High performance sporting is not healthy. Repeat: NOT healthy. I've been training for marathons with an Olympic athlete who consistently runs 42K in under 2 hours 15 minutes. He needs to take a continuos stream of dietary supplements and run 25 kilometers daily, use special cushioning on all his footwear to compensate for the deformation that the impact of running produces, and keep an extremely strict dietary regimen, not to mention constant sports massages to keep himself from cramping as well as a myriad of other things.
Being a professional means pushing your body to extremes it was not meant to take. We're not built to run such distances at those speeds.
Remember though, that only applies to the 0.001% of the population that plays professionally and has masochistic tendencies. Your average slashdotter should get off its ass and at the very least walk a half hour daily. I know that ever since I started running in the morning my day feels much better than before, and indeed I do feel sharper.
Simply not true. I see loads of +4 and +5 comments regarding honest and useful critiques of Linux. It just happens that most of the people doing the critical comments of Linux happen to be trolls or people who haven't a clue about anything computer related or who don't remember what they had to learn about using Windows when they were computer-illiterate.
I mean c'mon, we hear comments about the superiority of Visual Studio or the lack of Photoshop or the suckiness of GIMP all the time. It's just that we've stopped seeing as many "my hardware doesn't work" or "i don't know how to do this or that" because user friendliness and hardware support, just to name two areas, have improved significantly.
The day IBM or HP or Red Hat start complaining about the licensing of the GNU tools MIGHT be the day I take that position seriously. Until then, sounds like typical FUD. It's not like those companies haven't had time to consider a position on the GLP 3 draft. More so, remember Sun has considered licensing Solaris under the GPL.
There is no contradiction in critiquing the negative aspects of corporate power while praising its positive ones. The fact that most/.ers do not argue in favor of socialist revolutions imply that they see certain good in a market economy where corporations are bound to exist. That doesn't mean that we have to submissively accept everything that comes with that.
In all seriousness, in truly critical storage you save your stuff under a RAID1. RAID5 is simply too unreliable for the task(not to mention that those controllers aren't exactly cheap).
So save yourself trouble, money, and grief, and just user logical volume management to replicate drives.
No. Large corporations, unlike small and medium businesses, tend to run standardized suites of up-to-date software and actively managed systems by an internal team of programmers. You evidently haven't seen an IBM salesman in action; they can and will certainly get large corporations to port their software to other platforms if it's necessary to seal the deal with a few extra AIX or AS/400 boxes.
Most of the "local applications" you speak of are frontends to databases; porting them is trivial. I have yet to see a large, significant client-side application developed in-house for which a corporation depends on. At worst, that will comprise only a limited fraction of all desktops.
They've gotten dozens of corporations to blindly switch to ERPs like SAP, which is a massive restructuring business that incurrs potentially millions of dollars. I think they can get clients to use Java and GTK.
The devil always lies in two things: the details, and apathy. See, what most of us as IT staff see as evil, they see as "business as usual", and what they might see as philantropy, we see as "a rationalization for shoddy business".
Everyone will be taking actions throughout their lives which will be morally problematic for someone else. Eating meat, consuming resources, not being polite, having vices, tolerating certain things about other people, not taking a stand on issues, etc. It is inevitable and a part of our highly subjective morality and sense of ethics. If you work for an oil company as a programmer are you supporting their political practices? What if you do sales? What if you're a decision maker but not in contact with that area of that company?
Microsoft managers may not actually care about this. They might not even be doing anything to actually promote such behavior; it is quite possible that all those practices are spontaneous and natural to them. Think about it: if you're in a position of a near-monopoly (or any corporation for that matter), are you really going to consider giving your competition an extra inch? Not unless you're suicidal.
Given that, however, their moral stance on what they do is irrelevant on what I think about them . Sure, they aren't DeBeers, they don't go around killing people, and some might say that their monopoly can't really be considered exactly harmful. But their way of business affects me as a professional in ways which are far more detrimental than what they might be to the average end user. Hence why I feel there are no excuses for their behavior. The only difference between harming a million and harming one person is the number of people that complain. If the intent is the same, it is no better or worse.
I'd rather choose a person who know business than one who knows computers to lead a company. True, a LOT of businessmen are incompetent and don't know squat about anything, but at the end of the day you have to see a business through a businessperson's eyes. That means taking into account issues which might not be regularly considered by other experts.
Look, I'm a computer guy and I despise the fact that many people cannot understand the difficulties in my profession, but I do know that you have to get your shit straight to negotiate with salesmen, accountants, and clients, while projecting the ideas of a company and making sure that all specialties within a company are working fine. Like computer professions, business has aspects that are more art than science, and talented people can squeeze it for all its worth.
While this sounds like aimless Linux zealotry, this will probably be another flurry of people who complain needlessly about Linux package management without having bothered to use it or understanding it superiority to any other sort of package management.
Every significant distro has an easy-to-use frontend to its package manager. I wonder who actually considers its use to be more difficult than hunting the internet for shareware and crapware until you find the right one.
Dependency resolution is not an issue and it hasn't been one for a regular user for looong time. If you're using stuff outside of the package manager repositories then you know what you're doing and you can live with the consequences. I mean, who compiles software in Windows to install it? Have you had to remove esoteric stuff manually after uninstalling something in Linux? I know I've had to clean more than one Registry entry in my Windows install.
Most commercial packages run out-of-the box and set themselves up intelligently (read: VmWare, Crossover, Opera).
User friendly distros already have double-click installation. Ubuntu has GDebi. I'm sure RPM distros have an equivalent.
.tar.gz is used by the 2% of Linux users that want bleeding-edge stuff or want to try what can only be considered "dark magic" by the average user.
Man, an InstallShield-like installer is a step BACKWARDS for package management! I've had to spend hours and dozens of reboots in Windows getting my software right! It's a task that with aptitude or synaptic gets done in under 20 minutes, no reboot, full use of the machine in the meantime. ISVs should be embracing.deb and.rpm. C'mon, it's not that difficult to learn how to package for 3 or 4 major distros! If you know how to write a Makefile you should know how to package software.
At some point they'd figure it out. My expectations for this are still very low, since it's been demonstrated that these record execs are a bunch of conniving bastards, and they'll probably find a way to make this crap.
Still, money talks, and a decrease in sales is just what the doctor ordered, with a healthy injection of brains, in that business.
I really, really don't get where this "Sun is dying" thing is coming from. Having a bunch of friends at IBM and several telcos and consulting businesses, it is simply amazing the number of Sun Fire 25K machines being bought everywhere. These are 72-processor monsters that will set you back a cool $2 million each, and they're in pretty hot demand.
In the market for very large servers, there's only three choices: HP SuperDomes, IBM p590s and p595, and SunFire 25ks. The Sun machines have by far the largest market share, and with the support contracts they are making a pretty penny with each.
Because the people behind this organization want to gain mainstream support, and they know that's something they will never be able to achieve if they take a UNIX-encompassing view.
Sun is already backing Solaris and it has much more weight to throw around than these organizations could ever dream of; I doubt they need to promote OSS as benefit to their operating system, especially considering that, in practice, Solaris is an enterprise platform that usually runs very heavy, very proprietary apps.
OS X has Apple. It's goal is certainly not open source; it's an interesting side effect of using a BSD and LGPL technologies.
The BSDs do not have the commercial interest for any of this, however it is very likely that, being standards-complying OSses, they'll get along for the ride without any trouble.
It is interesting to note that most people here (especially many whose positions were lost) seem to believe that the outsourced labor will always turn out to be of inferior quality and lower productivity.
That has not been the case at the company I'm working for. When several of our clients outsourced their operations and systems operations to South American countries with high levels of literacy and good English skills, they saw a tremendous turnaround in productivity in relation to their American counterparts. They saw work being done in a more timely and efficient manner because of a more focused and motivated workforce.
I'm sure that's not the case most of the time, but it's certainly a reality here that has been repeated many, many times. And where things are still not working out perfectly, there's staff that's acquiring experience and English skills and looks at the prospect of a juicy salary and opportunities in a growing market.
Be on the lookout. Those people that so many of you here denigrate for being inexperienced and inefficient will one day be seasoned professionals. Remember that you were like them once.
I really don't see much use for this in workstations, but for us having a real-life need for this, I'd like to know how it compares in performance to Linux LVM, Veritas File System, AIX LVM with JF2, and NTFS Dynamic Volumes.
Am I the only one that actually likes telecommuting?
Seriously, there's a lot of things to not like about IBM, but telecommuting certainly rocks. For one, I get to skip an hour of traffic coming and going and save up on the money. My job as a sysadmin is very lax and easygoing, and I'm studying Computer Science simultaneously, which means that the free time that I'd spend in the office I can spend home studying or, God forbid, working naked in my bedroom, or outside in the backyard(you CAN take the laptop outside).
Socializing? You just coordinate your time telecommuting so that you have 2 days in the office so you can spend time with your team (assuming that your team is worth spending time with). I'd tell you, in a day with little stuff to do I'd rather do my own socializing inviting a friend over than spending in with a random coworker.
And sleep. Man, there is nothing better for your health than getting to sleep an extra hour because of not having to deal with the bullshit of getting dressed and driving. Better yet, you can get out and run or do exercise before tunring the machine on.
People who dislike telecommuting are simply not creative enough to know how to deal with it. A couple of weekly meetings in person with the rest of the staff suffices to kill the feeling of disconnection. The rest of the free time and benefits you get by being home are absolutely amazing if you use them right. I get to cook, watch TV, or read whatever I want. Yes, it does take personal discipline to lose the distractions when there's work to be done, but it's damn well worth it.
To say that simplicity or complexity on daily objects are mostly a matter of fashion and that complexity is "in" is, ironically, an oversimplification of the matter. Simplicity is good as long as it gets the job done. The one critique we have nowadays with it is that there is little choice of customizability or the possibility to do more complex things.
However, we do not like (or want) complexity by default. Check out the iPod. It's all ABOUT the "grandma factor"; being able to grab it, select the songs, and just grooving. The place where it falls flat on its face is that it's impossible to go beyond that, which is why more technically inclined users have opted for player with more features and clutters.
It is mostly impossible to design an object that is easy to use and yet is incredibly powerful by default. It will depend on the nature of the object and its features of course, but compromises are inevitable. And while I do agree that the whole mentality of "let's have on big button" is detrimental, the opposite extreme is too as long as the added complexity gives little in return.
An example of bad complexity: the sidebar in Konqueror. Absolutely useless 99% of the time. A perfect example where simplification would relieve us of clutter. Example of vital complexity: The cockpit of a 747.
KISS vs. TMTOWTDI should be all about having a full understanding of the use cases of the tool you're about to make and minimizing the number of compromises you have to make in your design, and knowing when to discard features to create a more appealing product for a smaller audience. It's about knowing that, while the perfect product for everyone doesn't exist,excellent products do.
But I frankly don't see any reversal of the outsourcing trend
As foreign workers acquire more and more skills, the gap between them and the first-worlders being replaced diminshes. Already we are seeing this: instead of outsourcing to places like India or China, many companies are turning to not-so-poor but cheap places like Easter Europe, Brazil, or Argentina. Countries where technically skilled people exist but were in low demand, but most importantly where the culture is extremely compatible with their clients'.
(Brazilians or Argentines DO have a language barrier, but their culture is much more similar to that of the US than other people in the globe, which makes their skill acquisition faster).
The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent and interests as yours. I know that personally I've had much more success with my customers due to my American accent than my less linguistically skilled co-workers.
For backups and archival you need tape backups, stored offsite. If you want something with more capacity and faster recovery, a backup server with rsync and beefy hard drives. Nothing else will do. With the time and effort you'll spend searching and writing DVD media you could have already bought and set up a file server or bought that tape drive.
Unless you're going to be taking those backups with you and using them in high volume, backing up to DVDs is simply a waste of time and space, and when you get some dreaded CRC errors you'll be crying for not having done otherwise.
The question is whether UWB will actually be as useful as it's being touted. I certainly know that I have no need or desire to have a home AP that whose signal goes beyond 100 meters. I'm sure most of us won't be using it for that either.
I can see a very practical use for this for quickly deploying an internet infrastructure under an emergency situation, as this would be perfect for creating relays to maintain connectivity to a distant area while covering a huge surface. I'm sure that as time goes on other more inventive applications will come to mind.
"I'll be the first to say that about the US government, but it sucks a lot less than the EU, China or the UN."
I'm guessing that you've never travelled or lived your life in a significant manner outside of the US.
Go live a few years in Holland, hell even in Argentina for that matter, and then try to state that opinion without laughing.
"Sucking a lot less" is a very subjective statement.
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High performance sporting is not healthy. Repeat: NOT healthy. I've been training for marathons with an Olympic athlete who consistently runs 42K in under 2 hours 15 minutes. He needs to take a continuos stream of dietary supplements and run 25 kilometers daily, use special cushioning on all his footwear to compensate for the deformation that the impact of running produces, and keep an extremely strict dietary regimen, not to mention constant sports massages to keep himself from cramping as well as a myriad of other things.
Being a professional means pushing your body to extremes it was not meant to take. We're not built to run such distances at those speeds.
Remember though, that only applies to the 0.001% of the population that plays professionally and has masochistic tendencies. Your average slashdotter should get off its ass and at the very least walk a half hour daily. I know that ever since I started running in the morning my day feels much better than before, and indeed I do feel sharper.
Simply not true. I see loads of +4 and +5 comments regarding honest and useful critiques of Linux. It just happens that most of the people doing the critical comments of Linux happen to be trolls or people who haven't a clue about anything computer related or who don't remember what they had to learn about using Windows when they were computer-illiterate.
I mean c'mon, we hear comments about the superiority of Visual Studio or the lack of Photoshop or the suckiness of GIMP all the time. It's just that we've stopped seeing as many "my hardware doesn't work" or "i don't know how to do this or that" because user friendliness and hardware support, just to name two areas, have improved significantly.
The day IBM or HP or Red Hat start complaining about the licensing of the GNU tools MIGHT be the day I take that position seriously. Until then, sounds like typical FUD. It's not like those companies haven't had time to consider a position on the GLP 3 draft. More so, remember Sun has considered licensing Solaris under the GPL.
There is no contradiction in critiquing the negative aspects of corporate power while praising its positive ones. The fact that most /.ers do not argue in favor of socialist revolutions imply that they see certain good in a market economy where corporations are bound to exist. That doesn't mean that we have to submissively accept everything that comes with that.
It's not considered one line if it has 3398EAFF23 characters.
Bullying is a societal failure. No amount of change of policy will be able to correct it. This is simply another feel-good piece of legislation.
Software RAID FTW!!
In all seriousness, in truly critical storage you save your stuff under a RAID1. RAID5 is simply too unreliable for the task(not to mention that those controllers aren't exactly cheap).
So save yourself trouble, money, and grief, and just user logical volume management to replicate drives.
Company dismisses competitors. News at 11.
Extortion. Plain and simple.
No. Large corporations, unlike small and medium businesses, tend to run standardized suites of up-to-date software and actively managed systems by an internal team of programmers. You evidently haven't seen an IBM salesman in action; they can and will certainly get large corporations to port their software to other platforms if it's necessary to seal the deal with a few extra AIX or AS/400 boxes.
Most of the "local applications" you speak of are frontends to databases; porting them is trivial. I have yet to see a large, significant client-side application developed in-house for which a corporation depends on. At worst, that will comprise only a limited fraction of all desktops.
They've gotten dozens of corporations to blindly switch to ERPs like SAP, which is a massive restructuring business that incurrs potentially millions of dollars. I think they can get clients to use Java and GTK.
The devil always lies in two things: the details, and apathy. See, what most of us as IT staff see as evil, they see as "business as usual", and what they might see as philantropy, we see as "a rationalization for shoddy business".
Everyone will be taking actions throughout their lives which will be morally problematic for someone else. Eating meat, consuming resources, not being polite, having vices, tolerating certain things about other people, not taking a stand on issues, etc. It is inevitable and a part of our highly subjective morality and sense of ethics. If you work for an oil company as a programmer are you supporting their political practices? What if you do sales? What if you're a decision maker but not in contact with that area of that company?
Microsoft managers may not actually care about this. They might not even be doing anything to actually promote such behavior; it is quite possible that all those practices are spontaneous and natural to them. Think about it: if you're in a position of a near-monopoly (or any corporation for that matter), are you really going to consider giving your competition an extra inch? Not unless you're suicidal.
Given that, however, their moral stance on what they do is irrelevant on what I think about them . Sure, they aren't DeBeers, they don't go around killing people, and some might say that their monopoly can't really be considered exactly harmful. But their way of business affects me as a professional in ways which are far more detrimental than what they might be to the average end user. Hence why I feel there are no excuses for their behavior. The only difference between harming a million and harming one person is the number of people that complain. If the intent is the same, it is no better or worse.
I'd rather choose a person who know business than one who knows computers to lead a company. True, a LOT of businessmen are incompetent and don't know squat about anything, but at the end of the day you have to see a business through a businessperson's eyes. That means taking into account issues which might not be regularly considered by other experts.
Look, I'm a computer guy and I despise the fact that many people cannot understand the difficulties in my profession, but I do know that you have to get your shit straight to negotiate with salesmen, accountants, and clients, while projecting the ideas of a company and making sure that all specialties within a company are working fine. Like computer professions, business has aspects that are more art than science, and talented people can squeeze it for all its worth.
While this sounds like aimless Linux zealotry, this will probably be another flurry of people who complain needlessly about Linux package management without having bothered to use it or understanding it superiority to any other sort of package management.
Man, an InstallShield-like installer is a step BACKWARDS for package management! I've had to spend hours and dozens of reboots in Windows getting my software right! It's a task that with aptitude or synaptic gets done in under 20 minutes, no reboot, full use of the machine in the meantime. ISVs should be embracing .deb and .rpm. C'mon, it's not that difficult to learn how to package for 3 or 4 major distros! If you know how to write a Makefile you should know how to package software.
At some point they'd figure it out. My expectations for this are still very low, since it's been demonstrated that these record execs are a bunch of conniving bastards, and they'll probably find a way to make this crap.
Still, money talks, and a decrease in sales is just what the doctor ordered, with a healthy injection of brains, in that business.
I really, really don't get where this "Sun is dying" thing is coming from. Having a bunch of friends at IBM and several telcos and consulting businesses, it is simply amazing the number of Sun Fire 25K machines being bought everywhere. These are 72-processor monsters that will set you back a cool $2 million each, and they're in pretty hot demand.
In the market for very large servers, there's only three choices: HP SuperDomes, IBM p590s and p595, and SunFire 25ks. The Sun machines have by far the largest market share, and with the support contracts they are making a pretty penny with each.
Because the people behind this organization want to gain mainstream support, and they know that's something they will never be able to achieve if they take a UNIX-encompassing view.
Sun is already backing Solaris and it has much more weight to throw around than these organizations could ever dream of; I doubt they need to promote OSS as benefit to their operating system, especially considering that, in practice, Solaris is an enterprise platform that usually runs very heavy, very proprietary apps.
OS X has Apple. It's goal is certainly not open source; it's an interesting side effect of using a BSD and LGPL technologies.
The BSDs do not have the commercial interest for any of this, however it is very likely that, being standards-complying OSses, they'll get along for the ride without any trouble.
It is interesting to note that most people here (especially many whose positions were lost) seem to believe that the outsourced labor will always turn out to be of inferior quality and lower productivity.
That has not been the case at the company I'm working for. When several of our clients outsourced their operations and systems operations to South American countries with high levels of literacy and good English skills, they saw a tremendous turnaround in productivity in relation to their American counterparts. They saw work being done in a more timely and efficient manner because of a more focused and motivated workforce.
I'm sure that's not the case most of the time, but it's certainly a reality here that has been repeated many, many times. And where things are still not working out perfectly, there's staff that's acquiring experience and English skills and looks at the prospect of a juicy salary and opportunities in a growing market.
Be on the lookout. Those people that so many of you here denigrate for being inexperienced and inefficient will one day be seasoned professionals. Remember that you were like them once.
I really don't see much use for this in workstations, but for us having a real-life need for this, I'd like to know how it compares in performance to Linux LVM, Veritas File System, AIX LVM with JF2, and NTFS Dynamic Volumes.
Am I the only one that actually likes telecommuting?
Seriously, there's a lot of things to not like about IBM, but telecommuting certainly rocks. For one, I get to skip an hour of traffic coming and going and save up on the money. My job as a sysadmin is very lax and easygoing, and I'm studying Computer Science simultaneously, which means that the free time that I'd spend in the office I can spend home studying or, God forbid, working naked in my bedroom, or outside in the backyard(you CAN take the laptop outside).
Socializing? You just coordinate your time telecommuting so that you have 2 days in the office so you can spend time with your team (assuming that your team is worth spending time with). I'd tell you, in a day with little stuff to do I'd rather do my own socializing inviting a friend over than spending in with a random coworker.
And sleep. Man, there is nothing better for your health than getting to sleep an extra hour because of not having to deal with the bullshit of getting dressed and driving. Better yet, you can get out and run or do exercise before tunring the machine on.
People who dislike telecommuting are simply not creative enough to know how to deal with it. A couple of weekly meetings in person with the rest of the staff suffices to kill the feeling of disconnection. The rest of the free time and benefits you get by being home are absolutely amazing if you use them right. I get to cook, watch TV, or read whatever I want. Yes, it does take personal discipline to lose the distractions when there's work to be done, but it's damn well worth it.
Cosas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/
To say that simplicity or complexity on daily objects are mostly a matter of fashion and that complexity is "in" is, ironically, an oversimplification of the matter. Simplicity is good as long as it gets the job done. The one critique we have nowadays with it is that there is little choice of customizability or the possibility to do more complex things.
However, we do not like (or want) complexity by default. Check out the iPod. It's all ABOUT the "grandma factor"; being able to grab it, select the songs, and just grooving. The place where it falls flat on its face is that it's impossible to go beyond that, which is why more technically inclined users have opted for player with more features and clutters.
It is mostly impossible to design an object that is easy to use and yet is incredibly powerful by default. It will depend on the nature of the object and its features of course, but compromises are inevitable. And while I do agree that the whole mentality of "let's have on big button" is detrimental, the opposite extreme is too as long as the added complexity gives little in return.
An example of bad complexity: the sidebar in Konqueror. Absolutely useless 99% of the time. A perfect example where simplification would relieve us of clutter. Example of vital complexity: The cockpit of a 747.
KISS vs. TMTOWTDI should be all about having a full understanding of the use cases of the tool you're about to make and minimizing the number of compromises you have to make in your design, and knowing when to discard features to create a more appealing product for a smaller audience. It's about knowing that, while the perfect product for everyone doesn't exist,excellent products do.
Cosas de un sysadmin argentin: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/
But I frankly don't see any reversal of the outsourcing trend
As foreign workers acquire more and more skills, the gap between them and the first-worlders being replaced diminshes. Already we are seeing this: instead of outsourcing to places like India or China, many companies are turning to not-so-poor but cheap places like Easter Europe, Brazil, or Argentina. Countries where technically skilled people exist but were in low demand, but most importantly where the culture is extremely compatible with their clients'.
(Brazilians or Argentines DO have a language barrier, but their culture is much more similar to that of the US than other people in the globe, which makes their skill acquisition faster).
The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent and interests as yours. I know that personally I've had much more success with my customers due to my American accent than my less linguistically skilled co-workers.
sig: Cosas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/
Repeating again and again and again:
For backups and archival you need tape backups, stored offsite. If you want something with more capacity and faster recovery, a backup server with rsync and beefy hard drives. Nothing else will do. With the time and effort you'll spend searching and writing DVD media you could have already bought and set up a file server or bought that tape drive.
Unless you're going to be taking those backups with you and using them in high volume, backing up to DVDs is simply a waste of time and space, and when you get some dreaded CRC errors you'll be crying for not having done otherwise.
sig: Cosas varias de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/
The question is whether UWB will actually be as useful as it's being touted. I certainly know that I have no need or desire to have a home AP that whose signal goes beyond 100 meters. I'm sure most of us won't be using it for that either.
I can see a very practical use for this for quickly deploying an internet infrastructure under an emergency situation, as this would be perfect for creating relays to maintain connectivity to a distant area while covering a huge surface. I'm sure that as time goes on other more inventive applications will come to mind.
Las quejas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/
Change first requires an expression in limited but signifacant forms.
You can't start a revolution or a movement if people aren't aware of your existence.
"I'll be the first to say that about the US government, but it sucks a lot less than the EU, China or the UN." I'm guessing that you've never travelled or lived your life in a significant manner outside of the US. Go live a few years in Holland, hell even in Argentina for that matter, and then try to state that opinion without laughing. "Sucking a lot less" is a very subjective statement.