Six months ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 with a dual-core Turion processor and 2GB of RAM. It came preinstalled with Vista Home Ultimate. I've lived with it for six months now. I kept wanting to like it, reminding myself how everybody bitched about XP compared with Win2k -- the "Fisher Price" graphics, the big Start menu that changed all the time, etc. I figured "Hey, Vista will be the same way. It'll take some getting used to, and then I'll be happy with it."
Six months later, I still hate it. I'm much, much more disappointed than I was in my first two weeks. My biggest complaint is performance; Vista is DOG-slow. 2GB of RAM should be plenty for common tasks; it isn't. The lag is just infuriating, and it affects everything I do. The UAC warnings were such an annoyance that I turned them off. The hard drive, on boot and at other seemingly random times, would grind and grind and grind for more than ten minutes, and sometimes more than twenty, absolutely killing performance (trying to launch apps with the laptop in that state was futile) while not accomplishing anything of apparent value for all the grinding. And this was after examining msconfig and the Startup registry entries trying to figure out what in the world was using all those resources.
My second-biggest complaint are the UI changes that hurt, not help productivity. To pick just one trivial and annoying example, in the new Explorer the little triangle things fade out when you're in the right-hand pane. So you can't tell at a glance if the folders have subfolders until you move your mouse closer to them. Why? Like someone above mentioned, I wound up trying -- for the first time in more than fifteen years as a Windows user -- a bunch of different third-party file browsers just to get a consistent experience across my XP and Vista boxes (I settled on FreeCommander).
I finally nuked the entire hard drive and reinstalled XP (I have regular, automated backups so restoring data wasn't an issue). And WOW what a speed increase. This is a great little laptop now, very usable and capable. The lag is gone. As I tried to with Vista, I've kept most installed apps (qttask, jusched, etc.) out of the startup cycle and the boot time is next to nothing.
Vista brought nothing to the table that I cared about, and repeatedly kicked me where it hurts most: performance and productivity. I installed my OEM copy of Vista into a virtual machine so I have it for testing, and I'm never going back unless forced to. I'll almost certainly wait for Windows 7 before trying again.
... or 5BX. Developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 50s. No equipment, done in the privacy of your own home, and effective. 11 minutes a day. There's a download link at the bottom of the Wikipedia article for the 5BX charts.
Faced with the choice of (a) no creative control but worldwide distribution rights, or (b) full creative control of nothing, Warner wisely popped for option a. Good move: her next albums were all million-plus sellers (with Book of Secrets selling over four million copies).
Yes, Warner's marketing muscle helped; the key point is that she didn't sell her soul to get them onside. And that deal was signed in 1991, long before most people were online. These days, someone that popular could probably go directly to the fans.
Norman's book is great, but it's NOT a GUI design book. It's a theory book, albeit a very understandable and accessible one. I would recommend it as a general background for understanding human limitations so you can consider those in your GUI design, but I think the OP is looking for something more immediately applicable.
The best general-purpose design book I've ever read, by far, is Robin Williams' Non-Designer's Design Book (Second Edition out now; Third Edition due next month). It doesn't deal specifically with GUIs either, but it IS immediately applicable to all sorts of design, GUI and non-GUI. As the former head of the usability group at a large hardware and software firm, I've used principles from this book as the foundation of a one-hour training course I delivered to over 60 developers at a former employer.
At the end of 40-45 minutes of instruction, all developers I've taught are able to apply the principles from NDDB to redesign a particularly hideous sample UI from the old IBM Aptiva PCs. At the start of the hour, none of them can usually explain what's wrong with the existing UI, though all agree it's hideous. By the end of the hour, everyone can ID what was wrong, and come up with various ways to fix it.
The book is short, cheap, and brilliant. It's the best starting point I could suggest; I've never found a better one.
I don't know about two years ago, but when I first saw the announcement of the new controller and heard about how they were targeting non-hardcore gamers, I thought they had a heck of a shot. I had an interview with the XBox team last year and had to keep my mouth shut about how cool I thought the new Wii was during the interview, and how it concerned me that their division might not turn profitable anytime soon, as a result. =)
The only way your point makes sense is if you're arguing global climate modeling is less complex than modeling a single hurricane. That seems absurd on its face. And if we can't accurately model the lesser, how can we accurately model the greater?
It's that "...largely believed trivial in the past..." part that got my attention. Here's a brand-new discovery about a single phenomenon that counters what was previously known. This is One. Weather. Phenomenon. And yet we're supposed to take seriously the idea that climate science is "settled." The mind boggles.
Go read about LTCM for a stark look at how well even the brightest minds have done at modeling complex systems.
No, no -- the U.S. spends more per capita (not per-patient) treating only the old and the poor than Canada spends per capita treating every citizen, including the old and the poor. See for example this comparison made in 2005, based on 2002 figures from OECD countries. It appears that one reason is that administrative costs are roughly three times higher, per capita, in the U.S. than in Canada. There are other more recent comparisons available but the numbers don't differ substantially.
I think you were trying to say that it's unreasonable to compare costs-per-patient in the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid systems with costs in Canada's (or any other OECD country's) national health care system where every citizen is a "patient" including the young. You would be right, except that's not the comparison the parent post was making.
Amen - small, frequent amounts of time can suffice
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I agree that if your family is or wants to be supportive, they don't usually require a lot of time each day. What my wife and kids DO require is some amount of time, however limited, that is theirs and theirs alone (nearly) every day. Also, they need to know that whatever else is taking my time is in pursuit of some concrete, beneficial goal.
I have bedtime traditions with my kids. Not the same one every night, but a handful we can use on different nights depending on everyone's energy level. Sometimes I wrestle with them before bedtime. Sometimes I read to them out of a slim blue volume of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems for children. With my daughter I'm teaching her a song in French; sometimes we dance around the livingroom and sing together. With my oldest son I'm now listening to him learn to read before bedtime.
None of those take more than fifteen minutes each, but they happen (nearly) EVERY night, at or about the same time, and my children and I have come to count on them.
With my wife it's similar. Some nights we're lucky, and all three kids are asleep early enough that we can talk (and do other things) for some time. Other nights we're really tired but we make time to exchange a simple kiss or two when passing in the hallway, or to rub each others' shoulders, or something.
I guess if I have anything to add to the parent post it's that you need to sell your family on the benefits of whatever else is consuming your time. If your family truly believes that what you're doing is in pursuit of some shared goal, there's less resentment at your being busy. Couple that with consistent time together, even if it's short, and it sends the message "I value you" rather than "I don't have time for you." I myself am very task-focused and tend to deal brusquely with interruptions when I'm focused on something, so when I'm with my family I try to be WITH them, and I apologize when I'm too harsh.
I'm rambling a bit, and I'm deeply sorry if this post is hard to read for the original poster since he's past the stage where these ideas have any value for his current situation. But I wanted to chime in with my two cents in support of the immediate parent post to this one, which contains a lot of useful wisdom.
If such studies are indeed not possible, then your (apparent) support of public schooling is just as groundless as the parent poster's support for home/charter/private schools. According to your own opinion, you can be no better armed than he.
I think it's a bit of both. I have a friend working in the MSN division and he has encouraged me to send in a resumé. Past the HR screeners and straight into the hands of people with authority to hire, complete with his unqualified recommendation. The last guy he did this for got two interview offers the same day.
No thanks.
Five years ago? Probably. Ten years ago? Definitely. But now, everything I read from former employees is: morale is down; everything's ossified; there are too many people doing too little work.
Even my friend has complaints about battling with nest-feathering management in his division.
I've had issues with my current employer, but they've been reduced in the past year, not increased. I'm not trading that to work for a mature and bloated company.
My wife and I manage an apartment building; yesterday the RCMP showed up at 6:30am asking for a suite master key. They had a search warrant, so we gave them the key. When I left for work later that morning, they were loading about a dozen PCs into a minivan.
They had told us it was a large, coordinated effort, so seeing the computers my first thought was child porn. We have two kids, 5 and 3, so at that point I wanted to know which of our tenants it was. They assured us it was nothing of the sort, however, so I declined to press further (the guy's innocent until proven guilty, after all, and while a warrant means probable cause it wasn't for something violent). I assumed it was something like this announcement -- most likely, I thought, selling DVDs of software and movies on eBay or in the local classified paper, i.e. profiting from piracy, rather than facilitating individual copying. Looks like I got it only partly right.
Using lighttpd instead of Apache, a shared hosting account on TextDrive took a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend. Without affecting the other sites on the same server!
Another alternative is lighttpd instead of Apache. See here for more. A shared hosting account was able to stand up to a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend.
No, it's just that the whole "chaos in the Inbox" tone of the story made me realize what how differently I manage my incoming volume of mail than I used to. Before, I kept most things in the Inbox in reverse chronological order. Some stale stuff had been in there for a couple of years.
so sorry, no astroturfing (notice no link-whoring to Amazon), but yes -- I am plugging a system I like. =)
I've just started using David Allen's system Getting Things Done (GTD) for organizing my work, mostly in response to a new position at work that has me involved in a lot more projects than before.
It's the lowest-overhead way I've found of staying organized. One of his tenets is getting your Inbox (both physical and virtual) to empty. I've done it.
Here I am on a Friday afternoon with exactly three items in my email Inbox, and none in my physical one -- although I've been working on three different projects today, and am currently involved (off and on) in a usability role in half a dozen others.
The biggest benefit so far in implementing this system has been rapid context switches: the biggest benefit so far has been faster context switches: I'm moving from project to project, meeting to meeting, and nothing gets lost - email, papers, usability test results, are all quickly and accurately accessible.
I guess my point is that even if email is being used as a personal database, it probably shouldn't be. Or at least, it should be structured in such a way that items are (1) only archived if they need to be for future reference, and there's no action to be taken on them, or (2) filed because you're waiting for someone else to do something, but you think you'll need to act once they're done.
I've only been at this for two weeks, but the benefits thus far have been dramatic, with very little overhead. Look up the book in your library or favorite local bookstore; I've been very impressed.
I have some sympathy for Microsoft here. If they don't force this patch, they're damned for perpetuating known security issues. If they do, they're damned for being bullies and for breaking compatibility with older applications.
Given the choices they're facing, I have to admit this seems reasonable: a few months for businesses to make the move on their own, after which they flip the switch so anyone on Automatic Update receives the patch.
True story: last year I lost my (Canadian) passport and had to get a replacement in a hurry because I was going overseas. I chose to pick the passport up at the local passport office because I could be sure to get it in ten days. Mailing it (the usual procedure) would have introduced an uncertain delay I wasn't willing to risk.
When I showed up at the passport office with my barcode receipt, the girl behind the counter scanned the barcode and then went and retrieved my passport.
And then she said: "I'll need to see some ID."
I swear, I Am Not Making This Up.
Her: "I'll need to see some ID."
Me, flabbergasted: "Er... I thought that was the id."
Her, with a warning tone in her voice: "Well, this is a travel document, but in order to release it to you I have to see some ID."
Me, getting snarky: "Well, you know, I thought you could open the passport, look at the picture, look at my face and say 'Hey, that's the guy!' You know -- like you expect border control at every other country in the world to do?"
Her, chilly as the Arctic: "That's as may be, but I'll still need to see some ID."
Me, exasperated: "All right, but what does it say that you trust the Alberta Driver's License security process more than your own?"
Slashdot Mirror
Six months ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 with a dual-core Turion processor and 2GB of RAM. It came preinstalled with Vista Home Ultimate. I've lived with it for six months now. I kept wanting to like it, reminding myself how everybody bitched about XP compared with Win2k -- the "Fisher Price" graphics, the big Start menu that changed all the time, etc. I figured "Hey, Vista will be the same way. It'll take some getting used to, and then I'll be happy with it."
Six months later, I still hate it. I'm much, much more disappointed than I was in my first two weeks. My biggest complaint is performance; Vista is DOG-slow. 2GB of RAM should be plenty for common tasks; it isn't. The lag is just infuriating, and it affects everything I do. The UAC warnings were such an annoyance that I turned them off. The hard drive, on boot and at other seemingly random times, would grind and grind and grind for more than ten minutes, and sometimes more than twenty, absolutely killing performance (trying to launch apps with the laptop in that state was futile) while not accomplishing anything of apparent value for all the grinding. And this was after examining msconfig and the Startup registry entries trying to figure out what in the world was using all those resources.
My second-biggest complaint are the UI changes that hurt, not help productivity. To pick just one trivial and annoying example, in the new Explorer the little triangle things fade out when you're in the right-hand pane. So you can't tell at a glance if the folders have subfolders until you move your mouse closer to them. Why? Like someone above mentioned, I wound up trying -- for the first time in more than fifteen years as a Windows user -- a bunch of different third-party file browsers just to get a consistent experience across my XP and Vista boxes (I settled on FreeCommander).
I finally nuked the entire hard drive and reinstalled XP (I have regular, automated backups so restoring data wasn't an issue). And WOW what a speed increase. This is a great little laptop now, very usable and capable. The lag is gone. As I tried to with Vista, I've kept most installed apps (qttask, jusched, etc.) out of the startup cycle and the boot time is next to nothing.
Vista brought nothing to the table that I cared about, and repeatedly kicked me where it hurts most: performance and productivity. I installed my OEM copy of Vista into a virtual machine so I have it for testing, and I'm never going back unless forced to. I'll almost certainly wait for Windows 7 before trying again.
... or 5BX. Developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 50s. No equipment, done in the privacy of your own home, and effective. 11 minutes a day. There's a download link at the bottom of the Wikipedia article for the 5BX charts.
She sold 50,000 albums on her own in the Eighties, which gave her the leverage to negotiate a licensing and distribution deal with Warner Music that let her keep her own music and label.
Faced with the choice of (a) no creative control but worldwide distribution rights, or (b) full creative control of nothing, Warner wisely popped for option a. Good move: her next albums were all million-plus sellers (with Book of Secrets selling over four million copies).
Yes, Warner's marketing muscle helped; the key point is that she didn't sell her soul to get them onside. And that deal was signed in 1991, long before most people were online. These days, someone that popular could probably go directly to the fans.
Norman's book is great, but it's NOT a GUI design book. It's a theory book, albeit a very understandable and accessible one. I would recommend it as a general background for understanding human limitations so you can consider those in your GUI design, but I think the OP is looking for something more immediately applicable.
The best general-purpose design book I've ever read, by far, is Robin Williams' Non-Designer's Design Book (Second Edition out now; Third Edition due next month). It doesn't deal specifically with GUIs either, but it IS immediately applicable to all sorts of design, GUI and non-GUI. As the former head of the usability group at a large hardware and software firm, I've used principles from this book as the foundation of a one-hour training course I delivered to over 60 developers at a former employer.
At the end of 40-45 minutes of instruction, all developers I've taught are able to apply the principles from NDDB to redesign a particularly hideous sample UI from the old IBM Aptiva PCs. At the start of the hour, none of them can usually explain what's wrong with the existing UI, though all agree it's hideous. By the end of the hour, everyone can ID what was wrong, and come up with various ways to fix it.
The book is short, cheap, and brilliant. It's the best starting point I could suggest; I've never found a better one.
I don't know about two years ago, but when I first saw the announcement of the new controller and heard about how they were targeting non-hardcore gamers, I thought they had a heck of a shot. I had an interview with the XBox team last year and had to keep my mouth shut about how cool I thought the new Wii was during the interview, and how it concerned me that their division might not turn profitable anytime soon, as a result. =)
When 40,000 years old you reach, look as good you will not!
Xara Xtreme doesn't have CMYK; Xara Xtreme Pro does. And I'll add my voice to those suggesting Xara as a fantastic alternative to Illustrator or Draw.
The only way your point makes sense is if you're arguing global climate modeling is less complex than modeling a single hurricane. That seems absurd on its face. And if we can't accurately model the lesser, how can we accurately model the greater?
It's that "...largely believed trivial in the past..." part that got my attention. Here's a brand-new discovery about a single phenomenon that counters what was previously known. This is One. Weather. Phenomenon. And yet we're supposed to take seriously the idea that climate science is "settled." The mind boggles.
Go read about LTCM for a stark look at how well even the brightest minds have done at modeling complex systems.
No, no -- the U.S. spends more per capita (not per-patient) treating only the old and the poor than Canada spends per capita treating every citizen, including the old and the poor. See for example this comparison made in 2005, based on 2002 figures from OECD countries. It appears that one reason is that administrative costs are roughly three times higher, per capita, in the U.S. than in Canada. There are other more recent comparisons available but the numbers don't differ substantially.
I think you were trying to say that it's unreasonable to compare costs-per-patient in the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid systems with costs in Canada's (or any other OECD country's) national health care system where every citizen is a "patient" including the young. You would be right, except that's not the comparison the parent post was making.
I agree that if your family is or wants to be supportive, they don't usually require a lot of time each day. What my wife and kids DO require is some amount of time, however limited, that is theirs and theirs alone (nearly) every day. Also, they need to know that whatever else is taking my time is in pursuit of some concrete, beneficial goal.
I have bedtime traditions with my kids. Not the same one every night, but a handful we can use on different nights depending on everyone's energy level. Sometimes I wrestle with them before bedtime. Sometimes I read to them out of a slim blue volume of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems for children. With my daughter I'm teaching her a song in French; sometimes we dance around the livingroom and sing together. With my oldest son I'm now listening to him learn to read before bedtime.
None of those take more than fifteen minutes each, but they happen (nearly) EVERY night, at or about the same time, and my children and I have come to count on them.
With my wife it's similar. Some nights we're lucky, and all three kids are asleep early enough that we can talk (and do other things) for some time. Other nights we're really tired but we make time to exchange a simple kiss or two when passing in the hallway, or to rub each others' shoulders, or something.
I guess if I have anything to add to the parent post it's that you need to sell your family on the benefits of whatever else is consuming your time. If your family truly believes that what you're doing is in pursuit of some shared goal, there's less resentment at your being busy. Couple that with consistent time together, even if it's short, and it sends the message "I value you" rather than "I don't have time for you." I myself am very task-focused and tend to deal brusquely with interruptions when I'm focused on something, so when I'm with my family I try to be WITH them, and I apologize when I'm too harsh.
I'm rambling a bit, and I'm deeply sorry if this post is hard to read for the original poster since he's past the stage where these ideas have any value for his current situation. But I wanted to chime in with my two cents in support of the immediate parent post to this one, which contains a lot of useful wisdom.
May I recommend Peter Rukavina's new site 3LA.ca where he explains three-letter acronyms via audcast, in plain English.
That was great. Where are my mod points when I need them? Just wanted you to know someone saw this.
If such studies are indeed not possible, then your (apparent) support of public schooling is just as groundless as the parent poster's support for home/charter/private schools. According to your own opinion, you can be no better armed than he.
I think it's a bit of both. I have a friend working in the MSN division and he has encouraged me to send in a resumé. Past the HR screeners and straight into the hands of people with authority to hire, complete with his unqualified recommendation. The last guy he did this for got two interview offers the same day.
No thanks.
Five years ago? Probably. Ten years ago? Definitely. But now, everything I read from former employees is: morale is down; everything's ossified; there are too many people doing too little work.
Even my friend has complaints about battling with nest-feathering management in his division.
I've had issues with my current employer, but they've been reduced in the past year, not increased. I'm not trading that to work for a mature and bloated company.
My wife and I manage an apartment building; yesterday the RCMP showed up at 6:30am asking for a suite master key. They had a search warrant, so we gave them the key. When I left for work later that morning, they were loading about a dozen PCs into a minivan.
They had told us it was a large, coordinated effort, so seeing the computers my first thought was child porn. We have two kids, 5 and 3, so at that point I wanted to know which of our tenants it was. They assured us it was nothing of the sort, however, so I declined to press further (the guy's innocent until proven guilty, after all, and while a warrant means probable cause it wasn't for something violent). I assumed it was something like this announcement -- most likely, I thought, selling DVDs of software and movies on eBay or in the local classified paper, i.e. profiting from piracy, rather than facilitating individual copying. Looks like I got it only partly right.
Using lighttpd instead of Apache, a shared hosting account on TextDrive took a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend. Without affecting the other sites on the same server!
Another alternative is lighttpd instead of Apache. See here for more. A shared hosting account was able to stand up to a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend.
David Allen wouldn't have a sub-150K user id. =)
No, it's just that the whole "chaos in the Inbox" tone of the story made me realize what how differently I manage my incoming volume of mail than I used to. Before, I kept most things in the Inbox in reverse chronological order. Some stale stuff had been in there for a couple of years.
so sorry, no astroturfing (notice no link-whoring to Amazon), but yes -- I am plugging a system I like. =)
I've just started using David Allen's system Getting Things Done (GTD) for organizing my work, mostly in response to a new position at work that has me involved in a lot more projects than before.
It's the lowest-overhead way I've found of staying organized. One of his tenets is getting your Inbox (both physical and virtual) to empty. I've done it.
Here I am on a Friday afternoon with exactly three items in my email Inbox, and none in my physical one -- although I've been working on three different projects today, and am currently involved (off and on) in a usability role in half a dozen others.
The biggest benefit so far in implementing this system has been rapid context switches: the biggest benefit so far has been faster context switches: I'm moving from project to project, meeting to meeting, and nothing gets lost - email, papers, usability test results, are all quickly and accurately accessible.
I guess my point is that even if email is being used as a personal database, it probably shouldn't be. Or at least, it should be structured in such a way that items are (1) only archived if they need to be for future reference, and there's no action to be taken on them, or (2) filed because you're waiting for someone else to do something, but you think you'll need to act once they're done.
I've only been at this for two weeks, but the benefits thus far have been dramatic, with very little overhead. Look up the book in your library or favorite local bookstore; I've been very impressed.
I loved that joke! Shortly after returning home from two years living in France I saw the following printed on a t-shirt:
Heaven is where:
- The police are British
- The mechanics are German
- The chefs are French
- The lovers are Italian
- And it is all run by the Swiss
Hell is where
- The police are German
- The mechanics are French
- The chefs are British
- The lovers are Swiss
- And it is all run by the Italians
I have some sympathy for Microsoft here. If they don't force this patch, they're damned for perpetuating known security issues. If they do, they're damned for being bullies and for breaking compatibility with older applications.
Given the choices they're facing, I have to admit this seems reasonable: a few months for businesses to make the move on their own, after which they flip the switch so anyone on Automatic Update receives the patch.
Also see God's Secretaries, and Wide as the Waters, two recent books on the various English translations of the Bible.
True story: last year I lost my (Canadian) passport and had to get a replacement in a hurry because I was going overseas. I chose to pick the passport up at the local passport office because I could be sure to get it in ten days. Mailing it (the usual procedure) would have introduced an uncertain delay I wasn't willing to risk.
When I showed up at the passport office with my barcode receipt, the girl behind the counter scanned the barcode and then went and retrieved my passport.
And then she said: "I'll need to see some ID."
I swear, I Am Not Making This Up.
Her: "I'll need to see some ID."
Me, flabbergasted: "Er... I thought that was the id."
Her, with a warning tone in her voice: "Well, this is a travel document, but in order to release it to you I have to see some ID."
Me, getting snarky: "Well, you know, I thought you could open the passport, look at the picture, look at my face and say 'Hey, that's the guy!' You know -- like you expect border control at every other country in the world to do?"
Her, chilly as the Arctic: "That's as may be, but I'll still need to see some ID."
Me, exasperated: "All right, but what does it say that you trust the Alberta Driver's License security process more than your own?"
I still haven't gotten over that one. =)
From TFA:
"WriterPerfect filter (Writer): The WordPerfect import filter is supported. You can now open a WordPerfect document in OpenOffice.org"
It's in the table "Interoperability with Microsoft Office and other products."