But it is SLOW. Sliding windows around takes a lot more time than say "alt-tab". Or even a click on the relevant button in the taskbar.
If I'm trying to get work done and I know exactly what I want, for example a particular application window, I want to be able to get to it ASAP. I don't want to have to slide lots of stuff around. I don't want to have to go through zillions of fancy animations and wobbly windows. And I certainly do not want to walk through multiple rooms and corridors till I finally reach the window. And no I do NOT want to battle monsters ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html ).
All that may be fine if I'm playing a game (subject to gameplay and "is it actually fun?" constraints).
And the average US citizen isn't getting better health care for all that spending.
That said, healthcare costs are increasing in many countries.
It's too easy for politicians to try to spend the money of future generations to win the votes of today's voters.
I think there should be a limit on how much public money each person gets for healthcare. A quota that depends on how rich the country is. Because as technology improves, there's going to be more and more things that can be done, but the costs for each "level" will increase way more than linearly[1].
Once you've used up your quota, you have to find the cash some other way (savings, donations, loans), maybe people should also be allowed to donate some of their quota to you if they want (subject to regulatory approval - to avoid abuse and swindling).
If you can't find enough money, too bad so sad, yes it's unfair that you have to die or stay crippled/sick, but it's also unfair to keep making everyone else pay for you past your allocated quota. And it means other people may get less as a result (which is also unfair).
Past a certain point, it becomes unfair to make others continue paying for you. Like it or not, the rest have done their fair share for you.
Some may ask, why should it be even fair for others to pay in the first place? I think it's fair to make people pay for the civilization they enjoy. To me it's uncivilized (and inefficient and crap) to have people sit in ER in order to get treatment, or even die needlessly from problems that are easily and cheaply avoided.
[1] Billionaires might be able to afford the best. Maybe in the near future there would be tech to grow replacement limbs from scratch - e.g. a batch of 1000 replacements grown, with the best one selected. A billionaire could pay for that. But a country is unlikely to be able to afford to do that for every person who wants that and still be able to provide other healthcare to others, at least not for a long time. So on the "public money" plan in a rich country, you'd just get a high tech prosthetic.
I tested the desktop script ( http://www.quirksmode.org/m/tests/scrollayer2.html ) on google chrome and firefox, and it's weird. Say I hold down and drag and then _stop_, even if the mouse pointer is complete stationary when I release the mouse button, the stuff still moves. If I leave the mouse stationary and just press and release the mouse button it jumps...
Does the actual problem he's complaining about show up when you use a touchscreen or when you use a mouse?
My initial impression is it's when you use a mouse since he says "I added the mousedown event to touchdown, mousemove to touchmove, and mouseup to touchup. Try it in a normal desktop browser. You'll find that, although the script works, the interaction just doesn't make sense. The mouse events aren't quite the same as the touch events, even though they're pretty similar.".
But other than the glitch I mentioned, I see no problems when using the mouse to move stuff about.
> Many Chinese are willing to accept the CURRENT situation only because they have not known economic freedom.
Most Chinese are willing to accept the current situation because they believe that things have actually been improving enough over the past decade or so. Many even have experienced first hand the improvements[1].
They have quite a fair bit of economic freedom in China. They don't have much political freedom. If you're poor, it doesn't matter how much economic freedom there is in your country - your options are still limited.
[1] Yes being better than really crap is not so hard. But hey they are actually improving stuff. Not everything is improving of course, but in general very many things have got better.
Basically Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada are being sued for not paying the artists.
And quote: After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing "the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers."
It's similar to the way a government stays in power by maintaining a monopoly over violence.
As long as they do a good job of it, people will put up with much.
If the only people that are allowed to kill or bash people up are the Government/Ruling Party, and they usually only happen after a bunch of fairly predictable (and avoidable) events then most people will be fine with that.
That's how dictators stay in power for so long. If you have some confidence that you and your family will still be alive next week, as long as you keep your head down and don't do stuff in the "list of things to NOT do" then most people will put up with all sorts of crap.
So I won't be surprised if Governments tried to have a monopoly on snooping too. There might be massive discontent if so much snooping by random people was allowed. And if just anybody could go around snooping, more people might snoop on the Government (or more importantly the People in Charge)...
The first poster is right though. There are lots of people who do things about as right as the successful people, but they still fail. If you keep failing, nobody is going to hear of you, unless you become such a huge failure that you are famous;).
I've actually seen a few examples - they do the right things, they're just unlucky (well I just have no idea why they aren't more successful). For example I've seen some restaurants - the food is good, the location is OK, prices reasonable, service OK. But they're still struggling with few customers. Whereas close by is a more expensive restaurant that's not really better in terms of quality, but with many customers. There's one restaurant I know of which did advertise regularly and even independent food blogs blogged the restaurant favourably. It's quite sad to see them eventually having to cut quality, portions and raise prices after years of struggling (there's just so much money you can burn) - and still struggle...
Jimmy Wales might say - if your business looks like it's dying, cut your losses quick and start a new one. And he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it. Whereas Mr X might say, if your business looks like it's dying, don't give up, try doing X like me, and he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it.
That's why most of those "X ways to be like successful me" books seem more like "How I eventually struck the lottery- you can be like me - just keep trying, don't give up!".
Now if Successful Person has a track record of turning around other people's businesses that are decent but struggling (not talking about turning around obvious crap), and wrote a decent book/article about it, then that would be an interesting read.
Lots of people do win the lottery, I'm interested if they actually have an above average technique of doing so[1]. Otherwise, meh...
[1] Yes, I know of the "wait till the jackpot gets really big, then try to buy up all the numbers" method.
See what you've done, now I'm getting flashbacks of the days of busy tones, modem negotiation screeches+chirps and Trumpet Winsock with multi-number dialup scripts.
Oh yah, there was also this program called WebWhacker which was like wget -r for windows (hmm looks like it's still around and selling for USD49.95).
On Windows, Microsoft has an update system that also updates non-Microsoft products - typically hardware drivers.
I don't use it for that because I like my computer to work fine without bluescreens and flakiness.
I doubt it is a good idea for Microsoft to start pushing that update system as a mainstream method of updating non-Microsoft software for Windows. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, so taking such a direction so soon would create more problems for them.
If you already have javascript disabled (partially or totally) and can actually see that page then:
a) You have already chosen a non-IE browser b) You have javascript disabled and you know what you are doing (and have as many different browsers as you want) c) The organization that provided you the computer system has already chosen the browser for you. d) The organization that provided you the computer system has disabled javascript and you're not supposed to enable it, much less change the browser. e) You're using the wrong computer - go use your own PC. f) You're some really fringe corner case.
The EC will just find a way to smack them even harder. They could get a bunch of independent or "independent" experts to give their opinion on whether the "technically correct" solution favoured IE or not, and present their conclusions.
Microsoft can get away with lots of stuff in the USA, but they're not considered an EU company like say Airbus.
If they hadn't already found Microsoft guilty then Microsoft could use technicalities and debate interpretations of laws to convince them that Microsoft is innocent. But Microsoft has already been found guilty.
If you want to stay somewhat unhindered in foreign countries, you don't piss off their governments and then try to weasel out of doing what they already said they want you to do.
Technicalities won't save you. Those Governments are unlikely to lose votes or support when they crush you (a foreigner) for misbehaving despite you trying to use some loophole. And the US Government is unlikely to burn any political/diplomatic capital to help Microsoft in this.
This is computer stuff, so "Limited Edition" is more likely to mean: "After a few months when we need something 'new' for marketing reasons, we'll just add the super capacitor, call it the 'Pro' edition, and phase out the 'Limited Edition'".
Whether Linux or Windows, I still keep swap around on most machines.
The idea was for my machines to not run out of memory immediately but get slightly slower and run out of memory before things get extremely slow.
So the swap size I pick is something like "maximum number of seconds I'm willing to wait" * typical disk speed when swapping.
However if you have a laptop running Ubuntu, it seems the swap file is used for hibernating as well so if you want the hibernate feature you need a swap file that's large enough to fit the RAM. On Windows the swap file is separate from the hibernate file, so you don't have that problem but you do have a different problem if you are low on storage space and actually want some swap (like say a netbook with an 8GB SSD;)).
In the end, I may still have to turn off swap on Windows XP since it often complains about low virtual memory even if I have lots of free RAM.
Does he also know that a significant percentage of those 154 million views were by people who did NOT want to watch his video at all? Or even never ever want to watch his video again;).
Anyone have an idea of what that percentage is? I know it's certainly higher than zero:).
If stuff slows down due to that swap out, then it's still accurate enough for me.
Maybe the O/S could get it right and swap out and swap in Firefox in a way so I won't notice any slow downs. Give me an example of such an O/S please.
So far in my experience, if Windows or Linux swaps out Firefox for whatever reason, if I then switch to Firefox, I have to wait for it to be swapped back in.
Why "page out" and not "page in"?
"Page in" doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have to wait if I switch to different programs- the O/S is bringing stuff from disk to ram - I believe in some cases the O/S pages in stuff as part of running a new program - so it's not such a useful metric for "not enough memory".
But "page out" means something in RAM is going to disk - if I ever want it back in RAM, I'll have to wait.
If stuff in RAM is going to disk needlessly and causing unnecessary waits then the O/S virtual memory algorithm is getting things wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same reason why I think GUIs should not borrow too much from "physical metaphors".
For example something like 10GUI might seem cool ( http://10gui.com/video/ )
But it is SLOW. Sliding windows around takes a lot more time than say "alt-tab". Or even a click on the relevant button in the taskbar.
If I'm trying to get work done and I know exactly what I want, for example a particular application window, I want to be able to get to it ASAP. I don't want to have to slide lots of stuff around. I don't want to have to go through zillions of fancy animations and wobbly windows. And I certainly do not want to walk through multiple rooms and corridors till I finally reach the window. And no I do NOT want to battle monsters ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html ).
All that may be fine if I'm playing a game (subject to gameplay and "is it actually fun?" constraints).
They might still be smiling since they'll get their face fixed for less than it will cost you after they smash your face in retaliation.
Compare how much the US is spending per person with the other countries:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/02/health-care-costs-opinions-columnists-reform.html
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita
And the average US citizen isn't getting better health care for all that spending.
That said, healthcare costs are increasing in many countries.
It's too easy for politicians to try to spend the money of future generations to win the votes of today's voters.
I think there should be a limit on how much public money each person gets for healthcare. A quota that depends on how rich the country is. Because as technology improves, there's going to be more and more things that can be done, but the costs for each "level" will increase way more than linearly[1].
Once you've used up your quota, you have to find the cash some other way (savings, donations, loans), maybe people should also be allowed to donate some of their quota to you if they want (subject to regulatory approval - to avoid abuse and swindling).
If you can't find enough money, too bad so sad, yes it's unfair that you have to die or stay crippled/sick, but it's also unfair to keep making everyone else pay for you past your allocated quota. And it means other people may get less as a result (which is also unfair).
Past a certain point, it becomes unfair to make others continue paying for you. Like it or not, the rest have done their fair share for you.
Some may ask, why should it be even fair for others to pay in the first place? I think it's fair to make people pay for the civilization they enjoy. To me it's uncivilized (and inefficient and crap) to have people sit in ER in order to get treatment, or even die needlessly from problems that are easily and cheaply avoided.
[1] Billionaires might be able to afford the best. Maybe in the near future there would be tech to grow replacement limbs from scratch - e.g. a batch of 1000 replacements grown, with the best one selected. A billionaire could pay for that. But a country is unlikely to be able to afford to do that for every person who wants that and still be able to provide other healthcare to others, at least not for a long time. So on the "public money" plan in a rich country, you'd just get a high tech prosthetic.
> I dislike the fact that many of the people here in the US that are arguing for it will not acknowledge that it's simply going to expensive.
If the US people are finally even though ignorantly stumbling into improving their screwed up healthcare system, that's still a good thing.
Your link itself shows that the USA was spending 2x what the Canadians do.
So it might actually be easier to improve the US healthcare system than to reduce ignorance.
Their product can be very useful indeed:
http://search.securityfocus.com/swsearch?query=symantec&sbm=bid&submit=Search!&metaname=alldoc&sort=swishlastmodified
To attackers aka hackers ;).
You want fairness?
How about this: http://slashdot.org/~TheLink/journal/208853
Leaders will have to risk their own lives first before risking the lives of the brave soldiers they cry crocodile tears over on TV.
Now that's fair to me.
With my proposal even sociopathic leaders will think twice before starting a war or "offensive military action".
FWIW, classic coke in the USA no longer uses cane sugar, it uses HFCS (however the "jewish passover" coke does have cane sugar).
I'm too lazy to figure out when exactly they switched to HFCS, but they certainly did, so in a way classic coke is not back.
Some people claim there's a difference in taste.
> That the good ones have higher prices.
I suspect some of the crappy ones have just as high prices too.
So that's where Ask Slashdot comes in - to see which high price hosting companies are providing better quality to customers, and which aren't.
I'm sure many of us here don't want to pay high prices and still get the same crappy service as some low priced provider.
I tested the desktop script ( http://www.quirksmode.org/m/tests/scrollayer2.html ) on google chrome and firefox, and it's weird. Say I hold down and drag and then _stop_, even if the mouse pointer is complete stationary when I release the mouse button, the stuff still moves. If I leave the mouse stationary and just press and release the mouse button it jumps...
Does the actual problem he's complaining about show up when you use a touchscreen or when you use a mouse?
My initial impression is it's when you use a mouse since he says "I added the mousedown event to touchdown, mousemove to touchmove, and mouseup to touchup. Try it in a normal desktop browser. You'll find that, although the script works, the interaction just doesn't make sense. The mouse events aren't quite the same as the touch events, even though they're pretty similar.".
But other than the glitch I mentioned, I see no problems when using the mouse to move stuff about.
What am I missing?
> Many Chinese are willing to accept the CURRENT situation only because they have not known economic freedom.
Most Chinese are willing to accept the current situation because they believe that things have actually been improving enough over the past decade or so. Many even have experienced first hand the improvements[1].
They have quite a fair bit of economic freedom in China. They don't have much political freedom. If you're poor, it doesn't matter how much economic freedom there is in your country - your options are still limited.
[1] Yes being better than really crap is not so hard. But hey they are actually improving stuff. Not everything is improving of course, but in general very many things have got better.
See also this:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/735096--geist-record-industry-faces-liability-over-infringement
Basically Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada are being sued for not paying the artists.
And quote:
After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing "the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers."
That's how a government stays in power.
It's similar to the way a government stays in power by maintaining a monopoly over violence.
As long as they do a good job of it, people will put up with much.
If the only people that are allowed to kill or bash people up are the Government/Ruling Party, and they usually only happen after a bunch of fairly predictable (and avoidable) events then most people will be fine with that.
That's how dictators stay in power for so long. If you have some confidence that you and your family will still be alive next week, as long as you keep your head down and don't do stuff in the "list of things to NOT do" then most people will put up with all sorts of crap.
So I won't be surprised if Governments tried to have a monopoly on snooping too. There might be massive discontent if so much snooping by random people was allowed. And if just anybody could go around snooping, more people might snoop on the Government (or more importantly the People in Charge)...
> Spend lots of other people's money.throwing crap at the wall as fast as you can until something sticks.
Sounds a bit too close to comfort to what those "Investment Bankers" do - gamble with other people's money.
They do it better though. If it goes belly up big time, they get bailed out and still get bonuses.
The first poster is right though. There are lots of people who do things about as right as the successful people, but they still fail. If you keep failing, nobody is going to hear of you, unless you become such a huge failure that you are famous ;).
I've actually seen a few examples - they do the right things, they're just unlucky (well I just have no idea why they aren't more successful). For example I've seen some restaurants - the food is good, the location is OK, prices reasonable, service OK. But they're still struggling with few customers. Whereas close by is a more expensive restaurant that's not really better in terms of quality, but with many customers. There's one restaurant I know of which did advertise regularly and even independent food blogs blogged the restaurant favourably. It's quite sad to see them eventually having to cut quality, portions and raise prices after years of struggling (there's just so much money you can burn) - and still struggle...
Jimmy Wales might say - if your business looks like it's dying, cut your losses quick and start a new one. And he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it.
Whereas Mr X might say, if your business looks like it's dying, don't give up, try doing X like me, and he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it.
That's why most of those "X ways to be like successful me" books seem more like "How I eventually struck the lottery- you can be like me - just keep trying, don't give up!".
Now if Successful Person has a track record of turning around other people's businesses that are decent but struggling (not talking about turning around obvious crap), and wrote a decent book/article about it, then that would be an interesting read.
Lots of people do win the lottery, I'm interested if they actually have an above average technique of doing so[1]. Otherwise, meh...
[1] Yes, I know of the "wait till the jackpot gets really big, then try to buy up all the numbers" method.
See what you've done, now I'm getting flashbacks of the days of busy tones, modem negotiation screeches+chirps and Trumpet Winsock with multi-number dialup scripts.
Oh yah, there was also this program called WebWhacker which was like wget -r for windows (hmm looks like it's still around and selling for USD49.95).
On Windows, Microsoft has an update system that also updates non-Microsoft products - typically hardware drivers.
I don't use it for that because I like my computer to work fine without bluescreens and flakiness.
I doubt it is a good idea for Microsoft to start pushing that update system as a mainstream method of updating non-Microsoft software for Windows. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, so taking such a direction so soon would create more problems for them.
If you already have javascript disabled (partially or totally) and can actually see that page then:
a) You have already chosen a non-IE browser
b) You have javascript disabled and you know what you are doing (and have as many different browsers as you want)
c) The organization that provided you the computer system has already chosen the browser for you.
d) The organization that provided you the computer system has disabled javascript and you're not supposed to enable it, much less change the browser.
e) You're using the wrong computer - go use your own PC.
f) You're some really fringe corner case.
Microsoft would be very stupid to do that.
The EC will just find a way to smack them even harder. They could get a bunch of independent or "independent" experts to give their opinion on whether the "technically correct" solution favoured IE or not, and present their conclusions.
Microsoft can get away with lots of stuff in the USA, but they're not considered an EU company like say Airbus.
If they hadn't already found Microsoft guilty then Microsoft could use technicalities and debate interpretations of laws to convince them that Microsoft is innocent. But Microsoft has already been found guilty.
If you want to stay somewhat unhindered in foreign countries, you don't piss off their governments and then try to weasel out of doing what they already said they want you to do.
Technicalities won't save you. Those Governments are unlikely to lose votes or support when they crush you (a foreigner) for misbehaving despite you trying to use some loophole. And the US Government is unlikely to burn any political/diplomatic capital to help Microsoft in this.
This is computer stuff, so "Limited Edition" is more likely to mean: "After a few months when we need something 'new' for marketing reasons, we'll just add the super capacitor, call it the 'Pro' edition, and phase out the 'Limited Edition'".
> every single application would have to be signed and greenlighted by Microsoft
Not so viable for Microsoft given their monopoly status (assuming the regulators aren't asleep), and backward compatibility reasons.
They'd have to do things a different way.
> Actually, the pile of newspapers does at least suggest that there are no rottweilers. If there were, somebody would be in charge of feeding them
:).
You might assume wrongly and end up feeding them
I heard there are also states with the "needed killing" doctrine :).
Whether Linux or Windows, I still keep swap around on most machines.
;)).
The idea was for my machines to not run out of memory immediately but get slightly slower and run out of memory before things get extremely slow.
So the swap size I pick is something like "maximum number of seconds I'm willing to wait" * typical disk speed when swapping.
However if you have a laptop running Ubuntu, it seems the swap file is used for hibernating as well so if you want the hibernate feature you need a swap file that's large enough to fit the RAM. On Windows the swap file is separate from the hibernate file, so you don't have that problem but you do have a different problem if you are low on storage space and actually want some swap (like say a netbook with an 8GB SSD
In the end, I may still have to turn off swap on Windows XP since it often complains about low virtual memory even if I have lots of free RAM.
Does he also know that a significant percentage of those 154 million views were by people who did NOT want to watch his video at all? Or even never ever want to watch his video again ;).
:).
Anyone have an idea of what that percentage is? I know it's certainly higher than zero
If you are running the sidebar you may like to look at this:
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2007/Sep/134
See the discussion and also the pdf http://www.portcullis-security.com/uplds/Next_Generation_malware.pdf
I'm sticking to perfmon.msc, task manager, resource manager and Process Explorer, depending on the circumstances.
If stuff slows down due to that swap out, then it's still accurate enough for me.
Maybe the O/S could get it right and swap out and swap in Firefox in a way so I won't notice any slow downs. Give me an example of such an O/S please.
So far in my experience, if Windows or Linux swaps out Firefox for whatever reason, if I then switch to Firefox, I have to wait for it to be swapped back in.
Why "page out" and not "page in"?
"Page in" doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have to wait if I switch to different programs- the O/S is bringing stuff from disk to ram - I believe in some cases the O/S pages in stuff as part of running a new program - so it's not such a useful metric for "not enough memory".
But "page out" means something in RAM is going to disk - if I ever want it back in RAM, I'll have to wait.
If stuff in RAM is going to disk needlessly and causing unnecessary waits then the O/S virtual memory algorithm is getting things wrong.