Not that I disagree with what you're saying in principle, but national oil companies (I.e. Aramco, the Saudi Government oil company) produce 52% of the world's oil and hold 88% of the proven reserves of oil. XOM is a huge, ginormous, supermajor company, but they don't hold nearly the resources of the NOC's.

Part of the reason that RPM is quicker slash more powerful for some things is cause of the HUGE amount of data and metadata it stores. I think a lot of it is in /var/cache/yum - huge sqlite files, and sqlite is reasonably dense for storing data (my fedora 12 server shows about 140MB of stuff here).

RPM is very powerful. You learn some of this stuff while studying for the RHCE test (or at least I did):

Want to know which packages are installed? rpm -qa
Want to verify a package's installation? rpm -qV packagename
Want to know, of those installed, which have been modified? for i in $(rpm -qa);do rpm -qV $i;done #will have false positives... This will tell you if the timestamp / security context / MD5sum have changed.
Want to know what package owns a specific file? rpm -qf /path/to/file
Want to know every file that a package installs? rpm -ql packagename

Even more, want to get a pristine copy of a file / binary / whatever that's installed with a package? Did you know RPMs are CPIO archives?
Verify yum downloader is installed (part of yum-utils).
mkdir somedir; cd somedir #because this will "tarbomb" your directory.
yumdownloader packagename
rpm2cpio packagename.rpm | cpio -dim
ls -lF
That's everything that the package *installs*, not counting any pre- or post-install configuration.

I've really come around to appreciating RPM and yum.

~X

It's better that Twain gave us something that will last us through the ages (his words) than to have been another generic family man.

Your comment sounds callous, but I completely agree with you.

Look at the 10,000 ft view. If you get too close, then everywhere, every day, is a tragedy. Yes, if he was a neglectful father and husband, that is a bad thing. However, look at the entirety of American Literature. In a completely objective sense, is it better with Mark Twain's writings than without? I think so.

The guy who was valedictorian of my High School went on to seminary and to become a baptist church youth pastor. Am I ok with that? Well, ...no, not really. The guy was brilliant - he could have cured cancer, or invented something that moves humanity forward in an unthinkable way. I honestly kind of think that if you're great at something, you owe it to the world to *be* great at it. The question shouldn't be "does this make Mark Twain a bad person", it really is "Why did he think that he had to have a wife and family, when he had all this other stuff going on?".

Terry Goodkind sort of touched on this in "Faith of the Fallen" (as much as that series gets preachy later, this was a good book). If you stop to look around, there are tragedies everywhere. It shouldn't stop you from achieving greatness.

Granted, IIRC Eucalyptus was from reverse engineering Amazon S3's api, and is compatible on the front end but sucks hard on the back end...

Tim Patterson wrote Q-DOS, which Gates and Microsoft purchases from him - after having promised IBM an OS for their personal computer.

Didn't you see Pirates of Silicon Valley?

You didn't venture far enough away from home.

Ways to find NPC Criminals that need a good killin':

1.) Ask an "agent" (NPC mission giver) for work. Keeping in mind, some of the agents are kill focused and some are industrial focused ("bring me X minerals and deliver Y to my friend Z in the next solar system).

2.) Venture out into lower security space and go to an asteroid belt. Although, what they're doing there, I've never figured out - they're never mining the asteroids.

Anyway, yeah, you can solo eve - the catch is you'll need start up capital to become an industrialist (like real life, I guess?). Which means running a few missions until you can start playing the (entirely player driven) market.

Or you can take the healthy shortcut - spend $40 on a game-time card, then sell it in game for a quarter of a billion credits, which is enough to get anyone started.

Once you have the money, though, you can work on market manipulation, trading, and even buying raw materials, producing goods, and selling the value-added goods.

~X

Agreed. In addition, I'd like to see an example of a mainstream piece of software that isn't becoming more 'bloated' as time goes by. It makes sense to give users more features and capability as hardware specs improve. Why would your average user want a browser that has limited functionality but only uses 10MB of RAM when they have a machine with 4GB that they only use to browse the web?

I'm using Opera at the moment on my office PC -- it's using ~350MB of RAM and I simply don't care. It could twice that and I still wouldn't care. For those that do, there will always be less mainstream options out there that are much more lightweight at the expense of some functionality.

I hate chrome.

But I use it on my netbook because Firefox hogs too much of the 1GB of ram and 16GB flash disk.

There's still a market for a lean browser.

You don't have to hire me (or anyone) to do those things. If you're a one man shop, and perfectly comfortable doing your installs yourself, no one "should" get paid-you've every right to do it yourself. On the other hand, if you're a large corporation, chances are someone's going to get hired to do installation, maintenance, and customization.

Exactly.

Case in point, one of my good friends just left us (Rackspace) to found a company called Riptano that sells support for Cassandra (there's a story in Database Journal here).

They are committed (John and Matt) to building bits on top of Cassandra for support / management / etc, but also contributing in a big way to the project its self and not forking it.

I don't have the stones to strike out on my own like that, but MAJOR props to them - this is what the F/OSS community needs more of. It takes people with an abundance of passion about a technology to make something like this a reality. Plus, who knows, they may really turn this into a big thing if Cassandra takes off and people want nosql solutions.

(plug: http://www.riptano.com/)

This is modded as funny, but if you see their Life Cycle page at:
https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

You can see that there's a 3 phase cycle for release support. Major versions are supported for 7 years, with the first 4 years being "primary support", i.e. new features, hardware support, and bug / security patches, and then after that they move into a maintenance cycle in which they will first not push new features, and finally only push bug fixes / security patches that are marked as "critical".

This is important to those of us that manage thousands of RHEL boxes.

Btw, got my RHCE a couple of months ago! So, technically, for me, the longer RHEL6 takes to come out, the better - my RHCE is valid until RHEL7.

I understand that the black hat community is actively trying to hack the PS3 because it's proven to be very well protected from pirates. I realize Sony is a business and they are simply trying to protect their rights.

The end.

That's why - the fact that someone found a way to get outside of the virtualized box that they put the "run other os" option in recently - they're trying to head the coming jailbreak off.

~W

Not to mention, some sauces such as Dave's Ultimate Insanity (which I had to sign a waiver to purchase), Blair's 3am, etc, are already pushing food additive properties into the multi-million scoville units.

~X

Medicare paid for the birth of my son. They were polite and efficient, and also personable.

When my wife (then girlfriend) got pregnant, she didn't have the maternity option on her health insurance. Medicaid said that they would pay for it, but that the hospital / OB would have to submit everything to the other insurance company to get denied first. Any slow-downs or inefficiencies in the process were strictly related to Anthem BC/BS having to deny everything medically that happened to my wife from the day she got pregnant.

20 months later, when the hospital tried to bill us for something else related to the birth, we got a personal call from our Medicare case worker - she already knew about it. She said "Now, you guys know, they only have one year to send you bills, so you're not responsible for that. Fax me a copy of it, and I'll sort it out with the hospital. They should know better."

Anecdote is the singular of data, but my experience with Medicare has been extremely positive.

Wow, I don't even know where to start.

Uh, well, I'll just quote your own source:

The length thing was from Russia during the Cold War. 500g, for the google-lazy, is 1.1 lbs. 22 weeks is almost universally non-viable - that's only halfway through a pregnancy. These cases count for an insignificant percentage of total births, and as Wikipedia makes a point of saying, don't explain the US's higher infant mortality rating.

In the US, tax rates are as much as 35% for federal, and up to 10% for state, not to mention up to 10% sales (VAT) tax, as well as a payroll of tax of up to 20%+ (you, and Huffington Post, and the Heritage foundation, and World Net Daily, ad nauseum, always love to put that in when talking about a flat tax - no reason to leave it out now).

Universal government-run health care payment is provably the cheapest way to provide health care.

False. I don't want health insurance. I want health care. There's a big difference.

False. I'm complaining that if I am mandated by the state to have my child examined by a doctor, ideally the state should pay for the exam, and if nothing else, there should never be a question about the insurance company not covering it. It should be something that's covered 100% of the time, in network / out of network / whatever / period. It is the very definition of a "standard health care visit" - it will be the same in every doctor's office across the entire state at least, and probably the country.

The right-wing mainstay for blocking progress when its convenient, and throwing out when it's expedient.

Ever actually read the document? Surely, you've read the Preamble - the statement of intent that covers everything else in the document? Specifically, the part about "promote the general welfare"? Or, how about the Declaration of Independence, where the framers of the constitution stated that it was self-evident that all mankind has the right to life, as well as the pursuit of happiness?

Ever tried to be happy with 7 million dollars in medical debt?

We ALL benefit from a society that is healthy. Healthy citizens are productive and happier, and produce more.

My mother-in-law died a couple of years ago, from breast cancer. Toward the end of her life, the part of her prescriptions that wasn't covered by insurance ran over $50,000 per month. If I got cancer, my health insurance covers my family for a maximum lifetime payout of $1,000,000. With today's medical rates, you can easily blow through that in 3 months.

But, it's no big deal, the free market will solve it! We should leave it alone! Why rush this through?!

Calling it "Obamacare" is a huge waving flag showing your true colors. You're a Registered Independent(tm). One of those people who lives by the credo: "BOTH SIDES ARE BAD LOL (vote republican)". So, take your talking points elsewhere. The rest of us are trying to make progress. You're outdated and, frankly, wrong, and you're damaging this country.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/05/weekly-address-what-health-reform-will-deliver-year would be a good start - why not ask the guy who wrote it?

The first proposal was one of those.

The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and right wing policy groups organized astroturf campaigns to scream and yell and basically banish it out of existence.

The bill we have now is sort of a consolation prize. It doesn't go NEARLY far enough, but it's at least something.

The thing that no one will acknowledge is that THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY PAYS OVER TWO THIRDS of the health care cost in this country, between medicaid, medicare, government employees, social security benefits, and other programs. This wouldn't be a monumental step - it would just be opening up medicaid as an OPTION to people who would choose to use it over private insurance. Namely, people who currently are un- or under-insured.

Sheesh. I really fear for this country sometimes.