They wouldn't have had all the windows replaced in one day if there were hundreds. There appear to only be a handful, if that. Given that, they were likely windows closer to the explosion. They may have also been older windows. Good try with the exaggeration, by the way.
As for the Mythbusters being full of shit... They're not scientists as we (geek types) see them, but anyone who pushes the public to put myths and theories to the test is a huge improvement over a scientific wasteland.
And that could result in a panic by part of the population, while another part goes up to see it. The rest probably wouldn't even read the announcement. All they've done now is cause a panic and increase the risk to a portion of the population.
The people that the Mythbusters hired to set things up (no, they don't set off these big explosions themselves) made a mistake. Mistakes happen. If that's not good enough for you, then go yell at whoever ACTUALLY set off the explosion, because they are the ones ultimately responsible for the size of it.
You're right that they should control their experiments. I'll bet most scientists/engineers that watch the show have been appalled at their approach at least once or twice. As the xkcd cartoon says though, the rest is bookkeeping. In this society, I'll settle for any attempt to experiment and worry about the paperwork later.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Regardless of what the orbiter can do and how much it teaches us, it CAN'T interact with the martian environment. That is what the rovers are for. Whether they've met your requirements for the mars mission or not, they've far exceeded what was expected of them. They're a bargain from NASA's point of view and essentially free research this far past their intended life span.
Perhaps they just mean that the technology will be at that level. We can very nearly build much of the stuff in the pictures with our current level of technology. It's mostly just money and practicality that keeps us from doing it.
The pictures from the orbiter are great, but pictures alone can't give you a complete view of anything, especially not when exploring a foreign planet. The orbiter can't give you a chance to interact with the environment. Maybe the rovers didn't find everything we hoped they would, but there's no way to be sure until you go down there and check it out.
Honestly, I don't understand why people are so afraid to spend money on science projects. If there's one place/field where the status quo shouldn't be good enough, it's science. Of all groups, I would hope Slashdot gets that.
People have lost sight of what science really is. Take the Mythbusters for example... A lot of people say things like "it's not real science." Well that's just plain wrong. Science is about exploring, forming theories, and disproving them through experimentation. (Oblig xkcd)
And of course, when the experiment doesn't work the way you want it to, you make something explode. The rovers have built-in planet-buster nukes, right?
It doesn't exactly read correctly, but this being Slashdot, I know I wasn't the only one who read that as "The International Federation of Pornographic Industry (IFPI)."
I've never done any benchmarks, but Firefox certainly FEELS faster in Ubuntu and Fedora than it did in XP or now Vista. I haven't tried Wine, but it does seem a tad faster in my XP VM than it did in native XP.
Anyway, I for one don't care until the differences are are noticeable during normal use. The rest is academic or even just pointless.
Who are those people to judge how I spend my time? Yes, it would be great if we all worked toward a common goal (ie. betterment of society), but there is nothing wrong with taking time to enjoy your life.
I'd rather spend my 80-whatever years enjoying myself as much as possible rather than working myself nearly to death while being completely miserable, accomplishing only slightly more than my lazier self.
In the cosmic end, it's most likely a wash anyway, so why not have fun with it?
Unless you have obscure or obscenely cheap hardware, you shouldn't have too many problems installing Win7. Even the Vista64 release candidate worked fine on my old computers. The only thing I had issues with was my old Turtle Beach sound card, which was made in 2001.
Either way, there's not much to stop you from making a new partition and trying it out. If it doesn't work, all you've lost is maybe an afternoon of fiddling.
I agree with your post, but I want to add one thing:
Even mid-high end computers purchased in 2005 should be fine running Vista. I built a new computer in 2005 with an Athlon64 3500+ and 2 gigs of RAM that ran Vista nicely. Granted, that might be a bit fancier than most businesses would have paid for at the time, but it wasn't terribly expensive.
I don't know if I support one side or the other, but if you're going to go with a tax of some kind, why not have it scale with the energy used? The more you use, the more it costs per unit. It could be scaled to match up with an average consumer's bill, which would punish (incentivize?) the heaviest users without hugely affecting (or maybe even helping) lower power users.
Still though... If the fighting back and forth is to be believed, his Blackberry likely isn't secure enough to handle a lot of the communications required for more serious business. If that's the case, then there might not even be a problem.
To some extent, maybe, but anyone who's dealt with a generic "car is broken" light constantly coming on might disagree.
Cars are moving much faster in the direction of computers than vice versa. Not to mention that complexity works against the transparency you want, as all but the most hardcore people are eventually turned off to (or completely incapable of) taking things apart.
Developers should figure out creative and useful ways to use the Wii remote in their games, not just treat it like a mouse. Just because it's not as precise as a pointer device doesn't mean it doesn't have a place. The Wii remote doesn't have to perfectly mimic the function of a mouse to replace it for Wii games.
I used to work with a Taiwanese guy who explained it once, so I think I understand, but people are welcome to correct me if I'm wrong...
There are different types. Phonetic keyboards are relatively slow, but easy to learn. Others offer sophisticated ways of choosing traditional and simplified Chinese characters based on the structure of the character itself, rather than the pronunciation. These can be much faster, but take training and practice.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. [SNIP] How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument?[SNIP]
Linux is making some good strides into other devices and will likely gain a nice market share there. It's true that a lot of people are switching to alternative devices for email and basic internet browsing, but PCs are hardly going away. Regardless, my post wasn't about Linux, the savior of the computing/tech world. It was about Linux on the desktop, in response to the story, only.
It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience".[SNIP]Same goes for restaurants.
I know car analogies are standard here, but cars (and restaurants) and operating systems are hardly the same thing. Average people have a basic understanding of what a car does (even if they don't know anything about the engineering and science involved) and they certainly understand food. Computing in general and software especially are like black magic to a lot of folks. They barely know how to make Windows work, so they stick with what they know. They obviously know how to eat food and cars basically all drive the same. Linux is kind of like buying a car with no oil in it and with no tires. People COULD make it work, but normal people wouldn't buy a car like that.
[SNIP]In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux.
Yes and no... They're different, but they're made by the same company, which scares them less. They may get frustrated with it, but they know it's 'safe.' It goes back to what I said about viruses and boxed software. It's been drilled into their heads that it's not okay to download things.
It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust.
But we're talking about software functionality, not just the input devices. Like you said, cars all have steering wheels, etc. That's great. What? They work differently under the hood? Your average driver will barely know the difference beyond having more or less power in one car versus another. It's different under the hood, but the differences are transparent to the user.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
True, and that helps Linux. Somewhat like what I was getting at when I said "Microsoft stumbled."
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get.[SNIP]
Yes, they do, but can you honestly tell me that most average people know about that? More often than not, Linux models are buried far enough into the site that you don't see them unless you're looking for them. Even if an average user saw them, he wouldn't
Free is great. I've used Ubuntu and Fedora and I like them both, but you and I are not mainstream users. Most mainstream users don't understand that software can be free. Especially with the virus/malware scares every week, if it doesn't come in a box or preloaded on their PC, they won't use it. It's been drilled into their heads that downloading free things from the internet is bad for your computer or even illegal.
More than that, how many regular people ever reformat their hard drive? How many would even know what it means to dual boot? For most of the general population, computer = Windows. The best you'll usually get from these users is a vague understanding that Macs don't have Windows. To them, the word Linux sounds like a virus.
As much progress as desktop Linux has been making, especially at the hands of Canonical, it's still not ready. I'm relatively Linux savvy and it took me a bit of effort to get the wireless in my laptop to work. Thankfully, it works more-or-less out of the box with Intrepid (not Fedora 10 grr...), but that's not the case for everybody. My sister/mother/grandfather/whoever wouldn't know how to do it. At all. They wouldn't even know where to start. A significant percentage of installations still require these skills that your average user just plain doesn't have and is afraid to learn. (No, I don't have numbers, but browse the Ubuntu forums and you'll see plenty of threads asking for help. There are plenty more people that don't post. Also, please note that I'm not saying it's a high number, but merely significant enough to still be a barrier for adoption.)
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I'll say it anyway... Linux on the desktop as it stands today will most likely never have its year.
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it. It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever. The only way I see it happening at this stage is if Microsoft continues to stumble with Windows. One potential back door I see for Linux is through business. If businesses adopt Linux, people will have that familiarity and won't be afraid of it anymore. For that to happen, of course, there needs to be much improved support for those systems, which is not happening yet.
Unfortunately, I think Microsoft is doing okay for the moment. They stumbled a bit with Vista, but the incompatibilities of Vista were a necessary step for them to improve the security and stability of Windows. If they can improve the performance of Windows 7, mainstream users will have little reason to switch.
I can't tell you when the Imperial units were simplified, but it doesn't strike me as a purposeful overhaul of the system. Likely the exotic parts were slowly replaced by what made more sense to the people who make those decisions.
As far as the metric system, I can really only comment on my little corner of the US, but it seems to be mostly younger science types who use metric with any regularity. Even with them, it's mostly just their professional life where they use metric and it's primarily because the units are easier to work with when doing complex math. I'm an engineer and I run into a lot of older engineering types who refuse to use metric unless they absolutely have to. Younger engineers (and scientists in general) with any decent education can generally switch between the two systems without much trouble.
In my experience with the general (non-scientific) population, metric is a lost cause at this stage. Some of the manufacturing/assembly people I work with (mostly older) actually get angry if I suggest we should use metric, even for simple things. Bear in mind, though, that I live in a somewhat rural area at the moment. Globalization is for unpatriotic commies and these new things like the metric system and computers are black magic. Better educated folks and more urban areas in general won't be as bad.
Slashdot Mirror
They wouldn't have had all the windows replaced in one day if there were hundreds. There appear to only be a handful, if that. Given that, they were likely windows closer to the explosion. They may have also been older windows. Good try with the exaggeration, by the way.
As for the Mythbusters being full of shit... They're not scientists as we (geek types) see them, but anyone who pushes the public to put myths and theories to the test is a huge improvement over a scientific wasteland.
And that could result in a panic by part of the population, while another part goes up to see it. The rest probably wouldn't even read the announcement. All they've done now is cause a panic and increase the risk to a portion of the population.
The people that the Mythbusters hired to set things up (no, they don't set off these big explosions themselves) made a mistake. Mistakes happen. If that's not good enough for you, then go yell at whoever ACTUALLY set off the explosion, because they are the ones ultimately responsible for the size of it.
You're right that they should control their experiments. I'll bet most scientists/engineers that watch the show have been appalled at their approach at least once or twice. As the xkcd cartoon says though, the rest is bookkeeping. In this society, I'll settle for any attempt to experiment and worry about the paperwork later.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Regardless of what the orbiter can do and how much it teaches us, it CAN'T interact with the martian environment. That is what the rovers are for. Whether they've met your requirements for the mars mission or not, they've far exceeded what was expected of them. They're a bargain from NASA's point of view and essentially free research this far past their intended life span.
Perhaps they just mean that the technology will be at that level. We can very nearly build much of the stuff in the pictures with our current level of technology. It's mostly just money and practicality that keeps us from doing it.
The pictures from the orbiter are great, but pictures alone can't give you a complete view of anything, especially not when exploring a foreign planet. The orbiter can't give you a chance to interact with the environment. Maybe the rovers didn't find everything we hoped they would, but there's no way to be sure until you go down there and check it out.
Honestly, I don't understand why people are so afraid to spend money on science projects. If there's one place/field where the status quo shouldn't be good enough, it's science. Of all groups, I would hope Slashdot gets that.
People have lost sight of what science really is. Take the Mythbusters for example... A lot of people say things like "it's not real science." Well that's just plain wrong. Science is about exploring, forming theories, and disproving them through experimentation. (Oblig xkcd)
And of course, when the experiment doesn't work the way you want it to, you make something explode. The rovers have built-in planet-buster nukes, right?
This really is the heart of the issue right here. Parent should be higher than +5...
Oh so you're the one that's been making all those 'secretary' videos...
It doesn't exactly read correctly, but this being Slashdot, I know I wasn't the only one who read that as "The International Federation of Pornographic Industry (IFPI)."
I've never done any benchmarks, but Firefox certainly FEELS faster in Ubuntu and Fedora than it did in XP or now Vista. I haven't tried Wine, but it does seem a tad faster in my XP VM than it did in native XP.
Anyway, I for one don't care until the differences are are noticeable during normal use. The rest is academic or even just pointless.
This is something of a pet peeve of mine...
Who are those people to judge how I spend my time? Yes, it would be great if we all worked toward a common goal (ie. betterment of society), but there is nothing wrong with taking time to enjoy your life.
I'd rather spend my 80-whatever years enjoying myself as much as possible rather than working myself nearly to death while being completely miserable, accomplishing only slightly more than my lazier self.
In the cosmic end, it's most likely a wash anyway, so why not have fun with it?
Unless you have obscure or obscenely cheap hardware, you shouldn't have too many problems installing Win7. Even the Vista64 release candidate worked fine on my old computers. The only thing I had issues with was my old Turtle Beach sound card, which was made in 2001.
Either way, there's not much to stop you from making a new partition and trying it out. If it doesn't work, all you've lost is maybe an afternoon of fiddling.
I agree with your post, but I want to add one thing:
Even mid-high end computers purchased in 2005 should be fine running Vista. I built a new computer in 2005 with an Athlon64 3500+ and 2 gigs of RAM that ran Vista nicely. Granted, that might be a bit fancier than most businesses would have paid for at the time, but it wasn't terribly expensive.
I don't know if I support one side or the other, but if you're going to go with a tax of some kind, why not have it scale with the energy used? The more you use, the more it costs per unit. It could be scaled to match up with an average consumer's bill, which would punish (incentivize?) the heaviest users without hugely affecting (or maybe even helping) lower power users.
Still though... If the fighting back and forth is to be believed, his Blackberry likely isn't secure enough to handle a lot of the communications required for more serious business. If that's the case, then there might not even be a problem.
We do this for driving a car
To some extent, maybe, but anyone who's dealt with a generic "car is broken" light constantly coming on might disagree.
Cars are moving much faster in the direction of computers than vice versa. Not to mention that complexity works against the transparency you want, as all but the most hardcore people are eventually turned off to (or completely incapable of) taking things apart.
Unless you're innocent?
Replacement != equivalent
Developers should figure out creative and useful ways to use the Wii remote in their games, not just treat it like a mouse. Just because it's not as precise as a pointer device doesn't mean it doesn't have a place. The Wii remote doesn't have to perfectly mimic the function of a mouse to replace it for Wii games.
It barely ran on actual hardware and you want to try in a VM? You're a madman...
Many's the time I wish I had a little more mobility or comfort with my computer.
Even nice headphones get uncomfortable after long periods. I can't imagine bulky goggles are terribly comfortable...
I used to work with a Taiwanese guy who explained it once, so I think I understand, but people are welcome to correct me if I'm wrong...
There are different types. Phonetic keyboards are relatively slow, but easy to learn. Others offer sophisticated ways of choosing traditional and simplified Chinese characters based on the structure of the character itself, rather than the pronunciation. These can be much faster, but take training and practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers
...but not because of the reasons you think.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. [SNIP] How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument?[SNIP]
Linux is making some good strides into other devices and will likely gain a nice market share there. It's true that a lot of people are switching to alternative devices for email and basic internet browsing, but PCs are hardly going away. Regardless, my post wasn't about Linux, the savior of the computing/tech world. It was about Linux on the desktop, in response to the story, only.
It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience".[SNIP]Same goes for restaurants.
I know car analogies are standard here, but cars (and restaurants) and operating systems are hardly the same thing. Average people have a basic understanding of what a car does (even if they don't know anything about the engineering and science involved) and they certainly understand food. Computing in general and software especially are like black magic to a lot of folks. They barely know how to make Windows work, so they stick with what they know. They obviously know how to eat food and cars basically all drive the same. Linux is kind of like buying a car with no oil in it and with no tires. People COULD make it work, but normal people wouldn't buy a car like that.
[SNIP]In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux.
Yes and no... They're different, but they're made by the same company, which scares them less. They may get frustrated with it, but they know it's 'safe.' It goes back to what I said about viruses and boxed software. It's been drilled into their heads that it's not okay to download things.
It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust.
But we're talking about software functionality, not just the input devices. Like you said, cars all have steering wheels, etc. That's great. What? They work differently under the hood? Your average driver will barely know the difference beyond having more or less power in one car versus another. It's different under the hood, but the differences are transparent to the user.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
True, and that helps Linux. Somewhat like what I was getting at when I said "Microsoft stumbled."
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get.[SNIP]
Yes, they do, but can you honestly tell me that most average people know about that? More often than not, Linux models are buried far enough into the site that you don't see them unless you're looking for them. Even if an average user saw them, he wouldn't
Free is great. I've used Ubuntu and Fedora and I like them both, but you and I are not mainstream users. Most mainstream users don't understand that software can be free. Especially with the virus/malware scares every week, if it doesn't come in a box or preloaded on their PC, they won't use it. It's been drilled into their heads that downloading free things from the internet is bad for your computer or even illegal.
More than that, how many regular people ever reformat their hard drive? How many would even know what it means to dual boot? For most of the general population, computer = Windows. The best you'll usually get from these users is a vague understanding that Macs don't have Windows. To them, the word Linux sounds like a virus.
As much progress as desktop Linux has been making, especially at the hands of Canonical, it's still not ready. I'm relatively Linux savvy and it took me a bit of effort to get the wireless in my laptop to work. Thankfully, it works more-or-less out of the box with Intrepid (not Fedora 10 grr...), but that's not the case for everybody. My sister/mother/grandfather/whoever wouldn't know how to do it. At all. They wouldn't even know where to start. A significant percentage of installations still require these skills that your average user just plain doesn't have and is afraid to learn. (No, I don't have numbers, but browse the Ubuntu forums and you'll see plenty of threads asking for help. There are plenty more people that don't post. Also, please note that I'm not saying it's a high number, but merely significant enough to still be a barrier for adoption.)
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I'll say it anyway... Linux on the desktop as it stands today will most likely never have its year.
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it. It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever. The only way I see it happening at this stage is if Microsoft continues to stumble with Windows. One potential back door I see for Linux is through business. If businesses adopt Linux, people will have that familiarity and won't be afraid of it anymore. For that to happen, of course, there needs to be much improved support for those systems, which is not happening yet.
Unfortunately, I think Microsoft is doing okay for the moment. They stumbled a bit with Vista, but the incompatibilities of Vista were a necessary step for them to improve the security and stability of Windows. If they can improve the performance of Windows 7, mainstream users will have little reason to switch.
I can't tell you when the Imperial units were simplified, but it doesn't strike me as a purposeful overhaul of the system. Likely the exotic parts were slowly replaced by what made more sense to the people who make those decisions.
As far as the metric system, I can really only comment on my little corner of the US, but it seems to be mostly younger science types who use metric with any regularity. Even with them, it's mostly just their professional life where they use metric and it's primarily because the units are easier to work with when doing complex math. I'm an engineer and I run into a lot of older engineering types who refuse to use metric unless they absolutely have to. Younger engineers (and scientists in general) with any decent education can generally switch between the two systems without much trouble.
In my experience with the general (non-scientific) population, metric is a lost cause at this stage. Some of the manufacturing/assembly people I work with (mostly older) actually get angry if I suggest we should use metric, even for simple things. Bear in mind, though, that I live in a somewhat rural area at the moment. Globalization is for unpatriotic commies and these new things like the metric system and computers are black magic. Better educated folks and more urban areas in general won't be as bad.