I have it as well. I stopped taking medication for it, but it's very frustrating to have something wrong with you that everyone else shrugs off as a big-pharm conspiracy. Overdiagnosed or not, it's real, and it's frustrating. It's painful for me to keep my mind on one topic, even for a minute. I am trying to train myself to do it better, though. But I wasted many years of my life because (a) I couldn't focus and (b) I bought into the anti-ADD hype (while being on pills for it, even) and deep down just assumed it was a discipline issue. But as I have gotten older I got better at seeing the signs, and denial became less of an option. Wish I could have figured it out sooner.
If I don't beat it, it's going to ruin me. As it is I have to go back and finish my undergrad, and like you, I'm scared to even try.
Most of the pills out there, at least the ones that I took, do not take any time to build up. They are just mild amphetamines. It's like caffeine that doesn't make you jittery. You don't have to take them on the weekend. But they do work. They kick in within a half hour and last for a few after that. The time release ones repeat the cycle four hours later. Headaches were common with me, at the very least you want to stay hydrated.
They're not a big deal and I'm sure it's different with everyone. If you are on top of your ADD in terms of correcting yourself when you see the signs, the medication will help. If you are not, then you will be tweaked all the time for no reason. It's important to not view the pills as a miracle cure.
I am terrible at remembering people for the same reason...I'm just not paying attention when they're talking to me, despite trying.
Some of us just have more of a load to carry than others. It's annoying that people don't see it as legitimate (and I don't deny that it's overdiagnosed in children), but like many things it's not something the majority of people understand on a deep level, they make their opinion quickly and lock it in place. I have learned to simply not bring it up with people and to just work on getting it under control.
Eh, we use both dot matrix (invoices) and thermal printers (shipping and receiving labels).
Migration is indeed hard but as you said the hard part is getting the data to match on both sides. Printing reports correctly doesn't seem like such a big deal...at worst you swap out your printer for one that speaks the right PCL or PS version, and if you can't do that then you hire a PCL or a PS guy for a weekend. Going from dot matrix to laser is a matter of coming up with a PCL header that will allow print the same number of columns you were going to send to the dot matrix, since everything's guaranteed to be fixed-width.
Of course, doing it all by yourself is difficult, and I do know the pain of being knee deep in PCL commands trying to get something to print correctly. (Because of course whoever supplies the software is not going to learn how to send the document to a host-based driver. That'd be unthinkable. No, let's pretend like it's still 1995.)
I agree that learning to use a new system is not a huge deal compared to being tasked with the migration, even if you have a very strong connection to the old system. But your users don't know that, and trust me they will regularly bring up the old, crappy system for 5 years like it was made of rainbows and unicorn poop, and they bring it up once every couple weeks for another 5.
That'd be because somebody decided that a lack of proper Unicode support was necessary to cut back on trolling, despite the already working moderation system.
Perhaps he means the koolaid in the Electric Koolaid Acid Test sense, and not Jim Jones
:)
No, it's Jonestown. My guess is, like many geeks, he knows the phrase but doesn't know enough history to be able to connect it to a suicide cult. I thought it was in poor taste as well.
And not really because of the cult thing, just because it's come to imply in tech lingo that the product is overrated. Frankly I don't think a Linux distro that takes a half hour to install and works immediately after can be overrated.
It's like blacks getting special racist scholarships in America because some ancestor was a slave 200 years ago.
That's not why we have minority scholarships and things like the UNCF. It's not why we have affirmative action. It's because 30 years ago those people couldn't vote. There are people here who like to call such things "reverse racism." I'm not one of those people.
I don't think it's something that non-Americans or at least non-Westerners understand. We value equality as nation and as a culture, it's in our founding documents, and the fact that we have never lived up to that causes us guilt. Certainly not everyone and not all the time. But it's there, and in general we are hyper-sensitive about it. For good reason: we still have blood on our hands from the times when we weren't.
Try being Polish in Ireland. Then try being Polish in America. Or Armenian in Turkey vs. Armenian in America. And so on.
Egalitarianism is a priority for us, even when we fail to live up to the standard. It's in no way as simple as saying "hey you have slave blood in you, so you get special treatment."
the impurity
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
This is a non-issue in this day and age.
Well *you* still clearly think of these people as less than fully Japanese, so I doubt that.
I have to disagree with you on the non-MS app explanation.
I think it's more the case that historically Microsoft has tried to make developing for Windows as easy as possible, even when there was a cost to the user (such as software stability or uniformity). They've have to reverse that position somewhat but I doubt they'll reverse it all the way. Windows might be the most open fully-commercial/closed-source OS we'll ever have, because of MS's tradition of OEMs and ISVs first.
And can you imagine the crap that would go down antitrust-wise if they (a) made it possible to white list your machine to an MS-approved state or (b) took it upon themselves to decide what software was and wasn't safe? I'm not saying that I know for sure that they won't ever do this, and They were trying to go there with Trusted Platform, after all. But my point is that the barriers are mostly cultural.
The WHQL stuff, where they allow vendors to have drivers signed, has been both good and bad. A lot of hardware vendors will just ship the hardware with some instructions on how to ignore the WHQL "this driver is not tested/signed" warning.
Which is not to say that there aren't technical obstacles, like the genius idea of shipping most of the OS code as DLLs and having a generic "DLL to EXE" program load them, and shoving services into a single process because processes are expensive. I'm sure there are others.
I agree, EULAs are shit. And I'm not above breaking them. I am above acting like it was my "right" though. It's one of those story-has-two-sides things to me. I'm ok with that.
Win7 might not be worth more than $15 bucks to you, but the fact that millions of people have paid a substantially larger amount for Microsoft OSes, going back over 20 years, makes the case easily. Perhaps someday if the OS gets scaled back to being just I/O + browser, we'll have a $15 OS. But it looks like that's where MS is going with this pricing scheme, and people are crying bloody murder. So perhaps not.
And price-fixing doesn't make sense when you're talking about a monopoly. Companies are still free to set prices, and that's different from having a cartel that secretly cooperates on price (as with the Big 5, now it's Big 4 I guess) while publicly "competes."
My main hope is that people who get these app-limited notebooks just take the plunge and put linux on there. But if people want Windows bad enough to be outraged that a cheaper/limited version exists, maybe that means MS is doing something right, and it also means those people should fork over some cash if they want it so badly.
(btw, I'm not the AC who replied here earlier, I only bring it up because I don't necessarily agree with his tone)
#1, I'm with you. I'm not sure that it actually would be illegal to break the restrictions anyway. It'd be counter the EULA, but as always that's a gray area.
#2: IP issues aside, I think that if someone works on something and brings it to market then it's theirs to sell, and the burden should be on "people such as yourself" to prove why it isn't. Sweat of your brow and all that. I didn't say don't steal, I said don't act as if you're somehow entitled to it.
Ripping off a Windows license, that's nothing. But having an ego that clouds an objective assessment of your actions when the consequences of them are negative...now that's criminal. Scary, even.
If you limit your requirements to "having Windows," then yeah, Windows is your only option. Crazy.
But you didn't write that, your requirements were somewhat more specific.
"have drivers for all the hardware"...but you only need the drivers for the hardware you own.
"run Win32-only software without any problems"...not even Windows can do that. I used Wine recently for the first time in years, and it's amazing how far it's come both in terms of compatibility and ease of use.
I want to know about this software that (a) doesn't run in Wine (b) doesn't have a functional alternative, and (c) is neither expensive nor mission-critical. In those three cases you can either run the software, avoid the software, or justify shelling out for the Windows upgrade.
The only people I feel bad for are the ones in developing nations who will end up with this arbitrarily limited software. But my gimme-gimme countrymen who can easily run linux but choose Windows out of convenience, yet aren't willing to pay for that convenience? I'll save my sympathy for those who deserve it.
There is a serious current on Slashdot of people not feeling that *any* software is worth money, which I find disturbing. I'm not a programmer by trade. And yes I believe in the power and good of FOSS. It disturbs me nonetheless.
What is poor about it, other than it doesn't fit in with the computer security theater kool-aid?
I'm sure it stays within the user account. Safari has a privacy mode. OS X and Vista will happily encrypt your home folder.
Browser caching is useful for 99% percent of the population, and that a few people don't like it due to computer-sharing or general paranoia doesn't make it evil, and neither does a car analogy. Especially since what we are talking about is still under the user's control, it's just a question of where the defaults are (and IMO they are sensible).
Cookies are bad, look how many Norton found! Wait, I need them for session persistence? Nevermind. Oh yeah, and screw Apple! Other people like them and I hate that!
I should add that I still thought that the Luke 18:9 was fitting and is a great example of the many things Jesus said and did to inspire a sense of egalitarianism in people. I just don't see it as the ultimate way to frame this...I think there's a more universal idea at work and that was just one (albeit enlightening) way to frame it.
A minority of people murder and steal. As they did in Biblical times as well. The Hebrews did not invent moral codes, just as they were not the last people to practice genocide.
I do not question the value of religion...but to declare that good and evil are supernatural and only to be understood in terms of (one) religion's assessment of them...don't you see how that could be viewed by others as, well, batty?
Hmm. I am hoping that's just a bad translation. Either way, it's creepy as hell.
This is about selling houses to not very bright people that might be afraid of being discriminated against.
Where I come from, you need money to buy a house. Not an IQ test, not pedigree papers. And we have laws to keep it that way.
Real Burakumin discrimination requires *illegal* access to family registers
I don't think you understand what we mean by discrimination. In the US, it's not the illegality of the information you use that makes it "real" discrimination, it's the refusal to treat two otherwise equally qualified applicants the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone who has it goes to school.
I have it as well. I stopped taking medication for it, but it's very frustrating to have something wrong with you that everyone else shrugs off as a big-pharm conspiracy. Overdiagnosed or not, it's real, and it's frustrating. It's painful for me to keep my mind on one topic, even for a minute. I am trying to train myself to do it better, though. But I wasted many years of my life because (a) I couldn't focus and (b) I bought into the anti-ADD hype (while being on pills for it, even) and deep down just assumed it was a discipline issue. But as I have gotten older I got better at seeing the signs, and denial became less of an option. Wish I could have figured it out sooner.
If I don't beat it, it's going to ruin me. As it is I have to go back and finish my undergrad, and like you, I'm scared to even try.
Most of the pills out there, at least the ones that I took, do not take any time to build up. They are just mild amphetamines. It's like caffeine that doesn't make you jittery. You don't have to take them on the weekend. But they do work. They kick in within a half hour and last for a few after that. The time release ones repeat the cycle four hours later. Headaches were common with me, at the very least you want to stay hydrated.
They're not a big deal and I'm sure it's different with everyone. If you are on top of your ADD in terms of correcting yourself when you see the signs, the medication will help. If you are not, then you will be tweaked all the time for no reason. It's important to not view the pills as a miracle cure.
I am terrible at remembering people for the same reason...I'm just not paying attention when they're talking to me, despite trying.
Some of us just have more of a load to carry than others. It's annoying that people don't see it as legitimate (and I don't deny that it's overdiagnosed in children), but like many things it's not something the majority of people understand on a deep level, they make their opinion quickly and lock it in place. I have learned to simply not bring it up with people and to just work on getting it under control.
Our business runs on something called BASIS and everything is stored in flat files. BASIS in turn runs on an old version of SCO OpenServer.
"oh look at me I'm stuck on FoxPro my object templates aren't hypermorphic" SCREW YOU AC
*sobs*
Eh, we use both dot matrix (invoices) and thermal printers (shipping and receiving labels).
Migration is indeed hard but as you said the hard part is getting the data to match on both sides. Printing reports correctly doesn't seem like such a big deal...at worst you swap out your printer for one that speaks the right PCL or PS version, and if you can't do that then you hire a PCL or a PS guy for a weekend. Going from dot matrix to laser is a matter of coming up with a PCL header that will allow print the same number of columns you were going to send to the dot matrix, since everything's guaranteed to be fixed-width.
Of course, doing it all by yourself is difficult, and I do know the pain of being knee deep in PCL commands trying to get something to print correctly. (Because of course whoever supplies the software is not going to learn how to send the document to a host-based driver. That'd be unthinkable. No, let's pretend like it's still 1995.)
I agree that learning to use a new system is not a huge deal compared to being tasked with the migration, even if you have a very strong connection to the old system. But your users don't know that, and trust me they will regularly bring up the old, crappy system for 5 years like it was made of rainbows and unicorn poop, and they bring it up once every couple weeks for another 5.
Why wait for Google? I tried it in WolframAlpha and it works fine.
Old English causes effects similar to PCP.
Get off the fucking internet.
I see a lot of this on Slashdot.
That'd be because somebody decided that a lack of proper Unicode support was necessary to cut back on trolling, despite the already working moderation system.
Good job being a pedant, though!
Perhaps he means the koolaid in the Electric Koolaid Acid Test sense, and not Jim Jones
:)
No, it's Jonestown. My guess is, like many geeks, he knows the phrase but doesn't know enough history to be able to connect it to a suicide cult. I thought it was in poor taste as well.
And not really because of the cult thing, just because it's come to imply in tech lingo that the product is overrated. Frankly I don't think a Linux distro that takes a half hour to install and works immediately after can be overrated.
It's like blacks getting special racist scholarships in America because some ancestor was a slave 200 years ago.
That's not why we have minority scholarships and things like the UNCF. It's not why we have affirmative action. It's because 30 years ago those people couldn't vote. There are people here who like to call such things "reverse racism." I'm not one of those people.
I don't think it's something that non-Americans or at least non-Westerners understand. We value equality as nation and as a culture, it's in our founding documents, and the fact that we have never lived up to that causes us guilt. Certainly not everyone and not all the time. But it's there, and in general we are hyper-sensitive about it. For good reason: we still have blood on our hands from the times when we weren't.
Try being Polish in Ireland. Then try being Polish in America. Or Armenian in Turkey vs. Armenian in America. And so on.
Egalitarianism is a priority for us, even when we fail to live up to the standard. It's in no way as simple as saying "hey you have slave blood in you, so you get special treatment."
the impurity
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
This is a non-issue in this day and age.
Well *you* still clearly think of these people as less than fully Japanese, so I doubt that.
I have to disagree with you on the non-MS app explanation.
I think it's more the case that historically Microsoft has tried to make developing for Windows as easy as possible, even when there was a cost to the user (such as software stability or uniformity). They've have to reverse that position somewhat but I doubt they'll reverse it all the way. Windows might be the most open fully-commercial/closed-source OS we'll ever have, because of MS's tradition of OEMs and ISVs first.
And can you imagine the crap that would go down antitrust-wise if they (a) made it possible to white list your machine to an MS-approved state or (b) took it upon themselves to decide what software was and wasn't safe? I'm not saying that I know for sure that they won't ever do this, and They were trying to go there with Trusted Platform, after all. But my point is that the barriers are mostly cultural.
The WHQL stuff, where they allow vendors to have drivers signed, has been both good and bad. A lot of hardware vendors will just ship the hardware with some instructions on how to ignore the WHQL "this driver is not tested/signed" warning.
Which is not to say that there aren't technical obstacles, like the genius idea of shipping most of the OS code as DLLs and having a generic "DLL to EXE" program load them, and shoving services into a single process because processes are expensive. I'm sure there are others.
I agree, EULAs are shit. And I'm not above breaking them. I am above acting like it was my "right" though. It's one of those story-has-two-sides things to me. I'm ok with that.
Win7 might not be worth more than $15 bucks to you, but the fact that millions of people have paid a substantially larger amount for Microsoft OSes, going back over 20 years, makes the case easily. Perhaps someday if the OS gets scaled back to being just I/O + browser, we'll have a $15 OS. But it looks like that's where MS is going with this pricing scheme, and people are crying bloody murder. So perhaps not.
And price-fixing doesn't make sense when you're talking about a monopoly. Companies are still free to set prices, and that's different from having a cartel that secretly cooperates on price (as with the Big 5, now it's Big 4 I guess) while publicly "competes."
My main hope is that people who get these app-limited notebooks just take the plunge and put linux on there. But if people want Windows bad enough to be outraged that a cheaper/limited version exists, maybe that means MS is doing something right, and it also means those people should fork over some cash if they want it so badly.
(btw, I'm not the AC who replied here earlier, I only bring it up because I don't necessarily agree with his tone)
#1, I'm with you. I'm not sure that it actually would be illegal to break the restrictions anyway. It'd be counter the EULA, but as always that's a gray area.
#2: IP issues aside, I think that if someone works on something and brings it to market then it's theirs to sell, and the burden should be on "people such as yourself" to prove why it isn't. Sweat of your brow and all that. I didn't say don't steal, I said don't act as if you're somehow entitled to it.
Ripping off a Windows license, that's nothing. But having an ego that clouds an objective assessment of your actions when the consequences of them are negative...now that's criminal. Scary, even.
If you limit your requirements to "having Windows," then yeah, Windows is your only option. Crazy.
But you didn't write that, your requirements were somewhat more specific.
"have drivers for all the hardware"...but you only need the drivers for the hardware you own.
"run Win32-only software without any problems"...not even Windows can do that. I used Wine recently for the first time in years, and it's amazing how far it's come both in terms of compatibility and ease of use.
I want to know about this software that (a) doesn't run in Wine (b) doesn't have a functional alternative, and (c) is neither expensive nor mission-critical. In those three cases you can either run the software, avoid the software, or justify shelling out for the Windows upgrade.
The only people I feel bad for are the ones in developing nations who will end up with this arbitrarily limited software. But my gimme-gimme countrymen who can easily run linux but choose Windows out of convenience, yet aren't willing to pay for that convenience? I'll save my sympathy for those who deserve it.
There is a serious current on Slashdot of people not feeling that *any* software is worth money, which I find disturbing. I'm not a programmer by trade. And yes I believe in the power and good of FOSS. It disturbs me nonetheless.
On further inspection, I was wrong about #1. That is poor behavior. Sorry.
That's too easy. You want these people to have enough time to go outside?
I don't. So keep that stuff on the d/l.
What is poor about it, other than it doesn't fit in with the computer security theater kool-aid?
I'm sure it stays within the user account.
Safari has a privacy mode.
OS X and Vista will happily encrypt your home folder.
Browser caching is useful for 99% percent of the population, and that a few people don't like it due to computer-sharing or general paranoia doesn't make it evil, and neither does a car analogy. Especially since what we are talking about is still under the user's control, it's just a question of where the defaults are (and IMO they are sensible).
Cookies are bad, look how many Norton found! Wait, I need them for session persistence? Nevermind. Oh yeah, and screw Apple! Other people like them and I hate that!
That is an excellent pun on the word good, and I just felt it had to be pointed out since the other guys went straight for the MS humor. Philistines!
As he should.
I once had a psych teacher refer to Africans (living in Africa, mind you) as African-American, because the discussion centered on skin color.
I have nothing against cultural sensitivity, but people should just say 'black' if they're planning on being retarded.
Third-generation Italian-Americans? Man, they think it's all gold crosses and little car antenna flags, and can't tell Abruzzo from Atlantic City.
whether you're a winner or a loser is judged by your wallet.
Like by how much you give to charity?
I should add that I still thought that the Luke 18:9 was fitting and is a great example of the many things Jesus said and did to inspire a sense of egalitarianism in people. I just don't see it as the ultimate way to frame this...I think there's a more universal idea at work and that was just one (albeit enlightening) way to frame it.
why do people still murder and steal
A minority of people murder and steal. As they did in Biblical times as well. The Hebrews did not invent moral codes, just as they were not the last people to practice genocide.
I do not question the value of religion...but to declare that good and evil are supernatural and only to be understood in terms of (one) religion's assessment of them...don't you see how that could be viewed by others as, well, batty?
Racial slurs are truth now?
racist rights
Hmm. I am hoping that's just a bad translation. Either way, it's creepy as hell.
This is about selling houses to not very bright people that might be afraid of being discriminated against.
Where I come from, you need money to buy a house. Not an IQ test, not pedigree papers. And we have laws to keep it that way.
Real Burakumin discrimination requires *illegal* access to family registers
I don't think you understand what we mean by discrimination. In the US, it's not the illegality of the information you use that makes it "real" discrimination, it's the refusal to treat two otherwise equally qualified applicants the same.
From the sound of it, a whitelist would be a much more efficient use of your time...