IMHO, what prevented MySQL from being a 'real' db wasn't missing transaction feature X, but data truncation. For anyone who hasn't run into this MySQL has a really nasty habit of truncating data if it won't fit into a field. Occasionaly this is desired for logging and non-critical information, but it can cause major problems that are incredibly difficult to track down. The solution up until now was to over-estimate column size and hope for the best (I'm aware that some connectors after 4.1 could convert warnings into exceptions/errors, a bit sub-optimal if you ask me).
5.0 corrects this issue by introducing several server modes controlling just how picky the db is about the input. I couldn't be happier - just being able to use conservative guesses about column lengths (and fixing them on the fly if I encounter larger values) means that my tables and keys can be significantly smaller - a HUGE space and performance boost. I'll be able to sleep better at night too.
At the moment I'm working on a MySQL data warehouse, and having real table partitions and the federated storage engine (virtual tables, so you can do cross-db joins) could solve a lot of problems for me, and views could be convenient (syntatic sugar if you ask me).
I'm sure someone out there will respond 'well if that bothered you, you should just use database x', but as far as I'm concerend one only has a few choices for databases:
Oracle
MSSQL
Postgres
MySQL
SQLite
Oracle has everything one could possibly desire and then some, but its expensive to license and expensive to maintain. MSSQL is nice feature and administration wise, but its still fairly expensive and you're locked into using Windows Server (ewww). As far as I'm concerned, Postgress and MySQL are very close. Historicaly it has been about features vs. performance, but the two are converging rapidly, and now its a matter of chosing between a half dozen advanced transactional features and an easy multi-user environment & larger community/language support.
Perhaps I just spend too much time in Boston and NYC, but it just feels like the average purse on a 20-30 something year old is a status symbol more than anything else. If you're the kind of girl that loathes the garbage that Madison Avenue produces rather than dreams of it - trust me, I'm not picking on you. I don't envy the attire women are 'expected' to wear. Particularly the shoes.
But the other side of this coin is that, for the life of me, I can't figure out the volume of stuff that women carry around that requires a bag in the first place. I carry a cell phone, iPod (often), wallet, keys, eye drops, chap stick, and gum on me - all of which could easily fit in any woman's coat pocket(s). The only other things I could think a woman might want to carry in addition would be a FHP, medical nessecity (inhaler/epi pen/whatever), or small makeup thingamabob. Should I require things like a computer/books/notebook, they all get tossed in a pretty small laptop bag - but its not exactly every-day everywhere-I-go kind of stuff.
So I'm not trying to be negative or anything. I just don't get it.
Okay, tell me where I'm supposed to put my wallet when MY PANTS DON'T EVEN HAVE POCKETS?!?!?!?!? And on the occassions when I do have pockets, they're usually too small to be useful. And then my girlfriends scold me for using them anyway, claiming I'm being unfashionable by carrying THINGS in my pockets.
You're just proving my original point that the entire issue is fasion related. IMHO, tight tank tops, baggy cargo pants, and skateboarding shoes is hot. The fact that a girl dressed like that does not complain about being uncomfortable or make me hold things is also quite nice.
they're a fasion accessory. Putting solar pannels on it won't make it anymore attractive to women, unless you get some Italian/French/NYC designer to plaster his name all over it.
If the goal was comfort and ease of finding things, women would buy cargo pants.
Yes, but if the torrent is corrupted, said IP's aren't distributing copyrighted works? They might be able to prove the intent to pirate, but not the actual act - the penalties for intention tend significantly less.
Of course, it would be easy enough to prove in court that distributing a corrupted file violates MS Windows copyrights. Then you'd be in trouble.
I'm sure the Communist Party of China would love to hear that news...;)
Yeah, but it sure sounts a lot better than the "Brutal Authoritarian Oligarchy" of China, doesn't it? Kind of like how the official name of the country is "The People's Republic of China" which, by my count, has two inherent lies in it.
You don't believe Amnesty International? Fine. What about Abu Ghraib?
You didn't like my citation for the patriot act? I linked you to the Library of Congress. Fine, perhaps you wanted me to be more specific. I refer you to really all of Title II (Enhanced Surveillance Procedures), specificaly Sect. 201 (Authority to intercept wire, oral, and electronic communications relating to terrorism) and Sec. 213 (Authority for delaying notice of the execution of a warrant)
You didn't like the Wikipedia article on the Drug War? I tried wikipedia to give a general overview of how wasteful and invasive it is, but tak a good look at the US Department of Labor Drug Regulations to see just how much your employer is allowed to drug test you.
Check my constitution? Well I don't know about yours, the first Amedment of mine starts out with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". So my commander-in-chief endorsing religion using government resources sure feels like its breaking the spirit of the law right in half.
If you want to call my reference to the widening economic gap a stretch, fine. But I do suggest a history lesson on the age of the American Robber Barons.
I don't know what else to say if you don't like these sources. Its easy for you to repeat "cite" or just ignore sources who don't share your viewpoint, but it's unhelpful. If you're not satisfied, perhaps you could disprove my original point that Americans are moving backwards in regards to civil liberties?
In other words, if you disagree, how can you prove to me that America has aggressivley maintained or improved liberties since the civil rights movement?
I agree that slashdot is a little heavy on the hyperbole, but you're missing the point. The issue is that the once-progressive American government is moving backwards in terms of civil liberties, whereas it seems like everybody else is moving forwards. And I don't think its just a knee-jerk reaction to the Bush administration either; American politics have been steadily moving to the right since JFK, RFK, & MLK were assassinated. We shouldn't have to compare ourselves to the rest of the world to feel better about it, we know what our potential is.
Thats true, all their players have an option to mount as extenal hard drives. It hides your music library, and the remaning space can be used for whatever. You'll be able to view any text notes, address books, and pictures (if you have a color display) directly from the iPod, but anything else isn't playable or viewable. But its nice to be able to carry a few movies and documents with you. As far as filesystems, you can format them in "PC Mode" or "Mac Mode", which I imagine refers to Fat32 and Ext/Reiser/whatever the hell OSX uses, respectivley. I'm aware the later is probably a technicaly superior filesystem, but I don't see a practical advantage, since OSX can read PC Mode and PC's can't read Mac Mode. Anyone out there have a little more insight?
Anyways, they're not trying THAT hard to keep you from manipulating the library, it's really not much more than a hidden folder. But the file and folder names aren't very human-readable, they're hashes (I'm not positive if this is done to discourage manual editing, or is done for efficency to reduce disk seeks or something), and I believe an index is kept as well.
So a drag and drop into the library won't work, and editing by hand would be tedious, but there's a lot of FOSS stuff out there to manipulate it. Of course, none of them are as pleasant to use as iTunes, but if you don't feel like running Windows or OSX or want to copy from an iPod to another machine, you're in luck.
I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FREELY DOWNLOAD THE NEW VERSIONS as they represent a more accurate representation of the recording I purchased the rights to hear. The money I paid was for the recording the artist laid down in the studio.
Not really. You bought two things - the right to the intellectual property, and the media it was recorded on or transmitted over (and the retail mark up, storage/transportation costs, ect).
I agree that you shouldn't have to pay for the former a second time (but how that could be enforced, particularly without slashdotters complaing about privacy is beyond me), implying that you should not have to pay for the later means that people should work for free, just for you.
A not-so-bright thief could have plugged it into the campus network. Universities have total control of their networks, and if they happen to know the MAC address of the stolen machine, its easy to pinpoint. My school (UMass Amherst) recovered several stolen machines this way.
As much as $3 a gallon gas has changed my habits, I guess it is good because it makes other, more environmentally friendly alternatives, an alternative price wise
Not to be too pesimistic here, but I don't think it will help. Sure we're finaly seeing a little conservation now, but as the price goes up we'll just replace our oil infrasctructure with electric/fuel cells/batteries. The vast majority of electric power in the US still comes from coal, and we have no shortage of it. I'm no chemist, but I can't imagine its any better for emissions.
More than a bit of an overstatement. The IT industry is the strongest it's been since the dot-com bubble. Its really because HP isn't as good as Dell and IBM, and that European labor laws are outrageous.
Its really an indication that the European economy is tanking - the continent is densley populated with few natural resources, the manufacturing is gone, and their high-tech output no better (and arguably worse) than the Americans/Japanese.
While I share your concern about the American debt, it is largely a result of military spending. If the rest of the world spent the time, money and effort to clean up hotspots, it wouldn't be an issue (not that I approve of the handling of Iraq, but the rest of the world does NOTHING). I'm not just refering to the Mideast - the Europeans and Japanese can't even clean up their own back yards (Yougoslavia and North Korea, respectivley) - they wait for the Americans to do it. As long as so many nations are dependent on the US Military and the US Economy, they won't LET America tank and keep lending money.
have you seen current 600 dollar pcs?
they far outclass the 600 dollar mac mini and those run tiger.
The current 600 dollar PC's are bottom of the barrel parts in custom motheboards and cases. CPU clock speeds != quality, nor to they guarentee greater overall performance. Besides, I'd take OSX over Windows in a heartbeat. Gaming aside, I can't think of a single thing Windows does better than OSX.
you have it wrong, hardware requirements are not a good reason not to get vista. there are much better reasons not to get it, like the massive DRM and financially supporting ms, which is as good reason as any.
I know how much slashdotters love to rag on MS for not including Monad and WinFS - but the reality is that very few desktop users care (I couldn't care either, I have little need for a poorly implemented bash shell and bloated file system). Vista fixes the two of the most common complaints with XP: the vunerability to spyware (by implementing, to some extent, the 30-year old UNIX concept of least permissions), and the boring and unintuitive GUI (with Aero).
If it makes my counter-strike machine that much more plesant to use, and that much harder for the girlfriend to break, I'll probably pick it up. Of course, I said I'd probably pick up Tiger too - but so far it hasn't proven to be enough of an improvement over Panther to warrant $125. If the linux desktop ever gets there, I'll put it on all of my machines instead of just the server... but that's another story.
Does anybody ever notice how whenever the free market fails at something, the government steps in to take the blame, which provides further "evidence" that government is incompetent, which results in further reduction of government services, and more privatization
Whether an organization is public or private is irrelevant, the important thing to remember is that just about everbody in this world is self-serving. Politicians are motivated by power, the private sector by money. So an issue needs to be popular or profitable (respectivley) to be addressed. This whole levee breach wouldn't have happened if EITHER the voters of New Orleans paid attention and voted the corrupt out, OR the levees were maintained by people that had something to lose by their failure (the insurance companies, perhaps?).
Let's take it one step further - it was Congress that cut funding for levees
Um, its generally the responsiblity of the States to fund and maintain such projects (my beloved Boston had to beg for years for federal funding for the Big Dig). And congress just signed that bloated transportation bill. I'm wondering where you got this idea.
I wish everyone would just shut up for a while and help somebody out. Even Bill Clinton said the other day that now is the time to act. We can point fingers later
What do you mean "even" Bill Clinton? Say what you will about the man, but one thing he has always been is compassionate & unifying. Course, he has been walking the center recently now that Hillary is going to run...
For what feels like the millionth time, say it with me - NEW ORLEANS WAS NOT BUILT UNDER SEA LEVEL. The land is a bayou; the city sank in the between the 40's and 60's as result of the 'modern' levee/pump system & shipping lanes dyring up the land & preventing incoming silt from the Mississsippi. In your own words - educate yourself before you make a stupid post.
I agree. I have a few to add myself. In the interest of equal-opprotunity hating, I did my best to cover the major desktop OS's:
Windows
To log off/shut down you have to go to the START menu - explain that to your grandmother.
Using the default install for most programs out there will give you a HUGELY cluttered start menu of installers/uninstallers/help files, organized in a bizzare heirarchy defined by the manufacturer (usualy company name->product->more junk)... I just want a fsking link to the program! KDE/Gnome did this right.
There is no universal place for tweaking OS settings - yes I know the 'Control Pannel' is supposed to do that, but thing how much stuff is burried in right click menus elsewhere. I would take the OSX 'System Preferences' or Gnome's GUI's and the/etc dir any day.
OSX
The green expand button - I don't know WTF it's doing to calculate size, but why not just full screen the window? Thats really what I want - it might be against the 'Mac Philosophy' or whatever, but I'm typing on a 12" powerbook and tend to only have one app visible & full screen at a time.
The dock is cool and all, because 90% of the time I'm using the same dozen or so apps. But for those lesser-used programs the options are either clutter your dock, or have to open and sort through the app folder every time.
Closing the last window of a program doesn't terminate the program - quite different than other OS's - and it means I have to rember apple-Q instead of clicking the x to actually quit
Linux
There is absolutley no consistency between programs (how menus are organized, ect), a problem that is exacerbated by the different look and feel of QT and GTK apps. Funny how the same group of people who are almost militant about standardization in regards to file formats and protocols do not feel the same about UI design
It looks like they haven't updated artwork or style in 10 years. You have to try rather hard to make a Linux desktop not 100% fugly - and I still can't get fully transparent menu bars in gnome (the handles are still there).
Unhelpful and/or cryptic error messages, and often a complete lack of human-readable documentation
You build cities on the best agricultural land in order to discourage farming
I don't know how you play Civ games, but I play something like 'build farms near protected shipping lanes, then watch the city expand naturally'. Which is how it really happens.
New Orleans, much of which sits below sea level, is surrounded by the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. Construction of the levees between the city, the river and lake began in 1879. The earthen barriers were originally errected to prevent damage caused by seasonal flooding, and allow the city to expand beyond the natural levees on which it had been initially constructed. This interfered with the normal process of the river depositing sediment and building up the land of the delta marshlands during the periodic floods. Interruping this process, which had created the land of the Mississippi Delta over the course of thousands of years, caused the land to dry out. In turn, the swampy lands of the region shrank like a sponge, the land began to sink, entire barrier islands disappeared, as the land of the vast delta slowly settled into the sea.
Indeed, the land of New Orleans and the surrounding communities was not below sea level when the communities were originally built. Only after the area was "modernized" (with the current levee system erected in the 1940s and 1950s, and the shipping canal flood walls completed in the mid 1960s) did the area begin to sink precipitiously.
Sure, you can blame civil engineers from the 40's who were unaware of their impact, but my point still stands - its not just as simple as 'don't build there'. It wasn't always dangerous, so at what point can you say 'well, time to abandon this major US city because something might happen some day'? Should we pack up and leave San Francisco because the San Andreas fault?
New Orleans has (I guess had) a series of pumps to deal with heavy rainfall. The city was in suprisingly good condition after the storm was passed (sure, a few broken windows, roofs, and flooded basements), but it was the rupture of the levees a day after that caused the real problems. Wikipedia has some great articles about the history of the pump/levee system, how it was breacked, and the effect on the city and the rest of the US. link
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, what prevented MySQL from being a 'real' db wasn't missing transaction feature X, but data truncation. For anyone who hasn't run into this MySQL has a really nasty habit of truncating data if it won't fit into a field. Occasionaly this is desired for logging and non-critical information, but it can cause major problems that are incredibly difficult to track down. The solution up until now was to over-estimate column size and hope for the best (I'm aware that some connectors after 4.1 could convert warnings into exceptions/errors, a bit sub-optimal if you ask me).
5.0 corrects this issue by introducing several server modes controlling just how picky the db is about the input. I couldn't be happier - just being able to use conservative guesses about column lengths (and fixing them on the fly if I encounter larger values) means that my tables and keys can be significantly smaller - a HUGE space and performance boost. I'll be able to sleep better at night too.
At the moment I'm working on a MySQL data warehouse, and having real table partitions and the federated storage engine (virtual tables, so you can do cross-db joins) could solve a lot of problems for me, and views could be convenient (syntatic sugar if you ask me).
I'm sure someone out there will respond 'well if that bothered you, you should just use database x', but as far as I'm concerend one only has a few choices for databases:
- Oracle
- MSSQL
- Postgres
- MySQL
- SQLite
Oracle has everything one could possibly desire and then some, but its expensive to license and expensive to maintain. MSSQL is nice feature and administration wise, but its still fairly expensive and you're locked into using Windows Server (ewww). As far as I'm concerned, Postgress and MySQL are very close. Historicaly it has been about features vs. performance, but the two are converging rapidly, and now its a matter of chosing between a half dozen advanced transactional features and an easy multi-user environment & larger community/language support.Perhaps I just spend too much time in Boston and NYC, but it just feels like the average purse on a 20-30 something year old is a status symbol more than anything else. If you're the kind of girl that loathes the garbage that Madison Avenue produces rather than dreams of it - trust me, I'm not picking on you. I don't envy the attire women are 'expected' to wear. Particularly the shoes.
But the other side of this coin is that, for the life of me, I can't figure out the volume of stuff that women carry around that requires a bag in the first place. I carry a cell phone, iPod (often), wallet, keys, eye drops, chap stick, and gum on me - all of which could easily fit in any woman's coat pocket(s). The only other things I could think a woman might want to carry in addition would be a FHP, medical nessecity (inhaler/epi pen/whatever), or small makeup thingamabob. Should I require things like a computer/books/notebook, they all get tossed in a pretty small laptop bag - but its not exactly every-day everywhere-I-go kind of stuff.
So I'm not trying to be negative or anything. I just don't get it.
Okay, tell me where I'm supposed to put my wallet when MY PANTS DON'T EVEN HAVE POCKETS?!?!?!?!? And on the occassions when I do have pockets, they're usually too small to be useful. And then my girlfriends scold me for using them anyway, claiming I'm being unfashionable by carrying THINGS in my pockets.
You're just proving my original point that the entire issue is fasion related. IMHO, tight tank tops, baggy cargo pants, and skateboarding shoes is hot. The fact that a girl dressed like that does not complain about being uncomfortable or make me hold things is also quite nice.
they're a fasion accessory. Putting solar pannels on it won't make it anymore attractive to women, unless you get some Italian/French/NYC designer to plaster his name all over it.
If the goal was comfort and ease of finding things, women would buy cargo pants.
Yes, but if the torrent is corrupted, said IP's aren't distributing copyrighted works? They might be able to prove the intent to pirate, but not the actual act - the penalties for intention tend significantly less.
Of course, it would be easy enough to prove in court that distributing a corrupted file violates MS Windows copyrights. Then you'd be in trouble.
I'm sure the Communist Party of China would love to hear that news... ;)
Yeah, but it sure sounts a lot better than the "Brutal Authoritarian Oligarchy" of China, doesn't it? Kind of like how the official name of the country is "The People's Republic of China" which, by my count, has two inherent lies in it.
You don't believe Amnesty International? Fine. What about Abu Ghraib?
You didn't like my citation for the patriot act? I linked you to the Library of Congress. Fine, perhaps you wanted me to be more specific. I refer you to really all of Title II (Enhanced Surveillance Procedures), specificaly Sect. 201 (Authority to intercept wire, oral, and electronic communications relating to terrorism) and Sec. 213 (Authority for delaying notice of the execution of a warrant)
You didn't like the Wikipedia article on the Drug War? I tried wikipedia to give a general overview of how wasteful and invasive it is, but tak a good look at the US Department of Labor Drug Regulations to see just how much your employer is allowed to drug test you.
Check my constitution? Well I don't know about yours, the first Amedment of mine starts out with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". So my commander-in-chief endorsing religion using government resources sure feels like its breaking the spirit of the law right in half.
If you want to call my reference to the widening economic gap a stretch, fine. But I do suggest a history lesson on the age of the American Robber Barons.
I don't know what else to say if you don't like these sources. Its easy for you to repeat "cite" or just ignore sources who don't share your viewpoint, but it's unhelpful. If you're not satisfied, perhaps you could disprove my original point that Americans are moving backwards in regards to civil liberties?
In other words, if you disagree, how can you prove to me that America has aggressivley maintained or improved liberties since the civil rights movement?
Sure.
How about the erosion of the 4th Amendment with the USA Patriot Act?
Or perhaps the human rights violations in Guantanamo bay?
Or the government intervention in something as personal as marriage?
Or the War on Privacy, err War on drugs?
Maybe the widening gap between the rich and poor? Perhaps the government endorsing religion?
Is that a good enough start?
I agree that slashdot is a little heavy on the hyperbole, but you're missing the point. The issue is that the once-progressive American government is moving backwards in terms of civil liberties, whereas it seems like everybody else is moving forwards. And I don't think its just a knee-jerk reaction to the Bush administration either; American politics have been steadily moving to the right since JFK, RFK, & MLK were assassinated. We shouldn't have to compare ourselves to the rest of the world to feel better about it, we know what our potential is.
Thats true, all their players have an option to mount as extenal hard drives. It hides your music library, and the remaning space can be used for whatever. You'll be able to view any text notes, address books, and pictures (if you have a color display) directly from the iPod, but anything else isn't playable or viewable. But its nice to be able to carry a few movies and documents with you. As far as filesystems, you can format them in "PC Mode" or "Mac Mode", which I imagine refers to Fat32 and Ext/Reiser/whatever the hell OSX uses, respectivley. I'm aware the later is probably a technicaly superior filesystem, but I don't see a practical advantage, since OSX can read PC Mode and PC's can't read Mac Mode. Anyone out there have a little more insight?
Anyways, they're not trying THAT hard to keep you from manipulating the library, it's really not much more than a hidden folder. But the file and folder names aren't very human-readable, they're hashes (I'm not positive if this is done to discourage manual editing, or is done for efficency to reduce disk seeks or something), and I believe an index is kept as well.
So a drag and drop into the library won't work, and editing by hand would be tedious, but there's a lot of FOSS stuff out there to manipulate it. Of course, none of them are as pleasant to use as iTunes, but if you don't feel like running Windows or OSX or want to copy from an iPod to another machine, you're in luck.
I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FREELY DOWNLOAD THE NEW VERSIONS as they represent a more accurate representation of the recording I purchased the rights to hear. The money I paid was for the recording the artist laid down in the studio.
Not really. You bought two things - the right to the intellectual property, and the media it was recorded on or transmitted over (and the retail mark up, storage/transportation costs, ect).
I agree that you shouldn't have to pay for the former a second time (but how that could be enforced, particularly without slashdotters complaing about privacy is beyond me), implying that you should not have to pay for the later means that people should work for free, just for you.
Its 2005. Just get Lasik.
You're forgetting Samsung, which I believe is Korean.
A not-so-bright thief could have plugged it into the campus network. Universities have total control of their networks, and if they happen to know the MAC address of the stolen machine, its easy to pinpoint. My school (UMass Amherst) recovered several stolen machines this way.
As much as $3 a gallon gas has changed my habits, I guess it is good because it makes other, more environmentally friendly alternatives, an alternative price wise
Not to be too pesimistic here, but I don't think it will help. Sure we're finaly seeing a little conservation now, but as the price goes up we'll just replace our oil infrasctructure with electric/fuel cells/batteries. The vast majority of electric power in the US still comes from coal, and we have no shortage of it. I'm no chemist, but I can't imagine its any better for emissions.
WARNING: it is because the US economy is tanking!
More than a bit of an overstatement. The IT industry is the strongest it's been since the dot-com bubble. Its really because HP isn't as good as Dell and IBM, and that European labor laws are outrageous. Its really an indication that the European economy is tanking - the continent is densley populated with few natural resources, the manufacturing is gone, and their high-tech output no better (and arguably worse) than the Americans/Japanese.
While I share your concern about the American debt, it is largely a result of military spending. If the rest of the world spent the time, money and effort to clean up hotspots, it wouldn't be an issue (not that I approve of the handling of Iraq, but the rest of the world does NOTHING). I'm not just refering to the Mideast - the Europeans and Japanese can't even clean up their own back yards (Yougoslavia and North Korea, respectivley) - they wait for the Americans to do it. As long as so many nations are dependent on the US Military and the US Economy, they won't LET America tank and keep lending money.
have you seen current 600 dollar pcs?
they far outclass the 600 dollar mac mini and those run tiger.
The current 600 dollar PC's are bottom of the barrel parts in custom motheboards and cases. CPU clock speeds != quality, nor to they guarentee greater overall performance. Besides, I'd take OSX over Windows in a heartbeat. Gaming aside, I can't think of a single thing Windows does better than OSX.
you have it wrong, hardware requirements are not a good reason not to get vista. there are much better reasons not to get it, like the massive DRM and financially supporting ms, which is as good reason as any.
I know how much slashdotters love to rag on MS for not including Monad and WinFS - but the reality is that very few desktop users care (I couldn't care either, I have little need for a poorly implemented bash shell and bloated file system). Vista fixes the two of the most common complaints with XP: the vunerability to spyware (by implementing, to some extent, the 30-year old UNIX concept of least permissions), and the boring and unintuitive GUI (with Aero).
If it makes my counter-strike machine that much more plesant to use, and that much harder for the girlfriend to break, I'll probably pick it up. Of course, I said I'd probably pick up Tiger too - but so far it hasn't proven to be enough of an improvement over Panther to warrant $125. If the linux desktop ever gets there, I'll put it on all of my machines instead of just the server... but that's another story.
Does anybody ever notice how whenever the free market fails at something, the government steps in to take the blame, which provides further "evidence" that government is incompetent, which results in further reduction of government services, and more privatization
Whether an organization is public or private is irrelevant, the important thing to remember is that just about everbody in this world is self-serving. Politicians are motivated by power, the private sector by money. So an issue needs to be popular or profitable (respectivley) to be addressed. This whole levee breach wouldn't have happened if EITHER the voters of New Orleans paid attention and voted the corrupt out, OR the levees were maintained by people that had something to lose by their failure (the insurance companies, perhaps?).
Let's take it one step further - it was Congress that cut funding for levees
Um, its generally the responsiblity of the States to fund and maintain such projects (my beloved Boston had to beg for years for federal funding for the Big Dig). And congress just signed that bloated transportation bill. I'm wondering where you got this idea.
I wish everyone would just shut up for a while and help somebody out. Even Bill Clinton said the other day that now is the time to act. We can point fingers later
What do you mean "even" Bill Clinton? Say what you will about the man, but one thing he has always been is compassionate & unifying. Course, he has been walking the center recently now that Hillary is going to run...
For what feels like the millionth time, say it with me - NEW ORLEANS WAS NOT BUILT UNDER SEA LEVEL. The land is a bayou; the city sank in the between the 40's and 60's as result of the 'modern' levee/pump system & shipping lanes dyring up the land & preventing incoming silt from the Mississsippi. In your own words - educate yourself before you make a stupid post.
Bling. Works great, thanks :)
Windows
- To log off/shut down you have to go to the START menu - explain that to your grandmother.
- Using the default install for most programs out there will give you a HUGELY cluttered start menu of installers/uninstallers/help files, organized in a bizzare heirarchy defined by the manufacturer (usualy company name->product->more junk)... I just want a fsking link to the program! KDE/Gnome did this right.
- There is no universal place for tweaking OS settings - yes I know the 'Control Pannel' is supposed to do that, but thing how much stuff is burried in right click menus elsewhere. I would take the OSX 'System Preferences' or Gnome's GUI's and the
/etc dir any day.
OSX- The green expand button - I don't know WTF it's doing to calculate size, but why not just full screen the window? Thats really what I want - it might be against the 'Mac Philosophy' or whatever, but I'm typing on a 12" powerbook and tend to only have one app visible & full screen at a time.
- The dock is cool and all, because 90% of the time I'm using the same dozen or so apps. But for those lesser-used programs the options are either clutter your dock, or have to open and sort through the app folder every time.
- Closing the last window of a program doesn't terminate the program - quite different than other OS's - and it means I have to rember apple-Q instead of clicking the x to actually quit
LinuxYou build cities on the best agricultural land in order to discourage farming
I don't know how you play Civ games, but I play something like 'build farms near protected shipping lanes, then watch the city expand naturally'. Which is how it really happens.
Yes, but I'm sure you are aware that New Orleans wasn't always in such a dangerous situation.
From Wikipedia:
New Orleans, much of which sits below sea level, is surrounded by the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. Construction of the levees between the city, the river and lake began in 1879. The earthen barriers were originally errected to prevent damage caused by seasonal flooding, and allow the city to expand beyond the natural levees on which it had been initially constructed. This interfered with the normal process of the river depositing sediment and building up the land of the delta marshlands during the periodic floods. Interruping this process, which had created the land of the Mississippi Delta over the course of thousands of years, caused the land to dry out. In turn, the swampy lands of the region shrank like a sponge, the land began to sink, entire barrier islands disappeared, as the land of the vast delta slowly settled into the sea.
Indeed, the land of New Orleans and the surrounding communities was not below sea level when the communities were originally built. Only after the area was "modernized" (with the current levee system erected in the 1940s and 1950s, and the shipping canal flood walls completed in the mid 1960s) did the area begin to sink precipitiously.
Sure, you can blame civil engineers from the 40's who were unaware of their impact, but my point still stands - its not just as simple as 'don't build there'. It wasn't always dangerous, so at what point can you say 'well, time to abandon this major US city because something might happen some day'? Should we pack up and leave San Francisco because the San Andreas fault?
New Orleans has (I guess had) a series of pumps to deal with heavy rainfall. The city was in suprisingly good condition after the storm was passed (sure, a few broken windows, roofs, and flooded basements), but it was the rupture of the levees a day after that caused the real problems. Wikipedia has some great articles about the history of the pump/levee system, how it was breacked, and the effect on the city and the rest of the US. link