Forced resale of bare copper IS a benefit. Why? Because where SBC can't be bothered to offer certain services, other providers have stepped in to fill the gap. I can't get ADSL or SDSL due to distance limitations where I live. The only viable option is IDSL which SBC refuses to offer. However, megapath and others offer IDSL (over covad IIRC) which allows me to actually get something approaching broadband, and more importantly, a static IP and permenant connection.
Forcing competition in the local loop monopoly is a VERY GOOD THING.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do understand that. However, the discrepency is so great that we cannot sustain our current level while pulling the rest of the world up to something approaching our standards of living in a short enough timeframe IMO. If the cost of living/production in China was 20% less than the US, then a small amount of production would shift there and we could consume it (due to our greater buying power from the decreased cost of production). Hence, our culture would pull theirs up with little impact to ourselves. That is the increase in wealth that you are referring to. They have increased growth from our consumption, and we loose out on some growth but make up for it by increased comsumption power. Over time, the growth in China would raise their standard of living, further driving comsumption and the overall worldwide standard of living. A net increase in worldwide wealth would ensue.
However, when the cost inequity is so great that a critical mass of productivity shifts to the cheaper country, hence removing so many jobs from the comsuming country that it looses its power of consumption, you no longer have an engine driving worldwide growth. Everyone suffers, but the consumption country will suffer the greatest until their standard decline enough to again become comporable. The developing countries increases in growth will still spawn some internal increase in standard of living. This will hopefully sustain at least their growth, but that is not a certainty. Just as worldwide wealth can grow upwards, is can also shrink. Like you said, its not static.
You've hit the nail on the head. Our cost of living is too high. This is ultimately because our standard of living it too high relative to the rest of the world. This is unsustainable. Our society must wane in a globalized society to decrease the spread between our standard of living and the rest of the worlds. Our entire society is a standard of living bubble. It would be nice to be able to pull the rest of the world up to our level, but it is not. Luckily, as our economy outsources itself into the toilet, we will be bringing the rest of the world up closer to where we are. China is already undergoing a huge jump in quality of life (at least as determined by a materialistic, consumer society). In time, the gap will narrow and we will be less and they will be more than they were previously.
I had a friend in college whose father had physically, emotionally, and probably sexually abused her all throughout her childhood. To avoid him, she had her phone number unlisted. Well, he happened to work for a phone company, so he was always tracking her down and futher harrassing her.
The moral: even if you trust the government to generally do right, giving unlimited power to individuals will eventually be abused.
Here's what I posted. Basically, it boils down to the fact that the only reason I can even get broadband is due to Covad. SWB can't be bothered............
I can only get broadband because SWB is forced to line-share with Covad. For 2 years I tried getting DSL from them but it was always 3 months away. I live 11000 ft. from my CO in an area where most houses are less than 10 years old in a growing metro area and yet SWB hasn't seen fit to get their copper in shape. I spent 4 years paying $200/month for ISDN since they never saw fit to offer a reasonable consumer version. SWB couldn't be bothered to offer IDSL, the only flavor of DSL that will run on their suboptimum lines, but Covad does. My 'net experience is now more reliable and while pricey at $100/month for 128kb, at least I can get it and can get a static IP, another thing that SWB is loathe to offer. As a technology professional, decent infrastructure like broadband with static ips helps me improve myself and benefits my employer and the economy, but if left to SWB, I'd still be on dialup or praying my fly-by-night ISDN provider didn't go out of business (as had already happened to me once).
Please save our competition. SWB cannot be trusted. They have proven that over and over. Trust must be earned, but even under regulation, they continue to try and undermine the public for their own competitive, childish purposes.
While he's being busted for the shell game that enabled them to get so much debt, the actual debt->bankrupcy->no debt->increased profits part is completely legal (IANAL, milage may vary).
Check out this article: http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/xsp/ isptelecom/story/0,10801,75316,00.html
Nah, they'll probably do the same thing as satellite phones. Declare bankrupcy, ditch their debt, and then take off. Heck, WorldCom's doing it and other bankrupt telecoms, why not everyone else?
People used to joke that new startups were following the following model:
1) Create a website
2) ?
3) Profit!
But I posit that the today's companies have revised that to:
1) Create something unprofitable
2) Run up massive debt to pay for massive capital costs
Not sure what the bushel of corn/ gallon of ethonal ratio is, but the fuel used per acre in the earlier post is definately off.
On my dad's farm, you can get around 100 and some odd bushel per acre. I think it might have been around 160/acre but its been a while. Since an acre is only something like 233 feet square, its not going to take driven feet to pass it. Some time operators like my dad use equipment that covers 15 feet per pass. Bigger operators use machinery that'll cover 2, 4 even 6 times that much (albiet with lower fuel efficiencies). And tractors get suprisingly good milage considering the torque that they generate.
Using modern farming practices such as no till or low till, you don't touch the field very often, so that comes out to 3-5 passes over the field in a year. Likewise, to try and keep costs low, any solvent farmer only puts on those chemicals needed in the portions needed, so that's declining. In fact, there're starting to get to the point where they can combine GPS and lots of soil samples with computerized applicators to vary the amount of chemicals over each acre to boost efficiencies as much as possible.
Anyway, thought someone may find that of interest.
Simple, hire some 15 year old to sit around and fast forward for you. Also get him/her to do your software installs. They can't legally enter a contract, so your set.;-)
HURD's got a really cool design philosophy that I think really deserves seeing the light of day (or better yet the magnetic fields of my hard drive). While the last I checked it was still incredibly immature and most of the spec'd features weren't yet implemented, it has a lot of potential to do things that most other OS's don't (yes, even linux).
A brief summary (from the dingy recesses of my memory): - services/processes can be remote or local, but they all look local from a users/programs point of view. Among other things, IPC type communications can span boxes all over the network with no complexities for the programmer. - almost everything runs in userland that runs in kernel space is most other OSs. This leads to efficiencies (not having to trap into the kernel for as much), conceptual simplicity, and theoretically better security. - translators for filesystems. Basically, this makes filesystems skinable by nonprivilaged users. One person can see a binary dump, another a SQL interface, and another some sort of html interface, but the data exists only once.
I'm not saying its gotta happen tomorrow (nor am I saying I'd gripe if it did), but that is the ENTIRE point of the 2nd amendment. It has nothing to do with protecting ourselves from foreign invasion or hunting, its overthrow the government when it grows too far out of touch with the people.
An ssh client would be the real killer app for me. Let me ssh to my house and/or work and that's all I really need. I wouldn't complain about a secure imap mail reader in addtion though.
Of course, the standard commandline classics (ldapsearch, ldapmodify, etc.) that come with any of the major vendors stuff (Netscape's SDK, Novell's eDirectory).
Also, I REALLY like the java LDAP Browser for GUI use (available from http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap)
As far as account creation tools, there's some nice trends among the big user provisioning corporate grade systems (i.e. Access360) to manage accounts in LDAP.
I'd stay away from Active Directory since it doesn't follow all of the standards. eDirectory's only big annoyance is that it's LDAP is actually a mapping on top of their old stuff, so sometimes that adds complexity. But for a long time they had the only multi-mastered replication setup. iPlanent now has that and MS/AD kinda does (but they have crappy granularity on their objects in case of collisions).
I started working with it shortly after our firm moved from v. 4 to 5 (or B.04 to B.05 in HP parlance). And I did read that they fixed the ownership I/O problems in 6.
I suspect that some of our problems were due to using a port that HP regretted having ever made. As I mentioned, we were running it on Solaris and eventually came to the conclusion that we were the only U.S. customers running on that platform. We usually ended up having to get support out of England. We also eventually discovered that HP didn't even do the Solaris port but contracted it out to another shop.
Okay, I used to be a unix/openmail admin for a large financial firm. We run OpenMail on Solaris with Applix as the clients. And I gotta say, the product sucked big time. While a bit part of the problem was HP (i.e. we used to have to argue with their tech support that they actually had a Solaris port of OpenMail), but it also had some rather annoying technical limitations. I think some of the are fixed now (i.e. all of the user mail were stored in database(ish) file owned by openmail but their connections were processes running as the user, so for any mail mod operation, the system had to chown the file to the user and then back for it to work. The system was consistantly 80% I/O bound).
But even with some technical fixes and getting it away from the mismanagement of HP, I'd still be leary of it. The thing would pop numeric error codes that the developers themselves couldn't tell you what they meant. It had the bizare way of storing paths to files within its files by encoding a 6 letter filename in a 4 byte word by string 6 5 bit bitpatterns together. I spent a week reverse engineering the file formats once because the new version couldn't export personal address lists stored by an older version of the product and my head about exploded. But most telling was the fact that it didn't even protect itself from buggy clients. Applix could cause it to leak file descriptors, and HP would refuse to fix the bug because they maintained that the client was misbehaving (of course, applix maintained that what they were doing was allowed by the API).
Side note, according to the Sun Performance class (or was it the Cockcroft book?), it includes processes currently running on a processor also. Hence, you only have processes waiting on a processor if you load is greater than your number of processors. Anyway, the reccomendation I remember is that you shouldn't even think about upgrading until the load is sustained at 2 times the number of processors or so.
That would pretty much nip Opera's scheduled reloads in the butt. I love having it refresh slashdot and a few other pages every 15 minutes.
Additionally, what about sites such as cnn that use java to autorefresh? How can you be responsible for views that you don't instantiate?
And then it may lead to crappy site layout so that sites could maximize bill rate. When everyone configs their slashdot account to autoexpand every post to save money, don't you think that slash will nip that in the bud to save on server load and earn Cmdr Taco a few more of his namesakes?
Are there people stabbing themselves in their ears?
I like Linux, but on the scalabilty front, it's still got a ways to go. Moreover, since most Linux used by corps (at least here) is Intel based, you've got to deal with less mature hardware (backplanes, reduncancy, etc.). Plus the enterprise management tools required are only starting to appear for Linux.
*climbs into his asbestos underwear to wait for the inevitable jihad*
Okay, I'm running the July release of Solaris 8 on an anchient Ultra Enterprise 1 with Gnome. And mind you, that's not the Creator, but the non-64-bit capable, 167 MHz really old UltraSparc. And you know what? It's pretty fast running a few terminals, opera, and some ldap browsers. Throw in a few rarely used servers including Novell's eDirectory and stuff still doesn't slow down. Changing panes takes a second to a second and a half unless one of my daemons is pegging the CPU, but pretty much everything else is fine. Granted, I'm not running Nautilus, but why would I want to run such a bloated piece of crap when I have "ls", "locate", "cp", "rm", "mv" and "df"?
And I agree with the poster who was wondering what the @(&* you were thinking running any kind of GUI on a workhorse server? Repeat after me, "GUI's do NOT belong on servers"!
Slashdot Mirror
Forced resale of bare copper IS a benefit. Why? Because where SBC can't be bothered to offer certain services, other providers have stepped in to fill the gap. I can't get ADSL or SDSL due to distance limitations where I live. The only viable option is IDSL which SBC refuses to offer. However, megapath and others offer IDSL (over covad IIRC) which allows me to actually get something approaching broadband, and more importantly, a static IP and permenant connection.
Forcing competition in the local loop monopoly is a VERY GOOD THING.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do understand that. However, the discrepency is so great that we cannot sustain our current level while pulling the rest of the world up to something approaching our standards of living in a short enough timeframe IMO. If the cost of living/production in China was 20% less than the US, then a small amount of production would shift there and we could consume it (due to our greater buying power from the decreased cost of production). Hence, our culture would pull theirs up with little impact to ourselves. That is the increase in wealth that you are referring to. They have increased growth from our consumption, and we loose out on some growth but make up for it by increased comsumption power. Over time, the growth in China would raise their standard of living, further driving comsumption and the overall worldwide standard of living. A net increase in worldwide wealth would ensue.
However, when the cost inequity is so great that a critical mass of productivity shifts to the cheaper country, hence removing so many jobs from the comsuming country that it looses its power of consumption, you no longer have an engine driving worldwide growth. Everyone suffers, but the consumption country will suffer the greatest until their standard decline enough to again become comporable. The developing countries increases in growth will still spawn some internal increase in standard of living. This will hopefully sustain at least their growth, but that is not a certainty. Just as worldwide wealth can grow upwards, is can also shrink. Like you said, its not static.
You've hit the nail on the head. Our cost of living is too high. This is ultimately because our standard of living it too high relative to the rest of the world. This is unsustainable. Our society must wane in a globalized society to decrease the spread between our standard of living and the rest of the worlds. Our entire society is a standard of living bubble. It would be nice to be able to pull the rest of the world up to our level, but it is not. Luckily, as our economy outsources itself into the toilet, we will be bringing the rest of the world up closer to where we are. China is already undergoing a huge jump in quality of life (at least as determined by a materialistic, consumer society). In time, the gap will narrow and we will be less and they will be more than they were previously.
I had a friend in college whose father had physically, emotionally, and probably sexually abused her all throughout her childhood. To avoid him, she had her phone number unlisted. Well, he happened to work for a phone company, so he was always tracking her down and futher harrassing her.
The moral: even if you trust the government to generally do right, giving unlimited power to individuals will eventually be abused.
Playing God with Dog. Or was that the other way around...
Here's what I posted. Basically, it boils down to the fact that the only reason I can even get broadband is due to Covad. SWB can't be bothered. ...........
I can only get broadband because SWB is forced to line-share with
Covad. For 2 years I tried getting DSL from them but it was always
3 months away. I live 11000 ft. from my CO in an area where most
houses are less than 10 years old in a growing metro area and yet
SWB hasn't seen fit to get their copper in shape. I spent 4 years
paying $200/month for ISDN since they never saw fit to offer a
reasonable consumer version. SWB couldn't be bothered to offer
IDSL, the only flavor of DSL that will run on their suboptimum
lines, but Covad does. My 'net experience is now more reliable and
while pricey at $100/month for 128kb, at least I can get it and can
get a static IP, another thing that SWB is loathe to offer. As a
technology professional, decent infrastructure like broadband with
static ips helps me improve myself and benefits my employer and the
economy, but if left to SWB, I'd still be on dialup or praying my
fly-by-night ISDN provider didn't go out of business (as had
already happened to me once).
Please save our competition. SWB cannot be trusted. They have
proven that over and over. Trust must be earned, but even under
regulation, they continue to try and undermine the public for their
own competitive, childish purposes.
While he's being busted for the shell game that enabled them to get so much debt, the actual debt->bankrupcy->no debt->increased profits part is completely legal (IANAL, milage may vary).
/ isptelecom/story/0,10801,75316,00.html
Check out this article: http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/xsp
Nah, they'll probably do the same thing as satellite phones. Declare bankrupcy, ditch their debt, and then take off. Heck, WorldCom's doing it and other bankrupt telecoms, why not everyone else?
People used to joke that new startups were following the following model:
1) Create a website
2) ?
3) Profit!
But I posit that the today's companies have revised that to:
1) Create something unprofitable
2) Run up massive debt to pay for massive capital costs
3) Declare bankrupcy
4) Profit!
...and will need to "evaluate" your proposal. Please send the case of Guiness to my house, post haste. ;-)
Not sure what the bushel of corn/ gallon of ethonal ratio is, but the fuel used per acre in the earlier post is definately off.
On my dad's farm, you can get around 100 and some odd bushel per acre. I think it might have been around 160/acre but its been a while. Since an acre is only something like 233 feet square, its not going to take driven feet to pass it. Some time operators like my dad use equipment that covers 15 feet per pass. Bigger operators use machinery that'll cover 2, 4 even 6 times that much (albiet with lower fuel efficiencies). And tractors get suprisingly good milage considering the torque that they generate.
Using modern farming practices such as no till or low till, you don't touch the field very often, so that comes out to 3-5 passes over the field in a year. Likewise, to try and keep costs low, any solvent farmer only puts on those chemicals needed in the portions needed, so that's declining. In fact, there're starting to get to the point where they can combine GPS and lots of soil samples with computerized applicators to vary the amount of chemicals over each acre to boost efficiencies as much as possible.
Anyway, thought someone may find that of interest.
Oh yeah, I almost for the classic Unix text: "The Magic Garden Explained"
TCP/IP Illustrated by Stevens. At least volme 1, if not the next two.
Simple, hire some 15 year old to sit around and fast forward for you. Also get him/her to do your software installs. They can't legally enter a contract, so your set. ;-)
IANAL, etc.
HURD's got a really cool design philosophy that I think really deserves seeing the light of day (or better yet the magnetic fields of my hard drive). While the last I checked it was still incredibly immature and most of the spec'd features weren't yet implemented, it has a lot of potential to do things that most other OS's don't (yes, even linux).
A brief summary (from the dingy recesses of my memory):
- services/processes can be remote or local, but they all look local from a users/programs point of view. Among other things, IPC type communications can span boxes all over the network with no complexities for the programmer.
- almost everything runs in userland that runs in kernel space is most other OSs. This leads to efficiencies (not having to trap into the kernel for as much), conceptual simplicity, and theoretically better security.
- translators for filesystems. Basically, this makes filesystems skinable by nonprivilaged users. One person can see a binary dump, another a SQL interface, and another some sort of html interface, but the data exists only once.
Anyway, I'm eager to try it out.
I'm not saying its gotta happen tomorrow (nor am I saying I'd gripe if it did), but that is the ENTIRE point of the 2nd amendment. It has nothing to do with protecting ourselves from foreign invasion or hunting, its overthrow the government when it grows too far out of touch with the people.
Isn't that what IBM's Power4 chip does? 4 cores on one silicon with certain shared resources....
An ssh client would be the real killer app for me. Let me ssh to my house and/or work and that's all I really need. I wouldn't complain about a secure imap mail reader in addtion though.
Stress free as in beer, not speech. Joe tax-payer will understand that.
Of course, the standard commandline classics (ldapsearch, ldapmodify, etc.) that come with any of the major vendors stuff (Netscape's SDK, Novell's eDirectory).
Also, I REALLY like the java LDAP Browser for GUI use (available from http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap)
As far as account creation tools, there's some nice trends among the big user provisioning corporate grade systems (i.e. Access360) to manage accounts in LDAP.
I'd stay away from Active Directory since it doesn't follow all of the standards. eDirectory's only big annoyance is that it's LDAP is actually a mapping on top of their old stuff, so sometimes that adds complexity. But for a long time they had the only multi-mastered replication setup. iPlanent now has that and MS/AD kinda does (but they have crappy granularity on their objects in case of collisions).
I started working with it shortly after our firm moved from v. 4 to 5 (or B.04 to B.05 in HP parlance). And I did read that they fixed the ownership I/O problems in 6.
I suspect that some of our problems were due to using a port that HP regretted having ever made. As I mentioned, we were running it on Solaris and eventually came to the conclusion that we were the only U.S. customers running on that platform. We usually ended up having to get support out of England. We also eventually discovered that HP didn't even do the Solaris port but contracted it out to another shop.
Okay, I used to be a unix/openmail admin for a large financial firm. We run OpenMail on Solaris with Applix as the clients. And I gotta say, the product sucked big time. While a bit part of the problem was HP (i.e. we used to have to argue with their tech support that they actually had a Solaris port of OpenMail), but it also had some rather annoying technical limitations. I think some of the are fixed now (i.e. all of the user mail were stored in database(ish) file owned by openmail but their connections were processes running as the user, so for any mail mod operation, the system had to chown the file to the user and then back for it to work. The system was consistantly 80% I/O bound).
But even with some technical fixes and getting it away from the mismanagement of HP, I'd still be leary of it. The thing would pop numeric error codes that the developers themselves couldn't tell you what they meant. It had the bizare way of storing paths to files within its files by encoding a 6 letter filename in a 4 byte word by string 6 5 bit bitpatterns together. I spent a week reverse engineering the file formats once because the new version couldn't export personal address lists stored by an older version of the product and my head about exploded. But most telling was the fact that it didn't even protect itself from buggy clients. Applix could cause it to leak file descriptors, and HP would refuse to fix the bug because they maintained that the client was misbehaving (of course, applix maintained that what they were doing was allowed by the API).
Please, use IMAP, screw exchangesque stuff.
Side note, according to the Sun Performance class (or was it the Cockcroft book?), it includes processes currently running on a processor also. Hence, you only have processes waiting on a processor if you load is greater than your number of processors. Anyway, the reccomendation I remember is that you shouldn't even think about upgrading until the load is sustained at 2 times the number of processors or so.
That would pretty much nip Opera's scheduled reloads in the butt. I love having it refresh slashdot and a few other pages every 15 minutes.
Additionally, what about sites such as cnn that use java to autorefresh? How can you be responsible for views that you don't instantiate?
And then it may lead to crappy site layout so that sites could maximize bill rate. When everyone configs their slashdot account to autoexpand every post to save money, don't you think that slash will nip that in the bud to save on server load and earn Cmdr Taco a few more of his namesakes?
Are there people stabbing themselves in their ears?
I like Linux, but on the scalabilty front, it's still got a ways to go. Moreover, since most Linux used by corps (at least here) is Intel based, you've got to deal with less mature hardware (backplanes, reduncancy, etc.). Plus the enterprise management tools required are only starting to appear for Linux.
*climbs into his asbestos underwear to wait for the inevitable jihad*
Okay, I'm running the July release of Solaris 8 on an anchient Ultra Enterprise 1 with Gnome. And mind you, that's not the Creator, but the non-64-bit capable, 167 MHz really old UltraSparc. And you know what? It's pretty fast running a few terminals, opera, and some ldap browsers. Throw in a few rarely used servers including Novell's eDirectory and stuff still doesn't slow down. Changing panes takes a second to a second and a half unless one of my daemons is pegging the CPU, but pretty much everything else is fine. Granted, I'm not running Nautilus, but why would I want to run such a bloated piece of crap when I have "ls", "locate", "cp", "rm", "mv" and "df"?
And I agree with the poster who was wondering what the @(&* you were thinking running any kind of GUI on a workhorse server? Repeat after me, "GUI's do NOT belong on servers"!