Seriously, I know I could just google it but damnit slashdot, this sounds like a typical example of an editor knowing about a subject that a submission happens to be about yet most likely the average slashdot users doesn't have a clue as to what/who the fuck "Video professor" is.
Well, it's not like you have to turn your head 45 or anything, and these are fairly small monitors, it's a lot worse when you've got typical large "desktop monitors" in the 24-30" range, and even then it's not really that bad as long as you don't have to position the monitors in a weird way to fit them on your desk.
Of course, personally I prefer three monitors with two flanking monitors but I think that would be way too unwieldy for a netbook or laptop...
Well yeah, the Solaris installation suggested I just put everything on one big partition and I decided to at least split off home directories and/usr from that. Guess I should've done a better job, still doesn't make sense not to warn about the whole "first thing that happens after you login is that the system will attempt to download 10+ GiB of update files" thing.
Exactly, I'm only using ZFS on FreeBSD for my home file server but it has run fine so far (and considering the issues I had with the combination of cheap consumer SATA disks + expensive RAID controller that I used before it would have to act up a lot to be worse than that (although I suspect if I had gone with better disks they wouldn't have been such a PITA)).
As for the tinkering, yeah, I agree that FreeBSD feels a bit friendlier in that respect, I've also never had FreeBSD tell me that there are upgrades available and then proceeded to fill the root partition of the system and crash, I suppose that's partially my fault for not checking how large all the update files were but still...
I've been using FreeBSD since somewhere around 1999-2000 and I've also played around a bit with various versions of Solaris and the way I look at it is:
If you want to learn something that you can put on your resumé then Solaris is probably the better choice, likewise if you want mature ZFS support, other than that I'd have to say that FreeBSD is the better choice for most people but as a long time FreeBSD user I suspect I'm quite biased, FreeBSD has always made a lot of sense to me, it's well-organized and I just happen to like the simplicity and sane layout that it has. But yeah, neither OS is Debian/Ubuntu and you'll have to learn their little peculiarities (and there's no point fighting it, trying to dump all software into/usr and making/usr/local a symlink to/usr because that's how your Linux distro of choice did it isn't going to fly with FreeBSD, just accept that when you install software it goes in/usr/local and be happy with it:).
(Yes, I once (1998-ish) saw what was a large Linux distro at the time pull that stunt)
I used to have that problem with Safari, I never bothered to check whether it was just some javascript or CSS trickery to hide that part of the page though...
Actually, if you ever fell for one of their "click here to register and see the answer" tricks then they stop showing the answer (until you clear out your cookies).
And it wasn't that long ago that they didn't show the answer to all users, it seemed to be browser-dependent, some user-agent strings would allow you to see the answers while others didn't.
Yes, those sites have actually become more annoying than the regular Experts Exchange-like sites that show content to google but not real users, at least those sites have the answer and can generally be tricked in various ways, the sites that just copy mailing lists are useless, especially the ones that "match" a hundred different questions so that they'll always be in the top 10 for a lot of searches yet they don't even have the answers to the questions, just other vaguely related questions.
This could possibly be the only time one of the retarded things our company-wide firewall did turns out to be right, it strips all referrer headers from HTTP traffic (which has caused me endless pain since some of my work involves said headers).
Of course, it still blocks all "application/---" MIME types which makes no sense and has caused even more issues (apparently anything with a MIME type that starts with application/ is a dangerous executable and must be blocked).
I've seen this behavior on a number of pages but can't remember any specific ones. I just know it feels silly and petty when you fix a typo and a bot immediately reverts the edit.
Related to the "deletionism" are of course the bots which auto-revert all edits to certain articles, or remove all "dirty" words even when relevant to the article (which is against WP rules).
The bots definitely helped drive me away from contributing to WP, what fun is it to help edit an article when some bozo has a bot that auto-checks the article and wipes all edits until the bot's owner approves of them?
Yes, I've seen this happen to several articles which I know had some useful content and which were about something that was definitely not obscure, yet some editor threatened to delete it, people complained about this and then it was deleted anyway...
Then there are articles about certain subjects where the "editor cabal" sweeps in and decides that "this is how history should be written" even when people give them a multitude of sources that show that they're wrong and people who were there tell them "no, that's wrong" and try to argue against them, in the end it often boils down to "well, I think you're biased because you have sources that prove me wrong/because you were there and therefore you are a commie/nazi/whatever since I'm convinced only commies/nazis/whatevers were present when $EVENT took place".
Actually, there are plenty of backup systems in Star Trek. Of course, a few of them fail in every episode to avoid having every episode end with a "Yay for Starfleet engineers!" after five minutes.
In fact, for some systems they apparently have up to four backups which all manage to fail magically at the same time *cough*transporters*cough*.
Let me guess, your next argument is that since it has become hard to sell the product then the "resource" will dry up as no one will design new cars/write new music/etc essentially building an argument ad tragedy of the commons? I think I've heard this one before...
Washed out LCD monitors, rubbish refresh rates, pale colours, all reds are orange.
Solution: stop buying "XTRA SPECIAL SALE NOW ONLY $50" monitors and get good ones instead.
Computer speakers, tiny badly-designed amplifiers, built-in speakers on TV's, plastic "hifi" speakers with metal cones, etc. Plenty of bass, fair enough, but just whisper "dynamic range" and "signal-to-noise ratio" to these people and you might just cause a flamewar.
Solution: buy a decent amp and speakers, can be had for a couple of hundred bucks.
Both your examples are examples of people buying crap because they either fell for the advertising or just don't know there is anything better out there.
There are definitely painful injuries where proper rehabilitation includes exercise and by insurance company logic you're rehabilitated if you can exercise (even if the exercise results in increased pain in the short-term). Much in the same way that a depressed person may very well smile and be happy on occasion without having recovered from his/her depression.
Here in.se there was a scandal dealing with a similar situation, insurance companies labeled people as frauds after PIs had photographed them grocery shopping. That would be like my boss firing me for going to the pharmacy when I've called in sick with the flu, just because you can push yourself hard enough to get something necessary done doesn't mean you're healthy enough to work.
Well, there are some issues mixing SSRIs and alcohol but these are not necessarily such horrible side-effects, I have a friend for whom the main side-effect of combining SSRI medication and alcohol was that the alcohol seemed to affect her more strongly than normally, and the therapeutic value of a night out may very well outweigh the risks of that.
As someone who has known several people with depression and bipolar disorder I'd like call bullshit on your kneejerk "FRAUD!" conclusion.
Most people with depression can be just fine for an hour or two and then spend a long time not even leaving their bed, those who are bipolar can be even worse, they'll be at a party having a blast and in just a few minutes they'll switch over to seriously contemplating suicide right then and there.
And even discounting this and trying to look happy for everyone else's sake there's also the fact that a lot depressed people do seem to really value those times when they can shake their depression for a few minutes or hours, and guess which image of themselves they'd rather show friends and family...
Well, let's say you have some form of chronic back pain, your doctor recommends trying to get at least some exercise but most of the time you're in way too much pain when exercising. Every now and then you do get some form of medical treatment which at least temporarily makes your back a bit better (like say, for a few days) and you take the chance to play a pickup game of football with your friends at a barbecue, would you say that's enough of a reason for your insurance company to cancel your policy?
I actually have a pretty good sense of smell, I just get overwhelmed by the stench from cars and compared to that tobacco smoke is barely noticeable to me.
So I take it that you don't live in a city then? Because in most cities I can't seem to smell the smoke from peoples' cigarettes unless they're almost rubbing up against me due to all the "healthy" pollution from cars, trucks and other combustion engine-powered vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard of them here in Sweden. And no, they don't run their commercials in Sweden (not that I watch TV anymore).
/Mikael
Well, after googling it I realized that I didn't know about it for the following reasons:
/Mikael
Seriously, I know I could just google it but damnit slashdot, this sounds like a typical example of an editor knowing about a subject that a submission happens to be about yet most likely the average slashdot users doesn't have a clue as to what/who the fuck "Video professor" is.
/Mikael
Well, it's not like you have to turn your head 45 or anything, and these are fairly small monitors, it's a lot worse when you've got typical large "desktop monitors" in the 24-30" range, and even then it's not really that bad as long as you don't have to position the monitors in a weird way to fit them on your desk.
Of course, personally I prefer three monitors with two flanking monitors but I think that would be way too unwieldy for a netbook or laptop...
/Mikael
Well yeah, the Solaris installation suggested I just put everything on one big partition and I decided to at least split off home directories and /usr from that. Guess I should've done a better job, still doesn't make sense not to warn about the whole "first thing that happens after you login is that the system will attempt to download 10+ GiB of update files" thing.
/Mikael
Exactly, I'm only using ZFS on FreeBSD for my home file server but it has run fine so far (and considering the issues I had with the combination of cheap consumer SATA disks + expensive RAID controller that I used before it would have to act up a lot to be worse than that (although I suspect if I had gone with better disks they wouldn't have been such a PITA)).
As for the tinkering, yeah, I agree that FreeBSD feels a bit friendlier in that respect, I've also never had FreeBSD tell me that there are upgrades available and then proceeded to fill the root partition of the system and crash, I suppose that's partially my fault for not checking how large all the update files were but still...
/Mikael
I've been using FreeBSD since somewhere around 1999-2000 and I've also played around a bit with various versions of Solaris and the way I look at it is:
If you want to learn something that you can put on your resumé then Solaris is probably the better choice, likewise if you want mature ZFS support, other than that I'd have to say that FreeBSD is the better choice for most people but as a long time FreeBSD user I suspect I'm quite biased, FreeBSD has always made a lot of sense to me, it's well-organized and I just happen to like the simplicity and sane layout that it has. But yeah, neither OS is Debian/Ubuntu and you'll have to learn their little peculiarities (and there's no point fighting it, trying to dump all software into /usr and making /usr/local a symlink to /usr because that's how your Linux distro of choice did it isn't going to fly with FreeBSD, just accept that when you install software it goes in /usr/local and be happy with it :).
(Yes, I once (1998-ish) saw what was a large Linux distro at the time pull that stunt)
/Mikael
I used to have that problem with Safari, I never bothered to check whether it was just some javascript or CSS trickery to hide that part of the page though...
/Mikael
Actually, if you ever fell for one of their "click here to register and see the answer" tricks then they stop showing the answer (until you clear out your cookies).
And it wasn't that long ago that they didn't show the answer to all users, it seemed to be browser-dependent, some user-agent strings would allow you to see the answers while others didn't.
/Mikael
Yes, those sites have actually become more annoying than the regular Experts Exchange-like sites that show content to google but not real users, at least those sites have the answer and can generally be tricked in various ways, the sites that just copy mailing lists are useless, especially the ones that "match" a hundred different questions so that they'll always be in the top 10 for a lot of searches yet they don't even have the answers to the questions, just other vaguely related questions.
/Mikael
This could possibly be the only time one of the retarded things our company-wide firewall did turns out to be right, it strips all referrer headers from HTTP traffic (which has caused me endless pain since some of my work involves said headers).
Of course, it still blocks all "application/---" MIME types which makes no sense and has caused even more issues (apparently anything with a MIME type that starts with application/ is a dangerous executable and must be blocked).
/Mikael
But it's being sold as for use with Apple computers that have other versions of Apple's operating system installed on them.
/Mikael
I've seen this behavior on a number of pages but can't remember any specific ones. I just know it feels silly and petty when you fix a typo and a bot immediately reverts the edit.
/Mikael
Related to the "deletionism" are of course the bots which auto-revert all edits to certain articles, or remove all "dirty" words even when relevant to the article (which is against WP rules).
The bots definitely helped drive me away from contributing to WP, what fun is it to help edit an article when some bozo has a bot that auto-checks the article and wipes all edits until the bot's owner approves of them?
/Mikael
Yes, I've seen this happen to several articles which I know had some useful content and which were about something that was definitely not obscure, yet some editor threatened to delete it, people complained about this and then it was deleted anyway...
Then there are articles about certain subjects where the "editor cabal" sweeps in and decides that "this is how history should be written" even when people give them a multitude of sources that show that they're wrong and people who were there tell them "no, that's wrong" and try to argue against them, in the end it often boils down to "well, I think you're biased because you have sources that prove me wrong/because you were there and therefore you are a commie/nazi/whatever since I'm convinced only commies/nazis/whatevers were present when $EVENT took place".
/Mikael
Actually, there are plenty of backup systems in Star Trek. Of course, a few of them fail in every episode to avoid having every episode end with a "Yay for Starfleet engineers!" after five minutes.
In fact, for some systems they apparently have up to four backups which all manage to fail magically at the same time *cough*transporters*cough*.
/Mikael
Let me guess, your next argument is that since it has become hard to sell the product then the "resource" will dry up as no one will design new cars/write new music/etc essentially building an argument ad tragedy of the commons? I think I've heard this one before...
Washed out LCD monitors, rubbish refresh rates, pale colours, all reds are orange.
Solution: stop buying "XTRA SPECIAL SALE NOW ONLY $50" monitors and get good ones instead.
Computer speakers, tiny badly-designed amplifiers, built-in speakers on TV's, plastic "hifi" speakers with metal cones, etc. Plenty of bass, fair enough, but just whisper "dynamic range" and "signal-to-noise ratio" to these people and you might just cause a flamewar.
Solution: buy a decent amp and speakers, can be had for a couple of hundred bucks.
Both your examples are examples of people buying crap because they either fell for the advertising or just don't know there is anything better out there.
/Mikael
You missed my point by about a mile.
There are definitely painful injuries where proper rehabilitation includes exercise and by insurance company logic you're rehabilitated if you can exercise (even if the exercise results in increased pain in the short-term). Much in the same way that a depressed person may very well smile and be happy on occasion without having recovered from his/her depression.
Here in .se there was a scandal dealing with a similar situation, insurance companies labeled people as frauds after PIs had photographed them grocery shopping. That would be like my boss firing me for going to the pharmacy when I've called in sick with the flu, just because you can push yourself hard enough to get something necessary done doesn't mean you're healthy enough to work.
/Mikael
Well, there are some issues mixing SSRIs and alcohol but these are not necessarily such horrible side-effects, I have a friend for whom the main side-effect of combining SSRI medication and alcohol was that the alcohol seemed to affect her more strongly than normally, and the therapeutic value of a night out may very well outweigh the risks of that.
/Mikael
As someone who has known several people with depression and bipolar disorder I'd like call bullshit on your kneejerk "FRAUD!" conclusion.
Most people with depression can be just fine for an hour or two and then spend a long time not even leaving their bed, those who are bipolar can be even worse, they'll be at a party having a blast and in just a few minutes they'll switch over to seriously contemplating suicide right then and there.
And even discounting this and trying to look happy for everyone else's sake there's also the fact that a lot depressed people do seem to really value those times when they can shake their depression for a few minutes or hours, and guess which image of themselves they'd rather show friends and family...
/Mikael
Well, let's say you have some form of chronic back pain, your doctor recommends trying to get at least some exercise but most of the time you're in way too much pain when exercising. Every now and then you do get some form of medical treatment which at least temporarily makes your back a bit better (like say, for a few days) and you take the chance to play a pickup game of football with your friends at a barbecue, would you say that's enough of a reason for your insurance company to cancel your policy?
/Mikael
I actually have a pretty good sense of smell, I just get overwhelmed by the stench from cars and compared to that tobacco smoke is barely noticeable to me.
/Mikael
So I take it that you don't live in a city then? Because in most cities I can't seem to smell the smoke from peoples' cigarettes unless they're almost rubbing up against me due to all the "healthy" pollution from cars, trucks and other combustion engine-powered vehicles.
/Mikael
What about social smokers? You know, those who have a cigarette or two when having a few drinks with friends but who don't smoke otherwise?
/Mikael