To some degree, you are correct, but:
1) I suspect the most popular methods of installing packages are commonly supported. I have yet to use a distro that couldn't handle tarballs and both Slack and Gentoo (the two distros I am most familiar with) have tools to allow the user to use an RPM to install a binary. I would be very surprised to learn that other common distributions didn't have an rpm2tar tool as well.
2) It's open source. If your distro of choice doesn't include your preferred package management tool, then you could conceivably port it (or find someone who would be willing to port it for you). For example, Gentoo's Portage is written in Python, just about the most readable language I have ever used. And anyone with a smidgeon of clue and the tar and gunzip utilities could install a Slackware package manually, although you would have to manually handle dependencies (yuck...).
Having said that, for my money, package management is one of the biggest reasons to choose one distro over another. I am in the process of moving away from Slack in favor of Gentoo because I like Portage so much. If you don't like the package management features of your distro, I have to wonder why you are sticking with it in favor of a distro with better package management tools:)
Why, oh why does everyone always have to gripe that "distro x doesn't do things the same way as distro y?"
Linux, unlike proprietary, closed source software is about choice. That's what I LIKE about Linux--I can choose the way that I prefer, be that how to install packages, which desktop environment to use, which CLI shell to use, if Linux boots into a CLI shell or if it goes straight to X-Windows, etc.
It's called "poetic justice." It's the MPAA who can't have it both ways. If you expect others to toe the letter of the law and if you do your best to throw the book at anyone who, knowingly or not, was somehow involved in breaking an IP law, then you had better be very, very careful that you do not break IP law yourself.
If you do, then you acknowledge that either IP law is so convoluted and out of touch with reality that it is in need of a rewrite (what I suspect most of the/. community argues) or that you think you are above the law (in which case you are in desperate need of a reality check to cut you back down to size).
I'm probably a little unusual on/. in that I'm not inherently opposed to the concept of intellectual property--within reason. I believe that the author of an artistic work--movies, music, an actual software product--has the right to set the terms of use, and that if I wish to acquire such an artistic work, then I must abide by those terms. But I do agree that the MPAA is out of control, and I love the irony that they got caught with their knickers around their ankles this time. It will be very telling to see how they respond to this accusation. If they did violate the author's licensing then the honorable thing to do is to voluntarily provide the same compensation to the author that they demand from their victi^H^H^H^H^Htarge^H^H^H^H^H...bah...people who violate the MPAA's terms.
I can't wait for electric vehicle technology to mature. I'd gladly trade my Talon TSi in for a http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1T esla Roadster, if they can overcome a couple of technical problems. While the recharging problem has been more than adequately addressed in this and other/. threads, I have a few questions that I haven't seen anyone else ask.
How do electric cars handle extremes in temperaturs? I know here in Anchorage, if I leave my headlights on overnight in the summer, my car will almost always start just fine. OTOH, in the winter, when temps are somewhere around 5-10, leaving the headlights on for just a couple of hours will discharge the battery enough to require a jump start. So......how well do electric cars hold their charge when temps are 0-20 degrees? Do the batteries work well enough in the cold to get back and forth to work, run a few errands, etc.?
On the other hand, there are problems with hot climates, as well. My mom recently was looking at a Ford Escape (?) hybrid. My uncle, who works at a Ford dealership, talked her out of the hybrid and convinced her to buy a conventional Escape, instead. She lives in Texas, and my uncle told her that the hybrids *never* turn the gas engine off in the summer in Texas, because the air conditioner draws too much power. So, while theoretically the hybrid should be more fuel efficient than a gas-powered vehicle, in the south, they actually get *worse* gas mileage than a conventional vehicle.
Finally, at this time, batteries are heavy. How much energy is wasted accelerating (I'm guessing) several hundred (thousand?) pounds of batteries all the time? By comparison, my Talon carries about 100 pounds of fuel and a 300 pound (guessing again) engine. Then the frame of the car has to be heavier to support the weight of the batteries, the brakes have to be beefier to provide adequate stopping power, etc. It takes more energy to accelerate all that extra mass, so how much more efficient are electric cars?
Don't get me wrong--I like the idea of electric vehicles, and I'd love to move away from powering my rice rocket with dinosaur bones, but I think I'll probably wait a little longer for electric technology to improve before I make the switch
The reason he is re-elected is because despite his problems, he brings much more funding to Alaska than any replacement possibly could.
That's not necessarily a good thing. For example, as I understand, even the residents of Ketchikan don't want the "Bridge to Nowhere (disclaimer: I'm not from Ketchikan, nor have I discussed this with anyone who lives there, so I could be wrong--that's just what I've read in the ADN and other sources). Pork barrel politics are (sometimes) locally good, but (almost always) nationally bad. Stevens' bringing the pork back home just increases the deficit. Furthermore, politics being what it is, if Stevens makes a deal with a senator from somewhere else--or more likely, many senators from many other somewhere elses--so he can fund his pet project, then there's a whole buttload of money being spent on projects that are quite likely very wasteful.
Additionally, we haven't exactly had a better option. Basically it comes down to the evil you know vs. the evil you don't.
Here, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
Don't assume that just because the majority of people vote differently than you do that they're all ignorant... That type of thought leads to far worse governments than ours.
Yeah, you've probably got a point here, and despite my previous post, I do respect the right of others to disagree with me. I don't necessarily want everyone to agree with me--or vote like I do--all the time. Dissention and free thought is healthy; the concept that you and I may disagree and sometimes you win and sometimes I win is a (tm) Good Thing. But I maintain that Stevens isn't good for Alaska, and he isn't good for the nation. When I see Stevens introducing legislation more and more often that seems to indicate that either he doesn't understand the long-range consequences of his actions or he simply doesn't care, I wish other Alaskans could look past the short-term. But yes, we could do worse than Sen. Stevens. While I'm afraid that terrorism and "think of the children" are becoming the modern version of 1950s' "Red Scare," Sen. Stevens hasn't yet matched the legacy of Sen. McCarthy. I hope he never does.
...what ports the program will be using for incoming/outgoing connections. Program uses a port different from what is listed in its manifest, the connection either is blocked, or the user is prompted to manually add an ACL entry allowing it...
Incoming, yes. Outgoing, no.
The reason why is that most software uses a range of ports for outgoing connections. For example, take an HTTP session. A web server typically listens on port 80 for HTTP requests. But, your web client (Mozilla, IE, Opera, etc.) can use *any* of the high-numbered/non-reserved ports for the outgoing web traffic. Furthermore, even your web server will spawn a new child process listening on a new port after negotiating the initial connection. Take a look at what's happening on my PC right now:
$ netstat -ep | egrep -i "(mozilla|firefox|80|http)" <...snip...> t cp 0 0 myhost:44595 mu-in-f104.google.:http ESTABLISHED mwallette 71522 10128/firefox-bin tcp 0 0 myhost:44596 mu-in-f104.google.:http ESTABLISHED mwallette 71523 10128/firefox-bin <...snip...>
Firefox is using ports 44595 and 44596 for outbound connections, but is talking to google on port 80 (http). This is so that your web browser can talk to multiple hosts. Each outgoing connection requires a unique socket, and each socket is a unique combination of IP address and port. Unless you have a unique combination of your IP address and port for each connection, you can't have a tab open to Google, another tab open to/. and another tab open to...well, I don't want to know what else you are browsing:) It gets even harder to filter applications based on IP Address/Port when you try to introduce a router doing Port Address Translation, since now there are multiple internal hosts with the source IP address/Port getting rewritten by the PAT router.
...can they stand up to my star coworker? No kidding, I've been here less than a year, and he has broken^H^H^H^H^H^Hdestroyed no less than four of our (non-Panasonic) laptops while I've worked here.
Wouldn't be any surprise if South Korea was one big botnet.
Have you ever looked in the log files of a mail server? S. Korea is one big botnet. Any time I find an IP address that reverses to a Korean ISP, I blacklist the entire class C--especially if it's a kornet.net or hanaro.com IP address.
Not to be a troll, but it's not these companies but rather the U.S. politicians that should have trouble sleeping at night! From the summary:
...Yahoo was under fire for recently turning over information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of a political dissident...Representative Tom Lantos summed up the mood of many of his colleagues by telling the companies, "I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."
Meanwhile, AT&T is turning over phone records to our fricken' government without either a warrant or a subpeona, legislation like the Patriot Act and CALEA is trampling over 200 years of civil rights, and detainees are rotting in Guantanamo Bay while Alberto Gonzales is saying that there is no guaranteed right to habeas corpus in the Constitution.
Give me a break--it must take some serious cojones to point the finger at China while doing as much as possible to emulate them right here in the good ole U.S. of A. <shakes head in disgust>
When I worked the abuse desk at my previous place of employment (yes, an ISP), we finally had to tell our customers "if you run a mailing list of any kind, don't send your messages to AOL users. While individuals on AOL may, in fact be savvy and intelligent, for the most part, AOL users are clueless idiots who don't know the difference between delete and report as spam."
It was a PITA trying to determine if our customers were really spammers or if they just had the bad fortune of e-mailing an idiot at AOL.
At the ISP where I used to work, we used radius to assign IP addresses to our customers. We could almost always look in our logs to match an IP address, date and time stamp to a user's account.
Note that I said "almost always". Radius uses UDP to transmit the log information, so it is possible for a log entry not to make it to our logging servers, since UDP doesn't track state. While modern IP networks are pretty reliable, excrement occurs, and once in a while, we wouldn't have an entry in our logs that matched an IP, date and time that was of interest. In those cases, we couldn't determine who was using the IP address in question.
While YMMV, the way our system was set up, we could not log MAC addresses. So, while we could (usually) match an IP address to a user, we had no way of matching a MAC address to a customer.
It can't compete...on cost with Windows (as long as Windows is bundled with PCs)...
I disagree.
At face value, you are right. You buy a computer, it comes with Windows pre-installed, IE, Outlook, maybe even Office. You and I know that you paid for the software in the purchase price, you just didn't see that cost since you were going to pay it even if you wanted Linux or x86 Solaris or FreeBSD or... So, it looks like Linux can't compete on cost with Windows.
Then you get infected with a worm or trojan because the anti-virus software installed on your computer didn't come with free updates for then next N months. Now you have to buy a subscription to McAfee, or Norton, or Kaspersky (or if you're really smart Nod32, but I digress), and that is a re-occurring cost every year. Because you've done some homework, you also buy firewall software from McAfee or Symantec or (shudder) Black Ice. Yes, XP comes with a firewall, but you want the reporting features and ability to block by program that a commercial product offers. Oh, but you're getting a lot of crap in your e-mail, so you also buy mail filtering software. Then your thirteen year old, who knows way more about computers than you ever will (okay, this is/. so that's probably not true for this subset of computer users, but assume you aren't a geek for a minute) is taking programming classes at school, so you buy Visual Basic and Visual C++, and so on.
Now how much cheaper is that Windows computer than Linux? There are free (as in speech and as in beer) alternatives for each of these problems available for Linux.
So, yeah, the initial purchase price may be equivalent, but after that, you are just throwing good money after bad. But that's just my opinion. YMMV:)
My truck and older vehicle gain nothing from higher octane than recommended.
How old are these vehicles? If they have no engine computer, then no, unless you manually adjust the timing to take advantage of the higher octane, they wouldn't show a difference between grades of fuel. However, if they do have an engine computer that can dynamically advance or retard the spark based upon engine sensor input, then I would be very surprised to learn that there was no difference between premium and regular unleaded in these engines.
Your engine is tuned for a particular octane.
Well, yeah. That's basically the premise I was arguing. A modern engine dynamically tunes itself (within a reasonable range) to get the most performance from whatever grade of fuel is in the tank. An older engine can't. Therefore, a computer-controlled non-turbo, non-nitrous-injected, non-insane-compression engine can run on lower octane fuel, but it won't get the same performance it will with premium gas. An engine without an ECU, however, is manually tuned for a particular, lowest-common-denominator fuel. It will run on higher grades of gasoline, but probably won't get any better performance since the timing and metering is adjusted for the lower octane fuel.
Modern engines don't even require the "higher" octane rating, as they can compensate as required for slightly lower octane ratings.
Hmmmm...so who do I trust? Some dude on/. or the manufacturer of my car's engine? I'll go with the manufacturer on this one.
If you are running a normally-aspirated engine with no aftermarket performance mods, yes, your engine can compensate for lower octane by adjusting the timing to avoid knocking, which isn't terribly healthy for your engine. However, the timing adjustments necessary to run with lower octane gasoline burn the fuel less efficiently than higher octane gas.*
Fast forward to last year, when I bought a '97 Talon TSi (turbo-charged). Because of the increased engine pressures caused by the turbo, the manufacturer says I have to run premium unleaded only because the engine computer can't adjust timing enough to compensate for the lower octane.
*I tested this over the course of a couple of months with my '92 Eagle Talon (non-turbo) about three years ago. I could get ~180 miles (city) on a tank of regular unleaded and about 215 on a tank of premium unleaded. At the price of gas at the time, it actually cost me less per mile to use the premium gas because of the better mileage.
Unfortunately, I think most people are more like my wife, who does one of two things: she either buys the cheapest she can find (shops at Wal-Mart despite their sometimes anti-competitive, anti-employee practices) or sticks with what she already knows despite immoral business practices, higher cost and significant security risk (i.e., Windows vs. Linux/OS-X, Office vs. Open Office, etc.). She rolls her eyes every time I mention "open source" -- even she's griping about something on her computer that isn't working right.
No, because the value of a company's stock is based on real assets, liabilities, and income: all of which are easily translatable to real money, and which commonly pay cash dividends.
Can you say "dot com bust":P
A lot of those stocks were highly valued even though the only "assets" they had were vaporware.
Disclosure: I currently work at a telco albeit a very, very small one in a remote corner of Alaska. I used to work at a marginally larger telco, also in Alaska.
The idea that sparked net neutrality is good: having an ISP extort money from Google, Youtube, MySpace, etc. is a Bad Thing (tm). The Internet was built on open standards, and in the spirit that built the Internet, ISP's should work together to make the Internet as useful as possible. I really don't want to see turf wars between Verizon and Vonage (as an example) break out across the net. And, especially in rural areas, you can't really count on market forces to sort things out, since there may not be a competitor that you can switch to. I know in some areas where my employer provides Internet services, there aren't any realistic alternatives.
However, I have yet to see a network neutrality proposal that is able to discriminate between reasonable prioritization and abuse by the ISP. For example, the company I work for provides class-of-service to customers who need a priority bad enough to pay for a top-tier service. We have a customer that provides telemedicine to rural areas, using VVoIP. This is a lifeline service to a lot of "bush" Alaskans. Can you really argue that someone's MP3 or divx download should be running at the same priority as a telemedicine video conference where a doctor at a rural hub is trying to talk a PA in a tiny, remote village through stabilizing a patient so the patient will survive long enough to get a medevac flight out to a real hospital? Also, all of the draft net neutrality legislation I have seen looks to me (IANAL) as if it would prohibit any blacklisting based upon source or destination address. At the ISP where I used to work, we maintained static and dynamic RBL's and the like in an attempt to minimize spam sent to our customers' inboxes. Judging by the e-mails our customers sent to our abuse e-mail, by far most of our customers *wanted* this service (actually, many of them griped that we weren't filtering enough). While we also used heuristic filters, the blacklists were our first line of defense against spam.
In the end, I simply don't trust Congress to write a law that adequately balances between legitimate prioritization and blacklisting by an ISP and abusive actions in an attempt to squelch competition (send me an internet through the tubes, if you think Congress is savvy enough to write a good piece of technical legislation...groan, and *he's* from Alaska, too...<shakes head in frustration>) I would rather see market forces determine what an ISP can and cannot do. Perhaps the big boys like AT&T and Sprint are different than the small ISP's where I've worked, but in my experience, most of the network engineers are decent people like most everyone else on/. We want the net to work because we use it, too.
Actually, the catch is here:
a DOD request under the NSL statutes cannot be compelled absent court involvement (emphasis mine, --M)
That means the banks, financial institutions, etc. who are are asked to provide this information have the right to refuse, no? (IANAL, so I would welcome confirmation or clarification from someone who is). My wrath isn't directed at the government (this time)--it's with the financial institutions that think it's okay to give out my confidential data just because someone with a shiny badge asks for it >:(
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting...I had looked over the Tesla web site, but missed that.
To some degree, you are correct, but:
:)
1) I suspect the most popular methods of installing packages are commonly supported. I have yet to use a distro that couldn't handle tarballs and both Slack and Gentoo (the two distros I am most familiar with) have tools to allow the user to use an RPM to install a binary. I would be very surprised to learn that other common distributions didn't have an rpm2tar tool as well.
2) It's open source. If your distro of choice doesn't include your preferred package management tool, then you could conceivably port it (or find someone who would be willing to port it for you). For example, Gentoo's Portage is written in Python, just about the most readable language I have ever used. And anyone with a smidgeon of clue and the tar and gunzip utilities could install a Slackware package manually, although you would have to manually handle dependencies (yuck...).
Having said that, for my money, package management is one of the biggest reasons to choose one distro over another. I am in the process of moving away from Slack in favor of Gentoo because I like Portage so much. If you don't like the package management features of your distro, I have to wonder why you are sticking with it in favor of a distro with better package management tools
Or in some cases, to arrest after you successfully protect yourself. Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Goetz
Why, oh why does everyone always have to gripe that "distro x doesn't do things the same way as distro y?"
Linux, unlike proprietary, closed source software is about choice. That's what I LIKE about Linux--I can choose the way that I prefer, be that how to install packages, which desktop environment to use, which CLI shell to use, if Linux boots into a CLI shell or if it goes straight to X-Windows, etc.
Wrong.
/. community argues) or that you think you are above the law (in which case you are in desperate need of a reality check to cut you back down to size).
/. in that I'm not inherently opposed to the concept of intellectual property--within reason. I believe that the author of an artistic work--movies, music, an actual software product--has the right to set the terms of use, and that if I wish to acquire such an artistic work, then I must abide by those terms. But I do agree that the MPAA is out of control, and I love the irony that they got caught with their knickers around their ankles this time. It will be very telling to see how they respond to this accusation. If they did violate the author's licensing then the honorable thing to do is to voluntarily provide the same compensation to the author that they demand from their victi^H^H^H^H^Htarge^H^H^H^H^H...bah...people who violate the MPAA's terms.
It's called "poetic justice." It's the MPAA who can't have it both ways. If you expect others to toe the letter of the law and if you do your best to throw the book at anyone who, knowingly or not, was somehow involved in breaking an IP law, then you had better be very, very careful that you do not break IP law yourself.
If you do, then you acknowledge that either IP law is so convoluted and out of touch with reality that it is in need of a rewrite (what I suspect most of the
I'm probably a little unusual on
I can't wait for electric vehicle technology to mature. I'd gladly trade my Talon TSi in for a http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1T esla Roadster, if they can overcome a couple of technical problems. While the recharging problem has been more than adequately addressed in this and other /. threads, I have a few questions that I haven't seen anyone else ask.
How do electric cars handle extremes in temperaturs? I know here in Anchorage, if I leave my headlights on overnight in the summer, my car will almost always start just fine. OTOH, in the winter, when temps are somewhere around 5-10, leaving the headlights on for just a couple of hours will discharge the battery enough to require a jump start. So......how well do electric cars hold their charge when temps are 0-20 degrees? Do the batteries work well enough in the cold to get back and forth to work, run a few errands, etc.?
On the other hand, there are problems with hot climates, as well. My mom recently was looking at a Ford Escape (?) hybrid. My uncle, who works at a Ford dealership, talked her out of the hybrid and convinced her to buy a conventional Escape, instead. She lives in Texas, and my uncle told her that the hybrids *never* turn the gas engine off in the summer in Texas, because the air conditioner draws too much power. So, while theoretically the hybrid should be more fuel efficient than a gas-powered vehicle, in the south, they actually get *worse* gas mileage than a conventional vehicle.
Finally, at this time, batteries are heavy. How much energy is wasted accelerating (I'm guessing) several hundred (thousand?) pounds of batteries all the time? By comparison, my Talon carries about 100 pounds of fuel and a 300 pound (guessing again) engine. Then the frame of the car has to be heavier to support the weight of the batteries, the brakes have to be beefier to provide adequate stopping power, etc. It takes more energy to accelerate all that extra mass, so how much more efficient are electric cars?
Don't get me wrong--I like the idea of electric vehicles, and I'd love to move away from powering my rice rocket with dinosaur bones, but I think I'll probably wait a little longer for electric technology to improve before I make the switch
That's not necessarily a good thing. For example, as I understand, even the residents of Ketchikan don't want the "Bridge to Nowhere (disclaimer: I'm not from Ketchikan, nor have I discussed this with anyone who lives there, so I could be wrong--that's just what I've read in the ADN and other sources). Pork barrel politics are (sometimes) locally good, but (almost always) nationally bad. Stevens' bringing the pork back home just increases the deficit. Furthermore, politics being what it is, if Stevens makes a deal with a senator from somewhere else--or more likely, many senators from many other somewhere elses--so he can fund his pet project, then there's a whole buttload of money being spent on projects that are quite likely very wasteful.
Here, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
Yeah, you've probably got a point here, and despite my previous post, I do respect the right of others to disagree with me. I don't necessarily want everyone to agree with me--or vote like I do--all the time. Dissention and free thought is healthy; the concept that you and I may disagree and sometimes you win and sometimes I win is a (tm) Good Thing. But I maintain that Stevens isn't good for Alaska, and he isn't good for the nation. When I see Stevens introducing legislation more and more often that seems to indicate that either he doesn't understand the long-range consequences of his actions or he simply doesn't care, I wish other Alaskans could look past the short-term. But yes, we could do worse than Sen. Stevens. While I'm afraid that terrorism and "think of the children" are becoming the modern version of 1950s' "Red Scare," Sen. Stevens hasn't yet matched the legacy of Sen. McCarthy. I hope he never does.
I tried, in the last election :( Unfortunately, too many of my neighbors don't have any more clue than Sen. Stevens does....sigh.
Incoming, yes. Outgoing, no.
The reason why is that most software uses a range of ports for outgoing connections. For example, take an HTTP session. A web server typically listens on port 80 for HTTP requests. But, your web client (Mozilla, IE, Opera, etc.) can use *any* of the high-numbered/non-reserved ports for the outgoing web traffic. Furthermore, even your web server will spawn a new child process listening on a new port after negotiating the initial connection. Take a look at what's happening on my PC right now:
Firefox is using ports 44595 and 44596 for outbound connections, but is talking to google on port 80 (http). This is so that your web browser can talk to multiple hosts. Each outgoing connection requires a unique socket, and each socket is a unique combination of IP address and port. Unless you have a unique combination of your IP address and port for each connection, you can't have a tab open to Google, another tab open to
...can they stand up to my star coworker? No kidding, I've been here less than a year, and he has broken^H^H^H^H^H^Hdestroyed no less than four of our (non-Panasonic) laptops while I've worked here.
"Humor. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical." --Lt. Saavik
Have you ever looked in the log files of a mail server? S. Korea is one big botnet. Any time I find an IP address that reverses to a Korean ISP, I blacklist the entire class C--especially if it's a kornet.net or hanaro.com IP address.
Meanwhile, AT&T is turning over phone records to our fricken' government without either a warrant or a subpeona, legislation like the Patriot Act and CALEA is trampling over 200 years of civil rights, and detainees are rotting in Guantanamo Bay while Alberto Gonzales is saying that there is no guaranteed right to habeas corpus in the Constitution.
Give me a break--it must take some serious cojones to point the finger at China while doing as much as possible to emulate them right here in the good ole U.S. of A. <shakes head in disgust>
When I worked the abuse desk at my previous place of employment (yes, an ISP), we finally had to tell our customers "if you run a mailing list of any kind, don't send your messages to AOL users. While individuals on AOL may, in fact be savvy and intelligent, for the most part, AOL users are clueless idiots who don't know the difference between delete and report as spam."
It was a PITA trying to determine if our customers were really spammers or if they just had the bad fortune of e-mailing an idiot at AOL.
At the ISP where I used to work, we used radius to assign IP addresses to our customers. We could almost always look in our logs to match an IP address, date and time stamp to a user's account.
Note that I said "almost always". Radius uses UDP to transmit the log information, so it is possible for a log entry not to make it to our logging servers, since UDP doesn't track state. While modern IP networks are pretty reliable, excrement occurs, and once in a while, we wouldn't have an entry in our logs that matched an IP, date and time that was of interest. In those cases, we couldn't determine who was using the IP address in question.
While YMMV, the way our system was set up, we could not log MAC addresses. So, while we could (usually) match an IP address to a user, we had no way of matching a MAC address to a customer.
I disagree.
At face value, you are right. You buy a computer, it comes with Windows pre-installed, IE, Outlook, maybe even Office. You and I know that you paid for the software in the purchase price, you just didn't see that cost since you were going to pay it even if you wanted Linux or x86 Solaris or FreeBSD or... So, it looks like Linux can't compete on cost with Windows.
Then you get infected with a worm or trojan because the anti-virus software installed on your computer didn't come with free updates for then next N months. Now you have to buy a subscription to McAfee, or Norton, or Kaspersky (or if you're really smart Nod32, but I digress), and that is a re-occurring cost every year. Because you've done some homework, you also buy firewall software from McAfee or Symantec or (shudder) Black Ice. Yes, XP comes with a firewall, but you want the reporting features and ability to block by program that a commercial product offers. Oh, but you're getting a lot of crap in your e-mail, so you also buy mail filtering software. Then your thirteen year old, who knows way more about computers than you ever will (okay, this is
Now how much cheaper is that Windows computer than Linux? There are free (as in speech and as in beer) alternatives for each of these problems available for Linux.
So, yeah, the initial purchase price may be equivalent, but after that, you are just throwing good money after bad. But that's just my opinion. YMMV
I always did like Ernie Ball strings (got 'em on my bass and both of my Strats, too). Now I have a good reason to like the company, as well :)
How old are these vehicles? If they have no engine computer, then no, unless you manually adjust the timing to take advantage of the higher octane, they wouldn't show a difference between grades of fuel. However, if they do have an engine computer that can dynamically advance or retard the spark based upon engine sensor input, then I would be very surprised to learn that there was no difference between premium and regular unleaded in these engines.
Hmmmm...so who do I trust? Some dude on
If you are running a normally-aspirated engine with no aftermarket performance mods, yes, your engine can compensate for lower octane by adjusting the timing to avoid knocking, which isn't terribly healthy for your engine. However, the timing adjustments necessary to run with lower octane gasoline burn the fuel less efficiently than higher octane gas.*
Fast forward to last year, when I bought a '97 Talon TSi (turbo-charged). Because of the increased engine pressures caused by the turbo, the manufacturer says I have to run premium unleaded only because the engine computer can't adjust timing enough to compensate for the lower octane.
*I tested this over the course of a couple of months with my '92 Eagle Talon (non-turbo) about three years ago. I could get ~180 miles (city) on a tank of regular unleaded and about 215 on a tank of premium unleaded. At the price of gas at the time, it actually cost me less per mile to use the premium gas because of the better mileage.
Global warming *isn't* our fault after all!!!
I do.
:(
Unfortunately, I think most people are more like my wife, who does one of two things: she either buys the cheapest she can find (shops at Wal-Mart despite their sometimes anti-competitive, anti-employee practices) or sticks with what she already knows despite immoral business practices, higher cost and significant security risk (i.e., Windows vs. Linux/OS-X, Office vs. Open Office, etc.). She rolls her eyes every time I mention "open source" -- even she's griping about something on her computer that isn't working right.
It's enough to make an idealistic geek cry....
Can you say "dot com bust"
A lot of those stocks were highly valued even though the only "assets" they had were vaporware.
Disclosure: I currently work at a telco albeit a very, very small one in a remote corner of Alaska. I used to work at a marginally larger telco, also in Alaska.
/. We want the net to work because we use it, too.
The idea that sparked net neutrality is good: having an ISP extort money from Google, Youtube, MySpace, etc. is a Bad Thing (tm). The Internet was built on open standards, and in the spirit that built the Internet, ISP's should work together to make the Internet as useful as possible. I really don't want to see turf wars between Verizon and Vonage (as an example) break out across the net. And, especially in rural areas, you can't really count on market forces to sort things out, since there may not be a competitor that you can switch to. I know in some areas where my employer provides Internet services, there aren't any realistic alternatives.
However, I have yet to see a network neutrality proposal that is able to discriminate between reasonable prioritization and abuse by the ISP. For example, the company I work for provides class-of-service to customers who need a priority bad enough to pay for a top-tier service. We have a customer that provides telemedicine to rural areas, using VVoIP. This is a lifeline service to a lot of "bush" Alaskans. Can you really argue that someone's MP3 or divx download should be running at the same priority as a telemedicine video conference where a doctor at a rural hub is trying to talk a PA in a tiny, remote village through stabilizing a patient so the patient will survive long enough to get a medevac flight out to a real hospital? Also, all of the draft net neutrality legislation I have seen looks to me (IANAL) as if it would prohibit any blacklisting based upon source or destination address. At the ISP where I used to work, we maintained static and dynamic RBL's and the like in an attempt to minimize spam sent to our customers' inboxes. Judging by the e-mails our customers sent to our abuse e-mail, by far most of our customers *wanted* this service (actually, many of them griped that we weren't filtering enough). While we also used heuristic filters, the blacklists were our first line of defense against spam.
In the end, I simply don't trust Congress to write a law that adequately balances between legitimate prioritization and blacklisting by an ISP and abusive actions in an attempt to squelch competition (send me an internet through the tubes, if you think Congress is savvy enough to write a good piece of technical legislation...groan, and *he's* from Alaska, too...<shakes head in frustration>) I would rather see market forces determine what an ISP can and cannot do. Perhaps the big boys like AT&T and Sprint are different than the small ISP's where I've worked, but in my experience, most of the network engineers are decent people like most everyone else on
Hmmm....would that be both hands, as in surrender?
Actually, the catch is here: a DOD request under the NSL statutes cannot be compelled absent court involvement (emphasis mine, --M)
That means the banks, financial institutions, etc. who are are asked to provide this information have the right to refuse, no? (IANAL, so I would welcome confirmation or clarification from someone who is). My wrath isn't directed at the government (this time)--it's with the financial institutions that think it's okay to give out my confidential data just because someone with a shiny badge asks for it >:(