I suspect that people used to complain about cars in the same way. Aferall a horse is so much simpler, I give it food, it does work and produces hose crap... anyone could understand this.
But man, early engines, what a bear! you had to crank them to get them to start, put in oil before running them (many early engines would actually spew oil while running by design!). Unlike the horse cars were really touchy about what sort of terrain they could handle. And god help you when something went wrong.
Im not saying that everything on a computer will be trivial. The software to design a house will never be "simple" but people who use that software can be really good at it and still be useless when the OS throws up a "disk is getting full" message or god forbid something more obscure.
Writing letters and sending mail and such probably should be easier than they are right now and I believe in the future you will see many of these actions getting to be quite easy for anybody to accomplish. Your right, computers may never get to the point where they are easier to use than cars... but then someday people may look back on cars of today and be shocked that you didn't just input the destination and sit back and relax the way they do.
I thought about getting into the familiarity thing but decided I didnt want to detail all that out in the post. Generally I agree with you, but by the time computers reach the point where they are as easy to use as a car (actually) this will not be an issue.
I often hear about how computers are complicated because they are general use. This is true and it always will be true. But this complexity does not have to be in the face of the average user. With work (and it will take a ton of it) a UI could be designed that was easier for the man on the street to use without ever running into major issues (or at least, without running into them too much after all, cars go to the shop sometimes). Admittedly this would limit some of the versatility of the computer, but there is no reason that a UI cant scale to the ability of the user. Just because we come up with a good way for everyone to use a computer without issue doesnt mean that there cant be a way to do just about everything if you know what you are doing.
This was often the argument of Mac vs PC. PCs were more general use, you cant change things on a mac. But that wasn't really true. Even in the OS 9 days you could configure and customize a mac quite a bit but you had to know what you are doing. Most geeks, who are the ones who write software for the most part, prefer to have control and options and don't usually think to hide these things or to make automated methods for handling them.
With time and the increase in computing power and a decrease in storage costs, I think you will eventually see a computer that is a lot more like a car in terms of its accessibility to the man on the street. That still wont keep the geeks from going all gear head on it though.
your right, but in this case a perfectly productive "doing something" would have been to just let the guy know that what he is doing is against the law and maybe let him know how he can be on the right side of the law.
I just hope that, even with the reduced sentence, this guy doesn't have a felony arrest and conviction on his record. He might never work again.
Yes, because the use of a car is designed to be a lot more intuitive than that of a computer.
Which is the point. Cars are designed for everyone to be able to use. The above poster chose to call everyone idiots, and frankly, the lowest common denominator is pretty damn low. Computers should also be designed for everyone to be able to use. They should be as close to idiot proof as possible like cars are (a big enough idiot can easily fail it when it comes to a car).
Now sure, you can argue that windows is hard too and even the "user friendly" Mac OS isn't that easy to use, but none of that changes what the goal should be. To make a computer that is as easy for any person off the street to use as a car is.
I will grant that cars are more familiar to people than computers and its not really fair to expect computers to be easy to use for people who spent most of their lives never having heard of them, but they could be a lot easier than that currently are.
OK. My statement might have been a little harsh, especially when looked at like that.
There is snitching and there is snitching. Nobody is going to come after you for tipping off the cops that they backed into a car (especially since that tip is likely to be anonymous). But I had a friend go through hell to avoid a felony conviction after he sold a friend of a friend an eighth of an ounce of weed. This guy wasn't a dealer, he just had some weed and this kid wanted some of it. The kid was working with the cops because he had been busted with a small bag earlier.
I dont have a lot of sympathy for that.
A large percentage of the police informants are criminals themselves just trying to get out of jail free and I have little sympathy for that.
Besides, its public information anyway... the relevant people already know all about it. But if this snitch of a kid had his name on the list at least he would have a harder time helping the cops bust some other college student that is just smoking weed on his own time.
This was an amazingly subtle troll. I aplaud you. You got so many people to bite too.
I think the only reason I noticed was because its a bit too obvious that stopping people from getting gainful employment causes most of the ill you describe. If you had left that bit out and just stuck with the felony convictions I probably wouldn't have noticed that this was a troll at all. But then what is the fun in that, right?
If this information is already publicly available in court records anyone who wanted to get back at their snitch probably could. All this does is consolidate it.
If you have an issue with this its the fact that these names of undercover agents are publicly available as it is.
While I have little to no sympathy for snitches, under cover agents should be protected by the legal entities that employ them. I see no reason why the names of under cover agents need to be public record in court cases.
The citizens of the US haven't become disenfranchised because of G.W.. That started decades ago and is simply accelerating rapidly these days.
Bush wouldn't be able to do a tiny fraction of the stuff he has gotten away with if average US citizens had not been so disenfranchised for so very long.
What on earth are these "most companies" that drug test. I have taken one drug test in my career to get my first job at a government contractor. I decided after that that I would not piss in a cup for employment (it helps that I have no desire to work in government contracting again) and I have never had an issue with that. I have no trouble finding programming firms that do not require drug testing.
I hear this "most" or "many" companies thing a lot but it hasn't been my experience. Of course where I live it is probably not legal to require a drug test for a job where nobody's life depends on your performance, but that is a fairly recent development and I haven't lived here for my whole career.
Most companies I have worked for would loose half their work force to mandatory drug screens.
I dont know, the first one on that list is the Pirus. Its new rating is a respectable 48MPG highway but its old rating was a whoping 60MPG. Sure, 48 is still better than your going to get elsewhere, but its certainly not the 60MPG we were being sold.
Also, I have often exceeded the EPA estimates on the highway for my car (the old estimates) but you don't hear about that happening with hybrids so I wonder how close any of these estimates are to actual real world numbers. Of course there really isn't a good way to find out since everyone drives differently and in different places.
From what I have heard your results are in line with the revised estimates so you are probably driving reasonably efficiently and you are getting reasonable results. you could probably do better than the EPA if you were extra careful and worse if you were extra careless. Some people do both of those things.
If you are happy with your car at 48 MPG then that is a good thing for you and you would probalby still have bought it with a sticker that said 48MPG in the window instead of whatever it used to say.... which I gather is quite a bit more.
remember that things are usually more expensive because they require more energy (and that means burned fuel unfortunately) then the cheaper version. Those batteries don't just cost money, they have a very real environmental impact. I'm not saying its a 1:1 ratio but people who love hybrids are usually loathe to think about that just as much as people who hate them like to talk about how many years it will take to make up the cost difference.
This is true, but its not going to have as significant an impact on those cars as it does on hybrids because the test was heavily biased to the hybrids. I mean the test has been around for a long time and all cars used to be pretty much the same.
Its not like the old estimates were that far off for gas vehicles (in my experience) but hybrids did something that the test was not designed to measure and it ended up giving an edge case result that was way off of what drivers were actually seeing in the cars. Its not surprising that the EPA tests didnt handle a new type of vehicle very well.
yea I did a little digging on the subject after this post and ran across that. I honestly find it hard to believe that this group could make good on that treat but hey, I don't honestly know that much about scientology... maybe they have mafia ties or something.
Christianity is a relatively mature religion, which has past the age where its followers think that they should convince everyone else to join, and that they can achieve that (and other goals) by saying doom to anyone who is not in the club or has anything to say about it.
What I don't understand is if his original crime was a misdemeanor in California, why did he flee to Canada? I mean sure, the charges might have been BS bit its only a misdemeanor... how bad could the result have been?
Its easy to blame developers but Microsoft has created this problem as much as anyone. There is very little available in terms of best practice guidelines for developing on windows and there really never has been. Developers learned mostly from the behavior of MS applications and from what was the easiest way to develop applications. UAC isn't that much different from the privlage escalation stuff on the mac but you dont see that dialog come up very much. A lot of this comes from the architecture of the mac. Its not necessary for applications to do things that require admin privileges... but more importantly there were good guidelines on where user data should be stored, where application settings should be stored and how things should work to minimize the need for those privileges. Microsoft should have been education developers about the impact of UAC for a very long time (at least as long as Vista was in development) and should have been pushing hard for these changes.
One other thing that might be an issue is that UAC allows programmers to be lazy. I don't know a lot about UAC honestly (so please correct me if I'm wrong) but my understanding is that it automatically prompts the user when an application attempts something that requires privileges. On the mac such an operation would (I believe) simply fail. The developer would have to explicitly escalate the application (requiring input from the user) in order to perform the operation. This forces the developer to do something. Either they escalate or they find the right way to do the task (put the data somewhere else for instance) but the Microsoft model doesn't force this. This might seem like nice flexibility but it severely reduces the effectiveness of UAC in practice.
Sometimes the OS has to show the application who is boss.
I remember talk about bar codes on peoples foreheads back then (mostly because of the connection to revelations ) but I don't remember a specific comment by regan comparing national ids to bar codes.
Still, given the talk about bar codes it wouldn't surprise me
There is little innovative about putting the newest chip in your box and getting better hardware. There really isnt that much innovative about building commercial boxes for the most part but it is how companies make money (and how most of us do our computing).
As for the new intel macs. I have a 2 processor dual core Xeon here at work. Its very nice, very respoinsive. Its a worthy upgrade over the G5s. That said, your dual G5 has probably got plenty of life in it and is going to perform well for the next several years. I dont think software is going to force you into buying an intel mac any time soon. I suspect most companies will continue to support the G5 for many years. Its not worth upgrading right now just to have the latest and greatest.
Now at home, I have an old Ti book. I'm about ready to get a new laptop and the new intel based mac book pros look quite nice. But if that machine wasn't showing its age (nearly 7 years old) I wouldn't even be looking at them. Upgrade on your schedule, not your vendors.
So in other words this story is 3 months late (based on the date of the demo)?
I kind of get his point. Apple is shipping a machine like this, so is dell, what about the article is news?
Sure this guy sounds like a mac fanboy but if he had left out the mac pro and just talked about the Dell his point would be pretty much the same. This is a fluff article. How to build your own 8 core Xeon machine which is pretty similar to a bunch of shipping hardware. Its not a special hack, its not unique and its not really news.
hummm... what sort of effect might this have on some of the municipal wireless networks being setup. Im not sure I disagree with the ruling but it leaves a line to be drawn between an ISP and someone who shares his network connection with a friend.
Im no medical expert but if all of the HIV virus in your system was wrapped in these proteins and some of those bits of warped virus got into someone else, they wouldn't be able to infect cells in the new host and thus would not be able to replicate.
I keep hearing very conflicting reports on the effectivness value of these condoms. some people say they arent as reliable (harder to use effectivly) some people say they are no better than regular condoms. I believe you are the first person I have heard praising them for the quality of sensation.
Do you have any more info on these? testimonials? advice? Ive been OK with regular condoms thus far but if you are telling me these actually provide a superior sensation then it is worth looking into.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that people used to complain about cars in the same way. Aferall a horse is so much simpler, I give it food, it does work and produces hose crap... anyone could understand this.
But man, early engines, what a bear! you had to crank them to get them to start, put in oil before running them (many early engines would actually spew oil while running by design!). Unlike the horse cars were really touchy about what sort of terrain they could handle. And god help you when something went wrong.
Im not saying that everything on a computer will be trivial. The software to design a house will never be "simple" but people who use that software can be really good at it and still be useless when the OS throws up a "disk is getting full" message or god forbid something more obscure.
Writing letters and sending mail and such probably should be easier than they are right now and I believe in the future you will see many of these actions getting to be quite easy for anybody to accomplish. Your right, computers may never get to the point where they are easier to use than cars... but then someday people may look back on cars of today and be shocked that you didn't just input the destination and sit back and relax the way they do.
I thought about getting into the familiarity thing but decided I didnt want to detail all that out in the post. Generally I agree with you, but by the time computers reach the point where they are as easy to use as a car (actually) this will not be an issue.
I often hear about how computers are complicated because they are general use. This is true and it always will be true. But this complexity does not have to be in the face of the average user. With work (and it will take a ton of it) a UI could be designed that was easier for the man on the street to use without ever running into major issues (or at least, without running into them too much after all, cars go to the shop sometimes). Admittedly this would limit some of the versatility of the computer, but there is no reason that a UI cant scale to the ability of the user. Just because we come up with a good way for everyone to use a computer without issue doesnt mean that there cant be a way to do just about everything if you know what you are doing.
This was often the argument of Mac vs PC. PCs were more general use, you cant change things on a mac. But that wasn't really true. Even in the OS 9 days you could configure and customize a mac quite a bit but you had to know what you are doing. Most geeks, who are the ones who write software for the most part, prefer to have control and options and don't usually think to hide these things or to make automated methods for handling them.
With time and the increase in computing power and a decrease in storage costs, I think you will eventually see a computer that is a lot more like a car in terms of its accessibility to the man on the street. That still wont keep the geeks from going all gear head on it though.
your right, but in this case a perfectly productive "doing something" would have been to just let the guy know that what he is doing is against the law and maybe let him know how he can be on the right side of the law.
I just hope that, even with the reduced sentence, this guy doesn't have a felony arrest and conviction on his record. He might never work again.
Yes, because the use of a car is designed to be a lot more intuitive than that of a computer.
Which is the point. Cars are designed for everyone to be able to use. The above poster chose to call everyone idiots, and frankly, the lowest common denominator is pretty damn low. Computers should also be designed for everyone to be able to use. They should be as close to idiot proof as possible like cars are (a big enough idiot can easily fail it when it comes to a car).
Now sure, you can argue that windows is hard too and even the "user friendly" Mac OS isn't that easy to use, but none of that changes what the goal should be. To make a computer that is as easy for any person off the street to use as a car is.
I will grant that cars are more familiar to people than computers and its not really fair to expect computers to be easy to use for people who spent most of their lives never having heard of them, but they could be a lot easier than that currently are.
I wish I could sue Microsoft for everything its software claims to do that other software does better.
OK. My statement might have been a little harsh, especially when looked at like that.
There is snitching and there is snitching. Nobody is going to come after you for tipping off the cops that they backed into a car (especially since that tip is likely to be anonymous). But I had a friend go through hell to avoid a felony conviction after he sold a friend of a friend an eighth of an ounce of weed. This guy wasn't a dealer, he just had some weed and this kid wanted some of it. The kid was working with the cops because he had been busted with a small bag earlier.
I dont have a lot of sympathy for that.
A large percentage of the police informants are criminals themselves just trying to get out of jail free and I have little sympathy for that.
Besides, its public information anyway... the relevant people already know all about it. But if this snitch of a kid had his name on the list at least he would have a harder time helping the cops bust some other college student that is just smoking weed on his own time.
This was an amazingly subtle troll. I aplaud you. You got so many people to bite too.
I think the only reason I noticed was because its a bit too obvious that stopping people from getting gainful employment causes most of the ill you describe. If you had left that bit out and just stuck with the felony convictions I probably wouldn't have noticed that this was a troll at all. But then what is the fun in that, right?
If this information is already publicly available in court records anyone who wanted to get back at their snitch probably could. All this does is consolidate it.
If you have an issue with this its the fact that these names of undercover agents are publicly available as it is.
While I have little to no sympathy for snitches, under cover agents should be protected by the legal entities that employ them. I see no reason why the names of under cover agents need to be public record in court cases.
The citizens of the US haven't become disenfranchised because of G.W.. That started decades ago and is simply accelerating rapidly these days.
Bush wouldn't be able to do a tiny fraction of the stuff he has gotten away with if average US citizens had not been so disenfranchised for so very long.
What on earth are these "most companies" that drug test. I have taken one drug test in my career to get my first job at a government contractor. I decided after that that I would not piss in a cup for employment (it helps that I have no desire to work in government contracting again) and I have never had an issue with that. I have no trouble finding programming firms that do not require drug testing.
I hear this "most" or "many" companies thing a lot but it hasn't been my experience. Of course where I live it is probably not legal to require a drug test for a job where nobody's life depends on your performance, but that is a fairly recent development and I haven't lived here for my whole career.
Most companies I have worked for would loose half their work force to mandatory drug screens.
Quantum Foam.... thats that expanding stuff they sell in cans at the Home Depot right?
I dont know, the first one on that list is the Pirus. Its new rating is a respectable 48MPG highway but its old rating was a whoping 60MPG. Sure, 48 is still better than your going to get elsewhere, but its certainly not the 60MPG we were being sold.
Also, I have often exceeded the EPA estimates on the highway for my car (the old estimates) but you don't hear about that happening with hybrids so I wonder how close any of these estimates are to actual real world numbers. Of course there really isn't a good way to find out since everyone drives differently and in different places.
From what I have heard your results are in line with the revised estimates so you are probably driving reasonably efficiently and you are getting reasonable results. you could probably do better than the EPA if you were extra careful and worse if you were extra careless. Some people do both of those things.
If you are happy with your car at 48 MPG then that is a good thing for you and you would probalby still have bought it with a sticker that said 48MPG in the window instead of whatever it used to say.... which I gather is quite a bit more.
remember that things are usually more expensive because they require more energy (and that means burned fuel unfortunately) then the cheaper version. Those batteries don't just cost money, they have a very real environmental impact. I'm not saying its a 1:1 ratio but people who love hybrids are usually loathe to think about that just as much as people who hate them like to talk about how many years it will take to make up the cost difference.
This is true, but its not going to have as significant an impact on those cars as it does on hybrids because the test was heavily biased to the hybrids. I mean the test has been around for a long time and all cars used to be pretty much the same.
Its not like the old estimates were that far off for gas vehicles (in my experience) but hybrids did something that the test was not designed to measure and it ended up giving an edge case result that was way off of what drivers were actually seeing in the cars. Its not surprising that the EPA tests didnt handle a new type of vehicle very well.
yea I did a little digging on the subject after this post and ran across that. I honestly find it hard to believe that this group could make good on that treat but hey, I don't honestly know that much about scientology... maybe they have mafia ties or something.
I guess if he believed it its worth running over.
oh really?
fired is one thing, jailed is another.
What I don't understand is if his original crime was a misdemeanor in California, why did he flee to Canada? I mean sure, the charges might have been BS bit its only a misdemeanor... how bad could the result have been?
Its easy to blame developers but Microsoft has created this problem as much as anyone. There is very little available in terms of best practice guidelines for developing on windows and there really never has been. Developers learned mostly from the behavior of MS applications and from what was the easiest way to develop applications. UAC isn't that much different from the privlage escalation stuff on the mac but you dont see that dialog come up very much. A lot of this comes from the architecture of the mac. Its not necessary for applications to do things that require admin privileges... but more importantly there were good guidelines on where user data should be stored, where application settings should be stored and how things should work to minimize the need for those privileges. Microsoft should have been education developers about the impact of UAC for a very long time (at least as long as Vista was in development) and should have been pushing hard for these changes.
One other thing that might be an issue is that UAC allows programmers to be lazy. I don't know a lot about UAC honestly (so please correct me if I'm wrong) but my understanding is that it automatically prompts the user when an application attempts something that requires privileges. On the mac such an operation would (I believe) simply fail. The developer would have to explicitly escalate the application (requiring input from the user) in order to perform the operation. This forces the developer to do something. Either they escalate or they find the right way to do the task (put the data somewhere else for instance) but the Microsoft model doesn't force this. This might seem like nice flexibility but it severely reduces the effectiveness of UAC in practice.
Sometimes the OS has to show the application who is boss.
I remember talk about bar codes on peoples foreheads back then (mostly because of the connection to revelations ) but I don't remember a specific comment by regan comparing national ids to bar codes.
Still, given the talk about bar codes it wouldn't surprise me
There is little innovative about putting the newest chip in your box and getting better hardware. There really isnt that much innovative about building commercial boxes for the most part but it is how companies make money (and how most of us do our computing).
As for the new intel macs. I have a 2 processor dual core Xeon here at work. Its very nice, very respoinsive. Its a worthy upgrade over the G5s. That said, your dual G5 has probably got plenty of life in it and is going to perform well for the next several years. I dont think software is going to force you into buying an intel mac any time soon. I suspect most companies will continue to support the G5 for many years. Its not worth upgrading right now just to have the latest and greatest.
Now at home, I have an old Ti book. I'm about ready to get a new laptop and the new intel based mac book pros look quite nice. But if that machine wasn't showing its age (nearly 7 years old) I wouldn't even be looking at them. Upgrade on your schedule, not your vendors.
So in other words this story is 3 months late (based on the date of the demo)?
I kind of get his point. Apple is shipping a machine like this, so is dell, what about the article is news?
Sure this guy sounds like a mac fanboy but if he had left out the mac pro and just talked about the Dell his point would be pretty much the same. This is a fluff article. How to build your own 8 core Xeon machine which is pretty similar to a bunch of shipping hardware. Its not a special hack, its not unique and its not really news.
hummm... what sort of effect might this have on some of the municipal wireless networks being setup. Im not sure I disagree with the ruling but it leaves a line to be drawn between an ISP and someone who shares his network connection with a friend.
Im no medical expert but if all of the HIV virus in your system was wrapped in these proteins and some of those bits of warped virus got into someone else, they wouldn't be able to infect cells in the new host and thus would not be able to replicate.
But like I said, im not an expert.
Re: the female condom.
I keep hearing very conflicting reports on the effectivness value of these condoms. some people say they arent as reliable (harder to use effectivly) some people say they are no better than regular condoms. I believe you are the first person I have heard praising them for the quality of sensation.
Do you have any more info on these? testimonials? advice? Ive been OK with regular condoms thus far but if you are telling me these actually provide a superior sensation then it is worth looking into.