Because we're not any different from the rest of the animals, who [...] talk to animals on the other side of the world whom they have never perceived in any way besides the imagination and cognitave communication [...]. Do animals have imagination? Do animals have an appreciation for anything which doesn't physically affect them (make them feel good)?
All good questions, and a good counter-point to GP. But there's one thing lacking - how do we know? Cats don't use computers (except when they walk across keyboards), but can we really know they aren't communicating with other cats or other animals, around the world, using "cognitive communication" (ie some form of telepathy or universal consciousness)? Sure it seems outlandish to think this, but its an assumption you implicitly make. Let's be explicit and say that, given our understanding of feline communication skills & abilities, we don't believe they have any form of telepathic communication. But perhaps our understanding of how the brain (human or feline) works is insufficient.
And I think you could make a fair argument (not conclusive, but fair), that animals do have imagination. We used to have horses, and one of them would get scared of a scary-looking tree on the driveway. The tree never did anything to this horse, but the horse would always get very nervous around that tree. Now, perhaps the horse was "imagining" something scary; or perhaps the horse really did sense something dangerous there that we humans could not. I don't know.
And again, perhaps all we can perceive of animal happiness is their physical expressions; but do we have any way of knowing their internal state? And I think you overstate human capability. Can you really appreciate a snowbank in -40 C weather if you were standing there naked? I would tend to think not, unless it was a dying, delusional thought. You can appreciate the snowbank only when you have a sufficient level of physical comfort.
In fact, I'll really play devil's advocate and say animals have a greater appreciation for nature than humans do. [Some] animals have the ability to change their surroundings - a beaver, for example, will dam a creek and build a home. They don't destroy their surroundings in the same way humans do.
When someone's life is involved, why the fuck would you be on the internet trying to find a hospital. We have a number for that, 911. If you're in Europe, 112.
What the GP was saying was that his mother was already AT the hospital, and the nurse called him to tell him his mother had had a heart attack. But with crappy Cingular (I have them too - once my contract is up I'm switching), he couldn't understand what hospital his mother was at - he just heard part of the name. But with google, that part was enough to get him the full name and a number to call back, and probably directions to drive down there.
I think you really oversimplify things. (Disclaimer - I do IT for a hospital finance department)
Hospitals (IMHO) are definitely willing to work with patients to pay their bills - set up payment plans, negiotiate some kind of discount, etc. But hospitals have bills to pay too. Insurance companies screw the hospitals by rejecting claims for outrageous reasons, or by continually changing the rules you have to use to file claims for payment. And as the price of insurance goes up, more & more uninsured people are skipping regular clinic visits (that would keep them healthier) and start coming to hospitals for emergency care (since the hospitals can't turn them away).
So what's a hospital supposed to do? You go to the hospital for your broken leg, they fix it & send you a bill, and you offer them 10c on the dollar, "take it or leave it?" Hospitals are generous - but they need to get paid too. They'll give you a decent chance to pay your bill, and if you don't, they send you to the collection agency, who gets a cut of whatever they collect. Sure, the hospital may eventually write you off, but only when collections says they can't get any more money from you.
Look, Linux is an operating system. It's supposed to operate and help people do their WORK. Adding philosophical crap on something as flat as "computers and operating systems", is just laughable. The best operating system is the one that WORKS with the smallest needed effort. Windows does that pretty well. If Linux needs special extra work and purchase of extra hardware, then it's not a good operating system (from a user's point of view). Users don't care about the source code. Users want a working machine and OS.
You make some good points - but having a stable API/ABI doesn't resolve them.
Right now, the Linux market doesn't seem to have enough pressure to force driver manufacturers to spend resources developing drivers for it. That's not going to change if Linux provides a stable driver API/ABI. What it will do is lower the barrier to providing a closed-source driver. Some may think that's a good thing, but there's enough evidence in this conversation & its links to suggest otherwise: 1. If you let manufacturers produce a closed-source, binary driver, that's what they'll do. 2. If they produce a closed-source, binary driver, it'll only work on a specific version of Linux, for a particular architecture, since binary compatibility depends upon the compiler & compiler options being used. 3. Manufacturers still won't put more resources towards driver development, so you'll get a bunch of half-assed drivers with bugs that now live in kernel space, with the potential to crash your system (ala Windows BSOD) 4. You also get a bunch of unknown binary code running on your system in kernel space, meaning security flaws in those products can now compromise your entire system. And then we can't fix kernel security bugs, because that might break binary compatibility.
So, allowing binary drivers gives no real advantages over the long-term. Companies that care about Linux can and do produce Linux drivers. Companies that don't, won't. I see no advantage to making it easier to produce Linux drivers for companies that don't care about Linux - all that will do is give Linux a bad name as companies with faulty drivers pollute users' machines, and make it more difficult for kernel hackers to debug problems due to bad binary drivers.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Not that your observations are wrong, obviously - just that it's my experience that wealth is not so cut-and-dried along political lines.
I live in a very liberal city (Madison, WI). There's a lot of well-educated, wealthy people here, many of whom (based on local politics and recent elections) vote liberal. A lot of more rural areas (which tend to have less wealthy individuals), both in Wisconsin and nation-wide, vote conservative. At the same time, you have many conservative business owners who, as you mentioned, tend to vote to the right.
I think people tend to vote more on ideology, and here the conservatives have a strong following on two orthogonal axes - the "values" plank (typified by the pro-life movement), and the pro-business plank (tax breaks & trickle-down economics). The liberals tend to appeal to a more diverse segment - environmentalists, humanitarians, those willing to spend more government money on social & educational programs, etc. Not all of those are people who necessarily directly benefit from such programs, just as not all conservatives directly benefit from a pro-life or pro-business agenda. But that's where their ideology lies.
C'mon, let's be a little more accurate here - let's say the company in question serves its coffee 20 degF hotter than its average competitor and has had numerous complaints & out-of-court settlements due to the extreme temperature of its coffee. This company obviously knows it serves coffee dangerously hot - it admits it, and said it had no plans to change.
An elderly woman, trying to consume the coffee she just purchased, spills it on herself. She's clearly made a mistake, and it cost her dearly - 3rd degree burns *within 3 seconds* (at the temperature of McDonalds' coffee) to her thighs & groin. McDonald's says she didn't get out of her clothes fast enough. Maybe a horny college guy can drop his pants in 3 seconds, but not an 81 year-old woman.
Furthermore, at numerous points throughout this process, the woman & her attorney offered to settle out of court. McDonald absolutely refused - they offered her $800, and that was it. Tell me - how much do you think medical bills to re-flesh your groin are? I bet the painkillers alone cost more than $800.
The jury found McDonald's at 80% fault and awarded the woman $160,000 in compensatory damages. The jury then awarded the woman $2.7 million (2 days worth of coffee sales) in punitive damages, as a punishment to McDonald's. But the judge reduced that to $480,000.
So let's see... McDonald's serves coffee at dangerously hot levels capable of harming consumers more than they realize (did *you* know you could get 3rd degree burns in 3 seconds from McDonald's coffe??). A woman is painfully injured as a result of this. McDonald's completely denies liability for her accident. The jury disagrees and finds them 80% at fault. McDonald's pays $640k to the woman (total), which is about a half-days' worth of coffee sales. That's not a drop in the cup to McDonalds.
Maybe they settle a couple of hundred-thousand dollar cases every few years. That's just another cost of doing business. Software companies don't even have that cost at all. How much was Microsoft sued for when Code Red took down IIS servers all over? How much does Microsoft settle for out of court everytime a new worm spreads through Outlook/Exchange servers? What was Microsoft's profit margin again last year?
All corporations are greedy. Software companies just managed to skip out on the liability "cost of business".
* They were running RHEL 3.0, which was certified by SAP * They were running it on SAP-certified IBM servers * The IT manager was used to running SAP on AIX * They used Red Hat-recommended contractors to install & configure RHEL for SAP, which took 2 weeks * IBM confirmed (apparently) that the hardware was not at fault * Patches were installed manually to ensure SAP certification, taking about 2 days a month for testing/installing.
Obviously the reason you are having trouble is because you didn't bother to RTFA and decided to spout whatever zealot talking points came to your fingertips, and expected to be right. You're not.
Newsflash - Linux isn't perfect and isn't always better than Windows. The FA says it best:
"We got to the point where we had a business requirement to move on, we couldn't wait for the error to occur again, because it was not a reproducible error," he says.
Uh, sorry, you were corrected elsewhere & I'll correct you here, as well.
Most of the country's teachers do NOT earn upwards of $45,000 for 8 months of work. The median *annual* salary range is just $40-$44k, and starting average salary is $30k. The lowest 10% of teachers make $25-$30k.
These figures are also undoubtedly skewed by teachers who perform extra functions (coaching sports, advising extra curriculars, and teaching summer school) to up their salary.
Assuming these employees get a teacher salary of maybe $30k, and an IBM pension, and benefits - yeah, that'd be a decent gig. But let's not over-inflate numbers here.
Why didn't we have the military there sooner to bring stability?
<smart-ass mode=ON>Because it takes a long time to fly back from Iraq!</smart-ass>
Seriously though - this is a complex situation, and it's going to take a while to figure out what really happened, and what could have been done. Hopefully this will lead to some real policy changes & real plans getting made, instead of just words being said.
but for the able-bodied people, there's something to be said for just getting up and leaving. Take the bus as far out of town as possible and then start walking. Or grab a cheap-ass bike and start making progress. You could make a good 30 miles over the 2 day warning period. Or hitchhike. Hell, $20 will get you 100 miles on a Greyhound bus. If you've got enough money to eat for the next 2 days, you've got enough to get out of the way of the disaster.
Nice idealism.
I suspect the reality is a bit different. You're a poor person working in a dead-end job making minimum wage (if that). You *could* take off on foot, or bus, or bike, to get out of town.. but then what? You probably have no (or very, very little) money to buy food, nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go. And on top of that, by the time you got back (assuming this hadn't turned into some massive disaster), you'd probably have lost whatever lame job you had (don't show up for work one day, you're gone!), so then you'd get *no* money.
And that doesn't even factor in any family members you're responsible for taking care of. Can't really pack up the mom, the wife, and the kids and hit the road so easily as you can if you're a loner.
Answer yourself on another question: Why we use RAIDs in servers and not only make a daily backup?
Two different problem sets - might as well ask yourself, why would people use laptops when they could just have a desktop with RAID?
Laptops, of course, offer portability. RAID in a laptop reduces that portability by increasing weight & power consumption. I'm not saying RAID in laptops is absolutely ludicrous - just that it doesn't make sense for a lot of people who value the portability of a laptop (which is probably why they bought a laptop in the first place).
I've got an $1900 bill from Ontrack Data Recovery sitting next to me that would explain the situation nicely. In the business world, not everyone is a tech-savvy geek with a broadband connection or a secure backup technique.
And how would having RAID on your laptop prevented that bill? Let's take a look:
1. If you use RAID-0, you get increased performance but 50% higher chance of failure. Wouldn't have helped, so the rest of this assumes RAID-1
2. Assuming failure was caused by dropped laptop: Minor chance that second drive would have survived when first one didn't.
3. Assuming failure was caused by spilled beverage burning out the drive: Again, minor chance that second drive wouldn't have been affected as well.
4. Assuming failure was caused by overheating of machine: If both drives are the same model their tolerances would similar, so again there's a minor chance the second drive would have survived.
5. Assuming failure was due to drive just going bad: Very good chance second drive would have survived, assuming this was some kind of manufacturing defect/bad component, and not brought about by usage & environmental conditions.
So out of 4 scenarios, only 1 gives you a good chance that having a RAID-1 array would have saved you. And what does RAID-1 cost you? 1. Decreased battery life 2. Increased heat 3. Larger case 4. More weight 5. More expensive
Let's take a look at your other options:
1. USB flash memory - quick, small, pretty reliable. Great for datasets 512 MB; very little power usage.
2. CDRW - Available standard on most commercial laptops. Burns a backup CD in about 10 minutes, start to finish. Good solution for datasets 700 mb. Can carry backup/restore CD if you needed to rebuild on the road. Downside: CDs can be easy to scratch, although slim cases can protect against that in not much more space than the CD itself. Uses power when it's running, but otherwise little (if any) power draw.
3. USB 2.0 Hard Drive: Using a laptop HD and a 2.5" case, you can get good performance in a small, external package. Plug in once a day, do your backup, unplug it & put it back in your bag. A little more expensive than options 1 & 2, a little larger, but can get you much higher capacity (80gb now for 2.5" HDs?), and as a bonus, you get an extra drive you could swap in if your main drive fails. This also uses roughly equivalent power to a RAID array when you're using it, but if you just do backups on it then it's not running constantly.
These are all widely-available technologies available right now, that you don't have to be a "tech-savvy geek" to use - everything supports drag & drop.
I'm not saying RAID doesn't have any place at all in laptops - I just don't see the advantage of it for most business/home-class users; and I don't think data redundancy is as big of a factor as some think it would be.
"In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health." --- Oh, Microsoft! You had me at hello!
Why a laptop, though? As cheap as laptops are, desktops are cheaper and more upgradeable. You can buy your kid a desktop computer during the middle school years, and upgrade it occassionally until the kid gets to high school or college and needs (or wants) a laptop or a faster gaming machine.
I had a laptop for a bit in high school, purchased used with my own money. It was fun, no doubt, but it wasn't something I really made full use of until college & work. That's when the portability of a laptop really kicked in as a necessity for me. Do students really need that kind of portability?
At any rate, I do agree with the notion of having a computer instead of an xbox or PS2 - at least, that's worked for me. Of course, a lot of friends had gaming consoles so I could just mooch off of them:)
As far as I can see, I get stuff for free which seems to work just fine for my purposes. This kind of reaction is similar to what I see when "people" protest Walmart's effect on Mom-Pop businesses. What should I care about Mom-Pop businesses as long as I get low prices? I go to a shop to buy stuff, not to socialize with the owners.
If "low prices" were the only factor to be considered, then you would be absolutely correct to choose Walmart. But price is not the only factor - its only the most *visible* factor. Consider some of the hidden, long-term ramifications:
1. After a few months or years of consumers choosing "low prices", the Mom & Pop stores goes out of business. Now Walmart has no competition, so they can edge prices back up and consumers won't realize it.
2. Assuming Mom-Pop stores were locally owned, the money you spent there (for the most part) stayed in the community. Mom & Pop would be more likely to take their profits & invest or donate locally. The profits of your local Walmart leave the community, depriving it of those investments & donations.
3. Most of the "cheap stuff" at Walmart is produced in China. Buying at Walmart is voting with your $$ - it increases US demand for cheap Chinese products and decreases demand for locally-produced goods (causing job loss, etc). I'm not generally a trade-protectionist, but I much prefer locally produced goods if available at a reasonably competitive value.
4. "Feeding the monster" - Walmart has grown to mythic proporations (2% of the US GDP, all by itself). At its size, it now has a lot of power in US and international politics. I'm not aware of how much Walmart exercizes that power, but concentrating so much power in one entity runs counter to the very principle of democracy. When it comes down to it, who will your elected representatives really listen to - the people, or the $$$ (Walmart)? Since $$$ buys elections in the US, don't count on your voice being heard if Walmart's got the other ear.
5. Walmart is continually forcing suppliers to reduce their price, which forces suppliers to reduce product quality and longevity - essentially making everything disposable. So consumers may get a cheaper microwave now, but they'll have to replace it more often. And since products are not built for repair, that means buying a new device & throwing out the old one = higher cost in the long run.
If consumers were to take everything into account (ideally-educated consumers), then I don't believe Walmart would always be the best choice. Sometimes it would, sometimes it would not, but there would be more room for competition. But consumers tend to focus almost exclusively on price, which Walmart has really been able to capitalize on.
One thing VHS can do that DVD cannot do is remember where in the program you are when you want to take the medium out and move to another room and resume in another player.
No matter how good of a DVD player you have, it won't know where you stopped watching the movie IN ANOTHER PLAYER (since DVDs are read-only).
Of course, you can jump back to that spot fairly quickly, assuming the DVD has reasonable-length chapters
I don't want my kid to walk in on the babysitter looking at porn. This is a reasonable law to ensure that parents have the option to control what is viewed in their house.
Since this service is "opt-in", I'm not vehemently opposed to it, but I still don't like it. There already are plenty of ways that parents can prevent children/babysitters/others from accessing adult content - for example, there's plenty of filter packages you can purchase. Or simply locking the computer with a password so it can't be used unless the parent is there.
In addition, this law would only be marginally effective - children & babysitters will be able to find ways around the block, either by using a web proxy, finding sites that aren't blocked, or downloading smut via P2P. If the parents really want to prevent their childrens' exposure to adult content, it needs happen through good parenting & good education, not technical obstacles.
What I would much rather see is a more widespread use of power/clock-throttling during such usage. It's been common in notebooks for awhile, I'd like to see that migrate more to the desktop (it's happening now, but I don't get the sense that its all here just yet).
Think of how much money businesses would save if instead of running 500 or 1000 Dell machines w/ P4's at 200+ W each, they could switch to Pentium M workstations running 100+ W each. Saves money on electricity and saves money on A/C usage & maintenance.
I found out about KeePass (http://keepass.sourceforge.net/) on that previous story, so I've started using it. It's a very handy utility to have! It can keep track of all my passwords for various email accounts, websites, etc. It's a simple program that (based on my experience so far), just works!
If you wanted portability, you could keep your password database on a USB memory drive and carry that around with you.
I see that they just released 1.0 on June 4th - congrats!! I highly recommend people check it out!
I have every right to share music I paid for. If I want you to hear my copy of music, it is my absolute right to show it to you.
I don't agree with the RIAA's actions, but you are simply wrong. You have no right to share music you have paid for, except for the rights granted to you by the copyright holder and US law (assuming you are a US citizen purchasing music in the US). Fair use does not extend to "sharing the music with everyone on the internet".
If you want free music, you can find it out there. Just not from the RIAA. Support musicians and companies that allow you to freely trade their music. Don't support the RIAA monster by "consuming" their drivel - just drop them altogether.
And what does this show? That Microsoft got your clients' dime (well, many dimes), and they racked up the sales numbers for reports like this. Is this data representative of what's in "the real world"? No, of course not - but it does show what's being bought, and marketing/PHBs can look at these numbers to justify or rationalize their purchasing decisions.
It's great that your company is now running a linux server park - but both your company & linux in general would have been much better served by purchasing linux servers up front. Of course, you knew that - it's too bad the consultants didn't and squandered your company's money.
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Besides, I moved from West Virginia to South Florida when I was 11. Seventeen years of hearing hillbilly jokes tends to thicken the skin!
;-)
Wow - that's some pretty cool time compression to fit 17 years of jokes into 11!
Or did you just really *not* want to come out of the womb?
Because we're not any different from the rest of the animals, who [...] talk to animals on the other side of the world whom they have never perceived in any way besides the imagination and cognitave communication [...].
Do animals have imagination?
Do animals have an appreciation for anything which doesn't physically affect them (make them feel good)?
All good questions, and a good counter-point to GP. But there's one thing lacking - how do we know? Cats don't use computers (except when they walk across keyboards), but can we really know they aren't communicating with other cats or other animals, around the world, using "cognitive communication" (ie some form of telepathy or universal consciousness)? Sure it seems outlandish to think this, but its an assumption you implicitly make. Let's be explicit and say that, given our understanding of feline communication skills & abilities, we don't believe they have any form of telepathic communication. But perhaps our understanding of how the brain (human or feline) works is insufficient.
And I think you could make a fair argument (not conclusive, but fair), that animals do have imagination. We used to have horses, and one of them would get scared of a scary-looking tree on the driveway. The tree never did anything to this horse, but the horse would always get very nervous around that tree. Now, perhaps the horse was "imagining" something scary; or perhaps the horse really did sense something dangerous there that we humans could not. I don't know.
And again, perhaps all we can perceive of animal happiness is their physical expressions; but do we have any way of knowing their internal state? And I think you overstate human capability. Can you really appreciate a snowbank in -40 C weather if you were standing there naked? I would tend to think not, unless it was a dying, delusional thought. You can appreciate the snowbank only when you have a sufficient level of physical comfort.
In fact, I'll really play devil's advocate and say animals have a greater appreciation for nature than humans do. [Some] animals have the ability to change their surroundings - a beaver, for example, will dam a creek and build a home. They don't destroy their surroundings in the same way humans do.
When someone's life is involved, why the fuck would you be on the internet trying to find a hospital. We have a number for that, 911. If you're in Europe, 112.
What the GP was saying was that his mother was already AT the hospital, and the nurse called him to tell him his mother had had a heart attack. But with crappy Cingular (I have them too - once my contract is up I'm switching), he couldn't understand what hospital his mother was at - he just heard part of the name. But with google, that part was enough to get him the full name and a number to call back, and probably directions to drive down there.
I think you really oversimplify things. (Disclaimer - I do IT for a hospital finance department)
Hospitals (IMHO) are definitely willing to work with patients to pay their bills - set up payment plans, negiotiate some kind of discount, etc. But hospitals have bills to pay too. Insurance companies screw the hospitals by rejecting claims for outrageous reasons, or by continually changing the rules you have to use to file claims for payment. And as the price of insurance goes up, more & more uninsured people are skipping regular clinic visits (that would keep them healthier) and start coming to hospitals for emergency care (since the hospitals can't turn them away).
So what's a hospital supposed to do? You go to the hospital for your broken leg, they fix it & send you a bill, and you offer them 10c on the dollar, "take it or leave it?" Hospitals are generous - but they need to get paid too. They'll give you a decent chance to pay your bill, and if you don't, they send you to the collection agency, who gets a cut of whatever they collect. Sure, the hospital may eventually write you off, but only when collections says they can't get any more money from you.
Or the non-techies who wrote the laws didn't realize the scope of their wording.
Sure about that?
By then M$ will be getting ready to start alpha testing for windows codename blackhole, based on singularity.
Boy, that'll really suck!
*rimshot*
Look, Linux is an operating system. It's supposed to operate and help people do their WORK. Adding philosophical crap on something as flat as "computers and operating systems", is just laughable. The best operating system is the one that WORKS with the smallest needed effort. Windows does that pretty well. If Linux needs special extra work and purchase of extra hardware, then it's not a good operating system (from a user's point of view). Users don't care about the source code. Users want a working machine and OS.
You make some good points - but having a stable API/ABI doesn't resolve them.
Right now, the Linux market doesn't seem to have enough pressure to force driver manufacturers to spend resources developing drivers for it. That's not going to change if Linux provides a stable driver API/ABI. What it will do is lower the barrier to providing a closed-source driver. Some may think that's a good thing, but there's enough evidence in this conversation & its links to suggest otherwise:
1. If you let manufacturers produce a closed-source, binary driver, that's what they'll do.
2. If they produce a closed-source, binary driver, it'll only work on a specific version of Linux, for a particular architecture, since binary compatibility depends upon the compiler & compiler options being used.
3. Manufacturers still won't put more resources towards driver development, so you'll get a bunch of half-assed drivers with bugs that now live in kernel space, with the potential to crash your system (ala Windows BSOD)
4. You also get a bunch of unknown binary code running on your system in kernel space, meaning security flaws in those products can now compromise your entire system. And then we can't fix kernel security bugs, because that might break binary compatibility.
So, allowing binary drivers gives no real advantages over the long-term. Companies that care about Linux can and do produce Linux drivers. Companies that don't, won't. I see no advantage to making it easier to produce Linux drivers for companies that don't care about Linux - all that will do is give Linux a bad name as companies with faulty drivers pollute users' machines, and make it more difficult for kernel hackers to debug problems due to bad binary drivers.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Not that your observations are wrong, obviously - just that it's my experience that wealth is not so cut-and-dried along political lines.
I live in a very liberal city (Madison, WI). There's a lot of well-educated, wealthy people here, many of whom (based on local politics and recent elections) vote liberal. A lot of more rural areas (which tend to have less wealthy individuals), both in Wisconsin and nation-wide, vote conservative. At the same time, you have many conservative business owners who, as you mentioned, tend to vote to the right.
I think people tend to vote more on ideology, and here the conservatives have a strong following on two orthogonal axes - the "values" plank (typified by the pro-life movement), and the pro-business plank (tax breaks & trickle-down economics). The liberals tend to appeal to a more diverse segment - environmentalists, humanitarians, those willing to spend more government money on social & educational programs, etc. Not all of those are people who necessarily directly benefit from such programs, just as not all conservatives directly benefit from a pro-life or pro-business agenda. But that's where their ideology lies.
Just my $0.02, anyway.
C'mon, let's be a little more accurate here - let's say the company in question serves its coffee 20 degF hotter than its average competitor and has had numerous complaints & out-of-court settlements due to the extreme temperature of its coffee. This company obviously knows it serves coffee dangerously hot - it admits it, and said it had no plans to change.
An elderly woman, trying to consume the coffee she just purchased, spills it on herself. She's clearly made a mistake, and it cost her dearly - 3rd degree burns *within 3 seconds* (at the temperature of McDonalds' coffee) to her thighs & groin. McDonald's says she didn't get out of her clothes fast enough. Maybe a horny college guy can drop his pants in 3 seconds, but not an 81 year-old woman.
Furthermore, at numerous points throughout this process, the woman & her attorney offered to settle out of court. McDonald absolutely refused - they offered her $800, and that was it. Tell me - how much do you think medical bills to re-flesh your groin are? I bet the painkillers alone cost more than $800.
The jury found McDonald's at 80% fault and awarded the woman $160,000 in compensatory damages. The jury then awarded the woman $2.7 million (2 days worth of coffee sales) in punitive damages, as a punishment to McDonald's. But the judge reduced that to $480,000.
So let's see... McDonald's serves coffee at dangerously hot levels capable of harming consumers more than they realize (did *you* know you could get 3rd degree burns in 3 seconds from McDonald's coffe??). A woman is painfully injured as a result of this. McDonald's completely denies liability for her accident. The jury disagrees and finds them 80% at fault. McDonald's pays $640k to the woman (total), which is about a half-days' worth of coffee sales. That's not a drop in the cup to McDonalds.
Maybe they settle a couple of hundred-thousand dollar cases every few years. That's just another cost of doing business. Software companies don't even have that cost at all. How much was Microsoft sued for when Code Red took down IIS servers all over? How much does Microsoft settle for out of court everytime a new worm spreads through Outlook/Exchange servers? What was Microsoft's profit margin again last year?
All corporations are greedy. Software companies just managed to skip out on the liability "cost of business".
Maybe you should try RTFA:
* They were running RHEL 3.0, which was certified by SAP
* They were running it on SAP-certified IBM servers
* The IT manager was used to running SAP on AIX
* They used Red Hat-recommended contractors to install & configure RHEL for SAP, which took 2 weeks
* IBM confirmed (apparently) that the hardware was not at fault
* Patches were installed manually to ensure SAP certification, taking about 2 days a month for testing/installing.
Obviously the reason you are having trouble is because you didn't bother to RTFA and decided to spout whatever zealot talking points came to your fingertips, and expected to be right. You're not.
Newsflash - Linux isn't perfect and isn't always better than Windows. The FA says it best:
"We got to the point where we had a business requirement to move on, we couldn't wait for the error to occur again, because it was not a reproducible error," he says.
Uh, sorry, you were corrected elsewhere & I'll correct you here, as well.
Most of the country's teachers do NOT earn upwards of $45,000 for 8 months of work. The median *annual* salary range is just $40-$44k, and starting average salary is $30k. The lowest 10% of teachers make $25-$30k.
These figures are also undoubtedly skewed by teachers who perform extra functions (coaching sports, advising extra curriculars, and teaching summer school) to up their salary.
Source: BLS (numbers from 2002).
Assuming these employees get a teacher salary of maybe $30k, and an IBM pension, and benefits - yeah, that'd be a decent gig. But let's not over-inflate numbers here.
Why didn't we have the military there sooner to bring stability?
<smart-ass mode=ON>Because it takes a long time to fly back from Iraq!</smart-ass>
Seriously though - this is a complex situation, and it's going to take a while to figure out what really happened, and what could have been done. Hopefully this will lead to some real policy changes & real plans getting made, instead of just words being said.
but for the able-bodied people, there's something to be said for just getting up and leaving. Take the bus as far out of town as possible and then start walking. Or grab a cheap-ass bike and start making progress. You could make a good 30 miles over the 2 day warning period. Or hitchhike. Hell, $20 will get you 100 miles on a Greyhound bus. If you've got enough money to eat for the next 2 days, you've got enough to get out of the way of the disaster.
Nice idealism.
I suspect the reality is a bit different. You're a poor person working in a dead-end job making minimum wage (if that). You *could* take off on foot, or bus, or bike, to get out of town.. but then what? You probably have no (or very, very little) money to buy food, nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go. And on top of that, by the time you got back (assuming this hadn't turned into some massive disaster), you'd probably have lost whatever lame job you had (don't show up for work one day, you're gone!), so then you'd get *no* money.
And that doesn't even factor in any family members you're responsible for taking care of. Can't really pack up the mom, the wife, and the kids and hit the road so easily as you can if you're a loner.
It just doesn't work that way.
Answer yourself on another question: Why we use RAIDs in servers and not only make a daily backup?
Two different problem sets - might as well ask yourself, why would people use laptops when they could just have a desktop with RAID?
Laptops, of course, offer portability. RAID in a laptop reduces that portability by increasing weight & power consumption. I'm not saying RAID in laptops is absolutely ludicrous - just that it doesn't make sense for a lot of people who value the portability of a laptop (which is probably why they bought a laptop in the first place).
I've got an $1900 bill from Ontrack Data Recovery sitting next to me that would explain the situation nicely. In the business world, not everyone is a tech-savvy geek with a broadband connection or a secure backup technique.
And how would having RAID on your laptop prevented that bill? Let's take a look:
1. If you use RAID-0, you get increased performance but 50% higher chance of failure. Wouldn't have helped, so the rest of this assumes RAID-1
2. Assuming failure was caused by dropped laptop: Minor chance that second drive would have survived when first one didn't.
3. Assuming failure was caused by spilled beverage burning out the drive: Again, minor chance that second drive wouldn't have been affected as well.
4. Assuming failure was caused by overheating of machine: If both drives are the same model their tolerances would similar, so again there's a minor chance the second drive would have survived.
5. Assuming failure was due to drive just going bad: Very good chance second drive would have survived, assuming this was some kind of manufacturing defect/bad component, and not brought about by usage & environmental conditions.
So out of 4 scenarios, only 1 gives you a good chance that having a RAID-1 array would have saved you. And what does RAID-1 cost you?
1. Decreased battery life
2. Increased heat
3. Larger case
4. More weight
5. More expensive
Let's take a look at your other options:
1. USB flash memory - quick, small, pretty reliable. Great for datasets 512 MB; very little power usage.
2. CDRW - Available standard on most commercial laptops. Burns a backup CD in about 10 minutes, start to finish. Good solution for datasets 700 mb. Can carry backup/restore CD if you needed to rebuild on the road. Downside: CDs can be easy to scratch, although slim cases can protect against that in not much more space than the CD itself. Uses power when it's running, but otherwise little (if any) power draw.
3. USB 2.0 Hard Drive: Using a laptop HD and a 2.5" case, you can get good performance in a small, external package. Plug in once a day, do your backup, unplug it & put it back in your bag. A little more expensive than options 1 & 2, a little larger, but can get you much higher capacity (80gb now for 2.5" HDs?), and as a bonus, you get an extra drive you could swap in if your main drive fails. This also uses roughly equivalent power to a RAID array when you're using it, but if you just do backups on it then it's not running constantly.
These are all widely-available technologies available right now, that you don't have to be a "tech-savvy geek" to use - everything supports drag & drop.
I'm not saying RAID doesn't have any place at all in laptops - I just don't see the advantage of it for most business/home-class users; and I don't think data redundancy is as big of a factor as some think it would be.
Christianity isn't one monolithic entity.. never has been... there's always been a strong pro-learning streak in [spite of] it
;)
You left out a few words - it happens to the best of us
"In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health."
---
Oh, Microsoft! You had me at hello!
Wait... Hello Kitty??
Why a laptop, though? As cheap as laptops are, desktops are cheaper and more upgradeable. You can buy your kid a desktop computer during the middle school years, and upgrade it occassionally until the kid gets to high school or college and needs (or wants) a laptop or a faster gaming machine.
:)
I had a laptop for a bit in high school, purchased used with my own money. It was fun, no doubt, but it wasn't something I really made full use of until college & work. That's when the portability of a laptop really kicked in as a necessity for me. Do students really need that kind of portability?
At any rate, I do agree with the notion of having a computer instead of an xbox or PS2 - at least, that's worked for me. Of course, a lot of friends had gaming consoles so I could just mooch off of them
As far as I can see, I get stuff for free which seems to work just fine for my purposes. This kind of reaction is similar to what I see when "people" protest Walmart's effect on Mom-Pop businesses. What should I care about Mom-Pop businesses as long as I get low prices? I go to a shop to buy stuff, not to socialize with the owners.
If "low prices" were the only factor to be considered, then you would be absolutely correct to choose Walmart. But price is not the only factor - its only the most *visible* factor. Consider some of the hidden, long-term ramifications:
1. After a few months or years of consumers choosing "low prices", the Mom & Pop stores goes out of business. Now Walmart has no competition, so they can edge prices back up and consumers won't realize it.
2. Assuming Mom-Pop stores were locally owned, the money you spent there (for the most part) stayed in the community. Mom & Pop would be more likely to take their profits & invest or donate locally. The profits of your local Walmart leave the community, depriving it of those investments & donations.
3. Most of the "cheap stuff" at Walmart is produced in China. Buying at Walmart is voting with your $$ - it increases US demand for cheap Chinese products and decreases demand for locally-produced goods (causing job loss, etc). I'm not generally a trade-protectionist, but I much prefer locally produced goods if available at a reasonably competitive value.
4. "Feeding the monster" - Walmart has grown to mythic proporations (2% of the US GDP, all by itself). At its size, it now has a lot of power in US and international politics. I'm not aware of how much Walmart exercizes that power, but concentrating so much power in one entity runs counter to the very principle of democracy. When it comes down to it, who will your elected representatives really listen to - the people, or the $$$ (Walmart)? Since $$$ buys elections in the US, don't count on your voice being heard if Walmart's got the other ear.
5. Walmart is continually forcing suppliers to reduce their price, which forces suppliers to reduce product quality and longevity - essentially making everything disposable. So consumers may get a cheaper microwave now, but they'll have to replace it more often. And since products are not built for repair, that means buying a new device & throwing out the old one = higher cost in the long run.
If consumers were to take everything into account (ideally-educated consumers), then I don't believe Walmart would always be the best choice. Sometimes it would, sometimes it would not, but there would be more room for competition. But consumers tend to focus almost exclusively on price, which Walmart has really been able to capitalize on.
One thing VHS can do that DVD cannot do is remember where in the program you are when you want to take the medium out and move to another room and resume in another player.
No matter how good of a DVD player you have, it won't know where you stopped watching the movie IN ANOTHER PLAYER (since DVDs are read-only).
Of course, you can jump back to that spot fairly quickly, assuming the DVD has reasonable-length chapters
I don't want my kid to walk in on the babysitter looking at porn. This is a reasonable law to ensure that parents have the option to control what is viewed in their house.
Since this service is "opt-in", I'm not vehemently opposed to it, but I still don't like it. There already are plenty of ways that parents can prevent children/babysitters/others from accessing adult content - for example, there's plenty of filter packages you can purchase. Or simply locking the computer with a password so it can't be used unless the parent is there.
In addition, this law would only be marginally effective - children & babysitters will be able to find ways around the block, either by using a web proxy, finding sites that aren't blocked, or downloading smut via P2P. If the parents really want to prevent their childrens' exposure to adult content, it needs happen through good parenting & good education, not technical obstacles.
What I would much rather see is a more widespread use of power/clock-throttling during such usage. It's been common in notebooks for awhile, I'd like to see that migrate more to the desktop (it's happening now, but I don't get the sense that its all here just yet).
Think of how much money businesses would save if instead of running 500 or 1000 Dell machines w/ P4's at 200+ W each, they could switch to Pentium M workstations running 100+ W each. Saves money on electricity and saves money on A/C usage & maintenance.
I found out about KeePass (http://keepass.sourceforge.net/) on that previous story, so I've started using it. It's a very handy utility to have! It can keep track of all my passwords for various email accounts, websites, etc. It's a simple program that (based on my experience so far), just works!
If you wanted portability, you could keep your password database on a USB memory drive and carry that around with you.
I see that they just released 1.0 on June 4th - congrats!! I highly recommend people check it out!
I have every right to share music I paid for. If I want you to hear my copy of music, it is my absolute right to show it to you.
I don't agree with the RIAA's actions, but you are simply wrong. You have no right to share music you have paid for, except for the rights granted to you by the copyright holder and US law (assuming you are a US citizen purchasing music in the US). Fair use does not extend to "sharing the music with everyone on the internet".
If you want free music, you can find it out there. Just not from the RIAA. Support musicians and companies that allow you to freely trade their music. Don't support the RIAA monster by "consuming" their drivel - just drop them altogether.
And what does this show? That Microsoft got your clients' dime (well, many dimes), and they racked up the sales numbers for reports like this. Is this data representative of what's in "the real world"? No, of course not - but it does show what's being bought, and marketing/PHBs can look at these numbers to justify or rationalize their purchasing decisions.
It's great that your company is now running a linux server park - but both your company & linux in general would have been much better served by purchasing linux servers up front. Of course, you knew that - it's too bad the consultants didn't and squandered your company's money.