the food with you. It's cheap, you know exctly what goes into the food, and the level of cleanliness is as high as you desire.
Maybe, eventually, when people like you stop eating at McDonalds, that chain of organic restaurants can finally start competing.
But instead of taking responsibility for your own actions, you want the government to step in and regulate McDonalds in a way that fits your world view because you are too lazy to take action yourself. Never mind that either the taxpayer needs to foot the bill or that it will greatly increase the cost of that McDonalds meal.
I'm actually all for small family farms, if they are run responsibly. But I disagree with your reasoning: a family farmer has no more right to have his way of life preserved at taxpayer expense than a programmer has the right to have his job not shipped to India or a cashier has the right not to have his job replaced by new technologies. Furthermore, subsidies are not the answer: they just lead to corruption.
If you want to institute regulations that require all restaurants to use organically grown food and free range animals, that's just fine with me. But let the market decide on how to comply with that regulation most efficiently. It might well turn out that the most efficient way of obtaining organically grown food is to import it from small farms in Mexico.
And until such regulations come through (which is probably a long time), there are plenty of things you can do yourself: bring your own food for eating on-the-go and plan ahead for eating at restaurants that fit with your worldview for when you go out.
Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges?
Technically, it's easy. Cell phones in most of the world work that way already.
In the US, cell phone companies could give people personal 900 numbers, and/or adopt generic "caller pays" 900 call-in numbers (you call the 900 number, then you dial the cell phone number).
OTOH, I really don't want pollsters to call me on my cell phone. I don't want them to call me at all.
in billion dollar agri corp controlled farms and ranches, who are doing everything they can to control all land and farms-and water.
Yeah, big agribusinesses are bad. They cause family farmers to lose their businesses, produce artificially enhanced products, change everybody's way of life, and sometimes make products that are bad for you?
So what? That's true of plenty of other businesses, too.
I see no reason to get particularly worked up about the loss of a bucolic way of life for family farmers when most of the rest of the population has been living with such changes since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Get used to it.
If you want to do something about it, work towards social reforms and policies that protect everybody, not the minority of the population that happens to be in electorially important, thinly settled agricultural states. Even better, exercise your choice as a buyer of products.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, you have already acted like a mad cow.
And what are you complaining about anyway? If you eat at McDonalds, you have already made your choice to support an industrial food infrastructure: industrial cooking of products derived from industrial farms. If you wanted to support family farms, you would cook for yourself or eat at businesses that buy from family farms. There are plenty of organic restaurants, after all. But, oh no, those are probably far too Birkenstock for you--all the wrong people go there, right?
And keep things in perspective: your chances of actually catching mad cow disease from eating meat are virtually nil; they are miniscule even for infected animals.
You can get over the stigma of working for an employer like SCO by quitting your job as soon as the employer "goes bad".
If you stay with them for a long time, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that you either approve of your employer's conduct or that you are really desparate for a job. Either way, it is not a recommendation.
and only those with the cash will be able to pay one of these people to get the interpretation they want
You used to have to bribe the judge for that, which was so much more expensive and only within reach of the very rich. Sure, this still costs quite a bit of money, but it's cheap in comparison. Think of it as democratization of bribery.
You want a system in your car that calls the paramedics and fire department when your airbag is deployed and you're knocked out.
No, I really don't. And I think people who do want such a system are either irrationally fearful, or they are risky drivers and they know it. It's the same idiotic attitude that causes people to buy "safe" large cars, everybody else be damned. You will do much better than OnStar in terms of safety if you and everybody else don't assume some fairy will pop out of the sky and rescue you in case of an accident, and instead drive defensively.
Let's not do anything that might gather some information!
Yes, that's the general idea. It's written into law in many countries.
Be aware there is a difference between a bad driver and somebody that dries well but above the posted artificialy low limits.
The difference is rationalization.
No, the difference is obviously how wet they start out, whether they go through the spin cycle, and what temperature they dry at. If the drivers are soaking wet, you put them through the spin cycle, and you dry them at a high temperature, drivers get all bent out of shape and shrink.
Your best bet with drivers, like with all sensitive items, is to drip-dry them.
It's notoriously easy to get a false positive on a DNA test if the lab isn't following proper procedure. The ways in which fingerprint tests can be screwed up area much easier to understand for laymen and easier to avoid, too. Courts, labs, juries and judges also have much more experience with fingerprints.
"These chemicals prevent thousands of deaths each year, but we must ban them because they might be causing tens of deaths each year."
Yes, that characterizes the problem: you are overly confident in your statistics.
And, no, "my kind" are the people who say that you must compare the benefits with the risks before making a decision.
We agree that one must make risk/benefit tradeoffs.
The trouble is that your risk/benefit tradeoffs are unsound: you assume that if you haven't seen a risk it must be small or even just doesn't exist. Yet, even a tiny risk, undetectable by any but the most stringent tests, spread of several billion humans, will result in tens of thousands of deaths each year. The problem of assigning risk to specific products becomes even harder when products only cause harm in combination, which is probably the rule rather than the exception.
"My kind" are the kind of people who actually know chemistry, for example.
Yes, that is the problem: your kind of people is overly confident in risk assessments from first principles. Unfortunately, knowledge of chemistry tells you almost nothing about whether the release of chemicals into the environment is safe.
Freon seemed about as safe to chemists as any chemical could be; who could have known that it would cause thousands of deaths each year through an unexpected interaction with the ozone layer which would lead to increased radiation exposure and skin cancer.
Basically, people like you are behaving irrationally, assessing risk irrationally, and putting us all at risk. You use risk/benefit analyses, but your numbers are wrong, so you arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Sure, let's let toddlers die in flammable pajamas, the 3rd world die of malaria, because you think cancer is on the rise.
Frankly, compared to massive releases of untested chemicals, yes those are probably better choices. They are better choices because we have other means of avoiding those problems. Toddlers don't combust spontaneously and they don't smoke (as a rule), so it's easy to avoid them catching fire. And malaria is easy to avoid: stop settling in malaria-infested areas.
Except, the only reason cancer is on the rise is because (a) we can diagnose it better and (b) we've gotten so good at stopping the infectious diseases that used to kill everyone before they got old enough to come down with it.
Except that statisticians attempt to correct for those factors, and they still see an increase in cancer.
But, who needs proof or rational thought when there are scary things running loose!
The only irrational behavior is the "pollute first, ask questions later" attitude you exhibit. Your kind is jumping from one quick fix to another, never stopping to make an accurate tally of the cost in human lives.
It's this kind of thinking that exterminated wild cats and wolves. After all - they're dangerous, right? We have to get rid of them!
If by "this kind" you mean "your kind", you are absolutely right: exterminating wild cats and wolves is quite analogous to exterminating malaria with DDT: you see a short term problem and you make a quick fix technological attempt at a solution with no understanding of the long term consequences.
But it's OK, says the skeptical environmentalists: after all, we do not have definitive proof that all those substances are bad for you.
Never mind that cancer is on the rise (could just be demographics, right?) and that dozens of species other than humans show hormonal abnormalities correlated with the presence of manufacured chemicals (could just be parasitic infections). Why be prudent and conservative if we can increase the GNP by 0.1%?
In fact, it's probably impossible to prove at all that they are bad for you because no single substance may harm you--they may only harm you synergistically. And since you are exposed to all of them constantly, it is impossible to assign responsibility to individual chemicals. But without definitive proof that an individual chemical is harmful by itself, we wouldn't want to limit the freedom of corporations to pollute, would we?
Well, I for one have never heard the word collective used in connection with Communism,
Well, then your education is wanting.
and there's no mention of a connection at m-w.com.
Sure there is, you are just using the dictionary incorrectly. As an adjective, the term carries no communist connotations. But you are using the term as a noun, so you have to click on "collective[2,noun]". There you will find an older usage that is synonymous with "group" (not used much anymore and not referring to an economic organization), and a more modern usage that is short for a "collective farm" and specifically refers to an economic organization in communist countries.
The term "collective" refers specifically to a communist form of work by a group under government guidance. You can't have collectives in the US because there is no government to organize them.
What you are referring to would be more like a "cooperative" in the US--a business enterprise operated and managed by its own customers. Some farming communities used to have for shopping, lending, etc. Cooperatives are a traditional American institution and, unlike collectives, they are independent of government.
But that is entirely unnecessary. The problem with the Wikipedia plea is not that they are asking for donations--donations have always been and will always be an essential part of open source software--it's that they are asking for donations of money. Donations of money are difficult to make and inefficient. Open source software is software that is developed by donations in kind: donations of development time and expertise, bandwidth, and hosting.
Your use of the term "collective" is an apparently deliberate attempt to link open source with communism; I find that reprehensible and intellectually dishonest of you.
Pleas for money by an open source project are usually an indication that there is something pretty fundamentally wrong with the project. Open source projects should generally not require monetary donations, they should live on donations of time, bandwidth, and hosting.
In this case, asking for money suggests that the project isn't well architected. A different architecture would allow the content to be hosted and edited on many sites. Then people could donate bandwidth and hosting instead of money.
Yes, the author made a bad choice of vendor--another thing he got wrong.
As far as not getting a G5 in a 1U. Where does that come from? WTF does that have to do with the article?
1U packaging greatly reduces the operating expenses for the usual uses these kinds of machines are put to. The fact that the G5's are unavailable in that form factor reduces their usefulness and makes them unacceptable for many applications no matter how fast they may or may not be.
Or just to see the reality?
The reality is that the Barefeats benchmarks are bogus and that the G5 is no better than the Opteron on industry-standard benchmarks. That's all there is to it.
Does your x86 biggotry impair your ability to read?
I don't have x86 bigotry. I stopped caring about processor architectures about a decade ago, when the differences between RISC and CISC stopped mattering.
My choice of platform is driven by software. I recommend you do the same: if you like Mac software, buy a Mac. It doesn't matter how fast it is as long as it's fast enough. Don't try to justify your choice with meaningless and inflated performance claims.
I smoked when i was 13/14 for about a year before I quit.
How lucky that you managed to quit. Most teenagers who start can't quit, and they lose decades of their lives.
the experience of feeling the effects of different drugs should not be robbed from people without their consent.
Parents have the right to have parts of their children's penises removed without their consent and with little demonstrable benefit. Talk about robbing people of experiences. I'd worry about that long before I'd worry robbing kids of the experience of becoming drug addicts.
Maybe instead of money, they need to move to a distributed and replicated system. It's easier for many institutions to donate bandwidth and server space by hosting something than by just giving cash. And it also reduces concerns that a single location may get too much control over the content (remember CDDB?).
People experience the effects of drugs differently because they differ genetically. That probably influences their susceptibility to addiction. It would make a lot of sense to try to even the playing field by vaccinating kids before they become addicted.
Of course, it shouldn't be mandatory. But it should be offered free to any parent who wants it for their child. And it should be carefully tested and monitored initially to make sure it doesn't have any unintended consequences.
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WiFi was never intended to allow people to cover huge areas--there simply isn't the bandwidth allocation for it. It gets even worse when a small number of access points are used to cover a large area. If all police departments started doing this, you'd probably not be able to use WiFi for anything else anymore, or your WiFi nodes would interfere with police operations.
Let's hope that this will cause the US government to release much larger chunks of spectrum for WiFi-like use, some regulated and some unregulated. And some bands should really be reserved for private use only--no businesses or government entities should be allowed to touch such parts of the spectrum for any purpose.
then a new core team will appear. In fact, we already have one: XOuvert.
Actually, XOuvert and whatever else might succeed the XFree86 core team is in roughly the same situation as XFree86 was with respect to MIT X11 when they got started.
Let's just be clear: X11 is here to stay no matter what because it's a protocol standard, not any particular implementation. And the XFree86 codebase already has at least one new group of maintainers, and I wouldn't be surprised if it found another. Both X11 and XFree86 are so widely used, successful, and important that any other outcome is inconceivable.
I think we really need a new X server, dedicated to desktop use. It looks like the RENDER model is going to be the primary graphics model these days and applications expect both multithreading and lots of bitmap storage from the X server.
Yet, the existing X server originated out of a code base that highly optimized the traditional X11 graphics model and assumed a completely different mix of clients and applications. That means that a lot of complexity in the existing server is devoted to optimizing things few people still care about.
A new implementation could replace that code with simple, generic implementations and focus on making the stuff that everybody uses these days efficient.
It may also be worth using C++ for such a new X server. That's not because C++ is "object oriented", but because C++ standardizes a number of facilities that big software systems need, like exceptions and resource cleanup, but for which C has no single standard.
Actually, at the same time, it might also be good to create a second, minimal X server from scratch that is aimed at handhelds and machines with very limited resources. Some existing work on such servers is based on XFree86, but I suspect one might be able to cut things down to an X server that gets by with 100-200k of code and data with careful coding and choice of features.
When someone calls you long-distance on a US cell phone, the caller pays for their portion of the call (their local connection and long distance charges) and you pay for the local portion of your connection (the wireless portion, no long distance charges).
So, while the phone companies get paid two chunks of money from two people (and while I'm sure they overcharge), those chunks of money are for different services.
You ever try to find a drive-through at an organic restaurant when you are running late for work or only have 20 minutes to grab lunch? How easy are they to find when you are on an interstate highway that's running through a rural area?
Well, as Republicans are so fond of pointing out: you have to take responsibility for your own actions.
If you are late for work, it's because you got up late. If you only have 20 minutes for lunch, you could pack lunch at home and bring it with you.
McDonalds is a known quantity. People know what they serve, know what the food costs, and obviously find it palatable.
Yes, and McDonalds is cheap and predictable because they use industrial food preparation throughout, including raising the cattle.
Find me a nationwide chain of organic restaurants that have drive-throughs, impeccable standards of cleanliness, internal food safety inspectors, good tasting food, and reasonable prices and I'm a convert.
Easy: cook at home and take the food with you. It's cheap, you know exctly what goes into the food, and the level of cleanliness is as high as you desire.
Maybe, eventually, when people like you stop eating at McDonalds, that chain of organic restaurants can finally start competing.
But instead of taking responsibility for your own actions, you want the government to step in and regulate McDonalds in a way that fits your world view because you are too lazy to take action yourself. Never mind that either the taxpayer needs to foot the bill or that it will greatly increase the cost of that McDonalds meal.
I'm actually all for small family farms, if they are run responsibly. But I disagree with your reasoning: a family farmer has no more right to have his way of life preserved at taxpayer expense than a programmer has the right to have his job not shipped to India or a cashier has the right not to have his job replaced by new technologies. Furthermore, subsidies are not the answer: they just lead to corruption.
If you want to institute regulations that require all restaurants to use organically grown food and free range animals, that's just fine with me. But let the market decide on how to comply with that regulation most efficiently. It might well turn out that the most efficient way of obtaining organically grown food is to import it from small farms in Mexico.
And until such regulations come through (which is probably a long time), there are plenty of things you can do yourself: bring your own food for eating on-the-go and plan ahead for eating at restaurants that fit with your worldview for when you go out.
Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges?
Technically, it's easy. Cell phones in most of the world work that way already.
In the US, cell phone companies could give people personal 900 numbers, and/or adopt generic "caller pays" 900 call-in numbers (you call the 900 number, then you dial the cell phone number).
OTOH, I really don't want pollsters to call me on my cell phone. I don't want them to call me at all.
in billion dollar agri corp controlled farms and ranches, who are doing everything they can to control all land and farms-and water.
Yeah, big agribusinesses are bad. They cause family farmers to lose their businesses, produce artificially enhanced products, change everybody's way of life, and sometimes make products that are bad for you?
So what? That's true of plenty of other businesses, too.
I see no reason to get particularly worked up about the loss of a bucolic way of life for family farmers when most of the rest of the population has been living with such changes since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Get used to it.
If you want to do something about it, work towards social reforms and policies that protect everybody, not the minority of the population that happens to be in electorially important, thinly settled agricultural states. Even better, exercise your choice as a buyer of products.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, you have already acted like a mad cow.
And what are you complaining about anyway? If you eat at McDonalds, you have already made your choice to support an industrial food infrastructure: industrial cooking of products derived from industrial farms. If you wanted to support family farms, you would cook for yourself or eat at businesses that buy from family farms. There are plenty of organic restaurants, after all. But, oh no, those are probably far too Birkenstock for you--all the wrong people go there, right?
And keep things in perspective: your chances of actually catching mad cow disease from eating meat are virtually nil; they are miniscule even for infected animals.
the crater wasn't there before Beagle landed.
You can get over the stigma of working for an employer like SCO by quitting your job as soon as the employer "goes bad".
If you stay with them for a long time, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that you either approve of your employer's conduct or that you are really desparate for a job. Either way, it is not a recommendation.
You go on dates with other people while you are in a relationship? It's getting weirder and weirder...
My 1968 Camaro SS 396 Big Block [...] gets me dates.
You're obviously trying to compensate for something.
and only those with the cash will be able to pay one of these people to get the interpretation they want
You used to have to bribe the judge for that, which was so much more expensive and only within reach of the very rich. Sure, this still costs quite a bit of money, but it's cheap in comparison. Think of it as democratization of bribery.
You want a system in your car that calls the paramedics and fire department when your airbag is deployed and you're knocked out.
No, I really don't. And I think people who do want such a system are either irrationally fearful, or they are risky drivers and they know it. It's the same idiotic attitude that causes people to buy "safe" large cars, everybody else be damned. You will do much better than OnStar in terms of safety if you and everybody else don't assume some fairy will pop out of the sky and rescue you in case of an accident, and instead drive defensively.
Let's not do anything that might gather some information!
Yes, that's the general idea. It's written into law in many countries.
Be aware there is a difference between a bad driver and somebody that dries well but above the posted artificialy low limits.
The difference is rationalization.
No, the difference is obviously how wet they start out, whether they go through the spin cycle, and what temperature they dry at. If the drivers are soaking wet, you put them through the spin cycle, and you dry them at a high temperature, drivers get all bent out of shape and shrink.
Your best bet with drivers, like with all sensitive items, is to drip-dry them.
It's notoriously easy to get a false positive on a DNA test if the lab isn't following proper procedure. The ways in which fingerprint tests can be screwed up area much easier to understand for laymen and easier to avoid, too. Courts, labs, juries and judges also have much more experience with fingerprints.
"These chemicals prevent thousands of deaths each year, but we must ban them because they might be causing tens of deaths each year."
Yes, that characterizes the problem: you are overly confident in your statistics.
And, no, "my kind" are the people who say that you must compare the benefits with the risks before making a decision.
We agree that one must make risk/benefit tradeoffs.
The trouble is that your risk/benefit tradeoffs are unsound: you assume that if you haven't seen a risk it must be small or even just doesn't exist. Yet, even a tiny risk, undetectable by any but the most stringent tests, spread of several billion humans, will result in tens of thousands of deaths each year. The problem of assigning risk to specific products becomes even harder when products only cause harm in combination, which is probably the rule rather than the exception.
"My kind" are the kind of people who actually know chemistry, for example.
Yes, that is the problem: your kind of people is overly confident in risk assessments from first principles. Unfortunately, knowledge of chemistry tells you almost nothing about whether the release of chemicals into the environment is safe.
Freon seemed about as safe to chemists as any chemical could be; who could have known that it would cause thousands of deaths each year through an unexpected interaction with the ozone layer which would lead to increased radiation exposure and skin cancer.
Basically, people like you are behaving irrationally, assessing risk irrationally, and putting us all at risk. You use risk/benefit analyses, but your numbers are wrong, so you arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Sure, let's let toddlers die in flammable pajamas, the 3rd world die of malaria, because you think cancer is on the rise.
Frankly, compared to massive releases of untested chemicals, yes those are probably better choices. They are better choices because we have other means of avoiding those problems. Toddlers don't combust spontaneously and they don't smoke (as a rule), so it's easy to avoid them catching fire. And malaria is easy to avoid: stop settling in malaria-infested areas.
Except, the only reason cancer is on the rise is because (a) we can diagnose it better and (b) we've gotten so good at stopping the infectious diseases that used to kill everyone before they got old enough to come down with it.
Except that statisticians attempt to correct for those factors, and they still see an increase in cancer.
But, who needs proof or rational thought when there are scary things running loose!
The only irrational behavior is the "pollute first, ask questions later" attitude you exhibit. Your kind is jumping from one quick fix to another, never stopping to make an accurate tally of the cost in human lives.
It's this kind of thinking that exterminated wild cats and wolves. After all - they're dangerous, right? We have to get rid of them!
If by "this kind" you mean "your kind", you are absolutely right: exterminating wild cats and wolves is quite analogous to exterminating malaria with DDT: you see a short term problem and you make a quick fix technological attempt at a solution with no understanding of the long term consequences.
But it's OK, says the skeptical environmentalists: after all, we do not have definitive proof that all those substances are bad for you.
Never mind that cancer is on the rise (could just be demographics, right?) and that dozens of species other than humans show hormonal abnormalities correlated with the presence of manufacured chemicals (could just be parasitic infections). Why be prudent and conservative if we can increase the GNP by 0.1%?
In fact, it's probably impossible to prove at all that they are bad for you because no single substance may harm you--they may only harm you synergistically. And since you are exposed to all of them constantly, it is impossible to assign responsibility to individual chemicals. But without definitive proof that an individual chemical is harmful by itself, we wouldn't want to limit the freedom of corporations to pollute, would we?
Well, I for one have never heard the word collective used in connection with Communism,
Well, then your education is wanting.
and there's no mention of a connection at m-w.com.
Sure there is, you are just using the dictionary incorrectly. As an adjective, the term carries no communist connotations. But you are using the term as a noun, so you have to click on "collective[2,noun]". There you will find an older usage that is synonymous with "group" (not used much anymore and not referring to an economic organization), and a more modern usage that is short for a "collective farm" and specifically refers to an economic organization in communist countries.
The term "collective" refers specifically to a communist form of work by a group under government guidance. You can't have collectives in the US because there is no government to organize them.
What you are referring to would be more like a "cooperative" in the US--a business enterprise operated and managed by its own customers. Some farming communities used to have for shopping, lending, etc. Cooperatives are a traditional American institution and, unlike collectives, they are independent of government.
But that is entirely unnecessary. The problem with the Wikipedia plea is not that they are asking for donations--donations have always been and will always be an essential part of open source software--it's that they are asking for donations of money. Donations of money are difficult to make and inefficient. Open source software is software that is developed by donations in kind: donations of development time and expertise, bandwidth, and hosting.
Your use of the term "collective" is an apparently deliberate attempt to link open source with communism; I find that reprehensible and intellectually dishonest of you.
Pleas for money by an open source project are usually an indication that there is something pretty fundamentally wrong with the project. Open source projects should generally not require monetary donations, they should live on donations of time, bandwidth, and hosting.
In this case, asking for money suggests that the project isn't well architected. A different architecture would allow the content to be hosted and edited on many sites. Then people could donate bandwidth and hosting instead of money.
The dual Opteron was MORE EXPENSIVE that the G5.
Yes, the author made a bad choice of vendor--another thing he got wrong.
As far as not getting a G5 in a 1U. Where does that come from? WTF does that have to do with the article?
1U packaging greatly reduces the operating expenses for the usual uses these kinds of machines are put to. The fact that the G5's are unavailable in that form factor reduces their usefulness and makes them unacceptable for many applications no matter how fast they may or may not be.
Or just to see the reality?
The reality is that the Barefeats benchmarks are bogus and that the G5 is no better than the Opteron on industry-standard benchmarks. That's all there is to it.
Does your x86 biggotry impair your ability to read?
I don't have x86 bigotry. I stopped caring about processor architectures about a decade ago, when the differences between RISC and CISC stopped mattering.
My choice of platform is driven by software. I recommend you do the same: if you like Mac software, buy a Mac. It doesn't matter how fast it is as long as it's fast enough. Don't try to justify your choice with meaningless and inflated performance claims.
I smoked when i was 13/14 for about a year before I quit.
How lucky that you managed to quit. Most teenagers who start can't quit, and they lose decades of their lives.
the experience of feeling the effects of different drugs should not be robbed from people without their consent.
Parents have the right to have parts of their children's penises removed without their consent and with little demonstrable benefit. Talk about robbing people of experiences. I'd worry about that long before I'd worry robbing kids of the experience of becoming drug addicts.
Maybe instead of money, they need to move to a distributed and replicated system. It's easier for many institutions to donate bandwidth and server space by hosting something than by just giving cash. And it also reduces concerns that a single location may get too much control over the content (remember CDDB?).
People experience the effects of drugs differently because they differ genetically. That probably influences their susceptibility to addiction. It would make a lot of sense to try to even the playing field by vaccinating kids before they become addicted.
Of course, it shouldn't be mandatory. But it should be offered free to any parent who wants it for their child. And it should be carefully tested and monitored initially to make sure it doesn't have any unintended consequences.