FreeBSD doesn't HLT on a SMP system, because they have not yet solved the problem of waking up the HLTed CPU in all cases. On a single processor system HLT is called.
For those who want to save power on a server, turn the monitor off when you leave the console. There isn't,much more that you can do.
Coke only announced the price increase because they didn't worry about people defecting to Pepsi. If Pepsi (or RC or Shasta) thought that with a lower price they could get people to drink their product over coke they would lower their prices. Accually Shasta is lower, but nobody drinks it, even though the taste is just as aweful. (Can you tell that I don't like cola?)
There are other options. First of all, these robots were expensive to create. Thus you can make an arguement that they will end up too expensive and accually cost money in the long run. (Robots didn't help GM in the 70s, though other problems did GM in)
Or maybe with robots they can profitably mine an area that wasn't worth it before (deep underground, or where the earth has lots of deadly posions leaking into the air)
Don't forget that there is more then only company with mines, and you can bet all have considered robots, if they are cheaper all the compition is likely on the way to their own robots. Thus prices drop when one realises they can undercut the price, and all are forced to follow.
Lots of other people have good point, but seem to be forgetting the most important issue: What do you [your friend] want?
If you are married, 4 kids that you love, and a big beliver in family, then you want more then normal amount of money to compensate for the time away from family.
If you are single, no kids, no steady boy/girl, and no house, then you might want to exchange less pay for vacation there.
Basicly if you want to go there, you can look at is as paid transportation to that country. If you don't want to go, then it is a job. (Probably with long hours so you can be done and gone quickly)
Most newspapers do not let the advertising department and editorial department have much contact. That is you can buy an ad that runs in the cooking section, but until the paper is printed you won't nessicarly find out that the column you are under is bashing your product. (In practice the finial copy editor would catch this and request a simple re-arrangement, but that isn't for sure) You can also buy an add under "Dear Abby", but you are not allowed to know what the column for the day is. For news stories you never know what will run on the same page as you. (Layout will try to keep ads conflicting with stories seperate, but they are not required to. The editorial and adversisers will have no knowlege of conflicts until after the paper is printed, and the layout editors have no control over content, just where the content is.
While this system isn't perfect it does tend to keep conflicts of interest down.
Ahh, but most countries have treaties with each other (including the US) which makes a patent in one country as good as one in any other. The specific form it takes is if I have a patent in the US, and I want to sue you in England I can file for a patent in the UK (I need an UK patent for this to work), but the fileing date of the patent in the UK will be the filing date of the US patent, not the day I file in the UK. So I just get my UK patent if/when I need it based on my US patent.
Note that if I have a patent in the US, there isn't a requirement for the UK to accept the patent, but they are very likely to do so, and if they do it counts as if filed on the US date.
Woah there, don't forget that most electric power is generated via a heat to work conversion innitially. Add that factor in and things don't look quite as good.
Mind you large central generators are more efficcant then most engines, but there is also power line loss.
Accually we do transmit power as DC. In fact all the really big power lines are DC. The main advantage of AC is the ability to use transformers to change the voltage quickly and easially.
AC does not allow two way feeds. There are phase problems if you attempt to connect any sort of a loop, or connect generators at both ends, with cities at both ends. That is if city A is drawing more power then city B, then the generator at B will attempt to make up the need, but the power arriving at A will be out of phase. (In this simple example it is possibal to make the phases come out right, but if B needs extra power latter the phases will be wrong again)
In addition there is a maximun voltage any wire can take, before you get leakage. We measure AC voltage as RMS (root mean square), which means you 120v line will accually reach 170 volts for a moment, but RMS (Think of like average if you don't understand what it means) is 120 volts. Europe will reach about 300 volts despite 220 RMS. The maximun voltage before this leakage it the same, but AC will give less power as at the max voltage your RMS is much less.
Of course electrical engineers have proper terms for the above which they will emeadiatly remember as soon as I point this out.
PS, I hate to defend Eddison against Telsa, but the fact remains that netiher was smart enough to realise that a compromise of both DC and AC was best.
Why should the wealth of his appointies affect him? Clinton had a lot fo millionairs in his cabinet, and that didn't seem to affect his popularity. Or maybe it did, Clinton got less votes then bush did.
It becomes obvious from that you are unwilling to give Bush a chance. He has been in office 3 days, and you are already perdicting doom and gloom, even your good points are worded in such a way as to cast doupt on how good they are.
Bush has officially been in office for 3 days. It takes longer then that for it to become clear what he is really about. There will be "bad" things that he does, and "good" things. Of course there is always anouther side, and so I might like what you dislike and vis-versa.
I remember quite clearly all the doom the right wing spread about Clinton in office. Well, it didn't happen like that. Mind you to the right wingers things should be better today (by their definition, which isn't just christian fundamentalist) if their guy was in charge.
Clinton was one of the few democrats who supported NAFTA, a complete surprize to the right wing that supported NAFTA - they once thought of Clinton as too left wing to support it, much less be a leader in getting it adopted.
Clinton also raised taxes (in 1993 if I remember right), which was perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom. There are several implications of a tax cut, some affect the ecconomy (which has done well), and some just a philosophy of what goverment should do. Perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom.
Both sides are claiming a balanced budget under the Clinton years, with many giving credit to rebublicans having congress - gridlock making it difficult to spend more money as each side has their own ideas of where to spend it. (Never mind that if you take the socal security ficasco out there isn't a balanced budget)
Clinton signed the Communications Decency act, the DMCA, and several others. Who would have thought a democrat would restrict freedom like that?
At the very least this proves that polititions are not always friendly to their side. Most likely Bush will not be anything close to the worst president in history. He probably won't be impeached. I will gaurentiee that he will never be considered the best or worst president. (I know people who like Nixon despite that scandol, Slient Cal has his fans, FDR, Lincon, and all Washington have critics - those are the obvious canidates for worst/best, and there is no concensious)
So give the guy a chance. Support him when he is right (and he will be). Be an opponant when he is wrong (and he will be). Remember there are two sides of every issue, try to see the other side even if you disagree. Keep the discussion civil.
My first reaction is "Loyality is for dogs", "To your own self be true", and so on. That seems well covered so lets look at the other side.
Sit down and find out what the honest chances for the company are. If they are public that is easy, otherwise good luck finding the finiancal information. If there is no way they can get enough funding to stay in buisness longer get a new job. If they won't be able to pay you in a few months, why stay, the ecconomy might turn bad and then you want to be amoung those with a job to keep not those looking for a job.
Okay, lets assume there is a chance they will find enough money to stay in buisness long enough to make a profit. Then the question is harder. Decide what you want to do. Some people like bing in a key role, others don't. If you don't want to be in your position in good times don't be there, if you want to be there is good times learn to live with the bad.
The company I work for last ALL the pivitol devolpers a year ago. For six months we were in panic. However because of the massive loss (4 key guys left in the same week) the CEO jump on a plane to fire the managers who were causing problems. Today we seem to have good management in place (Hard to tell when they have only been around for a short time), and in replacing the key people we discovered some critical problems they were glossing over that needed to be fix. Over all we are better off technically without those people just because the egos who made mistakes are gone. (Which isn't their fault, nobody is perfect)
Notice one thing that happened in my expirence: A bunch of technical people left, which forced the bad managers to "resign for personal reasons". (they were fired as I said above) When a key person leaves it is a sign to management, you could easilly be doing your co-workers who stay a favor by forcing the CEO to notice those under him are are sucking up but not doing their job. If management takes action when you leave to correct the problems, you have done your co-workers a favor. If management takes no action when you leave it proves that you don't want to work there. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
I'm on a couple mainlings lists that have gone to sponsership programs. Once a week I get a message on the list with [SPONSER] in the subject. Easy to filter out, but I don't. This isn't Spam, this is advertising from a legitmate company that is supporting something I enjoy. The least I can do is skim the message, if I'm interesting in their product (and often I'm not - delete) it is a plus mark to me that they are supporting things I like. I won't nessicarly buy from them, but they jsut got one point over compititors.
Elm, Pine, mutt, kmail, or one of several other mailers all work fine for my mail. I don't need anouther mail client. I do however need a way to do calendaring, and it needs to be compatable with everyone else's calendar. I don't care what your mail tool is, I'm used to pine and we can communicate.
This week we are in the process of switchig from Synchronize (with unix or windows clients) to exchange (and citrix for those with unix on their desk top - most of us) because the main office is exchange and those who regularly go to headquarts have a secratary just to keep the two systems in sync. It will work, but from playing with citrix I've already realized it is slow.
Problem is anyone can write a mail client. ASCII is an old standard. All the protocols are well described in rfcs. There are plenty of resources on network programing for just about any OS. Exchange is not well documented however. Good luck creating your own client - it is unlikely to work.
First of all, you should make sure that any one system can crash without an emergency call to you. If mail is critical, put it on redunand servers. If you have a critical database get a cluster up to your needs. If Guido (you) gets hit by a bus what happens? Get a redunant admin of some sort.
Remember that if one system crashes you have others, build fail-over into your system. Sure your web server will run horridly slow (and a mite more insecure) when it is also doing all your mail, but at least you have both functions after the mail server burns up.
Okay, now that the above is taken care of, and your still not able to leave for a week. Well don't take a week. I work with a couple folks who no longer work fridays, instead taking a three day weekend. They are too critical to take a week off (The one guy was not, as we realized after he quit and those taking his job found the critical problems easy to turn into self correcting situations) so they just got us used to not looking for them on friday. One guy was able to set up the weekend parting for all his friends. Anouther used the time alone to practice guitar all day.
Start by making the computers take care of themselves. Then make sure if you die there is a line of succession. Use your time off to take fridays off. (Accually in your job you might need a different day if weekends are upgrade time so you use friday to prepare and monday to fix real world problems)
True, but we don't normally in the US. 220 is reserved for things that use a lot of power (twice the voltage means half the amps), most low power hosehold stuff is 110 volts. If they are using 220, then it means they are using a lot of power.
The posters point is this: for what are they using that power? Enertainment. So you can solve californias power problems easially, just turn off your TV, boycott movies, don't touch amusement park rides. There are plenty of things that can be done cheaply for entertainment that don't involve electrisity.
Fishing is a lot of fun, and catch and release is the norm for most fishermen. Get a sail/row boat/canoe, a cane pole and try some old fashioned fishing with out the electronic gagets.
Your local library has shelves full of free enertainment waiting for you. You can read by the light of a 5 watt bulb (I've done it), and even if everyone did the same the energy use wouldn't amount to anything.
Set up a community dance with old fashioned acustic insterments live. Sure it won't be as loud, but it will be just as much fun. There is a good chance that your community has musicians with more talent then the loud music that most people listen to today. Plenty of socalizing, when your not breathless from dancing. You might accually get to know someone too if once conversation quits drifting to the latest movie/soap opera. (get a life people, what happens on your TV show isn't the most interesting conversation topic, just the easiest)
There are countless other activities you can get into that don't need electrisity, and many of them are fun. I've listed three, trying to cover a broad enough range that nobody will like them all. (Even when your not the only one in the boat fishing is a silent activity, while reading is best a solitary activity, and you can't have a dance as I've suggested alone - but you can do whichever fits your personality)
journals are designed so this isn't an issue. That is you make sure the journal is committed before you write the data, then you erase the journal. There of course needs to be enough journal space so that you can have several going at once (once process writing data when anougher starts writting into it's journal) Harddrives can tell you when something is comitted to disk, so if the journal is corrupt (easy to tell) you ignore it as nothing is wrong with the data it was refering to. If the journal is fine you check the data (sectors) it refers to and do a fsck, but since only those sector can be corrupt those are the only ones you check, not the whole disk.
FreeBSD's softupdates achives the same ends, but with a completely different means.
While I agree encoding is a problem, otherwise usenet is a good model for binaries.
Instead of tieing up the entire internet to get a binary, you tie up just one subnet at your ISP. The servers get the binary once, and from a site closer then the orginial ftp server.
Really it is a perfect model for binaries of use within a few days of publication, but not much use latter, that a large number of people want to see.
Saddly it doesn't work that way. Few ISPs run their own news server meaning you tie up the backbone for each binary. Worse, instead of binaries being of use only during a certian time, most are reposts every few weeks of something you don't want anyway. (Word'97 parts 1-35,37-50,51-74 - of 75 seperate parts)
Accually we do know what to do with the waste. However fear of normal nuclear plants may be less today, but fear of recycling the waste isn't going down. That waste is almost fully recycelable, if anyopne cares to do it.
The US military recycles all their nuclear waste, but it is illegal for non-military waste to be used for military purposes. Likewise the French recycle all their waste and don't have a problem. (I think only the US has a waste problem)
OpenBSD has been undergoing a security aduit for years. A couple months ago they were able to claim there had been no known root hacks in the current release for 3 years. (That is they were able to fix root hacks before they were discovered for the last 3 years). Well sometime this summer someone discovered a root hack in the released system, despite all those audits. (To be fair, they had fixed that hole in the unreleased code stream, nobody realized it was exploitable at the time though so there was no hurry to release it early).
Audits are good, but they take time. OpenBSD has proven they take a lot of time. There is no open source project with as much work in security auditing as openBSD. (Probably no closed source project either). No open source project cares are much, yet they can't always get it right despite 5 years of work. To criticie any other project for not discovereing all secuirity holes is a mistake. Even if the openBSD audit team had decided to work on this with as much effort as went into openBSD there is no reason to belive they would have discovered this sooner.
Sure I agree in theory that we need a cheap way to get off earth before we need a cheap interplanitory travel. However it turns out not to be stricktly true.
Assume getting off earth is expensive, but a break through tommorow turns up with cheap travel between solar systems. That means that the space station can send probes to do fly-bys of distant planets, and 20 years latter have the satilight return for repairs before going to a diffent solar system. (Of course that would be fairly close). reusable probes would be a break through, and while they are still expensive they would be a lot cheaper then starting with a new probe, and would give us data we cannot get today. (We cannot do a fly-by of other solar systems with current probes, but this might give is the ability to do fly-bys of farther out systems)
Second, and more likely is that eventially we get a fairly cheap way to get off earth. We don't want to start at ground zero devolping cheap interplanitory travel. A lot of early work in research is better done by small teams, once the theory(s) are devolped you then take a large team to impliment it. So once we have a cheap way to get off earth we really want to quickly get a cheap way to get elsewhere. Getting off earth might end up taking 3 hours, who cares, but if that super cheap drive that takes 3 hours to get off earth can't reach faster speeds it is wrothless for getting to mars. Take that cheap but slow drive as a farry trip to space, and switch to a ship with cheap interplanitory drive, and you can then reach mars in 2 weeks. Nobody would allow a ship with radio active by-products like the above in the earths atmosphere, but it si harmless in space, so we combine them.
sure I'll defendt them. Not all software patents are defensable however.
Although it causes us pain, LZW and RSA are both defenseable patents. They are useful, and they were discovered. Someone went through effort to discover those algorythms, and that should be rewarded. Copyright works, but copyright protects a specific implimentation. Patents are broader but don't last as long.
An arguement can (should) be made that because comptuers are new we should not yet allow patents because there are so many easy and obvious algoryithms that have not been found yet. Patents should reward significant effort to create something invative, not something that wasn't needed before but is now. Before the invention of gears (Or maybe it was something else but lets use gears) there was no need for patents because there was so little that could be done. Once we had gears there were many obvious things to build. AFter a few years someone working for years on end devolps something complex, only to have someone else copy it. The first person did all the work, he is the one who should be rewarded for the work, not any latter person who is smart enough to make a copy but not create to begin with. Once the point is reached that complex algorithms are all that we patent, then we need that protection, until then we don't.
Unfortunatly the patent system doesn't differentiate important. If the machine above also contained the discovery of oval gears, that would be worth more protection then the machine, because the gears are useful in many more ways. (Oval gears have existed for years, they are difficult to get right, but they do have advantages in some situations.
Okay, the above was idealistic. Now for the other point of view:
How do you feel about abortion. Now look at the other side and try to convince me the other side doesn't have a point. You have rights vs rights. The right of a person to live vs the right of your own body. Most people have taken a side here, but any honest person has to admit the other side has a point even though on balance it is wrong.
Now take drugs. Same thing, alacholism has destroied the lives of some friends. It (Generaly in a parent) has affected the life of other friends. How many people are killed in car accident involved drinking drivers? Are you sure we want alcahol legal? Of course there is the other side, we all remember the lession of prohibition. (But less alcahol was consumed then) I haven't touched hard(er) drugs, but similear things apply. What someone does to themselves doesn't bother me, so long as it doesn't affect me, but we have proven that alcahol all too often affects me, when other use it.
Now take guns, they enable several great sports. Your only chance of re-gaining freedoms if it really gets that bad. A few psycos have use them to kill others (outside of the last ditch effort to re-gain freedom) and ruined it for many.
Lets take the last a little farther. Some have proposed to get guns out of psychos by registration. Problem is two fold, on the one hand psychos have been known to steel guns which means it doesn't work, and on the other if it really comes down to the last ditch effort the freedom theives know who has the guns to take away. (And we are not even getting into the feasability of accually succeeding in a last ditch effort against a modern army should it come to that)
And so we see that freedom isn't quite as simple as I make it sound. It isn't just a matter of "Well it doesn't affect my life so if you want to be immmoal", but rather your freedom causes my prison. I did my best to be unbiased above, but I suspect you can see my personal biases. (If you can't at least name one you need to practice critical thinking)
Every country gives you some freedoms, that others don't give. Some countries in Africa where nomads are the largest faction give you the most freedom, but at the expense of many things you take for granted. Assuming you aren't willing to live without them (Like , you have to take some compromise.
If you want the freedom to drink when you are under 21, most of is better, likewise for many drugs.
If you want to own guns, then the US has the most freedom here.
If you want to be assured to will have food and shelter even if you don't work, Sweden is the most free, but they have in their own way limits on freedom. One is taxes, you don't have to work in Sweden, but if you want to buy something (Other then food and shelter) you have to pay for it, and that normally means work. Work means they take at least 60% of your money in taxes. (In the US it is about 40%)
Vote libratarian. I don't need freedom to look at porn because my religion prohibits me anyway - but I need freedom of religion. Joe down the road loves his guns, but doesn't care about religion or the press. Alone we are divided, I oppose porn, but if I'm willing to allow you to have your vice, and you allow me mine, togather we are a large force.
Don't forget that in the US your vote is counted. Get involved, make sure there is no election fraud in your distrcit (even if it is to your favor!). Alone we lose freedom, togather we stand up for everyone in a force that the corruption in DC cannot hope to match.
The Russians are experts as dealing with different guage tracks, as they have to deal with it already. Just a matter of putting different wheels under the cars. (Note the cars have to be built to support it, which isn't a problem excpet for US cars, but we can solve the problem)
I cannot belive that there is any railroad in the world that isn't an expert as switching cars around. Taking electric through the tunnel (dealing with exhaust means that electric is the likely choice) and then swithing to american diesel is a trivial task, just get out of the tunnel, stop (you have to stop for customs anyway), unhook, move the electric engine of the way, and hook on a diesel. More engines are needed to get up a mountain then across the great plains, so it is common to have a few extra engines that you hook on just before entering mountains, and dropping them off as you leave.
There are problems of course. Difficult problems in fact. However there are no problems that cannot be solved. The biggest is not digging the tunnel, but getting lines to the tunnel. Everyone wants to say they were a part of digging the great tunnel. Building anouther railroad line isn't as exciting. There are others.
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FreeBSD doesn't HLT on a SMP system, because they have not yet solved the problem of waking up the HLTed CPU in all cases. On a single processor system HLT is called.
For those who want to save power on a server, turn the monitor off when you leave the console. There isn't ,much more that you can do.
Coke only announced the price increase because they didn't worry about people defecting to Pepsi. If Pepsi (or RC or Shasta) thought that with a lower price they could get people to drink their product over coke they would lower their prices. Accually Shasta is lower, but nobody drinks it, even though the taste is just as aweful. (Can you tell that I don't like cola?)
The other posters have points too.
There are other options. First of all, these robots were expensive to create. Thus you can make an arguement that they will end up too expensive and accually cost money in the long run. (Robots didn't help GM in the 70s, though other problems did GM in)
Or maybe with robots they can profitably mine an area that wasn't worth it before (deep underground, or where the earth has lots of deadly posions leaking into the air)
Don't forget that there is more then only company with mines, and you can bet all have considered robots, if they are cheaper all the compition is likely on the way to their own robots. Thus prices drop when one realises they can undercut the price, and all are forced to follow.
Lots of other people have good point, but seem to be forgetting the most important issue: What do you [your friend] want?
If you are married, 4 kids that you love, and a big beliver in family, then you want more then normal amount of money to compensate for the time away from family.
If you are single, no kids, no steady boy/girl, and no house, then you might want to exchange less pay for vacation there.
Basicly if you want to go there, you can look at is as paid transportation to that country. If you don't want to go, then it is a job. (Probably with long hours so you can be done and gone quickly)
Most newspapers do not let the advertising department and editorial department have much contact. That is you can buy an ad that runs in the cooking section, but until the paper is printed you won't nessicarly find out that the column you are under is bashing your product. (In practice the finial copy editor would catch this and request a simple re-arrangement, but that isn't for sure) You can also buy an add under "Dear Abby", but you are not allowed to know what the column for the day is. For news stories you never know what will run on the same page as you. (Layout will try to keep ads conflicting with stories seperate, but they are not required to. The editorial and adversisers will have no knowlege of conflicts until after the paper is printed, and the layout editors have no control over content, just where the content is.
While this system isn't perfect it does tend to keep conflicts of interest down.
Ahh, but most countries have treaties with each other (including the US) which makes a patent in one country as good as one in any other. The specific form it takes is if I have a patent in the US, and I want to sue you in England I can file for a patent in the UK (I need an UK patent for this to work), but the fileing date of the patent in the UK will be the filing date of the US patent, not the day I file in the UK. So I just get my UK patent if/when I need it based on my US patent.
Note that if I have a patent in the US, there isn't a requirement for the UK to accept the patent, but they are very likely to do so, and if they do it counts as if filed on the US date.
Woah there, don't forget that most electric power is generated via a heat to work conversion innitially. Add that factor in and things don't look quite as good.
Mind you large central generators are more efficcant then most engines, but there is also power line loss.
Accually we do transmit power as DC. In fact all the really big power lines are DC. The main advantage of AC is the ability to use transformers to change the voltage quickly and easially.
AC does not allow two way feeds. There are phase problems if you attempt to connect any sort of a loop, or connect generators at both ends, with cities at both ends. That is if city A is drawing more power then city B, then the generator at B will attempt to make up the need, but the power arriving at A will be out of phase. (In this simple example it is possibal to make the phases come out right, but if B needs extra power latter the phases will be wrong again)
In addition there is a maximun voltage any wire can take, before you get leakage. We measure AC voltage as RMS (root mean square), which means you 120v line will accually reach 170 volts for a moment, but RMS (Think of like average if you don't understand what it means) is 120 volts. Europe will reach about 300 volts despite 220 RMS. The maximun voltage before this leakage it the same, but AC will give less power as at the max voltage your RMS is much less.
Of course electrical engineers have proper terms for the above which they will emeadiatly remember as soon as I point this out.
PS, I hate to defend Eddison against Telsa, but the fact remains that netiher was smart enough to realise that a compromise of both DC and AC was best.
So, is Russia a friend? n Tarditionally they were not. Now they are an unknown. We hope they are a friend, but their goverment isn't exactly stable.
Why should the wealth of his appointies affect him? Clinton had a lot fo millionairs in his cabinet, and that didn't seem to affect his popularity. Or maybe it did, Clinton got less votes then bush did.
It becomes obvious from that you are unwilling to give Bush a chance. He has been in office 3 days, and you are already perdicting doom and gloom, even your good points are worded in such a way as to cast doupt on how good they are.
Bush has officially been in office for 3 days. It takes longer then that for it to become clear what he is really about. There will be "bad" things that he does, and "good" things. Of course there is always anouther side, and so I might like what you dislike and vis-versa.
I remember quite clearly all the doom the right wing spread about Clinton in office. Well, it didn't happen like that. Mind you to the right wingers things should be better today (by their definition, which isn't just christian fundamentalist) if their guy was in charge.
Clinton was one of the few democrats who supported NAFTA, a complete surprize to the right wing that supported NAFTA - they once thought of Clinton as too left wing to support it, much less be a leader in getting it adopted.
Clinton also raised taxes (in 1993 if I remember right), which was perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom. There are several implications of a tax cut, some affect the ecconomy (which has done well), and some just a philosophy of what goverment should do. Perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom.
Both sides are claiming a balanced budget under the Clinton years, with many giving credit to rebublicans having congress - gridlock making it difficult to spend more money as each side has their own ideas of where to spend it. (Never mind that if you take the socal security ficasco out there isn't a balanced budget)
Clinton signed the Communications Decency act, the DMCA, and several others. Who would have thought a democrat would restrict freedom like that?
At the very least this proves that polititions are not always friendly to their side. Most likely Bush will not be anything close to the worst president in history. He probably won't be impeached. I will gaurentiee that he will never be considered the best or worst president. (I know people who like Nixon despite that scandol, Slient Cal has his fans, FDR, Lincon, and all Washington have critics - those are the obvious canidates for worst/best, and there is no concensious)
So give the guy a chance. Support him when he is right (and he will be). Be an opponant when he is wrong (and he will be). Remember there are two sides of every issue, try to see the other side even if you disagree. Keep the discussion civil.
My first reaction is "Loyality is for dogs", "To your own self be true", and so on. That seems well covered so lets look at the other side.
Sit down and find out what the honest chances for the company are. If they are public that is easy, otherwise good luck finding the finiancal information. If there is no way they can get enough funding to stay in buisness longer get a new job. If they won't be able to pay you in a few months, why stay, the ecconomy might turn bad and then you want to be amoung those with a job to keep not those looking for a job.
Okay, lets assume there is a chance they will find enough money to stay in buisness long enough to make a profit. Then the question is harder. Decide what you want to do. Some people like bing in a key role, others don't. If you don't want to be in your position in good times don't be there, if you want to be there is good times learn to live with the bad.
The company I work for last ALL the pivitol devolpers a year ago. For six months we were in panic. However because of the massive loss (4 key guys left in the same week) the CEO jump on a plane to fire the managers who were causing problems. Today we seem to have good management in place (Hard to tell when they have only been around for a short time), and in replacing the key people we discovered some critical problems they were glossing over that needed to be fix. Over all we are better off technically without those people just because the egos who made mistakes are gone. (Which isn't their fault, nobody is perfect)
Notice one thing that happened in my expirence: A bunch of technical people left, which forced the bad managers to "resign for personal reasons". (they were fired as I said above) When a key person leaves it is a sign to management, you could easilly be doing your co-workers who stay a favor by forcing the CEO to notice those under him are are sucking up but not doing their job. If management takes action when you leave to correct the problems, you have done your co-workers a favor. If management takes no action when you leave it proves that you don't want to work there. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
I'm on a couple mainlings lists that have gone to sponsership programs. Once a week I get a message on the list with [SPONSER] in the subject. Easy to filter out, but I don't. This isn't Spam, this is advertising from a legitmate company that is supporting something I enjoy. The least I can do is skim the message, if I'm interesting in their product (and often I'm not - delete) it is a plus mark to me that they are supporting things I like. I won't nessicarly buy from them, but they jsut got one point over compititors.
Elm, Pine, mutt, kmail, or one of several other mailers all work fine for my mail. I don't need anouther mail client. I do however need a way to do calendaring, and it needs to be compatable with everyone else's calendar. I don't care what your mail tool is, I'm used to pine and we can communicate.
This week we are in the process of switchig from Synchronize (with unix or windows clients) to exchange (and citrix for those with unix on their desk top - most of us) because the main office is exchange and those who regularly go to headquarts have a secratary just to keep the two systems in sync. It will work, but from playing with citrix I've already realized it is slow.
Problem is anyone can write a mail client. ASCII is an old standard. All the protocols are well described in rfcs. There are plenty of resources on network programing for just about any OS. Exchange is not well documented however. Good luck creating your own client - it is unlikely to work.
First of all, you should make sure that any one system can crash without an emergency call to you. If mail is critical, put it on redunand servers. If you have a critical database get a cluster up to your needs. If Guido (you) gets hit by a bus what happens? Get a redunant admin of some sort.
Remember that if one system crashes you have others, build fail-over into your system. Sure your web server will run horridly slow (and a mite more insecure) when it is also doing all your mail, but at least you have both functions after the mail server burns up.
Okay, now that the above is taken care of, and your still not able to leave for a week. Well don't take a week. I work with a couple folks who no longer work fridays, instead taking a three day weekend. They are too critical to take a week off (The one guy was not, as we realized after he quit and those taking his job found the critical problems easy to turn into self correcting situations) so they just got us used to not looking for them on friday. One guy was able to set up the weekend parting for all his friends. Anouther used the time alone to practice guitar all day.
Start by making the computers take care of themselves. Then make sure if you die there is a line of succession. Use your time off to take fridays off. (Accually in your job you might need a different day if weekends are upgrade time so you use friday to prepare and monday to fix real world problems)
True, but we don't normally in the US. 220 is reserved for things that use a lot of power (twice the voltage means half the amps), most low power hosehold stuff is 110 volts. If they are using 220, then it means they are using a lot of power.
The posters point is this: for what are they using that power? Enertainment. So you can solve californias power problems easially, just turn off your TV, boycott movies, don't touch amusement park rides. There are plenty of things that can be done cheaply for entertainment that don't involve electrisity.
Fishing is a lot of fun, and catch and release is the norm for most fishermen. Get a sail/row boat/canoe, a cane pole and try some old fashioned fishing with out the electronic gagets.
Your local library has shelves full of free enertainment waiting for you. You can read by the light of a 5 watt bulb (I've done it), and even if everyone did the same the energy use wouldn't amount to anything.
Set up a community dance with old fashioned acustic insterments live. Sure it won't be as loud, but it will be just as much fun. There is a good chance that your community has musicians with more talent then the loud music that most people listen to today. Plenty of socalizing, when your not breathless from dancing. You might accually get to know someone too if once conversation quits drifting to the latest movie/soap opera. (get a life people, what happens on your TV show isn't the most interesting conversation topic, just the easiest)
There are countless other activities you can get into that don't need electrisity, and many of them are fun. I've listed three, trying to cover a broad enough range that nobody will like them all. (Even when your not the only one in the boat fishing is a silent activity, while reading is best a solitary activity, and you can't have a dance as I've suggested alone - but you can do whichever fits your personality)
journals are designed so this isn't an issue. That is you make sure the journal is committed before you write the data, then you erase the journal. There of course needs to be enough journal space so that you can have several going at once (once process writing data when anougher starts writting into it's journal) Harddrives can tell you when something is comitted to disk, so if the journal is corrupt (easy to tell) you ignore it as nothing is wrong with the data it was refering to. If the journal is fine you check the data (sectors) it refers to and do a fsck, but since only those sector can be corrupt those are the only ones you check, not the whole disk.
FreeBSD's softupdates achives the same ends, but with a completely different means.
While I agree encoding is a problem, otherwise usenet is a good model for binaries.
Instead of tieing up the entire internet to get a binary, you tie up just one subnet at your ISP. The servers get the binary once, and from a site closer then the orginial ftp server.
Really it is a perfect model for binaries of use within a few days of publication, but not much use latter, that a large number of people want to see.
Saddly it doesn't work that way. Few ISPs run their own news server meaning you tie up the backbone for each binary. Worse, instead of binaries being of use only during a certian time, most are reposts every few weeks of something you don't want anyway. (Word'97 parts 1-35,37-50,51-74 - of 75 seperate parts)
Accually we do know what to do with the waste. However fear of normal nuclear plants may be less today, but fear of recycling the waste isn't going down. That waste is almost fully recycelable, if anyopne cares to do it.
The US military recycles all their nuclear waste, but it is illegal for non-military waste to be used for military purposes. Likewise the French recycle all their waste and don't have a problem. (I think only the US has a waste problem)
OpenBSD has been undergoing a security aduit for years. A couple months ago they were able to claim there had been no known root hacks in the current release for 3 years. (That is they were able to fix root hacks before they were discovered for the last 3 years). Well sometime this summer someone discovered a root hack in the released system, despite all those audits. (To be fair, they had fixed that hole in the unreleased code stream, nobody realized it was exploitable at the time though so there was no hurry to release it early).
Audits are good, but they take time. OpenBSD has proven they take a lot of time. There is no open source project with as much work in security auditing as openBSD. (Probably no closed source project either). No open source project cares are much, yet they can't always get it right despite 5 years of work. To criticie any other project for not discovereing all secuirity holes is a mistake. Even if the openBSD audit team had decided to work on this with as much effort as went into openBSD there is no reason to belive they would have discovered this sooner.
Sure I agree in theory that we need a cheap way to get off earth before we need a cheap interplanitory travel. However it turns out not to be stricktly true.
Assume getting off earth is expensive, but a break through tommorow turns up with cheap travel between solar systems. That means that the space station can send probes to do fly-bys of distant planets, and 20 years latter have the satilight return for repairs before going to a diffent solar system. (Of course that would be fairly close). reusable probes would be a break through, and while they are still expensive they would be a lot cheaper then starting with a new probe, and would give us data we cannot get today. (We cannot do a fly-by of other solar systems with current probes, but this might give is the ability to do fly-bys of farther out systems)
Second, and more likely is that eventially we get a fairly cheap way to get off earth. We don't want to start at ground zero devolping cheap interplanitory travel. A lot of early work in research is better done by small teams, once the theory(s) are devolped you then take a large team to impliment it. So once we have a cheap way to get off earth we really want to quickly get a cheap way to get elsewhere. Getting off earth might end up taking 3 hours, who cares, but if that super cheap drive that takes 3 hours to get off earth can't reach faster speeds it is wrothless for getting to mars. Take that cheap but slow drive as a farry trip to space, and switch to a ship with cheap interplanitory drive, and you can then reach mars in 2 weeks. Nobody would allow a ship with radio active by-products like the above in the earths atmosphere, but it si harmless in space, so we combine them.
sure I'll defendt them. Not all software patents are defensable however.
Although it causes us pain, LZW and RSA are both defenseable patents. They are useful, and they were discovered. Someone went through effort to discover those algorythms, and that should be rewarded. Copyright works, but copyright protects a specific implimentation. Patents are broader but don't last as long.
An arguement can (should) be made that because comptuers are new we should not yet allow patents because there are so many easy and obvious algoryithms that have not been found yet. Patents should reward significant effort to create something invative, not something that wasn't needed before but is now. Before the invention of gears (Or maybe it was something else but lets use gears) there was no need for patents because there was so little that could be done. Once we had gears there were many obvious things to build. AFter a few years someone working for years on end devolps something complex, only to have someone else copy it. The first person did all the work, he is the one who should be rewarded for the work, not any latter person who is smart enough to make a copy but not create to begin with. Once the point is reached that complex algorithms are all that we patent, then we need that protection, until then we don't.
Unfortunatly the patent system doesn't differentiate important. If the machine above also contained the discovery of oval gears, that would be worth more protection then the machine, because the gears are useful in many more ways. (Oval gears have existed for years, they are difficult to get right, but they do have advantages in some situations.
Okay, the above was idealistic. Now for the other point of view:
How do you feel about abortion. Now look at the other side and try to convince me the other side doesn't have a point. You have rights vs rights. The right of a person to live vs the right of your own body. Most people have taken a side here, but any honest person has to admit the other side has a point even though on balance it is wrong.
Now take drugs. Same thing, alacholism has destroied the lives of some friends. It (Generaly in a parent) has affected the life of other friends. How many people are killed in car accident involved drinking drivers? Are you sure we want alcahol legal? Of course there is the other side, we all remember the lession of prohibition. (But less alcahol was consumed then) I haven't touched hard(er) drugs, but similear things apply. What someone does to themselves doesn't bother me, so long as it doesn't affect me, but we have proven that alcahol all too often affects me, when other use it.
Now take guns, they enable several great sports. Your only chance of re-gaining freedoms if it really gets that bad. A few psycos have use them to kill others (outside of the last ditch effort to re-gain freedom) and ruined it for many.
Lets take the last a little farther. Some have proposed to get guns out of psychos by registration. Problem is two fold, on the one hand psychos have been known to steel guns which means it doesn't work, and on the other if it really comes down to the last ditch effort the freedom theives know who has the guns to take away. (And we are not even getting into the feasability of accually succeeding in a last ditch effort against a modern army should it come to that)
And so we see that freedom isn't quite as simple as I make it sound. It isn't just a matter of "Well it doesn't affect my life so if you want to be immmoal", but rather your freedom causes my prison. I did my best to be unbiased above, but I suspect you can see my personal biases. (If you can't at least name one you need to practice critical thinking)
Every country gives you some freedoms, that others don't give. Some countries in Africa where nomads are the largest faction give you the most freedom, but at the expense of many things you take for granted. Assuming you aren't willing to live without them (Like , you have to take some compromise.
If you want the freedom to drink when you are under 21, most of is better, likewise for many drugs.
If you want to own guns, then the US has the most freedom here.
If you want to be assured to will have food and shelter even if you don't work, Sweden is the most free, but they have in their own way limits on freedom. One is taxes, you don't have to work in Sweden, but if you want to buy something (Other then food and shelter) you have to pay for it, and that normally means work. Work means they take at least 60% of your money in taxes. (In the US it is about 40%)
Vote libratarian. I don't need freedom to look at porn because my religion prohibits me anyway - but I need freedom of religion. Joe down the road loves his guns, but doesn't care about religion or the press. Alone we are divided, I oppose porn, but if I'm willing to allow you to have your vice, and you allow me mine, togather we are a large force.
Don't forget that in the US your vote is counted. Get involved, make sure there is no election fraud in your distrcit (even if it is to your favor!). Alone we lose freedom, togather we stand up for everyone in a force that the corruption in DC cannot hope to match.
The Russians are experts as dealing with different guage tracks, as they have to deal with it already. Just a matter of putting different wheels under the cars. (Note the cars have to be built to support it, which isn't a problem excpet for US cars, but we can solve the problem)
I cannot belive that there is any railroad in the world that isn't an expert as switching cars around. Taking electric through the tunnel (dealing with exhaust means that electric is the likely choice) and then swithing to american diesel is a trivial task, just get out of the tunnel, stop (you have to stop for customs anyway), unhook, move the electric engine of the way, and hook on a diesel. More engines are needed to get up a mountain then across the great plains, so it is common to have a few extra engines that you hook on just before entering mountains, and dropping them off as you leave.
There are problems of course. Difficult problems in fact. However there are no problems that cannot be solved. The biggest is not digging the tunnel, but getting lines to the tunnel. Everyone wants to say they were a part of digging the great tunnel. Building anouther railroad line isn't as exciting. There are others.