Upgrading my SE/30 to 2.0 was a snap. Like you, I was running 1.6.2 earlier today.
Download the tarballs. Backup kernel. Install the new kernel. Reboot. Backup/etc. Install additional tarballs except etc.tgz. Reboot. Unpack etc.tgz into a temp directory, then run etcupdate to merge the new etc files with your existing customized ones. Reboot one last time.
The only problem I've had is that ntpd now wants to use IPv6 addresses and can't find a route, so I had to look up how to force IPv4 addresses. This is my second upgrade to this system, and it's very painless.
That's basically how we ran out infra/ultra house rules even in 2E. Ultravision required some low amount of background light - starlight at night would be sufficient. Infravision was based on thermal emissions, so it worked even in the pitch darkness of caves. It never made sense to us that surface dwelling races could see in total darkness.
At least I know I'm not the only one. I'd been manually fixing my replies for some time and no one had said anything. Then one very senior coworker complained and within 30 minutes I had a note from my supervisor. The "funny" thing is, the coworker is known around our division for having the most incomprehensible emails that anyone has had to deal with.
I'm fairly convinced that Outlook is single-handedly responsible for destroying email netiquette. I tried explaining the problem to a couple coworkers at my last job (where I at least had the freedom to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook or OE) and people looked at me like I'd grown a third eye. (At least nobody complained to the boss about my "unconventional" quoting style.) Everybody uses Outlook, has always used Outlook, and thinks that top-posting is just how email is done!
Didn't 1st Ed have infra- and ultra-vision? I think 2nd Ed only had infra. Dunno about 3rd Ed, I've dropped out of the AD&D scene. In many of our 2nd Ed games we still used ultravision instead of infra for surface-dwellers, as we thought it made more sense.
I take offense to that. Bards rock. I DM'd a PBeM (based on "Ancient Blood" from an old Dungeon mag) in the early 90's that lasted about two years, IIRC, with a party of 7 that contained 3 bards. (Actually started with 4 but one had to drop out fairly early and was replaced with a different PC.) None of the three was the most suited for an adventure of that type, but they added the most interesting elements to the group. I've found that bard players are often consciously choosing to throw themselves into role-play to a greater degree than others players. You usually don't find min-maxers playing bards.
edging NetBSD out of 'old slow deprecated system' into 'holy sh*t-fast modern system'
I'm a NetBSD user but don't follow all the news about latest developments at this level. In a nutshell, what's responsible for such a large performance boost? The biggest new feature I'm looking forward to in 2.0 is native threading. I'm going to recompile a bunch of my apps to take advantage of it.
Exactly. I was thinking of NetBSD myself, and I am even on minority hardware, so I don't even have the Linux emulation option. I'm hopeful for Kaffe, but I'm not holding my breath.
But some of us use minor platforms. It would be great if Java was open source. I know that projects like Kaffe are trying to produce a clean-room implementation of Java, but they have a way to go.
Not that I know of. Though if I could dredge up everything I've ever posted on the subject, I'd probably have enough.;) I link to relevant sites like electionmethods.org pretty frequently; those are good references as well. Slashdot user robla runs an election methods mailing list and site.
On a different topic, if you want a weaker, less-meddlesome federal government, then you should support a popular vote.
I do, that's why I support repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments. If you want to rein in the USGov, that would do it right quick. I support the EC because I don't want DC ignoring the concerns of smaller states altogether, which is what eliminating the EC would lead to.
Perhaps I misread you, or poorly stated my position. I don't deny the War of Northern Aggression increased centralized power at the expense of State power. I disagree that we should just go along with that, when I believe it is clearly in our best interest to restore the balance of power between DC and the several States.
Grass roots efforts to promote voting reform are a great thing. Letters to the editor and the like raise awareness, and if well done, can educate the public of the need and the options.
Third parties can also serve this function. Though they have platforms with many issues, solving this problem is a means to those issues. Since generally they are aware that the current system is stacked against them, they obviously have an interest. If I were to run a campaign, I would make it a forefront issue.
Unfortunately, most third parties advancing this issue (mainly Greens) have the wrong solution (IRV). We need to educate the parties as well. Citizen groups like the one you mention have undertaken to educate themselves. Parties may not have voting reform activists as adherents - they realize it is important but not enough to dig in themselves. They'll use information from the citizen groups. So we have to make sure they get the right info.
In that vein, I'd encourage anyone who can make a case for the need for voting reform, and can intelligibly discuss all of the several leading methods, to make a 15-20 minute presentation. See if your local parties would be interested in having you speak. Despite the "extremist" tag they get in the media, most 3rd party types are quite thoughtful, and will listen to and consider a well-reasoned speech. And they'd probably be happy to have someone volunteer to speak on an important subject like this.
A candidate might be able to hit more districts more quickly by campaigning in cities, but it suddenly would become less effective overall. For example, Kerry wouldn't have won all of NY just by winning NYC. Each district would count. Rather than trying to run up his total in and around NYC (assuming NY was ever a contested state), he'd have to pound ground out in some of the fringe suburban districts.
Right now there is incentive to court the cities because you can win a whole state without investing a lot of travel time. But the actual areas being contested are not always in the cities. I'd like to see politics being closer to the people, and anything to get candidates closer to the people seems like a good thing.
I disagree. Let the candidates win the election one EV at a time, one district at a time. Make them work for it, really earn it. Currently, if you win Denver you've got most of Colarado (9 EV IIRC) in the bag. It's not right that you could run up the vote in one small area and get a whole State worth of impact.
You're right, I purposely ignored the case of a tie. Why? Because in virtually any real-world scenario they would be extremely rare, to the point where I doubt most people would ever be involved in a tied election. You might hear of one, somewhere, during your lifetime. But Condorcet ties most often occur in small or contrived examples. How often do you currently hear of ties in any "traditional" two-way race? Not very. Why would they be more common in Condorcet? I don't see that they would. And the very fact that there is a way to determine a winner even in a tie situation is a point in Condorcet's favor.
All that said, and as much as I'll continue to promote Condorcet, if Approval replaced Plurality today I would be much happier than I am now.
So far I've upgraded about every 5 or 6 years. Why? Not because my old machine felt too slow for what I was doing, but because software was leaving me behind. In '98 I wanted to start doing some Java programming. Nobody was supporting System 7.1 on 68k Macs anymore. I had to get new kit. In '04, virtually all classic MacOS development was done, I had to move to OS X.
Until recently I still had the 650. Whenever I booted it, it was still fine at what I wanted to do with it. I still have the G3, though it runs Linux now. It still does a lot of good work for me. If Jaguar had installed, I probably wouldn't have upgraded. If developers supported the older platforms a little longer, I wouldn't have to upgrade as often as I do. While there's something to be said for getting stuff done faster, we all know that most PCs spend most of their time just waiting for user input.
The difference is that swing states can change from election to election. A city can't uproot itself and move elsewhere. We don't want candidates continually paying attention only to certain places, only pleasing small segments of the population in order to maintain that power base.
I'd like to see EVs allocated by district to lessen the value of a "swing state". It would create the possibility of "swing districts" though. Colorado as a whole might be predictably Republican, but some districts might be in play then. Likewise, New York as a whole might be predictably Democrat, but Republicans might be able to win some districts. Make politicians work to earn those EVs, flying all over the country.
Oh, I'm completely in favor of allocating EVs by district similar to Nebraska and Maine. But I'm completely against the abolition of the EC altogether.
But theoretically, someone could win a popular election with a million vote margin in one state while losing a 100 vote margin in every other. The EC removes this scenario from possibility. True, winning with only 11 States is not that great, but it's better than winning only 1 and becoming president. The point of the EC is that the president has to appeal to a broad range of voters, not a huge bloc of voters in a very narrow range.
"The winning candidate is the one who can beat every other in a head-to-head race. Just rank your choices 1, 2, 3, etc. Your preferences indicate who wins in a head-to-head in your opinion. Tally those 'wins' for everyone's ballot."
In theory, I like it. In practice, neither of the candidates running for legislature in my district made their positions very clear. I made the effort to try to educate myself on the candidates for every office on my ballot this year, but I couldn't tell the difference. I think many others had the same problem, as the results were less than.5% apart.
Nebraska (and New Hampshire, I've been told) has another problem - not paying legislators squat for the job. As a result, you only get candidates who are independently wealthy, or retired living off their savings. I don't think that makes for a very representative government. If you can wrap up legislative business in 2 months, maybe that's OK, but sessions typically last 4 months, and then there are special sessions. You can't hold a real job, and you can't live on your salary. It sucks. I'd like to take a shot at office, but I can't support my family on sub-poverty-line pay.
BTW, I've also used the "political vector space" analogy. It's silly to think that 1 dimension adequately describes the complex issues of the political arena.
Slashdot Mirror
Upgrading my SE/30 to 2.0 was a snap. Like you, I was running 1.6.2 earlier today.
Download the tarballs. Backup kernel. Install the new kernel. Reboot. Backup /etc. Install additional tarballs except etc.tgz. Reboot. Unpack etc.tgz into a temp directory, then run etcupdate to merge the new etc files with your existing customized ones. Reboot one last time.
The only problem I've had is that ntpd now wants to use IPv6 addresses and can't find a route, so I had to look up how to force IPv4 addresses. This is my second upgrade to this system, and it's very painless.
Obviously they were counting in binary and someone misread it.
That's basically how we ran out infra/ultra house rules even in 2E. Ultravision required some low amount of background light - starlight at night would be sufficient. Infravision was based on thermal emissions, so it worked even in the pitch darkness of caves. It never made sense to us that surface dwelling races could see in total darkness.
At least I know I'm not the only one. I'd been manually fixing my replies for some time and no one had said anything. Then one very senior coworker complained and within 30 minutes I had a note from my supervisor. The "funny" thing is, the coworker is known around our division for having the most incomprehensible emails that anyone has had to deal with.
I'm fairly convinced that Outlook is single-handedly responsible for destroying email netiquette. I tried explaining the problem to a couple coworkers at my last job (where I at least had the freedom to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook or OE) and people looked at me like I'd grown a third eye. (At least nobody complained to the boss about my "unconventional" quoting style.) Everybody uses Outlook, has always used Outlook, and thinks that top-posting is just how email is done!
BTW, what is Outlook quote fix?
Didn't 1st Ed have infra- and ultra-vision? I think 2nd Ed only had infra. Dunno about 3rd Ed, I've dropped out of the AD&D scene. In many of our 2nd Ed games we still used ultravision instead of infra for surface-dwellers, as we thought it made more sense.
I take offense to that. Bards rock. I DM'd a PBeM (based on "Ancient Blood" from an old Dungeon mag) in the early 90's that lasted about two years, IIRC, with a party of 7 that contained 3 bards. (Actually started with 4 but one had to drop out fairly early and was replaced with a different PC.) None of the three was the most suited for an adventure of that type, but they added the most interesting elements to the group. I've found that bard players are often consciously choosing to throw themselves into role-play to a greater degree than others players. You usually don't find min-maxers playing bards.
I'm a NetBSD user but don't follow all the news about latest developments at this level. In a nutshell, what's responsible for such a large performance boost? The biggest new feature I'm looking forward to in 2.0 is native threading. I'm going to recompile a bunch of my apps to take advantage of it.
Exactly. I was thinking of NetBSD myself, and I am even on minority hardware, so I don't even have the Linux emulation option. I'm hopeful for Kaffe, but I'm not holding my breath.
But some of us use minor platforms. It would be great if Java was open source. I know that projects like Kaffe are trying to produce a clean-room implementation of Java, but they have a way to go.
Not that I know of. Though if I could dredge up everything I've ever posted on the subject, I'd probably have enough. ;) I link to relevant sites like electionmethods.org pretty frequently; those are good references as well. Slashdot user robla runs an election methods mailing list and site.
I do, that's why I support repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments. If you want to rein in the USGov, that would do it right quick. I support the EC because I don't want DC ignoring the concerns of smaller states altogether, which is what eliminating the EC would lead to.
Perhaps I misread you, or poorly stated my position. I don't deny the War of Northern Aggression increased centralized power at the expense of State power. I disagree that we should just go along with that, when I believe it is clearly in our best interest to restore the balance of power between DC and the several States.
Grass roots efforts to promote voting reform are a great thing. Letters to the editor and the like raise awareness, and if well done, can educate the public of the need and the options.
Third parties can also serve this function. Though they have platforms with many issues, solving this problem is a means to those issues. Since generally they are aware that the current system is stacked against them, they obviously have an interest. If I were to run a campaign, I would make it a forefront issue.
Unfortunately, most third parties advancing this issue (mainly Greens) have the wrong solution (IRV). We need to educate the parties as well. Citizen groups like the one you mention have undertaken to educate themselves. Parties may not have voting reform activists as adherents - they realize it is important but not enough to dig in themselves. They'll use information from the citizen groups. So we have to make sure they get the right info.
In that vein, I'd encourage anyone who can make a case for the need for voting reform, and can intelligibly discuss all of the several leading methods, to make a 15-20 minute presentation. See if your local parties would be interested in having you speak. Despite the "extremist" tag they get in the media, most 3rd party types are quite thoughtful, and will listen to and consider a well-reasoned speech. And they'd probably be happy to have someone volunteer to speak on an important subject like this.
A candidate might be able to hit more districts more quickly by campaigning in cities, but it suddenly would become less effective overall. For example, Kerry wouldn't have won all of NY just by winning NYC. Each district would count. Rather than trying to run up his total in and around NYC (assuming NY was ever a contested state), he'd have to pound ground out in some of the fringe suburban districts.
Right now there is incentive to court the cities because you can win a whole state without investing a lot of travel time. But the actual areas being contested are not always in the cities. I'd like to see politics being closer to the people, and anything to get candidates closer to the people seems like a good thing.
I completely and fundamentally disagree with that notion. And I guess it shows in every discussion we have.
Is there even a NetBSD/x86 live CD? The only references I've seen were a 1.5.x version.
I disagree. Let the candidates win the election one EV at a time, one district at a time. Make them work for it, really earn it. Currently, if you win Denver you've got most of Colarado (9 EV IIRC) in the bag. It's not right that you could run up the vote in one small area and get a whole State worth of impact.
You're right, I purposely ignored the case of a tie. Why? Because in virtually any real-world scenario they would be extremely rare, to the point where I doubt most people would ever be involved in a tied election. You might hear of one, somewhere, during your lifetime. But Condorcet ties most often occur in small or contrived examples. How often do you currently hear of ties in any "traditional" two-way race? Not very. Why would they be more common in Condorcet? I don't see that they would. And the very fact that there is a way to determine a winner even in a tie situation is a point in Condorcet's favor.
All that said, and as much as I'll continue to promote Condorcet, if Approval replaced Plurality today I would be much happier than I am now.
I'm a Mac user. I'm used to getting good ROI, having low TCO. So far I've owned three primary (not counting hobby boxes) machines:
So far I've upgraded about every 5 or 6 years. Why? Not because my old machine felt too slow for what I was doing, but because software was leaving me behind. In '98 I wanted to start doing some Java programming. Nobody was supporting System 7.1 on 68k Macs anymore. I had to get new kit. In '04, virtually all classic MacOS development was done, I had to move to OS X.
Until recently I still had the 650. Whenever I booted it, it was still fine at what I wanted to do with it. I still have the G3, though it runs Linux now. It still does a lot of good work for me. If Jaguar had installed, I probably wouldn't have upgraded. If developers supported the older platforms a little longer, I wouldn't have to upgrade as often as I do. While there's something to be said for getting stuff done faster, we all know that most PCs spend most of their time just waiting for user input.
The difference is that swing states can change from election to election. A city can't uproot itself and move elsewhere. We don't want candidates continually paying attention only to certain places, only pleasing small segments of the population in order to maintain that power base.
I'd like to see EVs allocated by district to lessen the value of a "swing state". It would create the possibility of "swing districts" though. Colorado as a whole might be predictably Republican, but some districts might be in play then. Likewise, New York as a whole might be predictably Democrat, but Republicans might be able to win some districts. Make politicians work to earn those EVs, flying all over the country.
Oh, I'm completely in favor of allocating EVs by district similar to Nebraska and Maine. But I'm completely against the abolition of the EC altogether.
But theoretically, someone could win a popular election with a million vote margin in one state while losing a 100 vote margin in every other. The EC removes this scenario from possibility. True, winning with only 11 States is not that great, but it's better than winning only 1 and becoming president. The point of the EC is that the president has to appeal to a broad range of voters, not a huge bloc of voters in a very narrow range.
"The winning candidate is the one who can beat every other in a head-to-head race. Just rank your choices 1, 2, 3, etc. Your preferences indicate who wins in a head-to-head in your opinion. Tally those 'wins' for everyone's ballot."
Not too hard, eh?
Relatively new Nebraskan here...
In theory, I like it. In practice, neither of the candidates running for legislature in my district made their positions very clear. I made the effort to try to educate myself on the candidates for every office on my ballot this year, but I couldn't tell the difference. I think many others had the same problem, as the results were less than .5% apart.
Nebraska (and New Hampshire, I've been told) has another problem - not paying legislators squat for the job. As a result, you only get candidates who are independently wealthy, or retired living off their savings. I don't think that makes for a very representative government. If you can wrap up legislative business in 2 months, maybe that's OK, but sessions typically last 4 months, and then there are special sessions. You can't hold a real job, and you can't live on your salary. It sucks. I'd like to take a shot at office, but I can't support my family on sub-poverty-line pay.
Here's why.
BTW, I've also used the "political vector space" analogy. It's silly to think that 1 dimension adequately describes the complex issues of the political arena.