I'm a musician and a touch screen would be perfect for me.
While this example and a few above are good ones, they remain very niche applications. I too would possibly see a use every now and then to edit my numerous photos (gallery in web link above) although in truth I manage fairly well without it since most of my editing is colour balancing and cropping.
But it's still not a generic touch driven interface for which I too see no need. It's good for small portable units and a few graphical or very specific applications, but I doubt it will be seen in the office any time soon.
one that saves 23$ a year, which lasts a whopping 19 years ? yup, some people are stupid.
Not to mention that if you leave it off, it should last indefinitely ! Which means you save... Um, wait that's a tricky one, let me get back to you on that
incandescents have the advantage of putting off a lot of heat, if you're going to use one as a cheap heat lamp and light provider.
*And* you can melt cheese on them !
Of course since most of the energy put into an incandescent gets turned into heat whether you want it to or not, you might as well get a dedicated device that would likely perform better and only do so when you need it to.
Well, quite. It doesn't help that Microsoft have conditioned people to ignore these warnings as being totally unimportant, and at the same time have worded them so badly that most people never even try to understand them, they just hammer away trying to find a way to do what they want without the warning coming up.
I've actually met IT professionals who seem to think that doing this is the correct way to troubleshoot a problem. Shoot me now...
I'm not sure it has anything to do with Microsoft. I know it's popular to blame it on them but users have never ever read any warning on their screen. It probably pre-dates Microsoft by decades.
Back in Windows 3 days, both Windows and Mac users already couldn't tell you what was on their screen, what had been displayed or pretty much anything. There had been pop up boxes, they had been dismissed as being "annoying".
A fix would be for the machine to just halt with a huge immutable display of "CALL A PROFESSIONAL". But it wouldn't be popular.
What we need is efforts by software vendors like Microsoft to make computers easier to use and harder to mess up.
They already did that. It doesn't work because users are idiots.
"Didn't it display a warning that this thing you installed was acting weird ?" "I don't know, there always was some kind of message when I started the computer but I never read it"
I don't understand why people who are perfectly happy with getting knowledgeable technicians to work on almost all of their household equipment think that their PC is some sort of magical exception.
That one is easy.
Microsoft (and Apple) keep pushing the idea that computers and essentially their operating systems and software are super simple. Pah, a child a 5 could get this (fetch me a child of 5 !). People here know that it's actually horrendously complex and that it's often a miracle that it works at all, especially if we let users tinker with the stuff, but marketers have to sell their wares, so that kind of talk just won't do. So they lie through their teeth (they're trained to do this from a young age). It's super easy to use ! It won't break ! It's idiot proof (we mean *you*) !
On top of that it's not as if it was actual engineering stuff, it's just stuff you click on with numbers and things. It doesn't have any screws, or bolts or blinkenlights. Most people can actually crop their holiday snapshots all by themselves. This stuff is easy ! Professionals ? For this ?
OTOH most people do rely on professionals when it's time to poke at the hardware. Because it's hardware, real stuff, not just clicking. You actually need a screwdriver.
I've worked for ISPs here in Sweden and most serious ISPs here see it as standard practice to warn and then disconnect users who are running zombie machines, nothing strange or totalitarian about it, it's about protecting their network and their other customers from harm.
It certainly makes sense, but what happens next ? How do most clueless users manage to clean their machines, with no network access ? And how do they get their access back ? What's the process to certify their rig as being "clean" ? Or has a "home Windows cleaning" (no, not those windows) industry sprung up to meet the demand ?
This is so, so wrong. Slash and burn agriculture (swidden) is generally sustainable form of farming and many indigenous people have practiced it continuously for thousands of years.
Sure, go tell the people of Madagascar (a common example) how sustainable it is. I drove through the country and saw firsthand the damage it does to the land and animals (you think the small land critters, chameleons and insects have time to run away ? well they don't). All the topsoil gets wiped away by the rain, then the villages get wiped away, then people move and destroy some other place.
Sad but true. If the kernel driver API wasn't a moving target, it would be *much* easier for anybody to provide closed drivers. And providing the source of drivers isn't as easy as it may seem for a lot of companies that often rely on externally licensed software in theiy product cycles that they can only distribute as BLOBs.
It would "taint" the kernel whenever one was installed but it would make stuff work.
It has been discussed to death (we cannot have a stable driver API because this and that, BLOBs are evil, etc.), but in the end it means that everything has to be reverse engineered which takes time and a lot of work.
As a result, very few companies (nVidia comes to mind, they cannot be thanked enough) bother to make proper drivers. They're in the business of moving hardware, not writing software for niche markets. They might do it if it was easier, but not if they have to maintain a team working on it.
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare.
Sorry but I beg to differ, I've *never* had a Windows machine where *everything* worked in the last 5 or 8 years while I've regularly managed to get all my peripherals of the moment to work in Linux, often without having to add anything from outside the distribution (the main issue being webcams which remain a major pain in the butt). The only exception was laptops where, as excepted, the integrated stuff worked with the provided Windows version (as it did with the Linux system I replaced it with).
Regarding Mac OS, my only recent experience has been with Tiger on a, iBook G4 and it was roughly on par with Linux in early 2000. A lot of peripherals worked but a lot didn't and that was that (never managed to get any webcam to work with it for example).
Not really. It's good, proven technology. It is simple, with just a few moving parts that all move continuously in the same direction. It scales up very well: you get one big expensive steam turbine and you can point a boatload of cheap mirrors (/heat sources) at it. It takes advantage of some of the exotic properties of one of the most fascinating chemicals out there: Water. It produces no toxic waste to dispose of (not from the steam-engine part, at least... maybe a few lubricants you'll need to recycle, but that's pretty trivial).
Another fascinating chemical that's commonly used is sodium (since there are typically two circuits) which is commonly used in the secondary circuit when the heat source is radioactive.
Still, nuclear (indirect if it's solar) -> heat -> motion -> electricity doesn't trike me as being an elegant solution even though I'll agree that it's convenient.
Hard as it may be to imagine, 'free' is not always the primary selling point to open source software.
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
I've always thought that the "monetary free" had to be pretty close to the bottom of the list for most corporate decision makers when considering open source. Or at least quite far from the primary selling point. Freedom could be a good argument. Cost ? Not really. (except as in "but if it's free then who is going to invite me for lunch ?")
What makes you think the documentation for Exchange Server is any better?
Or for anything else for that matter. I don't know what state it's in now but there used to but lots of errors and interesting omissions in Microsoft documentation a few years back. At times getting anything to work was a little miracle in itself. Luckily the Internet an Usenet were there.
As someone who'd seen IBM and Tandem documentation before using Microsoft crap, it was pitiful. And frankly even Linux was better. At least it had manpages.
Something tells me a guy who has to spend hours dicking around in Linux to get his Internet connection working, fails, and just goes back to Windows doesn't care that the operating system is "libre"... he's not going to be patching the kernel anytime soon.
There also are people that spend hours poking at Windows trying to get it to work. Yet in most cases, just like Linux, it just works.
It's unfortunate that both fail in some instances but it cannot really be helped.
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed.
As true as that is, it doesn't help end-users much until it is. ODF inter-compatibility has long been a problem. (stopped using MS Word for home and Office at v. 2.0c here btw)
I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.
Is it just me that's annoyed that in most power plants we actually still use glorified steam engines ?
I know that it's the best way we currently have to convert heat (which is the only type of energy we manage to recover) into electricity, but it still feels kludgy. I hope we'll figure out something else eventually.
See, but my questions is this. How come the apology is only extended to Alan Turing? Surely many more homosexuals were mistreated and subject to injustice during the laws of this period of time. Alan Turing gets a special apology, but did the rest?
Most likely the Prime Minister had previous engagements that prevented him from reading the list of 5 366 743 names his staff had thoughtfully prepared. So he used Turing as a symbol and lumped the others into "the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws" which is better than nothing even though you cannot please everybody.
Welcome to crowdsourcing, my friend! The new corporate model where pathetic geeks will be exploited by the big moguls, and just see promises of profit sharing.
Ok Greg, get off/. and go back to your desk. And take your pills, you know what you're like when you forget them.
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However, I'm not sure why everyone's buying into this capacitive fad... Are people writing and painting with their fingers these days?
Sure. Although by the time they're 4 or 5 they've usually grown out of it.
3D porn?
They used to call that girlfriends in them olden days...
I'm a musician and a touch screen would be perfect for me.
While this example and a few above are good ones, they remain very niche applications. I too would possibly see a use every now and then to edit my numerous photos (gallery in web link above) although in truth I manage fairly well without it since most of my editing is colour balancing and cropping.
But it's still not a generic touch driven interface for which I too see no need. It's good for small portable units and a few graphical or very specific applications, but I doubt it will be seen in the office any time soon.
$40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb,
one that saves 23$ a year, which lasts a whopping 19 years ? yup, some people are stupid.
Not to mention that if you leave it off, it should last indefinitely ! Which means you save... Um, wait that's a tricky one, let me get back to you on that
incandescents have the advantage of putting off a lot of heat, if you're going to use one as a cheap heat lamp and light provider.
*And* you can melt cheese on them !
Of course since most of the energy put into an incandescent gets turned into heat whether you want it to or not, you might as well get a dedicated device that would likely perform better and only do so when you need it to.
That's the Sybian.
Is there an app for that ?
Well, quite. It doesn't help that Microsoft have conditioned people to ignore these warnings as being totally unimportant, and at the same time have worded them so badly that most people never even try to understand them, they just hammer away trying to find a way to do what they want without the warning coming up.
I've actually met IT professionals who seem to think that doing this is the correct way to troubleshoot a problem. Shoot me now...
I'm not sure it has anything to do with Microsoft. I know it's popular to blame it on them but users have never ever read any warning on their screen. It probably pre-dates Microsoft by decades.
Back in Windows 3 days, both Windows and Mac users already couldn't tell you what was on their screen, what had been displayed or pretty much anything. There had been pop up boxes, they had been dismissed as being "annoying".
A fix would be for the machine to just halt with a huge immutable display of "CALL A PROFESSIONAL". But it wouldn't be popular.
What we need is efforts by software vendors like Microsoft to make computers easier to use and harder to mess up.
They already did that. It doesn't work because users are idiots.
"Didn't it display a warning that this thing you installed was acting weird ?"
"I don't know, there always was some kind of message when I started the computer but I never read it"
I don't understand why people who are perfectly happy with getting knowledgeable technicians to work on almost all of their household equipment think that their PC is some sort of magical exception.
That one is easy.
Microsoft (and Apple) keep pushing the idea that computers and essentially their operating systems and software are super simple. Pah, a child a 5 could get this (fetch me a child of 5 !).
People here know that it's actually horrendously complex and that it's often a miracle that it works at all, especially if we let users tinker with the stuff, but marketers have to sell their wares, so that kind of talk just won't do. So they lie through their teeth (they're trained to do this from a young age). It's super easy to use ! It won't break ! It's idiot proof (we mean *you*) !
On top of that it's not as if it was actual engineering stuff, it's just stuff you click on with numbers and things. It doesn't have any screws, or bolts or blinkenlights. Most people can actually crop their holiday snapshots all by themselves. This stuff is easy ! Professionals ? For this ?
OTOH most people do rely on professionals when it's time to poke at the hardware. Because it's hardware, real stuff, not just clicking. You actually need a screwdriver.
I've worked for ISPs here in Sweden and most serious ISPs here see it as standard practice to warn and then disconnect users who are running zombie machines, nothing strange or totalitarian about it, it's about protecting their network and their other customers from harm.
It certainly makes sense, but what happens next ? How do most clueless users manage to clean their machines, with no network access ? And how do they get their access back ? What's the process to certify their rig as being "clean" ? Or has a "home Windows cleaning" (no, not those windows) industry sprung up to meet the demand ?
This is so, so wrong. Slash and burn agriculture (swidden) is generally sustainable form of farming and many indigenous people have practiced it continuously for thousands of years.
Sure, go tell the people of Madagascar (a common example) how sustainable it is.
I drove through the country and saw firsthand the damage it does to the land and animals (you think the small land critters, chameleons and insects have time to run away ? well they don't). All the topsoil gets wiped away by the rain, then the villages get wiped away, then people move and destroy some other place.
The island is slowly turning into a desert.
You place multiplayer capabilities at #374? Seriously?
Given the lame state of games on most servers, I don't place multiplayer very high either.
See The More Things Change for an example among many...
As for "computer engineers are most likely to crash" ... correlation does not imply causation
It all depends. I say it's better to play it safe and not code and drive.
How on earth do you get these internships?
They have people hiding outside Google on interview days trying to grab the ones who failed their interviews :
(voice from behind lampost)
"psst, hey kid, want a free xbox ?"
Sad but true.
If the kernel driver API wasn't a moving target, it would be *much* easier for anybody to provide closed drivers. And providing the source of drivers isn't as easy as it may seem for a lot of companies that often rely on externally licensed software in theiy product cycles that they can only distribute as BLOBs.
It would "taint" the kernel whenever one was installed but it would make stuff work.
It has been discussed to death (we cannot have a stable driver API because this and that, BLOBs are evil, etc.), but in the end it means that everything has to be reverse engineered which takes time and a lot of work.
As a result, very few companies (nVidia comes to mind, they cannot be thanked enough) bother to make proper drivers. They're in the business of moving hardware, not writing software for niche markets. They might do it if it was easier, but not if they have to maintain a team working on it.
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare.
Sorry but I beg to differ, I've *never* had a Windows machine where *everything* worked in the last 5 or 8 years while I've regularly managed to get all my peripherals of the moment to work in Linux, often without having to add anything from outside the distribution (the main issue being webcams which remain a major pain in the butt).
The only exception was laptops where, as excepted, the integrated stuff worked with the provided Windows version (as it did with the Linux system I replaced it with).
Regarding Mac OS, my only recent experience has been with Tiger on a, iBook G4 and it was roughly on par with Linux in early 2000. A lot of peripherals worked but a lot didn't and that was that (never managed to get any webcam to work with it for example).
Not really. It's good, proven technology. It is simple, with just a few moving parts that all move continuously in the same direction. It scales up very well: you get one big expensive steam turbine and you can point a boatload of cheap mirrors (/heat sources) at it. It takes advantage of some of the exotic properties of one of the most fascinating chemicals out there: Water. It produces no toxic waste to dispose of (not from the steam-engine part, at least... maybe a few lubricants you'll need to recycle, but that's pretty trivial).
Another fascinating chemical that's commonly used is sodium (since there are typically two circuits) which is commonly used in the secondary circuit when the heat source is radioactive.
Still,
nuclear (indirect if it's solar) -> heat -> motion -> electricity
doesn't trike me as being an elegant solution even though I'll agree that it's convenient.
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
I've always thought that the "monetary free" had to be pretty close to the bottom of the list for most corporate decision makers when considering open source. Or at least quite far from the primary selling point. Freedom could be a good argument. Cost ? Not really. (except as in "but if it's free then who is going to invite me for lunch ?")
What makes you think the documentation for Exchange Server is any better?
Or for anything else for that matter. I don't know what state it's in now but there used to but lots of errors and interesting omissions in Microsoft documentation a few years back. At times getting anything to work was a little miracle in itself. Luckily the Internet an Usenet were there.
As someone who'd seen IBM and Tandem documentation before using Microsoft crap, it was pitiful. And frankly even Linux was better. At least it had manpages.
Something tells me a guy who has to spend hours dicking around in Linux to get his Internet connection working, fails, and just goes back to Windows doesn't care that the operating system is "libre" ... he's not going to be patching the kernel anytime soon.
There also are people that spend hours poking at Windows trying to get it to work. Yet in most cases, just like Linux, it just works.
It's unfortunate that both fail in some instances but it cannot really be helped.
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed.
As true as that is, it doesn't help end-users much until it is. ODF inter-compatibility has long been a problem.
(stopped using MS Word for home and Office at v. 2.0c here btw)
I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.
Is it just me that's annoyed that in most power plants we actually still use glorified steam engines ?
I know that it's the best way we currently have to convert heat (which is the only type of energy we manage to recover) into electricity, but it still feels kludgy. I hope we'll figure out something else eventually.
See, but my questions is this. How come the apology is only extended to Alan Turing? Surely many more homosexuals were mistreated and subject to injustice during the laws of this period of time. Alan Turing gets a special apology, but did the rest?
Most likely the Prime Minister had previous engagements that prevented him from reading the list of 5 366 743 names his staff had thoughtfully prepared. So he used Turing as a symbol and lumped the others into "the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws" which is better than nothing even though you cannot please everybody.
Welcome to crowdsourcing, my friend! The new corporate model where pathetic geeks will be exploited by the big moguls, and just see promises of profit sharing.
Ok Greg, get off /. and go back to your desk.
And take your pills, you know what you're like when you forget them.
For my storage requirements I need something more reliable than "random" access. Sheesh.
Oh it's very reliable. You just don't know what your data will be until you read it.
And then it's gone.