Did microsoft rush vista to market? Yes. Say what? This is a project that started in 2001! And they had to strip out a lot of functionality (such as WinFS) to get it out that quickly. If that's "rushing to market", I'd hate to imagine if they'd taken their time.
If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that everybody's been talking about the Great Vista Delay since they missed their first target — in 2005! Hardly "rushing to market".
Is this any different to the situation they had with Windows 95, 98, 2k or XP? No. Except that Vista is the only one of these that took more than 3 years to turn around. And Vista is the only one where you started hearing nasty stories about its reliability before it was released.
XP was just a lot more stable because the driver model is exactly the same as 2k, and 2k had all the issues sorted already... You seem to be under the impression that Windows 2000 was the first OS in its release train. It was actually just the latest version in the NT train, which goes back to 1989. It only had driver issues because all the vendors had to learn how to write drivers all over again.
Run a brand new O/S in the first 6 months, and you need to be prepared for this shit. Well, Microsoft OSs, anyway. I've worked for several Unix vendors. If we'd been this sloppy, we'd have lost all our sales to the competition. MS, on the other hand, doesn't have any.
No, it's not. The psychology of talking to somebody at a remote location is completely different from that of talking to somebody who's sitting right next to you.
Yes, it's a positive thing when a computer lasts longer and is easier to use. But does that outweigh Apple's refusal to move away from toxic chemicals in manufacturing? I think not.
On a cell phone you tend to talk louder to be sure that you're heard. You're dealing with a tiny microphone. Actually, it's worse than that. People unconsciously adjust their voice volume based on audio feedback. Cell phones, unlike regular phones, don't feed the person's voice back to them. So they tend to shout without realizing that they are shouting. You get the same effect (only more so) when you try to talk to somebody wearing those big ear-covering headphones.
You're overlooking the fact that the douchebag is totally unaware of his surroundings. That's why he's acting like a douchebag. This is also why using a cell phone while driving is so dangerous, even with a handsfree setup.
I think stopping people from using them in stores/bars, in planes/trains, and in their cars is just silly, though in the case of cars I do think people should use handsfree. It's just that most handsfree solutions seem to suck. What, because you don't like putting on a headset on the off chance you need to answer a call? I'm assuming that you don't care about the distraction caused by cell phone drivers — even those with headsets.
Also, I'm guessing you've never noticed that people tend to shout when they're talking on their cell phones. ("I don't!" Yes you do. It's an unconscious feedback thing that the shouter is unaware of.)
However, when it comes to theatres I have to say there is no reason to allow people to use cell phones in theatres. Excuse me? Was this ever an issue? The only question is do you (a) find an usher; (b) ask them politely to go into the lobby; (c) dump your coke over their head.
And for the 1% of all computer users who never need to use industry-standard applications or platforms, your comments are relevant. To the rest of us, they're a big yawn.
I don't seem to recall any stories of XP or 2000 spontaneously rebooting without a prompt. This is not just another bit of MS flaky software. This is a fundamentally flawed OS.
The biggest instability issue is that spontaneous rebooting. Since this guy had it on two different computers running the same applications, it's probably an application issue.
And if it is, Vista is absolutely, unacceptably unstable. It should simply not be possible for an application to cause a spontaneous reboot without prompting the user. And in that context, your more positive experience is pretty meaningless: you don't have any applications that cause this problem now. But Murphy's Law says that you will eventually install a new application, or update an old one, that triggers this problem. Or some other buried problem.
Here's the bottom line: MS spent two extra years swatting bugs in Vista, and it still has a beta-level product. (Maybe even alpha.) This OS is a nasty, useless failure.
Having flextime is not the same as being able to pick your hours. It means you work with your boss and your co-workers to figure out which hours you work.
My boss is not picky about when I come and go, so I guess I have flextime. But I need to be onsite for meetings. And my hours need to overlap significantly with those of various folk I work with.
Plus there are external factors. Unlike many people, I don't have a family, so I'm not constrained by daycare/school hours, needing to time things in coordination with my spouse, etc. But I do like to avoid rush hour.
Bottom line: "I think I'll move my workday forward an hour in order to enjoy the long summer afternoon" is not an option for most workers. Not even most flextime workers.
You're still in school, right? If you were out in the real world, you'd know that very few people can choose exactly when they will work. Most people need to be available to their co-workers, customers, and suppliers on short notice. ("Sorry, sir, we can't sell you a cheeseburger — the flipper dude went home early.") The only way to do that is to have as many people as you can manage working at the same time.
So apparently maglev has little or no speed advantage over old-fashioned wheeled trains. I assume there's still an energy savings, but currently that doesn't seem to outweigh the extra cost of maglev infrastructure. Perhaps when energy costs rise a tad more...
One little detail has me curious: TGVs, though electric, still use locomotives to push and/or pull the train, a design feature that's been around since the first steam trains in 1833. I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
Indeed. Ever read The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper? It's the first of the "Leatherstocking" stories; this is the character who was the hero of Last of the Mohicans. Anyway, there's a character who's a sort of founding father of a village in upstate New York around 1800. Here's worried about deforestation due to settlement. This is due not just to cutting wood for fuel (ironically, his alternative is to dig a coal mine!) and for building materials, but to people setting fires to clear the land for development. When he tries to tell people that they're cutting down too many trees, the response is "Nonsense! There are enough trees here to last us a century!" And indeed there were...
"Renewable" is one of those magic words that people believe will make the environmental crisis All Better. The sad fact is that everything people do has an environmental impact. The trick is to figure out how to keep that impact to a minimum. Unfortunately, "minimum" means giving up the high-energy lifestyle, which nobody seems willing to do. So they switch to a hybrid (which uses less gas, but still uses a lot), or recycle (using a lot of energy in the process) or insist that their energy come from "renewable" sources. All of which makes people feel better, but barely makes a dent in the problem.
"life" isn't as delicate as we've once thought, it can be supported in extreme environments,
What, you mean places like volcanoes? Or ocean trenches? Those may be "extreme" compared to where you live, but by cosmic standards they're positively bucolic. Which is why there's no evidence that the other planets in our solar system are anything but sterile. You could maybe introduce life on Mars by being careless with decontaminating your space probes, but it seems unlikely that life ever evolved there.
And Mars is pretty hospitable compared to a planet that gets blasted by a companion star one a year. So double sunsets may be common, but there's nobody to see them.
and doesnt even have to be carbon based - on this planet. I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the special Horta issue of Scientific American. When did it come out?
Uhm, no. Currency was originally invented by banks, not governments. Currency started out as receipts for coinage that people had on deposit. That might seem like a formula for a stable currency (you take a dollar bill to the bank that issued it, and they give you a silver dollar), but it was just the opposite: the value of currency varied depending on the reputation of the bank and the difficulty of taking it back to the bank to be redeemed. Not having a a standard currency is bad for commerce, so governments either gave a single bank a monopoly on issuing currency (still the case in the U.K.) or took over the market themselves (though nowadays that's usually done by creating a "central" or "reserve" bank).
The only thing that prevents these QQ coins (or Green Stamps, or any other kind of IOU) from being a currency is the restrictions on what you can buy with it. A currency is just something that can be easily exchanged for most or all goods and services.
While I'm babelling, I might as well correct this error in the article:
The U.S. dollar, which lost its gold backing in 1971, survives because people trust the U.S. government. Two errors, actually. First, the U.S. effectively stopped backing currency with gold back in 1931, except for using it as a way to redeem dollars held by foreign central banks. (1971 is when they stopped doing that too.) Also, the "trust" behind U.S. currency is not in the U.S government (thank god for that!) but in the U.S. economy. For all our economic screwups, we still have the most stable major economy in the world. So if you have a lot of money (and I don't mean a measly million, I mean the billions that governments and big business deal in) that you need to stash somewhere, you're probably going to convert it into U.S. dollars.
That actually makes sense. Though you're wrong about the communists establishing red as a "brand": the use of red flags by revolutionaries, dissidents, and striking workers goes back to at least a century before Marx. Still, your basic argument is sound.
It's also consistent with something I just read in Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler: in the 1920s, the Nazis deliberately used red in their banners to piss off the Communists. Who would come to the Nazi beer-hall meetings and pick fights. Which would make the news, which is what the Nazis had in mind all along.
This, alas, is a reminder that the Democrats and liberals (to say nothing of the tiny remnant of American socialists) are damned wimpy about letting the Republicans and conservatives define the political vocabulary. Depressing.
But note: the Republicans being "red" means everybody has already forgotten the day when a "red" was somebody with left-wing views. Those that forget history, yada yada yada.
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That's very intersting, but it doesn't make you less of an asshole.
Is this any different to the situation they had with Windows 95, 98, 2k or XP? No. Except that Vista is the only one of these that took more than 3 years to turn around. And Vista is the only one where you started hearing nasty stories about its reliability before it was released. XP was just a lot more stable because the driver model is exactly the same as 2k, and 2k had all the issues sorted already... You seem to be under the impression that Windows 2000 was the first OS in its release train. It was actually just the latest version in the NT train, which goes back to 1989. It only had driver issues because all the vendors had to learn how to write drivers all over again. Run a brand new O/S in the first 6 months, and you need to be prepared for this shit. Well, Microsoft OSs, anyway. I've worked for several Unix vendors. If we'd been this sloppy, we'd have lost all our sales to the competition. MS, on the other hand, doesn't have any.If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that everybody's been talking about the Great Vista Delay since they missed their first target — in 2005! Hardly "rushing to market".
And what is the purpose of sidetone? Feedback. (Asshole.)
Oh, all right then. Cell phone "shout" is a myth. Sorry to have suggested otherwise.
By the way, you need to go look up the word "analogy".
No, it's not. The psychology of talking to somebody at a remote location is completely different from that of talking to somebody who's sitting right next to you.
Yes, it's a positive thing when a computer lasts longer and is easier to use. But does that outweigh Apple's refusal to move away from toxic chemicals in manufacturing? I think not.
You're overlooking the fact that the douchebag is totally unaware of his surroundings. That's why he's acting like a douchebag. This is also why using a cell phone while driving is so dangerous, even with a handsfree setup.
Also, I'm guessing you've never noticed that people tend to shout when they're talking on their cell phones. ("I don't!" Yes you do. It's an unconscious feedback thing that the shouter is unaware of.) However, when it comes to theatres I have to say there is no reason to allow people to use cell phones in theatres. Excuse me? Was this ever an issue? The only question is do you (a) find an usher; (b) ask them politely to go into the lobby; (c) dump your coke over their head.
And for the 1% of all computer users who never need to use industry-standard applications or platforms, your comments are relevant. To the rest of us, they're a big yawn.
I don't seem to recall any stories of XP or 2000 spontaneously rebooting without a prompt. This is not just another bit of MS flaky software. This is a fundamentally flawed OS.
The biggest instability issue is that spontaneous rebooting. Since this guy had it on two different computers running the same applications, it's probably an application issue.
And if it is, Vista is absolutely, unacceptably unstable. It should simply not be possible for an application to cause a spontaneous reboot without prompting the user. And in that context, your more positive experience is pretty meaningless: you don't have any applications that cause this problem now. But Murphy's Law says that you will eventually install a new application, or update an old one, that triggers this problem. Or some other buried problem.
Here's the bottom line: MS spent two extra years swatting bugs in Vista, and it still has a beta-level product. (Maybe even alpha.) This OS is a nasty, useless failure.
Having flextime is not the same as being able to pick your hours. It means you work with your boss and your co-workers to figure out which hours you work.
My boss is not picky about when I come and go, so I guess I have flextime. But I need to be onsite for meetings. And my hours need to overlap significantly with those of various folk I work with.
Plus there are external factors. Unlike many people, I don't have a family, so I'm not constrained by daycare/school hours, needing to time things in coordination with my spouse, etc. But I do like to avoid rush hour.
Bottom line: "I think I'll move my workday forward an hour in order to enjoy the long summer afternoon" is not an option for most workers. Not even most flextime workers.
You're still in school, right? If you were out in the real world, you'd know that very few people can choose exactly when they will work. Most people need to be available to their co-workers, customers, and suppliers on short notice. ("Sorry, sir, we can't sell you a cheeseburger — the flipper dude went home early.") The only way to do that is to have as many people as you can manage working at the same time.
So apparently maglev has little or no speed advantage over old-fashioned wheeled trains. I assume there's still an energy savings, but currently that doesn't seem to outweigh the extra cost of maglev infrastructure. Perhaps when energy costs rise a tad more...
One little detail has me curious: TGVs, though electric, still use locomotives to push and/or pull the train, a design feature that's been around since the first steam trains in 1833. I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
Indeed. Ever read The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper? It's the first of the "Leatherstocking" stories; this is the character who was the hero of Last of the Mohicans. Anyway, there's a character who's a sort of founding father of a village in upstate New York around 1800. Here's worried about deforestation due to settlement. This is due not just to cutting wood for fuel (ironically, his alternative is to dig a coal mine!) and for building materials, but to people setting fires to clear the land for development. When he tries to tell people that they're cutting down too many trees, the response is "Nonsense! There are enough trees here to last us a century!" And indeed there were...
"Renewable" is one of those magic words that people believe will make the environmental crisis All Better. The sad fact is that everything people do has an environmental impact. The trick is to figure out how to keep that impact to a minimum. Unfortunately, "minimum" means giving up the high-energy lifestyle, which nobody seems willing to do. So they switch to a hybrid (which uses less gas, but still uses a lot), or recycle (using a lot of energy in the process) or insist that their energy come from "renewable" sources. All of which makes people feel better, but barely makes a dent in the problem.
Then there's no truth to the rumor that David Duchovny is being replaced by Anthony Hopkins?
Mod parent down! Purely perverse reasons.
Oh gee, if it's in Wikipedia, it must be true! Forgive me!
You are hereby de-certified as a Macintosh Fanboy! Objective thinking is not allowed!
What, you mean places like volcanoes? Or ocean trenches? Those may be "extreme" compared to where you live, but by cosmic standards they're positively bucolic. Which is why there's no evidence that the other planets in our solar system are anything but sterile. You could maybe introduce life on Mars by being careless with decontaminating your space probes, but it seems unlikely that life ever evolved there.
And Mars is pretty hospitable compared to a planet that gets blasted by a companion star one a year. So double sunsets may be common, but there's nobody to see them.
and doesnt even have to be carbon based - on this planet. I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the special Horta issue of Scientific American. When did it come out?The only thing that prevents these QQ coins (or Green Stamps, or any other kind of IOU) from being a currency is the restrictions on what you can buy with it. A currency is just something that can be easily exchanged for most or all goods and services.
While I'm babelling, I might as well correct this error in the article:
The U.S. dollar, which lost its gold backing in 1971, survives because people trust the U.S. government. Two errors, actually. First, the U.S. effectively stopped backing currency with gold back in 1931, except for using it as a way to redeem dollars held by foreign central banks. (1971 is when they stopped doing that too.) Also, the "trust" behind U.S. currency is not in the U.S government (thank god for that!) but in the U.S. economy. For all our economic screwups, we still have the most stable major economy in the world. So if you have a lot of money (and I don't mean a measly million, I mean the billions that governments and big business deal in) that you need to stash somewhere, you're probably going to convert it into U.S. dollars.That actually makes sense. Though you're wrong about the communists establishing red as a "brand": the use of red flags by revolutionaries, dissidents, and striking workers goes back to at least a century before Marx. Still, your basic argument is sound.
It's also consistent with something I just read in Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler: in the 1920s, the Nazis deliberately used red in their banners to piss off the Communists. Who would come to the Nazi beer-hall meetings and pick fights. Which would make the news, which is what the Nazis had in mind all along.
This, alas, is a reminder that the Democrats and liberals (to say nothing of the tiny remnant of American socialists) are damned wimpy about letting the Republicans and conservatives define the political vocabulary. Depressing.
But note: the Republicans being "red" means everybody has already forgotten the day when a "red" was somebody with left-wing views. Those that forget history, yada yada yada.
Dude, pay attention: red is traditionally the color of the left. Blue is traditionally the color of the right. How did they get swapped?