If you are referring to the public protests in Madison coming from hired people out of state, then you are sadly misinformed. The protests are by Wisconsinites traveling in from all over the state. A few undoubtedly come from nearby states, but they, too, come on their own nickel. As a Wisconsinite myself, it is clear that this issue has galvanized people from every corner of the state, and in all walks of life. No matter how convenient it might be for a tea-hadist to think that most of the protesters are dirty, unwashed outsiders who've been bussed in by some dastardly entity, the reality is that it's simply ordinary people getting in their own cars and driving in to Madison for the day. (News flash: it's not a long drive at all from practically anywhere in the state.)
Besides, from what entity do you imagine the Democrats could possibly fund tens of thousands protesters every single weekend for the past month and a half? I mean, seriously, it's been like 20,000 to 100,000 people there every single weekend (and that's both on Saturdays and Sundays) for the past 5 or 6 weeks. At a not unreasonable cost of $25 per head, the cost would range from half a million to 2.5 million PER DAY! And for something that is only a protest -- so it's not like this dastardly entity would be collecting any real benefit from pissing away this amount of money. I can only conclude that tea-hadists have all parked their brain in some deep dark cave, and are happy to regurgitate lies without even so much as checking if they pass a sniff test.
Although the governor and his party can try to go after this university professor, it certainly shows just how thin-skinned, small-minded, and afraid they really are. No one who lives in this state can doubt the fervor of the response of the people of this state to the governor's actions. This professor hasn't said anything that others in Wisconsin aren't thinking and saying to each other. Trying to silence this one man isn't going to accomplish anything except to perhaps reinforce to the people how much he resembles other dictators and fascists leaders.
Actually, no. We electrical engineers often do programming, too, although in a very specialized language related to programmable logic controllers. (It's like boolean logic: if this happens and this other thing happens then put something in motion, otherwise go into fault mode. Let the motion go for a certain period of time, and then put everything back the way it was. Now do that routine 10 times, then wait for someone to start you up again...that sort of thing.)
As an electrical engineer, I frequently have to work with IT folks to provide data gathering systems on the equipment we install in our manufacturing facilities. Some of these plant floor networks are huge, and have tentacles that reach into every machine and sub-system processor. I never cease to be amazed at the complete lack of documentation that the IT folks put into physically mapping their network equipment. They will quite literally wave their flashlights and point to where they want the central network switches installed. While we and the mechanical engineers draw plans which show general equipment arrangements, and draw up network diagrams showing how our equipment is to be networked, and we label our equipment and electrical panels, the IT guy typically will typically tell me that yes, he thinks there's a switch around here somewhere I can use, and starts hunting around for it.
In my world, while it is quite possible to build and erect a machine without any prints or plans, any future maintenance or additions to such machines would prove to be doubly expensive since it would require a not inconsiderable amount of detective work to come to understand what exists so that it can be modified or changed. (Indeed, back in the early days of engineering, that's how things were built, and it took many decades before the value of making plans and documenting them was recognized.)
It seems to me that creating and maintaining a complete set of documents which map and explain the equipment and network should be adequate, and would prove to be simpler to keep up to date than any sort of RFID system of tying cowbells to servers. Granted, it requires resources and consistent effort, but this has long been the norm in the field of manufacturing engineering. If it works for machines and manufacturing equipment, why wouldn't it work for IT systems?
If you've ever lived in a city where an awful lot of snow falls in the winter, you would know that it's not enough to merely plow the snow. At some point the piles of plowed snow accumulates to the point where you can't plow any more snow onto the pile. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, every so often during the winter months, GINORMOUS monster snow blowers are brought out which are used to blow the mini-mountains of accumulated plowed snow into dump trucks, which haul the snow out into the countryside. In Wisconsin, this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale in parking lots. There they use end loaders to put the snow into dump truck...which then haul the snow out into the countryside.
Here's a video of one of these giant snowblower trucks in operation. (One manufacturer of these trucks is Oshkosh Trucks. I bet they'd be willing to sell a few to the city of Moscow.)
It takes a serious investment of tax payer's money to buy and keep such equipment. It's not clear to me that municipal governments in Russia function as effectively as they do in Canada and the US. Are taxes collected? Do citizens actually pay their taxes? Or are the citizens too poor to pay taxes, and the wealthy oligarchs excused from paying them? If taxes are paid and collected, do they end up being used for public needs? Or do those funds end up in the pocket of some public official?
In America a lot of people like to bash "government" as wasteful and inefficient, but most Americans have no idea of just how wasteful and inefficient a government can be.
There's nothing wrong with meandering...unless you've just landed in a strange town for a business meeting that you simply MUST arrive at on time. Or you're lost in a strange, big city and have inadvertently strayed into it's most dangerous neighborhood. Or you're in a large city on the eastern seaboard with confusing one-way streets that are poorly marked and AT NIGHT, no less (Boston, I'm looking at you). Or you're trying to get somewhere in a town where the map has all the expressways listed by their number, but the signs all list them by their name (NYC, I'm looking at you). Try navigating at night, or on an overcast, gray day, when you can't tell which way is north, in a place where the roads all began as cowpaths 300 years ago, so they're not laid out in a spiffy, convenient grid (east coast, I'm looking at you). Even on a sunny day, if you're trying to navigate through a mountainous, hilly, forest-y terrain, with narrow twisty-turny roads, it's amazing how quickly you can become lost (Virginia, Tennessee, I'm looking at you).
At times like these, all that meandering won't get me to where I need to be. I often find myself driving in a strange (to me, that is) part of the US, and I am a firm believer in both my GPS AND my maps. And in colleagues that I can call who'll look things up on MapQuest or GoogleEarth and talk me to my destination.
Just because you don't see the usefulness of space colonization today doesn't mean that it would be NEVER a useful thing. It is conceivable that one day it may become very useful, at which time it may be too late to experiment with space exploration.
When Columbus proposed trying to find the far east by sailing WEST, I'm sure there were people who wondered why bother since there was a perfectly acceptable land route for getting there. (That may be part of the reason why he couldn't find financing with any of the city states in Italy and had to go to the kingdom of Spain.) Granted, someone would've eventually found and permanently colonized the New World, but even so, my point is that it took an enormous and imaginative leap into the unknown to have done so. I should add that this point is not invalidated by consideration of the earlier Viking settlements in Newfoundland, which equally required an enormous leap into the unknown and for equally uncertain results. Furthermore, it could also be said that both expeditions (Ericson's and Columbus's) were built on the backs of previous explorations, both successful and unsuccessful ones.
I say whether with probes or with boots on the ground, let's just boldly go forward.
This is exactly my gripe. The books that I want to read are either not available in electronic format at all, or they're not available in a format that suits my electronic reader, or they're available at a cost that's hardly less than the hardback price (or the paperback price). In this last case, what stupid idiotic publisher imagines me to be dumb enough to pay such an exorbitant amount for a text file with some specialized formatting? I guess they're INVITING me to go find a digital copy that's at a more realistic price range.
It seems to me that the publishing houses are locked inside their old business model, without any imagination to grasp the future. Piracy exists because there's an eager market that's being under-served -- whether because you haven't made your product available to that market, or it's not at a price-point that that market is willing to pay.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US only a Psychiatrists can. (Psychiatric training includes earning an MD, whereas Psychologists' training does not. Part of the MD training involves learning about drugs and physiological reactions to them. However, whether or not Psychiatrists are very good MDs, well...that's another question.)
I CAN say that on two occasions in my life, when I was spiraling downwards towards clinical depression (couldn't sleep, couldn't move, was suicidal) therapy and Paxil worked for me. That is, therapy the first time, and Paxil the second time. Fortunately, both times I was able to regain my mental and emotional equilibrium.
However, from what I've seen in my time in group therapy, neither of these tools are always effective for all people. In general, severe and sustained childhood abuse, whether emotional or physical or sexual, can cause the most debilitating dysfunctions in adults. One result of such abuse is a deep rooted anger, which if unexpressed and repressed, CAN lead to severe depression. From where I sat during my years of therapy, observing fellow group members trying to come to grips with their horrific pasts, it was hard to believe that taking pills would resolve their anguish (at best, it might mask it), but it was equally clear that endlessly rehashing their past sometimes kept them trapped in it.
This should also be qualified to add that not all people suffering from clinical depression were on the receiving end of severe and/or sustained abuse. And making the disease more puzzling is that some victims of abuse manage to work their way into being reasonably happy and productive adults. As far as I can tell, there's no really good "predictor" of who's likely to suffer from clinical depression and who isn't -- anymore than being able to rely on either therapy or anti-depressants as a cure for the disease. Indeed, a bad therapist can do even more harm. (And trust me, they're out there.)
The only word of encouragement I can give is to keep trying. If one therapist doesn't work, try another. (There are many different schools of therapy, and one type might work for you where another type doesn't. For example, Rational-Emotive Therapy doesn't really focus on the patient's past, but more on the "let's just deal with what's on your plate now" approach.) If anti-depressants don't do a thing for you, give them up, and try alternative healing techniques: acupuncture, meditation, yoga, and so on. Some of the simplest techniques, such as daily meditation or prayer can be surprisingly effective. These all may sound very la-di-dah and new age-y kind of silly, but what have you got to lose but a little bit of dignity, and what if something you try triggers an insight and leads to progress? I tried something called "dream therapy" once, which I wouldn't necessarily do again, but it did provide me with an insight into my relationship with the rest of the world that I would never have grasped with years of conventional therapy, and which was a real "aha" moment for me. And no, that didn't "fix" me either, but it did give me an understanding of why I was behaving certain ways, and from there I could start re-examining my fundamental approach to life.
Exactly. The FIRST time you sync a new generator to the grid, that can get a little hairy, because you've got to get the phases checked to make sure their rotation matches with the phase rotation on the rest of the grid. But once you've got phase match, with modern sync check relays and automatic syncing and switching it's pretty routine.
Now...back in the day, before modern digital relays, when you had to watch a rotating needle on a dial and the three blinking lights, and the sync check relay was an electromechanical device, yeah, it could get a little hairy to switch a generator onto the grid.
The value to the economy brought about by the free use of Shakespearean material is far more than a few high school plays. For example, not only are Shakespeare's plays perennially staged in movies and on or off Broadway, but successful Hollywood movies and Broadway productions (10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story) are BASED on the plots of his plays. Then too, there's the value to local economies that are provided by Shakespeare festivals (i.e Stratford, Ontario or Spring Green Wisconsin, or Staunton, Virgina). Many book titles are based on quotes from his plays: Sound and Fury (Faulkner), The Way to Dusty Death (Alistair MacClain), etc. (Arguably, book titles don't have to be cribbed from Shakespeare, but part of his genius was his ability to coin catchy phrases. Furthermore the universal popularity of his plays provide immediate recognition of his phrases AND the CONTEXT of his phrases among readers, thus allowing authors to put added meaning into the titles of their works.)
The same could be said of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dicken's novels, or Jane Austen's novels. If these works were to remain in private use, the world would not only be culturally poorer, but also materially worse off.
Well, I'm sure you'll think me mentally defficient, but I barely noticed a difference between my 256M laptop and my 1G laptop in the way XP performed. But I noticed a HUGE difference in the way XP worked between the 128M and the 256M machine. It really was like getting a new computer.
No doubt the sorts of things I do on these computers has an effect on perceived speed and system response. I'm not an expert, and I was merely relating my experience as an average user of a PC. However, I don't encourage anyone to get less than 512M of RAM, and encourage them to get more if they can afford it.
Oy, no it's not a UK variant. It probably began life as a marketing term.
Dictionary.com describes this as an informal variant of the word "light". Dictionary.com also cites an American Heritage dictionary reference:
Having less substance or weight or fewer calories than something else: "lite music, shimmering on the surface and squishy soft at the core" (Mother Jones).
Wikipedia says it can be "A "lite" version of some computer software" or "A common marketing description for a basic, no-frills version of a product".
In general I would agree that shortening words is annoying, but in this case "lite" has a definite connotation and implies something slightly different than the word "light" would in this context. In my recollection, the use of the term "lite" to describe a stripped down version of any software is universally used and accepted.
On the other hand, "thru" has no different meaning or connotation than "through" does, and I would concur with you that using it as a shortcut is just plain lazy. However, the English language is a living thing, and is always changing, so one day even "thru" may come to have a genuine use in making a hairline distinction from "through". I have to keep reminding myself to keep an open mind, and that life's too short to keep getting my shorts in a knot over the lack of precision in the way other people use words.
Oh, I think you have something wrong in your settings somewhere. When I click on a bookmark that's a folder, my Firefox does not automatically open up all of the bookmarks in that file as a series of tabs. I can see why you're annoyed! That would annoy me, too.
For me that only happens if I use my middle click on my mouse. Sometimes I want this behavior, like when I want all my daily use websites to open at once. If I right-click on a bookmark, I get a choice between opening it in a new tab or in a new window. (If you go into your settings, you can sellect to have all pages open in a new window. I don't know how well that works, because I don't have it checked, but it's something for you to try.) What's maddening is I can't get my mouse on my Mac to behave this same way, and I can't figure out why that is. I blame it on OSX, though. ; )
I'm no expert, but I think you've got some extension that's messing up your mouse's normal action, or you have some sort of incompatibility between your mouse's driver and Firefox.
I ran XP for three years on a laptop that only had 256M of ram. I never felt any pain over that. (The laptop's power supply finally bit the dust, otherwise I'd still be using it.) Whenever I had a lot of processes open and running then, yeah, it would slow down, but the same thing seems to happen on my 1 Gig laptop, and even on my 1 Gig Mac mini.
However, on a previous desktop PC, I had XP on 128M, and is was very slow. Once I upgraded it to 256M it got much snappier. That PC is still in use by my nephew.
Mind you, I didn't do any gaming or any other graphics intensive work on my old laptop, but I frequently had Word and Firefox and a music player running simultaneously. As long as your computer tasks don't require you to have lots of windows and processes open, 256M is okay for XP.
I don't think you understand the vast plethora of freeware that is out there for a Windows machine. Compared to that, there really isn't much for a Mac. And for a lot of things that I would like to do on my Mac, which I can readily do on my PC, I haven't found a freeware equivalent. There's no equivalent to the simple and versatile photo-viewer functionality that IrfanView offers, for example. Yes, I tried the X11 based XNView, but I have not been able to make that work on my Mac at all. There isn't a more sophisticated text editor available for free, the way there is for a Window machine. There are no freeware Personal Information Managers, unless one resorts to web 2.0 applications. Even when there is a freeware application available, such as GIMP or Inkscape, that's only two graphics software that I'm aware of, compared to the four or five that you can find for a Windows machine. If there is a freeware option, there's usually only one or two choices, potentially forcing you to live with usability issues that you may not like, unlike the many choices there are for the Windows world, where you can search around and probably find the exact utility and application that suits you the best. I haven't found anything that for free that can do what Wink does (create flash files). The same is true for CD rippers (not everyone is in love with iTunes and trying to use the.ogg format on a Mac took me many extra steps and extre $$ that I didn't need to go through on my PC), DVD rippers, freeware video editors (should you want to do something in a format other than.mov or.dv), and money management software. No matter how simple a utility I'm hunting for in the Mac world, I'm continually amazed at how much of it ends up nibbling away at my pocketbook, each taking $10, $15, or $20 at a MINIMUM. It all adds up to quite a sum of money, and that expense is simply not there on my Windows machine.
I have both a Mac and a PC at home, and found this guy's review to be pretty much exactly the same as my experience, including the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing external hard drive. The hit or miss functionality with peripherals has been the same, too. Thankfully, I bought a Mac Mini with 1 Gig of RAM, so I didn't have his RAM issues, but I agree that it's stunning that Apple would sell a system that's substandard. (How different is that from MS creating Vista to be a resource hog?) The whole "it just works" thing is a myth, as far as I'm concerned. Worse yet, is that when you do have a problem, there isn't a good resource for finding a solution. At least on a Windows machine, the odds are very high that there's no problem that someone somewhere hasn't already encountered and resolved, and will share the solution with you.
I agree that for artistic types, the Mac works seamlessly, and the iLife suite is great. But art, especially music composition, is not my forte, and I want to be able to write, correspond, and blog on my machine. I need to be able to run spreadsheets from work at home, and to be able to edit heavily formatted legal documents. I'll be damned if I'm going to buy TWO versions of Office just to be able to do that. NeoOffice works fine on my Mac, and I use it for casual writing, but it doesn't work with the documents I use for my work. (My NeoOffice is Java based, so I don't know what the author was talking about X11, although I, too, have problems with X11 based software.) In short, my workhorse remains my PC, while my Mac is an expensive toy that I use when I need to do some casual video editing. I'm even willing to sacrifice and deal with the constant security vigilance that a Windows machine requires, rather than have to deal with the frustrations of using my Mac for my normal daily tasks. As for stability, XP has always been rock solid for me, so the much vaunted stability of OSX is a moot point with me.
In short, I came to the same conclusion about OSX that the writer did, that it is designed to take money out of my pocket, and that it may be a stable system, but it doesn't "let" me do the things I want to do with it.
Actually, these Doctor Who shows are fairly simple, with a limited set of regular characters, and with what is increasingly looking like only a stock set of situations. Sure, the WRITING might be better than Voyager or Stargate SG-1 (which isn't saying much), but plots and dialog are but one of many elements that have to be overseen in making a production work.
The complexity of Doctor Who's production doesn't look all that different than what can be seen on the screen for any other typical show -- here in the States, that is. There aren't more shots and edits, and there isn't any particularly fancy camera shots. There isn't that much more CGI, or costumes, creatures and suits, either. There's virtually NO alien worlds created; most of the stories take place on earth -- or historical earth, with only the occasional alien (or supernatural being) showing up to menace the earth. The more complicated all of these are, the more difficult they are to execute and tend to cause more shooting and re-shooting -- and tend to put more pressure on the production team to meet the schedule and budget.
I'm not dissing Doctor Who, I'm just saying that finally Doctor Who's production values come pretty close to matching the typical production values one sees in a Hollywood product. But it only barely meets that standard, and certainly doesn't go beyond that. Therefore I think it is perfectly valid to ask how come Mr. Davies' production team is burning out with only four 13-episode series to produce? Yeah, sure, he's also the producer for the Confidentials, and, if I understand correctly, the Captain Jack shows. But these are all still 13-episode series. There are producers in America that routinely produce two or more 22+ episode shows simultaneously AND for a decade or more (look at Donald Belisario, Stephen Cannell, or Jerry Bruckheimer, just to name a few). When Mr. Davies has produced a scifi show as complex and mutlifaceted as Farscape, with four 22 episode seasons, each increasingly complex and with an ever expanding cast, THEN he can complain about "burnout".
Having said all that, it's probably also fair to say that he is unlikely to have the same amount of or DEPTH of resources at his disposal as are available in Hollywood, or in the Canadian version of Hollywood, Vancouver. As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this reincarnation of the Doctor Who show is virtually the Beeb's first experiment with the "showrunner" concept of production, and a showrunner probably can only do as much as he/she has the staff for.
Legislating to NOT fund a war that 60% of Americans want us out of is not "micromanaging" a war. Especially a war that this administration has been unable to successfully manage at all in the past four years. This is what this Congress was elected in 2006 to do. It is actually the exact same thing that many past Congresses have done. (For a list of them, visit THIS site.http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/0 1/military_deployments.html)
As an electrical engineer, I can tell you that the only way to model electrical circuits is with math. You can't SEE electrons or electromagnetic waves, you have to use mathematical equations to model how they're behaving. In power circuits, you have to understand inductive, resistive, and capacitive circuits, or a combination of all them. Calculating the available short circuit at a fault on a power grid so that the necessary protective devices can be sized properly uses a complex array of equations using real and imaginary numbers. Yes, it's true that computer programs and calculators do the number crunching nowadays, but a practical knowledge of the equations and their calculations is essential to make sure that results are correct, or if there isn't some sort of error in data entry.
Sizing a motor so that it can drive a rotating load, or designing the circuit to control the motion of that load all involve using variations of E=IR or F=Ma, and even PV=nRT, for that matter.
And that's true to some degree even in the most lowliest of trades. I've noticed that the very best craftsmen, electrician, millwrights, pipe fitters, welders, machinists, etc, are the ones who know how to THINK, and have an understanding the theory behind what they do.
Engineering is solving problems, whether it's the problem of how to keep power grids more reliable, or how to make widgets more economically and faster and quicker than the competition, or how to build bridges to cross longer spans. Sure, some problems aren't very glamorous, like how to best pump raw sewage, or how to make sanitary napkins be more absorbant, but they're problems that need solving nonetheless. Engineers need to be thinkers to figure out how to solve problems, but their tools are based on the foundations learned in academic theory classes such as basic math, calculus, physics, and chemistry. Best of all, these same classes that teach theory also happen to teach students how to think their way through problems.
As for all the "practical hands-on" stuff that engineering students think they're missing out on, well those are all just details that only take a couple of years on the job to learn. Those details are frequently specific to the type of industry that students move into. Manufacturing, construction, or product development are examples of types of industry with very different ways of practicing the craft of engineering, and it would not be very cost effective for Engineering Schools to try to train all engineers on the myriads of specific practices employed by all industrial sectors.
(Well, you never really do learn it all. Your whole career will be spent learning and learning, so if you don't like learning, go into sales or be a street sweeper or something.)
Oh dear. You are the exact kind of nasty Mac fanboy that gives the product a bad name. There really are people who just don't care for the Mac OSX UI and if we don't like it, it isn't because we're too stupid to know if we're using it.
I also have the same problem on OSX, along with a whole host of other disconcerting behaviors that the OSX UI has. I hate how I cannot get my mouse's right button to work consistently on Mac applications. I had the hardest time getting used to how the Mac would just save my work somewhere without first asking me where I might want it. This would leave me in total darkness as to where it was, and forced me to use its search function everytime I wanted to find a file. I found that MADDENING. I usually have no problems remembering where I put my files, and I don't care how damn fast spotlight is, it slows me down to have to us it to find everything.
I see no advantage to the dock in OSX over the start menu in Windows; I find both to be equally annoying in their own way. I hate how the dock takes up real estate on my desktop, and OSX doesn't know to keep desktop icons away from it, so that whenever my mouse moves near it, the dock thinks I want to do something with an icon on it instead. Aaargh. There seems to be NO SPOT where I can put the dock without this happening.
I really dislike the lack of consistency between how all the applications work, so that I'm always playing a guessing game as to how to change a view, or edit, or even to just save something. I find there is also a lack of consistency about how to install software; sometimes I have to drop it in the application directory, and other times I have to drop it on the hard drive icon, and I've even found software where neither of these seem to do the trick.
Really, I just don't like using OSX and most of the software that runs on it. On balance I find that the frustrations I run into when using it are far worse than the frustrations I have with Windows. (I can't speak for Vista, as I work on XP.) However, Mac fanboys who tell me that I'm stupid for preferring WinXP doesn't help to sway me. (And all those "helpful" fanboys who will respond to this by pointing out to me all the secret keyboard commands that I simply have to execute just to take care of my various complaints don't see the irony. Counterintuitive commands like that negate the supposed "ease of use" that is always touted for OSX. So thanks, but no thanks.)
Pay no attention to the iconoclastic loner in the corner.
AutoCAD may not be a standard in his industry, but it is in standard use throughout many types of manufacturing and construction industries. I've been a plant engineer and a capital project engineer for going on 3 decades, working for five different firms. Since the late 80's, AutoCAD, along with Microsoft, have been the two constants in my career. In all the places I've worked, AutoCAD has served to provide architectural, civil-structural, steel, electrical, instrumentation, equipment layouts and details, and plant floor layouts. My father, who was a design engineer for a machine manufacturer (machines that made car parts), and who retired in the early 90s, also wound up his career using AutoCAD. Even after retiring, he still continued consulting with his old firm, using....TA DA....the ubiquitous AutoCAD.
You can pooh-pooh AutoCAD all you want, but the truth is, if you are an engineer in a manufacturing or construction environment and you aren't using it, even if it is for a very good reason, YOU are the odd duck.
Well, I bought a Mac about a year and a half ago, and at this point I utterly LOATHE it. Why? Because I don't know how to get things done with it. Yes, yes I know. I can get all sorts of software for it that allows me to to whatever I used to do with a PC -- but typically at a higher cost, both in dollars and in the time it takes to figure out how to install and operate the software. IF all you want to do is run the Mac with the software that comes pre-installed on it, then it's probably a fine machine. But then, a Windows machine performs equally well under those same conditions. In my experience there are plenty of annoying things about a Windows machine, but I found the Mac machine to be even more annoying!
I can get all sorts of work done on my PC, but that stupid Mac just sits on my desk collecting dust!
As for Linux, the thought of wrestling around trying to figure out where to find drivers for the peripherals I currently own, well...no thanks. Then once again, i'd be faced with an enormous investment of my personal free time for learning how to operate new software. After that fiasco with the stupid Mac, I'm damn sure not going to waste more of my personal time on trying to learn the gobbledy-gook for yet ANOTHER operating system. I'm like that car owner. I don't want to tinker with the engine under the hood just to be able to get my groceries, drive to work each day, pick up the dry cleaning, visit my parents, or take a leisurly road trip. Sure I care about the reliability of that engine, but you know, most cars are pretty reliable, no matter which brand you buy.
The only circumstance that I might be tempted to try Linux is if ever my Replay goes tits up. If that ever happens, I'll set up a Linux machine just to get MythTV going. If I do that, then all it will be is an appliance for recording TV shows.
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If you are referring to the public protests in Madison coming from hired people out of state, then you are sadly misinformed. The protests are by Wisconsinites traveling in from all over the state. A few undoubtedly come from nearby states, but they, too, come on their own nickel. As a Wisconsinite myself, it is clear that this issue has galvanized people from every corner of the state, and in all walks of life. No matter how convenient it might be for a tea-hadist to think that most of the protesters are dirty, unwashed outsiders who've been bussed in by some dastardly entity, the reality is that it's simply ordinary people getting in their own cars and driving in to Madison for the day. (News flash: it's not a long drive at all from practically anywhere in the state.)
Besides, from what entity do you imagine the Democrats could possibly fund tens of thousands protesters every single weekend for the past month and a half? I mean, seriously, it's been like 20,000 to 100,000 people there every single weekend (and that's both on Saturdays and Sundays) for the past 5 or 6 weeks. At a not unreasonable cost of $25 per head, the cost would range from half a million to 2.5 million PER DAY! And for something that is only a protest -- so it's not like this dastardly entity would be collecting any real benefit from pissing away this amount of money. I can only conclude that tea-hadists have all parked their brain in some deep dark cave, and are happy to regurgitate lies without even so much as checking if they pass a sniff test.
Although the governor and his party can try to go after this university professor, it certainly shows just how thin-skinned, small-minded, and afraid they really are. No one who lives in this state can doubt the fervor of the response of the people of this state to the governor's actions. This professor hasn't said anything that others in Wisconsin aren't thinking and saying to each other. Trying to silence this one man isn't going to accomplish anything except to perhaps reinforce to the people how much he resembles other dictators and fascists leaders.
Actually, no. We electrical engineers often do programming, too, although in a very specialized language related to programmable logic controllers. (It's like boolean logic: if this happens and this other thing happens then put something in motion, otherwise go into fault mode. Let the motion go for a certain period of time, and then put everything back the way it was. Now do that routine 10 times, then wait for someone to start you up again...that sort of thing.)
As an electrical engineer, I frequently have to work with IT folks to provide data gathering systems on the equipment we install in our manufacturing facilities. Some of these plant floor networks are huge, and have tentacles that reach into every machine and sub-system processor. I never cease to be amazed at the complete lack of documentation that the IT folks put into physically mapping their network equipment. They will quite literally wave their flashlights and point to where they want the central network switches installed. While we and the mechanical engineers draw plans which show general equipment arrangements, and draw up network diagrams showing how our equipment is to be networked, and we label our equipment and electrical panels, the IT guy typically will typically tell me that yes, he thinks there's a switch around here somewhere I can use, and starts hunting around for it.
In my world, while it is quite possible to build and erect a machine without any prints or plans, any future maintenance or additions to such machines would prove to be doubly expensive since it would require a not inconsiderable amount of detective work to come to understand what exists so that it can be modified or changed. (Indeed, back in the early days of engineering, that's how things were built, and it took many decades before the value of making plans and documenting them was recognized.)
It seems to me that creating and maintaining a complete set of documents which map and explain the equipment and network should be adequate, and would prove to be simpler to keep up to date than any sort of RFID system of tying cowbells to servers. Granted, it requires resources and consistent effort, but this has long been the norm in the field of manufacturing engineering. If it works for machines and manufacturing equipment, why wouldn't it work for IT systems?
If you've ever lived in a city where an awful lot of snow falls in the winter, you would know that it's not enough to merely plow the snow. At some point the piles of plowed snow accumulates to the point where you can't plow any more snow onto the pile. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, every so often during the winter months, GINORMOUS monster snow blowers are brought out which are used to blow the mini-mountains of accumulated plowed snow into dump trucks, which haul the snow out into the countryside. In Wisconsin, this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale in parking lots. There they use end loaders to put the snow into dump truck...which then haul the snow out into the countryside.
Here's a video of one of these giant snowblower trucks in operation. (One manufacturer of these trucks is Oshkosh Trucks. I bet they'd be willing to sell a few to the city of Moscow.)
It takes a serious investment of tax payer's money to buy and keep such equipment. It's not clear to me that municipal governments in Russia function as effectively as they do in Canada and the US. Are taxes collected? Do citizens actually pay their taxes? Or are the citizens too poor to pay taxes, and the wealthy oligarchs excused from paying them? If taxes are paid and collected, do they end up being used for public needs? Or do those funds end up in the pocket of some public official?
In America a lot of people like to bash "government" as wasteful and inefficient, but most Americans have no idea of just how wasteful and inefficient a government can be.
There's nothing wrong with meandering...unless you've just landed in a strange town for a business meeting that you simply MUST arrive at on time. Or you're lost in a strange, big city and have inadvertently strayed into it's most dangerous neighborhood. Or you're in a large city on the eastern seaboard with confusing one-way streets that are poorly marked and AT NIGHT, no less (Boston, I'm looking at you). Or you're trying to get somewhere in a town where the map has all the expressways listed by their number, but the signs all list them by their name (NYC, I'm looking at you). Try navigating at night, or on an overcast, gray day, when you can't tell which way is north, in a place where the roads all began as cowpaths 300 years ago, so they're not laid out in a spiffy, convenient grid (east coast, I'm looking at you). Even on a sunny day, if you're trying to navigate through a mountainous, hilly, forest-y terrain, with narrow twisty-turny roads, it's amazing how quickly you can become lost (Virginia, Tennessee, I'm looking at you).
At times like these, all that meandering won't get me to where I need to be. I often find myself driving in a strange (to me, that is) part of the US, and I am a firm believer in both my GPS AND my maps. And in colleagues that I can call who'll look things up on MapQuest or GoogleEarth and talk me to my destination.
Just because you don't see the usefulness of space colonization today doesn't mean that it would be NEVER a useful thing. It is conceivable that one day it may become very useful, at which time it may be too late to experiment with space exploration.
When Columbus proposed trying to find the far east by sailing WEST, I'm sure there were people who wondered why bother since there was a perfectly acceptable land route for getting there. (That may be part of the reason why he couldn't find financing with any of the city states in Italy and had to go to the kingdom of Spain.) Granted, someone would've eventually found and permanently colonized the New World, but even so, my point is that it took an enormous and imaginative leap into the unknown to have done so. I should add that this point is not invalidated by consideration of the earlier Viking settlements in Newfoundland, which equally required an enormous leap into the unknown and for equally uncertain results. Furthermore, it could also be said that both expeditions (Ericson's and Columbus's) were built on the backs of previous explorations, both successful and unsuccessful ones.
I say whether with probes or with boots on the ground, let's just boldly go forward.
This is exactly my gripe. The books that I want to read are either not available in electronic format at all, or they're not available in a format that suits my electronic reader, or they're available at a cost that's hardly less than the hardback price (or the paperback price). In this last case, what stupid idiotic publisher imagines me to be dumb enough to pay such an exorbitant amount for a text file with some specialized formatting? I guess they're INVITING me to go find a digital copy that's at a more realistic price range.
It seems to me that the publishing houses are locked inside their old business model, without any imagination to grasp the future. Piracy exists because there's an eager market that's being under-served -- whether because you haven't made your product available to that market, or it's not at a price-point that that market is willing to pay.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US only a Psychiatrists can. (Psychiatric training includes earning an MD, whereas Psychologists' training does not. Part of the MD training involves learning about drugs and physiological reactions to them. However, whether or not Psychiatrists are very good MDs, well...that's another question.)
I CAN say that on two occasions in my life, when I was spiraling downwards towards clinical depression (couldn't sleep, couldn't move, was suicidal) therapy and Paxil worked for me. That is, therapy the first time, and Paxil the second time. Fortunately, both times I was able to regain my mental and emotional equilibrium.
However, from what I've seen in my time in group therapy, neither of these tools are always effective for all people. In general, severe and sustained childhood abuse, whether emotional or physical or sexual, can cause the most debilitating dysfunctions in adults. One result of such abuse is a deep rooted anger, which if unexpressed and repressed, CAN lead to severe depression. From where I sat during my years of therapy, observing fellow group members trying to come to grips with their horrific pasts, it was hard to believe that taking pills would resolve their anguish (at best, it might mask it), but it was equally clear that endlessly rehashing their past sometimes kept them trapped in it.
This should also be qualified to add that not all people suffering from clinical depression were on the receiving end of severe and/or sustained abuse. And making the disease more puzzling is that some victims of abuse manage to work their way into being reasonably happy and productive adults. As far as I can tell, there's no really good "predictor" of who's likely to suffer from clinical depression and who isn't -- anymore than being able to rely on either therapy or anti-depressants as a cure for the disease. Indeed, a bad therapist can do even more harm. (And trust me, they're out there.)
The only word of encouragement I can give is to keep trying. If one therapist doesn't work, try another. (There are many different schools of therapy, and one type might work for you where another type doesn't. For example, Rational-Emotive Therapy doesn't really focus on the patient's past, but more on the "let's just deal with what's on your plate now" approach.) If anti-depressants don't do a thing for you, give them up, and try alternative healing techniques: acupuncture, meditation, yoga, and so on. Some of the simplest techniques, such as daily meditation or prayer can be surprisingly effective. These all may sound very la-di-dah and new age-y kind of silly, but what have you got to lose but a little bit of dignity, and what if something you try triggers an insight and leads to progress? I tried something called "dream therapy" once, which I wouldn't necessarily do again, but it did provide me with an insight into my relationship with the rest of the world that I would never have grasped with years of conventional therapy, and which was a real "aha" moment for me. And no, that didn't "fix" me either, but it did give me an understanding of why I was behaving certain ways, and from there I could start re-examining my fundamental approach to life.
Exactly. The FIRST time you sync a new generator to the grid, that can get a little hairy, because you've got to get the phases checked to make sure their rotation matches with the phase rotation on the rest of the grid. But once you've got phase match, with modern sync check relays and automatic syncing and switching it's pretty routine.
Now...back in the day, before modern digital relays, when you had to watch a rotating needle on a dial and the three blinking lights, and the sync check relay was an electromechanical device, yeah, it could get a little hairy to switch a generator onto the grid.
The value to the economy brought about by the free use of Shakespearean material is far more than a few high school plays. For example, not only are Shakespeare's plays perennially staged in movies and on or off Broadway, but successful Hollywood movies and Broadway productions (10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story) are BASED on the plots of his plays. Then too, there's the value to local economies that are provided by Shakespeare festivals (i.e Stratford, Ontario or Spring Green Wisconsin, or Staunton, Virgina). Many book titles are based on quotes from his plays: Sound and Fury (Faulkner), The Way to Dusty Death (Alistair MacClain), etc. (Arguably, book titles don't have to be cribbed from Shakespeare, but part of his genius was his ability to coin catchy phrases. Furthermore the universal popularity of his plays provide immediate recognition of his phrases AND the CONTEXT of his phrases among readers, thus allowing authors to put added meaning into the titles of their works.) The same could be said of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dicken's novels, or Jane Austen's novels. If these works were to remain in private use, the world would not only be culturally poorer, but also materially worse off.
Don't forget Rygel's tiney shiney hiney plugging the hole in Moya for about half an episode.
Well, I'm sure you'll think me mentally defficient, but I barely noticed a difference between my 256M laptop and my 1G laptop in the way XP performed. But I noticed a HUGE difference in the way XP worked between the 128M and the 256M machine. It really was like getting a new computer.
No doubt the sorts of things I do on these computers has an effect on perceived speed and system response. I'm not an expert, and I was merely relating my experience as an average user of a PC. However, I don't encourage anyone to get less than 512M of RAM, and encourage them to get more if they can afford it.
Oy, no it's not a UK variant. It probably began life as a marketing term.
Dictionary.com describes this as an informal variant of the word "light". Dictionary.com also cites an American Heritage dictionary reference:
Wikipedia says it can be "A "lite" version of some computer software" or "A common marketing description for a basic, no-frills version of a product".
In general I would agree that shortening words is annoying, but in this case "lite" has a definite connotation and implies something slightly different than the word "light" would in this context. In my recollection, the use of the term "lite" to describe a stripped down version of any software is universally used and accepted.
On the other hand, "thru" has no different meaning or connotation than "through" does, and I would concur with you that using it as a shortcut is just plain lazy. However, the English language is a living thing, and is always changing, so one day even "thru" may come to have a genuine use in making a hairline distinction from "through". I have to keep reminding myself to keep an open mind, and that life's too short to keep getting my shorts in a knot over the lack of precision in the way other people use words.
Oh, I think you have something wrong in your settings somewhere. When I click on a bookmark that's a folder, my Firefox does not automatically open up all of the bookmarks in that file as a series of tabs. I can see why you're annoyed! That would annoy me, too.
For me that only happens if I use my middle click on my mouse. Sometimes I want this behavior, like when I want all my daily use websites to open at once. If I right-click on a bookmark, I get a choice between opening it in a new tab or in a new window. (If you go into your settings, you can sellect to have all pages open in a new window. I don't know how well that works, because I don't have it checked, but it's something for you to try.) What's maddening is I can't get my mouse on my Mac to behave this same way, and I can't figure out why that is. I blame it on OSX, though. ; )
I'm no expert, but I think you've got some extension that's messing up your mouse's normal action, or you have some sort of incompatibility between your mouse's driver and Firefox.
I ran XP for three years on a laptop that only had 256M of ram. I never felt any pain over that. (The laptop's power supply finally bit the dust, otherwise I'd still be using it.) Whenever I had a lot of processes open and running then, yeah, it would slow down, but the same thing seems to happen on my 1 Gig laptop, and even on my 1 Gig Mac mini. However, on a previous desktop PC, I had XP on 128M, and is was very slow. Once I upgraded it to 256M it got much snappier. That PC is still in use by my nephew. Mind you, I didn't do any gaming or any other graphics intensive work on my old laptop, but I frequently had Word and Firefox and a music player running simultaneously. As long as your computer tasks don't require you to have lots of windows and processes open, 256M is okay for XP.
I don't think you understand the vast plethora of freeware that is out there for a Windows machine. Compared to that, there really isn't much for a Mac. And for a lot of things that I would like to do on my Mac, which I can readily do on my PC, I haven't found a freeware equivalent. There's no equivalent to the simple and versatile photo-viewer functionality that IrfanView offers, for example. Yes, I tried the X11 based XNView, but I have not been able to make that work on my Mac at all. There isn't a more sophisticated text editor available for free, the way there is for a Window machine. There are no freeware Personal Information Managers, unless one resorts to web 2.0 applications. Even when there is a freeware application available, such as GIMP or Inkscape, that's only two graphics software that I'm aware of, compared to the four or five that you can find for a Windows machine. If there is a freeware option, there's usually only one or two choices, potentially forcing you to live with usability issues that you may not like, unlike the many choices there are for the Windows world, where you can search around and probably find the exact utility and application that suits you the best. I haven't found anything that for free that can do what Wink does (create flash files). The same is true for CD rippers (not everyone is in love with iTunes and trying to use the .ogg format on a Mac took me many extra steps and extre $$ that I didn't need to go through on my PC), DVD rippers, freeware video editors (should you want to do something in a format other than .mov or .dv), and money management software. No matter how simple a utility I'm hunting for in the Mac world, I'm continually amazed at how much of it ends up nibbling away at my pocketbook, each taking $10, $15, or $20 at a MINIMUM. It all adds up to quite a sum of money, and that expense is simply not there on my Windows machine.
I have both a Mac and a PC at home, and found this guy's review to be pretty much exactly the same as my experience, including the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing external hard drive. The hit or miss functionality with peripherals has been the same, too. Thankfully, I bought a Mac Mini with 1 Gig of RAM, so I didn't have his RAM issues, but I agree that it's stunning that Apple would sell a system that's substandard. (How different is that from MS creating Vista to be a resource hog?) The whole "it just works" thing is a myth, as far as I'm concerned. Worse yet, is that when you do have a problem, there isn't a good resource for finding a solution. At least on a Windows machine, the odds are very high that there's no problem that someone somewhere hasn't already encountered and resolved, and will share the solution with you.
I agree that for artistic types, the Mac works seamlessly, and the iLife suite is great. But art, especially music composition, is not my forte, and I want to be able to write, correspond, and blog on my machine. I need to be able to run spreadsheets from work at home, and to be able to edit heavily formatted legal documents. I'll be damned if I'm going to buy TWO versions of Office just to be able to do that. NeoOffice works fine on my Mac, and I use it for casual writing, but it doesn't work with the documents I use for my work. (My NeoOffice is Java based, so I don't know what the author was talking about X11, although I, too, have problems with X11 based software.) In short, my workhorse remains my PC, while my Mac is an expensive toy that I use when I need to do some casual video editing. I'm even willing to sacrifice and deal with the constant security vigilance that a Windows machine requires, rather than have to deal with the frustrations of using my Mac for my normal daily tasks. As for stability, XP has always been rock solid for me, so the much vaunted stability of OSX is a moot point with me.
In short, I came to the same conclusion about OSX that the writer did, that it is designed to take money out of my pocket, and that it may be a stable system, but it doesn't "let" me do the things I want to do with it.
Actually, these Doctor Who shows are fairly simple, with a limited set of regular characters, and with what is increasingly looking like only a stock set of situations. Sure, the WRITING might be better than Voyager or Stargate SG-1 (which isn't saying much), but plots and dialog are but one of many elements that have to be overseen in making a production work.
The complexity of Doctor Who's production doesn't look all that different than what can be seen on the screen for any other typical show -- here in the States, that is. There aren't more shots and edits, and there isn't any particularly fancy camera shots. There isn't that much more CGI, or costumes, creatures and suits, either. There's virtually NO alien worlds created; most of the stories take place on earth -- or historical earth, with only the occasional alien (or supernatural being) showing up to menace the earth. The more complicated all of these are, the more difficult they are to execute and tend to cause more shooting and re-shooting -- and tend to put more pressure on the production team to meet the schedule and budget.
I'm not dissing Doctor Who, I'm just saying that finally Doctor Who's production values come pretty close to matching the typical production values one sees in a Hollywood product. But it only barely meets that standard, and certainly doesn't go beyond that. Therefore I think it is perfectly valid to ask how come Mr. Davies' production team is burning out with only four 13-episode series to produce? Yeah, sure, he's also the producer for the Confidentials, and, if I understand correctly, the Captain Jack shows. But these are all still 13-episode series. There are producers in America that routinely produce two or more 22+ episode shows simultaneously AND for a decade or more (look at Donald Belisario, Stephen Cannell, or Jerry Bruckheimer, just to name a few). When Mr. Davies has produced a scifi show as complex and mutlifaceted as Farscape, with four 22 episode seasons, each increasingly complex and with an ever expanding cast, THEN he can complain about "burnout".
Having said all that, it's probably also fair to say that he is unlikely to have the same amount of or DEPTH of resources at his disposal as are available in Hollywood, or in the Canadian version of Hollywood, Vancouver. As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this reincarnation of the Doctor Who show is virtually the Beeb's first experiment with the "showrunner" concept of production, and a showrunner probably can only do as much as he/she has the staff for.
Legislating to NOT fund a war that 60% of Americans want us out of is not "micromanaging" a war. Especially a war that this administration has been unable to successfully manage at all in the past four years. This is what this Congress was elected in 2006 to do. It is actually the exact same thing that many past Congresses have done. (For a list of them, visit THIS site.http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/0 1/military_deployments.html)
In fact, this administration has been so incompetent in carrying out this war that they are now looking for someone to take it over. I'm not kidding: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast /12policy.html?_r=1&ref=washington&oref=slogin Too bad they're having trouble finding someone dumb enough to take the job.
In a plastic cup.
(That's from Eddie Izzard, but I couldn't resist saying it.}
Why teach Math??? Are you an IDIOT??
As an electrical engineer, I can tell you that the only way to model electrical circuits is with math. You can't SEE electrons or electromagnetic waves, you have to use mathematical equations to model how they're behaving. In power circuits, you have to understand inductive, resistive, and capacitive circuits, or a combination of all them. Calculating the available short circuit at a fault on a power grid so that the necessary protective devices can be sized properly uses a complex array of equations using real and imaginary numbers. Yes, it's true that computer programs and calculators do the number crunching nowadays, but a practical knowledge of the equations and their calculations is essential to make sure that results are correct, or if there isn't some sort of error in data entry.
Sizing a motor so that it can drive a rotating load, or designing the circuit to control the motion of that load all involve using variations of E=IR or F=Ma, and even PV=nRT, for that matter.
And that's true to some degree even in the most lowliest of trades. I've noticed that the very best craftsmen, electrician, millwrights, pipe fitters, welders, machinists, etc, are the ones who know how to THINK, and have an understanding the theory behind what they do.
Engineering is solving problems, whether it's the problem of how to keep power grids more reliable, or how to make widgets more economically and faster and quicker than the competition, or how to build bridges to cross longer spans. Sure, some problems aren't very glamorous, like how to best pump raw sewage, or how to make sanitary napkins be more absorbant, but they're problems that need solving nonetheless. Engineers need to be thinkers to figure out how to solve problems, but their tools are based on the foundations learned in academic theory classes such as basic math, calculus, physics, and chemistry. Best of all, these same classes that teach theory also happen to teach students how to think their way through problems.
As for all the "practical hands-on" stuff that engineering students think they're missing out on, well those are all just details that only take a couple of years on the job to learn. Those details are frequently specific to the type of industry that students move into. Manufacturing, construction, or product development are examples of types of industry with very different ways of practicing the craft of engineering, and it would not be very cost effective for Engineering Schools to try to train all engineers on the myriads of specific practices employed by all industrial sectors.
(Well, you never really do learn it all. Your whole career will be spent learning and learning, so if you don't like learning, go into sales or be a street sweeper or something.)
Oh dear. You are the exact kind of nasty Mac fanboy that gives the product a bad name. There really are people who just don't care for the Mac OSX UI and if we don't like it, it isn't because we're too stupid to know if we're using it.
I also have the same problem on OSX, along with a whole host of other disconcerting behaviors that the OSX UI has. I hate how I cannot get my mouse's right button to work consistently on Mac applications. I had the hardest time getting used to how the Mac would just save my work somewhere without first asking me where I might want it. This would leave me in total darkness as to where it was, and forced me to use its search function everytime I wanted to find a file. I found that MADDENING. I usually have no problems remembering where I put my files, and I don't care how damn fast spotlight is, it slows me down to have to us it to find everything.
I see no advantage to the dock in OSX over the start menu in Windows; I find both to be equally annoying in their own way. I hate how the dock takes up real estate on my desktop, and OSX doesn't know to keep desktop icons away from it, so that whenever my mouse moves near it, the dock thinks I want to do something with an icon on it instead. Aaargh. There seems to be NO SPOT where I can put the dock without this happening.
I really dislike the lack of consistency between how all the applications work, so that I'm always playing a guessing game as to how to change a view, or edit, or even to just save something. I find there is also a lack of consistency about how to install software; sometimes I have to drop it in the application directory, and other times I have to drop it on the hard drive icon, and I've even found software where neither of these seem to do the trick.
Really, I just don't like using OSX and most of the software that runs on it. On balance I find that the frustrations I run into when using it are far worse than the frustrations I have with Windows. (I can't speak for Vista, as I work on XP.) However, Mac fanboys who tell me that I'm stupid for preferring WinXP doesn't help to sway me. (And all those "helpful" fanboys who will respond to this by pointing out to me all the secret keyboard commands that I simply have to execute just to take care of my various complaints don't see the irony. Counterintuitive commands like that negate the supposed "ease of use" that is always touted for OSX. So thanks, but no thanks.)
Pay no attention to the iconoclastic loner in the corner. AutoCAD may not be a standard in his industry, but it is in standard use throughout many types of manufacturing and construction industries. I've been a plant engineer and a capital project engineer for going on 3 decades, working for five different firms. Since the late 80's, AutoCAD, along with Microsoft, have been the two constants in my career. In all the places I've worked, AutoCAD has served to provide architectural, civil-structural, steel, electrical, instrumentation, equipment layouts and details, and plant floor layouts. My father, who was a design engineer for a machine manufacturer (machines that made car parts), and who retired in the early 90s, also wound up his career using AutoCAD. Even after retiring, he still continued consulting with his old firm, using....TA DA....the ubiquitous AutoCAD. You can pooh-pooh AutoCAD all you want, but the truth is, if you are an engineer in a manufacturing or construction environment and you aren't using it, even if it is for a very good reason, YOU are the odd duck.
Ugh! Here comes the Mac fanboy!!
Well, I bought a Mac about a year and a half ago, and at this point I utterly LOATHE it. Why? Because I don't know how to get things done with it. Yes, yes I know. I can get all sorts of software for it that allows me to to whatever I used to do with a PC -- but typically at a higher cost, both in dollars and in the time it takes to figure out how to install and operate the software. IF all you want to do is run the Mac with the software that comes pre-installed on it, then it's probably a fine machine. But then, a Windows machine performs equally well under those same conditions. In my experience there are plenty of annoying things about a Windows machine, but I found the Mac machine to be even more annoying!
I can get all sorts of work done on my PC, but that stupid Mac just sits on my desk collecting dust!
As for Linux, the thought of wrestling around trying to figure out where to find drivers for the peripherals I currently own, well...no thanks. Then once again, i'd be faced with an enormous investment of my personal free time for learning how to operate new software. After that fiasco with the stupid Mac, I'm damn sure not going to waste more of my personal time on trying to learn the gobbledy-gook for yet ANOTHER operating system. I'm like that car owner. I don't want to tinker with the engine under the hood just to be able to get my groceries, drive to work each day, pick up the dry cleaning, visit my parents, or take a leisurly road trip. Sure I care about the reliability of that engine, but you know, most cars are pretty reliable, no matter which brand you buy.
The only circumstance that I might be tempted to try Linux is if ever my Replay goes tits up. If that ever happens, I'll set up a Linux machine just to get MythTV going. If I do that, then all it will be is an appliance for recording TV shows.