You, ah, *have* used Vista pre-SP1? OR even XP pre SP1? And from some sources it's looking like Win7 users will be better waiting for SP1 as well frankly.
I will concede 9.10 is not as rock solid immediately as my last upgrades, with some minor glitches - FF 3.5 is slightly crash-prone, had a couple other minor issues that look bad in comparison to the track record of ignoring basic precautions with absolutely no consequence that has been my Ubuntu experience for the last couple years.
But - well, philosophically I like open-source but I'm not particularly vehement about it, and I've used windows for years, fairly happily. But let's not pretend that this glitchiness I'll be happy to see go away, or even the fairly major problems reported in the article, are par for the course - at worst, Ubuntu has for once had the same issues that are standard with the average windows upgrade.
I mean, let's have a reality check here. Make your back-ups, always separate your home partition from the OS, don't assume the upgrade will be perfect, et al - but let's keep a sense of perspective too.
Tiddlymath is Tiddlywiki with a plugin for MathML. Tiddlywiki is frankly my favorite format for redistributable text documents - non-proprietary, editable in Firefox, extensible, with all the advantages of wiki-formatting and cross-referencing.
So if I rent my home, who do they present a warrant to, me or my landlord?
So far as I know, it's me. That being the case, why does the question of whether or not I have leased service for email off of my personally controlled propertly change who the warrant should be served to. Google cannot grant to a Google employee any inherent right to read my email *without* a warrant, so it seems obvious to me that Google should not be served a warrant, I should, anymore than my landlord should be served the warrant for a home I rent.
For what it's worth - the sentence I abhor is the "Never Assume - it makes an ass of you and me!" bit of obnoxious cleverness, even more annoying than "There is no I in Team!".
It just irritates the hell out of me, since all logical though is in fact based on *some* set of propositions taken for granted. Euclid is based on one set of assumptions, Riemannian geometries an almost identical set of assumptions. Good thing for both Newton and Einstein Euclid never bought into *that* BS.
"Never Assume" only seems 'clever' to Sophist jackasses that don't want to give any ground in which they might lose an argument - as even Socrates observed, that was the entire point of the Sophists, that by not giving *any* starting ground with which to start a debate, they could switch arguments midstream and be seemingly unbeatable, but could not be counted on to achieve any sort of truth in the end.
Know your assumptions by all means. Be prepared to test them, to notice if an assumption leads to a contradiction, to discard it if it proves untrue.
But "Never Assume"? Never trust the worldview of anyone that thinks that's clever commentary on life.
Actually, language being a system for the encoding and decoding of information, yes the socially agreed upon usage throughout history makes it . . . correct.
Ha - do it right - a theory is only *scientific* if if it makes predictions not already observed, making it falsifiable upon finding out those predictions failed. So by it's nature a scientific theory can never be proven 'completely' - that would imply it had no more predictions to make.
Sorry - got into an argument with a conservative the other night, been reading my Popper - {G}. It amazes me how many people will present articles that have no verifiable information in them as 'proof' that flu vaccine is dangerous, the health care plan is going to destroy our economy, et al.
Of course, this *is* AT&T, a company that was allowed to get away with blatant violations of the law and snooping on American citizens without a warrant.
In fact, the one thing we know with absolute certainty is that they *can* tell if the employees have followed the CEO's suggestion.
One of the things I liked about Morrowind and disliked about Oblivion was that, in Morrowind, if you walked off into the wilderness without a definite plan, you were gonna die - end of story. If you weren't ready to go head to head against beasts, you wanted to stay in the 'safe' areas. In Oblivion, a low level character can walk across the wilderness to Kvatch, and it's *safer* than taking the roads - no bandits.
So, I rather hated that system. It's dumb.
Now, a system that starts to *anticipate* strategies - Galactic Civilization II, the AI notes what you're developing, and develops counter-measures. I'd love a system that took even this basic principle and changed the NPC's to notice that you used swords and work with ranged weapons, or if you used ranged weaponry and avoided close combat to develop ambushes and so on. Sane reactive strategies that make it obvious the thieves guild (or whatever) is taking notes thank you very much.
You mean, Vista, which was at best an incremental improvement, needed another, smaller, incremental improvement between it and XP?
We could call it Microsoft Zeno!
Sorry, no, I have to disagree. Windows problems are older than that, but just coming to a head now.
I have seen Microsoft aficionados point out that Microsoft actually has a much more granulated security permissions system than you normally see in Linux. The problem is exactly that - the lack of a history of security requires that they either come up with a carefully granulated security system . . . or they rip out the security they have and start over.
They bypassed all sorts of security issues to put IE explorer as an 'integrated' part of the system - and have spent years patching up holes this created.
And a dozen other issues all of which are coming to a head now. All of which . . . don't apply to me, because I'm on Ubuntu, which runs a Vista/Windows 7 quality system (Better in some ways that happen to be important to me, worse in others, some of which are important to me , in general on par from a usability context.). When I type in the password to access admin functionality I do so secure in the notion that it actually *was* an admin function, not the system crying wolf because a driver that had no business needing admin rights had 20 old legacy code buried in there somewhere.
Or to be fair, all the decades old legacy code was written knowing it had better not need admin rights either.
There was all sorts of other stuff that helped make this worse than it had to be - consolidating the two lines of systems into Windows XP, home and pro - Good; Needlessly making *seven* versions of Vista? Bad. The "Vista Ready" issue is already mythology as well encoded into the communities heritage as Intel's mis-handling of the Pentium Bug - 'Nuff said. DRM management obviously designed by committee, and a committee that had none of their actual consumers at the table. Dropping the new files-system, the *only* non-incremental advance in the entire OS - and frankly the only thing in it that I thought was genuinely exciting.
All that made it worse. But the bad part was baked in already - Windows was designed in a non-networked environment, has never adjusted properly to the security needs of a networked environment, and can't be run without admin access without becoming an insanely painful pain in the arse. This is improved in Windows 7, but I still think it's a gloss of paint.
Which would be fine, if there was something I *needed* Windows for besides playing games.
Heck - let's be fair - *I* can't take a joke either, sometime they really piss me off . . . except
oh, yeah, I'm expected to laugh off entire movies aimed at my gender. I'd like to have a life too . . .
Oh, wait, I'm posting from a 4-midnight shift I've been on for over five years, because they can trust me. I've seen women get transferred off this shift after six months, max.
There is a sense that a lot of feminism isn't that women don't have legitimate grievances - but that everyone had legitimate grievances but suddenly it's important when it's women.
but, if two people are in a room, and one of them says there is an elephant, the other swears the see nothing, and the camera you put into the room never shows an elephant, the scale under the floor only measures the weight of two people, and the microphones only recorded the sound of two of them breathing
even though one person saw and reacted to an elephant, still doesn't mean there was an elephant.
I went back and read the article and it' s predecessor, and indeed thought the faq he pointed to was interesting but . ..I think I have a certain degree of issue with the underlying assumption that the lack of a reasonable distribution implies sexism.
1.5% *is* disturbing if it is the result of sexism. But . . .
I don't have the records of what truly sexist percentages were in various industries - but my vague anecdotal recollections were that they were as low as 10% et al in the 80's
1.5% seems to me to be *too* strong a bias to be explained primarily by sexism. It may be a contributing factor, but without knowing what it's contributing to, it does very little good to be concerned about any sexism because trying to measure that effect without a proper understanding of the underlying primary effect may be like trying to measure which leg of a table is off in the midst of a magnitude 6 earthquake.
There may be a number of explanations, ranging from it turning out that *yes* only a certain type of woman is being taught the secret handshake, to it simply turning out that working on code for no pay isn't something women like to do. But the article seems to be begging the question by asserting only one explanation without any definitive support for it.
The law expressly limits your "Exclusive Rights" under copyright. As an "Owner of a Copy" - i.e. the actual Physical Media, I am expressly authorized to make additional copies and transfer ownership of that legally obtained copy and all rights therein.
 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs. (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. (b) Lease, Sale, or Other Transfer of Additional Copy or Adaptation.â" Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner.
Unless the court simply decides the UCC provisions saying that you can sell a contract just don't apply (Entirely possible - The courts have read the UCC in a rather smorgasboard fashion for the last few years.) I don't see that autodesk has a case.
I've bought and sold a house, and I've googled everything obvious that might reveal such a thing, and I've checked the UCC, plus my business law book.
There may be something in Alaska to that effect, but nothing in interstate agreements or federal law that I can find implies you're doing anything but talking through your hat.
I think it's courteous to leave light-bulbs, but I can't find anything requiring you to do so. So yeah, [citation needed] + [OP is a jackass that prefers being insulting to backing up what he says.]
The UK's Libel Laws are also being used to silence other Critical Journalism as well - Coming into work today a followup on 2006 story (Thousands Sickened by Toxic Waste in Ivory Coast) noted that the company responsible had been hiring legal firm specializing in libel to sue the BBC news media covering the story.
Not yet finding the story from today - it may not be on the NPR website and/or indexed yet.
More to the point, they have some mercury in them (although even that is going away). However the mercury in the bulbs that have it is still less than the additional mercury put into the environment by a coal fired power plant powering an incandescent bulb.
Per GEIt comes out to about 2/3rds of the mercury. Not great, but better.
I just haven't the foggiest what some people do to get such bad results with CFL's unless they just have bad wiring.
I live in an 1890's farmhouse, in Indiana - hardly a places with no temperature or humidity fluctuations. The wiring was all installed in the 50's-60's (With the exception of the fusebox which was upgraded to a circuitbreaker box last year, and a couple spots we rewired.) or thereabouts, we use CFL's inside outside, on the back porch, in the bathroom, they last for years, they save money.
We are *starting* to upgrade items to LED bulbs in the areas where we don't need 60+ watts, admittedly in part simply from the experience of upgrading our maglight to an LED bulb and having my niece leave it on in her room . . . for a week . . . two years ago. It's still on the same set of batteries it had then. Needless to say, we were fairly impressed - That's just plain useful.
But anyway, as long as we're bandying about personal experiences, from what I can tell, CFL's are darn efficient, and nearly as cheap at Costco as incandescent bulbs now - we buy them in ten pack for something like $12 - for what you save, well worth it.
Electric heat is useful for 'spot' heating - we use them in the bedroom in winter as despite the higher price you only need a small area warmed a small bit over the 60 degree's in the rest of the house.
But yes, propane or something similar is better in general. One of the other stupidities of this "Well Incandescent bulbs provide heat too" theory is, "Great - my basement/attic/hallway closet is warm now. Who cares?"
Slashdot Mirror
Umm - what?
You, ah, *have* used Vista pre-SP1? OR even XP pre SP1? And from some sources it's looking like Win7 users will be better waiting for SP1 as well frankly.
I will concede 9.10 is not as rock solid immediately as my last upgrades, with some minor glitches - FF 3.5 is slightly crash-prone, had a couple other minor issues that look bad in comparison to the track record of ignoring basic precautions with absolutely no consequence that has been my Ubuntu experience for the last couple years.
But - well, philosophically I like open-source but I'm not particularly vehement about it, and I've used windows for years, fairly happily. But let's not pretend that this glitchiness I'll be happy to see go away, or even the fairly major problems reported in the article, are par for the course - at worst, Ubuntu has for once had the same issues that are standard with the average windows upgrade.
I mean, let's have a reality check here. Make your back-ups, always separate your home partition from the OS, don't assume the upgrade will be perfect, et al - but let's keep a sense of perspective too.
Pug
I'm okay with that - because sooner or later secret, court unsanctioned spying blows up in their face.
So yeah, I want this decision overturned, so that when it blows up in their face there are consequences.
Pug
Tiddlymath is Tiddlywiki with a plugin for MathML. Tiddlywiki is frankly my favorite format for redistributable text documents - non-proprietary, editable in Firefox, extensible, with all the advantages of wiki-formatting and cross-referencing.
Pug
So if I rent my home, who do they present a warrant to, me or my landlord?
So far as I know, it's me. That being the case, why does the question of whether or not I have leased service for email off of my personally controlled propertly change who the warrant should be served to. Google cannot grant to a Google employee any inherent right to read my email *without* a warrant, so it seems obvious to me that Google should not be served a warrant, I should, anymore than my landlord should be served the warrant for a home I rent.
Is my logic (or my assumptions) very off here?
Pug
Actually, that sound like the plot to a fairly cool SF novel
Pug
For what it's worth - the sentence I abhor is the "Never Assume - it makes an ass of you and me!" bit of obnoxious cleverness, even more annoying than "There is no I in Team!".
It just irritates the hell out of me, since all logical though is in fact based on *some* set of propositions taken for granted. Euclid is based on one set of assumptions, Riemannian geometries an almost identical set of assumptions. Good thing for both Newton and Einstein Euclid never bought into *that* BS.
"Never Assume" only seems 'clever' to Sophist jackasses that don't want to give any ground in which they might lose an argument - as even Socrates observed, that was the entire point of the Sophists, that by not giving *any* starting ground with which to start a debate, they could switch arguments midstream and be seemingly unbeatable, but could not be counted on to achieve any sort of truth in the end.
Know your assumptions by all means. Be prepared to test them, to notice if an assumption leads to a contradiction, to discard it if it proves untrue.
But "Never Assume"? Never trust the worldview of anyone that thinks that's clever commentary on life.
Pug
Actually, language being a system for the encoding and decoding of information, yes the socially agreed upon usage throughout history makes it . . . correct.
{G} - Pug
Nine consecutive digits of Pi
For a small fee based in the central five digits of your Social Security Number, I'll tell you which nine.
{G} - Pug
Ha - do it right - a theory is only *scientific* if if it makes predictions not already observed, making it falsifiable upon finding out those predictions failed. So by it's nature a scientific theory can never be proven 'completely' - that would imply it had no more predictions to make.
Sorry - got into an argument with a conservative the other night, been reading my Popper - {G}. It amazes me how many people will present articles that have no verifiable information in them as 'proof' that flu vaccine is dangerous, the health care plan is going to destroy our economy, et al.
Pug
Of course, this *is* AT&T, a company that was allowed to get away with blatant violations of the law and snooping on American citizens without a warrant.
In fact, the one thing we know with absolute certainty is that they *can* tell if the employees have followed the CEO's suggestion.
Oh, yeah . . that. . .
Pug
You're *ALL* Wrong - it's GARY MITCHELL!!!!
One of the things I liked about Morrowind and disliked about Oblivion was that, in Morrowind, if you walked off into the wilderness without a definite plan, you were gonna die - end of story. If you weren't ready to go head to head against beasts, you wanted to stay in the 'safe' areas. In Oblivion, a low level character can walk across the wilderness to Kvatch, and it's *safer* than taking the roads - no bandits.
So, I rather hated that system. It's dumb.
Now, a system that starts to *anticipate* strategies - Galactic Civilization II, the AI notes what you're developing, and develops counter-measures. I'd love a system that took even this basic principle and changed the NPC's to notice that you used swords and work with ranged weapons, or if you used ranged weaponry and avoided close combat to develop ambushes and so on. Sane reactive strategies that make it obvious the thieves guild (or whatever) is taking notes thank you very much.
Pug
You mean, Vista, which was at best an incremental improvement, needed another, smaller, incremental improvement between it and XP?
We could call it Microsoft Zeno!
Sorry, no, I have to disagree. Windows problems are older than that, but just coming to a head now.
I have seen Microsoft aficionados point out that Microsoft actually has a much more granulated security permissions system than you normally see in Linux. The problem is exactly that - the lack of a history of security requires that they either come up with a carefully granulated security system . . . or they rip out the security they have and start over.
They bypassed all sorts of security issues to put IE explorer as an 'integrated' part of the system - and have spent years patching up holes this created.
And a dozen other issues all of which are coming to a head now. All of which . . . don't apply to me, because I'm on Ubuntu, which runs a Vista/Windows 7 quality system (Better in some ways that happen to be important to me, worse in others, some of which are important to me , in general on par from a usability context.). When I type in the password to access admin functionality I do so secure in the notion that it actually *was* an admin function, not the system crying wolf because a driver that had no business needing admin rights had 20 old legacy code buried in there somewhere.
Or to be fair, all the decades old legacy code was written knowing it had better not need admin rights either.
There was all sorts of other stuff that helped make this worse than it had to be - consolidating the two lines of systems into Windows XP, home and pro - Good; Needlessly making *seven* versions of Vista? Bad. The "Vista Ready" issue is already mythology as well encoded into the communities heritage as Intel's mis-handling of the Pentium Bug - 'Nuff said. DRM management obviously designed by committee, and a committee that had none of their actual consumers at the table. Dropping the new files-system, the *only* non-incremental advance in the entire OS - and frankly the only thing in it that I thought was genuinely exciting.
All that made it worse. But the bad part was baked in already - Windows was designed in a non-networked environment, has never adjusted properly to the security needs of a networked environment, and can't be run without admin access without becoming an insanely painful pain in the arse. This is improved in Windows 7, but I still think it's a gloss of paint.
Which would be fine, if there was something I *needed* Windows for besides playing games.
There's not.
Pug
Heck - let's be fair - *I* can't take a joke either, sometime they really piss me off . . . except
oh, yeah, I'm expected to laugh off entire movies aimed at my gender.
I'd like to have a life too . . .
Oh, wait, I'm posting from a 4-midnight shift I've been on for over five years, because they can trust me. I've seen women get transferred off this shift after six months, max.
There is a sense that a lot of feminism isn't that women don't have legitimate grievances - but that everyone had legitimate grievances but suddenly it's important when it's women.
Pug
Ummm.
There is an 'elephant in the room' phenomena -
but, if two people are in a room, and one of them says there is an elephant, the other swears the see nothing, and the camera you put into the room never shows an elephant, the scale under the floor only measures the weight of two people, and the microphones only recorded the sound of two of them breathing
even though one person saw and reacted to an elephant, still doesn't mean there was an elephant.
Pug
I went back and read the article and it' s predecessor, and indeed thought the faq he pointed to was interesting but . . .I think I have a certain degree of issue with the underlying assumption that the lack of a reasonable distribution implies sexism.
1.5% *is* disturbing if it is the result of sexism. But . . .
I don't have the records of what truly sexist percentages were in various industries - but my vague anecdotal recollections were that they were as low as 10% et al in the 80's
1.5% seems to me to be *too* strong a bias to be explained primarily by sexism. It may be a contributing factor, but without knowing what it's contributing to, it does very little good to be concerned about any sexism because trying to measure that effect without a proper understanding of the underlying primary effect may be like trying to measure which leg of a table is off in the midst of a magnitude 6 earthquake.
There may be a number of explanations, ranging from it turning out that *yes* only a certain type of woman is being taught the secret handshake, to it simply turning out that working on code for no pay isn't something women like to do. But the article seems to be begging the question by asserting only one explanation without any definitive support for it.
Pug
Does not apply if your name is Stef Murky
The law expressly limits your "Exclusive Rights" under copyright.
As an "Owner of a Copy" - i.e. the actual Physical Media, I am expressly authorized to make additional copies and transfer ownership of that legally obtained copy and all rights therein.
 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs.
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
(b) Lease, Sale, or Other Transfer of Additional Copy or Adaptation.â" Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner.
Unless the court simply decides the UCC provisions saying that you can sell a contract just don't apply (Entirely possible - The courts have read the UCC in a rather smorgasboard fashion for the last few years.) I don't see that autodesk has a case.
I've bought and sold a house, and I've googled everything obvious that might reveal such a thing, and I've checked the UCC, plus my business law book.
There may be something in Alaska to that effect, but nothing in interstate agreements or federal law that I can find implies you're doing anything but talking through your hat.
I think it's courteous to leave light-bulbs, but I can't find anything requiring you to do so. So yeah, [citation needed] + [OP is a jackass that prefers being insulting to backing up what he says.]
{G} - Pug
The UK's Libel Laws are also being used to silence other Critical Journalism as well - Coming into work today a followup on 2006 story (Thousands Sickened by Toxic Waste in Ivory Coast) noted that the company responsible had been hiring legal firm specializing in libel to sue the BBC news media covering the story.
Not yet finding the story from today - it may not be on the NPR website and/or indexed yet.
And of course, in Soviet Russia, Stalin Kills you, then Sues You.
Pug
Linux Does
More to the point, they have some mercury in them (although even that is going away). However the mercury in the bulbs that have it is still less than the additional mercury put into the environment by a coal fired power plant powering an incandescent bulb.
Per GEIt comes out to about 2/3rds of the mercury. Not great, but better.
Pug
Informative? Methinks 'Citation needed'.
I just haven't the foggiest what some people do to get such bad results with CFL's unless they just have bad wiring.
I live in an 1890's farmhouse, in Indiana - hardly a places with no temperature or humidity fluctuations. The wiring was all installed in the 50's-60's (With the exception of the fusebox which was upgraded to a circuitbreaker box last year, and a couple spots we rewired.) or thereabouts, we use CFL's inside outside, on the back porch, in the bathroom, they last for years, they save money.
We are *starting* to upgrade items to LED bulbs in the areas where we don't need 60+ watts, admittedly in part simply from the experience of upgrading our maglight to an LED bulb and having my niece leave it on in her room . . . for a week . . . two years ago. It's still on the same set of batteries it had then. Needless to say, we were fairly impressed - That's just plain useful.
But anyway, as long as we're bandying about personal experiences, from what I can tell, CFL's are darn efficient, and nearly as cheap at Costco as incandescent bulbs now - we buy them in ten pack for something like $12 - for what you save, well worth it.
Pug
Electric heat is useful for 'spot' heating - we use them in the bedroom in winter as despite the higher price you only need a small area warmed a small bit over the 60 degree's in the rest of the house.
But yes, propane or something similar is better in general. One of the other stupidities of this "Well Incandescent bulbs provide heat too" theory is, "Great - my basement/attic/hallway closet is warm now. Who cares?"
Pug