Plus it's far more expensive than DSL or cable broadband because it's a dedicated circuit to the phone company's CO. Where I live, a data T1 is somewhere in the $400/month range.
Well, they're only protected against that one single source of access. Cable has no defense against wireless and/or DSL, for example. And satellite is everywhere.
Satellite internet is slow, comparatively expensive, and only available where dishes are allowed or practical. Many suburban areas only have broadband access from either their cable provider or their phone provider. Even then, we've increased the number of competitors from one to three or four, of which one is already priced in a non-neutral fashion (cell phone data plans), two of them (Verizon and Comcast) have already expressed interest in non-neutral pricing, and one of whom has to provide the Internet from space.
What do telcos get out of net neutrality? The same thing they're getting now - the ability to price Internet service at whatever rate they think the market will bear without concern or liability over the specific content that flows over their network.
Except that's not true, is it? They lose pricing abilities that they presently have in exchange for naught.
Abilities that they haven't exercised yet, but have expressed an interest in exercising soon.
The knowledge that Internet service will be billed the same way as phone, electrical, and natural gas service - it doesn't matter what you're using it for, just how much of it you wish to consume at a given moment.
This is also not true. I can't call China (or Verizon) without additional fees. Will long distance be free by legal mandate now as well?
Well, you can't Facebook IM someone in China, either, but that's not something any legislative organization outside of the PRC really has any control over. Thanks to the joys of peerage agreements, however, you can get domestic "unlimited long distance" or per-minute long distance plans if you don't think you're going to consume much long distance - this would be the pricing model that net neutrality enthusiasts are asking for.
Whether anyone would find discriminated service valuable, though, remains to be seen.
Oh I don't know. I think an internet without any illegal/limitless filesharing on it might be a lot more pleasant. Could you imagine the reduction in traffic if people only downloaded what they had actually purchased, rather than entire seasons of Anime DVD's they never actually intend to watch?
We can accommodate that even with net neutrality in place simply by charging more for exceeding certain bandwidth limits. What I don't want, however, is my ISP deciding that, since members of the Democratic Party are pushing for net neutrality, they're only going to allow access to MSNBC, Huffington Post, and so on to those customers that pay an extra fee for the "Political Package". After all, if my ISP can control whether I go to Hulu or ISP-TV, well, what's stopping them from controlling the rest of my Internet browsing?
First off, most cable companies have locally guaranteed franchise agreements (basically, a local monopoly). This is why, for example, AT&T provides phone service in Reno but Sprint provides phone service in Las Vegas, or why Charter is the cable TV provider in Reno but Cox is the cable provider in Las Vegas (to use a set of examples I'm personally familiar with). What the telcos get out of these arrangements is fairly obvious - they can safely build into a neighborhood in their franchise area and know that a competitor won't swoop in and render their several million dollar investment in that neighborhood moot. In theory, the local areas get the guarantee that there will actually be build outs in the local area, even in areas that might not warrant a build-out if competition was allowed in that area, as well as some control over pricing. Point being, CableCompany isn't running that copper to homes "at their own cost", with all the risk such a build-out would entail - they're running it because there's a government-backed guarantee of market presence in that neighborhood when they're done.
This brings me to the answers to your questions. First, cable companies don't "own" the copper - their lessees, with local municipalities serving as lessors of the right-of-ways the cable companies dug through to lay that cable. Consequently, we're talking about a change to the terms of the lease. Why can't we handle this at the local level then? Well, we could, but we'd be looking at several thousand different interpretations of "net neutrality", one for each municipality, which would be a royal pain for everyone involved. What do telcos get out of net neutrality? The same thing they're getting now - the ability to price Internet service at whatever rate they think the market will bear without concern or liability over the specific content that flows over their network. We'd simply be codifying the status quo. What do the people gain? The knowledge that Internet service will be billed the same way as phone, electrical, and natural gas service - it doesn't matter what you're using it for, just how much of it you wish to consume at a given moment. What do the people lose? Well, if ISPs were allowed to engage in rent-seeking behavior and charge discriminatory pricing for specific sites (i.e. charging people more for Facebook access), some markets that might be marginal for broadband service might become more intrinsically profitable since they could extract more value from the broadband connection. Whether anyone would find discriminated service valuable, though, remains to be seen.
Ahem. Rolling out broadband into a neighborhood is fiendishly expensive and frequently requires digging a fair amount of cabling, which means lots and lots of permits since neighborhoods frown on people routinely digging trenches through their streets or running a rat's nest of overhead wiring. Consequently, the first company (or two, if it's a large enough neighborhood) to install something in the area becomes the only company that bothers to install something in the area.
I'm running into that very problem at my employment - for now, it's Frontier or nothing, though Charter might roll something out this way in the next year or two. Maybe. Don't think Frontier doesn't know it, either - that's why they want $7500/month for a DS3.
Seems to me there are more than a few countries with a lot of desert land that are already energy exporters. Now they can just export their energy in something other than liquid form.
Since you're not giving us a ton of details to work with, let's make some fairly basic assumptions...
1. Any workstations you've already purchased already have Windows pre-installed, and future workstations will almost certainly have Windows pre-installed. So, you're going to spend time (that's "$/hour" in management-speak, even if you're salaried) wiping these machines, installing Fedora or some other Linux distribution, then hoping and praying everything works off the bat. Since you almost certainly won't have the time to call in every Windows OEM license for a refund, this means you're actually spending money (in the form of time) to remove Windows off these machines. For what? If you're thinking about saving money in Office licensing, Open/LibreOffice is available for Windows, so you don't need Fedora or whatever to make that happen. If you're thinking about saving money on antivirus subscriptions, forget it - individual per-machine licenses for anti-virus subscriptions are a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd spend installing Linux, losing manufacturer support on your workstations (or keeping it, but having fewer support options), and retraining users on where things are.
2. Your company has already paid for Exchange. The only time it makes sense to walk away from a pre-existing Exchange installation (it's not that bad, if tended to properly) is if you're either about to outgrow it (i.e. you're on Exchange 2003 and running into the 75 GB data file limitation) or planning on replacing the hardware or software soon anyway (i.e. hosting it on a 7-year-old server and looking to upgrade). If you're not at that point, forget it - it's already paid for, so there's no savings to be had there. If you are at that point, however, you need to think clearly about compliance, performance, and migration issues. Gmail by itself can handle user@domain.com e-mail, but you already have to have that account somewhere for it to map up. Otherwise, you're looking at Google Apps, which may or may not meet your needs and may or may not be as cheap as you think it'll be. Then there's the issue of migrating the boss' 15 GB Outlook data file to Google Apps (ha!), whether your company has enough bandwidth to handle every user in the organization having to pull their e-mail from "the cloud", and whether or not you're encumbered with PCI or Sarbannes-Oxley data retention policies (keeping seven years of information, content filters to block out sensitive data from the e-mail system, etc. etc. etc.). Depending on your situation, you might be able to migrate to another groupware solution (Zimbra, OpenXchange, Novell Groupwise, *shudder* Lotus Notes, etc.), you might be able to migrate to a hosted platform (hosted Exchange, Google Apps), or you might be stuck with Exchange. Either way, "I'm sick of Exchange!" isn't a business case for making that migration.
3. What's your motivation? If your motivation is "Open source is awesome!", don't be surprised if your bosses laugh at you and tell you to get back to work. Business people don't mind paying for things that work well enough to get the job done and are (rightly) suspicious of anything that claims it can get the job done for less. Consequently, if you're going to push forward a solution of your choice, whatever that might be, you're going to get some push back. Will it open their reports? Better check that first. How quickly can we get it back up if it breaks? Will we have access to the information if a backhoe hits our Internet connection? More often than not, "how much does it cost" is so far down the list of concerns that it can be safely ignored, at least to a point.
Personally, I'm getting the "I just got out of college, got my first IT job, and want to save the world one Linux installation at a time" vibe, and that's okay. There's room to stretch your legs there - file server upgrades, for example, are a fantastic place to stop buying
You know you're either trolling or an incredibly dense American urban hipster with no grasp of self-awareness when you decide that "advertisements", "light pollution" and "cars" are infinitely worse than "starvation", "corruption", "bad trading", and "living under the iron-clad rule of a megalomaniac".
You know what's worse than advertisements? Not being able to buy anything because there's nothing to buy. No food, no clothes, no nothing. You know what's worse than light pollution? Not being able to turn the lights on at night. You know what's worse than cars and traffic? An ox cart pulled by a malnourished ox that you're seriously considering turning into food this winter, even though the meat's tougher than nails and it means you'll have to pull your plow by hand next spring. But, hey, it's that or starve.
But, hey, that fixie you were riding on before you posted your nonsense on this thread will totally come in handy in the Middle Ages-meets-zombie apocalypse world you have mapped out in your sociopathic head as an "ideal utopia" for your urban hipster douchebaggery. Good luck with that.
To put this into American terms, consider the situation in Mexico, how that affects immigration patterns, and how the border states are "appreciating" that. Now, consider what the situation in the border states would be like if most of Mexico was starving and the Mexican government collapsed completely. Now, imagine if your per-capita GDP was about a third of what it is currently, with most people over the age of 40 having "fond memories" of that "glorious" time when your entire country went off an economic cliff and attempted to be an authoritarian agricultural society.
And that's the China-North Korea situation in a nutshell. I'm on a horse.
I prefer to think of it more as one big greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Re:Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
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Right, 'cause it's creating the overhead it needs to convert those tables into objects that Drupal understands (nodes) and mapping the relationships between those objects using methods that Drupal understands (taxonomies and such).
Right tool for the right job and all that.
Re:Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
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Yes, in much the same way that Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are fuming great big piles of shit compared to a set of skilled engineers hard-coding in machine code against a motherboard.
They're generalized solutions to complex problems. Like all generalized solutions, they're more bloated than a more specialized solution for a specific problem because they contain code that solves problems you don't necessarily need solved. On the other hand, they usually take less time to deploy and they might solve a few problems that you don't even know you have.
Re:Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
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Luckily for you, I explained what Drupal was in the second paragraph of my comment.
Re:Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
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Seriously, though, Drupal is one of the more popular web content management systems out there. You can think of it in the same space as Wordpress, Joomla, Plone, Alfresco (sort of), and so on. The idea behind these systems is to build web sites and manage web site content without having to hard-code everything. Each system does it differently with different focuses on specific parts of the web site content creation process. Wordpress, for example, is a moderately simple system that's popular for blog creation - though it has some extensibility, ease-of-use has always been its primary goal. Drupal, meanwhile, is sort of the "Linux" of the web site creation world, in that you can customize it via specialized modules to make it do whatever you want, but it doesn't do you a whole lot of favors right out of the gate. Joomla is probably closer to Drupal than Wordpress, Alfresco's primary goal is document management (automating workflows, permissions, etc.) so it treats web content accordingly, and I don't know enough about Plone to talk about it even remotely intelligently.
Honestly, I thought Works cost more than that back in the day; for whatever reason, I misremembered it costing somewhere in the $75-90 range for retail. Then again, that was several years ago; I would imagine that its cost dropped significantly near the end of its life cycle. Do keep in mind, though, that Office Home & Student can be legitimately installed on up to three machines - since many people do, in fact, have more than one computer at home, that's pretty handy and drops it down to a more Works-level price point. I'll also note that, if given a choice between a $29 office suite that has Word and Powerpoint and a free office suite that also has something resembling Word and Powerpoint, most people will go with free if they know where to find it, so it probably doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to chase the bottom of the market.
A bloody genius, that's who. Between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition (only slightly more expensive than Works' retail pricing, not that anyone ever paid for it), Works doesn't make sense anymore, if it ever really did in the first place. Creating a watered down version of Office wasn't a bad idea, mind you, but making it incompatible with Office and pushing it as an OEM solution just caused a ton of frustration among people who rightly expected "Microsoft" products to talk to each other. Seriously, Wordpad has better.doc support than Works. Wordpad! That's inexcusable. When you factor in that the sole reason they used a different file format was probably to kill WordPerfect (same file extension - I doubt that was a coincidence), it just ups the malicious pointlessness factor up several notches.
It's true. I saw this documentary on Nickelodeon called Penguins of Madagascar and, man, they looked tough! We're talking crazy commando skills, unwavering loyalty, the ability to talk to zoo animals... it was chilling!
I've actually seen a fair amount of what you describe on my local paper's comment boards. Since I live in Nevada, every single news article inevitably devolves into a "Well, if Harry Reid did his job, then..." vs. "Well, if the Republicans didn't destroy the country, then..." flame-fest, and this is without anonymous commenting enabled. The best part? Guess who recommends comments - that's right, people willing to slug through that crap and recommend the viewpoints they agree with. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of idiocy and venality, with all of the reasonable people staying away from the comments section like the plague it is.
Unfortunately, I don't know what a good solution to this situation would be. Personally, I'd lean toward "nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure" and just eliminate online commenting entirely from most news sites - it's not like newspapers were known for their willingness to post anonymous content before the Internet anyway.
Well... it won't matter till the day your single server dies and you learn that, being a little drop in the sea, you don't have a "gold support contract" and it takes you one week to get a new spec'ed server (if only I weren't such a cheap ass and I'd buy two...). And when you turn on the new server you learn that you don't have the slightest idea about how it was exactly configured with all the tweaks you added through the years.
How does that change with scripting? If you lose the scripts, forget about them, or just do a one-time thing that you don't really think much of at the time, you're still in the same boat. I will note, though, that even small shops have backups (really!), many of them have image-based ones that can moderately conveniently handle hardware independent restores (dd is better than nothing; StorageCraft or Acronis or something similar will get the job done on Windows), and you can get 4-hour support contracts on single servers for a modest fee, so, scripts or otherwise, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
Your problem is YaST, not your approach.
Yes, though I noticed similar behavior in older versions of Ubuntu with the/etc/network/interface files and gconf. If there's anything better than having the GUI think the file says one thing, me knowing it says something else because I just edited it, then having the GUI reset the file to a "consistent" state (i.e. what it thought it said to begin with).
1) Proper engineering practices. Most of them are quite simple, once you get them. Just an example that it would be quite apt to this case: Debian favours as much as possible having configurations for complex services in its own directory, '/etc/complexservice.d/' where you drop "config snippets" instead of a big/etc/complexservice.conf file. If Suse did the same, YaST could be able to tweak the config snippets you allow it and you could manage by hand the ones you wanted/needed. But ask yourself why are you still using Suse and you probably will have to answer yourself "because YaST". Suse has no interest on making YaST a proper configuration tool because YaST is a lock-in tool instead. For the "easy" things you go with YaST, so you don't learn how to do it "by hand" on the cases where it makes more sense, the easy ones; by the time YaST gets short you don't know how to fully do it "by hand" and you can't manage it partly "by hand" because YaST will overwrite it. Net result: you end up locked in Suse.
Not if YaST doesn't do the job. Besides, Debian's "config snippets", great as they might be, can get just as inconsistent whenever dpkg-configure is thrown in the job. Why? Because unstructured text files is very human-friendly and very machine-unfriendly. Files can change between polling cycles, grammar can be inconsistent, spacing is all over the map, and on and on. It's precisely because of the problems with ambiguous grammars, file-based race conditions and the inconsistent error handling that results from automatically dealing with these issues that Windows used a database-driven registry. Granted, the registry created far more problem than it solved, but it doesn't mean the problems don't exist. A happy middle ground that lets you edit configurations by hand if the system goes down but requires consistent grammar would solve a ton of those problems.
2) Today, almost any "workgroup-graded" server has enough horsepower to handle virtualization. Fire up a virtual guest, test your new configs in the test environment, making use of the GUI tools if needed, and then go analyze the resultant configuration and replicate it by hand in your production environment. This will bring you the best of both worlds: fast entry path for new things by means of the GUI while retaining full customization abilities on production (and the analysis part will make you learn a lot at a very fast pace).
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Plus it's far more expensive than DSL or cable broadband because it's a dedicated circuit to the phone company's CO. Where I live, a data T1 is somewhere in the $400/month range.
Well, they're only protected against that one single source of access. Cable has no defense against wireless and/or DSL, for example. And satellite is everywhere.
Satellite internet is slow, comparatively expensive, and only available where dishes are allowed or practical. Many suburban areas only have broadband access from either their cable provider or their phone provider. Even then, we've increased the number of competitors from one to three or four, of which one is already priced in a non-neutral fashion (cell phone data plans), two of them (Verizon and Comcast) have already expressed interest in non-neutral pricing, and one of whom has to provide the Internet from space.
What do telcos get out of net neutrality? The same thing they're getting now - the ability to price Internet service at whatever rate they think the market will bear without concern or liability over the specific content that flows over their network.
Except that's not true, is it? They lose pricing abilities that they presently have in exchange for naught.
Abilities that they haven't exercised yet, but have expressed an interest in exercising soon.
The knowledge that Internet service will be billed the same way as phone, electrical, and natural gas service - it doesn't matter what you're using it for, just how much of it you wish to consume at a given moment.
This is also not true. I can't call China (or Verizon) without additional fees. Will long distance be free by legal mandate now as well?
Well, you can't Facebook IM someone in China, either, but that's not something any legislative organization outside of the PRC really has any control over. Thanks to the joys of peerage agreements, however, you can get domestic "unlimited long distance" or per-minute long distance plans if you don't think you're going to consume much long distance - this would be the pricing model that net neutrality enthusiasts are asking for.
Whether anyone would find discriminated service valuable, though, remains to be seen.
Oh I don't know. I think an internet without any illegal/limitless filesharing on it might be a lot more pleasant. Could you imagine the reduction in traffic if people only downloaded what they had actually purchased, rather than entire seasons of Anime DVD's they never actually intend to watch?
We can accommodate that even with net neutrality in place simply by charging more for exceeding certain bandwidth limits. What I don't want, however, is my ISP deciding that, since members of the Democratic Party are pushing for net neutrality, they're only going to allow access to MSNBC, Huffington Post, and so on to those customers that pay an extra fee for the "Political Package". After all, if my ISP can control whether I go to Hulu or ISP-TV, well, what's stopping them from controlling the rest of my Internet browsing?
So when you say that government is the problem. You're really saying YOU are the problem.
Close - I'm saying WE'RE the problem.
First off, most cable companies have locally guaranteed franchise agreements (basically, a local monopoly). This is why, for example, AT&T provides phone service in Reno but Sprint provides phone service in Las Vegas, or why Charter is the cable TV provider in Reno but Cox is the cable provider in Las Vegas (to use a set of examples I'm personally familiar with). What the telcos get out of these arrangements is fairly obvious - they can safely build into a neighborhood in their franchise area and know that a competitor won't swoop in and render their several million dollar investment in that neighborhood moot. In theory, the local areas get the guarantee that there will actually be build outs in the local area, even in areas that might not warrant a build-out if competition was allowed in that area, as well as some control over pricing. Point being, CableCompany isn't running that copper to homes "at their own cost", with all the risk such a build-out would entail - they're running it because there's a government-backed guarantee of market presence in that neighborhood when they're done.
This brings me to the answers to your questions. First, cable companies don't "own" the copper - their lessees, with local municipalities serving as lessors of the right-of-ways the cable companies dug through to lay that cable. Consequently, we're talking about a change to the terms of the lease. Why can't we handle this at the local level then? Well, we could, but we'd be looking at several thousand different interpretations of "net neutrality", one for each municipality, which would be a royal pain for everyone involved. What do telcos get out of net neutrality? The same thing they're getting now - the ability to price Internet service at whatever rate they think the market will bear without concern or liability over the specific content that flows over their network. We'd simply be codifying the status quo. What do the people gain? The knowledge that Internet service will be billed the same way as phone, electrical, and natural gas service - it doesn't matter what you're using it for, just how much of it you wish to consume at a given moment. What do the people lose? Well, if ISPs were allowed to engage in rent-seeking behavior and charge discriminatory pricing for specific sites (i.e. charging people more for Facebook access), some markets that might be marginal for broadband service might become more intrinsically profitable since they could extract more value from the broadband connection. Whether anyone would find discriminated service valuable, though, remains to be seen.
Ahem. Rolling out broadband into a neighborhood is fiendishly expensive and frequently requires digging a fair amount of cabling, which means lots and lots of permits since neighborhoods frown on people routinely digging trenches through their streets or running a rat's nest of overhead wiring. Consequently, the first company (or two, if it's a large enough neighborhood) to install something in the area becomes the only company that bothers to install something in the area.
I'm running into that very problem at my employment - for now, it's Frontier or nothing, though Charter might roll something out this way in the next year or two. Maybe. Don't think Frontier doesn't know it, either - that's why they want $7500/month for a DS3.
Seems to me there are more than a few countries with a lot of desert land that are already energy exporters. Now they can just export their energy in something other than liquid form.
Oh yeah? In my day, we had to pull ribs out of our bodies and wait for God to miracle us a woman!
1) The pig go.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Since you're not giving us a ton of details to work with, let's make some fairly basic assumptions...
1. Any workstations you've already purchased already have Windows pre-installed, and future workstations will almost certainly have Windows pre-installed. So, you're going to spend time (that's "$/hour" in management-speak, even if you're salaried) wiping these machines, installing Fedora or some other Linux distribution, then hoping and praying everything works off the bat. Since you almost certainly won't have the time to call in every Windows OEM license for a refund, this means you're actually spending money (in the form of time) to remove Windows off these machines. For what? If you're thinking about saving money in Office licensing, Open/LibreOffice is available for Windows, so you don't need Fedora or whatever to make that happen. If you're thinking about saving money on antivirus subscriptions, forget it - individual per-machine licenses for anti-virus subscriptions are a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd spend installing Linux, losing manufacturer support on your workstations (or keeping it, but having fewer support options), and retraining users on where things are.
2. Your company has already paid for Exchange. The only time it makes sense to walk away from a pre-existing Exchange installation (it's not that bad, if tended to properly) is if you're either about to outgrow it (i.e. you're on Exchange 2003 and running into the 75 GB data file limitation) or planning on replacing the hardware or software soon anyway (i.e. hosting it on a 7-year-old server and looking to upgrade). If you're not at that point, forget it - it's already paid for, so there's no savings to be had there. If you are at that point, however, you need to think clearly about compliance, performance, and migration issues. Gmail by itself can handle user@domain.com e-mail, but you already have to have that account somewhere for it to map up. Otherwise, you're looking at Google Apps, which may or may not meet your needs and may or may not be as cheap as you think it'll be. Then there's the issue of migrating the boss' 15 GB Outlook data file to Google Apps (ha!), whether your company has enough bandwidth to handle every user in the organization having to pull their e-mail from "the cloud", and whether or not you're encumbered with PCI or Sarbannes-Oxley data retention policies (keeping seven years of information, content filters to block out sensitive data from the e-mail system, etc. etc. etc.). Depending on your situation, you might be able to migrate to another groupware solution (Zimbra, OpenXchange, Novell Groupwise, *shudder* Lotus Notes, etc.), you might be able to migrate to a hosted platform (hosted Exchange, Google Apps), or you might be stuck with Exchange. Either way, "I'm sick of Exchange!" isn't a business case for making that migration.
3. What's your motivation? If your motivation is "Open source is awesome!", don't be surprised if your bosses laugh at you and tell you to get back to work. Business people don't mind paying for things that work well enough to get the job done and are (rightly) suspicious of anything that claims it can get the job done for less. Consequently, if you're going to push forward a solution of your choice, whatever that might be, you're going to get some push back. Will it open their reports? Better check that first. How quickly can we get it back up if it breaks? Will we have access to the information if a backhoe hits our Internet connection? More often than not, "how much does it cost" is so far down the list of concerns that it can be safely ignored, at least to a point.
Personally, I'm getting the "I just got out of college, got my first IT job, and want to save the world one Linux installation at a time" vibe, and that's okay. There's room to stretch your legs there - file server upgrades, for example, are a fantastic place to stop buying
Beats me. I guess somebody ran out of mod points.
You know you're either trolling or an incredibly dense American urban hipster with no grasp of self-awareness when you decide that "advertisements", "light pollution" and "cars" are infinitely worse than "starvation", "corruption", "bad trading", and "living under the iron-clad rule of a megalomaniac".
You know what's worse than advertisements? Not being able to buy anything because there's nothing to buy. No food, no clothes, no nothing. You know what's worse than light pollution? Not being able to turn the lights on at night. You know what's worse than cars and traffic? An ox cart pulled by a malnourished ox that you're seriously considering turning into food this winter, even though the meat's tougher than nails and it means you'll have to pull your plow by hand next spring. But, hey, it's that or starve.
But, hey, that fixie you were riding on before you posted your nonsense on this thread will totally come in handy in the Middle Ages-meets-zombie apocalypse world you have mapped out in your sociopathic head as an "ideal utopia" for your urban hipster douchebaggery. Good luck with that.
Ah, Goldfield... it's no Belmont, but, really, what is?
To put this into American terms, consider the situation in Mexico, how that affects immigration patterns, and how the border states are "appreciating" that. Now, consider what the situation in the border states would be like if most of Mexico was starving and the Mexican government collapsed completely. Now, imagine if your per-capita GDP was about a third of what it is currently, with most people over the age of 40 having "fond memories" of that "glorious" time when your entire country went off an economic cliff and attempted to be an authoritarian agricultural society.
And that's the China-North Korea situation in a nutshell. I'm on a horse.
Step 1: Seize control of North Korea.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Prophet!
I prefer to think of it more as one big greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Right, 'cause it's creating the overhead it needs to convert those tables into objects that Drupal understands (nodes) and mapping the relationships between those objects using methods that Drupal understands (taxonomies and such).
Right tool for the right job and all that.
Yes, in much the same way that Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are fuming great big piles of shit compared to a set of skilled engineers hard-coding in machine code against a motherboard.
They're generalized solutions to complex problems. Like all generalized solutions, they're more bloated than a more specialized solution for a specific problem because they contain code that solves problems you don't necessarily need solved. On the other hand, they usually take less time to deploy and they might solve a few problems that you don't even know you have.
Luckily for you, I explained what Drupal was in the second paragraph of my comment.
Let me Google that for you.
Seriously, though, Drupal is one of the more popular web content management systems out there. You can think of it in the same space as Wordpress, Joomla, Plone, Alfresco (sort of), and so on. The idea behind these systems is to build web sites and manage web site content without having to hard-code everything. Each system does it differently with different focuses on specific parts of the web site content creation process. Wordpress, for example, is a moderately simple system that's popular for blog creation - though it has some extensibility, ease-of-use has always been its primary goal. Drupal, meanwhile, is sort of the "Linux" of the web site creation world, in that you can customize it via specialized modules to make it do whatever you want, but it doesn't do you a whole lot of favors right out of the gate. Joomla is probably closer to Drupal than Wordpress, Alfresco's primary goal is document management (automating workflows, permissions, etc.) so it treats web content accordingly, and I don't know enough about Plone to talk about it even remotely intelligently.
So there you go.
Honestly, I thought Works cost more than that back in the day; for whatever reason, I misremembered it costing somewhere in the $75-90 range for retail. Then again, that was several years ago; I would imagine that its cost dropped significantly near the end of its life cycle. Do keep in mind, though, that Office Home & Student can be legitimately installed on up to three machines - since many people do, in fact, have more than one computer at home, that's pretty handy and drops it down to a more Works-level price point. I'll also note that, if given a choice between a $29 office suite that has Word and Powerpoint and a free office suite that also has something resembling Word and Powerpoint, most people will go with free if they know where to find it, so it probably doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to chase the bottom of the market.
A bloody genius, that's who. Between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition (only slightly more expensive than Works' retail pricing, not that anyone ever paid for it), Works doesn't make sense anymore, if it ever really did in the first place. Creating a watered down version of Office wasn't a bad idea, mind you, but making it incompatible with Office and pushing it as an OEM solution just caused a ton of frustration among people who rightly expected "Microsoft" products to talk to each other. Seriously, Wordpad has better .doc support than Works. Wordpad! That's inexcusable. When you factor in that the sole reason they used a different file format was probably to kill WordPerfect (same file extension - I doubt that was a coincidence), it just ups the malicious pointlessness factor up several notches.
Because this is Slashdot?
It's true. I saw this documentary on Nickelodeon called Penguins of Madagascar and, man, they looked tough! We're talking crazy commando skills, unwavering loyalty, the ability to talk to zoo animals... it was chilling!
I've actually seen a fair amount of what you describe on my local paper's comment boards. Since I live in Nevada, every single news article inevitably devolves into a "Well, if Harry Reid did his job, then..." vs. "Well, if the Republicans didn't destroy the country, then..." flame-fest, and this is without anonymous commenting enabled. The best part? Guess who recommends comments - that's right, people willing to slug through that crap and recommend the viewpoints they agree with. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of idiocy and venality, with all of the reasonable people staying away from the comments section like the plague it is.
Unfortunately, I don't know what a good solution to this situation would be. Personally, I'd lean toward "nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure" and just eliminate online commenting entirely from most news sites - it's not like newspapers were known for their willingness to post anonymous content before the Internet anyway.
How does that change with scripting? If you lose the scripts, forget about them, or just do a one-time thing that you don't really think much of at the time, you're still in the same boat. I will note, though, that even small shops have backups (really!), many of them have image-based ones that can moderately conveniently handle hardware independent restores (dd is better than nothing; StorageCraft or Acronis or something similar will get the job done on Windows), and you can get 4-hour support contracts on single servers for a modest fee, so, scripts or otherwise, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
Yes, though I noticed similar behavior in older versions of Ubuntu with the /etc/network/interface files and gconf. If there's anything better than having the GUI think the file says one thing, me knowing it says something else because I just edited it, then having the GUI reset the file to a "consistent" state (i.e. what it thought it said to begin with).
Not if YaST doesn't do the job. Besides, Debian's "config snippets", great as they might be, can get just as inconsistent whenever dpkg-configure is thrown in the job. Why? Because unstructured text files is very human-friendly and very machine-unfriendly. Files can change between polling cycles, grammar can be inconsistent, spacing is all over the map, and on and on. It's precisely because of the problems with ambiguous grammars, file-based race conditions and the inconsistent error handling that results from automatically dealing with these issues that Windows used a database-driven registry. Granted, the registry created far more problem than it solved, but it doesn't mean the problems don't exist. A happy middle ground that lets you edit configurations by hand if the system goes down but requires consistent grammar would solve a ton of those problems.
Yep - I agree with you there.