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Comment Re:So Much for FreeBSD (Score 1) 27

I haven't touched an HP switch in an age, but a large chunk of the switch market is owned by Broadcom chips, and most of the vendors take the Broadcom reference OS (based on Linux) and just put their branding and spin on it. There's a Cisco IOS-ish CLI, and then some will let you access a little more of the under-the-hood Linux (like the FiberStore datacenter switches I've used recently have some level of python installed although I haven't messed with it).

Realtek has been getting a foothold at the lower end, and I think their reference OS is also Linux based.

Comment Re:So Much for FreeBSD (Score 2) 27

Juniper has been moving to Linux over time. They started with a lot of customizations in their FreeBSD that always made it hard for them to rebase to a new upsteam release and to support new hardware (like they had issues with PowerPC CPU SMP support, so the MX80 and MX104 had multiple cores but JUNOS only ever used one).

Instead they've been basing a lot on Linux (Wind River Linux distro IIRC). The move is two-fold: they've been running Linux on the hardware and their FreeBSD-derived JUNOS in a VM on a lot of platforms, plus in parallel they've been porting their whole system to Linux as JUNOS Evolved.

Who knows what HP will do with all of that though... probably have to pay license fees for every new SFP you plug in (and go back to vendor-locking optics).

Comment Re:It's always bad news with the dollar (Score 2) 232

Sorry, you've misunderstood me. Let me try to clarify. When I said "the goal of the US" I didn't mean the traditional republican politicians. I mean the majority of the political will in the US. The voters. The large number of people who first voted for Obama, then wanted Sanders, and then, probably begrudgingly, voted for Trump. These are working class folks who don't want to drive for Uber or work in an Amazon fulfillment center, and would rather have a good paying factory job like they hear some previous generation had back in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. They want to shift the supply and demand economics of American labor. They want to shrink the supply by reducing immigration and increase the demand by adding manufacturing jobs, which they believe will make general laborer wages rise (relative to the rest of society).

Comment It's always bad news with the dollar (Score 5, Interesting) 232

I live in Canada. Every time you hear news about the dollar, it's bad news, whether it goes up or down. If it goes up the news reporters go and interview exporters who complain that this hurts their business, and when it goes down the reporters interview importers who explain how this is going to make all the products we buy more expensive. It's honestly very tiring. I mostly just ignore stories like this.

If a currency is functioning normally (not being manipulated) then it works to automatically balance trade. If Americans start buying more and more from overseas, then supply and demand in the currency market will cause the dollar's value to go down, which makes American products and investments more attractive to everyone else. You just have to understand that the US buys a lot of cheap products from overseas, but mostly exports expensive high end products like aircraft parts and machinery. People around the world really like investing in US companies (and even T-bills) because the US market is large, profitable, and safe. Therefore the long term trend has been that Americans import a lot of cheap products in exchange for a lot of investment capital flowing into the US. This kept industry humming, but also had the effect of pushing up housing prices, as a lot of people invest in US real estate.

The dollar has traditionally been so high because the US was considered to be such a safe place to invest. Investors around the world wanted better returns, and foreign governments wanted a safe reserve currency, and for the most part the US government took advantage of this because it gave the US access to very cheap capital (borrowing) which allowed deficit spending, and it also gave the US enormous leverage over pretty much every other country in the world financially. For instance, the sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are based on the fact that the global system of trade is mostly based on the US dollar.

The US dollar is falling because even though Americans are still buying lots of stuff from overseas, there's a notable concern about the stability of the US as both a safe place to invest, and as a good investment return. Now I personally think there's still a potential for high return on investment if I were to invest in the US, but I do also have concerns about any money I have in US investments because you just don't know if the US government would do something drastic like confiscate foreign investment, etc. I don't consider it likely, but it's not something I would have worried about 10 years ago, but it's at least a remote possibility now.

I think the goal of the US is to bring more manufacturing back onshore. I think this is a reasonable goal. There are always winners and losers in any change. Bringing back manufacturing jobs tends to help the working class, as does limiting the supply of cheap labor by deporting lots of people. Note that while this is probably a net benefit to the working class, corporations won't like it. They prefer a strong US dollar which makes borrowing cheap and they prefer low wages too, so they're generally pro-immigration. But that's the story of the last few years... the working class has now gained political influence, not just in the US but across the western world, and the right-wing political parties have embraced them, which is a bit surprising because the right-wing parties have traditionally been the party of big business.

Big business now finds itself politically homeless, or certainly far less influential than they used to be. I suspect they're just hoping to ride this out. I'm not convinced this is a temporary situation. I believe that Trump has proven that the working class is now in play politically, and both parties will bend themselves towards catering to their interests. We even saw this in Canada with the liberal party running a guy who's very moderate, perhaps even right-of-center in some ways, and reduced immigration significantly even before the election earlier this year. I think this is just the new political reality. That doesn't mean the democrats won't win again, but they certainly won't win if they don't start adopting some of the populist rhetoric ("working class vs. the elites") that has worked so well for Trump. People clearly wanted Sanders to win the democratic primary, but the democratic party has super-delegates and wouldn't let Bernie win because the party itself (the people running it) are very much against populism. The republican party doesn't have super-delegates, which is why a populist like Trump was able to win the primary in that party.

So it's interesting to see this story trying to paint a low US dollar as a bad thing. It's bad for big business, but not for the working class. I find it surprising because I wouldn't normally think of msmash as a pro-big-business editor. But here we are.

Comment Boggles the mind (Score 3, Insightful) 26

I don't understand how you can make two video games, where the first received critical acclaim, and the sequel was widely panned due to the story, and then when you adapted that into a TV show, you turned the second game into the second season without thinking, "hmm, the fans really hated this story... maybe we should change it?" It's just mindboggling.

Comment Re:Eating the seed corn (Score 2) 260

That's the Science process. People make mistakes, and their results can't be reproduced. New papers are written to point out the errors. A study finds out why the results could not be repeated, and new knowledge has been gained.

Instead of improving the process of error correction, your idea seems to be to not do Science at all, because if no peer-reviewed papers are produced, there are no peer-reviewed papers which can't be reproduced, right?

Comment Re:Slashdot is VERY Left Wing. (Score 3, Informative) 216

I think this bill isn't perfect by a long shot. But NONE of what is in the headline is true.

Why, because you don't want to believe it? Everything stated is literally in the bill. This is from yesterday:

The bill now in the House takes an ax to clean energy incentives, including killing a 30% tax credit for rooftop residential solar by the end of the year that the Biden administrationâ(TM)s Inflation Reduction Act had extended into the next decade. Trump has called the clean energy tax credits in the climate law part of a âoegreen new scamâ that improperly shifts taxpayer subsidies to help the âoeglobalist climate agendaâ and energy sources like wind and solar.

Of course the hypocrisy from those who applaud this cutting isn't lost on people with at least one brain cell:

âoeIf you require a money-spigot from Washington to make your business viable, it probably shouldnâ(TM)t have been in business in the first place,â said Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Funny how they never mention the money-spigot from Washington the oil and gas companies have received since day one, or the huge subisidies companies like Haliburton receive every year.

Oh look, here is the actual wording from the House bill posted on the congressional web site. But they're lying about this as well, right?

Comment Re:Eating the seed corn (Score 1) 260

Those who complain about lack of worker protections, tax evasion, etc., should similarly be opposed to illegal immigration, which only serves to enable all of that.

Correction. Those who complain about illegal workers shouldn't be hiring them, which only serves to enable all of that.

Time and again, those making the loudest noises against illegals are the ones hiring them, Trump included as well as those who voted for him.

Submission + - Sterilized flies to be released in order to stop flesh-eating maggot infestation (cbsnews.com)

Beeftopia writes: From CBS News: "The targeted pest is the flesh-eating larva of the New World Screwworm fly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to ramp up the breeding and distribution of adult male flies — sterilizing them with radiation before releasing them. They mate with females in the wild, and the eggs laid by the female aren't fertilized and don't hatch. There are fewer larvae, and over time, the fly population dies out.

It is more effective and environmentally friendly than spraying the pest into oblivion, and it is how the U.S. and other nations north of Panama eradicated the same pest decades ago. Sterile flies from a factory in Panama kept the flies contained there for years, but the pest appeared in southern Mexico late last year.... the U.S. and Mexico bred and released more than 94 billion sterile flies from 1962 through 1975 to eradicate the pest, according to the USDA. The numbers need to be large enough that females in the wild can't help but hook up with sterile males for mating."

A similar approach to certain species of mosquito is being debated. The impact on ecosystems is unclear.

Comment Re:OMG! What are the chances...? (Score 1) 67

He still can't prove his claims. No need to debunk him. And just because he was able to point out errors in some of the papers that tried to correct him, he wasn't proven right in any way. Errare humanum est, and you can be wrong in so many ways that most of them contradict each other. This does not make any of them more right than the others.

Comment Look at motivations (Score 4, Insightful) 93

When reading statements or listening to interviews, always keep the speaker's motivations in mind. What would the CEO of Ford be trying to accomplish by what they're saying? The typical motivations are to reassure investors. How does saying that half the white collar jobs are going to be gone in the coming years reassure investors? It says, "this new technology is going to allow Ford to cut half of a very large expense."

Is it realistic? No. But it supports his goal: you should invest in Ford because we can already see how to use this new technology to drastically decrease costs.

Another goal he has is to keep workers fearing for their jobs. This is an implied threat to a bunch of Ford workers... you're lucky to have a job, so keep your head down and don't make a fuss. Cuts are coming.

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