I think the vast majority of the "overload" that kids are dealing with (or in many cases, not dealing with) is advertising. It isn't the technology itself that is overwhelming for most people, it is the useless and often unsolicited information that is shoved down our throats on a daily basis. This is what kids are learning to deal with. They still don't know how any of it works. They don't necessarily know how to put it to good use.
What adults can to do to compensate is learn to use tools to filter the shit out. If you must watch TV, skip commercials with TiVo or similar. When browsing the web, use some serious ad blocking tools. Use an OS that isn't suseptable to 95% of the malware out there so you don't even have to worry about it. I can't tell what kind of difference these simple things have made in my life as far as coping with information overload. Without all of those distractions, you'll be at least on par with your average kid who doesn't know enough to filter that stuff out. And if you have kids, for god's sake, filter that stuff out for them and given them an advantage. Nobody should have to suffer through the information overload of average daily life.
I know the difference between sleep and hybernate, and I use sleep all the time, both for shutdown and startup speed. (writing 2GB of ram + POST and reading 2GB of ram takes a LOT longer than the 2/5 seconds it takes for sleep to do its thing.
To be fair to hibernate, you don't actually have to write the entire contents of RAM to disk. Hibernate is much more intelligent than that. You can ditch the disk cache, for example. No point in writing that to disk.
They should make the 'sleep' option do both hibernate and sleep. Always write the RAM to disk, but still leave the RAM powered just in case the user comes back after a few minutes. If sleeping for > 5 minutes (or some other configurable amount of time), turn off power to RAM and hibernate. I think Apple calls this "safe sleep." Best of both worlds.
I love firefox for it's plugins, but in gnome, epiphany might be a good choice. I found it more stable, easier on the mem and for the rest not all that different from firefox.
What is FF without plugins?
Don't forget to enable the ad-blocker and page-info under Tools->Extensions.
Sounds to me like it is actually a Carbon problem, and not a FF bug. The only issue I see here is that the bug wasn't closed with the appropriate explanation for why it won't be fixed. Either way, I don't think the problem is quite as serious as your article suggests. Who cares if my CPU jumps to 90% when I click and hold the mouse? What else is my computer doing? OS X has good enough multitasking that my system won't grind to a halt because one app wants a lot of CPU for a short time. I certinaly never noticed any problem. And I run FF on a G4.
Face it, the only real reason to keep using FF is if you are used to it and the extensions you use with it
You say that like it isn't a damn good reason. Extensions are the reason I use Firefox. I don't care if one browser is a little faster than another or if one uses more memory than another. RAM is cheap and my CPU is fast. I just will not surf the web without my Adblock Plus w/ Filterset-G, for example. Sometimes adblock leaves "holes" in pages. For that I have the Remove It Permanently extension. With it I can easily remove any element from any web page. I've browsed the web on other people's computers without proper filtering and I am horrified. Just horrified.
In a way I am "used to" the extensions that I use, but I use them because they aren't available elsewhere. Not even Opera. AFAIK, Opera's "widgets" can't really do what you can do with a FF extension. FF extensions modify the basic operation of the browser... adding to the menubar or context menus or even acting transparently. For example, I am currently using the Slashdotter extension that allows me to highlight text in a comment and generate a reply with the selected text quoted. Sure beats copy/paste/insert HTML tags. Widgets are just windows with specific information in them. There really isn't much comparison.
There is a little more to adhering to the look and feel of an OS than "themes." Most OS "themes" that I have used are actually very superficial. Normally I avoid cross-platform applications such as those built on Java because they never seem to look and feel quite right. A web browser, however, is in a rather unique position such that adhering to the native OS look and feel isn't nearly so important as with other apps. I mean, the vast majority of your interaction is within the rendered HTML, which, presumably, looks pretty much the same everywhere.
Anyway, complaining about the default theme if Firefox is pretty lame. Yeah, sensible default are important for an application, but geez.
That is why they follow the 35 (or some sufficiently large number) year rule. What you do is make a wild guess and pad it with enough years so that when the prediction doesn't pan out, nobody remembers. And if the prediction is remembered, people just look back and think you were just some quaint sci-fi author or something. Or maybe nobody will remember exactly who made the prediction... like the whole "flying cars" prediction made years ago.
I would love Outlook 2003 over 2002 (and especially 2000) for the saved search folders and the fact that it's better at coping when your network connection unexpectedly dies.
Sounds like you are one of those people who has to compensate for an incompetent IT department.
It is a lot different. Laundry soap runs out weekly (well, maybe more like monthly). People buy new laundry soap often and companies use "new and improved" to get just a little edge over the 10 other brands sitting on the shelf. Microsoft is just about the only brand on the Office suite shelf and nobody really has to buy a new copy every fixed period of time. For many people, Office 97, or even 95, still works just fine. Question is, will Vista require people to upgrade from older (than 2003) Office versions? I think THAT would be the biggest source of new sales.
Right now we are selecting "uneducated." It's a bit sad, but I don't want kids.
How do you figure? Education isn't a genetic trait. You can't select for it. You might say that that the less intelligent breed more, but that would seem to be more of a pessimistic assertion than something based on actual statistics.
If we wanted the "strongest" genetic pool, we could allow the stupidist and weakest to die, but we might lose people like stephen hawking.
A strong gene pool is a diverse gene pool. It has nothing to do with subjective judgments about individual worth. Such judgments are fraught with biases and prejudices. Best just avoid them altogether.
How many people on Slashdot have said that the gene pool has become watered down due to the protections of civilization?
"Watered down" has no real meaning. It is merely a sentiment that has no basis in facts. There is no way to "water down" a gene pool. You can't stop evolution by "protections of civilization." As long as individuals die and there is some differential in reproduction, evolution is happening. Sure, the evolutionary pressures and the source of mutations are changing slightly, but nothing is getting watered down.
Most ISPs are too big to be personally calling every infected customer to alert them. If the ISP does anything, they just turn off the 'net connection and wait for the customer to call. But that is risky from a customer service perspective. Usually the customer will expect the ISP to help them clean their machine. The small ISP I worked for did all that because it was a "boutique" shop, but it is very time consuming. I can't imagine a large ISP doing it.
In my experience, no single anti-spam measure has become "useless." Perhaps less effective, but you can always layer methods and get something that is very effective overall. For example, I have spamassassin, which uses rules, bayesian, and RBLs, running behind Postgrey. So if and when they do retry SPAM attempts, SA should catch it.
Even more likely, it is just bad PHP (usually Linux/Apache) that allows SQL injection or XSS. You dont' necessarily have to hack the servern OS itself just to get a list of addresses. There are lot of well known, vulnerable PHP apps out there such as old versions awstats. Patching your OS (which in the case of most Linuxes would include apache) is one thing, but trying to keep all your PHP up to date and secure is quite another. Plenty of otherwise security conscious admins are running vulnerable PHP code.
Why would a major manufacturer of motheboards want to stay away from Linux for BIOS? What do Award and Phoenix have better than Linux?
Well, at least one company makes money selling proprietary BIOS "upgrades." This company, and any motherboard manufacturer that makes you go through them, pisses me off to no end. It is such a scam. They claim that they are selling custom upgrades (what the heck is that, anyway?), but really they are just selling updates. Some manufacturers don't supply BIOS updates directly. They redirect you to esupport. Want the latest BIOS revision for your motherboard to fix a hardware compatibility problem? Pay like $50. I had to deal with these people once. I just went and bought a new motherboard instead.
Is global warming necessarily bad? If the earth getting warmer, that means more areas, such as Canada could have longer growing seasons which would produce more food for the world.
The way I understand it, higher temps mean more violent and dramatic weather. That is, flood/drought cycles. So even if Canada does get a longer growing season, that doesn't mean it will be wet enough during that season to take advantage without significant irrigation.
Ok sure some coastly areas might get flooded. Is that bad? Is it possible that the fish would have more environment to live in and therefore better thrive?
Higher CO2 concentration == more acidic oceans == bad for fish, AFAIK
A warmer environment would mean a growth in plant life, in general. Isn't that a good thing since plants are known to remove CO2 from the air?
Again, not if precipitation patterns don't allow for it. How much plant life is there in the desert? It is the tropical forests that do the serious CO2 removal. And they are disappearing. Making it hotter isn't going to bring them back.
Interesting piece. It does make a lot of sense, but I think there is one overarching flaw. Paul examines groups on the same scale when comparing historical societies to today. He looks at a country like England or Italy and compares the feudal version to the post-indistrial version, and wow, imagine that. Big difference. He notes that there is less corruption in capitalist countries because making money by generating wealth is easier than stealing, which might be true on the scale of a country, but I am not so sure that is true in a global current global economy. No, you can't make money by stealing from other people in your own wealthy country, but you sure as hell can make a lot of money stealing from OTHER countries (particularly the poor ones). In many ways, post-colonial third world countries have become the feudal estates of modern, rich countries.
Anyway, I guess my "solution" is not economic at all. That is, I don't think you can solve the worlds problems with either a free market OR some sort of shared wealth model (the dichotomy Paul Graham focuses on). I think the answer is education... even public education. I believe that is the root of all positive change in the world. Technology and healthy economies flow from mass education and freely shared information. Doesn't matter what kind of economy you have. Countries can be enslaved by capitalism just as easily as they can be liberated if the people are not educated.
-matthew
Re:Keywords: Government. Health Care. Disaster
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Imagine if we all went to dinner and had to pay our own meals. We'd all get what we could afford -- burgers for some, steaks for others, soup for the few. Now imagine if we decided to split the bill equally. At first, we'd still buy what we used to, but some people would realize they could now afford steaks for just a little more cash out of pocket. When other people subsidize your irresponsibility, you become irresponsible. Eventually, everyone's buying steaks -- and all our costs go up. In government-run healthcare, everyone orders steaks, but the added bureacracy means the costs are well over the average steak -- and everyone expects to pay for soup.
So what you are saying is that poverty must exist in order for you to maintain your high standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
But there are still two options from the "Shutdown" menu. The idea is to combine them into a single menu option.
-matthew
I think the vast majority of the "overload" that kids are dealing with (or in many cases, not dealing with) is advertising. It isn't the technology itself that is overwhelming for most people, it is the useless and often unsolicited information that is shoved down our throats on a daily basis. This is what kids are learning to deal with. They still don't know how any of it works. They don't necessarily know how to put it to good use.
What adults can to do to compensate is learn to use tools to filter the shit out. If you must watch TV, skip commercials with TiVo or similar. When browsing the web, use some serious ad blocking tools. Use an OS that isn't suseptable to 95% of the malware out there so you don't even have to worry about it. I can't tell what kind of difference these simple things have made in my life as far as coping with information overload. Without all of those distractions, you'll be at least on par with your average kid who doesn't know enough to filter that stuff out. And if you have kids, for god's sake, filter that stuff out for them and given them an advantage. Nobody should have to suffer through the information overload of average daily life.
-matthew
To be fair to hibernate, you don't actually have to write the entire contents of RAM to disk. Hibernate is much more intelligent than that. You can ditch the disk cache, for example. No point in writing that to disk.
-matthew
They should make the 'sleep' option do both hibernate and sleep. Always write the RAM to disk, but still leave the RAM powered just in case the user comes back after a few minutes. If sleeping for > 5 minutes (or some other configurable amount of time), turn off power to RAM and hibernate. I think Apple calls this "safe sleep." Best of both worlds.
-matthew
What is FF without plugins?
If it ain't Adblock Plus, it ain't nothin'
-matthew
Sounds to me like it is actually a Carbon problem, and not a FF bug. The only issue I see here is that the bug wasn't closed with the appropriate explanation for why it won't be fixed. Either way, I don't think the problem is quite as serious as your article suggests. Who cares if my CPU jumps to 90% when I click and hold the mouse? What else is my computer doing? OS X has good enough multitasking that my system won't grind to a halt because one app wants a lot of CPU for a short time. I certinaly never noticed any problem. And I run FF on a G4.
-matthew
You say that like it isn't a damn good reason. Extensions are the reason I use Firefox. I don't care if one browser is a little faster than another or if one uses more memory than another. RAM is cheap and my CPU is fast. I just will not surf the web without my Adblock Plus w/ Filterset-G, for example. Sometimes adblock leaves "holes" in pages. For that I have the Remove It Permanently extension. With it I can easily remove any element from any web page. I've browsed the web on other people's computers without proper filtering and I am horrified. Just horrified.
In a way I am "used to" the extensions that I use, but I use them because they aren't available elsewhere. Not even Opera. AFAIK, Opera's "widgets" can't really do what you can do with a FF extension. FF extensions modify the basic operation of the browser... adding to the menubar or context menus or even acting transparently. For example, I am currently using the Slashdotter extension that allows me to highlight text in a comment and generate a reply with the selected text quoted. Sure beats copy/paste/insert HTML tags. Widgets are just windows with specific information in them. There really isn't much comparison.
-matthew
There is a little more to adhering to the look and feel of an OS than "themes." Most OS "themes" that I have used are actually very superficial. Normally I avoid cross-platform applications such as those built on Java because they never seem to look and feel quite right. A web browser, however, is in a rather unique position such that adhering to the native OS look and feel isn't nearly so important as with other apps. I mean, the vast majority of your interaction is within the rendered HTML, which, presumably, looks pretty much the same everywhere.
Anyway, complaining about the default theme if Firefox is pretty lame. Yeah, sensible default are important for an application, but geez.
-matthew
Well, one data point beats a baseless assertion. At least that is what my Slashdot rulebook says.
-matthew
That is why they follow the 35 (or some sufficiently large number) year rule. What you do is make a wild guess and pad it with enough years so that when the prediction doesn't pan out, nobody remembers. And if the prediction is remembered, people just look back and think you were just some quaint sci-fi author or something. Or maybe nobody will remember exactly who made the prediction... like the whole "flying cars" prediction made years ago.
-matthew
Sorry, I just use plain ol' IMAP. I have never had to deal with such issues. I sometimes assume other people's lives are as simple as mine.
You're right, it clearly has nothing to do with IT staff.
-matthew
Sounds like you are one of those people who has to compensate for an incompetent IT department.
-matthew
It is a lot different. Laundry soap runs out weekly (well, maybe more like monthly). People buy new laundry soap often and companies use "new and improved" to get just a little edge over the 10 other brands sitting on the shelf. Microsoft is just about the only brand on the Office suite shelf and nobody really has to buy a new copy every fixed period of time. For many people, Office 97, or even 95, still works just fine. Question is, will Vista require people to upgrade from older (than 2003) Office versions? I think THAT would be the biggest source of new sales.
-matthew
My money is on microchannel. Nobody ever lost money betting on IBM.
-matthew
How do you figure? Education isn't a genetic trait. You can't select for it. You might say that that the less intelligent breed more, but that would seem to be more of a pessimistic assertion than something based on actual statistics.
A strong gene pool is a diverse gene pool. It has nothing to do with subjective judgments about individual worth. Such judgments are fraught with biases and prejudices. Best just avoid them altogether.
-matthew
"Watered down" has no real meaning. It is merely a sentiment that has no basis in facts. There is no way to "water down" a gene pool. You can't stop evolution by "protections of civilization." As long as individuals die and there is some differential in reproduction, evolution is happening. Sure, the evolutionary pressures and the source of mutations are changing slightly, but nothing is getting watered down.
-matthew
There is no "should," only "is."
Most ISPs are too big to be personally calling every infected customer to alert them. If the ISP does anything, they just turn off the 'net connection and wait for the customer to call. But that is risky from a customer service perspective. Usually the customer will expect the ISP to help them clean their machine. The small ISP I worked for did all that because it was a "boutique" shop, but it is very time consuming. I can't imagine a large ISP doing it.
-matthew
In my experience, no single anti-spam measure has become "useless." Perhaps less effective, but you can always layer methods and get something that is very effective overall. For example, I have spamassassin, which uses rules, bayesian, and RBLs, running behind Postgrey. So if and when they do retry SPAM attempts, SA should catch it.
-matthew
Even more likely, it is just bad PHP (usually Linux/Apache) that allows SQL injection or XSS. You dont' necessarily have to hack the servern OS itself just to get a list of addresses. There are lot of well known, vulnerable PHP apps out there such as old versions awstats. Patching your OS (which in the case of most Linuxes would include apache) is one thing, but trying to keep all your PHP up to date and secure is quite another. Plenty of otherwise security conscious admins are running vulnerable PHP code.
-matthew
Well, at least one company makes money selling proprietary BIOS "upgrades." This company, and any motherboard manufacturer that makes you go through them, pisses me off to no end. It is such a scam. They claim that they are selling custom upgrades (what the heck is that, anyway?), but really they are just selling updates. Some manufacturers don't supply BIOS updates directly. They redirect you to esupport. Want the latest BIOS revision for your motherboard to fix a hardware compatibility problem? Pay like $50. I had to deal with these people once. I just went and bought a new motherboard instead.
-matthew
The way I understand it, higher temps mean more violent and dramatic weather. That is, flood/drought cycles. So even if Canada does get a longer growing season, that doesn't mean it will be wet enough during that season to take advantage without significant irrigation.
Higher CO2 concentration == more acidic oceans == bad for fish, AFAIK
Again, not if precipitation patterns don't allow for it. How much plant life is there in the desert? It is the tropical forests that do the serious CO2 removal. And they are disappearing. Making it hotter isn't going to bring them back.
-matthew
Interesting piece. It does make a lot of sense, but I think there is one overarching flaw. Paul examines groups on the same scale when comparing historical societies to today. He looks at a country like England or Italy and compares the feudal version to the post-indistrial version, and wow, imagine that. Big difference. He notes that there is less corruption in capitalist countries because making money by generating wealth is easier than stealing, which might be true on the scale of a country, but I am not so sure that is true in a global current global economy. No, you can't make money by stealing from other people in your own wealthy country, but you sure as hell can make a lot of money stealing from OTHER countries (particularly the poor ones). In many ways, post-colonial third world countries have become the feudal estates of modern, rich countries.
Anyway, I guess my "solution" is not economic at all. That is, I don't think you can solve the worlds problems with either a free market OR some sort of shared wealth model (the dichotomy Paul Graham focuses on). I think the answer is education... even public education. I believe that is the root of all positive change in the world. Technology and healthy economies flow from mass education and freely shared information. Doesn't matter what kind of economy you have. Countries can be enslaved by capitalism just as easily as they can be liberated if the people are not educated.
-matthew
So what you are saying is that poverty must exist in order for you to maintain your high standard of living.
-matthew
I know plenty of girls who go for "odd." (probably the same girls making that above statement.)
-matthew